Movie Review: In The Cut (2003)

A film which trips over its own self importance, In The Cut suffers from the most fatal of elemental mistakes in murder dramas: the killer, once revealed, has no motive, no backstory, no opportunity, and no business doing any killing except to satisfy the cheap ending. The real surprise is that director Jane Campion, who co-wrote the script, and Nicole Kidman, who produced, both should have known better. The other script culprit is Susanna Moore, who may not know any better, but deserves at least as much blame because the film is based on her novel.

In The Cut moves at a pace that would come in a solid third in a straight sprint with a turtle and a snail. Campion litters every scene with needless frilly embellishing shots to the point of insane distraction. It's the type of directorial excess that screams "look at my clever directing!", because really, for long stretches, nothing else is going on, and Campion felt compelled to stretch out proceedings to two numbing hours.

Frannie (Meg Ryan) is a school teacher living alone, and best friends with her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Meg recently broke up with the creepy John (Kevin Bacon), although he continues to awkwardly stalk her. At a bar one night, Frannie discretely witnesses a man with a distinctive tattoo receiving a blow job from a woman with distinctive finger nails.

The girl is brutally murdered and chopped up, and one of her body parts is dumped near Frannie's apartment. Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) shows up to investigate, and Frannie is immediately attracted to him. They end up having a torrid relationship: the one problem is that Malloy has that distinctive tattoo.

Meg Ryan cuts loose, drops her good girl image, and indulges her wilder side with a highly sexual, lust-driven role, and her performance holds the better moments of the film together, barely. Frannie is a sympathetic enough character, torn between passion, the desire for companionship, and a curious fear of the danger that may lie behind Malloy's motives.

But beyond that, In The Cut has little to recommend it: the detective work is sloppy, the character behaviours are bizarre, the secondary characters are forgettable, and the evil-doer, once revealed, is a blank. In The Cut should have just been cut.

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Movie Review: Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

A tired series looking for reasons to continue churning out the installments attempts a 3D version. It doesn't matter: Resident Evil: Afterlife may as well be a Roadrunner cartoon, the franchise that started with the engaging original Resident Evil has degenerated into a choppy sequence of contrived theatrical set-pieces, exaggerated, outlandish and devoid of any emotion.

Alice (Milla Jovovich) has developed superhuman powers due to her unique DNA bonding with the mysterious T-virus, developed by the evil Umbrella corporation. Alice can now clone herself, and the movie opens with an army of Alices attacking and eventually destroying the Tokyo headquarters of Umbrella, and apparently killing Umbrella leader Wesker (Shawn Roberts), who himself is also infected with the T-virus.

Alice flies a small plane to Alaska to try and find the mythical town of Arcadia, an apparently virus-free community ready to reboot humanity. She reconnects with her friend Claire (Ali Larter), but there is no town of Arcadia. Claire and Alice fly down the coast and arrive at a devastated Los Angeles. They land on top of a large prison building, where a few surviving humans are holed up, surrounded by hordes of zombies, and wondering how to escape to the real Arcadia: a large container ship off the coast of LA. A few battles later, the human survivors with Alice's help make it onto Arcadia, which is actually controlled by Umbrella and the healthy-again Wesker, and being used for further nefarious virus tests. Alice and her buddies need to stop Wesker once and for all, but the one certainty is that before the credits roll, yet another sequel will be set-up.

The massively computer-aided action sequences play out like exquisitely choreographed ballet dances, bullets and bodies flying, twirling, and catapulting in all directions, and are certainly artistic, but they do not a movie make, and this is all that Resident Evil: Afterlife has to offer.

Jovovich and Larter go through the motions, projecting abject boredom, and looking forward only to the part where they cash their cheques. The other cast members were picked up from the corner store of discounted cardboard action movie rejects. Director Paul W. S. Anderson appears to be content building a comfortable but unambitious resume filled with sequels and derivative bottom-crawling actioneers.

The Resident Evil series is proving a theory that was once unthinkable: even an activity as fun as killing countless zombies can become tedious.

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Movie Review: Breakfast At Tiffany's (1961)

A cultural and stylistic landmark, Breakfast At Tiffany's is a timeless classic, capturing a society moving into a decade of enormous change, and doing it with panache.

When Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) is depressed, she eats breakfast on the sidewalk looking through the Tiffany's store window in New York. Living with her cat (named Cat) but otherwise very alone in her apartment, Holly's life is a series of encounters with men who seek her company and pay well for it. She classifies them as rats or super-rats, depending on how loathsome they are. Holly is desperately seeking happiness, fulfilment and riches; but she is unwilling to surrender her heart or her life to any true relationship. She even stoops to the level of getting paid to visit a locked-up crime boss, oblivious she is being used to transmit his commands.

