Reviewed by James Slone

“Iron Man” is the first wholly satisfying comic book adaptation I’ve seen since the original “Superman.” It perfectly captures the appeal of the character and the little corner of the Marvel universe he occupies, while adding ample satire and a twinkle of knowing humor to make it relevant to adults. It also addresses the tricky role capitalism plays in the depressing landscape of global warfare, and that takes some guts for an action-adventure spectacle.

Robert Downey Jr. plays the title character and the man inhabiting the suit, Tony Stark, a wealthy industrialist and super scientist extraordinaire. Stark is an unusual superhero, a narcissistic brainiac, douche bag womanizer, binge drinker—alcoholism was Iron Man’s kryptonite for much of the comic’s history—and war profiteer.

When the story opens, Stark is in Afghanistan showing off his latest toy, a guided missile system that he uses to obliterate a mountain. After the demonstration all hell breaks loose, and Stark is taken prisoner by an unusual multinational terrorist/mercenary group with unknown aims, the Ten Rings. In this humbling moment he meets another scientist taken prisoner, an Afghan, Dr. Yinsen (Shaun Toub), a pacifist who informs Stark that his captors want him to build a missile.

Stark has other plans, and begins using the “missile parts” to construct a suit of mechanical armor, blasting his way out of the cave in a scene of extraordinary carnage. As expected, Yinsen doesn’t make it and has a few parting words for Stark that shatters his other suit of armor: his outward narcissism. “Iron Man” is really about Stark’s growing empathy—even as he transforms himself into an augmented super soldier, he grows wiser and humbler. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

“Smart People” is about highly educated people sorely lacking in wisdom and perspective. In a way, the premise resembles the film; despite containing much wit and affection, “Smart People” is a bit of a drag. It has its winning qualities—most notably, Thomas Hayden Church and Ellen Page—but the romance between its two leads, Sarah Jessica Parker and Dennis Quaid, is by turns awkward, unbelievable and anything but winning. And winning, as they say, is everything in romantic comedy.

“Smart People” bears more than a passing resemblance to its predecessors (”Wonder Boys,” “The Squid and the Whale” etc.), dealing as it does with a dysfunctional family of sorts lorded over by a fading, misanthropic academic. Quaid plays Lawrence Wetherhold, a professor of Victorian literature at Carnegie Mellon, a curmudgeon and snob who ignores his students and treats his own family with the cold respect of professional peers, enlisting them in his own selfish interests, but otherwise ignoring them.

In other words, he’s yet another bitter old professor in a long line of Hollywood academics going all the way back to “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” an insulated man-child with a permanent scowl and a grocery list of neuroses. While I’m sure this stereotype exists in the flesh, I am happy to report that I never encountered it in my seven years of college. But at least nowadays, crusty academics are allowed to learn “important life lessons,” and Lawrence learns quite a few. I’m sure you can guess which ones.

Lawrence’s family is a bit more interesting. Ellen Page plays his teenaged daughter, Vanessa, a cold, methodical and charmingly clueless Young Republican and future climber. Page plays her like a slightly more realistic Juno, a know-it-all snob with a confused adolescent interior, especially when it comes to sex, which her older brother and aspiring poet, James (Ashton Holmes), excels at. Vanessa idolizes her father, using all her million dollar words and New England affectations to impress him—but of course he’s as narcissistic as she is, and is taken to task for it by his adopted brother, Chuck. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

Given its tough guy dialog, casually racist characters, ugly violence and overheated LA setting, it comes as little surprise that “Street Kings” was directed by David Ayer, the writer behind the brutally cynical “Training Day,” and was co-written by James Ellroy, patron saint of the LA crime novel. It’s exactly what you’d expect with the talent involved: gangland exploitation smartened up with a little commentary on racism and institutional corruption.

Keanu Reeves stars as Tom Ludlow, a one man LAPD hit squad, nominally working vice but really pushing vigilante justice. The head of his team, Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker spitting profanities and not taking any shit from no one) looks the other way while Tom drinks on the job, executes dangerous suspects, issues beat downs of minorities and alienates Internal Affairs and the press. Tom is the hardboiled cop archetype, cold, emotionless and predictably saddled with the memory of a dead wife.

When Tom walks into a house and unloads on a pack of heavily armed Korean sex traffickers, he finds himself under heavy scrutiny from both Internal Affairs, lorded over by Hugh Laurie (getting farther and farther away from Wooster every year), and an old partner, Terrence Washington (Terry Crews), who annoys Tom with his unimpeachable ethics and generally low opinion of targeting minorities. But Jack steps in and protects Tom every step of the way because he approves of his violent tactics.

