Zero Dark Thirty - Review

Starring: Jessica Chastain / Jason Clarke
Writer: Mark Boal
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Runtime: 157 minutes

• Uncle Sam gets payback
• Keeps it moving
• Holds the politics
• Good cast of non-stars

Zero Dark Thirty is that rarest of post 9/11 films: a story where al-Qaeda is the enemy and Americans are the good guys.

You can count on one hand the number of films made since September 11, 2001, that define radical Islam as an enemy of human liberty, and don't serve up Americans as greedy, oil sucking, two-faced creeps.

It's hard to even find a movie that mentions the words September 11th, as if that date was wiped clean from the consciences of anything but the most hardcore NRA bigot screenwriter. (As you can tell, it's been one of my hobby horses to watch Hollywood's cowards twist themselves into yoga-inspired knots while avoiding the words Islam and terror).

Generally speaking, if Hollywood produces a movie about terrorists, the terrorist will be anything but a radical Islamic fundamentalist. Hollywood's pathological avoidance of the subject is made most clear by action movies like Live Free or Die Hard, Skyfall, or any of the Bourne movies, where the terrorist bad guys turn out to be - shocker of shockers - guys from our own side. The latest flick I saw that did the faux-terrorist-switcheroo was Jack Reacher: a sniper knocks off a bunch of people in a crowded park and guess what? A former US soldier is framed for it. But not to worry, it's actually a corporate entity that set it up.

Are we this transparent, or what?

I sometimes ponder how this happened. During the Cold War, writers had a bad guy at their fingertips: the Russians. So the writers used the Russians, even though the Russians were more of an existential threat to the average movie-goer than an actual physical presence. That is, we were afraid the Russians might nuke us someday, or that a spy might by lurking in Washington DC, but other than that, we just knew they were the Bad Guy Over There.

The Nazis and the Japanese were regarded as the Bad Guys, too, and writers still use them to this day. Indeed, Nazi Germany gets more bad press in films 60 years after WWII (Inglorious Basterds, Defiance, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The Reader, Valkyrie, among other Nazi movies from the past decade) than radical Islamists ever will.

Soviet Russia, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany. Bad guys, with a mountain of movies to show for it. Heck, even the Vietnam war gets thrown in there once in a while, even if it's mostly used to say that American soldiers liked to smoke dope and cry a lot.

When it came to those peoples and cultures, Hollywood had no problem pointing the finger and claiming some sort of moral or cultural superiority. But when it comes to radical Islam, those fingers are  pointed back at themselves, when they are even pointed at all.

It is strange, isn't it? Islamic terrorists are a palpable enemy and they are an existential as well as a physical threat. They knock down buildings, incinerate busses, and cut off people's heads for an internet audience. Heck, just this week they took over an entire gas refinery and killed a bunch of hostages from a variety of countries. To put it mildly, Islamic fundamentalists are around, and they're busy. They do all kinds of nasty stuff that translates well to today's bloodfest movies: blow stuff up, take hostages, and kill innocent people who need to be rescued by special forces.

So where's the movies?

There's probably all kinds of reasons these movies aren't made, but top of the list are politics and cowardice. The politics come from the hangover of Vietnam (war is bad) mixed with the cocktail of post-Reagan liberalism (we are bad). Put them together and you get films like Redacted, though once in a while a film like The Kingdom slips in. Even then, however, filmmakers get nervous. When Kingdom director Peter Berg heard an audience applaud at the climax of his film, he wondered, "Is this American blood lust?" Buddy, relax. They're just glad the good guy got the bad guy. They're not going to leave the theatre and invade Kuwait.

The cowardice part is easy: if you insult radical Islamists in books or films, they say that they're going to kill you, and then they sometimes do. That simple. So I can't really blame producers for being a little on the chicken side, but please spare me the "George Clooney is brave" talk when he makes a movie about McCarthyism in the '50s. Big deal.

Which brings us - finally, you're saying - to Zero Dark Thirty. If it is true that people who make movies critical of radical Islam can face threats on their lives, then the makers of this movie are brave indeed, especially director Kathryn Bigelow. Still, the film is more of a by-the-numbers look at the search for Osama bin Laden than anything else and there isn't anything overtly political. Bigelow's good like that. She did the same in The Hurt Locker.

In this movie, we follow a CIA operative named Maya (Jessica Chastain), whose personal and professional quest is to find Osama bin Laden and see him die. This quest lasts ten years. She has done nothing else since the CIA, as she says, "Recruited me out of high school." I found it poetic that it was a woman who hunted bin Laden down, just as it took a woman (Bigelow) to tell the story and do it justice.

Some people might not like the scenes of torture, er, enhanced interrogation techniques in the film. Watching these scenes, I was reminded of all the pussyfooting around that was going on a decade ago. Is torture legal? Is it not? Is waterboarding torture? Is sleep deprivation torture?

Politicians of all stripes hemmed and hawed about it. Republican Bush denied it, and Democrat Feinstein still does. For my money, I wouldn't want to be tortured, but I don't get bent out of shape that others may have been. You knock down a couple of buildings and kill 3000 people, you might get slapped around a little.

What I did find myself thinking is, "What's it all for?" The terrorism, I mean. I'm not a complete fool: I know that the point of terrorism is terror, and in radical Islam's case it's about religion, and I do subscribe to the belief that we're rich and they hate us, but all the same it's such a stupid waste. In the movie, the CIA agents are in Pakistan or Afghanistan, observing people who hide out in slums and plot to murder bus riders half a world away. Do these thugs honestly have nothing better to do with their time?

There's considerable debate about how much of the movie is true. That's fine. I always caution that when a movie says Based on actual events, you need to beware of the word based, and the "s" in events. The lead character, Maya, is no doubt a hybrid of several people, which is a pretty common storytelling technique. Apparently Bigelow did have access to some confidential information, which lends the movie good credibility. For me, I took heart from seeing the screw ups during the hit on bin Laden, as well as Maya's extreme frustration that it takes the government months to act on her information. Big screw ups? Unbearable waiting times? That's got real government written all over it.

Zero Dark Thirty is an engrossing movie. It's long, but it doesn't feel long. If you want to see Uncle Sam get some payback, see the movie.

Photos: Rotten Tomatoes

Flight - Review

Starring: Denzel Washington / Don Cheadle
Writer: John Gatins
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Runtime: 138 minutes

• Washington and cast excellent
• Hair raising crash sequence
• Insult to airline professionals

I'm not quite sure which would be worse: watching Flight before getting on an airplane, or before you go for drinks with a couple of friends.

