In case you hadn’t heard, “Sin City” is officially a big hit. In it’s opening weekend, the hyper-stylized, ultra-violent film handily outgunned the PG-13 romantic comedy “Beauty Shop,” and though it was unseated from first place the following week by the heavily-promoted “Sahara” it still managed to outgross another cutesy-poo romcom in “Fever Pitch.” In strictly Hollywood-business terms, the pic earned back it’s $50 Million budget already and is on track to becoming substantially profitable for the studio (especially when the ancilliary marketing and innevitably big DVD push kick in.)

This is all rather surprising and significant, primarily because few were expecting a black & white, highly-expressionistic noir-homage splatterfest; to say nothing of one based on a strictly cult-item run of graphic novels, to have much in the way of crossover appeal to mainstream audiences. Yet that’s exactly what’s happened, and it’s leaving a lot of people searching for the words to explain the success away.

Specifically, the always-delightful pro-censorship crowd is (for a change) at a loss for words here: If, as we keep being told, the country is undergoing a “spiritual reawakening” and a return to “traditional values;” then how does a film where thuggery, prostitution and gunplay are the face of a psuedo-chivalrous heroic-ideal while organized religion is comprised of equal parts corruption, pedophilia and cannibalism become the number one film in the country? Sensible people, of course, will tell you that the film was full of popular actors, heavily hyped and well-reviewed, thusly a great deal of people were curious to see it. Many others, like myself, would add that it’s a damn good movie, which usually doesn’t hurt a film’s chances of making money. And still others, also like myself, would tell you that a majority of the country is still made up of free-thinking, independent folks with minds of their own who don’t need the censorship lobby to tell us what we should and should not be watching.

But for the enemies of freedom who make up the censor crowd this simply won’t do. Their entire schtick is based on the carefully-cultivated mythology that “the media” is controlled by a secular liberal (read: anyone who disagrees with them) cabal, and that violent or sexually-explicit material is being “forced” on a public which, if said cabal was to be overthrown, would demand only entertainment which envinced the “good, old fashioned Christian values” the censor lobby prefers. When a film like “Sin City” or a show like “Desperate Housewives” is a major hit, it throws the censors for a loop because it shows the fallacy of their claims by preventing them from pretending to speak for “the mainstream” and instead exposing their true face as anti-freedom, anti-First Ammendment, anti-Constitutional radicals who’s agenda has little to do with the common man and very much to do with installing a regressive theocracy.

L. Brent Bozell, leader of the “watchdog” group the Media Research Center and the anti-freedom organization “Parents Television Council” is the current vangaurd of the censorship movement, so you can bet he’s got something to say about this. The success of “Sin City” is just the latest thing to make his entire so-called belief system look completely foolish, and you can see him struggle to explain it all away HERE:
http://www.mediaresearch.org/archive/entcol/welcome.asp
(owing to technical difficulties, click link and scroll to entry titled “Sickos celebrate Sin City.”

Money quote: “It’s fine to appreciate the art of something, but not to the utter exclusion of a social conscience. Film is not just entertaining, it can be intoxicating. It can be a very malignant influence. Can you sit on the fence as this cinematic disease spreads? Just wait until the “Sin City” DVD starts traveling around in teenager backpacks.”

Please note, with irony, the way he here co-opts the old leftwing-socialist premise of the “social conscience,” here infering that the film should be low-rated for not envincing the particular political beliefs of Bozell and his cronies. See also use of terminology like “intoxicating,” “malignant influence” and “disease” to subtly prop up the undying yet completely unproven and unprovable dictum of the anti-freedom pro-censorship canon that such films will innevitably cause some sort of societal decay and/or imitated behavior. And finally the image of the “teenager backpacks,” speaking of the film as though it’s some kind of sinister underground cult-item instead of a hugely-popular boxoffice smash playing at every multiplex in the country to sizable crowds.

What Bozell and all of his ilk will either never understand or always pretend not to understand is that the success of any controversial film, whether it’s “Sin City” or “The Passion” is a quintessentially American thing: Despite what the anti-freedom, anti-First Ammendment, anti-Constitutional censorship-lobby may wish, we are free to choose, and we have chosen to be free.

The battle continues.

Warning: Some spoilers herein.

Here in New England, this is primarily known as “that Red Sox movie,” which means that it’s doing spectacular business. Whether that will translate to the rest of the nation remains to be seen, but it can be surely said that the promise of a story set during and around the Sox curse-reversing 2004 season has snared a big chunk of Red Sox Nation’s male populace into seeing a movie that they would likely otherwise have skipped: A rigidly-formulaic romantic “comedy” about a mismatched young couple making it work.

Which isn’t to say that the film doesn’t go out of it’s way to give Sox fans what they could reasonably have expected: “I walk by that place all the time!!!!” location shooting, expository banter about curses, Bambinos and Buckner, player cameos, etc. The Dropkick Murphys are on the soundtrack, along with all the standard pop-tunes about Boston and it’s eponymous team, the BoSox “font” is used for all the intertitles and (of course) a portion of the end credits roll over footage of the big World Series victory parade. If you’re a Red Sox fan, this is what you’re seeing “Fever Pitch” for, and the good news is you’ll get it. The not-so-good news is that getting to these fan treats requires you to sift through one of the most stiflingly predictable rom-coms not featuring Ashton Kutcher in recent memory.

