Reviews

Artistic styles come in two basic forms. You have your more lifelike art, which is meant to capture a moment in time through the imagination of the artist. The other is abstract art, wherein an artist has no intention of spoon-fooding you what to think, but is hoping to manipulate your feelings.

And it's not binary. Most art falls into a spectrum somewhere in between those two extremes.

If you've ever seen a David Lynch production like Eraserhead you'll recognize the abstract side of that spectrum, because you'll realize the futility of sorting out an actual plot. David Lynch, like sometimes directors David Cronenberg (Videodrome, eXistenZ, etc) and Terry Gilliam (Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, etc) or writers like Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, etc), confuses reality on purpose and likes characters who roll with it, so that you have no choice but to roll with them. They have no intention of making sense. Their movies are often an attempt to throw off your sense of reality and ask you to simply except what you're seeing instead of try to understand it.

Beau Is Afraid falls into that category, but nonetheless, I'm going to try to understand it anyway.

This movie spends its entire time inside the mind of a man who clearly suffers from extreme anxiety, but it's hard to pin down what exactly it is that he's afraid of. And unlike movies like David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, we're offered no obvious reason why Beau is seeing some of the weird things he sees. Is he schizophrenic? Maybe. Ari Aster does not want to answer that question, he wants you to ponder on multiple possibilities. And like most art that leans on the abstract side of the spectrum, each viewer is likely to reflect differently on it, and come up with their own answers (if any at all).

From what I could tell, there were many clues in the movie that seem to imply that his anxiety disorder is caused by something sexual. A sexual trauma, perhaps. From graphic graffiti at in the earlier sequences, scenes where he is attracted to a girl his age but believes he will die if he has sex with her, and a creature his mother calls "his father" locked in an attic that is basically a monster made out of male genitalia, the movie is riddled with disturbing sexual references. (Not unlike something Cronenberg would do.)

And his mother seems to be at the center of this problem. He behaves in a way that is constantly befuddled, and apparently victimized by every possible circumstance he stumbles into, but it all seems to have something to do with the way his mother treats him. Each sequence of the movie is another angle at the same problem, but in very different ways, and with perhaps red herrings to throw you off the scent.

In one very key shot, apparently a flashback, there was a POV scene of him in a bathtub and the young girl he has a crush on is sitting at the side of the tub, she gets up and exits the frame, but the camera pans over to see his mother entering the frame from the same direction - and approaching his young self. (He is effectively outside of himself observing his relationship with his mother.) His mother tries to remove his clothes for bath time and he resists, asking for his father. (It's not clear why he wants his father. Certainly not to undress him. My feeling is it was for protection. Why would a boy his age need to be undressed by his mother?)

The reason I think this is important is because I think the director is signaling to us that his mother might have sexually abused him through much of his childhood, and lied to him about his father and about his own sexual health in order to keep him tethered.

But yet there was an earlier scene wherein he was imagining himself in a play where he actually found a wife and had kids with her, and occasionally this wife looked like a man. (This man, we learn later, is identified as Beau's father.) Beau spends an entire lifetime in this staged story looking for his lost wife and kids (who had disappeared after a terrible flood) and finally he meets up with his sons all grown up. That this was framed as a stage play is no accident. It was an imagined reality.

Something about all that makes me think he had an intuition of being lied to all his life, and that his father represented the truth: that he could have a family all along. But we don't know what really happened to his father, and whether the man he met at the traveling theater was even real. Either way, his mother was very mean and impatient with him, and manipulative. She did not seem to approve of his natural interest in girls, and even seemed to enjoy watching him flirt with the idea of being with girls to see how it would play out.

It was she who frightened him into a life-long resistance to find love in the arms of another woman. When he finally broke down and at least believed he had intercourse with that childhood crush, now grown up and played by Parker Posy, and did not die, we learn that his mother apparently observed (and probably set up) the entire thing. When the girl died (at least figuratively), his problem shifted from having fears of himself dying to a feeling of terrible guilt for "killing" the woman he loves - a role which I think his mother insists on filling.

The final sequence was his trial, but unfortunately there was no redemption to be found here. Disappointingly, it appears he symbolically lost his battle with anxiety, false-guilt and low self esteem, and his mother won. No payoff to be found for the poor audience, who has sat through 3 full hours of this!

All in all, I would have rated it higher if the film was about 1 hour shorter and his long, painful journey of self discovery and failure to stop the pattern of "self incrimination" and "guilt" due to probably sexual abuse was rewarded at the end with something happier, something psychologically triumphant. But it wasn't. It was like watching someone die of cancer and then die without fixing anything in his life. So why was I taken on this ride into hopelessness? It's not like Phoenix's Joker character which was a portrayal of a man who chose evil due as a response to his unfortunate medical condition and the cruelty of life. The character of Beau went absolutely nowhere and changed nothing. He just learned the truth about himself, and his mind judged him guilty despite all that.

The movie is labeled a comedy and a horror, which is not quite accurate. It was satirical in many places, perhaps intending sarcasm about the violent world we live in. But it was neither that funny nor that scary. I'd have simply called it a psychological drama and satire.

Phoenix is an absolutely amazing actor, but I would have advised him to take another look at the third act and insist on a stronger payoff.

