A History of Violence

Viggo Mortensen stars in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, he plays Tom Stall, a small town family man living in Indiana with his loving wife and 2 children. He has a secret past nobody knows about, but that changes after he single handedly kills 2 cold blooded killers who appear one night at his diner wanting to steal his money and kill everybody there. He becomes a hero, makes the news, his past finds him and comes to get him.

That past includes Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), a one eyed mob boss from Philadelphia who comes to get revenge for something that happen to him because of Joey Cusack, the name he gives Tom. It involves that now dead eye. Tom denies it once and again, but Carl doesn't give up, and soon Tom's wife Edie (Maria Bello) and teenage son Jack (Ashton Holmes) are even doubting him. When Carl comes to Tom's house and threatens his family, Tom gets mad and all hell breaks loose.

Viggo is amazing. When his killer instinct kicks in he moves fast and with a blank face he brings down everyone in his way. But he's also a great father and husband. There are a few really great scenes between the family members, even if their first scene together is truly exaggerated. But he is really excellent here.
Same for Maria Bello. She is so strong and protective of her family, but when she finds out about Tom's truth Bello makes for some great acting. Maria and Viggo have great chemistry in their scenes together.
Ashton Holmes' Jack is strange. He's been being bullied at school for a while, but he reacts one day, and it's an awesome scene. But then he goes home and confronts his father and ends up crying like a baby.
Ed Harris is amazing as always. A great performance award worthy if it were a bit longer. Same goes for William Hurt who plays Richie Cusack, brother to the man Tom used to be. He appears towards the end of the movie for another violent showdown.

The violence is big here. It's very graphic but not exaggerated. And it's even hard to look at at times. The blood is just enough to make it all feel and look real. The score by Howard Shore is great too, giving some long silent sequences a great touch.
Josh Olson's screenplay is perfect. No wasted dialogue, the characters just talk when they need to talk and say just what's necessary. And Cronenberg's work behind the camera is excellent, award worthy, making A History of Violence his best movie to date, and Viggo's best performance to date too, which we'll be talking about come awards season.

Serenity

Serenity is a sci-fi western from Buffy and Angel mastermind Joss Whedon, who got to continue his cancelled TV series Firefly on the big screen thanks to the devoted fans who bought the series on DVD and made it a huge success. This is really all because of them, thanks.

A little backstory for those who've never seen Firefly: the story is set 500 years in the future, Serenity is the name of Captain Mal Reynolds' (Nathan Fillion) ship, named like that after the Battle of Serenity Valley, which he fought along his second in command, the fierce Zoe (Gina Torres). They were rebels, and they fought the Alliance. They lost that fight, and became fugitive criminals. They got themselves the ship and a crew, including ace pilot Wash (Alan Tudyk), who later married Zoe; the always happy, delightful and sex hungry Kaylee (Jewel Staite), though she never has sex during the series except when we first met her; and tough guy though not always trustworthy Jayne (Adam Baldwin).
They also rent one of the ship's shuttles to Inara (Morena Baccarin), a companion (which translates into a high society prostitute); a Shepherd named Book (Ron Glass); and siblings Simon (Sean Maher) and River (Summer Glau), he's a doctor, she was kidnapped when she was young and Simon had just rescued her from the Alliance when they aboard Serenity. The Alliance is now looking for them.

And so during the series' 14 episodes we have the Serenity crew pulling jobs for money, escaping the Alliance and trying to find out what happened with River while she was captured since she's now kind of a zombie at times.
There's also romance, as Kaylee likes Simon, but he's too busy with his sister, and Inara likes Mal, and he likes her, but it never worked. They never tried either.
Oh yeah, apparently our world as we know it today is gone. The United States and China got to dominate everything and so everybody speaks English and Chinese (without subtitles).

I always tried to watch Firefly, but I didn't find the time so I never did while it was on TV, but I did get the DVD, and I loved it. Everything about it. I'm even in love with Kaylee, and I think it was really a shame that the series got cancelled, because the main ongoing story, River's, never got explained. But don't worry, Serenity got us fans covered, giving us a resolution to River's problems, as well as some other character's stories I was not expecting to know about. I loved it.

The movie starts with River's rescue by her brother Simon. This was never shown in the series, and it's an awesome sequence. Kind of weird though, because Serenity was never part of that originally since they hadn't met yet. But here it works fine, and it's a kickass way to start the movie. Simon is more macho than in the series, and he pulls it off great.
After the rescue we meet Chiwetel Ejiofor's character, who doesn't have a name so I'm calling him Chiwetel. He's in charge of finding River at any cost, and we don't know why, and I won't reveal it because I wasn't expecting it and it was excellent. Chiwetel (the actor) had played a villain the series' last episode, but the one he plays here is a different one. Still, he does a great job, really inspiring fear, specially when he uses his sword.
After that we jump 8 months in the future, and the crew is pulling a job robbing a bank. Mal, Zoe and Jayne take River too, because she has mind reading abilities. Now, we viewers knew this from Firefly, but this was never addressed in the series between the characters, and Joss doesn't bother telling us how they discovered it. I didn't mind.

