Stitched, in my mind, to both Zhang's semi-great Not One Less (Chinese beaurocracy acting as a buffer for and a pathway to a new, bracing reality) and his somewhat less thrilling film called The Road Home (intensely emotional tale that seems to exist on the fringe of reality), Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles sidesteps the easily corrupted Father-Son dynamic - that usually leads to contrived, overtly button-pushing moments - by down playing the actual, central narrative and allowing it to grow on its own, adding task after task to the already superfluous end the calmly indifferent main character pursues. The title - though taken from the opera he's trying tto videotape -  ought to give you, however, some idea of what you're in for. While Zhang's film eschews convention in one sense, don't think for a minute that it won't reach similarly grandscale hues to The Road Home, most assuredly distancing this from the great films he made in the late 80s/early 90s: It could easily have been 20 minutes shorter.

Perfectly serviceable and, for those of us who saw Spellbound, a kind of super-spectacular daydream of well-meaning fictional skin being placed over reality's somewhat less tidy bones. Fishburne and Bassett play one-note tuggers to Akeelah's sensibility, both in awe of her, both unwavering in their support (despite its wretched form at times), both too utterly perfect to be believed outside the confines of the film's carefully structured crowd-pleasing demure. I'd be lying, though, if I wasn't still on board by the end and - without question - it turns out to be worth being on board for. Not because its unpredictable (it isn't) or because there's a huge emotional payoff (there is), but because the thing has a roundness about it that I don't often put myself into. In that way, the experience of actually watching the film is a far easier, far more pleasant thing than, say, owning up to liking the thing later on.

The most interesting thing about it is Giamatti: No role can bring him down. His scenery chewing inspector regularly upstages Edward Norton (on autopilot, clearly) and Rufus Sewell (doing his stock evil guy). For all the fuzzy corners and gold-toned eye squint at turn of the century Europe, the straightforwardness of the thing really seems to sack, particularly its inevitably lame coda, a twist that found me the most indifferent to being fooled as is humanly possible. David Cross's "Magic is already boring when its right out in front of you. I mean, the most you ever get, as a response is, uh, yeah, yeah that was my card. (pauses) Can I go?" heartily applies here.

More attitude and moment than film, but gleefully so - damn near a creative orgasm; Bernal reminds me, over and over and over again, of Léaud in Masculine-Feminine and Stolen Kisses, and the film itself has a sort of new wave vehicle shape to it, cooking its narrative extra soft, its color and quirk in full control of anything that occurs. There is almost too much to take in; His dreams are awesome-looking while the dialogue is hilarious and frequently brilliant, particularly in the hands of such terrific actors (particularly Alain Chabat as Guy, Stéphane's bluntly irreverant co-worker and Charlotte Gainsborg, the object of and stumbling block to Stéphane's affections). It envelopes you, swallowing your sensibility and osmotically turns you into a denizen of its world, as if the Gondry was proud enough of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to know he could make a (Godardian) companion piece focused almost entirely on the energy and craft.

A bit too cheeky to achieve a serious tone, The Queen flits around in a couple of different tones, never becoming consistent enough to hold us. It's deadpan and entertaining, but also so much more a history lesson than anything else. Mirren is terrific and Michael Sheen does an intriguing Tony Blair, but in the end, the whole thing seems about reading the public, whose thirst for vicarious participation in the melee of glitzy hollow that appears to be The Royal Life kept Princess Diana in the misery that she eventually succumbed to. I didn't get the sense the film meant for me to read into that, but its still a fascinating and sober look at the various shortcomings of democracy and idealism. I found myself siding with different people in different situations (The Royal Family over the flag, Tony Blair over nearly everything else, the public over the need for a monarchy).

Pretty forgettable and predicatable entertainment, but it is frequently quite funny and quite endearing. Each character seems to embody a different modern filmgoing stereotype, but it seems to be the film's conceit to transcend them (Aside from Blue Streak Grandpa who, despite having the funniest lines in the film, never gets the chance to attain a full dimensional outfleshing); Steve Correll is the best part of the film, although Paul Dano runs a close second. Little Miss Sunshine seems to stick together the heads and tails of a half dozen too-precious indie films and zap them with a quickened energy. At its height, it reaches absurdity. At its lowpoint, it's just warm TV. Subverting the establishment never seemed like so much damn work.

