Hat-tip to Kotaku.
http://www.local10.com/news/13466229/detail.html

The important parts:

Last Friday afternoon, Damian Fernandez and his 15-year-old sister, Deanne Fernandez, were home alone at their northwest Miami-Dade County home while their parents were at work when they heard knocking on the front door. Moments later, two men were prying the front door unlocked, prompting Deanne to hide in her closet.

As her brother slept in the next room, the burglars ransacked their parents’ room, taking some jewelry before moving on to what they were really after — a PlayStation 3.

“Once I saw him take off running back, I jumped off my (bunk) bed and I grabbed my sword … and I just waited for him,” he said. Damian said he lunged at him with his samurai sword, striking him in the chest.

“He freaked out,” Damian said.

The burglar ran out of the house with Damian chasing him down the road. When police arrived, a K-9 officer located the burglar hiding behind a neighbor’s palm tree. The second burglar got away.”

I have a profound desire for the ability to email this story to myself fourteen years ago so that 12 Year-Old Bob would FINALLY have an airtight argument for mom as to why he should absolutely be allowed to own functional feudal Japanese weaponry.

What I love is that it’s not like a samurai sword is some commonly-owned tool for brown-belt karate students – he just happened to own a samurai sword. This kid is my effing hero for the next 24 hours, at least.

SPOILER WARNING

It’d be interesting to find out what really scares Eli Roth.

I say that because, as most horror filmmakers are out to scare their audience and tend to start from a place that scares them, Roth seems to be an anomally: The first horror-specialist in a long time who’s (thus far) openly focused on the most literal interpretation of the job: His films are designed to horrify, not scare. Being scary is all about the unexpected, sudden shock/surprise, and so far Roth is all about the slow, meticulous buildup to a nightmarish event he’s already shown us coming.

This isn’t a criticism, just an observation: Roth is a gorehound, and the “Hostel” movies are FOR gorehounds. He’s expertly structured them to provide just-at-the-right-moment mixes of guiltily-fascinating “I can’t BELIEVE they just DID THAT!!!” brutality inflicted ON the victims and cathartic “Yyyyyeah! Get that bastard!!!” revenge brutality inflicted BY the victims; all of it imagined with the kind of perverse creativity that the Fangoria crowd can’t get enough of.

The first “Hostel” introduced us to “Elite Hunting,” a shadowy organization that kidnapped disposable tourists in Slovakia from a Hostel “front” and locked them into cells in some abandoned Eastern Bloc factory, where wealthy clients paid big bucks for the chance to mutilate, torture and kill them in any manner they saw fit. #2 offers more of the same, but with a more immediately-compelling set of victims-to-be and a broader look at how “Elite Hunting” operates.

Right off the bat: What’s going to make or break the endurance-factor for a lot of veiwers this time around is the new lineup of leads. The original film was willing to let it’s audience off the “hook,” to an extent, in the vicarious enjoyment department by making the bodies-to-be a trio of oversexed American frat boys – i.e., in the movie-verse, guys who’re “kinda asking for it” just by existing. This time around, though, he’s not going to let you off so clean: The “fresh meat” are three traveling female art students.

How far does he plan on taking the “screw with you” factor here? One of the three is played by Heather Matarazzo, best remembered as “Weinerdog” from “Welcome to The Dollhouse,” and lets face it… you’d have to be a pretty depraved son of a bitch to WANT to see something eye-poppingly ghastly happen to Heather Matarazzo. Er… for the record? Eli Roth: One depraved son of a bitch, it turns out… Ahem. The other two more-prominent leads are a sensible rich-girl (Jordan Ladd) and Bijou Philips as a party-girl who has chosen to ignore every single “how not to die in a horror movie” rule.

As with the first film, Roth is out to turn genre cliches against themselves: In an Eli Roth movie, being free of movie-sin is the OPPOSITE of a get-out-alive-free pass. In fact, he takes a visible pleasure in the “surprise” of putting the most sympathetic characters through the most shiver-inducing slashings.