Struggling author Paul Varjak (George Peppard) moves into another apartment in the same building. Women find him attractive, particularly Mrs. Failenson (Patricia Neal), a decorator willing to pay Paul for his calculated affection. Holly wants to keep Paul strictly as a friend, and does her best to deny their growing connection. Her former husband Doc (Buddy Ebsen) shows up in New York pleading with her to return to Texas, but Holly prefers a life of independent struggle to the comfort of anonymity. Eventually she reaches a critical decision point: her prospects look grim, unless she lowers the fence around her heart.

Holly Golightly is a representative icon for women rocketing from the predictability of the 1950s into the uncertain 1960s: sexually liberated, seeking love on her terms, forging an independent identity, making new connections in a freedom-obsessed society, and pressured to revert to the old but safe environment. And there are no playbooks to guide her, only instincts and self-belief. 

That Holly grapples with the big decisions in life so stylishly is a big part of Breakfast At Tiffany's appeal. The ridiculously oversized cigarette holder; the Givenchy dresses; the hats, sunglasses, and  jewellery: rarely has a single film had such an indelible impact on fashion. Craving unaffordable luxury also starts here: Holly never has any money, and she nevertheless looks gloriously fashionable wondering where the next dollar is going to come from.

Working from the novella by Truman Capote and a script by George Axelrod, director Blake Edwards assembles all the pieces of Breakfast At Tiffany's into a dazzling tapestry. He augments the visual appeal of his stars and setting with Henri Mancini's music, the spine-tingling theme song Moon River instantly claiming a place among the classic tunes of Hollywood. Edwards elegantly inserts the song throughout the movie without overexposing it. Humour is also judiciously deployed, the party scene in Holly's apartment a chaotic joy. 

Despite being cast against her wholesome image, Audrey Hepburn pulls off the role magnificently while enshrining her quiet grace and beauty, combining Holly's fun-loving innocence with a hard edged determination to keep her heart secure. George Peppard is adequate as Paul, never catching fire but holding his own. Mickey Rooney's portrayal of upstairs comic relief neighbour Mr. Yunioshi is an unfortunate yellowface misfire amplifying Asian stereotypes.

Breakfast At Tiffany's is soulful, hopeful and pragmatic. The prize is on the other side of the window, tantalizingly within reach, but at what cost.

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Movie Review: Body Double (1984)

Stylish but deeply flawed, Body Double is director Brian De Palma's attempt to modernize Hitchcock by introducing a potent dose of sexuality and a sharper instrument of death. Uninspired performances and a plot that crumbles under close inspection undermine the pizzazz.

Jake (Craig Wasson) is finding out just how bad a failing Hollywood career can get: reduced to playing the vampire in a Grade Z slasher flick, claustrophobia paralyzes him while he is entombed in his casket. Then he catches his girlfriend in bed with another guy, before being utterly humiliated in an acting class. Forced to abandon his apartment, Jake seems to catch a break when shady fellow-actor Sam (Gregg Henry) offers him the chance to house-sit a stunning villa with a breathtaking view. The major perk: sexy neighbour Gloria (Deborah Shelton) puts on a solo striptease show in front of her window every night, and Sam encourages Jake to watch through the conveniently available telescope.

Jake helps himself to the nightly eye candy, and quickly notices that Gloria is being dangerously stalked by one ugly looking Indian. Jake starts stalking both Gloria and her stalker, following them through a mall and on the beach, and is indecisive as to whether to interfere or not. It doesn't matter much: the following night Gloria is gruesomely murdered by the Indian, while Jake watches helplessly through the telescope. But many things are not what they seem: Jake discovers that porn star Holly Body (Melanie Griffith) was unwittingly duping him into witnessing a carefully staged murder. Jake has to unravel all the lies that he is being subjected to, and in the process both he and Holly become targets for the murderer.

De Palma imports at least a couple of classic Hitcockian themes: the Rear Window witness-to-a-murder, and the Vertigo acrophobia here becomes claustrophobia. There are other small touches, including the murder-on-the-phone from Dial M For Murder. But from the opening scenes De Palma also litters his movie with what-you-see-is-not-real references, and the mix of modernized Hitchcockian elements and almost overt winking at the audience just doesn't bake well.

