Salocin

I was reading Philadelphia Weekly, the local paper, for the movie reviews today, while locked out of my apartment and waiting for the maintenance guy to come and let me in. I quite like the style their reviews are written in (obviously more experienced at it than me). I noticed an interesting trend: All the movies for which we had such high expectations were considered inferior to a select few which, given a little thought, we should have known were showing more promise.

Just so you can see what I'm talking about, I've summarised a part of their review list here:

Title	Score
28 Days Later	A-
Rivers & Tides	B
The Hulk	C
Jet Lag	C+
The Hard Word	D
The Trip	C
Bend It Like Beckham	B
Bruce Almighty	D-
Capturing the Friedmans	A-
Dumb & Dumberer	C-
Finding Nemo	B+
Hollywood Homicide	C
Identity	D-
The Italian Job	C-
Man on the Train	A-
The Matrix Reloaded	D+
Spellbound	B
Wrong Turn	C+

That's enough for you to get the picture : The great expectations generated by the media hype surrounding Bruce Almighty or Reloaded fails to impress in comparison to the filmmaking effort that goes into doing something reasonably original such as Man on the Train or Spellbound. It's reassuring to see that even if the Hollywood decision-makers have completely lost their sense of taste, the reviewers who judge the decisions ex-post have managed to retain their composure.

I don't think the problem lies with the subject of the movies. It's true that the scripts that come off better on screen are those that deal with moderately original themes (although 28 days later is more of a new twist on an old theme), but this is not because completely original movies are inherently better than reworkings of tried and tested plot constructions. I think it's more to do with the fact that if you're trying to write something new, you have to think about it, build it with care and check its consistency meticulously. It's also not guaranteed to work, which means the team that build the picture deploy their talents more rigorously, and care more about the overall quality of the flick, because there's no "genre following" to guarantee it's success, it has to succeed on its own merits.

If some of the screenwriting, editing, directing and acting dedication that goes into making a new film and treading safely on new ground could be transferred into the bread and butter hollywood blockbusters, I think a revitalisation would occur, bringing the kind of freshness we experienced with La Femme Nikita or Adaptation to movies that rely too overtly on their story origins, audience preconceptions and special effects (think Hulk).

That having been said, I think 28 Days Later is going to be the horror flick of the year, and possible of the last 5 years, and I have to go see that. Maybe I'll go with a girl after telling her it's a sequel to the schmaltzy 28 Days of Sandra Bullock.

The latest incarnation of the Star Trek franchise, and the last time around the block for the Next Generation crew, provides us with big bangs and an intergalactic plot that fails to stir the blood. As the writers seek to bridge the gap between the majesty of a space opera that encompasses the fate of entire solar systems, with the actions of two men, the backdrop is insufficiently entrancing to overshadow the weaknesses in the foreground.

Jean-Luc Picard has a Nemesis. A twin with issues. This is not too bad a premise to start the movie with, and it works it's way higher in your expectations when you see the opening sequence in which a coup-d'état overthrows the Romulan leadership, but we are left in the dark as to the deeper motivations behind the power transfer.

It's a promising start. Interplanetary politics in turmoil, a secretly supported political takeover in a hostile state, a seemingly cunningly-conceived plan to obtain inside information on the federation's forces. Our expectations are raised high in the first few moments of the movie (apart from the usual scenes with Data embarassing himself that are simply superfluous). Unfortunately, having promised so much, this film delivers little.

What starts out as a grandiose story of majestic proportions quickly loses courage and boils down to a battle of characters between two men. This would be all right if we didn't expect events operating at a higher level. The entire Starfleet military capacity is cut out of the movie with a poorly contrived plot point, and the whole story, despite the backdrop of a risk to the existence of all mankind, is really about two characters in a battle of wills, with some interesting psychological overtones. However, if you want to do the "two-men-of-incredible-ability-in-a-battle-of-wills" storyline, you have to be aware that you're competing with John Woo's Face/Off, to mention but one of a plethora of movies superior to Nemesis.

