Reviews

The movie fails to establish the setting as a futuristic one populated by the fantastic inventions of Reed Richards. Instead, the setting looks contemporary, with the few sci-fi elements, like holograms and artificial gravity, appearing to be anachronisms. Even worse, they're not Richards'. In the film, Richards is a milquetoast loser and wimp, whose inventions/devices in the comic (the station/ shuttle, the shielding, the unstable molecules) are all Victor's, as is his love interest. Reed is fascinated to see a uniform made of self-regulating molecules, commenting that he's been working on a formula for the stuff. Looks like someone beat you to it, Reed.

Sure, the comics have always portrayed Reed as a bit of a long-winded egghead, but not such a shortsighted dunce. The film Reed is utterly oblivious to any goings-on around him not pertaining to his calculations, be it the fact that Susan still wants him, or the fact that Victor is trying to give her an engagement ring. The Reed I read was always a decisive *leader*. Gruffudd's Reed is an obsequious cipher, and when the notion of his being the leader of the team was voiced during the bridge scene, I didn't buy it. Indeed, the characters in general are handled poorly. Their reaction to their transformation, for example, is dumb. Reed and Sue are desperate to reverse their condition. WHY? You've just got cool superhuman abilities, and all you can think about is how to get rid of them? There is no sense of sci-fi ponderousness or intellectual curiosity about this incredible transformation. They just conclude that their DNA has been altered, and decide that they have to reverse it. The only one for whom this makes sense is Ben Grimm, whose desire to revert to normal is understandable. But even this ruined by his eventual decision, following his successful reversion to normal, to recreate his rocky appearance in order to….well I don't know why he does this. Can't the others handle Doom? After spending the film depressed because his fiancée and others are frightened of him, this made no sense. Even Johnny, whose desire to parlay his new gift into celebrity was fairly believable, was portrayed as far more of an insensitive jerk than he was in the comics.

The rest of the movie is one-dimensional. Doom is not the scary megalomaniacal villain, but a disgraced businessman who kills a few people for revenge. Nothing that makes him an interesting or fearful villain in the comics— the shrewd planning, the leadership of a country, armor and weapons, magical powers—are present. The climax is merely adequate, with Reed's defeat of him coming not from a particularly brilliant plan, but by his own admission, basic elemental chemistry. Dialogue is campy ("Marco…Polo?"), secondary characters like Alicia are cardboard, the science and plot logic is unnecessarily lousy, and much of the movie just makes no sense. Why does it appear that the team going up to the space station suits up in Doom's executive building, rather than at the launch site? Are Sue, Doom, and Richards qualified astronauts? Why does Ben's fiancée go outside on a New York City street in her negligee? Why, when testing Johnny's powers, does Sue refer to "supernova" as a temperature, rather than an event? Why does Reed tell the others that their costumes were exposed to the same cosmic rays that they were, so they can change like us. EXCUSE me? What? What the hell kind of nonsense is this? They're UNIFORMS. They don't have any DNA to mutate. They should change because they're made of unstable molecules. Not because they should exhibit the same reaction to cosmic rays as a human body. How can electricity incinerate a hole through a human body, when everyone who's even been hit by lightning knows that even though it burns, it passes THROUGH the body? And why, after Victor has killed that board member thus, did Johnny not suffer a similar fate later when Doom blasted him with the same energy? Why is it that twice, characters get punched hard enough to be sent flying several yards (first Johnny by Ben, and then a cured Ben by Victor), without being instantly killed? Why did Reed show no permanent effects after testing the machine intended to cure Ben on himself, which resulted in him melting? And the sequence in which Doom fires a missile at the Baxter Building is confusing. Presumably it's a heat seeker, which is why Johnny decides to lure it away from the building, and set a small island on fire (hope no one was on that island) to detonate it. But how did Johnny know it was a heat seeker? For that matter, how could it have been? Victor had to lock onto Johnny and Sue's location on that balcony to fire it, which should not have presented a signature any hotter than anything else in the vicinity.

In watching this film, I kept wondering about how its basic approach and motif would work if upheld for a sequel featuring Galactus. Can you imagine these losers going up against the Planet Devourer? Instead of the ponderous awe and wonder of an immense extraterrestrial life form who consumes the energy of planets, the depth needed to make interacting with his herald seem interesting, the fear and hopelessness evoked by the impossible nature of stopping such a foe, and the moral and ethical discussions raised by Reed's desire to spare Galactus' life, we'd instead get stuff like "Cool, an alien!" "Okay, let's stop him by just doing this" or "Wow, why does that guy look like an Oscar statuette on a surfboard?"

