Knuckle

Liam Neeson delivers an excellent performance in this movie, giving us a cold, calculating intelligence agent and loving father without resorting to any sort of hackneyed acting tricks. The script, likewise, avoids such obvious displays of his hard edge, like kicking a puppy or something like that.

The main story is taken straight from the headlines, and while it may or may not be accurate in its details, it does give us something to rally behind and so we don't mind that Neeson resorts to trickery and outright brutality in his quest to find his daughter. Some might call it pandering, but since scumbag slavers do exist in real life, I don't mind being pandered to here.

The action sequences, while a little too quick with the editing, show a lot of thought. Neeson uses whatever is at his disposal to end the fight quickly and there are no idiotic quips or comments. He's there to do a job and talking just gets in the way.

Top notch effort from all involved and certainly the best movie to come out of Luc Besson in a while.

This movie is well worth watching on the big screen.

No really. He takes a property that is fun and clever and entertaining, spews his well-worn brand of "dark and gritty" all over it, and proceeds to waste a little over an hour and a half of your life (more if parking was a pain in the rear - as it tends to be during the holiday season).

We'll start off with what's right with this movie.

It's... um... "visually stunning?" Maybe. If you haven't seen "300" or "Sin City" or "Sky Captain" before. (Please note that while two of the three mentioned films are based on his work - there's a good reason they're watchable. You guessed it - he didn't write and/or direct them) And that's about it.

The acting was phoned in - it takes a great director to wring a great performance from actors who are given laughably bad, pseudo-noir lines to puke out and guess what? Frank Miller isn't a great director. He isn't even mediocre. He's just plain bad.

So, what possessed the studio to gamble several millions of dollars when Robocop 2 and 3 should have been all the proof they need that one shouldn't waste more than the cover price of a comic book on this man's dubious talents? I'd like to think it was drugs instead of just plain stupidity, but I somehow doubt it.

There's several good reasons why they waited until Will Eisner was dead before making this. Do yourself a favor, take my word for it, and don't waste your time and money finding out what those reasons are for yourself.

According to Jeffrey Reddick's bio (the writer), when he was 14, his manuscript for a "Nightmare on Elmstreet" prequel was turned down because while he had a "fertile imagination, his stories lacked structure." Things apparently haven't changed.

"Day of the Dead" is a series of video game-esquire episodes capped by an incredibly illogical and predictable ending. It all begins with a bunch of kids making out in some kind of abandoned farmhouse or warehouse or other nondescript building and then jumps to a road block where the military is keeping people from going anywhere. Huh? What? Did I miss something? Like a set up or a first act? Anyone could have read the script and realized it was going to be a narrative mess. Except, it appears, the producers and director who went ahead with this mish mash of blood, gore, and tired lines.

The effects are also pretty lame with lots of cheap CG stuff and bad makeup.

All in all, don't bother. It's not good to appreciate or bad enough to laugh at - it's just plain mediocre.

Watching "Stuck" is not a comfortable experience. Beyond the obvious gut-wrenching events of the film, it will make you wonder, "What would I do in a similar situation?" Stuart Gordon's direction is excellent, as is John Strysik's screenplay. Together they set the stage perfectly for what could easily be an unbelievable series of events. Such is their skill in their respective arenas that you never once feel that the story is contrived.

Mena Suvari and Stephen Rea both deserve kudos as well. It would be easy to lose interest or feel trapped (in a bad way) given the unavoidably claustrophobic nature of the story. Both Rea and Suvari's performances, however, are so fantastic that my interest never waned.

Russell Hornsby, Rukiya Bernard, and Carorlyn Purdy-Gordon add the details to this world that bring it all together. Russell and Rukiya, as Suvari's boyfriend and friend respectively, are fantastic. Purdy-Gordon's turn as Mena Suvari's boss gives us just the right amount of evil-employer without delving into satire.

All in all, a fantastic movie.

Grindhouse is a fine example of what one can do with a name, some marketing, and absolutely no talent or thought.

Tarantino and Rodriguez, unable or unwilling to devise a compelling or entertaining story, insulated themselves from all criticism by deliberately setting out to make a campy movie - If you dislike it, then you just didn't get it. The B-movies (God only knows what doof came up with the phrase "Grindhouse") used to be a product of their limitations in budget and time. In that respect, Grindhouse is just a little bit different, being a product of their writer/directors' creative limitations.