Unfortunately, Body Double may have one of De Palma's all-time weakest casts. Craig Wasson , Gregg Henry and Deborah Shelton take up a lot of oxygen and deliver precious little presence in return. Wasson floats through the film in a vacuous state; Henry hisses slimy evil intent; and former beauty queen Shelton stares blankly out of her mesmerizing eyes, gradually realizing that television is going to be the only place where her lack of acting talent will flourish. Melanie Griffith arrives late and immediately injects a much needed shot of wicked edginess and sly humour, but by the time she makes her entrance, the pervasive bland acting delivered by everyone else has already suffocated the film.

With character behaviour straight out of a first year writing class for the imagination-challenged, Body Double is left with only it's emphasis on style to save it, and here De Palma does score points. The film oozes sleek extravagance, from the ridiculously attractive design of the look-out house to the sensual voyeuristic scenes and the sojourn into the ultra-expensive mall, De Palma layers luxury that, through Jake's eyes, is inaccessible to most mortals.

Body Double is more of an interesting curiosity than a good film, a bit of an unkempt cul-de-sac on the otherwise generally well-maintained De Palma career avenue.

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Movie Review: Gallipoli (1981)

A fictional story set against one of Australia's earliest grim experiences in world warfare, Gallipoli is an engaging war drama that helped to establish the Australian movie industry, as well as the careers of Mel Gibson and director Peter Weir.

In the wide open and desolate landscape of Western Australia in 1915, young Archy Hamilton (Mark Lee) is being trained as a sprinter by his Uncle Jack (Bill Kerr). But Hamilton is more interested in joining the Light Horse mounted division of the Australian army, fighting for the British Empire in the first World War. Word of the heroic exploits of the Australian army in the Ottoman Empire's Gallipoli region is filtering back home, firing up young men to join the armed forces.

At his first major sprint race, Hamilton defeats the cocky Frank Dunne (Mel Gibson). The two soon become friends. Initially not interested in enlisting, Dunne helps Hamilton make it to Perth, a journey that includes a treacherous trek across a desert. Although under-age, Hamilton is admitted to the Light Horse. Dunne knows little about riding horses and settles for admittance to the infantry. Both are sent to Egypt for training and preparations to join the war. Eventually thrown onto the brutal front lines where trench warfare rages, Hamilton will be part of a fruitless charge across open terrain; Dunne is assigned the role of courier between the front lines and the commanding officers. Both will have to rely on their sprinting abilities to try and survive.

Prior to Gallipoli, Gibson was mostly known for the first two Mad Max movies. Gallipoli allowed him to project more humanity without losing his cool charm. The role of Frank Dunne required Gibson to combine bravado with repeated failure: he does not win his foot race against Hamilton; he does not get into the Light Horse; he does not participate in combat; and he is frustrated in his attempts to get the right messages to the front. Few other Gibson films have seen him defeated so often.

Mark Lee has the bigger role as Archy Hamillton, and his performance is solid but limited by Hamilton's lack of world experience. Lee remained mostly active in the Australian film industry.

Peter Weir did make the jump to Hollywood after Gallipoli, and went on to direct a series of high profile movies including The Year Of Living Dangerously (again with Gibson), Witness, and Dead Poets Society. He leads Gallipoli with a steady hand, making use of the scenery without succumbing to it in the barren deserts of Australia and the pyramid-dominated training camps of Egypt.

Gallipoli tilts quite far towards being a human-centered representation of Australia's coming of age, the resourcefulness, courage, charisma and can-do positive attitude of Hamilton and Dunne a metaphor for their country stepping out to the world stage without losing its unique identity. As a war film, it is remarkably short of war action until the bleak final 20 minutes. War's destructive futility resonates loudly when the necessary time is invested to expound on the potential of the devoured victims.

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Movie Review: Love Story (1970)

Boy meets girl, boy loves girl, boy marries girl, girl supports boy, girl dies. As straightforward as romantic tragedies get, Love Story is exactly what is says on the tin: a doomed love story, manufactured with the sole purpose of crashing a happy union onto the rocks of the ultimate calamity. Based on the best-selling book by Erich Segal, who also wrote the script, the story struck a chord and the movie became a cultural phenomenon.

Oliver Barrett (Ryan O'Neal), a rich Harvard graduate and feisty hockey player on his way to law school, meets Jennifer Cavalleri (Ali MacGraw), a spirited Radcliffe College music student. She is vivacious, artsy, and has a sharp wit that turns every conversation into a jousting match. Jenny's social background is several steps lower than the snooty Harvard class that Oliver belongs to, but this does not stop them from falling madly in love.

