MOVIE: Unknown (2011)

This movie was almost universally panned by reviewers when it first hit theaters a few weeks ago.  But most of the reviews I read, especially Ebert’s, made it sound so bad it might actually be good, which is really all it takes to get my butt into a theater seat.

I spent most of the movie nodding in agreement while ticking off each one of Ebert’s criticisms in my head.  Until I got to the end, that is, when suddenly, all those complaints were completely resolved by a twist that I, personally, found  satisfyingly unexpected.  That made me wonder:  Did Ebert actually stay until the end?  Because in the context of what happens in the last 20 minutes or so, his review makes almost no sense whatsoever.

Huh.  Maybe he fell asleep.  I suppose I can’t really blame him for that.

Anyway, look, you know this isn’t going to be a great movie, right?  I mean, it’s an action flick about a guy who gets conked on the head and loses his memory — it’s not a “film.”   Nevertheless, despite some truly boring acting on the part of January Jones (has she EVER done anything interesting?  Why does she still have a job?), I found it to be fairly well-acted and entertaining.

Liam Neeson plays a doctor, Martin Harris, traveling to Berlin with his boring wife (Jones — why he couldn’t have a wife his own age is beyond me, but whatever, Hollywood) for a conference.  His briefcase gets left behind at the airport, so he leaves his wife at the hotel to check in while he climbs back into a cab to go fetch it.  On the way back, though, the cab gets into an accident, and Harris ends up in a coma for four days.

When he wakes up, he finds he’s been replaced by an impostor (Aidan Quinn), a man everyone says is the real Martin Harris, including his wife.  Meanwhile, a group of bad guys are after him, trying to take him out — mostly a bad thing except for the part where it at least lets him know he’s not crazy.  Right?  RIGHT?

There are a lot of car chases, loads of silly dialogue, and all the other kinds of stuff you’d expect from a thriller of this nature.  But it was exactly the sort of movie I was in the mood for, and I definitely got what I wanted from it:  two hours of satisfying entertainment.  You could do a lot worse, is what I’m saying.

And Ebert:  you’re fired.  (Ha ha!  Just kidding, man.  I still love you.)

[Prequeue it at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre:  Thriller
Cast: Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, January Jones, Aidan Quinn, Bruno Ganz, Frank Langella,

BOOK: Allison Hewitt is Trapped by Madeline Roux (2011)

I really wanted to like this novel — I mean, a story about a group of book lovers trapped by zombies HAS to be fun, right?

But though I found it entertaining enough overall, especially in the beginning, it took a turn for the boring and befuddled somewhere around the midpoint, and I found myself increasingly frustrated by the author’s lack of thoughtful use of the story’s primary gimmick:  the book is a collection of blog posts, complete with comments from “readers,” and I really feel like Roux wasted an opportunity to do something truly interesting with that set-up.  More on that in a bit.

Here’s how the story goes:  Allison Hewitt is one of a group of bookstore employees recently trapped together by the zombie apocalypse.  Luckily, she’s trapped with a still-functional laptop and a working wi-fi network, and she immediately starts to blog her situation to anybody who might still be alive out there in the world.

As supplies begin to run low and morale collapses (no bathrooms and a steady diet of break-room beef jerky will do that for you), Allison manages to convince a couple of her colleagues to join her in a quest to get to the apartments above the store and see if any of them are habitable.  She grabs a fire axe, the others grabbing baseball bats and fire extinguishers, and together, they burst out into the store, whacking zombie heads left and right, and scramble upstairs.  (The zombie fight scenes are a little “been there, done that,” I’ll grant you, but still fun.)

After some exploration, they decide the group’s gotta move in.   They can’t stay in the break-room — the time for panic has passed, they’re alive and likely to stay that way if they’re careful, and it’s time to move forward.  The group takes over two apartments and tries settling down into a more manageable life.  But when Allison discovers a broadcasting radio station, the gang decides the next step is to leave the building altogether and try to make it over to the university campus — where the broadcast is coming from and where, the broadcaster reports, a large group of survivors have begin to collect.

