Superman Returns / **1/2 (2006)

If the great triumph of superheroes on the big screen owes its comprehensive success to any one specific person or thing, that distinction belongs solely to the moment in which Christopher Reeve tears open his shirt and exposes a giant red “S” in the middle of his chest. That split second of footage, a mere morsel it seems amongst a slew of great scenes and sequences in the original “Superman” film, characterizes the essence of the conflicted superhuman crime-fighter almost instinctively: the costume is not just some random impulse intended for casual dress-up, it comes attached with all kinds of responsibility. An entire city, and therefore an entire population, trusts him to keep peace, fight crime, uphold justice and look out for every individual’s best interest. He is a god amongst diverse believers, a public that stands in the shadow of a world so littered in turmoil that wildly fantastical heroes are the only hope they have. And yet no matter how many beasts or brutes he may tame, no matter how many sinister plots he may thwart, no one consciously seems to realize that the person wearing the costume is, too, a living and feeling human being at the core. To successfully adopt the identity that he does, his personal identity must remain secret to all around him, which thus restricts his ability to maintain a decent personal life. It is a hard job for a guy who seems to sociable and friendly to his peers, but it is unwavering nonetheless.

Poseidon / ** (2006)

“The ocean has been the cradle of rebirth.” So announces a character aboard the cruise ship Poseidon, mere minutes before the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve. A guy who obviously never took into consideration the fact that Earth’s oceans have a nasty habit of claiming human lives as easily as an elephant goes through peanuts, you would think basic history knowledge (or even movie-going experience) would have given him the insight to rethink that proclamation – “The Perfect Storm,” about a crew of fishermen who are swallowed by the ocean during a tropical storm, and “Titanic,” telling of a catastrophic loss of life at the hands of human error on the open seas, are two prime recent examples of just how easily a simple thing like water can quickly become an object of chaos. No, his rhetoric is that of a man who is either too optimistic or too foolish to comprehend the oncoming contradiction of his statement. This is a man who never bothered to watch Ronald Neame’s “The Poseidon Adventure” before boarding.

Tristan and Isolde / ** (2006)

“Tristan & Isolde” is more a curious experiment than a full-fledged cinematic romance, a movie in which all necessities are captured in two hours of ambitious celluloid, except for one critical anchoring piece: a heart. The pain of characters like these is not that they sacrifice so much to be together, but the fact that they do so without ever being able to grasp the true feeling of the situation. Credible acting and a solid sense of style accommodate the final result only so far: slowly but surely, director Dean Georgaris’ medieval fable of love lost and found cripples our patience just as easily as he cripples the emotional walls around his hero and heroine. Foolish, ill-fated lovers they may be, but Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet they are not.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe / ***1/2 (2005)

Stories about kids have been known to get away with just about anything, perhaps because, unlike real life, literature isn’t bogged down by grave world events like child kidnappings or mysterious disappearances. On the printed page, their lives unfold as well as they deserve, without unnecessary tragedy but full of the kind of curiosity that gives their adventures the suggestion of fearsome danger. Admittedly, some of us who go into stories like these with preconceived perceptions of the harshness of reality might find some things a bit too hard to swallow. The kids in the Narnia chronicles are a particularly worrisome bunch, not so much for their own naïve inquisitiveness but for their basic nature to jump the gun and trust things that for any normal kid would seem a little too colorful and unreal to believe in. Of course, all of this is never much of a forethought when we are kids ourselves, but as adults it would be foolish to deny that our eyebrows do not raise a little at the mere notion of something like a little girl being eager to go home “for tea” with a half-human stranger she meets by a lamppost.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory / **1/2 (2005)

Tim Burton's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" plays like a road trip through the mind of a recovering psychiatry patient, zany and unsystematic, and so encased by its own bizarre reality that at times you wonder whether you will need a few prescription drugs to get through it. The visual look provides clues to the mindsets of the director and his special effects artists; here, on a canvas that has essentially been cleansed of all previous concepts of the famous children's novel by Roald Dahl, they unleash an environment that feels less like pure creative enterprise and more like a hallucination induced by illegal substances. That's not to say the movie lacks the enticing quality that make most of Burton's offbeat visual feasts so enjoyable, but to utilize it in a story which has, at its very basic core, been targeted towards children ever since its inception certainly blurs the focus. Is this movie for the kids, or is it for the Burton aficionados?