Oliver has a dysfunctional relationship with his stern father (Ray Milland), and Oliver's romance with Jenny does not help matters: Oliver's parents perceive her to be beneath them. Oliver becomes completely estranged from his father, and goes ahead and marries Jenny. As Oliver goes through law school, Jenny works as a teacher to support them. He graduates and takes a position with a prestigious New York law firm. All seems to be going well and they plan on starting a family, until Jenny is diagnosed with a fatal disease (likely cancer, although this is never mentioned in the film): she has very little time left to live.

Love Story has some points of irritation: for all her fresh-faced appeal Ali MacGraw's performance is almost theatrical in its grandiose delivery of every line; the famous musical love theme is over-used to distraction in the second half of the film; and Ryan O'Neal's default mode is that of the angry young man, no matter what is going on in his life.

And the infamously bad tag line "Love means never having to say you're sorry" has just gotten worse with time.

But director Arthur Hiller makes great use of Boston locations, and captures the spark of emerging love in the early scenes between Jenny and Oliver. More admirably, Love Story also takes the time to show the comforts of love and the tenderness between an established couple. A brief sofa scene with Jenny resting on Oliver while they each read a book grasps the essence of couplehood. And the scenes with Oliver's parents are deliciously uncomfortable, resonating with a mountain of never to be resolved issues between Oliver and his dad.

A cultural landmark for better or for worse, Love Story neither over-promises nor under-delivers. It is faithful to all elements necessary to create a heartbreaking romance.

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Movie Review: Drag Me To Hell (2009)

A simple morality tale turned into a cheeky horror film with a clever streak of understated humour, Drag Me To Hell is a refreshingly original and quite enjoyable movie.

Polite and timid Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is a bank loan officer, eyeing a promotion to the vacant Assistant Manager job. Pressured to demonstrate toughness, Christine turns down a desperate request by the elderly and quite creepy Sylvia Ganush to extend a home loan. This turns out to be a big mistake: the humiliated Ganush lays a humdinger of a curse on Christine, releasing the evil Lamia spirit to terrorize her.

Christine has the support of boyfriend Clay (Justin Long), and also seeks the advice of fortune teller Rham Jas; but neither can help much when uncompromising evil descends on her. Invisible forces invade her house and slap her around; a persistent black fly enters her stomach through her mouth; Ganush dies, but her image continues to reappear in various hideous forms to cause terror. Christine realizes that this will only end when Lamia kills her and drags her to hell (of course). She needs to find a way to break the curse to save her life, and unfortunately this may mean that someone else will have to suffer.

Director and horror master Sam Raimi wrote the script with his brother Ivan, and he overlays the sustained tension of Drag Me To Hell with a genuine sense of fun. There are sharp comic moments, never more than in the dinner scene when Clay introduces Christine to his parents while she is losing her mind because of Lamia's noisy antics. Even the early pivotal attack by Ganush on Christine in the deserted bank parkade manages to introduce snarky wit into a life and death struggle: Christine defends herself with a stapler and, temporarily at least, staples shut Ganush's ugly eye.

Alison Lohman makes for an appealing heroine and central victim, taking the role almost entirely seriously although once or twice a shadow of a smile does almost cross her lips. Justin Long has less to do as the supportive boyfriend, and thankfully the script avoids saddling him with any big speeches. Lorna Raver as the evil Ganush and Dileep Rao as the half smarmy, half effective fortune teller Rham provide plenty of background colour.

Some of the scenes don't work too well: things go bump in Christine's apartment for too long, and a seance involving a goat goes a bit over the top. But Drag Me To Hell is all about the penalty to be paid when selfish acts are committed, even by good people. And who knew that in a small, unpretentious package, being dragged to hell can be the source of no small amount of entertainment.

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Movie Review: Iron Eagle (1986)

It is difficult to imagine a worse advertisement for the 1980s. Horrible hair. Horrible soundtrack of limp rock. Horrible script. Horrible performances by horrible actors. Horrible villain spouting horrible one-liners with a horrible accent. And the most horrible, jingoistic, Reagan-era cowboy mentality pretending to be a viable solution to a crisis.

Iron Eagle somehow passed for entertainment in 1986. It's the story of Doug (Jason Gedrick), the hot-headed teenaged son of Air Force pilot Ted Masters (Tim Thomerson). On a mission over the Mediterranean, Ted is shot down, captured, tried and sentenced to be executed by an enemy country (Libya, although never named). When the official U.S. response is timid, young Doug, who is a hotshot fighter pilot himself, partners with the grizzled and semi-retired Colonel "Chappy" Sinclair (Louis Gossett Jr.) to plan and launch the most unlikely of rescue missions. Doug and Chappy somehow arrange to steal a couple of F-16s, then they pull-off a couple of unauthorized mid-air refuelling manoeuvres, before they bomb the Libyans into submission, destroy their air force in a couple of dog-fights, rescue Tom, and jet home.