This is all a rough translation of a popular Nick Hornby (see also: “High Fidelity” and “About a Boy”) book, directed by the Farelly Brothers. The British Hornby’s book was about soccer, and the Sox are on hand here because someone (not without reason) determined that Red Sox Nation was the only adequate American doppleganger for European soccer hooligans. (I’d imagine Raiders fans came in a close second.) As you’ve heard by now, the central premise is that of a “love triangle” in which our young hero is torn between his lady and his team. Drew Barrymore (who’s usually funny in these kinds of movies) is Lindsay the girlfriend, and Jimmy Fallon (who’s almost never funny in any kind of movie. Or television show. Or comedy album) is Ben the conflicted fan.

Let it not be said that this is a bad premise, or even not a very good one, but the film cannot seem to muster the will to do a single truly original thing with it. It plays like a script written in the manner of Mad Libs, as though the Farelly’s believed that the novelty of the Red Sox minutia was all they needed in the way of a new angle and just let the rest of the story play out by the numbers. It’s a total formula movie, and since formulas become formulas for a reason this means that “Fever Pitch” isn’t exactly awful or offensive… it’s just sort of “there.” It does, however, lack completely any semblance of ambition to be anything approaching memorable or meaningful.

This lack of desire to break formula becomes more and more clear as the film rolls on, and at about midpoint it begins to seriously hurt the characters: It becomes impossible to really care about Fallon or Barrymore’s characters once it becomes apparent that they have no depth or purpose beyond doing exactly what they need to do to make the required scenes happen. Barrymore’s character is, from scene to scene; understanding, irritating, silly, smart, insecure or over-confident, dependant ONLY on what the script requires her to do to provoke the plot-appropriate reaction from Fallon.

The film does her no favors, either, by going rather “soft” on it’s hero’s so-called “obsession.” Yes, his home is so stocked with BoSox memorabilia that it looks, as she says, “like he lives in a gift shop,” but as homes-of-fans go most of you have seen a lot worse in your actual lives. (Ever been in the garage of a hardcore Nascar devotee?) Ben’s fandom, as the film’s backstory endlessly informs us, is rooted more in the need for a surrogate family (his fan buddies, his fellow season ticket holders) than it is in any sort of “fanatic” trivium. Thus, when the film hits the obligatory “oh, Ben!” moments from Lindsay they don’t really work.

For example: A scene where Lindsay thumbs through Ben’s closet and finds a collection of team jerseys starts out as cute, but immediately sours when the contents actually serve to upset her. After she’s already seen his bedroom/memorabilia-museum, what did she expect to find? It’s a totally false beat, existing only because the formula called for a “speedbump” moment, and it only gets worse when she pronounces: “This isn’t a man’s closet!”, declares him a “man-boy” and sighs that her sister’s husband has a closet full of wonderful suits. Whereas the initial response reads as false, the name-calling followups simply feel cold and unreasonably mean. It also marks poor character structure, since in the very next scene she’s not only “nice” again but also a willing participant in his fanboy eccentricities.

The “arc” to all this is supposed to be that Lindsay meets and falls for Ben during the winter, and thus is “hillariously” surprised by the “different guy” that pops up during the baseball season. The trouble is, “winter Ben” is presented as such a superhumanly above-and-beyond boyfriend that even the most extreme display of misplaced priorities that “summer Ben” can muster aren’t really enough to make him even close to unlikable enough to justify the mandatory pre-happy-ending false-alarm breakup that innevitably ensues. The situation (Ben can’t contain his displeasure upon learning he’d skipped “the best game ever played” to attend a prove-I’m-more-important-than-the-Sox-to-you date with Lindsay) is so contrived, and Lindsay’s reaction to it so overblown-feeling that I just couldn’t help but wonder if she had somehow missed the rest of her own movie.

But maybe I’m being too hard. The plain fact is, formula romantic comedy has it’s audience and that audience will probably enjoy this. Enough of the jokes hit, theres a lot of fun classic rock music (a Farelly staple), I’m sure that a good number of so-called “sports widows” will find cause to nod to eachother in a “you said it, sistah!” manner in agreement with Lindsay’s frequent exasperation and I’m equally sure that devoted Sox fans will enjoy the multiple scenes where Ben’s colorful gallery of fellow-fans give Lindsay the Reader’s Digest version of Red Sox mythology from The Curse to the proper pronunciation of Yastrzemski.

So yeah, here and there I smiled and laughed. But it’s just so relentlessly predictable and lazy that I just can’t fully reccomend it in good conscience. It’s an average movie that seems less so because it never once tries to be above-average.

Bottom line for Sox fans: As Boston sports-comedies go, it’s at least better than “Celtic Pride,” but not good enough to be worth paying theater prices for unless you like formula romantic comedy at least a third as much as you like the Red Sox. Wait and rent it, and until then you can always just watch “Faith Rewarded” a few dozen more times, right?

