Dark City: Director's Cut / **** (1998)

The opportunity to revisit “Dark City” ten years from whence it found its way into the imaginations of a generation of eloquent and sophisticated movie-goers is, in many ways, just as staggering as it is rewarding. A personal barometer for which most (if not all) films have been measured in the years since, the film endures with me as one of the ageless, nourishing visions of modern cinema, significant for the fact that it attained a certain scope of detail that continues to drive the true promise of filmmaking. When I wrote my first series of online reviews in the summer of 1998, here was the film that I would proudly call the benchmark of my critiquing inspiration – and now a decade has passed, time has caught up with me, and both the movie and I meet once again at the center of the spiral. It is amazing how important things have a way of taking you on long journeys, only to end up bringing you right back to the place where you started.

So it goes like it goes... a decade of film criticism

How’s this for an eye-opener?

Out of sheer coincidence, I reflected late last week on the amount of time and energy I have spent reviewing film on the internet, and much to my surprise, it dawned on me, rather suddenly, that the following Tuesday was to be the tenth – yes, TENTH – anniversary of my first time being published online. The review was for “The Black Cauldron,” and Buena Vista Home Video had just released the Disney cartoon for the first time ever on VHS.

The Dark Knight / **** (2008)

“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

The crazed, almost hypnotic dance of wits that is shared between Batman and the Joker is the most memorable of the public rivalries exhibited in the comic books about the caped crusader, a savagely perceptive conflict in which good and evil forces meet and clash with dizzying arrays of results ranging from the exciting to the profound. They also share a chemistry that is often imitated but never fully replicated, and despite a broad arsenal of enemies that have been thrown into the midst of the dark knight’s presence, none of them come close to matching. That’s because the Joker is, for better or worse, the only antagonist in the original stories that seems to understand enough about the Batman identity to dissect it; much like the hero, here is a villain whose own “trauma” in life has essentially made him the spiritual opposite of Gotham’s biggest crime fighter, and the two engage in elaborate plots against one another as if they are brothers of war destined to counter-balance one another’s existence in the scheme of life. Theirs is a tumultuous love affair that is almost endearing as it is wicked.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull / *** (2008)

10 things that come to mind when watching the new "Indy" flick

1. It has been nearly 20 years since the last installment into the George Lucas/Steven Spielberg franchise that solidified Harrison Ford as a Hollywood action star. For those that express concern and/or confusion over the prospect of a movie hero being dusted off and revived so long after the fact, we should remind you that the resurgence of the aged action star is but a new hot commodity in Hollywood. Otherwise, how does one explain the rousing success of recent return ventures into film franchises like "Rocky," "Rambo" and "Die Hard?"

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian / ***1/2 (2008)

The Narnia of Caspian X is a place more menacing and cutthroat than that of the early age, ravaged by land-hungry totalitarians known as the Telmarines, its wondrous populations of fawns, talking animals and tree spirits silenced by their ruthless pillaging of the establishments of old. They occupy the screen in “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” with a certain arrogance in their demeanor, dressed in lush robes and observed carrying themselves less like invaders and more like monarchs of England’s Tudor era. To say that their existence feeds into an assumption that the movie’s writers are beginning to see C.S. Lewis’ magical world from a more political context would be an understatement; when the movie opens, there is no doubt in the minds of its would-be heroes – or the audience, for that matter – that the battle between good and evil no longer comes down to impressive displays of magic and fantasy. Instead, what we get is a film with impressive battle sequences, talk of strategy and intrigue, and character development that spend less time marveling over fantastical sights and more time contemplating the pros and cons that come with change.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning / * (2006)

The blood-soaked horror movie has become a disgusting and contemptible beast, burdened by notions of macho-sadism and traces of insanity that suggest their filmmakers are either overzealous with visuals, completely twisted and warped, or somewhere in between. They only get away with it because audiences have embraced it for 30 years. Recall the success of the original “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” or how audiences flooded to “Friday the 13th” and its sequels. Moviegoers seem to be amused by brainless bloodbaths in which idiotic teenagers are sliced and diced like cuts of meat at a slaughterhouse. Does that make them pointless? Not always, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that there’s only so many dumb teenagers you can kill in a century on screen.

