By now it’s a custom for critics, especially web/blog-based critics, to open their reviews of “Land of The Dead” with a paragraph or more laying out how familiar they are with George Romero’s “dead” cycle as a way of establishing their respective “geek cred.” I think my geek cred is established enough already, so I’ll break with that custom to a degree. Bottom line: This is a you-do-or-you-don’t sort of thing. Either the name George A. Romero means something to you or it doesn’t. Either you’re excited by the prospect of Mr. Romero shooting another zombie movie, or you’re not.

Whichever camp you fall into, you still ought to give this a look regardless. Amid all of the niche-targeted hype that the genre’s “creator” has made “his ultimate zombie masterpiece,” and the pages and pages of digital debate over old-school slow zombies (used here) versus the newfangled running zombies (seen elsewhere,) is the simple fact that this is a sharp, funny, scary horror movie that’s also leagues smarter and more character driven than most any offering we get in the summertime from any genre.

To recap: In three prior, loosely-connected films (“Night of The Living Dead,” “Dawn of The Dead,” “Day of The Dead,”) Romero imagined a slow-burn apocalypse occuring as an unexplained zombie plague sweeps the planet. As “Land” opens, the end of the world “as we know it” has come and gone. The zombies have more or less overrun the globe, and all that remains of human civilization has walled itself up inside a secure, unspecified city. Here, most of the citizens live a harsh, impoverished existance, but there is still an elite upper-class that rules over the place in pre-armageddon oppulence from the skyscraper-ensconed “community” of Fiddler’s Green. The upper-class, in turn, are ruled over by Kaufman (Dennis Hopper.)

The main heroes of the piece are among the scavenger-soldiers Kaufman employs to trek out into the zombie-infested wilderness for the food, medicine and other supplies he uses to maintain order and power. When high-level soldier Cholo (John Leguizamo) sees his plan to join the ranks of Fiddler’s Green cut down by Kaufman, he hijacks the armored anti-zombie assault-vehicle Dead Reckoning and tries to hold the city for ransom. As this occurs during and eventually amplifies an uptick in zombie aggression, Kaufman sends a team of colorful rogues out to retrieve Dead Reckoning. To say that nothing goes exactly according to plan is a given, no?

Oh, and the zombies? In the film’s sharpest moment of inspiration, the zombies themselves are off on their own paralell story until the final act. Until then, Romero makes good at paying off the notion of “evolution” among the walking dead he’s been hinting at since “Dawn”: Having claimed much of the world for themselves, the zombies are now content to shamble about pantomiming crude approximations of the lingering memories of their prior existance. A turning point comes when one zombie, a lumbering one-time gas station attendant the film credits only as “Big Daddy,” apparently develops a sense of… well, anger at the Dead Reckoning crew’s slaughter of his “people.” Making like a half-rotted Spartacus, Big Daddy organizes his fellow zombies into a march on Fiddler’s Green, during the course of which they are able to re-learn the use of tools… And weapons. Including guns.

As you may surmise, much of the film follows the side-by-side stories of the human heroes seeking to avert Cholo’s “terrorist” threat and Big Daddy’s undead horde questing for vengeance. The two lines are, of course, set to collide as Cholo’s rash scheme allows Big Daddy an entry-point to his target city… but Romero takes his time getting there; prefering instead to focus on the strong suits of the franchise: Elaborate, endlessly-inventive gore, allegorical social commentary and development of colorful characters. In especially that last area, the film is easily the strongest of the series since “Dawn,” as the wide-scale surrealism of a “zombie planet” allows the human characters room to be drawn with broad eccentricity: Our good-guys include a one-eyed, mentally-retarded but super-accurate sniper, a plump Samoan tough guy named Pillsbury and Asia Argento as a prostitute rescued from being fed to zombies colloseum-style.

But the standout character, and the element that puts the film up over the top into horror movie greatness, is Big Daddy (played, for the record, by veteran character actor Eugene Clark.) The masterstroke here is that Romero has turned the idea of the zombies’ “simpleness” back over onto itself: While all of the human heroes are initially running on shifting, complex, semi-selfish impulses for situational-morality or self-preservation, Big Daddy’s “simple” instinct to rally his people in defense against outside plunderers eventually renders unto him a kind of classical heroic nobility: An undead Obi-Wan cast opposite a half-dozen human Han Solos. With an almost invisible subtlety, Romero uses Big Daddy to transform the “rules” of zombie behavior into a whole new paradigm: by simply changing the context, the zombie moans and grunts become roars of anguished defiance; while the slow, deliberate shuffling Romero’s undead hordes are famous for become here an image of determination.

On the gore side, the reliable KNB give their collective imaginations a work out. Without spoiling a thing, those of you who thought you’d seen zombies and humans tear one another apart in just about every way possible after nearly half a century of these films… think again. There’s at least two “no way!” kills on display here. And yes, continuity fans, a character from the prior installments makes a showpiece appearance. You’ll have to see it to see who.

“Smart horror movie” isn’t as much of an oxymoron as some would have you think, but they don’t come much smarter or as well-made as “Land of The Dead.” A longtime-coming love letter to the genre and it’s fans this may be, but it’s accessible and well worth your time whether you’re a diehard who can spot every cameo or a newcomer who doesn’t know George Romero from Ceasar Romero.