Bottom line for everyone else: Just another romantic comedy, save for boasting some amusing trivium about Boston sports fandom in between the usual beats. This particular weekend, you’re still better off with “Sahara.”

FINAL RATING: 5/10

Adventuresome NUMA sea-explorer/relic-hunter Dirk Pitt (Matthew McConaughey) is chasing down a priceless historical curiosity with his sidekick Al Giordino (Steve Zahn) when they come upon a lovely do-gooder (Penelope Cruz) chasing down evil and corruption on roughly the same road. This turns out to be exceedingly fortunate for her, as Pitt is an explorer in the “Indiana Jones” vein and thus equally proficient with guns, slugfests and other sundry derring-do as he is at treasure-hunting. Much shooting and chasing ensues as secrets are unearthed, bad guys are dispatched and jokes are cracked.

The above not only describes the basic outline of “Sahara” but also the basic outline of nearly every adventure Pitt undertakes in Clive Cussler’s massive series of novels starring the character. Therefore, it’s understood that this film, an adaptation of Cussler’s first Pitt novel, is intended not merely as one movie but as the “pilot” for a hoped-for series of Cussler/Pitt-adaptations. (Don’t think for a minute that the phrases “the next James Bond!!!!!” didn’t cross any lips as this was being greenlit.)

For this first go-round, the Big Shiny drawing Pitt’s attention is a Civil War ironclad that may or may not have floated all the way to Africa and up a river that was eventually absorbed into the Sahara desert. Cruz is on hand as a World Health Organization doctor tracking the outbreak of a mysterious plague in the same region. Lennie James as a vicious African warlord and Lambert Wilson as a leering French industrialist are the bad guys who fight with the zeal of those unaware that Pitt has something like twenty-or-more books ahead of him.

Cussler is, apparently, less-than-thrilled with the film, but it matches the source at least in that it’s entirely a like-it-or-leave-it endeavor: However you usually feel about films in which handsome adventurers dig up treasure and shoot it out with villians in exotic far-flung locales is likely to be how you feel about “Sahara.” Let it be said, then, that McConaughey makes a suitable adventurer if perhaps a touch less refined than his incarantion in the books, and that the film delivers it’s promised action if perhaps a touch over-edited. Penelope Cruz has yet to deliver a single truly noteworthy onscreen performance, and that she continues her streak here is demonstrable of the hype of her being “the Latina Julia Roberts” was absolutely spot-on in all the ways they didn’t want.

Since the film IS, after all, a long (but briskly-paced,) advertisement for MORE Dirk Pitt films, it’s central action falls into a “you like this? wanna see more?” groove and runs with it: Pitt and Giordino get into scrapes, think their way out with (usually) explosive/entertaining results, and meanwhile their gruff but lovable benefactor (William H. Macy) frets about all the equipment their busting up but still shows himself to be a winking co-hero in his own right by shaking down beaurocrats to help the boys out. It’s obvious that the film is pitching all of this as something they’ve got more of if you want it, and that’s okay because it’s at least being honest.

Here’s the bottom line: The audience that’s going to like this is going to like this. You know who you are. You saw the trailer, maybe you were familiar with the books, you saw Pitt riding that sand-sailing rig he builds out of an old wrecked plain, you said “hey, that looks kinda cool!” It is kinda cool, and you won’t be sorry you saw it. The boxoffice will decide if Pitt heads off into a sequel, but for now you could do a lot worse than this one.

FINAL RATING: 7/10

So…

Now that Pope John Paul II has passed, how long do you think it will be before we start hearing about the movie of his life going into production? I’m guessing within the year.

I mean, it’s not hard to see that this is good fodder for a big oscar-bait epic biopic, no? Growing up in war-torn Poland? Presiding over the massive shift from pre to post-Vatican II Catholicism? Confronting, in his twilight years, the HUGE scandal of child-molesting priests (which may or may not have been the long-simmering “dark secret” occuring during much of his reign?) All the grandiosity and pomp and pagentry that goes along with the Vatican and Catholic imagery in general? This is an easy mark, and some enterprising producer is going to jump on it. You heard it here first.

Having said that, to me the following foue questions become mandatory of any prospective “Pope movie.” They are as follows:

Who will play the Pope? The role of the “aged” Pope would be a big, showy role that would likely draw just about every high-class older actor looking for that swan-song Oscar part… but is that the way to go? If the film plans to cover the earlier life using one actor, perhaps a middle-aged performer in old-age makeup? Either way, for me Ian Holm leaps immediately to mind for some reason, as does perrenial chameleon Gary Oldman. And Anthony Hopkins would of course be on any such list. Longshots, but would be brave and probably brilliant: Wallace Shawn, James Woods, Sir Ian McKellan. (the role of the “young” pre-Pope would, of course, be the place to let a rising young talent show off his stuff in a big debut.) This was also a major world political figure during some pretty major times, and thus any film would be RIFE with big roles. Presuming that this would be a big part of the film, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, both Bushes, Clinton, Gorbechav, Castro, Thatcher, Mother Theresa and any number of important Catholic figures are likely to show up and provide great cameo material for actors to chew on. This could be the “Aviator” of church movies.

