NEW RELEASES FOR JUNE 24th/JULY 1st

10,000 B.C.
(Dir. Roland Emmerich)
It was the year the Giant Beaver, the Dire Wolf and the Short-Faced Bear became extinct. Homo floresiensis was on its last legs and Mesolithic culture was all the rage. French people were painting the walls of caves and the Spanish, Swiss and Scottish were painting pebbles. Somewhere in Persia someone had the good sense to domesticate goats. Feeling nostalgic yet? I mean, filmically speaking, this kind of cultural and environmental upheaval didn't occur again until the 70s dumped a truckload of glitter all over the umkempt, exhausted, acid-addled corpse of the 1960s...  
 

 
Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, Day After Tomorrow) once again gives us world-wide cataclysm as imagined by a not particularly bright 11-year-old boy. And having been that 11-year-old boy at one time, rapaciously devouring such prehistoric sex & FX romps as Prehistoric Women (1967), One Million Years B.C. (1966), When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970 - from a story by J. G. Ballard!!), and Creatures the World Forgot (1971), whilst doting shamefully over nearly life-sized posters of cave femmes Martine Beswick, Raquel Welch and Julie Ege in their beaver pelt bikinis, I'm finding it difficult to be as brutal to 10,000 B.C. as I probably should be.

So I'll forgive the running eyeliner and plucked eyebrows of the cavewomen, the verbatim King's English lifts from Braveheart and Last of the Mohicans, the pin-up boy good looks of our hero, D'Leh (a brow-challenging turn from Details magazine coverboy, Steven Strait), and CGI effects that range from laughably crude to jaw-droppingly stylized (I think even the Old Master Harryhausen would be impressed by the woolly mammoths...). But, unlike the anthropological bodice-busters of yore, it takes 10,000 B.C. way too long to achieve the kind of dunderheaded delirium that makes criticism seem like a wan response to all the thudding grandeur onscreen, and by then you've had too long to ponder the film's inherent idiocy.

Bonneville (Dir. Christopher N. Rowley)

Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates and Joan Allen take to the road in the titular vehicle to deliver Lange's sainted husband's ashes into the hands of his venomous sister (an unusually austere Christine Baranski) in this trite, half-baked, wet dumpling of a movie. To watch such usually brazen actresses playing Utah spinsters & weary widows, balking at cuss words and handing out the Book of Mormon to hitchhikers, is bad enough, but there isn't enough conflict in this movie to power a Sunday afternoon checkers match, no less a feature film. The humor -- what little there is of it -- is almost exclusively derived from watching actresses you know to be ferocious and profane get all bashful  when the word "shit" is uttered and go loopy as hatters over "accidental" double entendre. As for the paper-thin lessons about female comraderie, I'm pretty sure there are fortune cookies with more pith and wit and those, at least, come with a fortifying meal.

Charlie Bartlett (Dir. Jon Poll)

Here's yet another thinly-veiled attempt to shoe-horn a bargain basement Harold and Maude into the indie zeitgeist in hopes of creating another darkly comic generational touchstone. Young indie film directors these days seem utterly obsessed with giving the emo generation another perennial like The Graduate or Harold and Maude, just as younger writers seem to be beating their scruffy heads against the tomes of Salinger, Roth and Pynchon. Charlie Bartlett has all the basic ingredients -- troubled privileged teenager dissatisfied with the stultifying rigors of private school, out-of-touch parents and authority figures, rebellion against wealth that could only be accomplished by the wealthy,  and a quirky, nonconformist ingenue with a heart of gold. Jon Poll's debut film even goes so far as to steal a Cat Stevens song from Harold and Maude, the whole private-school-jacket -worn-to-public-school schtick from Rushmore, and the disenchanted, stubbled, borderline headcase teacher from Election.

