Reviews

The Mormon allegory about resisting sexual impulses finally reaches the big screen with Twilight. This is, of course, the film adaptation of Stephanie Meyer's teen sensation novel and should be the first of about four in the series. Directed by Catherine Hardwicke, this bit of cornball vampire-romance schlock is the buzz of the preteen-to-teen set and the talk of everyone who hasn't seen another vampire movie or read another vampire book, like, ever.

Kristen Stewart stars as Bella, perhaps one of the most annoying protagonists put to film in 2008. She's a dreary, gawky, breathy teen with no personality and nothing to latch on to from a cinematic perspective. Bella moves to Forks, which according to Meyer's book is an incredible rainy locale, and lives with her father on the rugged Washington coast. She heads to a new school, where apparently every student has read her bio before her arrival, and makes friends easily despite having no discernible social skills and no actual likable qualities.

Eventually Bella discovers the one and only Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) in biology class. She is drawn to him instantly, as he is to her. Their breathless exchanges, their constant blinking and biting of lips, and their mumbled phrases abruptly blossom into a romance for the ages. One catch, of course, is that Edward is a vampire desperately trying to resist his "thirst" for Bella. Bella, on the other hand, seems to have no problem putting Edward through absolute hell if it means she can be with him.

We meet Edward's family, a strange crew of pale-faced nobodies, and a plot develops in which another vampire thirsts after Bella. Edward and his family only consume animal blood, thus making them vegetarians. Go figure. With Edward and Co. resisting the blood of Bella, they find time to play baseball and hang out with her. They take to her right away, just like Edward did, and soon enough they're risking it all to protect her from vampires who in reality do nosh on human blood.

Twilight carries on a basic idea of denial in that the "good" vampires manage to rebuff their instinctive longing for blood and apparently never take human blood no matter how burly the impulses are. No matter how much heavy breathing Bella does, no matter how much she bites her lip, and no matter how much she mumbles over her words in that mouth- watering adolescent way, Edward doesn't dare move from his staunch position of abstemiousness.

As a film, Twilight is terrible. The performances are awful from top to bottom, with negligible flashes of actual personality and life from the characters. Performers mumble, stumble, and stagger around the screen in an attempt to introduce us to these characters, but nothing really takes hold and the end results are colourless and ripe for Airplane!-style satire. Stewart inhabits Bella with such breathiness, such irritation, and such idiocy that one has trouble feeling any concern for her character at all. After all, why would we?

Pattinson might look the part, I suppose, as Edward, but he sure as hell does little to act the part. His is the most unexciting vampire of all time, I daresay. Part of this is Meyer's fault, sure, as Pattinson can't help the ridiculousness of "getting all shiny" when the sun comes out or the daft logistics of sucking the blood out of a deer. Pattinson's leering, gloomy, mind-numbing performance does little to drum up interest in the character beyond the phony morons of the eighth grade.

But enough is enough. Let's set aside the pitiable constitution of the motion picture for a moment. Let's ignore the fact that the movie manages to leave its established first person set-up to explore a pair of scenes that we really don't need to see. Let's pretend we never saw Bella shake a squeezable ketchup bottle. Let's imagine that the soundtrack wasn't a sweltering turd of tacky music set at the worst conceivable times. Let's imagine the movie had even one segment with some humour or wit. And let's pretend that the closing credits weren't among the most ostentatious and garish of all time.

What we're left with are the bones of a poor vampire movie that attempts to teach us a lesson about self-abnegation. It's about negating desires, about resisting life, about abstaining from impulses. This may or may not be a laudable message, depending on where your morality lies. But one thing Twilight and Stephanie Meyer's complete bleak, cowardly, decomposing empire is is a spineless and brainless excuse for literature. And it's a howling shame that this preposterous excuse for literature became a boring and dire excuse for a film.

In defining the Italian neorealist era, Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (also known as The Bicycle Thief) is one of the greatest motion pictures ever made. It stands as a work of profound emotion, highlighting human frailty, the importance of objects and the circle of morality by telling a beautifully simple and elegant story set in the bustling streets of Rome.

This movie is truly a work of art, a real and concise piece of passionate filmmaking by De Sica. In a time where most motion pictures functioned as paths to escapism, especially in Hollywood, De Sica's realistic look at the Italian streets and at the poor stood in stark contrast to the glitz and glamour produced in major studios. His Bicycle Thieves is a lean film, utilizing the suffocating poverty of Italy in its post-war era as a defining factor.

Lamberto Maggiorani stars as Antonio Ricci, a poor father and husband looking for work. He is given a job, but the conditions require that he has a bicycle. Together with his wife (Lianella Carell), Antonio sells some bedsheets and procures a bicycle to do the job. He is elated, as you might imagine, and becomes overjoyed at the prospects of earning money to help lift his family out of abject poverty.

One day, while working at his job of posting Rita Hayworth posters in Rome, Ricci has his bicycle stolen. He becomes frantic in the search, going to the police and using the help of friends to find the stolen property. With his son, Bruno (Enzo Staiola), he traipses through Rome in all conditions to track and hopefully recover his bicycle.

Watching Maggiorani, who was a factory worker and not a trained actor of any kind, put life into Ricci is an astounding experience. The way he struggles, with himself and with the situation, to come up with a way to understand what has happened to him and to come up with a way to go on with his life is simply amazing. The bicycle is no mere object to Ricci. It represents his livelihood, his pride and his ability to pull his life out of the gutter to offer hope for his family.

With this in mind, watching Ricci's desperate search through Rome takes on weight and urgency. As he pushes people aside to gather possible clues or to find people who may know where the thief is, we're with him every hurried step of the way. We're with him when he considers theft himself, too, and we see the distance growing between Ricci and Bruno as the man becomes more desperate and more upset.

Bicycle Thieves is a wonderful motion picture in that it taps the realism of the streets and of human despair in ways that few other pictures ever have. Placing this film in the context of post-war Italy, a country burning with poverty and anguish, creates a deafening sense of trouble and sorrow for its characters. The raw emotion is inborn for this picture, as though the massive importance of the bicycle and what it means to Ricci simply never needs to be explained.

From the relationship between Ricci and Bruno to the way Ricci elects to solve his problem, Bicycle Thieves is a movie filled with human frailty. It offers us a profound understanding of that frailty, treating it with respect and honour and dignity. The poor are not mere objects to shuffle aside, the thief is not a villain anymore when the story comes full circle and the lengths to which despair can take us are realistically and intensely explored on multiple levels. Indeed, Ricci's search through Rome mirrors our lives and our searches for individuality, meaning and respect.

Live action remakes of animated features almost always wind up being risky affairs. Disney's 101 Dalmatians, a live action version of its classic animated feature, goes well beyond risky and straight into idiotic territory. This jumbled mess of a film is only noteworthy for the animal acting and for an over-the-top Glenn Close performance that gets worse by the second. Unfortunately, even those rare elements of slight interest get glossed over by CGI and a ridiculous set of sequences that turns the minimalistic joy of the original into nothing more than chaotic clutter.

101 Dalmatians strips all the elements from the animated feature for the sake of laziness, it seems, and what we're left with is a completely unnecessary project that demonstrates Disney's unfortunate unwillingness to fully commit to a film with heart. This Stephen Herek-directed movie "updates" the formula and adds a couple of dumb chase sequences to fill time, giving us characters that we don't care about and putting them in situations that cheerlessly mangle the original plot.

Roger Dearly (Jeff Daniels) is a video game designer. He's an obvious update on the song-writing Roger out of the animated version and this proves problematic right away: there's no excuse for the famous and awesome Cruella de Vil song. In any event, Roger has a dog genius named Pongo. Pongo's pretty bright, but we have no idea what's going on in his canine head because there's no internal dog monologue. The key element that made One Hundred and One Dalmatians so fantastic is, alas, missing.

Roger meets Anita (Joely Richardson) in the park after a disastrous and apparently hilarious pair of chase sequences because one wasn't enough to set up things. They do what any sensible people do after getting thrown into a park's lake and get married immediately. Also, they both have Dalmatians and now Pongo has a lover. The cuddly dog scenes show us they love each other. Aww. Anita works for Cruella de Vil (Close) a bizarre fur-loving weirdo with designs on the puppies Anita and Roger's doggies eventually have. You know the rest.

Stunningly, this live action version of Dodie Smith's story was penned and produced by John Hughes. Yes, that John Hughes. How he managed to mangle such a simple story is beyond me, but he sure did a number on this one. For starters, this version sticks the humans squarely in charge of things and then jettisons them for the last act so that we get a musically driven dog's rescue sequence that eliminates the brilliance of the original because we can't hear what they're saying to each other.

The best parts of the animated version are, therefore, gone. The barking of the dogs becomes a bunch of noise and the overwhelmingly invasive Michael Kamen score keeps meddling and telling us what we're supposed to feel. As much as I dislike the premise of talking animal movies, Disney's remake could have used a voice or two from the kingdom of the canines.

Because the dogs lack voices and because we're focused on the dumb, boring humans, we don't really ever connect when the dogs go missing. The sequences that the animated version used to so lovingly attach us to Pongo and his family are gone, replaced by a grand "naming of the dogs" sequence that really only identifies the dogs by physical traits. This is another problem that could have been solved by having the dogs speak.

Of course, having animals speak in these sorts of movies usually suffers from the fact that talking animals generally look stupid. But Disney doesn't seem to have any concern of that because they use copious CGI anyway, "fleshing out" the actions of the dogs and other animals when the trained canines can't do the trick. The discrepancy here is abundantly and embarrassingly clear, as it's hard to mask the sudden appearance of a CGI puppy heading down a slide into the snow. The large group shots of the puppies also shine with the clumsy computer-assisted stuff.

In the end, 101 Dalmatians is a waste of time. While some may find value in the Glenn Close performance and some of the animal stuff, it wasn't enough for me. The movie is amazingly lazy, even by Disney's modern standards. The invasive score, the poor CGI and the bland performances from Daniels and Richardson make this a film to avoid like a creepy canine with rabies. And don't even get me started on the tragic absence of the beloved Sergeant Tibbs!

Backing my courageous assertion that I must watch everything and anything I come across, here is From Justin to Kelly. This 2003 "musical" is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Penned by Kim Fuller, the brother of American Idol creator Simon Fuller, From Justin to Kelly features Kelly Clarkson and Justin Guarini partying it up during one of the lamest spring breaks on record.

Is this some sort of elaborate joke? Can a movie actually be this bad? What the hell is Clarkson wearing? Why, dear Jesus, why?

Clarkson stars in this catastrophe as some sort of downhome Texas waitress named Kelly. She's the most conservative of her three friends. The other two are flat stereotypes: one is a shifty and confusingly manipulative blonde girl (Katherine Bailess) and the other is the token black friend (Anika Noni Rose). The two girls convince Kelly that she needs to take some time off from singing and waiting tables in this bar, so they head to Fort Lauderdale.

In Fort Lauderdale, Guarini is the inventively-named Justin. See? Justin and Kelly, just like on TV! Justin is some sort of party promoter and he also hangs out with two stereotypes: a nerd (Brian Dietzen) meeting a girl from the enchanted and apparently still profound internet and some buff loser (Greg Siff). Justin and Kelly "meet" in a stupid dance number and fall in love, but the confusingly manipulative blonde "friend" of Kelly's gets in the way. Will Justin and Kelly overcome the befuddling text messages and strange overtures?

From Justin to Kelly plays out like a teen movie written and produced by people who were teens about 78 years ago. There's this preposterous attempt to "understand" teen culture, but this drivel makes High School Musical look like Gone with the Wind. There are "dance" numbers, "songs" and "song-and-dance" numbers. The stereotypes fit in the right places and the movie's obligatory scoundrel turns out to be a Machiavellian curiosity that still leaves as one of Kelly's best friends.