Camp films didn't cost over twenty-million dollars to make. They also didn't have tens of millions of dollars in marketing. They also had a tendency to be entertaining (if accidentally) which is the one thing this movie (or movies) isn't.

"Grindhouse" is a fantastic movie, if acting, story, dialog, and entertainment value don't count.

Commando is by far one of the BEST damn movies ever made and is one of the most overlooked American movie masterpieces of all time.

In it, John Matrix (Arnold) is an ex-member of some super secret special forces team who is spending his retirement raising his daughter Jenny as a single parent (apparently Matrix's wife was crushed by a falling meteor, because if she'd been assassinated by ninjas, the whole movie would have been about Arnold turning ninjas into bloody skin bags of broken bones. And no, she didn't leave him - no respectable 80's action woman would ever be insane enough to leave a man whose biceps were bigger around than her waist).

His life as a single dad comes to a crashing halt when an ex-member of his squad, Bennett, blows up his house and steals his kid. It's a simple your-daughter-back-for-a-quickie-assassination scheme, but Matrix isn't going to have any of it. He commits brutal, cold-blooded atrocities all over 20 pound weaklings as he wrings the information of his daughter's whereabouts from Arius' (Dan Hedaya) henchmen. Normally, that would make Matrix a ruthless bully, but the soundtrack does a good job of reminding us that due process really isn't due to child-nabbing scumbags.

Along the way, he picks up a plucky airline stewardess named Cindy (Rae Dawn Chong) and she decides that aiding and abetting a psychotic felon who can lift cars is what she wants to do with her Saturday night.

And it's a good thing, too. Without her, Matrix may have had to figure out where the bad guys are all on his own, break himself out of jail, load his own stolen goods into his own stolen car, and pose as his own prostitute before beating another hapless man to death with his bare hands.

The final scene, where Matrix pounds an entire banana republic military into a smoking, bloody spot on the carpet is pure gold. About seven hundred men (cunningly played by the same six actors) prove the old gunfighter's adage that it's not all about who shoots first, it's all about who shoots last - with the magical gun that doesn't need reloading.

And then after plowing his way through the Los Lobos militaria fan club, he faces off against his nemesis - Bennett. Now, at first glance, it may seem like a no brainer; Hitler's short, fat clone vs. Thor may seem to be a foregone conclusion. Don't let the paunch, the flabby arms, the huffing and puffing fool you; Bennett is more than a match for Matrix and his body-by-In-N-Out is a ruse to lull Matrix into a false sense of security.

Matrix convinces Bennett that a knife fight is the best way to resolve their differences and while Bennett may be quicker on the draw, he learns that guns are no match for steam pipes and witty repartee. Jenny is recovered, all the bad guys are dead (oftentimes, several times over) and the cavalry arrives just in time to jam out to the badass end credits music.

This movie is a pillar of cinema and deserves to be worshiped as a graven idol. 10 out of 10

I wasn't expecting much when I saw the preview and even then I was pretty disappointed by this movie.

The Hills Have Eyes 2 has a bunch of National Guard rookies squaring off against some radioactive hillbillies who like to rape and torture city-folk.

While the marketing campaign would have you believe that this movie is a frightening descent into barbarity, the fact is that it is a half-baked retooling of Aliens without any of the suspense or horror. The mutants all look like one another, the deaths are all blood-drenched hatchet jobs, and there are a whole bunch of scenes in there that someone thought would inject a story into this whole mess but that only leave you scratching your head.

The ending is predictable, just like the rest of the movie.

The lucky ones don't die fast or first, they went to see another movie.

There's been a whole lot made about Carlos Mencia's (Mr. Holness, excuse me) theft of other comics' material. Heck, even before Joe Rogan had a blowup with him on stage I knew that Carlos Mensteala was swiping material from Cosby and Kinison and a host of others.

To compound the crime of his theft, he retold these comic geniuses jokes BADLY.

And that is a crime he continues to perpetuate on this show. I'm sure the series writers have to share some of the blame - it's got to be hard to write jokes day in and day out... but that's why people get paid so darned much to do it! These series writers need to go back to their day jobs of flipping burgers or whatever it was they were doing before they decided to embark upon a career of intellectual theft.