Who directs? The usual-suspects of high-end historical dramas and oscar bait would definately be clawing over one-another to make this. Ron Howard would toss his hat in the ring, I imagine, and maybe even Mel Gibson. The Miramax/Merchant-Ivory usual suspects, etc. Filmmakers from countries without a strong Catholic/Christian bent might be the best way to go, so that they could bring a freshness and discovery to this story and iconography that everyone knows… imagine the sights of Vatican architecture as seen by Shekar Kapur, or the pagentry of Catholic ceremonies as presented by Zhang Yimou. My dream picks: Oliver Stone or Paul Verhoeven, in that order. But ONLY if they got script-approval.

Real Vatican or Fake Vatican? It’d be a BIG publicity coup (plus a likely budget-buster) for the film to be able to say “shot on location in the real Vatican city.” But any such shoot would be strictly controlled by the church, which considers the city holy ground, and they would likely demand a say over what is allowed to take place in the film which would almost certainly hamper the ability to tell a compelling story (as opposed to the reverent whitewash the Mother Church would undoubtedly prefer.) Thus, constructing the various landmarks and interiors as sets would probably have to be done, which could push the budget so high that it might harm the chances of actually making the film at all.

Controversy? And here’s the big one. There’s no doubt that there’s PLENTY of story points with which to paint an entirely rosy, entirely happy and fawning story of the man and the office he holds: A resistance member in WWII Poland, a “reformer” Pope, a warrior against the Iron Curtain, a humanitarian, an ally of Mother Theresa, etc… But films thrive on conflict and, sadly, the “good parts” aren’t the whole story. The same “reformer” who implemented the radical reforms of Vatican II, brought Catholics and Jews together and issued the landmark pronouncements absolving Galileo and Darwin also became the hardline traditionalist resisting the calls for the Church to evolve in their views on women in the priesthood, birth control and gay rights. And, of course, it is now known that the Church for several DECADES of his reign was engaged in a massive coverup, possibly to VERY high levels, of a sex-abuse scandal of epic proportions. Any film that does not address these issues along with all of the good would be, in my opinion, seriously flawed as works of historical biography go; though the temptation to make such a “whitewash” version will be pretty high with the man now deceased and many feeling that brining up such would be “in bad taste.” So, will whoever makes the film be brave enough to confront the WHOLE story?

Those are my thoughts. I’d like to hear yours.

Here is the world of “Sin City”: The law is entirely ineffective. The government is entirely corrupt. The clergy is entirely evil. Prostitutes are warrior-queens, angels and goddesses-incarnate. Thugs, killers and fallen cops are knights in shining armor. The closer a character is to the image a monster, the more likely he is to be a hero. The closer a character is tied to the spectre of organized religion, the more likely he is to be irredeemably villianous.

I love documentaries, don’t you?

Based on Frank Miller’s epic series of noir-style graphic novels and directed by Robert Rodriguez (with an assist from Quentin Tarantino,) is not only like nothing you’ve ever seen before, it’s like nothing thats ever been attempted before. Not satisfied to simply translate the plot and prose from Miller’s work, Rodriguez literally throws a nearly panel-for-panel translation of the material onto the screen. Part digital-trickery, part CGI-animation and part tough-guy ultra-cast, “Sin City” exists as a visual experiment that appears born full-grown; alert, aware and sure of itself. The known world, the familiar personas of famous actors and reality itself are here all molded like primordial clay to be exactly as the omnipotent director imagines them to be, and while Rodriguez has famously abandonned film for high-end digital video, what he does here is filmmaking at it’s purest form.

The film, set in the titular fictional city tracks three storylines, each occuring out of sync with real time but all joined by setting and by a unifying story-arc: Three men, all damaged and cast from society in their own way, all embarked quests of horrifying violence, all in the name of the women they love. In one, A hulking, superhumanly-strong semi-psychotic thug (Mickey Rourke) tears the city limb from limb on a quest to solve and avenge the murder of the hooker (Jamie King) who has made him feel like a man for the first time. In another, A razor-wielding, gunslinging vigilante killer (Clive Owen) joins with the city’s army of saintly, sexy Amazonian prostitutes in their war against the pimps and mobsters who would enslave them and the cops who’d let it happen. And last, a framed cop (Bruce Willis) must protect a stripper who owes him her life (Jessica Alba) from a pedophile psychopath bent on vengeance (Nick Stahl.) At the center of the whirlpool is a ruthless family dyansty woven through the Church and the Government that rules Sin City with an iron fist.

Ladies and gentlemen, what we have here is THE movie to beat in 2005. With the coming of “Sin City,” the “bar” for hard action, sizzling romance, jaw-dropping violence and raw visual poetry has been raised another notch, and there’s no turning back. The envelope is not just pushed, the envelope is hacked, shredded and burned into oblivion, it’s ashes scattered to the four winds. Just as the science fiction and fantasy genres find themselves existing in the Post-“Lord of The Rings” era, so now will action/crime movies find themselves feeling the shockwaves of “Sin City” for years to come.

