Year:  2011
Genre:  Action, Thriller
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Tom Cruise, Paula Patton, Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner, Michael Nyqvist
Director:  Brad Bird
Run time:  133 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     The absolute worst advertisement for Mission: Impossible 4 is the first three Mission Impossibles.  Oh, I know, the first one was okay.  Maybe even decent.  But the second and third movies were two of the worst blockbusters of all time.  Well, until Transformers came along.

     So you would have every reason to believe that the fourth Mission: Impossible¸ Ghost Protocol, was going to be a steaming pile of turd from the get-go.  I went into this one fully expecting to be cringing and weeping by the halfway mark.  But I was wrong.  SO wrong.  Ghost Protocol is, in fact, AWESOME! 

     Gone are John Woo and JJ Abrams, the directors of the last two films.  Instead it’s Brad Bird, the Pixar director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille directing the fourth movie, his first live-action film, and a huge success.  It’s a non-stop whirlwind film, with Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg and Paula Patton jetsetting around the world to Mumbai and Moscow, among (many) other places. 

     There is some solid humour, some great dialogue, and some of the most incredibly breathtaking stunts I’ve ever seen in a movie.  The scene where Tom Cruise climbs the outside of the highest building in the world in Dubai is positively heart-stopping.  Woody, who has a fear of heights, would not watch this scene.  I think because he didn’t want anyone to see him cry.

     Of course, Mission Impossible four is as silly as the other three, with the masks and the explosions and the contact-lens-fax-machine-scanner gadgets and so forth.  But it has a huge leg up in that it’s well made, well acted, and it actually MAKES  SENSE!  This is by far the best of the Mission Impossible movies, and one of the best major blockbusters in recent years.  And it’s on DVD April 17^th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

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:  1993
Genre:  Blu-Ray, Thriller, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Tom Cruise, Gene Hackman, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Hal Holbrook, Terry Kinney, Wilford Brimley, Ed Harris, Gary Busey, Holly Hunter, David Strathairn, Tobin Bell, Paul Calderon, Paul Sorvino 
Eye candy:  Tripplehorn, Karina Lombard, Barbara Garrick
Director:  Sydney Pollack
Run time:  154 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     The Firm is a solid thriller, buoyed by some excellent performances courtesy Tom Cruise, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Gene Hackman.  I was just thinking the other day about how disappointed I am that Hackman has retired from acting, and how sad it is that his final film was Welcome to Mooseport.  He has 99 movies to his credit…why not just make one more for an even 100, and go out on a high note?  C’mon Gene, we miss you!

     Watching The Firm again, as it has just now been released on Blu-Ray by Paramount Home Entertainment, I rekindled my love for Mr. Hackman.  But I also forgot one of the most awesome things about this movie – Wilford Brimley!  The kindly old oat-monger, the friendly grandfather in so many films (Cocoon, The Natural).  And in The Firm, he’s actually scary as the “head of security” for the law company.  The company is an evil business enterprise affiliated with the mafia, you see, and so they hire, as their badass enforcer…Wilford Brimley!  It’s amazing because it works so well.

     Watching this movie now, in Blu-Ray HD, with the benefit of hindsight, there are a few dated moments – Ed Harris and the cops who try to get Tom Cruise to turn against The Firm are a little cartoonish, and the sinister control the firm exerts over its employees is heavy-handed from the start (“the firm encourages children!”)  But that doesn’t take away from my enjoyment of the movie, and most of it holds up very well.

     Seeing it on Blu-Ray is not a revelation, but it is certainly an improvement.  A few minor technical glitches (a splotch or two, a tiny bit of light blocking) are of no real import, and the movie does look much better.  The Firm is a movie full of vibrant colour, and the scenes that take place in the law offices are much clearer and sharp then before.  Likewise the darker scenes, like the one where Tom Cruise is seduced on the beach by a young Karina Lombard.

     One of the best movies ever made from a John Grisham novel (below A Time To Kill, above The Pelican Brief), The Firm clearly has legs.  A terrific Blu-Ray transfer today, a whole TV series dedicated to the concept tomorrow.  Yes, a TV series of The Firm is in pre-production, starring Josh Lucas as Mitch McDeere, and will be coming out in 2012.  Until then, we have this Blu-Ray.  And it’s a good one to have.

Year:  2009
Genre:  Drama, Thriller
Country:  Australia
Language:   English
Starring:  Guy Pearce, Sam Neill, Miranda Otto, Justine Clarke, Rebecca Gibney, Ruth Bradley, Kate Bell
Eye candy:  Bell gets naked early on…and she is almost 30 years old…but she is playing a 15-year-old…so do with that what you will.
Director:  Simone North
Run time:  100 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

                For a movie about a crazy girl who obsesses over the hot young dancer she babysits, I Am You is remarkably boring.  I think the reason may be that it’s based on a real story, the abduction and murder of a 15-year-old Australian girl by her deranged babysitter.  And maybe the producers didn’t want to add any extraneous details that would have made the story less true but the movie more entertaining.

