Reeling

The ''Millennium Trilogy'' films may all be released in the U.S. this year

 Last night I watched The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the film adaptation of the Stieg Larsson novel that is showing at the Miami Film Festival next weekend. 

I liked the movie so much I was considering reading the other two books in the series (the third one is scheduled to be published in the U.S. in May), just to find out what happens next to the characters.

But Music Box Films, which acquired the U.S. distribution rights to all three of the movie adaptations, has announced the other two films, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, may be released back-to-back in July and August this year.

 Actress Noomi Rapace, who plays Lisbeth Salander in the series (and is tentatively scheduled to attend the Miami screening at the Gusman next Saturday with director Niels Arden Oplev), told the Wall Street Journal that although an English-language remake of the first film is in development at Sony Pictures, she doesn't think "the Hollywood version will be as edgy as our film."

I'll say. Although Oplev's film originally aired on Swedish TV, there are scenes in it that come this close to NC-17 territory. One scene in particular - the depiction of a rape that helps explain the book's clumsier, original title, Men Who Hate Women - is so brutal it made me groan aloud.

I don't mean to scare anyone away from seeing the film, even if you're squeamish: This is a terrific, absorbing thriller with little actual violence, and I can't imagine the Hollywood remake will be as densely plotted or better acted (Rapace in particular is fantastic; she's a natural-born movie star).

I'm just a bit taken aback by the stuff the Swedes deem suitable to air on TV. I mean ... man! 

The first of my many articles about this year's Miami Film Festival will run in this Sunday's Herald. Some good movies are heading our way.

Review: ''The Crazies''

In 1973, when George A. Romero directed the original version of The Crazies, about a small town whose residents go nuts after their water supply is infected by a biological toxin, none of the movie's Vietnam allegories could overcome the obvious similarities to Romero's flesh-eating ghoul classic Night of the Living Dead.

The new version of The Crazies, which has been made with infinitely more style and panache than the original, feels even more derivative - the latest in a long line of apocalyptic horror pictures about viruses that turn people into zombies, lunatics or some combination of both. In this case, however, familiarity does not breed contempt.

Directed with great style and unusual restraint by Breck Eisner (who previously made the action dud Sahara but also directed a highly effective episode of the NBC anthology series Fear Itself), The Crazies has the feel of a Stephen King novel - and, in fact, often recalls his latest, Under the Dome, about a town that goes nuts after an invisible dome cuts it off from the rest of the world.

In The Crazies, a small Iowa town is sequestered by the military after the locals start acting in a bizarre way. At first, they're just a little spacey; soon, they're stabbing each other and blasting away with shotguns. Initially, the sheriff (Timothy Olyphant), his pregnant doctor wife (Radha Mitchell) and the easygoing deputy (Joe Anderson) try to maintain peace and order. But once soldiers wearing gas masks swoop in and, without asking questions, start shooting everyone in sight, the protagonists enter full-on survival mode, and The Crazies becomes a game of every man for himself.

Yes, you've seen this movie before. But Eisner makes up for the lack of originality with some terrific setpieces, such as a harrowing sequence in which the heroes are trapped inside an automated car wash. In another scene, people suspected of being infected are strapped to gurneys inside a tent when a crazy wielding a pitchfork wanders in and starts poking. And poking.

Olyphant, an actor capable of playing stoic heroes as well as sneering villains, anchors the movie with a believable sense of desperation, and the brief film doesn't waste a second on anything that doesn't bear directly on the crisis at hand. The result is a terrific little B-movie in which the deaths of characters carry a real sting, the gore is used sparingly but to disturbing effect and the editing has been paced at a speed that allows you to follow the action transpiring onscreen. Given the current state of the horror genre, these qualities are not to be taken for granted. You may not remember The Crazies in a month, but you'll have a grand time watching it.

(*** out of ****)

Review: ''Cop Out''

Heartbroken by the disappointing box-office grosses of his last film, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, filmmaker Kevin Smith - a smart, shrewd storyteller who has compensated for his lack of cinematic flair with a sharp and hilariously vulgar wit - decided to do something new: Put himself on the market as a director for hire.