The performances of the characters themselves (at least those we are used to) are perfect. You can tell that these actors wear the characters like second skins, as well they might after hundreds of hours of distributed episodes and heaven only knows how many movies. This is the film's great strength - the characters could have sleepwalked their parts and nevertheless seemed convincing. Unfortunately, the antagonists don't benefit from the same depth of character and long-term development, so a story is created that can suitably expose the new antagonists in a 2-hour movie. This makes them seem shallow in comparison to the protagonists. Star Trek always defined its main Federation characters as individuals we come to know, but the enemy is always a state, or a force, or a technology, and therefore lacks an screen presence - there simply isn't a cast of bad guys to draw from.

Star Trek: Nemesis doesn't fail to disappoint in the sense that it provides everything a Star Trek movie needs to in order to remain true to the franchise. There's a couple of things that let it down in the grander scheme of things though.

• First of all, we feel insufficiently attached to those characters that suffer in order to feel for them. Their emotional involvement in the movie is almost non-existent. When Deanna Troy gets violated in a way that could have been made to seem absolutely awful, all we register is a plot point that we know will come back later. The losses experienced by the crew of the Enterprise are not felt on anything remotely resembling an emotional level, and so when we see the characters responding emotionally, it clashes with our own feelings.
  
• Second, there is a mismatch between the scale of the movie and the impact of the protagonists that damages the integrity of the plotline. We see an underdog rise from Remus to become ruler of Romulus, and he does so with the help of Romulans. He also holds members of the army under his thumb through their fear of him. But we never really understand why. I think we're expected to believe his ship is the reason, but that's pretty weak: using a warship to tie the entire plot together. If that was the plan, a lot more attention should have been paid to characterising the ship itself, and increasing it's image in our minds. Instead, it just looks like a big, badly-designed weapon.
  
• Once again, everything is easy for the enemy until a sudden insight turns the tables. We know in our deepest hearts that this isn't realistic: when you're outgunned 10 to 1, an insight into your enemy's psyche shouldn't really be able to turn the tables on that. An inability to develop a sequence of events that lead to a victory in any other way results in an attempt at inserting a plot twist that is perilously close to Deus ex Machina.
  

All in all, it feels a little too pre-fabricated and shrink-wrapped to be a true addition to the shelf of "good movies from 2003". Nevertheless it will provide two hours of good entertainment to those who want to see the next installment, and its shortcomings will no doubt fade as fast as its individuality as a film as it is gradually subsumed into the overall collection of Star Trek material. For the fans, it will be easily assimilated.

I was checking through some old photos of San Francisco from a couple of weeks ago, and came across one that I snapped of a person walking up Powell Street in the blazing sun...

Welcome to the west coast?

I’ve been a foreigner most of my life. When you live in a country long enough to shed the label and look of the tourist, your treatment and impressions as a tolerated foreign presence give each country a unique signature: these impressions colour every aspect of life as an expatriate, and provide richness to the memories of living in each country.

Stay somewhere long enough, learn the language and adopt the accent, and you can pass for a local. This blurs distinctions, and after a time your status becomes that of a native. Nevertheless, the perspective of being a foreigner never quite fades for the "aliens", as my current host nation likes to refer to us, and we carry it with us as a memory of our experience in a foreign nation, for the rest of our lives.

When in sub-Saharan Africa, my status as a European visitor gave a unique but constrained insight into local culture, as the gap between their experience of life and mine, not to mention the difficulties of communicating through a few talented multi-linguals, made bridging the culture gap an uphill struggle. It is striking that they expressed as much of a desire to bridge that gap as I did, if not more so. They are as afflicted with curiosity as we are, they merely lack the opportunities to travel that we have. I found myself answering more questions than I was given the opportunity to ask.

Travelling and living around Europe I see the biggest strength of being part of the Union. Our press may complain endlessly about the ins and outs of the European Union’s bureaucratic machine, and "Brussels" may well have become a dirty word in European political discourse (much to my dismay, I was born there), but the free movement of people – one of the essential freedoms enshrined in the Treaty of Rome – combined with the Schengen agreement, have resulted in a continent accustomed to the presence of multiple nationalities in the same place. These "foreigners" (the word is too strong) are not merely tolerated, they are at home.