Flight is a movie about drug and alcohol abuse, with a heavy emphasis on the latter. It's a story about how alcohol can alienate you from your friends and family, and how it can destroy your professional life.

Or can it?

It's a tough movie to pin down thematically. It does a great job of walking the tightrope between drama and melodrama, but I'm not sure about the moral it teaches. It is a modern day Lost Weekend for the jet set, which may intrigue you, or may make you yawn, i.e., how many times do we have to be shown that drinking alcohol all day is bad for you?

The film opens with Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) lying in a hotel bed with a naked, extraordinarily beautiful woman. He smacks the usual "the movie is starting" alarm clock. As the woman gets herself ready, Whip ends up on the phone with an angry ex-wife, then proceeds to get ready for work by downing some booze and doing a line or two of cocaine.

Using alcohol and narcotics before going to work is generally not a good thing, especially if, like Whip, you are an airline pilot who has a flight in two hours. His bed mate is an airline flight attendant, but she has no problem with Whip using drugs before heading to the airport with him.

Though Whip is high on coke and booze, his aviator shades help cover the pupils, and his long-time-addict brain helps cover the substance abuse. He boards the aircraft and treats it like just another day, though today he has a new co-pilot flying with him. Also on board the aircraft is another flight attendant named Margaret. They have evidently known each other for a long time and they seem very friendly.

After a rough take off, the flight is going along smoothly. Then bang.

The plane goes into a vertical dive, and the co-pilot has no control. There is yelling from a lot of people, but not from Whip. He is the picture of calmness.

In these scenes, Washington reminded me of The Right Stuff. In that book, Chuck Yeager was described as the guy who started the pilot's habit of sounding like Mr. Smooth. Even while hurtling towards the Earth in a deadly spin as a test pilot, Yeager would speak as if giving directions to the hardware store: Tail spin....Trying A....A didn't work....Trying B...B didn't work...Still spinning...Trying C...

Nothing rattled Yeager, and apparently his cool, slow drawl is the inspiration for every pilot's voice we hear today.

In Flight, while the plane is going down, Whip is Yeager incarnate. Smooth, talented and fearless. Even with all of the crap pumping through his veins, he can do no wrong.

I don't think I'm spoiling the movie by saying that Whip saves the day on that plane. He makes a miraculous landing and saves a lot of lives. The story is really about what comes after the crash landing. Whip is hailed as a hero, and every network news anchor wants to interview him, but there's a problem: after an airline accident, all crew must receive a blood test. Guess what Whip's test shows?

The remainder of the movie is a cat and mouse game between Whip and the NTSB, Whip and his friends, and Whip and himself. Every addict is a liar, and Whip is no different. Frustration will build in you as the lies grow deeper, and as Whip continues to destroy himself and others with these lies. Still, the lying feels - oddly enough - honest. It's the way that addicts behave. They will lie until they reach rock bottom.

As I said above, it's not like you haven't seen this material before. While watching the film, I rattled off a number of movies in my head that cover the drunk-person-in-crisis theme. They tend to be depressing and didactic movies that I wouldn't want to revisit. Flight is a little different in that is has a great cast, and Denzel Washington can carry any movie across the finish line.

One thing about this movie that bothers me, however, is how readily people accept his addiction, and try to cover for him when their own reputations or lives are at stake. The hot flight attendant who watches him do a line of coke, the older flight attendant who apparently knows he partied all night, the co-pilot who thinks he smells gin on Whip's breath, the lawyer and union rep who let him do some coke to calm him down before a hearing.

There's a cynical and comedic streak to the movie that is frightening. If I was in the airline profession, I would not be a fan of this film and in fact would feel the need to speak out against what it implies: that pilots can still make great landings when drunk, and that their colleagues will cover for them. Unless that's all true, which is almost too disturbing to consider.

Those thoughts aside, the movie is well done and worth seeing.

Photos: Rotten Tomatoes

Killing Them Softly - Review

Starring: Brad Pitt
Writer/Director: Andrew Dominik
Runtime: 97 minutes

• Good performances
• Too much talk
• Good premise wasted
• Tin eared economic theme

Killing Them Softly is a gangster movie which squanders a plausible premise and becomes boring pretty quickly. It asks you to emotionally invest in several characters who aren't very interesting, and it has a strange political subplot starring George W. Bush and Barack Obama in footage from the 2008 presidential election.

Bear with.

The story starts out with three men plotting to knock over a card game run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta). Some time in the past, Trattman admittedly staged a robbery of his own card game. He lived to laugh about it. The thinking now goes that if his card game is hit again, Trattman will be blamed for it and take the fall, likely with a bullet in his head.

This logic proves mistaken, as the mysterious syndicate who oversees these card games sends Jackie (Brad Pitt) in to investigate the latest robbery. Jackie draws the conclusion that it doesn't matter if Trattman did it or not. Everybody who might be involved should be rubbed out.

Sounds like a nice set up, doesn't it? Fairly straightforward, with lots of room for double crosses, shoot outs, and all of that good stuff that makes a gangster movie entertaining. Except this movie forgets about entertainment value, and instead spends too long teaching us why we should care about these characters, and letting them talk. And talk. And talk.

The yakkety-yak scenes in this movie goes on forever, and they aren't nearly interesting enough to make it worthwhile. I found myself asking, "Who gives a damn?" more than a couple of times. James Gandolfini makes an appearance in this flick as a hitman with a conscience and he refuses to shut up about the problems he's having with his wife. He goes on in great, obscenity-laced detail about how horrible his life is. Even Brad Pitt looks like he's had enough. One scene begets another of Gandolfini bitching about his wife, his possible jail term, his drinking, his lousy hookers. After a while, you wish he'd put a hit on himself and end it already.

The political angle of the film could have been interesting, if it had anything to do with anything or if the characters did anything with it. In the background of a lot of scenes, we see news footage of George W. Bush or Barack Obama on TV, giving speeches about the economy of 2008. At first, I thought the director was simply saying, "Here's your clue that this takes place during the 2008 election." But after a few scenes, I realized the director wanted us to know that it meant something.

