Fourth Row Center

The spirit of Sherlock Holmes and his loyal assistant and chronicler Dr. Watson (played by Robert Downey, Jr., and Jude Law, respectively) is alive and well in this breathless reinvention of the Holmes genre, although in the details these characters are more Ritchie than Doyle. No matter. The convoluted plot involving a strange cult bent on wielding great power in England (which in my mind borrows heavily from Mark Frost’s intriguing novel “The List of Seven”) manages to sustain itself only by the sheer power of Downey’s performance as the illustrious detective. It's absurd, confusing and over-blown, but Downey manages to infuse a degree of style and modern sophistication into it. This version of Holmes is not for the purist. If you want Doyle’s work and character incarnate seek out the phenomenal BBC series starring Jeremy Brett. There’s no better interpretation of Holmes’ character than Brett’s. But as holiday flicks are concerned, Sherlock Holmes is as entertaining and fun as an...

I was hoping Chuck would post his Avatar review by now, but in its absence, I'll plow ahead. After more than 10 years, James Cameron ( The Terminator, Titanic) returns to the director’s chair in this visual feast of a film that combines live action with CGI so seamlessly that it lives up to the techno-hype. And there has been quite a bit of hype, indeed. The story is simple: mankind goes to far off planet to rob it of its precious natural resources. Primitive alien people stand in the way. Mankind must wipe out primitive people. Good man comes to the rescue and saves the day. Heavy-handed? Maybe. Culturally and environmentally relevant? Sure. Where this film succeeds visually, it lacks in character and in its very simple and uninspired storytelling. And aside from Sigorney Weaver, Avatar sports a cast that is merely adequate. Still, in 3D, Avatar is not something to be missed. See it.

Recently there was a cast reunion worth mentioning. No, I am not writing about the Seinfeld reunion that is the subject of this season's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" on HBO. Think more David O. Selzenick and less Larry David. To honor the 70th anniversary of Gone With the Wind , surviving cast members gathered at a tribute event outside Atlanta recently. With Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh being off-planet, the cast reunion comprised actors who played children and babies and Beau Wilkes at various childhood ages in the classic 1939 film. I don't suppose there was much reminiscing going on at this reunion. But for those surviving performers in attendance , it must be marvelous to know that each was a part of such a remarkable feat of cinematic grandeur the likes of which are long gone in American motion pictures. I think I'll add Gone With the Wind to my Netflix queue. It's been a while for me, too. Oh, and George is divorced and is trying to get back with this ex-wif...

To follow up on Jay’s post, I have two films that follow the vein of The Blair Witch Project , but, does it right. The films are Quarantine and [*REC], but we only need to talk about the later as the former is an American remake of the later Spanish Film. Both are excellent, but, I have to admit to liking [*REC] better. Both stories follow a female reporter who host the show “While you were sleeping” and follows a group of fire fighters who are called to a tenement building to help with an old lady who has fallen. That’s when the film goes to hell. Literally. What makes both films great is that it does not start as a horror film. It lulls you into a false sense of security. The second thing is that the actors in the film feel like normal people who have gotten stuck inside the building. I prefer [*REC] because the main character is absolutely convincing and ending is…well…creepy. It has more in common with Aliens than Blair Witch, and makes for a pretty scary Halloween ...

Two films have been released this autumn that fall in the vein of The Blair Witch Project : feature motion pictures produced from purported actual archival video capturing elements of the unexplained. The newly released The Fourth Kind, starring Milla Jovovich, is one of those “let’s pretend this is real using actual video footage” movies, like Paranormal Activity , except here the filmmakers augment the archival “footage” with “dramatic reenactments.” The premise involves a close encounter of the fourth kind, abduction, and the aliens here are not the happy ET’s of Spielberg’s movies. These are bad beings with a grudge. The set up is intriguing: a psychologist in Nome, Alaska (Jovovich), has patients who seem to all have abduction accounts when placed under hypnosis. And so, too, as it turns out, does our heroine. But the result is uneven, and the climax never really wraps anything up, except to suggest that these bizarre nocturnal owl sightings are really alien abductions, which the...

