Director Marc Forster’s newest film, Stranger Than Fiction, tells the parallel tales of lonely IRS agent, Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), moving through his banal existence, and a writer’s block stricken author, Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), who is on the brink of finally finishing her masterpiece after a decade of developing it to perfection. What neither knows is that their lives are about to intersect. How? Well, one day Harold begins hearing a voice, a narrator to be precise.

 At first the voice is harmless, although rather irksome for both Harold as well as the audience, continuously describing Harold’s every action in meticulous detail, with a sophisticated eloquence and a rich repertoire of words. Then one day it indicates that he’s going to die. This worries Harold and send him to the office of  shrink, then a literature professor, played by Dustin Hoffman.

In the other story, Karen’s publisher has sent an assistant to make sure the final draft of her great opus is   not delayed any further by reveries of suicide, daydreams of tragic car accidents, or the occasional trip to the emergency room to watch people suffer and search for those about to die.

Back in Harold’s world, he and his new companion are trying to decipher whether his life is meant to be comic or tragic. To aim for comic, the literary professor suggests Harold try to ignite a romance with a woman who can’t stand him. After an initial failed attempt, Harold’s told to try just living each day as if it were his last. He does so. And for the first time he begins to enjoy life. He even wins the heart of a quirky, young woman who used to hate him. Things are going well, until he hears Karen on the news. As his literary  companion informs him, Karen only writes tragedies. To make things worse, after tracking Karen down and getting a copy of her unpublished manuscript, Harold realizes that the death she has in store for him is the most poetic death one could hope for. Should he accept his fate, or should he try to take control of his own life? That he the question he must face.

Now if this seems like an interesting premise to you, I cannot disagree. The script has a Charlie Kaufman type feel to it along with Charlie Kaufman-esque philosophical questions. The cast and the director are first rate. And the potential for dark humor is endless. But, there’s a problem. The film doesn’t take full advantage of its dark potential. For the first hour or so of the film, we primarily only see Ferrell doing a toned down Will Ferrell romantic comedy routine (think Bewitched) occasionally interrupted by a much funnier, much darker, much more interesting character storyline involving a perpetually depressed, death obsessed genius. After the first hour, I must say the film does improve, and once the worlds collide we get some truly great scenes in which we see an author meet one of her characters and several people weighing the meaningless life of one man against what may be the perfect tragic end that will not only give meaning to that man’s life, but also give the perfect ending to what just may be the greatest novel of our time. Will Ferrell even proves that he can be taken seriously as an actor in these scenes (not quite the Oscar nomination worthy performance I am convinced he will before the end of the decade, but another step in the write direction). The only problem now is that the film failed to consistently play from the darker side from the beginning.

Rating:***

Ever wonder what would happen if a long dead European Countess’ spirit moved to Louisiana for some reason then decided to release a video game, then killed people through the video game? Me neither. But apparently someone did (footnote: one of those someone’s is McG). If they hadn’t I would not have wasted 90 mins of my life that I can’t get back.

In Stay Alive a group of post-teenagers whose lives revolve video games obtain a copy of an illegal game called “Stay Alive” (footnote: about half of them are either to rich or to hot to be that pathetic).They play it together at a party. Get kind of freaked out by graphics as startling as those in maybe House of the Dead. Then start dying the way they die in the game. Police get involved. Kind of suspect on of the post-teens. More people die. They figure out the game is haunted and that it can interact with them in real life even if they think they’ve quit the game. Then they have to kill the killer ghost lady.

If this were an episode of Futurama, it would have been hilarious, but as a 90 minute movie that actually takes itself seriously, staying awake is more diffiult for the audience than staying alive is for the post-teens in the movie. The only fun part of the movie was when it looked like the little whiney bitch from Malcolm in the Middle was going to die, but his death was off screen…then he came back to life somehow.

Rating: 0 stars!!!

Imagine a world where freedom of speech and expression are things of the past. A place where every home in the country is bugged. Where the the evening news is fabricated and used as a weapon of terror. I know since we live in America that is a difficult thing to do. I watch the “fair and balanced” channel every night and find that whole concept quite laughable. But such a thing does make for a good movie. That move is V for Vendetta, a dark and atmospheric view of the future.

V is a terrorist, guised as Guy Fox, created by some mishap involving secret experimentation on humans carried out by the government. He can’t remember his past beyond the eperimentation, but he does hold a grudge, and has sworn vengeance against Britain’s totalitarian regime.

