It has to trace back to the Memorial Weekend of 2004 to scope out the last time when openers exploded to north of $60M+ three consecutive weekends in a row, the martini trio being Shrek 2, The Day After Tomorrow and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. After four and a half years of long waiting, the trifecta of Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, Quantum of Solace and Twilight repeated the feat, opening to $63M, $67M and $69M respectively. The teen Dracula romance pretty much shattered all industry expectations with an astonishingly huge opening of $69M, only a few notches below Pixar's The Incredibles, ranking 5th in the highest November openers after the Pixar toon and three Harry Potters. Eclipsed by the shadow of vampire last weekend, Disney's in-house animation Bolt looks to pick up some steam this coming weekend and chucking loots throughout the entire holiday season. Two past Oscar winners Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon also look to present their new outings to the Turkey frame. Witherspoon's Four Christamses, co-starring Vince Vaughn, despite all the vile reviews, is expected to do robust business throughout holiday frame till new year comes, whereas the big-budgeted, star-studded, Oscar-seeded Australia, which pairs Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman again after co-voicing over the romantic penguin couple two years ago, is welcomed by lukewarm reviews and has a relatively hard time to find enough audience to fill the auditorium.

Bolt

Once acclaimed as the emperor of 2-D animation golden age, Disney animation studio has never retrieved their ancient glory after entering the new 3-D animation era. Dinosaur (2000), Chicken Little (2005), The Wild (2006), Meet the Robinsons (2007) were all pretty much overshadowed by their more prominent competitors, Pixar and DreamWorks' PDI.  With the marriage inked in 2005, one of Pixar's forefathers, John Lassette, started overseeing Disney's in-house productions as the executive producer, which makes those non-pixar-branded Disney 3-D animations inevitably going pixar-ish, which is, I gotta admit, actually a good thing, as evidenced by this new talking-animal toon, "Bolt".

The TV show hero dog Bolt (John Travolta) never leaves the filming settings in his entire life. Despite the strong affectionate connection with his person Penny (Miley Cyrus), Bolt actually has no idea how a dog should behave in real life, mistaking all his super powers created by special effects are real. By an accident Bolt is transported to New York and under the impression that Penny was in grave danger, where he sets paws on a journey finding Penny and more importantly, discovering himself.

Again, talking animals rule. That's actually something I don't want to talk about any more. The story itself has a huge "Toy Story" emblem branded on it, having pretty much the Buzz Lightyear story transplanted onto the little white dog. The animation itself is more solid rather than spectacular. DreamWorks has all but played the card of cute talking animals to the extreme where one step ahead is as difficult as a breakthrough. Simultaneously and evidently, those animations from Disney's own animation studio lack the magic touch of pixar that endows characters real liveliness. For the quality being, Bolt is pretty much in line with Meet the Robinsons, so to speak, solid but not spectacular.

Bitten by vampire last weekend, the opening of Bolt was weakened by around $10M compared to industry expectation. However, family should embrace this animation harder throughout the coming holiday season so decent gross should be in grasp. But then again, as said, if Disney animation studio seeks real groundbreaking success, to say, on par with Pixar outings, John Lassette's assistance and advanced technology are obviously not enough.

B+

Quantum of Solace

In general sense, the relationship between 007 series is not exactly predecessor-sequel because most of them are isolated episodes of stories. However, Quantum of Solace is by all mean the standard sequel to Casino Royole: the story begins where Casino Royale left two years ago; to begin with, Bond escorts the hostage to M, only to find he is only an iota of an unnamed, omnipresent international crime organization that is up to some no good...

Insulated from other 007 movies, Quantum of Solace satisfies any criteria for a solid action movie that can be described with all kinds of cliches like "high-octane", "testosterone-fraught", "action-packed" or whatsoever. However, what it tries to pick on is pretty much one of the best-reviewed action movies ever, let alone the one that reanimated an aging franchise. In order to inject some humane factors into the super spy, the playwright forcefully shoved melodrama into the plot, only making the story paler and more discursive, characters more one-sided and illogical. The new Bond seems to have lost those genteel brand name mannerisms that distinguished Bond from other known action figures, sadly falling into the categories that are more likely in answer to another J. B. agent from Universal.

Daniel Craig is good as ever, so is Judi Dench's M. After taking on "Hitman" and "Max Payne", Olga "new Milla Jovovich" Kurilenko shouldn't have too much trouble handling roles of action heroines, which catalog more Bond girls fall in. It's not the cast who are to blame for The mediocrity of this movie. The superiority of Casino Royale made its followers hard to come up with a competitive script, and the strange choice of Marc Forster never boded well for Quantum of Solace to exceed its instant predecessor, by any means.

C

Australia

Story about a distant concept that fails to connect with mainstream audience, debut to a dismal $2.5M opening day (budget over $130M), lacking the support of critics (below 60% on rottentomatoes, which is definitely unacceptable for a best picture contender), patience-testingly long running time (2 hours and 45 minutes), buzz that Baz Luhrmann was forced by the studio to re-edit the ending, none of these factors bodes a promising future for Australia to earn back its budget by the end of its stateside run.

It's definitely not a time for real epic. When was the last non-fantasy epic? We need to run all the way back to the prime time of Hollywood that witnessed the birth of real greatness like Benhur, Lawrence of Arabia, The Searchers, Out of Africa, and Gone With the Wind. In order o make a real epic, the director is required to be in hold of great ambition, indestructible stamina and passionate love towards the epic story he wants to tell the audience. Baz Luhrmann happens to be the director with superior vision of beauty, unchained passion for his homeland, vast ambition to revive the classical Hollywood splendor (It's precisely Moulin Rouge! that resusciated the entire genre of musical, hence the following successes of Chicago, Dreamgirls, Hairspray and Mamma Mia!) and sharp sense that captures and depicts the grandeur and mystery of that far-away land. Having this in mind, I respect him unreservedly.

However, the story itself somewhat backfired.

September 1939, Lady Ashley (Nicole Kidman) flies from England to Australia following her husband who she suspects is cheating on her, only finding he has been stabbed to death and left her a deserted cattle station with over 1500 cattle to handle. To herd the cattle all the way up to the northern portal city Darwin, Lady Ashley has to hire the rugged Drover (Hugh Jackman) and cross the most unforgiving land in the continent.

However unsatisfied you are with Australia, you gotta give credits to the stunningly beautiful landscape across northern Australia. Baz Luhrmann tested to the utmost his ability to capture beauty and brilliance of nature, the vast wildness and emptiness, engulfing any individual existence, making any human endeavor to conquer nature next to zero, but the beautiful scenery is only the backdrop where story takes place. I see the script trying to bring together a huge mixture of romance between different hierarchies, the story of the stolen generation and the twisted lives in the life-devouring war, which, however, pales in the face of the beauty of nature. I'd rather Baz Luhrmann had kept the tragic ending that could have just blown people off the water by the unpredictability and cruelity of destiny, where as the current ending only dampens the real strength of a good tragedy, ending up as another "happy-go-lucky" Hollywood assembly line product.

Hugh "The-Sexiest-Man-Alive" Jackman delivered a convincing performance as the wildly free spirit The Drover. But I'm more concerned about Kidman and the money fate of this movie. I was not surprised by the low-end opening of Australia because mediocre critical reviews and lukewarm WOM are pretty much the death knell for box office potential of such awards-contender-to-bes. Though I'd got the hunch that Australia was going to fail, I am still shocked by the surprisingly persistent bad luck haunting Fox and Kidman. Honestly, it has to be trying very hard to produce such a long list of flops.

Kidman used to be a decent actress and I did enjoy a couple of her performances... Personally I have nothing against her, everyone has the rights to inject whatever he/she wants into their faces, right? But since her face got frozen in Cold Mountain, her career has been spiraling down and she has been heading into the Cher territory (or Joan Rivers, if she is not careful).

Plus, she is supporting in "Nine" and I am sure she will be supporting in most of her films from this point on. Australia may be one of her last few leading roles as I read. I could be wrong and she could go the route of Meryl Streep if she manages to dim a little bit her ice queen halo (where I still don't know what made her lose the first Narnia to Tilda Swinton), but as far as romantic leads, her days are numbered. Besides, her movies' stateside performance is freefalling, hence long gone the $17.5 million per movie good old days. I have no idea how much Fox paid her for Australia but should be less than The Golden Compass' $15 million considering her downsizing audience appeal and discount over Baz Luhrmann.

B

Twilight

It's one of the shittiest movies I've ever seen. I watched about one fourth, slept for the next one fourth and then walked out. I don't get the memo of how Robin Pattinson's pale-faced, bloody-lipped vampire look can pull off any concept in the neighborhood of "totally gorgeous". Kristen Stuart's beautiful deadpan face plain turned me down. The story is horribly horrible. No one expected you to pass King Kong as for inter-species love, but cliched concept, terrible acting, cheesy dialogue and shallow plot only make the story more awful than it already is, where the fact that those unfulfilled teen and tween girls rushed to see it and helped it post one of the largest opening ever only magnifies the fact that shallowness of human being has hit a new low. Not going to waste more of my words.

D-

Four Christmases

Oh I hate cliches. I thought Vince Vaughn's Fred Claus is horrible enough but at least it doesn't splash so much body fluids. I do appreciate Reese Witherspoon's courage of taking on diverse screen characters but have you ever thought a body-fluid comedy was not going to help you a lot with your down-spiraling career? The appearance of Sissy Specek and Mary Steenburgen only makes this movie more tragically Specek- and Steenburgen-free. Quick maths, an entire cast that has 5 Oscars registers a lower than 30% rating on RT, what in the world is happening?

C-

Having picked up some old stuff here, I'm not going to detail them...

Open Season 2: Direct to DVD, which matches its direct-to-DVD quality.

Run, Fat Boy, Run: See how low Simon Pegg's comedy can reach.

How to Lost Friends and Alienate People: Even lower.

Wild Hogs: Road comedy that featured Tim Allen, John Travota, William H. Macy and Martin Lawrence made one of the biggest wonders in recent box office history. Quality-wise, it looks pretty good by the side of its RT rating: 14%.

Silent Movie: Mel Brooks' classic, filmed in 1970s, where the only line is delivered by a mime. I can see a little bit of Charlie Chaplin, some Buster Keaton and quite a handful of Wall-E in it. All hail to Mel Brooks!

Silly season finally ended with a fabulous splash from the first African-American president ever elected in the US's history, with the entire country kinda drunken in the hangover of welcoming a wholly new and promising presidency and the apprehension of the upcoming shaky ground of economy. Speaking for myself, I drank awful lot of liquor last night and ran into a serious hangover this morning, so much for decency... Well honestly I'm sorta lost on the sudden withdrawal of all the campaign stuff, which is perhaps what folks call as PEWS -- Post-Election-Withdrawl-Syndrome. Had it been longer we would have had a lot more good jokes walking around, just like Sarah Palin. Isn't she a live walking laughing stock? In lieu of drawing the demographic McCain had expected she would draw, the Alaskan Governor, former Miss Congeniality, John McCain's running mate and a series jokes she made, including the proximity foreign policy theory, hocky mom, Joe six-packs and the latest French president thing pretty much backfired instead of bolstering McCain's campaign. Well so much for politics, let's talk about movies. Finally the multiplex started picking up a little bit fuel gas with the new toon sequel Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa joining the battlefield, making some serious big noise with a you-can-not-complain-it opening day gross of $17.5M and eyeing to round up the first skirmish with a delicious $58M for the debut weekend. Raunchy comedy Role Models starring Sean Williams Scott and Paul Rudd opened to a better-than-expected $6.7M, well paving to a weekend finish of a healthy $20M. The union of Samual L. Jackson and the late Bernie Mac as a duo of soul singers in the musical comedy Soul Men failed to trigger a bigger blip on the radar than $1.8M upon arrival. Hey Thanksgiving, yuletide, winter vacation, Oscar and other year-end festivals, here we come baby!

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa

I never try to hide my passionate hate towards the first one, which I always take as one of the most awful 3D animations made, even inferior to Chicken Little and The Wild. However, I'd say this sequel pretty much has restored my faith in the franchise. DreamWorks' PDI has sticked to jarring talking animals since the very initial and this is of course no exception. The four fugitives from New York Central Zoo, Alex the lion, Marty the zebra, Gloria the hippo and Melman the giraffe, pick it up where they left three years ago, get onboard a dangerously unreliable airplane launched by a giant slingshot and piloted by the co-fugitive penguin ninja quartet, and head back to the Big Apple. However instead of landing in New York, the plane crash-landed in the very center of African savannah...

As said, I never liked the first one and actually was not holding much confidence in this piece either. Nonetheless it turns out to be something really decent. Though the plot and role settings have "Lion King re-imaging" written all over it but the similarity indeed matters little. Having produced runaway successes like Shrek series and Kung Fu Panda, PDI guys sure as hell know how to capture the target demo. Madagascar 2 depicts a vivid African graffiti fraught with all species of animals singing and dancing all the way down to the Kilimanjaro where the exotic attraction is limitlessly magnified. I believe even adults dragged into theaters by their kids would also enjoy such a feel-good jovious family toon. Though lacking originality which I am not going to complain because I am actually the one to blame, the story is actually surprisingly solid. The Lion King talk is kind of "deja vu" feel but only occupies an reasonable amount of time, where the story is greatly enriched by numerous subplots and lively supporting roles. The stellar voicing cast of Stiller, Rock, Pinkett-Smith and Schwimmer aside, DreamWorks also hired talents like Sacha Baron Cohen, Cedric the Entertainer, Alec Baldwin and late Bernie Mac (whose other late-stage movie Soul Men also debuted this weekend but is largely ignored), among whom the most credits have to be given to Will I Am who not only voices over the chubby chunky hippo Moto Moto but wrote quite some quality songs for M2. Should you plan to watch this movie, please remember to hum along with the song "Fish Out of Water", written and sung by Will I Am, composed by Hans Zimmer.

