The Ring

Okay, I’ll be honest with you. I hate horror movies. Most of the time, I laugh my way through them because of how obvious they are and how stupid they are. Not to say that the ketchup blood has definitely gained some better graphics, but the plots and scare tactics just bother me.

However, when I watched “The Ring,” I had a new respect for horror. At last, there was a story line and a mystery that was combined with the horror. This start with a journalist who finds a video tape that has killed some teenagers. She now has to find exactly what killed these youth and why. Her investigation is what leads her to finding the “horror catch” as well as solving a mystery that you get to solve along with the main character.

This film came out in 2002 (I know, it’s still kinda old). The star is Naomi Watts, acting as Rachel Keller, the journalist. Her side kicks are Martin Henderson, David Dorfman and Brian Cox.

Oh, and for a little extra history of this film, this was a re-do of a Japanese film on the same topic, known as Ringu. The Japanese version is said to be more of the mystery side than the horror side when it was put together. And, for those of you who actually do like horror, you can follow this up with the Ring Two. It’s just as good.

So, if you are not a horror buff, like me, start with ‘The Ring.” It’s definitely better than an actual horror movie, with some good substance and a story line that keeps you involved, not just through adrenaline rushes.

Bad Boys 2- From the “movieseer.com” site.

Here is movie review from movieseer.com site thank you .
This summer movie season has been dubbed the “Summer of the Sequel” by the American media, and rightly so. It seems to follow the tried and true method of movie marketing: if it worked once, it’ll work again. Michael Bay has even developed a following of his own, which happens rarely with directors primarily known for blowing stuff up. People know exactly what to expect from a Bay movie and that’s what they go to see. Couple that with the draw power of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, and you have a project that any studio would be foolish not to green-light.

Bay and uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer are teamed-up once again and set out to make another bullet-riddled corpse of an adventure. The only comparable flick this summer has been Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, simply because both follow the same formula: same director, same cast, similar script, big budget. But where Full Throttle derailed (over-directed, too goofy to be serious, too serious to be goofy), Bad Boys II stays right on track. Bay knows his audience almost better than they know themselves and he keeps this cinematic train of chaos skillfully on course.

Mike (Smith) and Marcus (Lawrence) are still working for the Miami Police Department, basking in the pink-neon glow of the city famous for excess. Marcus is still the same family man with a short fuse and Mike is still the same playboy with a fast car. After an informant tips them off to the biggest ecstasy shipment the country has ever seen, they find themselves knee-deep in bullets, drugs and bad guys — as usual. Things get a bit complicated, though, when Marcus’ sister Syd (Gabrielle Union), and her DEA team investigate the very same drug lord that Mike and Marcus are on to. What happens next? Well, in these troubled times it’s nice to see an example of two different law enforcement agencies helping each other out while trying to bring in the same bad guy, and that’s what happens. Working together, they figure out that the drugs are being shipped all over the country using a rather inventive (and pretty gruesome) method by a Cuban drug lord. And before you can say “Let’s get ‘im!”, we’re in hot pursuit up the bad-guy chain of command.

Smith and Lawrence don’t quite reach the lofty heights of buddy cop movie perfection that Danny Glover and Mel Gibson set with the Lethal Weapon series, but these two talented comedians are still very fun to watch. That said, it seemed to me that their relationship was a bit too highly strung. They spend nearly the entire movie arguing, and where the first Bad Boys portrayed them as best friends who liked to yell at each other, the sequel paints them more as acquaintances who are forced to spend all their time together. I still had to laugh out loud a few times at some very funny exchanges, especially with Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano) who plays the stressed-out buffer between his boys and the police commissioner with great comic timing.

The camera rarely leaves the duo’s side as we follow them from one tip to the next, dodging bullets the whole way. Yes, it’s a movie, but be careful not to think about it too much because their cop methods are laughably unrealistic – if real cops behaved half as unlawfully as these two, they’d be tried for high treason. They make the LAPD look like a gang of pacifist choirboys. But the big draw of the film is — say it with me — the action, and, wow, does it ever deliver on that front. Bay seems to have tied a camera to Spiderman and paid him to swing above and beside speeding cars and bullets as they smash through nearly everything in sight. He excels in bringing the audience right into the eye of the hurricane, especially in a draw-dropping car chase that has the bad boys and an armada of police cars chasing a fully stocked car transport truck. When the heavily armed bad guys start unhooking the cars and dropping them on the road behind them, I lost count of how many went spinning past the camera in 100 mph backflips. Bay handles these scenes with the skill of a veteran pro, bombarding his audience with slick, aggressive camera moves and quick cuts that keep things moving but at the same time don’t distance or confuse the audience. (His three editors deserve special medals, as the longest shot in the movie is about three seconds long).

