Nick Chinlund is John Reilly (a ‘Reilly, Ace of Spies‘ reference?) involved in some double-agentry that the audience hasn’t been informed of, and the character goes through several changes about what he knows and what he may or may not know. Malheuresement, I feel that Amir Mann hasn’t done enough to win my sympathy for Reilly and his predicament.

Why has Mann chosen Africa as the site of Reilly’s imprisonment? The Middle East would have been a more timely place for the story to occur,  with the subtext of extraordinary rendition. Mann gave away currency and revelence when he chose to site his drama in Africa.

The Fifth Patient is stylish, timely and relevant film punctuated by an occasional subliminal message/dream-state/flash-back editing style. For all of it’s good looks, director Mann willfully resists competing the protein that would make his film stand out. Perhaps Mann and the studio were trying not to be too on-the-nose with his anti-war statement, but he film loses a lot of potential by opting out of current events.

One other thing that mars this film is over-explanation. They mention that Reilly has been programmed, re-programmed and programmed again. In the plot-holes where Reilly and his alleged wife, Helen (Marley Shelton) are talking about the family life he can’t remember. But a wife and 2.5 kids are the American dream, something that Reilly shouldn’t necessarily question laying claim to. At another point in the script, one of Reilly’s African wardens makes a point about Western arrogance, “Americans are just naïve — I’m a reralist. I realize that sometimes bad things have to happen for the greater good.” The African Prison Warden literally lectures Reilly, the American, on the Realpolitik of the Bush II years. Wow, just wow. Nice swing, but…

During interviews with his wife-apparent (Shelton), Reilly asks Helen whether they have any children and how they met, since he has no memory of them, only her word that she is his wife. Just like John Byrne’s, “Once In a Lifetime”, this scene begged the question, “You may ask yourself, this is not my beautiful house/You may ask yourself this is not my beautiful wife”. This scene comes and goes without apparent significance, but a better director would have forced this scene to hang a bit more significantly because it’s here that writer-director Mann touches down on one of his central themes — identity — and fails to make it a structural component of his drama. Perhaps it’s just this reviewer, but for reasons such as this, it sometimes felt as though it was shot by a director who had overlooked the writer’s intentions.

How did Helen even get to Ngobo in the first place? Did the government of Ngobo just take her identity at face-value when she turned up? Did Ngobo pay for her passage or did the Americans? And the revolving-door of suited white men who were able to gain access to Reilly seemed to defy common sense.

Yet, this film has the courage to investigate the tortuous perils and paranooia of a war we’ve been involved with for the better part of a decade. While the script could suffer a touch-up and some performances be sharpened (a slow-clap towards the end fails me), the cinematography and art direction were solid. I give it a 4/5.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

If you aren’t aware of the plot, it’s a late, experimental variation on noir, about 2 grifters in the Hustler-Older Woman game. For reasons that seem to make no amount of sense, real life con-artists/lovers Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez posed as brother and sister during their scams, their schemes allowing the 200-lb. Beck to accompany Hernandez and their target on ‘dates’ as a chaperone up to and after the ‘wedding’.

It’s an odd film, with primitive camera movements, clumsy direction and stilted dialogue. Conversation and character interaction seem to be second-thought here — almost every line is exposition. describing things that are going on off-screen.

The big question is whether the director, Leonard Kastle intended that the performers ‘externalize’ the performances the way they did. In 1969, it might have been seen as revolutionary, but in 2010 it just seems mannered in an unproductive way. If he had done 10 more films like this, it might have amounted to an interesting style, like a Pinter play or Mamet film. But this was Kastle’s only screen credit and this Kastle can’t boast any relation to the other Castle of B-movie fame.

The story of Beck and Hernandez has been remade twice as ‘Deep Crimson‘ (1996) and ‘Lonely Hearts (2006).

Recommended for fans of David Lynch and John Cassavettes

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

1. ‘Children of Men’
2. ‘Moon’
3. ‘District 9′
4. ‘A Scanner Darkly’
5. ‘Avatar’
6. ‘Donnie Darko’
7. ‘Star Trek’
8. ‘Minority Report’
9. ‘Cloverfield’
10. ‘Serenity’

CoM, check; Moon, looked good, but it didn’t keep me awake; District 9, not — why South Africa? — and on and on. I am just incapable of becoming excited by most of these titles. Minority Report was interesting because of it’s Philip K. Dick cachet (and the fact that it was made during Bush II) , but very few of those movies had the **umph** of the movies I grew up on. As a child of the ’70s and ’80s, I feel as though I’ve lived a charmed life, given that the following came out during the period that sanned 1979-1989:

‘Alien’ (1979)
‘Altered States’ (1980) ‘The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
‘Blade Runner’ (1982)
‘The Thing’ (1982)
‘Return of the Jedi’ (1983)
‘Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai’ (1984)
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1984)
‘Dune’ (1980) ‘Back to the Future’ (1985) ‘Brazil’ (1985)
‘Re-Animator’ (1985)
‘Aliens’ (1986)
‘The Fly’ (1986)
‘Robocop’ (1987)
‘Near Dark (1987)
‘They Live’ (1988)

And I’m still unable to think of a good sf movie for 1989.