FINAL RATING: 9/10

I’m assuming most of the interested parties have seen this by now, but I wanted to try out Blogger’s new photo option so I figured this’d be as good a reason as any…

“Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe” finally has it’s one sheet, and as far as I’m concerned this is damn near the best poster for anything I’ve seen in years. But I’ll let you be the judge of that.

Ain’t it purty, though?

What I like about this is, it’s a massively eye-catching poster and it works on both levels: If you’re a fan, you’re getting a good solid look at the film versions of Aslan, Jadis, the children and even some of the monsters. If you’re not, I can’t imagine that seeing this on a movie theater wall between all the other posters mainly consisting of actor’s headshots wouldn’t make you pause and wonder just what it is you’re looking at.

A small note of controversy HAS been generated in the fandom, though: The poster is the first indication of any noteworthy changes from the text, in that it seems the Witch’s sleigh is here being pulled by polar bears as opposed to reindeer. My take: Polar bears are cooler 🙂

Entertainment-industry reporting is a strange thing, in as much as most of the “ordinary” people who are absorbing it have no real idea of what the news ever actually means. For example, many of you have probably heard that the movie industry is in a “slump” in terms of movie theater ticket sales. Almost no one ever bothers to go into what this “slump” is, or what it’s supposed to mean, but the idea catches on anyway: “Hollywood is in a slump” is now an article of gospel truth in the U.S. media.

First, a definition is in order. This “slump” actually refers to the following phenomenon: For 17 weeks straight, weekend movie-ticket sales totaled less than they did on the same day last year.

And thats it. All this bruhaha boils down to is that the Studio line-graph is not running as high as last year’s. There’s no steady, bottoming-off decline in ticket sales or some dramatic downturn of major proportions, it’s simply a matter of 2005 thus far not being as overall profitable as 2004.

In every other rational industry on Earth, i.e. those not prone to engineering their financial reports into narratives as entertaining as their products, this is simply known as “the way markets work.” Things go up, things go down, some times are more profitable than others. But in Hollywood, where entire studio dynasties can rise and fall in a matter of weeks based only on the fortunes of ONE movie, the failure to defy all known laws of economics and continue to perpetually rise in profitability MUST be viewed as a cataclysm worthy of profound concern.

In my opinion, the particular hysteria that has gripped The Biz this summer is largely fueled by the studio executives’ well-documented, near-pathological need to always be correct. In a business that turns on random variables of cultural taste, the only bosses that survive are those who can “prove” to be always right in their predicitions. So, of course, everyone will tell you that they are always right, no matter what.

So goes the logic, then, that most Hollywood business-types would prefer bad news that makes their predictions look right over good news that would make them look wrong. And for at least a year now, the majority of studio predictors have been big on the doom-and-gloom: Piracy will kill the boxoffice. Too many sequels/remakes will kill the boxoffice. Ticket prices will kill the boxoffice. DVD sales will kill the boxoffice. In my estimation, the wildfire-spreading of this “slump” concept is owed to this more than any rational concern: Faced with not-great financial news, the doomsayers are playing it up because it helps makes them look right.

Doomsayer: “Batman Begins’ ONLY made seventy-million!!! Y’see, I told you that illegal downloading was going to kill us!”

Yes, truly the sky is falling, huh? And hey, isn’t Disney’s big Summer family offering a feature-length version of “Chicken Little?” Spooky…

So yeah, eventually I’m concerned but not SUPER concerned about the “slump,” and really you oughtn’t be either. It doesn’t really immediately effect any of us. What SHOULD concern us, and what does concern me, is that Hollywood sees this “slump” as a physically real thing, a lumbering monster that MUST be destroyed. And whichever film eventually “breaks the slump,” i.e. “makes more money than some other movie the same weekend last year,” will be crowned “slump-slayer.”

And thats where my worry comes in: Whatever the “slump-slayer” is, all of those eternally-retroactively-correct studio prognosticators will arrive instantaneously at the same unanimous conclusion: That “what we were doing” (read: EVERY movie that is not slump-slayer) wasn’t getting the job done, and that THIS (read: whatever sort of movie slump-slayer is) is “what the people must have been waiting for.” Whatever characteristics distinguish slump-slayer from the pack will become the dominant paradigm of mainstream filmmaking no matter what it is. If a documentary about the political structures of sexual role-play among the migratory African albino-capabera comes out and manages to make more money that whatever came out in it’s approximate weekend slot last year, knock-offs of documentaries about the political structures of sexual role-play among the migratory African albino-capabera will be playing on every other screen for the forseeable future.

Does that scare you? It scares me. It scares me because of how easily something lousy could wind up the slump-slayer and spread it’s lousiness virus-like across the movie landscape. Yes, something GOOD could become slump-slayer and we’d have the possibility of good resulting from it’s arrival, but the negative could be far worse.