Land of the Dead / *** (2005)

There is a certain morbid obsession I share with the average moviegoer when it comes to zombie movies, an ongoing allure that has me inexplicably flocking to stories in which mankind is being victimized by walking corpses with a taste for warm human flesh and blood. The approach is certainly not without its restrictions, true - exactly how much can you do with a villain when he's dead? - but something about the stagnancy of the setup (or maybe even the complete lack of seriousness of the concept) makes it impossible to disregard. Thankfully most filmmakers seldom stray far from these sentiments, too; in the years that the zombie has walked the celluloid, they have come to recognize their mindless mute antagonists as a creation whose only viable purpose on film is for synthetic thrills. Some might consider this a kind of back-handed exploitation of a genre that began with relevant psychological context, but consider this more carefully: if you are going to spend two hours at a movie for nothing other than sheer visual stimulation, wouldn't you rather be around brainless zombies rather than brainless teenagers getting hacked to death by masked killers?

Fantastic Four / * (2005)

"Fantastic Four" is the most insipid and dispiriting of the super hero comic book screen adaptations of recent times, an obnoxious muddle of a movie in which potential adventure is sideswiped in favor of watery characterizations and dialogue that feels like it was lifted from five or six reality shows. As a concept the movie houses vast potential - its focal points are seized from a foundation which has garnered great success on the printed page for decades - but as a full-fledged undertaking it quickly crosses the threshold of stupidity, expecting audiences to tag along all the way through as if hinting that the outcome will justify the build-up. The problem: if there is any payoff here, it lies in the notion that the movie actually ends before it gets even more stupid than it could have. At a time when the superhero film has been cinematically reinvigorated by crusaders who are driven by inner conflict rather than absurd crime sprees, four clunky human mutations whose superpowers are their only distinguishing characteristics just don't stand up.

Narnia and Christianity -- One in the Same? Hardly.

In art the audience is encouraged to project its own emotions and feelings onto a slate of work, not necessarily feel things the way their creators intended them to be. Not only is it more sensible a notion, it is also easier -- who the hell knows for sure what the exact message of a certain detail was in a piece of literature or in a scene in a movie? The great thing about it is that looking from different perspectives makes for more worthwhile discussion, otherwise you might as well just have the author or filmmaker stand in front of you and tell you exactly why things are the way they are.

Imagine how boring that all would be. Imagine, furthermore, how completely withdrawn the casual person might become if they were forced to endure continued talk about the thrust of something like the Narnia Chronicles, in which C.S. Lewis supposedly modeled his series of children's fables after certain interpretations of the Bible. Reading, watching, hearing -- whatever the task -- is made unique because by people bring their own idealism and perspective to the job, not by someone trying to directly correlate the meaning of something the same manner that its founder did.

Returning to Hogwarts

Those who know me well enough to predict what I will like and dislike are no doubt staring on in a state of confusion at the recent revelation that I have recently joined the ranks of the millions of people that make up the Harry Potter fanbase. In years past my only connection to the world of young wizards and witches was limited to the big screen: a prospect that, needless to say, is reason enough to understand why the desire to read J.K. Rowling's series of novels was never that strong.

Some have called me a killjoy for speaking negatively of all three released film adaptations of her stories, but I stand by my initial response: these movies lack perspective, and are not about youngsters being heroes but about how special effects can upstage potentially-resonating childhood fantasies.

Batman Begins / **** (2005)

"If you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, you become something else entirely."
-Henri Ducard, Dialogue from "Batman Begins"

In comic books it is the ideology of heroes (particularly the more emotionally unstable ones) to become the embodiment of their phobias, to turn all traces of pain and suffering into an inspiration behind their careers as crime-fighters. Some (like Frank Castle, aka The Punisher) embrace this conviction at a tactical level, while others (like the more well-known Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man) simply remake themselves into actual objects of horror. The latter certainly constitutes for most of the more interesting superheroes of the comic universe; when it comes to leaving a lasting impression on those whom you are facing off against, sometimes image is everything. And besides, if you were a masked vigilante who wanted to be known to those whom you were waging war against, would you have more success being yourself or being an unknown in a spider suit?

