I only watched this movie because there was nothing else even remotely interesting and Lance Reddick is so good on The Wire. Reddick is a dirty cop but we’re supposed to think that’s only due to some bad luck and too much gambling, which got him under the thumb of Julian, a weird local crime boss played by Austin Pembleton.

Dirty Work picks up when Assistant State Attorney Frank Sullivan (Mike McGlore), running for his boss’s job, comes home late one night. During a fight he gets physical with his alcoholic wife and strangles her; he and his campaign manager smuggle the body out and stage her to appear as if she was another victim of a rapist/murderer. The other plot is that Reddick decides he’s not going to let Julian ruin a young Polish hotel maid, after she overheard the real killer, Julian’s top goon, admit that fact to his boss.

In the end, this movie is too simple and formulaic. Writer/director Bruce Terris, in his first feature-length production, leans too heavily on dark visuals, bad Chicago winter weather and some pretty decent acting to overcome poor material with too few surprises for a thriller.

not recommended

This 2006 sci-fi comedy from Mike Judge, the man behind Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill and Office Space, was greatly anticipated by many Judge fans and disappeared without so much as a commercial ripple. Which was too bad since this movie is funny, but understandable since the zingers hit just a tad too close to home for the mass market audience.

Idiocracy stars Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph as two statistically average folks turned into test subjects on a military hibernation project in 2005, only to wake up 500 years later after being lost due to a scandal involving the scientist and general running the experiment. Instead of the idealistic flying car future we generally expect, the pair find that reproductive demographic trends lead to one where everyone is stupider than a pair of broken twigs.

The planet is dying, of course, especially since water’s been displaced by Brawndo, a sort of Gatorade, and half the population works for the company. Being the smartest man alive according to a prison aptitude test, Wilson is told to solve the world’s problems in a week, or else. Being of what we’d consider average intelligence, however, all he can think of is to tell people to use ‘water from toilets’ to feed crops and that doesn’t work fast enough.

Judge uses present-day trends, such as the increasing number of mindless TV game and reality shows, to extreme good use. Consumer-facing giants such as Starbucks and H&R Block are still around but their products have transformed into, er, brothels (e.g. lattes are handjobs). Wilson is very well-suited to the role while Randolph’s role is rather smaller and less demanding. Dax Shepherd is quite good as one of the smarter 26th century morons.

recommended

After taking down Vegas and Hong Kong, the unlikely pairing of LAPD detective James Carter (Chris Tucker) and Hong Long PD Chief Inspector Lee (Jackie Chan) are after the biggest game of all in Paris, the leaders of the Hong Kong Triads. Brett Rattner retains the director’s seat he’s occupied for all three installments while Jeff Nathanson, who took over the writing for 2, repeats here.

In Rush Hour 3, Lee’s mentor Ambassador Han is about to reveal this great secret of the Triads before a made-up version of the World Court when he’s assassinated with Lee just a few feet away from the podium. Lee sees the sharpshooter and gives chase, running into Carter. Han’s daughter, now all grown up and hot, is kidnapped, sending the boys to France to finish the job Han started and recover the girl.

Tipped to a private gentlemen’s club, Lee and Carter connect with a hot Asian (Youki Kudoh) and French-African woman (Noemie Lenoir), respectively. Kudoh, unfortunately for Lee, is a Triad assassin and requires him to use all of his agility to get away but Lenoir is much friendlier to Carter. Max von Sydow and Oscar-winning film director Roman Polansky are not bad in supporting roles as the head of the World Court and a French police detective. Polansky, of course, has also been a fugitive from American justice for over 30 years on a statutory rape charge, so I was quite amused to see him playing a cop; von Sydow has played this type of roles so many times over the years that one worries he’s going to walk through his lines.

Hiroyuki Sanada is Kenji, the principal villain, beginning with Han’s killing and right to the climactic confrontation with Lee and Carter in the restaurant at the top of the Eiffel Tower. Along the way, through the three’s interactions, we finally learn a bit of Lee’s personal story and Carter shows he hasn’t been talking out of his ass when claiming to have spent the years since the duo’s last adventure studying martial arts.

Overall this was an enjoyable entertainment even if it is also the slightest of the three Hours. Rattner and Nathanson still to their formula like SuperGlue in every scene and line of dialog, and I’m not sure I’d pay to see Rush Hour 4, but since it’s a decent formula we walked out of the theater laughing and if they do make a fourth I’d certainly watch it on cable.

recommended

I was asked to review an independently made movie called Lithium Springs but have nothing positive at all to say, so I will just leave my comment as this note.