The U.S. Air Force showed unusually good judgement and mercifully refused to have anything to do with Iron Eagle due to the portrayal of a fighter jet theft, but that may have been just a most convenient excuse because surely even the Pentagon would have recognized the stench emanating from the fetid script.

Canadian director Sidney J. Furie has a chequered resume, and he did his reputation no favours by directing this embarrassment, plus several sequels. Louis Gossett Jr. chews through his lines looking for nothing but impact but finding only cartoon-level intensity. Jason Gedrick needs only a few minutes of screen time to prove that he is all hair and no talent, but unfortunately gets a lot more than a few minutes. The rest of the cast may as well have been drawn in with thick felt markers for all the nuance and texture that they bring to the movie.

Iron Eagle stands as a monument to the level of brainlessness that movies can descend to when catering to the lowest common denominator of dumb action and blind, revenge-driven so-called patriotism.

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Movie Review: Out Of Sight (1998)

A heist movie featuring a romance across criminal lines between a bank robber and U.S. Marshal, Out Of Sight tries to be slick but succeeds only in being mostly wet. Based on an Elmore Leonard novel, the action never leaves the realm of the contrived and hydroplanes on accumulations of the absurd.

Serial bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) has committed more hold-ups than anyone can remember.  He is non-violent and has never used a gun, and has spent a lot of time in prisons and as much time plotting to escape. With the help of frequent accomplice Buddy (Ving Rhames), Jack busts out of jail, and in the process takes Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) hostage. A spark immediately ignites between the two, but they part ways as Jack and Buddy hook up with another accomplice, the slow-witted Glenn (Steve Zahn). As Jack and his gang make their way to Detroit where they plan to hold-up the diamond-rich mansion of Ripley (Albert Brooks), Sisco is part of a group of federal agents on their tail, and hardened criminal Maurice Miller (Don Cheadle) leads a rival mob intent on getting to Ripley's mansion first.

Out Of Sight is a film attempting to be cool and real, but not many of the central actions or character behaviours ring true. Foley's unlikely escape from prison; Sisco abandoning all logic to immediately fall for a con man who has abducted her; the police showing up en masse to arrest Foley and Buddy at their hideout hotel, but failing to secure the parkade; and the prolonged climactic robbery sequence, in which the real bad guys (Miller and crew) fall into that typical Hollywood trap, where vicious and calculating criminals become bumbling and incompetent just when it matters most, to the benefit of the attractive stars.

Director Steven Soderbergh attempts to cover up the gaping script holes by unnecessarily forcing the action to jump around the hurdle of convoluted flashbacks, which add little style but plenty of confusion. Other stunts include tiny roles for Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Keaton, and Nancy Allen, none of whom are on-screen long enough to meaningfully contribute.

Without a firm grip on any sort of reality, Out Of Sight is left with the chemistry of its two stars as it's only watchable element. Clooney and Lopez do not disappoint, but neither can they save the movie. Clooney, still a couple of years removed from movie superstardom, provides further proof that he is heading in that direction with a world-weary performance that oozes class, while Lopez overcomes her character's lack of common sense and delivers what may be her most engaging screen performance, particularly in the scenes opposite Clooney.

Despite the available star charisma, Out Of Sight is out of ideas and quickly out of mind.

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Movie Review: Carrie (1976)

A chilling horror film that is both a psychological and physical terror ride, Carrie combines the worst nightmares of any young girl: awkward puberty, bullying by the meanest of classmates, parental religious terrorism, and prom night turning into torment. That Carrie White discovers a way to extract a brutal revenge on all who abuse her through telekinesis just makes Brian De Palma's task of creating a frightfest so much more fun.

Based on the Stephen King novel, the movie opens with withdrawn and friendless high schooler Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) discovering her first period in the gym shower, and being traumatized when her mean classmates, including Chris (Nancy Allen) and Sue (Amy Irving) throw tampons at her. As the gym teacher Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) tries to make amends and help Carrie out of her shell, Carrie begins to discover that she has the telekinetic power to physically move objects through mind control. Carrie's real problem is her uncompromisingly stern mother Margaret (Piper Laurie), a sexually repressed religious zealot who abuses her daughter.