Which brings me to my current home, the east coast of the USA. There are many things to admire and like about this country, not least the sheer scale of its institutions, the spirit behind the words of its founders and the attempts of many to keep that spirit alive in the present and for the future. But how distorted good intentions can become under pressure. After a year, I still feel very much like a foreigner here, as the interactions I have with the state, the people and the immigration services change almost weekly, keeping me constantly off-balance. Violent swings in the perceptions of Europeans, based largely on what was printed in the papers that morning, have taken me by surprise on a number of occasions over the past year, and the paperwork required to retain permission to study here seems to never stop.

Much of the administrative immigration hassles are, of course, due to the terrible attack on the World Trade Centre. This has resulted in a need to improve national security. I see the level of security in two ways. There’s the extent to which the borders have been closed and the security of the castle has been reinforced. There’s also the extent to which the need for such measures has been attenuated through a diminution of the threat itself. The two are related: the US’s terrible failure in defusing tensions has resulted in a huge increase in border protection and internal security costs. Were the goal to render the border protections and internal security ever more necessary, the administration could hardly have done a better job.

This is symptomatic of the current state of mind in the US. The subconscious belief seems to be that the US should be able to stand, impregnable, against any threat from the outside. Once this is the case, the level of external threat becomes irrelevant. This idea is outdated and its effect on those that live inside the castle, and those that would interact with it, is profoundly negative.

Today, I received a message from the International Office at my university, stating

We write to inform you about new Department of State rules that will lead
in many cases to substantial delays in visa issuance at U.S. consular posts
abroad.

 

If you plan to travel abroad and obtain or renew a U.S. visa stamp before
you return you will first need to make sure that it will be possible to get
the visa in the time you have available.

 

Delays in visa issuance are expected because the new rules require consular
officers to interview most visa applicants in person but do not provide
additional resources to handle the increased workload. Consular posts that
do not already have appointment systems have been instructed to consider
establishing them and the Department of State has acknowledged that "many
posts will face interview backlogs."

This follows the introduction of SEVIS, the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, which “provides tracking and monitoring of non-immigrant students and exchange visitors and their dependents”, a system that needs to get told every time I cross a border so that I, as a potential threat, can be tracked.

The Homeland Security Advisory System, which rarely seems to drop below “Elevated”, sometimes hops up to “High” based on undefined “increases in chatter”, causing delays to hundreds of passengers and filling airports with long lines that snake through entire terminals as every third person is asked to remove their shoes, boot up their computer and "please step this way". The increases in costs resulting from the heightened security levels are causing a "cry wolf" effect whereby states that can ill-afford to pay for such massive deployments of police under tight budget constraints are scaling back their response as no terrorist strikes occur, thus defeating the entire purpose of the exercise.

Passing immigration with a foreign passport has become an ordeal. A friend of mine, who has entered and exited the US numerous times during her studies here, recently had her immigration documents put in a big red folder, and was sent (escorted) to the INS desk to wait in line as if her documentation were invalid. There was nothing wrong with her papers, they were just checking for the hell of it, but the considerable cost in time was borne by her.

Over 13000 Arab and Muslim men in the US are facing deportation after voluntarily registering with the INS following a request that they register following 9/11. The believed that by co-operating they would be treated leniently, most had "lapses in their immigration status". Instead they're all being thrown out because they made themselves known in order to help improve homeland security. Many of the families are packing, but many are going underground.

Finally, the Patriot act is in the process of eradicating many of the checks and balances that are so admired as the genius of the constitution. Patriot II is waiting in the wings for some terrorist incident to carry it through to the legislature, and the voices of civil libertarians, loud though they are, seem barely considered in the debate, and risk attracting the criticism of being "unpatriotic".

I don’t know where all this is leading. Having not predicted this state of affairs based on the events of the past, I feel ill-equipped to predict anything much at all for the future. I feel that the political reality has little to do with the facts we are given, and despite the huge amount of information available, feel that I am missing key pieces of information that would allow me to judge what our leaders' long-term plans are, assuming they have some. Politics and press-conferences look like stage-managed shows designed to elicit a specific reaction in the audience, rather than communications of information that allow independent judgement and critical thinking.