In one of those strange Hollywood coincidences that looked like a game of chicken both sides were determined to not to lose and so both went over the cliff still in the car, two movies about magicians and their loves came out within weeks of each other last fall. One was The Illusionist, which I wrote up a month ago, starring Edward Norton and Joaquin Phoenix fighting over Jessica Biel.

In The Prestige Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) fight each other over their magic, not their women (Piper Perabo and Rebecca Hall), but the women get involved in their unfriendly competition nonetheless. Michael Caine has the lead supporting role as a man who creates tricks for magicians and is somewhat of a confidant to Angier and Borden who, early on, meet while working under the tutelage of the same star.

David Bowie is delightful as Nikola Tesla, a real person who was Thomas Edison’s employee, vitcim and primary competitor in the commercial development of electricity. The Prestige is set later in Tesla’s life, after Edison has won the corporate battle; though we never see the Wizard of Menlo Park onscreen, his agents are shown hounding Tesla, forcing him to be constantly on the defensive and on the move, though willing to assist Angier when he travels to wintry Colorado Springs in quest of a copy of a device he believes Tesla built for Borden.

Director Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins, Insomnia, Memento), who co-wrote the snappy, intelligent script with his brother Jonathan from Christopher Priest’s novel, points out right at the beginning that in the world of magic nothing is ever what it seems to be, that the show must be watched carefully and that the performers will go to great lengths to create illusions. This is very useful advice, so I pass it along to you.

recommended

Released in 1995, essentially the eve of the World Wide Web’s unleashing, this is a fascinating mashup of hot teenage lust (Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie in her first lead role) and computer-based corporate blackmail. Watching it again after a dozen years I see many writers and directors copped bits and ideas for reuse in their own projects, but then again reuse is a holy grail of computer programming and hacking in its most positive sense so its not that bad.

Hackers uses the Robert Morris-authored computer worm of 1988 as its launching point, but transforming college student Morris into 11 year old prodigy Dade Murphy; fast forward seven years and Dade (Miller) and his mom (Alberta Watson) are relocating from Seattle to Manhattan for his senior year of high school. Kate Libby (Jolie) is the school office intern who turns out to be a budding hacker herself, and four male classmates complete their clique.

The main downside is the writers seemingly had a grasp of technology based on reading random computer product datasheets. At one point near the climax Penn Jillette, playing some sort of computer security analyst, starts screaming “They’re into the kernel! They’re into the kernel!” At another the teenage hacker boys are checking out Jolie’s laptop, throwing out features as if they were centerfold measurements.

Fisher Stevens, the villain of the piece, does come up with one sentiment that is totally absurd but allegedly an expression of the hacker mentality: “There is no more good or evil, there’s only fun and boring.” The technical details of the plot are on a similar level, but the tension, especially between Jolie and Miller, makes Hackers watchable.

recommended

Twenty years on Crockett and Tubbs finally make it to the big screen, with Colin Farrell replacing Don Johnson and Jamie Foxx in place of Philip Michael Thomas and a budget commensurate with their star power. Since Michael Mann created the TV show and wrote and directed this movie, we get a lot more continuity than in similar migrations (e.g., Lost in Space, SWAT). Castillo, Zito, Switek, Gina and Trudy are all back too, though things are far too serious to make time for the series’ parade of goofy informants like Noogie and Izzie.

Miami Vice the movie felt like a really well-made two hour episode and I mean that as a compliment. The plot, the characters, the atmosphere, the visuals are all in tune with the best of the series; overall I was most reminded of the second season opener Prodigal Son that spent much of its time in New York, with Crockett falling for a bad woman and walking the streets at night to Glenn Frey’s song “You Belong to the City” all over the soundtrack.

No Manhattan here, though we do get to see a bit of Havana, Port au Prince (Haiti’s capital) and Columbian jungles. Crockett and Tubbs get brought in by an FBI ASAC after they help him discover a leak in his drug task force and, not knowing where the bad apple sits, leave them to run things as they see fit. Finding a weak link in the cartel’s use of outside contractors to transport their drugs, the squad busts the current jobholders and get hired in their place.

