Movie Review: "Paris"

My expectation was that the City of Lights would be displayed in an exceptional manner. Take it from me, it is not. I don't claim to know Paris well, but I have visited the city on several occasions. In my opinion, its beauty is predicated on the splendor and uniformity of its architecture. Unfortunately, the panoramic views from the sky in this film are so small that the magnificence of the city and that harmonized architecture is lost.

Pierre (Romain Duris) is a dancer in poor health due to a heart condition. His divorced sister, Elise (Juliette Binoche), and her three children move in with him to tend to his needs. Elise decides to find a girlfriend for Pierre who has his eye on a woman in an apartment across the street. The most interesting character is Roland (Fabrice Luchini), a professor who stalks one of his students, Laetitia (Melanie Laurent).

My expectation was that the City of Lights would be displayed in an exceptional manner. Take it from me, it is not. I don't claim to know Paris well, but I have visited the city on several occasions. In my opinion, its beauty is predicated on the splendor and uniformity of its architecture. Unfortunately, the panoramic views from the sky in this film are so small that the magnificence of the city and that harmonized architecture is lost.

Pierre (Romain Duris) is a dancer in poor health due to a heart condition. His divorced sister, Elise (Juliette Binoche), and her three children move in with him to tend to his needs. Elise decides to find a girlfriend for Pierre who has his eye on a woman in an apartment across the street. The most interesting character is Roland (Fabrice Luchini), a professor who stalks one of his students, Laetitia (Melanie Laurent).

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Zombieland Movie Review

It is a rather odd phenomenon that zombies are so popular right now. But with everything from movies to books, comics, games, figurines, candy, and even a zombie wine on the market, it’s no surprise that we should see a movie like Zombieland, essentially the most epic zombie comedy ever conceived by man.

Zombieland stars Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson as Columbus and Tallahassee, two survivors of the zombie apocalypse. Columbus has developed a set of rules like “always check.

The back seat” and “beware of bathrooms” that helps him survive, while Tallahassee stays alive on pure testosterone and a “gotta enjoy the little things” attitude.

Eventually they team up with Wichita and Little Rock, two con artist sisters on their way to Pacific Playland, an amusement park outside of LA.

The tremendous performances along with the crudely witty dialogue and overall revelry in the zombie tradition makes Zombieland hands-down one of the best movies of the year and quite possibly one of the best horror-comedies of all time.

This is a film that is accessible to any audience (though it’s rated R by the MPAA for a reason) and certainly won’t disappoint non-horror fans. Bill Murray has one of the all-time great cameos complete with Ghostbusters references and all appropriate reverence for the comedy great.

Really and truly there’s not enough to say about Zombieland without giving anything away that clearly expresses how excellent this film is. Suffice to say that no film since the original Dawn of the Dead has made the zombie apocalypse look so appealing, and you absolutely must see it for yourself.

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Gamer Movie Review

Bursting with their trademark visual style, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (Crank) attack the screen with this twist on the virtual reality genre. Unfortunately, the film is a cacophonous mess without a single interesting character.

In the nearish future, roleplay game-maker Ken Castle (Hall) has made his fortune with two games that let people live vicariously through others: the sex-and-party Society and the war-and-destruction Slayers. The twist is that the gamers are controlling actual people due to nano technology implanted in the performers' brains.

In Slayers, they're all death row inmates firing real bullets, and the global megastar performer is Kable (Butler), controlled by rich geek Simon (Lerman). But Kable longs to escape and find his wife (Valletta), and a renegade hacker (Bridges) sets his escape in motion.

While this clever idea allows for all kinds of interesting subthemes, the filmmakers are clearly only interested in two things: naked women and grisly carnage. They put all of their considerable skills to bear in these two areas, indulging in hyperventilating action, exaggerated violence, gratuitously skimpy costumes and glimpses of bare breasts every few minutes. But none of this is remotely enjoyable because it assaults our senses without any coherent context.
And the relentless misogyny and homophobia are simply vile.

Besides the vast plot holes, the film is just overwrought silliness. Sure, it looks great, with the lurid photography, gritty images and textured design, but the characters are all swaggering, overconfident idiots. So the solid cast is left to play mere cartoon characters, really. And none of them seems to be having much fun either, although Hall gives it a go by chomping shamelessly on the scenery like a Bond villain on acid.

Eventually, everything boils over into even bigger, nastier carnage, as Slayers invades Society and then society before converging in a truly surreal confrontation that's choreographed like a Bob Fosse musical number. And it has to be noted that Ventimiglia's appearance, in a skin-tight PVC catsuit, is the film's quirkiest sequence. Although when the script strains for a thinly developed reunited family sentimentality, there's nothing we can do but groan.