To say that the film is “unrealistic” is to miss the mark entirely… reality is not even an issue here. This is a world born of the movies, now returned to the movies. The real name of the town is “Basin City”, and the name is appropriate: All of the crime, noir and action stories of film eras past have seemingly flowed into a single basin, and from this evolutionary soup a new animal has emerged. Born of a billion myriad influences, from pulp comics to radio dramas to film noir to Dick Tracy to Batman, from Cagney to Mitchum to Eastwood to Bogart, from Lang to Huston to Coppola to Miike, from Spillane to Hammet to, well, to Frank Miller… the only influence “Sin City” requires absolutely NOTHING from is our “reality.”

Instead, the film has it’s own vision of “reality,” it’s own rules of nature, of science and even of morality: The world of Sin City is like the Dark Ages breaking out in the Depression… freed from the need to be “real,” it’s characters become through exaggerated costumes and makeup and even more exaggerated acting and dialogue god-sized archetypes of heroism and villiany in a world where the terms “good” and “evil” are entirely alien. The “law of the street” becomes a machine-age Code of Chivalry, leg-breakers and cops hard enough to scare Dirty Harry himself become Knights Errant and traditional symbols of “good” like Senators, Cardinals and innocent, bible-reading choirboy farmers become demons, ogres and (literal) man-eaters.

This is, immediately, the best new film now playing in this country.

This is the big one.

This is the one that’ll still be worth talking about a year from now.

This is the one we still will be talking about a year from now.

This is the one you can’t afford to miss.

This is the one that you need to see, regardless of how you eventually find it. You may love it. You may despise it. But you must experience it.

FINAL RATING: 10/10

DISCLAIMER: I was in a really, really lousy mood today when I saw this. I’d had a terrible day, and assumed that going to see what many had assured me was a terrible movie was the appropriately masochistic thing to do. Thusly, my opinion of the film may have been affected by my less-than-happy mindset, which might mean that “Beauty Shop” is either a bit better or a bit worse than I am about to report.

Okay, so this pretty damn pointless.

“Beauty Shop” is presented here as a “female” offshoot from “Barbershop,” a sitcom-pilot-as-movie comedy from two years back who’s well had already run noticeably dry in it’s own “official” sequel. The sole connections that hold this film to it’s predecessors is that Queen Latifah’s character of “Gina” was introduced in “Barbershop 2,” and that she keeps a briefly-glimpsed photo of her Barbershop crew pals taped to her mirror while on the job as a top stylist in a trendy Atlanta hair salon (we’re told she relocated here following her daughter’s acceptance to an exclusive music school.)

The Salon is owned by Jorge, an impossibly-evil jerk of a boss whom the film asks us to despise on the merits that he is (possibly) gay and speaks with a European accent. Jorge is played by Kevin Bacon, an actor too good for this movie doing work on very much the same lines. The male villians are usually the “best” characters in bad female-empowerment comedies, because unlike the heroic female leads the actor playing them is freed from the constraints of having to constantly embody a righteous avatar of feminism and social-justice. In any case, Jorge sets the plot in motion by finally “crossing the line” in his verbal abuse of Gina that motivates her to quit and strike out on her own.

Adhering stridently to the “every-other-movie-like-this” handbook, Gina buys a run-down beauty salon in the middle of Tha’ Hood, tries to turn it into a high-class joint, meets it’s staff of self-conciously colorful stylists and hires two comedy-caricatures of her own: A handsome street-tough ex-con with a gift for braids and a white country-gal (Alicia Silverstone, so THAT’S where she’s been!) who provides both opportunity for the film to wallow in uncomfortable (and unfunny) racial humor and for the other stylists to learn a powerful lesson about tolerance of others… unless, of course, those “others” happen to be possibly-gay, since the film indulges openly and unashamedly in mocking both Jorge’s apparent drama-queeniness and also the dubious sexuality of the “metrosexual” ex-con braiding expert.

Djimon Honsou is also on hand, playing an electrician who lives above the shop and turns out to be not only an eager love-interest for Gina but also a master pianist, thinker of deep-thoughts, good with kids, a great dancer and a Cyrano-level expert at old-school wooing. Eventually, someone will cast Honsou as something other than “Impossibly Perfect And Noble Man,” but until then let it still be held that he can play these parts better than almost anyone.

Not much really goes on in this film. People hang out in the beauty shop, talk, tell jokes, etc. There’s some business about a curiously overbearing City Inspector giving Gina’s shop too many fines (and GUESS who’s behind THAT), but primarily the film is concerned with coaxing laughs not so much by being witty, insightful or clever (because it’s not) but instead through an endless parade of cartoonish caricatures who’s “humor” seems based not on being funny but by being familiar in an “I know someone JUST LIKE THAT!!!” way to what “Beauty Shop’s” producers assume is their primary audience.

There’s really not much more to say about this. It’s just not good, plain and simple. I can offer that, while I was no great lover of “Barbershop,” the film could at least be admired for it’s lack of political correctness and it’s zeal for attacking (or, rather giving voice to characters who were attacking) the kind of sacrosanct PCism of popular culture that “Beauty Shop” holds up as a kind of ideal. Cedric the Entertainer’s angry loudmouth from the original film would likely be driven to rail for hours against the mindlessness of a film like this, and those hours would be much more interesting to watch than “Beauty Shop.”