The ick-factor is furthered by following a seperate, paralell storyline: The day-before adventures of a pair of white collar American “power tie” guys on their way to an Elite Hunting holiday. One is hoping to gain an aura of board-room power from the act of murder, while the other is mainly blowing off steam about his domineering wife. The cast MIGHT be too on the nose here, as both of them look like the picture-perfect image of preening upscale-suburban douchebaggery – or, in shorthand, they’re both dead ringers for Mitt Romney.

The bottom line is, you already know whether or not you’re going to see this, and if you ARE then you probably already know the point is to go in and be repulsed-yet-transfixed by the horrors being done to the good guys, with the payoff being that eventually at least ONE of the good guys will “strike back” with even GREATER horror which you can then enjoy without shame. We KNOW Roth is going to deliver on this, so whether or not he does isn’t the question. Of course he does.

The important question is, aside from visceral thrill of the thing, how is it otherwise? Short version: Pretty damn good. Roth knows his way around formula, which means he also knows exactly where a curveball as to who’s capable of what and why will be best suited. He knows what his audience wants to see, and thus what they aren’t expecting to see (the two “big” kill scenes of the film will be talked about by genres fans for YEARS, including one which openly breaks one of film’s oldest and silliest taboos.) And, when necessary, he knows that sometimes a classic never goes out of style: An early interlude involving a (seemingly) rare female Elite Hunter who seems to be emulating a certain Euro-horror staple character should put a (guilty) grin on the face of more than a few genre afficionados… until, of course, they realize what it means they’re about to be shown.

FINAL RATING: 7/10

Do you like the new header? I like the new header. And it’s my Blog, so it stays. Mostly, it’s there because I just figured out how to put a big-ass picture there.

For the record, counterclockwise: The One Ring, Old Glory, James Cagney, Mario, Robocop, Crow T. Robot, Devon Aoki, Spider-Man, Kate Winslet and Godzilla.

So much of Jodie Foster’s acting career has been defined by the concept of “strong women” characters – not “strong” in the character sense but in the literal: She specializes in “you ain’t gonna push me around just cuz I’m female AND teeny-tiny!” roles, and it’s mostly paid off for her… well, okay, “Contact,” “Anna & The King” and “Flightplan” all really, really, really, REALLY sucked… but she’s not that bad in most of them.

Unfortunately for her, no novelty (even those backed up by actual talent) lasts forever. In a movie-world where ‘tuff-chicks’ are now a Hollywood staple and every other week is bringing us a new Lara Croft, Elektra, G.I. Jane, Ultra-Violet, Storm, Trinity, Domino, etc; a movie-world where the women of “Kill Bill,” “Crouching Tiger” or “Dead or Alive” are vaulting through the air killing armies armed men with a single sword… well, these days simply donning an asexual pantsuit, minimal makeup, a “business-bob” haircut and delivering all your lines in a clipped “loud-whisper” just doesn’t seem like as much of a revolutionary act as it used to.

I’d posit this situation has more than a little something to do with how little we see of Foster these days, and almost everything to do with some of the baffling “action grrrrl” parts we HAVE seen her in: Just a little over a year ago, she was making a fool of herself in the Die Hard knockoff, “Flightplan,” and now we have the eye-poppingly cheesey trailer for the awful-looking “The Brave One,” which finds Foster in – I shit you not – an unofficial remake of “Death Wish” in the Charles Bronson role of an ordinary person turned into a gun-toting, mugger-slaying vigilante who ends the trailer by pointing a gun right at the camera, spitting out a catchphrase and firing into a white-screen fadeout. No, seriously, that’s what happens. Take a look:

“Yeah… I WANT MY DOG BACK!!!!” BLAM! You gotta be freakin’ kidding me. Lookout, criminal scum! Nell’s comin’ to kick your ass!