This premise isn’t completely far-fetched; certain LAPD anti-gang units were pretty close to right wing death squads in the 1990s and that decade’s excesses inform much of the film’s jittery, paranoid atmosphere, steeped as it is in deeply entrenched police corruption and Wild West violence. When Tom approaches Terrance in a convenient store with the intent of pummeling him a bit in retribution, he ends up witnessing his murder at the hands of two apparent gang members armed with military grade machine guns. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

Staff Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillipe) enjoys the love and respect of his soldiers, small town boys who’d follow him to the ends of the earth, or at least the dead end of an alleyway in Tikrit. His soldiers are mostly working class small town kids who spend the boring stretches of their tour shooting amateur rap and nu-metal videos, and singing patriotic country anthems. Things are boring but uneventful, that is until a car runs their checkpoint, drawing Brandon’s men into an ambush.

In the ensuing firefight, his men are pinned down in the alleyway, forced to fight up close and ugly as bullets and rockets rain down from the rooftops above. In the confusion, one of Brandon’s men enters a building to pursue some of the attackers; Iraqis, both insurgents and civilians, are killed and Brandon’s man is badly injured, with missing limbs and burns covering his body, but Brandon is able to pull him out of the wreckage.

When Brandon returns to the Texas cow town he calls home, he’s given a hero’s welcome, having served tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. But Brandon and the boys find it hard to readjust. The firefight in the alleyway lingers in their minds like an existential dead end. They turn to booze and fighting as a means of coping, the machismo of military life fusing with the cowboy bravado of rural culture. They go out to celebrate, but underlying the happiness of reunion is a dark, unresolved tension.

The first crack in the facade appears when, in a drunken rage, Brandon’s best friend Steve (Channing Tatim) hits his fiancé, Michele (Abbie Cornish). When Brandon arrives on the scene, Steve, still in solider mode, is digging a hole in his front yard to pass out in. As the film progresses, other friends slide into alcoholism and petty crime, especially Tommy (played with Edward Norton level intensity by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a good kid who has been irreparably damaged by his experience in Iraq. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park” takes its name from both a park in Portland (officially O’Bryant Square) and the state of mind of its protagonist, a teenage skater who visits the park at the invitation of a friend. It’s a gritty concrete block littered with gutter punks, skaters, druggies and homeless vagrants. Alex, a middle-class kid with recently divorced parents, is a little uneasy among the older kids and drifters that make the park their home, but he’s also enthralled by the transgressive otherness of the place.

He doesn’t want to skate there so much as take it all in, especially the gravity defying stunts of the outlaw skaters—seen here without gear or endorsements. But despite his efforts to remain a neutral observer, things take an unexpectedly gruesome turn. One night he finds himself on a railcar with an older drifter he met at the park and something goes wrong, horribly wrong, resulting in the accidental death of a security guard. Alex is not a murderer, but he finds himself saddled with guilt and deep paranoia resulting from the death.

Alex has a moody girlfriend, a cheerleader whose main relationship goal is to lose her virginity to him. But Alex is too distracted by his own problems to worry about his or her virginity, and too interested in attractive older boys—the story doesn’t beat us over the head with Alex’s sexual orientation, which seems pretty variable. We’re conditioned to see teenagers as horny sex machines, but Van Sant is content to give us a kid searching for an identity, unsure of his sexuality, and definitely not the sort of person to obsess about it.

In fact, he spends most of his time in the film trying to figure out what happened at Paranoid Park and coming to terms with having had a hand in someone’s death. Whether he’s at the mall with friends or alone on the Oregon coast, he stays in his head, observing and recording his feelings about the event. His parents and everyone else in his life, including a police officer investigating the death (Daniel Liu) are like specters, occasionally intruding into the foreground with desultory observations or chatter. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

I’m confident that in some parallel universe, “10,000 BC” is called “10,000 BCE” and contains something like recognizable history. Oh, how lucky the denizens of this strange other world must be to live on a planet where science, history and genuine curiosity reign supreme. But we live in an imperfect world where the best a blockbuster filmmaker can do in tribute to our brave ancestors is create a work of unimaginative fantasy junk food. “10,000 BC” is about as historically accurate as “Conan the Barbarian,” wherefrom, along with “Apocalypto,” writer and director Rolan Emmerich lifts most of the story.

