Guess Who

It's Meet the Black Parents when Zoe Saldana takes her fiancee Ashton Kutcher to her parents ' house for their 25th anniversary party in Guess Who, a comedy based on interracial relation s that doesn't get mean, and succeeds to give laughs, even with uncomfortable situations nobody would want to be part of.

Kutcher plays Simon Green, a successful young man who just proposed to Zaldana's Theresa, and they're going to tell her parents when they go to the party. That is until Simon learns that Theresa hasn't told her parents he's white, which causes for much laughter when they go to meet them as they are, just like her, black.
Bernie Mac plays Percy, Theresa's father, and he's not happy about the situation. Not entirely because he's white, but also because he's all about security and hard work so when he learns that Simon has quit his job (for unknown reasons) and he never told Theresa, he gets mad.
But it's all about laughs most of them time when Percy finds the kids having fun, or every time other members of the family meet Simon, and specially in a very funny scene at the dinner table involving black jokes that is very well done and doesn't offend anybody.

Though Dude, Where's my Car? was an awesome movie 5 years ago, and his Kelso in That 70's Show is comedy gold, Ashton Kutcher's latest tries were pretty horrible in My Boss's Daughter and Just Married, but he makes us forget those two here as he is great. Mac is really funny as always but can also play the serious dad very well.
Him and Kutcher have a really great chemistry and it works perfect in the movie.

With great comedic actors and great funny situations handled really well when using racial jokes, Guess Who offers a really fun story that works on every level, and it's one of the best comedies, if not the best, we've had this year so far.

Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous

Five years ago, Sandra Bullock starred in the surprise hit Miss Congeniality, a movie about a female cop protecting a beauty pageant by being a contestant on it. I have to admit, it was funny, and overall a very good movie, so it's no surprise that, just like Legally Blonde and Bridget Jones Diaries to name a few others targeted to same audience, we're getting a sequel. It's also no surprise that like those other movies' sequels, Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous is not as good as its predecessor, but is still good enough.

There's a new formula though, as instead of having Gracie Hart (Bullock) saving someone all by herself, we add Regina King as FBI Agent Sam Fuller, and we have a female buddy cop movie.
It turns out that pageant host Stan Fields (William Shatner) and current Miss United States Cheryl Frasier (Heather Burns- who was crowned in the first movie over Gracie) have been kidnapped, and they're going to be killed. Gracie can't work on the case because she's screwing up every case she works on as a result of her being famous now, and instead of catching the bad guys, she has people asking her for an autograph. Because of that, she is named the face of the FBI, so she can give the agency a face the public like, and so she can do something instead of work in a desk.
But she wants to rescue Cheryl, so she gets Sam, who's working as her bodyguard because nobody wants to work with her for being antisocial, and together they try to solve the case and bond at the same time. Also helping is Gracie's new stylist Joel (Diedrich Bader), and Jeff Foreman (Enrique Murciano), the FBI agent in charge of them while in Texas.

Funny again is Bullock, though you can tell she's getting older and doesn't look as good as in the first movie but she can still give a good comedic performance.
Heather Burns and William Shatner are all tied up most of the time but when they get to say something is always funny, specially Burns. Also really funny was Diedrich Bader, who got most of the laughs.
The only one I didn't like was Regina King. Now, I'm not a big fan of hers, mostly because every time I see a movie with her she's always mad and looks angry. I don't know why but I can't get myself to like her. And she's fresh from her acclaimed performance in Ray, where she was really good, but I have to say that I liked the other two actresses better in that movie.

So I have to say I liked it. It had the good characters we liked from the first movie (bye bye Benjamin Bratt), added new good characters, and there were some really funny parts. If they keep it like this, I could see myself liking Sandra Bullock and the rest of the guys going for the trilogy.