Bladerunner 2049, like the original, is a concept art movie whose DNA is pure introspection wrapped tightly in a silk of ambiance. Various other movies have attempted to introspect on what it means to be human... What humanity is... Bladerunner is among the best of those, but it doesn't stop with just that question. When you analyze the Bladerunner movies together you find yourself sensing metaphors and symbols and outright injections of racism, sexism, elitism, commercialism, and "isms" I haven't even thought of; exploitation, environmental negligence, invasion of privacy, neglect, police corruption, and abuse of power. It was a frightening glimpse at ourselves today, at our inner nature, at fears ranging from xenophobia to claustrophobia to phobias that haven't been invented yet. Those are the negative things, but you can also find human ingenuity, art, innocence, and the need for love and nostalgia, all but lost like tears in the rain. The pacing of the movie was ponderous because it needed you to digest all of this brain food and eye candy, and it used the music and sound effects and visual effects to keep your attention. The music helped to glue you to the thoughts the movie was injecting you with - and some of them were on the level of subliminal advertising.

It remained consistent with the original movie, in continuity with the atmospheric theme but allowing us a more diverse glimpse outside the urban waste-cage and the clutch of overpopulation. But there is no improvement to be found outside the city: it is a lonely place with or without the crowds. The barren desert landscapes, the angry ocean waters, the garbage heaps of San Diego littered with desperate children, and the decadent remains of a sepia-baked Las Vegas were no improvements, and yet the eyes drink it all. The assault of personal space and by unregulated advertisement and human debauchery that sticks to you in like filthy grime was set in stark contrast with a distinct isolation on the outside, no better and no worse, and all welded together with stunning sounds. Both Bladerunner movies are a war between perfection and imperfection: our struggle to create a perfect world for ourselves results in a world decidedly imperfect. This is a world- build set on the unstable ground of organic, cultural, technological and industrial blemishes, the kind we turn our eyes from and pretend they don't exist. Watch both movies and you find yourself buried in things that fail or do not work quite right... Shorting out, dying, rotting, falling into disrepair, scraped up, beaten up... It is the future through the lens of today, rather than through the rosy glasses of yesteryear.

There are scenes in the Bladerunner movies (and others) in which the characters really aren't doing anything but thinking or taking a journey. The plot doesn't move and the characters don't develop. When that's done on purpose (see Under the Skin for more-than-enough of that technique) and when the actors and Director of Photography and Sound Designer and Composer aren't on board with what the director is trying to do, it fails. Even if they ARE on board it could fail, so it's a risky art, especially with an enormous amount of studio money, in a system where the studio people can intercede to "protect" their investment. I felt that this cut could use a little trimming here and there, as we lingered on a person thinking for a few seconds too many, or waiting (without any suspense) for Deckard to finally say, "Rachel," and as I waited, in my mind that police loudspeaker was saying: "Move-on... Move-on... Movie-on..."

The question of Deckard's humanity, and the ambiguity that drives everyone to debate it, is the metaphor of ourselves. He is the "everyman." What makes us human? Aren't' we all machines, striving for perfection, losing to imperfection, tangled in a war against death for a life of despair we can't seem to win? The unicorn has been used in mythology to symbolize the incarnation of Christ, able to bring back the dead and offer immortality. It did not make an appearance in the second movie. Or did it?

Normally I really enjoy movies written by Simon Pegg. I especially liked Shaun of the Dead and Paul. This movie really stumbled.

Remember that scene in Shaun of the Dead in which they decide the best thing to do is head toward a pub and defend themselves from the zombie horde from there? This movie makes that idea its central theme, changing the zombies into some sort of alien robots, and multiplying the pubs. That's it.

Paul had me laughing out loud every minute or two, and I never get tired of watching it. The World's End gave me just a couple of chuckles throughout the film. And I almost nodded off several times.

The setup before the robots appeared was too long and tedious, and after the robots appeared I couldn't quite understand why our characters kept running from pub to pub. And worse, I didn't much care.

It just wasn't silly enough, witty enough, or clever enough to hold my attention.

While there has been a lot of hype around The Lone Ranger being a major box office bomb, let's set the facts straight. As of the date of this review, it's made over $87 million. What we saw on screen couldn't have been worth more than $50 million at best, and I'm being polite. Deserts, cowboys on horseback, some trains... We've seen it all before. And it made $87 million. Not bad considering the plotting wasn't great and Tonto being over-baked to a crisp.

So why all the hype about it being a bomb? Because the studio proudly reported that they spent $215 million to make this movie.

WHAT??? Did they cut a massive special effects extravaganza out of the movie somewhere? How did they manage to spend $215 million on this? Where's the production value? They put a lot of work into the train SFX, especially train crash SFX, but I'm still not seeing $215 million worth. I'm not even seeing $100 million worth. I'm not even seeing $50 million worth.

But let's get back to the story.

There are two problems with the plotting and characterization of this movie. 1) Tonto is mentally unstable, rather than a loyal and brave guide for The Lone Ranger as he was intended to be. 2) The Lone Ranger didn't seem to have any outstanding skills, and wasn't even very sure of himself or what he should do. I expected them to dial up The Lone Ranger into an Indiana Jones type of character. I wanted to see him as a sharp-shooter who gets knocked down over and over but keeps coming back until he achieves his goal. 3) Silver, the horse, was turned into a sort of semi-mystical spirit creature, apparently capable of doing a few things horses normally can't do. I didn't much like introducing magic into world of The Lone Ranger. Why not throw some aliens in while we're at it? The movie wasn't completely without merit, but all in all, ho hum.

And $215 million dollars??