Minor Spoilers

Popular culture has been full of fictional serial-killers that we “like” since before the term “serial-killer” technically existed, everything from penny-dreadfuls to early B-movies were chock full of perversely-fascinating heavies doing their wicked deeds for our vicarious enjoyment. Implicit in this was a certain moral trade-off: We would ‘enjoy’ the fun of temporarily inhabiting the psyche of a monster so long as we never fully lost sight of the MONSTER part. We allow ourselves to “like” Hannibal Lecter, for example, because he’s slick and clever and interesting… but he’s not “likable.” He’s a prick, a snobby elitist who’s cannibalism M.O. (in the macro sense) is basically just WASPy Social Darwinism carried to a ridiculous extreme. Likewise, Freddy Krueger’s engaging “hack comedian” persona comes hitched to his “child murderer” background, Patrick “American Psycho” Bateman is ALSO a Wall Street creep, etc.

“Mr. Brooks,” however, is trying something completely different – setting up both as it’s star AND audience-perspective character a titular murderer who’s not only able-to-be-liked… he’s actually LIKABLE. Earl Brooks (Kevin Costner) is a self-made white-collar CEO, living a happy life in the Midwestern suburbs. He’s a faithful, genuinely-loving husband, a profoundly understanding father, an honest businessman and all around super guy: Charming and sophisticated but also human and approachable. He’s got no temper, deals with everything reasonably, never raises his voice in anger and doesn’t even seem to know any curse words. There’s literally nothing wrong with Earl Brooks…

…with the noteworthy exception that Earl Brooks is ALSO the “Thumbprint Killer,” an as-of-yet uncaptured serial-slayer who likes to gun down copulating couples in their homes, pose and photograph the bodies and then vanish with such alarming precision that forensics teams joke about the victims being “killed by a ghost.” Brooks is “accompanied” on his excursions by a prodding imaginary friend named Marshall (William Hurt,) but this is no actions-excusing “schizophrenic” cop-out: Brooks is totally aware of his actions and in full control, while Marshall functions primarily as a sort of “anti-conscience” egging Brooks on toward decisions he’s eventually going to make anyway.

Brooks regards his “murder habit” as an addiction, one he’s ashamed of and recently been trying to kick by half-truthing his way through AA meetings (how nice of a guy is Mr. Brooks? He not only goes to the meetings, he volunteers to help clean up afterwards.) The attempt at cold-turkey gets sidetracked, though, by an unfortunate confluence of events: A self-styled “supercop” (a shockingly-bearable Demi Moore) is on the hunt for “Thumbprint” and seems VERY capable of actually catching him, the Brooks’ daughter has just dropped out of college and arrived home carrying some unpleasant secrets (one easy to guess, the others… not so much,) and most-pressingly: A sleazy voyeur (Dane Cook, his easy-to-despise nature HELPING for a change) has snapped some photos of Brooks in the act of murder and is actively blackmailing him – but not for money, he wants Brooks to mentor him in the fine art of human-hunting.

Oh, and Moore’s policewoman comes with almost a whole other movie’s worth of subplots unto herself: Her cretin ex-husband is legally harassing her and another serial killer aside from Brooks just broke out of prison on a mission to hunt her down (there may or may not be a third killer roaming around as well… but that would be telling.)

All this would seem to make “Mr. Brooks” yet another Summer-of-07 movie suffering from gratuitous plot-bloat, until it settles into it’s deliberately-paced groove and reveals itself more akin to an elaborate timepiece: After carefully setting up Earl Brooks’ seemingly ninja-level skills as a stealth serial-murderer and impenetrable likability as.. well, everything ELSE, it drops him deliberately into a twisting, booby-trapped maze of a plot – and not only will we get to see if Brooks The Killer is super-slick enough to escape, we’ll also get the slightly naughty thrill of rooting for Brooks The SuperDad to succeed.