The cuts between these tragedy-happy vignettes come at great places, but they're unnecessary; This is an omnibus film if I've ever seen one, connected with threads thin as fishing wire. The best moment in the film - Rinko Kikuchi's first experience with ecstacy - is also the one that feels the least encrroached by the film's finger-waggling persepective of bleakness. It's intent on putting big bells and whistles on every topical attitude it trots out gets way out of hand (its not enough that she didn't have permission to take the children across the border, she also has to be an illegal immigrant). I might also suggest that the pre-shooting sequences with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett feel very much like an Antonini parody (as cool as that sounds, its full of embarrassed-smirk tedium), but the whole film feels like it veers into a self important tizzy of circumstance (yes, that  murderous moppet smashes the rifle against the rock as if to rid the world of it forever) with an uncharacteristic note of political sand in our eyes for every tic of the tale. For instance, the repeated jab of "Now, how would you feel if you lived in a world where every act of violence done to an American in another country is immediately and irrevocably labeled terrorism?" should likely be inferred, and certainly not overstated. This is - as I feared - clearly one too many cubist, faux-documentary melodramas.

The Painted Veil felt slight to me, occasionally great and engrossing (Naomi Watts and Ed Norton, sparring, cruelly, then later burning with passion), but too often it felt stock - the old sage character (Diana Rigg), the paper tiger general, that awkwardly embarrassing sequence where Norton's Dr. Fane figures out how to get the water to the village (a series of bamboo pipes! how Swiss Family Robinson!) - and far too smitten with the source material (you find it drying up with mundanity for a good sag in the middle, there). Check out the grandness of this scenario: The too-hasty marriage, an even hastier love affair and, finally, the vicious condition with which Fane forces his bride to accompany him to an isolated village (where cholera has broken out) in the most beautiful place in China. What's attempted in subtlety? I think Randy points out the best example in what turns out to be a very foreseeable conclusion for one of the main characters when he says "It was labored over terribly and there was no tortured grieving on camera"; The film seems to arch in buildup and smatter in execution, but that in no way gives it color or weight. Prediction: It will drift from memory with haste.

As bad, if not worse, than your prediction. Scott wants too wide a teeter to totter on too miniscule a balance: He wants the touching slow burn of a memorial piece (where Crowe mourns - with little explanation or reason - a man he neglected to see for a decade) to ingratiate itself with a gentle - occasionally nodding very physically to farcical (the pool full of dirt) - romantic comedy for people with hearing aids who just pretend to hear everything that is said. Dialogue has that forehead-smack quality Mystery, Alaska had - but this is far worse than that. Crowe's character in Jay Roach's goobered hockey laffer didn't feel like a parody of himself. In A Good Year, there's no message being tossed about between the very black and the very white: Either Crowe will do anything for money, or he has really, really - just wildy - erratic taste.

Much like I allowed my emotions to intrude on my opinion of World Trade Center, my feelings about Borat are hopelessly tainted by what turned out to be painful bouts of laughter (about 30 minutes in, we took a break to catch our breath). So, while that general memory of consistent, repeated gut laughs taints my perspective, I also found myself  - with abandon - really admiring Cohen's irreverance, his tearing down of the establishment, and his reckless, fearless performance, wrongly ignored at this year's Confidence Validation Pageant. Racist and sex-obsessed to such a casual, high pitched degree, the combustion of this personality and various, similarly morally skewed Americans feels almost - dare I say - important. That's nott to say that there aren't moments that feel staged or contrived (plot points are kept to a minimum - it's more of a road movie in concept than execution) but, irregardless, Borat's message is loud and clear: This country is comfortable in ignorance and intolerance.