Maybe Allison’s mother is there, you see?  Maybe Phil’s family.  They can’t ignore the possibility, so they set out with what little supplies they have left in pursuit of a larger community.

Most of the group manages to make it to campus safely, but that’s where the story starts to fall apart.  There’s a bizarre plot twist involving a group of fanatically religious women who kidnap and torture Allison and her friends; a boring, boring, borrrrrring love story between Allison and an astronomy professor; and a gang of militant survivors trying to force themselves into power, shooting anybody who dares challenge their authority.

Most of the second half of the book is an absolute mess, with a lot of inconsistencies in the story and subplots I feel like I’ve seen/read a million times already in both the zombie and post-apocalyptic genres.  That might’ve been okay, though, were it not for my increasing frustration over the blog format.

The problem was that I felt Roux could’ve done more with that device, and I was annoyed that she wasn’t bothering.   Despite the fact it made little sense Allison was able to keep a laptop running AND access a still-operational wi-fi network (whatever — I was willing to roll with it), when I first realized Roux was going to include comments from readers, I got a little bit excited.  I was expecting a whole second storyline to develop in the comments section, as people chimed in from all over, swapping stories and advice, starting flame wars from all the stress and anxiety, forming relationships between themselves and with Allison, etc.  All the stuff that typically DOES happen in a blog comment section (hi, guys!).  At the very least, I was expecting more emotionally charged content and question-asking.  What’s going on?  My god, I just had to kill my own mother.  That sort of thing.

Instead, there are only a couple of comments per “post,” and most of them are totally vacuous (Keep fighting, Allison!  Hey, we’re on a boat, tra la!).  Disappointing.  Occasionally, Roux tried to shove in an incongruously-timed comment from a reader suddenly logging on to despair, and once there was a father posting about his infected son, but none of these comments were particularly emotionally evocative, in part because the replies to them from Allison and other “readers” were usually bizarrely cavalier and quick.  Instead of exploring what that father might be going through, for example, Allison just says something flip like, “He’s not your son anymore — kill him!”

Man, great opportunity wasted to explore some of the painful, personal side of the whole end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it thing, instead of just the gleeful zombie-killing adventure side (which is mostly what this novel deals with — nobody seems to think twice about killing anybody in this book, even zombies they recognize, which I just found strange, though that’s not uncommon in the genre, really).

One positive note:  I did like the fact each blog post/chapter’s name was a relevant book title (In Defense of Food, A Room with a View, Things Fall Apart, e.g.) — clever, but not enough to save this novel from its thorough lack of originality.   That was what the format needed, and failed, to do.

Overall, I’d say this one’s definitely worth picking up if you’re in the mood for something brainless (pun intended) and fun, but while I did find it entertaining (I read the whole thing, after all), after reading the excerpt from Roux’s upcoming second novel (included at the end of this book), I don’t think I’ll be going on from here.

Fooey.

[FICTION, HORROR]

[Buy from an Indie Bookstore | Buy from Amazon | Browse more book reviews | Search book reviews]

MOVIE: Sanctum (2011)

My expectations for this movie were low — I was pretty much just after a 2-hour episode of I Shouldn’t Be Alive and a chance to stare lustfully at Ioan Gruffud’s delicious  nose for a while.  So, it says a lot that even going in with little in the way of hope, I still emerged from this stinker disappointed. When are the people who make movies going to realize that scripts matter?  This movie had all the elements it needed to be really entertaining — a great setting and a decent story (about a group of people trapped in a huge, underwater cave system in Australia, forced to work together to try to find their way out with minimal gear). But instead of focusing on the adventure elements, they spent way, WAY too much time on stupid, trite, unoriginal interpersonal relationship nonsense.  Beeyuck, I say.

If the whole movie had been like the last ten minutes, my pals and I agreed, where the survival and escape parts finally became the focus, it could’ve been pretty good.  Alternatively, if the characters had been interesting people with actual depth, instead of merely being oft-recycled characters from 8000 other films just like this one, it also could’ve been pretty good.  Or at least pretty better, anyway.