I've been around the world in a pouring rain.
Feeling like the place I feel strange.
Taken to a place where none knows my name.
I ain't know nobody, all look the same.
I am a fish out of water lion out of jungle.
I am a fish out of water lion out of jungle.
I am a fish out of water lion out of jungle.

People, my people, take me to my people.
...

B+

Role Models

Far as I can remember, my taste of movies has varied kind of greatly after coming to the US. I still can remember the old days when I was into horror flicks while dissing raunchy comedies like American Pie series. The thing I didn't see coming is that one day I even find those R-rated comedies attractive and most horror movies tasteless. Wind changes direction! Heh heh. Two guys who fucked up with the traffic police are forced to do community service in a adults-children reciprocation project called Sturdy Wing in order not to be put in jail. However the pairing with a brain-fantasized teen dweeb and foul-mouthed ten years old actually makes going to jail seem a better idea...

Paul Rudd has appeared in quite some latest Judd Apatow projects while his co-star Sean William Scott long launched his R-comedy career long before Judd Apatow grew known by the audience, with American Pie series by the end of last century. Each of them may not sport a sturdy box office draw by now but the synergy of the dynamo duo is sound enough to draw college kids into the theaters, plus the presence of the "Superbad" nerd McLovin, no wonder the robust opening numbers for a relatively low-budgeted comedy.

Frankly I wasn't caught on to this movie because the premise actually paled in the first place. However I changed my mind when reading the reviews collected by rottentomatoes. Generally the market goes skimpy towards comedies that are not escorted by box office surefires, evidenced by the Summit flop Sex Drive, which failed miserably in spite of its robust WOM and reviews. Therefore, the success of Role Models and such likes actually again proves the axiom that has been in effect a long way, which says for a comedy to succeed you need to have a couple of recognizable names and real solid yet convincing gags throughout. Not too difficult, huh?

B+

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Movie-wise this really ended up as a great weekend for me 'cz I've got the feel that all the movies start to pick up somewhat, both box-office-wise and quality-wise. The director of Clerks series who is notoriously known for making raunchy comedy summoned the cornerstone of Judd Apatow factory Seth Rogen and actress-of-the-time Elizabeth Banks. Numerically she has appeared in three movies that were released in last four weeks, W., Zack and Miri and Role Models, with more upcoming movies to come!

Both this and Role Models are R-rated comedies but the latter is no match to Z&M in terms of dirty language, which turns out to be a sex slang extravaganza. You gotta know that Z&M was once pushed to the edge of NC-17 which would mercilessly rule out any of its potential on box office. But still, this movie is rude, crude, lude, vulgar, full of graphic nudity, direct sex shots, let alone tons of swears and sex terminologies. Honestly you can actually see the frontal nudity of both male and female such that the only difference is camera shots were not drawn close where they are in real pornos. Despite the kind of tabooed topic featured in the title, Z&M turns out to be a really heart-felt story that every couple who seeks advices on their love or sex life had better take a look at.

Seth Rogen is funny as ever, whose Knocked Up I just went through the other day. The curly-haired Canadian Jewish gradually shape up as the newest sizzling comedy star that sells tickets, recent resume augmenting with new DreamWorks animation Monsters Vs. Aliens, Steven-Chow-helming graphic novel adaptation The Green Hornet and another Judd-Apatow vehicle Funny People. Elizabeth Banks does not feel natural as Rogen does but still OK. Thanks Kevin Smith. Few directors in Hollywood would dare to use porno as the raw materials of their movies, let alone write it directly in the title but Kevin Smith is the man, who dares to defy the H-wood conventions and make some real wonderful refreshments to us moviegoers. All hail to Kevin Smith!

B+

Changeling

Year end is nearing so serious pictures, a.k.a awards contenders, are hot on the wheel planning on something big upon the annual movie party that starts with an O so here comes Clint Eastwood. The Hollywood veteran never bows his nobel head to aging even in his seventies and now again he delivered us another one-two punch of Changeling and Gran Torino, just as what he did back in 2006 with Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima. Gran Torino's wide release is scheduled in the latter half of December, *cough Letters From Iwo Jima *cough, then again I could only take a look at this period crime drama set at Los Angeles back in 1928. It's actually the second time Eastwood picked up child-molest materials, the first one being Mystic River that won him tons of accolades and awards in 2003.

Changeling refers to the folklore that fairies steal away human babies and substitute one of their own race; the latter would never thrive, remaining small, wizened, mentally abnormal, and ill-tempered. A baby whose defects were not obvious at birth but appeared in the first year or two could thus be explained as not truly human. In 16th- and 17th-century England, such an infant was called a ‘changeling’. Here in this movie, Angelina Jolie played the extremely distressed mother Christine Collins who unswervingly seeks her lost son and fights with the corrupt LAPD with her individual force.

After watching the only thing I'd say is: Eastwood still is the man and Jolie actually demonstrated she really deserves the little golden statuette in her closet and still can do something other than selling tons of magazines that feature her adoption, pregnancy, birth giving or quarreling with Brad Pitt in bedroom.

The whole emphasis of the story was laid upon Christine Collins' subliminal maternal love and persistent stamina, which were pretty much pushed to the extreme by Jolie. Sure she is hot and more than that she knows well when to leash her hotness out like in Wanted and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and when to hide it from spotlight like in Changeling and A Mighty Heart. Had I not known it beforehand, I wouldn't believe the pale, bony, wizened, highly disturbed mother actually shares the same body with the sizzling hot female assassin in Wanted. I assume most of the audience would give in to her portrait of the great mother because of the powerful performance bursting out of the screen, just like a storm that can blow you off the water. John Malkovich played Reverend Gustav Briegleb who not only rescued Christine Collines out of the hellish psychopathic rehab but steadily supported her throughout her battle with LAPD as well. Two more memorable performances are actually from the abject Captain J. J. Jones and the crimemind ____ behind the entire tragedy. Jeffrey Donovan's J. J. Jones stood out of the page turning out to be such a despicably corrupt scumbag that he deserved in every way what fell over him eventually. Every of his facial expressions and body languages screams vanity, cold-bloodedness, haughtiness and abomination. As for the other one, in fact I can not talk too much because that would just spoiler the story.

You can still tell Clint Eastwood's brand of story-telling even he was physically unseen in the movie. The fast-paced delivery, clinically detached way of narration and green-and-grey screen shots bode the extremely grim and dark theme throughout the entire movie. Because the Changeling story is actually adapted from a real event, I knew how the story ended even before it came out but I was still greatly magnetized by the way how Eastwood manipulated everything. However, talking about dramatic twist, this is less intense than Million Dollar Baby and the less-than-spectacular review along with the resemblance to Mystic River actually could be well in its way to any bigger awards categories like best picture or best director but I've got the feeling that Angelina Jolie has pretty secured the second Oscar nomination in her career due to the fact that it is a quite bleak year for breakthrough female performances and the fact that the academy would probably remember how she got snubbed with "A Mighty Heart" right one year ago. Then again, even though Changeling does not bode well for Eastwood's award potentiality, the old Californian cowboy still holds some serious chance with Gran Torino. Who knows the Letters From Iwo Jima drama will not repeat itself all over again?

A-

Recently I've picked some 2007 stuff I left:

Knocked Up, a very solid comedy, strongly recommended to all married, unmarried couples or couple-to-bes, also to any single friends who plan to remain single for another while.

Reservation Road: I was cheated by the title, which I thought was a kind of abstract innuendo as redemption or whatsoever but which just turned out as the name of the road where the accident happened. Besides the ending is incredibly weak.

Gone, Baby, Gone: I watched half of this crime thriller and Ben Affleck's directorial debut when it came out. The reason I didn't finish it is simple: I was bored. But seriously urged by Peter I picked it up where I left and discovered it is surprisingly good. Solid ensemble cast with a similar theme of Changeling and Mystic river actually made it a kind of critical-darling-to-be and it did collect some early buzz last year if my memory serves. But ultimately it ended up with winning only one nomination for Amy Ryan's portrait of the typical American white trash and eventually lost it to Tilda Swinton from the mediocrefest Michael Clayton. Well if there's someone who is in the mood of enjoying some dark crime thriller, this or Changeling could pull off a good choice.

When it's Halloween, you know there is Saw. Well technically Halloween is still one week away but the fifth chapter of the torture-fest series already zinged its engine. However, it's the first time in five years since the original Saw cut down the first bulk of flesh in 2004 that this series walk away without the weekend #1 crown, only yielding to an even scarier movie... Though the giant Hollywood land is notorious for playing counterprogramming games, examples being rat chief cooked LAPD, the devil wearing Prada enchanted the returning Superman and two "W"s faced off the weekend before the last Independence Day, it rarely sees the absolute polarity of this weekend's pair of openers. Sure that both High School Musical and Saw series own solid built-in audience but the similarity ends here. The feel-good G-rated tuner croons its high note to a "FABULOUS" $16.9M opening day, projecting way in the north of the current October opening weekend record holder Scary Movie's $48M while the Lionsgate R-rated horror franchise's new saw scares an approximate $14.1M loot, pretty much on par with where older saws ended after their first days ($14.8M for Saw IV and $14.5M for Saw III). Both pics are doing robust business in their own right, looking to powering this very weekend to be one of the biggest ever in the fall season corridor. The long delayed Pride & Glory opened as poorly as feared in fourth with $2.3M. Since this weekend on bigger holiday tent pole movies will run out of cage one after another. Despite the absence of the highly anticipated Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Madagascar 2, Quantum of Solace, Bolt, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Yes Man and Bedtime Stories will try to keep 2008 in pace with the sizzling winter of 2007 boiled with the sensational business of jarring chipmunks, last man in New York city and a gang of semi-pro treasure hunters.

High School Musical 3: Senior Year

As I said, this movie in some sense is even scarier than Saw and I was not exaggerating at all. East High School kids are about to graduate so everybody is hot on the coming prom night, and sure enough the "baddie" Sharpay (Ashley Tisdale) is scheming to elbow Gabrielle (Vanessa Hudgens) out both on and off stage. While Troy (Zac Efron) also faces the trilemma of choosing between basketball, performing career and his beloved Gabrielle...

Nothing surprising, nothing is out of expectation. The reunion of director Kenny Ortega and East High wildcats kids still manages to solve every difficulty singing and dancing as they did in the last two chapters. Crisp songs and dizzy colors can not cover the fact that the roles are all black-and-white, one-sided, puerile, quite a bunch of premodonnas, with story being banal, empty, shallow, short-sighted, totally irrevelant to even the slightest truthfulness. What's more dangerous, the fancy crap fantasizes the kids' brains that the world is all about sunshine, sand beach, palm trees and glasses of soft drink dipped with lemons. Who the fuck told ya so? You should just kick right on his butt and beat the crap out of him. In reality I bet Troy and Gabrielle would be nothing more than a link of each other's daisy chain, Ryan would be fooling around gay bar and Sharpay would be drunken in alcoholism, spoofed in sex tape and confessing in third-class talk show... The more unbearable part is this crap is even rated fresh in Rottentomatoes. What the fuck? Have all the critics got shit in their brains or they are just bribed by Disney with megabucks?

Denny Ortega is totally competent as a cheographer but talking about some real direction, c'mon, gimme a break, just bury the shit way down, will ya? Disney hyped up the concocted real-life love between the two leadings, which received pretty good effect as evidenced by the fabulous box office and sale numbers of CDs and OSTs. Zac Efron got more than $3M payday and rumor has it he is in negotiation with Disney to reprise Troy Bolten in HSM4, with the number increasing to $8M. But how could they still stay in high school when senior year is over and diplomas are all handed over? There is one thing definitely no doubt 100% absofuckinglutely true that Disney would by no means give up the golden goose that easily, the question being either starting milking another bunch of kids dry with HSM 4 or blatantly retitling it as College Musical. Stay tuned fellas, see how Hollywood plays this time.

C-

Max Payne

With the "max pain", Fox ended the painful waiting without a single #1 opener throughout the last seven months after Horton Hears a Who banged last March. Pitifully this Mark Wahlberg star vehicle has no way to escape the fate of other videogame big screen adaptations that share in common: mediocrity. After his wife's tragical death, Detective Max Payne is resolved to scope out the murderer behind, only getting involved in a bigger governmental conspiracy. Sounds familiar, huh? I can tell you every square inch of the screen is fraught with cheesy dialogue, contriving coolness and redundant gunpowders, which turned out to be more effective than the best sleeping pills I've taken. The angel-like flying beings, named Valkyrie in the movie referring to the mystic female warriors in north European mythology (Tom Cruise's new thriller quotes from the same legend), did pretty nothing but set up some lousy shades and screams. The funny thing is, to maximize its potential audience crowd Fox is said to have trimmed down over 50% of bloody and gunshot scenes, finally struggling to win this movie a more audience-friendly PG-13 rating (most of other videogame movies, including Hitman and Resident Evils series were rated R). Yet I need to give some credit to the two Russian hotties. Well honestly Mila Kunis was born in the US with Russian decent, who wrote her name big on the slate with Judd Apatow's Forgetting Sarah Marshall earlier this year while Olga Kurylenko was actually imported from Ukrine (still remember Milla Jovovich?) and played similar roles in last year's Hitman and the about-to-come 22nd 007 Quantum of Solace. However awful it is, some credits would be given to the cinematographer as well. To begin with I'd see this movie feature some really beautiful camera shots with birdview of the city night, explosive sky full of hell fire and the angel-like creatures' beautiful and deathly flight.