If not for its overuse of conventional mise-en-scene and rancid little bits of dialogue you wish you could just cut away, The Last King of Scotland would likely have been as disturbing and haunting as you envision its makers intending. What I find most exciting about it is how unrelenting it is as the floor slides out from under the selfless, horny Scottish Dr. Garrigan who comes to Uganda and is seduced by General Idi Amin Dada (played by Forest Whitaker as a swanky eccentric who, on the side, is the leader of the nation) and later, is hunted by him as if he were trying to leave the confidence of the mafia. Sparing no graphic detail - but leaning on all the safe corners of contrivance and nick-of brand timing - Macdonald's film is fine, even noteworthy, particularly in the earthy color scheme, a dark shade that gives the film a foreboding, almost ominous quality. The 1970s look as they might have on film stock used in the time period; I'm imagining that Macdonald wanted to present something that looked similar to General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait, as it is a widely available, conclusive capture of the same time and place represented here. Smart play: I believed most of The Last King of Scotland..

For Your Consideration, while it has some really funny bits, overall, feels almost like a weird hybrid of The Guest Troupe's usual mockumentary stylings and a distinctively unmemorable fiction film that's sending up the film industry. In point of fact, very little about the film - save its photography - even sets it apart from the mockumentaries to any new or interesting end, giving us pause to examine the decision in the first place. Aren't the mockumentaries written, too? In truth, given my recent over-the-cliff dose of cynicism regarding the Awards, the industry and that whole scene, one might surmise that a film like For Your Consideration would show up just in time to match my taste. No so. The whole thing seems underdrawn, overlit, and far too silly - not the same silly you're thinking - to approach realism. Guest's films have never really struck me as more than a passing fancy. I seldom find myself bowled over by them.

Just as it always was, is now and ever shall be, a film with a script this serviceable, shot by its own director, will inevitably look gorgeous, but be nigh unwatchable. Part of the problem is the cookie cutter script that clumsily portrays Papale as a strong, kind-but-stubborn South Philly working class boy, (the kind the film makes you feel guilty if you don't root for) and part of the problem is Wahlberg, who plays Papale as a schizophrenic: Damn near vacant, bordering on tempermental, and occasionally, the exact opposite - flirtatious, warm and thoughtful. Why are his friends inconsistent and stereotypical? What great film was ever this loaded with stereotypes but was not a parody? Why would someone who considers himself an amateur Eagles fan be met with such violent backlash upon not liking the film? It's not an Eagles film. It's a Disney sports uplifter. And a damn cruddy one at that.

Innately chilling from start to finish (I saw Upton Sinclar's name volleyed about in reviews - and it seems just about right), but also admirable (there's a character who quits because selling fast food seems so "wrong" and "fake"), compelling (the monologues read by Hawke, Willis and Kristofferson are terrific) and, deeply flawed (that fatalistic arc that you can see coming a mile away really sinks almost all of the stories).

Just as Tom Cruise was so terribly wrong for The Last Samurai, both Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Connelly seem to be far too clean-cut and compromising in these roles to begin to communicate the desperation and obsession of their character's chosen careers. It's one of those films that thrives on the "take that!" quality of a biting or deadpan remark just before a cut. And by thrives, I mean overuses. Nearly every scene between the two actors goes this way and, after awhile, you wonder if anyone on the set ever pulled Ed Zwick aside and told him that trumpeting a cause requires some measure of realism, none of which we're going to find when everyone is carrying on as if they are movie characters. Part of this is that the film continually wants its cake and to eat it, too: The harsh realities alone won't do, there also has to be a staged, slow-zoom, heart rending climax to accompany. Trouble is, Zwick has no idea how to set aside emotion and be impartial (see also: every film he's ever made), making, for example, the big reunion scene seem almost silly, like a parody. This grandstanding seqeunce, by the way, also serves as a perfect example of how the film revels in implausibility: We pan across a staggering, almost unthinkable number of people before Jennifer Connelly remarks that this is what a million people looks like. Hounsou then proceeds to find his family in, like, two minutes. And everything seems so inappropriately Hollywood for a film that aims to shed light on a social issue. The dialogue has that sour, unnatural fervor as if its been overwritten. Excessive action sequences are tossed in at will, a ghastly ingredient to mix with message mongering. It lacks focus; It attempts to multi-task its thematic reach, trying to tackle, practically all at once, child soldiers, refugee crises, conflict diamond trade, civil unrest, slavery, the accountability/role of the press, profiteering, forgiveness, selflessness, sniff, sniff, whimper, whimper. What is unforgivable is dragging Hounsou (not exempted and insanely over the top, too) into a film like this, one that makes most of the very Africans it purports to have such undying, string-laced sympathy for into faceless baddies. Bordering on laughable and absurd, Blood Diamond is only slightly less offensive than Beyond Borders (a statement, I believe, of some serious gravity).