Instead, our four main characters were these extremely familiar yahoos:

Cranky Team Leader:  Extremely focused cave diving expert who abandoned his wife and son years ago when he realized the only thing he truly cared about was work.  Can’t express emotions and has long since given up on trying.  Likes to quote Coleridge incessantly, I’m assuming because the writer read “Kubla Khan” in high school and has been waiting ever since to impress chicks by working it into a script.  (Shut up, Coleridge.)

Team Leader’s Teenage Son:  Dragged along on this expedition by his father in a half-hearted attempt to un-irreconcilable their differences.  Predictably snotty and bitter about it, though I should note he was the only character I liked who made it to the final act.  As it turns out, Rhys Wakefield is pretty adorable;  I wouldn’t mind seeing him again in something.  Something . . . say . . . good, perhaps.

Rich American Prick:  Ioan Gruffud’s character (forced to speak in a brash American accent, which did not help matters much), who is funding the expedition.  He’s just arrived at the site as the film opens, primarily, it seems, to show off his huge, costly project to his new girlfriend.  He’s an arrogant jerk.  He also, coincidentally, has all the worst lines in the film (my friends and I were snorting back laughs every time Ioan opened his mouth, poor fella).

Also, for the record, I never want to hear Horatio Hornblower use the word “clusterfuck” ever again.  It just comes out all wrong.  Ioan, next time make them let you substitute “absolute bollocks” instead, ya dig?  Obliged.

Rich American’s Stupid Girlfriend:  She’s actually an experienced mountain climber, which is why it was so surprising when she refused to take any of the advice the divers kept giving her.  You’d think an experienced-anything would know better.  It starts with her refusing to put on a wet suit despite the obvious risk of hypothermia (the water is a mile deep in a CAVE where it gets no SUN, lady!), and it only goes downhill from there.   I couldn’t wait for her to die, to be honest.  I’m sure that makes me sound like a terrible person, but, hey, just wait until you meet her.

These guys all get trapped in the cave system together when a hurricane hits land above them and a boulder falls into their only known exit.  They spend most of the next 90 minutes bickering and swimming around, boring boring boring, and it’s not until the final ten minutes, when we’re down to just the father and son, that the movie finally hits its stride.  In the meantime, everything else goes exactly as you’d expect — the father and son clash constantly then finally bond when it becomes clear to the son that his father cares if he lives or dies, the Rich American argues all the time and acts cocky and is later revealed to be a total coward, all the nice people get killed early on and in truly horrible ways, etc. etc.

And then, ugh, there was the 3D, which was absolutely pointless.  It added nothing of interest whatsoever visually (not that there was much to work with — boringest underground cave system EVER), which surprised me because it was my understanding they shot the movie in 3D, as opposed to adding the effects later, and so one would assume they were thinking about cool things to do with it the whole time.  Alas, not.  Also, James Cameron was the producer, a man who clearly knows a lot about how to use 3D effectively (Avatar was a bad movie, yes, but the 3D effects totally blew my mind).   So, like, what the hell, team?  If you have the option of seeing this in 2D instead, you should take it.  Save yourself the extra dough and spend it on margaritas afterward so you and your own movie-watching pals can get sloshed and make fun of Ioan Gruffud all evening.  Ach, if only we’d known!

Then again, I should probably mention that it’s entirely possible this movie was a lot better than I’m giving it credit for.  Because, in all honesty, I spent a ridiculous amount of time focusing on Cranky Team Leader’s face, ignoring everything else, trying to figure out why Stellan Skarsgaard looked so weird.  Turns out, Stellan Skarsgaard looked so weird because he was actually Richard Roxburgh.  Go figure.

That plus the fact we were waited on by Poor Man’s Philip Seymour Hoffman at the concessions stand left me all dopplegangerly disoriented, which I’m sure helped matters very little.