Cirque du Freak is something for teens, a modern Fright Night , as far as I’m concerned, and it’s a good, clean vampire fun. Two best friends become vampires after visiting a peculiar little freak show run by Mr. Tall (Ken Watanabe) and come down on opposite sides of a vampire conflict: one sides with the good vampires (they do not kill humans) and the other sides with the evil vampires who kill humans and want a war with the good vampires. Silly, of course, but this kind of goofy cinematic fun is sometimes what movies are all about. Director Paul Weitz ( In Good Company, About a Boy ) keeps the action moving in this simple but entertaining good versus evil story. The decent performances by John C. Reilly, Selma Hayek and a terrific turn by Willem Dafoe as one of the "good" vampires provide the flick with a little street cred, as does a screenplay co-written by one of my favorite screen scribes Brian Helgeland ( Payback, Mystic River, L.A. Confiedential ).

Directed by Jane Campion, “Bright Star” is not only a poem by John Keats but the person for whom the poem was written, a young Englishwomen by the name of Fanny Brawne, who falls in love with the young Keats despite the fact that the struggling poet has no income to support a wife. Their romance is not an easy one, lacking the approval of both Keats’ best friend and Fanny’s traditional family, and the three year romance is ultimately cut short by Keats’ tragic death at age 25, a failed poet, broke and alone in Italy recovering from an illness. A great romance flick for those who love poets and poetry.

DISTRICT 9 Produced by Peter Jackson. This sci-fi lesson about racism has some nice ideas—unwanted aliens stranded on earth and kept in camps, growing inter-species mistrust, a plan to return the aliens to their planet gone awry. But the follow-through is lacking, the performances second-rate and the film withers pathetically on the vine. G-FORCE Animated, from Disney. Talking CG guinea pigs are secret agents. Why, Disney, why? HANNAH MONTANTA Starring Miley Cyrus and Billy Ray Cyrus. After so many bad films, Disney takes a kids’ Disney Channel sitcom and stretches it out to an hour and a half motion picture, and what do you have? A pretty watchable film, actually, and much to my surprise. Although the first part of the picture (set in Hollywood) is pretty much business as usual for the “Hannah Montana” show, the rest of it takes on some meaning as Robbie Ray takes his daughter Miley (who is actually superstar Hannah Montana) back to the family farm in Tennessee, much against Miley’s w...

I went to see what will most likely be my last summer movie today, and it got me thinking: I haven’t posted a single thought about it on 4RC. Shame on me. Wolverine * I really liked the first two X-Men films, but the third was completely lost on me. Wolverine started off with one of the best opening montage sequence since The Watchmen. After that, it jumped around, and by the time film ended, I just didn’t care anymore. Star Trek **** I have mixed feelings about this film. TOS has a particularly special place in my inner geek, and part of me was sad to see that they made a TOS film that was better than five of the other TOS movies. I approached this movie fully expecting to kinda like it, but not love it. But J.J. breathed life into my childhood heroes and proves one of my friends favorite sayings: “it’s all about the story.” Terminator Salvation *** I think that after Seth Rogan, Christian Bale must be the hardest working man in Hollywood. I went into this film with ...

Inju: the Beast in Shadow follows French mystery novelist Alex Fayard as he arrives in Japan for a publicity tour and receives a cryptic warning from his Japanese rival, Shundei Oe, a wildly popular but reclusive author who has never been seen or photographed, known only by a gruesome self portrait on his book jackets. Alex meets a dancer in a tea house who thinks she knows who Oe really is, a brutal and insane former lover who may be capable of harming Alex. Director Barbet Schroeder ( Reversal of Fortune, Single White Female ) seems at ease with both the material and the odd French/Japanese hybrid style of the film, which blends mystical Asian themes with elements of a taut European thriller. The plot unfolds like a flower, petal by petal; and as the plot unravels myriad twists and misdirection are revealed, the end result is a watchable and satisfying cinematic experience.