                Additionally, for a movie with big-name actors like Guy Pearce, Miranda Otto and Sam Neill, this is a surprisingly poorly acted movie.  Pearce and Otto seem to be going through the motions as the parents of the missing girl who keep pressuring the police to look for her.  Neill seems vaguely bemused as the father of the insane girl.  And Kate Bell isn’t terribly convincing as the pretty young dancer on the edge of womanhood and childhood.  But it’s Ruth Bradley, as the insane killer Caroline, who really kills this movie for me. 

               First of all, Caroline is desperately ashamed and enraged about her own lousy looks and crappy body.  But Ruth Bradley, the actress, isn’t half bad looking.  It’s like one of those teen movies where they put like Mila Kunis in overalls and glasses and call her the ugly chick.  Bradley may be a bit bigger than most young actresses, but she is by no means the hideous eyesore everyone seems to think she is.

                The thing is, Bradley is pretty good for most of the film.  She is low-key creepy and socially inept at work and at home, she obviously has mental issues that people don’t want to deal with any more.  But when she loses it, and freaks out, and gets all murderous, I couldn’t stop laughing.  When someone murders a person in a dramatic movie, it’s not supposed to be hilarious.  But it IS hilarious.  Hmm.  On second thought, maybe that’s a reason to watch I Am You after all.  It comes out May 10^th from Alliance Films.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (*********9/10)

Year:  2009
Genre:  Action, Crime, Thriller
Country:  Sweden
Language:   Swedish w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Annika Hallin, Lena Endre, Peter Andersson, Jacob Eriksson, Sofia Ledarp, Georgi Staykov, Michalis Koutsogiannakis 
Eye candy:  Rapace, Hallin, Endre, Ledarp
Director:  Niels Arden Oplev
Run time:  152 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     I loved the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo books by Stieg Larsson, even though I didn’t find them to be quite as powerful a “feminist fantasy” as did some others.  (More on that way, way down in this post.)  And as a fan of the books, I was initially disappointed in this first movie adaptation.  Huge portions of the story were left out, huge leaps were made between plot points, and I kept waiting for scenes that never came.

     It was only on the second viewing that I realized how great this film really was.  Noomi Rapace gives one of the best performances I have ever seen as Lisbeth Salander, the girl of the title.  Michael Nyqvist is perfectly cast as crusading investigative journalist Mikael Blomqvist, and Lena Endre is almost exactly as I pictured Erika Berger while reading.

     I also realized that the stuff that was left out of the movie made it a better film.  Still long, at two and a half hours, it would have been interminable had they included Blomqvist’s affair with Berger, Berger’s husband’s free-thinking take on the subject, and the inner workings of the news magazine.  They would have had to make this a SIX-movie trilogy instead.  As it stands, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is tight, fast-paced and perfectly contained in its run time.

     Another great thing about Dragon Tattoo is that it stands on its own.  Even though it leads into two sequels, it could just be its own movie and that would be good enough.  A satisfying conclusion, everything wraps up nicely, and only a few threads are left to lead into the sequel…

The Girl Who Played With Fire (****4/10)

Year:  2009
Genre:  Action, Crime, Thriller
Country:  Sweden
Language:   Swedish w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Annika Hallin, Lena Endre, Per Oscarsson, Peter Andersson, Jacob Eriksson, Sofia Ledarp, Johan Kylen, Tanja Lorentzon, Georgi Staykov, Michalis Koutsogiannakis, Anders Ahlbom Rosendahl, Niklas Hjulstrom, Micke Spreitz
Eye candy:  Rapace, Hallin, Endre, Ledarp, Lorentzon
Director:  Daniel Alfredson
Run time:  129 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     This second installment in the Dragon Tattoo trilogy almost killed the entire thing for me.  Unlike the first movie, this one asks more questions than it answers, doesn’t work on its own as a film, and ends up being totally disjointed and confusing.  Rapace is once again magnificent, but she really doesn’t have a ton of screen time considering pretty much the whole film is about her back story.  A couple more characters are added (bikers this time) but they appear to be in the movie just so they can get beaten up by Lisbeth so we can see how badass she is. 