Where's Jason Statham when we need him?

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Surrogates Movie Review

There's one moment in Surrogates that's so utterly fantastic, so face-meltingly awesome it represents everything we hold to be true as human beings, and if they just made this scene the movie it would win every award from Academy to Nobel AND it would unify nations to one global consciousness.

It involves Bruce Willis emerging from a room (after drinking some scotch, naturally) and beating the holy hell out of a laughing robot with his bare hands.

That image should be on flags. Alas, the rest of Surrogates isn't nearly as awesome as that brief moment. It starts off alright, but quickly becomes a warmed over stew of missed opportunities and movies (and chases) you've seen in the past, complete with unnecessarily convoluted plotting that's more obnoxious than clever and.

A "twist" I literally called during the opening credits. (It should be pretty obvious to anyone who's a sci-fi nerd. Or anyone who's ever read a science fiction story). It's pretty much a slightly dumber version of I, Robot, but with far less product placement.

Surrogates brings you up to speed in the opening credits, establishing the world of the Surrogate. Originally designed by James Cromwell to help paraplegics feel the sensation of walking again, the Surrogates quickly caught on by the general populous. People never leave their homes, secure in the control of robots they control around the cities. There is a resistance headed by Ving Rhames, who has the wonderful moniker of The Prophet. He and others live in designated safe havens for those who refuse to let robots do their living for them.

The movie begins with an attack on a Surrogate, which kills the user. (Unlike the Matrix, if terrible things happen to your Surrogate, it doesn't affect you in reality). This is a first, so the FBI is called in, which introduces us to a wonderfully wigged Bruce Willis. His Surrogate reflects a younger version of Bruce, but then we discover the Bruce we know and love: gruff, grizzled, and with a manly pate of shaved head, but a rockin' goatee.

Bruce Willis discovers things about the victim, who is the son of Cromwell's character. Apparently, the murder was meant to kill Cromwell for designing the surrogates, and they've developed a weapon that can kill users while they operate. It's up to Willis to find out who's behind everything, but complications arise later that force Bruce out of his shell and to become the man we love and worship.

The premise is kind of neat, and at first they have some fun with the details. I liked how it was close to the present day, yet everything was candy-colored. I liked how the Surrogates are user controlled, and there's no real threat of robotic uprising, although that should be the number one fear in this world. I liked the gag with the "legal team", and wished there was more explored around the idea that we don't know who the user of the Surrogate is, as a Surrogate allows you to be anybody. Sort of like anonymous commenting on the internet.

Hey, wait a minute, could this movie be making a point about how humans are spending too much time on the internet and socializing through machines instead of genuine human interaction?!?!

Alas, the movie makes that point, and that point alone. Where it could explore neat themes and ideas about this world, instead it settles into rote chase sequences and a need to complicate matters that sort of negate other plot threads. On top of this, the movie is filled with terrible old age make-up effects, an obscene amount of Dutch angles, and an intrusive score that verges on ridonkulous.

Still, I didn't hate the movie. I was mildly entertained, and Bruce Willis is pretty much good in anything these days. Ving Rhames was pretty decent, and James Cromwell now gets to claim the sci-fi nerd triple crown as he built these robots, the I, Robots AND created Warp drive with the assistance of Geordi LaForge. (He also trained Babe, too!) And if you ever wanted to see Rhada Mitchell utilize a parking meter as a spear as she throws it into a Prius that Bruce Willis is driving, you might even like this movie more than me.

But then again, I keep coming back to that one scene, and the amazement it provides. If and when the robots do rise up against us, I hope we can look at John McClane destroying metal with flesh. And I hope that inspires humanity to take things back. A boy can dream, can't he?

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What's Your Raashee? Movie Review

Billions of Blue Blistering Barnacles! Sorry Captain Haddock, I had to borrow your oft-repeated phrase used in exasperation, or was it a mild way of using an expletive!

Watching Ashutosh Gowariker's WHAT'S YOUR RAASHEE evokes an exclamation of this sort. You expect much more from the director who gave us that mammoth hit LAGAAN and followed it up with SWADES and JODHA AKBAR. WHAT'S YOUR RAASHEE, is nowhere near these three films in terms of content or execution.

A simple, logical shift would have been in getting 12 different girls with different Sun Signs to enact what Gowariker is trying to characterize on screen. But what you get is 12 Priyanka Chopras donning the garb from Aries to Pisces.