Pass.

It's possible that there are certain inherent limitations to the source material. Since the resolutions comes about as a result of something the humans have nothing to do with, and have no control over, there is an unavoidable feeling that the main characters are too passive and ineffectual in terms of the plot and climax.

But I tend to be an optimist when it comes to the problem-solving needed in art, particularly storytelling, and I believe that there are things that could've been done with "WotW" to have made it better. For example, you can give the main characters a character arc in which they experience some type of change. Or one in which the alien threat presents to them an opportunity to act against type, and exceed his apparent limitations. Or you just plain make those characters interesting. But the movie doesn't do this. All we know about Cruise is that he's a divorce and a lousy father to his kids. He loves his kids, though, and goes on the run with them when the aliens show up. And then he delivers them to their mother. And that's it. Yeah, his teenage son thinks he's an a—hole, and then they're relationship is softened by the end of their arc. Whoopee.

Mind you, the first half of the movie is very frightening as humanity is subjected to a horrific and near-inescapable genocidal Holocaust, and we feel for Tom Cruise's character and his kids as they do what they have to in order to survive. But there are just way too many contrivances and plot holes in the film, and what little power the film has all goes downhill during the second half, starting with the scene in which Cruise is trying to make his son flee from the scene of the tripods engaging the military.

Why, for example, does this little idiot say that he has to be there, that he "wants to see" the destruction? Why, during the trio's earlier bathroom stop, did he try to join the military, as if they need him? What was the reason for this? If I were Cruise, I'd have punched the little idiot in the face and told him to get his ass moving. What purpose did Tim Robbins' character serve, or Cruise's confrontation with him? And how was that one car that Cruise stole still functioning? The mechanic said something to him that got past me. Was he saying that switching the starter, or something, worked? How's this? Wouldn't the component he switched have also been fried by the E.M.P., even if it wasn't installed or turned on? Yeah, I've seen it alleged that circuits don't get fried by E.M.P.'s when they're not being used (as in "Broken Arrow", but then wouldn't all those cars on Cruise's block still be working, since they're weren't being used at the time?

The most ridiculous aspect of the film is the behavior of the aliens. For one thing, how does a living being "ride lightning", and penetrate the ground with it? And if this is how they entered the tripods, then where were they prior to this? If they approached Earth from outer space, wouldn't NORAD have been alerted to their presence? And why did they bury the tripods underground? Why didn't they just take them with them when they came for Earth today? What exactly did they want with humans? Their energy weapons seemed to simply incinerate the humans. But why? What was their problem with humans? And if they were harvesting our biological material, as some have suggested, is zapping each one the best way to do it? Also, why did they have to tip over that ferry in the second half of the film? Is there something about boats that prevents them from zapping them where they are? The only reason for this seems to be that it was scary to the humans and the viewer. And why do they zap some humans, but trap others in those mesh prisons underneath the tripods' main bodies? And when those imprisoned are sucked into that red orifice, why is it so much easier to escape? All you have to do to defeat these idiot aliens is to have a few people pull you back out, and make sure the sucking device takes a belt full of grenades? Just how incompetent are these aliens? These retards are so advanced that they can build these tripods, and travel (presumably) through outer space, but they're too dumb to understand the dangers of foreign germs? They send a tentacle probe into Tim Robbins' basement (for reasons I didn't even understand), and they can be evaded by hiding behind a friggin' MIRROR?????? What, don't they have non-optical sensors, like infrared, night vision, heat imaging, etc.? And instead of being composed of some super strong material, they can be chopped off with an axe? Just what the hell is the matter with this alien technology? Hell, when the tripods' main bodies were viewed up close, they didn't even *look* like something of an exotic-looking extraterrestrial design, but like something engineered on Earth.

I don't know what Spielberg or Cruise or screenwriters David Koepp & Josh Friedman were thinking, but this movie looks like they phoned it in this time.

Good thing I was friendly with the theater manager, so I didn't have to pay for the phone call.