There’s a really, really strange alchemy going on here, mixing a very “movie-world” handful of supervillian slayers, “Lifetime”-ish family drama and even a little tuff-chick-cop B-movie riffing thrown in for good measure; and the whole enterprise is hinging on Costner’s central performance. Lucky for us, he nails it, tweaking his natural All-American “ordinary-ness” just enough to turn Earl Brooks into easily one of the best acting turns of his career. Less experienced (or maybe just less disciplined) actors would likely take this as a chance to go over the top, or indulge in schticky “evil suburban stiff” silliness, but Costner plays it straight and subtle: Brooks is interesting because he’s not interesting. He owns a box factory. His big non-murder hobby? Pottery. Even as a serial-killer, he’s strictly vanilla: No fancy weapon, no symbolism-laden mask, he’s just a plain ol’ shooter (though thanks to Costner’s sharp senses as a physical actor, Brooks ends up looking as cool as one can possibly look with a plastic-bag zip-tied over one’s pistol-hand.)

What we’ve got here is a sicko slasher premise plotted-out in the manner of a off-beat “grownup” drama, like the movie equivalent of a “Slipknot” lyric sheet that somehow wound up being recorded by James Taylor instead. Hell, to carry the music analogy even further, it reminds me of the innevitable moment when a metal band jumps the shark by bringing in a symphony orchestra: Yeah, we all know it’s the height of silliness.. but on the other hand, “November Rain” is a pretty good song. In the end, it boils down to campy sleight-of-hand, but it wrings it’s premise and it’s cast for every drop their worth and comes up with something that’s tremendously watchable and even marvelous at points, with an abundance of satisfying moments and at least one “HOLY SHITBALLS!!!!” shocker.

How much plainer can I be, folks? GO SEE THIS MOVIE.

FINAL RATING: 9/10

NOTE: Minor Possible Spoilers.

The first thing you need to know before going to see the third and (for now) final “Pirates of the Carribean” installment is that if you weren’t geeking-out over the first two films’ surprisingly rich internal-mythology, attention-rewarding multi-plotting and laundry-list of talismans, curses, monster-species and competing character factions but instead just sort of let all the detail wash over you while you grooved on the eye-candy spectacle and Johnny Depp’s gonzo turn as Captain Jack Sparrow… Well, then you should probably watch them AGAIN with both ears on the names/allegiances/locales/backstories “fanboy” details before heading out to #3, or there’s fair odds you’re going to feel a little lost this time around.

Indeed, “At World’s End” quickly reveals itself as a quintessential creature of the ongoing Geek Age of Cinema: It’s all about expanding-on, playing-out and ultimately paying-off plot threads, countdowns and mysteries that’ve been building since the original film, the cinematic equivalent of an individual comic book (or installment of a serialized novel, for that matter) which draws it’s power not only from it’s own singular events and merits but because it’s also the moment where a certain background-story or lingering detail from so-and-so many issues ago FINALLY gets it’s payoff. All of which is a more analytical way of saying, before anything else, that “Pirates 3” works to the extent that it’s the final part of a whole, and while it has it’s own story-points and character-arcs to work with it gets it’s REAL “oomph” from what has been carried over from the earlier films. Traditionally, this has been THE damning criticism of any sequel or outside-influenced film in general: That it doesn’t fully work without the “backup” of it’s external material.

But now, I wonder… given the “age of cross-platforming and multimedia” we’ve entered, if it really still ought to be. Canceled TV shows continuing their “official” continuity in post-cancellation movies and comic books, film websites offering “webisodes” expanding on pre-movie character mythology, animated short-subject “prequels” or “in-betweenquels” coming out on DVD between Blockbuster installments… these are all commonplace, mainstream movie-culture goings on now. Yes, fine, those of us in the “Geek Community” are pre-acclimated, most of us having spent decent time pouring through comic-book continuity where huge reveals came with yellow editorial boxes instructing us on which back-issue of a completely different book to track down in order to fully “get” what was happening. But in a time when “Lost” is a mega-hit network TV show and the third “Lord of The Rings” chapter is a Best Picture winner, is it really proper to damn the third “Pirates of the Carribean” for operating under the presumption that it’s intended audience has already seen, and was paying attention during, the first two – especially when they’re two of the highest-grossing movies of all time?