I appreciated this movie on a number of levels. For one, it tried to be different from its predecessors by not getting carried away by spectacle. I like epic super-hero movies but they don't all have to be that way. Sometimes they just need a little quiet time, to reflect on who they are and where they are going. For another, it maintained continuity with both X-Men Origins: Wolverine and X-Men III: The Last Stand, so that we don't feel like the filmmakers are re-inventing the character and thumbing what other directors have done with him.

This movie was introspective. Wolverine knows basically where he came from now. He joined Professor X but obviously didn't stick around the school. He suffers from chronic nightmares. And he suffers from a sense of purposelessness, which is what leads a lot of people to MDD (major depressive disorder) and suicide. But Wolverine doesn't age (at least not like most people), and heals so quickly that he's very hard to kill. What to do? The movie helps to reset him, to remind them that his fate is tied to a purpose. He just needs to stop moping around about his condition and own it.

Some of the action sequences are tremendous, especially the train. You don't have to knock down skyscrapers to have a breathtaking fight scene.

Hugh Jackman takes his role very seriously. He always trains for the part, and his physique is really killer now. Unlike other actors like Christian Bale, who give up interest in playing the same super-hero, Jackman has no problem returning to the role over and over and building something new out of it. He'll be back again for X-Men: Days of Future Past. He is the only actor to appear in all of the X-Men movies playing Wolverine, with only a few seconds in X-Men First Class (which itself was a great film, but with continuity problems otherwise), and it helps to tie the franchise together. (Days of Future Past is rumored to try to fix some of the continuity errors, but we'll see.) I am to the point that I want to see a Hugh Jackman movie, no matter what it is. He's arrived as a great action star.

The movie might have been a little above average had the Men in Black and Ghostbusters movies never been made, but it wasn't quite as funny as either of those science fiction comedies.

This was no fault of the actors. Jeff Bridges always surprises me with his acting range.

But it's as though the the script was written by fanboys of MIB and Ghostbusters who wanted to do the same thing with their own characters.

The following points can describe both MIB and RIPD:

* A hidden company with a cool acronym recruits people to hunt down weird creatures. * An old, seasoned creature-hunter pairs up with an upstart rookie and sparks fly as they track clues toward a serious event about to take place. * Creatures are hiding amongst us, and an agency that hides "in plain sight" is tasked with controlling them.

Now let's look at similarities with Ghostbusters:

* A heroic group is tasked with capturing dead creatures. * Dead creatures are trying to take over our dimension, and it may spell doom for mankind. * Special technology is used to eliminate dead creatures.

All three are comedies, deal with some ridiculous but popular fantasy elements (ghosts, aliens), and have an entourage protagonist (a team rather than a single person).

RIPD tried to be funny within its niche, and managed to accomplish a chuckle here and there, but the rip-off of its predecessors was painful.

One might argue that rip-offs are normal in Hollywood fare. After all, how many modern zombie movies are basically inspired by Night of the Living Dead (which itself was probably inspired by Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, a book written 14 years earlier and struck the same basic theme and plot points)? But MIB cornered a particular style that RIPD so obviously copied, right down to the acronym itself, that it's hard to look past it.

All that aside, the movie was barely entertaining, and really not worth modern ticket prices. It'll be largely forgotten in a few years, and you'll be lucky to find the Blu-ray discs in the $1 bargain barrel at Best Buy.

Ever since the original Gojira in 1954, a serious movie about a giant monster tearing down our civilized world, I've been hungry for an epic movie with the same treatment.

The wait goes on. And the reason is because the subject matter is rarely taken seriously. In fact movies of this ilk are intentionally goofy or tongue-in-cheek, and Pacific Rim is well within that range. It's as if the storytellers feel that there is no way to treat the subject matter in a serious way. After all, it's ridiculous to have giant monsters rise out of the sea and knock down buildings, right? So why not make movies about it that are just as ridiculous?

Really bad thinking.

All of the Godzilla movies made by Toho since the 1954 movie were dumbed down, made for kids. The Roland Emmerich Godzilla in 1998 was full of ham. Cloverfield was serious, but the found-footage hyper-POV format killed the epic, global flavor that I wanted.

I had high hopes for Pacific Rim, but I was very disappointed. The scientists really killed it. They were so ridiculous I was embarrassed every time they had a scene.

Also, Pacific Rim is as much about giant fighting robots as about the giant monsters. The movie began by summarizing an entire history wherein these creatures attacked us, with a few glimpses of them, and jumped forward to begin our story when we already were at war with them using giant robots. It rubs me the wrong way to tell stories in this manner, but I keep an open mind on a case-by-case basis. District 9 used that format, wherein it started long after the aliens have already arrived, rather than chronicling the arrival itself. But I was fine with it. But in Pacific Rim I felt like I was watching a sequel to a movie that was never made.

The battles between robot and monster were very hard to see. There was always darkness, pouring rain, splashing ocean water... I felt like I rarely got a good view of the monsters.

But all of that I would have forgiven if they had expunged it of sappy scientists acting like cocaine addicts and spouting things that made no sense.

I look forward to Gareth Edwards' Godzilla treatment next year to see if he finally breaks the trend.

When I first saw the trailers for World War Z, I thought, "Seriously? More zombies?" Just when I thought the genre had been done to death. I figured the TV series The Walking Dead pretty much capped it. Can't get much better than that for a zombies-are-taking-over-the-world scenario, not because there is anything about the zombies that hasn't been done before, but because The Walking Dead is a very well scripted survival series with an excellent cast playing well developed characters.