C

W.

Oliver Stone's third trial on the presidency is proved to be , ugh, not that successful. Outvoted by Max Payne, Chihuahua and bee last weekend, W. needs some sensational hold to make back its $30M budget, which most probably will not be the case. Oliver Stone is always ranked high in my book but I was kinda disappointed this time. His fabulous resume comes a long way down from Platoon, JFK, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, U-Turn to more recent Any Given Sunday and World Trade Center. I can still remember being deeply shocked throughout the re-depiction of the real life disaster happening on that nightmarish day by the real splendor of mankind shining brightly, unswerving, indestructable, faint but steady, pale yet vivid. However in W., I sensed that he lost the sharpness and boldness that distinguished him from regular Hollywood filmmakers. That's actually understandable because it's not the first time that a president is filmed but the first time a president that remains in office makes his way to the big screen. The entire movie sinks in a kinda forced comedic tune but you can barely laugh couple of times throughout the movie. Josh Brolin's portrait of the 43rd president of the United States definitely nails down the point but was largely wasted by the Stone's ineffective way of interpreting the goofy, well-intentioned but wrongly-behaved president. In general, I expected more than his arrest during fight with Princeton, flirtation with Laura Bush or quarrel with George Bush Sr. from the eventful life of W. But who the hell knows? Perhaps that's just the way his life is, perhaps he was really that short-sighted to glue the nation in the quagmire of an unwise untimely war, perhaps it's really not a good idea to film a president that is still in power but who the hell knows?

B-

The Secret Life of Bees

Another niche movie. Before it came out every so-called box office guru pegged it around the maximum of $6M opening but the bees took a full swing, roared over presidency and perched at the 3rd lot last weekend. Again like last time watching The Family That Preys, I might be the only non-black audience sitting through this all-female cast movie.

Story involves around a little white girl (Dakota Fanning) escaped from her abusive father with the loyal African-American maid Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson) running into the haven of the kind-hearted Boatwright sisters, who raised bees in a peaceful suburban area of North Carolina. The first half of the movie was kinda slow-paced until the sudden death seized the attention of audience again but before that my patience was largely run out. I can tell the pain those women suffer from but generally there is very limited amount of sympathy I can shed upon meaningless sentiment, which is mostly the privilege of women. Dakota Fanning must have been quite reluctant to swallow the fact the Abigail Breslin received a best supporting actress nomination before her (2006 for Little Miss Sunshine) because she has been obsessed with serious drama roles since, from Hounddog, Winged Creatures to Bees. I appreciate her challenge towards serious award-winning roles but being dramatic doesn't help make the role more convincing, honestly. Her overreaction betrays herself that she remains in the mold of "drama queen" set up in War of the Worlds. Jennifer Hudson and Queen Latifah offered the solid shoulders the little girl was supposed to cry over when she was helpless but nothing in depth was discovered from these two probably most acclaimed African-American actresses. Alicia Keys' June Boatwright pales even worse due to the fact that the role itself has simply nothing worth digging. The only worthwhile performance came from Sophie Okenado who earned an Oscar nomination back in 2004 with the genocide thriller Rowanda Hotel. She played the kind-hearted, purely innocent and slightly mentally challenged May Boatwright (yes, to me extra sentiment equals mentally challenged) whose points, however, were taken due to the annoying nature of the role itself. Generally the all-female cast provided a passable ensemble performance and thanks to the mediocrity of the movie itself there goes all its hope for Oscar. Bye bye Fanning! Don't keep me waiting too long for your next melodramatic role and I believe you won't disappoint me.

B-

The Fireflies in the Garden

I was once deeply attracted by the clips cut from this intense drama. Having watched it, though dismayed by its giant plot holes, I still give some credit to the intoxicating performances from Willem Dafoe, Julia Roberts, Ryan Reynolds and Emily Watson. An accident that happened right in front of the homecoming son of the family (Ryan Reynolds) took away Lisa's life (Julia Roberts). The supposedly happy family reunion totally immersed into edgeless sorrow and some family secrets started to surface...

I like the fierce father-son confrontation scene and this film oozes the fluid of sorrow, despair, unfaith and doom from scalp to sole. Somewhere it even suggests some incestual subplot but it ultimately didn't show up. The movie starts with a flashback memory of the son that his father drove him out of the car in a pouring rain. The ever-escalating family war tore apart every family member, twisting the son's heart, sewing him full of hatred towards his stepfather. Moon waxing and waning, even after years by the time they were bounded again by the death of their closest person, wife and mother, they still held some feud that ultimately burst out over the dinner. Willem Dafor's Charlie is a demonic, nosy and totalitarian father who barely allows room to breathe for all his family. After voicing in The Ant Bully and Charlotte's Web, Julia Roberts chose this arthouse film as her live action returning debut and did a quite decent job. The kind-hearted mother Lisa actually stands right in the middle of the giant whirlpool. She was the one who tried to appease the resentment between her husband and her son, even after death it was her who eventually tied all family together. I did enjoy the riveting performances delivered by those practiced actors but it can not make the giant flaw invisible. The playwright set up too many subplots there were ultimately not filled, especially the dialogue between Ryan Reynolds and Emily Watson in the kitchen, and the appearance of Ian Gruffudd. Well had the end been more intense and the story more complete, I would have given it an A but now..

B

Having watched Pride & Glory for around 40 minutes, I totally got the reason why it had been delayed over two years. It has every cliche all October crime thriller has, varying from The Yard, We Own the Night to The Departed, but it doesn't have a single advantage these movies have. Collin Farrell's career was thrown a vicious monkey wrench by the fiasco of the gynormous stinker The Alexander in 2004 and has been hiding in indie films since. Please, please don't drag down Edward Norton. I at least like him somewhat.

XXXX Technical Enterprises
P.O. Box XXX • XXX XXXX • XX • XXXXX
Phone 408-XXX-XXXX
October 16, 2008


Liang Quan
XXX Holmes Street apt. #X Atlanta, 30318

Dear Liang Quan:

XXXX Technical Enterprises. is pleased to offer you a job as a New Product Head-HDD Characterization Engineer.

We trust that your knowledge, skills and experience will be among our most valuable assets. Should you accept this job offer, per company policy you'll be eligible to receive the following beginning on your hire date.
Salary: Annual gross starting salary of $XXX,XXX, paid in biweekly installments by your choice of check or direct deposit Performance
Bonuses: Up to three percent of your annual gross salary, paid quarterly by your choice of check or direct deposit.
Stock Options: 800 XXXX stock options in your first year, fully vested in four years at the rate of 150 shares per year
Benefits: Standard, XXXX-provided benefits for salaried-exempt employees, including the following.
401(k) retirement account
Annual stock options
Child daycare assistance
Education assistance
Health, dental, life and disability insurance
Profit sharing
Sick leave
Vacation and personal days

To accept this job offer: Sign and date this job offer letter where indicated below. Sign and date the enclosed Non-Compete Agreement where indicated. Sign and date the enclosed Confidentiality Agreement where indicated. Sign and date the enclosed At-Will Employment Confirmation where indicated. Mail all pages of the signed and dated documents listed above back to us in the enclosed business-reply envelope, to arrive by October 31, 2008. A copy of each document is enclosed for your records. Attend new-hire orientation on Monday, November 14, 2008, beginning at 9:00 AM sharp.

To decline this job offer: Sign and date this job offer letter where indicated below. Mail all pages of this job offer letter back to us in the enclosed business-reply envelope, to arrive by October 31, 2008.

The multiplex is so overpopulated that the Hollywood is in desperate need of birth control!

Ambulances are waiting outside the cinema gates to carry the casualties directly to rental store. October is always known for traffic jam and towering death toll, as evidenced by the clash of over eleven wide releases within two weeks. Last weekend the chihuahua from Beverly Hills barked the loudest among all freshmen. In the meantime, the manipulative mini-dog is looking to piss the largest territory again in its soph sesh, winning an edge over the disappointing Body of Lies, though headlined with the prominent trio DiCaprio, Crowe and Scott. Famine in Hollywood aggravates everyday and more sequels, prequels and remakes are in production. Remake of Spanish horror [Rec] Quarantine slashed out a way into the market, pandering those long-waiting gore hounds before Saw V starts the engine. Well I've gotta admit the box office of fall season can never be as exciting as that of summer but the idea of welcoming Oliver Stone's third mess with the presidency, the previous two being J.F.K and Nixon, and embracing the launch of possibly the biggest aggregated weekend ever in the fall corridor (High School Musical 3: Senior Year and Saw V) still gives me a thrill.

Beverly Hills Chihuahua

Someday, the world is coming to an end and earth will be living its final days, and the planet's one remaining scientist will look at the formulas he's scrawled on his chalkboard and have an epiphany, tracing the decline of civilization and end of the world to exactly one thing: the success of this movie.

A Beverly Hills chihuahua accidentally gets lost in the mean street of Mexico, under the help of all old and new friends, eventually fighting back to her penthouse home. Aren't we done with talking animals? Does anybody still hold even the slightest interests of the story, the plot, the characters or the movie itself? I don't want to be mean to kids but apparently those little pathetic creatures abso-fucking-lutely have no idea of how harmful the colorful junk food can be to their teeny-tiny brains. I mean, the residual stink of Alvin and the Chipmunks last year hasn't completely diminished now another gang of dogs just bark out of the gate, can anything be more unbearable than that? Well sure as hell I know later September till early October is perfect for awful family films aiming at kids, instances being Open Season in 2006 and The Game Plan in 2007 both having done decent business with at best mediocre quality. Though the formula of moneymaking is still in effect, I don't get it that how Disney, I mean, the mousehouse that owns Pixar, come on, Pixar! can blatantly work out such a horrendous piece of turd and throw it into market just like this? Come on!

D-

High School Musical 2

The first type of people I don't get is those who keep Saw series' opening weekends constantly above $30M, the second being those who set the HV sales record for the previous two HSMs and who are expected to bolster HSM3 to shatter the opening weekend record of October. HSM2 itself is only a TV movie, which in normal situation I wouldn't give a darn shit. However, the surging hype of HSM3 and fervent forum folks' talk about how this is gonna slain the monthly opening record and cover the ground with broken eye glasses actually aroused my interest somewhat. Therefore I did one of the few things I regret to have done in my entire life.

By and large I'm quite tolerant to musicals, I mean, not only tolerant but tend to appreciate them more than they deserve, like a bunch of musicals including Mamma Mia!, Hairspray, Dreamgirls, The Phantom of the Opera, Chicago and Moulin Rouge! But this one definitely crosses the fucking line of travesty and absurdity. It's not a movie but huge excretion enclosed in colorful icing, a good mixture of soap-opera melodrama, cheesy fest and gay parade, a well-decorated null ornamented with Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Tisdale's extremely inviting voices and fledgling heartthrobs like Zac Efron and Cobin Bleu. I can deal with shallowness, low-class or even banality, but absolutely no idiocy. Come on look at the supposed baddie "Sharpay" (look at the fucking stupid name), I'd be willing to eat my own hat if someone in real life as arrogant as she would not seek revenge after such immense humiliation and failure, just to name a few and if necessary the list can go on. In conclusion, if you cherish your hard-earned money and 90 minutes in your life, stay away from the coming sequel.

Actually HSM2 reminds me of a very funny scene in Role Models,

"Sounds gay."
"If you mean the old English definition of fun, enjoyable and carefree then yes. It's extremely gay."
"I think he means the other definition."

D

Deception

Bank accountant (Ewan McGregor) who leads a simple routine life and who always fancies having sex with different women, runs into a mysterious lawyer (Hugh Jackman) who offers him a seemingly perfect chance to realize his dream. What he doesn't see coming is the price he has to pay...

Frankly I give credit to the performances to the leading actors and if not for the over-cliched story line, this movie could have eked a B- or suchlike from me. But pitifully the story is by no means original or enlightening. From the first minute I realized what the poor accountant could do to the advantage of the devilish stranger, I could picture out how the criminal mind would die and it just happens that way. Since Horton Hears a Who, Fox started its historically awful year with Deception playing the bellwether. Buckle up fellas, bumping ride ahead!

C

The Fall

A sick little girl encountered with a mystic young man in a hospital located in LA suburb in 1928. Enchanted by his "epic" story about five people seeking to revenge upon the tyrannical Spanish dictator Otto, the angelically chubby little girl launched an adventure both in her imagination and real life ...

The Fall is one of the most visually original movies out of 2008's slate, sharing a lot in common with great Terry Gilliam's Tideland with little girl taking the lead, venturing into imaginative land and the similarly creative visual. I developed kinda deja vu that the director must have loosely quoted from Yimou Zhang, where the close kinship of The Fall's visual style to that of Hero is not too difficult to tell. Collage of large chunks of colors melts the boundaries between reflections and the original, between the reality and the vivid imagination of the little girl. Frankly the story itself doesn't make it stand out but the unique visual style will certainly help it lock some nominations in tech categories like best costume, best cinematography or best art direction. Good luck!

B+

Funny Games

This line-by-line, shoot-by-shoot, verbatim reshoot of Austrian director Michael Haneke's thriller really gives me a chill to the bone. First thing I want to say is this movie is anything but funny. The story evolves around a troubled couple who expect to spend a weekend with their son at the suburb lakeside house. Everything seems so perfectly peaceful until the arrival of two uncomfortably polite young invaders who wear white golf suits...

