Doug Brunelle maintains one of the better regular columns over at Film Threat, “Excess Hollywood.” I thought I’d point you in the direction of his latest column, wherein he and author Alan Dean Foster have an exchange concerning the hypocrisy of the mainstream film industry’s bias towards science fiction and fantasy as genres:

http://www.filmthreat.com/Features.asp?Id=1454

Money quote from Foster: “Note,” the author observes, “that of the top 12 grossing films (domestic) of 2004, eight were fantasy or science-fiction. Yet these are precisely the genres the average Tinseltown producer does not understand.”

And from Brunell: “Think of all the romantic comedies that fail, yet there are new ones on an almost monthly basis.”

Amen.

An important distinction must be made, when discussing films based on events of history, between a film that is “history,” i.e. one that makes a concerted effort to occupy and visualize a specific period in time not our own; and one that is “historical allegory,” i.e. one that is set in a historical period but is actually designed to offer up a ‘lesson’ for our current time. As you may or may not realize, almost NO films can really qualify as “history,” or even try. Almost all of our historical films are, in fact, historical allegory, and “Kingdom of Heaven” is no different.

It’s especially important, in this case, to keep all that in mind amid all the swirling “controversy” of this film’s portrayal of the Crusades (or more precisely the portrayal of Muslims during the Crusades.) The film indeed recreates more-or-less accurately what we can safely assume the era looked and felt like, it’s not truly concerned with doing a similar job of recreating the additudes, feelings or even actual speaking-styles of the characters in the same way: these aren’t “medieval characters,” rather they are mirror-images for various types of people and veiwpoints in today’s Western/Islamic clash transported to the similar clash of yesterday in order to make points and explore ideas from a safe distance.

I mean this distinction not as a criticism, since for the use of allegory to “invalidate” “Kingdom of Heaven” would mean that almost all other historical films ever produced would be similarly invalidated. It’s merely an observation, made in the interest of helping us all to view this film objectively beyond all the media histrionics over whom it’s more or less “fair” to.

In “Kingdom’s” imagining of this period of the Crusades (the first fall of Jerusalem to Saladdin,) the city of Jerusalem is preserved in tri-religious quasi-truce between Christian, Muslim and Jew by the will of it’s Christian lords King Baldwin the Leper (Edward Norton) and Tiberius (Jeremy Irons.) Muslim king Saladdin seeks to recapture the city (lost to the Christians over 100 years worth of Crusading ago) but seems to favor something resembling diplomacy rather than the open holy war and slaughter of infidels demanded by his soldiers and subjects. On the Christian side, the religious-zealot order of The Knights Templar (led by Brendan Gleeson as Renault de Chatillon) are covertly causing havoc in order to undermine the staunchly-secular Baldwin and provoke the open war on the Muslims which they believe their God has demanded.

In other words, the “thesis” of the film’s setup is that conflicts of states and men would be far less savage and terrible if said conflicts were left to statesmen, and that the weilding of political power instead by zealots of organized religion almost never serves to do anything but make these affairs bloodier, more protracted and more pointless. This is, I think, an astute and admirable position to stake… but it is just every-so-slightly out of place in the larger context of the Crusades. History would tell that the film is both entirely too hard on and entirely not hard enough on all the characters, affording a political and social complexity to an age of mutual barabarism cloaked in varying illusions of chivalry and faith. Again, though, this film isn’t really about the Crusades as they were but instead the Crusades as they can be slightly-reconcieved in order to make a “larger” point.

The hero of the peice is Balin, (Orlando Bloom,) who believes himself a humble blacksmith Crusading in the vein hope of earning absolution for a deceased loved one but finds himself heir to a Knightly legacy that makes him the Baron of a small community of peasants and the eventual protector of Jerusalem itself when the Templars’ troublemaking bears the expected fruit. Balin and his allies are, for the purposes of the story, enlightened secular-humanists striving to help “the people” weather the whims of faith-based warfare: His “community” is a rough serfdom of Christians, Jews and Muslims who are content to live and work in harmony until the religious fundamentalists on both sides ruin everything.

So too it is with Saladdin, here shown as a strong and violent but also intelligent and honorable warrior who seems burdened by the religious aspects of his job. Just as Balin finds heroism in rejecting organized Christianity in favor of a humanistic code of defense of the defenseless, Saladdin is openly annoyed by the insinuation that the Muslim victories are mandated by God (it’s a nice touch in the way of drawing-paralells that when the Muslim characters are “speaking English they translate ‘God’ rather than just saying ‘Allah’,) rather than won by his leadership and his men’s bravery.

It takes a good director to make such occasionally heavy-handed themes work as a film, and Ridely Scott is such a director. The film is beautiful to look at, has wonderful action scenes and is full of fine actors doing top-tier work. On a technical level, the affair is largely flawless if a touch on the routine side: There are no real “whoa!” kills or action beats, and sadly it appears that those who feared that “Return of The King” had put the ultimate cap on seige-of-the-castle scenes were dead right: Much like the similar seige-scenes in “Troy,” there’s a sense of been-there, seen-this in the otherwise finely executed attack and defense motions that form the final act of the film. Bloom, getting his first real shot at a leading-man role here, aquits himself nicely especially when sharing the screen with titans of the genre like Gleeson, Irons and a cameo’d Liam Neeson.