     A little more context is needed here.  A lot more, actually.  Unless you’ve read the book, there’s a good chance you won’t have a clue what’s going on most of the time – otherwise, you’ll have to wait until the third movie to actually figure most of this stuff out.  Now, about the third movie…

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest (********8/10)

Year:  2010
Genre:  Action, Crime, Thriller
Country:  Sweden
Language:   Swedish w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Annika Hallin, Lena Endre, Per Oscarsson, Peter Andersson, Jacob Eriksson, Sofia Ledarp, Johan Kylen, Tanja Lorentzon, Georgi Staykov, Michalis Koutsogiannakis, Anders Ahlbom Rosendahl, Mirja Turestedt, Niklas Hjulstrom, Hans Alfredson, Micke Spreitz
Eye candy:  Rapace, Hallin, Endre, Ledarp, Lorentzon, Turestedt
Director:  Daniel Alfredson
Run time:  148 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     The third installment in the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trilogy is good.  It’s a solid, competent finale to a really good trilogy of films.  And it’s far better than the second movie, The Girl Who Played With Fire.  (In that it makes sense, and it’s possible to follow the plot.)  It is NOT as good as the first movie, which was spellbinding.  What sets this third one apart, however, is that it’s the ultimate performance in the series by Noomi Rapace, reprising the role of Lisbeth Salander for the third and (presumably) final time.  She has been great in all three, this time she’s masterful.

     More on Rapace in a minute.  First, a quick deconstruction on the books.  Because I think most people who were interested in these movies first read the books.  The Stieg Larsson trilogy has been hailed as a contemporary vision in feminist iconography.  Some of that makes sense – all rapists, molestors, abusers, stalkers and woman-killers get their comeuppance, and every woman in the novels is strong, powerful, brilliant, and totally together.

     But by the time I got to the third book, I realized a few things.  It all clicked in for me when Lisbeth Salander, almost inexplicably, bought herself breast implants.  Why would this girl, who ostensibly doesn’t care at all what anyone thinks of her appearance, get her boobs done?  Then the rest fell into place a little bit - consider this – every woman in the series is, yes, tough and smart and great at her job and better than most of the men.  But they are also…beautiful.  Every one of them.  And almost every one of these beautiful, powerful, brilliant women sleep with the same man.

     That same man is crusading investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist.  It is interesting to note that Larsson, who wrote the books, is himself an investigative journalist.  And has written a book where the one basically flawless character is Blomkvist.  He is so self-assured and charismatic that every hot woman he meets (and he meets only hot women) comes on to him and hops into his bed.  (It should be noted that they all come after him, he never makes any effort to initiate the proceedings.)  The women know about each other, and don’t care, as long as they can spend some time with this magnificent man!

     Blomkvist is, of course, entirely successful with every woman in his life, and none harbour animosity toward him except for the one who may have fallen in love with him.  (And how could they NOT fall in love with him, he’s flawless!)  But he is also successful beyond the wildest dreams of any investigative journalist in his professional life.  He and his magazine, Millenium, are constantly uncovering massive corruption scandals that reach the highest levels of Swedish society and government.  Quite a life, this guy has!

     On an unrelated note, I am currently preparing a series of screenplays that will revolve around an intrepid radio personality who solves crimes through his radio program, becomes a national celebrity with a syndicated show that earns him millions of dollars, and who bangs the hottest women on the planet two and three at a time, only to wake up each morning to see them cooking me – I mean him – breakfast.  It will be lauded by feminists everywhere!

     Back to the movie.  The thing I like best about the transfer of the books to the screen is that the films have (for the most part) done away with this unnecessary plot device.  The second and third movies make it clear Blomkvist is nailing his editor, Erika Berger.  But that’s about it as far as the sex goes.  It actually makes the story better and the movies are much more of a feminist fantasy than are the books, on closer inspection.

     And so now we get the final film, directed once again by Daniel Alfredson, and Noomi Rapace.  Rapace makes the absolute most of her final screen appearance as Salander, a character she has come to define by herself.  I could no longer read the books without picturing Rapace as Salander, and I will not be able to watch the American version of these films, the first one coming out this year, without making the comparison. 

     Although there’s less of a back story in Hornet’s Nest than in Played With Fire, more focus is put on Salander herself this time.  And although she spends time in only three locations in the movie – the hospital, the prison and the courtroom – it’s a welcome change that she gets the bulk of the screen time.  She is as emotionless as ever, as cold and brilliant and intense as I have come to expect.  But when things start going her way, and the evil men in her life start to receive their comeuppance one by one, the veneer cracks just a little. 

     What’s amazing about Rapace’s performance in those moments is that the little half-smile that plays across her face is NOT an indication that she is trying to hold back that emotion.  In most scenes like this, you think the character would be bursting into peals of laughter were she alone, but that she’s repressing the urge in the company of others.  Not Lisbeth Salander.  She is not capable of such subterfuge.  No, Rapace makes it clear that this little half smile is the most emotion Salander is capable of showing.  And therein lies the brilliance of these moments.  And of this movie.  And, to an extent, of the whole series.

     The trilogy is being released together, as a box set, on May 10th from Alliance Films.  I highly recommend picking up all three.  Make a weekend of it or something.  And even though the second one is pretty weak, you DO have to watch it to get to the third.