I honestly had not read the novel on which this movie was based, itself a sequel. And I was quite surprised that there was a bidding war over the rights to it. Could it be really that different from everything else? Well, it's not remarkably different. There is nothing particularly unique about these zombies, or in the story. They have their own particular spin, and set of rules. They bite, and that spreads some kind of disease. Seen that before. They're quick. Seen that before too, but I think this is the most tireless I've ever seen them portrayed.

But they aren't technically zombies... That is, you don't have to die first, and they don't seem to be "eating" people, just biting them. It's more like a super-virus with zombie-like characteristics, infecting people extremely fast (within seconds), while they are still alive. Once zombified, the victim exerts energy that would make the world's greatest athletes jealous. They are fast, tireless, feel no pain or emotion, somewhat strong, and really hard to "kill." There is also a way to walk among the zombies without being attacked, which is slightly unique. In some zombie movies you just have to act like a zombie, or disguise yourself with zombie stench, but World War Z introduced its own take.

At any rate, it's a fast-moving plot with several visually spectacular sequences. Brad Pitt carries the film.

As a writer myself, I think the screenplay missed the opportunity to vastly increase tension. They should have kept his family on the brink of danger. Instead, his family was given relative safety. I wouldn't have done that. There is nothing more stressful to a father and husband than to put his children and wife in danger and keep him from helping them. This would have been much more suspenseful and emotionally engaging.

World War Z was a fun movie to watch, and while it didn't "redefine" the subgenre, it moved the needle a little bit by creating EXTREME zombie energy. (These guys are DESPERATE to bite people! They reminded me of a blend of army ant and killer bee behavior.) So it was worth seeing, but I have to wonder why it was worth making? Did the genre really need this? Was it worth the risk for Plan B (Pitt's company) to win the bidding war? Not so sure.

For Pitt's sake I hope it does well enough for him but I would sure like to sunset the zombie subgenre because I'm getting fairly tired of it.

I almost never give any movies less than 5 stars unless the filmmakers clearly dismiss the art and science of movie storytelling (such as what you might find from the likes of Charles Band, Ed Wood, or Troma). Movies in which the filmmakers are trying but fail will get something from 4-6 stars from me.

Reviewers who give even movies like this "1 star" are abusing the rating system. To think that there could be no movies worse than this is ridiculous. Just watch the SyFy channel's original monster movies, like Mansquito. I dare you. The Purge does not rate at THAT level.

The Purge has a provocative idea: what if one day a year there was almost no law enforcement, so people were allowed to steal, commit violence, murder, rape, etc, without any police or legal interference? The movie takes that a step further and suggests that our culture evolves to promote this behavior as somehow patriotic, as it supposedly helped to rid our nation of violence for the rest of the year.

There are some precedents in history for barbaric annual festivals of this kind, but not to the effect that they created peace for the rest of the year.

The problem with the movie is that it misunderstands human psychology. The idea is that we all have a violent nature, and that violence in any culture can be attributed to our need to vent that nature, as if it were pressure building up in us like a tea kettle. This is not the case.

While every human has the capacity for violence, this is quite different from having a drive to be violent, even if the situation presents itself. There are some interesting studies on mob behavior, which has a bizarre counter-active effect on typical individual personality and behavior. And I think there is a genetic disposition toward competition, which is what drives people to love sports. And there are some who have a desire to hunt, which is mainly an echo from the millions of years of human survival strategy, especially before we learned how to farm. But it is not correct to presuppose that most humans would choose to go out and commit extreme recreational violence and harm against others, even murder, just to support a national holiday or purge themselves of some instinctive pressure to be violent.

Cultures that exhibit wanton violence are the result of being taught that violence is expected or required of them from a very early age. Vikings and Spartans are well known examples of such societies. A misguided and hateful culture can steer collective human behavior for some time before it is "normalized." Surely the Nazis have shown how dangerous this can be.

But without cultural pressure, humans have a high capacity for feeling shame. I think more than any other organism, possibly in Earth's history, humans indulge in a sort of psychological self-flagellation, a self-loathing that extends not just to one's self but one's gender, one's country, even one's race. I am hearing people complaining that humans are evil rubbish, comparing us to viruses (which is ironic considering how successful viruses are, and how most viruses are harmless and some have even contributed to the evolutionary advancement of life), and that we deserve to be "wiped out" before we "destroy the planet." People with these feelings might envision a movie like this as being completely accurate. In fact, they prove the movie is not - because self shame would neutralize self-indulgent violence toward others. Most humans who are not sociopathic also have a tendency toward high empathy, not only to other humans but to other creatures. This also tilts the balance toward non-violence.

The movie, as shown in the trailers, attempted to demonstrate a family that did not choose to participate in this festival. They hunkered down to ride out the storm. But the point of the movie seems to be that a majority of people seem to choose violence because they feel it helps them and helps society for the rest of the year. Not just violence but weird, psychotic behavior.

(If you wait to the credits you'll hear the suggestion that Dallas, Texas has the highest number of participants. A thinly veiled political stab?) I am growing ever-so-tired of Hollywood's cock-eyed perception that the "upper class" is made up of unsympathetic, selfish, elitist bigots. It's almost as tiresome as the idea that the military is nothing but a legal mob of evil warmongers, and that our democratic republic is a group of rights-violating conspirators intending to take advantage of the "underprivileged." These clichés are overused and their logic is unimpressive. At least The Purge chose main characters who were among that so-called "upper-class" who do not behave that way. Had they been some poor family fighting to survive attacks by the rich, I would have dropped the movie to four stars... Maybe three.

