By Ray Pride

Filmmakers, publicists and early reviewers have all made the point that Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet” (Un prophete), France’s nominee for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, is an anti-”Scarface,” an anti-”Godfather.” What it is, mostly, is a self-made creature, much like its compelling main character.

Audiard is a painstaking filmmaker, with only five features as director to his credit at the age of 57. While his father, Michel, was a successful screenwriter, Audiard began his career as an editor. That experience is apparent in his movies, including 1996’s “A Self-Made Hero,” 2001’s “Read My Lips” and 2004’s “The Beat That My Heart Skipped.” “Self-Made” has an unreliable narrator as its central character; “Read My Lips” is an uncommonly uneasy, witty Hitchcock-Chabrol-style thriller that turns on what the characters hear; and “Beat,” a remake of James Toback’s fierce testosterone opera, “Fingers,” brings grace to the crude shape of a gangster film. Audiard’s notions in how to depict his characters, their surroundings and their fated choices all sing with a film editor’s ruthless insistence on speed and specificity. Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Smith directs and edits a screenplay by Robb Cullen and Mark Cullen, who show their knack for comedy in this line from their press notes: “Robb is a high-functioning moron with no formal education or training.” If it’s not funny, that’s his excuse in a news cycle when “retards” so interest pundits, gag writers and identity activists. “Cop Out” scores a sort of parity by proving incompetent in all departments except maybe craft services and set security. This cop buddy comedy is set in Brooklyn and Queens where lots of Mexicans with tattoos get shot. On their ninth anniversary on the force, detectives Jimmy (Bruce Willis) and Paul (Tracy Morgan) get thirty-day suspensions without pay. That dashes Jimmy’s plans to cover the $48,020 cost of his daughter’s wedding. But wait, maybe parting with his prized 1952 Andy Pafko baseball card will save face for Jimmy since the last one up for auction brought $83,000. If only two ninja-garbed thieves with Tasers didn’t stick up the sports collectible shop just after Jimmy walked in. Which leads to a stolen Benz whose trunk hides a woman from Mexico wearing a crucifix necklace that hides a flash drive with drug cabal data. Like most cop buddies on the screen, Jimmy and Paul go through the usual humiliation issues with their off-duty ex’s and spouses. Their on-duty routine is a very limited overplayed joke about their “homage” to lines of dialogue from other cop films.  With Seann William Scott, Rashida Jones Adam Brody, Kevin Pollak, Guillermo Diaz, Ana de la Reguera, Michelle Trachtenberg. 110m. (Bill Stamets)

Luc Besson presents a story he made up about two CIA agents making mayhem all around Paris. There’s some good dumb fun bloodshed, but then there are all the bad parts that are not funny bad, just bad. In this goofy romp, James Reese (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, “Mission: Impossible III,” Velvet Goldmine”) is the flunky to a U.S. Ambassador (Richard Durden) who tasks him with discovering which young aide a French colleague is “banging, the brunette or the blonde.” “Both,” reports Reese. “God, I love the French,” sighs his avuncular boss. Reese has another boss. Like Charles Townsend in “Charlie’s Angels,” this unseen CIA overseer assigns him covert errands by cell phone. Go to the airport and pick up senior CIA operative Charlie Wax (John Travolta). They stop off for egg fu yung at a Chinese restaurant where Wax shoots the waiter, cook and busboys. Then he perforates the ceiling where about a ton of cocaine is cached, and tells Reese to collect five or so kilos of the white powdery rain in a giant Chinese vase. Read the rest of this entry »