I dunno about you, but I more-or-less like the current situation of cinema: I like that we back up dumptrucks full of Oscars at the door of epic fantasy trilogies. I like that costumed superheroes and Zen kung-fu masters have overthrown surly muscleheads and cops “who don’t play by the rules” as the action heroes du jour. I like that “Miss Congeniality 2” vanished without a trace, and that I haven’t had to see a Meg Ryan movie lately. I love that “Batman Begins” crushed “The Perfect Man” under it’s big rubber boot. I adore that Tarantino poured every ounce of his considerable talents into a two-films-long kung-fu/samurai/horror/mystery/action/revenge/gore epic. I worship that Robert Rodriguez, Brian Singer and Christopher Nolan treat comic-adaptations as though they’ve been assigned to preserve holy relics. This is an immensely good time for filmmaking. If the slump-slayer is, say, a “Monster In-Law”-style romcom, would the return to top-tier prominence of such drivel be anything but a total disaster?

And it could get MUCH worse: The so-called “values” crowd, Bozell, Dobson, Falwell, Baer, etc., have been doing their own “reporting” on the “slump,” and wouldn’t you know that they’re pushing their own theory of what’s going on: Namely, that the new “moral” American public are rejecting “secular” (read: not extremist-fundamentalism) Hollywood fare; and that if only Hollywood would put it’s effort into their sort of films (like, say, Mel Gibson’s torture-porn “Passion,”) the slump would end. Hopefully, they’re as wrong about this as they are about most everything else, but this should be cause for concern nonetheless: If slump-slayer is anything even remotely “moral” or “family-friendly,” watch for this crew to spin like mad that it’s success is “proof” that Americans are “rejecting” movie sex and violence in favor or “traditional morality.”

Bottom line: “The Slump” is not something for most of us to be overly-worried about. Bad filmmaking trends taking advantage of the slump (intending to or not) and poisoning the movie landscape… as far as I’m concerned we can’t be concerned ENOUGH about that. Something will break the “slump.” Pray to whatever god one such as you may worship that it’s something we could stand to see more of.

The battle continues.

WARNING: Review may contain plot spoilers, read at your own risk. This goes double for all of my comic-book devotee readers, who may infer things from this review that I assure you you’ll want to save for the theater. You have been warned.

Popular-culture mythology has long maintained that what killed Warner Bros. original “Batman” franchise was the hiring of director Joel Schumacher, who brought “camp,” bloat and silliness to the 3rd and 4th films. MovieBob, on the other hand, has long maintained that popular-culture mythology is wrong. In actuality, in spite of whatever virtues it did possess, the “Batman” franchise was broken from the start, and all of the much-lamented flaws in the Schumacher films (an underdeveloped lead character, more attention to art design than story structure and overhyped marquee-name actors mis-cast as villians) was present all the way back in the heralded Tim Burton entries. The series was going in the wrong direction from the moment Michael Keaton’s hollow rubber shell of a Batman first stepped onto the streets of a hellaciously overdesigned Gotham City to battle a Joker that was little more than Jack Nicholson doing his usual schtick under clown makeup.

Now, with “Batman Begins,” we have Warner Bros. doing what many thought would never be possible: Re-starting the franchise from the ground up, with both eyes fixed on placing the Dark Knight back on top of the superhero-movie pantheon. They’ve been spurred to decision, doubtless, by the success of the Marvel comic-to-movie cycle of recent, and the increasingly permanent-looking mainstreaming of the superhero genre that has spun out of it, but make no mistake: WB is no mere visitor to the genre. With superhero movies the emerging standard of action filmmaking, and Warner Bros. being the only film studio to own an entire comic book company (DC Comics) and thusly the movie rights to over fifty-percent of the most popular characters in the medium… the idea of that they would finally “get” the material, place it in the hands of serious filmmakers, plan franchises long-term and (most importantly) show a profound respect for the properties and their fans… has been the big “what if?” of the so-called “comic book movie craze.”

As of June 15, 2005, that big “what if” is the big “what now?” I’m here today to tell you that “someday” has arrived. Warner Bros., formerly the film studio most maligned (and for good reason) by geek culture and comic fans especially, has gotten it. The same studio that, only eight years ago, all-but killed the superhero movie with stunt-casting, careless writing and outright disrespect for the medium, has handed director Christopher Nolan the keys to the kingdom and one of the best casts of any film this year and turned both loose on Batman. The result is the best action film of the summer so-far, and unquestionably the next great leap for the “comic book movie.”

Batman “himself” doesn’t appear in costume for almost an hour into the film. Instead, the film takes it’s time getting about creating a living world and populating it with characters and relationships that make it breathe. As the familiar beats of the Batman backstory are laid out, (Bruce Wayne watches his millionaire parents killed by a random mugger and grows into a brooding seeker of vengeance on the world of crime,) the story masterfully weaves the narrative around a half-dozen different threads to give us a clear picture of how this world functions: Gotham City’s underworld empire, it’s corporate titans, it’s corrupt police force and it’s international distinction as a symbol of collapsed metropolitan ideals, are all fleshed out in wonderful detail. By the time the grownup Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is honing his martial-arts skills with a cult of moralist Tibetan ninjas called The League of Shadows, the audience already has a working knowledge of what Batman must do and why once he “Begins” in the 2nd act.

To be certain, this all has a dual purpose: The extended fleshing-out of the Batman universe is designed to ease the process franchise-building just as much as it is to turn this initial offering into a fully-rounded film in it’s own right. Warner Bros., it appears, hasn’t just learned how to make great films out of comic books, they’ve gotten a degree in it. They aren’t just setting up a foundation for more Batman movies here, their digging in their heels for a major campaign of turning “their” superheroes into movies: Along with the innevitable Bat-sequels, “Superman” is on the way alongside Wonder Woman and others.