The result, Cop Out, is the first film Smith has directed that he didn't write. It also is, without question, the worst picture he has made - a soulless, witless, landfill contraption that Smith once would have mocked mercilessly. Cop Out is a straight-faced parody of 1980s cop-buddy pictures, complete with a cheesy synth score by Beverly Hills Cop's Harold Faltermeyer.

But making fun of such a tired genre is as redundant as a stand-up comic's doing an Andrew Dice Clay impersonation. The funny simply is not there. The plot centers on a pair of veteran NYPD cops played by Bruce Willis, more engaging on TV talk shows than he is here, and Tracy Morgan, so devoid of screen presence you wonder if 30 Rock was just an accident.

On their ninth anniversary as partners, the pair run afoul of a gang of Latino baddies who are portrayed in such a stereotypically racist manner you feel magically teleported back into one of those Steven Seagal movies in which villains were defined primarily by ethnicity. Maybe that impression was the point, but like the rest of the movie, it isn't much of a joke.

For much of Cop Out, Smith's usually astute sense of humor is thrown off course. An early scene in which Morgan interrogates a suspect by quoting famous lines from other movies is amusing in concept, but Smith uses so many zoom shots and close-ups that the sequence just comes off as noisy and shrill. Having a Mexican immigrant (Ana de la Reguera) be unable to tell the difference between "Hi'' and "Bye'' just makes her seem mentally impaired, and the gag is repeated so often you start wishing the bad guys would bump her off.

The only truly funny bits in Cop Out - which either feel improvised or bear Smith's distinct writing stamp - come courtesy of Seann William Scott as an acrobatic thief who has an uncontrollable compulsion for mocking other people, even when he's sitting in the back of a police car on his way to jail. Scott, an underrated actor, brings a jolt of energy, but his role is a minor one. The rest of the film, which affords Smith his largest budget to date and proves he has no business shooting elaborate action sequences, is just dead air. Cop Out was originally titled A Couple of Dicks, until TV networks refused to air ads for a film with that title before 9 p.m. Sell Out would have been a more honest title.

(* out of ****)

The most racist movies of all time

Complex.com has compiled an entertaining but ultimately useless list of the 50 most racist movies you didn't think were racist. That modifier allows them to ignore obvious contenders such as Birth of a Nation and King Kong, but then the writers go ahead and include easy targets such as Soul Man and Planet of the Apes.

Number 14 on the list is Brian De Palma's 1983 remake of Scarface, which once again gets blasted for Al Pacino's "ridiculously over-the-top" accent. Just another reminder that people who don't live in Miami should never write about Scarface, period.

This movie, though, really is racist. I remember being shocked when I watched it on cable one night. And then, of course, there is this Best Picture Oscar winner, which always struck me as a movie that might have been celebrated in the 1950s, say, but felt weirdly anachronistic the same year Spike Lee made Do the Right Thing.

Review: ''Shutter Island''

Martin Scorsese's grandly theatrical Shutter Island is a showy, arresting movie - an example of a master filmmaker's bringing all his toys to material another director might have taken more seriously. Fans of Dennis Lehane's novel, scrupulously adapted by screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis, will find the fiendishly complicated story essentially intact: In 1954, U.S. marshals Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) investigate the disappearance of a prisoner at an asylum for the criminally insane on a remote island.

But the tone and mood of Shutter Island are different on the screen from on the page - the shadows darker than you imagined, the violence more ghastly, the blood redder. Shutter Island may have been conceived by Lehane, but the movie is Scorsese's show all the way. When a character says "God loves violence. Why else would we have so much of it in us?" he might as well be talking about Scorsese's entire canon.

 

For a thriller, Shutter Island is unusually heavy on exposition. Teddy has a tragic, complicated past that includes the death of his wife (Michelle Williams) in a fire set by an arsonist and his participation in the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, where he saw things that left irreparable scars. Scorsese uses flashbacks and dream sequences to fill us in on Teddy's life, and some - such as a long panning shot of Nazi soldiers being executed - rank among the best set pieces of his career.

