Reviews

"Crash" has been called a film about racism, a description which nails its leitmotif but fails to do justice to an engrossing film about a variety of people loving and hating in L.A.

The movie, written, directed and co-produced by Caucasian Canadian Paul Haggis, comes at its subject matter from so many angles it might even appeal to some racists! "Crash" provides plenty of drama to keep the enjoyment level high while a mixed bag of racial and ethnic stereotypes parades in front of the camera lens. As the pieces to the puzzle-like narrative fall into place, we are shown ostensible reasons for racism, but also persons who refuse to give in to hate. "Crash" also dares to point out that there are no guarantees: someone's racially motivated judgment may turn out to be accurate in a particular instance. Without moralizing or even leaving us with a moral at the end of the story, "Crash" does, however, lament the ultimately losing proposition racism represents -- whether it is practiced by an individual or a bureaucracy. The anger and hatred recycled throughout the City of Angels by the racially prejudiced characters in this film is shown to be a destructive force that takes a human toll.

Sandra Bullock plays a district attorney's wife, defined by attendant privilege. When she is traumatized by armed carjackers, it brings out the bile of her biased views. Bullock's performance is absolutely raw; she is a woman alone with her anger, whose husband (Brendan Fraser) is more involved with political damage control than reconnecting with his spouse after their harrowing experience.

Matt Dillon is a cop who blames "the job" for his lack of humanity and the dehumanizing way he interacts with others, whether they are African-Americans, women, Hispanics or rookie cops. And it is "the job" which will ultimately define him.

Don Cheadle, also a co-producer, plays a police detective whose senile mother blames him for the misspent life of his younger brother (Larenz Tate), an otherwise intelligent kid, who just happens to practice armed robbery. Cheadle's character is all too well aware of the ramifications of race on his job and in his department. However, he is paralyzed to act against it by the same world-weariness, acquired from years of chasing down bad guys, that arguably allows him to continue to function in his job while caring for his increasingly helpless mother.

Rookie officer Hanson (Ryan Philippe) is disgusted by gratuitous abuse. But his instincts are not yet honed enough for him to successfully navigate the hard-to-predict world of cops and robbers.

An African-American TV director (Terrence Howard) is forced by events to re-examine his place in society. When and where he chooses to make his stand might reflect the stranglehold of "the man" or it might just hold the key to real social change. Viewers will decide for themselves.

Thandie Newton delivers a performance of wide-ranging authentic emotions in her pivotal role as Cameron's wife. Chris "Ludacris" Bridges plays Anthony, the garrulous "Go To" guy in a gang of two. Armed and delusional, he rants about conspiracy theories on racially charged themes, while preying upon solid citizens. But when his snub-nose is wrested from him during an attempted carjacking, Anthony is symbolically emasculated, and he freezes in fearful helplessness. Afterward he slips back into his criminal routine, but Anthony may have found religion or at least a moral line on the asphalt that he is not ready to cross.

In one subplot we watch a loving father provide for his preschool daughter while trying to keep her safe from gun violence. At the same time, a caring adult daughter reluctantly helps her angry storekeeper father purchase a gun he is convinced he needs for his protection. The unlikely convergence of these separate households plays out like a karmic ballet.

At times in "Crash" it seems as if L.A. is home to only hateful people. But amid all the useless bluster we are also given a glimpse of the potential for a racially harmonious future. It lies within the grasp of each of us, literally: the same hands that violate, can also save and console.

"Crash" also holds up the inherent innocence of children as part of the plan for a better future. Aligned against this hope is a formidable adversary: the prejudice alive in men's hearts and society's institutions. Adults may have the power to create a fairy-tale world for their offspring, and children may have the naïveté needed to fully believe in that world, but beliefs built on purity don't often survive as we mature into adulthood.

"Crash" teeters at times on a cliff of conspicuous contrivance and melodrama, but its in-your-face attitude, the praiseworthy lyricism of James Muro's cinematography and an emotive musical score keep it from plunging over the edge.

In the big city, with its fast pace, complex institutions and disparate populations, it is all too expeditious to misjudge based on skin shade or language. "Crash" leaves its audience questioning the wisdom of basing important choices on such insignificant matters.

"Capote" creates an impression that doesn't easily wear off. The film tells how Truman Capote came to write his seminal work "In Cold Blood," which deals with the brutal murder of the Clutter family in Kansas in 1959.

The genius of this movie is its unerring exposition and its focus on the writer's creative process. Along the way, "Capote" offers fascinating, if thin, recreations of the Cool Jazz-fueled cocktail circuit of the early 1960s brownstone intelligentsia in New York City as well as an outsider's view of the more grounded yet aspiring "wheatfield soul" of rural Kansas (landscape by Manitoba).

Philip Seymour Hoffman reveals a Capote whose vulnerability has made him tough. Capote's vibrant, fey demeanor comes across at first as off-putting. But he is soon accepted by all because his consistency belies a force at once gifted and resolute. We realize we are dealing with someone who is determined to make sense out of a senseless aspect of human existence. It is not always a pretty sight. Capote manipulates his subjects and the people in his private circle in order to produce his book.

Lured out of the halls of The New Yorker magazine by the killings in Kansas, Capote crash lands in an alien sensibility. His fame is his credential, but he demurs in the face of the local sheriff (played with admirable restraint by Chris Cooper), who tells him fiercely, "I care," referring to the capture of the killers. Here are lawmen faced with bringing brutal murderers to justice. Art may be eternal, however both Capote and the sheriff know for sure that life is short. At the press conference, a duly subdued Capote stands, silent, in the back of the room. He is beginning to assimilate -- the first step in getting the real story.

When Capote calls his publisher in New York to ask for more money and for "Dick" Avedon to take pictures of the captured killers, it is the ego of the artist taking over. Without this selfish force, the book could not be created, but it remains a selfish drive to the end, nonetheless.

Meanwhile, Capote remains a cruel cut-up. This is his defense mechanism, to keep others from knowing his insecurities, from guessing at his depression. The writing process turns Capote inside out, and there is no way he wants to share that with anyone.

Instead, Capote regales his adulating listeners with name-dropping tales of boozy moments in exotic locales alongside cultural icons. More poignantly, he glibly deprecates the killers he has been cozying up to. Yet Capote's sincerity is apparent as he attempts to understand their story, which will become his book, and to help their cause as long as it dovetails with his opus.

A "necktie party" is how killer Perry Smith (Clifton Collins, Jr.) refers to his own impending death sentence; in 1965 Kansas still "hanged from a rope until dead" its capital murderers. Does anything emphasize more strongly the link to the Old West, especially as viewed by an arriviste member of the nation's cultural elite? Capote cleaves to his New York cachet; earlier he had denied that the subtle landscape of Kansas reminded him at all of his youth in the Deep South. He would rather see himself as a product of northeastern intellectualism than a bayou baby brought up in 'bama. His work on "In Cold Blood" forces him to reconsider his innermost self.

We are never truly moved to pity Smith, even though we are introduced to the accused in a humanizing environment, a kitchen that serves as an emergency detention cell. We are subsequently alienated from the convicted killer, whether by cell bars, his own attempts at artifice or the hangman's harness. The peculiarity of the outbuilding that houses the scaffold, to which the condemned are chauffeured in a roomy car, built "when Detroit still cared," further distracts from empathizing with Smith in his most helpless and final hour.

In days of yore the hangman might shake the condemned man's hand to judge his weight before adjusting the noose. In "Capote," Smith shakes the sheriff's hand before climbing the gallows. The scene reminds us of the sad truth that it is ultimately a weak man who would, as Smith's older sister told Capote in an earlier scene, "just as soon kill you as shake your hand."

Capote came to view murderer Perry Smith as a brother in spirit, and he confided this profound emotional tie to Nelle (Catherine Keener), his friend since childhood. After justice has been meted out in the Kansas barn, it is Nelle who refuses Capote's personal revisionism that he tried to stay the execution.

While the victims of the murders are not the focus of "Capote," the sheer brutality of the crimes is directly depicted in an abrupt flashback, lest we forget why these murderers have been ordered to forfeit their lives.

"Final Destination 3" may be a film with TV production values, but it has cult aspirations, and even lives up to them spottily. Sadly, for fans of Scythe-Shoulderer schlock, some of the scenes that build up to destruction and death are oddly without excruciation, not to mention too complicated for even Rube Goldberg. But as the film unspools, it manages to pick up a beat good enough to dance to -- with the suspension of one's disbelief as a partner.

"FD3" begins with Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) celebrating with members of her graduating high school class at an amusement park. Sitting in a roller coaster waiting for the ride to begin, she has an intense vision of disaster, causing her to panic. She takes herself off the ride before it starts and is led away---along with some friends who disembarked to calm her---by an uncaring adult who accuses her of being on drugs. Not so, Mister. Wendy's vision soon turns real and many witness the deadly horror. Among the victims are Wendy's best friend and her boyfriend.

The seven grads who escaped "roller coaster death" thanks to Wendy's clairvoyance are living on borrowed time, as Wendy discovers, and are scheduled to die in the order they originally boarded the ill-fated ride, as if Death were methodically rectifying the last-second screw-up caused by Wendy's vision. Digital photos from the night at the amusement park hold clues to the "do-over" deaths of the kids who got away. Our mission, should we decide to watch this movie, is to try to figure out the means Death will use to put its books in order, and exactly when the make-up mortality will take place.

On one level, Wendy spends the rest of the film trying to save her friends. On another level, she is trying to recapture a happier past by solving the mystery that left her boyfriend dead and her own life a psychotic ruin. Like the best private eyes in our pop culture, she is dismissed by the police. Wendy must rely on her deductive reasoning to attempt to divine the future, something she had been able to predict at the amusement park via involuntary intuition.

These different levels are linked by feelings of guilt -- she feels responsible; selfishness -- she begins to care more about solving this mystery than the lives it claims; and gradually by her own impending doom, which forces out all other considerations.

Wendy is a brooding heroine, who graduated high school only to be thrown violently into that adult world from which her storybook namesake fled on the coattails of Peter Pan.

Death, says Ian (Kris Lemche) in "FD3," is an inexorable force. Others begin to believe Death works according to a sick plan. The film itself depicts our physical demise as the haphazard result of the aleatory nature of our lives, a dimension we are mostly blind to because of our ego-based point of view.

Director James Wong actually succeeds in making it fun to tag along with Wendy as she tries to save her friends, deal with her own guilt and save herself Along the way, two shallow girls pursuing the consumer ideal of beauty suffer a gruesome, painful end. The demise of these "hotties" is not without its irony. We also see the hotheaded football star, played by Texas Battle, strengthening every muscle but the one between his ears. Could this omission become a vulnerability? Disturbed rebel Ian spouts science, but believes in nothing. And there is no avoiding Frankie (Sam Easton), a legend in his own groin, and too full of himself to attract any fans, except perhaps one.

There is plenty of gore and spatter, but surprisingly little philosophizing about the meaning of life. Perhaps that's the key to the success of "Final Destination 3." Oddly, some dialog in the script, penned by Wong with experienced TV screenwriter Glen Morgan, belies a confused understanding of colloquial American Englsih. For instance, when Wendy hangs back during a funeral, preferring to stand apart from the gathered mourners, fellow survivor Kevin (Ryan Merriman) asks her why she is in the "nose-bleeds." He uses it as a synonym for "far away," but the term derives its meaning from the height of the seats furthest away from the playing field (especially at a vintage stadium like the one in the Bronx), an altitude high enough to cause a nose bleed. Since there is no comparable landscaping in evidence at the cemetery, this usage makes no sense.

At the same funeral, Easton's tasty character claims he regrets having treated women as "fun bags," a jocular slang that first appeared in print 40 years ago this month (in Playboy, where else). Still, this derogatory term obviously doesn't refer to the female of the species, but rather only to her most commonly fixated upon secondary sexual characteristics.

While the film provides laughs for the depraved, it also educates. We learn there are deadly hazards all around us, from "not so fast food" drive-thrus to litterbugs on a sugar high. "FD 3" isn't so much a real movie as a kind of running visual gag in the form of a movie, and as such holds your interest, gets you worrying 'bout Wendy and, despite a poorly staged climax, is actually kind of fun.

Like many forgettable movies before it, "Firewall" opens with scenes of familial chaos: computer security chief Jack Stanfield (Harrison Ford), the happily married father of two, prepares for his morning commute to the bank where he oversees the safety of customer accounts. As we learn later in the conference room, this is a nice bank, one that really cares about its customers. Stanfield is a stand-up suit, who personifies this philosophy and opposes the crasser corporate credo that accepts customer fraud as part of the price of banking in America; it is good to know that our hero cares about the little guy.

Stanfield's noticeably younger wife Beth (Virginia Madsen) is an accomplished architect, who designed the family home, which balances on a forlorn rocky precipice overlooking the water, yet lies within range of a pizza joint that delivers. This huge house also serves as Beth's office. And in the absence of any domestic help, we must assume Mom also does the housekeeping, earning her husband's gratitude and presumably the audience's sympathy.

Around the breakfast table, multitasking siblings verbally attack each other's IQ, apparently with unerring insight, since neither kid has school for the rest of the week and thus both should, according to all available data, be sleeping until noon. It is the trite portrayal of American home life: wise parents indulge spoiled children in act one; subsequently the family bands together to defeat the evil interlopers.

At the bank Stanfield has a supportive colleague (Robert Forster) and an understanding boss (Alan Arkin). A merger is underway and Robert Patrick plays Stanfield's counterpart in the takeover company. Wow! What a great supporting cast! Alone the voices of these veteran actors are a joy to listen to. Unfortunately, they are given too few lines and are basically jettisoned from the script soon after we're introduced to the bad guys, to the film's great detriment.

As for the bad guys, they are a prosaic lot: a suave and sociopathic ringleader, Bill Cox (Paul Bettany), and a coterie of cookie-cutter criminals who, despite their SWAT-team-type takeover of the family home and their hi-tech hardware, contribute little in the way of excitement or tension to the tale. Cox shows Jack and Beth he means business by committing a cold-blooded murder, but his choice of victim is, to say the least, odd. Perhaps it is meant as an homage to the late Richard Pryor. Sadly, the scenes in "Firewall" showing the family held hostage are for the most part devoid of suspense, terror or even logic.

The hi-tech hustlers outfit Stanfield with video and audio in order to track his every move at work the next day, when he is expected to effect the massive transfer of bank funds to the bad guys' off-shore account. But when complications thwart Plan A, the hi-tech option is unceremoniously ditched in favor of "old school," and Cox shadows Stanfield in his own private version of "Bring Your Family's Kidnapper to Work" Day.

Stanfield gradually turns the tables on the bad guys and defeats them in a low-tech showdown, complete with disproportionate explosions. The codex governing Hollywood's ritual dispatching of lead villains dictates that the main bad guy dies last, horribly and in such a way that he realizes in real-time his own demise. I will say one thing in favor of "Firewall," before it's over Cox knows he has "picked" the wrong guy to fraud with.

But leading up to the final throwdown, the action and the tension never really synch up. "Firewall" fails to live up to the promise of a high stakes computerized bank caper. The narrative actually pivots on a "MacGyver-esque" contraption and a "delete all" computer command. Nor is the film's setting, Seattle, ever given to chance to shine. Instead it is constantly raining, as if the filmmakers had realized their project couldn't stand exposure to sunlight, and we are shown precious little of personality of the Pacific Northwest's popular metropolis.

The dénouement occurs in a completely different setting, seemingly plucked at random by a screenwriter suffering from attention deficit syndrome. The family unit's post-trauma hug scene with sunset is embarrassingly cheesy.

Ford's gruff, minimalist acting style fails to convince. He never becomes his character in "Firewall." But Ford does reprise here a couple of his well worn on-screen moments. When Stanfield has his "aha" moment, we are treated to quintessential Harrison Ford: his facial expression emotes the realization of the horrible spot his character is in, while simultaneously showing us the wheels already turning in that place behind his famous face, as he strives to find a way out. A second signature Ford moment comes when Stanfield finds himself with his back against the wall---literally. Here Ford emotes "total determination"; his character will stop at nothing to get his family back. Both of these moments are familiar from any number of previous and more exciting films, including "Frantic," "Air Force One," and "The Fugitive."

Woody Allen's latest, "Match Point," offers some breathtaking views of London and the country estates of its super rich, but the movie itself remains a dark tale of the moral bankruptcy of today's affluent society.

A washed-up professional tennis player, Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) has chucked the Grand Slam circuit in favor of the "big fish in a little pond" lifestyle of a tennis pro at a series of posh resorts. At the story's beginning he sits knees together, an apparently obeisant supplicant in a job interview for a spot at an exclusive London country club. His subdued appearance betrays no vestige of the alpha-male pro athlete.

Chris gets the job and befriends a wealthy young man, Tom Hewitt (Matthew Goode), whom he meets there. Soon Chris is enjoying nights at the opera and weekends at the Hewitt family's bucolic country estate, where shooting clay pigeons and drinking are the preferred activities. Tom's sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), who is portrayed as sweet and singularly awkward among this high-class race of smooth operators, falls for the former tennis star, who accepts her attentions with the same polite enthusiasm he displays for opera tickets. He beds her in his shabby London flat, where he otherwise spends his time reading Dostoevsky and listening to "serious music," as if exposure to high culture could inoculate him against his baser origins.

When he meets Tom's serious squeeze Nola (Scarlett Johansson), Chris immediately shows signs of ruthless desire, revealing his truer, primitive self. Nola's tragic flaw is that she sees herself as a Lola whom no man can say no to (unless he is casting a movie). She is an American from a broken home, an aspiring actress specializing in lousy auditions, and like Chris, who came from Irish poverty, she is out of place in the drawing rooms of the rich Brits. Nola readily admits that her relationship with Tom is nothing more than the result of his good looks and the amount of gifts he showers upon her. Eventually, when even a downpour fails to quench the animal attraction between them, Chris and Nola have an old-fashioned roll in the alfalfa.

The Hewitts and their hangers-on seem to glide through their conspicuously consumptive lives. But for Nola and Chris, who were born sans the silver spoon, the sojourn among these rich dawdlers threatens to be a fleeting proposition.

Chris punches his own ticket by marrying Chloe, taking a job in her father's business and climbing the corporate ladder, buoyed by his father-in-law's imprimatur and a natural facility for bossing secretaries and abusing expense accounts. Still, newlywed Chris is determined to have his (cheese)cake and eat it, too, and he pursues Nola, who has been dumped by Tom in favor of a blue-blooded bride.

The pressures, which Chris's clandestine affair inflicts on this working-class parvenu in the rarefied air of London's highest social strata, bring him to the verge of a crack up. Now the pace of the film accelerates, as we watch Chris's high society shell hatch a heinous Mr. Hyde in order to untrammel his illicit romance. Later Chris has a good cry and slips back into the routine of his well paid sinecure-cum-chauffeur and saccharine family life.

The police procedural scenes near the film's end are truly the saddest of the movie, since they effectively destroy the dreamlike lifestyle we've been vicariously living for an hour in the dark. The submissive attitude Chris assumes vis-à-vis London's finest is reminiscent of his job interview at the movie's beginning. We wonder if Chris's lucky streak will hold.

The snappy jazz soundtracks that have been an Allen staple are replaced in "Match Point" by an elegiac operatic score which takes on an additional dimension as the story unfolds.

Woody Allen never appears in front of the camera in "Match Point," but his screenplay has earned the prolific writer/director his latest Oscar nomination

Also absent here is Allen's signature intellectual dialog. When Chris and his in-laws come together, it is whisky, not wit, which sets their tongues wagging. And their banter belies no purpose other than self-contentment and no belief in anything greater than luck, as perhaps befits those born into enough wealth to isolate them from the vicissitudes of life.

What becomes of morality in a society blessed with an abundance of all creature comforts? What is the use reading yourself to sleep with Dostoyevsky if you fail to grasp that the Russian author's nihilism is a plea for spiritual direction in the world? Woody Allen shows us the vapid lives of these affluent characters toward a similar end: Who needs lessons learned, if Lady Luck trumps all?

At the film's end, the happy Hewitts celebrate their family's newest arrival: Chloe's and Chris's baby. Floor-to-ceiling windows fill the couple's flat with glorious ambient light and provide a spectacular view of London and the Thames. Through this happy diorama, one somber figure shuffles: Chris, dressed in a dark suit, is like an inexpiable sin on the soul of society.

The premise of Ira Roth's "Hostel" is the European vacation of two All-American college boys, whom we meet in Amsterdam, where they get high but not happy. Paxton (Jay Hernandez), is a law school grad with no qualms about paying for whatever the market offers, which in Amsterdam covers a lot. He tries to cheer up his friend Josh (Derek Richardson), an aspiring author, by telling him that "life experience" is grist for the writer's mill. Josh wants badly to hook up with exotic women, but his sensibilities won't permit him to patronize the world's oldest profession, unlike his coarser compadre. His frustration fuels the "ugly American" ethos of entitlement that he brings to the party, and hamstrings his chick cruising moves.

Enter Alex, who gives the Americans, and an Icelandic traveling companion, one of those tips that must be urban legend by now: a hostel full of loose ladies that's not on any map, in a country squirming with lonely beautiful women, in love with the American accent. Our pleasure seekers don't care if Alex is a pimp, and they certainly don't suspect whom he's pimping out. They leave for Bratislava, in a Slovakia which, according to Alex, is bereft of men because of "the war." Just exactly which war, is something our boys might well have asked, before crossing a continent in search of hot babes. As it is, Roth disembarks them at Poricany, a town in the middle of the Czech Republic, near Prague not Bratislava, where our college educated youth fall victim to their own blinkered view of the world. Seeking frivolity in cold-blooded foreign streets, they end up being exploited to an unimaginable extreme and on a level that is unbelievable even in today's real world of sex tourism, pirates and child predators.

The mentality that wrongful deeds committed in another land somehow don't count, can flow from the mindset, common among some Americans, that other countries do not deserve equal status with our own. The "what happens in Bratislava, stays in Bratislava" view of the world is at the heart of the horror here, and to its credit, the film shows this to be a Weltanschauung shared by rogues from a number of nations.

Today, with our leaders supporting the spread of freedom and democracy throughout the world, the hedonistic abuse represented by sex tourism is downright un-American. Paxton doesn't care about anything except making memories to sustain him through the upcoming busy months of cramming for the bar exam. Perhaps the global perception that such selfish attitudes are especially emblematic of Americans is why, in "Hostel," the disturbed torturers pay more to vivisect bearers of our passport than any other group on the albeit limited menu.

When the boys finally enter the hostel midway through the film, a small TV in the lobby is showing an overdubbed version of "Hostel" producer Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction." The claustrophobic tension in that film added excruciating horror to the anticipated violence. In "Hostel," much of the violence is so non sequitur that you never quite believe in these silly butchers or their patient cadre of chauffeurs. The upshot is much less horror, more disgust and, one can only hope, no arousal.

When a victim does cry out "Why?" he might be speaking for the audience: Why make this movie? And when the pay-as-you-torture psychos pause to bare their souls to bound and bleeding victims, these scenes visit real torture upon moviegoers in the painful forms of pathetic acting and pitiful dialog.

Here, sadists have ceded their place to wealthy psychopaths, especially German-speaking men, who pay to "get their medieval freak on," that is, if one can get medieval, by definition, with a chainsaw or acetylene torch. During an uninspired escape attempt sequence, Paxton is cornered by an American businessman (Rick Hoffman), whose years of global sex tourism have left him unsatisfied and obviously insane. He is now ready to graduate to torture and murder for his sexual gratification.

Perhaps there is an audience of Americans willing to exchange their ignorance of Europe for the misshapen image that risks becoming the pop culture residue of this movie: a Sybaris for bored backpackers, where women resemble lingerie models, preschoolers gang bang mercilessly, and where the occasional ex-Nazi still hobbles about his same unspeakable errands, more circumspect in his depravity than forty-odd years ago.

To judge by "Hostel," there is certainly a surfeit of silicone in Slovakia. We are shown plenty of gratuitous female nudity, but only between rounds of bloodletting: Tarantino carefully segregates titillation from torture.

Dressed in the anonymous business suit and tie preferred by the weekend torturers, Paxton attempts to practice a bit of "Old Testament Law," before returning to civilization secure in the knowledge that he can "out-Herod Herod." Throughout this film "Josh" never quite appreciates the jokes; while "Pax" never finds the peace that comes from exorcising one's own demons---he just cuts his vacation short, so to speak.

In the final credits, thanks are given to, among others, Chloe and Major League Baseball! These entities deserve harsh censure if they paid for product placement. One star, hacked to bits.

"Jarhead" is not a war movie in the accepted sense, even though it follows the adventures of its lead character from Camp Pendleton to the Saudi desert and into Iraq as part of Desert Storm in 1991. Instead, director Sam Mendes has created perhaps the first post-Vietnam film of war without heroes.

The movie is the story of one man's descent into Hell. That man is Marine Anthony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal), who realizes his mistake as soon as he is assigned to a company of screw-ups who welcome him "to the suck," Marine jargon for their otherwise beloved Corps, by pretending to burn a crude USMC brand into his leg. Swofford recovers but is chronically sick. As he reads the existentialist masterpiece "The Stranger" in the head, trapped by destiny and his Staff Sergeant (Jamie Foxx), who uses artifice to rekindle Swofford's interest in the Corps, at the same time tossing Camus away, replacing the book with a sniper rifle.

"Jarhead" steals its most rousing war scenes from Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," which it quotes in a film-within-a-film scene, with the Marines being shown the Vietnam war classic at their base movie theater. As Robert Duvall's helicopters prepare to unleash their rockets on a village, and Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" is just about to reach its crescendo with the Marines in the audience humming loudly along, suddenly the lights come up and the projection halts. A voice over the loudspeaker advises the soldiers they are shipping out forthwith. It's a classic case of coitus interruptus, and the only consolation is the tinny voice urging them all to "Get some!" But these jarheads won't be seeing real action any time soon. Instead, they stage in the desert, train and fight only boredom.

Meanwhile Swofford is fast-tracking into insanity. Despite the Staff Sergeant's reminders that Swofford, now a Marine sniper, is part of a team, there is no esprit de corps. It is as if all camaraderie was killed back at Camp Pendleton, when a Marine was accidentally shot during training, a chilling foreshadowing of more senseless dying to come. Repeatedly, Swofford is filmed apart from his fellow grunts, separated by a tent flap, or venturing alone to parlay with some Arab men in the desert. Swofford knows some Arabic, but this intellectualism serves only to further isolate him from his fellows, many of whom are portrayed as stupid. Even the Marines' own government issued gas masks isolate the men from each other.

If the viewer has any doubts that Hell is the destination, these are swept away when "The Mother of all Battles" finally begins and Swofford's unit heads into the Iraqi desert to get some. The hauntingly original cinematography of war in the oil fields of Iraq, with burning oil wells, soot-covered sand, and even an oil-soaked Arabian steed, leave no doubt that this is Hell. In one scene, Swofford wanders off and finds the burnt body of an Iraqi, with whom he sits, assuring the charred corpse that they both have had a rough day.

Swofford accepts his situation with the existentialism of the hero of "The Stranger," Meursault, who kills one more Arab in Camus' book than Swofford will during Desert Storm. While Foxx acquits himself well as the Marine Staff Sergeant, he fails to bring anything new to the cigar-chomping persona with sadistic tendencies, who has become so familiar to audiences from such disparate films as Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam War ode "Full Metal Jacket" and Ridely Scott's "Aliens." Sykes confides in Swofford his personal reasons for choosing to stay in the Marines by pointing to the desolate landscape of burning oil wells. Foxx's character fell in love with war and never wants out. He even speaks in vintage Vietnam War military slang: Americanized French and Vietnamese words, picked up no doubt in Indochina a quarter century earlier. Despite Swofford's acceptance of his fate, he wants only to finish his tour of duty and muster out of the Corps.

When Swofford and his sniper teammate return from a mission to discover their unit celebrating insanely in the desert night, we are treated both to an homage to Coppola's inspiration for "Apocalypse Now," namely, Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, and to a visceral vision of the breakdown of civilization. These half-naked Marines, dancing wildly in the firelight, could, for all their apparently unreasonable savagery, be the very cannibals of the Congo described in Conrad's book. After the war, Swofford loses the high and tight Marine haircut that spawned the term jarhead, and returns to civilian life, but he can't lose the suck, that's with him till Death do them part. Semper Fi.

They say that if the music is too loud you're too old. If this also holds for movies, then I am so too old. "Just Friends" comes at you loud and over the top. Subtlety is definitely not director Roger Kumble's strong suit. Nor is wit. Scores of high-pitched screams puncture the soundtrack while low frequency sound effects accompany every groin shot and pratfall, of which there are plenty.

The movie opens in New Jersey with caricatured high school students who are almost as ruthless as the real thing, but lack the humanity present in even the jerkiest of real teenagers. The main character Chris (Ryan Reynolds) is an overweight boy with a retainer, and is quite odd-looking, costumed as he is for this role in what appears to be Jiminy Glick drag. He is "best friends" with Jamie (Amy Smart), the hot ditz who dates the football team yet, we are challenged to believe, remains unaware of the desires her playful wrestling awakens in forlorn Chris. The rest of the film is a concatenation of cheesy scenes that failed to elicit any audible laughter in the theater I was in.

After the painful initial set-up, ten years pass before we rejoin Chris, now a svelte master of the MTV universe living in L.A. (The movie conveniently omits any reference to college, presumably because that would only alienate its target audience.) By now Chris has learned how to use others before or while being used by them, certainly a worthy skill on either coast, but hardly the transcendence of his own unrequited high school crush, and nothing that would make his character sympathetic.

The cast performs as if it had barely attended some "SNL skit" school of acting. Unfortunately for this movie and all who pay to watch it, there is a yawning chasm between aimless shtick and comedic character acting -- emphasis on yawning. Chris does have a few darned good lines, but Reynolds delivers them as if he is too embarrassed to try to salvage something from this tripe.

We catch up with buff Chris in time to watch him make it home for Christmas for the first time since graduation--purely by accident in the midst of a most improbable business trip. (Its release date notwithstanding, "Just Friends" does not qualify as a Christmas flick—it barely qualifies as a flick!) Oh yes, did I mention that Chris arrives with the country's hottest teen female pop star, Samantha James (Anna Faris) hanging on his arm and poking at his crotch? Faris does a good job of making us cringe at her lack of musical talent, while tantalizing more like a terrorist than a temptress. During a foreplay massage Samantha demands more oil with wanton abandonment then abruptly shifts gears with the deflating abruptness of a self-absorbed brat.

The movie ostensibly builds comedy around the serious issue of true happiness. Is real success a mindless career in a faraway city (portrayed as a faraway career in a mindless city)? Or does success follow from modest homespun joys, like those of the girl Chris had desired in high school, and who is now a local schoolteacher/barmaid still living at home.

Chris decides to extend his emergency layover in New Jersey because Jamie is now impressed with his trim torso and retainer-shaped smile. He feels he deserves to "boink" his old buddy, to employ the film's vernacular.

But our nouveau Kalifornicator has woefully lost touch with his roots and can't seem to hit his stride in the Garden State. Whereas Chris's scourge of yore, a crude jock with a mean streak, has fallen hopelessly into male pattern beer drinking, another scorned suitor from back in the day, Dustin (Chris Klein) appears to be more than a match for our Left Coast professional brown-noser. Dustin has reinvented himself as the ultimate woman pleaser: a sensitive stud. His sincerity is the one weapon Chris cannot match, until a twist occurs in the story, which isn't worthy of the term plot.

Two people walked out of the theater during the movie, and I would have joined them had I not been there to review the picture. But why did everyone else stay. Who knows? Maybe they were aficionados of fatuity, or perhaps they were also movie reviewers.

At least after all that noise the picture ends with a whimper. Still, I would have felt better about the whole silly business had Chris given Jamie the boot in favor of Samantha's sex and rock scenario of a future together. One broken star.

As Johnny Cash in "Walk the Line," Joachin Phoenix has achieved a tour de force with his powerful portrayal of the singer's early years in the music business. Phoenix's singing has been widely and deservedly praised, but Reese Witherspoon (June Carter) also holds up her half of the duets just as credibly, and her buoyant performance helps save the film from wallowing in the lead role's personal troubles.

But also credit James Mangold's adept direction of his and Gill Dennis's screenplay for the ultimate advance of the narrative with a savvy use of songs that reinforce the tale. You will cry and smile, alternately, during this emotionally charged and highly enjoyable film version of an authorized biography.

Mangold shows us the boy called J.R., suffering a drought of paternal affection in the shade-deprived cotton fields, but who learns from his mother how to tap into a spiritual strength by singing. We are brought into the boy's dark night, where we sense his self-doubt which, fed by guilt, will later sap the spirit of the young singer, and lead to the addiction that threatens to destroy him even as he strives for success.

When Phoenix finally appears on stage as the veritable embodiment of the successful Man in Black, and leans into the microphone to give us that "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash" in perfect Deep South baritone, we have no doubt, so true has been the cinematic exposition and Phoenix's craft. With superb attention to detail, the film captures a lost era in the life of our nation, just as it repeatedly shows Johnny Cash attempting to regain an idealized childhood. The cinematography of Phedon Papamichael II frames forlorn scenery with the reverence a true believer has for all God's creation.

When the relentless touring takes its toll on Cash's first marriage, the couple argues in a room filled with fan mail. Cash prefers to rest alone among piles of unopened letters than be with his wife and children. Even when the singer brings his family to a concert to watch his performance, we see that they clearly belong with the audience, and not among Cash's true inner circle. Who could better share his love than June Carter, his tour mate, the disembodied voice he idealized when still a boy and the one woman who remains his true friend.

Cash spirals into the depths of drug addiction, and inevitably is arrested, but the scene of the singer alone in a jail cell is cut short so that it doesn't function as a moment of truth. Cash avoids confronting his personal demons, and heads home instead to hang his head in self-pity at poolside. Throughout the film, Cash's struggles and triumphs are consistently shown as they affect the intimate side of the man; the great financial success and the many number one songs are referred to mostly obliquely in montage.

Finally, June Carter literally saves the drowning singer. She dries him off and then dries him out.

The happy ending works in this film, since Cash's reconciliation with his father has been prepared. After a lifetime of miscommunication, misdirected anger and guilt between father and son, it is the brutal honesty of the senior Cash that forces the crisis that brings about the singer's redemption. Johnny Cash goes from being a talent mired in addiction to the man who recaptures his artistic potential, symbolized by the live concert at Folsom Prison. Whereas the song, "Folsom Prison Blues," was an early product of Cash's chafing against authority, the actual live concert is a way to show the world that the Man in Black is truly a star, who belongs on stage, not in prison. Even if those cons know every word of his lyrics, they are just another part of the world Johnny Cash celebrates in song, and in so doing, redeems himself.

The concert is Cash's final attempt to recapture an elusive dream from his past. The Man in Black succeeds and we leave him enjoying extended family bliss, united with June Carter. He even recalls his father's triumphs with equanimity.

The credits roll to the voices of the real Johnny Cash and June Carter singing one of their signature duets. Here we realize with awe that these great singers are inimitable, yet we are equally amazed at how consummately these two American icons have been acted and sung back to life by Phoenix and Witherspoon. I say, give them both Oscars, and by all means ask them to sing "Jackson" on Academy Awards night. Four stars.

The set-up of "Aeon Flux," namely, that 99% of humanity succumbed to a pandemic in 2011 before a vaccine could be developed, is a bit eerie for anyone following the news about the avian flu. But the dreamlike life in the 25th century in "Bregna," earth's last remaining city, initially presents a soothing vision of society, comprised exclusively of what appear to be designer-dressed hipsters. The inhabitants of this walled burg, humanity's final aseptic bastion in the midst of a lethal jungle, stroll leisurely through parks and, fittingly, past Bauhaus architecture to colorful vegan buffets and subdued cocktail parties.

There are few obvious signs of automation. Cell phones seem to have been reduced to the size of a dime and implanted behind the ear, but minutes must be expensive because rarely do ring-tones intrude on this almost somnolent society. The corporate world is invisible: no ads mar the stunning visuals, only over-sized portraits of the city's scientist leader, Trevor Goodchild (Marton Csokas). But there is deep trouble in paradise: people are disappearing and the entire society is subjected to a sinister form of constant surveillance. Rebels have organized to bring down the Goodchild dynasty. They are called Monicans, and one of the deadliest is Aeon Flux (Charlize Theron), a graceful, gun-toting assassin. The Monicans communicate using a technology that seems to be a type of drug-induced extra-sensory perception or interactive hallucinations. This is how Flux learns she has been given the mother of all missions: croak Goodchild. But Flux is flummoxed when she finally comes face to face with Goodchild. She senses some personal connection and aborts her mission in order to solve this mystery, which is of course, the crux of "Flux."

Unfortunately, it is here that the movie begins to break down, losing much of its surreal vision. "Aeon Flux" was developed from an original MTV animated series by Peter Chung, and Theron truly brings to life the classic anime character with her big eyes and jagged hairdo. But the director Karyn Kusama eventually forces her into the mold of that most mundane of Hollywood heroines: a machine pistol-toting action figure. The fight scenes were better when they remained brief stylized ballet. But as the film progresses, its "life is but a dream" ambiance is disturbed by redundant kicks and machine gun volleys ad nauseam.

There is another glitch in this futuristic paradise: everyone is sterile, oops! It's a side effect of the Goodchild vaccine. It turns out that Goodchild laboratories have been cloning individuals for seven generations while they attempt to fix the problem. During that whole time, hopeful couples have been fooled into thinking they had conceived, and cloned embryos were implanted in the naive mothers during pre-natal visits.

In addition to this far-fetched reproductive conspiracy, the vision of the film now cracks like a dropped petri dish. What had been woven into the dreamlike surrealism of the film, namely, that some kind of consciousness might be passed down from previous generations, is now laid at the feet of Goodchild's clones. And even inveterate MTV addicts know the difference between cloning and reincarnation, right?

There are still scenes of surreal beauty, for example, a tense showdown in a blossoming orchard, but it's not enough for us to suspend our disbelief. What wakes us up is the incessant sound of automatic weapons firing and some inane dialog, for example, when the council members confront Goodchild after the failed coup to tell him they don't mind dropping the whole matter, "After all we are not anarchists."

The film concludes with the destruction of the zeppelin-shaped memorial, which floats above the city. Thoughts of "O the humanity!" are impossible to repress despite the discretion of the filmmakers who stage a flame-less crash. Instead, the memorial breaches the city wall only to reveal an Eden-like rain forest, seemingly beckoning the humans, some of whom are now fertile, to start over.

Costume designer Beatrix Aruna Pasztor and production designer Andrew McAlpine both deserve Oscar nominations. Together they create, along with Theron's look, an original and highly intriguing futuristic world. One star cloned six times.