Now in the movie Book is not on Serenity. He's living in one of the friendly planets the crew met during the series. We don't know why he left. Inara is not there either. She had tried to leave at the end of Firefly, and here she is in charge of some kind of companionship facility. Now, we fans know that she is a companion and what that is, but if you haven't seen Firefly and you watch this then you probably won't know. It's not that important for the big story, but at the same time it sucks because we never get to know her character in the movie. And that happens with the other's too. Like we see here that Kaylee probably likes Simon, but we don't know much. Still, she has a few great little scenes. Jayne, Zoe and Wash get nothing to do here other than their usual jobs, but almost nothing in the big story. I don't think it's even mentioned that Wash and Zoe are married.

Mal I think it's better here than in the series. He's tough, funny, heroic, a leader, and he also has a soft side. Fillion does a great job mixing the dramatic parts with all the comedy, and there's a lot of it. He also has one great fist fight at the end of the movie with Chiwetel that is awesome.
The secret weapon that is River gets the better transition from TV to movie. We get to know her truth, and she kicks a lot of ass in the process. She's super cool. There's a massive fights between her and everybody in a bar, and then again when she protects the Serenity crew against the Reavers. She also talks a lot more than in the series.
Now what are the Reavers? They were normal people, but something happened to them and they are now cannibals. They drive around the universe looking for unprotected ships and planets to attack. Everybody is afraid of them, as they will kill you, but first they take your skin off and rape you. Pretty nasty.

The icing in the cake in the movie is a huge spaceships battle towards the end. It may look out of Star Wars, but is better than anything happened in any of the prequels. An excellent space battle with ships of all shapes and sizes. That single scene is what makes the movie excellent, better than anything I was expecting and better than we probably deserve to get.

With the great score from the series behind it, Serenity maintains that feeling I loved in Firefly, with those great comedy pieces all throughout the movie, great scenes to cheer, and a few to cry.
I think the movie works a lot better if you see Firefly before, but my brother didn't and he loved the movie anyway.
Joss Whedon has created a science fiction masterpiece in Serenity. I don't know if sequels would work, they never got to explain the Hands of Blue and it's not mentioned here, so I guess they could go that way. But what I am sure of is that I want more of these characters, a lot more. And if you are a fan, stay until the very end of the credits for our beloved theme...

Take my love. Take my land.
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don't care, I'm still free.
You can't take the sky from me.

In Her Shoes

Curtis Hanson is weird. He went from L.A. Confidential to Wonder Boys, then shocked everybody directing Eminem in 8 Mile, and now he's back for a chick flick. His choices doesn't make any sense to me, but it doesn't matter, because the results are excellent.
The chick flick is In Her Shoes, a serious comedy about two very different best friend sisters who learn to love each other, and themselves, finding a long lost grandmother in the process.

Cameron Diaz plays party girl Maggie, who can't keep a job and spends her time going out, getting drunk and sleeping with guys. She loves shoes, but not hers. She borrows her sister's, who has a huge collection he never wears. She just buys them because unlike clothes, shoes always look good. Toni Collette play sister Rose, a workaholic lawyer with no confidence at all in herself. She finds a guy, and he ends up sleeping with Maggie, who has been living for a few days with her sister after their stepmom kicked her out of their father's house because she came home drunk all the time. And so they fight and Rose kicks Maggie out too.

Maggie search her father's desk for money when she finds letters addressed to her from a grandmother she though was dead, and so since her sister kicked her out she goes to Florida to live with her new grandma in her retirement home. Shirley MacLaine (who's back with 3 movies this year after a 5 year break) plays Ella, and she's been away from the family after her daughter (Maggie and Rose's mom) died a long time ago. Their mom had mental problems, and so when she died their father told Ella to stay away from them. She wrote them, but their father never gave them the letters.

Toni Collette is always very good, but Cameron Diaz is a very underrated actress. She was great in Being John Malkovich, Vanilla Sky and Gangs of New York, but because of stuff like Charlie's Angels everybody loses respect for her. This is her best performance to date, award worthy even. Same for Collette.
Shirley MacLaine doesn't have much to do despite the top billing. Her work is really supporting, and it's weird because everybody could've played her part. She doesn't do much connecting with the girls, who share their strongest scenes with other supporting characters or with each other.
Those other supporting characters are great too. Francine Beers plays Mrs. Lefkowitz, one of the old ladies friend of Ella. Lots of great comedy bits coming from her. Then Mark Feuerstein plays Simon Stein, Rose's love interest, and Norman Lloyd plays Mr. Sofield, a blind patient in the home's hospital who helps Maggie.

Susannah Grant adapted the story from the novel by Jennifer Weiner. The story is great, with excellent dialogue, but what makes the movie are the performances by the two leads Diaz and Collette. Amazing work by both of them. And I'm sure it's all because of Curtis Hanson. In Her Shoes is so good because of him. He has something that makes his actors give the most of them for the movie, and just like the girls' shoes, it works just perfect.

Tim Burton's Corpse Bride

From the wonderful mind of Tim Burton comes the Corpse Bride, cousin to his classic marvel that was The Nightmare Before Christmas 12 years ago. I will not compare them, I will only say that I love them both and will forever be in my Best Of... lists.

Johnny Depp voices Victor Van Dort, a young man soon to be married to the beautiful Victoria Everglot (voiced by Emily Watson), a young woman he's never met, but it's an arranged wedding so they have no voice about it. Once they met for the first time though, sparks fly as the two of them share an emotional scene playing piano. It could work for them, but the night of the rehearsal (which is on the same day they met), Victor's troubles giving his wedding vows prompt the magnificent Pastor Galswells (powerfully voiced by Christopher Lee) to kick him out and ask him to come back when he's learned the proper vows. And so Victor leaves town and goes to the forest, where he recites his vows to the trees, but when he finally gets it right, he rings a branch sticking out of the ground which turns out to be the skeleton of a dead woman, the Corpse Bride (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter). She comes to life, and Victor passes out.

When he wakes up he's in the Land of the Dead, a place full of colorful, magical creatures, skeletons dancing and singing. It's a wonderful place, specially compared to the dark world of the living he used to be in. He sees his bride again. She's beautiful, and weirdly full of life considering she's actually dead. He's not dead though, and he wants to come back to Victoria, but he's married now.

Claymation has never looked better, made with digital still photography cameras instead of film cameras. Everything looks perfectly detailed, and there's lots of little stuff in the backgrounds and in every character.
And there are lots of those. Besides the three love birds, there's the parents. Victor's are Nell Van Dort (Tracey Ullman) and William Van Dort (Paul Whitehouse), and Victoria's are Maudeline Everglot (Joanna Lumley) and Finnis Everglot (Albert Finney). Then we have Mayhew (also Paul Whitehouse), the Van Dort's chauffeur who dies and while down there notifies Victor that Victoria is set to be married to Barkis Bittern (Richard E. Grant), an evil man who is only after her parents' money, which they don't have, and so are making Victoria marry him because they think he has money.
And finally there's the Maggot. A sure to be favorite of the audiences, he lives in the Corpse Bride's head and pops out every now and then to give his opinion and even advice. He's voiced by Enn Reitel.
There a lot more characters, and they all come together when the dead come to life, an excellent sequence towards the end in which the living meet the dead when Victor brings them all up.

If I had one complaint about the movie, it would be that Victoria gets criminally underdeveloped. We know almost nothing about her, but we know almost everything about the Corpse Bride. Victor is the classic Tim Burton lead character so what we know about him is enough to know him completely.

Danny Elfman is what made Nightmare so excellent for me. His score and songs were astounding, and he does it again here. He has 4 songs here, and while the opening one, 'According to Plan', sang by Victor's parents didn't do it for me, the rest were magical. 'Remains of the Day' and 'Tears to Shed' tell us about the land of the dead and the Corpse Bride, and those are really what stands out more of the movie.

Now we all know these are Tim Burton movies, and they are, but there's something weird with both of them. Burton wrote the story for Nightmare, but it was adapted by someone else. And he didn't direct it, Henry Selick did. Now Corpse Bride is codirected by Burton and Mike Johnson, but written by John August, Pamela Pettler and Caroline Thompson, who adapted it from the classic tale. I find this extremely weird, but whatever, because the characters and places have that classic Tim Burton style I love and Elfman's music is once again excellent despite being a lot less compared to Nightmare. But let's not compare them, all that matters now is that Tim Burton's Corpse Bride is brilliant, and an instant classic. And give it the Oscar for Best Animated Movie already please.

Flightplan

Jodie Foster is back in Robert Schwentke's Flightplan, as a woman who gets crazy on a plane when her daughter disappears while on the air. The plane is huge, a new model she played a part in its engine design, and so she'll do everything to find her.

Jodie is Kyle Pratt, and she's traveling from Berlin to New York with her 6 year old daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston) after her husband died a few weeks ago when he fell from their house's rooftop.
Kyle is traumatized, she's delusional, she imagines her husband is still with her, so when her little daughter disappears on the plane, and nobody saw her nor there is any records of her ever getting on the plane, she must fight the flight attendants, passengers, the Pilot and the Air Marshall who don't believe her daughter was ever there, and think Kyle is getting crazy.

The movie has 2 totally different parts. The first 70 minutes is all about a this crazy woman getting crazier on the plane imagining she lost a daughter that's actually dead, or so you'd think. And said woman is actually the villain of the movie, or should be. Besides getting crazy in the plane threatening the safety of the 400 plus passengers, she physically attacks people, and what people.
This is when I started to hate the movie. It's a movie about a plane so what better idea than to add some terrorism to the story in this post 9/11 world. "Lets put some Arab terrorist in it!", someone said Touchstone Pictures, and they did. I fucking hated that. It was so offensive. And even worse because after the final and horrible twist (the last 20 minutes or maybe less) which came out of nowhere, the poor Arabs didn't have anything to do with what happened. They were truly victims of this demented woman.

Jodie Foster's acting was good, but she's getting older, and I really couldn't buy her having a 6 year old daughter. Peter Sarsgaard looked bored as the Air Marshall Gene Carson. Like he didn't even care about the movie. Sean Bean was good too as the Pilot, but he had little to do. Then the flight attendants. Erika Christensen is ok, but her character is weird. It seemed like she was going to participate in the twist but then didn't, so lots of little things that happen earlier to her end up being a waste of time. Australian beauty Kate Beahan (who looks a lot like Cate Blanchett) plays another stewardess and she's good, and hot. The stewardess situations were pretty great and they all had good dialogue.

I won't spoil the ending, but it was really bad, and really hurt the movie which could've ended up just fine and emotional had they gone with a simple story about a woman who can't accept her daughter is dead. But no, that doesn't happen.
Flightplan adds explosions and chase scenes (just running though) and will get forgotten soon as a bad thriller in Jodie's resume. I guess we should just be happy just because she's working, but this is basically Panic Room in the sky, and it's a bad movie. Someone please give her a decent role.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose

Based on true events, The Exorcism of Emily Rose tells the story of a 19 year old girl (Anneliese Michel in real life) who died as a result of an exorcism at the hands of the family's priest. The marketing studios has made this look like a horror, but it's not, it is actually a courtroom drama headed by the priest's lawyer who defends her client. Not against Emily's family though, as they wanted to get Emily exorcised, but against the State, and the Devil himself.

Laura Linney stars as Erin Bruner, a high profile lawyer fighting for senior partnership at her firm if she gets her client to plead guilty and go to jail for a while. But Father Moore (played by Tom Wilkinson) doesn't want to. All he wants is to go to trial so he can have the chance to tell Emily's story, even if that means that his sentence could be longer.
Erin, while not believing that demons played a part in all this, agrees to the trial, getting in trouble with her bosses, and the demons too, who start playing with her too.

Linney gives a great performance here. She's so good as a lawyer, very believable at it. See the magnificent Primal Fear for more proof.
Tom Wilkinson is also great, specially in the exorcism scenes. And finally Emily who is played by Jennifer Carpenter. She is so freaky looking. All trashed down and possessed. And the scenes between her and Wilkinson exchanging words in Aramaic were excellent.

While the movie is not a horror movie, there are really great scares, and the fact that the source of fear is not tangible but spiritual made it even more frightening and unnerving.
Great work by writer and director Scott Derrickson creating a very creepy atmosphere, specially during the exorcism scenes which are just brilliant.
Add the wonderful performances and The Exorcism of Emily Rose is an excellent movie that really scares, and scares hard.

Cry_Wolf

A combination of Urban Legends and Gossip, but with no known stars, gore or nudity, Cry_Wolf tells the story of rich high school kids who think they're the shit and so they make up a serial killer after a girl is murdered in the campus premises. Only one girl died, but the story they put in the mass email that gets sent to the entire school is that this is not the The Wolf's, as they named the killer, first hit. The rumor is that other kids have been killed before her, and they even describe the killings as if it happened to each one of them.
But soon The Wolf comes to life, and the friends start dying one by one just as they described it in the story, and they all think it's one of them that is dressing as The Wolf and killing them. They are all suspects, and the killer is probably Jon Bon Jovi, but you can never be sure.

Yes, Bon Jovi is in the movie, along with Jared Padalecki, who was in the very hated though I loved it Paris Hilton debut movie House of Wax remake earlier this year, and then a bunch of unknowns like Julian Morris as Owen, the very smart guy who's been recently expelled from various schools, and Lindy Booth as Dodger, the queen of the school who manipulates them all. Then of course we have the fat guy, the piercings guy, the black guy, the Latina girl, and the Asian girl, with Padalecki playing Owen's jock roommate Tom. And there's also the creepy old maintenance guy. He's not there much but at the end he brings a big laugh, a very lame big laugh. Btw, that the main guy Owen is British is very annoying. That was one exaggerated accent (even though the actor is British) and it felt weird, specially since his father (Gary Cole) didn't have that much of an accent.

I knew who the killer really was around the middle point of the movie, not bad considering you can usually spot him at the beginning. But after he's revealed the movie plays a big cheat on us and changes the rules. It's a good and smart idea, but I was already done with the movie after the killer was revealed so I kind of didn't care about it.

Writer/Director Jeff Wadley, responsible for the award winning short The Tower of Babble and the also award winning animation Catching Kringle made this movie, but all that turns into nothing when your first big time movie is a ripoff of other movies, and you don't have the balls to make it Rated R to scare us, disgust us even, or at least a tit. But no, this movie brings nothing new to the genre. And while not super original, the idea of the killer communicating via the highly popular instant messages could've worked just fine, but it's not used that well. Cry_Wolf is bad, but it could've been worse.

Lord of War

After a brief introduction on gun statistics by Nicholas Cage, we have the coolest opening scene for a movie since Catch Me If You Can a few years ago. We are introduced to the bullet-cam, as we follow the entire life of a bullet since the moment it is created, cased, shipped and sold to an African country where seconds later it'll be shot blowing a kid's head in its way. This is Lord of War, Andrew Niccol's follow up to the underappreciated masterpiece that is Gattaca and the piece of shit that is S1m0ne. But hey, everybody makes mistakes, and Niccol redeems himself here.

This is the story of Yuri Orlov (Cage), an Ukranian born New Yorker who found his call in the business that is arms dealing after realizing that guns is something the world will never stop buying. He enlists his brother Vitaly (Jared Leto), and together travel the world selling arms to whoever wants them. They don't care what are those people to do with them, not even if it's to kill someone right next to them, or to fight America. It's not their problem, someone has to supply them guns and ammo, and if they don't do it someone else will. So make so much money they can't have enough of it, drinking vodka and snorting coke like crazy in the process, which gets Vitaly in a rehab center a couple times, but no big deal.
They have enemies though, Ian Holm plays Simeon Weisz, Yuri's rival in the business, and Ethan Hawke plays Jack Valentine, the Interpol agent trying to catch them. But they are no trouble for Yuri either, and he even finds time to deduce the girl of his dreams (Bridget Moynahan), marry her and have a child, keeping his business as good as ever while all that happens, without them knowing a thing. Well, she knows, but they don't talk about it.

Nicholas Cage carries the movie from start to finish, he's in almost every scene minus a couple, and he does an outstanding job at being neutral about the whole deal, and that shows perfectly in his character. The soundtrack is also a high point, and of course that it includes Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah which everybody is using these days. It's a great song and I love it, but I've heard it in like 5 movies these past couple of weeks.

Something eventually happens between all of the characters, but it's not that important. And that what really surprised me about the movie, that being all about guns, it's very uneventful. I mean, stuff happens, but just like Yuri, we don't care much because it doesn't concern us. Until it does, and that's when the movie could've gone for the happy ending or the violent and cool ending, but It doesn't go for any of them. What Lord of War goes for is the for idea it's been telling us all the time, that guns will never go away, and that someone will always sell them. It's a perfect ending for a great and very entertaining movie.

Proof

In another case of a Miramax movie made in 2003 that is just getting released, Proof marks the second pairing of John Madden and Gwyneth Paltrow after the Academy Award winner Shakespeare in Love, and once again the result is wonderful. While not as good as A Beautiful Mind or Good Will Hunting, the only other movies about a similar subject, math, that come to mind right now, the movie has excellent performances from all its four main characters and at just 1 hour and 40 minutes, it never bores us, keeping the story flowing perfectly.

Gwyneth plays Catherine, the daughter of Anthony Hopkins' Robert, a brilliant mathematician, the best of his generation, who's been declared crazy and so Catherine as been taking care of him for the past 5 years, leaving school and having no social life at all in the process.
Catherine is also a great mathematician, so when his father dies, her sister Claire (Hope Davis) comes back home for his funeral and also to try and take care of her, as she thinks she's going crazy just like their father. And she kind of is.
Also in the picture is Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal), one of Robert's students, who falls in love with Catherine, and at the same times wants to research Robert's more than a hundred notebooks hoping to find whatever it is the beautiful mind has supposedly been working on when he was out of his mind.

This is Gwyneth's best performance to date, and have in mind she won an Oscar already. She is so believable in the role, helped by David Auburn and Rebecca Miller's smart screenplay that gives her and all the characters great dialogue, specially when it comes to math.
Catherine never goes crazy, but she does show some signs, and while Gwyneth does not show it like Russell Crowe (who got robbed at those Oscars) did, her more quite performance is equally magnificent.
The one showing more Crowe-like signs is Hopkins, who is crazy and fatherly and sweet all at the same time. Davis and Gyllenhaal also give very good supporting performances with some great dialogue from both of them, specially whenever Hal talks about his fellow geeks.

Because of my love for math I knew I was going to like this movie, but the amazing performances and smart dialogue made me love it. Proof is intelligent but not confusing, funny when needed and then perfectly realistic in its drama, an overall excellent movie, with Gwyneth Paltrow giving a performance that puts her at the lead of the Oscar race.

The Constant Gardener

Fernando Meirelles's follow up to the critically acclaimed and very powerful City of God, is The Constant Gardener, a political thriller about an activist and her fight against the pharmaceutical corporations illegally running drug tests in Africa. Based on John le Carre's novel of the same name (which sucks by the way, the title, as it tells you nothing about the story other than a character is probably a gardener, which is true), the movie shows a reality of Africa not many know about, but the character's personal dramas are boring, and some characters, specially Rachel Weisz's Tessa, are not likeable, at least not to me, despite the fact that she's pregnant and is fighting for a good cause.

The movie is kind of divided in 2 stories after the an introduction in which we learn how activist named Tessa gets attached to Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), a British diplomat, and after a passionate day she pretty much gets herself married to him with the sole purpose of going to Africa, it seems. And right after that (in the movie, not in the story's timeline) we learn that she was killed in Kenya after an attack to her car. The driver, an African activist just like her, has not been found yet.

So now we have 45 minutes or so of flashbacks about Tessa's work in Kenya, fighting to bring down these corporations testing on the sick people in Africa. While everybody thinks they're actually helping by giving them medicine, they are giving them teh medicine, but they are also testing other medicine's on them, which they don't need and it ends up actually killing them in most cases. Tessa's methods include manipulating people, maybe even cheating on her husband with the aforementioned fellow activist named Arnold (Hubert Kounde) or with Justin's friendand coleague Sandy Woodrow (Danny Huston), a British high commissioner. Her enemies include Bill Nighy as Sir Bernard Pellegrin, the head of the Foreign Office (and Justin's superior) and Pete Postlethwaite as Marcus Lorbeer, one of the doctor's doing the deadly drug tests.