Speed Racer / *** (2008)

“Speed Racer” is a stylish, electrifying, intense and visually breathtaking catastrophe of a movie, a picture so filled with wondrous images and astonishing sights that one is left bewildered by the notion of so much technical energy being squandered on a narrative so obviously uninterested in matching it. Or maybe that is basically the whole point. I dunno. Based off of an old 1960s Japanese animated series– one which I am unfamiliar with – the filmmakers present their endeavor with just the kind of flat-footed, shapeless screenplay you half expect to be derived of the source material. But what empowers these filmmakers with enough nerve to justify giving this clueless premise much more enthralling a presentation than it so clearly deserves? This is a movie that forces us to question our very nature as moviegoers: do we simply dismiss such an endeavor because it is all style and no substance, or do we embrace it based on the notion that the style’s scope is so ambitious and intricate that it is basically high art?

The Best and Worst of 2007

2007, you might say, was the year of revelations at the cinema, a year of surprises, startling discoveries and spectacular achievements. But that is not necessarily a positive prospect, either. Saturated by ambition and ambivalence, the movies that occupied theater screens in the 12 months of the calendar year offered high stylization, great energy and loud explosions, and payoffs too brief and momentary to make many of them deserving of that output. The trend was not one limited to the more prolific of box office competitors, either; like a disease that transcends culture and social divides, no one, including the Indies or the art-house flicks, were safe from the mediocrity that spread through the crops.

Oscars 2008: Nominee Predictions

2008 opens with change in the air. Hollywood quivers under the clout of a potentially drastic change to the industry with an ongoing Writer’s Guild strike. Studios face a future filled with gaps as scripts become more sparse and projects face delays. Networks cope with the prospect that high-profile awards ceremonies will get shortchanged by the absence of important figures. And yours truly has settled back into a groove he had not expected to return to when he gave it up over five years ago: sifting through heaps of awards hoopla in order to come up with a fairly accurate prediction of what the envelopes might contain when the Oscar nominations are announced this Tuesday morning.

Beowulf / *1/2 (2007)

For all the visual wizardry at work on screen in Robert Zemeckis’ “Beowulf,” it’s a wonder I found myself leaving the theater feeling lifeless and unenthusiastic. Certainly, here we are at the helm of a true technical achievement in cinema, a complex and rigorous endeavor that marries the real and the digital with the kind of detail that makes its nearest cousin, “The Polar Express,” look almost like a dress rehearsal in comparison. But perhaps that is the root of the conflict at hand; for every whisker and every pore that is visible on the face of an actor who has been completely altered by the multi-dimensional capabilities of a computer-generated image, there is a facial expression, a sign of human feeling and even basic mannerism that is lost in the system. Characters do not pass very basic plausibility tests because there’s no outlet for them to warrant it – they can’t be merely cartoons because we know there is flesh behind the gimmick, and we can’t accept them as human beings because they appear to lack very basic facial functions. Are they supposed to look authentic? Are we supposed to consciously acknowledge that they are thespians simply being represented on-screen by elaborate shell casings? The movie offers no answers, a terrible dilemma at a time when this bizarre and uncultivated sub-genre is in desperate need of rationale.

The Golden Compass / **1/2 (2007)

“The Golden Compass” represents cinema fantasy at its most striking and fearsome, underlining the genius of the modern moviemaker as technology grows and continues to allow him or her to test boundaries of realism without surrendering to obvious visual deceit. If only the screenwriters shared those ambitions. No, it’s not as if we as adults are the wrong target audience for a movie in which the hero is a young girl; au contraire, the source material, penned by the talented Phillip Pullman, is both brilliant and frightening in the way it allows dread to creep up on its young stars, forcing them to adopt adult roles in a story way too dark for innocent children to play in. A fully satisfying screen endeavor would sneer at the opportunity to dumb down Pullman’s narrative maturity in order to create broader appeal, but that alas is not the central mission in this venture. Absent from the film is the deeply political subtext of its foundation, the glaring void filled by ambitious special effects and colorful canvases meant to distract audiences from the notion that they are watching a story with its roots firmly planted in something much more tragic than those involved might be willing to admit.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age / **1/2 (2007)