Dear Frankie

Emily Mortimer stars in Dear Frankie as Lizzie, the single mother of the a 9 year old title character. Frankie (played by Jack McElhone) is deaf, and he doesn't have a dad around. He's a sailor currently at sea on board of the ACCRA. Frankie writes to him, and answers from all over the world telling about the places he visits. It's been like this ever since Frankie can remember, as his dad has never been back to visit him.
Soon we learn that there is no sailor dad, and instead is Lizzie the one that receives Frankie's letters and writes back as if she were his dad. They are currently living in a small town in Scotland, and they've been in the run from Frankie's dad for a long time, a man who used to hit Lizzie and he's the one that left Frankie deaf, "a gift from his daddy", as Lizzie says at one point. But Frankie doesn't know any of this. He's just a boy moving with his mom and grandmother (played by Mary Riggans) all the time, but he's happy with communicating with his dad via mail.
Problems for Lizzie start soon, as Frankie learns from a school friend that the ACCRA is arriving in a couple of days, and his friend even bets him money that his dad wont come home to visit him, so Lizzie deals with what to do, finally going with the idea of finding a stranger that would pose as Frankie's dad. Lizzie's friend Mary (Sharon Small) is the one that finds her the stranger (played by Gerard Butler), and Frankie gets a dad for a few days.

The story is very predictable, using the formula of the stranger getting to know the family and finally falling in love with them, but there are a few subplots regarding Frankie's real dad, and the story doesn't finally go where it usually goes.

The acting is excellent from all the actors, with Emily Mortimer being note perfect. Being such an emotional movie, her character cries and is angry and so many more feelings, but Frankie is deaf, so she also has communicate all these feelings with the use of the sign language, so we have some really powerful scenes of her crying and doing the signs at the same time. Jack McElhone is also great, playing the innocent and sweet Frankie. He and Gerard Butler have some great and touching moments playing games and being a dad and his son.

Directed by Shona Auerbach and written Andrea Gibb, and also possessing a superb score highlighted by Damien Rice's "Delicate" in the closing credits, Dear Frankie is a very emotional drama with such great acting from all these great British actors. A must see for those not afraid to cry.

Sin City

Robert Rodriguez had to quit the DGA so Sin City creator Frank Miller could share Directing credits with him in the movie, and he also got crazy mastermind Quentin Tarantino to be guest director and put a little of him in the movie. The result is a masterful story filled incredible visual style taken right out of Frank Miller's violent and tragic books.
The movie combines 3 of the books and moves in a Pulp Fiction sort of way, giving us lots characters all performed perfectly by the great and talented cast. I won't get into much detail as how the stories go because with so many characters and crime and violence being the theme of the movie, I would be spoiling their faith, so I'll just name which characters form part of what stories and who they are.

The Hard Goodbye is the first of Miller's books, and follows the story of Marv (Mickey Rourke), a big, tough, covered in band-aids man currently on parole, and seeking revenge for the death of his true love, a prostitute called Goldie (Jamie King). His parole officer and friend is Lucille (Carla Gunino).
He also receives the help of Goldie's twin sister Wendy (also Jamie King of course) and the killer is a young cannibal called Kevin (Elijah Wood).
Marv's is the best character in the movie for me and his story is also the most satisfying to watch, and not completely because Jamie King and Carla Gunino are both naked most of the time. Mickey Rourke is a marvel to watch here and Carla Gunino puts a great supporting performance too.

The Big Fat Kill is the third book in the series, and the central story in the movie. Dwight (Clive Owen) protects his new friend, a waitress called Shellie (Brittany Murphy), from her crazy exboyfriend and cop Jack Rafferty aka Jackie Boy (Benicio Del Toro), who doesn't want to be her exboyfriend. The story takes them to the city' Old Town, ruled by the prostitutes after an arrangement with the cops that keeps them out of the place letting the women to protect themselves. They are led by Gail (Rosario Dawson), a former lover of Dwight's, and there's also the very young Becky (Alexis Bledel) and the deadly Miho (Devon Aoki). Jackie Boy's side is later led by a big black man called Manute (Michael Clarke Duncan).
Dwight is also one of the best characters, with very good work by Clive Owen. My beloved Alexis Bledel looks great, and the amazing Devon Aoki provides the best action.

Finally we have That Yellow Bastard, the fourth book, named after the deadly rapist called Junior (Nick Stahl), who trying to get to Nancy (Jessica Alba), an almost victim of his acts years ago, now a stripper working at Shellie's bar. John Hartigan (Bruce Willis) is the cop that stopped him that time and must Nancy again after getting out of jail. Hartigan's partner is Bob (Michael Madsen).
This story is split during the movie and it works great, with Bruce Willis doing a great job in the lead as well as Jessica Alba.

Besides those three stories, there is an isolated opening scene consisting of a dialog between a salesman (Josh Harnett) and his customer (Marley Shelton).

I haven't mentioned, though it's easy to deduct from the trailers, that the movie has the same style of the books, being all in black and white with just some objects in color like blood, lights, shoes or hair to name some. This style looks amazing, and was filmed like last year's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, with the actors working against a green screen and then Robert Rodriguez added the backgrounds using today's technology.
These excellent visuals, smart and violent action stories, and the great work by the entire cast, make Sin City the movie an excellent adaptation from the probably excellent books by Frank Miller. I can't wait to read them and watch the movie again.

The Ring Two

Hideo Nakata, director of the Japanese originals Ringu and Ringu 2 takes the helm from Gore Verbinski for the American sequel after the very successful The Ring a couple of years ago. I really liked The Ring, but I accepted it as just a horror story that worked without the classic jumps and sounds that are all over the new generation of horror movies, and it was also smart, with a great ending.

Now in The Ring Two, Naomi Watts is back as Rachel, who had defeated the ghost of Samara by making a copy of the damned tape, saving her son Aidan (David Dorfman) and herself from dying after 7 days of having watched the taped. Six months have passed and they have left Seattle and are now leaving in Astoria, Oregon, a place where nothing happens until the tape reappears in the hands some kids who end up killed (or scared to death) by Samara.
After some discoverings, Rachel finds out that Samara wants to get into the body of Aidan so she can be free again, so Rachel must find out how to stop her.
Personal note here, because I totally didn't know that Rachel was Aidan's mother. He always called her 'Rachel" in the first movie and there was never mention of a father or anything, so I was assuming that she was his aunt or something. Weird stuff, cause when she asks him to call her "mom" in this one I was like, "What?".

What I like about the movie is that Nakata kept the same style that Verbinski used (though I guess Verbinski did the same, taking it from Ringu) in The Ring, keeping the story moving by making us, and the characters, figure out what's going on, instead of turning up the volume and making us jump at every cheap chance. I also liked how the scenes in the tape continue to work and are used in new ways and for more discoverings.

What I don't like is a lot, starting with the kid. Aidan was really creepy in The Ring, not telling what he knew and all that stuff, and it worked great that time, but that doesn't work now. He knows what happened to them before, so he's not creepy anymore, he's just acting like an idiot by not saying anything. Also, there's a scene which was just pure laughs towards the end and it wasn't meant to be like that, but knowing him from the first one and how the character is, they can't expect us to take it seriously.
I also have problems with the secondary characters, because they are totally useless in subplots that do nothing for the main story. Sissy Spacek's appearance is good though, despite being way too short.
Now my biggest problem is how the stuff happens. They invented too much new stuff, and have forgotten almost completely about the Tape, which was what made the movies in the first place. There's also not a mention or single use of the the tweaked faces in the pictures or the dying after a week deal (the latter only at the very beginning but not by the main characters).

Overall, it's not a better movie than The Ring, and I don't like a lot of it, but for some reason I ended up liking it anyway. I guess because of Naomi Watts, as she once again puts a great performance, and the story, despite the many new stuff, is still interesting and smart.

Millions

UPDATE: I had to watch the movie a second time and remove from my head the idea that Danny Boyle is the director, but that's what it took for me to love the movie.
The imagination of the people that made this movie in incredible, displayed on screen by the two perfectly portrayed kids. One bribing the kids in his new school so they would be his friend and work for him, and also planning ways to make the money worthy after the currency change from British Pounds to Euros, like buying properties or change it into American Dollars.
The other kid has more pure ideas, since the money was an 'Act of God', and so he wants to make good deeds or miracles in order to be an Angel when he goes to Heaven just like he hopes his Mom did. And I love the Saints idea now, and it was used, advicing him what to do with the money. I guess I really felt the magic with this second viewing.
Oh wait, Danny Boyle is the director? Bravo.

This was my kind of negative review from last month:

You're Danny Boyle, you had a breakout hit with your horror (not zombie!) movie back in 2002 and you are picking your next project, Millions (written by Frank Cottrell Boyce), a drama about 2 children finding stolen money and what they go through with it, all set in an unusual religious background. Odd choice, and the result, disappointing.

Alexander Nathan Etel plays Damian and Lewis Owen McGibbon plays Anthony, two little kids that move to a new place with his father after their mother dies. Damian is the younger one, and his imagination is bigger than anything. He's also cute as hell with his little freckles in his face. Add his British accent and you have the cutest kid ever, until he started annoying me with his religious stuff. The kid is crazy for Saints, and he imagines lots of them, and he knows everything about them too, always stating their names, date of birth and death, and the miracle they did to became Saints. Damian is looking for his Mom, and so he asks all these Saints if they know her, always getting a negative response.

The title of the movie refers to the money Damian encounters while day dreaming one time, but it's real, even though he can't believe at first, so he tells his brother Anthony for confirmation. After realizing all the money they have (they even count it!) they start spending it, in different ways though.
Anthony, being older and less innocent, starts buying stuff, even buying friends (they didn't have any at their new school since they just moved in) which turns into one of the best parts of the movie making me remember Donnie Darko's introductory high school scene with the music and all.
Damian has other ideas on how to use the money: to make good deeds. Yes, He starts giving money away, buying stuff for people he doesn't know, donating money, even his Saints ask him for stuff.
All this ends when someone comes to claim the money, and we learn that the money is stolen and not an 'Act of God' like Damian was thinking.
We get here the only other cool scene of the movie as we see how the money was stolen, filmed in the same style as Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later. After this we get the kids dealing with the problem of what to do, while Damian keeps talking to his Saints.

The movie is fine, good performances, but I really didn't like the whole Damian talking to the Saints idea and how it was used, and I think they should have made the movie about Anthony and his story, as he gets to do all the stuff I was thinking I would do if I found that money, and that's what I wanted to see here.

Ice Princess

The beautiful yet very precocious looking (she's 19) Michelle Trachtenberg makes her starring debut in Disney's Ice Princess, about a young girl very into math (geek!) who gets into ice skating for a school project and ends up finding her true calling.

Michelle is delightful as Casey, who has almost all her life planned (with the help of her mom Joan, played by Joan Cusack), so she only needs to make a final school project so she can get into Harvard. She likes to skate, so she gets the idea to film her school friends, 3 aspiring professional ice skaters, and create a computer program that transforms the skating movements into aerodynamic equations. Math stuff.
Soon, she starts liking it, and with the help of the program she gets really good at it, to the point where she finds herself competing with her 3 friends, in part so she can implement the program into herself.
Her mother knows nothing about this and is not happy when she finds out, also not happy is her coach Tina Harwood (Kim Cattrall), a former professional skater that was suspended for causing an injury to a competitor. Her daughter Gen (Hayden Panettiere) is one of the skaters so she doesn't want Casey to win and be better than her.
Gen doesn't have a problem though and supports Casey, same for the other 2 girls, a Chinese girl name Tiffany (the actress' name is nowhere to be found) who has a great artistic skating style, and the small sized Nikki (Kirsten Olson), nicknamed "The Jumping Shrimp".

The story is predictable even from the trailers, Joan Cusack is a waste (though she shouldn't even be taking this 'mother roles'), and there are more than necessary lines that are so cliche you'll have your eyes rolling, but the good attitude and charm of Michelle Trachtenberg and her supporting girls (specially Kirsten Olson) make for an entertaining movie that parents wont mind, kids will enjoy, and little ice skating girls will love and worship.

The Upside of Anger

I'm starting the early Oscar buzz for next year nominating Joan Allen for Best Actress. She owns The Upside of Anger, a tragic drama with comedic bits written and directed by Mike Binder, from start to finish. She's strong, funny and amazing.

Allen is Terry Wolfmeyer, a woman whose husband leaves her for his secretary and goes to Sweden. It happens unexpectedly one day and he doesn't say anything to her or their daughters. After this, Terry becomes this hateful woman who takes on heavy drinking and smoking pot with her friend Denny, a former baseball superstar, now a sports talkshow host on a local radio, played by Kevin Costner. He's also excellent as the stoned and drunk, but also serious when needed Denny.

The daughters are 4, and they already hate or are soon going to hate her mother because of they way she treats them, Terry tells us at the beginning of the movie.
Alicia Witt plays the leaving for college Hadley, who can't wait to leave the house and her mother. She then plans to get married but she tells her mother the day of her graduation, also the same day she's going to make her mother and sisters meet her in-laws, who've known of the marriage plans for some time now. Easy to predict that Terry wont be so happy about the situation.
Then we have Erika Christensen as Andy, who's skipping college to start working, so Denny, trying to help despite Terry being against it, gets her a job as an assistant producer on the radio. Andy also starts a relation with Denny's producer Shep, a kind of dirty 40 something year old. He's played by writer and director Mike Binder.
Felicity's Keri Russell plays third daughter Emily, who dreams of dancing and go to ballet school, which is an Art School she tells her mother trying to convince her to let go there. She also starts a bad eating habit so can stay thin for ballet.
Finally, the so beautiful but only 17 years old Evan Rachel Wood plays the young Popeye (as her family calls her), who's just in high school trying to find her first love in a awkward new friend who just joined the school she goes to.
Though they're mostly happy, Terry always finds something to complain about in their lives, justified in most cases.

At 2 hours, my only complaint is that the movie should have been maybe 10 or 15 more minutes longer, making the daughters' stories longer, and allowing these amazing young actresses to show off they excellent acting skills. But it's not a big complaint, because it's all about Terry and her story and performance, dramatic, funny, and hateful but understandable. And it's very early, but maybe it's time, after 3 nominations, for Joan Allen to get the gold.

Downfall

During the first scenes of the Oscar nominated Der Untergang, the biggest grossing movie ever in its country of Germany, we see Adolf Hitler selecting his new stenographer between 5 young women. As the very nervous Traudl Junge starts the test which consists of Hitler dictating a letter to her, she makes some mistakes to which he replies something like "Calm down, even I have made bigger mistakes". He's warm, and even fatherly to the girl, and you know he's Hitler, he who killed Jews to preserve his race and also tried to conquer the world, but you already start not hating him. Even liking him, because we're seeing something we haven't before, and that's the greatness Director Oliver Hirschbiegel achieves with this movie, he shows us the human side of Hitler and those around him, in their final days when staying in a bunker in Berlin while the Russians were taking the city and ending World War II and everything these people believed in.

Besides the wonderful Alexandra Maria Lara who plays Traudl Junge, this all German cast is also lead by Bruno Ganz as The Fuhrer in an amazing performance, Juliane Köhler as Eva Braun, Ulrich Matthes as Joseph Goebbels, one of Hitler's Chiefs, and Corinna Harfouch as Goebbels' wife Magda. There several many other characters like Hitler's generals, the doctors, and even his cook maid.

We get to see what they all suffered on these last days for many of them, and who supported Hitler and who wanted to surrender, and also specific stuff about them that is not common knowledge like that Hitler was a vegetarian, or that he married his wife Eva just hours before they killed themselves. We see how exactly they killed themselves, who followed him to suicide and for what reasons, and the many other happenings in those final hours, most heart wrenching and horrifying, but fascinating.

The movie doesn't make you forgive Hitler and the Nazis for what they did, of course not, it just shows you what happened to these people, and you can continue feeling exactly what you felt before.
Personally, I absolutely don't agree with what Hitler did regarding the Jewish people and the preserve of his 'Pure Race', but I admire him for having the balls to try to conquer the world, and thanks to this masterpiece, now even more.

