Year:  2010
Genre:  Action, Thriller
Country:  United States
Language:   English
Starring:  Dwayne Johnson, Billy Bob Thornton, Carla Gugino, Moon Bloodgood, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Maggie Grace, Tom Berenger, Mike Epps, Xander Berkeley, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
Director:  George Tillman Jr.
Run time:  98 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Faster is an enjoyable movie, despite its many, many flaws.  It works thanks to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who has become a dependable action star in recent years.  When he made his first foray into action films, The Rock was big.  And that was about all he had going for him.  He looked menacing, but couldn’t act his way out of a parking ticket.  Now, he has expanded his repertoire of facial expressions just enough to become believable as a one-dimensional tough guy.  Which really just means that he is now better than Seagal or Van Damme.

     In Faster, all Johnson has to do is look angry and kill people.  And he does, with a single-minded determination akin to Mel’s in Payback.  Only without all the nuance.  See, Driver (no one has a name, but they all have occupations) was sent to prison for his part in a robbery (he was the driver, you see) after being betrayed by some thugs.  Thugs whose connection to Driver and his brother and the rest of their gang is never exactly clear.

     Those thugs killed his brother, then they shot Driver and left him for dead.  But of course he survived.  And went to prison.  Where he apparently worked out 20 hours a day, got into fights with a bunch of other inmates and killed them, all while waiting to be released so he could exact his angry, bloody revenge.  Why he didn’t get extra time in prison for killing all those other inmates, I’m not sure.  I guess it would have made him too old when he got out, and this movie wouldn’t have worked with Ernest Borgnine as the star.  HE just looks SILLY when he flexes.

     The second Driver is released, he walks into what appears to be the set of Office Space, complete with cubicles and Swingline staplers, and shoots some guy in the head.  I don’t know where he got the gun, or how he found this guy, but he sure found him and he sure shot him and he’s sure dead.  As The Rock continues to cut a swath through the bad guys (most of them appear to be ex-bad guys who have ostensibly gone straight), little pieces of his back story begin to emerge.

     In the meantime, a badly underused Carla Gugino and a badly overused Billy Bob Thornton play a couple of cops trying to figure out who this guy is and what’s going on.  There is more of a connection between the Driver and the Cop than we initially see, but the movie spells out the mystery so plainly early on that it really isn’t, in any way, a “mystery”.  The Big Revelation in the final scene is so obvious that it’s laughable.

     Another subplot involves a professional killer (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) who has been hired by some mysterious guy (although we all know who it is) to kill Driver.  He keeps showing up where The Rock shows up, and they have shootouts and car chases.  Just to keep the action lively, I suppose.  Killer serves no real purpose in the movie, unless it’s just to provide a contrast to Driver.  Killer is meticulous and well-groomed and elegant in his attempts to assassinate Driver, while his target is brutish and single-minded and utterly inelegant in his pursuit of revenge.

     There are enormous plot holes.  The finale leaves a TON of questions unanswered, and perhaps the most notable antagonist unpunished.  Many characters have no discernible motivation whatsoever to do what they do, and Killer especially appears to be an utterly nonsensical character.  Every side plot feels like it was sloppily stapled onto the main one with no regard for relevance.  The one exception here, I think, are the surprisingly tender, awkward scenes between Thornton (Cop) and his chubby, unathletic son.

     So why, with all these things working against it, am I giving Faster a mild recommendation?  It’s almost entirely because of Dwayne Johnson.  Yes, he’s a one-dimensional character, despite the weak attempt to humanize him right at the end.  And yes, his acting in this film is confined to scowling and snarling and staring at victims without emotion.  But this is the kind of role that requires that very character.  And after his painful five-year foray into kids’ fare, Johnson is back doing what he’s supposed to be doing, and he’s better than ever.

     I couldn’t help but get swept up in the kinetic energy of Johnson and his quest for revenge.  Stylish camera work, a myriad of references to other movies (some better, some worse), and a protagonist who is more a force of nature than he is a human being make Faster too charismatic to fail.  It didn’t bore me, it didn’t annoy me, and although I found myself groaning at it quite often, I was mostly just enjoying the ride.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Drama, Thriller
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall, Jeremy Renner, Jon Hamm, Blake Lively, Titus Welliver, Chris Cooper, Pete Postlethwaite, Owen Burke
Director:  Ben Affleck
Run time:  124 minutes

     Just trying to get in as many reviews of Oscar-nominated movies as I can before the awards here…and The Town is up for one – Best Supporting Actor for Jeremy Renner.  It’s a weak nomination, although Renner is very good here – but I think it’s more about carry-over from the incredibly successful The Hurt Locker last year, which won six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, as well as scoring a Best Actor nomination for Renner (an award that went to Jeff Bridges).

     At any rate, The Town is an immensely entertaining, if flawed, motion picture from director and star Ben Affleck.  Affleck is a decent actor, but he is a better writer (Good Will Hunting) and director (Gone Baby Gone) than he is an actor.  In my review of Gone Baby Gone, I suggested that the best movie writer/director Affleck made was in NOT casting himself.  Instead, he cast his younger brother Casey, and the result was magic.

     And now, with The Town, I feel that the biggest mistake Affleck DID make here was in casting himself.  Renner is fantastic, Blake Lively is terrific, Rebecca Hall is very good, but Affleck, the star and centre of the movie, is passable at best.  I just don’t believe this guy as a bank robber, a lover, a nice guy OR a tough guy.  And certainly not all four at once. 