The rest of the movie is not quite up to that level. Shutter Island eventually gets so complicated that a character must sketch a quick summation on a blackboard - the result of a plot-driven movie by a director interested primarily in observing human behavior. Scorsese isn't emotionally connected to this material the way he was plugged into The Departed and Goodfellas and Raging Bull. Instead, he seems to be out to explore the conventions of the horror genre, as in Cape Fear, and to pay homage to his heroes while coming up with a few new tricks.

A lot of Val Lewton spookiness permeates Shutter Island, along with a strong Hitchcockian undertone (emphasized by some beautifully artificial process shots) about the realities people sometimes invent when they can't deal with their own. This is DiCaprio's fourth collaboration with Scorsese and, in many ways, the most intense and taxing, given that the actor plays a tortured, haunted man who must hold our attention even though we don't come to understand him until the movie's closing moments.

The more Teddy investigates the shady goings on at the asylum, which is presided over by a not-always-cooperative doctor (Ben Kingsley), the more convinced he becomes that things are not as they appear. Why do the institution's guards seem to itch for any excuse to use their weapons? What is the meaning of the puzzling note the missing prisoner left behind in her cell? Could the staff be conducting medical experiments on the patients? And why does a hurricane have to bear down on the island in the middle of Teddy's investigation?

Everything but the freak weather pattern is satisfactorily resolved by the end of Shutter Island, and the hurricane gives Scorsese the chance to stage several scenes in which the lightning, wind and rain thrash in the background. You've never seen a dark and stormy night quite like this one. Aided considerably by a score of sinister classical music supervised by Robbie Robertson - a score that makes you fear something awful is always about to happen - Shutter Island is popcorn entertainment polished to an unusually high sheen. Yes, you could argue the movie is simply a mood piece. But what a mood.

Review: ''Happy Tears''

Parker Posey is a resourceful and lively actress who doesn't get nearly so much work in Hollywood as she deserves. But in Happy Tears, Posey lands a juicy starring role designed to showcase her eccentric energy, and she's so delighted by the opportunity that her happiness infuses the movie: She keeps the first half of Happy Tears aloft on a cloud of endearing tics and mannerisms.

Posey plays Jayne, a compulsive neurotic in profound denial who has convinced herself that people can't see right through her (she likes telling everyone she has quit cigarettes and alcohol, even though she clearly has done neither). Jayne lives in San Francisco and is married to a rich painter (Christian Camargo) whose mental problems have kept the couple from starting a family. So Jayne runs around the city happily spending her husband's money on such things as $2,000 boots.

Then her sister Laura (Demi Moore) calls, asking Jayne to come home to Pittsburgh to help care for their father Joe (Rip Torn), who suffers from a rare form of dementia. Posey and Moore are utterly believable as sisters who retained their bond from childhood even though their lives headed in radically different directions (Laura leads a modest middle-class life in Pittsburgh with her husband and kids). Each has something the other secretly envies: Laura would love Jayne's financial freedom, while Jayne desperately craves to be a mother.

The rapport between Posey and Moore is pleasurable and convincing - there is an unspoken complexity in the way they communicate with each other, as real siblings do - and Happy Tears initially seems to be a study of a disjointed but reunited family forced to regain its bearings. But writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein (Teeth) has a different plan in mind, throwing in extraneous supporting characters such as Joe's girlfriend Shelly (a deglamorized Ellen Barkin), who claims to be a nurse but whose dirty teeth, restless manner and perpetually dirt-caked fingernails clearly mark her as a junkie.

The character isn't just unbelievable: Her presence also distracts Lichtenstein from the film's true center (Camargo, as Jayne's husband, fares even worse: His character is so underwritten, he's practically incomprehensible). Lichtenstein, son of the famed artist Roy Lichtenstein, also throws in occasional fantasy sequences (the lovers in a tryst float on giant jellyfish) that do the movie no favors. Flashbacks meant to be poignant, such as Jayne's memory of her late mother in a hospital bed, come off as pedestrian and unnecessary.