It’s unfortunate, then, that the film has a serious pacing problem. Simply put, this is an EPIC story with big ideas, lots of interconnecting lines of plot and lots of characters, and it needs room to breathe. Two and a half hours just doesn’t cut it, and you can feel the film straining against the running-time. Big scene follows big scene, reveal follows reveal, grand characters and introduced and dispatched, and theres just not enough “down time” in between. This film is as much about character loyalties, politics and procedure as it is about it’s battles, and it needed the slowly-unfolding canvas of “Braveheart” instead of the rapid action-adventure pace that seems to have been forced on it.

The greatest casualty of this is Gleeson, who gives a knockout performance as the Templar leader who is more-or-less the outright “villain” of the peice. (Saladdin is relegated to the role of the enigmatic warrior-king as opposed to a full-on baddie.) It’s a great turn and a great character, and he’s gone too soon leaving a BIG void.

There’s a great film (here’s hoping for a director’s cut DVD) in here, and once the middle of the 2nd act rolls around it really starts to take shape and get cooking… but it’s an almost, not a slam-dunk. When the history of such things is written, “Kingdom of Heaven” will get the necessary credit for being the first film to use The Crusades as a metaphor for exploring the modern post-911 political world, but it may not eventually remain the best.

FINAL RATING: 7/10

Note: This review of “Crash” is spoiler-free.

This will probably be one of (comparitively) the shortest reviews I’ve ever written for this blog, a fact which I’m hoping doesn’t delight too many of my readers. Upon seeing “Crash” I came to the conclusion about twenty-minutes in that this is not a film that can really be properly “reviewed” in the style I generally employ in this medium (and is generally employed by some 98% of print film critics.) It’s the sort of film which is so densely-contructed and so much “about” it’s own storytelling architecture that it lends itself far better to the process of “analysis” by and for those who’ve already seen it than to the process of “review” by those who’ve seen it for those who may wish to.

It’s really even impossible to describe ANY real details of the plot or the characters occupying it, because writer/director Paul Haggis has here constructed a story that is COMPRISED of a plot instead of being driven by one: Every character is defined by their interactions with every other character, and every plot leads into every other plot, and thus one cannot really say ANY one thing without spoiling another thing and eventually everything. Getting the picture?

It’ll have to suffice to say that this is another in the quirky cinema subgenre of “interlocking-story” films. The best of these, (in my opinion, of course) is Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia,” while the most overpraised is Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts,” (which is not the same as saying it’s a BAD film, merely that Altman is probably the most overpraised filmmaker currently working and thus his films often wind up as the most overpraised of their respective genres.) The setting is Los Angeles, the time-period is two days around Christmastime, and the overrarching theme is race. The characters are actors, politicians, cops, houseworkers and blue-collar joes; their races are white, black, latino, asian and middle-eastern; their racial-outlooks run the gamut from false-colorblindness to “racially conscious” to outright racism.

I realize thats VERY little to “go on” if you’re reading this to decide whether or not you wish to see the movie. Let me bottom-line it: You should go see it; it’s a very, very good film.

Now here’s the unfortunate part: Very, very good though it may be, the film very briefly takes a giant leap forward and become great. It becomes so great, in fact, that at the moment greatness occured I was ready, willing and of sound mind to declare “Crash” the instant runaway frontrunner for the title of year’s best film. But then, shortly after, the greatness is not only snatched away but actually voided from existance by the same plot machinations that created it, and the film slumps back to a respectable but never the less smaller stature… in abandoning greatness, it cannot merely retreat back to “very, very good” and instead settles as “so close to great it HURTS.”

The brief jump to “great” occurs in single a sequence, (I will not tell you whom it involves, when it occurs, or what takes place,) which, when I realized what was about to (and did) play out, caused my hand to literally fly to my mouth in shock and amazement, followed immediately by soaring admiration for the sheer GUTS of the filmmaker. The shock, amazement and admiration were then multiplied exponentially by the scene’s “resolution,” which is the precise moment that “Crash” makes the big leap into the upper-atmosphere where only the Film Immortals are allowed to go.

But then, only a few scenes later, a new peice of plot is revealed that not only negates and obliterates the scene that shot the film to greatness (and, thus also negates the greatness itself), but makes it clear that this was the direction of the film all along (as opposed to a strikingly bad post-production alteration.) Thus, “Crash” becomes not merely a very-good film that was almost great, but instead a very-good film that masqueraded as great for a short time. It’s a foul, cheap cheat that actually manages to injure the film-that-is by offering a glimpse of the film-that-could-have-been.

You’ll see what I mean, (and I’m pretty damn sure A LOT of you will disagree with me about the Big Flaw,) when you see the film. Which, despite my palpable dissapointment, I still do strongly reccomend that you do as soon as you can.