Not to say that he steals all of his material. You can tell when he has devised a joke on his own when what you are watching transcends the merely awful and goes straight into the territory of horrifyingly bad.

Because he likes to call people b***h on his show, ten year olds call him a genius. They're gonna grow up one of these days, Carlos, and when they do, you're gonna dry up and blow away.

Okay, so 300 isn't going to win any awards for historical accuracy, or even for stellar writing or acting. It's a movie meant to show how a handful of Spartans marched to the Hot Gates and made a bloody mess out of the Persian army.

And if that's all the filmmakers had done, it would have been a grand action/war movie. It's interesting visually, the fight choreography, while not revolutionary, was entertaining, and the pacing of the movie was fast enough to keep my butt from ever getting numb.

But noooooooooooooooooo. They had to try to inject some idiotic story in there about freedom and free men and free men fighting for freedom. Oh, and there's some throw away back story that takes place back in Sparta involving politics and the Queen, and blah, blah, blah.

THAT stuff was boring. Mind numbingly so. The previews promised me blood and guts and that's all I wanted to see and all of this politics crap is like lettuce on a burger - a feeble attempt to inject some wholesomeness into a completely, irredeemably unhealthy bundle of fun. I didn't give a rat's rear about the queen, about the politicking she and her Abraham Lincoln-looking ally had to engage in, or any of that and if they'd cut it out wholesale they might have stuffed in another fight scene or two.

It's worth seeing on the big screen but might be a more enjoyable experience on DVD since you would be able to skip all those stupid, talking bits.

8/10

Film Geek, from writer/director James Westby, has all the hallmarks of a film that has been made with absolutely no compromises at all and as such comes off as an incredibly self-indulgent exercise on Westby's part. He got every scene and line of dialog he wanted but didn't really bother to let the rest of us in on the joke.

Scotty Pelk (played by Melik Malkasian) is the titular geek whose life we are supposed to find fascinating. Everything from his monotonous droning about movies to his box sniffing is supposed to endear us to this man but succeeds in doing nothing more than reminding us why it is most people who are labeled geeks are social outcasts. He's not funny, he's not charming, he's not sweet, he's not anything but a pain in the butt and we get to be subjected to his nonsense for almost two hours.

And while Scotty is most certainly in the running for the title of Most Annoying Thing About This Movie, the winners, far and above the tepid acting and predictable plot line, are the little bits of dialog that rear their ugly heads from time to time to remind us that Westby has a horribly overdeveloped grasp of melodrama. The only thing worse than hearing Scotty drone on and on about movies is hearing Scotty drone on and on about his dreams and aspirations.

Perhaps if somebody had told Westby (preferably at the script writing stage), "You might want to try to entertain someone other than yourself," it would have been a better film. Since this movie is supposedly based upon Westby's days as a video store clerk, it's easy to see where this narcissism comes from.

Wow. Jared Hess is a modern day alchemist, having turned Jack Black's comedic gold into cinematic lead. In a continuation of his hump-a-single-note series, Jared Hess takes the wild and wacky world of Mexican wrestling and lampoons it for about an hour and a half too long.

In what Jared Hess must have considered to be a "high concept," Jack Black plays a monk in a monastery who turns to Mexican wrestling in order to raise money for an orphanage. It sounds slightly more interesting than a feeb trying to get his friend elected class president, but this movie turns out to be about as watchable (which is to say, not at all) as Napoleon Dynamite.

With predictable set ups and punchlines, there is nothing at all to make this movie worthwhile. There's a lot of jokes about the outrageousness of wrestlers, some lame crap about how to prepare to become a wrestler, and some really stale jokes about tight clothes on men. Unfortunately for Jared, if you've been through the sixth grade, you've heard all of these jokes a long time ago - and they weren't funny then, either.

So forget all of the nonsense you've heard about this movie being culturally insensitive and concentrate on what really matters - it's just a plain, old bad movie executed by men and women who should have been told "no" during pre-pre-pre production.