That said, Charlie Bartlett is enjoyable enough, though its contrivances eventually get the best of it. Alpha Dog and Fierce People 's Anton Yelchin plays Charlie, a precocious go-getter who often dabbles in crime as a shortcut to popularity. After having been expelled from a number of private schools, his pill-popping -- but good-hearted -- mother (a vacuous, benign Hope Davis) enrolls him in a dingy public school where he sets up a lucrative and often quite therapeutic psychiatry practice in the boy's restroom, complete with pharmaceuticals he's either copped from his mother or conned from his own bevy of therapists. As a drug-pushing guru, Charlie is able to unite the punks and the jocks, the cheerleaders and the drama club girls, etc. and, for a time, it seems the only thing standing in the way of his being crowned rightful king of youth culture, is the alcoholic, suicidal principal (played with knowing bravado by Robert Downey, Jr.). Of course, there must be comeuppance for all this, and it comes with a startling lack of subtlety and pretty much derails the whole film, turning what once seemed a delicate -- but sustainabl -- balance of real-life and potent fantasy into all-out fable, a disposable message movie.

While the abrubt changes in tone and the reliance on teenage stereotypes don't necessarily hamper Charlie Bartlett 's likability (the movie is as eager to be liked and popular as its main character, in fact), they make the film's frequent nods to cherished pop-culture icons seem pretty damn glib.

Drillbit Taylor (Dir.Steven Brill)

While usually at the service of Adam Sandler vehicles (Little Nicky, Mr. Deeds), Director/Actor Brill finally weighs in with some real comic talent, the ubiquitous team of Judd Apatow & Seth Rogan & though this is a far cry from the wicked comic gems those two have recently concocted (40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad & the much-anticipated Pineapple Express), there's enough profane spark here to make for a great rental. Wade (Nate Hartley, from The Great Buck Howard) & Ryan (Troy Gentile, who made an early career of playing the young Jack Black in Nacho Libre & Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny ), are basically more cartoonish versions of the Michael Cera/Jonah Hill pairing in Superbad, but whereas Cera & Hill were simply marginal high school types -- past being bullied, on civil terms with the popular kids -- Wade & Ryan are complete outsiders & the first day of their high school careers they run egregiously afoul of unrepentent hallway sadist, Filkins (Alex Frost), sadly while wearing identical Hot Topic bowling shirts. It's a break-out performance for Alex Frost (Gus Van Sant's Elephant), who plays the bully with the kind of charming sociopathology Edward Norton often registers. While you half expect a backstory for Filkins that includes child abuse & brutish neglect, he is, in fact, a middle class kid whose family has emancipated him so they can attend to corporate jobs in Hong Kong. For Filkins, high school sadism -- and make no mistake, Filkins is a textbook sociopathic sadist -- is simply a part of the natural order of things. He's found his troubling place in the pecking order & he fulfills the obligations of that post with a cruel, unnerving fervor that might be admirable if he weren't constantly showering less-fortunates with their own piss or trying to run them down with his car.

Naturally, since they're up against a foe bent not just on making their lives miserable, but actually killing them, Wade & Ryan seek help from a bodyguard. After interviewing Israeli army veterans, killer bikers, a wildly over-caffeinated Frank Whaley (Swimming with Sharks, Pulp Fiction), and Adam Baldwin from the 80s classic, My Bodyguard, the two settle on homeless army deserter Drillbit Taylor (Owen Wilson), who plays himself up as a Black Ops/Special Forces renegade. This is the sort of role through which Wilson can sleepwalk blithely & he does. Of course, Drillbit's first order of business is to steal as much loot as he can from Wade & Ryan's homes, with a plan to pull off a fullscale robbery once he's bilked the kids of all the petty cash they can cough up, all the while teaching them ludicrous combat techniques which only serve to further inflame the highly flammable Filkins. Finally, in an unlikely but likable plot contrivance, Drillbit sees the life he's missed out on by masquerading as a substitute teacher. Of course, Filkins & his minion Ronnie (The Wackness' Josh Peck) soon suss out that Drillbit's a fraud, though not as soon as you'd think considering Wilson's rather high-profile panhandling in the neighborhood.