Happy Tears grows more conventional and less involving as it unfolds, eventually taken over by Jayne's hunt for a hidden treasure Joe is supposed to have buried in the backyard. And the requisite Big Secret From the Past that Laura reveals in an effort to get through Jayne's happy-go-lucky nonchalance ("Gee, it must be a happy place inside that brain of yours") lands with a deadening thud. On its way to a climax that ends every plot strand on an unrealistically upbeat and pat note, Happy Tears loses sight of what made the film so engrossing in the first place. And by film's end, Jayne remains as self-obsessed and neurotic as ever. She's just a lot happier now, having learned to accept she's just a teeny bit crazy.

Happy Tears opens Friday Jan. 19 at the Intracoastal in Miami and the Sunrise and Gateway in Fort Lauderdale.

Tarantino is considering making an all-out Western - with a twist

A lot of Quentin Tarantino's movies have been spiritual, if not literal, homages to the Spaghetti Western genre. So it makes sense that the New York Daily News is reporting the director Tarantino is pondering a full-blown western as a follow-up to his World War II fantasy Inglourious Basterds.

 "I'd like to do a Western," the director said. "But rather than set it in Texas, have it in slavery times. With that subject that everybody is afraid to deal with. Let's shine that light on ourselves. You could do a ponderous history lesson of slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad. Or, you could make a movie that would be exciting. Do it as an adventure. A spaghetti Western that takes place during that time. And I would call it A Southern."

The report also made it clear that while Tarantino and his Basterds star Brad Pitt both occasionally partake of a certain weed, neither of them ever do it while they're on the set.

"Brad doesn't smoke while he's acting. And I don't smoke while I'm directing."

Review: ''The Wolfman''

Benicio Del Toro looks pretty awesome in full werewolf get-up in The Wolfman. His makeup, mostly old-school prosthetics and fur with just a dash of computer-generated accents, is fantastic - nostalgically hokey and still cutting edge. The man-to-beast transformation scenes, which are surprisingly brief, are also greatly effective, if not quite so elaborate or revolutionary as the ones John Landis achieved in his seminal 1981 horror comedy An American Werewolf in London.

But the rest of A Puerto Rican Werewolf in London - I mean The Wolfman - is done in by a fatal lack of purpose. Director Joe Johnston (Hidalgo, Jumanji) ladles on the mood and atmosphere: This is the sort of movie in which the woods are always shrouded in fog and shadow, and the moon looms impossibly large. The production design is impeccable: There's no faulting the movie's art direction. But Johnston fails to make a story set in 1891 England relevant to contemporary audiences. Why not set it in present-day London? Why retell this woefully familiar tale at all?

There are some new, albeit disappointingly telegraphed, plot twists in the script by Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven) and David Self (Road to Perdition), but they're not enough to distract you from the fact that you're watching a remake of an old, infinitely superior movie,and you keep wondering what the point was. No metaphors or subtexts regarding the beast that lurks within the hearts of men or sexual repression or the rampaging id - nothing but a superficial gloss on well-worn material. The film isn't quite so redundant as Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, but it comes close.

With the exception of Hugo Weaving's Scotland Yard detective, who investigates a recent string of murders apparently committed by a wild animal, the performances in The Wolfman all feel as if the actors were playing dress-up. The usually resourceful and vibrant Del Toro is muted and disengaged as Lawrence Talbot, an actor who returns to his hometown just outside London after his brother's mysterious death. As Lawrence's father, Anthony Hopkins hams things up so ferociously you wonder if the monstrous creature roaming the moors is a wild pig.

And the talented Emily Blunt is saddled with the most perfunctory Token Love Interest role of all time - Gwen Conliffe, the former girlfriend of the dead brother, who immediately starts making cow eyes at Lawrence even though the corpse of her ex is still warm. A tender scene in which Lawrence and Gwen discover a mutual attraction while he's teaching her how to skip stones across a pond is so dull and perfunctory I started wishing the filmmakers would throw in a surprise homage to the scene in Frankenstein in which the monster throws a little girl into a lake.

