Epic romantic melodrama, teeming with Doyle/Wang's gorgeous cinematography (he makes close-ups seem as if no one has ever shot a close-up in the history of cinema), told in equal parts first and third person narrator (Wong Kar-wai, and his filmmaking, are as much a part of the voice of the film as Tony Leung's first person narration), 2046 mines similar territory as its predecessor, In the Mood for Love, namely, the sobering realities of bitter, unwavering romantic motives. Sad and just absurdly entertaining, it's one grand digression after another.

[Really enjoyed the expanded version of a more articulate, actually very skillful fondling of ideas that also occured to me. This linking crap is something my betters (read: bigger nerds) took to long ago. Might as well let you know why I stopped writing about this film. Because I decided to (you dolt) start reading what others wrote instead. Ostensibly, I switch-flipped from output to input.]

I was dreading the meat of Mysterious Skin, as it seemed like the contrast - two sexually molested boys take different paths: One becomes ajohn, the other supresses his violation by claiming to have been abducted by a UFO - had made its appearance almost immediately, leaving the movie to simply unfold in the usual way. The teary reconciliation, though, is more than worth slogging through the film, which is built around an amazing central performance by Joseph Gordon Levitt, who finds himself immersed in a by-the-numbers genre picture that becomes just confrontational enough, at close, to win us over. I was pretty sure, as I watched it, that Araki had sabotaged himself (seriously, if she stuck her arm inside that dead cow one more time, I was going to turn the damn thing off) with his usual brand of vapid, narrowly generational attitude. That he's able to raise the bar as high as he does is commendable. That the Midnight Cowboy references are kept to a very minimum is almost a miracle.

Boyle does his best to mask the hopelessly cluttered, painfully earnest trappings of Millions by practically vivisecting the screen with multimedia sunsplash every couple of minutes; It's as if he's trying to spice up a simple story with a bright Windows XP background, causing us to squint through countless bright green fields, moving frame transitions and time lapse digi-skies. Of course, there isn't a simple moment to be found. Noble intentions miss the mark by a country mile, attempting to mishmash a grieving boy prone to hallucination (of saints) with a sackful of stolen money, some Ethipians in need of a well (out in left field somewhere, we imagine), the lb.-to-euro changeover, droves of the destitute spinning in and out of the story, a robber trying to reclaim his dough and the constantly looming moral weight that might as well have manifested itself as a little digital scale in the corner of the screen that rose and fell based upon the decisions made about the moolah. And what of said coin? Millions attempts to make a very sincere point in rooting the fluctuation of money's value in perception. Trouble is, simply acknowledging this variance of perceived amounts isn't enough (the film title, for Christ's sake, derives from the boys' original assumption and subsequent treatment of the oft-stated 200,000+ lbs as if it were, ahem, millions); The Williams/Elfman score (written by John Murphy) does its best to build the kind of family atmosphere you'd expect to transcend writer FC Boyce's painfully obvious point about the difference in money's worth from person to person (thereby underscoring its overall worthlessness) - - - it doesn't. The idea just sits there, right up on the screen, never reaching epiphany for any of the characters. Later, it dissolves (only to return one last time in an ending as baffling and unnecessary as we're likely to see this year), as the main character simply has a conversation with his dead mother, completely resolving a film's worth of half-posed questions (apparently). Millions turns out to be just the sort of sloppy wet kiss of pat, emotional drivel you'd imagine it to be. (Fucker's repetitious, too: There had to be a period of thirty minutes where the movie just spins its wheels, slamming down the same shades of the younger, more selfless kid's character and his brother's ironic-for-his-age, enterprising ways.)

Orlando Bloom oughta run out and sign a three picture deal with Cameron Crowe; This is the first film that hasn't found me embarrased for him. It's an exercise for the great director of significantly cool romantic comedies of whimsy, who pulls out every single stop from him to the kitchen sink (which, in addition to everything but, he also includes): Musical montages come more frequently (or, I'm probably closer to right if I say equally as frequently), as dialogue scenes come in most films. Clearly the best of the barrage of realized maturity being exorcised on screen (see also: Garden State and Sideways, just to name a couple) and it nails the difficulty Modern Men have in feeling happy with a much keener eye, as if it's really paying attention. Romance stales, briefly, when Bloom and Dunst are flirting with idea of progressing away from their flirting; All this happening at once is, more often than not, too jarring not to seem like two movies mishmashed together BUT...it's a good mishmash, teeming with the likes of My Morning Jacket and Elton John, not to mention Paul Schneider, reprieving his role as the goofy loser from his David Gordon Green twosome. And broad corporate commentary. And no less than a dozen bright, booming epiphany moments. The general freeness with which Crowe breathes, as if exhaling the dirty air of The Big Studio Picture and embracing these reasonably personal riffs on his own life, is like watching a kid run out of church as soon as the service ends, but before the choir is finished singing.