Shoving all that aside and looking at it as a popcorn movie, there are other problems. The plot was too contrived, and full of thriller clichés.

Example: do you remember a moment from any movie in which an important character is about to be killed by a bad guy, but suddenly the bad guy is killed in the last second, saving our hero's life? I'll bet you've seen that dozens of times over the last 20 years, right? Well in The Purge you'll see it not once, not twice, but at least three times! Even a new untested screenwriter shouldn't be making mistakes like that.

I could go on. The point is: this movie is made up of gratuitous well-worn thrills based on a spurious psychology.

I would pass on this one.

This mockumentary was successful enough to inspire a recently released sequel: "Mermaids: The New Evidence," a talkshow followup featuring various pseudo "viral videos" and "leaked videos" of incidents that help to support the myth.

This is a fictional documentary special about the story of a scientist and his team stumbling upon "evidence" supporting the "Aquatic Ape" theory, which purports that a branch of ancient human returned to the ocean, and that we are a near-branch of those creatures that still carry apparent aquatic features.

The idea is provocative because it is not at all outside the realm of scientific feasibility for ancient humans to have returned to the oceans, just as the ancestors of whales and dolphins did. But just because it's a feasible notion, that doesn't mean we need to consider that it may have happened. The problem is that aquatic mammals are air-breathers, and therefore need to surface with at least enough frequency that, with the ever-growing human population, it's extremely unlikely for them to escape direct evidence that they are alive. There is nothing in the fossil record supporting such creatures either. And finally, there is no reason any government around the world would want to suppress evidence of such creatures, any more than a new species of land primate or a new species of dolphin.

I must digress for a moment, so that this kind of program is placed in context.

Animal Planet, like any non-premium television channel, is in the business of advertising. That is how they make most of their revenues, and all content in between the commercials is a sales gimmick to attract an audience to watch the advertising. Even a news broadcast is a gimmick, though it runs by a certain code that at least pretends to be objective, and is further governed by laws such as "freedom of the press." Therefore, any television content can be manipulated to maximize interest in it, either by creative editing, creative writing, or creative visuals, or any combination thereof. It is folly to see television as a reflection of reality. It is not at all the same as personal experience. But television producers and the technology at their disposal are getting more and more clever at blurring the line between entertainment and reality. The precocious radio / television / film actor / producer, Orson Welles, created a live radio play in 1938 inspired by H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds that came across as a news broadcast, and accidentally tricked lots of people into a panic thinking Martians were really invading. This demonstrated the power of mass media vs the gullibility of humans to confuse what they see and hear on media with reality.

Mermaids: The Body Found, and Mermaids: The New Evidence, explore the same territory by mixing various known scientific paradigms with fake interviews, fake footage, labeled live action reenactments, and CGI dramatizations. The network's interest is simply in ratings. But what of the producers? I believe one motivation of the producers is simply to find a creative way to protest military testing in the ocean that can harm marine life, in particularly sonar testing which many believe is proved to link to the mass beaching of marine mammals. The producers needed to find a way to draw mass interest in their protest. So they devised a gimmick to propose that there could be very important undiscovered life in the ocean that is being damaged by this testing.

However I feel they crossed the line, and may have shot themselves in the foot. For one thing, by creating a fake documentary and passing it off as a real one, it creates distrust that anything in the show has any basis in fact at all. Call it the "cry wolf" syndrome.

Secondly, and more importantly, in their fake documentary they create an atmosphere of animosity toward our government - claiming that our government and military agencies stole evidence, harassed witnesses, and interfered with their programming. It is one thing to scream "fire" when this kind of thing happens for real, and to protest testing that may be very damaging to the environment. But to make up government "cover-ups" and pretend it's real, and distribute that on a channel that passes itself off as an educational outlet for all ages, is in my opinion unethical, irritating, and dangerous.

If my pre-teen kids watch this show along side genuine nature programming, they can walk away feeling angry toward our government for something it isn't doing - covering up evidence of something important. Or they could walk away not believing the entire thing - dismissing something the military may be doing that it should not be.

While one can argue that a mockumentary like this challenges our youngsters to think critically, teaching them to discern what is real and what is not, I tend to think it actually does quite the opposite.

Zero Dark Thirty was a gritty, docudrama-like movie much in the flavor of Black Hawk Down and Munich. Unlike the Hollywood fiction formula of old, you won't find a "love interest" and "comic relief." It is a dry film - meaning the plot had very little bandwidth and the characters were all business.

As such, it is a not a theme that greatly interests me, or attracts me to the theater. In fact I go to the theater to escape dwelling on these types of realities, not immerse myself in them.

Nonetheless I'm compelled to voice my opinion on this one because the film is harshly criticized for an assortment of reasons. possibly some even conflicting. I thought the film portrayed itself exactly as Katheryn Bigelow (whose career I've followed since Near Dark, not since The Hurt Locker like most younger people) advertised. "Boots on the ground." The story is very zoomed in, not zoomed out.

I avoid movies like this because I have very little interest in the political opinions of Hollywood (or of anyone else for that matter). Opinions are opinions, and I give none more or less weight than my own, frankly. Harlan Ellison is quoted of saying, "You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion." Which is an agreeable notion, but it depends on the quality of the information, doesn't it? And how can you confirm that information? If one is misinformed, his or her "informed" opinion may be of nor more value than an ignorant one.