After we find out the dangerous stuff Tessa got herself into we jump into Justin's investigation of her wife's death. This includes the same character and places Tessa interacted with before she died. We find out lots of bad stuff about her here, and it brings up the question about their relationship. Justin didn't really love I thinl. He though he did, but he didn't know the real Tessa until she died and he found out all that stuff about her, then he was really in love, and found the peace in her death.

The performances are good, but not as great as everybody is saying they are. Maybe I didnt like them as much because I really didnt like some characters, specially Tessa which I hated. Fernando Meirelles' work behind the camera was better than the acting, and the cinematography by Cesar Charlone was really great.
The Constant Gardener is confusing at times with so many characters and the story going back and forth in time, and while interesting and important, is just boring.

The Edukators

Hans Weingartner writes and directs The Edukators, a German drama about young idealists who rebel against the system in a very unusual way, they break into rich people's mansions while they're not home and move around all the furniture and everything they see, and then leave messages like "Your days of plenty are numbered" or "You have too much money". They never vandalize or steal anything, because they are not burglars, they just want to bring fear into these people's lives as they know that someone has been watching them and has been into their homes.

Daniel Bruhl from Goodbye Lenin! plays Jan and Stipe Erceg plays Peter, and they are The Edukators. But while Peter goes to Barcelona for a few days on vacation, his girlfriend Jule (played by Julia Jentsch), who recently moved in with them, finds out about what they do all night, and so after getting drunk she convinces Jan to go break into Hardenberg's villa. Hardenberg (Burghart Klaubner) is a rich guy she has a past with. She was in a car accident and hit his super expensive car, she didn't have insurance, and so she had to pay everything, and still is, or isn't actually, which is the reason why she got evicted of the apartment and had to go live with Peter.
While they're breaking into the house, Hardenberg comes back from his business trip and finds them there, and recognizes Jule, so they have no other choice than to kidnap him, and after Peter comes back, they all leave the city for to Jule's uncle's rural country house so they can think about what to do.

When they get there, they sort of befriend Hardenberg, who tells them how he used to be just like them when he was younger. He has this great speech about how he slowly changed from the liberal he was, but then his work paid off, he got married, children, a house, and so he needed security, and so one day he found himself voting conservative. The 4 of them debate during the entire movie about their ideas, and we are lectured about 10 year old children in Asia making our Nike shoes and stuff like that, which could bore some people, specially who knows all about that, but I feel it's necessary for the movie to work, since they had no way to show all that kind like The Motorcycle Diaries did for example. And these conversations make for around an hour of the movie, making for very smart and intelligent scenes which work excellent thanks to the great chemistry between the actors.

With a great soundtrack including Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah which is played 3 times near the end (with great results) and songs from several punk rock German bands, and a great cinematography by Daniela Knapp and Matthias Schellenberg who give us amazing visuals of Germany, Hans Weingartner's The Edukators educate us about the injustices people suffer in the world, making us want to be freed from the system, and it succeeds, at least with me. If money wasn't a problem, I'd love to be an Edukator.

Just Like Heaven

Mark Waters who gave us the great Freaky Friday and Mean Girls in the past 2 years directs Just Like Heaven as his 2005 entry. With a Ghost like story but as a comedy, the movie fails completely despite a very good performance by Mark Ruffalo.

Reese Witherspoon plays Elizabeth Martinson, a young woman who devotes her life to her job, she a doctor. And when I say devotes I mean it, as when the movie starts she's finishing a 26 hours shift, not because she has to, but because she doesn't have anything better to do, plus she wants to work a lot to get a promotion which she ends up getting. So after the good news she's finally sent home, and then boom!, a car accident.
Now we meet David Abbott (Ruffalo), a former landscaping architect who moves in Elizabeth's apartment which has been without a tenant for months. Some family tragedy her realtor tells him. And so he moves in, and drinks beer and more beer, as we learn that he used to be married and is clearly depressed something that happened.
Soon Elizabeth shows up wanting to know what is he doing in her apartment, which is the same thing he wants to know. That's when we learn about Elizabeth's fate after the car accident. She's a ghost now and only David can see her for some reason. This prompts him to do all kind of crazy things like exorcisms, until he hires a psychic named Darryl who believes him, and though he can't see her, he feels she's there, and so he advises David to try and find out what's going on.

Now, something interesting and smart could be done with that setup, or they could've gone for the predictable but still funny and with heart which usually ends up with good results. But the filmmakers went with the predictable and lame instead, as they finally come to terms about her being dead, try to find out what's going on, eventually fall in love, but using the lamest lines and situations possible, ending with the classic Lame Line d'Or: "You saved my life" to which he replies, "No, you saved mine". And that's when I wanted to die.

As I mentioned before, Ruffalo is really good, in the comedic scenes as well as in the few dramatic scenes like when he tells Elizabeth what happened with his marriage.
Ruffalo's been getting some negative comments about his film choices lately, as she goes back and forth between romantic comedies and dramas, and apparently people didn't like the comedies but I really liked View from the Top and 13 Going on 30 so he's fine in my book. One of the best actors working today in my opinion. He's got Rumor Has It (with Jennifer Aniston and Kevin Costner) and All the King's Men (with Sean Penn, Jude Law and a lot more big names) coming out this year.

Witherspoon is back after a bad couple of years (Legally Blonde 2 and Vanity Fair) and she is the disappointment here in the lead. She doesn't look as beautiful as she really is and she gets really bad lines of dialogue. The character is general is pretty bad written as she doesn't question many things, like when she enters David's body like they do in Ghost. It happens only once here, for nothing important, and then they just forgot about it seems. Like the filmmakers didn't want to look too much like Ghost. They shouldn't have used it in the first place.

Now I don't want to trash the genius that is his Napoleon Dynamite, but Jon Heder plays Darryl the psychic and he is not convincing at all. His lines all seem forced and like he doesn't want to sound like Napoleon but at the same time he wants to sound all laid back and cool. And his repeated use of the word 'righteous' got annoying very soon. For all those who wanted to see the movie just for him, he's there for maybe just 12 minutes but he's got 2 or 3 scenes in which he leads and then 2 more showings.

Witherspoon is playing June Carter in the Johnny Cash biopic next, which will fight for the Oscars, but she'll need to be really good there for me to forgive her for this movie. With no chemistry between the two leads, a nothing soundtrack (which usually helps this kind of movies), and a horrible ending, Just Like Heaven comes off very lame and it just plain sucks.

An Unfinished Life

An Unfinished Life tells the story of Einar Gilkyson, an old Iowa cowboy taking care of her lifelong friend Mitch who was attacked by a bear a year old. At the same time we have his daughter in-law Jean, who leaves her home with her young daughter Griff and goes to Iowa to stay with Einar after her boyfriend beats her up once again. Einar does not welcome them, as he still blames Jean for the death of his son (Jean's husband), who died a decade ago in a car accident. Jean was driving.

Lasse Hallstrom (What's Eating Gilbert Grape, The Cider House Rules, Chocolat) directs this drama about anger and forgiveness, and gets great performances for his actors, and the bear too. Einar is played by Robert Redford and the story focuses on him for the most part. He gives a great performance though having in mind that this movie is pretty much Oscar bait, I think he's missing that one great scene needed to get a nomination. He had a chance though, in one of many scenes in which he visits his son's grave, but there was none of those beloved tears the Academy loves. Great performance still, specially in all the scenes he has with Jennifer Lopez who plays Jean. You can see the anger in his face and how much hate he has towards her.

Lopez is really good too. Her part sounds a lot like her Enough role without the training and fighting but is not like that. She gets second billing in the movie so I'm thinking her screen time was a little bit reduced since the film was done 2 years ago (it was delayed because of the Weinstein's departure from Miramax and all that). Everything made it sound like it was more of an ensemble drama but Redford gets most of the story, and I'm pretty sure even Morgan Freeman, who plays Mitch, has more screen time that Lopez. Still, she's really good here.

Freeman is the usual excellence, and when I say usual I also mean that his part is a lot like all his previous performances in which he plays the old wise best friend or mentor, but there's nobody who can do it better than him so no problem there. I would expect an Oscar nomination but since he won last year I don't think he'll get it.
Besides the always great advises, he has one excellent scene in which he finally faces the bear that attacked him. Mitch is all wounded in the face and back, and needs help to walk, get clean, and specially get his daily medicine shots.

Then there's Becca Gardner who plays the young Griff. She started a little weak I thought but by the time she meets her grandfather and Mitch she gets really good and gives a fine performance with a couple of very great emotional scenes.
Rounding the cast are Damian Lewis who plays Gary, Jean's boyfriend; Josh Lucas who plays the local Sheriff Crane; and Camryn Manheim who plays Nina, the owner of the local diner who gives Jean a job waiting tables there. Manheim has one great scene with Lopez that could've give her an Oscar nom alone if her character wasn't so small.

Overall, I think for it to play big this awards season, it needs a lot more work in the emotional department though that didn't keep me from enjoying the movie a lot. An Unfinished Life is a great movie with a simple story, brilliant acting and a great bear.

Transporter 2

Jason Statham is back as Frank Martin in the not as good or fun as the first one, but still good and fun, Transporter 2, with Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen also back in the writing department, and Louis Leterrier, who directed one of my favorite movies of the year, Unleashed, behind the camera instead of Corey Yuen who directed the first one.

This time around Frank lives in Florida instead of Europe, and he also drives an Audi A8 W12 instead of a BMW. The job is still the same, and the rules probably too though there's no mention of them this time around, as we get back with Frank when he's not doing one of his regular jobs, which usually include something illegal. Instead, he's helping out a friend by filling in as the driver of the kid of a rich couple. Soon the kid is attacked and kidnapped by Lola (Kate Nauta), a deadly skinny model looking assassin girlfriend of Gianni (Alessandro Gassman), the mastermind of a plan to infect the whole world with a deadly virus to which only he has the antidote, and so he would get rich by selling it when everybody is infected. They need to capture the kid because his father Jefferson Billings (Matthew Modine) is the head of US narcotics division and so he would get infected too and would infect all the other important people he's meeting with in a couple of days. They would get infected because the virus is passed just by breathing the air someone infected breathes, kind of like second hand smoke.
Amber Valletta plays Audrey, the mother of the kid, wife of Billings, and Frank's kind of love interest.