Robots

From the creators of Ice Age (a very underrated movie, so great), comes Robots, a new CGI adventure set in the world of machines, and like with almost all animated movies these days, all the characters are voiced by very well known actors, here ranging from Robin Williams to Carson Daly to Dianne Wiest.

We follow the story of Rodney Copperbottom, a small (robot) town young man going to the big city to became an inventor for the company run by his idol, the greatest inventor ever Big Weld. Rodney has invented a dishwashing gadget to help his dad at the restaurant he works for, and that's what he wants Big Weld to see.
When Rodney gets to the big city, he soon learns that Big Weld is no longer running the company, and has retired and left, and he has put Phineas T. Ratchet in charge, a robot secretly working with his evil mother on a plan to end all robots made of spare parts and get everybody to have the new (very expensive) upgrades the company is producing.
After being rejected by Phineas, Rodney searches the city looking for Big Weld, and he befriends first Cappy, a young female executive working for the company, and then Fender and his family, aka the Rusties, who are also old robots made of spare parts like Rodney.

Though the story is good, the movie's artistic aspects disappoints big time, starting with the world it's set in. Being this a new universe they had to create, I was expecting something great, but they failed. I actually can't remember anything worth commenting about from it. This is something that separates Fox from the genius at Pixar and Dreamworks, whose backgrounds and everything on screen is full of life in movies like Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo and the Shreks.

The voice work also disappoints, not because is not funny, it is, but because the cast is huge but you can easily recognize a small part of it like Robin Williams (Fender), Ewan McGregor (Rodney), Mel Brooks (Big Weld), Greg Kinnear (Phineas) and Amanda Bynes, Harland Williams and Jennifer Coolidge who are part of the Rusties.
Those are just 8 of a cast of more than 20 that also includes Halle Berry who plays Cappy. She barely talks a few lines at the start and then stays quite during the whole second part of the movie even though she's onscreen. And you can't even tell that is Halle's voice.
And then major thumbs down for totally unrecognizable cameos by Drew Carey, Jim Broadbent, Carson Daly, Conan O'Brien, Jamie Kennedy, D.L. Hughley, Paul Giamatti (!!!), Stanley Tucci, Sofia Vergara and Dianne Wiest. When I saw the credits at the end of the movie I couldn't believe all those people were in the movie.
Oh, and James Earl Jones has a line, though it's taken right out off Star Wars and I don't think he actually went to record it again for this movie.

But it has Robin Williams who's really great, and it's CGI. That's the big reason this movie will make tons of money. But we have to start criticizing these animated movies of the new era, and criticizing them hard and make their creators work extra hard on them before the really horrible movies start coming to make lots of money, or (since I'm not a big Dreamworks fan) just let Pixar do them all. Remember, just because it's CGI, doesn't make it automatically great.

Be Cool

Be Cool is the sequel to 1995's Get Shorty, and once again we follow the story of Chilli Palmer, a loan shark turned movie producer who now wants to enter the music world.
Having not seen Get Shorty myself nor my friends, we were wondering why wasn't this called 'Get Shorty II', and apparently is because both movies are based on books by Elmore Leonard, and word of mouth say those are better.
People I've talked to don't think Get Shorty is great but they can't wait for Be Cool. I have no interest at all in seeing Get Shorty, and I don't think Be Cool is good. A couple of characters are great, but the movie is poor.

John Travolta plays Chilli Palmer, who wants to get into the music business by managing a young upcoming singer called Lynda Moon (played by real life upcoming singer Christina Milian), whose current manager, Raji (Vince Vaughn), is not going to get her anywhere any time soon. He also thinks he's a black pimp. Raji's bodyguard Elliot Wilhelm (The Rock) is a not sure he's gay aspiring actor, and his partner at the discography is Nick Carr (Harvey Keitel). Nothing to say about him.
Chilli is trying to help Edie Athens's (Uma Thurman) discography by getting Lynda, but they have another problem as they owe a lot of money to Sin LaSalle (Cedric The Entertainer), a hiphop music manager who around with his posse which includes Dabu (Andre 3000 of Outkast), a hiphop superstar who likes guns but can't handle them.
The movie goes around and around complicated situations for our leads Chilli and Edie including the Russian mob, the cops and Steven Tyler (of Aerosmith) playing himself.