FINAL RATING: 8/10

The ultimate confirmation that “House of Wax” has no intention of living up to even the bare-minimum of dubious entertainment potential ingrained in the DNA of all B-grade slasher entries comes about an hour into the enterprise, when heavily-hyped guest star Paris Hilton comences with the film’s first (and only) striptease and only makes it down to her undies. Did she suddenly get shy!?

Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis’ “Dark Castle” production imprint was founded on the principal of making films exactly like this, i.e. high-end B-horror flicks in the spirit of an occasionally remade from the works of 1950s ballyhoo champ William Castle. The company got off to a big start when their flagship entry, a quickie gored-up remake of “House on Haunted Hill” came out and wound up looking MUCH BETTER by comparison to a bloated, gore-free remake of “The Haunting” the same Summer. Similarly-enjoyable business followed in “13 Ghosts” and “Ghost Ship,” but they floundered with “Gothika,” an attempt to apply the formula to a “serious” thriller featuring Halle Berry right at the start of her post-Oscar freefall culminating (hopefully) with last year’s “Catwoman.”

“House of Wax” arrives as a back-to-formula release for Dark Castle, a remake this time not of a Castle film per-say but a similarly-gimmicky one best remembered for the lead performance of Vincent Price. It’s better than “Gothika,” which you may guess is not the same as saying that it’s actually “good.”

What appears to have happened here is that someone had a pretty damn cool idea for an amped-up modern spin on the idea of a horror movie Wax Museum, and a kicker of a final action climax that would occur in such a setting. So pleased to have happened upon these sparks of originality, said story-spinner didn’t bother to do any further thinking and instead hurriedly dropped these new ideas into a standard-issue “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”-rehash, with a group of road-tripping collegiates happening upon horrorific goings-on just off the main road in swamp country.

This time around, the “goings-on” in question invole a nearly-deserted flyspeck of a town that’s conspicuously the home of a huge Wax Museum with a requisite unfortunate family history, (and the fun new twist that the building itself is made entirely from wax.) You know you know where this is going, but for some reason the film allows almost a full hour to pass before anything happens. Until then, it’s content to hang around the campsite with a crop of uninteresting characters, devoting a HUGE amount of time to a lame in-joke about a hanger-on’s obsession with training his camcorder of Hilton (get it?) It’s an amazingly long, and boring, session of character-building for characters who aren’t really worth the effort.

Things don’t get much better as we move into a (truncated) 2nd-act “characters split up and beg to be killed” segment, which will leave the unfortunate souls who insist on asking for logic from slasher-movie heroes pulling out more hair than usual.

Eventually, all of this DOES pick up when all the killing begins. Once about it’s required job of finding inventive ways to whittle down the supporting cast, the film hits a certain entertaining stride. It ends up boasting at least two genuinely fine setpeice kills (Hilton’s exit, as promised, being the high point,) a standout sequence reveling in the gooey details of turning a victim into a wax sculpture and the distinction of inflicting more specifically-nasty damage on a leading lady (Elisha Cuthbert) than most recent slasher pics.

But too much movie entirely is devoted to plugging up the various story-gaps with over-used cliches of the genre: Amber-lit industrial chambers, child-abuse flashbacks, dutch-angles, twins, facial deformities and desk drawers overflowing with expository information. Eventually there’s just too much old in here for the little new to make any real impact. Yes, the last five minutes or so are excessively cool and well-executed, as you’ve heard, but it’s not enough to make the whole film worth watching by-default.

FINAL RATING: 3/10

Beginning it’s life at various permutations as a radio play, an epic BBC miniseries, a “trilogy” of five novels and a text-based adventure computer game fondly remembered by those of us prone to having fond memories of text-based adventure computer games, Douglas Adams’ popular science ficition comedy now arrives as a feature film. Though vastly enjoyable and excellently entertaining, the film succeeds in a curious manner: In finding a way to faithfully adapt the book to a film despite the long-held belief that the material was unadaptable to the medium, the filmmakers have essentially proved correct the long-held belief that the material was unadaptable to the medium. I’d like to think that the late Adams, who’s tales included one where God proved Himself to be nonexistant, would find that terribly amusing.

To be sure, a lot of popular books, especially those in the scifi/fantasy canon, are frequently said to be “impossible” to make films out of. Usually, those saying such are exaggerating, and misusing the word “impossible” as a substitution for “very, very difficult.” It turned out, for example, that it was not impossible to film “The Lord of The Rings,” but merely an extremely complex undertaking requiring undreamed-of technological wizardry and a director of singular vision and skill. In terms of narrative, Tolkien’s tomes were written (very intentionally) in the manner of historical-record, and thus in terms of a workable screenplay were as “adaptable” as any event of history.