I have seen lots of torture horrors before like Saw series, Hostel I, II, See No Evil, The Hills Have Eyes I, II, etc, hence generally no stranger to this gory genre. However Funny Games is quite different at how it diffuses the gore into audience's nerve instead of showing it to the eyes, so to speak, the movie doesn't feature any direct torture scenes at all. Every harassment, punishment or assault is out of the picture which you can only complete in your brain. Meanwhile, the two young men constantly break the fourth wall, making the audience feel like peeping through the camera, inherently intensifying audience's presence in the tragedy. The director even endowed the two murderers *spoiler the upperhand to rewind the tape *spoiler to erase the part of game they wish not to have happened. The famous seven-minutes long shoot always puts audience's patience under test which I found pioneering but by no means entertaining.

Generally I never feel emotionally attached to any of the roles that appeared. The major reason is that I have watched the original one, meaning that there wouldn't be any surprise at all. Secondly I don't get the essence of the verbatim translation from German to English. Are the American audience only able to understand a story that is told in English? Well I can see the genre of dog changes and some idioms varies of course but lines pretty much remain the same, even that random trinkets scattered in the kitchen match the original settings exactly. Apparently box office says it all: the way the story is told fails to connect with the audience by any means. Does it earn a lot of critical rave? Not to my knowledge.

C+

Body of Lies

The Iraq war and mideast theme have been so poisonous that not a single movie that is either closely or loosely related to them has done well in my recent memory. From further-away Rendition, Redacted, In the Valley of Elah, Lions for Lambs and The Kingdom to much nearer Stop-Loss and Traitor, none of them has done at least passable business, even Adam Sandler's surefire comedy You Don't Mess With the Zohan only narrowly managed to have eked past the century mark by the end of its run under the frostbite of the untimely warfare, even Warner Bros. has made every effort to dilute the backdrop of mideast, the DiCaprio-Crowe spy thriller still stumbles right out of the gate.

But as I see, the movie has itself more to blame rather than the ominous raw materials. Three years after visiting "Kingdom of Heaven", Ridley Scott returned to the wonderland, where it's only several hundreds of years later. In this espionage story DiCaprio portraits a CIA operative fighting against terrorists in Jordanian area while Crowe acts as his bureaucratic, carefree CIA superlative, both of whom are largely underused in my opinion, especially the latter. DiCaprio has done a great job in Blood Diamond but he reprised a very similar role this time just with far less momentum and credulity. More pathetic with Crowe is that I was expecting a great twist with him which ultimately didn't show up! The CIA spy story endeavored to parallel his two gritty J. B. colleagues (James Bond and Jason Bourne, you pick) but failed to offer enough intense action sequences. More intolerably, Ridley Scott threw too much redundant sentiment into the story, making the so-called special agent the slave instead of the master of his own emotion. What the hack has happened to the Ridley Scott who has directed Alien, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down?

C

Righteous Kill

One of the most predictable, monotonous and tasteless movie I have watched. The more unbearable comes that it has De Niro and Pacino!

D

City of Ember

The flop of this movie does nothing but solidifies the fact that 20th Century Fox definitely runs out of luck this year. Following Deception in the line of flops are Meet Dave, X-Files: I Want to Believe, Babylon A. D. and now City of Ember, which opens to a barely negligible $3M for first weekend, even paler than last year's The Seeker. Not for the robust Horton Hears a Who and the promising-looking The Day The Earth Stood Still playing the only saving grace, Fox would not even have a single $100M grosser this year.

Well back to City of Ember, whose failure I see coming for a long time. The apocalyptic child fantasy involves a muddy grim hopeless underground world that is doomed to enter the eternal darkness which is temporarily held back by a gynormous dying generator. The key secret to rescue the dying city is hidden in a long-lost iron box waiting to be discovered by the two heroic children... The cast includes Saoirse Ronan (who earned a name by her bar-setting performance in Atonement), Bill Murray (known since the era of Ghostbuster, bounced back in Lost in Translation and Broken Flowers) and Tim Robbins (Oscared by the stunning performance in Mystic River back in 2003), which has nothing to laugh at. Obviously it's not the cast to blame. They are not supposed to and can not shoulder the responsibility of carrying this movie to success. Fox shouldn't have picked such an unknown material and followed up with so limited amount of propagation.

Additionally, long gone are the good days of steampunk so the little gadgets created in this film don't look far more intriguing than the eerie backdrop, as referenced in Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. First half falls into kinda sleepy pace while the second half wakes up a little bit but audience's patience has pretty much consumed already. Besides, for me the story is still nothing fresh. Perhaps I need to restrain a little bit from watching too many movies. What if one day there's no new story they can tell me? Heck!

C

Appaloosa

This Ed-Harris-directed westerner turned out to be the surprise of the day to me. Not because it's surprisingly good or shockingly awful, the truth is ... I have all kinds of sterotyped impressions of westerners which is understandable. But what I don't get is ... I had never anticipated this movie would be so ... comedic...

1882 in a small town Appaloosa in the state of New Mexico, two gunmen played by Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen took the badges and became the law enforcers of the town. Their biggest nemesis was Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons) that had been the pest of the town for a while. However, right by the time they had arrested Bragg, the appearance of a woman Allison French (Renee Zellweger) changed the whole equation...

Well I was expecting this movie to turn up as another 3:10 to Yuma, featuring some real gunfighting, bloodshedding, gritty necks and tough bones. However, the over-weighted Renee Zellweger, both physically and figuratively, blended too much emotional factor into the supposedly testerostone-fraught westerners. Unlike 3:10 to Yuma and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, even the not-so-western No Country for Old Men, where men's resolutions are rarely swung by women, Appaloosa was softened by the female pianist played by Renee and those men are also far less formidable than they should have been. What is noteworthy is the villain Randall Bragg portraited by the elegant and handsome British gentleman Jeremy Irons, who perfectly restrained and shaped the role more "human", less like the bad guys he played in Die Hard 3 and The Lion King.

B

Sex Drive

So friggin' tired that I decide to keep it short. The small-budgeted, star-free sex comedy is hilarious but that's all. Don't expect anything groundbreaking because you've seen it all. Oops probably I should say I have seen it all...

B-

For the interval between Appaloosa and Sex Drive, I was forced to put up with Nights in Rodanthe for about 40 minutes... Should be able to finish The Amber Spyglass sometime next week. Yay!

Well I admit that the debate physically happened in Oxford, Mississippi instead of Washington D. C. but sure as hell the big debate between two presidential candidates happening on Friday night glued over 30 million viewers at home and inevitably dampened the whole movie market, influencing more the older crowd: talks in town said that the Steven-Spielberg-producing, D. J. Caruso-helming and Shia-Labeouf-starring political thriller's potential to dethrone Sweet Home Alabama of the September opening crown looked promising but a $9.8M opening day of Eagle Eye is a far cry from overtaking the romantic comedy anchored by Reese Witherspoon and Josh Lucas in 2002. Six years after the erotic thriller Unfaithful, which actually earned the leading lady a best actress nomination, the veteran duo Richard Gere and Diane Lane joined hands together revisiting their old bread-and-butter in the big screen adaptation under the same title of Nicholas Spark's romantic novel Nights in Rodanthe, which witnessed an expected opening day of $4.8M as the bridesmaid (Warner Bros. seems particularly interested in reteaming old screen couples like Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey in Fool's Gold, Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in Lake House, and now Richard Gere and Diane Lane in Nights in Rodanthe). Spike Lee's new World War II drama Miracle at St. Anna died on arrival, looking to rounding out the top 10. Since Eagle Eye failed to wake up the sleepy market, there's truly quite limited I can make out of the sloppy sultriness.

The Great Debate

Not that I took some sudden interest in politics, it's just that the debate itself is plain too influential, important and interesting to leave it alone. Under such tempestuous political and economical climates, I also need to be concerned with job, housing, salary, welfare and savings. Besides, recent news like Angelina Jolie endorsing Sen. McCain, Matt Damon bashing Sarah Palin and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler addressing their "Fella Americans" playing Gov. Palin and Sen. Clinton permeates too deep into my daily life for me to ignore. Throughout the debate, John McCain even quoted twice from the movie Miss Congeniality which featured the Sarah-Palin-lookalike star Sandra Bullock. Generally, Sen. Obama acted just like a spear, full of passion and aggressiveness, as evidenced by his previous refusal to Sen. McCain's request of postponing the debate, but it's just the moment of attack when it exposes most of its weaknesses. Contrarily, Sen. McCain handled the whole thing with great delicacy, like a shield fully equipped with barbs and hooks, acting just like a more practiced politician, an ideal mixture of a good deceiver and a good debunker simultaneously. Apparently, he was so clear about Sen. Obama's characteristics, which is full of passion and aggressiveness that he knew precisely how to shirk the direct attack while throwing a myriad iotas of insults in the face of his Democratic rival: For instance Sen. McCain only looked into his rival's eyes once throughout the debate, either recording on paper or looking at the audience for most of the time while Sen. Obama was looking at him attentively during his speech, where such intentional avoidance of eye-contact (even when attacked vehemently by three consecutive "You were wrong"), especially in such an essential occasion of clash and exchange of opinions and views, is an unmeasurably crafty method to let Sen. Obama feel the invisible scorn, to hurt his self-centered ego and inherently irritate him,  hence so many times when the younger presidential candidate couldn't even wait for Sen. McCain to finish to start his own counter-accusation. Though terminologies like earmark and bailout are unfamiliar to my ears, the 95 minutes show is yet as riveting as any political movies I've ever seen with lots of little humor and quibs like Sen. McCain's "You're afraid I couldn't hear him" that seem to be tracing back to the Reagen times.

A

Besides, in case anyone is interested, I attach two videos here below where you can see how a hockey mom or shrew or harpie or boner shrinker, or whatever you call her is just one heartbeat away from being the president of the United States.

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/palin-hillary-open/656281/
http://www.awardsdaily.com/?p=2642

Eagle Eye

This movie is purely of mindless fun offering breathlessly brisk fast-paced action sequences to make you lean forward over the edge of the seat. Sloppy city slacker Jerry Shaw and single mom Rachel Holloman were total strangers before they are connected by an extremely persuasive and omnipresent female voice via a mysterious phone call and forced to perform missions like terrorist's deeds and ultimately find out the criminal mind behind all that's happened is actually nothing but .... Well I'm not gonna spoil. The movie is intense and as said of much fun to watch where you can sense the maneuverability of the Disturbia duo. As always, the young rising star, who recently got involved in a DUI accident (where he was proved innocent later) reteamed with his Disturbia "old flame" D. J. Curaso (the two are actually working on their new project Y: The Last Man ) after two domestic $300M grossers including Transformers and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull. Coincidentally enough, ten years ago in 1998 Will Smith, who was such a supernova right after the runaway successes like The Independence Day and Men in Black I, escorted a political thriller Enemy of the State single-handedly all the way to a giant success, both critically and box-office-wise, where he launched his ten golden years cruising among different types of movies and gaining enormous successes one after another. Now Shia Labeouf pretty much reprised the similar role Will Smith once embodied and sure as hell is eyeing Big Willie's golden crown of box office king as well. But here is the thing, Eagle Eye is panned by the critics and the market at present can not be more different from nine years ago. Obviously, to be another golden boy in H-wood Shia Labeouf needs more effort and fortune -- even he has the hands of Spielberg over his head.

B

Lakeview Terrace

After laying hands upon topics of misogamy and misanthropy, director Neil LaBute now picked up the hot talk of interracial marriage in his new thriller Lakeview Terrace. Chris and Lisa are a newly-wedded couple who just moved into a luxurious townhouse with a beautiful lakeview. What they didn't see coming is the unnamed hostility and constant harassment from their widower LAPD neighbor Aber Turner ... Story is simple that you can easily figure out all the possible twists-and-turns that's following. Thanks to the director's last work the remake of 50' horror classic The Wicker Man, I hadn't held too high anticipation but the movie turned out to kinda interesting stuff to watch. The reason why I say so is because the movie is by no means great but just like every man who enjoys watching squabbles through neighbor's window pane, audience satisfy the little voyeurs residing in their minds and that's all this movie is about. Samual L. Jackson is awesome as well and his role of a retiring LAPD is just as mean and despicable as the role is supposed be.

B

Igor

Anyone still remember the name of the second banana always standing behind the mad scientist in every such movie like Van Helsing, Frankenstein or Dracula? Yes, they share one name in common which is Igor. This animation piece from Exodus Productions and MGM is about a kind-hearted Igor working for Dr. Frankenstein furtively created a similarly kind-hearted female monster and *yawning fell in inevitable love *yawning with her. The animation is mediocre at best and the story is cliched. Audience like me spoiled by Pixar and PDI masterpieces wouldn't give a shit to it but the family market is just so blank and hungry for whatever that's coming out that this even turns out to be a minor success, till next week the Disney giant turd Beverly Hill Chihuahua barks out of the gate...