Some stunts are repeated from the first movie like the oily arms sequence, but the rest are, while over the top, lots of fun. Like a scene in which he flips over the car in the air to get rid of a bomb attached to its chassis, or a scene in which a plane crashes into the sea. About that one, it's weird that it doesn't explode, considering that even 2 cars crashing at low speed looked like an atomic bomb, though it was probably because our hero was in the plane. I also love the fact that Frank keeps new suits and shirts in the car in case something happens to the ones he's using.

While the first Transporter had a brilliant first 45 minutes, after that it lost its magic. This sequel is better in that aspect, as it keeps the action even throughout the entire movie, and is good at all times.
With a great score and Francois Berleand reprising his role as French Inspector Tarconi for comic relief, Transporter 2 succeeds in entertain us and makes for a good second part to a franchise I wouldn't mind if it gets 5 more of them.

2046

A sequel to 2000's In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar Wai is back with 2046, a confusing story of a writer who falls in love with different women that are staying in the room 2046 in a hotel in Hong Kong in the mid 60s. He's in room 2047. He's writing a story about a futuristic train that takes you to 2046, a place where you can go to find lost memories, though nobody knows what exactly happens there because nobody has ever come back, except for one person.
The different stories are happening at all times during the movie, and all of them involve the same characters, Tony Leung's Chow as the writer and the 4 beautiful women he has meets are Ziyi Zhang's Bai Ling, Gong Li's Su Li Zhen, Faye Wong's Wang Jing Wen and Carina Lau's Lulu/Mimi. There's also Maggie Cheung as a robot named slz1960. Cheung was with Tony Leung in In The Mood for Love.

The acting is excellent, and I read somewhere that the characters speak all different languages: Chow speaks Cantonese, Bai Ling speaks Mandarin, and Tak (Takuya Kimura) speaks Japanese. Very interesting though it made no difference for me because I was just reading the subtitles. The cinematography and costumes are also a high point of the movie, even though the scenes of the future look out of a videogame, but it's supposed to be that way I think, so it worked fine. And I'm so glad Wong Kar Wai decided to use colors this time instead of the blue cinematography he used in The Hand, his segment of Eros.

The movie is super slow paced, though that didn't bother me much, what really bothered me and almost made me fall asleep, specially during the first 45 minutes or so, was the camera work. The director just points at an actor or a background and keeps showing the same nothingness (the no dialogue during lots of these scenes) for so many seconds that at times I'm sure it was minutes. This drove me crazy to the point where I actually wanted to scream at the screen to go on with the story.
2046, as its actresses, is beautiful and interesting while confusing at the same time, but the slow pacing and camera work make it fail to entertain, and so it ends up boring more than anything else.

A Sound of Thunder

Based on a Ray Bradbury short story A Sound of Thunder is another case of a movie delayed in its release because of production problems, in this case over 2 years, as it was going to be originally released in 2003. But I know that the problems did not affect the writing of the movie by Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer and Gregory Poirier, nor the direction by Peter Hyams or special effects (which deserve a whole paragraph just for them), all horrible.

Edward Burns stars as Travis Ryer as the leader of a hunting group sent to the prehistoric era where dinosaurs ruled the rule. It's all part of a Time Traveling Safari, which company owner Charles Hatton (Sir Ben Kingsley) offers to the most rich people in the world.
But there's Sonia Rand (Catherine McCormack), the woman who invented the technology, who warns them that what they do is wrong because just a little mistake (known as the Butterfly Effect) could be fatal as just by killing a butterfly in the distant past you could modify the evolution of the species, all the species. And so of course it happens, and the writers wouldn't think of anything original so they went with the laziest idea, they accidentally kill a butterfly while on a trip, and monstrous beasts suddenly appear out of nowhere in the world of today killing all humans. The world of today in the movie is in the future too, though it looks just like our time only that the cars are computerized.

The special effects are some of the worst I've ever seen. Starting with the aforementioned cars which look straight out of an old videogame. And the city is a disaster too. It's so obvious that you can clearly see the actors are walking on a machine in front of a camera. Then the Monkeysaurs and the huge bats (or at least they looked like bats) are the only 2 monsters the filmmakers could come up with. And they are horrible.
Same for the T-Rex they go to kill when they go back in time. It looks extremely fake and the effects of the ice-shots hitting him are horrible.

Other than Burns, the rest of the cast are pretty bad in the acting department (Kingsley is embarrassing), and for a time traveling movie, the story doesn't explain much of what's going on, including waves of energy that appear every couple of hours to change the evolution of things. It's explained all very quickly and it makes no sense.
The studio waited 2 years to dump this movie in not many theatres and on this time of year when all the bad movies that are sure to fail get released, and A Sound of Thunder won't be an exception to that.