We can only hope the title is the truth. This movie was dreadful, almost as bad as Daredevil! Maybe if Brett Ratner had been able to coax Chris Tucker from wherever he has been hiding to play a mutant… maybe if Alan Cumming had returned… maybe if any of the secondary characters had any significant reason for existing… maybe if the fate of the iconic X-Man had not been so clumsily handled…. The teaser at the end of X-2 had fanboys all atwitter. How angry they must be. You might want to see it on DVD if you liked the first 2, to see how awful it is, but how about finding a copy of The Specials instead.

The Specials

Some exciting action scenes, some fun caper stuff (a staple of the M:I movies), Philip Seymour Hoffman was excellent as the villain, but his exit from the film was underwhelming and anti-climatic. Nothing really new or worth writing about in this installment of the franchise.

The equivelant to Freebird for a bar band, the Aristocrats is the joke that every comedian knows. What they bring to it makes it their own. Bob Saget’s telling of the joke recieved the most hype, but Carrot Top and the South Park kids made me chuckle the most. Hearing how the movie came to be (Gilbert Gottfried’s apperance at a roast for Hugh Hefner) reinforced my love for Mr. Gottfried as a comedian. Without this story, the movie would have been little more than a curio: comedians famous and not all telling the same joke.

Ignore the pedigree: a writer from the Facts of Life directing Brendan Fraser, Sandra Bullock, Ludacris and Tony Danza…. a wacky summer blockbuster? Crash is a look at the prejudice that we all carry with us every day. This is not a perfect film, and having not yet seen Brokeback Mountain I cannot say which one should have won the Oscar for Best Picture (apparently, the race was between these two only…). There are parts of the movie early on that do not ring true, some of the dialogue is too-expository, and the actors seem uncomfortable and unnatural with this dialogue. As the film moves on, the story is told through more compelling dialogue and visual narrative, abandoning the director’s penchant early-on for Speilbergian explanations. The conclusion of Ryan Phillipe’s story said everything it needed to say with no explanation whatsoever. I wish the earlier dialogue had been as tight and less lazy. Show, don’t tell. The cast was excellent, but as in the true best picture of 1997, L.A. Confidential it was arguably the weakest member who got the recognition: Matt Dillon was okay, but his performance was not anywhere near as strong as the other principal cast members. And, although he is dreamier that his brother, I have always enjoyed Kevin’s performances more.

My two year old enjoyed the finale to this updating (which I am assuming ignores Bruce Campbell’s contributions to the franchise). The scenes of teen queen Lohan driving Herbie had the same cheap effects working as when Dean Jones was behind the wheel, which was a nice touch. Written by Thomas Lennon, of the cult television classic The State, this actually felt like three Herbie movies squished into one. A lot happened, yet at the same time why was Michael Keaton in this? As David Spade might quip: “Look kids, up in the sky! A falling star!” Although this film technically takes place in a reality akin to our own, no one is really all that flabbergasted when Herbie pulls off his amazing tricks. Herbie has personality, and is true gentleman; his co-stars are of little significance. I have a “Fully Loaded” joke about Lohan, but it really is like shooting fish in a barrel.

As a heist movie, Inside Man is a non-derivative take on the genre. With Ocean’s 1X setting the tone for so many hipster-heists, seeing a film not trying to re-create the attitude and tone of that re-imagining was refreshing. Tense, taut, twisting and well-thought out. The surprise ending is a non-surprise but in a surprising way. Maybe it has something to do with the title… Jodi Foster is a fine actress, but I would haver liked to have seen someone else in her role, as I think there something different should have been brought to the screen, an actress with a dark side. Denzel has white teeth. Willem Dafoe was in this, though I am not sure why. Nice to see Daryl “Chill” Mitchell on-screen, considering his spinal injury. Waris Ahluwalia was great. Must there always be a however? Yes. Because this was a Spike Lee Joint, there was a running sub-text and commentary on racial relations. Some of it worked and was appropriate (Waris Ahluwalia’s reason for speaking) some of it was not only contrived but was too obviously threaded in to serve not only as commentary but plot device. Ugh. It is unfortunate, as there is an almost-great movie here without the obvious message.