And thus, when Bruce turns up again in Gotham as a grown man on a mission, he slips into as astoundingly complex and intricate a world as has ever been rendered for a superhero franchise on it’s maiden voyage: Wayne Industries, once the financial arm of the late Mr. Wayne’s Gotham-centric altruism, has been usurped by a greedy tycoon (Rutger Hauer.) Former board member Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) has been exiled to the lower depths to catalogue discontinued military hardware (y’know, the kind a superhero might need.) Mafia boss Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) runs roughshod over a police force that is utterly corrupt save for the lone Sgt. James Gordon (Gary Oldman.) Arkham Asylum is overflowing with criminally-insane patients under the care of Dr. Johnathan Crane, (Cillian Murphy,) who likes to don a burlap mask and douse people with fear-inducing toxin as a would-be supervillian called The Scarecrow. There’s also the issue of the League of Shadows and it’s leaders Ras Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe) and Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson), with whom Wayne did not part on the best of terms.

In other words, it’s a situation in need of a superhero. What it gets instead is more like a creature. For the first time, a Batman film has understood that Batman’s main “ability” is to be scary. Bale’s Batman is, yes, costumed once again in a suit of rubber-like armor, but he moves and fights more like the title beasts of the “Alien” films than a costumed crimefighter: Bad guys are yanked into shadows, pulled through floors and tugged up into the air with fearsome speed, and somehow it becomes possible to be afraid of Batman even as you’re rooting for him to win.

And just wait until you see what Batman and his director have saved up for the final act, involving no less than full-scale riot-police deployment, car-to-train chases, ninjas warfare, mass-psychedelic hysteria, a prison break, a big twist and at least two “what to expect in #2” teases that’ll have comic fans spinning theories for months.

There’s just so much that works here, it’s almost hard to take it all in at once: Bale is the perfect Batman, the first actor able to convey a plausibly direct divide between Millionaire Playboy and Dark Knight. The way the film works the often-overlooked angle of Wayne using “bad” public behavior to divert attention from his “real” business. The way every major action scene, even the chaotic third act, is a direct result of the story and never an aside to it. Oldman’s instant “I-like-this-guy”-ness as the future Commissioner Gordon, an audience-p.o.v. character who for a change doesn’t come close to wearing out his welcome. The subtle visual nuances of Scarecrow’s chemically-induced hallucinations.

And still more… The way Neeson so eagerly chews into the meat a role that cleverer reviewers than myself have already dubbed “Qui-Gone Wrong.” The way the filmmakers, so obviously conscious of their prime-audience, turn what seemed like their biggest deviation from a character’s established history into their best story surprise instead. And let’s hear it for Michael Caine as wise butler Alfred Pennyworth, here concieved as the man charged with teaching Batman how to be Bruce Wayne.

There’s only ONE element that just doesn’t work, and it’s Katie Holmes. Quite simply, this is a serious, complex bit of moviemaking, and she just doesn’t prove up to it. Her character is chronically out-of-place throughout the film, and it doesn’t help matters that Mrs. Holmes is an emerging actress of (thus far) average range, and she’s surrounded by a collection of the finest character actors in the business. (Seriously: Freeman, Neeson, Hauer, Caine, Watanabe, Oldman, Wilkinson, Murphy, Bale… comic-book movies are becoming talent magnets of the Shakespeare-movie level.)

More problematic is that Holmes’ character, District Attorney Rachel Dawes, seems to have been ordered into the film solely on the basis of a lack of any other strong female characters, and it’s a bad fit: As an unnecessary secondary law-enforcement ally to Batman, the character detracts from Jim Gordon’s development, and as an unnecessary moral-foil to Bruce she detracts from Alfred. The most frequent complaint you will hear from the “fanboy” set about this film will be that this character should have been scrapped in favor of the Batman-saga’s usual D.A. (and future “Two-Face”) Harvey Dent, and I don’t disagree with them.

So Holmes’ role and her turn in it are bad enough missteps to render the film JUST shy of perfection, yes. But don’t let that discourage you from seeing this if you’ve got any inkling to whatsoever. This is the summer’s best action offering so far, featuring the best cast assembled this year so far. The superhero movie genre has a whole new player in the re-focused Warner Bros., and with “Batman Begins” they’ve now set the bar several spaces higher.

FINAL RATING: 9/10

If you ask me, one of the BIG reasons that the Democrats have become so sidelined as a political force is because, within the two-party system, the Republicans are currently stuck in the midst of a continuing split into two parties in it’s own right: Old-guard, small government, low-tax conservatives on one side; and the so-called “Religious Right,” who’s leaders actually support big-government intervention so long as it’s enforcing their fundamentalist ideals on the American public, which has all but declared “ownership” of the party after the exit polls claimed that “moral values” voters saved Bush’s tush in the last election, on the other side.