One can only hope that tensions will ease despite the actions of the US, or that those actions will evolve into a less coercive form of international relations. The recent efforts in the Palestine-Israeli conflict are a positive sign, but success there will take years, and failure can take but a moment. Solving that conflict may well defuse much of the antipathy that exists in the world, but solving it badly may do the opposite, and the US is perceived to be biased by the Palestinian side of that debate, despite being their best hope for peace. Working on improving relations with Arab nations – and by that I mean their people, not just their dictators – will provide an easier backdrop to future interactions.

This has to be one of the funniest things I have seen in quite some time. Gollum won the best digital performance award at the MTV movie awards, and his creators decided he should be making a little acceptance speech. It's a bit on the rude side and absolutely hilarious.

Eminem is a surprising success in this grim reflection of a life lived daily on the edge of failure, sustained through necessity and nourished on dreams. Directed by Curtis Hanson and written by previously unaccomplished Scott Silver, this is a well-wrought story that will have you silently rooting for "Rabbit" as he battles in rhyme with Detroit rappers.

When i first saw 8-Mile coming, I thought it would be to Eminem's music what Men in Black was to Will Smith's repertoire. It's a far cry from that. Eminem is surprisingly good as Rabbit, possibly because he has personally experienced a fair portion of the world Rabbit inhabits.

As we see him try to juggle his deperate mother (courageously played by Kim Basinger), his love for his sister, his need to hold down a job and his desire to succeed on the local rap scene, we learn to care about the same things he does, and appreciate the courage it takes to stand up on stage again after choking on his words the week before.

This is a touching story, and it shows, all to accurately, how people fight daily merely to get by, and how valuable friends and small victories can be.

You can buy this on DVD at Amazon.

Mark Wahlberg and Jennifer Aniston star in a story of dreams lived and 80s rock star lifestyles revealed.

Chris Cole sings for a "Steel Dragons" tribute band. He idolizes the "Dragons" lead singer and dresses like him, walks like him, sings like him. When the Dragons lose their frontman, he gets plucked out of his life and inserted into the role, a dream come true. Or is it? As he gets deeper into the lifestyle, he realises that perhaps, the trappings come at a personal cost that gets heavier by the day, and as he finds himself and discovers his personal creative side, the hidden constraints of the job are not worth the benefits.

Rock Star is a story of the realisation of a dream, a young man becoming a Rock Star overnight, and the gradual awakening to the real cost of his new fame and image: the inability to sustain a "real life" outside of the rock star mould which demands all he has to give. Enlightenment regarding the "true nature" of the stardom success machine comes in small snippets here and there. As Mats, the road manager of Steel Dragons (played by an on-form Timothy Spall) puts it, "You see you've got all these birds out there dreaming about having it off with you, that makes the guys want to be you. The guys are the ones that buy the records, so if the chicks don't like you the guys are gone. I mean put it this way - your job is to live the fantasy other people only dream about". Whether the insights are true or not, they make for a good film!

As Chris begins to live the life of a rock star, the 24-hour party begins to take over his life, and aspects of his former life begin to drop away, his girlfriend starts a company in Seattle, and when he comes to visit, they have so little left in common that she splits up with him. As time goes by, an awareness of what he's giving up creeps up on him, and as the sacrifices he's asked to make mount up, he faces having to sacrifice it all to find his own voice.

Marc Wahlberg does very well as the lead singer of the Dragons, and the victim of temptation as he is offered his dreams on a plate with little awareness of the cost. Rather than play the world of rock stardom as a heavy-handed drug-riddled parody, this movie portrays it as a lot of fun, but ultimately not what Chris Cole was meant to do with his life.

While I would recommend Almost Famous as a far more touching and emotionally involving look at the perils of the Rock Star lifestyle, with a broader cast of more deeply developed characters, Rock Star did not deserve the straight-to-video treatment it received, especially given the level of much of what has graced our theatre screens of late. When next in the video store, at least read the sleeve on the DVD, and give this one a chance.