Scott McCloud, in "Understanding Comics," made the important observation that in comics, and media in general, there is a tendency to confuse form with content. Every medium has its own tools for storytelling. The best creators make full use of the distinct language of these media, and overcome their limitations. When adapting material from one medium to another, good creators take heed of these different tools, resulting in masterpieces like Sidney Lumet's "Twelve Angry Men", or "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan." But with movies based on comics, there's this bizarre fallacy that the fact that the story is derived from a comic should somehow affect what the movie looks like, which doesn't hold for movies based other media.

Say someone adapts a play into a movie. Do they show, on the movie screen, curtains being closed and opened in between scenes? Of course not. When adapting a best-selling book, do they show pages being turned on the screen? The very notion is silly to suggest. Each medium has its own tools for telling a story, and these things are merely aspects of the medium from which the film is being adapted. To suggest that the "mechanical" nature of the medium from which a film is adapted should somehow inform the look of the film ("The film is based on a comic book, so we have to show pages from the comic book in the opening title sequence") is to engage in non-sequitur. Hollywood doesn't get that, and gives us a Batman TV show with actual sound effects written on screen, not realizing that such things are in comics because they don't *have* sound, or even dumber, a "Hulk" film that attempts to use actual panels, as if the otherwise-lauded director doesn't get that panels are only used in comics because they are, by nature, told through a composition of static images. Some, get it right with the "Superman" and "X-Men" films, but some seem so focused on making good "comic book movies" that it doesn't seem to understand that they should instead be setting out to make good "movie" movies.

But if Rodriguez and Miller's travesty of a film shows no wisdom of this point. Why is it necessary to include narration in which the sound of a gunshot with a silencer is described? In the movie, we *hear* the silencer, so we don't need this cornball musing on it. Marv's ranting about the "blood-for-blood good old days" or Dwight's saccharine "Valkyrie" metaphor for Gail, made me cringe.

Why the obsession with having so many shots mirror actual panels in the books? The white-silhouettes-on-black backgrounds, which work in the comics, look utterly ridiculous on the screen. Is the story really enhanced by fluorescing Hartigan's tie, or the bandages on Marv's body so that we can see them when they rest of their figures are in shadow? The almost entirely-CGI backgrounds, which Rodriguez cluelessly lauds as making his work easier are lifeless and artificial. When Josh Hartnett walks onto the balcony in the film's prologue, never once do I feel that what I see behind him is real, and any suspension of disbelief is lost. The subsequent pan of the buildings when this prologue ends, is equally about as vibrant as a bowl of oat bran. So oblivious are the directors to the simple reality that elements that work in comics may not work in film that no attempt is made to modify the scenes of Marv getting hit head-on with a car, or dragging a perp from his own car at 50 miles an hour, or Hartigan gushing blood when getting perforated by bullets, and the result descends into cartoonish preposterousness.

The directors would rather bury a big-name star like Oscar-winner Benicio Del Toro under gobs of facial prosthetics, despite the fact that there is nothing particular about his character that would require it . Squandering a film's star power like this underscores a total lack of judgment on the part of the directors.

What they did change is mind-boggling. Why was Bob, who shot Hartigan, his partner, several times, the one to greet Hartigan upon his release? Why was "That Yellow Bastard" cut up so that the first Act was shown before the rest of "The Hard Good-bye", and the rest of "Bastard" shown later? Why is Kevin seen in the beginning when he's about to kill Goldie, thus destroying the suspense of knowing her killer's identity? Why do Rodriguez and Miller include Manute's mention to Gail about "serving a new master," which is a reference to the events of "A Dame to Kill For", which isn't in the movie? Why did they hire an actress to play Nancy Callahan who refused to do nudity, when that scene is so crucial to the story? I don't mind that the others didn't do the nude scenes in which their characters originally appeared, but the moment when Hartigan sees Nancy performing in "That Yellow Bastard" is a vital plot point in the story, because when we see that the little girl he saved is the same stripper we have come to know and love from previous stories, we're able to feel the same creepy feeling Hartigan does.

Armond White nailed it: "Graphic art has its own principles and justifications that become inane when converted into live action. Rodriguez and Miller try to resolve this problem through digital photography that simplifies the imagery, recreating the starkness of print panels. Their wasted effort does little more than turn cinema back into two-dimensional flatness.

Rodriguez (uses) the same elastiviolence as in the "Matrix" movies: Killing and brutality are absurdly amplified yet have no effect. Rodriguez and Miller don't actually have an esthetic's, just a gimmick.