Now, two of the most visible and extreme proponents on these two-sides-of-the-same-side have declared open conflict on one another: L. Brent Bozell, leader of the Parent’s Television Council; and Grover Norquist, the famed archconservative and top-dog of Americans for Tax Reform. At issue is TV Watch, an anti-censorship lobbying group fronted by a patchwork of television industry bosses to fight against the expansion of powers by the FCC to “police” the airwaves. Bozell’s PTC rightly views TV Watch as a direct enemy of their agenda, and they’ve been knocked for a loop by TV Watch’s public relations coup of getting Norquist to speak out on their behalf to Newsweek magazine.

Here’s Norquist on the matter:
“People are saying, ‘This is puritanical Puritanism.’ No, it’s still socialism, dressing it up and getting a minister to say it doesn’t change that.”

Now, Grover stands far more to the right than I do for the most part, but when the man is right the man is right, and he’s totally right.

And here’s Bozell’s typically-hysterical response (scroll down to “Norquist vs. Public Opinion”):
http://www.mediaresearch.org/archive/entcol/welcome.asp

Bozell is so upset because Norquist marks the first major dissenter from the “moral values” party-line. Norquist is approaching this as a pro-business advocate, arguing for the TV nets to have the right to live without government interference in their business. If it catches on, it’s going to spark a major battle for which “side” is really running the show: REAL conservatives of the pro-business side, or the anti-freedom “religious” crowd represented by the PTC. And guess what: Bozell KNOWS this is a fight he might not win, and that news is as BAD for him as it is GOOD for the United States.

If you’ve read this blog frequently, you already know my position: ALL government regulation of television, radio or film content is un-Constitutional, a violation of the First Ammendment and thusly wrong. The FCC has no authority to do anything other than make sure broadcasters conduct ethical business practices, they were NEVER meant to become arbiters of public taste. All government regulation of arts or entertainment should be stripped from federal and state law, and content “policing” should be returned to the private businessmen who operate the TV nets, radio stations and movie theaters.

To those of us who still value freedom, conservative, liberal or otherwise, this is all a good thing: It’s time that American businesses stood up to the FCC for their rights to make and sell their products without interference by the government or puritan busybodies like the PTC, and it’s about time for the “conservatives” to stand up alongside their traditional businessman allies and do the right thing for America.

The battle continues.

Most films for children, even the good ones, are concieved and made almost-exclusively by grownups, and often grownups in committee at that. For good or ill, thats the truth. Always one to go against the grain, Robert Rodriguez here offers something just slightly different: A movie for kids that plays on a kid’s general level of pace a logic, features an almost-exclusively child cast (all but one of the grownups are secondary characters) and which was thought up by a kid.

The story goes that Rodgriguez, modern Hollywood’s ultimate champion of do-it-yourself filmmaking late of “Sin City,” was so impressed by the creativity of his son Racer (brothers’ names: Rocket and Rebel, really) in the imagining of a pair of made-up pre-teen superheroes that he encouraged the boy to expand their adventures into a feature-length story. Rodriguez then adapted Racer’s imaginings into this film, made on the quick using the director’s beloved digital cameras, greenscreen-sets and homemade special effects. He’s also elected to release it in 3D, that reliably gimmicky technology that Rodriguez is still much more fond of than me (though it’s more pleasant here than in his prior outing, “Spy Kids 3D.”

Despite the title, the film is really centered on gradeschool-age Max, (Racer’s middle name), a hyper-imaginative introvert who’s detailed yarns about the titular dreamed-up superhero duo have earned him the scorn of the bully Linus and grave prodding to get “real friends” by his teacher Mr. Electricidad (George Lopez, in one of four roles in the film.) At home, his parents are on the cusp of the cusp of divorce (Mom’s too much the businesswoman, Dad’s too much the dreamer) and Max just wants to run off to his made-up escapist fantasy of Planet Drool rather than face another day of it.

Which, you’ll have guessed, is exactly what happens. Shark Boy and Lava Girl come crashing (literally) into Max’s school and spirit him off to Planet Drool, where he’s needed to lead the kid resistance against evil Mr. Electric (Lopez, morphed into a digital monstrosity that looks too much like Modok to be an accident) and a mysterious supervillian who’s turning Max’s dreamscape from good to evil. Much chasing, fighting, bad-guy outwitting and magical-object hunting follows; the young heroes battle monsters made out of giant electrical plugs, rescue captives from a non-stopping rollercoaster and cross a river of milk running through a landscape of cookies.

The reason this all works in spite of.. nay, because of it’s silliness is because everyone involved appears to be taking it all with total sincerity. The film isn’t trying to be self-aware or ironic about how it unfolds, it plays like a narrative dreamed up by a little boy which is precisely what it is. The film gives it’s target audience heroes their own age, drops them into a youthful dreamscape and lets things play out without a hint of grownup irony: Baddies are throttled and traps are escaped to a soaring action-epic score, and the young actors solemnly intone their Roy Thomas-esque heroic declarations with straight-faced gravity.

Let it also be said that young Racer has a keen mind for the invention of superheroes, his creations (an amphibious, anti-hero orphan raised by Great Whites and a morphing, magma-throwing alien respectively) are a lot of fun as characters. 13 year-old martial-artist Taylor Lautner, especially, seems to be having an insane amount of fun as Shark Boy, to the extent that he may end up the film’s breakout star (which would make this the youngest an action star has debuted in a long time.)