Make of that whatever you will, but the plain fact is that I DID see the first two, I WAS paying attention and as such, “PoTC: AWE” worked for me. Worked like hell, in fact. 2 hours and 45 minutes of elaborately-staged action, terrifically imagined monsters and dizzyingly-dense exploration of franchise mythology. It’s a massive, preposterously entertaining winner.

Fully recapping the plot, as it would also require recapping the other two movies as well, would spoil a lot of the fun, but suffice it to say that it eventually boils down to a series of big-stakes shell-games being played by dozens of characters with several dozens of magic tokens, items/persons of interest and valuable information amid a full-blown naval war between the world’s Pirates and the British Navy – which has been hijacked by Lord Beckett, the evil mastermind of the East India Trading Company (cute.) As of movie #2, Beckett has turned demonic sea-scourge Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) and his crew of human/fish hybrid monsters into his own personal warrior/slaves by capturing the Dead Man’s Chest containing Jones’ disembodied heart. He’s using Jones and his submersible demon-ship, the Flying Dutchman, as a weapon to enforce total control of the sea trade. Facing extermination, the world’s remaining “Pirate Lords” have been called to a battle-planning session – part of which requires that undead Captain Barbosa (Geoffrey Rush,) possibly-tragic lovers Elizabeth Swan (Keira Knightley) and Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and their crew to cross-over into the Land of the Dead to fetch recently-deceased Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) from Davy Jones’ Locker. And that’s just for starters.

What makes the labrynthine mythos of this series work so well and move so briskly is that the writers openly embrace the inherent “shiftiness” that comes from most of the characters being, well, PIRATES. As such, everyone has their own set of agendas and the double-crosses, backstabs and treachery flies fast and loose all over the place: Everyone is trying to get-over on everyone else, and their all expecting it to one degree or another. Will is still trying to save his father from Jones’ captivity, Elizabeth wants revenge on Beckett (and she’s wracked with guilt after murdering Jack to save her and her friends at the end of the last movie,) Jack is getting worse and worse at pretending he doesn’t care about anyone but himself but seems clueless what to do about it, Jones wants his heart back, Chinese pirate Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat) wants to stay on the winning side of history, Barbosa is hoping for the Pirate Lords’ help in freeing the magically-imprisoned sea goddess Calypso to hopefully even the odds against Beckett/Jones, and at one point or another every one of them sets about trying to sell out all the others in order to accomplish their chosen ends.

swimming around in all that plot is an overarching story that’s unquestionably the darkest and richest of the trilogy – it’s a rare film that can turn the absurd image of a “beached” Godzilla-sized squid into an exchange that gives two of the previously most “surface-y” characters untold depths.. and then does the same thing for the entire bloody series reaching back. In the broad strokes, the film’s buccaneers-versus-beaurocrats setup plays out less like a battle between Colonial-era law and open-seas anarchy than as a last stand of mythic maritime fantasy against enroaching reality: Magic compasses and octopus-faced sea monsters fighting for survival against gunpowder and trade-stamps. Frequently, this undercurrent of subtext bubbles up so fiercely that the film begins to resemble those of Terry Gilliam; who was making “absurdity-as-a-virtue” epic fantasies decades before “Pirates” made it a blockbuster template (irony-of-ironies: Gilliam’s most-infamous recent troubled project to die in infancy: An offbeat fantasy/adventure starring Johnny Depp. OUCH.)

Amazingly, even though it STILL feels overstuffed with fish-men, giants, betrayals, twists, magic crabs, dimension-skipping and ships sailing on sand despite a nearly three-hour running time; it finds time and room to achieve an impressive number of non-visual goals: Explaining the function and origin of Davy Jones, offering a visual peak at just HOW manic Jack Sparrow’s perception of the world around him seems to be, give Keira Knightley room and reason to do what she does best – i.e. swell her screen presence up to MASSIVE heights despite her dainty frame by sheer force of those amazingly expressive eyes and her incongruous gift for belting out rally-cry speeches like the “300” Spartans, and even set Orlando Bloom’s Will Turner firmly back into his place as the principle HERO of the series (a feat which seemed implausible given how cheerfully #2 allowed co-star Depp to overtake the story.)