Sue feels some regret at the mistreatment of Carrie, and to make amends, convinces her popular boyfriend Tommy (William Katt) to ask Carrie out to the prom. But Chris is much more intent to continue the bullying, and plots with her boyfriend Billy (John Travolta) a most humiliating climax to Carrie's prom night. Carrie enjoys most of her evening with Tommy, the one and only successful social event in her life, but when Chris turns the prom from dream to nightmare, Carrie unleashes her telekinetic power to extract a most violent revenge.

Sissy Spacek was 26 years old when she portrayed high school student Carrie White, and her performance is unforgettably disturbing. Acting with haunted eyes, a frail physique, and long, uncared-for hair, Spacek's sheer presence foretells disturbing obscurity and impending doom in equal measures. Spacek is matched by an unhinged, over-the-top performance from Piper Laurie as Carrie's mother Margaret, a religious fundamentalist who embraces all the most twisted interpretations of sin and guilt associated with sexuality and dumps them on her daughter. The scenes of Margaret terrorizing Carrie with her religious dogma are more disturbing than all the blood that De Palma throws onto the screen.

And De Palma is the third star of the movie, using slow motion, camera rotation, and point-of-view shots to great effect. He boosts the impact of the horror sequences by juxtaposing them with tranquil scenes, or by deliciously prolonging the set-up prior to unleashing the inevitable shocks.

Carrie's secondary characters are brought to life by a lively group of actors, many of whom achieved varying degrees of fame. This was John Travolta's last film prior to shooting into superstardom with Saturday Night Fever, while Nancy Allen, Amy Irving , P.J. Soles and William Katt would go to on build modestly interesting movie profiles. Betty Buckley had an excellent stage, screen and television career, and Priscilla Pointer (Irving's real-life mother) was most famous for a role on TV's Dallas.

Many hidden meanings can be layered into Carrie's story, from her entire experience being a metaphor for the sacrifices of womanhood, to the societal damage caused by religious extremism and the equating of sexuality with sin. The hints of subtext bubbling below the surface provide an added edge of enjoyment to the unfolding tragedy.

Carrie is a classic horror film, compact, on-target, unsettling and unforgettable.

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Movie Review: Letters To Juliet (2010)

The attractive young American in a foreign land, having doubts about her fiancée. The handsome young Englishman. The romance that starts off on the wrong foot. The wise old woman who nudges the burgeoning attraction between the awkward couple. The eternal search for true love, lost 50 years ago and now about to be regained. And gorgeous, sun-drenched Italian scenery.

Letters To Juliet is a sweet, old-fashioned romance that ticks all the right boxes, achieving exactly what is sets out to do. It mercifully avoids the more modern tendencies for unnecessary vulgarity and cattiness. It also, most thankfully, steers clear of the excruciating self-help, looking-for-myself-because-I-deserve-it nonsense that dominated the intolerable Eat Pray Love (2010).

New York couple Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) and her fiancee Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal) set off on a trip to Verona, the setting of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, presumably to enjoy a pre-wedding honeymoon. But Victor is too easily distracted networking with local food suppliers for his soon-to-open restaurant, and is quick to ignore his future bride. Left on her own, Sophie, an aspiring writer, sets out to discover the city, and stumbles upon a group of local women who collect and answer letters written by desperate lovers and left in the cracks in the wall below "Juliet's" balcony.

Sophie finds a 50 year old letter embedded in the wall, written by Claire, an Englishwoman who abandoned her Italian lover Lorenzo when they were both young and confused. Thanks to the response written by Sophie, the now elderly but sprightly Claire (Vanessa Redgrave) shows up in Verona with her grandson Charlie (Christopher Egan), determined to find and reunite with her Lorenzo after all these years. Sophie joins them on a road trip to find the right Lorenzo (Franco Nero), setting the stage for a romance to blossom between Sophie and Charlie as they drive across the Italian countryside.

That Letters To Juliet heads with unwavering commitment towards a happy ending is part of its charm, with the three leads playing their part towards romantic bliss. Seyfried and Egan need to do little except look radiant in the Italian sun, while Redgrave effortlessly pulls off the dual responsibility of seeking her true love while sagely guiding the young lovers-to-be towards their destiny.

Director Gary Winick, who tragically died in 2011 before his 50th birthday, keeps the mood lighthearted without veering into comedy, and allows the breeze of romance to seep into every frame. Letters To Juliet has no surprises, no disappointments, and enough pleasant moments to reinforce the positive energy of the well-intentioned pursuit of love.