Written and directed by Marc Lawrence II, who also has writing credits for Miss Congeniality, this quite charming and light-hearted Romantic Comedy is a little bit by the numbers, but it's a recipe that works, with two actors that are very experienced in the genre.

Sandra Bullock plays Lucy Kelson, a lawyer and staunch defender of the little person and his local monuments. In an attempt to prevent him from destroying a building in her community, she ends up working for property magnate George Wade, played by Hugh Grant, who quickly becomes dependent on her no-nonsense, straight talking interaction. Unfortunately, working for the rich and powerful is not her cup of tea, and he has to work hard to keep her, if not as legal counsel.

My opinions on this film may be a little skewed, because I watched it immediately after Mission to Mars, which ranks as one of the worse films of all time.

Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock are very capable romantic comedy actors, and Marc Lawrence proved with Miss Congeniality that he knows how to maintain the sharpness and wit of the dialogue, while injecting enough originality into the screenplay that it obscures the basic and familiar structure the genre depends on. So Two Weeks Notice doesn't fail to please.

Sandra Bullock is refreshingly convincing as Harvard Law School chief counsel for Hugh Grant's mysoginist magnate, and her irreverence towards him and his foibles is what draws them together from early on in their professional relationship. This hand is cunningly well underplayed throughout almost the entire movie, leaving so much unsaid and unshown that it is our traditional expectations of the genre that lead us to predict the outcome.

In a world of unrealistic, crass, muscle-bulging heroics from all of our traditional heroes (even James Bond succumbed to the temptation), it's nice to see two roles that are larger than life in their ability to feel, to change, to fall for the simple romantic stuff, instead of their ability to rise above ridiculous physical obstacles.

I'm not a huge fan of the romantic comedy genre, but it can be done very well, and it hasn't fallen prey to the ever-growing need for bigger-faster-better in film. The practitioners of this art can still elicit emotion in a simpler form, and while not high art, it compares very favourably with much of what's on offer today.

It won't stay with you for days after leaving the theatre, but you won't be disappointed. If you like romantic comedies, or Hugh Grant, or Sandra Bullock, then this is worth seeing.

I finally watched this in the belief that if someone was going to put together a budget big enough to make a movie that was set on Mars and in space, they'd at least take the trouble to make sure the script was half decent. Obviously I have some way to go before I fully understand the extent to which filmmakers are willing to compensate for a bad script by using a space theme and lots of marketing. This is hit and run filmmaking at its worse.

The world's first manned mission to Mars seems to be going well, but then an interaction with a large object on the surface of Mars results in devastation and damage to all involved. Another team is sent to look for survivors and understand what went wrong.

A succession of events, mostly resulting from bad luck, cause the rescue team to crash land on the planet, whereupon they look for survivors, spend 3 short minutes cracking a problem that 18 months of research couldn't dent, and then go on a 2001-style excursion that's lacking style, structure and a point.

Tim Robbins manages to deliver possibly the worst performance of his life, with supporting awfulness from Gary Sinise and Don Cheadle, under the surprisingly awful direction of the usually excellent Brian De Palma.

This movie is a fantastic case study into those minimum requirements that allow a movie to grab the audience's interest. It covers a number of bases. Much of this is taken from my reading of a book by screenwriting authority Robert McKee called Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting - quite possibly the bible of screenwriting.

PACE. There isn't any. Air is venting from a spaceship and people are likely to die. One guy doesn't have time to go fetch his spare helmet, one member of the crew is going to reboot the computers by ripping out some wires and the third is going to fix the holes by going on an EVA, but he's going to move really slowly because there's no real sense of urgency. We watch for hours on end as what should have been an emergency procedure drilled into them from months of practice turns into a badly improvised botch job carried out in slow motion as all the air leaks out of their ship. We should have walked away with a sense that the crew were hardened professionals, instead they look like they have no idea what they're doing.

The moments that are supposed to be high-tension are carried out in such painstakingly long and repetitive sequences that I was frantically wishing the damn film would get a move on. When a character dies in one of the most badly acted and scripted sequences of all time, it takes so long that my only thought during the pathetic melodramatic failure was "hurry up and die already", all sympathy for the character having long since evaporated.

DEUS EX MACHINA. You're not supposed to use it - it's cheap and it solves problems without supporting the internal consistency of the story. Coincidence is a major driver of this movie. They just happen to intersect the orbit of the only other vessel circling Mars, thus having their lives saved by chance. They just happen to land just before a storm, they just happen to get hit by meteors, they just happen to establish their base camp 16km from the artifact prior to its discovery.

VALUE SHIFT. To engage, a story has to fundamentally alter the values in its world. At the end of the movie, some of the most central values have to have shifted in some way as a consequence of the events that have unfolded. At the beginning and end of each sequence, some value has to have changed that actually matters in some way to the viewers and to the characters. This doesn't happen at any point in the entire movie, resulting in a feeling that there is really nothing of interest happening, despite the fact that they've travelled all the way to Mars and are exploring an unknown artifact.

EXPECTATIONS. The essence of excitement and interest in movies is often driven by our expectations of what will happen next, and what actually happens. The movie gives us too few facts and data to form any real expectations. When things do happen, they tend to be unrelated to the actions of the crew (a random meteor storm, for example). As a consequence, you quickly learn not to care about what the crew are doing because their actions are going to be pretty irrelevant. They are mere spectators in a sequence of events that happens around them regardless of their reactions to them.

As a follow-on to that, COHERENCE is important. You need to feel that the scenes and sequences interact with each other in some way. That things that happen earlier somehow set up our expectations regarding the characters, their actions and their feelings. This provides internal consistency to the movie and renders the whole thing a story rather than just a sequence of events. There's little tie-in between scenes other than they happen in chronological order. Of all the events in the movie, I only managed to find two things that were set up beforehand, one is a stupid Flash Gordon necklace that is used in the most clichéd and melodramatic way possible, and the second is a dance-related moment in zero-G that could have been cut from the whole film without affecting it at all (because it fails to set up what it is supposed to prepare us for, because it's badly scripted and filmed). There are few scenes in the whole film that are essential to its story, and most of the rest feels like filler.

The whole thing, in the words of Bilbo Baggins, feels "like butter scraped over too much bread". There's not enough real material in the movie to make a movie, and as such we spend considerable amounts of time watching a very few events unfold, destroying the movie's pace and forcing the characters to spend much time on screen waiting for nothing to happen.

So unless you really want to see what McKee meant about substance, structure and style by looking at a piece of work in which they are all absent, please follow this advice: Avoid succumbing to the temptation, as I did, of watching this movie because it looks like it might be a semi-dramatic or interesting space opera - it isn't worth seeing, not for 8 bucks, not for 3 bucks, not for free - it's a waste of 2 hours.

A dodgy premise passingly well executed, Equilibrium blends elements of emotionless futurism with martial arts and the now overused motif of Matrix-style gravity-defying wirework, but is better than it's type and marketing would suggest.

In a not-too-distant future, a third world war has so traumatised the population of (at least this part of) the planet that a new drug that inhibits emotions (Prozium, would you believe) is mandated for use by all human beings, and anything that could lead to emotion (specifically: art, music and literature) is outlawed, and possession of such items is punishable by death through incineration. To enforce this law, a new enforcement agency, the Grammaton Clerics, are trained in a martial-arts-like combat style that focuses on firearms, and emotionlessly, ruthlessly and implacably eradicate all forms of emotional representation they come across, be it human or the Mona Lisa.

Not a very promising start is it?

But fear not, from this rather lacklustre premise comes a film that, while not "good" by most standards, certainly performs above the expectations set by its own storyline. Let me enumerate the positives, even if they're false negatives...

• The Matrix-style effects are rarely overdone.
  
• The world it is set in is internally consistent (for the most part), which allows us to immerse ourselves in the film
  
• The gun-style martial arts (gun-katas, they call it) is actually quite cool, and based on at least a reasonably plausible premise. It also makes for a pretty cool fight scene at the end.
  

Christian Bale plays the impassive, emotion-deprived hero very well, as his features seem custom-moulded for the task. His approach hails implacable destruction of all who stand against him or are guilty of "Sense Offenses", and the movie sets him up as ruthless and efficient for just long enough that his transformation into someone who actually feels is not totally without interest.