As shot by Rodriguez, "Sin City"'s digital b&w lacks the mystery of photochemical b&w photography. A noir without the enveloping quality of shadow or the tactile sensation of smoke, it fails at what makes movies a great visual art form."

In brief: "A bit more cutesy than "Kindergarten Cop," but more family-friendly, and Vin Diesel shows his versatility."

I don't usually attend screenings for kids' movies, but when I first found out about this film, I was very curious to see how Vin Diesel would do in a kid's film. I've liked Vin Diesel ever since "Pitch Black", and while some may dismiss him as a muscle-bound action workhorse, I've long thought that there was more to him lurking behind that facade, and remembering the skepticism that greeted Arnold Schwarzenegger's attempts at comedy—skepticism that was greeted with what I thought were successful turns in "Twins" and "Kindergarten Cop", I was curious to see how successfully Diesel would play against type.

The result is a family film more cutesy and farcical than "Kindergarten Cop", (the model my mind kept going back to for comparison), with an unfortunately greater focus on infant waste products, but greater conflict between Diesel and his young charges, which lends itself to more heartwarming moments of rapport-building.

Diesel plays Lt. Shane Wolfe, a Navy SEAL assigned to protect the five children of a top scientist (Tate Donovan), and find a hidden computer program that may be secreted in his house while their mother (Faith Ford) and Wolfe's C.O. journey to Zurich to try and find the right code word for the scientist's safety deposit box. A simple assignment, it seems, except these kids have issues. Eldest son Seth is defiant, suffers bullying from fellow students and the school's V.P., and is negligent in his wrestling team responsibilities. Oldest daughter Zoe ("American Dreams"'s Brittany Snow) is truant in her Driver's Ed class, and willfully disobedient. The problems of the youngest three, Lulu, Peter, and Tyler, seem simpler, but are no less mountainous for Wolfe, who first tries addressing these problems with the roughshod military discipline he's accustomed to, but soon finds himself changing tactics by listening to these kids' problems, and helping them out more as a parent than a military bodyguard. Whereas Schwarzenegger's character was instantly ingratiated with the object of his protection in "Kindergarten Cop" by becoming friends and eventually boyfriend to his mom, and merely had to win his class' attention, here Wolfe has the more difficult task of cutting through the layers of resentment in a pair of teenagers, taking care of an infant and two young children, and protecting them from assassins that come crashing through windows, which lends itself to both some genuinely warm moments when he opens up to Seth and Zoe, and some surprisingly interesting but funny action sequences that seem evocative of Jackie Chan, with a really nice setup-and-payoff when Wolfe realizes the secret to getting to the computer program.

This is obviously a film geared more for the kids, as evidenced by the kooky overacting, the silly Swiss stereotypes (which I didn't even realized existed), and the goofy actions on the part of the bad guys, such as the revelation, for example, that squirting a juice box into a bad guy's face is akin to spraying it with acid (and somehow keeps the bad guy from falling backward in response), but while that may be a let-down to the older folk, the parents will probably be pleased, since I recall some parents being upset with the more adult scenes in "Kindergarten Cop".

The bottom line is, bring the kids to see it, but if unless you're a die-hard Diesel fan, and want to see anything he does, it probably won't be your cup of tea if you're past grade school.

As Jerry Bruckheimer films go, this is not going to have the wide mass appeal of 'Pirates of the Caribbean', but it's not offensive like 'Armageddon' or 'Pearl Harbor', and quite entertaining.

Nicholas Cage comes off as quite sympathetic as Benjamin Franklin Gates, the seventh in a line of archivists, treasure hunters and history buffs stretching back to a confidant of President Andrew Jackson. As a child, Ben was imbued by his grandfather (Christopher Plummer) with not only a love of American history, but a love of stories of knight quests, secreted treasures, maps, and clues hidden deep within the grooves of American History trivia.

Ben's father (Jon Voight) does not approve of his father encouraging such nonsense in his son, and his dialogue strangely reads like a non-Bruckheimer fan in the audience voicing his skepticism of the absurd plot to follow, but Ben nonetheless comes to believe his grandpa's story about how the treasure discovered by the Knights Templar within the Great Pyramid in Giza, Egypt during the Crusades was hidden in America to keep it out of the hands of Britain.