Year:  2011
Genre:  Horror, Thriller
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Hilary Swank, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Christopher Lee, Lee Pace, Aunjanue Ellis
Director:  Antti J. Jokinen
Run time:  91 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     I know that someone, somewhere, thought women would flock to theatres…or maybe the DVD store…to see the re-teaming of Hilary Swank and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.  After all, they were in one of those Ultimate Chick Flicks, P.S. I Love You.  (Remember him – he was the Irish-accented pseudo-Gerard-Butler she hooks up with toward the end?)  So they got the big name, Hilary Swank.  Then they got the suitable, bankable co-star from a previous hit.  Check and check.  Now…to make the movie.

     And that’s where this whole thing falls apart.  The casting seems to have been more important that the script or the story or the set design.  (Christopher Lee is added to the cast to provide some horror-movie credibility, but sadly not to add anything at all to the story or the other characters.) 

     The story is about a gorgeous young doctor (Swank, who does a very good impression of a gorgeous young woman) who rents an amazingly affordable apartment in a terrific location from a charming landlord (Morgan) after a bitter breakup with her ex.  She and Morgan begin a tentative, casual romance that turns out to be terribly creepy when it turns out that he is…terribly creepy.

     From there, you can likely write the rest of the story yourself.  He spies on her through the walls, then escalates.  (On the plus side, this involves a fair amount of naked Hilary Swank – maybe that’s why I gave it three full stars.)  He gets creepier and meaner, he does more and more stalkerish awful things, and eventually kills some people and then there’s a final showdown which feels like it lasts 33 minutes of the 90 minute run time and it’s all so very…usual.  I’ve seen this very movie many times before, and it has almost always sucked.  The Resident is no exception.

     Now, here’s my biggest complaint.  If you’re a film maker just starting out, and you want to make a movie starring your three buddies from film class and your grandmother, you make a movie like this one.  If you have two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank in the cast, wouldn’t one expect a little more effort?  Maybe a good script, an interesting twist on the standard story, even a little interesting decor? 

     If I was playing house-league basketball in Ottawa, and all of a sudden my team acquired LeBron James (he’s taking his talents to a high school gym in Ottawa!), I wouldn’t immediately join the NBA and take on all challengers.  I would need to build a team of adequate players around him, and devise a game plan, and actually TRY.  No one can make something succeed all on their own.  And even if Swank is the best actress in the world, she can’t even come close to saving this piece of crap.  Although her fresh-from-the-bath scenes DO help a (very) little.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Drama, Thriller
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Cheryl Dunye, VS Brodie, Guinevere Turner, Skyler Cooper, Lisa Gornick, Deak Evgenikos
Director:  Cheryl Dunye
Run time:  66 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     The “OWLs” in the title of The Owls, out March 29th from First Run Features, stands for Older, Wiser Lesbians.  Older, yes.  Director / actress Cheryl Dunye is now 45 years old, and her friends are about the same age.  And they are all, indeed, lesbians.  It’s the designation of “wiser” that’s up for debate in this film.  Does wisdom really come with age?  Or is it a tired complacency that gets mistaken for solid, grounded wisdom?

     The film centres around two lesbian couples.  Carol (Dunye) and Lily (Lisa Gornick) are a longtime couple in a stable home, separated from the rest of the world.  But they are unhappy, and get on each others’ nerves, and Lily especially feels trapped while Carol desperately tries to hang on to the relationship (Lily having a baby should help).  Meanwhile, Iris (the gorgeous Guinevere Turner) is a drunk, hanging on to past glory while torturing her on-again-off-again partner MJ (V.S. Brodie).

     Now, ostensibly, the movie is about the events before and after the murder of a young lesbian named Cricket (a powerfully sexy Deak Evgenikos) at a pool party.  Ten years earlier, Iris and Lily were members of a major lesbian punk band called The Screech.  Now they have settled into restless, angst-ridden lives with their respective partners, and they each act out in their own way – they miss the craziness of their one-time rock and roll lifestyle.

     At a pool party, Iris gets drunk and comes on to Cricket, a gorgeous younger woman who happens to be there for some reason.  An altercation ensues, and Cricket is killed.  The four older women conspire to hide her body, and carry on with their lives.  Soon, another character arrives and turns their lives upside down once more.  Skye is a person of ambiguous sexuality – he’s either a very effeminate man or she’s a very muscular masculine woman.  He-she insinuates him-herself into Lily and Carol’s home, despite the fact that she-he clearly hates both of them.

     Of course, Skye is linked to Cricket (Cricket mentions Skye in one of the first scenes of the movie) and this provides the basis for the conclusion of the film.  But the actual killing of Cricket, and the involvement of Skye, although they take up a lot of the screen time, feels like a real sidebar to the rest of the movie.

     Dunye shoots the movie as a sort of reality-show docudrama.  Each of the characters (including the dead Cricket) spends about a third of their screen time addressing the camera directly, usually in split screen while one of the earlier scenes gets replayed on the other side.  At one point, it is the actors themselves who address the camera, not in character but as themselves, talking about their characters and how they perceive them.  In fact, sometimes the “characters” refer to “Cheryl” instead of “Carol” in their segments.