     Once again, Affleck has set his movie in Boston.  In this case, a specific neighbourhood in Boston that apparently produces bank robbers the way Compton apparently produces gangsta rappers.  Affleck plays Doug, the leader of a team of bank robbers who are like a surrogate family to him.  Jem (Renner) is his #2, almost a brother to him, even though Affleck is apparently very nice and kind and warm-hearted and Renner is vicious and angry and ruthless. 

     After a particularly difficult hold-up, the gang takes bank manager Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) hostage, then dumps her away from town without ever taking off their masks.  Soon, they discover that Claire lives in their neck of the woods, and begin to wonder whether she might be able to identify them.  So Doug begins to stalk her, eventually showing up at the same laundromat to test the theory.  Theoretically, I suppose, if she recognized him, he would have…what?  Pulled out a gun and blown her away?  In front of her own laundry?

     But she doesn’t recognize him, so he goes to Plan B.  He decides to date her.  This stands to reason, as no one has ever gone to a laundromat in a movie, in history, without coming out with a girlfriend.  And so Doug and Claire begin to date, and he can never tell her who he really is, and she is traumatized from the holdup, and Jem is increasingly angry and suspicious of the whole situation.  And then the cops start sniffing around.

     Of course, the movie boils down to the One Last Job the crew has to do so Affleck can leave the town and be done with his life of crime.  Which means he has to tell his girl and hope she will join him and not stab him.  And it also means he has to extricate himself from this family-crew he has, a crew that will be bank robbers for life and really, really seem to want to drag him down with them.

     Renner is terrific here as the loyal-to-a-fault nutcase, the man to whom violence and robbery is not just a means to an end, but is bred in the bone.  Although it’s Doug who comes from a long line of professional bank robbers, it’s Jem who not only can’t but never wants to quit the life.  Complicating things is Jem’s sister Krista (a fantastic Lively) who may or may not have had a child with Doug.

     The story is pretty familiar, but written well enough that no scene seems obvious.  The acting is, for the most part, top-notch.  And the pacing, the backdrop and the settings are all superb, thanks to some great direction from Affleck.  The only probelm I have is Affleck himself, who seems to think that just showing up is enough to make his character believable.  It isn’t.  Hall is believable.  Lively is outstanding.  Renner is great.  Affleck is weak, and makes this movie a little less than classic.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Documentary
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Director:  Josh Fox
Run time:  107 minutes

     An eye-opening look at the industry of natural gas drilling across the United States, Gasland has a lot going for it.  It exposes an industry that until now has received very little tough scrutiny in the media.  It features some compelling interview subjects who have basically been poisoned and run off their own land when natural gas wells open nearby.  And it features, time and again, the most incredible, striking visual in a movie this year – people, in their own homes, opening their taps and actually lighting their water on fire.

     The film begins with the documentary maker, Josh Fox, being offered a fairly large sum of money to lease out portions of his homestead’s land for natural gas drilling.  One of the huge energy corporations wants to drill on his family’s property along the Delaware River Basin in Pennsylvania.  Ostensibly, Fox sets out to find out as much as he can about the drilling process and the environmental effects, although I suspect he already knew at least a little bit about how disastrous it was.

     Fox meets people who are afraid to put their faces on camera, either fearing retribution or because they have signed non-disclosure agreements with these energy firms in return for the use of their land.  But invariably, wherever Fox travels throughout the States, the results are the same.  People are getting sick and dying because the natural gas is bubbling up in their water supply.  Most of them can’t use the water from their own faucets (and many can light it on fire).

     These people are now buying their water from other sources so they can use it for drinking, cooking, bathing and providing water for their livestock.  In the places where they can’t afford to buy all that water, and their animals are drinking the naturally occurring water in the area, the horses have hair that is falling out and they are dying, cats and dogs are terribly sick, and people are losing their homes and their businesses.

     This all comes from the process known as “fracking” – vast, insane amounts of water are combined with enormous chemical solutions and fired directly into the earth, basically fracturing the Earth through a hydraulic process and forcing the natural gas up to the surface.  The chemical-laden water then seeps into the soil around it, coming up in wells and basins and ditches and lakes and rivers, killing wildlife and poisoning the environment.

     Much of this comes as a direct result of the 2005 Energy Policy Act, a Dick Cheney initiative, which removed basically all environmental protection restrictions on fracking and gas drilling and the natural gas industry in general.  The huge energy corporations, then, could act with virtual impunity, destroying the land with few (if any) repercussions.

     Fox takes us through the history of the regulations and the disastrous consequences, as he interviews the people affected and makes (at least a halfhearted) attempt to talk to the people responsible for the devastation.  I don’t like the pacing of Gasland.  At times it drags, it often goes over the same ground more than once, and it sometimes speeds over something that I find interesting and would like to explore further.  But it certainly gets its message across, and it certainly taught me a TON about an industry I thought was relatively environmentally friendly.  Also, it has people lighting their tap water on fire!  Gasland is up for a Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars on Sunday.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Kids, Animation
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring (voices):  Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Ned Beatty, Don Rickles, Michael Keaton, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Estelle Harris, John Morris, Laurie Metcalf, Timothy Dalton, Kristen Schaal, Bonnie Hunt, Whoopi Goldberg, R. Lee Ermey
Director:  Lee Unkrich
Run time:  103 minutes

     Pixar never, ever misses.  Oh, they’re bound to at some point have a dud.  Maybe.  But after Ratatouille and Wall-E and Finding Nemo and Up and The Incredibles and a bunch of other children’s classics too long for me to bother typing, it is starting to look like it will never happen.  Now, with Toy Story 3, Pixar has returned to their first and greatest success, the Toy Story franchise.  All three Toy Story movies have been truly great, although now that we’ve reached the third film in the series they have lost the ability to be truly transformative.