I've done a great deal of second guessing since I saw - and reacted with more dismissal than understanding to - Soderbergh's marginal failure of an experiment in replicating the melodrama of every aspect of 40s wartime films: He intersperses newsreel footage and does watered down riffs on acting style (not consistent enough), swooning scores (its stormy without being decadent), titles (opening and closing titles fit), subject matter (see below) and photography (occasionally done well, often the lighting seems too complicated, the picture too clear). The excitable, very passionate lover of these films in me was never going to let this film have a crack at re-creation - it was an idea that I've been thinking about for some time - and probably skewed things a bit. This, of course, does nothing to explain why Soderbergh chose to include all the lurid elements of a modern period piece (such swearing in the squeaky-clean past! bare breasts and animal-style deviant sex! discussion of - and flashback to - rape! blood-splattering to follow gunshott wounds!), nor does it speak to why Clooney's performance bears little or no resemblance to anything but past Clooney performances. However: While the tale itself didn't do much for me while I was watching it, the peripheral characters and the little details of the plot have been working their way around and around in my brain since I've seen the film. For instance, how great is Leland Orser as the military attorney whose blind aid to Clooney comes out of dedication to a wicked dogma: That each and every German was once - and therefore, is - a nazi. Or, take for example, the screen time dedicated to Danny Curran's late night pimp/bartender, whom Clooney shares a warm evening of boozing 'til dawn - right smack in the middle of a busy, labrynthine narrative. And, despite the annoying contradiction that he does most of the cursing and the fucking referenced earlier, Tobey Maguire is easily the best thing in the film. Scheming without friend or foe, in every breath and every tic, sometimes becoming violent in short order and balancing his lowdown core with a downright polite, clean-cut American boy facade, the turn smacks of self-image subversion. (When he hits a mostly forgettable Cate Blanchett early in the film, its actually really startling, partly because its early enough on in the film that you're still not sure if Soderbergh is planning to keep it code or not.)

Roughly half of Stranger Than Fiction reaches some of the same fuzzy warbles recent comedic giants have achieved by chucking the chuckles (Carrey in Man on the Moon or The Truman Show, Bill Murray in Lost in Translation). Will Ferrell is nearly as funny in deadpan loser mode as he is in hopped up supernut mode. But what I really liked about Stranger Than Fiction was how endearing a gear-jumping, typically precious "unlikely" romance it sports, giving me considerable pause to consider how likable Maggie Gyllenhaal is. There is an existential shadowplay between writer Emma Thompson and the main character in the novel she is writing, who can inexplicably hear her narration whenever he isn't self-aware. She doesn't put herself into the book (that is, she isn't writing about how he can hear her narration), which seems like a huge wasted opportunity (or perhaps a Charlie Kaufman nod too many), but until the two meet, it is fascinating to consider the eerily lucid experiential point-of-view storytelling, wherein we are sensitive to the qualities of both writing and being a character in a "fiction". Very little of it really matches though (Does she write about his trip to the psychiatrist who tells him he is schizophrenic? It's not clear.) and, in the eventual, Dustin Hoffman is brought in to transition Ferrell into self-actualization and Thompson out of sensitivity. But no matter. Even Queen Latifah's brief role as Thompson's assistant, i.e. - the running exposition track (and pointlessly wacky straight woman ying to Thompson's neurotic eccentric yang) can't bring down a film in the throes of the spirit of genuineness embodied in a squarely standard scene like Ferrell's wooing Gyllenhaal with the acoustic (read: vulnerable) croon of Wreckless Eric's "Whole Wide World" before she starts kissing him as if he's headed to his death.