The characters go from wasted (Danny DeVito and James Woods) to easy laughs but tiring (Vince Vaughn thinks he's black!) to boring performances (Travolta and Thurman).
I only loved The Rock (the big guys are getting funnier between him and Vin Diesel) and Christina Milian. Great characters. Though her probably because I've never heard her sing in real life, but this looks a way to get her mainstreamed.
Uma Thurman has a very hot and sexy opening scene in a bikini (her only good scene), and then her character turns into an uninteresting woman following Chilli everywhere, even to a bar for drinks where they dance. We all remember the greatness that was Travolta and Thurman's dance scene in the revolutionary and super cool Pulp Fiction, so yeah, they must do it again! But it doesn't work here. It's boring and long.
Cedric The Entertainer does his usual comedy, nothing new. Same for Harvey Keitel who plays his very repeated tough old bad guy with power.
John Travolta is the biggest disappointment here, with the same boring facial expression all the time, being calmed all the time against any situation and telling everybody the title of the movie. And that title doesn't work by the way, because yes, they all keep the calm and everything, but they're not cool. They should've called this 'Be Calm' instead.

At the start of the movie, Travolta and Woods an idea for a movie, and that's what this movie's story turns into. They also talk about actors making sequels just for the money, and that's what this movie turns into too, a moneymaking disappointment.

The Jacket

You know those dark adult thrillers that are just very cool movies? That when they finish you wondered what you just saw and you have to replay it in your mind to see if it makes sense? Movies with characters that are not sure what's going on themselves and don't know where they are or even when? There's usually time traveling, like 1995's 12 Monkeys, with Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, a movie that has a similar idea to this one, but it's completely different at the same time.
You can add the fucking cool and great The Jacket to those lists now.

We follow the story of Jack Starks, a war veteran (Iraq, 1991) who goes home after being shot to death in the head, only he didn't die. A year later, he encounters a woman and her little girl on the road having car trouble. The woman is wasted and puking on the side, so she helps them fix the car and they leave, not before him having a conversation with the little girl, to whom he gives his dog tags as a gift.
He goes on and gets a ride from some guy, but they're soon stopped by the cops and the guy kills and cop, who shoots Jack leaving him unconscious. When he wakes up he's being accused of murder, but the doctor dictates he's mentally troubled because of the war and they send him to an asylum, where a doctor conducts experimental treatment on him, drugging him, putting him in a jacket like those for crazy people, and locking him in a drawer in the basement for hours.
But something happens to Jack there, he starts seeing images, and in a blink of an eye he's somewhere else, no idea where but he's ok. He meets Jackie, a low life waitress who invites him home so he wouldn't freeze in the cold. Soon he founds dog tags, his dog tags, and realizes that Jackie is the same little girl he met on the road a few days ago, only that it happened 15 years ago. Jackie is grown woman now, and it's 2007, and he learns that he actually died 15 years ago in a few days while in the asylum.
From there he jumps back and forth in time, only when he's put in the jacket and locked up, and never knowing for how long, so he and Jackie try to find out what happened and how he died, so he can try and stop it in the past.

Adrien Brody plays Jack, Oscar Winner Adrien Brody that is. His performances and overall movies after The Pianist have been from bad to ok, but he's great here. Keira Knightley plays the older Jackie, and while I normally hate most of her previous performances, and mostly because of her and not because of bad writing, I really liked her here. I should say that she has a couple of topless scenes here which added to an overall great performances.
Kris Kristofferson plays the doctor experimenting on him and Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a psychiatrist at the Asylum.

It makes you think, it keeps you tense, the performances are awesome, and though some parts still don't, it makes sense at the end, but even if it wouldn't, it would still be awesome.