Phew.  Whadda stinker.  I will say, though, that I had a great time watching this movie — there’s really nothing quite as entertaining as seeing a bad film with a couple of bad-film loving friends.  Let’s do that again soon, ladies.

[Prequeue at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre:  Action, Adventure
Cast:  Richard Roxburgh, Ioan Gruffudd, Rhys Wakefield, Alice Parkinson, Dan Wyllie, Christopher Baker, Nicole Downs, Allison Cratchley, John Garvin

New TV This Week (One Night Only!)

Just a quick post to let you know there’s another new winter series that starts tonight at 10pm — CBS’s spin-off Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior (as opposed to Criminal Minds: Totally Not Suspicious At All Behavior, which is their planned spin-off for fall, no doubt).

The only reason I’m tuning into this is because it stars Forest Whitaker and Janeane Garofalo.  But even Forest Whitaker and Jeaneane Garofalo can really, really suck sometimes.  And I have  feeling this show is going to be the perfect platform to show that off.  But hey, you never know.

Oh, fine.  We totally know.  What else do you have to do tonight but confirm your suspicions and then feel smug, though?  EXACTLY.  JOIN ME.

BOOK: The Best American Science Writing 2010 edited by Jerome Groopman (2010)

I’ve seen several of these “best writing” journalism books over the years — there’s a sports writing one, a music one, etc. — but I’d never picked one up before.  Why?  Because I’d never seen the SCIENCE one before, DUH.   And now that I’ve read 2010′s for science, I can’t wait to go back and read all the others I’ve missed (it looks like this particular series goes back to 1995 — whee!), because it was really, really incredibly great.

Some of the articles were ones I’d read in their original publications, as there are several from Discover, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and the New Yorker, all things I read regularly.  But most of them were articles I’d missed completely.  The first piece in this collection had me thinking for days; it’s about people who volunteer, via a web site, to donate their “spare” organs to sick people (for free), selecting from the site’s numerous profiles a person in need whose story appeals to them and then offering them a much-needed kidney, part of their liver, etc.  Now, think on that for a while — not just about the unique psychology of such a donor, but also the pressure of a gift of that nature (in most cases, the donor and the recipient end up getting to know each other personally) and the ramifications of this on the standard UNOS system, which typically ranks recipients based on medical need (ensuring fair treatment for people of all skin color and financial status, for one thing).  The article addresses all these things and more, and left me feeling a whole host of complicated emotions, ranging from wishing I had the balls to offer someone a gift of that nature and thinking this is probably a really, really bad idea in general.

The second article, about the placebo effect and its place in pharmaceutical research and psychological history, was equally striking, as was the article later in the book that was about a hospital in New Orleans just after Katrina, where doctors made the decision to euthanize several patients, perhaps unjustifiably.  (Anybody who had a DNR, for example, was deemed a low priority for evacuation regardless of their current health status, a fact that utterly horrified me, even as I recognize I can only imagine the hardship and struggle these doctors experienced trying to save as many people as they could.)

Other articles in the book look at genetics, the continuing evolution of man, pesticides as a potential cause of massive bee death, the dangers of the death of real science journalism, and more.   Every article was thoroughly engaging and extremely well-written, not to mention pretty provocative at times as well — exactly what you’d expect from a collection of “best writing” from the last year.

Highly recommended to anybody with even the most passing interest in what’s going on in the world of science these days, and I’m really looking forward to catching up on all the previous years.

[NON-FICTION]

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MOVIE: Robin Hood (2010)

I wasn’t expecting much from this film, to be honest  — figured it would be a fairly standard Russell Crowe/Ridley Scott action flick, like Gladiator set in England instead of Rome.  And while that is, in fact, pretty much what it is, I ended up really enjoying it, especially the fact it takes such a different approach to the standard Robin Hood yarn.

The story most of us are familiar with is the one about the bandit living in the forest of Nottingham along with his merry band of thieves, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor.  But this film starts about a year before that more traditional tale.  It opens in Europe at the end of the Crusades, where an archer named Robin Longstride (Crowe) is fighting alongside King Richard the Lionheart as they pillage their way back to England, jubilant with victory.