     All they do is talk about what it’s like to be an aging lesbian, or what it means to be “butch” or “femme”, or how they designate someone as “transgender”.  After a while, it becomes self-indulgent, and really feels like they’re narrating the movie.  The scene ends, and the characters come on screen, and hit you over the head with what it all means like I wasn’t going to be able to understand what was going on in the scene I just saw. 

     The Owls is interesting, both stylistically and in subject matter, but after a while it feels like it’s going over the same ground again and again, and the relatively brief 66 minute run time feels a lot longer by the time it’s done.  It’s an interesting experiment, but doesn’t really work as a compelling film.

Year:  2008
Genre:  Drama, Thriller
Countries:  Brazil, Poland, Spain
Language:  Portugese, Spanish w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Fele Martinez, Mariana Loureiro, Seu Jorge, Mauricio Garcia, Paca Gabaldon, Rosi Campos, Norival Rizzo
Director:  Murilo Pasta
Run time:  100 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     Carmo (Hit The Road) rests mainly on the performances of the two stars, Mariana Loureiro and Fele Martinez.  Loureiro is enchanting as Carmo, the title character who wants nothing more than to get out of town and take off to…anywhere but here.  Martinez is good as a wheelchair-bound smuggler, trying to get his truckload of stolen steroes out of Brazil.  Together, they form a sort of uneasy alliance and head out on the road. 

     The movie begins with some stylistic similarities to Tarantino-esque films (the characters are all introduced with a flourish, the words written on the screen, even if they’re a…”BANK TELLER”).  But it quickly loses the steam that comes from those quirks and becomes a pretty regular road movie with two mismatched protagonists who will learn to overcome their mutual animosity and so on and so forth.

     Carmo and Marco meet up with the kind of people everyone encounters in a road movie – gangsters and gamblers and oddball inept thugs and cops and border guards.  It’s all pretty standard, except for the one strange quirk that makes this movie different – Marco is in a wheelchair.  This makes a few scenes, which otherwise could have been stark or harsh, almost comical.  When Marco is going out to rough up the thugs who stole his truck, he brings his gun.  But he also brings his wheelchair, which means he has to set it down on the ground and go through the awkward process of lowering himself into it before he can go wreak havoc on the bad guys.

     It’s one of the stylistic touches that make Carmo interesting and a worthwhile viewing.  Much of the film falls flat, but with a certain amount of flair and two strong performances, it succeeds overall.  Carmo (Hit The Road) is on DVD now from First Run Features.

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:  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:  2010
Genre:  Action, Crime, Thriller
Country:  Sweden
Language:   Swedish w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Annika Hallin, Lena Endre, Per Oscarsson, Peter Andersson, Jacob Eriksson, Sofia Ledarp, Johan Kylen, Tanja Lorentzon, Georgi Staykov, Michalis Koutsogiannakis, Anders Ahlbom Rosendahl, Mirja Turestedt, Niklas Hjulstrom, Hans Alfredson, Micke Spreitz
Eye candy:  Rapace, Hallin, Endre, Ledarp, Lorentzon, Turestedt
Director:  Daniel Alfredson
Run time:  148 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     The third installment in the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trilogy is good.  It’s a solid, competent finale to a really good trilogy of films.  And it’s far better than the second movie, The Girl Who Played With Fire.  (In that it makes sense, and it’s possible to follow the plot.)  It is NOT as good as the first movie, which was spellbinding.  What sets this third one apart, however, is that it’s the ultimate performance in the series by Noomi Rapace, reprising the role of Lisbeth Salander for the third and (presumably) final time.  She has been great in all three, this time she’s masterful.

     More on Rapace in a minute.  First, a quick deconstruction on the books.  Because I think most people who were interested in these movies first read the books.  The Stieg Larsson trilogy has been hailed as a contemporary vision in feminist iconography.  Some of that makes sense – all rapists, molestors, abusers, stalkers and woman-killers get their comeuppance, and every woman in the novels is strong, powerful, brilliant, and totally together.

     But by the time I got to the third book, I realized a few things.  It all clicked in for me when Lisbeth Salander, almost inexplicably, bought herself breast implants.  Why would this girl, who ostensibly doesn’t care at all what anyone thinks of her appearance, get her boobs done?  Then the rest fell into place a little bit - consider this – every woman in the series is, yes, tough and smart and great at her job and better than most of the men.  But they are also…beautiful.  Every one of them.  And almost every one of these beautiful, powerful, brilliant women sleep with the same man.

     That same man is crusading investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist.  It is interesting to note that Larsson, who wrote the books, is himself an investigative journalist.  And has written a book where the one basically flawless character is Blomkvist.  He is so self-assured and charismatic that every hot woman he meets (and he meets only hot women) comes on to him and hops into his bed.  (It should be noted that they all come after him, he never makes any effort to initiate the proceedings.)  The women know about each other, and don’t care, as long as they can spend some time with this magnificent man!