Cinderella Man / *** (2005)

Family man and all-around nice guy Jim Braddock lugs around enough nobility to put most guys to shame, the task on his shoulders so physically demanding and uncertain that it's a wonder he is able to go home at night and be halfway civil to his children and wife. Reality is certainly not in his favor; a successful prize fighter whose golden days dissipate just as the clout of the Great Depression is set into motion, his life both in and out of the ring are sent into major freefall, a predicament that would be more than enough to cripple any man emotionally. But no, here is a guy who projects the ideals of the working class and an attitude of optimism so resolute that he refuses to cave. For him, failure is not only not an option, but a completely foreign concept. Maybe that is what drives him down a road of new opportunities and success, or maybe it is just sheer luck. In any case, this is the kind of guy whose ambition is just as great as his dignity, and when put to the test he faces those dilemmas like they are nothing more than challengers in a ring begging for a knockout.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith / *** (2005)

The reveal of a new chapter in the elaborate "Star Wars" saga may seem commonplace in an age when special effects have been able to discover countless visionary movie worlds, but it is important to remember that the essence of our movie blockbusters today is partially owed to the ambition that set this franchise into motion all those years ago. When the first part of this story was unleashed in the mid-70s, it did more than just excite and marvel those who witnessed the spectacle; it literally awakened a new generation of dreamers, who saw cinema as more than just a tool for mimicking the foreground of our everyday lives. Here, at long last, movies were capable of exploring the universes that were nothing more than just figments in one's imagination on a grand scale. Limits were breached, walls were torn down, and gravity was eradicated from celluloid forever. Not a single person who saw the film could challenge its scope or its animal enthusiasm, and its legacy, further enriched by two equally satisfying follow-up chapters in the forthcoming years, was one that not only endured for future generations but in ways stayed relevant even amongst a slew of equally-ambitious endeavors that filled the theaters in the decades to come.

Kingdom of Heaven / ** (2005)

Ridley Scott's latest excursion into the eras of old, a religious war epic called "Kingdom of Heaven," opens with a scene in which Godfrey (Liam Neeson), a knight from Jerusalem, returns to his home in France to reunite with the son he never knew. Young and quiet Balian (Orlando Bloom), on the other hand, doesn't seem very anxious for any kind of family reunion; recently scarred by the death of his newborn child and suicide of his wife, he passes days in a remote village making horseshoes and saying only what passers by require of him - usually nothing of significance. Godfrey's abrupt arrival might have at least seemed startling to such a hardened mourner, but for Balian it's just another revelation in a series of days he wants to be long over. Even when he accepts an offer from his new-found father to escape France and return to the Christian-ruled holy land, we never sense that he is doing it for the sake of understanding his father's desertion or for getting to know him in any capacity. At that stage in his life, the only thing that matters to him is change, and running away from the tragedies of his wife and child turns out to be motivation enough.

House of Wax / zero stars (2005)

"House of Wax" is such a vile and despicable heap of trash that I pity any lucid person who will actually pay decent money to sit through it. As a straight horror film, it supplies no legitimate horror other than the notion of sabotaging its source material in favor of visual repugnance, and as a remake of yet another famous 1950s scare-fest it completely squanders any chances it might have had of at least being amusing on the nostalgia scale. The people involved in making this thing should be ashamed of themselves; it is the kind of picture so revolting that it deserves to not only undermine careers but general reputation as well. A good manager might have pointed out that such a credit on a film resume might do a lot more damage than it's worth, but I guess you can't necessarily expect much sense from anyone who showed interest in the project to begin with.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy / *** (2005)

The mentality of the average moviegoer is not one that is very receptive towards products that demand you to step into an alternate medium in order to acquire necessary background knowledge. This will surely be the primary dilemma facing many a casual viewer upon witnessing "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," the new film adaptation of the famous 1970s series of sci-fi comedy novels. Penned by a quirky and spontaneous over-achiever named Douglas Adams, the material is, I gather, a lot more detailed and informative than what the cinematic translation is willing to provide - here we get countless quips, quirks and moments of ingenuity that seem like they are referencing something much greater than what actually plays out. The narrative structure is painted in extremely broad strokes, occasionally punctuated by something satisfying, and most of the inevitable laughs come not from the fact that there's an effective punchline, but just for the fact that they are spontaneous and fall at an amusingly random pace.