What else can you say about an action movie that can be summed up entirely by it’s climactic setpeice battle: Two massive sail-ships, one of “good” Pirates and the other of evil fish-man monsters, firing cannon volleys at one another while circling a giant supernatural whirlpool? It has it’s issues, it’s silly as all get-out… but this is the kind of entertainment the movies were made for, the kind that justify the spectacle in the word “spectacular.”

FINAL RATING: 8/10

Yes, yes, covering “Plastic Ono”-era John Lennon for a Save Darfur album is just about the definition of “not punk rock.” Y’know what else is “not punk rock?” Going around saying stuff is “not punk rock.” At this point, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that GreenDay can put together a metal-tinged mini-epic – but for some reason you still kinda say “This is who? Seriously? Wow.”

Anyway; great song, great cover, great cause, great job. It being no secret that there is something really, really wrong with my wiring, however; the first time I heard it the idea immediately popped into my head to make an I’m-mostly-kidding-but-also-maybe-kinda-serious hagiographic music video tribute to the Super Mario Bros. Because they’re blue-collar plumbers, see.. and also heroes. And because I grew up in the 80s and have a profoundly skewed way of mentally sorting-out the world around me.

So I did. Enjoy!

“Transformers” finally has it’s round of “real” trailers hitting theatres and TV, and wouldn’t you know it the streak of me being either underwhelmed or utterly horrified by every single solitary promotional image, teaser or “leaked” image from the film is more-or-less over. It’s a good trailer, well cut with lots of action and buildup. Looks like every other Michael Bay movie, yeah, but you were expecting that – and every other Michael Bay movie had a great trailer, too. Michael Bay, after all, basically makes feature-length trailers.

See it here:
http://movies.yahoo.com/summer-movies/Transformers/1808716430/trailers/31

The bad news is, well… the Transformers themselves still look like ass. I’m aware that I may as well not even bring that up anymore, because no matter what people will jump to the immediate conclusion that it’s just “fanboy” complaining that they don’t look exactly like their cartoon counterparts, but I just can’t ignore it: From a purely asthetic standpoint, the majority of these guys strike me as some of the most un-cool looking movie robots since “Saturn 3.” I can appreciate the intricacy of all the little wheels and parts flipping around in the transforming animations, and there’s certainly a cohesive “theme” going on – but, I’m sorry.. yuck. They all end up looking like generic H.R. Geiger knockoff “aliens” with car parts glued to them.

Oh, and what little dialogue/acting we’re shown also sucks… but, again, it’s Michael Bay. You were expecting that… though I’m surprised even Bay would serve up a trailer who’s big slugline is “BRING IT!!!!” Sheesh…

In any case, Hollywood is expecting a pretty decent hit from this, so a mini-boom of mid-1980s toy/toon franchise movies is currently being greenlit. Most recent to the table: “Masters of The Universe,” here reported on by CHUD’s Devin Faraci…
http://www.chud.com/index.php?type=news&id=10315

…who is really waaaaaaay too grumpy about this sort of thing for a guy reporting for a film geek news site named after a 1980s Daniel Stern sewer-monster movie. I mean, I like Devin, but lately… gah! it’s like he’s auditioning to become Jeffery Wells:
http://www.chud.com/index.php?type=news&id=10039

Let’s be perfectly honest: There was really no reason to make a 3rd “Shrek” movie. The most interesting part of the story was already told in the original, all the necessary loose-ends and character arcs were tied up in the second, etc. Aside from the garaunteed boxoffice paydirt set to be innevitably scored by financially-wobbly Dreamworks, there was really no pressing “need” to revisit this particular franchise.

Fortunately, unnecessary isn’t always the companion of “bad.”