He will not rest until he incites a revolution. To do so he carries out a series of complex plots that result in a series of even more complex scenarios. Sometimes there’s collateral damage. Sometimes there’s not. Either way he gets the job done. To go into it in enough detail to make it comprhensible would take about as much time for me to write as it would for you just to see the movie yourself.

But what I can say is that V for Vendetta is a superior superhero film. The Orwellian future presented in the film does not look like it is too far into the future. The evil dictatorship in the film appears to be a cross between Nazi Germany and modern day America. The casualness that the nation’s citizens have toward this is humorous. And V is amusing both for his violent acts and his keen british wit (it’s also fun to watch him do housework watch movies and flirt with Natalie Portman, all while in full costume).

Like Sin City and Batman Begins, V for Vendetta is a part of this new breed of superhero film, a bit more grown up than say X-Men or Fantastic Four. The brooding loner in costume is sympathetic and well developed. The situations are dark. The violence is graphic. And the chivalric superhero code is dead.

Oh, and since I don’t know who’s reading, George W. Bush is the greatest president ever. And I love Jesus.

Rating:****

In his latest movie, The Libertine, Johnny Depp does what he does best: bring life to a quirky character that would seem absurd if done by anyone else. Depp plays John Wilmot, Second Early of Rochester (think Jame’s Spader’s Alan Shore from Boston Legal, but as a 17th century poet rather than a 21st century lawyer). He drinks, screws, pisses off every one he comes in conact with, tries to make some semblance of a social commentary on the war with France and the disproportionate distribution of wealth in England, and does all this with a perverse wit. The problem is he also philosophizes and philosophizes…and philosophizes without ever really making a strong argument beyond a vague musing on an unclear topic. And that’s where the movie falters.

When John Wilmot is being an asshole naturally it is amusing. When he does it, believing he has purpose, the film becomes tedious, excruciatingly dull, and boring. The film tries to make political and philosophical points, as well as turn into some morality play by the end, but it constantly fails. I think Depp gave a good performance and the movie tried to do some interesting things, but nonetheless the movie suffered froma weak script.

Question: If the U.S. governement told you, your family, and your entire community to vacate your town so they could test nuclear bombs on the land, would you (A) Do as they said (B) Hire a lawyer who specializes in such disputes (C) Call up every major news station as well as Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Sean Penn, and Michael Moore help gain public sympathy, or (D) retreat into some nearby mines, emerge after the government is done proving it wasn’t fucking around when it said it was going to test some nukes, and then take revenge against the government by trapping, hunting, raping, killing and eating every unlucky traveller that comes your way? Most people would answer with some combination of A,B, and C. The non-conformists in The Hills Have Eyes chose option D for some reason.

With that said, the protagonists in this film are a family of about seven obnoxious, bickering stock-characters who you kind of want to see die. They’re travelling through the desert. An inbred old man tells them about a short cut. Big surprise, they get trapped in the middle of nowhere. Luckily they have guns. The patriarch of the family is a newly retired ex-cop who’s always prepared. Too bad his aim is shit.

After hillbillies capture him they use him in a somwhat interesting stragey of divide and conquer. There’s some raping and killing. A baby is captured. Its father, a nerdy cell-phone salesman, decides to go rescue it the next day, armed with only a baseball bat while a couple of teenagers are left to defend the family trailer. The teenagers bond while setting some traps of their own. The cell-phone salesman goes on his little excursion, up grading his weapon, in true video game fashion, to an axe then a shotgun, slaughtering his way through every hillbilly that gets in his way. And he gets the baby back, meets up with the teenagers, and everything is fine…or is it? The POV shot at the end says no. More importantly, do I really care? That answer is also no.

The envelope that stopped before maiming, torture, and raped was pushed a few years ago by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Saw cemented such things as the standard. Nip/Tuck played around with it for the last couple of seasons by setting a serial mutilator/rapist loose on its cast. And The Devil’s Rejects essentially made a film from the sub-genre of slasher-horror as artistic as one from that sub-genre has ever been.

Where does that leave The Hills Have Eyes? If you didn’t get the hint from the paragraph above, it doesn’t do anything that hasn’t been done better by another movie. It tries to be a bit artistic. It tries to appear to push an envelope. It does have a few entertaining kills and action sequences. But in the end its incredibly average, banal, and forgettable.