I'm sure the majority of film critics working today pleasured themselves greatly during these scenes of Yes We Can nostalgia, but really: how many of these thugs are going to listen to this stuff on their car radio or behind the bar of their local watering hole? They don't comment on it until the last scene of the movie, and in fact appear to be oblivious to it in every other scene. So why is it on their radios and television sets everywhere they end up? Rings false.

All of the actors in this movie do a fine job. Indeed, even Gandolfini's self-indulgent scenes are fine when you take them on their own, as you would for a scene study in some college course. But when you line them up one after the other for 90 minutes, it's a yawn (quite literally: the guy in front of me fell asleep halfway through the movie and didn't wake up until the credits).

Be careful if you're going into this looking for a Scorsese or Tarantino gangster picture. I would also caution you against seeing it if you think it's film noir. I've seen that written in a couple of places, that this movie is somehow a good example of film noir. It isn't.

Photos: Yahoo Movies.

Jack Reacher - Review

Starring: Tom Cruise / Rosamund Pike

Writer/Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Runtime: 130 minutes

• Good action sequences
• Tom Cruise still on his game
• Werner Herzog as psychopath
• Chevelle SS

When I heard they were going to cancel the premiere of Jack Reacher because of the shootings in Connecticut, I didn't know if it was the right call or not because I hadn't yet seen the film. Now that I've seen it, I know the producers made the right decision.

Jack Reacher is a good hybrid of an action flick and a detective movie, but the opening sequence will make anyone's palms sweat, as a sniper picks people off one by one in a crowded Pittsburgh park. Watching this opening sequence take place, as body after body hit the ground, it was impossible not to think of what the producers were mulling when they cancelled their premiere: Our opening sequence is exactly what people don't need to see right now.

It doesn't take long, however, to settle into the movie and enjoy it for the ride that it is. It's a fairly straightforward story: did the police catch the right man for the shooting? Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) doesn't think so.

An ex-Army cop, Reacher is a now a tough guy drifting around the US. He shuns the trappings of divers licenses, credit cards, and email addresses. Reacher sees news of the shooting on TV and heads to Pittsburgh to nose around. Reacher knows the suspected shooter from his old days in Iraq, and while he believes the suspect is a murdering scumbag, he doesn't think he's the murdering scumbag in this case. Reacher teams up with the suspect's lawyer and slides into the action movie groove: put clues together, beat people up, put clues together, get shot at, put clues together, drive cars really fast, and so on. What's not to like?

The movie is based on the book One Shot by Lee Child. It's a very popular literary series, which means that Jack Reacher himself could have jumped out of one of the books and played himself on the screen and fans would still have grumbled about him being wrong for the part.

I was on the subway last week and heard a man go on at length at how Tom Cruise could never play Jack Reacher (too short, too pretty, he's Tom Cruise, damnit), while the woman he was with nodded in earnest agreement. Neither of them had seen the movie yet, but they were sure that Cruise could never play that character. News flash: he just did.

It bears repeating that movie makers generally aren't interested in being faithful to a book. They may pay lip service to the idea, but what they really want to do is make a movie that makes money. Surprise, surprise.

The Bourne Identity is probably the best example of this, as screenwriter Tony Gilroy was told to not even read the book before writing the script. He was given the title, an outline, and that's it. Robert Ludlum fans may have been disappointed by this, but the movie cashed in for over $120 million. Book? What book?

Tom Cruise and Rosamund Pike

My guess is that producers are a little more careful with subjects like Harry Potter and Twilight, if only because the literary youth cult might storm the gates of the movie lot and hang them for changing a character's hair colour. But for action fare, budget considerations and audience projections mean a lot more than satisfying a bookworm's belief that Jack Reacher should be over six feet tall. All things being equal, if Tom Cruise plays Jack Reacher, then Jack Reacher makes money. If some no-name guy who "looks" like Jack Reacher plays him, then the movie might flop. End of casting meeting.

Besides, all of this ignores two things: Tom Cruise is a good actor, and a very bankable action star. He's 50, but could pass on screen for 35, and his skills haven't slipped. Jack Reacher's action sequences are well done and about as believable as action movies allow them to get. It's been known for a long time that Cruise does all of his own stunts, but I read that in this movie he also did all of his own stunt driving. If that's true, then this guy's a damn good driver. He makes a Chevelle SS walk and talk in this movie and let's face it: any movie that has a Chevelle in a car chase is worth half a look.

The supporting cast is good, too. Rosamund Pike is good as the defense attorney, and the chemistry she has with Cruise is on the money. I was glad to see the script didn't go all the way down Love Interest road, though. Robert Duvall turns up for some needed comic relief, and Werner Herzog drops his director's hat in order to do a turn as a European psychopath. Richard Jenkins is in a few scenes as Pike's father, but his talents are entirely wasted in a part too small for him, both literally and figuratively.

Fans of the Jack Reacher book series may not be entirely happy with the film, but they certainly could have received much worse. See it.

Short Cuts

Some more reviews of movies I was either too busy or too lazy to review before. Enjoy.

G.I. Joe: Not your daddy's G.I. Joe movie. America is mentioned in passing once or twice, but this revamp of the Joe team is headed by...NATO. Giggle at will. A lot of effects, not much acting, but a few skin tight suits to keep the boys happy. Since all of the West's real enemies gave up at the end of the Cold War, Hollywood has had to invent bad guys and heroes or just steal them from fifty-year-old comic books. Iraq? Iran? Afghanistan? North Korea? International terror? Come on, you can't make a movie about those boring subjects. We need something ripped from the headlines. Hence, this movie.

The Taking of Pelham 123: Highly enjoyable thriller with John Travolta and Denzel Washington. Does the original Pelham (starring Walter Matthau) justice. Travolta and some henchmen hijack a subway car and hold the people inside hostage. Mayhem ensues. Travolta is great. Washington is quite good, too, but Travolta has the better part. Always more fun to play the bad guy.

Crank 2: Completely implausible and totally over-the-top. Also fun as hell. Check your incredulity at the door and just enjoy. Jason Statham plays a guy who has an artificial heart which needs to be shocked every few minutes or he'll die. As if that's not enough, he has to find the guys who have his real heart while dodging cars and bullets along the way.

Antichrist: Great, great movie, but not for everybody. If you hated anything by Bergman, then you'll hate this flick. A man and a woman (they remain nameless throughout) lose their child in an accident. The man takes the woman to the woods to help her recover. He's a therapist. She's a decidedly uncooperative patient. There's blood and violence, but the horror is mostly of the psychological kind. This movie pulls no punches. Beware.