This movie is fun, but it’s really not made for me or anyone over the age of the main cast. Not really. Adults may tolerate it, and I enjoyed it… but this is one for the kids in the purest sense of the idea. And the kids it’s made for should have a blast with it.

FINAL RATING: 8/10

Note: The following may be considered a spoiler to people who have not seen any trailers for this movie yet. You have been warned.

The big scene that “everyone will be talking about” from “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” comes a little over an hour in, and goes something like this: John and Jane Smith, an upscale suburban couple who’s marriage zipped through the intersection of Boring and Distant years ago, have just discovered that each is (unbeknownst to the other) a top-secret asassin working for a competing agency, find themselves alone together at home. Each acting under a “kill or be killed” order from their respective Shadowy Employers, they trade fire in a John Woo-reminiscient gunbattle that tears their Ikea showroom of a house to pieces. When the ammo runs out, they break out the martial-arts, exchange beatings that Danny the Dog might gladly skip, arrive at a stalemate and… drop the weapons, tear off their clothes and have the best sex of their marriage (best sex of anyone’s marriage, from the looks of it.)

I’m not kidding.

So, then… now that everything that ever need be said about the psychology of the Hollywood action-scene has been said… where do we go from here?

The big story surrounding the release of “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” has been that, for the first time in many moons, a studio has been openly concerned about the potential for a rumored offscreen cast dalliance to harm the boxoffice grosses: i.e. the notion of celeb-o-philes “boycotting” the release in protest of Brad Pitt divorcing actual-wife Jennifer Anniston for movie-wife Angelina Jolie. I have a hard time believing that there are enough people that broken up about this to matter, but in case you DO exist please put that issue of “Us” down slowly and repeat after me: It was only a TV show. Jennifer Anniston is not REALLY a “Friend” to whom you owe some kind of personal loyalty. You don’t “know” ANY of these people. Their lives have no actual relevance to you. Please, please, please seek help.

At this point, boxoffice or not, all this “Access Hollywood” nonsense has managed to shift the focus away from the actual merits of the film itself. (And why not? Since it’s such a mystery why a wealthy and powerful superstar would run off with a globe-hopping sexual-decathlete, after all…) Which is a real shame because the film itself is actually quite good. It’s a big self-conscious lark, of course, a knowing farce that coasts along on star chemistry and the structural conciet of merging the stock-scenes of a romantic comedy with the stock-scenes of an action shoot-em-up: The Smiths argue over the proper operation of a mini-van… in the middle of a car chase. They engage the various troops sent to kill them… in a department store. Get it?

None of this adds up to, or is meant to add up to, a tremendous amount. It’s a silly star-vehicle that bleeds it’s premise for all it’s worth and doesn’t aim for any kind of higher purpose: The only time it even steps outside it’s own central joke comes way into the 3rd act, and it’s for a background gag involving a bit-player’s T-shirt. Director Doug Liman has, yes, more good-movie street cred than you’d expect from someone helming so proudly commercial an enterprise as this, but that’s sort of the point: Liman’s auteur-instinct makes it all look far too good to be a fluff movie, the same way Pitt and Jolie look far to good to be just another bored married couple. (Jolie, in particular, looks once-again impossibly beautiful to the extent that, were there a complex plot to be distracted from, no one would be able to recall it.)

This is a studio cash-magnet movie, no two ways about it. It exists for no other reason than to draw as much of your money onto itself between now and this Wednesday when “Batman Begins” comes out. But it’s a topscale action pic, the comedy works and yeah, the leads do have a certain remarkable chemistry, and did I mention Jolie turns up in a rubber dominatrix bodice? It’s filmmaking-as-product, but I got what I paid for.

FINAL RATING: 7/10

WARNING: This review may contain information that may be regarded as “spoilers,” read at your own risk.

Let’s get this part out of the way: YES, this film is French. If you’re planning on skipping it solely because of that, out of some kind of obnoxious instinct you’ve mistaken for patriotism, I’m begging you: Take the 90 minutes you might otherwise have spent watching this film and grow up.

Now, if you’re planning on skipping it because you don’t enjoy subtitles, I can offer this: Though most theaters are advertising the film as “French with subtitles,” a curious technique has been employed to dub roughly 70-80% of the spoken dialogue into English: A single added line of dialogue turns a main character and her family from native French citizens into American expatriates, allowing for nearly the entirety of the film’s talk-heavy first act have all it’s actors speaking English. After that, the French-speaking characters take over for the most part… but by then the film is largely running and killing, without time for talk. This accomplishes it’s primary goal of rendering the film more “accessible” to English-speaking audiences, but it also may have the curious effect of turning what was intentioned as a French spin on the American “slasher” genre into, for some, a kind of parable about an innocent American family being (literally) torn to shreds by a perverse French psychopath.

Depending on your genre-preferences, you may or may not recall a French film released a few years back to major fanfare but lukewarm U.S. boxoffice called “Brotherhood of The Wolf.” Only a minor hit Stateside, internationally the film represented and indeed was intended to represent a throwing down of the gauntlet by the French film industry i.e. it’s lack of “street cred” in the blockbuster business. Director Christophe Gans was famously told by his producer to “beat the Americans at their own game,” and he didn’t just beat us… he kicked our ever-living ass.