Steven Strait plays D’Leh, a mountain tribesman who may live in Africa or central Asia– since the geography and landscapes of the film are all over the map, it’s hard to say where exactly. His people live in the frigid highlands, hunting packs of mammoths that apparently mull around in the mountains, and sporting a look best described as post-apocalyptic Rastafarian. Think “Thunderdome” with dreads and peace pipes. A young man when the story first begins, D’Leh falls in love with a young blue-eyed girl Evolet (Camilla Belle), the lone survivor from a tribe killed by “four legged demons” (could these be horsemen?).

Naturally, there’s a prophecy involved, because all human history can be reduced to simple fate and destiny in the movies. D’Leh is destined to take up his exiled father’s cause, Evolet is destined for prophetic power, and he who carries the white spear will do great things etc.

After losing Evolet’s hand in marriage during a mammoth hunting contest (a great special effects scene that leaves us wondering how mammoths ever went extinct with these people hunting them), D’Leh’s mood takes a nosedive, and then sinks even further when the four legged demons show up to get their slaving on. Needless to say, Evolet is abducted along with most of the tribe, and D’Leh sets off to meet his destiny, accompanied by his mentor Tic’Tic (a well cast Cliff Curtis), who provides prophetic support and a good hand.

They cover a lot of terrain, including steaming jungles inhabited by giant man eating terror birds, arid wastes complete with saber tooth tiger that D’Leh can talk to telepathically ala Beastmaster, and Egyptian pyramids being built over a half millennium too soon with brick towing woolly mammoths. What amazes me about their journey isn’t telepathy or Egyptian architecture so much as how they cross what must be a continent on foot in a couple weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

In “Military Intelligence and You!,” Seattle based director Dale Kutzera splices together footage from World War II propaganda and training films with scenes of Airplane style parody to mixed satirical effect. The aim here is to create a “Why We Fight” film that pointedly remarks on the idiocy of the war in Iraq. It occasionally lands a blow against jingoism and bad intelligence, but suffers from overworked analogies and a reliance on stock gag humor.

In an appropriate nod to “Starship Troopers,” a more effective repackaging of the “Why We Fight” films (though let’s be fair, “Starship Troopers” had an astronomical budget), Patrick Muldoon is cast as the good looking but empty-headed hero, Major Nick Reed. With a jutting jaw line, impeccable hair and an arsenal of brain dead nationalistic platitudes, Nick Reed embodies the arrogance of insulated officer elites, coolly sending men to their deaths over the radio while finding time to romance an old flame, Lt. Monica Tasty (Elizabeth Ann Bennet). Don’t look at me; I didn’t come up with the names.

The movie alternates between the control room scenes and stock footage of US fighter pilots taking on a German “ghost squadron.” Some of the pilots are captured and taken to a German fortress where they’re wined, dined and interrogated. Clive Van Owen summarizes the action in the deep booming voice of a WWII era narrator, offering ironic commentary and the occasional snide remark. Some of his best narration describes how Germans would really interrogate POWs, and needless to say it’s not the genteel treatment shown in the film. For an interesting comparison, consider the way the Japanese officers were portrayed during the war.

The film is largely one of contrasts, finding its humor and ideas in setting the inspiring and simplistic propaganda (which includes music by Richard Wagner) against the also simplistic hubris of the control room staff. Infantrymen and pilots soldier on, while inspiring speeches and romance keep the commanders pumped up on patriotism in relative safety, even as their mistakes and pigheaded insistence on staying the course rain death and destruction upon friend and foe alike. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

“Vantage Point” is a political thriller powered by a gimmicky plot device worthy of Fox primetime. Occasionally entertaining but never smart or believable, the movie’s story is clever beyond its means. It’s set in Salamanca, Spain, beginning just minutes before a speech from an American president (William Hurt standing in for el Presidente Bush) joining the United States in an historic alliance with the Arab world against a presumably monolithic terrorist threat the likes of which we’re incredibly unlikely to see in our lifetimes.

As you have probably guessed, terrorists are present among the crowd of onlookers and protesters and quickly dispatch the US president live on the news (with producer Sigourney Weaver onsite), following their hit with a bomb attack in a public square, killing said onlookers and protesters.

If things were this simple, of course, there would be no movie. So the film rewinds twenty minutes and shows us the same event from the perspective of the secret service agent charged with protecting the president (Dennis Quaid). We watch as he observes some strange events leading up to the attack, including movement in a supposedly abandoned building.