Nothing wrong with that. But 12 sun signs will have their 12 different and distinct characteristic traits apart from the physical attributes and Priyanka tries her best but ends up repeating herself. She begins well with the first two Sun Signs. However, I wonder which girl, apart from the Scorpio girl, who I believe was decently portrayed, will ever associate with any of the Raashee's depicted by Gowariker.

CHECK OUT: Ashutosh Gowariker is a genius

Run for cover, Gowariker!

The ones for whom this film will do a world of good though, is Priyanka Chopra and Harman Baweja. Priyanka gets to don 12 different characters to display her acting skills. As for Harman, this lad has finally shaken off his Hrithik ka bhoot and is actually looking good and has put up a decent performance. Their chemistry here is very different from their LOVE 2050 disaster.

Based on the Gujarati novel 'Kimball Ravenswood' by Madhu Rye, WHAT'S YOUR RAASHEE? is Ashutosh Gowariker's first romantic comedy. Yogesh Patel (Harman Baweja) is happily pursuing his studies and working in the Big Apple. A phone call about his dad's state of health has him rushing back to India. His brother, it appears, had taken huge loans. The only way out is to get Yogesh married. They stumble on this idea when the pundit who is called to predict whether Yogesh's brother will face a jail term ends up studying Yogesh's kundli. He states that if Yogesh gets married by the 20th of the month, there will be a flood of wealth in the household. Right enough, when he is delivering his prediction, Yogesh's mother gets a call from her father in Gujarat that he is 'willing' his entire property to his darling grandson, Yogesh. From here starts Yogesh's dilemma. To cut the long story short, he agrees after much persuasion, but on the condition that he gets to meet one girl from every Sun Sign


The premise is silly, the plot frivolous and the execution lacks direction. It appears as though Gowariker has let go of the reins and is not aware of what is happening. The movie breaks the three-hour barrier. Each Sun Sign lasts for over 12 minutes and is most often punctuated with a song. And in every 'meeting' Yogesh is always helping the girl, either to be a model, marry the one of her choice, or pursue her studies. One even follows him and another tries to seduce him in the first meeting! And these are all shudh Gujarati belles.

There are also too many sub-plots; the pundit who turns jaasoos, the sidekicks of the don and the Kampala to Khandala plot.

The music is a huge draw but is overused, the start is terrific; giving one a Broadway feel but then comes the downer...

It's easy to predict the fate of this flick at the Box Office!

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Movie Review: WANTED (2009)

Starring: Salman Khan, Ayesha Takia, Vinod Khanna, Mahesh Manjrekar, Prajkash Raj, Govind Namdeo, Inder Kumar, Aseem Merchant, Sajid. Director: Prabhu Deva

If you are crazy about regular commercial masala films leaving your brains at home, Wanted is the right choice. Wanted is a canvas painted in south Indian colours where you can get a glimpse of Rajnikanth in our macho man Salman Khan. Woah hold down It’s a Prabhu Deva film, Bingo

Wanted is undisputedly a well-written story with an excellent screenplay. But there is a flipside to it. It is a well-written story which lacks good direction and editing. Wanted opens up with an interesting plot with commissioner Ashraf Khan (Govind Namdeo) leaving no stones unturned to eradicate underworld terrorism from the country. Radhe (Salman Khan) is a hardcore gangster known for brutality and commitments.

All he knows is the language of money. His loyalties lies with any gang provided the money is right. His entry in Gani Bhai (Prakash Raj) gang under the wing of Golden (Aseem Merchant), the right hand of Gani and betrayal to his existing gang headed by Data Pawle leads to bloodshed, as disputes crop up unexpectedly. However, story takes a twist with Golden’s death, which compels Gani Bhai to take matters in his hands and fly back to India. How Gani Bhai realizes the trap of commissioner Ashraf Khan, and the truth of Salman Khan, would have been an exciting watch had Prabhu Deva tightened his script.

Cinematographers Nirav Shah and S Sriram are simply excellent. Special effects are over the top; could have been subtle. The music is awful, except ‘Dil Leke’ track, which is the only saving grace.

No refreshing treat for ears, as far as stereotypical dialogues go.

Wanted rides on Salman Khan despite his regular run-of-the-mill, yet nice performance. Ayesha Takia is good and looks gorgeous. Mahesh Manjrekar is perfect for his part as a womanizer. Prakash Raj as Gani Bhai has small, yet pivotal role and lives up to it beautifully. Vinod Khanna and Inder Kumar don’t have much scope, though they are instrumental to the pace of the story. Aseem Merchant is fairly good. Same goes for Govind Namdeo.