The real “impossible” adaptations, rather, are those materials where narrative either doesn’t exist in any recognizable form or where the narrative is so cerebral and/or internalized that it can only really work properly by reading it. Frank Herbert’s inner-monologue-saturated “Dune” had to be gutted and reshaped from the ground up for David Lynch to make a working film of it, and the result has still managed to annoy lots of hardcore fans and perplex lots of non-fans to this day. (A recent TV-miniseries version, obsessively faithful to the novels, was further and final proof that the material was just NEVER mean to work as a film exactly-translated.) We’ll probably never see functional films of “Finnegan’s Wake” or “The Catcher in the Rye” for the same reasons.

So too it is with “Hitchhikers,” where the narrative turns on a relatively “routine” (for the genre) quest-through-space adventure and the “meat” of the comedy lies in Adams’ very British musings on all the interstellar oddities the heroes encounter AND in the endless supply of dryly-absurd outer-space anecdotes supplied by the titular “Guide,” a sort of e-book Encyclopedia for spacefaring stowaways. Thusly, turning any story that relies so heavily on divergence and inner-musings into a straightforward narrative brings with it the requirment to strip away much of Adams’ signature tangents and the risk that in doing so one may also strip away any reason to tell the story in the first place.

The “main” story arrives onscreen mostly-intact: Sad-sack English-everyman Arthur Dent is spirited off the planet (and away from his pitiable crusade to stop his house from being demolished to make way for a bypass) by his pal Ford Prefect moments before the Earth itself is demolished by the alien Vogons… also to make way for a bypass. Prefect turns out not to be human, but rather an interstellar hitchhiker himself charged with compiling data for The Guide, and he and Arthur are soon semi-unwelcome visitors aboard the spaceship Heart of Gold and innadvertently caught up in the mad quest of Zapphod Beeblebrox, the fugitive President of The Galaxy who’s seeking “the question to the ultimate answer” alongside Trillian, the last (female) survivor of Earth.

And that’s pretty-much the whole of the “story.” Like I said, the whole exercise is really a rung on which Adams could hang a series of tangential tirades about “life, the universe and everything.” The film preserves a fair sampling of these nuggets, including some choice samples from The Guide and a succession of oddball bits involving dolphins, sofas (my favorite) and a sperm whale. For book fans, other material hasn’t so much been excised as it has been changed in execution. Ford Prefect’s devotion to towels remains, but none of his ultra-sensible rationale for such is presented; thus the gag becomes a kicky non-sequitor for newcomers and a winking inside joke for the fans. A fair compromise, I’d wager.

Some fans with have MORE difficulty, though, with the way the film has engineered the story to more comfortably fit a traditional adventure-film narrative: The film adds expanded supervilliany (expanded, that is, from a few of Adams’ universal-oddities) to throw Trillian into danger, amps up a love story between Arthur and Trillian, puts a new twist on Zapphod’s secondary head and crafts a more wide-scale climax. I dealt with this, and found it to work well enough, others likely won’t.

What finally makes much of the difference is a well-assembled cast of character performers, with special note needing to be made of Sam Rockwell as a re-imagined American-huckster version of Zapphod and Warwick Davis (body) and Alan Rickman (voice) doing double-duty as a fantastic Marvin the depressed robot.

The eventual truth is that it’s difficult to say whether this new twist on the story is “as good” or “not as good” as any of the myriad other twists (each retelling has had it’s additions and subtractions, after all) but at least in the opinion of this reviewer the film succeeds as a faithful translation of Adams’ offbeat spirit if not entirely as a faithful adaptation of Adams’ actual material. Those looking to see a 100% visualization of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy” won’t find it here, but those hoping to find a very clever little film based-on “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy” will probably leave smiling.

FINAL RATING: 8/10

I may or may not have taken a few cheap shots at the original “XXX” (said, for the record, as “Triple X”) in previous film reviews posted on this blog. It’s possible that shots may also have been taken at it’s expense in non-review articles about film also posted on this blog. And maybe also in articles about TV. And censorship. Come to think of it, unkind words directed at “XXX” are so ingrained in my day-to-day personal lexicon that it’s likely even to have come up in articles posted about weather, attractive lingerie models and varieties of soup I enjoy (or don’t enjoy, for that matter.)

Yeah, wasn’t a big fan of the original “XXX.”

You may or may not have some difficulty recalling the specifics of “XXX,” a difficulty which will rise and fall largely on your being OR being in the close proximity of either an employee of the film retail business or a member of the audience demographic (male “street”-culture poseurs between the ages of 12 and 16) for whom it’s otherwise-talented star Vin Diesel occupies the center a Holy Trinity of pop-culture demigods slightly below Eminem but slightly above Tony Hawk.

In any case, the film featured Diesel as one Xander Cage, aka “XXX” owing to a helpful neck-tattoo, an extreme-sports devotee recruited as a deep-cover secret agent by Augustus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson,) the apparent leader of a super-elite cloak-n-dagger government division. His mission: Throttle eurotrashy terrorists using as much conveniently-placed extreme-sporting equipment as available (which turned out to be quite a lot.)