The final showdown between our end-of-their ropes heroes & Filkins is physical comedy at its best, with tons of surprise turns as the battle rages through the bully's comfy suburban home & spills out onto the front lawn. The happy surprises in Drillbit Taylor come in the form of scale, not ingenuity. All the cliches are in place -- hearts of gold are revealed, evil is vanquished & meekness redeemed, like Jesus said it would be. But Brill meanders blissfully away from easy outs just enough that when tidy bows are finally tied round the proceedings, you almost feel lucky to receive the rather ho-hum package. It doesn't hurt that the cast is peppered with very likable familiar faces, including Mike Judge-regular, Stephen Root as the gullible Principal Doppler, Judd Apatow's wife, Leslie Mann (Katherine Heigl's sister in Knocked Up) as Wilson's love interest, insult-comic Lisa Lampanelli as Ronnie's mother & the charming Valerie Tian (Juno) as Wade's reason to fight.

 
PICK OF THE WEEK!

In Bruges (Dir. Martin McDonagh)

There are bits here that will certainly remind you of other existential gangster films. Ralph Fiennes' Harry Waters seems a step just to the left of Sir Ben Kingsley's Don Logan in Sexy Beast & has a name sure to conjur up the mob boss from Nicholas Roeg & Donald Cammell's psychedelic gangster classic Performance (1970), the bald, pug-nosed Harry Flowers. There are also shades of Jean-Pierre Melville's French crime classic Bob Le Flambeur (1956), and its crazily underrated re-make, Neil Jordan's The Good Thief (2002). This is only director McDonagh's second film (the first being the very odd Brendan Gleeson vehicle Six Shooter from 2004), and it's so self-assured & lacking in post-modern guile that you'd think it was made by a grizzled genre veteran like John Mackenzie (1980's The Long Good Friday) or Mike Hodges (Get Carter, Croupier, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead). And just in case you're thinking this may all be a little high-brow for your tastes, what with all the scenes of Flemish art & talk of heaven & hell, I'd like to reiterate that this is also one of the bloodiest films I've seen in quite some time, with fierce, gruesome violence coiling around every medieval cornerstone & down every quaint cobblestone street. But, come to think of it, with grisly Low Country masterworks like this15th Century doozy from Gerard David, The Flaying of tihe Corrupt Judge Sisamnes, so prominently displayed in the film......

  ...Some blood's to be expected. In Bruges is a modern crime classic & highly recommended!

Meet the Browns (Dir. Tyler Perry)

 Proving John Huston's adage from Polanski's Chinatown that "Politicians, ugly buildings & whores all get respectable if they last long enough," Tyler Perry has finally been getting show-biz respect lately, scoring industry magazine covers & feature interviews in mainstream entertainment magazines. His one-man cottage industry of live theater, TV shows & 12 movies since 2002 (most of them remakes of his own movies...), has long-been a goldmine with black audiences, but often failed to translate to audiences at large. One could posit racism here, since Perry's films are nearly all cast with black actors & plotlines that depict African Americans in all walks of life, from poor rural farm families to nouveau blue-noses, but it's more likely that Perry's incompetence as a director & infantile funny bone is what keeps mass acceptance at bay. That said, Perry is obviously laughing all the way to the bank.

Meet the Browns is standard-issue Perry, though he's managed to corral Oscar-nom Angela Bassett & A-List character actors Jennifer Lewis & Frankie Faison into this one. We have the usual rural southern grotesques (best exemplified by Perry regulars David & Tamela J. Mann), mind-numbing transvestism (Perry himself re-appears once again as the noxious granny, Madea), mawkish sentimentality & Perry's distasteful certainty that some folk will laugh at damn near anything if it's loud & scatological enough.