C

Miracle at St. Anna

This is that kind of movie that tests your tolerance and patience to the limit but I'm glad I passed the test anyway. The last effort of the African American director Spike Lee Inside Man opened to a boffo $29M and powered its way to a robust $88M total, which, however, has more credit on the one-two-punch of two Oscar winners Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster. After two years of hibernation, Lee returned to his old style and brewed this 167 minutes World Wall II drama, story telling a first level murder committed by a veteran who has been selling stamps behind the bars over decades and suddenly killed a customer who he met for less than a minute ... I can tell the effort Lee exerted to make the movie epic and to some extent he succeeded because at least I like the story and see the essence of it though the movie failed at box office and was brutalized by the critics (which I suspect is largely due to the over-enduring 167 minutes time span). Spike Lee beset the story backdropping a once-peaceful Italian village that was under the rampage of German invasion, involving four African American soldiers, a bunch of Italian guerilla, a German regiment, some good-hearted Italian villagers and a mysterious Italian boy. Setting against the gunpowder of War World II, the plot sings the theme of the primeval emotional connections between human beings that shine even more brightly against the devastating warfare. I am definitely not the biggest fan of Spike Lee because he always tends to make too much out of the racial issue, like his relatively biased accusation upon Clint Eastwood of not featuring African American soldiers in his WWII movie Flags of Our Fathers but his talent is just undeniable. I do think he would realize that the epic length of two hours plus forty seven minutes will definitely hurt its business potential, talking about the durability of audience and the number of repeating showings that can be accommodated within a day. But even after one compromise to commerciality (Inside Man), Lee still maintains the old brand of moviemaking to tell his own story, all about the color black, all about his African American countrymen, all about the ancient glory that is rooted in Africa and that is blossoming on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. He wouldn't care no audience other than his hardcore fans would pay and watch this movie or the academy would favor or despise him. The holocaust scene made me twitch the tickets held in my hand so tight that I just could not control what was churning inside me. I do appreciate Lee's bravery of few against many, his ceaseless effort on humming a hymn for the unsung heroes in countless wars, his irrefutable enthusiasm of making his own auteur movies and he deserves every glory with all due respect.

A-

Here come two recommendations that I believe few have watched.

The Visitor

Lonely widower college professor lost track of life in daily chore, not knowing what he is doing, what he should do and what he could expect, until he returns to his long deserted apartment in New York, where he runs into two uninvited guests... The story is by no means groundbreaking or epic. It's just about how a long lost soul retrieves his redemption and self-discovery by closing the distance between hearts. Rather than the adjectives like fabulous, stunning or blazing, I'd prefer to describe Richard Jenkin's performance as permeating and penetrating. He is just everywhere (referencing his performances in Step Brothers and Burn After Reading), like the professor beckoning to you in the aisle and smiling to you in his lecture, everyday. But the poisonous loneliness encroaching from his inside builds around him an excessively defensive shell towards anyone wanting to approach him, until the protective shell is softened by the unexpected encounter with the young musician couple, hence his unswerving resolution save them to at all costs from ... If you happen to know the corrosive and toxic loneliness, you will like it.

A

The Life Before Her Eyes

Honestly the title had confused me for a while but when I realized the story, I just couldn't think of a more proper title for this delicate and intense drama. Adult Diana seems to have a perfect life, a loving husband, a lovely daughter and a decent job until the horrifying secret that's been looming in the depth of her heart is finally disclosed ... The Life Before Her Eyes is not an enjoyable movie, not even close, but the ideology and rendering of the way movie tells the story is quite refreshing. Perhaps you may say oh I have seen such styles before like in ____ and ____ (sorry I can't say because that would deprive all the meaning of watching), but the deceptive setup the story tries to make you believe is actually nothing it ever seems. People easily get lost and tired in the ceaseless flashbacks between 1993 and 2008, but if you watch close enough you will see how beautiful and ruthless it is when a young life wilts within an eyeblink. Enough talking and I would have crossed the line if I'd said one more word about the plot.

A

Great Paul Newman passed away last night and I heard National Guardian Warrior again and I know it's the elegy for him. Rest in peace.

In general sense I'm not particularly into rock'n'roll but the fire in my soul was lightened up by this awesome piece of Kid Rock's National Guardian Warrior, attached ahead of most movies I watched today, from which I quoted the title, even if it was just trying to blandish the grandeur of The United States of America but I just love it. Things are that I feel myself more and more connected to this country, this nation, both physically and emotionally: I'm staying with American friends for most of the time, now English is pretty much the sole language I use everyday, I enjoy sitting in the dark theaters all day long, watching Hollywood movies and talking about them with friends... I can hardly recollect what I once loved, hated or maybe just cared back there in China or perhaps I just couldn't care less. Since the moment I decided never to log onto those bulletin board systems ever again, I already knew it would be my fate of the inevitable Americanization. It's just so frickin' irresistible and overwhelming that I can hardly embrace it any tighter.

Holy-moly another glorious movie day here if you ask me! I won't bother to talk about box office 'cause there really isn't too much to make out from this dumping ground of September. Tyler Perry's new urban flick The Family that preys and the new offering Burn After Reading from the fresh OSCAR best director award winners The Coen Brothers, who joined hands with some biggest names in H-wood like George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich, Richard Jenkins and suchlike, are pretty much competing to shoot down the golden laurel crown. Two screen legends Robert De Niro and Al Pacino sat together through much more time together in the new NYPD crime thriller Righteous Kill than in their previous two joint efforts of Godfather II and Heat, pretty much securing the bronze medal. A bunch of American-Sweetheart-used-to-bes, represented by Meg Ryan, Annette Benning and Debra Messing, starring with the Cuban chocolate hottie Eva Mendes in the new chick flick The Women, will most probably stabilize as #4. However, additionally due to the unbearably stupid chore in last few weeks, I'm gonna summarize a little more about those I saw recently aside from movies mentioned above.

Burn After Reading

For god sake I love it! The Coen Brothers weaved such an intricate web that invisibly hooks up every single role in it, where you can see how powerful and crazy the craving of a woman towards plastic surgery can be... This sounds ridiculous but the delivery will convince you anyway. The so-called secret CIA sheet imperceptibly entangles everyone in the huge seine in such a ruthlessly devil-may-care attitude. Meanwhile you can never underestimate the effort of such a stellar ensemble cast, full of seasoned actors in all manners. Brat Pitt's goofy gym bodybuilding coach shined through the screen but Frances McDormand ultimately stole most of the thunder, whose performance as a middle-aged hag unreasonably obsessed with plastic surgery is plain of so much fun to watch. The chain-reaction farce triggered by the relay of the secret CIA sheet among different hands from retiring CIA officer, officer's wife having an affair, a shallow dumb coach and a headstrong woman from the gym, the Russian Embassy and on... finally ends up in such an absurd way that you can't help laughing till the end while discovering that it's just impossible to figure out a better solution for this damn mess than it already is. One thing I'm not particularly satisfied with the script is that I do think they could have enriched the roles of George Clooney and Tilda Swinton, giving them a better way of ending but oh well.

A-

Tyler Perry's The Family that Preys

I was probably the only non-black audience sitting there watching this new work piece from Tyler Perry, who for god sake I swear must have signed kinda devil's contract to maintain such an incredible box office consistence with most of the movies he released. The movie is about two families of different colors involved in a setup all about friendship, business, power, secret, sex and conspiracy. Kathy Bates and Tyler Perry aside, I can hardly spot anyone from the rest of the cast but still the ensemble performance easily captures the audience watching it. The story plot line has all "Made by Tyler Perry" written all over it, nothing complicated, spectacular or epic, just some plain story all about the daily life of black people being crucified by love and hatred, trust and betrayal, life and death. One thing I'm happy about is that my hearing again improves that I've got the feel that I can start conquering the urban accent. Woohoo!

B

Traitor

Just like a one-sided "The Departed" and the protagonist is actually much luckier than DiCaprio, which makes it less intense and tragic actually, I have to say I was a little bit disappointed with this one 'cause compared to other movies I could choose from today it's rated on rottentomatoes as relatively fresher! But then again for me it's nothing too different from other recent political thrillers like The Kingdom, Rendition and Lions for Lambs, where probably performances are even more riveting! Don Cheadle does a more solid than spectacular job here just because there are too many far more superior paragons to compare with. The only other leading role was taken by the pale Aussie Guy Pearce, who made a name with Momento in 2000 but his last memorable big screen impression needs tracing back to 2004's Two Brothers. High-leveled movie fan as I am, who has yet to see him in indie movies like Factory Girls, First Snow, Death Defying Acts, etc, I can hardly recollect any standing out roles from him that could possibly make on the mainstream audience an impact. Well mediocre is my general comment and that's it.

C+

The House Bunny & College

I can hardly believe I gave up on Babylon A. D. and watched this pure female-oriented chick flick but it was a pleasant small surprise. The entire movie is quite hilarious and I think Anna Faris can officially claim that she has stepped out the caging of Scary Movie series and proved her competence of shouldering a comedy all by herself. I'm actually sorta into such kind of college comedy because it's quite close to my life, just like looking into the fraternity and sorority houses, just like looking at the standard life style of American teens and tweens. It actually reminds me of another frat house comedy I watched recently, which is completely a disaster. College is about three high school kids who drive to a local college for a weekend, in kinda horny anticipation but end up in a great mess. Nothing much to say about this horrible movie that I leave one comment here: Compared to College, The House Bunny is like The Importance of Being Earnest.

B- and D

Bangkok Dangerous

I was keeping repeating "Can't you just go faster?", "Can't you just stop being so stupid?" and "Can't you please just let me know this is an action movie packed with too much stupid romance and sentiment or just a friggin' cliched drama mixed with a handful of action?" while watching. As far as the tagline concerns, "There's only one way out", I'm gonna take it with quite a grain of salt.

D

The Oxford Murder

Long gone are the good old days of Lord of the Ring so our respectable ring bearer Elijah Wood has to trudge in the shuffle of roles like a teenage involved in football scoundrel fighting, an silent weirdo killer who bears long and sharp nails, voicing of an fledging stupid penguin who likes to tip-top annoyingly all the fucking time or just like here a young nerd who gets involved in an seemingly abstruse series murder case in Oxford University. Concerning seriel killer films, this is definitely no match to Se7en, The Silence of the Lambs or Zodiac, at most on par with Sandra Bullock's Murder By Numbers in 2002, given the fact the feel-good surprising ending twist might not turn out as surprising to me as the director anticipated it should have. But one good thing about this movie is the pure British accident is a real relish to my ears that sometimes I even ask myself if I am also infected with the British accent fetish? lol

C+

Proud American

Critics will say that this movie is fraught with cliched, reader's digest-styled stories, which is the truth, but I'm just in incorrigible love with it for Christ sake! It tells about five "American dream" stories, in which we have a black young man, born in one of the harshest neighborhoods in Chicago, fighting his way to be a respectable doctor, a refugee who, in the 1970s, left Vietnam with her parents on an overcrowded boat, finally got her MBA and eventually found a software company with her husband, a Brazilian man who struggled to start his own seafood restaurant and a 9/11 widow who visits Ground Zero with her daughter, as well as footage of cemeteries and a military parade. For those having trouble grasping the messages, songs like "(I'm a) Proud American," "Free to Believe" and "Freedom Isn't Free" are there to help. Honestly, if you don't have faith in the message oozing in this movie, then you will most probably get bored by this documentary. However, I happen to be that kind of audience who are precisely in resonance with these inspiring stories and would like to swallow the spirit completely. So, here comes my rating,

B+

Now the fall season officially more rains softly over rather than thunders upon us. A long list of eagerly awaited movies already line up, waiting for me to check out ... Eagle Eye, Body of Lies, The Changeling, The Soloist, Milk, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Valkyrie, The Spirit, Doubt, Quantum of Solace, Madagascar 2, Revolutionary Road, Australia, Defiance, Che, Bolt, The Tale of Despereaux, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Bedtime Stories, Yes Man, The Miracle at St' Anna, Twilight, Max Payne, W., Sex Drive, Seven Pounds, High School Musical 3, Saw V...

Kung Fu Hustle seems the only Chinese movie I ever watched since I came to the US..., which I didn't finish and actually borrowed from my American roommie, ironically enough. However, talking about production, commerciality and watchability, not a single one in the whole world, maybe even the combine of them all, can match even 10% of what the American does. Movie snobs can despise me but I don't give a goddamn shit because it's just like what I said, "I'm giving you all myself, because that's what I do".

Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured multi-faceted jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet. Overshadowed by the giant figure of time, human life becomes so trivial that the point of all the struggling, the purpose of the endless labor is all lost, accomplishing nothing, leaving people empty and disillusioned, leaving people broken.

In my opinion, the existence of life is a highly overrated phenomenon. Look at the mars, the red planet gets along perfectly without so much as a microorganism. No life, no life at all, but giant steps, ninety feet high, scoured by dust and wind into a constantly changing topographical map, flowing and shifting around the pole in ripples ten thousand years wide. Those jumbled box canyons below, where volcanoes boiled the permafrost into scalding geysers: once they could have been fountains of life. The ground crumbled when the subterranean ice melted releasing torrents of water to form vast rivers, now long dry. Life could have flourished here then, but mars did not choose life. It chose this: it's called chaotic terrain.

The ancient spectacles were birthed here, which make human life brief and mundane. Look at it, a volcano as large as Missouri, its summit fifteen miles high, piercing even the atmospheric blanket.

Breathtaking.

The chasm stretches more than three thousand miles, so that one end knows day while the other endures night. Temperature difference breeds shrieking winds that herd oceans of fog along a canyon four miles deep. Does one human heart ever know chasm so abysmal?


However, I long to observe such a thing, a thermodynamic miracle... event with odds against so astronomical. They are effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. And among a thousand million sperms vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter...


... and of that union, of the thousand million potential children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged.


Yeah, it's such a miracle that when the biggest joins hand with the smallest.