“XXX” was, putting it mildly, a disaster. You’re shocked, I know, since the idea of a catchphrase-spewing commercial for marketable faux-additude saving the world by snowboarding has such obvious cinematic potential. No more than a disgustingly calculated cash-grab for the disposable incomes of teenaged boys who’d developed an instantaneous fixation on Diesel after seeing him embody their wish-dream fantasy of self-perfection as romanticized drag-racing superhero Dominic Toretto in the embarassingly popular “The Fast & The Furious” and an even MORE disgusting calculated attempt to turn Diesel into the next-big-thing in action heroism. In what can only be described as an unexplainable minor-miracle, something was wrong in the marketers’ math and the film was greeted with a lukewarm “eh” by even it’s notoriously-undiscerning target audience.

But it wasn’t a TOTAL loss and now, for good or ill, we have a sequel in “XXX: State of The Union.” Diesel declined to reprise his role as Xander Cage, a move which will likely benefit his future career prospects and has in my opinion GREATLY benefitted the “XXX” franchise. Yes, you read that right. Here’s an action-sequel that blows the original out of the water and, heaven help me… I liked it.

Almost from the get-go, it becomes apparent that the filmmakers are heeding the age-old wisdom about how to proceed when life gives you lemons: Rather than scrapping the whole thing in the event of Diesel’s departure, they’ve taken the opportunity to jettison the Xander Cage character entirely along with all of the moronic grasping at the X-Games culture he represented and get about the more agreeable business of fashioning an action hero for whom being the angry-young-American answer to James Bond is it’s own gimmick. As Gibbons (Jackson again) speeds away in a narrow escape from one of the cleverer opening action scenes of late, he informs his aid of the immediate need for a “new Agent XXX,” (Xander’s nickname and tattoo having, apparently, been absorbed into the agency-proper,) and pointedly adds “no more surfers, bikers, snowboarders, etc.,” a sentiment which nearly drew from me a reflexive shout of “Amen!” which would have been loud enough to be deemed inappropriate were I even in Church at the time.

(Xander Cage, by the way, is expositioned-away as having been recently killed; an event not shown in the film but available to anyone with the lack of respect for their money to spend it on the new “Special Edition” of the original “XXX” on DVD.)

In any case, Gibbon’s choice for the new XXX is Darius Stone (Ice Cube,) a thug turned Navy SEAL turned convicted felon. Stone, played by Cube as a natural (in an action-movie) progression of the streetwise persona he’s honed to a fine art since his early rap career, makes it immediately clear that he WON’T be joining Xander on the half-pipe anytime soon: “I don’t play with my life, I’d rather play with your’s.” It’s a cute line, well-delivered. Cube is a good actor who’s had better, meatier roles before this and will have them again, but he knows enough that it’s more fun to play this material straight than to try to go too far with it. If Xander Cage was a studio marketing committee’s idea of cool; Darius Stone is cool, period.

The bulk of the story takes place in and around Washington D.C., as XXX and the remnants of Gibbons’ elite unit blast their way through a conspiracy involving a military-led coup of the Presidency, somehow tied to the President’s planned introduction of a new anti-isolationist “make allies of our enemies” direction for National Security at the State of The Union address.

The somewhat stunning lack of cynicism on the part of the film in this respect is almost charming, as it eventually means that the “big evil scheme” is hinged entirely on the premise that once the President merely voices an idea before the public that it will become and immediate and unstoppable force for change and thus must be stopped by whatever means necessary. Nope, lobbying or watering the initiative down in Congress or media skepticism or even the possibility that the President might just be floating a nice idea for polling’s sake are NOT possibilities in the world of this film. Somehow, this level of wide-eyed faith in the absolute honesty of presidential declarations is strangely endearing occuring, as they do, in a film where a later exchange sums the situation up as follows: “Freedom is in the hands of a bunch of hustlers and thieves.” “Why should tonight be any different?”

So yeah, it’s dopey. But I can’t say that it doesn’t succeed at being what it wants to be: Namely a fun, diversionary action-vehicle for Cube that revels in it’s own action-movieness. Given the implications of the subject matter, i.e. a militaristic overthrow of Washington, the omnipresent unreality of the film’s execution gives it license to produce scenes that no “serious” political thriller would dare attempt: Like an architecture-busting shootout in the Senate rotunda or the Capitol Dome blasted open by a tank shell. I’m even tempted to seriously suggest that the film’s knowing veneer of shoot-em-up silliness allows it to inject the possibility of relevant social commentary (of a sort): Surely SOMETHING bigger must be bubbling in the subtext of the film’s final-act, with Stone leading a makeshift army of street-tough thugs from the poor ghetto neighborhoods surrounding the U.S. Capitol on a mission to save America from an internal threat.

Also, the film uses it’s percieved unseriousness to handle the innevitable subject of race in what I can’t deny is a deft and proper manner. The film-proper and Darius himself never make any explicit reference to the noteworthiness of his black leading-man stature, (save for a single scene of verbal-comedy at the expense of a clueless bigot) but the fact is cleverly and naturalistically acknowledged in a few key moments. Stone’s choice of disguise for “blending” at a swank D.C. bash leads to the film’s funniest visual punchline, and later on the topic provides Cube with his best action hero one-liner of the show: When told by a skeptical lawman that he “looks guilty” after being set up, he shoots a stone-faced glare at the camera and knowingly intones “I was BORN looking guilty” in a manner that leaves little doubt to the multi-tiered meaning behind the statement.