When Richard is killed in battle, one of his most trusted knights, Sir Robert Loxley, is given his crown to return to the palace, where it will be passed on to Richard’s brother, King John the Foolhardy.  On the way to the ship that aims to take them home, however, Loxley’s group is attacked by a gang of Frenchmen led by a British traitor named Godfrey, who, it turns out, is in cahoots with the French king, planning to turn England against John, leaving the country vulnerable to invasion.

Godfrey manages to kill all of Loxley’s men, and fatally wound Loxley himself, before Robin and his pals stumble onto the scene and scare him off.  As Loxley lies dying, he begs Robin to take his sword back to Nottingham to return to his father, Sir Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow).  Robin, an honorable sort, can’t refuse the wish of a dying man, and once Loxley has passed, he and his gang, including ye olde familiars Little John and Will Scarlett, steal the knights’ armor and gear, with plans to pass themselves off as king’s men to gain faster passage home.

When they get to the ship, Robin identifies himself as Loxley and shows the king’s crown as evidence, nervous that at any moment, they’ll all be found out and hanged.  But nobody suspects a thing, and when Robin successfully passes the crown to John without anybody recognizing him as a fake, he and his pals decide to maintain their charade all the way to Nottingham.

When they arrive, Loxley’s father asks Robin to pretend to be his son a while longer in order to strengthen Nottingham’s status in the growing unrest.  The only hitch?  Robert’s wife, Marion, who isn’t too keen on having a stranger passing himself off as her spouse.  Luckily, it’s not long before Robin has cause to take his shirt off, taming her resistance immediately, and the two begin to fall in love.  (Well, okay, but once YOU see him without his shirt on, I think you’ll understand.)

Back at the palace, Godfrey manages to Wormtongue his way into the king’s ear, convincing John to enact enormous taxes on all the land owners so he can become richer and more powerful.  John’s just dumb enough to believe that ruling with an iron fist is the best way to get respect — exactly what the French king was counting on.  As a civil war begins to brew in England, the French gather up their swords and set sail for its shores, ready to divide and conquer.

But Robin’s since learned a secret about his own past that has inspired him to take a stand against the king and unite the people against the French.   You want respect, he tells John, you gotta earn it, yo.  And the best way to do that is to give the people MORE freedom, not less.  (Magna Carta, anyone?)  The king reluctantly agrees, promising his people that just as soon as the French are quashed, he’ll sign a treaty that restores more power to the citizenry.  But, of course, as soon as the French are put down, John reneges on his promise and declares Robin a traitor.

Robin retreats to the forest of Nottingham, and the film ends just where most Robin Hood stories begin — with “Robin of the Hood” an infamous outlaw, teamed up with Little John, Friar Tuck, and Maid Marion to battle the forces of evil and mete out justice their own way. (Cue Robin Hood Daffy to complete the saga in the very best of ways — “Ho ho and ha ha, eh?  I’ll ho ho and ha ha you, fat friar. . .!”)

Though it’s exactly what you’d expect from a Ridley Scott movie, cheesy dialogue and silly romance times bloody battle and male bonding plus one, I still found it really entertaining.  I enjoyed the characters, especially Blanchett as Marion (to be honest, I mostly just appreciated that they cast an older woman as the romantic lead instead of, say, Megan Fox), and also the historical elements, which were surprisingly not that inaccurate.

All in all, a darn good time and well worth a rental.  “Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!”  (For those who have no idea what I’m talking about:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZEcSgGKfQg.  And you’re welcome!)