     That being said, there are few movies I anticipate more than Toy Story films.  The main reason, I maintain, that Pixar has been consistently great is that they refuse to pander to kids, or to dumb down their films. 

     Think about the scene at the end of Ratatouille where the food critic gives his incredible, high-brow dissertation on criticism in general that had to give movie critics pause, let alone children.  Or the scene in Up where the old man remembers his life and his wife crying when she can’t have children and then her death – not only is Pixar not going to dumb their movies down for kids, they aren’t going to sugarcoat life’s events either, and they’re not afraid to make kids cry.  Good.

     And so it is with Toy Story 3, where enough personality and emotion is invested in childrens’ toys that their feelings are palpable when they get left behind.  Andy is now much older, and heading off to college, which means he will be leaving all his childhood toys behind.  That is, except for Woody, who Andy will take with him for nostalgia.  This leaves the rest of the toys to an indeterminate fate.  They might be boxed up and stuck in the attic, or tossed out at the curb.

     In the end, the toys (Woody included) get donated to a children’s daycare centre.  What at first appears to be an idyllic place, with dozens of kids wanting to play with the toys, turns out to be a nightmare compound run by a fat, mean fuzzy purple bear named Lotso (voiced by Ned Beatty).  The new toys are relegated to the toddler room, where the little kids abuse them and break them and tear them to pieces, while Losto and his cronies hang out in the nice room with the older kids where they are loved and cared for.

     There are some terrific scenes – one in particular between Ken and Barbie, where he is modeling his clothes in his dream house, is hilarious.  Another, where Buzz gets set to “Spanish mode” is side-splitting.  Lotso is vicious and cruel, his henchmen are loyal and brutal, and his backstory is sad and actually humanizes him somewhat.  Or…stuffed bearanizes him?  I guess? 

     At the heart of the film is a quandry – if toys aren’t being played with, are they still toys?  And if they’re being played with badly, is that actually worse than being ignored?  And furthermore, should toddlers ever be allowed to touch things?  All good questions.  In the end though, as always, it comes down to sticking together and being good friends and overcoming obstacles as a team and all that good-for-kids stuff.  What sets Toy Story 3 (and all Pixar fare) apart is that it’s good for adults too.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Comedy, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Mia Wasikowska, Josh Hutcherson
Director:  Lisa Cholodenko
Run time:  104 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     I liked The Kids Are All Right, but I must confess I was stunned when it was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.  Annette Bening, I get.  I think Julianne Moore got robbed, and should have been nominated as well.  But Best Picture?  No.  And Best Supporting Actor for Mark Ruffalo?  No.  Original Screenplay?  No.

     The film stars Bening and Moore as a lesbian couple with two teenage kids (Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson, both of whom are terrific).  Of course, being teenagers, the kids are starting to rebel a little bit, and question their place in the world.  And that means, for Joni (Wasikowska), searching out her biological father.  Her brother, Laser (Hutcherson) reluctantly tags along to the meeting with Paul (Ruffalo), as he happens to be his biological sperm-donor father as well.

     Soon, the kids are connecting with Paul, and as their bond deepens he slowly becomes more and more involved with this unconventional family.  Soon, the free-spirited Paul has hired Jules (Moore) to do some landscaping at his house.  As the rockiness in the marriage between Jules and Nic (Bening) begins to surface, sparks fly between Jules and Paul, which threatens to rip the family apart.

     The Kids Are All Right is more about the characters than it is about the story itself.  Which means that it hinges on the performances of the actors and the way the characters are written.  For the most part, that succeeds.  Bening, Moore, Wasikowska and Hutcherson are all top-notch.  But my problem is with Ruffalo.  Not with his acting, which is solid.  But his part is, I think, very poorly written.

     The free-spirited nature of this guy is commendable.  He runs an organic food company, he rides a motorcycle and doesn’t shave and wears sandals and is immensely likeable.  And when these kids suddenly show up in his life – remember, he didn’t give them up for adoption or disappear out of their mothers’ lives, he was a sperm donor – his willingness to embrace them is remarkable.

     Now, if these kids sought him out, and wanted to meet him, the idea obviously was that he would become a part of their lives.  And that fact that he is willing to give that a go is terrific.  Where the problem arises is when he begins this odd relationship with Jules.  This laissez-faire, happy-go-lucky guy all of a sudden wants to abandon his entire life to become a button-down, full of responsability family man because…why?  Now he wants to be a father?  It’s a bit of a leap, and I feel that it was designed to create some kind of quasi-villain toward the end of the film.  And the end of the film does not treat Ruffalo at all kindly.

     The other characters are terrific.  I feel like I have known Annette Bening and Julianne Moore and their family for their whole lives.  Their marital difficulties are clearly the result of a lifetime of being together, old resentments and long term foibles bubbling up to the surface.  The kids, while smart and capable and strong, are also unsure of themselves in the way teenagers so often are.  It’s a perfectly drawn family with completely realistic relations.  Only Ruffalo seems out of place.  And that’s the only reason this movie isn’t a classic.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  James Franco, Clemence Poesy, Amber Tamblyn, Kate Mara, Kate Burton, Lizzy Caplan
Director:  Danny Boyle
Run time:  93 minutes

     127 Hours, as most of us know by now, is the true story of Aron Ralston, a mountain climber and adventurer who became trapped in a remote area with his arm pinned beneath a massive boulder.  For 127 hours.  Until he sawed off his own arm and made it to safety.  Which is gross.

     There are other characters in Danny Boyle’s movie.  There are two girls who meet up with Aron as he mountain bikes around in the desert.  He hangs out with them for a while, takes them cliff diving and swimming, and then moves on.  But as one of the girls remarks, they didn’t really figure in his day at all.  And they don’t much matter in the movie either, except to show us a little more of the charm and lust for life that Aron exhibits.

     No, the actresses in this film are pretty much just extras, fleeting moments in Aron Ralston’s life story.  The film’s success rests entirely with James Franco, as the unfortunate hiker trapped for days.  And he is sublime as Ralston.  His growing sense of panic, tempered by a remarkable self-awareness and an ability to laugh tragically at his own hopeless situation is tangible in every frame.

     What really makes this movie amazing is how tense it is, even though we know how it ends.  The way I sighed with relief when the rain came and provided Aron with much-needed water, then tensed with panic as the rain threatened to drown him where he was stuck.  Franco makes every moment believable and nerve wracking.

     Thankfully, the movie is only 93 minutes long.  I don’t know how much more I could take from the edge of my seat.  How good does a movie have to be when it’s just one guy, in one spot, for the vast bulk of the film, and it still has me on edge the whole time?  I’d say, it has to be pretty damn good.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Drama, Thriller
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Winona Ryder, Barbara Hershey
Director:  Darren Aronofsky
Run time:  108 minutes

     You thought Inception was the most mind-bending of the Best Picture nominees this year?  Nope.  Black Swan is a psychedelic nightmare, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy so thoroughly that when Natalie Portman can’t make the distinction toward the end of the film, I fully understood.  I hadn’t been able to since the 30 minute mark.  So what follows is a review of what I think is going on in the movie.

     Portman plays Nina, the hardest working ballerina in her company.  When the troupe begins looking for their next superstar, the dancer to play the Swan Queen in Swan Lake, she is consumed with desire for the role.  While Nina is elegant and fragile and ideal for the part of the White Swan (the innocent part of the ballet), her director feels she is incapable of playing the Black Swan (the White Swan’s evil, scheming doppleganger) because she can’t let herself go and feel the darkness in the character.

     There is a new dancer at the company, Lily (Mila Kunis).  She is free-spirited, badass, tattooed and dangerous – in other words, the perfect Black Swan.  As Portman hesitantly begins a friendship with Lily, she also grows jealous and resentful of her.  Meanwhile, the former star attraction of the ballet, Beth (a wonderful Winona Ryder), is having a complete suicidal breakdown and is hospitalized.  Shades of things to come, methinks…

     While these stresses weigh heavily on Nina, none pressure her nearly as much as her passive-aggressive mother Erica (Barbara Hershey).  Her mom was once a successful ballet dancer too, but never managed to make it out of the background to become a star.  Now that Nina has become a star, her mom is resentful.  Of course, she has been pushing Nina all her life for this very reason, but deep down it appears that she really hoped Nina would never exceed her own success.

     Nina tries to break free of her constraints – tentatively at first, and then more forcefully as she comes on to the director, goes out partying with Lily, and has a fairly hot lesbian fantasy about the new girl.  But as she breaks the bonds of her meek persona, she is also breaking the bonds of her sanity.  At least, I think that’s what’s happening.  She scratches her own skin.  Which I think may be mostly real.  But sometimes it isn’t.  She’s scratching her back because she’s growing big ass swan wings.  That likely isn’t real.

     As the movie goes on, the line between her fantasy world and her reality and our fantasy world and our reality blurs, connects and whirls everything and everyone around until I can make little sense out of what’s happening.  Nina is becoming darker, she is embracing the Black Swan side of her personality, but exactly HOW much darker she actually is remains a bit of a mystery.

     Now all that being said, I don’t want you to think that the ending is one of those dissatisfying ones where you don’t know what’s going on and you don’t know what’s happened.  There ARE some things I didn’t know at the end.  Like, whether Mila Kunis was ever real.  And whether Nina’s mom was actually in the audience or at home.  And a few other loose ends that are meant to be loose.  But the big finale IS a satisfying one, and it does provide a solid sense of closure to what has been a weird, terrific film.

Year:  2011
Genre:  Kids, Animation
Country:  UK
Language:  English
Starring (voices):  James McAvoy, Emily Blunt, Michael Caine, Jason Statham, Ashley Jensen, Ozzy Osbourne, Matt Lucas, Jim Cummings, Stephen Merchant, Patrick Stewart, Maggie Smith, Dolly Parton, Hulk Hogan, Kelly Asbury
Director:  Kelly Asbury
Run time:  84 minutes

     I get it.  Gnomeo & Juliet is based on Romeo & Juliet.  They rhyme, see?  And I also get that Romeo & Juliet is a play by Shakespeare.  I don’t (and nor do my kids) need to be hammered over the head with it.  By all means, make reference to the play you’re doing.  You know, Romeo and Juliet.  But throwing in references to Hamlet (2b or not 2b), Macbeth (out out damn spot) and dozens of other non-sequitors is not funny.  It’s obnoxious and pompous.

     And I know Elton John’s a big reason this film got made.  But maybe he could have recruited a few more of his friends to fill out the soundtrack some.  It isn’t a question of who will come up next, but what is the next Elton John song to be used?  (Although I will say I did enjoy the use of ”Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting” in one scene.)

     For a while, garden gnomes coming to life and talking is cute.  The red ones live at one house and the blue ones at another and they are the Montagues and Capulets and have hated each other for generations for no apparent reason.  But this is exactly like all other “normally inanimate things come alive when the humans are gone” movies.  And there are a LOT of those movies.

     So once you get over the cuteness of the gnomes, and that happens surprisingly quickly, all that’s left is to go through the motions of re-enacting Romeo And Juliet with some vaguely quirky extra characters (a flamingo locked in a shed for years, a water-spitting frog who stands in for Juliet’s nurse).  But that’s all there is.  And with the exception of a few scenes featuring some maniac stone bunny rabbits, there is little left that I enjoyed.

     There just isn’t any magic in a story being acted out by yet another group of toys-come-to-life, especially when it’s one of the most familiar stories ever.  The biggest twist imaginable would have been if they had kept the original ending to the real Romeo and Juliet – they don’t – not like I’m giving anything away there though, it’s a kids movie.  What are you gonna do?

Year:  1982
Genre:  Comedy, Action
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Nick Nolte, Eddie Murphy, Annette O’Toole, Frank McRae, James Remar, David Patrick Kelly, Sonny Landham
Director:  Walter Hill
Run time:  96 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     48 Hours comes to Blu-Ray today, which has given me an opportunity to take another look at this old 80s classic.  I couldn’t remember it well – it has, after all, been likely 20 years since I last saw it.  I wondered if it just seemed like a classic because it was surrounded by all kinds of crap in the early 80s, and shone brighter as a result.  Or, was Eddie Murphy actually funny at one time?

     It turns out – a bit of both.  Eddie Murphy WAS funny at one time.  And before he became the “after” picture for the don’t-get-electrocuted PSA, Nick Nolte was the toughest, most grizzled, ideal hardass cop in the movie business.  Both were at the top of their game here, 20 years before Nolte’s infamous mugshot and 25 years before Murphy’s even more infamous Norbit.

     It may only be in the light of the hundreds of thousands of buddy-cop movies since 1982 that 48 Hours feels dated and tired.  Yeah, they’re partners who hate each other, but they will of course gradually grow a modicum of respect toward each other over the course of the film.  I’ve seen it a hundred thousand times before.  And it always gets old.  Even in the older films that originated the genre.

     48 Hours works on a few levels – the action and the chase of the cop-killers takes precedence over the comedy.  The comedy, and Eddie Murphy, are secondary to the plot and the action.  And that really, really works.  Murphy’s scene in the redneck bar is as funny and great today as it was then, and the cool cars and action scenes still work.  It isn’t solely a product of the 80s the way so many of its contemporaries are.

     That being said, the necessity of upgrading to Blu-Ray if you already own this film is unclear to me.  It looks great, but this was a gritty and dark movie to begin with, and your existing DVD will do fine.  However, if you don’t already own 48 Hours, now’s a good time to revisit a fine film.

Year: 1961
Genre:  Western, TV series
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Richard Boone, Lisa Lu
Guest stars of note:  Bob Hopkins, John Mitchum, Hal Needham, Jack Elam, Kam Tong, Harry Dean Stanton, George Kennedy, Jeanette Nolan, William Conrad, Bob Woodward, Ken Curtis, Harry Carey Jr,
Creators:  Sam Rolfe, Herb Meadow
Run time:  8 hours, 11 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     “Have Gun, Will Travel reads the card of a man…a knight without armour in a savage land…” I had been watching Season Five Volume Two of Have Gun Will Travel, and I’m walking around the house singing the theme song.  It’s a real earworm, after all.  Catchy as hell.  I’m chopping some vegetables, singing away, and I hear from the other room – “a soldier of fortune is the man called Aladdin…” my wife was singing along with me!  What gives?  I was irritated at first that she confused Paladin, the ultimate badass renaissance man with a gun, with the cartoon carpet-flyer who takes advice from Robin Williams.  Then I thought – how the hell does SHE know this song?

     My wife refuses to watch Have Gun Will Travel with me.  It’s a western, you see, and she will not watch a western unless it stars that delightful Matt Damon.  It’s also a pre-1980 TV show, and she won’t watch any of those unless they are Happy Days.  So how could she possibly know this tune?  Well, it turns out I should probably have known it too – the kids are singing it as they walk along the train tracks in Stand By Me.  My wife, the ultimate child of the 80s, has seen Stand By Me about a thousand times.

     Anyway, all this to say that the “Ballad of Paladin” is more well-known today because of that movie than it is because of the actual show itself.  And it’s too bad.  Yes, some of the episodes were ridiculous interpretations of cheesy old stories, like the one on this set where some Russian count comes to America and finds the most dangerous gunfighter in the world (Paladin, of course) in order to hunt him for sport.  Or the irritating episode about the astrologer planning to kill people and take their fortunes.

     But most episodes are top notch, and I have decided after watching a few of these DVD volumes that Paladin is the greatest TV western hero ever, more so even than Matt Dillon.  On Gunsmoke, Dillon saw everything in black and white.  He was the toughest and the fastest and the coolest, but he won most of his battles simply by being more right than everyone else.  And things just fell into place from there.  Paladin has no such luxury.  He also is the fastest and toughest and coolest.  But he’s also the smartest and wisest.  He knows more than just shooting and justice.  He also knows poetry and fine cuisine and tracking and sleeping on a rock under the stars.  He speaks several languages and is familiar with the customs of just about every strange culture he encounters.  He understands politics and moral questions and great literature.  And through all this he remains totally badass and fully cool.

     The greatest western hero on TV comes back to DVD February 22nd from Paramount Home Entertainment as they release Season Five Volume Two of Have Gun Will Travel.  Paladin still gets into some pretty silly situations because not every writer can come up with a gem every time I suppose.  But he remains as cool as ever, some 48 years after hanging up his six guns.

Year:  2001, 2002, 2006
Genre:  TV series, Cartoon, Kids
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Richard Steven Horvitz, Rosearik Rikki Simmons, Andy Berman, Melissa Fahn, Wally Wingert, Kevin McDonald, Rodger Bumpass, Lucille Bliss
Creator:  Jhonen Vasquez
Run time:  179 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     As you can tell from the clip I included above, nerds around the world are rejoicing about the upcoming DVD release of Invader Zim: Operation Doom, out February 22nd from Paramount Home Entertainment.  There have been a lot of shows where armies of nerds tried desperately to save them once they were canceled.  Precious few of those shows have actually been brought back for a second go-round.  The most famous is, of course, Family Guy, which was brought back into syndication after sales of the DVD sets went through the roof.

     I’m one of those people who got on the Family Guy bandwagon during the second go-round.  The thing is – I got it.  Right away.  I was interested because anything that gets brought back because of DVD sales must be at least worth checking out.  And Invader Zim was worth checking out for me, for the same reason.  In fact, if DVD sales of this particular disc, Operation Doom, actually manage to get the show brought back, it will be Zim’s THIRD run of shows.  Which is, I imagine, unheard of.  So I guess what I’m saying is – nerds, don’t hold your breath.

     I tried, really hard, to like Invader Zim.  And, to an extent, I really did.  But I certainly didn’t “get it”, at least not right away.  The animation is way too busy, which makes the show confusing for a while.  And once I got used to the headache-inducing style, it was still too cluttered for me to truly follow the action.  I did manage to pick up the basics – Invader Zim is an alien who has come to Earth with a plan to take over the planet.  Or, at least, orders to take over the planet.  The plan, he must devise himself.  He disguises himself as a student at the “skool”, where only one of his classmates, Dib, has figured out who he really is.  And as Dib tries to expose Zim, Zim tries to eliminate Dib with the help of his slow-witted yet entertaining servant robot, GIR.

     There are other characters who pop up now and then – Dib’s mean, scary older sister Gaz.  Their mad-scientist father Professor Membrane.  Their teacher Mrs. Bitters, and Zim’s superior officers The Tallest.  I’m not sure if Zim and the Tallest and the rest of the aliens he deals with are from a race called “Invaders”, or if that just happens to be the job they all have and the title they give themselves.  But other than that, I think I have a handle on this thing.

     Operation Doom appears to be nothing more than a collection of episodes, 13 in all, from different incarnations of the show.  One thing I found irritating is that the show takes place on Earth, but this Earth is way different from ours.  The school is patrolled by futuristic droid surveillance systems a la Robocop, which indicates a vastly superior intelligence than that which currently exists on Earth, but the school is spelled “skool”, which indicates a much stupider populace.  The thing that usually makes shows like this work is that the Earth itself is normal, and the alien trying to blend in is the odd one out.  But in Invader Zim, everything – the aliens, the other planets, the school, the television, the human beings – are all hyper-speed, top-volume parodies of what we would consider “normal”.

     It’s just too much, all at once, as is the animation.  And it’s really too bad, because there is some really, really good stuff in here.  Zim himself is hilarious, taking himself terribly seriously and raising his voice in triumph or in malice at the most inopportune times.  His robot GIR is funny too, like a great village idiot in a politically incorrect movie.  And some of the ideas are so bonkers they can’t help but be entertaining – like the episode where Gaz has a spell cast upon her and now everything she eats tastes like pig.  Even the episode titles are great – that one is called Gaz, Taster of Pork.

     Half the time, Zim is doing nefarious things on Earth, and the other half he’s battling tornmentors around the galaxy.  Fry cooks, drill sergeants and the like.  The Tallest are constantly sending him to areas where they assume (and hope) that he will be killed, but of course he manages to escape, or to emerge victorious, and if not the episode always ends just before he meets his fate.  There is so much good stuff in here that I totally get why people are obsessive about it.  For me though, there’s just way too much extraneous noise and visual overload to fully appreciate the nuggets of gold inside. 

     So I guess what I’m saying is – you can buy Operation Doom on DVD now.  I wouldn’t recommend it, so don’t do it on my say-so.  Do it because you’re interested in finding out for yourself why a bunch of nerds you’ve never met are obsessive about it.  Or, you could be even MORE benevolent and buy it because you think there’s a chance that by purchasing the DVD all those nerds you’ve never met might get back a show you’ve never heard of before today.  Or you could just take my word for it and forget all about it.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Comedy, Cartoon, Kids
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring (voices):  Will Ferrell, Brad Pitt, Tina Fey, David Cross, Jonah Hill, Ben Stiller, JK Simmons
Director:  Tom McGrath
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     A few different editions of Megamind are coming to DVD February 25th (Friday) from Paramount Home Entertainment.  There’s a Blu-Ray, a single disc DVD, and a package DVD that comes with the extra short film Megamind: The Button of Doom.  I don’t really understand this idea – putting a fifteen-minute short on a second, separate disc.  Is there really no way to cram it on there as a special feature?  And more to the point, is it worthwhile even making it?  This particular short film is certainly cute, as Megamind accidentally unleashes one of his old evil inventions on his first day as the good guy protecting Metro City.  But of course, like all these little mini-film addendum’s to kids movies, it’s far from essential.

     As for the film itself – the voice talent is remarkable.  I can’t think of another time I’ve heard Brad Pitt’s voice in a cartoon film, and Will Ferrell is terrifically cast as the inept villain Megamind.  Tina Fey and David Cross are good in supporting roles, and Jonah Hill is a welcome addition to the cast as the newly-minted super hero-villain Titan.  The premise is a solid one too – Megamind (Ferrell) is the super villain, Metro Man (Pitt) is the super hero, and they have done battle with each other, over and over, since birth.  Metro Man always wins, Megamind always loses.

     Of course, this is exactly how kids’ superhero movies go, every single time.  And it’s getting tired.  And so, too are Megamind and Metro Man getting tired of the same old, same old.  Even Roxanne Ritchi (Fey), Metro Man’s presumable love interest and constant Megamind kidnap victim, is becoming tired of the routine.  She has been kidnapped by Megamind so many times that she can predict the pit of crocodiles and the spinning blades and the other nasty contraptions he has in store for her.

     Then, the unthinkable happens – Megamind, through a total fluke coincidence, actually wins!  Of course, when Metro Man wins, he just takes Megamind back to prison…again…and the dance goes on.  But if Megamind wins…well, of course that means he has killed Metro Man!  And now – what does he do, when he actually has control of the city?  This is, as I said, a neat premise – what DOES an evil supervillain, especially an incompetent foolish comedic one, do with a city once he has it?

     The answer is, not much of anything.  After a little villainy, he becomes bored.  And the nasty future the citizens were expecting never materializes.  Megamind, you see, is used to the status quo.  He is USED to losing.  And so he decides to create a new super hero, Titan (Hill), so he has someone to fight.  I guess it’s the psychology where a victim of spousal abuse ends up finding new abusive partners and repeating the whole cycle. 

     As it turns out, though, the plan backfires when Titan, imbued with all of Metro Man’s powers, turns out to be more of a villain than a hero.  In fact, more of an abusive creepy stalker with a violent bent than anything else.  Think…Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.  But with superpowers.  And now Megamind must cast himself as the hero if he wants to do battle with Titan.  In fact, he has had a change of heart since falling in love with Roxanne.  Although, why he thinks she will love him for HIM, when she finds out he killed her ex-boyfriend, I can’t imagine.  Maybe it’s more of that stalker mentality.

     It’s an interesting plot, with compelling characters and great voice actors.  But Megamind is drawn down a lot because it just doesn’t crackle the way great kids’ animated movies do.  Megamind and Metro Man are funny together, but they bemoan the fact that they are just going through the motions.  And that’s a sense I get far too often during the film.  It’s just going through the motions and touching the next base in order for an animated kids superhero movie.  And there’s that very misguided idea that all three hero-villains seem to share when it comes to women.

     But I do like the movie.  I like it, and my wife likes it, and the kids liked it, and that’s good enough for me.  Although it feels like a paint-by-numbers kids animated movie, sometimes that works anyway.  The movie is worth it just for the scene where Ferrell and Pitt trade hilarious, utterly nonsensical verbal barbs while fighting each other, and the companion scene later in the film where Megamind gets disappointed when Titan doesn’t seem to be up to the challenge when it comes to verbal jousting.  Little moments, moreso than the big picture, are what make Megamind worthwhile.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Drama, History, Period
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter, Jennifer Ehle, Guy Pearce, Timothy Spall, Michael Gambon, Derek Jacobi
Director:  Tom Hooper
Run time:  111 minutes

     It seems that there is a fairly easy formula to follow when it comes to making a run at a bunch of Oscars.  Make a period piece starring mostly British actors about a British monarch.  (The Queen, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Peter O’Toole, Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, Vanessa Redgrave…and so on.)  Now, if only there were some way to get Nazis into the movie also, it would be a shoo-in, right?  Well, I guess we’ll find out next Sunday.

     The King’s Speech, of course, deals very little with actual Nazis.  The scourge of Hitler and his war in Europe serve only as the catalyst for the speech of the title.  King George VI (Colin Firth), in 1939, had to speak to all of Great Britain in a radio address on the occasion of the declaration of war against Germany at the beginning of World War II.  In order to make this incredibly important speech, the king sought the help of speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) in an effort to correct his rather pronounced stammer.  Logue’s methods are not exactly traditional, and he insists upon calling the new king by his childhood pet name, Bertie.

     The stutter tends to come out of Bertie only when he is nervous or flustered, which seems to be most of the time.  He and Logue delve deep into his childhood, in increments, over the course of the movie, but it’s never clear whether some childhood trauma caused the stammer, or if there is a breakthrough of any kind on that front.  Really, this is just a story about two men from two distinctly different classes becoming friends and learning to trust each other.  Logue is a failed Australian actor with a certain amount of disdain for the monarchy, Bertie has spent his whole life shielded from the common class by the bubble that surrounds the royal family.

     And that, along with the performances by Rush and Firth, is the strength of the movie.  The class distinctions are drawn expertly, and the attention to detail in the costumes and backdrops is remarkable.  The strange thing for me though is that the King overcoming his speech difficulties is actually the second most interesting thing happening in the film.  At the time, and in the history of the British monarchy, the biggest story of the past hundred years was the abdication of the throne by Bertie’s playboy brother Edward (Guy Pearce) so he could marry thrice-divorced Wallis Simpson (Eve Best).  That was a gigantic scandal at the time, and remains one of the most interesting stories in the history of the British royals.

     The fact that Edward’s abdication and carelessness are treated as a minor subplot irks me a little.  It seems to be thrown into the movie more as a way to show the callousness with which Edward treats Bertie than as a seriously large event.  It’s a minor quibble though with an otherwise terrific movie.  British royalty period pieces always get nominated for Oscars.  But they rarely interest me throughout, and even more rarely do they manage not to bore me.  The King’s Speech is NOT the best movie made this year.  Even though it will likely win Best Picture next Sunday.  But it IS one of the best British period films made in a long time.  And that makes it well worth seeing for anyone.

Year:  2011
Genre:  Comedy, Stand-up
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Eddie Griffin
Run time:  84 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Like so many comedians (George Lopez, Robin Williams, Dane Cook, the list goes on and on) I feel like Eddie Griffin is all delivery and no substance.  He’s got that harsh voice and the leer and the strut and he’s enjoyable to watch, but not a lot of what he says makes me laugh.  I think one of the best things you can say about a comedian is that after watching his (or her) stand-up special, you want to quote a bunch of it to your friends.  I just finished watching Griffin’s special, and the only line I remember clearly is “you can tell ‘em I said it” – and that’s because his special is called You Can Tell ‘Em I Said It, and the phrase is therefore printed on the DVD box.

     Griffin takes on a lot of sacred cows, and tries to be as irreverant as is humanly possible.  He opens the show talking filthy about Michelle Obama, in words I can’t really reprint in this forum.  Now, I love irreverant humour.  But it has to make me laugh to be considered humour.  And just saying you want to f- the s- out of the a- of the First Lady is not, on its own, funny.  It’s just crass.  I’m not sure this bit would get a laugh at a drunken frat party.  It does, of course, get laughs out of the crowd in the special – after all, crowds go to comedy shows ready to laugh whether they really like something or not.

     Then Griffin gets into the stuff all comedians rip on – Viagra, black men like white women, hahaha and all that.  By the time he does his black-guy impressions and his white-guy impressions I feel like I’m watching a comedian down at the local Comedy Club, riffing on the easiest things in the easiest way.  Sure, he’s polished and his act is honed and he’s done it hundreds of times, but that’s his only real edge.  He’s funny because we think he’s funny because he’s been doing it for such a long time.  But the laughs are fading.

Year:  1999
Genre:  Sci-Fi, TV series
Country:  Canada
Language:  English
Starring:  Michael Easton, Cynithia Preston, Karl Pruner, Judith Krant, Michael Rawlins, Matthew Bennett
Guest stars:  Martin Sheen, Titus Welliver, Jayne Heitmeyer, Art Hindle, Xenia Seeberg, Victoria Snow, Anthony Zerbe, Kristin Booth, Lisa Ryder, Clint Howard, Adrian Hough, Chad Allen, Sara Botsford, Kim Coates, Nick Mancuso, Laura Harris 
Creator:  Art Monterastelli
Run time:  16 hours, 8 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Total Recall 2070 is what I like to think of as a “blender” TV show.  Take everything you know about science fiction, throw it in a blender, and hopefully what comes out makes at least a little bit of sense.  The show is based partly on the movie Total Recall (in that there’s a company called Rekall that gives people vacations in their brains).  It’s also partly based on the movie Blade Runner, the Philip K. Dick book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (also the basis for Blade Runner), and the Philip K. Dick short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, which inspired the movie Total Recall.  Make sense so far?  OK, bear with me.

     Individual episodes appear to be inspired by things as diverse as I, Robot (the Will Smith movie based on the Isaac Asimov short story), The Andromeda Strain (the James Olsen miniseries based on the Michael Crichton book), and a few episodes of The Outer Limits.  With me to this point?  Alright, let’s continue.

     The star of the series is Michael Easton, who plays a cop in the future who is for some reason named David Hume.  David Hume is ALSO the name of a famous 18th-century Scottish philosopher who founded the school of Empiricism along with John Locke and George Berkeley.  Empiricism is a philosophy that states that all ideas and beliefs a person holds must come directly from their experience and evidence – particularly sensory evidence that one can touch, see, smell or hear.  (Hence the term “empirical evidence”.)  Perhaps Hume’s most famous quote is “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions”, suggesting that desire predicated human behaviour more readily than did reason.

     Why do I bring this up?  Because it has absolutely nothing – nothing – to do with the TV show.  Now, I suppose there could be a simple explanation for this.  Perhaps the character was named by people who had no idea who David Hume was, and it was just a strange coincidence.  But I doubt it.  Hume is a famous enough figure in Western Philosophy that someone, somewhere along the line would likely have caught it.  I suspect that the reason the main character in Total Recall 2070 is named David Hume is that someone wanted specifically to make a reference to Hume, and then forgot somewhere along the line WHY.

     Like I said, it’s a blender show.  And the name David Hume was thrown into the blender along with Philip K. Dick stories and science fiction movies and dozens of other books, TV shows and films.  Now, here’s the weird thing.  Although it’s a terrible, insane mishmash of a million different styles and themes and ideas, it almost works!  The show lasted only one season, 22 episodes (all of which are on this one DVD box set coming out February 22nd from Alliance Films).  But I think that had it continued its run a little while, it may well have caught on.  There is something strangely compelling about the program despite its lack of focus.

     I think the vast majority of the charm comes from the relationship between the central characters – the inappropriately named David Hume and his cop partner, Ian Favre.  Hume is a tough-guy, old school cop.  And since the show is set in 2070, the “old school” in this case means “the school of 100 years ago”.  Hume is no fan of the androids that are all over the world, working for human beings and sweeping the floors.  He suspects them, you see.  And yet, he is partnered with one such android, Favre (Karl Pruner), who exhibits human emotions and occasionally has his feelings hurt.  The dynamic between the two really works, and is by far the most interesting thing in the show.

     Less interesting is the office politics constantly being played by the superior officers, or the sex between Hume and his wife (the smoking hot Cynthia Preston), which for some reason happens during EVERY show.  We get it – they love each other and have lots of sex.  Amazingly, I got pretty bored with it pretty quick.  Actually, the very first scene of the very first show involves naked boobs.  This bodes well.  I then saw NO naked boobs for the rest of the series.  Weak.  But I would say it’s a testament to this show’s strange watchability that I didn’t get bored watching the whole mess of a “complete series”.