The film opens with a couple, eyes glazed, finalizing a divorce. Exhausted-looking. The next scene is pivotal (arguably, the one after that, because it establishes the sequence, is even more pivotal - but never mind that now): The couple unddress and have sex. What initially looks like one final fling after the divorce turns out to be, cheap irony in tow, the last gurgle-splurt of a chance before signing the papers. It is at this point (just as Randy joked), fifteen minutes in, that Ozon declares his supreme moral agenda, allowing this marginally interesting choice of construction to serve not one banal purpose, but two. (The second, of course, is that events, no matter whether they precede or follow other events, carry their own context.) As the film unfolds, backwards, each sequence, despite being spurred by the previous (or, later) sequence, makes its own, nice mini-movie (a reminder as potent as any in 8 Women: In spite of scant running time, Ozon works best in shorts). The husband and wife live an impossibly duplicitious life, constantly unfolding more dimensions of cruelty and pain, even skewing their wedding night and first meeting with selfish acts o' plenty. That Irreversible used the exact same conceptual tool to illustrate a much more universal perspective makes this film feel a bit like a safe version of that film. A safe version where the director is clearly judging his characters, leaving very little time to enjoy the scarce moments of romance and bliss, that is. Both films argue that these "moments" have nothing to do with the big picture they comprise. Irreversible acknowledges said big picture; 5 x 2 does not.

It's a lark for a while - all cheeky and full of "accidental" philosophy - but, after awhile, becomes more of a series of adventures than a forward, progressing narrative. Unfortunately, in its haste to clutter itself with digi-spacescapes and forgettable cameos, it forgot to chuck out the remaining semblances of dumb, lowest denominatorisms ("Is she the one?" is uttered and I finally get to see what the inside of my head looks like because my eyes have rolled backwards into my head) and, in all it's wisdom, gives its main character (Martin Freeman, essentially, in Tim-mode) a silver platter of a redemption, despite the fact that impressing Zooey Deschanel seems pointless, here, as she's been reduced to a vacancy sign with hypnotizing eyes. Ultimately, though, the dimwitted premise regarding a "kidnapped" President of the Galaxy (Rockwell says "Think Zap Brannigan as a fourth Wilson brother") only further reminds everyone that this is based on a book hailed by then nerds, back in the 80s, who are now in their mid to late thirties. Animation in the actual title tome is the best part; I'd watch an entire film of this color-splashed shadow imagery that whiles in dry humor.

I wanted so bad for the iambic pentameter to be enough to consistently distract me from the banal, mid-life crisis story happening somewhere in the background. Because the filmmaking is so excitable, you can almost turn it off most times; Other times, it sounds like Shakespeare narrating a fucking soap opera.

If Yoda were to be conjured up by one of these hormonal teen-warlocks, "Showing signs of wear, to be sure, this franchise is" might be his observation and his advice. Stepping away from the celebration of storytelling that graced most of Alfonso Cauraon's Prisoner of Azkaban, Newell explores so fervently the very reality of these characters. This reality, of course, is the very thing we're supposed to be watching Goblet of Fire to escape from. And let me be clear: Reality, in this sense, simply means that the film makes it very clear that it's more interested in the unfolding Hogwarts soap opera - with Harry, Ron, Hermione and three others attending their first-ever ball, a sequence that seems almost banal when compared, say, to the mano-a-mano-with-a-dragon sequence that took place just before it. Easy enough to digest, though - - If I can doze through ten minutes or sso and seamlessly follow events, wondering - but not really caring, mind - why Harry was angry at Ron at one point, that's a pretty good sign. I find it really irritating trying to review these films. They all run together, they're all basically the same template of horrors, constantly teasing the bigger, somewhat nonsensical mystery of Harry's parents (they're dead...is there more?) Here: The film offers Lord Voldemort himself, played by Ralph Fiennes, attempting in vain to transcend the hokum he's stumbled into. Also: One scene with Gary Oldman. I'm sorry, but that's just not right.

The black and white filmmaking is such a perfect choice for such a focused, single-minded, (beautiful), work of leftist propoganda. Not as tyrade worthy as others I can think of, Clooney directs his picture with glee, really enjoying the characters and their wordy trademarks as it nobly poses as a great snapshot of a moment very similar to the one in The Insider, when corporate policy suddenly dictates what is reported - and how. (Particularly relevant as an antidote for the current state of things, when news channels and news shows have become tools of the party rather than the objective reports of the state of things.) Strathahairn pretty much just pours himself into the role - a dangerous one, as its constantly put next to Actual Documentary Footage - and easily walks away with the movie, communicating, very palpaby, a man who knows his weight but makes a conscious effort not to throw it around (watch him, he uses his intelligence differently with each person). The air starts to leave it, though, even before we realize how out of place Downey, Jr. feels nowadays (among seasoned actors, that is), as it goes on for less than ninety minutes, but still seems, somehow, too long. Love the very convincing  minimalist period evocation where Scotch is king, tobacco is like oxygen and suits are still square.

Initially I found the structure (Two independent narratives with similar plot elements: One interpreted as comedy, the other as tragedy) interesting enough to start Actually Enjoying Watching A Woody Allen Picture, a past time not indulged in since 1999's Sweet and Lowdown (for me) or 1989's Crimes and Misdemeanors (for many). How was he able to make this cast work and not other, more promising casts in recent years? It certainly wasn't by conscientiously ignoring the fact that his leading man is doing a caricature of him (because, despite the high marks, he does that yet again here). Luckily, while Will Ferrell isn't aping Woody's mastery of the nervous Jewish joke bombadeer, Rhada Mitchell turns in possibly her most resonant performance to date (as good, anyway, as her performance in - dare I gulp and drop another of my favorite hyperbolic references - High Art). But, all for nought, as my wife (exuding far too much influence over this site of late) came in midway and pointed out that she had no trouble following what was going on, thereby completely undermining the structure's great purpose: To mask melodrama posing, still, (sadly), as great satire. But he's getting close: The Park Avenue types actually refer to themselves, a few times, as Park Avenue folks. In great faith, here's me hoping that Melinda and Melinda might simply be acting as the appetizer if all the buzz about Match Point warrants any merit.

Having rested fiction, predominantly, of late, Herzog's delightfully bizarre blend of reality and his own, controlling influence over the events deflects any promise of non-fiction. It's a beautiful limbo, this quasimodo fictional documentary middleground of his. I particularly love the long takes, carved in his typical starved-for-images grandeur, itself a quality that never seems to stop overwhelming us with mystery. Profiling one particularly Nanookian local, Herzog seems kind of shallow. Insisting to its inventor, who is haunted by his own tragic version of a similar experience, that he (Herzog) - and his camera - must be aboard for every moment (despite the inventor's previous hopes of peace and tranquility), the umcompromising director boards a balloon-like aircraft on its journey to an inaccessible and rarely-visited rainforest canopy in Guyana. By doing this, its as if he's creating the story as he goes.

Really, anyone could have directed most of it, with Herzog putting in his two cents every once and awhile, but never really stamping the film his own. The subject is really quite fascinating, but the film remains so by-the-numbers, you immediately wonder if this is more ironic than it seems: A film about selfless Buddhists made merely as a paycheck to fund better films (like The White Diamond and, from the sound of things, Grizzly Man).

Either wear your heart on your sleeve or put the audience in the place of these guys - you can't do both if you're constantly underlining how we're to feel with manipulative songs and a tight, reoccuring set of cry moments every ten or fifteen minutes: Our imagination is handicapped. Milking every moment for its most extreme drama, Murderball, more often than not, is less a documentary per se than an absurdly compassionate foray into the reality television pool of MTV. Characters take on harmoniously larger-than-life roles in dovetailing profiles of Learning to Cope With Your Disability and Channeling Rage Into A Competitive Deathsport as seen on TLC. Irony follows. Zupan, in particular, makes a compelling case for positive recovery - of a deeply negative personality - in a quadrapeligic state. Soares - be he a jerk or be he just really frickin' driven - gets pretty old pretty quick as the filmmakers make the point about his stubborn beligerance in the face of adversity very quickly and very clearly - - and very repeatedly. The film is curiously well covered, a candid dinner conversation belying Soares' arrogance literally (as he toasts Team Canada instead of his wife on his anniversary) and figuratively (Why was his anniversary dinner worth covering in the first place?), gives it something of a too-perfect shape, leaving it ripe for the wolves of my imagination (which I kept throwing it to): What if this was, instead of being played for its inspirational solemnity, was played for out-and-out laughs? Originally I was thinking of something like Christopher Guest's conceptually front-loaded mockumentaries, but I kind of wonder, with its manipulative drawl, if it might instead play like a Farrelly Bros' Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. God forbid.