I never felt that Zero Dark Thirty was taking any stand for or against torture. There were no debates or analysis or reflection between the characters on the merits or ethics of water boarding and other methods of duress interrogation. It's only risk was to choose to depict members of the CIA using torture as it is commonly defined, and there are strong opinions that we did no such thing. Those opinions, I daresay, are based entirely on what one wants to believe, not on facts. The facts, unfortunately, are elusive. I assume we did torture, based on my gut feeling on how various officials reacted to the question, especially President Bush. But it's just an assumption on my part - I am not informed, and neither are most people.

So Zero Dark Thirty made some assumptions, based largely on information fed by the Obama Administration (which is an eyebrow-raiser for most Republicans of course) and built a story about the long and arduous hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Despite claims to the contrary, there was nothing political about how the movie played this out. I was actually quite relieved. It didn't point accusing fingers, act ashamed, or express pride. Intelligence mistakes that occurred were human ones. It was an extremely difficult hunt, with CIA members sometimes chasing bad information that looked pretty good at the time. In fact, the final attack on Osama's compound (which was amazingly powerful) was itself an exercise in probability, not fact. We didn't know for sure Osama was that compound, but there were lots of compelling reasons to think he was. Similarly, the CIA didn't know for sure that Iraq wasn't hiding WMD production, but there were lots of compelling reasons to think they were. In one case we made a judgment call and lost, in another we made a judgment call and won. I'm sorry to say, that's the way the game is usually played.

So if you like this genre, this is a movie well worth seeing. If you flatly refuse to believe we tortured anybody in the war against al qaeda, probably you will be angered by the film, but I'm betting you haven't a shred of proof one way or the other. I don't, and neither do the filmmakers. So put your crystal balls down and try to enjoy.

The current comedy fad is heavy on sex and toilet jokes, to the point of being grotesque. But there are a lot of people who laugh at anything that's gross, even it it's not intended to be funny. I'm sure there's some psychology about that. Unfortunately I am not among them. Gross is gross, not funny, unless the actors are very good comedians (Robin Williams, Jim Carey...) and know how to make gross funny. So I don't mind comedies that attempt to give us an alternative.

Unfortunately Larry Crowne wasn't a very funny movie either. Maybe because it wasn't really a comedy, but more of a light-hearted romance. It did have its redeeming values, a quality lacking severely in Hollywood these days.

Hanks plays Larry Crowne, who is a middle-aged divorcée struggling to pay for his house and a divorce settlement working at a retail store. I had to wonder how he ended up working for so long at a retail store at that age. Surely it wasn't a career decision. But in context his character and situation does explain it: he was in the Navy for 20 years and has no college education, so by the time he entered the work force this was the best he could get. And he did very well at it because he's a kind-hearted man who likes his job no matter how little it pays, and doesn't seem to mind any lack of vertical growth.

The store executives didn't think the same way, and when they had to start cutting back they began plucking employees who had no college education that would offer them chances for advancement. And so he was canned. It was all an excuse of course. Normally companies don't care so much if you don't advance through the ranks, as long as you are doing a good job.

In reality they did him a favor. This character was optimistic in nature and "settled" with the changes life forced upon him with no fight at all. That trait is both his strength and his weakness. While you can enjoy the life you have, you aren't going to make a lot of advancements in it if you don't stand up for yourself and try to build. If you settle, you can stagnate, unless you get lucky. Larry Crowne didn't get lucky, and he paid the price. Maybe that's why his wife left him?

So off to college he goes, part time, and Julia Roberts plays the teacher of his "informal communication and speech" class, Mercedes Tainot. She is in a horrid relationship with a man who cares more about babes with big boobs than managing his relationship. He basically sits at home all day looking at porn and uses "being a man" as an excuse for his sloth and neglect. He's every woman's worst nightmare, and Tainot being an intelligent woman this relationship seemed to have been made in hell.

I thought it was bad advice for Larry Crowne to have taken her class. WIth what little money he had left, and so little time before he lost his house, I think he could have found some better classes to beef up his education. But it's ultimately Larry Crowne's romance with Mrs. Tainot, who is obviously going to leave her worthless husband, that made the movie interesting. The movie's failure is that it seemed to take forever just to get the romance started.

Hanks, who directed the movie, seems to have taken his queues from Nora Ephron, with whom Hanks worked on several occasions: Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail, the latter on which I had the pleasure of working as an extra. Ephron can direct light-hearted romances and sweet-but-intelligent character movies in her sleep... Probably her most famous product (as a writer) being When Harry Met Sally.

Ephron's delivery isn't always strong though, and Tom Hanks didn't pull his movie off well either.

As a romance it didn't spend enough time developing his relationship with Julia Roberts, whose smile can still brighten the room like a sunrise, and who can act rings around a majority of actors in the business when she is in the right role. In fact a lot of screen time was spent on Roxana Ortega's character, a ridiculously forceful young woman Larry Crowne meets in college who changes his life in all the most superficial ways. It almost seemed as though she was intended as a red herring -- a character he'd get mixed up with romantically because she is his exact opposite in personality. But there was no relationship. He was more like her victim than her friend, and aside from Mrs. Tainot misunderstanding it, it had nothing to do with the story. The changes Ortega's character forced upon Crowne didn't help him win Tainot, although she steered him in her direction once (almost literally) and her in his direction. But she could have done this with much less time spent on screen.