[Netflix it | Buy it]

Genre:  Action/Adventure
Cast:  Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Max von Sydow, William Hurt, Mark Strong, Oscar Isaac, Danny Huston, Eileen Atkins, Mark Addy, Matthew Macfadyen

BOOK: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart (1949)

Ish Williams is out camping in the woods when he gets bitten by a rattlesnake.  Far away from civilization with no access to a phone (this novel is set in the 1950s, back when phones were made out of dinosaurs), he has no choice but to ride it out and see if it kills him.  He manages to make his way to a nearby cabin, crawls into bed, and waits to die.  As the venom works its way through his body, his fever skyrockets, and he spends several days in and out of consciousness.  At one point, two other men show up at the cabin’s door, take one look at him, and flee, panicked.  It’s not until Ish recovers and makes his way back to town that he realizes why:  some horrible epidemic has infected, and then killed, pretty much the entire world.  Town is empty.  There’s nobody left alive.

Ish’s first reaction is to head for his house in Berkeley, where he spends a few weeks waiting around just in case any of his friends or family show up.  But it soon becomes clear nobody will be coming, and, for lack of anything better to do, Ish decides to gas up his car and drive as far as he can get to see what he can see.

As he travels, he comes across other survivors here and there — a man camped out in a liquor store gleefully drinking himself to death, a teenage girl who seems terrified of him, and a smattering of others.  But nobody seems to be coping all that well and Ish begins to despair for the future of mankind.  Until he meets Emma, a woman about his age who makes him laugh, seems clever, and eventually becomes his wife (of sorts — there aren’t any judges or ministers left, either).

By the close of the first section of the novel, Emma and Ish have established a small community with about eight other survivors roughly their age.  They all begin having as many children as they can, managing to keep water flowing (gravity, usually my nemesis, turns out to be quite useful in these situations), adapt to the lack of electricity, and sustain themselves on a diet of canned food and bottled beverages pilfered from local stores.  The second section jumps us ahead by about 20 years, and the third ahead again, and by the end of the book, we’ve lived through Ish’s entire life, the majority of it spent in this “brave new world.”

Though the novel has some slow parts (and also some things that don’t make much sense, like them eating canned food for decades without dying from botulism), I found it completely fascinating.  It’s the rare post-apocalyptic novel that doesn’t take a doomsday approach to the whole thing.  Instead, its approach is far more practical.  Rather like Ish himself .

Ish himself, incidentally, isn’t a terribly endearing character — he’s extremely judgmental and kind of an ass, frankly.  When I first started the novel, I almost put it back down fifty pages in because I simply didn’t LIKE him.  But his attitude ends up providing a unique and unapologetic observer’s account of what life is like when the world disappears.  It’s hard.  It’s frequently miserable.  But it carries on.  And Stewart clearly gave this subject a lot of thought:  there’s a crazy, crazy epidemic of ants for a while, for example, and then a horrific epidemic of rats — both of which end up quashing themselves, because that’s just how nature works when there’s too much of any one thing, right?  (Perhaps for people too.)

There are extremely complicated social questions that emerge as well, several of which I’m still thinking about, weeks later.  In the second part of the book, Ish’s two sons go out to explore (finding it increasingly difficult to drive anywhere not because there isn’t any gas, but because there’s been no road maintenance for decades — pot holes that eat Volkswagens for lunch, e.g.) and come back with a new friend Ish and the other “elders” immediately distrust.  For one thing, he’s boastful about having slept with dozens of women, which makes them worry he might be carrying STDs, which they’d pretty much eradicated in their community by never having been exposed to them.  And for another, he starts wooing the community’s mentally handicapped member, which makes Ish worry she might procreate, trashing the future-humans gene pool.  (See what I mean about Ish being an ass?  But, if you think about it, that’s actually sort of practical, despite the fact Ish had no way of knowing if her mental defects were truly genetic in cause or if they were simply related to the trauma she suffered when the world as she knew it ended).

The elders end up coming up with a plan — they’re going to have to kill the interloper to protect themselves.  But one of them objects to this, because in the old world, this would’ve been against the law.  This leads to a fascinating quandary — what is “law” when the world changes so dramatically?

That’s just one example of the numerous thoughtful issues raised by the characters and their situations in this story.  I could talk about this book for hours, really, and that’s probably why, as I discovered later, this book makes it onto just about every “best sci-fi novel ever written” list.  I don’t know how I’d never heard of it;  moms who love sci-fi totally rule.