The script, by Ron Shelton and Jerry Stahl, certainly knows how far it can push the violence. Make no mistakes, this is a “hard R” film and should definitely not be seen by the kiddies. As an example, it wasn’t enough for a bad guy to get thrown off of a moving car — he had to spin through the air, bounce off of concrete support and fall 5 stories onto a glass kiosk. Bullets fly, blood spatters and by the end of the film, our heroes have gone from solving crimes with guns and humor to storming a Cuban drug fortress with Delta Force commandos, rocket launchers and C4 explosives. Where do they train these police officers?

The one reservation I had with the movie was that it dragged on a bit too long. I don’t have a problem with a movie having one or two almost-endings, but when your popcorn action flick passes the 2 hour and 30 minute mark, it’s time to wrap things up. Also, intimidating a young kid who has just come to your house to pick up your daughter for their first date: funny. Intimidating him with a gun: not funny. And while I’m complaining, I might as well bring up the music, which always seemed to be precluding a gunfight, even when the pace of the film slowed down; and the sound in the theatre. Movies like this deserve to be seen with a top-of-the-line sound system. Might I humbly suggest that both major theatre chains in Thailand shell out for a THX technician to spruce things up a bit.

Autumn in New York

When hotshot restaurateur and womanizer Will Keane (Richard Gere) meets Charlotte Fielding (Winona Ryder), she’s a diner in his restaurant having her 22nd birthday party dinner with friends. The other guests are quick to chat with him – they all clearly think this old guy is drop dead gorgeous - but arty hatmaker Charlotte stays quiet and demure. “Do you speak?” an already-lusty Will asks.

Well, Charlotte doesn’t really speak much, and herein lies one of the main problems with this film: Given Charlotte’s 22 years to Will’s 48, what is it that draws these two together? Sure, it’s partly lust, but to really care about what happens to these two characters, the audience needs to know why they care about each other.

Will cleverly connives to get Charlotte to go on a date with him in an awful white dress, one things leads to another and it’s morning – time to discuss their “relationship”. Will tells Charlotte he can only offer her “this”, and he’s only being honest because he really likes her. Charlotte responds that she, too, can only offer him “this” because she has a terminal illness and she’s only telling him because she really likes him.

And so, despite the warnings of friends – and of Charlotte’s grandmother (Elaine Stritch) - Will falls for the dying Charlotte, and Charlotte for some reason falls in love with Will. The age difference between the two is emphasized by the fact that Charlotte’s mother also fell for Will, but, the script emphatically points out, they didn’t sleep together. Yeah, sure! We already know that would be utterly unlike Will.

Ryder, despite slowly succumbing to a fatal illness with no name, couldn’t possibly look more radiant and vital if she tried – she’s just inconvenienced by an occasional fainting episode at dramatically appropriate moments. She and Gere both put in reasonable performances, but there’s just no convincing chemistry between the two.

Actress-turned-director Joan Chen (Xiu Xiu: the Sent Down Girl) makes the most of it being autumn in New York, and cinematographer Changwei Gu does a good job of capturing the city’s beauty. This is a fine film to watch; besides parks filled with russet leaves, boats in lakes and ice rinks, there’s Charlotte in her white bedroom, playing with stringed glass beads hanging from her ceiling, there’s rainy streets, cozy restaurants, trendy apartments and eventually there’s a dusting of snow on the streets to indicate – a little obviously - that time really is ticking away for Charlotte.

There is a subplot of mystery, as an attractive woman (Vera Farmiga) who could be a former lover tries to find out more about Will. Who is she? Is she a threat to Will and Charlotte’s relationship? It’s an interesting diversion that serves to emphasize the difference in age between Will and Charlotte, and allows Will a bit of character development, but once her identity and past is revealed, one has to wonder why Charlotte doesn’t already know this woman.

Plot inconsistencies aside, this is a film that isn’t too ambitious from the start, so it doesn’t fail to deliver. It’s a sentimental romance that’s nice to watch; there just should have been a little more substance to the romance part.

Audition

A quick glance at the list of external reviews linked on the IMDB website for Audition confirms that it’s been relegated to obscurity as a cult horror film. Aside from the New York Times and the Village Voice, most reviews are from genre-specific websites like “Slasherpool Review” and “Sex Gore Mutants.” Genres can be helpful categories, but their dogmatic application can also breed preconceptions that can steer us away from movies that make us think, solely based on what they make us feel.

Such is the case with Audition, an undeniably gory film by director Takashi Miike, who’s become something of the auteur of graphically extreme social commentary in his native Japan, where genres thankfully hold a much looser grip on the public imagination and commercial films are unshackled by a Byzantine ratings system like the one that infests the US. Even so, Miike remains a cult figure whose movies probably generate more academic debate than gross receipts. Any release of his movies in North America would probably require an NC-17 rating, or worse, a hackneyed edit of the scenes deemed most offensive, emasculating it of its message. Which is a pity, because as hard as it is to watch all the way through, Audition is a courageously insightful film that earns every drop of its viscera, and whose underlying political message is — or at least should be — much more disturbing than its over-celebrated bloodletting.

