Dirty Love / zero stars (2005)

During a schmaltzy greeting card monologue in the opening scenes of “Dirty Love,” the heroine informs us that “love is unreal,” before launching into a scene of hysteria after she has discovered the love of her life in bed with another woman. Most people scarred by that sort of discovery, at least in a comedy, would usually plot some sort of devious revenge. Rebecca (Jenny McCarthy) opts to make her grief an incompetent public spectacle, which will include her approaching sex workers for job applications, showing up to public gatherings on the arms of awkward losers, and avoiding run-ins with her ex in various locales, like a grocery store while she is tripping over her own menstrual blood. Are you still listening to this? These are the sight gags of a filmmaker who has watched a plethora of outrageous comedies but has only memorized out-of-context punchlines, relegating everything that he does to a one-note show of languid showmanship. Even then, most narrow concepts could be forgiven if they produce laughs, however shallow. John Asher’s junkyard of a film, unfortunately, only inspires the sorts of groans usually reserved for painful indigestion.

Last Days / ***1/2 (2005)

Three movies in Gus Van Sant’s filmography make up what is commonly referred to as his “death trilogy,” and like similar multi-picture endeavors by Ingmar Bergman and Lars von Trier they are linked less by story or characters and more by deep thematic echoes. But to describe the material in them as being just about “death” would be to simplify the nature at which they originate; while death itself awaits many of the important players, it is the journey towards it that stirs uncomfortably in the mind of their curious author. Consider the long and arduous walk towards nothing in “Gerry,” or the almost haunting silence preceding the chaos of the final hour of “Elephant.” Van Sant’s theory is not that some are meant to die young or tragically, but that they often do so because of a decay in stability brought on by lifelong alienations – many of them either self-imposed or clandestine. In these worlds, taking one final breath well before the mortal clock has wound down may just be a release from a routine that has already killed their goal to persevere.

The Devil's Rejects / ***1/2 (2005)

The space inhabited by the characters in “The Devil’s Rejects” is a laboratory of unconventional challenges, of ambitious morality tests not ordinarily reserved for an ensemble of would-be horror movie casualties. Its existence comes down a tricky gimmick seized by Rob Zombie, the writer/director, who finds an interesting platform to stage the events on – one in which homicidal maniacs are hunted by a legal authority who seems driven by the same barbaric tendencies as those on their own killing spree. Driven earnestly by a mission he refers to as the “cleansing of the wicked,” this maniacal force – a Sheriff known as John Wydell – strikes a chord in others that clouds the certainty of a horrible act with that of a deserving retribution, and both sides of the equation meander in the outskirts of their inevitable confrontation like they are hoping to avoid the central point. That is not to say the movie itself is evasive about the issue it raises, but more to suggest the discomfort from asking the difficult question: when you castigate those who have committed heinous crimes with the same level of depravity, are you any better than those you punish?

Alone in the Dark / zero stars (2005)

I should be issuing warnings to those who may encounter “Alone in the Dark” but instead find my words guided by a greater urge: to maul the film in the same vicious, unfiltered manner that it contaminates the movie screen. Here is an endeavor (if you dare call it one) so utterly bereft of the simplest morsels of intelligence that it inspires a wrath within that I have rarely recognized, leaving me in an elusive predicament – how do you savage something this pathetic, this completely unbothered by the basic concept of passable composition? Those who stood behind the camera weren’t just making a lazy movie, they were allowing themselves to undermine the basic desire of going to the theater. Usually hidden behind all the pomp and circumstance of something superfluous is a motive that at least intends someone to have a good time, and we can cut some bad movies slack when we understand (and accept) those aims. But not a soul involved here is capable of passive intentions, much less a rational thought. Their purpose is to deliberately rob innocent filmgoers of precious time, without anything to show for it beyond regret and empty wallets.

Red Eye / *** (2005)

Wes Craven’s “Red Eye” begins with an abundance of strategic visual cues that recall the framework of some of the more sensational Hitchcock endeavors: shots of a stolen wallet, a crate of ice aboard a fisherman’s boat, urgent feet peddling through an airport terminal and news broadcasts about vague threats to homeland security. As isolated devices they seem far too fragmented to be congruent, but those well-versed in the language of movie thrillers know they must add up to something – in this case, a plot that must match urgency with underlying political intrigue. But what horrors are we inclined to contemplate, really, when the most threatening exchange occurs in a hotel lobby between an inexperienced clerk and two disgruntled guests? How are we to assume such menace is around the corner when the two leads, a pair of people who seem to meet incidentally at the terminal, share drinks in the bar and exchange stories that seem more like precursors to romantic interest? The genius of Craven’s long-standing affinity for such premises is that he knew exactly how to throw his audience off the scent of the danger, even though his most loyal viewers knew it must be inevitable. How many astute people consciously thought of ensuing violence, mind you, after Drew Barrymore answered a call from a wrong phone number at the beginning of “Scream?”