My wife and I took our almost 2 year old to see this. All he wanted to do was run around until the previews started. Considering we were in the theatre 30 minutes early because it was opening weekend, him enjoying his first movie seemed like a long shot. However, once the moving pictures hit the screen, he calmed down. He sat on my lap the whole movie and I whispered in his ear and he whispered back. He laughed at all the funny moments, even a couple of the moments meant for parents. 15 minutes of previews and an 80+ minute movie is a long time for a little fellow to sit still. Curious George was a fun movie, the adults laughed, no doubt helped by Will Ferrell as the man in the yellow hat, and the kids enjoyed seeing that trouble maker brought to life. And that monkey sure is cute.

I don’t know how much of this is fact, and what has been made up. What I knew of Howard Hughes going in was that he was rich, collected urine in jars and didn’t cut his fingernails. Maybe I knew a bit more, but for many people their knowledge base was probably about as wide as mine. The Aviator gives us a more detailed and complete look at Hughes: he was a renaissance man – he designed airplanes, took them on their often dangerous test flights, financed movies, questioned the censors of his films, was able to multi-task with great efficiency, was a savvy businessperson with vision few of his contemporaries had and finally, suffered from what appeared to be severe OCD. Nowadays, there is often help for OCD, but for Hughes there was little in the way of comfort. What was most fascinating about his growing obsessions was that he never truly descended into madness, rather he knew he was suffering and was able to muster moments and periods of lucidity and could fight his brain’s chemistry (albeit only as a stop-gap measure) when he needed the presence and majesty of his character, intelligence and will. Scorsese shows remarkable craftsmanship and restraint by not making this a film about the descent into madness, it shows that Hughes was human and not just the butt of jokes on The Simpsons. DiCaprio captures the man in his greatness and weakness and Cate Blanchett’s (who is an attractive woman) portrayal of Katherine Hepburn (another attractive woman) could have easily been parody, instead was totally believable (although on-film she was homely, which is utterly bizarre, given that it is an attractive woman playing an attractive woman…).

Previews made this out to be more of a comedy than it was, especially considering the previous work of the writer/ director Weitz brothers who brought us the American Pie films, but they also brought us About a Boy. This movie is not as much about Topher Grace becoming Dennis Quaid’s boss (when Topher finds out how old Dennis is, his reply “That is one year older than my dad”) as it is about the business world, more specifically traditional business people ala Quaid who have worked hard their entire lives and are dedicated to their profession verus the Blue Shirts (my term): young people who expect to be VP at 30 and retire at 35. Blue Shirts are made managers of departments they know nothing about. As the movie progrsses, it also becomes a movie about a young man looking for something more out of life. Topher deftly conveys both arrogance and pain, and Dennis Quaid is… Dennis Quaid (he is no Randy). Having worked at a job where I interacted with Blue Shirts, much of this movie struck home. For my ex-co-workers who still enjoy ramping up the synergy, this movie will hit like a synergistic bullseye!

Rare is it that I get to see a movie on the Big Screen. Kong, being an FX heavy film, I wanted to try and appreciate it as it was meant to be viewed. Coupled with the fact that everything I had heard had been positive if not glowing about it, I decided to put away my initial reluctance when I first heard of the project (”Why do we need another Kong movie, the original, although revolutionary for the time, set out what it wanted to accomplish, and although the 70s remake has mainly detractors, it worked fine enough for me?”) Darn instincts, right so many times…. The FX were too much, and quick scenes with humans and FX in the same frame didn’t work. Peter Jackson could have easily cut an hour of the film. The music in some scenes did not complement the action on-screen. The natives looked like Uruk-Hai rejects and Skull Island might have been an island resort on Jackson’s Middle Earth. Ultimately, this version brought nothing new to the table from the previous two iterations.