The first half of Audition plays much like the dramas of other Japanese directors, with a ploddingly thoughtful introduction to a broken family. Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) loses his wife to an illness in the first scene, with the dying wife on the bed intercut with shots of her young son walking up the corridor bearing a hand-made gift for her. This melodrama is followed by a jump to seven years later, when the son (Tetsu Sawaki) is now a lively teen who tells his father that he looks old and should consider remarriage. Together with his film producer friend Yasuhisa (Jun Kinimura), Aoyama contrives an audition for a fake film project so that he can overview a few dozen young women for dating purposes. From the ensuing parade of young ambitious actresses, Aoyama selects the mysterious Asami (Eihi Shiina), a shy former ballet dancer whose resume essay intrigues Aoyama with descriptions of mourning and loss that mirror his own.

Their courtship is touching, slow, and full of genuine moments, with the two trading bits of information and slowly allowing access to each other’s interior. Aoyama is nevertheless the aggressor, being the older one and the instigator, as well as the male. But his deepening desire for Asami and craving for entry into her life is sincere, which makes the radical gear-shift of the last act of Audition all the more unsettling. Aoyama is our sympathetic protagonist, an aging widower looking for love, and thus not the expected subject of the kind of horrible vengeance Asami finally wreaks upon him. It is this seemingly unjustified twist that reeks of sadism to many, who dismiss Audition as an incredibly gratuitous ruination of what was amounting to a very sweet film about lonely people seeking a second chance. But it’s this twist that is exactly Miike’s point about the true disorder of Japanese society. The problem is not beautiful, seemingly nice girls who turn out to be medically-trained sadists, but the normal sexualization of Japanese women by men who don’t think of themselves as abusive or hateful.

Miike’s trick is to first show us a movie world in which we think we know the rules. Aoyama’s loneliness is not especially selfish, and his occasional guilt over the memory of his deceased wife provides touchstones to his humanity. The audition is a fraud, but Aoyama himself thinks so too. He isn’t trying to exploit the women, just find a compatible one. In parallel, the audience is drawn into the game as well, delighting in the voyeuristic pleasure of watching 30 pretty Japanese girls preen and prance and occasionally strip for us. The other women in Aoyama’s life aren’t victims either — his subordinate who announces her impending marriage, his housekeeper, and the teenage girl who studies biology with his son all pass through Aoyama’s life like unimportant minor characters. He’s only interested in Asami, more so when she disappears on him, leading him to an investigation of her past that begins to reveal a dark side with implications of murder.

The deeper Aoyama gets into his search for Asami, the more his life and mind begin to unravel, concurrent with the unraveling of our own understanding of what kind of movie we are watching. Although Audition drops several early hints that Asami is not what she appears, we are still unprepared for the descent into dream logic that Miike takes us on. Audition liberally mixes and matches sections of dialogue and scenery, placing dream sequences within dream sequences, and jumps back and forth between time, space, and realities. But it’s not a random pastiche — rather, it mirrors the collapse of Aoyama’s sheltered world, and more importantly accumulates into an unexpected indictment of Aoyama’s (and our) entire sexual existence. In one long hallucinatory sequence, he engages in terrifying oral sex with every woman in the movie in turn, unleashing his subconscious guilt into a conscious crime. Aoyama is not a bad person, and neither are we, and in mutating the comfort of our own middlebrow sexual ideas into a list of indictments that warrant torturous punishment, Miike accomplishes something revolutionary, or at least way overdue.

Its insight, as well as the likelihood of its miscomprehension by most audiences, is reminiscent of Remy Belvaux’s 1992 fake-documentary masterpiece Man Bites Dog. Following a charming serial killer with a camera crew, Belvaux casualizes and humorizes his protagonist’s multiple homicides until we forget that it’s murder — something which most mainstream entertainment does as well. Bit by bit the camera crew becomes involved in the killings, as does the audience by extension, climaxing in the drunken butchering and rape of a pregnant women whose fetus is eviscerated. It’s this scene which delivers Belvaux’s hidden message that murder is horror, and we are horrible for having enjoyed any of it. Not coincidentally it’s also this scene that had to be edited out for release in most markets, reducing Man Bites Dog to a mockumentary about a serial killer who eventually gets killed by another serial killer and sparing us the discomfort of facing our own appalling appetite for violence as entertainment.

Audition uses very different but equally disciplined method to deliver a similar message about sex. Asami represents the very essence of mainstream desirability — young, lithe, opaque yet sweet — what Yasuhisa describes as “beautiful, classy, and obedient.” Even when she turns into a nightmare sadist she’s still sexy, a calm philosopher whose face never breaks from its angelic expression even as she executes a piano-wire amputation. Even when we see what she has reduced a former victim to — and believe me, it’s awful — Asami never descends into monstrosity. Miike never lets us off the hook because Asami never stops being what we still desire.

Atlantis: The Lost Empire

In the 21st century, when Japanese culture and technology has penetrated the Western world so thoroughly that Pokemon and PlayStation have become household terms, it’s not surprising Disney thinks it’s time for its new era of animated films.

Amid the increasing popularity of these Japanese products in the States, 20th Century Fox has released an action sci-fi animation pic called Titan A.E. (which is obviously influenced by PlayStation games), while Columbia Pictures have Final Fantasy, whose protagonist goes by the (Japanese sounding) name Aki Ross. Even Warner Bros. released Iron Giant to have its share in the animation craze, which has long been Disney’s unrivalled market. How, then, can an animation giant like Disney stay put? The studio moved quickly to develop the Atlantis project, expecting to reclaim its post as the number one animation business. But this time, this film, a quest for the lost ancient city, is packed with action scenes in Japanese comic fashion. Atlantis hardly has anything in common with Disney’s typical style, which usually contains beautiful musical animation – and there’s no easy listening theme songs nor any joker character to win laughs from the children. This is a big mistake.

An animated adventure film, Atlantis tells the story about a quest for the legendary empire of Atlantis – which has been flooded by sea waves and has been lying under the ocean ever since – to seek for new energy sources. The idea stemmed from the belief that the Atlantis people are much more civilized than those in the present world, even though it disappeared more than 12,000 years ago. Amid the ongoing debates as to where Atlantis might be located, linguist Milo Thatch (voice of Michael J. Fox) made his appearance to point out mistakes in earlier interpretations of ancient scripts related to the topic.

Making new suggestions, Milo is now set to take off on a mission to locate the lost land so speedily that junior viewers probably won’t be able to follow. The dialogue is also full of technical terms and spoken in such serious manners it’s as if Disney’s long-standing target group is being left out.

The team meets up with Aryans, and Milo is the only person who could communicate with them. He doesn’t know he is being used by the group so that they could have enough information to find something else. The story progresses with many twists and turns — mostly related to the crookedness of Commander Rourke, the leader in this exploration. He forces Milo to make Princess Kida to tell them the secrets of Atlantis’ power resources. The complicated storyline is likely not going to be enjoyable to a young audience.

Even for teenagers, Disney’s new target group, the battle scenes come late in the story (when Milo leads the citizens of Atlantis in combat against Commander Rourke) and will probably not generate much excitement. If Disney thinks these scenes would impress PlayStation lovers, Disney is wrong. The games are much more exciting.

There’s one interesting observation about Disney’s animation films (released in theaters). With only one notable exception (Tarzan), all of Disney’s animated films that featured male protagonists – in Hercules and The Hunchback of Notredame, for example – have not been successful. Atlantis producer Don Hahn and director Kirk Wise might never have realized this, although their experience with Hunchback should have been a good lesson.

Despite earlier claims that the animation team of Atlantis is among the largest teams in the world of animation, the characters turned out so stiff that it’s hard to believe this is a Disney picture. Background details, too, cannot be compared with earlier Disney works, even though the use of Cinemascope (widescreen projection) has been employed to show the scenes in wide format.

With regards to the voices of the characters, Atlantis didn’t make any ripples here either, compared to Robin William in Aladdin and Eddie Murphy in Mulan. Not to say that Michael J. Fox, James Garner and Leonard Nimoy did a bad job, but rather that the screenplay was simply too flat and didn’t give the actors much of a chance to exhibit their talents.

Disney’s attempt to reach new target groups, by developing a new style, is admirable and comprehensible – the studio is losing its share in the market it used to control. Moreover, internal conflicts caused key executive Jeffrey Katzenberg to say goodbye to Disney (he moved on to co-found Steven Spielberg’s production company, Dreamworks). Disney’s attempt to produce and distribute a new style of animation, however, did not prove to be successful. Whatever project Disney begins to develop, its rivals seem to match and beat them. So, as it turns out, Disney is losing its identity – with regards to both developing plots and in producing animation. Take the example of recently released The Emperor’s New Groove, which is very similar to Dreamworks’ The Road to El Dorado in many aspects. You’d find it difficult to point out an obvious distinction in the drawing works from in Atlantis from those of Fox’s Titan A.E.. You can also see how heavily Japanese comics have influenced Atlantis’s storyline, overall pictures, drawings and other details. These could make hardcore Disney fans worry about the unique charms that are disappearing from Disney’s animation.

Arthur and the Minimoys

Arthur and the Minimoys which brought in more than 80 million euros on the box-office in France is allegedly Luc Bessons’ last movie as a director. I can’t help but wonder whether if made that much money because everybody knew it was Bessons last and wanted to give him a silver screen salute or because of the huge marketing campaign (Sorry! call that Brain-washing) that started in August 2006 in France (for a release in December 2006)

But beyond the brilliant marketing campaign performed by Luc Bessons’ team – what about this animation movie which is “for children and parents alike” as Besson mentioned in virtually all the movie magazines in France.

Movies such as the Big Blue (Directors cut – not the American version where girl gets boy) la femme Nikita, Leon the Professional (Directors cut because that movie is just sooo cool) the 5th element came from this director who gaves us some of the best visual shots movie history has seen. I must admit, when I go to see a Besson movie I have a certain level of expectation – and that level is high : the music scores by Eric Serra are brilliant – the visual shots are breath taking the action is full of energy and well paced, the humor is dry or sarcastic and the script is original.

Apparently – for this final movie – all those values took a sabbatical! Well – the only thing we can say which is positive about this movie is that it a fair attempt to try 3d movie animation on the European continent. Other than that it is an artistic disaster and this movie genre should be left to those who know how to do it be – i.e. Pixar / Dreamworks / Sony pictures.

The whole script of Arthur and the Minimoys is basically the story of a boy who, after his grandfather disappears, sets out to save his family home from emerging real estate developers. Arthur learns that he must follow his grandfather’s ancient clues to a vast treasure – and unlock the passageway to a spectacular new world filled with mysterious little people, so tiny they are considered invisible, and enlist their help. But once in the magical land, Arthur must join swords with a beautiful princess and a reckless army of defenders to save the land from the evil wizard. It seems like an impossible task, but as he discovers along the way, sometimes the smallest heroes can make the biggest difference.

That sounds like a C.S. Lewis novel … yes it does – which makes the fact that Besson wrote, produced, and directed this final movie even more disappointing because there is nothing original in there.

Reviewers Note: yes that’s the pitch is a carbon copy of the movie profile on www.Movieseer.com – I honestly tried to find something else in there but no avail. There are some spoofs to other movies such as Star wars (the magic dagger does sound like a light saber at one time) Saturday night fever or Pulp fiction – but how do you want 7 year old to recognize such spoofs? Adding to the pain, having the voices of Madonna or de Niro or David Bowie or Snoop Dogg just makes you wonder why on earth did they accept to do this?

Not only does the whole movie turn around this pitch – but it also indulges in the in-your-face display of a naive goody-two shoes attitude that even Disney stopped doing that more than 4 years ago and a meaningless emphasis over a particular bad event that can perhaps be found today an Bollywood B-Movies where the allies take forever to die but still manage to give a last speech which is more than 4 pages of script long … and he has 5 bullets in his chest!

The Europacorp which sound like thugs that came out of a ghetto which is in complete incoherence with the rest of the animation environment. And even if their one-liners are amusing and some times second-degree it doesn’t really fit in a fantasy animation as smoothly as it would in say any Shrek movie.

Around The World In 80 Days

If the American box office results for Disney’s latest child-friendly flick are any indication, the company that bears Walt’s famous name is in trouble. Boardroom mutinies, disappointing box office for many of their recent movies and a general public opinion that equates ‘Disney’ with ‘corporate merger’ rather than ‘fun,’ seems to have put the House of Mouse on very shaky ground indeed. In fact, while watching the latest remake of the Jules Verne classic, I was reminded of a quote that, I believe, refers to the charging armies of scientific advancement: “While wondering if they could, they never stopped to ask if they should.”

Around the World in 80 Days is quite a conundrum actually – full of movement but emotionally empty; stuffed with colorful characters but joyless in execution. One has to wonder if anyone other than corporate America could have taken such a timeless classic and turned it into such a mildly entertaining, sterile adventure story.

I must admit, I have never read the book. I imagine that I was supposed to somewhere along the meandering track that is my early education, but I almost certainly skipped that class. However, I am familiar enough with the story and characters to know that, fantastic as Verne’s imagination was, I don’t think he ever conjured up stories with jade buddhas and battles between rival kung fu clans in the mountains of China.

The plot, in case you don’t know, chronicles the adventures of Phileas Fogg (Steve Coogan), a brilliant but misunderstood scientist in 1890’s England who’s pressured into taking a bet that seems impossible: to circumnavigate the globe in 80 days or less. With his trusty sidekick Passepartout (Jackie Chan) and sultry tagalong Monique (Cécile De France) by his side, he sets out to prove the scientific world wrong.

But almost right away, the plot gets lost. Fogg, an eccentric genius whose life is full of crazy gadgets and amazing inventions, shoulders the entire story but we rarely see any hint of his brilliance. Once the bet is underway, the gang sets out by… boat. And then on to a train, and a hot air balloon. Then another train. Only at the end of the movie does his brilliance catch up with him, but by then it feels almost like a fluke.

The thing that rather surprised me, actually, was how very segmented the movie felt. Obviously we can’t stay with our heroes every single step of their adventure; time and story structure dictate that we’re only able to see a small part of the whole. But each time we catch up with our intrepid crew, if feels forced and diluted, like a series of short sketches thrown underneath the blanket of the classic story. Bad set design and claustrophobic direction don’t help either; you can nearly see the set walls and lighting equipment.

It was inspired casting to hire Steve Coogan though – a superstar in England but a relative unknown in America. From his days as Alan Partridge (“A-haa!”) to his great work in 24 Hour Party People, he’s proven that he’s no flash in the pan. I read a review of an advance screening several months back that proclaimed that this would be the movie to make Coogan a superstar in America. But with an under-written role that only seldom lets his comic timing shine through, he doesn’t have much room to breathe and disappointingly, fades into the background.

So who’s left to sell the film? Jackie Chan of course, the Dick Clark of kung fu movies, who I’m sure will still be doing back flips out of low-flying helicopters well into his 90’s. It can’t be said that Chan is boring; it’s clear from every role that he’s in that he’s giving 110% and I’m darned if he ain’t such a likeable little feller. Granted, his character’s story, and the fact that it plays a pivotal role in the action of the script, is nowhere to be found in the book; another glaring modification that the studio hopes you won’t notice if Chan beats up a few guys with a wooden bench.

One of the recurrent things that got my goat, though, was that in a movie that’s supposed to capture your imagination and let you see new and wonderful worlds through the bewildered eyes of the cast, there were way too many distractions. Cameos from everyone from special effects god Kit West to multi-billionaire businessman Richard Branson just foster quick whispers of “Oh, it’s him!” This is a sweeps-week television gimmick and doesn’t really belong in an adventure movie. It also doesn’t help that your two antagonists – one with more makeup than KISS and the other stupider than a bowl of hair – are absent for nearly the entire movie. Where’s the consistency? Where’s the danger?

Anger Management

The poster for Anger Management is an inspired marketing maneuver: Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson, nose-to-nose, screaming in each other’s faces. It promises an intriguing combination, riffing on the public perceptions of Sandler, who usually plays characters with preposterously short fuses, and Nicholson, who, in real life, settled a traffic dispute with a golf club. “Heeere’s Johnny,” indeed.

While Nicholson undeniably adds scene-chewing appeal, this is primarily an Adam Sandler vehicle, replete with all the requisite lowbrow dross we’ve come to expect: flatulence, dick jokes and cartoon violence. This will come as a relief to Sandler aficionados after their hero’s recent roster of more atypical projects (the Mr. Deeds remake, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love, and the animated 8 Crazy Nights), although Sandler’s trademark irritating obnoxiousness is mercifully toned down in a subdued role. Nicholson capably fills that particular void with relish; with a disheveled beard and his straggly hair standing on end, he looks something like Salman Rushdie on speed, deliciously hamming with that devilish grin and those elastic eyebrows on full parade. But even Jack can’t save what is essentially a one-joke movie; we’re reminded of Robert De Niro’s participation in such lame turkeys as Showtime and Analyze That.

Sandler plays mild-mannered Dave Buznik, a shy, self-deprecating designer at a pet products company, who loves his fiancée, Linda (a criminally underused Marisa Tomei), despite being too timid to kiss her in public. Through a series of bizarre in-flight misapprehensions he is misdiagnosed as a person filled with suppressed rage, and assigned to therapy with famed anger specialist Dr. Buddy Rydell (Nicholson).

Rydell introduces Dave to a therapy group, including Luis Guzman, as a gay hood with a paunch fettered by Day-Glo spandex, and John Turturro as Dave’s “anger buddy.” Both are unmistakably wacko — and so, it would seem, is Dr. Rydell, as Dave finds himself trapped in an escalating spiral of trouble and court appearances. Dave initially thinks Buddy’s methods are unorthodox, and when the unconventional Dr moves in with him for “intensive counseling” and starts flirting with Dave’s sweetheart he’s even less impressed. Is Buddy a heretical genius or a manipulative Svengali twisting Dave’s life to suit his own ends? Or is he just a couple of couches short of a therapy certificate?

Rydell, a loose canon with an explosive temper, is more in need of anger management than his client, despite his predilection for homilies like ”Temper is one thing we never get rid of by losing it.” For a while, the set-up, poking fun at America’s obsession with self-help and pop psychology, provides humor, and touches of absurdity in David Dorfman’s script provide glimmers of hope. One of best scenes sees Buddy forcing Dave to park in the middle of snarling, rush-hour traffic to accompany him in a rousing rendition of the West Side Story torch song I Feel Pretty. However, the patchy screenplay gets stuck floundering in a one-way street and runs out of ideas.

With Tommy Boy and Nutty Professor 2 on his resume, director Peter Segal is no stranger to this sort of comedy. Sandler controls most of his movies himself (he’s executive producer this time), but his most critically well-received performance to date came when he relinquished control for Punch Drunk Love to Paul Thomas Anderson. While the pair seemed the unlikeliest of bedfellows (or at least as unlikely as Sandler sharing a bed with a naked Jack Nicholson, as calamitously occurs in Anger Management), for once Sandler was in a sharp film that unlocked a dark, soulful potential inherent in most of his screen personas (which vary little) and he displayed hitherto unsuspected depths. Here he steps out of his usual volatile persona, demonstrating a facility for underplaying surprise; Dave is one of the few Sandler creations who doesn’t seem to need anger management — his likeable soft-centered demeanor brings warmth to the wackiness.

This creates a problem in itself: Sandler, playing it relatively straight, undermines Anger Management by unevenly blending an ostensibly character-based comedy with exaggerated farcical lunacy. Any film that expects us to care about the emotional journeys of its characters can’t afford to digress with cringe-worthy walk-ons from Rudolph Giuliani and John McEnroe. The way the movie piles on cameos, such as Woody Harrelson as a German drag queen known for “lickinzeedickin,” smacks of desperation. That said, the brilliant John C Reilly’s bit part, as a monk with a wedgie, was reportedly one of the film’s redeeming features, but Thai audiences are deprived the chance to judge for themselves by the censors who have culled all traces of Reilly from the film.

America’s Sweethearts

The execs at Columbia must have wet their pants with greedy anticipation when the casting agents confirmed that Julia Roberts, John Cusack, and Catherine Zeta-Jones were on board with producer/writer/star Billy Crystal’s romantic Hollywood spoof America’s Sweethearts, not just for the star power draw but for what must have looked on paper like an ultimate conceptual cocktail of Hollywood superstars and insiders portraying Hollywood superstars and insiders in a manner both comic, romantic, and mildly satirical.

Of course, the reality of combinatorial star arrangement tends to resemble more art than science, more alchemy than chemistry. Just as 1993’s The House of the Spirits showed that combining critical darlings Glenn Close, Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, and Armin Muehler-Stahl with a screenplay by celebrated novelist Isabel Allende could still result in a critically-panned movie, 2001’s Rush Hour 2 continues to prove that previous niche actors like Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, when combined properly, can create a $350 million franchise.

Despite the industry’s habit of ignoring the lessons of history, at least some of the caution that should have accompanied the creation of America’s Sweethearts seems to have seeped through. It should be said that among the four leads, three have been around long enough and endured enough transformations to know something about how promising star cachets can fail. Prior to Roberts’ recent triumph as Alpha-Woman with Oscar, she suffered through a half-decade where mentions in the press were limited to making fun of her attempt at an Irish accent (Michael Collins, Mary Reilly); Cusack survived an awkward transition from teen hero everyman to adult hero everyman with his wit intact; Crystal has been in the purgatory of semi-Jew one-liners for so long that he’s returned to writing. Zeta-Jones, though too new to be a veteran of anything except pre-nuptial agreements, does seem to know how to use being typecast to her advantage.

It’s probably not surprising then, that America’s Sweethearts comes across as an orchestrated effort to prevent anyone from playing against type. Crystal plays Lee, a publicist for a film studio which is so heavily invested in its upcoming release, Time Over Time, that Lee must forcibly or fraudulently reunite the film’s stars into the real-life couple that they were for a dozen previous hit films. Cusack plays star Eddie Thomas, a tilted, jilted over-wound but basically nice guy who’s still obsessed over estranged star-wife Gwen Harris (Zeta-Jones), an eye-candy narcissist with a new Spanish lover and a habit of abusing her assistant/sister, the humble, hard-working, undiscovered beauty Kiki – Julia Roberts. All four are brought together for a press junket at a desert hotel as they await the arrival of the film, which the possibly-insane director won’t let anyone preview except the press.

In other words, there’s little here that you couldn’t infer from the America’s Sweethearts poster, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. While there’s much to be said for actors who try to expand their milieu a bit, here we have four that have apparently learned to be satisfied with their basic (and lucrative) appeals. And in that capacity, they’re quite good. Crystal mugs, Cusack clenches and twitches, Roberts glows from within and Zeta-Jones whines incessantly. The burden of surprise or twist is shouldered instead by an alternately inspired and lazy supporting cast of second-tier vets: Stanley Tucci is sharp as ever as the studio head, Hank Azaria heterosexualizes his Birdcage role as the Spanish lover, Alan Arkin yawns as Eddie Thomas’ guru, and Christopher Walken riffs a nice Terence Malick-esque parody as the director.

What fails is not the synergy of the main players, but the attempted synergy of tone. Ostensibly a parody about media couples and their effect on public reception of their art, America’s Sweethearts takes its comfortableness with itself so far that it loses any edge. The supporting cast, while funny, aren’t given meaty enough roles in Crystal’s screenplay to land much punch. Tucci’s studio head plays a few laughs as the cruel avarice, Arkin rolls his eyes conspiratorially when Eddie Thomas finally leaves his ashram, but rather than deepening any parody these bit parts glare like disjointed self-reference, thus painting what was supposed to be a celebrity parody as a strange parade of celebrity walk-ons. Walken, especially, gets wasted. His arrival at the junket with the secret film is the payoff that drives the film forward, but he too gets cast aside – as does most of what he brings in the film canisters – as America’s Sweethearts settles into an over-written, overworked ending that at best reflects the warm whimsy of the central plot but betrays the zany comedy promise of the movie’s funniest moments.

It almost seems that in the end America’s Sweethearts is an ambitious attempt to do nothing, except to lower the standards of a star-ensemble cast. There is arguably a thematic connection between a plot about audiences over-expecting their superstars to extend their screen romance to real life and teaching us to under-expect our superstars’ ability or desire to expand their art. It’s a stretch, too much of one to make America’s Sweethearts anything resembling an important movie about movies. But by the soul-deadening standards set by this past summer of Bangkok releases, it’s a more than reasonable place to get some entertainment, the kind that’s best provided by movie stars who, for better or worse, know exactly what they’re doing.

American Pie: The Wedding

I don’t think that I’ll be offending any purists when I say that in the illustrious and distinguished genre known as the teen sex comedy, there are really no new ideas left. I have to be honest: before Porky’s came out (and became the highest grossing independent movie ever at the time), I can’t even remember if there was a teen sex comedy genre. At any rate, there is now, and if you look at the grosses for the current king of that particular hill — the American Pie series — the genre has never been healthier.

This third entry in the oft-quoted series follows the same time-tested formula as the dessert it’s named after: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Why change a recipe that’s both satisfied, and made, millions? For a dessert, that’s a good idea; for a movie, well… while the third entry is still standing, its age is definitely beginning to show.

After following our intrepid group through losing their respective virginities’ in the first film and renting a summer party house in the second, it’s time for everyone to grow up and face the last hurdle to adult-hood: getting married. Jim (Jason Biggs) and Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) are tying the knot and taking their friends with them. Um, that’s about it, really; a 13-word premise padded to 90-minutes which, come to think of it, has pretty much been the modus operandi for the last two flicks.

The thing that makes the American Pie series so (in)famous is not that it has gross-out humor, but that it’s one of the few films to so blissfully embrace it and display it like a gap-toothed kid who has just won his first Tae Kwon Do trophy. From sleeping with your friends’ mom and drinking sperm-laced beer to super-gluing your hand to your penis and French-kissing your best mate on a dare, there seems to be nothing that the series won’t tackle. It’s like hanging around with that one friend that everyone has who just does not get embarrassed, ever. You know something horrible is going to happen but all you can do is watch and wait for it to come.

In American Pie: The Wedding, Jim and his loyal cronies face the usual daunting obstacles of an impending wedding – meeting the bride’s parents for the first time, finding the perfect dress, learning how to dance and competing for the affection of a bridesmaid. But, don’t forget, this is a Pie sequel and therefore wouldn’t be complete without touching on topics such as bestiality, shaving your pubic hair and oral sex in public. This is not a film to bring your younger cousins to.

Despite the absence of Meena Suvari, Chris Klein and the highly over-rated Tara Reid, who all previously played major roles, this one still manages to satisfy its audience. Director Jesse Dylan (son of Bob, brother of Jakob), doesn’t do a particularly good job here — not that he really needed to break any new ground. By this point, the characters and stature of these films are nearly self-guiding and I think that they just needed a name to put on the marquee. The script, by Pie veteran Adam Herz is funny but a bit too gross, which was one of the things that bothered me. In the past two Pie movies, the filmmakers knew the location of the very thin line that separates humor from disgust. In this one, I think they lost the map because on several occasions they step over the line — I swear I actually heard someone in the audience gag during one particularly over-the-top scene.

Seann William Scott, (who works in curse words like an artist works in watercolors), also returns as the notorious Stifler but instead of being a loveable, blasphemous goof like in the last two movies, they’ve turned him into an overbearing jerk. Still entertaining, but not as funny. The genius of Fred Willard as Michelle’s Dad is wasted which is a shame, because when his comedy “on” button is lit, he could read a “Sorry for your loss” Hallmark card and have the room in stitches. And I don’t want to waste too much time complaining about Thai censorship laws, but we all know what breasts look like. Do they really think they’re saving the country by blurring out the offending areas? Give me a break.

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