Hanks is apparently a huge scooter buff these days, and centered the movie around scootering. He makes a good point: it's a cheap alternative to SUVs in a time when so many people are suffering from job loss. But I found no value in the Ortega scooter gang he falls into. They did nothing fun, said nothing funny, and seemed to waste a lot of precious story time. I wondered how he got his studying done.

Other characters in the movie were a little to quirky for my taste, and not funny either.

So I give it a 6 out of 10, and a respectful nod to Tom Hanks for a good try, but this is a very talented man and I think he can do better.

A truly uninspired comedy with lackluster writing, weak plotting, and very little comedy. Apparently conceived to capitalize on the bathroom-humor fad, this entry by the makers of The Office should have gone through more rewrites, and perhaps -- dare I suggest it -- given to some other writers for some fresher comedy and character arcs that actually make sense.

Cameron Diaz plays Elizabeth Halsey who has no interest in teaching. When the movie opens, she's already been there a full year. I can't imagine how she made it through the first year without anyone realizing how horrible she was. She quits the job because she's found a rich boyfriend and is using him for his money, but her boyfriend's mother wises up and their pending wedding is canceled. So she must return to her dreaded job, and based on what we see on screen she's so incompetent that it seems ridiculous that the principal and the school board never notice.

It would have been far more believable if she had been a new teacher who was forced into the role for some clever reason. Maybe she should have been trying to make moves on the principal, who became love blind and pulled strings to get her the position -- which she didn't want but needed to take in order to get something out of the principal she needed. She's a user in the extreme, superficial to the last, with no moral values that I can see. So it makes no sense for her to have ever pursued teaching as a career.

Now, it is normal for characters to grow and transform as the story progresses. That is what story's are all about, in fact. But Halsey doesn't grow or transform at all. She only "tries harder" at teaching so that she can win a contest to get money to pay for a boob-job, which she believes she needs to attract another teacher who comes from a wealthy family. When her students seem to be failing to meet the standards she needs, she finds a way to steal the answers to the school tests so that she can train up her students on how to pass it (they don't show how she manages this). This plot works, but she is caught by another teacher. Does this teach her a lesson? No, she adds blackmail and other tricks to her list of crimes and wins that battle too.

By the end of the movie she has not redeemed herself at all, and I had to wonder how these writers can consider themselves professionals.

I'm giving the movie a 5, which is being nice. Cameron Diaz is too good for roles like this, she needs to choose more carefully.

Coming out of Super 8, I felt as though it was the early 80's again, or sometime in my own childhood. That is not because it was set in the early 80's, however. It's because J.J. Abrams engineered a style of film that reminded me of a monster movie formula of the 60's combined with a science fiction formula of the 70's and early 80's. It definitely has a Spielbergian echo, with thematic homages to movies Spielberg directed like E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Jaws, and produced in his early years like Poltergeist, Gremlins, and The Goonies (when he was more creatively involved). Monster movie motifs were found all over the place, ranging from zombie flicks (the type of Super 8 movie the kids were making) to Them and Earth vs The Spider, as well as cult SF alien invasion movies like Invaders From Mars.

Abrams thankfully avoids the shaky-cam trend of modern movie making and takes more time setting up shots and angles that work in the moment, another Spielberg and Hitchcock style I wish more directors would adapt.

That is not to say that Super 8 isn't original. Every child carries genes of his or her parents, grandparents and ancestors, but is still unique. It is a great adventure movie featuring a group of kids doing things not unlike what I tried to do when I was young (but with a lot better resources than were available to me), and so it reached me personally not only in style but in content.

For younger audiences, who may not have even been born until the mid-80's (or later), and who haven't taken the time to watch movies from earlier years, should find it fresh, fun and interesting, and unlike your typical Michael Bay action film, easy to watch.

No matter how it performs in today's box office climate, I think Super 8 will prove to be a classic in later years.

Better scripted than X-Men: The Last Stand, and about equal with X-Men Origins: Wolverine. So by that rule of thumb if you hated the Wolverine movie then you'll probably hate this one; if you really enjoyed the Wolverine movie (as I did) then you have a good chance of enjoying this one. It created a good context for Magneto's behavioral origins, as well as his use of power. I thought that was well thought out.

Unfortunately they compromised their quality script with a glaring continuity problem -- Charles Xavier is in a wheelchair by the end of this movie, which takes place in the 60's, but he was seen in another movie as a much older Professor X (Patrick Stewart) walking... I'm not referring to his walking in a telepathic state, as in the original X-Men movie, but actually walking in a flashback to the '80's in X-Men: The Last Stand, when he and Magneto discovered Phoenix.

So either the filmmakers were ignorant of this issue (which is surprisingly possible -- you'd be frightened to learn how little some filmmakers know about the material they are assigned to direct or produce or even write!), or they chose to ignore this continuity problem (as many filmmakers do), or they plan on having him walk temporarily at some point later in life, in some fashion that will be explained... But I doubt the latter. It's more likely that the filmmakers decided to do what ever they wanted to do, and believe that their own story shouldn't be confined by any franchise continuity -- it's an ego thing, not a logical thing. Happened in Star Trek all the time. Could also be that they decided they hated X-Men: The Last Stand and chose to ignore just that particular movie, which is also not unprecedented. (The makers of Jaws: The Revenge chose to ignore Jaws 3-d, but it was just as terrible.)

But if you are willing to look past that, this is well worth seeing at the theater.