Forgive me about this stupid title! If it was you who have watched Mirrors, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Pineapple Express, Tropical Thunder and Henry Poole is Here, you would be unable to come up with a friggin' smart title as well. There's no way I can showdown these nouns here like this, Mirror + Barcelona + Pineapple + Thunder + Henry Poole, what the fuck is this stupid thing? Well now back to the topic, this weekend the new semester has obviously kicked in so expecting those towering numbers as a usual sizzling summer weekend witnesses is unfeasible. DreamWorks' high-profile satiric war comedy Tropic Thunder finally has dethroned the 6th batpic, grabbing the #1 spot, which is the first time in five weeks since the advent of the dark Ktulu bat. Meanwhile the renowned one-film director George Lucas rehashed the SW series again and released the animated version of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, taking on the biggest comedy names in H-wood, having pretty much secured a bridesmaid spot with its quirky and angular animation rendering, which is also the reason why I gave it up. The Dark Knight stepped down to #3 and has locked the silver medal in the all-time domestic gross chart, only after the gigantic boat. The stoner comedy Pineapple Express is struck by the new thunder from another R-rated comedy into the multiplex. And here comes the maestro of sentimental Woody Allen who is known for his obsession with New York, with his latest film Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Mirrors

H-wood has been trapped in the inertia of copying stories from Asian horrors and here we go again. After "One Missed Call", "The Eye", "Shutter", "Possession" and "The Sisters", H-wood remade another Asian horror movie "Into the Mirror" into a new creepfest "Mirrors", starring Kiefer Sutherland and Amy Smart. The original version featured Ji-tae Yu whose most talked-about role is the hysterical avenger who has developed an incestual relationship with his own sister. Yeah, you are right, it's 2003's Oldboy. In this new version set in New York, Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland) is still haunted by the spooky grudge trapped in the world behind the mirror. Some scenes fraught with gore did give me a chill, like splitting the jaws with one's own hands and being dragged into the reflection by one's own image. However, to be honest, Mirrors could be more than a decent horror movie to me if I didn't know about all the twists and turns that were gonna happen. Alexander Aja was discovered by horror mastermind Wes Craven and made a name with the 2006 gorefest "The Hills Have Eyes". Now he is pretty much en route to the career track Wes Craven and John Carpenter once set foot upon.

Of course. If you haven't seen Morrors or Into the Mirror, I'd like to spoil it a little bit by telling you that its end shares a lot with "Silent Hill".

B

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Woody Ellen is always good at making films full of libido attraction and sexual confliction. Two young American girls (Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall) fly over to Barcelona, planning to spend entire summer enjoying the landscape and architecture there, until they encounter with the wildly charming painter Juan Antonio, who is entangled in an ever-escalating tempestuous battle with his lewd ex-wife Maria Elena. Before release, the cast and the director kept boasting the movie's palpable sexual tension and steamy camera shots. Besides who can reject the one-two-punch of Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson? The most recent OSCAR winner Javier Bardem is still pronounced with his characteristic Latin enthusiasm, where he sported a better hairstyle as well. Just think about the Bohemian life style of the artistic trio, you monogamous guys should be ashamed! There's never too much you can make out of your limited time span of life. Apparently, Woody Ellen intended to pass sort of under-message via the depiction of the twisted relationship between the three, and the compressed desire torrent churning restlessly in Vicky and Judy. However, here is the thing, though the openness of Cristina doesn't actually lead her to what exactly she wants, I still tend to agree to her style: life per se is too short and precious to waste upon only one person. What you see is what you got and if that's not what you want, get lost.

B+

Pineapple Express

This one failed to connect to me actually though I like most of the recent R-rated comedies. One thing that made me chill is the intolerable stupidity of Dale Danton in the scene of murder. It's so freakin' difficult for me to imagine anyone intentionally exposing himself witnessing a murder! This guy must be unbelievably moronic. The scriptwriter should have come up with a better idea! The entire story doesn't make much sense to me except the brotherhood that gradually blossomed between the three weed loonies, while the rest just sounds exactly like the definition of absurdity, tastelessness and childishness.

C

Tropic Thunder

I'm in fuckin' love with this movie! Because most of the gags and jokes can not be understood unless you are familiar with the movie industry and movie production around H-wood, I enjoyed this movie much more than I expected I would. Story is about a budget-exceeded, long-postponed filming of a war movie in Vietnam (Apocalypse Now?) that finally turns out to be a real battle. The fake music video and trailers in front of the movie are ridiculously funny! The H-wood parody starred Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr. and its own helmer Ben Stiller, with an even more stellar cameo cast including Matthew Mcconaughey, Nick Nolte, Tobey Maguire, Bill Hader, Jon Voight, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Tom Cruise. My interest was highly aroused when I first watched the viral campaign video for Tropic Thunder released in the MTV award, which you can check out in this link. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=03HFni_n2SQ

"Go see Tropic Thunder, with the panda, and don't fuck with the Iron Man!" Man, this promoting video is fucking funny while the movie itself is even more fucking hilarious. Just sit your sexy ass on the seat and taste the lines delivered by those awesome motherfuckers, if you know the movie industry well enough you can not help but keeping laughing your @$$ off at those edgy dialogues. RDJ's theory about the subtlety between playing partially and completely retarded roles and winning an OSCAR, (Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump won but Sean Penn in I Am Sam didn't), Ben Stiller's bribery about Teen Choice Award, fake Academy award ceremony, countless fantastic lines about Steve McQueen, Jimmy Lee Curtis, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Tobey Maguire and other stars, the final revelation of everyone's hidden secret, all of these factors were impeccably blended together into a fabulous parody movie of both war and movie industry.

One thing that's worth reiterating is Tom Cruise's performance. The part in which he roared back through the phone to the Viecom kidnapper vaguely reminded me of the blurred impression of his eloquent monologue in 1999's Magnolia. In addition, the bald plumpy believer of moneyism dances perfectly to his inner ugliness.

Great as this movie is, I would hold back my recommendation to my friends because I had some hard time totally embracing RDJ's part, whose accent is even more weird than the real urban accent and probably not everybody has the background knowledge to understand the Hollywood-inside innuendo jokes in this movie, without which much fun would just be missed. Besides, the movie derogates China quite a little, the weird Mandarin spoken by the Viecom, Beijing Film Festival, etc.

A

Henry Poole is Here

Middle-aged Henry Poole has been living his isolated life for years but everything changes after he moved into a new townhouse where stain like Christ's face surfaced on his wall. I'm tired so not going to say too much about this. Besides, given that I'm never into such slow-paced movie, I regretted slightly to have watched this average, small-budgeted, supposedly heart-felt little film. Luke Wilson's performance is convincing but his romantic connection with Ridha Mitchell isn't. So much for it.

B-

August here we come! Fitting to the spot another threequel "The Bourne Ultimatum" stepped into last year, a dormant franchise's latest entry Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor has resurged and rehashed pretty much from Indy, previous two Mummy flicks and some Chinese elements, rushing into the multiplex with sort of hybridized new looking. With a bang of roughly $16M opening day, the terracotta adventure is pretty much on the way to a $39M~$43M opening weekend and a $115M~120M finish. TDK finally gave way to the freshmen, stepping down into #2 with an estimated $40M 3rd weekend. This behemoth has almost crashed all the records that can possibly be named, now on the verge of entering the box office giants club including the first Spider-man, Shrek 2, DMC and TPM, eyeing the stratosphere only one movie,  the ultimate goal -- Titanic, has ever touched. Step Brothers still fared good 'cuz it's the only R-rated comedy in the market, but things will change because studio stablemate Pineapple Express and romp war comedy Tropic Thunder are on its heel. Musical hit Mamma Mia! extends even leggier multiplier than Hairspray with somewhat lukewarm reviews, safely en route to a larger gross of $130M or above. X-Files: I want to believe now officially joined the glorious "2008 summer flop club", befriending with puppies like Speed Racer, The Love Guru and Meet Dave.

Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Beijing Olympics arrive in days and the entire world is feeling China's pulse. Following the theme of Forbidden Kingdom and Kung Fu Panda, H-wood again blended some molded ideas with stolen exotic ingredients and came up with this weird looking third chapter of this long forgotten franchise. Rush Hour 3 already demonstrated what was gonna happen last year. The last Mummy movie kicked 2001 summer start and grabbed the best non-holiday opening ever (lost to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone later the same year), since when many larger franchises like LotR, HP, Spider-man, Shrek and Pirates showed up so long gone the good old days of Mummies. After seven years of dormancy, Universal summoned back part of the cast and revived the nearly dead series. Rob Cohen replaced Steven Sommers and Maria Bello stepped into Rachel Weisz's old shoes. More importantly, the entire story switched from ancient Egypt to ancient China.

Had they handled the materials well, this could have turned up as a good movie. However, that's not the case.

The whole point is, the entire story is unbearably contrived and awfully concocted. Some plots are just ridiculously cliched. There's no way I can spoil the story 'cuz there's basically nothing out of expectation. Just think about the first two Mummy movies, Hellboy 2 and any other "bad-guy-awakening-long-dormant-evil-force" movies, then you know everything. The transformation of Jet Li into three-headed dragon and hairy monster is unbearably funny and cheesy. What's worse is the  yetis, a.k.a the abominable snowman, who can be summoned and serve as brave guards to protect you in an avalanche! What the hell? Are we looking at a mystique creature exhibition or Ice Age 3? I don't think there were three-headed dragons and yetis in ancient Chinese myths, for Christ sake why not use phoenix or unicorn if you really want to make it "Chinese"? Brandon Fraser and John Hannah tried to be funny but things just didn't work. Maria Bello's British accent made me laugh inside my jacket. Michelle Yeoh and Jet Li were largely underused.

Bad as the movie is, I'd give some credits to the wagon chasing scene in the first half, which was pretty intense and eye-catching. One memorable thing about it is the reincarnated terracotta emperor threw one piece of face skin as a dart, which was quite interesting.

One thing I found from the movie is that my Chinese fades quite a bit. During some dubbed parts, I couldn't even figure it out without the aid of subtitle. Besides, it felt quite uncomfortable when the mummies were actually murmuring something I could understand.

C-

Step Brothers

Well, the reunion of the Talladega Night duo offers a hilarious comedy. There's nothing elusive or surprising in the plot, just like any underdog-fighting-for-the-top family-themed story, but Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly did quite a decent job. I can tell the director's effort to make the movie "feel better" by stealing the ending scene of "Little Miss Sunshine" but it didn't work much as it had been expected to. The R-rating it carries already told me there'd be lots of F-word and sexual content dialogue in this movie but I was still surprised to see what Will Ferrell did to J. Reilly's drum set. A funny movie and that is all.

B

X-Files: I Want To Believe

One of the worst cinematic experiences in recent memory. Roles are incredibly stupid. I can't imagine anyone who's doing illegal human organ transaction carrying a bag with an ostensible sign on it. I can't imagine anyone intentionally exposing her own position during an extremely dangerous criminal chase so I think the special agent well deserved what happened to her. I can't imagine anyone breaking into the dangerous biomed center without notifying any assistance beforehand, especially after such a serious car accident. All dialogues were on purpose made elusive or abstract, which turned out to be boring and redundant to me. What's more stupid is the meaningless repetition of "I want to believe" & "Don't give up" and the ceaseless showing off of medical terminologies. Come on we are paying to see a good thriller not you two old guys arguing about the meaning of YOUR life on the big screen. A good thriller can not be made by being stupid, elusive, unnerving or hysteric all the time, or by some drops of fake blood from eyes.

And I don't like the undermessage passed out from this movie. The occupation, sexual orientation and nationality of the criminals were clearly suggesting some depreciating information.

D

Such an amusing article that I have to post it here. Have fun...
http://www.awardsdaily.com/?p=935#more-935

Holy clone, the resemblance is so uncanny I can barely tell them apart.

BATMAN: Tormented over the tragic mistakes he’s made.
BUSH: Makes jokes about the tragic mistakes he’s made.

BATMAN: Has Lucius Fox and Alfred to ensure he stays on the right track.
BUSH: Has Karl Rove and Cheney to steer the country down the wrong track.

BATMAN: Acting on false intelligence, destroys the lives of his loved ones.
BUSH: Acting on false intelligence, destroys the lives of other people’s loved ones.

BATMAN: When Gotham is attacked, steels himself with the courage to take charge.
BUSH: When Manhattan is attacked, pisses himself and reads My Pet Goat.

BATMAN: Tracks down and captures the Joker.
BUSH: Drops the ball and loses bin Laden.

BATMAN: Takes responsibility for his own misdeeds and scorns the misdeeds of others.
BUSH: Takes no responsibility his own misdeeds and pardons the misdeeds of others.

BATMAN: Spends millions of dollars of his own money for his obsessive vendetta.
BUSH: Spends billions of dollars of taxpayer’s money for his obsessive vendetta.

BATMAN: Hands over control of surveillance system for eventual suspension.
BUSH: Demands retroactive immunity for telecoms so surveillance can proceed unheeded.

BATMAN: Reckless moral confusion results in corruption of Gotham’s highest ideals.
BUSH: Reckless moral confusion results in corruption of America’s highest ideals.

BATMAN: Stitches up his own wounds.
BUSH: Chokes on pretzels.

BATMAN: Endlessly fighting the same deadlocked battles for 70 years.
BUSH: Endlessly fighting the same quagmire wars for 100 years (oh, wait, that’s McCain)

Reference: What Bush and Batman Have in Common
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB121694247343482821.html

Unprecedented weekend! Who could predict that only after 14 months of Spider-man 3's towering, sizzling, jaw-dropping, eye-popping, passion-firing $151M record opening weekend, the arachnid has to bend down before the caped crusader, the flying mammal that's guarding the dark Gotham jungle, Batman, a.k.a, The Dark Knight! Opening with a recording-breaking opening day of $66M, this WB's Gotham justice enforcer will surely pull off a dizzy height for opening weekend, poised to outdo the tiny human-spider. What's more, it's such a well deserved honor for the dark knight that I can not hold my "Yyyyyaaaaaayyyy" (review reserved for later)! Go, batman! Another $400M blockbuster, continuing the trend of one $400M juggernaut every other year! 2002 witnessed the crowning of Spider-man, 2004 embraced Shrek the Ogre's second tour, 2006 summer escorted the metrosexual Captain Jack Sparrow sail to a towering height of a stunning domestic $423M and worldwide $1,061M, now it's the time of the dark comic hero's glory -- Batman... Another success story is about the ABBA musical that counterprograms with the dark behemoth, Mamma Mia! sings and dances her way to a robust $10M opening day, which means the jovious musical, featuring Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth is pretty much on the same track the awards-winning and universally beloved musical hit Hairspray once set her feet upon (last summer, exactly the same weekend), en route to a $27M~$30M opening and a finish over $110M. This entire weekend offers a monstrous aggregated $250M box office, zooming past July 7th ~ 9th, 2006 as the record highest aggregated weekend ever in the history.