The "songs" in From Justin to Kelly are bad. The "dancing" is bad. The "acting" is bad. The "screenplay" is bad. The "characters" are bad. The "scenery" is bad. The "camerawork" is bad. The "direction" is bad. The "titles" are bad. The "end credits" are bad. Any "animal actors" are bad. The "food" is bad. Everything, and I mean everything, is bad.

Brandon, the aforementioned buff loser, raps. The nerd meets a strange- looking girl from the internet. Kelly and Justin sing on a boat. Kelly sings a song holding her purse walking down the beach after leaving a bar without her purse. There's a bald steroid freak, apparently, and a dude that looks to be about 45 hanging around moaning about losing his girlfriend to somebody he never lost his girlfriend to. There's a whipped cream bikini contest that isn't the least bit interesting. Seriously.

This is spring break zaniness for the Disney set, an imagined and hopeful view of what people in their twenties are up to when all bets are off and the night can cover the sins of the day. Hannah Montana is more hedonistic. Or so I've heard.

At the end of the day, I found myself somewhat proud of the grand achievement of having made it through From Justin to Kelly. I felt like I had accomplished something spectacular, like I had really done the world some sort of service. Any of my other failings were quickly glossed over by the realization that I made it. Any sense of inadequacy was gone. I made it. I lived to tell.

Some documentaries are overcooked showcases of sleek editing techniques and computer graphics, while others are rather slim in stature. Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary is an unfussy motion picture that consists entirely of about 90 minutes of interviews with Traudl Junge. To overlook the barebones testimony of Junge, Adolf Hitler's youngest personal secretary, would be a mistake.

There are some who may find the hour and a half to be lacking in bells and whistles, but there's much more going on here than meets the immediate eye. In our day and age of attention deficits, real or imagined, it is often hard to convince people that they really ought to listen to what Junge has to say when she's not saying it over an explosive musical score or in 3D.

In any event, directors André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer present Junge sitting in a chair in her home and only cut away a few times. The cuts are used for different reasons. One particular cut shows Junge watching the main feed of the interview. She offers a little extra commentary over what we've just heard.

Junge's memoir, Until the Final Hour, was used as a basis for one of my favourite motion pictures of the last few years, 2004's dazzling Downfall. In Blind Spot, we learn more about what it was like during those final years of Hitler's power and life. Perhaps more importantly, we learn about Traudl Junge and how she was swept up into such profound evil without knowing the details. Spellbound by Hitler's charisma and by, at least in part, her daily routines, she held reality in her blind spot.

There are some who will mumble over what they feel is a mere news interview, but they tragically miss the depths of Blind Spot. Here is a motion picture that should be a motion picture. The depths of Junge''s consciousness are raw and torn apart. Her facial expressions, her tears and her agony are spread across these 90 minutes and present an emotional cavern that few other movies would have dared to explore.

It is the unflinching, unadorned nature of Blind Spot that grants it the power it needs to carry on. It is the silent moments, too, and the space between words that speak volumes. It is the small moments, described in almost endearing detail, that display what happened in the bunker and during Hitler's final hours in bright, vibrant colours. We don't need a score, we don't need graphic assistance. We carry it, I think, in our mind's eye.

The trouble with an unscripted masterwork like Blind Spot is that we can't see the bottom. There's no direction for Junge to follow, other than to sit in a chair and talk about her experiences. When she wanders off on tangents, we go along and the purpose engrosses us. As she begins to talk about Hitler's affection for Blondie, his dog, we marvel at the detail. Later, when Junge explains how Hitler poisoned his dog during his final maddening moments, the circle closes.

With most moviegoers, even those brave enough to chart the waters of documentary films, used to a line-up of talking heads and a barrage of information, Blind Spot proves deeper than most with just one individual voice carrying on. As a true sign of fascination, I was left with more questions. Just as I wanted more out of hearing my grandmother talk about her life experiences, I wanted more out of Traudl Junge. Perhaps this was all she had to give, though, as she passed away in February of 2002 at the age of 81 (the same day the film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival).

Before she died, Junge apparently said "Now that I've let go of my story, I can let go of my life."