 For an R-rated horror film, The Wolfman is also surprisingly light on scares - and when I say light, I mean completely devoid of them. This movie wouldn't scare an impressionable 5-year-old girl who's afraid of the monster under her bed. OK, that's not really true. The Wolfman would probably freak that little girl out, especially during a scene in which the rampaging werewolf leaves a pile of entrails and severed limbs in his wake. But there's a dispiritingly rote and uninvolving air about The Wolfman that keeps the movie from being the slightest bit frightening for anyone old enough to see it. All the atmospherics big-budget Hollywood can muster will never fill the void left by a weak story, and there wasn't a moment in The Wolfman during which I believed anything I was watching. The editing also feels choppy, as if large chunks of the film had been excised during the year-long delay before its release.

In the best scene, some doctors and psychiatrists who think Talbot is a mere lunatic and not really a monster strap him to a chair as the full moon rises to prove their case, and Del Toro bellows "Tonight I will kill all of you!" before sprouting fangs and claws and proceeding almost to fulfill his promise. The scene - a large group of frightened people trapped inside a locked room with a crazed monster - is fun and original and exciting. The rest of The Wolfman, which must have the limpest ending ever to grace a werewolf picture, is about as frightening as a Benji sequel … the one in which he got rabies.

Review: ''Valentine's Day''

There are so many romantic-comedy cliches crammed into Valentine's Day that watching it feels like surfing through the channels of an all-chick-flick cable service. Whenever you start to become bored by a particular plot strand or character, you only have to wait a minute or two until the film cuts away to something else. Here, finally, is a date movie for couples suffering from attention deficit disorder.

Director Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman, Runaway Bride) has rounded up an impressive roster of big names: This has to be the starriest cast ever to grace such a formulaic crowd pleaser. Even though some of the famous faces appear for only a couple of minutes (sorry, Kathy Bates), the starpower works in the movie's favor, helping make the contrived scenarios more tolerable than they'd normally be.

Ashton Kutcher and Jennifer Garner, for example, share such a nice rapport onscreen that you almost don't notice they are playing yet another reprisal of that stale rom-com stand-by: Two best friends stuck in rocky relationships to other people who don't realize they are perfect for each other. Jessica Biel brings a bit of much-needed credibility to her role as a harried publicist who can't get a date. You don't buy Biel as a lonelyheart for a second, but at least she makes the character amusing by pushing her neuroses to humorous extremes.

In her film debut, musical superstar Taylor Swift pretty much steals the movie from her more experienced co-stars as a bubble-headed teenager in love with her equally daft boyfriend (Taylor Lautner). Swift is a natural comedienne and fearless about making herself look silly: Her character, although as thin as the others, deserved more screen time.

 But Valentine's Day, which was written by Katherine Fugate (creator of TV's Army Wives) and stitched together from the scripts of a hundred movies before it, has too much ground to cover to spend too long on any single protagonist. Shirley MacLaine and Hector Elizondo are essentially wasted as a longtime couple about to renew their vows, while Julia Roberts contributes what amounts to an extended cameo as a military servicewoman sharing a flight with a guy (Bradley Cooper) who may or may not be flirting with her. Jamie Foxx looks bored as a TV sportscaster assigned to file a man-on-the-street report on the holiday, and George Lopez shows up to add a bit of Latin flavor to the proceedings as a flower deliveryman.

 Too much of Valentine's Day, in fact - from the various ages of the protagonists to the carefully balanced mix of ethnicities and races - feels as if the movie were written by a marketing team thinking only about appealing to the widest demographic possible. The film might have fared better had it shed some of its blander plotlines (such as the silly romance between Topher Grace and Anne Hathaway, who moonlights as a phone-sex operator, a premise lifted from Short Cuts) and spent a little more time exploring the thrill and elation of being in love - or at least just being horny. Valentine's Day isn't a chore to sit through, but it isn't much to watch, either. It's perfect back ground material for necking, though: You can tune in and out with your date and barely miss a thing.

Review: ''The White Ribbon''

Full disclosure: I'm an ardent fan of the films of Austrian director Michael Haneke (Funny Games, Cache, The Time of the Wolf, The Piano Teacher), which sometimes get rapped for being a little too obsessed with the human capacity for cruelty and the cyclical nature of evil. Haneke is a commanding and provocative filmmaker, and to say that his world view is bleak does not do his vision justice: Even Lars Von Trier comes off as an optimist by comparison.