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Movie Review: Public Enemies (2009)

A potent mix of elements from Bonnie And Clyde (1967) and The Untouchables (1987), Public Enemies never quite reaches the same heights as classic crime movie dramas, but is nevertheless an often compelling yarn about charismatic bad guys, their dames, and the g-men out to get them.

Public Enemies is based on the true story of notorious criminal John Dillinger, who was designated public enemy number one in the 1930s for a string of daring Depression-era bank robberies and prison escapes. A media darling and something of a folk hero for treating customers with respect as he held up the bank managers, Dillinger (Johnny Depp) falls in love with Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) without slowing down his often violent crime spree.

Under the growing influence of a young J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), an FBI task force led by Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) is created to track down Dillinger and his associates. Dillinger repeatedly embarrasses the police and the FBI by slipping through their fingers before he is eventually betrayed, cornered and killed outside a Chicago movie theatre.

Director Michael Mann puts the hefty 140 minutes of running time to good use and finds a reasonably satisfying balance between intense action sequences, including prison escapes, bank robberies, and hideaway shoot-outs, and the development of the three main characters. Depp succeeds in giving Dillinger some soul, Bale provides Purvis with grim determination, and Cotillard captures the wide-eyed attraction of women who have nothing to criminals who offer a life of unimaginable adventure.

Public Enemies would have benefited from a purposeful trimming of the supporting cast. The film occasionally stumbles when numerous secondary characters get in the way. Many Dillinger associates clutter the screen and are given little time to breathe (often literally). Criminals Baby Face Nelson, Tommy Carroll, Red Hamilton, Pretty Boy Floyd, Ed Shouse, Pete Pierpont, Charles Makley and Alvin Karpis are just some of the fellow gangsters who make an appearance in the character-heavy script (co-written by Mann), but they do little except snarl and fire their weapons. On the other side of the law, another half dozen agents form Bale's posse, and they generally just appear earnest and follow instructions.

The cinematography, costume design and set design succeed in bringing to life a vibrant 1930s setting grand enough to absorb the unfolding larger than life drama, but with more emphasis on glitz and glamour than depression.

Public Enemies has epic ambitions, and while the human focus is spread too thin and works only when attention is maintained on the main characters, the action-oriented scenes live up to expectations, exuberantly spraying thrills from the barrels of smoking Tommy guns.

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Movie Review: Once Upon A Time In Mexico (2003)

Robert Rodriguez concludes his El Mariachi trilogy, but bloat creeps in and the fun factor suffers at the hands of too many characters vying for space in a convoluted plot. Rodriguez is unable to follow in the footsteps of Sergio Leone's "dollars trilogy" and make the jump from enjoyable camp to delicious epic. Once Upon A Time In Mexico aims for grand elements, but never comes close to scaling the necessary heights.

El Mariachi (Antonio Banderas) is recruited by CIA Agent Sands (Johnny Depp) to assassinate the vicious General Marquez, who is conspiring with drug lord Barillo (Willem Dafoe) to overthrow the Mexican President. El Mariachi is eager to gain revenge on Marquez, who brutally killed his wife Carolina (Salma Hayek, seen only in flashback) and young daughter. Rattling around the thick edges of the plot are Billy Chambers (Mickey Rourke), who hangs around Barillo's compound; anti-narcotics agent Ajedrez (Eva Lopez); former FBI Agent Ramirez (Ruben Blades), and local thug leader Cucuy (Danny Trejo). Several of these characters will switch allegiances as the plot against the president progresses. And that is not all: Cheech Marin in the local informant helping Sands; the President has a double-crossing advisor; Barillo is planning face-changing plastic surgery; and El Mariachi once again calls on two heavily armed friends, Lorenzo and Fideo, who show up to join the action.

It is a rare for a movie to suffer from being too short, but Once Upon A Time In Mexico, at just over 100 minutes, simply isn't hefty enough to carry everything that is trying to happen within it. Characters are introduced in a hurry or hardly at all, events seem rushed, motivations are barely sketched in, and with so many characters vying to tell their tale, the action sequences now actually get in the way.

Johnny Depp manages to stand out as the conniving Agent Sands, but only by going so far over the top, and having his character meet such a gruesome destiny, that he forcefully etches himself into the memory. Banderas seems disengaged, and most of the other actors have too little screen time to make a lasting impression.

Once Upon A Time In Mexico offers a few moments of enjoyment, but the underground feel and wild abandonment of the earlier El Mariachi movies is gone, replaced by plot congestion caused by character cramming.

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Movie Review: Desperado (1995)

All style and limited substance, but when the style is this flashy, a lot can be forgiven. Desperado is the first major Robert Rodriguez production, and it helped to propel the careers of both Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek. And it doesn't hurt that Quentin Tarantino contributes an unforgettable 10 minutes to add a further injection of irreverence.