30 years later, Ben and his partner Ian Howe ('The Lord of the Rings's Sean Bean) and comedic foil Riley (Justin Bartha) come to conclude that there may be an invisible map written on the back of the Declaration of Independence leading to the treasure, and when Ben refuses to go along with Ian's plan to steal it, and the authorities refuse to listen to him, Ben is forced to foil Ian's crime, and ends up with the stolen document himself, with Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger from 'Troy'), the beautiful archivist in charge of the National Archives (because naturally, archivists working at the National Archives tend to be such lookers) dragged into the chase against her will. With FBI agent Harvey Keitel on their trail, Ben and his partner Riley (Justin Bartha), along with Abigail, race to find the treasure before Ian.

What follows is a series of chase scenes as the treasure hunters find and search for clues leading them from one historic place to another across three different states, clues that are steeped in the minutiae of American history lore (I have no idea of any of these points is based in historical fact, but in a movie like this, it hardly matters), with Jon Voight again providing the sole voice of reason as he questions whether these clues are just an endless series of arrows pointing to other clues rather than to any real destination.

The action isn't too implausible, the characters are likable, and the movie is just plain fun. The planning and machinations that the film supposes on the part of the Founding Fathers seems wildly implausible, but it doesn't matter. This is a Jerry Bruckheimer film, and one of the better ones. It's take on history may be fluff, but at least it endeavors an interest in it as a prerequisite for the plot, and a medium through which the audience may think to themselves, 'Ooh, I didn't know that about Benjamin Franklin.' If you're an expert in history bothered by the mistakes or flaws about Liberty Bell, or the Masons, or the hidden secrets on our currency, or who just plain doesn't buy the technological sophistication required for some of the artifacts uncovered by the characters, then perhaps you're watching it for the wrong reasons. If you don't know one way or the other, then it doesn't really matter. This is a popcorn film, and if you know anything about Jerry Bruckheimer, you should know going in what you're getting.

Bruckheimer was in attendance last night, and gave the brief speech before the movie began (which not usually the case outside of premieres-this was just a press screening), and right before leaving when the closing credits started, I complimented him, saying it was very entertaining.

If you like to sit back and have fun, I recommend it.

With a relatively simple story, 'Ladder 49' shows us the life and career of a fire firefighter as he grows from a cocky rookie to a family man, and how his life as a firefighter not only changes him, but how his life changes the way he comes to view being a firefighter.

Told 'in media res,' the film opens with Jack Morrison (Joaquin Phoenix) and his brother firefighters entering a large warehouse enveloped in flame. Before long, Jack is separated from his group, and trapped by collapsed floors and debris. As he waits for his coworkers to save him, he flashes back through his career, beginning with the day he first walked into Captain Kennedy's (John Travolta) firehouse. The movie inter cuts various moments throughout Jack's career with scenes of him trapped in that warehouse in the 'present,' where his chances of rescue look bleak.

The movie avoids the tendency to glorify the lives of firefighters in purely heroic terms by illustrating the toll the life of a firefighter takes on him and his family. When Jack first meets Linda (Jacinda Barrett, of MTV's 'The Real World London'), the job of running into burning buildings to rescue trapped people is fascinating and sexy; the stuff great first dates are made of. But as Jack and Linda build a life together, the dangers inherent in his job become impossible to ignore, as he is forced to cope with the loss of fellow firefighters, and she is forced to endure the terrifying possibility of a red car pulling up to her door every night to tell her every wife's worst nightmare. When his Captain asks him one night if he loves the job the way he did when he first started, one notices that Jack doesn't give a direct answer, and when he asks in response if he's saying that he should leave the firehouse, Kennedy answers that he thinks it's a question Jack should be asking himself.

These are valid concerns, to which the movie does not pay mere lip service. We bond with the characters and experience their fears and their grief, largely because we get to see as much of the firefighters' camaraderie and sense of family as we do of them fighting fire (though we see plenty of that too, and the firefighting scenes 'are' excellently done). It's probably no accident that there is little conflict among the firefighters (only Lenny, played by Robert Patrick, is at all antagonistic, and even then, not much); that they are all nice guys allows us to like them, and sympathize with them through their joys and their pains. The conflict, rather, is in the conflict inherent in those occupations that require people not only to take huge risks and sometimes make the ultimate sacrifice, but which require the same of their wives and loved ones as well. It is through the thrilling action sequences of buildings exploding in flame and the inevitable tragedies that result that the movie is able to successfully convey firefighting as an occupation that is both inescapably glorious and frightening. It is because these are all too-real concerns easily mirrored in real life, moreso now in a post-9/11 world than ever before, that the film is able, without a deeply convoluted story or extremely edgy plot twists, to elicit our emotions and hold our interest.