Hard Candy / ** (2005)

Jeff Kohlver is one of the most thoroughly smarmy characters in recent years, and his oppressor Hayley Stark one of the most transparent. Their existence in David Slade’s “Hard Candy” – a movie as unpleasant as its own participants find it – serves to fuel an agenda that would be no more persuasive in the hands of a more skilled filmmaker, because dealing with this subject is a matter of nearly impossible resolution. Sure there are more certainties we can all arrive at when it comes to dealing with a scenario this stark, but what are we supposed to feel in terms of emotional involvement? Are we supposed to care about either person’s strange or tragic history when they convey themselves in a manner that bypasses the grey areas? Seeing them on screen creates just as much of a fascinating conundrum as it does a glaring aftertaste; they are toxic exemplifications of their ideals and yet thoroughly dislikable to the point of sickness. The fact that the characters are portrayed so convincingly by their respective actors only complicates the issue of our involvement.

Chaos / zero stars (2005)

David DeFalco’s “Chaos” is an unholy assault on human decency, a worthless and hateful celebration of evil that not only delves into excessive cruelty, but has the insolence to frame it all within the perspective of a pretentious moral obligation. At the opening of the picture, a title card informs us that the ensuing material is purposely extreme for the sake of “education,” although any initial claims of the sort are usually shields in these sorts of pictures. From what, you dare to ask? It usually comes down to the inevitable reality that all subsequent events are glorified to a point of perversion, which often necessitates a disclaimer for damage control. But any sensible person who will be unfortunate enough to witness any two minutes of this shameful and mean-spirited disaster will easily protest such prospects, because what they will be seeing is 74 minutes of senseless torture and sadism lacking all notions of context. By the end, the only certainty is that we are united in our wonder of more underlying concerns: namely, how the people who made this ever thought it could be palpable to audiences with some semblance of ethical integrity.

The Descent / **** (2005)

A critical window of insight is what separates the characters in Neil Marshall’s “The Descent” from the disposable line of victims normally seen in modern horror movies. It occurs in the opening scenes, when three female friends are out rafting enthusiastically through treacherous river waters. They share laughs, shouts of warning, and occasional lighthearted screams. Their antics are spied by a man and his daughter from a nearby hillside, both of whom are there to cheer on Sarah (Shauna Macdonald). She is the wife and mother, a woman with few cares in the world beyond this current moment. When the raft pulls into an embankment and the three friends begin to part, awkward glances are exchanged between the man and Juno (Natalie Mendoza), Sarah’s other friend. The third catches sight of these gazes, but does not convey a response beyond internal fascination. And then in the next scene, Sarah and her family are on the road heading back into town when tragedy strikes: he veers accidentally off into the lane of incoming traffic, and a head-on collision with another car ends with the deaths of husband and daughter. Later, long after their world has collapsed under the weight of horrific new adventures, one of them makes an observation that effectively frames the entire premise of their interactions: “we all lost something in that crash.”

Grizzly Man (2005)

The greatest mystery of man often lies in the choices he makes, and Timothy Treadwell created perhaps some of the most ambitious riddles one could imagine. For thirteen consecutive summers, the shy and offbeat nomad left the human world behind and went to live in the company of the wildest of animals: large and dangerous grizzly bears in the Alaskan peninsula, many of which had spent their existence so far outside of human contact that he seemed to occupy space in their unrestrained existence as a lone alien. Social awkwardness made him an outcast, while the seeming peace and tranquility of the wilderness inspired buried passions. But what was the purpose of his consistent desire to distance himself from human interaction? What did he see in the grizzlies that gave him purpose? What do hours upon hours of video documentation show us, other than the dogged dreams of one who fell victim to a false idealism about ferocious predators that exist only to feed and survive?

Hostel / *** (2005)

Eli Roth’s “Hostel” is an agonizing experience to sit through – disheartening, unpleasant, bursting with torture, detached and harsh, and unrelenting in its passion for the horrific. To call it a challenge in the visual sense does not begin to explain its ability to completely rob you of the comfort of artifice; it so fully indulges in its reality that every cut, every bloodcurdling moment in which pain is inflicted on a number of unsuspecting victims, is felt rather than seen. That may rob the movie of repeat value even in the hands of audiences who willingly embrace this overzealous sub-genre of torture-driven horror, but it does provoke deeper considerations: in the hands of skilled filmmakers who know how to establish reason and perspective, can extreme visual depravity rise above its nature to merely sicken and appall? Like “Saw II” and “High Tension,” here is a movie that elicits a powerful reaction not simply because it goes for the hardcore, but because it has plausible justification for doing so.

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.