A camera he momentarily confiscates belongs to an American tourist (Forest Whitaker), who gets his own twenty minutes. Another man, an undercover cop he tries to detain (Eduardo Noriega), escapes from custody and receives his own chunk of movie. So on and so on. Each time the films pulls us back, we get another facet of the action, another plot revelation, another narrative.

I won’t reveal the plot here, but it’s unnecessarily convoluted and riddled with idiotic problems and contingencies. Cobra Commander has executed schemes less ridiculous than this. If real Muslim radicals ever get this sophisticated they’ll need a secret island skull fortress and an army of giant robots.

“Vantage Point” is being marketed as a “Rashomon” story — Dennis Quaid has even invoked the Akira Kurosawa film by name in interviews — but whereas “Rashomon” attempts to illuminate, “Vantage Point” uses its narrative strategy as a thriller gimmick, wasting the potential of its premise on cheap thrills and “hair raising” revelations. “Rashomon” presents one story with divergent narratives, showing how different people can interpret a single event, a rape and murder in the film, in radically different ways. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

On December 5, 2002, shortly after the US invasion of Afghanistan, a 22-year old farmer turned taxi driver named Dilawar was arrested by Afghan militia on the way to Khost. Falsely accused of aiding in rocket attacks against US forces, he was handed over to American military intelligence at Bagram Air Base, where he was detained for interrogation. But instead of being asked questions, he was repeatedly shackled to the ceiling of his cell, deprived of sleep and forced to stand for hours at a time. Six days after his detainment, he was found dead in his cell. His autopsy revealed that the cause of death was blunt trauma caused by multiple beatings. The US soldiers charged with his protection had pummeled his legs into pulp.

“Taxi to the Dark Side” is an ugly, close-up examination of the use of torture as an intelligence gathering tool since September 11, 2001, as well as the tortured logic used to justify it. As pointed as it is enraging, the documentary—written and directed by Alex Gibney, who co-wrote and directed “Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room—uses Dilawar’s murder at the hands of US soldiers as an entry point into the mindset that allowed US policymakers to treat the Geneva Convention like toilet paper and its “wartime” prisoners, especially those held without charge, like subhuman chattel.

Gibney builds his case with interviews, photographs and video footage, all of it difficult to stomach. We see Dilawar’s autopsy photos, his bruised and battered legs, as well as the tiny cell he was shackled in. We’re shown graphic pictures and video from Abu Ghraib, the feces covered Iraqis, the barking dogs, forced sodomy and masturbation, Lynndie England’s 15 minutes of fame pointing at a prisoner’s dick, prisoners on leashes, and the rest of the organized sadism that has characterized post-911 intelligence gathering. Uncensored on the big screen, these images take on a unbearably rank power.

Most of the soldiers charged with killing Dilawar are interviewed at length, and while they might rationalize their actions to a certain extent, they are honest and frank in appraising their part in his death and the role played by the chain of command. Inexperienced in interrogation and dropped into an alien situation, they could only fall back on orders. But who gave the orders? No officer was ever charged, and yet we know that someone approved their behavior. Their commanding officer, Captain Carolyn Wood, far from being charged, was actually promoted and went on to commit the same abuses on a larger scale at Abu Ghraib. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

Now here’s a film with a refreshingly matter-of-fact view of aging and death, its comic rhythm tied to the slow ambling tempo of declining middle-aged life. It is as sad as it is happy, as wistful as it is heartwarming. As I watched it, I thought about “Juno,” a comedy that also tried to inject dramatic weight into its comic premise, and it just seemed that much more contrived. “The Savages” might not be a perfect movie, but it earns the feelings it inspires, taking place in something like a recognizable reality, with the kind of deadpan humor you would actually find in real life under the same circumstances.

It stars Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman as siblings Wendy and Jon Savage, and Philip Bosco as their father, Lenny. The film opens in Sun City, Arizona, the sprawling sun scorched prototype of the master-planned retirement community, where Lenny has been living with his girlfriend. Lenny is sliding into the dark room of dementia—he writes “prick” in his own shit on a bathroom mirror—and is whisked away to a local hospital. With no one to take care of the old man, the hospital asks Wendy, who lives in New York City, to come and retrieve him.

Wendy is an aspiring playwright on the high strung side of neurotic, a pill popping sometimes depressive, engaged in a passionless affair with a middle-aged neighbor, Larry (Peter Friedman); when they have sex she zones out and pets his dog, and we sense that the affair is really just a pretext to see the dog. Like a lot of thirty-something playwrights, Wendy works boring temp jobs and lives in a 400 square foot closet.