The story, a sequel to Rodriguez's El Mariachi, is the most standard revenge fare. Buscemi (Steve Buscemi, as unsettling as ever) enters a filthy bar in a small Mexican town and spins a tall tale about a heavily armed stranger on a mass-killing spree, looking for a certain gang lord called Bucho. The bar is indeed a front for Bucho's business, and the bartender (Cheech Marin) and all the supposed customers are Bucho's men.

The stranger is El Mariachi (Banderas), Buscemi's friend, and he is on a single-minded mission to kill Bucho (Joaquim de Almeida), as revenge for Bucho having killed his girlfriend. El Mariachi arrives at the bar, and using the arsenal of heavy weaponry he keeps hidden in a guitar case, kills everyone in it after an ultra intense firefight. He then survives an assassination attempt by the mysterious knife-throwing Navajas (Danny Trejo) -- Buscemi is not so fortunate. El Mariachi hooks up with Carolina (Hayek), who runs a library in a town where no one reads: the library is another front for Bucho's business. After several more encounters with Bucho's men, one featuring two El Mariachi friends who also use ridiculous guitar-disguised firepower, Bucho's loyalists are annihilated and a final confrontation unfolds.

Faithful to the philosophy of never using one bullet when 20 are available, Rodriguez fills the screen with dead bodies, literally piled up at the end of every battle scene. Cleaners are brought in to mop up the rivers of blood soaking into the Mexican soil after El Mariachi is done perforating his opponents with an army's worth of ammunition. Entire wars have been fought with less firepower than is on display in Desperado.

Banderas plays his role seriously, and gets away with it, his intensity matching the action even if the revenge motivation is too flimsy to carry the amount of bloodshed. Hayek brings a sultry victimized presence to her role as Carolina, not straying too far from the eye-candy specifications but fitting perfectly into the exaggerated mayhem. Cheech Marin is quietly hilarious as the bartender, conveying emotion with a combination of eyebrow movements, burps, and undisguised glances of contemptible disgust.

Desperado is all very much tongue in cheek, never more so than when Tarantino shows up at the bar and unspools a long-winded and totally irrelevant story about a man making a bet related to long-distance pissing into a beer glass. The story is as meaningless as the film, and as ridiculously enjoyable.



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Movie Review: Boiler Room (2000)

Further proof that there is a sucker born every minute, Boiler Room takes a look at the modern-day snake-oil salesmen taking advantage of the suckers by peddling worthless stocks with empty promises of future riches.

College student Seth Davis (Giovanni Ribisi) is trying hard to impress his stern father (Ron Rifkin), but he is going about it the wrong way. Seth drops out of college and establishes an illegal but successful casino in his apartment, raking in money from fellow college kids looking for a good time.

Seth's entrepreneurial skills attract the attention of the shady stock-trading firm J.T. Marlin, and he is recruited as a trainee. Senior trader Greg (Nicky Katt) is appointed as Seth's mentor, while Chris (Vin Diesel) and Richie (Scott Caan) are among the other traders peddling shady stocks. Jim (Ben Affleck) is the motivator-in-chief, promising all the young recruits a life of unimaginable riches.

J.T. Marlin's phone-based business is sweet-talking naive investors into pouring their life's savings into useless stocks, and Seth becomes quite good at it. He also starts a relationship with the firm's secretary Abbie (Nia Long), who has just dumped Greg. But no matter what he does, Seth cannot get his father's approval, and eventually he wises up to the damage his salesmanship is causing, and the illegalities of the firm's business.

Boiler Room's premise is painted in vivid colours that dissolve under the mildest scrutiny. Can Seth really be the only person in the United States curious enough to notice the shuttered and abandoned offices of a supposed high-tech medical research company developing the next miracle drug? A scene that features a regulator shredding documents at night is underlined as proof of wrong-doing; a large but empty office filled with banks of phones on the floor is also supposed to hold evil intent. Neither the significance of the documents being shredded nor the purpose of the lonely phones are ever convincingly explained, and once again, Seth is the only one noticing.

Ben Affleck has a grand total of three scenes, as J.T. Marlin's in-house recruiter and morale booster. It looks like a good paycheck for about a day's worth of work, but Affleck does bring a testosterone-injected intensity to his cheesy rabble-rousing speeches.

Any reminder of the ease with which the combination of greed and gullibility can be exploited is useful, but Boiler Room otherwise brings little that is new to an old morality tale.

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