Since some of the best sci-fi of the passing decade has occurred on the small screen, I couldn’t resist listing a few television shows, if only because their effect on our pop-culture was indelible. In no particular order:

‘The Man from Earth’ (2007)
‘Children of Men’ (2006)
‘Minority Report’ (2002)
“Firefly”
“Battlestar Galactica”
‘Night Watch’ (2004) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Watch_%282004_film%29
‘Day Watch’ (2007) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_Watch_%28film%29
‘Iron Man’ (2008) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man_%28film%29
‘X-Men 2′ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men_2_%28movie%29
“Farscape” (1999-2003) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farscape

Many of these moives and shows, I’ve already written about on this site.
Now, none of these entertainments as groundbreaking as any of those eighties movies, but I just needed a place to start this thing.

During the week, I’ll make an attempt to justify my choices, but in the meantime, I’ll ask readers in the audience to recommend their own science-fiction favorites or offer their own recommendations from a faded

The problem with both previous Predator flicks were that there was very little high-concept. In both preceding entries (Predator and Predator 2), the Predators and the humans were on Earth.

In the first film, the Predators interrupted Arnold Schwarzenegger’s hunt for something or other, and in the sequel, they appeared in a very hot L.A. summer, getting in the way of a police investigation of some sort. In each, it is strictly humans vs. Predators.

In this new Robert Rodriguez film, things have gone 3 paces further, as the protagonists have been kidnapped to an off-world hunting preserve and there is no ‘team’ of humans working against the Predators. Rather, the 7 humans *aren’t* working together. After a short spell they recognize that the 7 of them each represent the worst kind of murderous criminal on Earth and that they have each been selected as quarry for some yet-to-be-determined agent on this new, Earth-like planet.

Rodriguez wrote an original script for Predators back in 1994, long before the AvP franchise was even conceived. To Rodriguez’s credit,Predators (1995) was conceived as a direct sequel to Predator 2.

Most interestingly, this really isn’t a Predator movie until well into the 4th reel, when the Predators finally appear. Until then, the film simply plays as a particularly good episode of The Twilight Zone, where the  hunters  of The Most Dangerous Game size each other up, before trying to do one another in. Rodriguez does a nice job here by prepending a human story to all of the glitchy, gooey and messy effects, remembering that the story should drive the effects and not vice-versa.

The most interesting aspect of this film is the ‘hands-off’ approach that Fox studio chief Tom Rothman has taken with this franchise, after his direct involvement with the ‘AvP‘ franchise. Here, Rothman has handed Rodriguez the entire Predator franchise to shoot, not in some Hollywood backlot, but on Rodriguez’s own Troublemaker Studios, out in Austin, TX. The most interesting thing is that the film works as a late addition to entire concept of Auteur filmmaking.

And a great big hats off to Adrien Brody for playing against type and to Topher Grace for making another, great, unaticipated career move.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Operation Paperclip Nazis working in criminal sanitariums off the coast of Washington State? Mind control? A WWII veteran and widower with PTSD? Visuals by David Lynch.

It’s 1951 in this film and the most unfortunate thing about Shutter Island is that Scorcese and writers Stephen Knight and Laeta Kalogridis decided that it’s okay not to make sense. They decide to just let go. Film is a visual experience and flourishes are flourishes, so why the fuck not? If your local cinemat can affor to spend $750k on a new 3D projection kit, you can sit and watch Martin Scorcese orchestrate some crazy in 2D. On Shutter Island, the Eater Eggs and Red Herrings run thick, wild and free. So wild, that you may want to pause and consider throwing a few back, before deciding which ones you want to take home to eat.

Emily Mortimer is both Rachel Saldano whom Marshals DiCaprio and Ruffalo have been sent  to find, but also a Concentration Camp victim that DiCaprio liberated Dachau back in ’44. Saldano was committed 8 years ago, after she stabbed and drowned her 3 children, but disappeared out of her cell 3 nights ago. DiCaprio and Ruffalo wake up one morning to discover that Saldano has returned.