How do you make a movie like Napoleon Dynamite? First, steal a name, preferably a cool one from a source that you HOPE is obscure enough that no one will notice. Second, take a shtick, let's say a mumbling, whining stereotypical geek, and stretch that one-note gag to the absolute limits of your audience's endurance. Third, tune your marketing to capture the limited imaginations of gullible twenty-somethings and voilà - You have one of the world's most overrated movies ever! John Heder fronts this cinematic car accident as the title character Elvis Costello, oops, I mean, Napoleon Dynamite ("We didn't know!" Suuurre...) and hems and haws his lines in an attempt to make us believe he's acting. He dances badly in a scene that goes on way too long and then throws in a nod to Eric Anderson's childlike illustrations and Ghostworld with drawings of his own! See? He's hip! He can swipe from the cool kids, too! Jared Hess is the vacuous mental midget responsible for writing and directing this, although I can see evidence of neither in the finished product. Shots are poorly framed, actors ramble their lines off badly, and what lines appear to be intentional are so bad as to give a black eye to the English language as a whole.

All in all, it's hardly worth the time to ignore and certainly not at all worth the time to watch.

1 out of 10

Except that Andy Kaufman was a truly brilliant comedian - Sacha Cohen is merely an imitative cretin without the talent or imagination to make his mark on the world of comedy in any meaningful way. It's true that Andy Kaufman's comedy often made its audience uncomfortable (Tony Clifton, anyone?)but what separates Kaufman's routines from this crap is that it did not make discomfort its sole source of comedy. This fine, but important, distinction between the two men is what separates the geniuses from the mewling pukes who exemplify the worst of "reality" based entertainment.

In this fantastically horrible pile of trash, Cohen's alter-ego Borat buffoons his way across America and gets those wonderfully credulous everymen to join in making asses of themselves. Borat is not funny enough to sustain an entire film, so what cheaper way is there to pad a meaningless waste of time than to film regular joes acting stupid? He might have tried writing some decent material, but not everyone is cut out for that line of work, lacking either the talent, intelligence or humor to do so.

Sure, sure, I've heard the arguments that by parading about as Borat, and getting regular folks to speak what's really on their minds, Sacha Cohen is exposing anti-Semitism in everyday life, but he does it by lampooning the Kazakhstani people in a way that can best be described as ignorant and bigoted. In fact, if this movie were directed at Jews, it would be declared to be the most objectionable movie to hit the screen since Birth of a Nation.

Even if you ignore the fact that this movie is mean-spirited, ignorant, xenophobic, and imitative, the bottom line is that it also is just not very funny either.

1 out of 10.

According to the box, this movie is about the future, where privatized police crack down on dissidents through the use of high technology and omnipresent surveillance devices. There's a serial killer on the loose and somehow, he, she, or it manages to evade all of the gadgets that are supposed to make dystopia safe for the proles.

Well, that's what it says on the box. The movie, on the other hand, is so poorly written, so badly directed, so pitifully shot, that the only the only thing I could figure out about the story was that it was wasting my time.

This movie was not only held back by its micro budget, but by the absolute lack of talent in any of the departments.

Save your money and rent something else.

"What happens when you give a homeless man $100,000?" As if by asking that question they are somehow morally absolved of what is eventually going to happen. The creators of "Reversal of Fortune" try to get their voyeuristic giggles while disguising their antics as some kind of responsible social experiment.

They take Ted, a homeless man in Pasadena, and give him $100,000 to see if he will turn his life around. Then, with only the most cursory guidance and counseling, they let him go on his merry way.

What are they trying to say? "Money can't buy you happiness?" "The homeless are homeless because they deserve to be?" Or how about, "Lift a man up - it's more fun to watch him fall from a greater altitude." They took a man with nothing to lose, gave him something to lose, and then watched him dump it all down the drain. That's supposed to be entertainment? They dress this sow up with some gloomy music and dramatic camera shots, but in the end it has all the moral high ground of car crash videos - only this time they engineered the car crashes and asked, "What happens when you take down a stop sign?"

From the minute Bob Dylan's music starts to play during the opening credits, you know Curtis Hanson is going to hit another one out of the park. This movie is not only one of the best, it is one of the rare few that remembers that movies are the sum of their parts - and each and every part of this movie, from the music to the writing to the direction to the wardrobe to the set design - EVERYTHING meshes flawlessly to create one of history's perfect movie-going experiences.

Michael Douglas, in one of his finest roles to date, plays Professor Grady Tripp, a man who finds himself paralyzed by the fear of not living up to the stellar expectations of his first success, The Arsonist's Daughter. As a professor at a northeastern university, he watches his life fade away before him one failed marriage at a time.