Two Fists, One Heart: Paint-by-numbers Australian flick about a boxer and his desire to please his father. And his girlfriend. And himself. This has Redemption Theme written all over it. You've seen it all before, but it's an okay movie.

The Hurt Locker - Review

Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Starring: Jeremy Renner/Anthony Mackie
Written by: Mark Boal
Runtime: 2 hours 10 minutes

War movies these days aren't really war movies. They're more psych-drama mixed with one or two battle scenes. They're often heavy handed on a message (war is terrible, war is evil, war kills and makes friends cry), and they're usually pretty boring.

The Hurt Locker has a touch of all this, but it works because the movie isn't about battles. It's about a bomb squad, the guys who defuse Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) that are left at the side of the road by terrorists and insurgents. That allows a lot of room for silence, but not of the good kind. It's a silence that's waiting to blow you to smithereens.

Jeremy Renner is excellent as Staff Sergeant James, team leader of a bomb squad. He's the guy that dons the suit and walks in while everyone is else is running out. His character is interesting and fun, which is a switch from the usual morose heroes in today's war pics. He's fearless, a little crazy, and basically what a hero should be: a guy that makes us think, "That's who I'd be."

There's some very good scenes in this movie and none of them have loud noises. A duel between two snipers is especially well done. The tedium of it. The heat. The boredom. The waiting. And bang.

The movie only goes off the rails three-quarters through when it sidetracks into a subplot involving a young Iraqi boy who has gone missing. It rings false because the movie has taken too long before deciding to "care about the kids," and the conclusion of the subplot is pretty unsatisfying.

This movie has the usual crying jags and temper tantrums. It's old. War is awful and of course I can't say what I would do. Maybe I'd lose my marbles. But from a film/writing point of view, war movies are tedious and paint-by-numbers: insert dead friend here, estranged wife there, temper tantrum this way, crying crack up that way, and wrap it up with a character saying, "What's it all for, anyway?" There hasn't been a new way of telling a war story in a long time. This movie comes close, but can't help itself and eventually caves.

Still, it's well done and it's worth seeing.

Photo: Rotten Tomatoes

Short Cuts

Some more quick reviews of movies I either didn't have time to write about before, or just couldn't be bothered to review because they were lame.

The Watchmen: A bunch of has-been super heroes comes out of retirement to save the Earth. Good effects, stupid ending.

Horsemen: Dennis Quaid plays a cop. Guess what? His wife's dead. Guess what? He's estranged from his kids. Guess what? There's a serial killer about town. Guess what? Quaid is morose and will catch the killer at any cost. Guess what?

Push: A guy has the power to 'push' people through the air, through walls, through plate glass windows, through anything. It's an X-Men rip-off in the sense that there's more 'mutants' like him around, and there's another group of mutants that want to kill the good mutants and take over the world. Now that I've written that, I see that it is exactly an X-Men rip-off.

The Haunting in Connecticut: Lame horror flick about a haunted house. You've seen it a million times before.

Knowing: Nicholas Cage plays a guy whose son finds a piece of paper that prophesies disasters like plane crashes and train wrecks. Nic Cage has been in some real flops over the past decade, but this one is surprisingly good. I was totally prepared for it to stink, but it didn't.

International: Clive Owen is an Interpol agent investigating a dirty bank that has ties to arms dealing. Pretty good movie, and it feels relevant for the times, too. The shootout scene in the Guggenheim is the best shootout scene in a while.

Killshot: Mickey Rourke and Diane Lane in a movie based on an Elmore Leonard novel. This was shot before Rourke did The Wrestler, and it was scheduled and rescheduled for release a ton of times. Not a great sign, as that means it was hacked to death in post-production. It got a limited release, then got dumped into the video store. It deserved it. It's not terrible, but not good. Just run of the mill shoot-'em-up.

Public Enemies - Review

Director: Michael Mann
Written by: Mann/Bennett/Biderman
Starring: Johnny Depp
Runtime: 2 hours 23 minutes

If you put people in fedoras, they are legends.

Think about your average bank robber from today. Some stick up guy at a gas station or a liquor store. When you see the security camera footage on the nightly news, all stick up guys look like bums. Eventually they get caught and put in prison and you find out - if you find out - that their life story is the ho-hum stuff of juvenile delinquency: raised poor, stole some cars, busted for assault a few times, and finally nabbed knocking over a five and dime. None of them are hailed as heroes. More often than not, they're described as scum bags and losers.

That isn't the way bank robbers were back in the day. Or at least that's not the way Hollywood and our minds project them. Back in the time of fedoras and Thompsons, they had great names: Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly. John Dillinger isn't remembered by a nickname because he didn't need one. How can you have a better nickname than Public Enemy #1?

Why did I just write that? How can you have a better nickname than Public Enemy #1?

It's funny how we look at robbery when it has the sepia tint of memory. Armed robbery in black and white looks so cool, so interesting, so fun, so glorious. Who wouldn't want to be a bank robber in the 1930s? And now that I think about it, it works both ways: back then, FBI agents were "G-Men." Now they're "Feds." How boring.

These were some of my thoughts while watching Public Enemies, a slightly wonky title given that the movie revolves around one Public Enemy. Though Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson make an appearance, the movie centers on Dillinger. He's played by an always good Johnny Depp, who looks perfect for the role.

The movie takes some liberties with history. Doesn't matter much. If you're looking to films to give a history lesson, then you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Truth might be stranger than fiction, but truth can be a bitch when you're making a movie. So tack a "based on" credit to the opening and let fly.

This is a Michael Mann movie from the word go. He still likes to go handheld most of the time, and there's plenty of extreme over-the-shoulder camera angles. Guns blaze and sound like guns, and when people get shot they are punched full of holes. The Thompson submachine gun is a co-star of this movie, and when it goes off there's a muzzle flash five feet long. (Halfway through the movie, watch as one character gets blasted; the way he goes down will remind you of DeNiro's character's demise in Heat, another Mann film).


This movie isn't all cops and robbers. It tries for some kind of humanity, which could have been fatal. Dillinger is not the savvy, fearless man we've come to dream about. Depp plays him as tough and slick in the early going, but as the pressure mounts and his friends are gunned down, he begins to get paranoid and frightened.

That's normal. That's how life works: pressure grinds down the toughest of us. But showing this can kill a movie about a tough guy and turn it into melodrama. This movie doesn't do that because the script doesn't allow a long winded soliloquy about "getting out of the life," and Depp doesn't become a caricature of robber-with-a-conscience.