I don't think my opinion a qualified one as, to begin with, I snoozed at least twice throughout, but I assert that there's something refreshingly un-safe about a major studio setting your standard rat versus toad adventure cartoon in a sewer (or lines like "I've got a bum like the Japanese flag"). Though the British humour makes for some right hilarious one-liners, even the toss-off gags like the Benny Hill music popping in at a key moment or the headline "England leads in penalties" seem to do little more than establish the film as British rather than American, despite the fact that its sensibilities lie so squarely with American cartoons. Its also full-up with necessary and unnecessary slapstick (neither of which is terrifically funny) and lags into template tale autopilot after a promising first act. There's nothing serviceable about its characters, though, particularly Ian McKellen's wacky (slash British) The Toad and Jean Reno's self-deprecating (slash French) The Frog. There's also no need to sit around and overrate a film like this.

Somewhat separated from each other, the background - so prevalent in Miller's Mad Max ((post-apocalyptic dust bowl) and Babe (Idyllic storybook farm and Nightmarish storybook city) films - and the foreground - Penguin family crises teach us not to judge what is different - are not even on speaking terms in this one. Often veering into the children's film staple The Long Journey Both Toward Maturity And The Widely-Doubted Unknown, Happy Feet takes place in a mind-blowing snow world with limitless vanishing points, beautiful sun glows and savage wind blows. Unfortunately, I found myself too often falling into Shrek syndrome, where the voices of the characters speak so loudly of the obscenely famous celebrity who lent them his or her voice (e.g. - Elijah Wood, Nicole Kidman and - come the fuck on with it already - (I mean, sheesh) Robin Williams). Indicative of their director, the dark edges of things are included: There's no "Run for your life, Simba! Escape your Wicked Uncle!" here, Mumble (whose titular flappers annoy everyone for some reason) is cast out by the elders and asked to leave at a relatively young age before being zoo-ed (in a sequence of claustrophic, hopeless terror). When it opened with a Moulin Rouge-esque sequence of bombast singing, dancing and Musical-brand exposition about town, I found myself wondering (and now I'm sure): Happy Feet is a committe-driven digi cartoon that Miller was granted a few precious spins of. We fall another league in the slow n' steady descent of animated films still being a marginally safe bet.

What I like about Flags of Our Fathers is completely different than what I liked in its companion film. I, regrettably, ended up seeing Letters from Iwo Jima first, after I started to worry that I'd be missing something outstanding, which turned out not to be the case. It was a pretty good film, nonetheless - as is Flags of Our Fathers, the first in Eastwood's Iwo Jima dyptich (yeah! I got to use this word, too!) - but what I (and I'm sure everyone else who obsesses over the cinema) really feared I was missing was, alas, another Unforgiven. I feel the need to trot this whole Eastwood issue out, as I feel like by showing up for 8 of the last 9 films he's made since 1992, I've somehow been egging on the mediocrity (the first two were pretty good, but the next seven - who lived just down the street in truecrimeville - were not). This is a strong and solid take on the trials and tours of the marines who staged their roles in the famous photograph of four marines propping the flag at Iwo Jima, causing controversy, enjoying breezy celebrity status and coping with the haunts of their military experience. This is the unique bit: It sheds light (without a real nod at parallel, thankfully) on something tickling the underbelly. In other words: An American movie that makes Patriotism seem mechanical and studied, like a zombie-voiced plea for war bond purchase or brash discussions of apathetic attitude among the troops at Iwo Jima. Stark and detailed, Flags of Our Fathers is, in its own right - particularly when taken next to the grey-washed slow burn philosophia of Letters from Iwo Jima - a decidedly American-looking period picture. With such total recall, this glimpse backwards (see also: The Good German) has the casual taste of something patterened after the art of the time (specifically films), a piece of Eastwood's palatte that is almost as intriguing, and certainly a part with the gutteral dinge of the Old West he seemed to be filtering from his own Spaghetti Western experience in the aforementioned golden goose (Unforgiven).

[Note: After re-reading my one-off review of Letters from Iwo Jima, written about three months prior, it appears I did sort of like the same thing about both. Ah, me.]