The plot, for what it's worth, concerns Chicagoan Brenda Brown (Bassett), a prostitute's daughter with three kids from three different dead-beat dads, who loses her job & packs her family off to Georgia for meet her deadbeat dad's "respectable" family, on the occasion of his funeral. Turns out dad was a pimp before he found Jesus. Go figure. Under the catty wing of this reluctant extended family, Brenda learns to love, trust, open up to men again, mother more gracefully, etc.

Only two things redeem this clanging barrage of shrieking unfunniness -- luscious model Sofia Vergara as Brenda's bi-polar pothead friend (she can't act, but who cares in crap like this?) & the pretty hilarious ptich-black funeral scene outtake that runs during the closing  credits. Wow, Perry had a genuinely funny scene & cut it out of the movie!

Addendum: Some special scorn needs to be heaped upon composer Aaron Zigman for blatantly ripping off the Brian's Song theme ("Hands of Time") to jerk tears for this abomination. 

Persepolis (Dir. Vincent Paronnaud/Marjane Satrapi)

A truly unique animated film based on a French autobiographical graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis is not only one of the finest animated films of the last decade -- using expressionistic, defiantly two-dimensional, black & white animation instead of trapsing uselessly into the Uncanny Valley -- but simply one of the best coming-of-age stories ever made. As a graphic novel Persepolis was treated with the same kind of respect accorded to Art Spiegelman's ground-breaking holocaust memoir, Maus (which was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize), and is published in America by Pantheon Books. The memoir begins during the first stages of the Iranian revolution which deposed the comparatively liberal Shah in favor of a repressive Islamic theocracy. The young Marjane's family are educated, westernized members of an Iranian middle class that will soon disappear altogether & as the stranglehold of Islamic fanaticism forces her family further & further into the shadows, Marjane is shipped off to Vienna for high school, where she becomes a punk rock girl, falls in love, has her heart broken & eventually returns to Tehran, attending college in the restrictive atmosphere of Islamic zealotry.

The story is an incredibly personal & heartbreaking one. The scene where Marjane is reluctantly shipped off to Austria by her nearly defeated parents caused a lump in my throat the size of a pomegranate. Voiced by a legion of fine French actors, including Catherine Deneuve (Marjane's mother) & Deneuve & Marcello Mastroianni's real-life daugfhter, Chiara Mastroianni (Marjane), the characterizations are all flawless. Of course, such a subtle animated epic was bound to get lost in the parade of pasta-cooking rats, franchise ogres, surfing penguins & neurotic bumblebees, and sure enough, it did. Sad part is, despite the often heavy subject matter, the politics, expatriation, religious issues & other important issues in Persepolis all take a back seat to Satrapi's unique, irreverent & altogether entertaining worldview. And the animation swirls one image into another with such forward momentum & grace that Persepolis is every bit as rollicking as Ratatouille or Meet the Robinsons & ten times as valuable for being indisputably human & tragically alone in this year's animated film offerings. A great film, highly recommended.

Sex and Death 101 (Dir. Daniel Waters)

Wriggling uncomfortably  in the guise of a romantic comedy, Sex & Death 101 has a pitch black undertow that almost makes up for it overstaying its welcome by about half an hour. To say the least, the film is an ambitious wreck on the gender wars highway, masquerading as the kind of winking, innuendo-strewn male bonding comedy most women would think of any excuse to avoid seeing, Sex & Death actually manages to perfectly portray the eventual anomie & ennui of the serial womanizer & tackle some fairly heady questions about fate & the nature of true love along the way. Hunky Simon Baker (who would probably play James Bond if Bond were a TV series) plays Roderick Blank (hey, I said the movie was ambitious, but it only lives up the ambitions about 3/4 of the time), the owner of a boutique fast food franchise called Swallows (leaving room for a neat gag where an employee's nametag reads, "Linda Swallows"), who is accidentally e-mailed a list of all the women he has & ever will sleep with in his life by a rogue supercomputer. This mysterious supercomputer is supervised by three enigmatic functionaries named Alpha, Beta & Fred (comedian Patton Oswalt), who inform Blank that he was the only e-mail recipient to get such a list, the other hundred or so recipients receiving the exact dates of their deaths. Needless to say, Blank feels lucky. He shouldn't, of couse.