I don't know how Mann does it, but he always makes a movie that's either pretty good or very good. Public Enemies is just all right, but it's Michael Mann's just all right. Which means you'll enjoy it even if it is uneven and sometimes a yawn. (Miami Vice was terrible. Terrible. But it was shot by Michael Mann, so for some reason I quite liked it. Weird, I know. The man just makes things look like you want to enjoy them).

Public Enemies won't win any prizes, but it won't waste your time, either. See it.

Movie Poster: Yahoo Movies

The Last House On The Left - Review

Director: Dennis Iliadis
Writers: Alleca/Ellsworth
Starring: Sara Paxton
Runtime: 100 minutes

I don't know what it would take for a movie to get an X rating these days. The Last House on the Left proves that violence won't do it.

This is a remake of an old Wes Craven horror flick by the same name. In many ways, this new treatment harkens back to the exploitation horror flicks of the '70s. The lighting is blue, the colors are muted, the characters don't have neatly primped hair, and marijuana makes an appearance as "grade A" stuff for teenagers. One of the evil characters is named Sadie, a name that always reminds me of Sadie Mae Glutz, a member of the Manson "family," so this added to the '60s/'70s vibe.

The movie's about the Collingwood family. Daughter Mari (I looked it up - in this movie it's Mary-with-an-I), is having trouble connecting with her parents because she's a teenager and because her brother has died. So the trio go to a house on the lake to enjoy some family time. Ten minutes after arriving, Mari wants the keys to the car so she can go visit a friend (this is probably the truest part of the movie - teens on family vacations don't wait three seconds before taking off from the family). Mari joins up with her friend, they meet a stranger, smoke pot, and then meet the stranger's homicidal lunatic family.

I just noticed there's a lot of the word "family" in the above paragraphs. Maybe the movie's going for a social statement.

In any event, Mari and her friend Paige are brutally assaulted and one of them is brutally raped. I mean brutally. And here's where I figure you can't do anything to get an X rating anymore. The viciousness of the assaults and rapes is cold and dreadful. This is probably the grimmest movie I've seen in a while, and it got me thinking about a line from a movie critic some time back: "What's the point of all this shit, anyway?" I guess the gore movie fans would say, "Well, it shows that raping young girls is brutal and mean." Okay. Fine. But was there ever any argument about that?

The final scene between the father and the lead killer is the definition of gratuitous. The movie is already over, nothing more to see here, folks, and then out comes the microwave. For what?

If you're a horror junkie, you might like this movie. But then, this movie isn't really a horror flick. It's a violence flick. Mari is raped, and after that it's a just battle between two families to see who can mutilate each other the worst. There's no suspense or horror, but there's plenty of gore. Since that doesn't turn me on, I was just left saying, "Gross. But who cares?"

Terminator Salvation - Review

Director: McG
Writers: Michael Ferris/John Brancato
Starring: Christian Bale/Sam Worthington
Runtime: 114 minutes

For weeks I heard that this movie wasn't worth seeing. I had accidentally-on-purpose stumbled across some movie reviews and the majority of them were bad. The complaint seemed to be that the movie had no story, sacrificing plot for effects and gimmicks.

I mulled over waiting for it to come out on DVD and finally decided to see the thing. It was, after all, a Terminator movie. I wasn't in the mood for a story. I was in the mood to see things get blown sky high. So I went and saw the movie and I came out thinking, "What was so wrong with that?"

Not much. If you haven't seen it, it's better than you think. The no-story complaint is one of my favorite hobby horses, but I wasn't expecting a decent story from Terminator Salvation. For one, it's a story about time travel and killer robots. For another, it's sequel number 4 in a franchise that will probably have sequel number 5. Story? From that?

Well, okay, here goes: the year is 2018. John Connor is finally all grown up. In the first three Terminator movies we had to watch him grow from an embryo in Linda Hamilton's womb (Terminator - she finds out she's pregnant), to a teenage smart ass (Terminator 2 - he befriends the Terminator and has a good cry when Arnold bites the dust), to a twenty-something loser trying to save the world but can't (Terminator 3 - where he hooks up with his high school crush and watches the world get nuked).

That's a pretty hectic childhood. Anyway, Connor is now a weathered adult and he's played by Christian Bale. The world is a vast wasteland and the machines have taken over. The machines hold dominion over everything and are hunting down the last remnants of mankind. This shouldn't be hard to do because the humans still have fighter jets and airline hangars, but what the hell. Maybe they're taking their time.

Connor is a general of sorts in the Resistance. He knows that he has to save his father's life, otherwise his father will never go back in time and get Linda Hamilton knocked up so that Connor will be born, grow up to watch the world get nuked, and be around to save his father's life so that his father can go back in time...so forth.

Story?

Thrown into the mix is Marcus Wright. He's a newbie resistance guy and he steals the show. In fact, Bale shouldn't really be listed as the "star" of the movie, since Wright (played by a very good Sam Worthington) has 75% of the scenes. But Bale's got a bigger name and that's life.

I found Worthington's character interesting. Some time in the writing stage of this movie, someone decided to throw Connor's character under the bus. That's interesting because the entire franchise has been about Connor. Yet in the one installment where we should see Connor in action, he takes a back seat to a newcomer. This seems suspicious, as if there were arguments over who would play Connor, and whether or not Bale even wanted to play Connor. It smells of a rewrite. I'll never know the truth of that, but it turns out that the producers made the right call either way: Worthington is good and his character makes the movie fresh and watchable.

I can't go into Worthingon's character or I'll blow the whole movie, but I will say that he is Terminator Salvation's salvation. I found myself wishing that Connor had been deleted from the script entirely in order to spend more time watching Marcus Wright.

The effects in this movie are good, and the cast does a reasonable job. It was nice to see Michael Ironside again, though his character is meaningless. Like the other Terminator movies, the film is ultimately preposterous: time travel, people surviving a punch in the chest from a machine (picture being hit by a crowbar compliments of Barry Bonds; think you'd get up?), open heart surgeries being practiced by MASH units in the middle of the desert. But still...it's fun.

That's what I wanted from this action movie and it's what I got. If you're in the mood for that, then this movie is up your alley. If you want high brow sc-fi, then good luck. You won't find much of that these days.

Photo: Rotten Tomatoes

Drag Me To Hell - Review

Director: Sam Raimi
Writers: Sam Raimi/Ivan Raimi
Starring: Alison Lohman/Justin Long
Runtime: 1 hr 39 minutes

This is the horror movie I've been waiting for. Funny. Silly. Moderately gross. Fun. Fun. Fun.

In this flick, Sam Raimi shucks his Spider-Man cloak and goes old school, back to his early days of directing spooky horror flicks that contain enough thrills and gags to put the girlfriend in your lap and laughter in your mouth.

It's been a long time since I clapped during a movie. I probably clapped a half-dozen times during this one: "I can't believe he just did that." Hilarious.

The movie's about Christine Brown, a loan officer at a small bank. A gypsy woman comes in and wants an extension on her loan before she loses her house. Christine, bucking for a promotion, decides to prove she's a hardball banker. She turns the gypsy woman down. So the gypsy woman curses her to three days of torment before a demon will come and drag her into a pit of eternal fire and damnation.

Wow. Maybe Raimi was looking to give homeowners some catharsis in tough economic times. "Take my house? Burn in hell. Literally." Take that, AIG.

The movie's story is as thin as paper, but it doesn't matter. It's all been done before. Why anyone would anger a gypsy woman is beyond me, because we all know that anyone with a glass eye and missing teeth is in league with the devil. The devil, of course, must be short of cash because gypsy women can't afford anything better than a rundown fixer upper from hell. But just try to take that fixer upper away...

There's a number of great scenes in this movie. The fight scene (yes, fight scene) between Christine and the gypsy woman is an insta-classic. It reminded me of how fun Sam Raimi used to make his horror flicks. Another scene where a tormented Christine visits her fiance's parents is a beauty.

When Raimi can't scare you, he goes for the gross out. Watch out for a few scenes involving maggots, worms, a decidedly unappetizing cake, and a kitten. A kitten? "I can't believe he just did that." The movie even has a seance and a talking goat. A talking goat? Come on, you know it's gotta be a good scene (Raimi fans will like the sound effects in the scene; the voice sounds a lot like the voices from Evil Dead).

For a modern day horror flick, the body count in this movie is ridiculously low. Raimi proves you don't need ten teenagers and a machete to scare people. The cast is small and all of them are good actors. The lighting is sparse. The visual effects are good. This is a stripped down flick that moves along so quickly you could be forgiven for thinking it's one of the previews.

This is a good, fun horror movie. See it.

Inglourious Basterds

Vis-a-vis Tarantino's new war-shoot-'em-up, Reuters has this to say:

Most of the dialogue is in German and French and translated with subtitles, possibly limiting the film's box office potential in the United States.

Sigh.

I hear that all the time from my film buddies in LA: subtitles are bad. Don't have a female lead. Black and white sucks.

All of these rules are a sham. All that matters is a good story, and that Holy Grail of film success: for some reason, people that want to see the movie.

Let's face it. Subtitles on a Tarantino movie will only make it seem more cool. Tarantino's fans will flock to see it. They'll stay up late, break out the French-German-English dictionary, and pore over every word to see if Big T is sending them a hidden message.

To Mel Gibson's credit, two of his last movies were done entirely in foreign languages and he won huge. The languages in his movies were so foreign that some of them haven't been spoken in hundreds of years. Here's his returns for the effort:

The Passion of the Christ: Budget: $30 million. Worldwide gross: $611,899,420
Apocalypto: Budget: $40 million. Worldwide gross: $117,785,051

So far, so good.

Star Trek - Review

Director: JJ Abrams
Writers: Alex Kurtzman/Roberto Orci
Starring: Chris Pine/Zachary Quinto
Runtime: 2 hours 7 minutes

With the exception of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, the new Star Trek movie is the most fun movie in the franchise. It has taken a tired, old clunker of a ship and turned it back into something that can run at warp speed.

The movie is a prequel - of sorts. We see the moment that James T. Kirk is born, and we see a young Spock decide to forgo a life of science on Vulcan to join Star Fleet. The bad guys are the Romulans, there's plenty of "Fire phasers!" and "Incoming photon torpedo!" Kirk sleeps with a green skinned girl, he beats the hell out several people and aliens (but no, doesn't get his shirt ripped open), and a young Bones is along for the ride with lines like, "Damnit, man, I'm a doctor not a physicist!"

The movie's plot is preposterous, but it doesn't matter. Star Trek was always preposterous. Klingons, Vulcans, Romulans, you name it, they all still speak fluent English and in fact speak it better than Chekhov.

The one moment in this film that made me worry was the appearance of a "time-travel-made-easy" plot device involving black holes. I needn't have worried. Though the science is completely out of whack, it's used for a good purpose: adventure and thrills. This far surpasses the other Star Trek movie, where time travel was used to...save whales.

This film takes Star Trek back to its roots. Kirk and Spock don't sit around wondering about the meaning of life. There are no aliens that need to be "understood." There isn't a wimpy Jean Luc Picard in sight. Shockingly, there are only two references of, "Gee, wouldn't it be nice if there was peace all over the universe?" One of these references comes from Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood), who says that Star Fleet is a humanitarian fleet. That has always made me wonder: if humanity has become a load of peaceniks before taking to space, how did they develop phasers, photon torpedoes, and ships loaded for galactic bear?

The other reference to peace in our time comes near the end of the film. Kirk says a line so completely at odds with his character and the scene that it's ridiculous. It provides a big "Gimme a break" moment.

In any case, what you have here is a good, old fashioned science fiction opera. It's stripped down to the essentials of fun and gun. The filmmakers were smart in throwing a few bones to the Trekkie crowd (Scotty with the one-liners, a cameo by Leonard Nimoy) while keeping it fresh enough for new viewers. In essence, they made a movie that can please both camps.

See it.

Photos: Yahoo Movies

The Uninvited - Review

Director: The Guard Brothers
Writer: A whole lot of people
Starring: Elizabeth Banks/David Strathairn
Runtime: 87 minutes

This is one those reviews that starts with, "Do I have to?"

Write it, that is.

I guess I do, because I haven't written a movie review in a while and I'm feeling guilty. But...do I have to?

All right, here goes:

1) The movie starts with a dream sequence.

2) Throughout the movie, there's a lot of dream sequences.

3) The heroine, Anna (Emily Browning), is a nutso kid who can't get over the death of her mother. She thinks the nanny did it.

4) The nanny, Rachel (Elizabeth Banks), has been boffing Anna's dad since Anna's mom died in an accident.

5) Spooky ghosts haunt Anna's dreams. Since this movie is yet another remake of an Asian horror flick, the ghosts walk bent over backwards and make weird noises at the backs of their throats. Old.

6) Anna's sister walks around in a bikini all the time, probably to draw the teenage boy crowd.

7) David Strathairn plays Anna's dad. He's a great actor. I have no idea why he's in this movie, but hey, money's money.

8) See this movie if you're really bored, or have a 14-year-old daughter. It's tame enough for the teen crowd, but it's only a must-see if you're a total horror junkie.

9) Seeing this movie reminded me that good, original horror flicks are very hard to come by. Very. The best part about it was, being a teen horror flick, I knew it wouldn't be longer than 90 minutes.

There. Did it. Now on with my day.

Photo: Yahoo Movies

Quantum of Grimace

Quantum of Solace is being released on DVD and Blu-ray today. Big deal. I guess it's worth a look if you can rent it, but I wouldn't lay out 20 bucks on the thing.

Here's what I had to say about the movie back in November:

Director: Marc Forster
Writers: Purvis/Wade/Haggis
Starring: Daniel Craig, Judi Dench
Runtime: 1 hr, 45 minutes

I watched some episodes of American Idol last year. My favorite critique of Simon Cowell's: "You did a good job with that song, but it was forgettable." That is excellent, excellent criticism. Don't fight to be good; fight to be remembered.

This is Quantum of Solace's problem. It is not great, not bad, not anything. It's forgettable. It's a generic action picture that happens to have a character named James Bond. He uses the line, "Who do you work for?" more than once, without a hint of embarrassment. The line has been used so often in spy stories that Austin Powers made a joke out of it. That was a decade ago. If you think that's bad, Quantum of Solace even has this fresh and original dialogue: "You're suspended until further notice." Quantum of Solace's hero could have been named John Smith and it wouldn't have made a difference.

The Quantum story picks up where Casino Royale left off. Bond's girlfriend has just died and he is out for blood. Following the so-so opening theme song, Bond chases people, fights, chases people, fights, and finally stumbles upon the arch villain of the movie. The man's name is Dominic Greene. As his name suggests, he is a pitchman for green environmental projects. His latest scheme is a bid to stop the deforestation of Bolivia.

It's only later that we find out that Greene is truly deranged. Not only does he kill people, but he's lying about saving the planet. He couldn't care less about the water table of Bolivia. Even worse, he's in bed with the most vicious, evil entity on earth: the United States of America and the CIA. The lead CIA man in the film is a chuckling boob, and is more than happy to have a go at killing an MI6 agent. During discussions about how twisted the CIA and US government are we're treated to a few helpings of, "Americans will do anything for oil."

Good grief. Is this the best they could do, a bad guy from the op-ed page of the New York Times? Paul Haggis helped with the script so I'm not surprised it went down this road, but I thought they'd have something else to level it off. Nope.

The movie is literally a Bourne rip-off, with very little "Bond" in it. The one or two cheesy one-liners sound flat and aren't funny this time around. Connery and Brosnan's delivery was far better. Hell, so was Daniel Craig's in the last movie. But that was the last movie.

The fight and chase sequences are cut way, way, way too fast for a Bond film, and could easily have been taken from Bourne outtakes because you can never focus long enough to see if Daniel Craig or Matt Damon is driving the car. The one five-second sex scene in Quantum isn't sexy, and the violence is way over the top, making Bond as indestructible as a Van Damme.

Maybe they were going for a younger crowd. Maybe they had such good luck with the "dark side" of Bond in Casino Royale that they forgot who Bond is. We want to like him and be like him, not just watch him wreck stuff and see him get punched in the face over and over again.

Quantum of Solace has turned James Bond into regular action fare, removing all of his charm and killing his humour. When he drinks a martini, he drinks to get drunk and forget his sorrowful past. When he kisses a woman good-bye, it's a quick peck on the lips. This is Bond? James Bond? Even the Bond theme takes a backseat, as it is only used at full volume during the closing credits. In the film, the theme is replaced by a lame action movie beat. (This is probably a cheap shot, but I even have a problem with the movie's posters: since when does Bond walk side by side with a girl, looking dirty and morose? Where's the tux? The smirk? The confidence? Or in the other poster, since when does Bond carry a howitzer instead of his slick pistol? Is he compensating for something since his girlfriend died?)

Though this movie is an early hit, I think it's riding on the reputation gained from the last outing. Another one or two like Quantum of Solace and they could sink the franchise.

Cowell's pragmatic criticism fits this film perfectly: forgettable.

I've Loved You So Long - Review

Director: Philippe Claudel
Writer: Philippe Claudel
Starring: Kristin Scott Thomas
Runtime: 117 minutes
French with subtitles

This movie is the very definition of "character study," and it probably would never have been filmed in Hollywood. Made in France, I've Loved You So Long breaks a lot of the rules reserved for "gripping emotional drama." There are no ups and downs, no twists, no subplots, no shifts in tone. The movie is an emotional straight line from beginning to end, neither extremely dark or blissful.

A movie like that is very hard to keep interesting, especially when it runs close to two hours. I've Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t'aime in French) somehow overcomes this problem. It's a satisfying film, with a good cast and a brave script.

Kristin Scott Thomas plays Juliette Fontaine, a woman just released from prison for the crime of...something. We don't know what. Since she's been away for a long time, we know that it must have been a heinous act. As one character says in the film, "15 years? What did you do, kill somebody?" The days of Les Mis and being locked up for an eternity for stealing bread are long gone. If you get put away for fifteen years these days, you really did something.

Juliette's sister Lea (Elsa Zylberstein) picks Juliette up from prison and takes her home to live with Lea's family. Lea's husband Luc (Serge Hazanavicius) doesn't want her there, and especially doesn't want her around his kids. Naturally enough, he wants to know when she's going to get a place of her own. Lea says it will happen when it happens, but that she wants to get to know her sister. Not get to know her again, but get to know her in the first place: she never visited Juliette in prison, and in fact was forbidden to by their parents.

Juliette knows no one from her past. Every face she's seen for the past 15 years has belonged to a prisoner or a guard. Her family disowned her. No one visited and no one wrote. She is starting her life over, this time as an ex-con. And, thanks to a good script and director, this movie bears no resemblance to Rachel Getting Married or any other sanctimonious "poor-me-just-out-of-prison" nonsense.