Po is a kung fu legend who can't seem to act like one. He's a goofball with a good heart, and tries hard to fill a serious role, but he thinks that also means being cool, which unfortunately never works out for him. You have to give him credit for lack of embarrassment. He's not ashamed of himself, because he knows he's doing the best he can, and people look up at him anyway.

The story naturally fills a gap left by the first movie that we didn't realize was there, so it did not feel as though it was repeating itself. His lesson is a new one, and the lessons fits well with the adventure that has been thrust upon him this time.

Funniest animated feature since Tangled, and well worth an afternoon with your kids!

On Stranger Tides wasn't nearly as "strange" as the third installment, At World's End, nearly as crippled with plot holes, and not even half as spectacular as Dead Man's Chest.

While it brings back everyone's favorite two battling pirates, Jack Sparrow and Hector Barbossa, who were played out in all their colorful glory, none of the supporting characters were of great interest at all. Probably most disappointing was Blackbeard, who looked like any other pirate and didn't stand out to me as being a very imposing villain. Compare him with Barbossa when he was a ghost, Tia Dalma and especially Davy Jones.

Lots of missed opportunities here. First of all I would have made his beard BLACK, and something you can't take your eyes off of (hence the name), and I would have given him more magical power and sinister dialog. He should have been made into the nastiest, least honorable pirate alive. And I would NEVER have given him a girly daughter.

The mermaids were interesting as an idea, but as characters they played too small a role to sustain my attention. The Fountain of Youth was promising when they crossed into it but failed to deliver after they arrived. It was about as visually appealing as... well, an ordinary cave spring, only with a hint of ruins standing within.

The movie had many amusing moments, but they were strung together by the traditional pirate clichés and more sword fights that offered nothing we haven't seen before.

The background pirates were hardly even noticeable. No lovable sidekick pirates like Ragetti and Pintel or mascots like the undead monkey.

All in all it was fun to see Johnny Depp play Jack again, one of his most compelling characters, and Geoffrey Rush's ingenious Barbossa, but if you're looking for something to top Gore Verbinski's trilogy you'll be disappointed.

I had often wondered how they would introduce Thor at the movies, because unlike most of the other Marvel superheroes thus far, Thor in his comic origins has a basis in mythology rather than science fiction (or science fantasy, if you take my meaning) and originates off- world. Like Superman, he comes from a fantastic planet whose science and physics are so beyond ours that from our viewpoint it is magic. (This does not explain why they all look human, but let's not go there.)

What I imagined from the movie was that they would feature Asgard at the beginning, for an origin sequence, and the rest would take place on Earth. Turns out, Kenneth Branagh and the writers plotted the movie on Asgard for at least 50% of the screen time. This, I think, saved the movie. The otherworldly sequences were the most interesting and important elements of the story, and looked fantastic. This not a movie about Thor on Earth, it's a movie about Thor's conflicts with his father Odin and his sneaky step-brother Loki, wherein his banishment to Earth was just a part of the story arc.

Part of the problem with the Earth-side story is that it's boring. It's set in a very small New Mexico town in the desert. Thor befriends an ambitious astronomical researcher Jane Foster, played by Natalie Portman, whose character seems to have no real depth because we never get to know her personally. In fact somehow he falls in love with her, but I'm not sure how or why this happened. At any rate, the major battle scene on Earth takes place between Thor (with his entourage, who comes to fetch him) and a powerful golem from Asgard that seems remotely controlled by Loki (somehow). The golem (the Destroyer from the comics) was great, but he trashes nothing more than a tiny desert town. Or more specifically, main street in the tiny town (although I don't think there are many other streets to trash). Thor defeats him, end of the Destroyer. That's it? To me this missed a huge opportunity for a more epic battle. It should have taken place in a huge metropolis. Perhaps a Northern European city (because why does it always happen in America?) closer to where apparently the wormholes interacted with the Norse (resulting in the mythology). In fact if Thor crashed in New Mexico, fine, but I would have had his hammer land in Scandinavia or thereabouts, which would have made for a much nicer backdrop, and thus drawing our characters and the conflict to that region. I would have had the Destroyer toppling skyscrapers and smashing castles before Thor could stop him, leaving a path of destruction several hundred miles long through Europe. Not little old Western stores and a café. And the Destroyer should have made a much bigger mess of his friends.

So had the movie spent all its time in a little New Mexico town and its surrounding desert and not returned to Asgard or Jotunheim (the world of the Frost Giants, enemies of the Asgardians) for action, the movie would have fallen flat on its face.

I suppose there could have been a budgetary reason why they didn't "go urban" on the Earth- side, because special effects of this rendering scale are not cheap, and they did front-load quite a bit on Asgard.

Chris Hemsworth was okay as Thor, but the character seemed a little too winky and toothy at times. I would have had him cocky and snobby, but not so chipper. His friends seemed a little too much like a bunch of "hang-out dudes" (plus childhood gal-pal) than a band of adventurers. I would have made them a little more serious. Chris Hemsworth in particular does look like Thor -- well chiseled and sufficiently Scandinavian looking -- but his acting doesn't have a lot of believable range. He'll need to work on that.

All in all it was a good, but not great, movie. It will not come close to the success of Iron Man or Iron Man 2. But it wasn't a flawed mess like the first Hulk movie was.

BTW: the 3d is worth it for the space sequences and Asgard. And as with all the Avengers-era movies, need I mention, wait for the Easter Egg at the tail of the end credits.