NONE of this, you’ll understand, is meant to suggest that “XXX: State of The Union” is some deep well of social commentary or racial insight, but it’s just slightly smarter than an action-movie sequel needed to be; and that’s a big part of why this is a superior film to the original and FAR better than any sequel to “XXX” had any right to be.

As strange as it is to type these words… I’m reccomending it.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

I’ve been going over the old reviews during this largely-slow news period in hopes of compiling some sort of reccuring best/worst of the year so-far list(s), and it dawned on me that I’ve been using a numerical rating for the concluding “Final Ratings” but have never really clarified what the numbers should be taken to mean. An oversight on my behalf, to be sure, and one I intend now to correct.

What follows is the ten possible final rating scores for this sites reviews, along with brief explainations of what such a rating is meant to say about the film.

10/10: An unequivocal reccomendation. The film is either perfect, damn-near perfect, or has positive qualities so abundant and extraordinary as to negate the impact of any flaws it may or may not possess.

9/10: The film is excellent, in the upper-echelon of quality, worth seeing immediately. Perhaps lacks the esoteric spark of grandeur to achieve a “perfect 10,” but still better than almost any immediate alternative.

8/10: A great film, reccomended. Not quite an instant classic, but nothing seriously wrong with it and a great deal more right with it.

7/10: Not a classic and not on the “run-right-out-and-see” list, but the film is most-likely solid and assured filmmaking, and may even contain a few sparks approaching genuine greatness.

6/10: Decent and inoffensive, but only barely rises above the average.

5/10: Totally average. In many ways, this is probably “worst” rating even if it is not the lowest, as it’s my general asthetic philosophy that the most egregious crime of art is to be unremarkable in either good or bad traits. “5” films are generally competent and properly-assembled, but lack the necessary interest to make them worth mentioning. In other words: “eh.”

4/10: Below average. Something is inescapably wrong with this film. It has unignorable flaws, and is not a good film.

3/10: A film with serious problems. It’s flaws run deep, and it’s positives are nearly nonexistant.

2/10: This is a bad film, with major flaws all the way to it’s core. May even approach “awful” throughout it’s duration.

1/10: This is a terrible film, not only bad but very possibly painful to endure. In some instances, which will be noted in the review-proper, films this bad may actually be bad in such away that there are actually “reccomended” for the humor and learning-value of their innate awfulness.

If I had to reduce my reviews to capsules, here would be the entry for “Kung-Fu Hustle”: This is very possibly the funniest movie of the year, definately the funniest so far and likely tough to beat as the months go on. Get yourself into a theater and see this now.

By the time you’ve read this, you’ve probably heard a hundred times over from voices ranging from Roger Ebert to the boxoffice teller at the cineplex that “Hustle” is a martial-arts flavored fusion of Buster Keaton and Bug Bunny, an East-meets-West lovechild of the MGM Musicals and the Shaw Brothers chop-socky epics. It’s all of these and more, but now having seen it I believe that the majority of observers have overlooked the film’s true pop-cultural ancestor: Popeye.

Specifically, I mean the golden-age of Popeye cartoons made for Paramount by the great Fleischer animation studios; the typical episode of which were gleefully-insane celebrations of the maleability of the cartoon form: Popeye and Bluto endlessly engaged in apocalyptic grand-scale fisticuffs while the animators reveled both in their innability to be seriously injured and their surroundings limitless potential to be demolished in ever-more creative ways. The heroes and villian’s of writer/director/star Stephen Chow’s film indeed have the Popeye characters powers, and the world they inhabit shares not only the Fleischer animator’s fondness for elaborate property damage but also their eye for setting such antics amid affectionate renderings of the everyday world of the working poor: As Popeye and Bluto’s cartoon world was indelibly linked to a Depression-era cityscape apple carts and tenaments, Chow grounds his tale in a 1940s-looking Chinese slum.

At the same time that Jackie Chan, Jet Li and other Hong Kong action superstars were making migratory inroads to American fame, Stephen Chow was becoming a phenomenon of the Asian cinema as a wunderkind comedy star. Chinese audiences adored him, leading to an explosive rise to the top but also a dour pronouncement: Because his self-invented style of nonsense-comedy relied heavily on verbal gymnastics, he’d never translate to Western audiences. Chow’s response was to hone his proficiency with physical humor, drawing heavily on comedians of the silent era and the 70s kung-fu epics of his youth. The first film showcasing this new approach by Chow was “Shaolin Soccer,” which became the biggest domestic hit in Chinese history and a phenomenon in soccer-phile Europe only to see it’s release fumbled by Miramax in the U.S. “Hustle,” a superior film to “Soccer,” has been given a wide release by Sony and may finally be the film to make an American name for Chow.