FINAL RATING: 2/10

According to AICN and a growing amount of “chatter” on the web, Thomas Hayden Church’s bad-guy role in “Spider-Man 3” may indeed be… The Sandman.

There’s a pretty decent writeup of his history (and some good Official Handbook-style character images) to be found HERE…
http://www.alaph.com/spiderman/enemies/sandman.html
…but as you might guess, the basic idea is that the guy is made of sand.

First reaction: I’m still just glad it’s NOT Carnage.

Second reaction: This is actually an interesting choice. Sandman (aka Flint Marko, aka William Baker) is one of those fun sort of “second-tier” comic baddies who’s called a Spidey villian because thats where he originated but has come to be more of a perennial Marvel Universe “jobber” who wound up in scuffles with almost every costumed hero at one time or another, mostly because (as already stated) he’s made of sand, which is kind of automatically cool and must be a lot of fun to write and draw.

Thus, what we (apparently, since no one from Sony or Marvel can confirm this) might have here is a main baddie who’s essentially always been a “hired thug” character, (though last I checked he’d reformed and become a good guy,) short on pyschology or complexity. So, then, what’s his function in the film? Retooled into a more potent threat? A hired-thug used by Harry Osborne? It’d certainly make sense if he was only ONE of two or more bad guys, being more of a “grunt” than the big-picture-oriented Green Goblin or Dr. Octopus, which would lend tantalizing credence to all those rumors about Chloe Sevigny and The Black Cat awhile back…

I live for this stuff.

The “Fantastic Four” movie site now has the link up to the “ShoWest” trailer (aka “the one that doesn’t suck, we promise this time”) as a sort of funky hidden easter-egg. Don’t want to jump through Fox’s hoops to see it? Here’s a quick shortcut link:
http://www.fantasticfourmovie.com/us/flash/vondoom/archives/video.html

We’ve been waiting on this for awhile folks, the first “big wide-open look” at the film; representing both fans’ first opportunity to try and get a handle on the real overall tone and feel of the film and the latest in the producers’ dwindling number of opportunities to reverse the almost universally negative buzz the film has had since, well… pretty much since they started signing the talent, really. Make no mistake, this thing is right now on the web for the sole and sufficient purpose of getting internet film-fanatics and web-centric Geekdom in general thinking (and posting) the happy thoughts that Marvel and Fox know will form the pre-blitz grassroots marketing that can mean the difference between “Daredevil” and “Spider-Man” in terms of boxoffice and franchise potential.

So how’d they do, in the opinion of this particular exemplar of web-centric Geekdom?

Well…

Dammit.

Seriously, I mean. Dammit. I’d almost have prefered something that made it look “bad,” as opposed to this which, while all very impressive and shiny-looking is none the less imbueded with the feeling of “dissapointing,” that more queasy of unpleasant reactions incurred when a lackluster film’s landscape is dotted with moments of brilliance or signs of unrealized potential for greatness. If this trailer is an accurate reflection of the film, then that seems to be exactly what we could be in for…

It’s definately better than last time, sure… but “better enough” to change the pre-existing bad buzz? Sadly, no.

There’s stuff in here that works: The Human Torch looks great (fire FX are hard!) The Thing looks great, and Chilkis is really conveying the appropriate sadness and self-pity through all that makeup. What little we’re being allowed to see of Mr. Fantastic looks impressively realized. It’s nice to see what appears to be Dr. Doom’s mask (instead of the metalized-look being his “face” as previously reported.) It looks injected with a certain degree of “fan bait” lines and images; and boy, it looks like Fox’s budget department was willing to spring for a lot of trucks, cars and pyro.

But there’s also too much that just looks “iffy… and more disturbingly it’s a lot of the same stuff that’s looked “iffy” all along: Jessica Alba is still reading loud and clear as a major casting mistake. Iaon Gruffud is still looking too far on the young side for Reed Richards (and the gray temples look sort of silly on him, bad sign.) The dialogue coming out of Johnny Storm is still sounding really annoying (memo to writers: Dialogue that sounds too obnoxious coming from The Human Torch is pretty damn obnoxious, indeed.) Dr. Doom retooled into yet another eeeeeeeeevil corporate creep is still looking like nothing but a bad idea done badly.

In more general terms, the whole thing is just looking so… typical. All this big, noisy, spectacular stuff is going on and it all just looks like so much been-there-done-that. The crashing-cars, big citywide explosions, bad guys tossing lightning all over the place, people falling out of skyscrapers… proficiently accomplished, sure, but not really looking all that different from the similar scenes in dozens of films-prior.

A few months back the big story was Fox being hugely worried about the film winding up looking too much like “The Incredibles.” Seeing more of the movie now, I’m given to wonder why they weren’t equally concerned about looking too much like “Armageddon.” Or “ID4.” Or “The Core.” “Supernova.” “Spider-Man.” “Blade 3.” “SWAT.” “Taxi.” Getting the idea?