Bereaved and aggrieved, Mel Gibson plays a hallucinating loner meting out Old Testament justice. Armed with a gun, a badge and a bottle of thallium-laced milk, Boston detective Thomas Craven (Gibson) tracks the killer of his 24-year-old daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic, “Drag Me to Hell”)–and the military contractor and the war-veteran senator who pay her killer and others to cover their tracks. “Welcome to hell,” are Craven’s last words to an evildoer. This mediocre action thriller opens at night with three bodies surfacing on a Massachusetts river. Cut to a 1990 home video of little Emma playing on a beach with a toy shovel. “Let me know if you strike oil, OK?” says her dad. Now Emma (Bojana Novakovic) is an entry-level employee at Northmoor in Northampton, where she digs up shoddy deals to build “jihadist dirty bombs.” Martin Campbell (“Casino Royale”) directs a screenplay by William Monahan (“The Departed”) and Andrew Bovell (“Lantana”) that’s adapted from a 1985 BBC miniseries originally written by Troy Kennedy Martin. Darius Jedburgh (Ray Winstone) is a fixer-for-hire with intriguing tastes and theories. His supporting character outstrips Gibson’s standard-issue role. Most tiresome is the double-barrelled endorsement of extrajudicial execution, although a few in a word-of-mouth audience cheered each and every one of these deaths. “Edge of Darkness” attacks Boston cop culture where cases tagged “officer involved” are handled with greater care. Another local dis is implied by depicting Emma, who earned a M.S. from MIT, as knowing no way to leak her Northmoor dirt to the media. With Danny Huston, Shawn Roberts, David Aaron Baker, Jay O. Sanders, Denis O’Hare, Damian Young. 117m. (Bill Stamets)

RECOMMENDED

“Daybreakers,” written and directed by twin brothers Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig (makers of 2003’s outback zombie tale “Undead”), is set in 2019, when most of the world has “turned” after a plague, becoming vampires (or “vamps,” as the script has it) dependent on an ever-decreasing population of humans for blood to put in their morning coffee. Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) is a hematologist vamp researching a blood substitute for his boss Charles Bromley (Sam Neill), head of the Bromley Marks Corporation, “World Leader in Blood Pharmacy.” The yellow contacts Hawke wears are almost unnecessary, set against his impressively high, gaunt 40-year-old cheekbones. He carries a kind of survivor’s guilt, wishing he could be disinfected, to become human, mortal, again. The opposition is represented by a cross-bow wielding human with a secret named Elvis (Willem Dafoe): vampiric even when playing ordinary humanity, Dafoe’s cracker Van Helsing drawls the bulk of the movies’ punchlines (“Bein’ human in a world full of vampires is as safe as barebacking a five-dollar whore.”) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

(Le Plaisir de chanter, 2008) French novelist-filmmaker Ilan Duran Cohen’s exuberant “anti-romantic comedy” is a musical, thriller and spy movie as well. Like many musically inclined French features of the past decade, it’s pleasingly bonkeroo. (But it still can’t top “Wild Grass,” the insolent new film from 87-year-old Alain Resnais, out in spring 2010.)  To describe its sexy, funny turns would spoil much of the fun. A singing class rife with spies? Clandestine lovers who are spies? A widow’s secrets? A lighthearted joy, indeed. With Marina Foïs, Lorànt Deutsch, Jeanne Balibar, Julien Baumgartner, Nathalie Richard, Caroline Ducey, Guillaume Quatravaux, Evelyne Kirschenbaum, Frédéric Karakozian, Dominique Reymond. 99m. (Ray Pride)

By Ray Pride

Novelist Barry Hannah says it well:  “I really want stories that are rippers in the old sense. Tales of high danger, high adventure, and high exploration.”

And has that been what James Cameron’s been conjuring in his fevered imagination for as long as twenty years, a true ripper? Of all the things that can and will be said about “Avatar,” is that it’s the one 2009 feature drawing from the War in Iraq that could make a mint. While his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow’s “Hurt Locker” is the best American movie about war in movies this year, and is racking up year-end critics’ nods, it didn’t blow up at the box office.