Wendy calls Jon in Buffalo and convinces him to come with her to Arizona to figure out what to do about dad. Jon is none too thrilled at the prospect of caring for a father who apparently abandoned them to their lives, but joins his sister. When they finally see him, he has already slid deeply into a state of angry confusion, only half aware of the presence of his children. Unsure what to do, they deposit him in an elderly care center in Buffalo, a depressing gray building enveloped by gray skies and snow. Lonely, Wendy decides to stay with Jon to help take care of their father and work on her play. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

The “Rambo” films are the ultimate conservative fantasy movies of the 1980s, American wish fulfillment carried out through unspeakable acts of entertaining, if unbelievable, carnage and violence. John Rambo, embodied by the eternally ripped Sylvester Stallone, took his personal war to Vietnam to save our semi-mythical POWs and brought the Indochinese communists to their knees. He followed up that résumé stuffer by dealing the deathblow to the Soviet forces in Afghanistan, teaching the Mujahideen how to fight old school American style: with maximum firepower and carte blanche to use it.

Now, twenty years after the mumble-core super soldier rocketed to screens, John Rambo is back with a film bearing his name and the same old chip on its shoulder. Rambo has retired from the life, living on a river boat in Thailand, passing the time wrangling snakes for low rent entertainment. One day he’s approached by a Christian missionary/human rights advocate, Sarah (Julie Benz), who implores the grizzled old warrior to drive her fellow Christians up the river into Myanmar, where the Burmese government has been graphically slaughtering Karen villagers.

Rambo mumbles something about Burma being a war zone, but persistence soon brings him on board, along with a squad of mercenaries presumably in it for the money and glory. Stallone doesn’t so much act during the perfunctory scenes of dialog, as push his considerable middle-aged weight around and mutter sullenly. That is until the boat is attacked by pirates, at which point Rambo comes out of his shell to get some killin’ done. And kill he does, in one scene of audience pleasing brutality after another, using knife, bow, claymore (the mine, though I wouldn’t blame you for thinking the sword) and a really big machine gun that literally shreds his enemies.

We don’t really get to know the Burmese soldiers or their victims. This is consistent with the Rambo worldview, which is about American catharsis first and foremost, merely using the suffering of civilians as a pretext for Rambo’s self-sacrificing heroism. We see civilians rounded up and shot, Karen women turned into sex slaves, boys abused and Burmese soldiers leering at their victims, but neither the Karen nor the Burmese are allowed any perspective- they literally exist to be wiped out or saved. If I can’t relate to the victims on any human level, why should I care if they’re avenged? Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

Charlie Wilson’s congressional career was two faced in the way a lot of Cold War careers were: all smiles and progressive goodwill stateside, and all underhanded interventionist violence abroad. A longstanding US Democratic representative from Texas, Wilson supported social programs and civil rights for the South, while partying with corrupt rightist regimes like the Somoza clan in Nicaragua. He is best remembered for securing appropriations for the CIA’s operations against the Soviets in Afghanistan. In “Charlie Wilson’s War,” or as I prefer to call it, “John Rambo’s Funding Source,” Tom Hanks plays the notorious coke sniffing, booze swilling, skirt chasing congressman at his Reagan era apogee.

When we first see him, Charlie’s partying with a couple of naked broads in a Vegas hot tub. Things are going well until he sees Dan Rather on the news interviewing Afghan rebels and refugees who have fled in the face of the Soviet war machine. Sobered by this development, he returns to his DC office to size up the situation. His office is staffed with an army of smart buxom women he refers to collectively as “jailbait.” Despite his pro-choice record, I’d be hard pressed to call Charlie a feminist. He loves smart women, you see, but would prefer them in varying states of undress.

Tom Hanks is well inside his comfort zone playing gregarious southern charmers, and his Charlie Wilson is no exception. He sidles up to the Texan, sporting a soft permaglow of swaggering politico masculinity. The only awkward moments in his performance appear when he skews serious, something that happens in the film’s most clumsy scenes, the ones that want us to cry, inspire us, or make us cry while inspiring us.