Set in a version of 1940s (30s?) China, the film finds the land under the merciless control of a hatchet-slinging kung-fu crime syndicate appropriately dubbed The Axe Gang. Only the poor slum of Pig Sty Alley is safe from the Axe’s reign, and only because it’s too poor to be worth robbing. Sadly, this knowledge (make that any knowledge, really) is lost on wannabe gangster Sing (Chow), who tries to shake down the locals by masquerading as an Axe only to wind up wayover his head an inadvertently drawing the attentions of the REAL Axe Gang, who aim to make an example of Pig Sty Alley as to what happens when you mess with even a fake Axe. Their presence unleashes a slapstick battle-royal and the hidden secret of Pig Sty Alley: A whole crop of it’s most mild-mannered residents are actually kung-fu Supermen, old-school wandering master-figthers from the days of Shaw Brothers-school high adventure hiding out among the poor and downtrodden. Accordingly, this sets off a war between the Pig Sty masters and a succession of increasingly bizzare evil masters hired by the humiliated Axes, while Sing continues his quest for the villiany he’s so obviously unsuited for.

Slyly understanding his genre, Chow and his film are openly aware from the get-go that Sing’s innability to be a bad guy (no matter how desperately he wishes to be one) can only mean, in a kung-fu epic, that he’s destined to become a hero for the ages. He gambles, wisely I think, that the majority of the audience (and eventually EVERYONE in the film except Sing himself) will get this to be a fact from the get-go.. except of course for Sing, who at first seems clueless to the idea and later graduates to being openly hostile to it. It’s a grand credit to the film that this belligerence on the part of the hero to accept the fate we all know is coming to him transcends being a device of plot-extension and is instead presented as a crucial element of the plot and his own development. I won’t spoil how, but suffice to say it involves the mysterious character of Lolipop Girl and winds up providing a moment of romantic melodrama so earnestly-presented you won’t even feel silly at being genuinely moved by it. It’s expected, as the writer, director and star that Chow enjoys and even loves this material, but the deeper key to it all is that he believes in this material.

Chow is all over the film in all respects except for the one you’d most expect: actual screentime. His Sing is the main character, and his arc sets the tone for the rest of the movie, but in a rare display of auteur anti-egotism Chow is content to keep Chow’s story at a secondary level to the more colorful and immediately-endearing heroes up until the big climax. Sing spends the first act as an obnoxious would-be baddie, the second act as a guest-star in his own movie and only emerges as a superhero in the third and final act. Until then, he graciously cedes the stage to the cast of wacky aging kung-fu dynamos he’s assembled, and together they put forth a display of post-prime glory reclaimed thats every bit as cheer-inducing as the similar heroic reemergence in “The Incredibles.”

It would do the film’s setpeice scenes a disservice to try and describe them to you, as words simply won’t do them justice. Let me just say that special note needs to be paid to a tone-setting scene where Sing challenges all of Pig Sty to a fight… sort of, a shockingly funny scene involving knife-throwing and cobras that would do Dr.s Howard, Fine and Howard proud, and the hillarious revelation of “Toad Style” kung-fu.

The MPAA has rated the film R, mostly for violence (Chow doesn’t cut away from many of the bloody results of the Axe Gang’s mayhem, but shows the worst as black and white crimescene photos) and a few comical scenes of rear male nudity. I’m not in the business of making family-audience reccomendations for such things… but I’d say that if you’ve got kids who are looking to see this I’d say it’s at least suitable for the ten-and-up crowd in my opinion. At the very least, it has no real cursing (at least as far as the subtitles are concerned) no explicity sexual content and it’s overall message (basically “do unto others” with a Buddhist flavor) is broadly virtuous and worthwhile.

Far and away the best comedy out right now, don’t miss it.

FINAL RATING: 10/10

WARNING: Some entries here may or may not be regarded as spoilers by some. Read on at your own risk.

Personal fact: I graduated College with a degree in Art. Having offered this context, let me make an overtly Art Major’s observation about “The Interpreter”: It plays as a movie very similar to the vibe one gets looking at especially empty examples of “minimalism,” in that it does very little, means even less and expects to be congratulated for these facts.

Here is a suspense film without very much suspense, a story of political intrigue that sports about as much real “political” insight as the average suburbanite “Rage Against The Machine” devotee and isn’t very intriguing at all. A non-thrilling “thriller-lite” with a bead drawn on yuppie psuedo-sophisticates who’ll file into it eager to be made to feel smarter just for seeing it and, in many cases, to turn up their noses at all the “rabble” heading for the showing of “Kung-Fu Hustle” across the hall.

At least the performances, though not in service of much, are good. Nicole Kidman leads as a United Nation’s interpreter who’s pretty sure she’s overheard someone plotting to asassinate a visiting dignitary in the obscure dialect of her African homeland. Sean Penn is a bitter, jaded Secret Service agent (why yes, in fact, he IS a self-destructive lone-wolf owing to the recent loss of a loved one to tragedy.. how’d you guess?) who’s assigned first to investigate he claims and eventually to protect her when she seems to be in danger from whoever may or may not be “behind it all.”