One of the top lieutenants is a hot Asian woman (Gong Li) and she and Sonny fall for each other immediately. This doesn’t sit well with Jose Yero (John Ortiz), the cartel’s security and counterintelligence manager, and in the end he tries to use it against them. Tries. There are gun battles, a few explosions.

recommended

One cannot deny that I’m a big Jet Li fan. Oddly, and mistakenly, I was reluctant to watch Huo Yuan Jia since I had the impression he’d made an adoration to a man who was his own hero, who’d founded the Wushu school of martial arts a century ago. Indeed, before becoming an actor, Li five times won the Chinese Wushu championship although modern Wushu is a creation of the country’s Communist leadership and not the same style practiced by the historical Huo Yuan Jia.

Jet Li’s Fearless, the English title, is a bit idealized from the man’s real life. Not just to make a nice dramatic 100 minute package but to create a more heroic character; not that it matters to me, not being Chinese all I care about is an entertaining film. It does apparently present the man’s true position on the meaning of martial arts: self-improvement and self-development, with combat against others useful only as a means of testing one’s progress.

The movie can be divided into three parts: Huo’s childhood and early adult years, his years in the wilderness absorbing some tough lessons and finally, the emergence of a national champion at a time when Westerners and the Japanese treated China like a toy chest. At first Li’s character is arrogant, his ambition only to defeat every other fighter in his home city of Tianjin, but on attaining this goal its revealed as shallow and empty and his conceit leads to the death of his mother and daughter.

Destroyed, he’s nearly killed after running away from the shame but saved on the point of drowning by the crew of a fishing boat from a simple village. A lovely young blind woman and her grandmother take him in, restoring his health and teaching her their traditional wisdom. After several years working his way to an integrated, mature mental state, he returns to Tianjin only to find that foreigners have arrived in his absence and reduced his proud friends and neighbors to servants.

With his hard-earned insight Huo travels to Shanghai to take on a massive boxer. This O’Brien has defeated every Chinese fighter who gets in the ring with him and mocked the entire nation as weak, providing the final spark in Huo’s thinking. Not only does he defeat the boxer, easily, but does so with such graciousness that his opponent is able to push through his rage to acknowledge defeat.

Huo then founds the Jingwu Sports Federation (Jing Wu Men) based on the idea that only through unity will China pull free of foreign dominion. The foreigners don’t cotton so quickly to this thinking and challenge him to fight a champion from each of their four nations, a British boxer, a German lancer, a Spanish fencer, and a Japanese martial artist. Huo wins but also loses.

Li has the meat of the action, but also turning in strong performances are Betty Sun as the blind woman, Shido Nakamura as his Japanese opponent in his final match, Yong Dong as his lifelong friend and partner; the youngster who play’s Huo as a child isn’t listed in the IMDB or official website credits but was also terrific.

The movie was directed by Ronny Yu, one of Hong Kong’s most highly regarded filmmakers, and the action sequences were choreographed by the legendary Yuen Wo Ping.

recommended

Longtime readers will remember that I was a huge fan of both Bourne Identity and Bourne Supremacy; indeed this was my most anticipated movie of the entire summer big budget season and, frankly, the first in a long time I might pay to see twice. Though not perfect–director Paul Greengrass needs to get control of his shaky handheld camera addiction–even the Big Guy, who watched it with TS1 and me, gave it a TZero rating. TZero, in the time flies when you’re having fun sense, means the apparent time elapsed was zero; my own scale focuses on ass pain, meaning the longer the experienced length, the more discomfort from sitting still, and the third Bourne flick got a zero on that one too.

Bourne Ultimatum picks up in the minutes after Jason Bourne apologized to Irena Neski and left her Moscow apartment, which was only the next to last scene in Supremacy. He evades the Russian police and, nicely foreshadowing a similar confrontation towards the end, doesn’t kill a cop after disarming him even though the cops had shot him moments before.

Skip to a few weeks later. We see British journalist Simon Ross (Paddy Considine) meeting a source in Italy, a man who gives him highly classified details about Bourne, Treadstone and the (new in this film) Blackfriar Program into which the motivations and methods of Treadstone have been folded. Ross has already written a few articles about Jason, attracting his attention and so Bourne arranges to meet him in London.

Ross also got noticed by CIA Deputy Director Noah Vosen (David Strathairn) after using the Blackfriar name in a cell phone conversation with his editor and Vosen, the character taking the place of Brian Cox’s Ward Abbott here, dispatches his local resources, including a Bourne-like assassin, to grab or kill him. The way Jason walks Ross through the huge Waterloo Station via a cell he sneakily slipped him after recognizing the CIA agents is terrificly inventive, more so as Vosen is unaware for the opening moments that the writer’s there to meet Bourne. Unable to trust his new ally, Ross chooses to flee against advice and is killed, though Bourne grabs his notes and does get away.