The best thing in the new trailer is that great little shot near the end of (presumably) Human Torch “sky-writing” the F4 logo in the night sky over NYC. (Or maybe it’s the “calling the F4 for help” flare-gun that came back into use in the recent comic stories.) In either case, cool.

The worst thing in the new trailer is pretty much anything involving Dr. Doom. Sorry Fox, just not feeling it.

The likelihood that Marvel has a pretty big dissapointment soon to be on their hands remains… a lot higher, in my humble opinion, than the studio would like it to be at this point.

But the sky-logo is pretty cool.

SPOILER WARNING is in effect, you have been warned.

The New Word of the day is: “McMovie.” Refering to a film that bares overwhelming similarity to a McDonalds menu item as opposed to any other sort of food, i.e. any film that plays exactly the way that it’s pitch, poster and title would indicate. Intentionally devoid of anything surprising, unexpected or “off” that might result in the audience getting a slightly different experience (good or bad) than they had anticipated upon seeing/hearing said pitch, poster and title.

Was anyone really so fond of “Miss Congeniality” that a sequel was really necessary? I don’t know, thats why I’m asking. Occasionally certain McMovies (of which the original “Miss” was a prime example) attain a kind of following, which is impossible to predict because it defies all logical sense: By design, McMovies are bereft of the depth or layering that is usually essential to the formation of a fan-base. But, then, since there are people who are “devoted” to the Big Mac, (delicious, yes. worthy of worship? no.), I suppose it’s possible that there is a grassroots groundswell of fans that were counting down the minutes till the next adventure of Gracie Hart. To such folks I can only say that A.) I mean no offense and, B.) you desperately need to see more movies.

Since I’m sure some of us have forgotten the premise (or, more luckily, the existance) of the original “Miss Congeniality,” to recap: Tough, tomboyish FBI agent Gracie Hart (Sandra Bullock) foiled a threat against the Miss USA pageant by going undercover as a contestant; an act which facilitated much alleged comedy and Hart’s discovery that ::gasp!:: it’s okay to be feminine, after all! As this unasked-for sequel opens, Hart’s elevation to nationally-known celebrity following the pageant case has made her too recognizable to continue working as an undercover agent. Afflicted with the same crippling Pavlovian fear of a desk job!!!! that troubles all law-enforcement personel in derivative action-comedies, Hart agrees to be reassigned as the FBI’s new top publicity-laison, where her fame will instead be an asset. First assignment: Las Vegas, where some thugs have abducted ::gasp!:: Gracie’s buddy the current Miss USA and the pageant host (William Shatner) for ransom!

Hm, y’know something? I’ve got a feeling plucky Gracie Hart won’t be content to just do her publicity job with her pals in trouble, no matter how much trouble it gets her in. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if she even conveniently stumbles onto a case-cracking clue that the non-publicity agents refuse to believe, forcing her to take matters into her own hands. Call it a hunch.

The sequel offers a pair of additions to the franchise, both of whom are mistakes in their own way. First is Diedrich Bader as Gracie’s clearly “Queer Eye”-inspired stylist. He replaces Michael Caine from the first film, and thus serves mainly as a broad unfunny joke trying to fill a hole left by the departure of the only modicum of class the original had. Really, folks, is the “effeminate gay stylist” bit actually still funny? Maybe, maybe not, but certainly Caine’s character was funnier because he wasn’t something totally worn out: The “stylist” character as an Obi-Wan style wise mentor was something (almost) sorta-new.

The second mistake is a new “foil” for Bullock, an even tougher, meaner and more tomboyish female agent with serious anger-management issues and an instant intense dislike for Gracie Hart which, by the logic of derivative action-comedies, makes her the obvious choice to be Hart’s bodygaurd. The character, played by Regina King, is named Sam Fuller; and I’m willing to bet that almost no one who’s willingly going to see this outside of critics and masochists knows why that’s sorta funny. I could be wrong though. Fuller is a mistake because she’s too shrill and hard to like for such a thinly-sketched character, and given too much screentime to boot.

It occurs to me that there was a way to make a much better movie out of Hart and Fuller’s chemistry (such as it is) that the film almost seems willing to go for but never quite makes it. Frequent readers to this blog and friends of mine will easily deduce my thoughts, and are already rolling their eyes, but this time I’m being serious. Really.

Here me out on this: The film presents us with two female characters, one decidedly more “womanish” but both focused consistently on proving their proficiency at violence and aggression. They dislike eachother, they fight, they come to blows but slowly a mutual respect grows from their back-and-forth attempts to physically dominate one another. Both are single, and none-too-thrilled at men in general, (Fuller: “Men, can’t live with `em… nope, thats all.”), and while there is an available male character hanging around extraneously his love-finding ending doesn’t occur with either of them. In fact, Fuller and Hart wind up with no one but eachother, exchanging post-victory action-heroine affections that no male action-duo would get away with straight-faced (if you’ll pardon the pun.) Getting the idea?