Anybody who read Cormac McCarthy’s über-depressing novel The Road ought to think about picking this book up.  As my mother said, it’ll help “wash the ashes out of your mouth.”  And when you’re done, I’d love to talk to you about your experience. This is definitely a book I won’t be forgetting any time soon.  If only because of the rats.  Seriously, the RATS.  THINK ABOUT THE RATS!!  I never thought about the rats!  Good lord, the rats would’ve totally done me in.

Highly, highly recommended!

[Buy from an Indie Bookstore | Buy from Amazon | Browse more book reviews | Search book reviews]

MOVIE: Red (2010)

Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) is a retired CIA operative living a quiet, boring life in the suburbs.  The highlight of his month is when his pension check arrives in the mail — a pension check he promptly tears in half so he can call to report it missing.  On the other end of the phone is the same woman each time, a clerk named Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), and over the last year or so, she and Frank have talked dozens of times and begun to develop obvious crushes on each other.

Those crushes are why, when a team of black-ops assassins are sent to Frank’s house one night to kill him, he immediately heads to Kansas City to get Sarah, realizing he’s undoubtedly been under surveillance for weeks, making her a target too.

Though she’s initially a little freaked out (to say the least — Frank essentially has to kidnap her, though he quite politely, I thought, vacuums her apartment for her before they leave), her own mid-life crisis has left her yearning for adventure, and when she realizes Frank’s telling the truth about his past as a spy and the present prices on both their heads, it’s not long before she’s pretty much game for anything.

They begin by looking into the recent, seemingly connected murder of a New York Times reporter, quickly discovering she was in possession of a mysterious list of names that included Frank’s as well as a dozen others, most of whom are now dead.

And that’s when Frank decides they’re gonna need some help; it’s time to “get the band back together” and enlist the assistance of his old colleagues — the savvy Joe (Morgan Freeman), the paranoid-delusional Marvin (John Malkovich, who should only ever play comically crazy action heroes from now on, if you ask me, because he’s so delightfully good at it), the classy Victoria (Helen Mirren), and her old beau Ivan the Russian (Brian Cox).

Together, they trace the hit list back to an incident in South America in the 1980s, a mass murder of civilians covered up by the son of an American senator who now wants to erase all traces of his crime.  Dodging a determined CIA agent (the dashing Karl Urban), the team puts together a complicated scheme to enact payback, stop the villain, and, you know, have a little good old-fashioned spy-game fun.

This is a totally nutty flick, based on a graphic novel and featuring loads of goofy comic book-style special effects, as well as a marvelous cast and a frequently hilarious script (I loved the post card theme as well — cute).  It’s not perfect, but it’s good-natured and extremely fun, and one I’ll definitely be pulling out the next time I’m in need of a hearty laugh.

You know, like tomorrow.  For example.  My copy is en route from Amazon as we speak.

Highly recommended!

[Netflix it | Buy it]

Genre:  Action, Comedy
Cast:  Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich, Julian McMahon, Ernest Borgnine, Richard Dreyfuss, Brian Cox, Karl Urban

New TV This Week

Am I the only one hugely disappointed by the crap job Kathy Bates is doing on Harry’s Law?  I’m giving her two more episodes to figure it out (and to get rid of that stupid shoe store) before I bail.  FIGURE IT OUT, KATHY BATES!

Only one new show this week that looks worth checking out — The Chicago Code on Monday night — but for all you Timothy Olyphant fans out there, Justified returns for its second season on Wednesday on FX.  Complicated show, great theme song.  It’s a keeper.

Monday, 2/7

The Chicago Code — FOX — 9pm.  Developed by Shawn Ryan (creator of the brilliant FX series The Shield), this series sounds like it aims to be a similarly gritty and violent cop drama.  Jennifer Beals stars as Chicago’s first female superintendent — bad-ass police woman by day, exotic dancer by night (I’m kidding about that last part.  I bet J.Beals never gets tired of Flashdance jokes, huh?).  And Delroy Lindo stars as . . . well, as some kind of bad-ass or another, I feel sure.  This one has promise.  Let’s see if it lives up to it.