Charlie visits an Afghan refugee camp on Pakistan’s northern border at the behest of General Mohammed Zia, then dictator of Pakistan and all around nice guy- Charlie gets one off about Zia executing his predecessor, the late Benazir Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Bhutto (one of the virtues of the film is that it rewards informed audiences). In the refugee camp, Wilson has his Oscar Schindler moment, and walks around in a teary eyed daze. This is the first of many unbelievable moments where the generally sharp comic satire drops out, leaving us to, what? Care, maybe. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

“There Will Be Blood” plays like a horror movie about vertical integration, real estate speculation, religion, and most concretely, oil. In this sense, it’s very much of a horror movie for our times. Oil lurks and seeps like a monster beneath the Earth, enthralling the greedy, gobbling up lost souls, and quite literally killing those who would drag it to the surface. The evil of men can be measured by their greed for it, and the desire for the wealth and power it brings. In an early scene, oil is smeared on a baby’s forehead like a baptismal rite.

The man most obsessed with oil is Daniel Plainview, an early twentieth century wildcatter enthralled by the substance as much as the aggrandizement that comes with it. Daniel Day-Lewis, who portrays him, does not so much act as give himself over to demonic possession. From his oddly patrician speaking voice to the wry smile that dances across his face to the outbursts of pure animal instinct and reckless violence that gushes like oil from a well, Day-Lewis is Plainview, a man fixated on both the process of extraction and the financial rewards that follow.

He’s an unhappy man, given to bouts of sullenness, intense misanthropy, and brutality when people stand in his way. An instinctive survivalist, Plainview is also a bit of a cad, seducing landowners with the promise of fortunes immeasurable, prying their fingers off the prize with sweet words and when those fail, outright threats. Day-Lewis acts the part in the negotiations, performing for an audience, speaking with forced affability and carefully observing audience response. This makes Plainview sound like a sociopath, but there are still many businessmen like him in the world and we tend to accept them, warts and all, at face value.

Accompanying Plainview on business trips is his intensely serious kid, H.W. (played by the unforgettable Dillon Freasier), who he uses to sell his humanizing family man pretenses to suckers, though with his son’s eerie gaze and little man getup, one wonders who Plainview thinks he’s fooling. Outside oil, H.W. is Plainview’s closest friend and only true confidant; Plainview teaches him about the business, how to buy at below market value, treating him as an adult because that’s the only way Plainview knows how to treat anyone, as either an associate or an adversary. That H.W. is really someone else’s baby is largely beside the point, well, until it isn’t. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

“No Country for Old Men” runs its course in the expansive broken landscape of West Texas in 1980 and yet seems to reside in the deep and disturbed recesses of the American mind. It’s as much a product of this country, with its tangled and bloody history, as the superficial cowboy fashions its protagonists wear. Directed by the Joel and Ethan Coen and based on the sparse and violent Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, “No Country for Old Men” plays out like a nightmare, heavy with the cruel resignation of the inevitable.

The inevitable in this case is Anton Chigurh, a black vortex the story swirls helplessly around, pulling everyone he encounters into his destructive orbit. He’s played by Javier Bardem, a Spanish actor with a knack for hiding in plain sight (watch “Before Night Falls” to see what I mean). With only a cattle gun and a shambling lurch, Anton burns a trail of carnage across a wide swath of small towns and scrubland. His eyes linger on his victims with the aloofness of an archangel, his expression shifting from subtle amusement to empty headed serenity. Anton is not a standard issue sociopath, but a natural force, immutable and eternal.

Through the mechanics of fate or arbitrary happenstance other characters are sucked into Anton’s maelstrom. Llewelyn, a retired welder and Vietnam veteran played with devious ingenuity by Josh Brolin, discovers the bloody remains of a drug deal gone bad while on a hunting trip in the desert. Among the corpses, he discovers a satchel with a couple million dollars. A foolhardy cowboy by nature, Llwelyn takes the money and runs. After a near lethal encounter with Mexican smugglers, he sends his sweet wife, Carla Jean (played with open faced sincerity by Kelly MacDonald), to her mother’s and flees with the money. But his bid for fast cash soon attracts Anton.

Anton has escaped arrest and garroted and cattle gunned his first victims. His initial killings, carried out with the efficiency of a robot programmed for murder, attract the attention of local sheriff Ed Tom Bell and his deputy. Played with an unapologetic West Texan drawl by Tommy Lee Jones, Bell enters the story saddled with feelings of defeat; his narration, which bookends the action, introduces us to a man who has simply stopped understanding the world. With Bell’s old fashioned values and conservative mindset, sociopaths like Anton exist beyond the pale of explanation. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

“Juno” is the latest film in the sweet and twee school of comedy, following “Garden State,” “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Me, You and Everyone We Know.” It’s quirky, it’s cute, it’s written by an ex stripper, it has an indie rock soundtrack, and it’s a little on the glib and facile side. It stars Ellen Page in a fairly winning performance as Juno, an irreverent teenager in Minnesota who gets knocked up by her boyfriend and generally goes about dealing with it.