     Blomkvist is, of course, entirely successful with every woman in his life, and none harbour animosity toward him except for those who fall in love with him.  (And how could they NOT fall in love with him, he’s flawless!)  But he is also successful beyond the wildest dreams of any investigative journalist in his professional life.  He and his magazine, Millenium, are constantly uncovering massive corruption scandals that reach the highest levels of Swedish society and government.  Quite a life, this guy has!

     On an unrelated note, I am currently preparing a series of screenplays that will revolve around an intrepid radio personality who solves crimes through his radio program, becomes a national celebrity with a syndicated program that earns him millions of dollars, and who bangs the hottest women on the planet two and three at a time, only to wake up each morning to see them cooking me – I mean him – breakfast.  It will be lauded by feminists everywhere!

     Back to the movie.  The thing I like best about the transfer of the books to the screen is that the films have (for the most part) done away with this unnecessary plot device.  The second and third movies made it clear Blomkvist was nailing his editor, Erika Berger.  But that’s about it as far as the sex goes.  It actually makes the story better and the movies are much more of a feminist fantasy than are the books, on closer inspection.

     And so now we get the final film, directed once again by Daniel Alfredson, and Noomi Rapace.  Rapace makes the absolute most of her final screen appearance as Salander, a character she has come to define by herself.  I could no longer read the books without picturing Rapace as Salander, and I will not be able to watch the American version of these films, the first one coming out this year, without making the comparison. 

     Although there’s less of a back story in Hornet’s Nest than in Played With Fire, more focus is put on Salander herself this time.  And although she spends time in only three locations in the movie – the hospital, the prison and the courtroom – it’s a welcome change that she gets the bulk of the screen time.  She is as emotionless as ever, as cold and brilliant and intense as I have come to expect.  But when things start going her way, and the evil men in her life start to receive their comeuppance one by one, the veneer cracks just a little. 

     What’s amazing about Rapace’s performance in those moments is that the little half-smile that plays across her face is NOT an indication that she is trying to hold back that emotion.  In most scenes like this, you think the character would be bursting into peals of laughter were she alone, but that she’s repressing the urge in the company of others.  Not Lisbeth Salander.  She is not capable of such subterfuge.  No, Rapace makes it clear that this little half smile is the most emotion Salander is capable of showing.  And therein lies the brilliance of these moments.  And of this movie.  And, to an extent, of the whole series.

     The trilogy is complete with the release of this third one on DVD and Blu-Ray January 25th from Alliance Films.  I highly recommend picking up all three.  Make a weekend of it or something.

     Claude Chabrol, the legendary French New Wave director whose oeuvre spanned more than 60 movies, all infused with suspense and creepy tension, died earlier in 2010.  First Run Features is now releasing a two-DVD set of Chabrol films, featuring two of his lesser-known late-career thrillers.  Both are very good, both are worth seeing.  It’s also a decent introduction to Chabrol for those who are not familiar with his work, as these are two fairly accessible movies compared to the rest of his output.

  Merci Pour Le Chocolat (********8/10)

Year:  2000
Genre:  Drama, Thriller
Countries:  France, Switzerland
Language:  French w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc, Rodolphe Pauly, Anna Mougalis
Director:  Claude Chabrol
Run time:  99 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     Merci Pour Le Chocolat translates literally as “Thanks For The Chocolate”, but the screen shot that opens the film calls the movie Nightcap for English audiences.  I like that title.  Somehow, having seen the movie, the word “nightcap” holds more subtle menace than does “chocolate”. 

     There are a few story lines that make up Nightcap.  One is about Jeanne (Anna Mougalis), an aspiring pianist, who discovers an old family secret.  Although it is unlikely to be true, there is a slim chance that she was switched at birth with another baby.  The other child was the son, Guillaume (Rodolphe Pauly) of world-famous concert pianist Andre Polonski (Jacques Dutronc).  Jeanne plays piano, could her father be this incredible pianist?

     Another story line involves the pianist himself and his new wife Mika (the wonderful Isabelle Huppert).  They have a strange relationship, almost disinterested and passive-aggressive most of the time.  Their seemingly happy family has a cloud hanging over it, stemming from the mysterious death several years earlier of Andre’s first wife (and Guillaume’s mother) Lisbeth.

     Jeanne goes to visit Andre out of morbid curiosity, more than anything else.  She doesn’t really believe he is her real father, but the coincidence is intriguing.  On her first visit there, she catches Mika intentionally dropping a thermos full of chocolate.  Jeanne later finds out that the chocolate in that thermos was spiked with Rohypnol, the date rape drug.  And so begins the intrigue.