On the whole, ‘Salman Khan’ factor will pull the audience to make this film survive. Infact, half the battle is won, courtesy loads of hype. My verdict: One time watch.

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500 Days of Summer - movie review

The sardonic narrator of (500) Days of Summer warns us early on, as if not to get our hopes up, that this is not a love story… but that it is a story about love. That’s just a little bit of semantic trickery of course. (500) Days of Summer is a love story – in truth a better love story than most, since it captures love in all its beautiful contradictions.

It is a peculiarly told love story though, which treats time a bit like a skipping record. The needle drops first not on Day 1 – the day Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meets his boss’s new assistant Summer (Zooey Deschanel) and falls for her instantly – but Day 488, a scene on a park bench which looks rather like the end of Tom and Summer’s relationship.

The film continues in this vein, sliding backwards and forwards in the 500-day history of what appears to be a doomed love affair, as we try to work out, along with Tom: what went wrong? This is a romance in retrospect: sliced and diced, sweet, sour, bitter. But these are Tom’s subjective memories, and one’s memory can play tricks.

(500) Days of Summer is a bit like a fun-lovin’ version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and, like Michel Gondry, director Marc Webb cut his teeth making music videos. He draws on this sensibility here in a big way. There is of course the obligatory trendy indie soundtrack (comprised, naturally, not of love songs, but of ‘songs about love’), the now-compulsory Zooey Deschanel singing scene (see Elf, Yes Man, Raving), and gentle hints provided on band T-shirts and vinyl covers (‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, ‘Wake Up And Smell The Roses’, etc).

But there’s also Webb’s quirky visual style, which has the heightened reality of an actual musical. It flits from song-and-dance numbers to parodies of French new wave cinema, from vox pops to clever split-screen sequences. We’ve seen this kind of intentional wackiness before, but none of it is just for kicks in (500) Days – it’s all part of the storytelling

For a movie so splendidly self-aware, the choice of Deschanel is somewhat less brave though. It’s something to do with those dish-sized blue doe eyes that Deschanel is always cast as the ‘free spirit’ (it’s just the details that are different: listening to Simon and Garfunkel; jogging photography; hitching across the galaxy), and she’s fairly underwhelming here. But then again, (500) Days makes no apologies for not creating a rounded character out of Summer – it’s Tom’s feelings for her that are important, and Gordon-Levitt is the kind of guy you enjoy riding the highs and lows with. Clearly in a bid to escape his sitcom roots, he’s done his time in dark, broody films – he and Deschanel both previously starred in Manic, a very different film indeed – and it’s great to see him returning to something of this flavour, which has laughs from start to finish.

(500) Days of Summer presents the perfect analogy for itself: a greeting card copy writer experiencing real love. It’s a hearty and heartfelt dose of something real and wonderful amongst phony emotions and conveyor belt sap we’ve come to expect from the rom-com genre, with a little bit of cinematic magic to capture that most magical of subjects.

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American Casino - Movie Review

I don’t think most people really understood that they were in a casino” says award-winning financial reporter Mark Pittman. “When you’re in the Street’s casino, you’ve got to play by their rules.” This film finally explains how and why over $12 trillion of our money vanished into the American Casino.

For chips, the casino used real people, like the ones we meet in Baltimore. These are not the heedless spendthrifts of Wall Street legend, but a high school teacher, a therapist, a minister of the church. They were sold on the American Dream as a safe investment. Too late, they discovered the truth.

Cruelly, as African – Americans, they and other minorities were the prime targets for the subprime loans that powered the casino. According to the Federal Reserve, African-Americans were four times more likely than whites to be sold subprime loans.

We meet the players. A banker explains that the complex securities he designed were “fourth dimensional” and sold to “idiots.” A senior Wall Street ratings agency executive describes being ordered to “guess” the worth of billion dollar securities. A mortgage loan salesman explains how borrowers’ incomes were inflated to justify a loan. A billionaire describes how he made a massive bet that people would lose their homes and has won $500 million, so far.

Finally, as the global financial system crumbles and outraged but impotent lawmakers fume at Wall Street titans, we see the casino’s endgame: Riverside, California a foreclosure wasteland given over to colonies of rats and methamphetamine labs, where disease-bearing mosquitoes breed in their millions on the stagnant swimming pools of yesterday’s dreams.Filmed over twelve months in 2008, American Casino takes you inside a game that our grandchildren never wanted to play.