The Dark Knight

Even Martin Scorsese would be graced if he could include The Dark Knight into his long and glorious resume. The Dark Knight obviously turns out to be the only comic hero movie that pictured the sense of "epic" in my recent memory. As the premise for such a summer tent pole pic, the special effects are basically beyond great, with all the explosions, gunfights, carchasing and all other over-the-edge-of-the-chair scenes that will sincerely leave the audience completely stunned, giving out voices like "Wow"s and "Whoa"s. But clearly, The Dark Knight is much more than that. Again, Christopher Nolan still didn't set a low bar for his story even after immersing into the mainstream movie production. From some indie-ish movies like following, Momento, Insomnia, to big names like Batman Begins and The Prestige, he always maintains a bar-setting level of the stories presented. Riveting as the story is, Chris unspooled all the correlations, webs, camouflages, undercurrents, feud, jealousy and other factors involved on the canvas. Seasoned movie audience like me still can't help but being awed time by time. Probably not as intricate as The Prestige, the story of The Dark Knight still embodies every criterion listed in testbook for a crime pic to sublimate to a crime epic. That being said, watching this movie, you feel like you are experiencing a comic version of The Godfather. Pity that I missed the golden age for H-wood classical film noir, but I feel lucky to have Chris Nolan to live in our era.

Good story needs good delivery, good delivery relies upon good performances. The performances in the movies are so intense, delicate, natural and fluent that you can not even find a single weak point in the chain. Undoubtfully, Heath Ledger is the cynosure that attracts most eyeballs and he did a perfect job, reincarnating the role of Joker seamlessly. The criminal mind can never be so vividly depicted on big screen. I don't mean to depreciate the performance of Jack Nicholson but Ledger's rendering of Batman's nemesis is simply captivating just like he has relived the Satan. While watching I can just feel the perception of cruelty, darkness, brutality and evil like kind of tangible semi-liquid oozing from his language, body movements or even just an appearance. The weird tone, whimsical complexion, devilish laughter profiled only one single word - evil. He has no sympathy towards anybody and what he wants is nothing but to reveal the darkest inmost of everyman. After watching this, Heath Ledger's tragical death is understandable because anybody who gets clung with such an evil spirit is facing unprecedentedly fierce internal fight with his normal self. I think he has probably secured a spot in best supporting actor nominations in the 81th Academy Award. Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent demonstrated perfectly the other acme of the triangle. The tragical and doomed transformation of him into the dark side actually pretty much sidenoted the revelation of inner darkness Joker predicted, boasted and anticipated. His deformed face is scary as hell. Chris Bale launches his career as a child star in SS's Empire of the Sun but his commercial value was first proved in Batman Begins. Now with series large titles of Terminators and Batman, Chris has been on board the express of career firing that includes RDJ, Ed Norton, Jake Gyllenhaal, James McAvoy and Clive Owen, originally Heath Ledger as well... The three excellent actors construct the force trident that couldn't be more polarized in a sort of delicate and dangerous balance. The star-studded cast of Maggie Gyllenhaal's Rachel, Gary Oldman's Gordon, Michael Caine's Alfred and Morgan Freeman's Mr. Fox make out an impeccable ensemble performance that we can do nothing about but admire.

Generally the movie of The Dark Knight transcended the boundary of common superhero flicks, but endowed the crime film thickness of epic. I'll be definitely watching anything Christopher Nolan makes in the future, even blue screen.

A+

Mamma Mia!

Greek island girl Sophie invited her possible father to her wedding in her mother's name. And the once-lustrous singer mother doesn't know about this and you can pretty much expect what will happen next.

I've never heard about this ABBA thing until I learnt that Mamma Mia! was being made. The singing part is really good but the entire story is not that exciting. Mamma Mia! is quite a fun movie to watch but still a far cry from excellent musicals like Dreamgirls and Hairspray, let alone Moulin Rouge! and Chicago. This Meryl Streep-anchoring movie stars a seemingly impossible combination of one of the Mean Girls Amanda Seyfried, former 007 Pierce Brosnan, British Gentleman Colin Firth and "Bootstrap" from the Caribbean pirate ship Stellan Skarsgard. But the biggest screen-stealing comes from Christine Baranski's flirting old hag Tanya, whose singing section on the beach, teasing a crowd of young men who could be her sons, turns out to be the shiny sparkle in the entire musical.

Though the story is a little far-fetching and kinda illogical, for a summer entertainment it's still a worthwhile choice. Additionally, my words would be this definitely deserves an OST.

B+

The world around me has been churning upside down in the last half year. Now the bumping journey finally nears its end and I'm so glad to see it coming. Never give up still is and will be my shiningly branded motto and I am certainly heading along, well, not in Hawaii, not in Alaska, somewhere you never expect.

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809838857/video/8831867

Two H-boys power each way to a $30M+ weekend. Being the biggest name now in H-wood, Will Smith has been lodged in the critic-proof club for quite a while. The critically panned superhero dramedy Hancock still zoomed past $100M threshold within 5 days, eyeing another chart top position competing with three new entries into the multiplex. Mexican director Guillermo del Toro solidified his position as one of the most visually creative directors in H-wood with Blade II, Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth. The atypical superhero sequel also upgraded itself from spring-released B-movie to summer tent pole project, facing off Hancock's 2nd weekend for the gold medal. Warner Bros. and New Line's Journey to the Center of the earth also does more solid than spectacular business, featuring Brandon Fraser, Josh Hutcherson and the Icelandic beauty Anita Briem. Oh I almost forgot, Eddie Murphy's new sci-fi, multi-role-playing comedy "Meet Dave" flopped, again.

Hancock

Will Smith is the only saving grace in what is otherwise a craptacular movie. Worst special effects I have seen in a long time for a movie of such size. Messiest camera movements. Crappiest dialogue (homophobic at times, Jason and Will). Palest super hero plot. Weakest villain. Again, Will saves it from an F.

D+

Hellboy 2: The Golden Army

Tagline: Good, never look so bad.

This is a really good movie. I enjoyed it much more than the first.

Del Toro really has chosen projects that allow him to fully realize things he is good at as director. His resume and experience since the first Hellboy have added to make this installment that much richer.

Del Toro's obsession with otherworldly creatures and intriguing gadgets is more pronounced in this movie. The movie starts with a flashback scene to 1955 when the young Hellboy was still being raised by John Hurts fatherly Trevor character and is recounting the saga of The Golden Army as a bed time story. This of course does the introductory part.

Allowing Hurt to be in the movie cause he was critical in the first, sets up what the golden army is and shows us Hellboy as a child with all the trappings of any child. We move to the present where an auction is being held. Up for bid is a piece of the royal crown. The exiled prince needs all 3 pieces of the crown to reactivate the Golden Army. His father had broken up the crown which controlled the mechanical army after a truce with the humans hundreds of years ago. He needs his father's piece and his twin sister's piece so he sets off to obtain them. Meanwhile the auction raid has set the B.P.R.D. on the trail of what exactly may be happening. In order to follow their clues and confirm their suspicions they seek out the mystically hidden, nearly mythical Troll market. Events unspool from there and we learn that they have to go to Ireland because that his where they mystical portal is that grants access to The Golden Army.

I'm omitting some elements but want to save the finale from you in my review. I really liked the final fight between Hellboy and the Prince. The setting and sequence were a real thrill to watch. I will say that I think the one thing keeping me from making this movie on par with Spider-Man 2, which I gave an A grade, is that the full threat promised of the Golden Army never is really explored as a threat to mankind. We get glimpses in that final act but I think had something happened to make The Golden Army a bigger threat to mankind it would've been that much better.

Although before Hellboy fights the Prince he and his B.P.R.D. comrades have a good fight with the golden army and the armies power is evident.

There is also a spoiler about Liz that is worth saving for the film.

A great comedy scene that is timed perfectly admist the chaos in the movie comes about mid point of the film. Two Words: Barry Manilow!

This is a good movie and deserves to not get lost in the shuffle after The Dark Knight hits. Check it out!

A-

Journey to the Center of the Earth

If you can't watch it in 3D theaters, my words would be you'd better leave it alone. The really amazing visuals of this new rehash of the world-famous sci-fi writer Joule Verne's masterpiece can only unspool its utmost beauty and stunningness when watching it in a perspective 3D view. The special effects and visual part are generally impeccable. At the same time, there are too many scientific contradictions in the story plot line but I don't want to be nerdy therefore decide not to checklist them. However, if you only want to enjoy a fun summer film, then Journey would be a passable choice.

B

I gave up on the Eddie Murphy's new turd "Meet Dave" and watched Wall-E for the fourth time.

My city,

I can not deny her.

My city screams.

She is my mother,

she is my lover.

And I'm her spirit.

I'm on my way.

"On your knees then."

"Do I look like a good girl?"

"Come to me."

"Keep the mask on."

In this place, sex is as common an afternoon activity as jumping into the pool.

In this world, the sin eclipses the sun.

Here we come with another big counterprogramming fight! Since 2006 witnessing The Devil Wears Prada chunked big from Superman Returns' wallet in this very weekend, Die-hard LA cop Bruce Willis faced off rat chef in Paris out with a win-win situation, grossing $34M and $47M each for opening weekend when last June ended. Now the sizzling 2008 June shows no sign to stop, Pixar's new entry Wall-E duels with Universal's kick-huge-huge-ass action flick Wanted, resulting the highest aggregated June weekend ever (over previous chart topper Harry Potter and the Prisioner of Azkaban in 2004) with stunning $70M & $48M (projection) in bank. Quality-wise, both of two films deserve my 100% recommendation. Believe me my friend, go watch it and you won't be disappointed.

Wall-E

The new Pixar feature "Wall-E" is easily one of this summer's peak achievements. The animated world created by Finding Nemo's director Andrew Stanton simply attracted both kids and adults into the wonderland. The story of Wall-E is not all about sunshine, icecream and happily ever after, the first half hour of the movie actually somewhat slided into the dark tone, 700 hundred years later, the earth is pretty much covered by trash and people have abandoned the uninhabitable planet, leaving the cleaning to the the hand of an incredible robot as in the title, "Wall-E". Doing what he's been programmed to do for so long time, after meeting with the new robot "Eve" sent back by human to search the trace of life, the little robot finally realized what he was meant for. These two robots are romantically bonded by Wall-E's favorite movie, "Hello, Dolly" and step into an adventurous and colorful exploration into the space.

That sounds crazy but the idea does work like everything about Wall-E I'd say. Just like last summer Pixar's animated feature "Ratatouille", Wall-E is a rich and visually sophisticated relish for any age. However, more than the stunning visual, the big heart Andrew Stanton put into the little robot successfully came up as the most riveting selling points in the movie. Details work perfectly well. The tender and persistent feeling of Wall-E shaped himself out as a real human being. Only emotions can give such a role some real personality, just like David the little robot in 2001's Spielberg's apocalyptic sci-fi masterpiece"A. I.". Compared to most of other summer eyecandies, the overflowing of emotion let Wall-E stand out, making the robot actually feel more human than most other roles that appeared in live action films.

I really admire their skills of delicate animation and the originality of entire story. Setting an ordinary love story to happen in space and between two droids actually offers the movie a wholly new and refreshing feeling. There are some dark moments, or some strange things that could make kids have a hard time embracing it. This could possibly prevent it from reaching the vicinity of $300M but does that really matter? Pixar doesn't need that to embellish its shining brand and every such likes as "it deserves a flop" or "balance theory" is pathetically defied, at least this time.

A+, my favorite so far this year, possibly will hold this title until year end.

Wanted

If you have a mood going for such stylish action sequences in "300" or "The Matrix", then go and watch this flick. Call it the fast-and-furious Russian style, the Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, whose resume includes huge local hits as "Night Watch" and "Day Watch", presented us this over-the-top, hyperactive, ultra-violent and testosterone-overflowing action flick about how an everyday guy Wesley Gibson, becomes from a nameless nobody to an enforcer of justice.

James McAvoy has apparently joined the uprising star list, including RDJ, Ed Norton, Clive Owen and Chris Bale who are seriously firing up their own commercial franchises. The Scottish thespian who starred in last year's best picture nominator drama Atonement must have spent a lot of time in gym, building himself up as a qualified action star. Morgan Freeman again proved that he can fit in any genre of films, from Million Dollar Baby, The Bucket List to Wanted. Paving all the way down from Lara Croft series and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Angelina Jolie demonstrated her undisputable #1 female action star position right now in Hollywood.

So many "WOW" factors are jammed in this fast-paced action film that you tend to keep you mouth open, leaning back into the chair, twisting anything in your hands unintentionally. The Russian director added so many things we have never seen before. He is obviously good at synchronizing the audience's emotion with the movie with intense actions and funny gags. Simultaneously, the movie is not plotless or mindless as most Hollywood action flicks are these days. As said, three actors greatly enriched the personalities of their respective roles, the story line is quite interesting while it does set up kinda new kind, atypical hero, who will obviously show up again in the sequel. With all these, what would you complain about?