Following those notes takes him to the Agency’s cover office in Madrid and, although he’s too late to find the station chief, Ross’s source, he does meet up with cute and perky Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles). She doesn’t hesitate in helping him get away from the secondary smash team and to the source in Morocco. Why? We never get an explicit answer but she’s surprised that Bourne doesn’t remember, the implication being that before he lost his memory they were romantically tangled (note: this is not known by the CIA). After having her dye her hair black and cut it short, looking very much like Franka Potenta in the earlier movies, Bourne puts her on a bus to safety.

The action moves to New York City, where Bourne and Pam Landy (Joan Allen) have that conversation we saw as the last scene in Supremacy. By now Landy understands she’s being played for the patsy by Vosen and the Director of Central Intelligence (Scott Glen), is pissed that Parsons is considered an acceptable casualty and so ready to do unto the men who massively underestimate her as they’d do for her. We also meet Dr. Albert Hirsch (Albert Finney), the man who devised the program that transformed David Webb into Jason Bourne, and that Webb volunteered for this change; of course we know that whatever rhetoric Hirsch and others gave him, Bourne’s trust was betrayed time and again.

As I said, Greengrass (besides Supremacy, United 93, for which he got nominated for the directing Oscar, and Bloody Sunday) needs to kick the handheld habit, here he uses it so much during furiously-paced chase scenes both on foot and in cars that I was wishing for a dose of Dramamine. Other than that, his work is great, tremendous velocity, tightly framed shots and terrific cinematography from Oliver Wood a very big help.

Tony Gilroy, who also wrote the first two, is joined by George Nolfi (Ocean’s Twelve, The Sentinel) and Scott Z. Burns (only previous credit is indie hit The Half Life of Timofey Berezin, starring Considine) in writing smart dialog in a fluff-free script.

The performances by Matt Damon, Joan Allen and Considine are first rate, with Stiles, Strathairn and Finney just a step behind.

recommended

A surprise ‘major indie’ comedy from last summer, this gem about an extra-quirky six person family is from the pen of Michael Arndt and enabled him to (finally?) quit his long time position as Matthew Broderick’s assistant. Most people pointed to Abigail Breslin’s performance as the title character but I enjoyed Alan Arkin’s grandfather more. He reminded me of a more realistic version of the, er, unrestrained old lady played by Estelle Getty in The Golden Girls, the big payoff coming even after he’s offscreen in the climactic beauty pageant talent performance by Breslin’s Olive.

Plenty of laughs throughout but this one nearly left me choking. Arkin won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor–and Arndt for Best Original Screenplay–so perhaps I wasn’t the only one to recognize his quality. Breslin did get a Best Supporting Actress nomination and the movie one for Best Picture.

Little Miss Sunshine covers a long weekend with the Hoovers, set off by two events: the wife’s brother Frank (Steve Carell) comes to stay with them after a suicide attempt and Olive gets a chance to fill in for a regional pageant winner at the state finals. However its the California finals and the Hoovers live in New Mexico, the tot had entered on a whim while visiting a cousin, and the family is too strapped for cash to fly the 1000 miles, plus neither of the adult males is willing to stay home with Frank who can’t be left alone.

Cash is short because Dad (Greg Kinnear) is trying to get a deal to launch a career as a motivational speaker but, since these guys are all pretty much losers, the promised deal falls through. Bryan Cranston (yeah, the father from Malcolm in the Middle) has a nice hard-edge part as the dealmaker who can’t deliver. Mom (Toni Collette) is near the end of her rope dealing with this, not to mention her teenage son (Paul Dano) not speaking for nine months from a mixed inspiration of German philosopher Nietsche and plans to apply to the Air Force Academy. Not known to the family, Grandpa has a habit of sneaking snorts of heroine in the bathroom.

The only vehicle large enough for all six is a nearly dead decades old yellow VW Bus and, in the Job-like never ending series of problems for the Hoovers, its transmission kicks during the first day’s driving. Not all the way, as long as the car can be pushed so it can be started in third gear, and of course the middle of nowhere garage can’t get a replacement until Thursday. But the family abide, pushing the VW and parking on a downhill where possible.

Directing team Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton make the most of the limited budget; while they didn’t get Oscar nominations they did get one from the Directors Guild, not bad for their feature film debut.

recommended