Things come to a head during the weekend of a literary festival. Tripp discovers that his current mistress, Sara Gaskell, is pregnant. His publisher, Terry Crabtree has come into town, desperate to get his hands on a novel that Tripp has been promising him for years. And to top things off, he discovers that his enigmatic student, James Leer, has a novel of his own - a novel that far outshines anything Tripp has ever seen or written; and he wrote it all over the course of the winter break.

As I have said before, everything fits together flawlessly and the plot is no exception. Everything comes to an unexpected but wholly satisfying end.

Kudos to Curtis Hanson. As the man at the helm, he deserves whatever praise he gets. Michael Douglas, Robert Downey, Jr., Frances McDormand, and Tobey Maguire all shine. And last, but not least, the men who first brought this story to life, Michael Chabon (author of the novel) and Steven Cloves (screenwriter).

10 out of 10. It is truly a timeless classic.

Catholic-bashing never seems to go out of vogue, does it? While I'm not accusing Kevin Smith of being a founding member of the KKK, I am accusing him of being incredibly lazy (once more) in his efforts to entertain us. I do give him points for tackling a novel subject. Well, it was new for him, anyway.

In his diatribe against organized religion, Kevin Smith borrows, steals, cribs, and plagiarizes from every single stand-up comic, comic book, book, and newspaper op-ed piece that ever had anything remotely clever to say about the hypocrisy present in any hierarchical religion. He brings nothing new to the table and the result is yet another tired, lame Kevin Smith mess.

I'm not sure why Kevin Smith's debut effort is hailed as such a great flick. I know it's not supposed to be Casablanca, but it is supposed to be entertaining, right? Every poorly delivered line and hideously framed shot drips with smarmy, self-referential hipness and I would venture to guess that the majority of those who sings its praises do so out of fear of being labeled "uncool." Kevin Smith can't write - his lines, while attempting to be cutting edge blasphemous, are pedestrian at best. Anyone who ever heard a class clown in the 6th grade bellow on and on about the unfairness of being stuck beneath their abilities by a cruel and uncaring world has just heard every line from Clerks. To heap further abuse upon his audience, Kevin Smith can't direct, either. The performances he wrings out of his actors are sub-par and wooden, his choices for shots are peculiar when they're not just plain bad, and for those who suspect I am merely being contrary, Kevin Smith has himself admitted to his shortcomings as a director.

This movie does have its good points, however. It is mercifully short and the soundtrack doesn't blow.

Matewan tells the tale of just one of the battles fought in the coal mining wars of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century.

Chris Cooper, as Joe Menehan, plays a union organizer intent upon bringing the miners of Matewan out from underneath the heel of the coal mine owners. When intimidation and terror tactics fail to cow the locals, the mine operators and their private security thugs bring in scabs, nominally led by "Few Clothes" Johnson - played by James Earl Jones. When the scabs join the strikers the mine operators resort to all-out warfare against the unionized miners.

David Strathairn, Chris Cooper, James Earl Jones, Mary McDonnell - everyone on the cast delivers a believable, wonderful performance. Everything in this movie makes you feel as if you were really there and depicts this often overlooked event in American history with a stark realism that will leave you thinking about it over and over for a very long time.

Such is the impact of the direction, acting, and writing of this movie that when I saw this movie on video about a week ago, it was still as fresh in my mind as when I saw it last on the big screen on opening day.

10 out of 10. Truly an overlooked classic.

As fatuous as the first Mummy movie was, it had a certain goofy charm to it. The characters were marginally likable and a few scenes here and there made me chuckle.

The sequel, however, is a monstrosity. It lacks all the cleverness and innocent goodwill of the first movie, which leads me to believe the rumors I hear that a) the first movie benefited from massive uncredited rewrites and b) the same ghost writers left Sommers to his own devices for the second after getting shafted on credit for the first movie.

So here we have it, a clear portrait of Stephen Sommers' film-making abilities and they are meager. As a writer he gives us some real gems of dialog. You know that any movie that has a kid say, "My dad's gonna kick you a**," is going to be a real stinker. The rub in this situation comes when you realize that it's the best line in the movie.

CGI effects dominate this movie and they are bad. Everything from the midget mummies to the flying boat zeppelin looks fake and stupid.