And then Scorcese lets it all fall away, revealing that DiCaprio is, in fact a Nº 6 and he’s been lured to the island for treatment,  and that he’s apparently murdered his dead wife. It’s a brain teaser.

In the last scenes there’s an uncomfortable acceptance of roles, where DiCaprio and Ruffalo briefly acknowlege the role-playing game they’ve been involved in, before DiCaprio joins the men with the pitforks and shovels (literally!) to take his long walk off a proverbial short pier. Scorcese spares us the pier, but leaves us wondering what kind of mannerist, noir, magic realism thing we’ve just given 137 minutes of our lives to. It’s beautiful and occaisionally sublime to behold, but I somehow suspect Dennis Lahane’s novel makes more sense in print.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Granted that Abrams and his writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman add a little time travel quirk that creates an alternate reality for this new Trek, it does come off with a bit more verve than the original series had some 40 years ago. Both the writing and the SFX have improved, just as Desilu Studios never gave Roddenberry $75M to shoot a single episode.

The idea of a utopian, space-faring human civilization is bourne of a postwar optimism and late ’60′s ebullience that the War on Terror and our current financial debacle have put a fork in. If not for the success of the franchise in years past, nobody would posit a Federation of Planets based upon the United Nations because the latter has been such an overwhelming success.

I certainly don’t number myself among the Whedon-can-do-no-wrong zombies, but Firelfly seemed a better augur of things to come, should humans ever escape Earth’s gravity-well to inhabit the stars. But Paramount has rebooted Trek, keeping many of it’s societal constraints intact, but alterting the biographies of it’s chief protagonists, James Tiberius Kirk

SPOILER WARNING: In this new 2009 film the vengeful Romulan, Nero has altered various timelines in such a way that Kirk both gtows up in single-parent households. Like Like Luke Skywalker before him, Kirk is suddenly an orphan from some backward province. Instead of the son of a decorated officer, he is military orphan with an impetuous streak. He is discovered by one Capt. Christopher Pike and joins Starfleet. Thus is the new new Trek launched.

Given the time-travel abuses that committed by science-fiction, it was probably just a matter of time before Paramount spawned an alternate Trek-verse. This Trek is more action oriented and plagued by coincidences. Like Skywalker, this Kirk finds himself on planet Hoth challenged by Arctic monsters before — surprise! –he comes into contact with the older Spock from the original Trek timeline.

Surely, this alternate-timeline is the stuff of fanboy heaven, creating new possibilities for retelling of the series’ original 79 episodes, but I’m not holding my breath. Trek ’66 was a product of its time as much as Farscape was a product of the late ’90′s.

As Corinthians 13, chapters 11 and 12 says, ” When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child…, but when I became an adult, I gave up childish things.” And that is precisely the head-space Trek occupies for me these days. As a writer, I find it both absurd and arbitrary that Starfleet Officers aren’t allowed to disagree with one another, but Abrahms, Kurzman and Orci seem to be willing to play fast and loose with other Roddenberry Rules ¹.

That said, Chris Pine does a serviceble job as Kirk, not by imitating William Shatner, but by trying to inject some naturalism into the role, emoting rather than projecting, allowing Kirk to be a young, inexperienced captain, ratter than the cocksure swaggart of the old show. Though he can’t separate his ring and middle fingers, Sylar does a serviceable job as young Spock. Though I may not become an adherent of this re-imagined franchise, it will be interesting to watch it develop in the coming years.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Before that damnable show went off the air 6 years ago, all of the major broadcast networks — NBC, ABC and CBS each tried to catch some of Chris Carter’s alt.conspiracy.ufo fire.

Fringe‘s distinction is that the show is hard science-fiction, a rare event for network television — HARD science-fiction, is based on real science, not fantasy, not urban mythology and not old Saturday matinée fare. Though there are plenty of whiz-bang moments in there, most of the spectacle on Fringe is derived from current available technology.

One of Fringe‘s few shortcomings is its superficial resemblance to the X-Files. During the pilot, Special Agent Olivia Dunham (Australian actress Anna Torv) and Special Agent John Scott (Mark Valley) of the FBI are called out to investigate the mysterious circumstances where a plane full of passengers is all evacuated by a flesh-melting virus.

After investigating the plane, the Agents are led to a storage unit rented by one of the passengers thought responsible for the downed plane. Scott is infected by the biological agent and Agent Dunham is required to enlist the assistance of noted ‘Fringe’-scientist, Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble), who’s been locked-up in an asylum for the past 17 years.