But The White Ribbon, Haneke's latest and much-acclaimed new movie, the leading contender for the Best Foreign Language Oscar and winner of the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, is - how to put this politely? - an artsy bore. Haneke's ambitions are admirable: Using the increasingly strange events in a small German village shortly before the start of World War I to illustrate how cruelty, violence and sadism can spread like a virus and how the fascism that would become prevalent in the 1930s sprang from seemingly peaceful, family-oriented people.

But Haneke has dramatized his intellectual conceits in an uninvolving, snail-paced movie that illustrates its themes in an obvious, almost banal manner. Shot in soft-focus black-and-white intended to make the film look as if it had been made in the era it unfolds, The White Ribbon even resorts to that old screenwriter's crutch - the voiceover narrator - to make sure no one misses the point. There are no obvious villains in The White Ribbon: The malevolence that permeates the seemingly idyllic town seems to afflict everyone, even children, and spawns a series of unexplained accidents and crimes that raise everyone's level of paranoia. A doctor is injured in a fall after his horse trips over a wire strung between poles. A woman dies after she falls through rotten floorboards. A pastor punishes his son by tying his arms to the sides of his bed at night. Another boy is found horribly beaten and potentially blinded.

 Haneke skips from household to household, using long takes to capture sudden moments of abuse, psychological and physical, that erupt with increasing frequency. A man dismisses his mistress with unforgivable cruelty (‘‘You're ugly, flabby, messy and have bad breath''). The town's doctor expresses a little too much physical affection toward his teenage daughter. And children start roaming in packs, like the demon seeds from Village of the Damned, innocents turned into threatening figures - Nazis in the making. Despite the turmoil, the citizens maintain a veneer of placid content, and the collective silence further helps to corrode the village's morals.

This all sounds a lot more interesting than it play out, though. The White Ribbon is undeniably intriguing on an intellectual level, but Haneke's flat, austere direction, intended to augment the growing horrors, instead results in tedium. Despite the occasional effective scene, you never feel the dread and revulsion The White Ribbon wants to convey. You can only hear Haneke lecturing, lamenting the evil that will sprout from the seeds being planted under the guise of a puritanical, largely Protestant society blind to its hypocrisy. The director's cool, remote touch has been fiendishly effective in previous films, but in The White Ribbon, his remove leaves you cold.

The White Ribbon opens Friday Feb. 12 at South Beach in Miami and Sunrise in Fort Lauderdale.

''Superman'' reboot finally in the works

 Deadline Hollywood reports Warner Bros. has approached director Chris Nolan, who resuscitated the Batman franchise with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, to do the same for The Man of Steel. A new Superman movie would completely ignore the events of Superman Returns, which grossed $391 million worldwide but cost a whopping $270 million, in part because the project had so many false starts (remember when Tim Burton wanted Nicolas Cage to star?)

Nolan, who is putting the finishing touches on Inception (due July 16th) and is next slated to start work on a third Batman film, would not direct the Superman picture, but serve instead as a creative consultant and possibly as a credited producer. Bryan Singer, who directed Superman Returns and told me last year he still held out hope to get a shot at making another one, has moved on and is preparing to direct a new X-Men picture.

 Also not returning will be Brandon Routh, whose career has pretty much fizzled since Superman Returns. I really liked the melancholy tone Singer brought to the Superman saga - the biggest problem with Superman Returns was that Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) just wasn't enough of a villain - and I would have liked to see what Singer would have done having learned from his mistakes. Now we will never find out.

Don't expect Superman 3.0 in theaters any time soon, though. It will be at least a year, if not more, before a script is written and pre-production on the project begins in earnest.

Random appearances by owls in movies

Wolf (1994) dir. Mike Nichols

As a werewolf (Jack Nicholson) prowls the woods in search of prey, an owl looks on indifferently, because owls aren't afraid of anything - even monsters.

Leonardo DiCaprio talks ''Inception'' and addresses those rumors of a remake of Michael Haneke's ''Hidden''

 I had a brief - way too brief - telephone interview with Leonardo DiCaprio this week to discuss Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, which I am not allowed to talk about yet, or else Paramount Pictures will go all Travis Bickle on me.