Don't waste your time. This movie was a monumental waste of time and money.

1 out of 10.

Van Helsing is called upon by the Vatican to kill Count Dracula. Along the way he meets Frankenstein's monster and other assorted critters in a big old homage to every single "Monster A" meets "Monster B" movie ever made.

The problem is, when the wolfman met the mummy, it was a B-movie back then and it's a B-movie now. Add to that the fact that Stephen Sommers is not a very good director and an even worse writer and what you have is a story that would struggle to make it as a comic book much less as a feature-length movie.

All throughout this misadventure into stupidity, Sommers tries to imbue his characters with personality and the story with some meaning. He fails on both counts. He wants to entertain us (I'm assuming) but instead winds up wasting about two hours of our time.

Hugh Jackman does his best, but every line he is given is such a clunker that no matter how much you want to like him or his character, you just can't. Kate Beckinsale once again proves why she should never be allowed in front of a camera - every time she lays that horrible accent on us, you just want Dracula to rip her throat open so we can be done with her.

Except that if he did, she'd turn into one of those hideous CGI critters that someone, somewhere mistakenly thought would be a good idea.

This movie is a convoluted, idiotic mess designed to sell toys and rip our movie-going dollars from our pockets. Don't waste your time.

I wish I could say I liked this movie more since I love zombie movies, but in the end, all that this movie has to recommend it are some pretty good effects and a moment or two where it doesn't take itself too seriously.

In this horror flick, a group of kids are traveling across the desert to some unspecified destination to participate in a debate competition. Along the way they get hijacked by a drug dealer who just so happens to be engaged in an epic quest to kill the man who screwed him in a dope deal.

The good points: effects are good. There are some zombies that don't make the grade, but the same can be said of Dawn of the Dead. I blame the director or cinematographer for letting "filler" zombies get too close to the camera. The last-gasp, cocaine supercharged fury was a nice touch, too.

The bad points: LOW production values - and it shows in everything but the zombies (which is where I imagine they spent most of their money). The acting is truly painful at moments, especially when Gwen has to do anything but stand there.

5 out of 10. There's worse out there, but that's not enough to recommend it

Another Woman is bar none one of the best movie Woody Allen has ever made. In this movie, Marion Post (Gena Rowlands) starts to reexamine her life when she overhears Hope (Mia Farrow) speaking with her analyst.

Of course, a one sentence synopsis cannot even begin to do justice to this masterpiece's depth. The characters are incredibly engaging and the dialog is a pure joy to behold when delivered by one of cinema's finest assembled casts.

Gena Rowlands, of course, delivers her role wonderfully, but Gene Hackman's performance is nothing short of stellar. The brief moments he is allowed on screen are gems to be treasured and represent some of his finest work to date.

Only Hannah and Her Sisters comes close to matching the perfection of this movie, with all of its emotional and intellectual complexity.

Ten out of ten. Memorable, beautiful, and wonderful.

The Duck Dodgers TV series bastardizes the source material, plain and simple. Littered with self-referential gags and lame one-liners, this show is pretty much a poster child for what is wrong with animation today. There is no wit or thought put into any of the scripts and I doubt very highly if anybody bothers to storyboard these things. Rather than using animation as an art form, the morons in charge of this masterpiece of trash rely on animation to keep their production costs down.

Long gone are the geniuses like Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Michael Maltese. Maybe Spike Brandt, Tony Cervone, and company grew up watching Looney Tunes, but adoration does not translate into talent and I'm not giving out any A's for effort.

This is a solid 2 out of 10 - Even a 1 out of ten is too good for this, since that would imply a certain amount of excellence in the field of horribleness.

Sure the animation isn't great, the voice acting is kind of lame, and the characters grate on your nerves, but Robotech holds a soft spot in my heart, having occupied so many after school afternoons during my youth.

In Robotech (Macross) the earth gets plastered by the Zentradi - a race of genetically engineered giant warriors, who are in search of a crashed alien ship. There's something about protoculture and the Robotech masters, but truth be told, the whole story is pretty secondary to watching gigantic robots blasting gigantic chicken-looking Zentradi walkers to smithereens.

Second only to the Transformers cartoon - and it is a mighty close race. Robotech loses out because Minmei is the suckiest character ever in animation history.