First time screenwriter Stephen Lindsay, who hails from Greer, SC, not far from my old stomping grounds, says he was thrilled to be involved with Hachiko: A Dog’s Story , to which actor Richard Gere attached himself early on and provided a great deal of creative input toward the final script. Gere stars as Parker, a New England man whose life is changed when an Akita pup finds him late one night at the train station. The station master, played by Jason Alexander, can only turn him over to the pound, so Parker elects to take the pup home until the owner is located. It’s not an easy transition for Parker’s wife, but Hachi and Parker bond, becoming an inseparable pair. And, as any dog movie worth its salt would have it, the pup’s owner never comes forward. Hachi becomes not only Parker’s best friend but a staple in the community where they live. Parker commutes to work by train, and like clockwork Hachi is waiting on his master every day outside the train station at five o’clock, rain or ...

Matthew Broderick stars as Ben Singer, a an embittered civil servant whose marriage has failed, who is estranged from his only daughter, whose career is at a dead end and who blames corporate greed on the part of The Man (an amusing performance by Philip Baker Hall) as the origin of both his and all society's ills. Then his roommate (and only friend) enters a diabetic coma and Ben is forced to take stock of his life. He's helped along by his roommate's sister, Khadi, who travels from Dakar to wait by her brother's bedside, and by a coworker who discovers that Ben was previously a very successful recording artist of children's songs until being put down by The Man. Thankfully, Wonderful World is not as heavy-handed as it might have been, and Broderick brings a soft, sympathetic touch to Ben’s pessimistic nature. Writer-directer Joshua Goldin (who wrote Out on a Limb with Broderick and 1990’s Darkman ) crafts a movie that blends comedy into a hopeful story about a m...

The Fortress is a Swiss documentary about a weigh station for foreign refugees seeking asylum in Switzerland, and it manages not only to paint a clear picture of what a refugee has to go through to obtain Swiss residency, but it paints portraits of a few hopeful souls and the dramatic and often painful journeys their lives have taken to arrive at the Swiss border petitioning for refuge. This is the only documentary I have seen at this year's festival, and I arrived thinking I was about to see a movie called Cold Souls with Paul Giamatti . I did see Giamatti standing outside of the Harvard Exit theater, signing a few autographs, but he did not appear in the Swiss documentary I screened. There was no narration nor were there any interviews. The Fortress was shot entirely in the refugee center, and the filmmakers did a terrific job editing the film in such a way that the lives of the workers and refugees there were vivid and fully realized. The movie is fascinating and flows nicel...

Many of the films shown at Seattle's film festival were made here, the majority of them independents. Such is the case with World’s Greatest Dad . Robin Williams plays Lance Clayton, a high school poetry teacher and failed writer. And he is hardly the world’s greatest dad. His teenage son, Kyle, who is crude and cruel and virtually friendless, seems to have no moral or ethical compass and runs roughshod over his weak-willed single parent. Williams is terribly sympathetic in his failure to discipline his son, and his rebuffed efforts to bond with the teen – dinner, movies, anything – are heartbreaking. But this is a black comedy, one of the darkest American comedies I've seen, and when Kyle dies in an accidental and undignified manner, his grieving father pens a suicide note leading all to believe that Kyle was a friendless genius who has taken the easy way out. Having redefined his worthless son, Lance finds that his life takes a remarkable turn for the better, as others (who p...

So Long at the Fair is one of those rare treats offered at film festivals, an old British film not available in the states but well worth the look on the big screen. Fair is a 1950 suspense thriller said to be a favorite of Hitchcock's. It incorporates an old legend about a disappearing room. Directed by Terence Fisher, who went on to direct most of the classic Hammer horror films of the 1960's and 70's, Fair stars Jean Simmons as Vicky Barton, a woman attending the 1889 Paris exhibition with her brother when inexplicably he disappears. Upon making inquiries as to his whereabouts she is told by the hotel staff that not only did she arrive in Paris alone, but that her brother's room, number 19, does not exist. Indeed, there is no room 19 and Vicky is unable to find anyone in Paris who has any memory of him. So Long at the Fair is a solid thriller, and holds up fairly well. While it lacks the flair of a Hitchcock film, it benefits from numerous unexpected turns of plot ...

Jack and Molly Campbell are the well-to-do parents of six-year-old Joey who are informed, out of the blue, that their infant adoption was not legal. To make matters worse, Joey's biological father, until recently wholly unaware of the boy's existence, wants his child returned now that he's completed his seven year prison sentence for domestic abuse. A judge orders the child removed from his adoptive parents in Florida and flown to Ohio to live with his biological mother and father. That is Like Dandelion Dust , a movie chronicling the lives of two sets of parents intent on raising young Joey and of the confused child caught in between. It goes without saying that to a point both sets of parents are sympathetic. Rip (a terrific Barry Pepper) has reformed and his desire for fatherhood fuels his efforts to rebuild his life. His wife, played to near perfection by Mira Sorvino, desires a simpler life, a life with a family, and her desire to be a mother to the child she gave up s...

When the director of the indie The Merry Gentleman suffered a ruptured appendix, actor Michael Keaton stepped up and delivered a beautiful, quiet and contemplative film about two souls looking for redemption and release from the horrors of their pasts while struggling with issues of trust and acceptance as they face painful and uncertain futures. Set in Chicago, Keaton plays a loner who struggles with the horrible things he does for a living, and is about to end it all when a woman (Kelly MacDonald) running from her past as the wife of an abusive husband interrupts his attempt and ultimately saves his life. This one moment draws the characters together into a complex relationship that has dangerous – and perhaps deadly – consequences. But these characters, drawn with light stokes of the director’s brush, manage to embed themselves into the psyche of the viewer, resonating with a power that is both puzzling and refreshing. The Merry Gentleman is not an easy film to sum up without givi...

Moon is one of those festival films that manages to surprise and delight, as it far exceeded my expectations. Often, "independent" and "sci- fi " add up to a nice effort and only that, with two much effort expended in trying to make "cool sci- fi " while leaving story and character back on Earth. Not so, Moon . English director Duncan Jones said his influences were the original Alien , Silent Running and Outland , and he's crafted a story about a simple blue collar working man who's finishing up a three year contract mining helium on the moon and wants nothing more than to return to his wife and child back on Earth. But with two weeks to go before returning to Earth, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell, in a role written with him in mind) begins to suspect that he is not alone on the moon. To continue with the synopsis would include a spoiler on which the entire plot of Moon turns, so I will say only that Sam is tested physically and psychologically to his l...

I am sitting in the Egyptian theater waiting on Moon to start. It's been a good festival thus far, as I've seen films ranging from a Romeo and Juliet-inspired tale of teen angst and forbidden love to a few of the great classics classics of American cinema. Tonight I am here to see a cabin fever flick set on the moon starring Sam Rockwell as an astronaut who has spent three years alone overseeing a mining operation and, with two weeks to go before he is to return to earth discovers that he may not be alone. The Egyptian is one of those huge, grand old city cinemas with lush velvet curtains everywhere and colorful ornamentation (in this case, the theme is, well, Egyptian). They feature typical art house fare - independents, foreign films, classics and great weekend midnights like Raiders of the Lost Ark , Bladerunner and The Princess Bride . Tonight's feature is sold out, and the place is packed. Fourth row center feels like the middle of a sardine can. But the cinematic ex...

In The Answer Man Jeff Daniels plays the author of a bestselling book on spirituality who is himself still searching for answers to life's most painful questions. He lives in fear of being discovered as a fraud and his solitary life is invaded by a few fearful and searching souls who believe he holds the answers they've been seeking. At its core The Answer Man is about fear -- fear of being alone, of not knowing where our lives are headed, of losing those close to us, of not finding the answers to the questions that plague our lives. Daniels is immensely likable as the bitter sage who gleans answers to his own questions through the act of helping others. He is supported by a capable cast that includes Lauren Graham as the love interest. The Answer Man is not a perfect film, but neither are its characters.