I was able to ask DiCaprio all of three or four questions before my time was up. When he was being yanked off the phone, I hurriedly asked him what he could tell me about Inception, which looks awesome and mysterious and is the summer movie I am anticipating the most, now that the Footloose remake has been canceled.

"It's been kept under wraps very intentionally," DiCaprio said. "[Director] Christopher Nolan and the studio want to keep the concept under wraps. Essentially, it is about a group of people who are able to access the minds of people in power and manipulate them, as well as access information they are hiding in their dream state. The movie works on multiple levels of reality, and I'm really looking foward to seeing how Nolan puts that giant jigsaw puzzle together."

 Then I thanked DiCaprio for his time and pulled the old trick of sneaking one last question into my goodbye, asking him if there was any truth to the rumor he and Scorsese are planning to collaborate on a remake of Michael Haneke's Cache (Hidden).

"We have nothing set," he said as he was being literally pulled from the phone by a publicist. "I don't really talk about anything until it might actually be true."

That sounds like a big maybe to me.

Random list of movies I wish I could get on Blu-ray

 
I'm about to sit down to watch the new Blu-ray of Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt, which I am thrilled got the high-def treatment.

Here are some other movies I wish the studios would put out on Blu-ray immediately, although I know it's going to be a while until some of these come out, if ever. I left out the movies that are coming out later this year, like the Alien films.

I couldn't find a good image of the original poster, but I prefer the theatrical cut over the "Redux" version.

Yeah, I know, I know. But it's still awesome.

Duh. Come on, Warner Bros. Bring it!

Give the people what they want, Lucas.

 

 

   

  

  

 

Review: ''From Paris With Love''

In the generic but breezily entertaining From Paris with Love, John Travolta runs around sporting a bald head, a goatee, a hoop earring and an I-don't-give-a-damn disposition. Playing Charlie Wax, a U.S. special agent sent to Paris to thwart a terrorist attack, Travolta is funny and limber and a genuine bad-ass - someone who gets a secret kick out of always being smarter than everyone else in the room. This is Travolta's most enjoyable and energetic performance since Pulp Fiction and Primary Colors, and he's a blast to watch.

Directed by Pierre Morel, who previously made two equally brisk (District 13 and last year's Taken), From Paris with Love doesn't waste a second of its 92 minutes. A protégé of French filmmaker Luc Besson (who produced the film), Morel has an unusually strong knack for pacing without assaulting you with his editing (ahem, Michael Bay). Morel is also shrewd at never slowing down his story with unnecessary exposition. Here, you learn everything you need to know along the way.

For example, the movie introduces James Reece (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), an assistant to the U.S. ambassador who will become Wax's unwilling partner. At first, you figure Reece for a nebbish pencil pusher, until a scene in which he tries to plant a microphone under a desk with chewing gum that isn't sticky enough. Although he's resourceful, Reece is the mirror opposite of Wax - he's a man of words, not action - and their odd-couple pairing should have been tiresome and cliched.

But here, the mismatch leads to some inspired action, such as a scene in which the men ascend a spiral staircase lined with bad guys, Wax one floor ahead of Reece to clear the way, the latter horrified at the stream of bloodied bodies his partner keeps flinging over the bannister.

From Paris With Love is also filled with bits of business that you'd never catch the good guys of American pictures doing. When the heroes hole up in a brothel to wait for the bad guys to arrive, Wax decides to pass the time by partaking of the services offered. For about a third of the movie, the pair runs around holding a large vase filled with cocaine. The drug is supposedly evidence, but the heroes occasionally dip into it for an extra boost before walking into a gunfight. You know, like Red Bull, only not.

Even the plot of From Paris with Love, as simple as the film's brief running time implies, contains a couple of terrific twists, including one dinner scene that would send even the Food Network's unflappable Barefoot Contessa screaming from the room. From Paris with Love isn't anything special, and it lacks the furious energy that Liam Neeson brought to Taken. But the movie is a more-than-adequate time filler before the big films of spring start to arrive, and it proves there's plenty of life left in Travolta beyond crap such as Wild Hogs and Old Dogs. He just needs the right director to get his mojo going.