Juno considers getting an abortion, but in keeping with the generally conservative tone of the better film comedies of late, decides not to after spending time in a depressing waiting room and listening to a tirade about fetuses “having fingernails” from a high school friend protesting in front of the clinic. For once, I would like to see a movie where a woman warms up to the idea of an abortion and benefits from it, instead of brushing it off like “Knocked Up” or sniffing at it distastefully.

Termination ruled out, Juno decides to find parents to adopt the baby. Her father and stepmother defy the rules of the teen comedy genre by being reasonable people who respect their daughter and decide to support her endeavor. Played by J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney, they’re quite charming, as smart as Juno and mercifully less pop culture savvy. With the support of her father, boyfriend Paulie (Michael Cera) and best friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby), she makes contact with a young couple who want a baby.

Well, one person who wants a baby anyway. The couple she finds live in a giant McMansion complete with Oprah approved Martha Stewart décor, and beam bourgeois tidiness. The would be mom is played by Jennifer Garner as the kind of weepy femme neurotic we more or less expect to be fertility challenged in the movies. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

“The Golden Compass” is both whimsical fantasy and serious minded religious allegory, and like all things that occupy opposites it tends to fall in a middling gray zone somewhere in between. Based on the Philip Pullman novel “Northern Lights,” the film takes place on a parallel Earth where humans wear their souls on the outside in the form of animals (or daemons in the book’s parlance), Polar bears forge armor and intone heroically, and the world is dominated by the totalitarian Magisterium.

Our hero in this world is Lyra, a rebellious tomboy played with durable aplomb by Dakota Blue Richards. A ward of Jordon College in England, she scamps around campus, occasionally helping her uncle, Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig) spy on local political figures, especially those representing the Magisterium. It turns out that our man Asriel has stumbled on his very own Corpernican Revolution in the form of a substance called Dust, a theoretical particle that the Magisterium considers heretical.

After an agent of the Magisterium fails to poison him, Lord Asriel takes off on an Arctic expedition in Norway to continue his Dust research. The indomitable Lyra wants to tag along, but Asriel would rather she stay out of the Dust controversy. While he’s away, Lyra is visited by the icily beautiful Ms. Coulter (the typically fetching Nicole Kidman), who asks her to accompany her to the north as her assistant. Right from the start we know something’s wrong: Ms. Coulter’s daemon is a vicious and mute monkey who immediately takes to harassing Lyra’s, the willful but physically weak Pantalaimon (voiced by Freddie Highmore).

On her journey north, Lyra encounters fantastic creatures and locations, including an exiled polar bear warrior, Lorek Byrnison (voiced by Ian McKellen), an airship pilot with a southwestern drawl and cowboy gear (who if not Sam Elliot?), the swashbuckling leader of the seafaring Gyptians (Jim Carter), a kindly witch (Eva Green looking pretty hot) and the dark agents of the Magesterium called the Gobblers. The setting is the best thing about the film, a Victorian-Edwardian steampunk hodgepodge, a world as advanced as our own but with a nineteenth century emphasis on craft. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

In the early 1970s, Frank Lucas ran Harlem, importing heroin from Vietnam and dominating the market in the New York metro. An instinctive businessman, he undercut his competitors with the purest and cheapest product. Instead of dealing with smugglers and established dealers, he cast his own line to the Golden Triangle, employed loyal family members from North Carolina to run his Harlem operations, and forced the Italian mob out, employing violence to silence most would-be competitors.

A capitalist to the core, Lucas was a natural problem solver. What’s the cheapest way to transport heroin out of Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s? Put soldiers on the payroll and hide it in the returning coffins of dead GIs. If he had been born wealthy and white, he might have been a respected businessman, to paraphrase a remark Denzel Washington makes in Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X.” When he was finally arrested in 1975, his combined assets were worth about $250 million. Always one to work out a deal, Lucas gave names and received a reduced sentence.