In whats meant to be the “big” character scene, the two lady agents bed down together on a hastily-assembled guest-bed couch, and in pre-slumber smalltalk they bare their souls in the traditional manner of action-comedy lawpersons, i.e. exchanging stories of youthful skin-hardening and beloved, long-lost parents. Understanding grows, sympathy is exchanged, the subject turns to their innability to hold stable relationships with men, and… They go to sleep.

Okay, now am I really the ONLY ONE who can easily imagine a much more interesting, surprising and flat-out better way for that scene (and, thusly, the rest of the story) to play out? Hm? Cause I don’t think I am…

But whatever, in the end thats just a little flight of fancy on my part. As it stands, the film goes exactly where it looks like it’s going, exactly what you think will happen happens, and nothing has really been lost or gained but time and one more stinker in Sandra Bullock’s column.

See something else.

FINAL RATING: 2/10

“Guess Who” presents us with a light family comedy that isn’t great mostly because it doesn’t make any effort to be so. On the one hand, that means that the film suffers from unrealized potential, but on the other hand it can’t precisely be said to “fail” as a movie either. Instead what we have is a film content to be “okay,” sporadically superior to (the impossible to avoid comparisons to) “Meet The Fockers” and certainly better than any film that began life as a remake of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” had any right being.

What it lacks is ambition, largely because what it has to begin with is a situation-comedy premise which, as goes the saying, “could write itself.” For those who’ve missed the trailers: Simon Green (Ashton Kutcher) is a hot young stockbroker involved in an interracial relationship with a photographer (Zoe Saldana.) The story follows the pair as they head for the home of her parents (Bernie Mac and Judith Scott) for Simon’s official introductions, with Simon feeling intensely on edge due to his in-laws to-be being as yet uninformed that their daughter is dating a white man. That both Kutcher and Mac are inhabiting characters identical to their usual “default” onscreen persona can tell you all you need to know about how the rest of this will play out.

It’s essential to getting “into” the film, I think, to understand that Mac’s character of Percy (played by Mac with precisely the swagger and hard-won self-confidence of a man who had to go through adolesence with the name “Percy,”) is not specifically a racist: He’s a feircely overprotective father who’s looking for any excuse to test the mettle of his daughter’s boyfriend, and Kutcher’s whiteness provides him with a constant wellspring of ways to do so. If the prospect of his daughter dating outside her race really bothers Percy on any kind of deeper level, it’s one that never comes to play in the film. At one point, after discovering that the hotel he’s being put up in as a “change of plans” had been booked weeks in advance, Simon asks: “You knew you were going to throw me out a week ago?” To which Percy matter-of-factly responds: “I knew I was gonna throw you out twenty-four years ago when the doctor told me it was a girl.”

The interesting surprise here is that, while the subject of race seems to always be on the minds of certain characters, the setup is engineered thusly that it seems seldom to occur to the film itself: Whereas the culture-clash of black and white America was the very forefront of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “Guess Who” is insistent that the world of it’s predecessor is long gone. Were that as true as the film would like to believe, it would render a “races flipped” version entirely irrelevant (really, wouldn’t a “true” modernization of this premise involve the daughter bringing home another woman?) but nevermind that. The point is, the original film criticized the racial views of it’s characters, whereas this new incarnation criticizes it’s characters for having racial views.

Unless this is the first review you are reading, you’ve by now heard that the film’s funniest scene is the “family dinner” sequence. This is true, but what many are missing is that the reason the scene is the film’s funniest is because it’s also the film’s most honest. Percy, a master of subtle psychological bullying, goads Simon into telling some “black jokes” over dinner. Instantly, we all know how this is destined to go, don’t we? The first few jokes go over surprisingly well, until Simon inevitably gets a little too loose and tells one that offends everybody. That’s what happens, yes, but the devil is in the details: The film doesn’t just randomly assign a joke to be the one that goes to far, it’s chosen very carefully one that is markedly different from the others on a very specific current. In this case, it’s a fine but visible line between harmless and hurtful, and while Simon was certainly “led” into crossing it the point is he did cross it.

When “Guess Who” is running with this material, the awkward interplay between a man convinced that his girlfriend’s father is out to get him and a father only too happy to oblige him, it has a good thing going. Unfortunately, it ends up devoting too much time to less fully-formed subplots: Percy’s fascination with Nascar racing, preparations for an anniversary party, the genre-required “all the womenfolk get together and get hammered” scene, Percy’s contentious relationship with a “metrosexual” party-planner and Simon keeping some sort of secret about work from everyone (which eventually pays off very well but not well enough to excuse how dull the “mystery” was otherwise.) The film wisely relegates these lesser elements to third-act plot-complications, which gives the character-comedy middle-act plenty of helpful breathing room but results in a mis-paced and overloaded final twenty minutes.

With a little more care and attention to the basics of pace, storytelling and structure, the elements are all here to have made a great and lasting comedy. Instead, we’re left with a decent but unspectacular family film; better than it needs to be but far from achieving it’s true potential. At most it’s a noteworthy pre-Summer distraction, with several funny gags, a single inspired scene and a pair of accomplished lead performances. Mostly-reccomended.

FINAL RATING: 7.5/10