Among the many programs featured each year at the film festival it is perhaps the archival program that I enjoy the most. I have screened many great films from years past, both well known and obscure, in large venues packed with movie lovers. This year's archival screenings are introduced by Robert Osborne, that knowledgeable, film-savvy host from Turner Classic Movies. He's like a professor: he knows everything about every movie ever made. And he is also much like a favorite uncle who knows all the family gossip, but in Osborne's case they are stories from Hollywood's Golden Age. Watching him introduce a movie is like having him in your living room, rummaging through you DVD collection and offering observations like,"Once Hitchcock completed filming the classic shower scene he realized he could never use Janet Leigh in a movie again because viewers would forever associate her with Psycho ." Osborne introduced The Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn...

The Seattle International Film Festival is back and again this year I am going to cram as many films as I can into the 25 days of non-stop screenings. SIFF boasts 268 features and 124 shorts this year, as well as the usual few surprises. Today I screened a new film called Shrink , starring Kevin Spacey as Henry Carter, a successful Los Angeles “psychiatrist to the stars” who turns to drugs following the death of his wife. The movie deals with loss, suicide and drug addiction. But despite the heavy subject matter the superb cast delivers a good deal of humor and humanity along the way. Shrink is also about movies – watching movies, loving movies and making movies. The lives of an obsessive-compulsive Hollywood power agent, a struggling screenwriter, two substance-abusing film actors and a distraught teenager who escapes her pain by cutting school and going to the cinema orbit and intersect with Carter as his life and career spiral out of control. This is a film about broken people sea...

In order to review George of the Jungle, it must be placed in proper context.  This is a Jay Ward cartoon come to life. Jay Ward brought us George of the Jungle, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Cracked Fairy Tales, Dudley Do Right, and many others. The Narrator was a trademark of each tale. George of the Jungle stars a very likeable Brendan Frasier as the main character, Leslie Mann as Ursula Stanhope, George’s true love, and Thomas Hayden Church as George’s competition for Ms. Stanhope’s heart. And, then you have John Cleese providing the voice of an Ape named Ape. My family watched George of the Jungle and it was a big hit with everyone. The language is fairly clean, and most of the jokes are juvenile.

It is best to remember that the twisted mystery in which Ben Affleck ’s character, one Congressman Collins, entangles himself does not bear careful examination. It is convoluted and raises more questions that the film ultimately answers. The real power in director Kevin ( The Last King of Scotland ) Macdonald ’s political thriller is in Russell Crowe ’s star-powered performance as the reporter who manages to unravel it all. It’s not an easy task, but Crowe , playing a methodical, tenacious old-school hard-news reporter makes it look easy. He inhabits the role with such rumpled grace that, as with many of his best roles, the character emerges and remains a dominate force in the film as a whole. The movie becomes less about the mystery itself and more about how Crowe ’s Cal McAffrey goes about solving it all. Much is being made of the issues confronting the film’s fictional Washington Globe, which is helmed by the always solid and compelling Helen Mirren as Cameron Lynne. McAffrey la...

I found this article interesting. The Dark Knight finished its official run last on March 5th, the day before the Watchmen opened. It ran for 231 days and made $131, 364 in the final week on 54 screens. Officially, this put the movie in the top 50 money makers last week according to Box Office Mojo . It amazes me that a movie released last July had those legs. I watched it once in the theater, and maybe twice on DVD (and the second time because my wife agreed to watch it). Did the film cross boundaries with people that most "comic book" movies don't? Like the Watchmen, I thought the film was over long, and started to dry up when Heath Ledger wasn't on the screen. Something about Christian Bale's growling Batman voice bugged me. But kudos to the franchise for launching the most attended movie since The Phantom Menace.