The plot is not a high-concept 'what if.' It is merely about life.

Specifically, it's about the lives of those who are paid to give theirs to save ours.

It's become clearer and clearer to me that with the success of `The

Sixth Sense', M. Night Shyamalan may be just a one-trick pony.

What was a well-written and well-acted drama with tension and a

shock ending worthy of a classic has given way to a trilogy of

progressively worse movies that seem created more just to justify

a clichéd shock ending than to provide a coherent or meaningful

story, and this comes to a crux with `The Village'. Even

`Unbreakable', with its snore-inducingly drab color palette and

lighting, which put me to sleep at both screenings I attended for it,

had a somewhat interesting human story that held up surprisingly

well when I saw it on TV recently. `Signs', despite the same

boring first Act, villains whose actions made no sense, and plot

holes big enough to drive a Mack truck through, had genuinely

SCARY moments. `The Village,' however, lacks any of these

virtues, but whose first 35 minutes (and some intermittent

moments afterwards) is of that same flat quality that works better

than NyQuil, and whose ending doesn't seem so much as a

shocker as it does an offensive hoax.

The movie is set in (I believe) the 1800's, in an isolated

Pennsylvania village surrounded by the Covington Woods, into

which the villagers are forbidden to cross, lest they disrupt the

truce between the village and Those We Do Not Speak Of,

demonic creatures that even in their first obscured appearance in

the film, do not look scary, but rather merely silly, resembling the

Scarecrow monster in the current story arc that just wrapped in

`Batman.' There is not a single scary moment in this film,

absolutely nothing in the way of suspense, character development,

or an interesting plot in the first forty or so minutes of the film, until

a character's contrived serious injury requires the film's female

heroine, Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard-director Ron's daughter), to

venture forth into `the towns' to find medicine, at which point the

Shyamalan Shocking Revelation is revealed, which unlike those in

Shyamalan's previous three films, resembles more a massive

scam than it does a plot twist, a scam perpetrated on both the

characters AND the audience, and if you didn't figure out until this

scene that Ivy's blindness was contrived to mesh with this

eventual plot twist, then perhaps you haven't been watching a lot of

Shyamalan films. Or many films period.

Edward Walker (William Hurt) tells Lucius (Joaquim Phoenix) that

he is fearless in a way that he will never be. Damn right, Edward.

Most people who suffer from grief eventually get over it. You and

your fellow rejects, on the other hand, were so cowardly that rather

than face your pain, you not only retreated from society, but

decided to engineer a massive lie to your children to cover up the

truth, when you could very easily have retreated from society and

lived a simpler existence without making the kids believe that they

were living in a past century, complete with silly bogeyman

costumes, and your idiotic insistence on using antiquated

phrases in your speech like `fortnight.'

It is at the point of this `revelation' that the entire movie doesn't

seem at all like a journey in which insight is made in terms of

characters or themes, or the audience is treated to even a

plausible plot (Shyamalan explains that airspace is restricted over

the wildlife preserve in which the village is located, but doesn't

explain how that small group of founders transported all the

building materials necessary to build all those nice-looking

homes and town halls), but just one big practical joke; a pointless

exercise in how to maintain a color-by-numbers format that

Shyamalan seems to insist for all of his films, such as the

obligatory Pennsylvania setting, the use of the color red as a plot

harbinger (as it was in `The Sixth Sense'-in `Unbreakable' and

`Signs' it was water), and of course, Shyamalan's patented

Shoehorned-Into-The-Story appearance, which is thankfully kept to

a minimum, as it takes the form of mostly a voice and a minor

reflection in the glass door of a medicine cabinet. Hey, Night!

Wanna come up with a new schtick? It's getting kind of old, ya

know.

This was a really entertaining movie. Cruise excels at creating a

frightening, intimidating killer, probably his first clear-cut villainous

role since `Taps'. Jamie Foxx, in an interview I saw before seeing

this film last night, talked about how he was asked to `take it down

a notch' so to speak, in order to play a simple, humble cab driver,

and seeing the film proves he did that just well. (As a side note, I

saw the trailer for `Ray' in front of `The Manchurian Candidate',

which I went to after `Collateral', and just from the trailer, Foxx's

performance looks like it might be an Oscar contender.) Michael

Mann's direction rises to its usual adroit level, and this was his

best thriller since `Heat', full of close-up shots of characters and

lingering shots that cause the heart to pump. Stuart Beattie's

script wisely creates that thriller that, not content with mere empty

action, gets under the skin of its characters, using their lives and

their weaknesses to create a rapport with the audience, evoking

both sympathy and tension.