     The whole film is tense in the way Hitchcock made his movies tense.  We, the audience, know a little bit more than do most of the characters in the film.  We suspect that Mika is a nefarious character, but we don’t really know how or why.  We suspect that she is drugging people, but if she is, her motive for doing so is elusive and shrouded in mystery.  It’s a terrific work.  Not Chabrol’s best, but well worth revisiting.  Here’s your chance to do so.

  La Demoiselle d’Honneur (*******7/10)

Year:  2004
Genre:  Drama, Thriller
Countries:  France, Germany
Language:  French w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Benoit Magimel, Laura Smet, Aurore Clement
Director:  Claude Chabrol
Run time:  110 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     The Bridesmaid relies heavily on the performance of Laura Smet, who has to do two things.  As Senta, the femme fatale title character, she must be so convincingly sexy that I believe her “victim”, Phillippe (Benoit Magimel), would fall head over heels for her, losing all perspective on what a relationship should be.  At the same time, she has to be utterly crazy, and totally loony when it comes to what she believes a relationship is.  It’s the only way the movie would work.

     Basically, Chabrol asks us to buy into a relationship that makes little sense.  A button down, hard working real estate man loses himself entirely when a strange beautiful woman throws herself at him.  He loses himself so much, in fact, that if he were to discover that she was some kind of serial killer he would still be madly in love with her.  That stretches credibility, on its surface.

     But Laura Smet is so good, and so convincing, that I could actually see it.  I know what a brand new relationship is like, the rush of new love and so forth.  And I can see it being that much more intense with a woman who is, to borrow a phrase from John Mayer, sexual napalm.  And I can see such intensity in Smet that she can’t help but transfer it to her unfortunate partner Phillippe.

     As with most Chabrol works, there is more going on in this movie than a young man’s insane relationship with a deranged woman who may or may not be a killer.  There is also the wedding of Phillippe’s younger sister.  There is a lot made of the relationship his mother (the terrific Aurore Clement) has with a mysterious man named Gerard.  And there is a creepy stone bust that comes into the movie at strange times, so Phillippe can sleep with it.  Or kiss it.

     But in the end, what stayed with me was Laura Smet.  Her maniac obsession, her violent mood swings, her childlike vulnerability, and her magnetic sexuality.  She is The Bridesmaid.  Not just the character, but the whole movie.

Year:  2009
Genre:  Action, Crime, Thriller
Countries:  Sweden, Denmark, Germany
Language:   Swedish w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Annika Hallin, Lena Endre, Per Oscarsson, Peter Andersson, Jacob Eriksson, Sofia Ledarp, Yasmine Garbi, Johan Kylen, Tanja Lorentzon, Hans Christian Thulin, Ralph Carlsson, Georgi Staykov, Michalis Koutsogiannakis
Director:  Daniel Alfredson
Run time:  130 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     I don’t mind that there is little action in The Girl Who Played With Fire.  And even though I read the books, and remember them well, I didn’t mind that the film spent a lot of time explaining the things I already knew.  What I DID mind, however, is that a two-hour-plus movie, which spends most of its time explaining things, doesn’t take any time to explain the plot of this movie.  It gives us an extensive back story on the title star of the series, Lisbeth Salander.  We learn a lot about her origin and her childhood and her life up to this point.  But – we don’t really learn what the hell is going on NOW.  In THIS movie.

     Of course, I do know.  Because I read the books.  So throughout the film, I was pausing to fill in the gaps for my wife, as the movie was doing a piss-poor job of doing that itself.  The movie starts out with a young man coming to visit crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) at his Millenium magazine, promising a story on humna trafficking, murder, and girls forced into prostitution that will blow the lid off a vast conspiracy and implicate many prominent Swedish citizens in the police, in government and elsewhere.

     Soon, that young writer is murdered, and all signs point to Lisbeth Salander as the murderer.  Well, her fingerprints on the murder weapon point to her.  But nothing else shows any connection at all between her and the victims.  The police, nonetheless, launch a massive nationwide manhunt for the heroine of the film, who now hides out in a lavish penthouse thanks to her ill-gotten gains at the end of the first movie.  A boxer shows up…then goes away.  There’s a huge guy beating people up.  There’s a lesbian relationship that crops up…then goes away.

     The biggest problem with the movie is that every major revelation, including the exposure of former Russian spy Alexander Zalachenko (a major character in the back story of Lisbeth Salander), is not connected in any way to the central story.  OK, here’s Zalachenko, and this is who he is and who he used to be…but what does that have to do with the trafficking of girls for the purposes of prostitution?  Why does his giant blonde henchman deal with bikers and carry drugs around?  What does this have to do with that?

     It was helpful to me to watch this with my wife.  She hasn’t read the books, and so when I thought the movie might be getting confusing, she would confirm that yes, indeed, something made no sense.  I could give her the pertinent details thanks to the books that I had read, but she had a really hard time with this second movie without that added benefit.  I think the third movie in this trilogy will be better, since it’s a little more straightforward, plot-wise.  And Noomi Rapace is sensational as always as Lisbeth Salander.  But this second movie is pretty weak in comparison to the first.