Blank quickly dumps his fiance & makes a mad dash through the list, eager to meet the next prospect. That is until he finds out that the last name on the list is a serial...um, comatizer called Death Nell (a surprisingly buxom Winona Ryder) by the tabloids & her feminist acolytes. Death Nell sleeps with all manner of date rapists, peeping toms, hounds & simple street corner sleazebags & then injects them with a substance that causes them to slip into a coma. As luminous as Ryder is in this film, it's a sure bet they slipped into the engulfing darkness quite happily. 

Unable to back-pedal at this late date & with no further sexual prospects on the list, Blank barricades himself into his house & tries vainly to stave off the inevitable, which comes in a genuinely surprising fashion. Sex and Death 101 veers giddily from the salacious to the profound & it has some trouble holding its focus, or even nailing down an appropriate tone. It wants to be vile slapstick, satiric farce & melancholy food for thought all at once and -- unless you happen to be French -- that's a hard row to hoe. Still, Waters (who wrote the screenplays for both Heathers & Hudson Hawk), keeps throwing curveballs & the movie is anything but boring, what with its copious nudity, game supporting cast (Scrubs' Neil Flynn, Talladega Nights' Leslie Bibb, TV staple Frances Fisher and, of course, the always agreeable Oswalt), sudden necrophilia tangents, castration threats, whirlwind narrative inventions & that aforementioned ambition.

I'd have to say I recommend Death and Dying 101, but you'll have to stay with it or it won't do you a lick of good & you'll hate me for even mentioning it. Finish it though, and you may wind up a fan.

PICK OF THE WEEK!

Shotgun Stories (Dir. Jeff Nichols)

With this feature, first-time director Jeff Nichols joins the ranks of great cinematic regionalists such as fellow Arkansan David Gordon Green (George Washington, Undertow), Floridian Victor Nunez (Ruby in Paradise, Ulee's Gold) & Texan Eagle Pennell (Last Night at the Alamo). Nichols has an unerring eye for down-at-heel southern small-town life, for characters whose eccentricities grow on them naturally, like unconscious barnacles, setting them apart as individuals, but also making them ill-disposed for successful living. But where many regionalists meander with glum resolve through the simple tasks or diversions of the people they portray, Nichols knows how to mount a helluva tale. At rock-bottom, Shotgun Stories is a classic movie Western about two sets of brothers whose paths violently collide when their mutual father passes away. Michael Shannon (the berserk force of nature in William Friedkin's incredible Bug from 2006) plays Son Hayes, the unmotivated, but innately perceptive, elder brother of the clan the alcoholic bastard left on the wrong side of the tracks. When his wife leaves him for gambling away a month's salary, he takes in his two brothers, one who's been living in a tent in his backyard & another whose been living in a custom van down by the river. While we don't get to see as many privileged moments with the other Hayes family, the one sired after the father stopped drinking & found Jesus, we can see easily that they're more well-adjusted. The younger boys are college-bound & the older boys are rough-hewn, but successful, farmers.

As the violence escalates, our cinematic sympathies (often so different from our real-life sympathies) are definitely with the more colorful poor white trash, though -- upon closer examination -- both sides have their reasons & both sides act with Old Testament clarity when the feud turns deadly. The small-town atmosphere -- boarded up main street, sterile highway Dairy Queen, rusty railroad bridges, endless fields of cash crop, small crackerbox houses with creaking broken screen doors -- weighs heavy on these characters & Nichols takes the time to show us the nooks & corners, meandering with subtle humor for a good half an hour before Shotgun Stories takes its dire turn into sad, inevitable violence. It's a really astonishing debut feature & one that sticks to you, the way small-town ghosts are wont to do. Highly Recommended.     

