Hit me with a big stick, this was one funny movie. I didn’t expect to like it but someone decided to get it without asking me (and what’s up with that?) so I went along with the thought. Damn if Down To Earth isn’t funny, especially Chris Rock and Chazz Palminteri. This is a superior update of the mid-70s Warren Beatty flick Heaven Can Wait, which is fitting since Beatty co-wrote his version and Rock is credited for the same here. Brothers Chris and Paul Weitz show their usual strong touch with comedy–they directed American Pie (and AP2) and wrote Antz and Nutty Professor II.

recommended

Jamie Foxx is stupid but he can run fast and, just when he needs it, he pulls some brains out of his back pocket in Bait. David Morse is a hardass Treasury cop looking for Doug Hutchinson and using Foxx as, wow, a surprise, bait to get him. This is a sharp looking film and the plot almost holds together but inconsistencies like Foxx’s varying level of intelligence make it hard to take.

modestly recommended

It’s gross! It’s funny! It’s inside Bill Murray! It’s Osmosis Jones, the latest movie from Peter and Bobby Farrelly (the brothers gave us Me, Myself & Irene, There’s Something About Mary, and Dumb & Dumber). We go for a wild animated ride inside Bill Murray’s insides, led by Chris Rock and David Hyde-Pierce as coppers chasing Lawrence Fishburne’s deadly virus, not to mention William Shatner’s weasly mayor of the City of Frank. Cool but not for the really young.

SciFi Weekly weighs in with their review–only a C+. I’d give it a B+.

recommended

The best movies are all about emotion, about evoking an emotional response inside the viewer. Chocolat is all about that. There is a plot, revolving around a chocolate shop in a small French village in 1959, but the movie, nominated for five Academy Awards in 2001, is about pulling happiness straight out of your heart. The beautiful Juliette Binoche stars as the wandering chocolatier, Alfred Molina smolders through his own interior walls as the village count, Judi Dench and Carrie-Ann Moss as a mother and the daughter who can’t forgive her, and, not the least, Johnny Depp as a wandering minstrel. The cinematography by Roger Pratt (Batman, 12 Monkeys, The End of the Affair) is lovely, capturing the wind pushing Binoche, the light at a dinner party, a boat floating on the river. Sophisticated direction by Lasse Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog, Cider House Rules) and script by Robert Nelson Jacobs (Disney’s Dinosaur). A sweet, wonderfil film, watch it.

definitely recommended

If you like pure Hong Kong cinematic martial arts, Once Upon a Time in China is not to be missed. The video we watched was dubbed in English, which tends to take away from my enjoyment because the voices are so obviously fake and the dialog is so poorly translated. On a DVD I would have had a choice to use subtitles instead but… This is the first of a trilogy where Jet Li plays Wong Fei-hung. Wong is a healer and martial artist in turn of the century China, reacting to the intrusion of Europeans and Americans into China.

recommended

We were looking for some action, some chest pounding, screaming action today. And hoping a bunch of apes could deliver. Did they? You bet. Tim Burton has reimagined Planet of the Apes, going back to Pierre Boulle’s original novel and mostly ignoring the cheesy Charleton Heston version–although the main character is American, not French, and he travels in time, not to another star. Mark Wahlberg keeps pushing the memory of his days as a Calvin Klein underwear model further and further into the dim recesses, Helena Bonham Carter shows the complexities of being an ape with a conscionse, and Tim Roth is positively vicious as the human-hating general. Is Burton making a movie about racism and ignorance or an action flick?

Did you know Boulle also wrote The Bridge over the River Kwai, made into an excellent movie with Alec Guinness?

recommended