The original “Shrek” got most of it’s early buzz from it’s much-touted spoofing of the Disney brand, but it became a gigantic hit on the strength of it’s refreshingly small, character-focused story. True, it was wedged in among a lot of pop-culture jokery and broad satire, but there was a genuinely moving and engaging central narrative at work and audiences responded to it. The law of diminishing returns kicked in a bit with “Shrek 2,” but it was an overall worthwhile entry from the “bigger and wackier” school of sequel-making.

“Shrek the Third” wisely dials the scale back a bit from #2’s epic size, offering up what amounts to a “here we go again” mini-adventure (or two, really) that feels at points more like the third act to a longer cut of the second film than a seperate entity in it’s own right: Just as Shrek (Mike Meyers) and Fiona (Cameron Diaz) are gearing up to leave Far Far Away and head back to their cozy swamp cottage, King Harold (Fiona’s dad, voice of John Cleese) passes away – leaving Shrek next in line for the throne. Shrek is acutely aware that he’s not at all cut out for the job, and he’s already wrestling with his angst over Fiona’s just-announced pregnancy, so when he learns another heir exists in the person of Fiona’s dorky cousin Arthur (Justin Timberlake) he jumps at the chance to set out on yet another quick quest with Donkey (Eddie Murphy) and Puss N’ Boots (Antonio Banderas) to go and fetch him. Meanwhile, evil Prince Charming, (Rupert Everett,) still smarting from his defeat at the end of the last film, seizes on a temporarily Shrek-less kingdom as the ideal opportunity to stage an invasion of Far Far Away with help from an assembled army of fairytale villians.

It’s more than a little dissapointing that, after the clever upending of Disney-fied fairytale iconography in the original film, this installment can’t seem to find much material to mine in it’s broad satire of Arthurian fables once Timberlake’s “Artie” enters the picture. The basic gag is to relocate Camelot to a sitcom High School (Lancelot= jock, Merlin= hippie teacher, and so on) which is cute, but also a bit… stale. The story also suffers noticably from the lack of a great antagonist. Everett has fun with Charming, but the sole and sufficient joke to the character (“THE Prince Charming is the bad guy, the ogre is the good guy!”) was played-out by the end of #2 – where he was a supporting villian for a reason. And while the “bad guy army” is a fun idea, it’s mostly a collection of gags we already saw in the other two movies.

Basically, there’s a distinct sense of half-effort coloring a lot of the broader story strokes, but the consolation prize to that is the rest of the film being similarly light and unpretentious: the gags fly fast and loose, and it seldom feels the need to pile on the “this is IMPORTANT!!!” pathos – it plays like an above-average episode of a weekly sitcom, and in this case it’s a solid choice. And there’s a lot of fun to be had in the subplot of Fiona’s all-Princess baby shower teaming up to fight Charming.

What still works the best, and helps make the film not entirely disposable, is Shrek himself. It was quite a revelation, coming to the original film informed only by the slapstick-heavy trailers, that the titular grumpy ogre turned out to be that rare children’s film hero who was actually characterized by a certain intelligence: Shrek isn’t a “lovable oaf,” he’s a clever and fairly shrewd character – which made perfect sense given the solitary existance we’re told he’d been living most of his life, and gave an added poignance to his “outcast by choice” situation in the original film: It wasn’t that he “didn’t know any better,” we could tell he had chosen his path based on genuine pain and a more-than-complete understanding of how the world regarded him.

This continues here in the subplot of Shrek’s unease at impending fatherhood: Usually when a franchise takes this road, the go-to angle is that of an immature guy leery of being forced to definatively “grow-up” as a father. Shrek, on the other hand, is already a grown-up, and he has a grown-up reason for his worry: Not only does he fear not being able to handle the responsibility, he’s really worried that his overall nature will make him a less-than-ideal parent: “Wait till you meet my Dad, he’s a real OGRE,” he sighs, noting that no one’s ever uttered that phrase in a positive context. When we get the obligatory “nightmare” sequence as Shrek imagine’s himself in a deluge of babies, the theme of the “fear” is that he’s barely able to keep them from injuring themselves. To the degree it can in a cartoon about an ogre, this feels real. This feels relatable.

