The plots of the original “Predator” and the new “Predators” are rudimentary: chase, kill. Repeat until reduce prey to an American star, plus one. Adrien Brody (“Splice,” “The Pianist”) takes over Arnold Schwarzenegger’s role; the co-survivor, verging on a love interest, was played in 1987 by a Mexican-born actress and by a Brazilian-born one in 2010. (In between, a Cuban-born actress played the comparable character in 1990′s “Predator 2.”) The novelty of the first film was the extraterrestrial who hunts for sport on earth. Trophies ensue. By pluralizing the title, Alex Litvak and Michael Finch add a minor notion: the U.S. commando characters originally created by Jim Thomas and John Thomas who saw action in Afghanistan, Beirut, Cambodia and Libya are now combatants hailing from an updated roster of global hotspots, including Chechnya and Sierra Leone. This prey with its own predatory tendencies include a Japanese yakuza, a Mexican narco-enforcer, an American psycho killer on death row and an Israeli Defense Force sniper (Alice Braga). Nimrod Antal (“Armored,” “Vacancy,” “Kontroll”) directs this lively action with style, if little else. Read the rest of this entry »

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By Ray Pride

Sad to say, there’s more drama in the film industry than in most movies these days.

One snapshot: “The kind of cinema that we used to make is drying up, I’m afraid,” the Irish filmmaker-novelist Neil Jordan told his biographer recently. “The distribution is vanishing. The funding is vanishing.” An ominous enough quote, but here’s another snapshot: Memorial Day weekend had the worst attendance at North American movie theaters in seventeen years. Among informed observers, at least Roger Ebert’s an optimist, twittering on Monday, “Public rejecting Hollywood’s move to dumb formulas. Good movies, they’ll attend.” Bring on the good movies! Aside from vanishing finance and finicky audiences, what, pray, is going well at the movies?

Restorations and reissues, at least, drawing on the large (but ultimately finite) fount of great movies: “Bicycle Thieves” ended a run at Siskel Thursday and a new 35mm print of Godard’s “Breathless” is coming this summer (even if the 79-year-old auteur’s elliptical high-definition “Film Socialisme” bewildered much of the Cannes-going scribe tribe). For inveterate moviegoers, these reissues and restorations come as a revelation, and for me, at least, it’s not because the movies have changed, but because we have: our memories of the old movies fade as life’s other experiences come along. And there is one new-old film that I’m happy not to have seen in any form for many, many years, as my only memories of it will be of a version close to its original form: Fritz Lang’s 1927 “Metropolis,” now entitled “The Complete Metropolis,” at the Music Box. Read the rest of this entry »

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Unholy genome! Brainy horror, Vincenzo Natali’s “Splice” preys on a veritable blood bank of modern fears. Start with scientists who are bright enough to manufacture recombinant DNA from multiple animal strands yet foolish enough to think a world of laws and politicians will bow to their expertise and vision. Natali’s greatest fortune in his bluntly efficient tale is having Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody as his leads. Their line readings are inspired (“You’re Bob-fucking-Fosse” sounds better than it reads when it comes from a talented actor) whether comic or fearful, and both play at adults who still dress like teenagers. (The wardrobe of crisp, clever designer T-shirts must have had its own line item.) Read the rest of this entry »

Zach LeBeau’s very modest yet philosophically ambitious “The Scientist” stars Hal Hartley stalwart Bill Sage as the titular physicist, who’s grieving over lost loved ones and constructing some sort of generation to channel psychic energy. It’s a swell vehicle for Sage’s brand of conflicted charm, but the film is neither “2001″ or “Solaris,” which the filmmaker has said he admires, nor “Pi” nor “Primer,” intellectually ambitious films made on a half-a-hand-me-down-shoestring. The other performances are erratic. A scene with the wind rustling crisply in trees made me long for summer to come. In a director’s statement, LeBeau talks an admirable game: “We can draw from so many cultures, so much history, so much pain and anguish and beauty and wonderment and put all of that cumulative experience and knowledge together to do something great together, as a people, to take our consciousness en masse to a higher level.” With Brittany Benjamin.  88m. (Ray Pride)

“The Scientist” opens Friday at Facets. LeBeau will appear at screenings Friday,  Saturday and at Sunday’s 3pm, 5pm and 7pm shows.

This buddy pic about loyalty in the workplace is based upon Eric Garcia’s novel “The Repossession Mambo.” (It’s not a pluralized sequel to 1984′s “Repo Man.”) In the near future, when there’s a “global recession” and an overseas war called Operation Hope Springs Eternal, an organ transplant company called The Union– “Helping You Get More You Out of You”– employs back-office repo men to extract hearts, kidneys, livers, lungs and other body parts with its barcodes from clients in arrears. A pancreas can set you back $618,429 with a 19.6 percent APR. I didn’t catch the price of the 5.5 Neural Net. After a ninety-six-day grace period, your transplant turns into a loaner. “It was never a horror film,” claims Garcia, who co-wrote the screenplay with TV producer–writer Garrett Lerner. “The original was always a comedy.” Miguel Sapochnik directs this anti-corporate thriller with scapel action that elicits multiple squirms per centimeter of incision. Read the rest of this entry »