A.

Steve Carell topped the same weekend consecutively in two years. In 2007 he stepped into Jim Carrey's old shoes, opening the critically panned spin-off Evan Almighty to $31M, en route to a total barely over the century mark. This year another Steve-Carell tour de force claimed the top sport as the big screen adaptation of revived old TV series "Get Smart" with a sizzling $42M, eyeing a $120M finish.

Get Smart

I gotta admit this is a middle-sized disappointment to me.

In my opinion, this movie just failed to trigger even a single natural giggle. It wasn't funny, the action sequence wasn't exciting, and the plot was just tasteless. Not to mention the villains and their whole scheme was the definition of weak.

The film did revive some classical lines from the old TV-show series such as "Sorry about that chief" and "Miss it by that much", did spoof those known spy films like 007 and served as a homage to the once-popular TV series like using gadgets including shoe phone, fire thrower and alike. But most of the time the audience could only feel how contrived those gags can be. Those jokes that were supposed to make the audience laugh from inner depth ultimately turned out to be kinda puerile, far-fetching and illogical. Believe me, if you've seen the trailer you have watched most of the funny moments already.

Alan Arkin and Rock just did their jobs. Carrell was amusing at times, and Hathaway and Carrell did actually have good chemistry, but that is the only positive I can say about this movie. It wasn't a BAD movie, but it's one that I'm completely indifferent to and forgot about 30 minutes after I left the theater.

C

The Incredible Hulk

Summary: The Hulk < The Incredible Hulk < The Incredibles

This film has some really really awesome action sequences, as well as a strong lead performance by Edward Norton and a good, unusual villain of Tim Roth. However, it has little else going for it.

I like Liv Tyler, but she wasn't cast well here. She works better in movies without such a fast, action pace, and her character was rather uninteresting and fish-out-of-water as a result.

The chemistry between Norton and Tyler just wasn't there. I never felt their romance.
 
There are too many in-jokes and little we-need-a-quick-laugh moments. The movie had, what, four cameos? One's more than enough. The fact that the best scenes were the action scenes proves that Hulk just isn't that interesting of a character, and I don't fault the people involved for this, just that you simply can't get very in-depth with his concept, whereas other heroes can have much more interesting inner-struggles.

While this is a better film than Ang Lee's "Hulk," which is a much more thoughtful version. Of course, it got the job done better, but there really wasn't much creative effort shown here - it was just action with scenes in between leading to more action, and that fit Hulk's character pretty well - but I think that the reason why Ang Lee tried a more creative approach was because he didn't wanna make just a mindless blockbuster like the Hulk "should" be, and I therefore applaud him for that. Pitifully comic fans and audience didn't buy the idea much.

The great action sequences and pretty strong central performances make up for these issues, but keep it from greatness. I have this just a notch below the overrated "Iron Man," but well ahead of superhero flicks like "Fantastic Four," "Ghost Rider," "X-Men: The Last Stand," and all the other sub-par superhero movies. With this one, I'm at least anticipating another...hopefully it'll be made with a bit more interest and ambition than "hulk smash!"

B

The Happening

The Happening is the latest from director M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense). I've enjoyed most of his past work (including Lady in the Water). The story follows Elliot and Alma Moore (played by Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel), a couple living in Philadelphia, the setting of most of Shyamalan’s films. A catastrophe strikes in New York, causing large numbers of people to commit suicide. Fearing the growing threat, Elliot and Alma flee Philadelphia in an attempt to escape the attack.

The Happening has a peculiar balance between humor, seriousness, and the morbid. The film was advertised as M. Night Shyamalan’s first film with an R-rating ("for violent and disturbing images"), which I think ended up being a problem for the film. Many people have compared him to Alfred Hitchcock ("the master of suspense"), which I now serious doubt.

In previous films, Shyamalan has worked well in the PG-13-rating. He was great at introducing suspense and startling the audience, think of the sprinklers in Lady in the Water. With his latest film, however, the horror is just there. There were suspenseful moments that I liked (the trees, he tracking shot with the policeman and the cars, etc.), but a good deal of it seemed there just to justify the rating than advance the story.

The acting in the film didn't do it for me, either. Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel, two good actors I might add (Think The Departed and All the Real Girls), just didn’t seem to fit. Should we blame the acting or the script? I don’t know. Coupled with that is the on-the-nose dialgue. The long-anticipated suspense turned out to be such a stink bomb. I didn't mean to spoil the twist but my words would be if you are expect anything close to The Six Sense's ground-breaking, concept-redefining, jaw-dropping, view-repeating twist, you will be let down for a major time. Mark my words, you can bet on that.

D+

Obviously moviegoers across the U.S. were in a kung fu-fighting mood in the past weekend. A big, lazy, lovable panda ate up the competition all the way to the top spot of American box office chart with $60M. Adam Sandler's new laugher You Don't Mess with the Zohan also chewed up slightly higher than the industry expectation.

Kung Fu Panda

This is pretty much as good as 3D animation can get outside of Pixar.

Pros

The character of Po the Panda, voiced by similarly big and lovable Jack Black, is able to tickle the nerve of laugh just by sitting there. Pixar and Wall-E, watch your back!
The settings of entire story are so colorful and vivid that you can feel them about to jump off the screen.
Applications of Chinese elements are pretty much the best we can expect.
Dustin Hoffman's Master Shifu appears to be the character with most personality other than Po. The plotline that Tai Lung got an Oedipus spine for Shifu to pick out isn't that original actually but yet enough to support the subplot.
Panda is almost pleasantly free of all the pop-culture hints, quotes and parodies chewed tons of time by other DWA animations.
The battle sequence between The Furious Five and Tai Lung on the rope bridge is one of the best animated action sequences I've seen.
The consistence and originality of jokes are quite satisfactory. (Actually I watched it twice instead of watching the four-hookers-talking-about-sex movie)

Cons

How many times have we seen an "underdog-fighting-to-the-top" story? Countless I'd say. Under the apparel of traditional Chinese factors, patterns and animation, the shortage of originality across Hollywood is still embarrassingly baked in the sun.
The characters of The Furious Five are far from fully developed. For seasoned moviegoers you don't need the help of IMDb to recognize the familiar voices of Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu and even David Cross, which were miserably underused most of the time. Compared to their fancy actions the personalities of the five are somewhat eclipsed, well probably aside Jolie's tigeress but it doesn't help a lot.
The fact is how Mr. Ping the Goose borrowed kinda universal power and sired such a giant panda is still beyond me. The discrepancy remains unclarified till the end.

In all Kung Fu Panda is a very enjoyable movie. Just go watch it and I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

A-

You Don't Mess with the Zohan

In fact The Zohan is nothing but a huge talking & walking crotch.

I thought the movie started out somewhat promising but then it just kept getting worse and worse until it nosedove at the end, only to be let down by the so-called climax. Well it is in terms of a filmmaking context, the movie is by no means terrible but in terms of entertaining the audience, it doesn't get the job done even for a single minute. The thing that drew me into the movie was Adam Sandler being a super Mossad secret agent who could do literally anything. This was going to be a movie representation of all those Chuck Norris jokes you've ever heard. But really, it focuses more on the hair styling, and Adam Sandler's crotch. And then it rehashes hummus jokes to boot.

It seems like all the stuff that wasn't funny was the ones that were used over and over. Sandler's character was ok, it's just that the writing for this movie doesn't really exploit everything the Zohan should be IMO. The movie goes beyond ridiculous perhaps that had me doing a facepalm bigger than the Refrigerator scene from Indy 4. But for what little there is of Adam Sandler kicking @$$ and defying physics had me laughing quite a bit. John Turturro as the Phantom (his rival) was probably the best thing Dugan and Sandler could come up with this movie, even if his character goes the way of the dodo by the end.

Overall, D+.

The Strangers

When was the last time I watched a really good horror movies on big screen? It'll need tracing all the way back to last fall's The Mist. Hollywood horror has lost its magic.

I was not scared once in the entire course of this film. It completely relies on Hitchcock-type chills, but guess what? It was actually GOOD when Hitchcock did it, because he didn't make idiot characters who probably couldn't even find an emergency number in a phone book and then have the 'villians' just stand around acting 'menacing' before finally just killing them and moving on with their jolly old lives. I have no idea what the hell I just watched. It was honestly terrible. Predictable, boring, harmless, anticlimactic, stupid, vapid, empty, lacking, hollow, and ridiculous. I haven't seen Prom Night though it's hard to beat this in terms of absolute crappiness. I was laughing into my jacket so as not to attract attention whenever some 'scary' things happened with the strangers either just standing there or doing something incredibly predictable which was then followed by a monumentally unbelievable reaction by the blithering idiot characters.

If you're going to rely on suspense for your horror, here's a tip. Don't lead the characters into a trap by having them do something that could not possibly be explained by human logic. This film was just the equivalent of a 2-hour long traverse of these characters running from a murderer and then turning around for no explicable reason to head straight for the knife.

What's even funnier is that by the time these retarded characters finally get killed, you don't even care anymore. You aren't disturbed, you aren't disgusted, you're just nonchalant about the whole thing because they friggin' deserved it! And yes, it is true that the main point of a horror movie is to scare you. If everything else was the same but it had managed to SCARE me, then I would at least give this a B.

But it didn't. It didn't scare me once, unless you count 'jumping' because of unnecessary loud fu(king noises a couple times as being 'scared'. The characters were so stereotyped and so dumb that you can tell what's going to happen 30 minutes in for the rest of the movie. No thought went into this, and I'd be willing to bet a 3-year old could come up with better 'twists' then in this pathetic movie. If I had to say something good about the movie, I would compliment to the cameraman, they did an okay job with the cinematography. But that's it. If the cinematography wasn't there this would get an F or F-.

Overall, F+.

ATTENTION: HUGE SPOILERS AHEAD!

PROS
Opening sequence including titles (at least a bit of eeriness) & music (Big Mama Thornton & Elvis Presley's Hounddog, "You ain't nothin' but a hounddog, cryin' all the time", come on it's one of my favorite songs), chase at the college, fighting scenes in warehouse and jungle ;
50s - designs, settings etc.
Harrison, Shia and Cate mostly;
Marcus Brody (and H.J.Senior);
Reminders musical themes and other references to the previous movies camera work (especially tonality) etc.

Overall I was kinda pleased until they left US.

Average

Marion - she was nice but VERY underused; while it's pleasing I'm not sure the end goes together with their always troubled "relationship" .

CONS

Plot = the whole f'ck-up with the alien (other dimensions) thing WTF? Cheeeeesy. Do you remember: "The search for the Cup of Christ is the search for the divine in all of us." ? - I know IJ is about pure entertainment but should come to an honorable end.

No traps, no good riddles, weak historical/mythological context and lack of eeriness - there was always somebody BEFORE Dr. Jones (mainly Oxley - remember Forrestal in Raiders? That one was dead already for a good reason). I almost didn't feel uncovering the secrecy. Watching a mystery being revealed, I always got goose-bumpy in all previous pics in the franchise (not much in TOD though).

Score - J.Williams, you disappointed me in a most painful manner; you enjoyed me just with old musical themes, nothing new was composed to remember.

CGI - why the digital effects are so recognizable for the most part? no, it's not the true question. Why they seem so lame and unrealistic to me? Is this field not developed enough yet? Maybe it's just ME. Anyway, the ants seemed fake, let them be so. But that embarrassing scene with the monkeys and Shia a.k.a Tarzan.

Mac - personally if asked I would leave him dead as Indy's gee at the end of the opening sequence to build up hatred of the villains. His further presence is unnecessary to the plot. The story can be simply developed without him. Or give him more funny and important moments and cast him more significantly.

Egregious absurdity

A-bomb - completely redundant subplot (not particularly subplot, maybe one of THEM had a vision of Indiana Jones's silhouette on the field of the nuclear explosion and therefore it had to be added - an old hero meets the dawn of a new age) .

Russian agents INTRODUCING THEMSELVES as KGB in public - oh come on let alone the Russian military group easily accessing the most restricted area in the centre of U.S. (in the paranoid fifties). Overall In my view, the movie didn't add anything to the legend besides very interesting look of Indy in senior age (the best thing about the movie IMO) and introducing eventual new junior direction I'm afraid of but conscious that the future more belongs to younger man than Indy - and me (though I´m young, just not THAT young).

B+

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

Copycat-of-Helms-Deep battles, cheesy inspiring speeches, a WTF love in the end. Totally a stupid movie, as stupid as its predecessor if not more. Definition of cheesy, campy, puerile, tedious, empty, banal and tasteless. The CG effects are passable but the dialogues are simply meaningless, come on have we never seen an "inspiring" battle speech before? 10000 BC's stink is still in the air. Ben Barnes looks like a woman overdosed with male hormone. Those four kids are so annoying, especially the youngest one. "For Narnia!" What the hell? I am an unswerving hater of LWW but have yet expected the sequel could be even more horrendous. A totally deserved flop, demonstrating the death of fantasy.

D+

Those who stay in Beijng might have heard something from Rodolfo. For long I've developed the habit of not exhibiting too much detail about my life here. Now I'm gonna summarize what's been happening to me in the past spring. Quitting my PhD program for a master, running into a serious car accident, flying around to south Florida, Santa Barbara, Minneapolis and so forth for on-site interviews, getting bunches of job offers from different-leveled companies and graduating in the coming August. Simple, easy and peaceful, huh?

Sorry for not disclosing any further information about my reasons, status, decisions, salaries, whereabouts and my companies here in myspace. Probably I'd say sorry also for being unable to host my friends here in Atlanta but who knows. Good luck.

Btw anyone going to see Indy4 this coming weekend?