It’s probably time to call it quits on the series at this point, and the movie itself isn’t in any way essential, but it’s likable and inoffensive. In a Summer season that’s going to deliver both a Michael Bay movie and a “Resident Evil” threequel, there are worse things to be.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

The original “28 Days Later” was, initially, one of those movies that the target audience was already in love with before any of them had seen it. For months leading up to it’s release, film geeks of the horror-phile set gorged on a steady diet of legend and hype about the film’s myriad fresh, new qualities: It’s shaky-cam verite (not yet done to irritating death by the “Bourne” movies,) it’s bleak vision of apocalypse and, most importantly of all: It was a NEW ZOMBIE MOVIE! Hard to remember, but pre-“28DL,” zombie movies were, you’ll pardon the pun, a dead genre. And though the featured creatures of Danny Boyle’s mini-epic weren’t technically “zombies,” they operated under most of the same basic rules and the tone, setup and style drew clear and unashamed influence from all things Romero and Fulci; and it can be easily argued that this was the point-of-origin for the Zombie Renaissance. We can also BLAME it for introducing the loathsome concept of “super-speed zombies,” but you know what they say about omletes…

And yet, there’s still no zombies in this new sequel from newbie “Intacto” helmer Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. Well, c’est la vie. Instead, we’re once again up against “The Infected” (priority one for “28 MONTHS Later”: give the monsters a better name,) aka ordinary humans who’ve contracted “Rage,” a kind of jacked-up rabbies that near-instantaneously turns infectees into psychotic, feral flesh-eaters. As mentioned, “The Infected” play by zombie rules despite their functioning nervous systems and Barry Allen legwork – a bite or blood-contact will turn you into one of “them” instantly, they travel in packs and vary in intelligence depending on what will cause maximum tension from scene to scene.

As the sequel opens, we learn that The Rage never spread beyond it’s original British outbreak site due to England being an island; and that by evacuating and sealing-off the entire country The Infected have been effectively starved into extinction. 28 Weeks Later (hence the title) a U.S. led NATO force has begun the task of re-introducing humanity into a small secure “green zone” (nudge-nudge-wink-wink) on the Isle of Dogs. Early focus falls on a civilian official (Robert Carlyle) who’s just been re-united with his out-of-the-country-during-this-whole-thing children… and who has a bit of explaining to do about what exactly happened to Mum. The military personel seem to have a decent handle on the situation, though there’s concern as to how soon is “too soon” to begin reconstruction. And, of course, should The Rage turn out to not be quite as wiped-out as we thought…

To be honest, it wouldn’t be fair to go any further than that, as 28WL manages to pack a startling number of “whoa!” surprises into it’s plot before the first act is even up, but suffice it to say that the shit does, in fact, hit the fan and pretty soon everyone is knee-deep in Infected again – leaving the NATO team in a difficult position: Keep fighting and hope it’s winnable, or accept that you can’t always save the world and bust out the Napalm in the name of the greater good.

“Zombie” movies, by nature, lend themselves easily to social commentary – featuring as they do antagonists who exist as grotesque parodies of “normal” life. So it’s tempting (and at this point kind of unavoidable) to want to see these installments as a kind of political metaphor. But the original film defied simplistic political analysis: It’s big (human) baddies were a squad of nasty BSAF recruits perhaps a little TOO welcoming of Armageddon, yes… but it also set up that this localized-apocalypse came about because of overzealous animal rights activists.

This sequel remains equally defiant of simple “red vs. blue” filtration: It’s easy to read a form of Iraq analogy into the overall situation of soldiers trying to introduce civilization to a population with a nasty habit of turning into bloodthirsty subhumanoids out of the blue (Infectees= Iraqis? The Rage= religious fundamentalism?) but the film doesn’t seem to take a “side” as to what should be done – it sympathizes equally with the soldiers and their terribly limited options AND with the innocent people who’re likely to get the short end either way.

This is one HELL of a great horror film, an equal to it’s predecessor and a genuinely good ride. I reccomend it.

FINAL RATING: 8/10