That’s where the X-Files similarities end, because Fringe is not a Mulder/Scully ‘shipper show, but an ensemble show that rounds out with the son of Dr Noble, Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson), Phillip Broyles (Lance Reddick), and actors Kirk Acevedo and Blair Brown in supporting roles.

While the X-Files was content to meander into the occult, urban legends and UFO lore, Fringe remains firmly planted in the realm of viable, cutting-edge, so-called fringe-science While I can’t vouch for the ‘Altered States‘-like sensory-deprivation tank, the flesh-eating virus, the gas attacks and the genetically-engineered parasite of subsequent episodes are all currently viable technologies.

That said, Torv, Jackson and Noble are compelling character-actors who fill out an hour’s wort of television in interesting ways — Jackson and Noble have and ongoing Father-Son shtick, while Torv’s character has ongoing encounters with the bits of Scott’s personality that were left behind in her head after the aforementioned isolation-tank experience.

Let’s hope the show maintains it’s strong ratings when the show returns in January ’09.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

While the franchise’s demons, the Cenobytes, appear within the film’s first 5 minutes, we only get a glimpse — they are by no means central to the story. Rather, Pinhead and the Cenobytes are simply the vehicles of hubris:The cenobytes both identify and punish those who are willing to overreach. Though the SciFi Channel insists that all genre movies reveal their creatures within the first 15 minutes, that formula — dictated by commercial requirements — is really irrelevant because ‘Hellraiser’ is an epic drama that circulates around Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence) and her evil stepmother, Julia (Clare Higgins).

Indeed, writer-director Clive Barker waits over an hour to give the audience a good look at the franchise’s signature demons, the Cenobytes, specifically Pinhead. The key antagonists in the first film are really Julia and the posthumous Uncle Frank. Julia wears little makeup, and Frank little skin.

What makes ‘Hellraiser’ an effective and entertaining movie is its emphasis on character and story, rather than makeup.

Uncle Frank rises from the dead at approximately the 20-minute mark, whereupon he marches around for the next 45 minutes fully flayed and in search of skin that can only be acquired vampirically, via the victims that Julia supplies him.

Looking back, ‘Hellraiser’ really was one of the precursors to the big genre franchises that the studios are wont to get ahold of these days — you know, the one-picture spec that turns into the 3 picture franchise-project after box-office receipts cross the $120M mark. Even Mr. Barker is probably surprised that his little million dollar picture spawned seven sequels and warranted a remake.

The remake — due in either 2009 or 2010, depending on where you look — one hopes that Seraphim Films and the Weinstein Company will work toward a 3 picture story-arc and take into into account the many continuity errors of the first two movies, like the Julia-spawning mattress that somehow survived the Dresden-like house fire at the conclusion of the first movie. Though substantial time is spent on a retcon-recap at the beginning of ‘Hellraiser:Hellbound’ (1988) that one would hope that the Weinsteins would choose a capable director and take the LoTR approach.

But the real value of ‘Hellraiser’ lays not so much in its latex prosthetics and stage-blood, but the slow burn of it’s domestic taboo themes: incest, infidelity and lust. It’s not selling her soul to the Devil that’s Julia’s error, it’s her transgressive relationship to brother-in-law Frank that drives her to participate in a Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka-like serial-killing spree, to restore skin to Uncle Frank’s undead sinews. Certainly, the soap operatic Bonnie and Clyde prepending of Hellraiser that makes the first movie so effective, especially when one considers similar movies — Bernard Rose’s ‘Candyman‘ (1992) and Paul W.S. Anderson’s ‘Event Horizon‘ (1997) — and their reasons for relative mediocrity.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

*Actually, the Cenobytes do make an appearance at the 3 minute mark, but it’s dark and ambiguous — the only real concluusions viewers can draw is that they wear leather and are comfortable around medical waste.

What ‘W.’ does do, is lean upon other, older archetypes — W is the young Prince Hal, trying to get away from his father’s legacy only to reform from his wastrel ways and accept the destiny destiny intended — in George W. Bush’s case — for his younger, smarter brother.

Though .W.’ is meant to illustrate the presidency happening to one George W. Bush, it sadly avoided the 2 or 3 most important things that occurred while Bush was in office — the movie skips around between 1967, 1992 and 2003, there is no mention of 9-11 , Iraq or Afghanistan, no Enron and no bank failures which effectively puts a great, big donut-hole in the middle of this movie.