Just In on DVD

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Dir. Paul Schrader, 1985)

An appropriately florid attempt to capture onto film the essence of one of the 20th Century's most confounding artists, Yukio Mishima, who was, by turns, a great novelist in the tradition of Thomas Mann, a popular celebrity, a filmmaker, a libertine, a strident militarist, a self-styled samourai & a national joke. Such a wildly contradictory life, with so many confusing tangents, allow director Schrader (Cat People, American Gigolo, Hardcore, Auto Focus) a multitude of voices, both visually & narratively.

In 1972, before Schrader penned the script to Taxi Driver while living in the backseat of his car, he wrote a book called Trascendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, a seminal text suggesting that the films of the given directors, despite differences in locale & cultural landscape, aim to express, in a similar fashion, that which lies beyond human experience or comprehension. A famous quote from the book says that films "cannot inform one of the Transcendent, they can only be expressive of the Transcendent." While this expressive impotence could easily explain why so many film students find the films of Ozu, Bresson & Dreyer deathly dull, it could easily be used to describe the pitfalls in telling a life as enigmatic as Mishima's. Swap out the word Transcendent for Mishima in the quote & you'll see what Schrader was up against. Mishima is, perhaps, his most Transcendental film, and not just because he gets a chance to imitate the styles of his favorite directors, especially Ozu, whose influence is deeply felt in the stark black & white sequences of the author's childhood.

Between the writer's odd, secluded childhood & his black-comic ritual suicide in the offices of the Eastern Command in Tokyo (which bookend the various chapters of the film), we are treated to some of the most gorgeous, technicolor artifice since Douglas Sirk, scenes whose textures are so vivid as to demand a tactile response & performances (most importantly that of the brilliant Ken Ogata, as the older Mishima) that engage while only deepending the mysteries of Mishima's crowded life. Mishima is most certainly Paul Schrader's crown jewel as a director (Blue Collar running a close second), and it's a landmark of biographical cinema, a way of intimating instead of telling that will one day, hopefully, allow for a film treatment of the life of Celine. Most highly recommended.

 
The Night Stalker (Dir. Max Kleven, 1987)

Great Z-Movie hard-ass Charles Napier (Ed. Note: Too much crap for a parenthetical overview) stars as sweaty, alcoholic detective J. J. Striker (is that an, um, Dickensian name?) who, while protecting a whole gaggle (murder?) of prostitutes with hearts of cotton candy, becomes a big sweaty alcoholic juggernaut to track down a whore-killer who, for some reason, is impervious to bullets. It may have something to do with the very weird, phased-out, Alvin Chipmunk voodoo chants that fill his (and, by extension, our...) head when he's about to kill, kill, kill. Watching Napier drink in this film actually made me want to stop drinking altogether. Thankfully the flick was only 93 minutes long. Dodged a bullet on that one.

Simon, King of the Witches (Dir. Bruce Kessler, 1971)

Same Time, Last Year
July 2007

Black Snake Moan (Dir. Craig Brewer)

You might be thrown off by the presence of some respected actors in Brewer’s sophomore effort (his coming-out was 2005’s Hustle & Flow), but this is, in all actuality, a Southern Gothic exploitation classic, akin to such florid, sweat-pocked, lurid exercises in Chitlin’-sploitation as Poor White Trash (Harold Daniels, 1957), Mudhoney (Russ Meyer, 1965) & Shanty Tramp (Joseph Prieto, 1967). The best moments of his previous feature achieved the same kind of potboiler excess as Black Snake Moan, but were overwhelmed by the idea that the director, through the gritty performance of Oscar nominee Terence Howard, might actually be trying to SAY something. There’s no such subterfuge here. Brewer comes out blazing with one incendiary (or at least eyebrow-raising) image & plot turn after another.