Without spoiling any major details, the over-arching storyline is about the propensity for revolutionaries to morph into dictators (particularly in war-torn Africa) and the questions of whether or not counter-revolutions to stop them can accurately be described as “terrorism.” Meaty stuff, yes, the “The Interpreter” is only concerned with the thinest, most easily-digestible cuts of such: It’s shockingly easy to tell who the surprise-baddie is going to be from the moment he walks onscreen, especially if you’re even a casual student of politically-correct movie cliche’s and thus aware of the standard “out” used by films involving African turmoil hoping to avoid the P.C. taboo of making a minority the bad guy.

But, then, the movie really isn’t concerned with the goings-on of the story-proper; it’s concerned with it’s lead characters. More precisely, it’s concerned with their suitability as talking-head avatars in what amounts to a pretentious parable about differing approaches to disagreements (read: wars), with Kidman’s willowy pan-Euro class representing the virtues of U.N.-style debate and diplomacy and Penn’s swaggering macho-stoicism standing in for over-aggressive American vengefulness. Three guesses which side makes a convert of the other.

These are, of course, themes worth discussing and a debate worth building a film around, but not when the deck is so stacked to one side that the characters become one-dimensional editorial cartoon figures. Once you’ve figured out what the film’s message is, every event of it’s story becomes instantly predictable, and regardless of which side of the argument you fall on it just makes for dull, uninspired filmmaking.

Failure of story-mechanics aside, the film on the visual level is otherwise totally routine for the genre: steely gray-green vistas of perpetually overcast New York, womb-like amber-hued leading lady apartments, agents pounding back starbucks while staring out of stakeout windows, the obligatory single scene featuring a giant fireball of an explosion included so that the trailer can snare some wayward action fans, people snapping crucial photos from park benches, multi-tiered chases scenes linked by cellphones and radios… you know the drill by now.

Nothing terrible on display here, but certainly nothing unexpected or worth talking about either. It’s not going to rot any brains, but it won’t be expanding any either.

FINAL RATING: 4/10

Not going to do too big a thing on this, as I’m getting the sense that mainstream fascination with the anachronistic Catholic pagentry in the choosing of a new Pope will soon fade. Let me merely say that, my Catholic upbringing aside, the new Pope Benedict XVI (aka Joseph Ratzinger) is not a man who’s beliefs I’ve ever greatly agreed with as long as I’ve known about him. He is, and has been for a long time, a hardline traditionalist in a Church that could use a lot less of those at this point. Still he’s now the Big Cheese and to the degree that you’re inclined to care what he has to say I suppose he deserves a clean slate.

Oh, but just one thing (hat tip to Andrew Sullivan on this one)…

THE pressing issue for the Catholic Church is, will continue and SHOULD continue to be their as of yet still grotesquely innadequate response to the clergy sex abuse crisis. What has the new Pope previously had to say about this issue? Read on…

“I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign, as the percentage of these offences among priests is not higher than in other categories, and perhaps it is even lower… One comes to the conclusion that it is intentional, manipulated, that there is a desire to discredit the church,”

For those of us who don’t speak B.S. fluently, he means that the scandal is all just a creation of that eeeeeeeeevil secular/liberal American media boogeyman. Didn’t see THAT ONE coming, eh? Prediction: Unless there’s another big flare-up of accusations, justice will continue to not be served for the hundreds of rape victims of priests, American Catholics will continue to drift further and further away from the Mother Church (a schism, perhaps?), and organized religion in the West will continue it’s inexorable slide toward irrelevance.

I’ve said this before, but perhaps not here: There should be a worldwide, U.S.-led full-scale criminal investigation into the entire Roman Catholic Church on this matter. EVERY priest found guilty of abuse should be in jail. EVERY Cardinal or official who knowingly covered up the abuse and moved them around to new victim-rich environments (I’m looking at YOU Bernard Law) should be in jail. EVERY Vatican official who is found to have known about the coverups and did not immediately report it to a superior or a law-enforcement agency should be (at least) arrested. If the Pope himself (including the new Pope, who was a high-ranking and highly-involved Vatican official before his ascension yesterday) is found to have known about it and participated in ANY WAY in the coverups, even in passing, then yes, he should be arrested and possibly even imprisoned for doing so. No one is above the law, “infallible” or not.

I know that some say that a criminal investigation into the upper echelon’s of the Church must not take place because it could cripple the institution. To them I say: Understood, but disregarded. It would be justice, plain and simple, to “cripple” the financial status of the entire Church if that was what was required to bring justice to ONE abuse victim… and there are THOUSANDS. To ALL politicians with the power and place to do so, I deeply implore you: Do not let this scandal “die” with the last Pope. Many offenders are still in the Church, and still being protected. Don’t go soft on this. Show them that no one gets away with hurting our children, no matter how big their castle, how oppulent their throne or which God they claim to speak for. Get on this, get the people responsible, get it done, and let justice at last be served.

The world has now not only the duty to save children from predators, but also the opportunity to perhaps save the Church from itself.

But then, thats just my opinion.