The film has no real plot. The question of what crime Juliette committed is the Hitchcockian (Hitchcockesque?) McGuffin in the film. It motivates some of the characters and adds to audience interest, but it isn't critical to the story. Plot is an afterthought. Instead, the film shows this woman adapting to real life and learning how to live again, but without the usual preachy scenes of, "You don't know what it's like on the inside," or, "Nobody loves me anymore." One great line in the movie is when Lea calls prison "inside," and Juliette says, "Would you stop calling it 'inside?' It's called prison."

As I said, this movie doesn't get made in Hollywood. Take one scene where Juliette becomes trusted enough to look after Luc and Lea's kids for the night. In Hollywood, Juliette would abuse this trust by allowing the kids to wander into the street, or dropping a curling iron on their arm, or carelessly allowing one of them to fall down a flight of stairs. At that moment, Luc or Lea would walk in the front door and say, "Ah ha! We knew we shouldn't have trusted you. How could you let this happen to our daughter?" Then the screaming would begin, or the obligatory scene where Juliette realizes they're right, she is worthless, and goes outside to hug herself and cry.

That's Hollywood. In this movie, Juliette puts the kids to sleep. She sits down on the couch and nods off. Lea comes home. Juliette wakes up and they say hello. And that's that.

So what's the movie about? Search me. It's just the story of a woman who gets out of prison and starts to live her life again. It walks a fine line between interest and boredom and I think it pulls it off. The ending won't stun you because you'll see it coming a pretty long way off. In fact, you might consider it a cop out, and I wouldn't blame you. But I don't think it matters much. Juliette is the point of the whole thing, and Kristin Scott Thomas makes watching her worthwhile.

The cast helps because they're excellent, and the script helps as it's refreshing not to be treated to Obligatory Scenes. Juliette isn't hooked on dope, she doesn't blame anyone else but herself for her problems, she doesn't spend half the movie crying, and there isn't one flashback scene in the whole film.

Incredible. And satisfying.

Photos: Rotten Tomatoes

Drag Me To Hell - Preview

It's good to see Sam Raimi leave the web slinging behind for a while and go old school with his Evil Dead roots.

Not much new here, but it might still be cool. Call it a cross between Thinner (gypsy curse) and The Amityville Horror (flies and other creepy stuff in the house).

Random aside: winter can't end soon enough. It's been a long cold one, and there hasn't been a decent movie out in ages.

Public Enemies - Preview

Michael Mann? Johnny Depp? A movie about John Dillinger? Gold.

Oscar Right and Wrong

"My pick" is who I thought the Academy would give it to, not necessarily who I thought deserved it. Tonight, I landed about 50-50. I caught some of the speeches tonight, too. They always make me feel weirdly uncomfortable, like eavesdropping on a bunch of people shamelessly kissing each other's butts. Sometimes you feel like interrupting.

Best Actor

My Pick: Sean Penn. Right. He got the award, made a few political statements, said he was glad Obama got elected, mentioned Mickey Rourke was his buddy. Everyone happy.

Best Actress

My Pick: Kate Winslet. Right. From her speech: "I'd be lying if I haven't made a version of this speech before." No kidding, Kate.

Best Supporting Actor

My Pick: Heath Ledger. Right. His mother, father, and sister accepted the award. A class act all the way, with a poignant speech that concentrated on the late Ledger's love of acting.

Best Supporting Actress

My Pick: Viola Davis. Wrong. Their Pick: Penelope Cruz. I thought she was good in Vicky Christina Barcelona, but it wasn't anything I hadn't seen before. Incidentally, I've found a new appreciation for Woody Allen's films in the past few years. I never liked his movies much before that. The secret: they're better when he's directing them, but not in them.

Best Picture

My Pick: Milk or Frost/Nixon. All wrong. Their pick: Slumdog Millionaire, which I thought deserved it. I was surprised it didn't go Milk's way, as screenplay and best actor both did.

Best Director

Another flip. I thought Van Sant would take it for Milk. Wrong. Instead, the deserving Danny Boyle got it for Slumdog Millionaire.

Best Original Screenplay

My Pick: Milk. Right. I figured the Academy would throw it to Milk. Like Penn, screenwriter Dustin Black used it as an opportunity to treat the podium as a political soap box.

Best Adapted Screenplay

My Pick: Slumdog Millionaire. Right.

Cinematography

My Pick: The Dark Knight. Wrong. It went to Slumdog Millionaire.

Best Documentary

I forgot to write this in my previous post (I guess like everyone else, I'm guilty of giving documentaries the shaft), but I had a good feeling this movie would take it. My Pick: Man on Wire. Right. One day documentaries might go head to head with features (who am I kidding? No they won't). If that had happened tonight, Man on Wire would have been my pick out of all the flicks mentioned. A great movie, fact or fiction.

A Barack Obama Film

After looking at Friday the 13's box office haul of $43 million (THR has it as $45.2 million) I checked out how the rest of the weekend movies fared. Pretty well:

THR: Collectively, the Presidents Day weekend registered a whopping $224 million in a record performance that surpassed last year's holiday haul by 34% and 2007's then-record tally by 19%, according to Nielsen EDI.

Yes, that economy. Quite a catastrophe. It's so bad that the American people dropped a quarter of a billion dollars on movies in 4 days. Note to Obama: need a stimulus plan? Do something useful and produce a Nightmare on Elm Street remake.

Think I'm crazy? Think about it: the president has a ton of Hollywood friends. Remember that dumb pledge video where all of the stars said they'd do his bidding? Time for those sanctimonious goofballs to put up. They'll work cheap. Imagine the screenwriters and directors who will be begging for a pitch meeting in the Oval Office. He'll have the pick of the best talent around. He can put "Produced by Barack Obama" on the movie posters. People will flip out. The lines will be huge. Every Obama zealot will go to see the thing, and the press will give it a load of free advertising. He is virtually guaranteed a nice profit, if not an outright blockbuster, and an Oscar is in the bag. He'll even be able to smoke in public, using one of those long cigarette holders like the old-time directors used to sport.

"A Barack Obama Film." That has a nice ring to it. It sounds like a cash register. The Chrysler bailout will be chump change, and anytime there's a scandal his press secretary can say, "The president's in his trailer," until it blows over.

If he puts his mind to it, he can do it. Yes, he can.