I read the Watchmen back in 1989. At the time, I was going through a string of up and down relationships. To clear my head, I invited my bud, David, with me to go spend the weekend at Edisto Island. It was great. We hung out, drank some beer and he loaned me his copy of the Watchmen. It did not grab me like it did others. In fact, I would have gone as far as to say I did not like it. Fast forward, last week, I bought the comic (sorry, graphic novel) and have been making my way through it. I think there was too much heartbreak, sand (and maybe beer) that I missed a lot of the story. I don't think I even read excerpts at the end of each issue. It is in those narratives that flesh out the world of the Watchmen. What I missed the first time was that Alan Moore created another world that was really fleshed out. How could they ever make this into a movie? All of that back story just so that you understand how this movie hit me. It was like the reading back in 1989: it was good, but n...

Saturday was the third annual Best Picture Showcase, featuring the five movies nominated for this year's Best Picture Award. Sitting through five movies is very difficult, especially for the final film. Last year, they played No Country For Old Men , and I dozed off during a critical part and I was lost for the final twenty minutes of the film. Not wanting to repeat the same thing this year, I packed up some "No-Doze" to help me make it through. With the exception of Benjamin Buttons, I had very little idea of what the films were about. I posted the films that I liked the best on my Facebook page when I got home, and I wanted to address that here. Milk - It was the first film of the day, and it was the one that I was looking forward to watching the least. It was the subject matter - an openly gay man running for office. What I found was a movie that was more about civil rights than homosexuality (however, there was plenty of men kissing men in the film, so be warned). ...

It’s not unusual for me to wait until the last moment to post my Oscar picks. I am always torn between picking my favorite in a given category or choosing the artist or film that I think will win, regardless of my own opinion. What follows, this year, is a combination of both, a few predictions and a few hopefuls. We'll see how I do following tonight's Oscar telecast. Supporting Actress Viola Davis, Doubt Supporting Actor Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight Actress Kate Winslet, The Reader Actor Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler Editing Slumdog Millionaire Art Direction The Duchess Cinematography The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Costumes The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Makeup The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Visual Effects The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Screenplay, Adapted Frost/Nixon Screenplay, Original In Bruges Song Peter Gabriel, “Down to Earth,” WALL-E Score The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Foreign Film Waltz with Banshir Documentary Encounters at the...

In Taken , Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a retired secret agent who moves to Los Angeles to be close to his daughter, who is living with Bryan’s ex-wife and her well-to-do husband. But when his daughter is kidnapped while visiting Paris with a friend, Bryan comes out of retirement and hunts down the thugs who snatched his daughter. Taken is a high concept movie that moves along well and benefits from Neeson ’s determined and level performance. He is likable and believable. Taken holds no surprises -- we know how things are going to go down in the end: with fists and bullets flying. It’s the journey that’s entertaining, seeing how Bryan uses his experience and his wits to connect the dots and find his daughter’s kidnappers. Taken is co-written by Luc Besson (who directed La Femme Nakita and The Fifth Element ), but his script, though often crisp and tight, has no real spark. The film is ultimately mediocre, and it occurred to me that as capable as Neeson is, Harrison Ford or B...

In advance of the Oscar nominations I thought I'd share a few thoughts about 2008's slate of movies. In thinking about the forthcoming Oscar noms it is strange that there was nothing huge this year that would make for typical Oscar fodder, big films such as Titanic , The English Patient , Braveheart or Shindler's List . I suppose those who produced the big-budget period picture Australia were hoping a late-year release might generate Oscar buzz. No one, apparently, went to see it. So this years best movies are, in my opinion, all over the board. Still having not seen a couple of flicks on many critics' top ten lists ( The Wrestler , Happy-Go-Lucky and Revolutionary Road among them), I will endeavor to offer one of my own: Frost/Nixon Slumdog Millionaire In Bruges Doubt Gran Torino Changeling The Dark Knight Man on Wire The Bank Job Iron Man Regarding Wall-E: although it failed to move me personally, I was impressed with the animation and particularly the storytelling...