Samuel Jackson plays former blues musician/present-day Holy Roller cuckold, Lazarus, who discovers a half-naked young girl (Christina Ricci) on the side of a country road, beaten senseless. By asking around some, Lazarus finds out Ricci is the town tramp, which in this case is attributed to a nearly pathological condition - more a kind of degenerative swamp fever than a psychological dysfunction. Lazarus, wounded to the quick by his own wife’s philandering & clutching at his religion the way he once clung to a bottle of rye & a guitar, decides to “heal” Ricci & chains her to his radiator until she can get “her mind right.” Packed with fetid, kudzu blues of the Fat Possum variety (R. L. Burnside, Black Keys, North Mississippi All-Stars, Son House), lensed in heat-saturated colors, and rife with fever-dream dialogue equal parts dementia & hokum, Black Snake Moan is a classic of Southern Exploitation & damned enjoyable from start to finish. But if you’re looking for any of the vaguely literary merit found in other inflated cornpone like Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade, Carl Franklin’s One False Move & Sam Raimi’s The Gift (ALL written by Thornton), you’re definitely barking up the wrong cypress tree here.

And yes, judging from Alpha Dog & this, it appears Justin Timberlake can, indeed, act.

Driving Lessons (Dir. Jeremy Brock)

Sort of Harold & Maude without the hippie beads & Nehru collars, Brock’s Driving Lessons eschews the eyebrow-raising suggestion of physical love for a more intellectual & aesthetic attachment between the young boy (Rupert Grint, perhaps overusing his deer-in-headlights befuddlement) and the older alcoholic Shakespearean actress (a pleasantly over-the-hedgerow Julie Walters) who purloins him for a road trip to some kind of small-town literary kitsch-fest that could only occur in Great Britain. Laura Linney (Breach, The Squid & The Whale) adds some necessary pathos & vulnerability to the otherwise thankless role of Grint’s (Harry Potter & All Manner of Magical Objects) domineering mother. Late-period Walters (Educating Rita, Billy Elliot) teeters hilariously, as always, between dowager frump & hysteria-prone Minerva/Medea/Electra. The whole thing’s a very British lark, of course, but a massively enjoyable one & highly recommended.

Shooter (Dir. Antoine Fuqua)

Considering how few good, non-comic-book-related action flicks there were last year, it’s surprising Shooter didn’t fare better with critics & at the box office. Mark Wahlberg plays world-class sniper - ahem - Bobby Lee Swagger, who feels responsible for his buddy’s death while on a clandestine mission in Ethiopia. Guilt-ridden, Swagger (hey, he didn’t name himself!) predictably becomes a backwoods hessian recluse with a ridiculous pony-tail & the kind of chip on his shoulder only a formidable, ominous military officer like Danny Glover can effortlessly brush away. When Glover & a portentous gaggle of goons (led ably by Elias Koteas & 24’s Rade Serbedzija) show up at Swagger’s mountain cabin suggesting he set up a model assassination of the president so they know just how a potential assassination threat might go off, we’re pretty sure our hero’s being set up, but it’s endless fun to watch as the wild conspiracy unfurls. Almost every performance here exceeds expectations. Michael Pena, as the hapless but observant FBI agent who sides with Swagger, really seems to be struggling between his need to please higher-ups & his nagging doubts. He’s no hero at the outset & he doesn’t become superhuman just to meet the demands of the action genre. Glover & Koteas are chummy sadists who relish their positions well-outside the dictates of the U.S. Constitution & law and order in general. Ned Beatty gets points for just showing up & boldly preaching the bad news that money is power & vice versa. But the most outrageously entertaining turn comes from that old drummer for The Band, Levon Helm, as some kind of gun-nut guru with a hand fetish & a truly unique worldview. We even catch the occasional knee-smacking moment of wit from Wahlberg, flashing endearingly from inside his sturdy Bronson-ian non-expression. Fuqua’s direction is suitably brutal, with moments of giddy, gratuitous violence that will certainly give the movie a lasting shelf-life among B-Movie enthusiasts. Shooter’s a guilty pleasure to be sure, but an outright pleasure nonetheless. Recommended.