The things listed in the title of this post describe just a few of the characters found in the film Transamerica. This is good because it shows the Weinsteins are using their talents for something a little more interesting than Hostage or one of the other crappy mainstream films that marked their last few years with Miramax (that’s not to say they didn’t do anything good during their last few years with Miramax, but if you add up their score card for recent years, crap wins, followed by non-offensive Oscar contenders).

Anyway, with regards to the movie Felicity Huffman’s performance as a man who is one surgery away from pseudo-womanhood is as excellent as everyone says it is. As for the story, I found it to be mediocre. Much of the plot seemed contrived. And the blend of comedic and dramatic elements was a bit uneven.

Early in the film Stanley/Bree gets a call from the son he never knew he had. When he tells his therapist about it, just before receiving consent to get his final surgery, his therapist tells him that consent will be withheld until he makes peace with his son. This involves flying across the country, bailing that son out of jail, and travelling back across the country by car with the son. One of the elephants in the room that wasn’t adequately addressed is that Stanley/Bree is poor and probably couldn’t afford afford such a trip as well as a week off from work plus the surgery if this were real life. Also I think his therapist would know this, and wouldn’t threaten to take away consent as a way to force him to go on costly trip to get to know the son he never knew he had.

As the film continues, there are a couple of tragic episodes that make the father and son grow closer and some occasional awkward jokes. About half way through the film, maybe a little more, tragedy is replaced by comedy when Stanley/Bree, now pretending to be a Christian missionary, takes his son to what seems like a transexual tupperware party (at this point the boy still doesn’t know Stanley/Bree is really a man or his father).

This is followed by the son seeing Bree stand while urinating, an episode involving a Peyote priest who steals their car, another involving an Indian man who kind of develops a crush on Bree, and some hilarious scenes involving Stanley’s family. The film goes back to tragedy when the son realizes his relation to his transexual benefactor.

It ends with some bitter sweet closing scenes. The overall message of the film is something along the lines of don’t try to change people, but respect and love them for who they are. It sounds nice, but considering the characters involved… should no one try to change a sexually abused young man who becomes a drug addicted male prostitute by 17 and aspires to be nothing more than a male porn star…

And just as a closing thought, one of the questions that always comes to my mind when viewing something that deals with transexuals, whether the second season of Nip/Tuck, the episode of South Park where Mr. Garrison becomes a woman, or Transamerica is: ‘does allowing people who suffer from a psychological disorder that causes them to believe they are of the opposite sex to get an operation to make them appear to the outside world to be of the opposite sex, create the potential for these people to unintentionally involve others in a type of relationship that they might not feel confortable being in’.

Now before you answer that, let me rephrase it: you are dating, making out with, having sex with, engaged to, married to a person, and they tell you that they were not always the sex they appear to be now. How do you react?

Oscar Sunday is upon us and something amazing is about to happen: for the first time in years a picture worthy of the title of “Best Picture” is going to win the prize for “Best Picture”. I know! It’s hard to beleive! This year there are no safe or mainstream films nominated for the award. Instead, this year it comes down to five of the most artistic thought provoking films of the year, which are two qualities that are usually rather rare in “Best Picture” nominees and even rarer in “Best Picture” winners. This year it comes down to Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Crash, Good Night & Good Luck, and Munich.

Now personally, if I picked them, I would have substituted The Weatherman for Crash and Lord of War for Good Night… (and possibly Sin City for Brokeback), but nonetheless this is still a pretty good group. I mean I can’t expect miracles.

Anyway, Brokeback follows the heartbreaking story of two gay cowboys in a time and place that won’t accept them. Capote examines the moral dilemma of a man who must choose between trying to save a friend’s life and being able to write the perfect ending to his novel. Crash takes a look at race relations in L.A. through about a dozen or so interelated storylines. Good Night…, like Capote also eamines the moral dilemma of sorts faced by a group of men who must choose between their careers and their values. And, my personal favorite of the five, Munich follows a group of mercenaries/terrorists as they constantly question, debate, and rationalize the morality of their profession.

Once again, all are worthy. This year the deciding factor will not bethe ambition of the director rather than his final product (i.e. James Cameron’s Titanic, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, Peter Jackson’s LOTR) or the popularity of the film’s director (Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind or Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby).