Year:  2005
Genre:  Drama, Crime, Western
Country:  Australia
Language:  English
Starring:  Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Emily Watson, Noah Taylor, Danny Huston
Director:  John Hillcoat
Run time:  104 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     There aren’t a lot of great westerns any more. Which makes me sad, because I love westerns.  The last truly great western movie was Unforgiven, and that was 20 years ago. Since then there have been a few good ones, and only one that came awfully close to greatness.

     That western was the magnificent Guy Pearce-Ray Winstone movie The Proposition, written by musician Nick Cave and also starring Emily Watson and Danny Huston. It’s an Australian western from 2005, and it’s breathtaking. The scenes of the harsh Australian outback are terrific, and the cast is sensational, including a fantastic turn by John Hurt as a bounty hunter.

     The “proposition” of the title comes from a deal made between Pearce and Winstone. Pearce plays Charlie Burns, the middle Burns brother in the notorious Burns gang. Winstone plays Captain Stanley, the lawman who captures Charlie and his younger, mentally handicapped brother Mikey. Neither Charlie nor Mikey is the big prize though – Captain Stanley really wants the ringleader, their psychopath older brother who is hiding in the outback where nobody can get to him.

     Arthur Burns is so crazy, and so violent, that neither the army nor the aboriginals will go anywhere near his hideout. So Captain Stanley makes Charlie a proposition – you go out there, find Arthur and kill him. Otherwise, we’re going to hang Mikey on Christmas morning.

     From there, things get violent and cruel and nasty. And it’s incredible. The Proposition takes its time with every story line, delivering a hugely powerful climax as the stories of the brothers and Captain Stanley come together. This is a western movie every western fan should own, and it finally gets its much-needed Blu-Ray release August 28^th from Alliance Films.

Years:  2005, 2006
Genre:  TV series, Crime, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English, French
Starring:  Mark Harmon, Michael Weatherly, Sasha Alexander, Pauley Perrette, Sean Murray, David McCallum, Brian Dietzen, Cote De Pablo, Lauren Holly
Creator:  Donald P. Bellisario, Don McGill
Run time:  17 hours, 37 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Season three is when NCIS started to go downhill for me – I guess someone, somewhere got the idea that Sasha Alexander was not hot enough, and they replaced Caitlin with Ziva (Cote De Pablo), I guess figuring she was hotter.  And just in case that wasn’t enough eye candy to make NCIS even more successful, they added Lauren Holly as the director of NCIS, and Gibbs’ on-again-off-again love interest. 

     My biggest problem is Ziva.  Mark Harmon as Gibbs is irritating enough.  The whole team lives in fear of Gibbs and his wrath and his badassery, but it never actually comes up.  Gibbs never actually does anything to justify this respectful fear.  And Ziva is the same.  She is a Mossad assassin, ostensibly, who has now been added to the team – she is now the Most Lethal NCIS Member, and she can kill you with a spoon or a fork or a garlic press as soon as look at you…except that she never does.  Whenever Ziva has to subdue some out-of-control suspect, or a soldier on PCP, the guy will come at her, everyone will run down the hall to help, and they will open the doors to find the bad guy subdued and bleeding on the floor.  It’s pretty rare that we get to see Ziva actually kicking any ass at all.  So it’s all just words.

     That means that the only thing the character of Ziva adds to the cast (aside from the admirable hotness of Cote De Pablo of course) is her awkward grasp of English.  She seems to exist solely to butcher common English sayings and have DiNozzo correct her.  She’ll say something like, “you can’t see the jungle for the ferns”, or “does a bear sit in the woods”, and then someone will have to correct her, and I guess it’s supposed to get a laugh.

     The thing is, these DVDs have been re-released by Paramount Home Entertainment (August 2nd) because they have added French dubbing.  That’s fine, except Ziva’s butchered colloquialisms don’t really translate into another language.  She’s the multi-lingual member of the team, the only one who speaks French, and she’s a totally useless character in that language.  Well, not entirely useless.  Her French dubbed voice makes her sound like a ten-year-old Justin Bieber fan.  And that really works here, because every time she talks, it’s either to say something charmingly inept, or to re-assert, yet again, her badass bonafides.  And sounding like a ten-year-old girl when she does is hilarious.  I think, in fact, I like Season Three better in French.  7/10 in French!

Years:  2004, 2005
Genre:  TV series, Crime, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English, French
Starring:  Mark Harmon, Michael Weatherly, Sasha Alexander, Pauley Perrette, Sean Murray, David McCallum, Brian Dietzen
Creator:  Donald P. Bellisario, Don McGill
Run time:  16 hours, 49 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     The second season of NCIS has been by far my favourite.  More focus, better character development, better roles.  Yes, some things still annoy me.  The recurring character of Ari, the Hamas-Mossad Israeli-Palestinian terrorist-freedom fighter-assassin has worn me out, and the season finale makes it quite clear that Ari will be reappearing in Season Three.  At least for a while.  But I like the banter between Caitlin and Tony, I like the fact that McGee has been added to the team full-time, and I like the fact that (until the very end of the season) the show doesn’t do that cop-show cop-out bit where they involve the characters themselves in the cases so that I, the loyal viewer, will care more about them.

     The show is best as just a regular police procedural.  The fact that it has to do with the Navy only is just a silly excuse to create another CSI type show, and that’s all this is.  Only with better-drawn characters and a better cast.  And so when Season Two ends with the team at the centre of a terrorist situation, and the bad guy has targeted them, it spells “downhill” from there.  That, and the end of the season also ramps up that whole rah-rah-super-American go-military stuff that really turns me off.  I think, in the end, the 8/10 rating I gave Season Two applies to the first 14 hours, and not the last three.

Year:  2005
Genre:  Blu-Ray, Thriller, Sci-Fi, Action
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:   Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Buscemi, Sean Bean, Djimon Hounsou, Michael Clarke Duncan
Eye candy:  Scarlett Johansson in that white jumpsuit is stellar.  In HD!
Director:  Michael Bay
Run time:  136 minutes
Blu-Ray distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Without a doubt, The Island is Michael Bay’s best movie.  In fact, it is head and shoulders above the rest (the rest including Transformers, Transformers 2, Bad Boys II, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and the Playboy video documentary Playboy Video Centerfold: Kerri Kendall).  This is also the only Michael Bay movie for which I have written a positive review, ever.

     I am tempted to say that The Island works despite the ham-handed direction of Bay, but I think he deserves a little more credit here.  The problem I (and most critics, I think) have with Bay in general is that he gets an idea for some huge action scene (cars transforming into machines and blowing up a city!  An asteroid exploding!), then appears to build the movie around the explosions and car chases and ludicrous excess.

     In The Island, he doesn’t do that.  Instead, the long, ludicrous action scenes appear to be inserted into the plot because he can, not because they are the plot.  And the action scenes here ARE cool.  The car chase on the expressway with the giant iron…whatever they are…coming off the back of a flat-bed truck and colliding with armored cars is genuinely awesome.  Then, of course, a couple of little flying motorcycles show up, and the whole scene becomes Michael-Bay-excessive once again.

     The Island is similar enough in structure to movies like Logan’s Run that it’s tempting to call it a rip-off.  But I don’t think it is – Bay creates a plausible, creepy sterilized world in the first half of the movie, and it’s a different vibe than other similar films.  A lot of this is thanks to some stellar acting performances from Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, as well as bit parts by Michael Clarke Duncan and Steve Buscemi. 

     McGregor and Johansson are two inhabitants of a massive underground bunker.  They have jobs and a routine, and must obey a set of rules – most of those rules are designed to make sure they don’t have sex with each other.  The denizens of this sterile world exist with one special desire.  To be chosen to move on to The Island, a paradise where they can live out their days in peace, outdoors.  The reason they are confined to this bunker is that there was a Great Contamination, and the outside world is no longer safe for human life.  Or so they are told.

     Little cracks begin to appear in the cover story, and only one inhabitant of the giant facility has a brain that is developed enough to question his surroundings – Lincoln Six Echo (McGregor).  He soon finds out that the “lottery winners” who are chosen to go to “The Island” are being killed instead, and their organs are being harvested.  The inhabitants of the facility are not survivors of some kind of apocalypse, but rather clones of real human beings who are being kept alive in case their human counterparts need a spare liver or lungs.  Or, in the case of the women, in case they want to have a baby without going through all that irritating pregnancy.

     The premise of the movie raises some interesting ethical dilemmas, and there is a little bit of exploration on that front – but much later.  There is no time for exploration halfway through, because as soon as we discover the real nature of the facility, Lincoln Six Echo escapes with Jordan Two Delta (Johansson), and the explosions and chases must begin in earnest.

     The Island is really two movies – a creepy sci-fi thriller, and then a futuristic car-chase action film.  Both parts work, and the disconnect between the two isn’t jarring enough to really hurt the movie.  As with all Michael Bay movies, the action sequences are spectacular, and (in this case) not so excessive that they ruin everything.  And as with all Michael Bay films, they are meant to be seen in high definition. 

     The Blu-Ray of The Island is wonderful, the action sequences are sharp and that much more exciting as a result, and the underground bunker takes on even more sterility and becomes creepier as a result.  The only problem with the HD is that occasionally Scarlett Johansson looks more like a mannequin than a human being…but then, it’s only occasionally and the rest of the time she looks like Scarlett Johansson – in high def!  The Island is made for the Blu-Ray format, it looks tremendous, and it’s the only Michael Bay movie (up to this point) that I will advise anyone to buy.

Year:  2004, 2005
Genre:  Sci-Fi, TV series
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Kevin Sorbo, Laura Bertram, Lisa Ryder, Keith Hamilton Cobb, Gordon Michael Woolvett, Lexa Doig, Steve Bacic
Eye candy:  Bertram, Ryder, Doig, and of course Brandy Ledford who appears all over this review.
Creator:  Gene Roddenberry
Run time:  15 hours, 46 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Okay, I’m going to get my complaints out of the way first, when it comes to Andromeda Season Five, out January 4th from Alliance Films.  And by that I mean that once more, I’m going to harp on the legacy of the departed Gene Roddenberry.  This show and Earth: Final Conflict were two of those shows that purported to have been created “by” Roddenberry, in that they were created out of notes he wrote that were discovered after he passed away.  This is much like saying Beethoven was responsible for “My Humps”, because he once sketched a picture of a lady’s ass while working on his 5th Symphony.  It’s something of…a stretch.

     Okay.  Now for the good stuff.  Season Five of Andromeda features the “acting talents” of Kevin Sorbo, and the eye candy coupled with “acting talents” of Lexa Doig, Lisa Ryder, Laura Bertram, and newcomer Brandy Ledford.  Ledford takes over for Doig, playing the artificial intelligence being created by the perverted guy to be as hot as possible.  (Doig, I believe, was on maternity leave.)  Ledford was a Penthouse Pet, as well as a hardcore actress who did some terrific girl-girl pictorials for such classy mags as Genesis, Club International and Hustler.  And then she made her foray into television, upping the eye candy quotient and lowering the “acting talents” quotient of Andromeda and later Baywatch: Hawaii.

     And now for more complaints.  After providing the world with so very much wonderful pornography for so many years, Brandy Ledford left the skin-showing behind and discovered that Jesus was a lot more fun.  The interest of men everywhere in Brandy Ledford instantly waned.  And now I have no idea where she is.  She has disappeared, just as Andromeda has disappeared.  But we’ll always have this final season, Season Five, to remember how hot Brandy Ledford once was, and how silly Kevin Sorbo has always been.

Years:  2004, 2005, 2006, 2007
Genre:  TV series, comedy, sitcom
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Kevin James, Leah Remini, Patton Oswalt, Lou Ferrigno, Jerry Stiller, Victor Williams, Gary Valentine
Guest stars:  Tucker Carlson, Rampage Jackson, Burt Reynolds, Nicole Sullivan, Adam Sandler, Adam West, Robert Goulet, Huey Lewis, Kirstie Alley, Randy Couture
Creators:  David Litt, Michael J. Weithorn
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     I like Kevin James and Jerry Stiller and PAtton Oswalt and the rest of the cast of King of Queens.  And I REALLY like Leah Remini, who is one of the hottest women alive and a terrific actress as well.  But then, this sitcom suffered simply because of that.  More than any other sitcom of the 90s and 2000s, this one really, really felt like a formula crammed into a box and spit out into mass production.

     I get that it’s politically correct to say that women are better than men.  That they are smarter and stronger and tougher and better looking and in every way superior.  It’s also very easy to get a laugh this way.  Oh, look at the poor stupid men!  Aren’t they adorably inept and generally terrible?  Ah, he’s going to try to fix the sink!  This will be so funny!  Well, to some people, I guess it is.  Lots of people, ’cause this show lasted nine seasons!

     But to me, it’s just implausible and sad.  This gorgeous, hot brilliant tough woman has inexplicably married a fat, sloppy, inept moron with very little discernible charm.  Imagine, just for a moment, that the situation were reversed.  Imagine watching a sitcom where, say, Brad Pitt was married to Susan Boyle.  And the whole show consisted of Susan Boyle wearing the same underwear for a week at a time, or forgetting Brad Pitt’s birthday because she stopped to eat a bucket of fudge.  How long do you think that would last?  Would it make it out of the boardroom at all?

     And so, with so many sitcoms of the 90s, we’re supposed to swallow this utterly inexplicable couple, and we’re supposed to laugh at the fact that Doug has to beg Carrie to be allowed to leave the house with the guys for a weekend.  Dude – you have no kids!  Why wouldn’t you be allowed to leave the house, unless she’s a heartless control freak harpie and you’re a spineless useless dishrag?  Oh – because it’s funnier that way.  I get it.

     The final season at last tried to do something about this obvious imbalance – it took this ludicrous relationship to its logical conclusion, as Carrie and Doug began contemplating divorce throughout Season Nine.  However, because the writers and creators of this show were as spineless and chicken and formulaic as Doug himself, they copped out with the big finale.  So sad.

Year:  2005
Genre:  Horror
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Paul Campbell, JR Bourne, Sarah Lind, Julian Christopher, Patrick Gallagher
Eye candy:  Lind
Director:  Carl Bessai
Run time:  93 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     It’s got to be really, really easy to come up with an idea for a zombie movie.  So – we just take everything every other zombie movie has already done and…we do that.  Good?  No.  Not good.  Boring, and obvious, and not interesting in any way.  There’s a market for blood-spattered gore, as long as it comes with big naked boobies and some realyl gross skin-eating scenes.  But that’s about as far as it gets.

     So we get an endless parade of movies just like Severed: Forest of the Dead, which dredge up the old zombie movie cliches (an evil company has created a virus in a lab which has unintended side effects!), hire a couple of halfway competent actors, spend all your time figuring out whether it’s cooler to have a face ripped off or a neck chewed apart (and then splitting the difference and doing both), then throw in an ending that is an exact replica of the one from 28 Days Later.

     See, simple!  So easy to do!  But not good.  Or interesting.  Or worth thinking about for another second.  Severed: Forest of the Dead comes out October 5th from Alliance Films.

Year:  2005
Genre:  Science Fiction
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Miranda Otto, Justin Chatwin, Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman (narrator)
Director:  Steven Spielberg
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     There are certain people who can do no wrong.  When you say “Albert Pujols had a weak season”, you mean it was a weak season by Pujols standards, which means he hit .310 with 35 home runs and 109 RBIs.  It’s still pretty darn good.  And when I say that a Steven Spielberg movie is weak, I mean by Spielberg standards, and I am referring to War of the Worlds.  Which is weak only because it isn’t Schindler’s List or Munich.

     War of the Worlds is being released on Blu-Ray today by Paramount Home Entertainment, and it’s time to pick this movie up.  I happen to be one of the many thousands of people in the world who believe that everyone ought to own every single Spielberg movie ever made.  Then again, I AM the guy who owns every Steven Seagal movie ever made.  So take me with a grain of salt, if you must.

     Here’s the deal though – the Blu-Ray, high-definition transfer of War of the Worlds is disappointing.  There are no new special features of note, and the high definition enhances the picture only a little.  So here’s what I recommend.  If you don’t already own War of the Worlds, you should own it.  So purchase it on Blu-Ray, because it is a superior format and it IS marginally better than the original DVD.  But if you own that original DVD already, don’t bother spending the money on an upgrade.  This is a good movie that looks good enough already.

Years:  2005, 2006
Genre:  TV series, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Stephen Collins, Catherine Hicks, Jessica Biel (guest appearance), Beverley Mitchell, Haylie Duff, Sarah Thompson, George Stults
Creator:  Brenda Hampton
Run time:  15 hours 43 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     There’s a really obnoxious reliance on milk and cookies as a plot point over the course of Season 10 of Seventh Heaven,which gets more and more insipid with every successive season.  Season 10 comes out March 23rd from Paramount Home Entertainment, and in it, everyone in the Camden household and extended family eats cookies and drinks milk.  Often.  They even discuss eating their cookies and drinking their milk with each other.  It feels like home, you see, when you are sitting down with milk and cookies.  Lots can be accomplished when discussions are accompanied by milk and cookies.  Milk.  Cookies.

     You see, most of the Camdens are dunkers.  Except for those two irritating children, who have yet to learn.  Then there’s Lucy, who dunks in front of her family, just to fit in, but twists and scrapes and then dunks with her husband.  It’s their special thing.  Normally, I would expect a husband and wife to have something sexual as their “special thing”.  But no one in the Seventh Heaven universe has sex.  They have milk and cookies.  And babies are magically conjured out of hugs and hand holding.

     This show wants badly to be a soap opera.  Lies!  Betrayal!  Secrets!  But…the big lies are so lame as to be laughable.  Like, someone secretly elopes and gets real-married before their big wedding ceremony.  The horror!  Or, someone else loses a wedding ring.  My stars!  One young couple is having money troubles.  And so he drops out of school to work more hours to pay for the wedding ring and oh my heavens what will the rest of the family do?  Other than…not caring…which would be a more reasonable reaction.

     Melrose Place this is not.  It isn’t even 90210, which was similar only they had burgers and cokes instead of milk and cookies.  But Seventh Heaven is too tame for carbonated soft drink beverages and trans-fat laden grub.  Rather, they live in Camden-world, which is kind of like The Truman Show in its simplicity and inoffensiveness.  I expect that at the end of the final season we’ll see the Camdens discovering that in fact they live in a giant bubble and are being televised without their knowledge.  Until then, we will get more milk and more cookies and more bland nothingness.  And seasons like this one, which may as well be one really, really long, fifteen-hour Oreo commercial.

Year:  2005
Genre:  Drama, Romance
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger, Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams, Randy Quaid, Kate Mara, Anna Faris, Linda Cardellini
Eye candy:  Hathaway, Williams, Mara, Faris
Director:  Ang Lee
Run time:  134 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     The first half of Brokeback Mountain is excellent. The camerawork is sensational, and is reminiscent of some of the best work done by Terrence Malick in films like Days of Heaven and Badlands. Brokeback Mountain itself actually becomes a character in the movie, and Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger are almost irrelevant.  Ledger, however, gives a terrific performance as a man who is simply struggling to communicate with everyone, including his gay lover Gyllenhaal.

     Then the gay sex happens. It’s rather shockingly aggressive, and that sets the tone for the second half of the movie, which is NOT very good. It’s about an hour too long, and we sort of know what will happen before it does. Jake Gyllenhall comes off as more of a sexual predator than a lover, and Heath Ledger spends the last two hours of the film just trying to escape from this man with whom he has had an ill-advised fling.

     Brokeback Mountain is much like Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. It starts off great, but by the two minute mark, we get it. No need to make the song seventeen minutes long, just jump to the end and save us some time. 

     Milk (*********9/10)

Year:  2008
Genre:  Drama, Biopic
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Emile Hirsch, Diego Luna, James Franco
Director:  Gus Van Sant
Run time:  127 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

  “If it were true that children emulate their teachers, we’d have a lot more nuns running around.”

     Milk is the true story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man ever to win an election for public office in the state of California.  He was shot and killed, along with the mayor of San Francisco, by a rival politician in 1978.  We know all of this information going into the film, which focuses mostly on 1977 and 78, and the controversial statewide initiative that sought to ban gays, and their “supporters”, from teaching at public schools. 

     Through a taped statement that Milk (Sean Penn) reads just before his death, we see the movie mostly through flashbacks related to this tape.  We also get to see archival footage – Walter Cronkite with the news, Anita Bryant and her crazed crusade against homosexuality – that creates a really great late-70s feel in the film. 

     The only bone I have to pick with Milk, really, is that it spends too much time introducing us to Harvey Milk.  We get to see him hook up with a new boyfriend, move to San Francisco, open a camera shop, and begin to become politically active.  But we’re not really getting to know him through all this.  The real Harvey Milk shows up when he decides to take on certain local issues, and begins to become a voice for the gay community.  I would have been just as happy had the movie started here. 

     But that’s a small issue when compared to the big picture, which is a very good movie featuring some very, very good performances.  Emile Hirsch (Into The Wild) is a former street hustler who joins Milk’s campaign for city supervisor, adn he is almost unrecognizable.  He’s also fantastic.  James Franco (Spiderman) is terrific as Milk’s steady boyfriend Scott, and I really liked Alison Pill as Milk’s lesbian campaign manager when Scott left.

     One actor I found unnecessary and distracting was Diego Luna, who played Milk’s new boyfriend, Jack.  A crazy, possessive, lunatic boyfriend, he’s one of those characters who makes you cringe every time he shows up on screen, and makes me want to fast forward through his scenes so I don’t have to share in the embarassment he’s causing himself.  But you can’t fast-forward at the theatre, can you? 

     The best performances in the film, however, are by Josh Brolin and Sean Penn.  Of course, the Academy has already acknowledged this themselves, having nominated both for acting Oscars.  Brolin is nominated for Supporting Actor for his role as Dan White, the rival politician whose bitter feud with Milk ends with the murder.  A brooding, seething presence, Brolin still manages to remain reasonably likeable and utterly convincing.  And Penn as Harvey Milk has done some of the best work of his already remarkable career.

     Milk serves well as a terrific snapshot of the late 70s in San Francisco.  The clothes, the characters, and the actors are all able to create a very convincing 70s gay Castro district scene.  The movie also serves as an inspiration for a civil rights movement that still has gigantic challenges in front of it, and it functions as a pretty solid biopic of a very interesting man.  I don’t think it deserved to be the Best Picture of the Year at the Oscars, but I do think it deserves to be watched by as many people as possible.  It comes out on the double feature with Brokeback Mountain March 2nd from Alliance Films.

  Hostage (*******7/10)

Year:  2005
Genre:  Action
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Bruce Willis, Kevin Pollak, Ben Foster, Jonathan Tucker, Marshall Allman, Kim Coates, Rumer Willis, Michelle Horn
Director:  Florent Emilio Siri
Run time:  113 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films 

     Hostage is a pretty regular, pretty average Bruce Willis action movie.  Which means that it’s goddamn awesome.  It’s kinda silly.  Hostage negotiation movies usually are.  But it isn’t quite as silly as The Negotiator, for example.  It’s kinda fun, as Bruce Willis  action movies tend to be, but it’s not quite as fun as Die Hard With A Vengeance.  It’s just Bruce Willis being conflicted and tortured and badass for 108 minutes (plus credits).  And that works for me.

  The Lookout (*********9/10)

Year:  2007
Genre:  Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jeff Daniels, Matthew Goode, Bruce McGill, Alberta Watson, Alex Borstein, Sergio Di Zio, David Huband, Isla Fisher, Carla Gugino
Eye candy:  Isla Fisher, Carla Gugino
Director:  Scott Frank
Run time:  102 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     The real gem in this double feature, out February 23rd from Alliance Films, is The Lookout.  This film was terribly overlooked when it was released in 2007, and I really hope it gets watched now.  This should have been the star-making performance for Joseph Gordon-Levitt.  He should be the hottest young star in Hollywood right now, on the strength of this movie alone.  Supporting roles in movies like Stop-Loss haven’t hurt (although movies like Killshot might have).

     In The Lookout Gordon-Levitt gives a tour-de-force performance as a former high school hockey star whose dreams of glory were dashed by a car accident.  The crash left him with a condition where he has no way of ordering things in his head.  He has to keep notes with him to remember everyday, mundane things that most of us take for granted.  His only close friend is an older blind man (Jeff Bridges).  Their respective disabilities make them close, and their relationship is an interesting, compelling one.

     Gordon-Levitt has a job as a custodian at a bank.  That means he is in a position to help some bad guys rob the place, if only they can get to him.  It proves to be relatively easy, as a femme fatale walks into his life and turns it upside down.  Soon he is hanging out with her friends, who need only to reference his former glory to make him a willing accomplice.  The scene where one of the creeps tells him that he was a few years older in high school, and he looked up to him is perfect. 

     It’s Gordon-Levitt’s reaction to praise such as this that makes his performance so flawless.  You can see in his face that he would do anything to be looked upon the way he once was.  He has mostly resigned himself to the fact that this will never be the case, but a small part of him will not let the dream die.  And it’s that small part that is played upon by the bad guys, who know just what buttons to push.

     The Lookout loses a little steam toward the end, with a climax that is a little bit contrived and overly clever, but it does little to detract from the rest of the movie, which rests almost entirely on the performances by Gordon-Levitt and Bridges.  And The Lookout is an absolutely fabulous movie on the strength of those performances alone.  Look for this bargain-priced double feature.  The Lookout alone is a must for movie lovers.

Sin City (**********10/10)

Year:  2005
Genre:  Crime, Comic book
Country:  United States
Languages:  English
Starring:  Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke, Powers Boothe, Benicio Del Toro, Josh Hartnett, Michael Clarke Duncan, Rutger Hauer, Michael Madsen, Nick Stahl, Elijah Wood, Jessica Alba, Devon Aoki, Alexis Bledel, Brittany Murphy, Rosario Dawson, Carla Gugino, Jaime King
Eye candy:  Alba, Aoki, Bledel, Murphy, Dawson, Gugino, King
Directors:  Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller
Run time:  126 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     In 2005, one of the best movies of the year was Sin City.  An all-star cast of babes and tough guys, a new filming style and a crazy multi-story plot made the film a revelation then, and it’s still impressive and brilliant now.  Clearly Sin City is the stronger film on this two-film bargain DVD released February 23rd by Alliance Films.

     Sin City is incredible in that it’s a stand-alone movie.  No other movie since then with a similar style has been any good.  The Spirit, I’m looking at you.  So it isn’t just the style that makes Sin City a classic.  And it isn’t just the giant cast of great tough-guy actors – Clive Owen, Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Michael Madsen et al, or the long line of stunning babes – Jessica Alba, Brittany Murphy (R.I.P.), Rosario Dawson, and the ridiculously hot, naked Carla Gugino.

     In fact, in watching this movie again, I think a good case could be made that Gugino, even though she has a relatively small amount of screen time, might be, in this movie, the hottest woman in any movie ever.  Hell, Sin City even made Alexis Blededl, the erstwhile cute little girl from Gilmore Girls, into one of the sultriest, sexiest women imaginable.

     The key to Sin City‘s brilliance, in my opinion, is the direction of Robert Rodriguez.  When I first saw the film I thought Frank Miller had a big hand in this as well.  Since then, however, I have seen The Spirit.  Now I believe that Miller made a fantastic graphic novel, but when it came to the direction on Sin City, Rodriguez was acting alone.  The pacing is magnificent, the black and white style is perfectly shot with the occasional splash of colour, and the balance between comedy, action, violence and potboiler tough-talk is perfect.  Sin City was, and remains, pretty close to perfect.

  The Crow (*******7/10)

Year:  1994
Genre:  Fantasy, Action
Country:  United States
Languages:  English
Starring:  Brandon Lee, Ernie Hudson, Bai Ling, Jon Polito
Director:  Alex Proyas
Run time:  100 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     The Crow is the weaker of the two movies on this double feature.  But it’s a pretty good weak link.  A cult classic more for its stylishness than for its substance, The Crow became famous mostly because Brandon Lee died during the filming, and Brandon Lee was famous mostly because his father was named Bruce.  That being said, it’s a movie worth watching and revisiting.  It just isn’t the classic we seem to think it is.

     One of the problems with The Crow is Brandon Lee himself.  His back-from-the-dead rock star is a silly cliche to begin with, and he looks a little like a prototype for Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight.  But Lee plays Eric Draven very flat, and there is little about the Crow himself that is interesting.  More troubling, however, is the Big Bad Guy, who is never really explained.  Is he some kind of mystical super-villain who sleeps with his sister and eats the eyes of his enemies, or is he just a creepy lunatic who sleeps with his sister and eats the eyes of his enemies?  Either way he’s boring, so I don’t care.

     The best characters in the film are the cop who helps Draven and the little girl who used to be his ward.  But they are given little to do.  And the action scenes are disappointing.  So that leaves a straight-ahead revenge story with a mystical resurrection twist to entertain us.  And, thankfully, it does.  Cheesy 80s villains straight out of Death Wish are entertaining, as is the obligatory long-table council of mob bosses that seems to spring up in every movie from the 90s involving gangsters.

     There’s also something comical about Lee’s flatness in itself.  His Crow, boring as he may be, somehow works better because of his lack of charisma.  It’s…funnier that way.  Watching bad guys scurry and cower in fear every time he giggles makes me giggle too.  And the scene where he cleans up the little girl’s junkie mother is priceless.  What The Crow really has to offer is cheese, and it offers it up by the Cracker Barrelful.  It isn’t good.  At all.  But it’s tons of fun.

Year:  2004, 2005
Genre:  TV series, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  David James Elliott, Catherine Bell
Eye candy:  Catherine Bell
Creator:  Donald P. Bellisario
Run time:  Interminable
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     J.A.G. jumped the shark midway through its third season, as far as I’m concerned, so it’s absolutely stunning to me that they managed to live on for ten years.  TEN years!  Of this!  Stunning the way Catherine Bell is stunning.  Hmm.  Maybe there’s a connection there.  But Catherine Bell and her shapely fantastic…ness… combined with David James Elliott and his soap-opera level looks and ability was simply not enough to make this show good.

     The first episode of Season Ten, out February 9th from Paramount Home Entertainment, is a continuation of the final episode of Season Nine.  Of course.  Catherin Bell is desperate to find the man she loves, a man who went missing and was presumed dead as the ninth season came to a close.  But now, thanks to this slick British agent guy, she believes he is alive, and her love is SO strong for him that she will find him, come hell or high water.

     Of course, we all immediately know that the slick British agent is really the bad guy.  Not because the show tells us.  In fact, they want to keep it a secret so the episode ends with a BIG REVELATION.  No, we know this because we’re not stupid, and the show is very bad at setting up their surprise.  When Bell finds the love of her life at the end of the show, and the British super-agent-spy-dude shows his true colours, we’ve seen this coming a mile away.

     Now, Bell must make a decision.  After all, she loves this guy enough to track him down while putting her life and career in jeopardy, and she has been single-minded in her determination to get him back and…presumably…live happily ever after.  But no.  Once she finds him, she decides it’s too much effort, and their relationship is just…over.  Oh, OK.  I guess she was just sort of fond of him, that’s all.  This “love” business has so many shades to it.

     And – surprise surprise – the real reason for this breakup is (it becomes clear almost immediately) that the show is about to end, this season.  And how do you end a show when you’ve never put a lot of thought or effort into the show to begin with?  Well, the two main characters get together, of course!  And they live happily ever after!  So she can’t still love that guy, because that would really get in the way of her loving the important guy. 

     Season Ten is (mercifully) the final season of J.A.G., and that first guy she loved is never again mentioned after the first episode.  He’s just gone.  His name was Clayton Webb.  He will be missed but not really.  And now we are just waiting, and waiting, and sitting on our hands until they are numb and waiting for Harm (maybe the dumbest nickname in recent TV memory) and Mac to get together.  And they do.  You can see that in the clip I have included at the top of this review.  And hopefully that means you won’t have to sit through this interminable season of bad television.

“What kind of bastard would break a dog’s back?”

Year:  2005
Country:  South Africa
Languages:  Zulu, Afrikaans, Xhosa, English.  W/ English subtitles.
Starring:  Presley Chweneyagae, Terry Pheto
Director:  Gavin Hood
Run time:  91 minutes

     It may surprise you to hear that the best movie ever made about a man and a baby does NOT involve Tom Selleck. I know, I was shocked too. OK, OK. The best movie about a man and a baby does involve Tom Selleck. Three Men And a Baby remains a cinematic classic.

     With apologies to Steve Gutenberg and Ted Danson, the SECOND best movie ever made about a man and a baby is Tsotsi, a movie from South Africa that received limited release here in Canada. The 2005 Oscar winner for best foreign film is exactly that. The best foreign film of that year and the best overall since City of God. Tsotsi is a nickname given the main character, a South African word meaning thug. And that’s what he is. The movie opens with him killing a man for his wallet, then shooting a woman and stealing her car. But when he looks in the back seat and finds her baby, it might be the one thing that can turn around his downward spiral.

     Presley Chweneyagae plays Tsotsi. He’s South African and I can’t come close to pronouncing his name. But he is one of the best young actors in the world. This actor puts everything he has into this role the way Jimi Hendrix put everything he had into his live performances. Tsotsi is his The Wind Cries Mary.

“When your spirit is happy, that is true religion.”

Year:  2005
Countries:  Tibet, Switzerland
Languages:  Tibetan, English
Starring:  Interview subjects
Director:  Luc Schaedler
Run time:  97 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     There was once a guy named Gendun Choephel.  He was a Tibetan buddhist monk who criticized the conservative religious culture and government of his home country.  An intellectual heavyweight, Choephel traveled all over seeking a deeper understanding of the world and of his own country.  Any buddhist monk who has sex with women and goes on drinking binges is not just a philosopher and a man of the world, he is also on the short list of real-life Most Interesting Men In The World.

   “Drinking beer and sleeping with women can be very instructive”

     Choephel was also a painter and a writer, and his writings have become terrifically important to Tibetan people and expatriates in the years since his death.  Still a controversial figure, his legacy remains a powerful one.  Filmmaker Luc Schaedler goes on a trip through India and Tibet to trace the history of this man who is almost completely forgotten in the world outside Tibet.  Schaedler interviews people who knew Choephel, and people who have been influenced by his writing and his philosophy.

     That being said, as a film Angry Monk tends to drag.  Certainly, this man was a terrifically interesting figure, and this movie is one of the few documents in the world that really traces his life and deals with his ideas.  There is a terrific website for the movie, you can click on that here.  The content on the website is just about the same as the special features on the movie - a written interview with the director and some written excerpts from Choephel’s writing form the bulk of the content.  The movie is interesting, and the man is interesting, but it’s on such a small scale that only people truly interested in Tibet, Buddhism and politics would be truly engrossed.

     Angry Monk comes out August 18th from First Run Features.