Ridley Scott’s “American Gangster” is about Lucas and the New Jersey detective who brought him down, Richie Roberts. Played by Denzel Washington, Frank Lucas is a model of bourgeois success, a dapper gentleman with alpaca carpet, a beautiful girl on his arm, and classy imported suits. He’s a nice boy from rural North Carolina who puts his mother up in a mansion and employs his younger brothers and cousins in the business. In a nod to the mood of the time, he ends conversations with both associates and enemies with several variations of “my man.” Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

Lately, David Cronenberg’s films play with and benefit from convention, both expanding his own work into traditional drama while dragging mainstream audiences kicking and screaming into his world, where identity is slippery, violence is a physical and psychic disruption, and comedy relief is served black. Drawing on his horror background, Cronenberg is willing to shock, unnerve, and upend audience expectations, bringing a brooding and ugly atmosphere to film genres that are too often detached from their own violence.

This new phase of his film career, one that plays to convention while defying it, actually surfaced gradually throughout the 1980s and 1990s, though the real break from horror came with 2002’s “Spider,” a dank, moody, and deeply introspective thriller of inaction about a British schizophrenic. “A History of Violence” followed. An action revenge film with a conventional plot became an incisive character study of dual identity punctuated with scenes of traumatic fatality in Cronenberg’s hands.

On one level, “A History of Violence” is the same old thing: a man’s past comes back to haunt him forcing him to employ violence to protect his family. On another, it calls special attention to the violence itself; usually designed to please, the violence in “A History of Violence” is used to sicken. The man, played by Viggo Mortensen, gets his revenge spectacularly, but when the carnage is over the audience is anything but pleased with the results. Violence is disruptive, revealing the every day world, Main Street USA, to be a sham, a set of social norms and niceties kept in place to hide or disguise the underlying Hobbesian brutality that makes “civilized” existence possible and preferable.

“Eastern Promises,” also starring Mortensen, presents the reverse. It mostly takes place in a world governed by open violence and slavery, a location hidden from public view where kindness, duty, and the rule of law are the alien intrusions. The film is set in London and considers the inner workings of the Russian mafia and the human trafficking business where they ply their trade. When a young anglicized nurse, Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts), recovers the diary of a Russian teenager who dies while giving birth on her watch, she’s compelled to hunt down the next of kin for the good of the baby. This brings her face to face with the girl’s keepers. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

Instead of opening titles, “The Kingdom” begins with a fast and furious summary of British and US foreign policy shenanigans in Saudi Arabia over the past century and the less than enthused response by Islamic fundamentalists living there. It’s unusual for an action film to provide historical context, but “The Kingdom” is not quite a normal action film.

It begins like an action revenge movie. In Saudi Arabia, American oil workers live in large fortified compounds, little islands of the United States surrounded by a sanctified Arab state. The one we’re introduced to at the start of the movie is attacked and destroyed by men disguised as security guards, first with bullets and then with the blast of a car bomb. The resulting carnage doesn’t look too hot to Washington intelligence experts, who know they’ll need to find out who did it and then, with a little luck, take them out.

An FBI team is quickly assembled to investigate, led by Special Agent Ronald Fleury (in the 1980s, his name would have been Ron Fury). Fleury is played by Jamie Foxx, whose star seems to rise with every performance. Fleury is tough, confident, and doesn’t take guff, not even from the Saudi royal family. His team of specialists includes the forensics specialist and notable woman, Janet (Jennifer Garner), a grizzled explosives expert, Grant (Chris Cooper), and Special Officer of Comic Relief, Adam (Jason Bateman continuing the comic persona he established in “Arrested Development”). Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by James Slone

There’s a kind of movie that takes a certain perverse pleasure in the practices it seeks to condemn- Tony Scott and Joel Schumacher are patron saints of the genre, pumping up lurid exploitation with distracting whiz bang camera moves and excessive style, while making every effort to frame the spectacle with overwrought social commentary. “Trade” hangs out on the same dumpy street corner but it doesn’t aspire to the level of real trash. It’s not quite sleazy enough to be entertaining, and a little too distracted by its prurience to be redeemable.

Jorge (Cesar Ramos), a Mexican teenager, idles away his days, luring dumb Americans into alleys with the promise of sex before mugging them with a water pistol. One day, his beloved thirteen year old sister Adriana leaves the house unattended and is promptly abducted by some mean looking toughs, who whisk her away to a secret sex slave distribution point operated jointly by Russian businessmen and Mexican smugglers.

Adriana, who is of course fiercely Catholic so her later rape will further tarnish her sanctity for viewers, bonds with a Polish woman, Veronica (Alicja Bachleda), already graphically raped in the film’s first five minutes. If I seem to be overemphasizing the rapes, you might want to skip this movie since rape and beatings are pretty much the film’s central motif. Given its supped up editing and Tony Scott touches, I was half expecting a rape scene in bullet time. Read the rest of this entry »