Instead, Stone’s ‘W.’ characterizes the Bush II Presidency meant as a family-drama where the protagonist tries to overcome the low expectations of his family. What’s not addressesed, in the movie is the damage that he does to the world on the way to besting his father.

When Stone announced that he was doing ‘W.’, it elicited doubts everywhere, given the unflattering accounts he’d created for Nixon, JFK and Reagan via the eponymous and period films –, ‘Platoon’ (1995), ‘The Doors (1991), ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ (1989), ‘Wall Street’ (1987) and ‘Salvador’ (1986).

Josh Brolin does an effective job as Mr. Bush, though I suspect Mr. Bush was far less assertive than he is depicted here. Richard Dreyfuss is a serviceable Cheney, Bruce McGill is a ringer for George Tenet while Geoffrey Wright and James Cromwell each turn in serviceable jobs as Colin Powell and Bush père.

Though Stone probably had no idea of the tailspin that the Middle East and the American economy would take by the time this film was released, it’s clear that this will not be the last Bush II biopic, only the first.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

While this installment of Batman seems to be the most successful commercial film since James Cameron’s ‘Titanic‘, you’d think that such a movie would have to have a simple storyline to keep selling tickets at such a rapid pace, week after week. Not so, here.

Despite the relatively simple two-villain interplay and some romantic conflict lifted from a drugstore novel, TDK takes what should be a simple, 90-minute flick and turns it into an angsty and operatic 150-minute movie that will challenge your kidneys to make it to the end-credits.

What Nolan, his co-writer and brother, Christopher and David Goyer attempt to do with that extra hour is create a dramatically plausible Batman, capable of transcendin multple genres at once — the Historical Allegory, the science-fiction flick, the comic book flick and the Lifetime movie-of-the-Week, where the Rachel Dawes character is concerned.. Promotional materials for the movie indication Nolan’s interest in creating a film more ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ than Spider-Man in it’s sensibility.

One of the things that Anne-the-filmmaker, my Cineblog partner here complained about was the lack of focus that many of the shots seemed to have. That could be easily chalked-up to the oversized IMAX film-format that Nolan and chose to shoot much of the movie on — a variation on 70mm film-stock that runs at roughly 3x the conventional frame-rate, roughly 60 frames-per-second.

The problem for non-IMAX theaters is that the prints for conventional theaters are shrunk-down and de-resed for the 35mm/24fps resolution of conventional theaters, resulting in a smaller, fuzzier picture.

Story problems begin when they try to fuse Batman’s street-level crime-drama with the international, high-finance aspects, The Joker’s terrorist ambitions and the romantic ambitions of Bruce Wayne’s double-antagonist, Gotham’s new District Attorney, Harvey Dent. Like the IMAX film, the whole thing just doesn’t scale well.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the first 15 minutes are thrilling — some unidentified criminals execute a well coordinated heist of a mob bank. As, in the best caper flics, it’s a delight to watch a bunch of characters execute a well-planned heist. But once Nolan finishes that sequence, the whole affair proceeds to become another two or three movies, piled into the same movie screen. For another 140 minutes.

Bruce Wayne is Batman; we know that from Batman Begins. Rachel Dawes, Wayne’s childhood sweetheart in the prior movie — Katie Holmes , there, reprised here by Maggie Gyllenhaal. And then there’s ADA Harvey Dent, competing for Dawes’ affections and that of Gotham’s chief prosecutor. Finally, there’s The Joker, the movie most easily identifiable villain.

Whether or not it was Nolan’s intention to comment upon Human Civilization after 9-11, it’s become apparent that Batman has become too good at his job. Violent crime in Gotham has apparently plummeted some 90%, because Batman has successfully detected and prosecuted all criminal enterprises in Gotham since the end of the first movie. He’s so successful that the police department routinely broadcasts the Bat-signal, simply to discourage criminal activity.

Madman that he is, The Joker sees this detente as a business opportunity. Now that organized crime is hunkered-down around its boardroom tables, The Joker elects to set off random explosions and make off with the criminals’ dirty money.

The Joker describes himself as an agent of chaos. Throughout the film, he repeatedly raises the bar, first by offering a cash reward for Batman’s identity and then, inexplicably, a bounty on a Wayne Corporation employee who may have a line on Batman’s identity

So what’s to like here? More than two and a half hours of bladder-challenging Batman, if that’s your cup of tea. Heeth Ledger’s last performance and Aaron Eckhart’s best ever. The effects might get an Oscar, if only because the media has gushed about the film all summer. Me. I’m waiting for Aranofsky to direct a redacted version of the ‘Hush‘ storyline.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars