Teasing out the universality in the best love story of the year feels almost effortless, largely due to Lee's insistence on taking his time. While the bulk of the film is about love being hidden away in "correct" values such as wives, children and gainful employment, Brokeback Mountain is smart enough not to overdose on the heartbreak that, in other, heavier hands, might have easily soured the deeply sacred-feeling first third of the film, wherein Gyllenhal and Ledger simply and unassumingly fall for each other on the natural land mass referenced in the title. It seems like a given that both actors be phenomenol in a film like this one (and they are, particularly Ledger, raising introverted to an art form) and that the scenery be awe-aspiring (as it mixes with what sounds to me like the best score I've heard in forever), but its greatest triumph - for me, anyhow - is that it brings Lee back to some major Ice Storm territory.

I don't think it would be off base to suggest that greed and luck are inexorably intertwined, a statement Allen makes - very slyly, I might add - without affectiing any real moral judgement upon his characters; It's like a Hitchcock movie, for the most part, because the protagonist (in this case a very handsome, striking Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) keeps surprising us as he raises level of his defiance/evil cunning and, at the same time, brandishes a very real, very pitiful puppy-face when he realizes he's so stepped in it: He's like a Patrick Bateman who suddenly starts feeling. And there's plenty to feel: He's bangin' the incredibly much hotter future brother-in-law's ex-fiance...in London. Hype-laden almost to a fault, Match Point is such a departure for the Allen we've come to underrate, we almost feel like we have to deduct the weight of his name - not his signature, though, as, stylistically, the film is practically eponymous - from the proceedings almost unconsciously. Fortunately, the film is such a pleasure to watch, smoothly unfolding without excess of filler or moral pondering (unless, of course, you count the natural tendency the film has for equating the infidelity and murder with attaining wealth; This, to me, is a minor note that Allen's presence casually allows us to dismiss: He's never judged privelidge, only celebrated the faux-intellectual byproduct buried in expensive clothes and acquired opinons.)

Far more entertaining than it has any right to be, stinking its obvious crossover scent (Harry Potter meets The Incredibles) and all; The real greatness of the film is how instantly and consistently it begins defying convention, despite its cartoonish effects (which work in the same, intentionally exaggerated way Robert Rodriguez's effects work) and its overcooked finale (the light, self parodying atmosphere is suddenly work to maintain). First and foremost, it's a pleasure to watch, with high school kids who actually look and act their age, whiling in a comic book fantasy world somewhere between television comedy and live action animation.

It's hook - the creeping pan of the camera observing delicately on the fly - carries Tony Takitani the way a shrill music score beefs up (or, in some cases, doubles as) emotional resonance in other films. There's a splinter of intrigue in Ichikawa's ultimately dissatisfying Mourner Finds Companion Via Bizarre Circumstances riff on Haruki Murikami's novel. And, as in this year's Nobody Knows, it happens as an afterthought rather than a main idea, giving you an insane amount of context for very little payoff (the ratio is not quite as lopsided as in that film; Takitani is a scant seventy-five minutes long). This splinter - Bizarre Circumstances = Vertigoesque would-be doppelganger trying on Mourner's dead wife's clothing collection, itself an visually oddball but reasonably hammy crumb of symbolic disconnect - buys Tony Takitani's forgiveness simply by playing along with its barely crawling preamble; Instead of resenting this drearily proficient long bus ride of a set up, it acts like a shot in the arm, giving Audition a run for its money in the jump cut of moods department. Suddenly, the film's sporting a healthy sliver of DePalma. Also, it took me three and half hours to finish.

[By the way: Love the shot of the kid building the ocean liner in the dirt on what we expect to be a beach, but instead turns out to be a path through an empty lot in industrial urbania, stage lit for a lovely two level evocation of detachment to reality (the world of the man varying from the world of the city or the boy's seeming split with everything but his dirty soil sculpture.]

It's a haunting piece because it profiles everything leading up to a haunting pair of deaths, but it's also pretty unsettling to see how the subject - Timothy Treadwell - is seen by all of his friends, even his own hand (his video camera was found after his death, as well as footage from several years of his summers spent living among grizzly bears), after succumbing to an attack as he pushed too far into a foreign society (Was he committing a slow suicide by teasing death for thirteen years?  Did this kind of life lead to his feeling of separation from traditional society?) Herzog doesn't seem at all surprised by this, even going so far as to suggest that Treadwell could stand the primal, even violent tendencies of one society, as long as they didn't have the profoundly crushing emotional inclinations of another (namely, ours). What follows is yet another brilliant comment by Herzog on the way imagery affects man, examined in Treadwell's insanely self-absorbed overcoverge of his escapades (which suggest that the fodder for the film is one big long downward spiral into lunacy as an unanswered cry for help). Why were all these key moments of a life shot? They turn out to be the most generously unknowing anticipation of a feature documentary since Capturing the Friedmans. Herzog is given, essentially, the complete collection of man's life, drawing conclusions through the same receptor hell-bent on taking human nature at face value that forged My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski and Little Dieter Needs to Fly. His tone this time, as it happens, is eerily grave, with none of the light or goofy moments found in those films. This is the flip side to The White Diamond, with Herzog in no situation where his presence is needed to make the non-fiction more kinetic. That he made these stylistically polar opposites back to back is like a full penance for Wheel of Time. (I'm hoping this year's Rescue Dawn will excuse 2002's wretched Invincible. It's going to have to be Citizen Kane 2: P.O.W. Boogaloo to even come close.)

When its not showing highlight reels of its own action scenes, placing products by the double digits or doggedly refusing to pay homage to THX-1138 (the movie its clearly patterned after), The Island somehow manages to succeed on the flashiest level possible - in one hour cashing in on its protagonist's curiosity by leaving us in the dark with him (a tactic that makes the specifications seem vague, giving us the hope that they won't be explained to death as they typically are in these sorts of entertainments) and, in another hour, milking ethical assumptions about the audience in the most knuckle headed ways (for those of us who - outside of the overpopulation threat it implies - have no real problem with the concept of human replication, this was a reasonably moot point). The most prevalent contradiction, of course, is that The Island is a frickin' action movie with no gripes about dutiful deaths (in frequent police chases, et al.), going so far as to tap the collective spotlight we as a country seem to have cast on preserving any and all human life (likely a byproduct of 9/11 anxiety, methinks). Luckily, all of my conspiracy theorist introspection could be done while I watched the movie - as little of value (read: Johannssen is attached to those clothes the whole time) outside Steve Buscemi being allowed to deliver The Big (tre obvious) Secret in full-on Carl Showalter-mode - and I didn't have to waste any more of my [sic] precious time (currently being used to indulge and purport my curious interest in the theory of Singularity, which would make a far more interesting topic to frame a big, dumb action movie around.)

Terrence Malick's quietly abstract tone poem strikes me on that hazy, above-the-clouds level of indescribable clarity. Taking a slightly different approach here than in The Thin Red Line (which sprawls in a way that makes Altman look tight), Malick has chosen the indelibly simple story of Pocohantas and John Smith and framed it with an absence of historical urgency. At no moment throughout The New World, are we involved in pondering the film's accuracy or bygone recall (so much so that I found myself annoyed when anyone wanted to discuss "facts" or "how closely they followed the story"). We're stuck in bubbles. Bubbles where our vantage point contains the inner and outer perspectives of characters (via beautifully nattering voice over), a truth that few films bother to acknowledge (no one is the same outside and in their head). The love story is a lovely one, full of passion and tragedy, all the while mirroring the effectual settling of Virginia and its reprocussions on a more natural culture (namely: The Native Americans, given the same full face the Japanese were given in The Thin Red Line). Truly, the "loss of Eden" has been ballyed around a peg in most notices. There's a certain voice in the film, though, that seems to suggest that eden will always exist, but continue changing forms (the child running through the maze caps it off with what I would call the eden of youthful ignorance). And even if some are unclear about Malick's intentions, the stylistic psyche massage of his filmmaking - with its slow building long takes set to Wagner and its constant parrallels to nature - could convince us of anything.

It never really stops being a platform for talking heads to brew analogy after analogy after analogy. Has a doomsday air about it that's pretty well-felt; I can't imagine any documentarian being objective about such obvious and blatant disregard for ethical business practices. Now, if only I understood a whit of what these business practices actually were. Brownie points for a Simpsons clip and three (3!) Tom Waits songs from three (3!) different albums.

Though his motive is unclear, the main character is such a fiery, go-for-broke nutcase that the push-pull romantic inclinations almost seem to bleed naturally from all the chaos he and his young fascade bride cause with their casually hedonistic social misgivings. They're like a more organized, familial-wreck version of Sid and Nancy. The denoument seems lifted from a more structured, somehow less shaggy love story.

Brimming with 70s exploitation evoc, Zombie's second feature actually manages to be less entertaining than the already teetering House of 1000 Corpses, a film I reviewed with anticipatory perspective (make one to get your bearings), being far more tolerant of its overall mediocrity than I'd ever dream of being to The Devil's Rejects. Actively brilliant in spots (long Skynard montages, terrifically dark cruelty for a film made in '00s America and, um, the roughshod realism of the characters), but is cobbled together with the same brand of asinine placeholder narrative. In other words, Zombie eschewed the advice of all, abandoning the easy out and focusing more energy on filmmaking than storytelling; In horror movies, this just makes the final product a drag. (Especially in terms of dialogue: Bare bones (if that) will do it. The long, improvised banter between the killers unravels any evil dignity they might have otherwise possessed).

Agonizingly well-intentioned, Polanski's oddly safe follow-up to similarly proto-mature The Pianist (what, weird doesn't interest him anymore?) works better when setting off caricatures in peripheral characters (the elders at the first orphanage, in particular, who look down in the camera and mumble their lines). It doesn't seem to have the cajones to merge this darkly comedic tendency it opens with, quickly slipping into unceremonious proficience. And though it carries no real flawed or stifled qualities, it seems an opportunity for Kingsley to further slip into his newest, not altogether flattering typecast (playing bad guys with accents), giving a performance that barely vindicates him. His Fagan is so hopelessly impossible to understand, what's necessary is for Polanski's mise-en-scene to fill in the distant humanity and its peculiar hold on the virginally innocent Oliver (it doesn't). While I've always found this part of the story to be tearjerking rubbish to begin with, its not nearly as apropos viewed here in present day, when cinema's limits are far less restricted. Its inclusion, particularly Oliver's weepy pity party for The Demented Fool at the film's conclusion, makes you worry that Polanski himself has slipped into a similar haze of antediluvian existence.

[The digi-assist, by the way, makes London look like, as Summer put it, "an animated matte painting". Why would a matte painting every need to be animated? Bad form.]

I'm thoroughly astonished that the very comfortable half-hour portioning of Wallace and Gromit translated into two and a half times that without filler, without belaboring a point and without losing too terribly much of their essence. They've always survived on their cleverness and this King Kong meets The Wolfman riff is no black mark, not by a long shot, on the original conception. The painstaking time constraints of claymation force Park and Box into a spartan creativity, leaving no moment wasted. As a contender among the long tradition of brainey animal sidekicks who inexplicably carry their bumbling masters, these two are held in a reverance I can't help but continue to feed.

The Hand (Wong): C
Borders on self-parody (it doesn't help matters that it could easily have been the bastard cousin of one of 2046's swooning, heart-saturated subplots).

Equilibrium (Soderbergh): B+
A great, fresh zinger of reversible dream logic that teems with a period dialogue practically unmatched for its quickness by anyone short of Mamet (Downey, Jr. more than making up for his clunker performance in Good Night, and Good Luck.).

The Dangerous Thread of Things (Antonioni): C
A lukewarm entry bordering on flat-out bad (the translated mess of philosophical rambling seems entirely sour in this context - - although I don't object to this much nudity, really, as a rule).

[The theme was very loosely adhered to (with the third film, I imagine, simply passing mustard in the eligibility category because it was directed by Antonioni) with none of the entries really hitting an erotic pulse.]

More interesting than the film itself are its riffs on topical themes (e.g. - the fear of terrorism comfortably blurred into the air travel experience, the untrustworthiness of the modern, romantic male entity, and the value of life in a me-or-them situation), a quality that barely conceals Craven's watery third-generation Hitchcock suspense and hopelessly derailed ending. By the time you've realized it doesn't have a map to where its headed, however, you're hooked on secretly rooting for Cillian Murphy's striking psychopath to drub Rachel McAdams, whose frailty is the object of so much of the film's sympathetic focus, its almost impossible not to rebel and share the bad guy's corner.

Works overtime not to spoil its goodies (namely, visual extravagazas so alluring you immediately give yourself over to them), tapping Bosch and Dali via hallucinatory multimedia CG to help override its queerly base variation on the Alice in Wonderland/Wizard of Oz symbolic psychobabble that's occasionally far too overt. Most of the time, the Journey of the Self routine is only vaguely coherent (best when rambling outright) leaving Mirrormask to politely do its job (i.e. - trippin' you out). And the same question, over and over and over again: How did he get Jim Henson and financing for this thing?

This could easily become a platform for gripes about the extended versions on these DVD's (Wedding Crashers is the other example), but since I've consistently had the choice and continue to bet the "more sex and nudity" way, I've really only my self to blame (although I suspect they don't sabotage the film that much - weigh the grade more carefully on the revview, in these instances - see also Land of the Dead and The Devil's Rejects while I'm thinking about it). Everything that's tirelessly noble about this character is exposed in the fusion of Correll and Apatow, making their choice of genre - sex comedy - all the larger a challenge. It's incredibly funny all the way through, despite how exceedingly episodic it becomes (runoff, I'm certain, from Apatow's television-trained genius); It starts to feel like there's a very clear, very generic dialogue wrap-up to every event, as if tying it altogether was priority numero two. Nevertheless, it couldn't possess a more pleasant or reverant worldview, one where the casual, don't-think-about-it nature of sex comes crashing up against The Act's common obsesses-until-fixated and "put on a pedastal" bent.

Unfocused love in a Beijing theme park where world sites (e.g. - Eiffel Tower, Manhattan, et al.) are replicated on smaller scales affords a poke at universality the film almost treats as background noise. Unfortunately, what's happening in the foreground, for the most part, is trite and soapy, with precious little of substance or wisdom to give it motion. Some of the staging is exceptional. Most of the film is forgettable.

I'm game to downgrade it much more in hindsight. I don't care about the anticipated label I'll receive as king snob; After truly registering my disgust, I'm down to a D+ easy. I was so embarrassed to laugh, however, that I didn't actually have a good time watching the overlong, buys-it's-own-bullshit riff on The Great Repair of Male Moral Character (groan). The last thing we want to see - after celebrating the tantalizingly immoral reversal in extended, hilarious montage (the "wedding crashin'" as it were) - is Owen Wilson's babyface stoner character trailing such a indignant and insulting lapse into the annals of shamefully protracted whims of the film's convenience (as if the symmetry of the big finale's locale - a wedding - was so darling, so utterly important, that a good twenty minutes of sap tolerance was required on our part). It's worst sin falls on the wacky combo: We never believe for a minute that these two - despite their sleepover friendship pact - would spend more than five minutes together; Wilson seems to have his ephiphany quite a long while after this character likely would and Vaughn doesn't pull off his transition into responsible territory (read: wants to be married): They're act like frat brothers from different fraternities who aren't sure if they're supposed to be accomodating each other or starting a fight. With it's musical montages, its gross-out moments and its misfired sentimentalism within a dynamite premise, it's like a looser Farrelly movie: If it would just veer into black comedy, it might have a fighting chance.