Tuesday, 2/8

Traffic Light — FOX — 9pm.  The first problem with this new sit-com is its title, which keeps annoying me by getting that droning Monty Python song about traffic lights stuck in my head (“I like traffic lights, but not when they are red.”)  The second problem is that it’s a romantic comedy sort of thing.  The third problem is . . . god, I’m bored.  What were we talking about?

Wednesday, 2/9

Mr. Sunshine — ABC — 9:30-10.  The thing is, Mr. Sunshine, I can really only do one Friends comeback show at a time, and I’m already hooked on Showtime’s new Matt LeBlanc series Episodes, which is absolutely brilliant.  So, Matthew Perry?  Not gonna happen.  Your timing’s all wrong.  And, as they say, in comedy, timing is everything.

Am I right about Harry’s Law, or am I RIGHT?  Comment away!

MOVIE: The Children (2008)

If I spend the last 40 minutes of your horror film yelling (mostly swearing) at your characters, this means one of two things:  your movie is either really bad and my yells are intended as encouragement for the bad guy (GET ‘EM!), OR your movie is scaring the hoo-hah out of me.

Never in a million, trillion, bajillion years would I have expected this film to fit in that latter category.  And yet, holy fish-on-a-bicycle, did it ever.

This British flick, one of 2008′s Ghost House Underground movies (Ghost House is ex-Boyfriend Sam Raimi’s production company, by the way), is about two sisters, Elaine and Chloe, who have gotten their families together just after Christmas for a long weekend of holiday fun.  Chloe’s family owns a house way out in the snowy wilderness, and as the visit begins, the kids mostly spend their time playing in the woods, sledding and having snow ball fights, while the parents stand around in the kitchen gossiping and drinking tons of wine.  Most of the children are under the age of 10 or so, but Elaine’s eldest daughter, Casey, is about 16, precocious as hell, and adolescently sullen, bitter she got dragged along on this stupid trip when she could’ve been going to a totally sweet New Year’s Eve bash with her friends instead.  Parents totally suck.

Things are going pretty well until the holiday dinner the next evening, when, out of the blue, all the little kids start crying and screaming at the table.  While at first it seems like they’re just tired and cranky, when Chloe goes to comfort Elaine’s 10 year-old daughter, the little girl suddenly hisses at and then bites her.  Rawr!

The next thing we know, the adults are dying horrible, violent deaths, at first possibly by accident (note: never sled down a hill head-first), but then clearly viciously and intentionally.  Casey’s the first to figure it out: THE KIDS ARE NOT ALL RIGHT.  In fact, they seem to be sick with something that’s turned them into blood-thirsty little monsters.  And though anybody who’s ever seen a horror movie can pretty much take this from there, this film was so wonderfully shot, with cameras peeking here and there, not showing us what’s really happening until the final moments, that I was litrilly on the edge of my seat for the entire second half.

It was also a refreshing and complexity-adding twist to have the kids seem sick, as well (the theory seemed to be that the woods had infected them with something).  They began by vomiting, and as they grew more and more ill, seemed driven by a compulsion they weren’t fully conscious of.  And so, as each adult was confronted with the madness in their child, they also  had to confront their parental instinct to protect said child.  To want to take care of him or her.  Even while the kid was lunging at them with a paring knife.

All in all, a fine little thriller, beautifully made (lovely, lovely visuals), creatively written, and actually mother-frakkin’ goddamn scary.  Whew.  Man.  Nailed it!  Highly recommended to all fans of scary movies, and that goes double for those who have written off the “evil kid” genre after seeing far too many tediously identical installment.  I’ll definitely be checking out more of the films in this series.  See any?

[Netflix it | Buy it]

Genre:  Horror
Cast: Eva Birthistle, Stephen Campbell Moore, Jeremy Sheffield, Rachel Shelley, Hannah Tointon