Shekhar Kapur’s “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” marks more than just a return to an England of visual opulence and intricate political intrigue, it also underscores a personal revelation in the life of this cinema aficionado, whose first self-appointed task in the fall of 1998, just a few short days after gaining certified status as an online film critic, was to see and review a fairly obscure indie costume drama that chronicled the early years of the reign of one of the country’s most important and famous monarchs. The person who invests much of his or herself into a personal pastime for an extended length of time never measures their dedication according to months or years, but when an occasion arises where we are reminded of where we’ve come from and how far the journey has taken us, it often boggles us. The appearance of this endeavor, a follow-up to a movie that I hold in high esteem for essentially being the first classic picture I saw from the perspective of a film analyst and writer, is a sobering prospect. It hardly seems possible that nine years have come and gone, and here I am still writing, analyzing, and caring about the material that I see on a theater screen.

Death of a President / ** (2006)

The documentary hopes that we are eager for education and insight into something historical that might demand more than just ordinary detail to be understood; the “mockumentary,” a sub-genre occasionally visited upon by more adventurous filmmakers, is less about education and more about philosophy of the unknown, a study of feelings and reactions in a “what if” scenario that may or may not be feasible in our own reality. “Death of a President,” which belongs to the latter class, is probably the first movie I’ve seen that is so brazen and outspoken with the concept of projecting realism onto social rhetoric, devising a premise that comes millimeters from crossing a barrier that would fuel fires in the war over censorship in the arts. There is little in the way of misinterpretation when it comes to comprehending the plunge of director Gabriel Range’s challenged endeavor, which makes an attempt to dissect an unsolved assassination involving, well, current president George W. Bush as the victim.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix / ***1/2 (2007)

The realm of spectacle and sorcery at the heart of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” is not the gentle and capricious place that moviegoers were enticed into admiring when this series first came to the cinema six years ago. Gone are the good-hearted and harmless touches of children’s fantasy, their light-weight and colorful textures replaced by shadows, dank exteriors, menace and threat, and an occasional blood splatter thrown in to emphasize the notion of evil being actively at work in the fabric of the story. We have always anticipated the world of Potter and his magical friends to get darker and more solemn, not just because the premise conflicts require it to, but also because it is of the nature of kids to look at their settings in more serious a light when childhood daydreaming is replaced by the reality of adolescence. The safety that comes with innocence – and the prospect of magic itself being a shield from all grave conflict – is but a self-delusion long left in the dust when the teenage heroes return to Hogwarts for what is to be their fifth school year. They are at the forefront of life-altering decisions and situations now, and every thought they have or move they make requires more specific consideration, lest they fall into traps designed to crush their aspirations as prospering professionals in a world of wizardry.

Children of Men / ***1/2 (2007)

Alfonso Cuarón’s “Children of Men” is an anti-thesis of the modern Hollywood movie dystopia, an endeavor in which the image of a condemned human civilization contains no gloss, depends on nothing proverbial, and insists on taking paths so seldom traveled that we often wonder if it knows just how dangerous or challenging the unpaved roads can be. The movie doesn’t even have safety nets to fall back on, other than the background notion that its director’s sly and unusual style perhaps makes him ideal for assuming control over this rather heavy and morally-intricate source material. Whereas most filmmakers might broach the P.D. James novel “The Children of Men” with a straightforward or assertive attitude, here is a guy who knows it takes not just an analytical slant for the material to work, but also confidence in the prospect of it being obscure on formula and drab in its emotional thrust. Needless to say, he finds the precise chords required of it and doesn’t even bat an eyelash in the process. The very soul of the film scoffs at the expectation of being conventional or formulaic.