But I can't really come off too positive on this film, because something just doesn't feel right. The main protagonist, as he gradually misses his shots of emotion-dampening compounds, finds himself in situations where his emotions are getting the better of him, and can't seem to control them at all. Admittedly, if you're not used to feeling, it can be hard to deal with, but you'd think someone hardened enough to kill in cold blood without even blinking would be able to hide his emotions a little better than he can during his apparent awakening. To put it more succintly, as he awakens, his inability to fake it simply isn't convincing. Also, as his ability to be implacable fades, this has absolutely no impact on his combat skills, which I would have thought were at least partially dependent on his ability to not feel any fear, anxiety or guilt as to the consequences of his actions and the death he so liberally distributes to all who encounter him in the line of business.

A rare breath of fresh air was a slight (and almost missable, given how underplayed it was) plot twist regarding his son. All too rarely do writers and directors these days underplay good ideas, because there's such a lack of them I guess.

Frankly, I'm sorry to say that once again you should avoid unless you want to see a simple and somewhat internally inconsistent action film, but if your needs are simple, and involve action, and you've seen MI, X-Men and Spiderman already, then this is probably not too bad a gamble.

---

Equilibrium links at IMDB, and Rotten Tomatoes.

Starring Christian Bale, who also played the lead role (Patrick Bateman) in the movie American Psycho.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that I hadn't seen a movie in a while, but you'd be wrong. It's just that what I've seen lately has been so poor that I haven't had the heart to review it. I feel I should at least try, so here goes.

Men In Black II

You know you're in trouble when weak plot points are solved through the abundant use of Deus ex Machina. I can just imagine the script-writing session that came up with some of the answers to the problems facing the sequel authors.

A: We can't bring him back, he lost his memory because he was neuralized.

B: So we give him his memory back, just think of a name for a machine that gives it back to him and put it in the movie.

A: Errr.. DE... Neuralizer?

B: That's really good, how do you come up with these things? Thank God we're paying you lots of money to help us with this script.

When running out of clever dialogue, the dastardly duo have a new cunning weapon against the neer-do-wells that refuse to co-operate: They stand really still, freeze their facial expressions and say nothing. Somehow the targets of this cunning piece of mental trickery crumble under the pressure and quickly become very co-operative. How do the writers get so creative?

Weak weak weak weak weak. I should have listened to the video-store guy, he knew what he meant when he saw me rent it and his eyebrows rose so violently they fell off his head.

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Which leads me to ... The Transporter

If you like action and nothing else, this is passable - unfortunately, the dialogue suffers from Luc Besson-isms and ends up very stilted, and the whole thing doesn't hang together very well. I watched this at home and found myself wandering around, making coffee and flicking through magazines as it played because there wasn't much in the way of plot.

With lengthy action sequences, there's less and less room for development, and with most conversations boiling down to collections of witty one-liners, writers no longer need to define their characters to any level of depth. The result is a feeling that the main protagonists are only skin deep, and they are. The backstories that motivate the actions of the characters on screen are two-dimensional, and this leads to predictability, cliché and a lack of empathy with them. More often than not now, we don't really care about the characters anymore because there are no value-changes during the stories. Moral dilemmas are simple, two-state and solvable, and our characters don't grow as people during the story.

When at the end of a story, the world and it's people seem pretty much the same as they were at the beginning, you have to wonder what the point of it all was.

I can't think of much to say about the above two films because there's really not much to them. Avoid.

Remember the first night of the war, when cruise missiles crashed down on a location where Saddam Hussein was believed to be hiding? Guess what they found.

Nothing. According to News24.

Admittedly, my source is a little shaky, as the numerous grammatical errors in the article suggest (especially the missing word in the first paragraph), but if even half their facts are right, it's a pretty funny story.

First of all, there was no underground bunker, just big holes where the bombs hit.

Secondly, they missed the palace. They managed to destroy every building in the compound, but missed the palace itself. According to the CBS crew that were there first (or so they claim), a person in the palace could have survived, despite all the windows being blown out.

Thank God for Western Intelligence and Precision Munitions.