Brilliantly viewfinding moments where characters are lying to the audience about events, wonderfully stating the inconclusives behind Mathieu Amalric's stay at a mental institution after removing him, forceably from his apartment with the same guffaw of aplomb as a later debate whether to split an inheritance with an adopted family member - - these are some of the great things Desplachin is working on in Kings and Queen, an interlocking narrative figure-eighting the Sirk-laden adventures of a woman coping with her father's deteriorating health and the aforementioned farce in the looney bin. Trouble is, both of them, on their own, aren't very substantial. In fact, Emmanuelle Devos gives such an atrocious performance - lip smacking every moment into a faux-sincerity - it's almost shameful to see her conversing with the fuzzy image of her dead father, seated on a stool in front of a professional photo backdrop. A microcosm of what's wrong with Kings and Queen, this little contrast is a terrific example of Desplachin's ultimate downfall: Storytelling Style over any substance whatsoever.

Really glad I didn't remember a smidgen of the book (or whether I'd actually read it or merely pretended to in order to get out of re-reading it); It felt very reverant to me, somewhat less swoony than its obvious counterpart (in marketing and in terms of literary buddies), Lord of the Rings, et al. The sense of wonder from a child's view is used very liberally, peppering the film with a sense of meaty atmosphere, the kind that (gulp!) is usually described as "carrying one away" by Larry King. That said: Holy digi! Adamson does a remarkable job considering his previous claim to fame. Tilda Swinton in danger, now, of being typecast as the villainess. Which is a good thing.

Kinda torn because it does as I've previously instructed (remove the cushion to the layman and set us adrift in tech talk), leaving the story vague and its inferences underlined (rather than its outright statements); Emotionally decrepit, including stories of a man tortured and a little boy killed that seem as passionless and vacuous as meet after meet after meet with the well-dressed important people who can't stop talking like movie characters do (in droplets of wisdom and more eloquently than necessary); Structured far more loosely than Traffic, but similiar enough to constantly echo its sense of unilateral perspective-as-the-tapestry film; The most emotionally rich sequence is also the most cliched: An angry worker fired as a result of an American merger learns the ways of the radical muslim and, in the eventual, suicide bombs a drilling station at the behest of his charismatic religious crony. In the end, its sucks you into its world, tantalizing you with fat, uber-worldly burnout Bob Baer - who wrote the book on which this film is largely based - as Clooney, the gentle double agent. That it's able to suck you in at all, being so stiff and stilted and all, is the real triumph.

The real trouble isn't necessarily that Linklater appears to have instructed Thornton to simply re-hash his Bad Santa persona (sole variation: he becomes a softie just a few reels earlier), but that this just isn't a very strong story to even bother expending the effort to remake. I won't mention some of the other idiocy - which sometimes, in big one-liners, leads to genuine gut laughs I will admit - but I will take it to task for using a song (that will remain nameless) also played in Linklater's unmatched valentine to (his) youth (Dazed and Confused), an act I realize I'm a Gigantic nerd for criticizing (but, seriously, What Blasphemy! Why call my attention to that while I'm in the midst of such crass, commerical xeroxing?). These gripes aside, the film feels as hollow as we all know School of Rock was at heart. Here, he's just not doing as great a job of masking it. I'm glad I paid to see it so Linklater could bankroll his next Waking Life or Before Sunset. Greg would be so proud.

It's a pretty amazing little dissection of the ill effects of divorce, but it's also riotously funny all the way through? Herein, Baumbach invests the same acute attention to tight editing he demonstrated in his unsung modern classic Kicking and Screaming, but tells a story so personal, you can't help but wonder if it hurt him more than it hurt us. I mean, how could one whittle from such a life-affirming, cataclysmic event a film as succint and detailed and thorough, but keep it as slim as Salinger? In my own struggles to purge the demons of nostalgia, I popped off a 220-page eye swallower called 1993. Every attempt to keep its wily tenticles of offbeat, shaggy-dog genius [sic] out of the way of, you know, the story, seemed too steep to thwart. Which brings me to the real problem in my notice: The films that make honest use of personal subjectives - like literary elitists who split up but continue a half-assed attempt to model their divorce after the family life they could barely hold together - always end up being the ones I can't help but spout all over (alas, I submit that there is a half-jealous side, too; I'll spare you). It's one of those movies where the performances are all too good to single out (although Jesse Eisenberg is a distinctly sharp actor, playing a role similar to the one in Rodger Dodger, but clearly making all the right distinctions and choices), the jokes are all too funny to repeat ad nauseum (like when It's "minor Dickens" later to become "minor Fitzgerald" or Daniels referring to Kafka as one his predecessors), and, in the eventual, the unique quality of its voice is too expansive and, simultaneously, minimal to in a way: At the same time, its so complicit and carefully threaded but also so simple you don't want to spoil it with overthinking.