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In post-apocalyptic films, survivors are gleaners who improvise their wardrobes and weapons from pre-apocalyptic debris. In “The Book Of Eli,” screenwriter Gary Whitta likewise proves resourceful in recycling a gamut of bits from prior films for a robust genre exercise directed by Allen Hughes and Albert Hughes, the twins who brought us “From Hell,” “American Pimp,” “Dead Presidents” and “Menace II Society.” Eli (Denzel Washington, “American Gangster,” “The Siege”) is a loner armed with a long blade and keen senses of hearing and smell. Trekking westward for three decades across a despoiled landscape after “the war” and “the flash,” he clutches a weighty leather-bound tome locked with a clasp. “The Book of Eli” is a literal Western for its itinerary, but includes a frontier town run by  Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a sort of an American pimp from hell menacing society where the president is dead. Ensconced in his office above a saloon called The Orpheum, he’s introduced with a copy of R. J. B. Bosworth’s biography “Mussolini” prominently in view. Carnegie, maybe named for the patron of public libraries, dispatches illiterate bikers to find a copy of one special book he covets. The latest foray only yielded “The Da Vinci Code” and a well-preserved issue of Oprah’s O magazine. Knowing the location of freshwater springs gives him dominion over the thirsty townfolk and his thugs. Finding a King James Bible, though, will let him expand his power. “I grew up with it,” he tells Eli, who is passing through town to recharge the battery for his iPod. “I know its power. So do you. That’s why they burned them after the war.” This is Whitta’s most inspired idea: two men fighting over a text that can reboot America, though with opposed agendas. “It’s not a fucking book–it’s a weapon,” thunders Carnegie. Eli finds allies in Carnegie’s blind common-law wife Claudia (Jennifer Beals) and her sighted daughter Solara (Mila Kunis), perhaps named after a rusting Toyota. “The Book of Eli” is a far more fun than the “The Road.” References include the rowboat in “Children of Men,” the bibliophilia of “Fahrenheit 451″ and the attuned dexterity of “Zatoichi.” The biggest debt is owed to “The Postman” (1997) wherein an itinerant bard starts to restore a post-apocalyptic America by reciting Shakespeare. Eli is a former K-Mart clerk with voices in his head and burns all over his back who undertakes a similiar mission. Why it takes this holy wanderer thirty years to reach a city upon a hill is the least of this action film’s revelations. The best that can be said about the outsized score is that Atticus Ross composes in the key of self-parody. With Ray Stevenson, Tom Waits, Michael Gambon and Frances de la Tour. 118m. (Bill Stamets)

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“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 »

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 »

Spanish videogamer Jorge Blanco directs his debut, a passable PG-rated animated sci-fi comedy, with co-directors Javier Abad and Marcos Martinez. Joe Stillman (two “Shrek”’s and “Beavis & Butt-Head Do America”) writes a snarky tale rife with references to flying-saucer films. The third installment of the alien-invader film franchise is about to open on the planet Glipforg when American astronaut Captain Chuck Baker (Dwayne Johnson) lands. Planting the U.S. flag on what NASA identifies as uninhabited Planet 51, he interrupts a backyard barbeque. On the run from General Grawl (Gary Oldman), Buck finds an ally in Lem (Justin Long), the 16 year-old Junior Assistant Planetarium Curator who’s failing to impress girl-next-door Neera (Jessica Biel.) The planet is set in the 1950’s, with long-haired protest singer- guitarist Glar (Alan Marriott) driving a VW bus. Indigenous pop culture is full of mind-control conspiracy paranoia. The human alien, though, can hide in an alien look-alike contest at the premiere of “Humaniacs III.” Twix candy bars are out of place, as are gags about plugs to block anal probes by aliens. Cutest behavior belongs to the robot dog Rover, modeled on the moon and Mars rovers. This frantic jokey fare is engineered to distract kids and their handlers alike. Music quips go from “Macarena” to “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” With more voices by Seann William Scott, John Cleese Freddie Benedict, Alan Marriott, Mathew Horne and James Corden. (Bill Stamets)

In a generous epistemological gesture, writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi tells us: “It’s Up to You to Decide…” What’s up in the night air are Sumerian-speaking Alaskan-abducting owl-impersonating aliens. They interrupt slumber in Nome, leaving victims with nightmares and shoulder scars. Suicides ensue. Milla Jovovich plays psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler. Standing on a country road as the camera does 360s around her, Jovovich tells us at the start her own name and says that her character’s name is an alias for an actual psychologist portrayed in the film. (Numbskull skeptics at Imdb.com confirmed that the “Dr. Abigail Tyler” is in fact fictional, citing as sources Alaska’s state licensing examiner, the director of the Alaska Psychiatric Institute and the president of the Alaska Psychological Association.) Tyler videotapes Alaskans under hypnosis. They convulse hard enough to break their own bones, as they voice cryptic static. Another woman plays the real woman who originally videotaped hypnotized abductees. She also appears on a university TV interview show hosted by Osunsanmi. Videotapes in the film are marked as authentic by italicized inserts in brackets: “alias,” “name omitted,”  “address withheld,” “actual audio.” “The Fourth Kind” is no riff on Brechtian alienation of the fourth wall, with all its split-screen juxtapositions of the real and recreated videotaping sessions. In this inane thriller, characters can believe in aliens, but when an alien claims to be God, the good people of Alaska draw the line and suspect a God-impersonator. Osunsanmi offers film reviewers a “Sampling of Actual Reported Alien Activity in Alaska” yet withholds all the actual alien activity in that state. Omotic-speaking Oklahoman-abductors might be next. With Will Patton, Elias Koteas, Corey Johnson, Hakeem Kae-Kazim and Daphne Alexander. 98m. (Bill Stamets)