Even if James Cameron had spent $200 million-plus on a trainwreck the equal of the Icelandic economy, that would have been gratifying, even at the cost of encouraging the wisenheimers who, without seeing the film, invoked the Smurfs, “Ferngully: the Last Rainforest” and something called “Delgo.” All the pessimistic early jabber made it seem like this would be the in-flight movie that you would see on the way to become part of the Matrix. Of course, virtually no one had seen the movie until its Thursday night premiere in London and its staggered press screenings in the U.K. and North America. Then the lights went down, time passed entertainingly, the lights came up, the Twittering began, and within hours an embargo against reviews before opening day was lifted. Read the rest of this entry »

Baby endangerment may be next to tossing puppies off high-rise balconies as ill-advised plot elements in movies—John Woo’s “Hard-Boiled,” riffing on Sam Fuller’s “Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street” may have been the apotheosis—but that doesn’t mean filmmakers like the seemingly humorless Jeff Celentano won’t reach for that terrible effect in violent goulash like “Breaking Point.” Knotty plotting, conspiratorial complexes and scowling performances by the likes of Tom Berenger, Busta Rhymes, Kirk “Sticky Fingaz” Jones and Armand Assante make this New York City would-be drug noir near-intolerable for its epic mediocrity. Worse, there’s a strain of misogyny that dances around racist violence, then accomplishes it. The opening scene promises modest Armageddon but fails on its crude promise. 93m. Widescreen. (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED

Having seen both the original, two-part, five-hour Chinese version of John Woo’s Chinese period epic “Red Cliff,” set at the end of the Han Dynasty, and the truncated, U.S. version in the past year, my memories of the two are hopelessly commingled. I can at least testify that both are stirring, with majestic moments, but Woo has definitely made choices about what kinds of action appeal to Chinese and the types of diversions that American audiences would resist. China’s most expensive film and Woo’s first in Asia in seventeen years boasts most of the expressive virtues of his vivid visual style, to the point of self-parody. Yet that’s a good thing: his virtuosity, combining hundreds of extras at times with computer-generated imagery, demonstrate the range of his vital filmmaking imagination. (His love of the dove is not neglected, either.) His sense of action choreography is stellar, especially in the climactic extended battle sequence. There’s more characterization and more flying arrows in the longer version, but the American cut still rises above its intermittent choppy storytelling. With Tony Leung, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Zhang Fengyi, Chang Chen. 148m. (Ray Pride)

In my notes I drew a large chunk of cheese with some stink lines over it. I wish that would work as a review, since it’s everything I need to say about the continuation of” The Twilight Saga.” “New Moon” continues a summer after “Twilight” ends. Bella and Edward are happy like any other young couple in love, except their problems are not precisely like most teenage worries. Bella’s impending 18th birthday leads to paranoia that one day he will not love her as she grows old. After being bitten by James, she learns a vampire’s venom is what turns human to vampire. She decides that the best way to be safe is to be turned. Yet, Edward’s reluctance has her believing that he does not want to love her for an eternity. Even though his motives are spiritual, he believes that turning Bella will take her soul. Months pass: Bella lives as a ghost. Letters, hallucinations, vampire packs, the threat of Edward’s suicide and motorcycle repair follow. There are endless green forests, and the gray Pacific Northwest suits heartache. The vampires’ marble-like pallor offers a subtle difference from humans, more unreal than obviously undead. Even the CGI wolves hold their own with graceful movement and fur that looked soft to the touch. Nor is the acting terrible. What makes “New Moon” excruciatingly cheesy is that absolutely everything is made explicit in dialogue. There’s nothing left to the imagination, no way to place yourself in Bella’s shoes. It’s like when you are out with a friend, and they run into an ex they had a nasty breakup with. They start off friendly enough, then after a few drinks slowly descend into backhanded comments and hissing accusations as you sit pretending to text someone, even as you’re fascinated by the train wreck next to you. But fans of Stephanie Meyer’s books will likely get what they crave, and there are enough half-naked men to prompt a lust coma strong enough to dull the cheese. 122m. (Julie Gavlak)