A Hollywood-style “summer” action-adventure in the vein of “The Mummy” but bloodier, sexier and smarter than the Hollywood equivalent would ever be permitted to be (everything worth understanding about the difference between America and France can be understood in the truth that the French produce ultraviolent movies but feign a marked disdain for the actual violence of war, whereas America puts tremendous stock in it’s martial prowess while maintaining a puritanical censorship of films, TV and radio,) “Brotherhood” was a direct and bold statement from the French film industry to Hollywood: “From now on, anything you can do we can do also… and maybe better.” “High Tension,” (“Haute Tension” in it’s native France and, for some reason, “Switchblade Romance” in England,) viewed as a presence on the world-cinema stage, is something of a followup to that original challenge: “Yes, we can even make these!”

“These,” for the record, being the venerable American genre-staple of the rural “slasher” horror flick. The film takes a “Friday the 13th”-style lumbering unkillable super-killer, gives him the keys to the big-rusty-truck-from-hell from “Jeepers Creepers” and sends him to a very “Texas Chainsaw”-reminiscient farm county in the south of France. A pair of female college students, Marie (Cecile de France) and Alex, arrive at the home of Alex’s family to study (it becomes immediately apparent that Marie is mostly there to study Alex, the subject of her unrequitted sapphic crush) only to have their plans cut short when a hulking ogre of a serial killer invites himself into the house.

Posessed of the standard-issue “Jason”-level super strength and situational weapon skills, the killer spends a good deal of time turning Alex’s mother, father and younger brother into Fangoria photo-spreads while Marie darts through the shadows trying in vain to call for help. When the killer kidnaps Alex, Marie follows him and the film descends into a tense chase-and-stalk piece where the innability to find help slowly turns Marie into an impromptu action-heroine; eventually employing an improvised weapon that’ll likely go down with “Evil Dead 2’s” hand-mounted chainsaw and “Shaun of The Dead’s” cricket bat in the pantheon of horror movie weaponry.

Aside from it’s French origins and the overtness of it’s lesbian-longing angle, the film isn’t really trying to break much new ground. It’s extremely unnerving and unpleasant, builds it’s titular tension well, and features it’s share of novel kills and inventive bloodletting. That’s about the most one can honestly ask of any “slasher” movie at this point, whatever country it comes from. The point here is to make France a player on the horror scene, not THE player.

By now, you may or may not have heard that the film eventually arrives at a kind of twist, and you may or may not have heard that it’s decidedly a “love it or hate it” addition to the overall film. At the risk of spoiling it for you (your genre-acumen will determine how quickly you figure it out, if at all) I’m going to say nothing about it save that it both adds a lot of texture to the film but also subtracts a certain quotient of logic. I’ll leave it up to you to figure whether you think the loss is worth the gain.

Bottom line: Solid slasher entry, more remarkable for where it’s come from than the condition in which it’s arrived. Worth a look.

FINAL RATING: 7/10

Premise: “D.E.B.S.” is a secret government organization that uses a code hidden in the SAT to recruit beautiful college-age girls as master spies. Under the guise of an elite private academy, the “D.E.B.S.” agents carry out their missions in form-fitting “schoolgirl” uniforms (yes, plaid skirts and kneesocks just like your thinking) and battle supervillian Lucy Diamond, who is also a stunning college-aged young lady (didn’t ya just know it?) When a raid goes bad, top D.E.B.S. recruit Amy confronts Lucy solo and makes three amazing discoveries: A.) Lucy is a lesbian. B.) So is she. And C.) They’ve both fallen madly in love at first sight. Heroine and villianess thus begin a secret courtship of covert hanky-panky behind the backs of their innevitably-dissaproving respective “sides.”

Having read that premise, what kind of movie are you imagining “D.E.B.S.” to be? What sort of audience do you guess it was made for? Surely, based on the above description, and the obvious market appeal for gun-toting lipstick-lesbians in fetishized schoolgirl costumes, you’d be totally within reason to conclude that “D.E.B.S.” is softcore porn, another “skinemax” offering from the Seduction Cinema crew with Misty Mundae scissor-kicking her way through another glib spoof of genre film.

You’d be totally within reason to conclude this… but you’d be wrong.

What a delightful little surprise, indeed, that this film is almost a full-fledged opposite-number to the kind of straight-to-DVD masturbatory aide that it’s premise would suggest. “D.E.B.S.”, instead, unfolds as a sweet-natured PG13 teen comedy. It’s “sex” scenes are so innocent and chaste that, were the participants a heterosexual couple, it could easily achieve a PG rating and a rotating spot on the Family Channel with the deletion of a few minor curse words. It’s characters may indeed be costumed as objects of male fantasy, but the story they inhabit and the gags strung around it are aimed squarely at girls the approximate age of the heroines, and maybe younger. It’s visibly low-budget, and it’s “comedy” renders the “Austin Powers” cycle a paragon of subtlety by comparison, yes… but damn if it isn’t infectiously smile-inducing.

Equally remarkable alongside the film’s eschewing of explicit showiness in it’s lesbian romance angle is it’s wish-dream lack of concern with the “lesbian” part of the equation: Few of the characters are ever surprised at Amy’s outing, and those that are express such as a momentary “huh, how ’bout that?” manner and move on. At no point in the film are we given the indication that anyone is really bothered or even especially interested that Amy’s love-interest is another woman, (save for Amy’s bewildered former boyfriend, who pronounces the predicament “kinda hot,”) the sum-total of their objections are that Lucy Diamond is, y’know, their mortal enemy.