   The Killer (**********10/10)

Year:  1989
Genre:  Action, Crime
Countries:  Hong Kong
Language:  Mandarin w/ English subtitles, or English dubbing
Starring:  Chow Yun-Fat, Sally Yeh, Danny Lee, Kenneth Tsang, Chu Kong, Shing Fui-On
Director:  John Woo
Run time:  110 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     The Killer opens in a church with a bunch of candles around Chow Yun-Fat.  Churches and candles will be very familiar to people familiar with the works of legendary Hong Kong director John Woo.  It then moves on to scene after scene of bloody violence, two-gun shootouts, sliding-along-the-floor gun battles and face-to-face gun-to-the-head standoffs, before closing out in a…church…with candles.  And doves.  All great Woo conventions.

     In recent years, those conventions have become cheesy and at times rather painful.  Woo’s Hollywood fare is tired dreck for the most part (a few personal favourites of mine are exceptions…like Face/Off).  But it must be said that the reason he was allowed to make that Hollywood dreck in the first place was that his Hong Kong movies were sensationally good, starting with The Killer.

     The pairing of Woo and Chow Yun-Fat is one of the great partnerships in movie history, like a Hong Kong version of John Ford and John Wayne, or more recently David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen.  Their work together is absolutely sublime.  The Killer delivers on every conceivable level, and Yun-Fat gives one of the finest performances of his career as a conflicted assassin with a strict code of ethics.  (Another convention that would grow to be tiresome in later years.)

     The Killer is not only Woo’s best film, and one of the great action movies of all time, and one of the greatest Hong Kong movies of all time, it’s one of my absolute favourite movies.  Ever.  Every scene works, the action is consistently spectacular, and the heart of the movie never gets overshadowed by the crazy amount of bullets flying around.  This two-disc Ultimate Edition is great, the second disc a must-have for fans and casual observers alike.  The Killer is a cult classic, but deserves better than just “cult” status.  It’s one of the best.

     The Killer ultimate edition comes out as a single DVD, and also in a package with Hard Boiled on March 30th from Alliance Films.

  Hard Boiled (*********9/10)

Year:  1992
Genre:  Action, Crime
Countries:  Hong Kong
Language:  Mandarin w/ English subtitles, or English dubbing
Starring:  Chow Yun-Fat, Bowie Lam, Philip Chan, Tony Leung, Kwan Hoi-Shan, Anthony Wong, Teresa Mo
Director:  John Woo
Run time:  126 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Hard Boiled is not a cinematic masterpiece like The Killer.  But it sure is a lot of fun.  For this follow-up, Woo ratcheted up the action a lot, and that’s saying something considering how many bullets were sprayed in the first movie.  This time, Chow Yun-Fat finds himself on the other side of the law, playing a cop out for justice, in league with an undercover officer.

     There are still some stylistic flairs that distinguish Hard-Boiled, but mostly it’s a Woo shoot-em-up from beginning to end.  The two guns, the gun-to-the-head standoffs, the sliding along the floor and shooting while leaping through windows are all in this movie also, just turned up to eleven.  And then there’s the ludicrous (but highly entertaining) shootout in the hospital to close things out in the maternity ward, babies and everything.

     Hard Boiled is great entertainment, it’s stylish and fun, but it just doesn’t have the heart or the flow of The Killer.  Which isn’t to say it’s not a great movie – it is.  But it deserves its “cult” status, and not much more.

   Oldboy (*********9/10)

Year:  2004
Genre:  Action, Crime, Thriller
Countries:  South Korea
Language:   Korean w/ English subtitles, or English dubbing
Starring:  Choi Min-Sik, Gang Hye-jeong, Yu Ji-Tae
Director:  Park Chan-wook
Run time:  118 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     I say this without hyperbole.  Oldboy is one of the creepiest movies I have ever seen.  (And I’ve seen The Tin Drum and I Spit On Your Grave!)  It’s also one of the most thrilling, taut and heart-pumping films imaginable.  It’s a deep, dark character study about the nature of isolation, the effect of time and the manipulation of self.  It also has a staggeringly cool hammer fight.  The wonderful Choi Min-Sik stars as Oh Dae-Su, a husband and father who is the victim of a seemingly random attack.  He is imprisoned in what appears to be a hotel room, fed every day, and kept there for fifteen years.  Then, suddenly, he gets released.  No explanation is given, but he is handed a wad of cash and a cell phone.

     Then, of course, he goes on a mission to find out who did this to him.  And to seek revenge.  His revenge, and the leadup to it, is bloody, and violent, and darn cool.  And then there comes one of the most stunning twists I have ever seen in a movie, one of the creepiest and most shocking endings ever, and I won’t go any further.  You must watch this film.  Just a taste here – this is some of what Oh Dae-Su’s revenge looks like (don’t watch if you abhor violence in any way):