As if the attention to size permeated every aspect, the three hour Kong is the very picture of giant-sized entertainment. The throwback-to-age quickness of the first hour (enjoyable as if it accidentally dropped right from reels shot during the time period in which its set) melds into a too-long, too-repetitious, yet somehow consistently exciting second hour full of CGI-fights as off-the-wall as the stop animation variety displayed in the original (which I've not seen, but can see Jackson possessing an equal reverence and thirst for up-to-the-minute visual tinkering, not unlike Lucas's reworked Star Wars trilogy re-releases). By the time New York rolls around, though, its out of fresh variation. This section, it seems, required so much planning and so much staging that it was impossible to invest any more energy in the staling Brody/Watts romance, instead (or, directly resulting in) choosing to crank the intensity of the one-note Watts/Kong attraction, itself too moving to falter in such a condition but, nevertheless, unresolved in the same way a woman might be attracted to a zombie or a monster. Jackson better asserts his horror movie roots in the film's most notorious (and, most seat squirming) setpiece that can be described by swiping the title of the second track on Elvis Costello's Mighty Like a Rose: "Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs are Taking Over)".

While Worlds forfeits its purity for square-box PC touches (Dakota Fanning is a commercial for her upper class changeover, a detail that - while valuable - is often distracting) and wrongheaded characterizations (What movie is Tim Robbins planning to direct that he needed to trot out the goober stereotype with such ploddingly simple strokes?), Munich simply doesn't realize that it's a better film when its lost in the throes of its thriller chops, some of which are as dazzlingly methodical as anything in Catch Me If You Can, the somewhat lukewarm dramatic entry to Spielberg's oeuvre this film more precisely parallels than the dusty dark history of Amistad or the terrifying and immediate docu-shock of Schindler's List. Munich just doesn't have the historical urgency it's being pimped with. And while it is about political warfare, what really cripples it is how, while it's alleviating the ever-increasing panic I had that it would never chuck off its viciously partisan perspective (note to self: trust the director next time), it manages to lapse into character study, showing the Israeli idealist who is tired of the fighting and the taking of sides, thereby forcing the movie into a situation where it's merely showing an objective perspective without actually being objective itself. Nevertheless, this changeover was like a weight off of my shoulders as soon as the film took stock of the toll on unwitting terrorists, thereby blurring the line between payback and aggression, suggesting that a difference doesn't actually exist when the freedom fighters become the, ahem, invaders. All of these terms must sound very familiar and specifically allegoric. However, in a broader sense, though both films examine the complacency of revenge, we never lose sight of Bana's or Cruise's plight to stay human, a battle Spielberg sees as, ultimately, a more integral part to understanding the concept of political violence as a whole. This initiates a fittingly punitive cycle for Bana, who realizes he's either been had or has traded his security the way the terrorists traded their lives for the cause. Cruise, who also survives his own shortcomings by killing (Tim Robbins, in this case), finds himself clinging to family. In both films, the subtext echoes a sentiment actually stated in Munich: Home always costs more. Both films aren't merely reactions, but warnings focused on behavior in the wake of terrorist attacks. War of the Worlds sees it from the common (read: working class) man's eyes while Munich comes from the mind's eye of the soldier.

[ Munich has the flavor commonly referred to as Hitchcockian (an overstatement of what it really is); The only nod to the Master of Suspense is the way it transforms its main character from a simple bodyguard into a field operative. Think Torn Curtain or North By Northwest. Neither film really makes its politics grave or terribly relevant. Munich's politics seem to spring more from national identity (or lack thereof) than any sort of retelling of history's ongoing conflicts and their "highlights" (after all, One Day in September did shed some light, very recently, on much the same events). Love the way it unfolds, though: It unspools, for the most part, without a great deal of pontificating, and, as I said, is best when its merely following the exploits of the Israeli revengists. It's probably a little too rounded and, on occasion, a little too handsome, but Munich is easily one of the most immersing thrillers to come down the pike in a great while, making me wish very much that Spielberg had toned down the very thing (the moral) I found to save the film. It's a contradictory bit of praise I can't help bestowing and taking away from the film (at the same time).]