I’m not, you may be aware, usually prone to talking up a movie based on it’s possible use a tool of social-benefit, but y’know something… there are a lot of gay teenage girls and young women out there. Many of them are confused and even scared, despite all our much-touted strides toward tolerance, I can’t help thinking that they may not exactly be filled with reassurance or confidence at their own normalcy or ability to lead happy lives by, say, the dark nihilism of “Bound,” the “lesbo-show-for-the-guys” mentality of “Girls Gone Wild” or the gloomy soap-opera of “The L-Word.” (And how do you think young gay males see their futures as “related” by the films of Gregg Araki or David DeCocteau?)

But here is a movie, as frothy and silly as any “normal” romantic comedy, as lighthearted and youth-appropriate as “Legally Blonde” or “Mean Girls,” where the lesbian characters are presented as just a cute, more-than-a-little-ditzy couple. There’s no lumbering monsters of intolerance to slay, no horrible hateful society to overcome. In the world of “D.E.B.S.,” the idea that there could be anything “wrong” with Amy or Lucy’s sexual preference just doesn’t seem to exist. So yeah, it’s a fantasy. But it’s a fantasy worth working toward, and it’s a fantasy that I’m willing to bet a good number of young women would like to see made real… or at least as real as a jokey movie they can rent. Now, here it is.

Oh… speaking of fantasies made real (and in case you be misled that this film has nothing to offer a male audience) one of the sidekick D.E.B.S. is played by Devon Aoki, late of “Sin City.” Miho, “the one with the swords.” Yeah, now you remember. Anyway, she’s playing a sexaholic recruit who, while Asian, is apparently French and speaks with a “Fringlish” accent.

Yeah, you read right: Asian goddess, schoolgirl uniform, French accent. Guys, if you need to take a minute or two on that one, I understand 🙂

FINAL RATING: 7/10

Ever since “Boogie Nights,” the default arc for recent-history biopics has been as follows: The hero(es) begin living lives of utopian happiness in the “carefree” 1970s, and come crashing down once their various lifestyles are tainted by the stain of 1980s capitalist “greed.” Previously, the “empty” hedonism of the Disco Age was shown as the “dark finale” of the “peaceful” 60s, as seen in the 80s fantasy musical “The Apple” where 60s-style folk singers lead a rebellion against a facist Disco-themed world government. That may have worked before, but to a generation for whom the “flower children” have grown up into “the system,” it just no longer washes.

And so we have the “Boogie Nights” model: The sex, drugs, glitter-fueld and responsibility-free 70s are the days of wine and roses, and if only they could’ve gone on forever instead of being cut down by recessions, Reaganomics and AIDS. The heroes are happily living out perpetual adolescence, only to be “cruelly” smacked down by sudden and horrible adulthood. How perfectly this resonates with a certain bulk of “Generation X,” so often raised themselves in utopian extended childhoods by hippie-turned-yuppie Boomer parents only to be shocked upon entry into the real world, has everything to do with why the model keeps getting used.

“Lords of Dogtown” tries, with varying success, to press into this model the story of the rise of modern skateboard culture through the eyes of the “Z-Boys” skate pioneers in Venice Beach, California. The characters and rough outline are sketched from an excellent documentary from a few years back, “Dogtown & Z-Boys,” which should be considered required viewing if you wish to understand a single thing that happens in this film and are not already intimately familiar with the Venice Beach skate culture.

Briefly: The “Z-Boys” are Venice Beach surfer teens who, upon the invention of eurythane wheels, learn to “surf” on concrete with skateboards. Their feats of acrobatic derring-do turn skateboarding from a niche non-sport into a cultural phenomenon, but it also turns them into marketable celebrities. Eventually endorsement deals, shifting loyalty and the pressures of grownup life destroy their innocence, break the group up, contribute to the dreaded “commercialization” of the skate culture and yadda yadda yadda…

Meanwhile, the “Boogie Nights”-mandated soundtrack of classic rock hits blares on over the soundtrack, and eventually the film becomes and endless swirl of skateboard terminology and name-dropping. Certainly, those with a pre-existing fascination for the sport and this formative era may indeed find all this fascinating, and I enjoy a good show of skateboard stunts as much as the next guy… but it’s finally just hard to care about much that happens here.

Which is not to say that the material can’t be made interesting. On the contrary, writer Stacy Peralta (one of the founding Z-Boys) directed the “Dogtown” documentary which was riveting because it featured the real participants in the action, and their nostalgia was infectious. Here, with actors in the roles and a narrative drama-structure imposed, it’s just hard to develop a lot of interest.

Yes, very sad and very happy things happen to the characters, but it just can’t escape the problem that a story of a niche sport going mainstream is not in itself really very interesting to watch. It must have been fascinating to live through, and the documentary allowed the audience to experience that. The film, while earnest and made with great sincerity, just cannot accomplish the same thing. It’s like watching people’s vacation videos: No matter how interesting a place they may have traveled, the footage almost never conveys what it must have been like to be there.

FINAL RATING: 5/10