This was a great film. I recommend it.

God, what a mindless film.

I haven't seen the first film, but heard that it was a critical bomb. Since I was staffing the screening today we had at noon for this one, I decided to stay and watch, and in part because I invited a friend from high school to it. I wanted it to be over before the halfway mark, and when the final chase/confrontation began, I thanked God.

After the third or fourth scene featuring the Angels in a new set of disguises, it begins to resemble not so much a movie as it does a sketch comedy in which each scene is a skit with different costumes that bears little importance with what scene came right before or what comes after it. Who was that `Thin Man' guy played by Crispin Glover supposed to be? And why were the Angels following that guy that Cameron Diaz met at the beach? I didn't get any of this, and after a while, I didn't care. The only thing going of the film was Cameron Diaz's rear end, and other assorted shots of the Angels in skimpy outfits. Most of the stunts were incredibly poor, had lousy F/X shots (except for the fight inside the warehouse with the Irish guy and his men, which I enjoyed), and Bernie Mac's minstrel routine just made me roll my eyes.

"View from the Top" is Film 101 for how to do the "Small-Town Person Who Dreams of Big Success But Realizes True Love is Preferable" story in the plainest, most generic, and least interesting way possible. If you've seen "Doc Hollywood," which does this type of story with charm, humor, and lovable characters, you needn't see this one.

Gwyneth Paltrow plays Donna Jensen, a Nevada woman who lives in a trailer and works at the local department store in a job she got because her high school sweetheart is the store manager. She dreams of bigger things, and decides that becoming a stewardess is the gateway to world travel and prestige. To make this trip seem worthwhile, the plot presents an obstacle or two that she must overcome to get there, but the plot, which moves along briskly, and culminates in what appears to be its emotional/character climax only one hour into the film, is so devoid of any true character conflict or development, and so lacking in any explanation for some of the characters' actions, that the entire thing just seems so pre-ordained. Things happen because the plot requires them, not because they follow any interesting character trait.

Why, for example, does Kelly Preston (looking more pulchritudinous than ever), appear, and then, in violation of Roger Ebert's Law of Economy of Characters, suddenly disappear? Why is nothing made of her character or her not moving on to the next level? (Because the plot needed Gwyneth to not be alone when she started out on her first flight, but once she and Christina moved onto the next level, they no longer needed Preston.)

Why, for example, does Candice Bergen, the veteran flight attendant who married rich and who's promoted her recipe for flight attendant success on Oprah, suddenly grab a group of flight attendant trainees at random for no reason and invite them to dinner at her home? (Because the plot requires her to become Donna's mentor.)

Why does Rob Lowe appear for two short scenes and then disappear? (Don't ask me to explain THIS one in parenthesis, because I have no idea. Maybe his other scenes were cut. Given the hour and twenty minute running time-which is followed by unfunny outakes no doubt meant to pad it-that Stacey Dash is also almost entirely absent from the movie, and that Christian Slater and Regis Philbin's cameos, were also absent, they may have left quite a lot on the cutting room floor.)

As Gwyneth aims for the big international First Class job, the movie doesn't bother to even try making the Big Stumbling Block to that dream remotely mysterious. If what happened to her wasn't totally obvious to you, well, then maybe this is your type of movie, but this review isn't. :)

There is absolutely no sense of tension, nor any sympathy for the characters, who are utter cardboard. Nothing they do feels important, has any consequence, reveals character or incites any kind of development. There is never the sense that anything that the characters do is done because they have any kind of motivation or desire.

I have a feeling, though, that I will be in the minority. More than one friend who saw it told me they loved it, and said that Mike Myers was "hilarious" in it. Personally, I didn't find a single one of his gags funny. I thought his character was a self-important nerd, and rather than acknowledge that nerds' jokes aren't funny, and that humor should come at the EXPENSE of the nerd, the movie instead makes believe his gags are actually funny. Given how most people in the audience laughed throughout it, I imagine this movie will do well. Personally, I was far more impressed with Christina Applegate, who looks quite delicious in this film, and fills out a blue bikini quite nicely.