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Carriers Movie Review

After a long delay and the new Star Trek vaulting Carriers lead Chris Pine to stardom, this post-apocalyptic thriller/horror is finally getting at least a limited release. When the film wrapped back in 2006 Paramount decided to shelve it, but what once seemed doomed to the overcrowded world of direct-to-DVD horror is now available in theaters for at least some of us.

Carriers picks up after a deadly unnamed disease has wiped out most of the world’s population. In the hopes of finding someplace isolated, four friends are making their way to Turtle Beach where two of them, brothers Brian and Danny, spent their summers growing up. They abide by a set of rules that is supposed to keep them all alive and uninfected, but the rules aren’t perfect, especially when you break them.

Contrary to what a lot of the trailers and media coverage leading up to the release would lead you to believe, Carriers is not a zombie movie. It does fall into many of the tropes set out by the traditional Romero zombie flick (small group of people getting by in a post-apocalyptic world, gun-toting survival extremists, scavenging the remains of American capitalism, etc.), but by cutting out a lot of the violence from the scenario, we are left with a film that focuses almost entirely on the necessities of survival and what the characters give up in exchange.

Chris Pine carries the film for much of its length. As the group’s de facto leader, his character Brian is a charming prick who does anything necessary to keep himself and his brother alive. The group’s motto, “the sick are already dead,” leads this film into morally ambiguous territory and forces the characters to make difficult decisions. In this world, if the disease doesn’t get you, the survivors might.

In the end, Carriers is not a great movie, but it’s not bad either. Certainly there are those who will enjoy it and those who won’t, but for most people it’s a decent way to kill a couple hours. For horror people and zombie fans though, it’s interesting to watch Carriers as a ‘zombie movie without zombies’ and to see the implications of that as a horror film.

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Josh Movie Review

It is difficult to believe that Dil Raju the man with a golden hand and a producer who is blessed with the quality of judging moviegoer's pulse correctly and has delivered so many hit films can actually become instrumental in selecting a story that is clichéd for the launch of Nagarjuna's son.

What's even more worse is roping in a director who has messed up the film, he has not only not highlighted one single quality in the hero but disappointed the audiences with a very ordinary approach to direction. There are occasions like this when one misses having a reputed, happening, well-versed director who would add and lend his experience to filmmaking. There could be a chance of such a film misfiring too but then atleast you know he had worked on giving a 'pro-active' image of the hero.

Josh has nothing outstanding or even average to offer, it's a poor debut for all the newcomers. The only dialogue that is sensible is when Prakashraj tells Chaitanya that 'college paatam cheppi pareeksha pedthundi, jeevitham pareeksha petti paatam nerputhundi.' Naga Chaitanya is confined to being shown as serious and his dances and fights are normal.

The film opens with Satya (Naga Chaitanya) quitting studies and wanting to go to Hyderabad. Why he wants to go to Hyderabad is revealed in the second half of the story. The film is boring and doesn't move, if it moves you know what happens next. Dialogues are silly, hardly makes an impact.

Naga Chaitanya might take a while to get a foothold in TFI which is not at all a difficult job but till then Josh will remain as an embarrassing debut for him and also for the heroine. There is absolutely no chemistry between the lead pair and the hero is short by industry standards.If you are curious to watch the newcomers perform, wait till it comes on your cable TV.

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Fox Movie Review

I don't know which publisher in the world would take a decision of going into prints after reading a manuscript within the first night itself. Also, I don't know which publisher would cosy upto the writer and call him 'Baby' without even spending a day with him.

In short, the publisher has the hots for the writer, who also happens to be a well-known criminal lawyer in India. The publisher in question is Sophia (Udita Goswami), who rushes through her dialogues and hurries through her scenes as though she has a local to catch.

The lawyer in question is Arjun Kapoor (Arjun Rampal) who is sought after and known for letting criminals off the hook with his in-depth knowledge of knowing where exactly the loopholes lie in the law. After one such case, he is distressed at being cursed where he defends his rich friend who has murdered an innocent girl. Disgusted, he decides to give up his practice after creating a furore in the court stating that his friend is indeed the killer. He is held in contempt of court and his licence is revoked. Arjun decides to take off to Goa leaving behind his flourishing practice and girlfriend Urvashi (Sagarika Ghatge).

In Goa he meets with an old man Vivian McNamara who invites him home after a session of fishing in Arjun's speed boat. He gives him a manuscript of a novel he has written and urges him to read it. Arjun is hooked onto it and finishes reading it in one night. Next morning McNamara calls to inquire whether he got a chance to read a few pages. Arjun tells him that he finished the entire script and loved it. He is invited over for a lunch of Goan Fish Curry by McNamara. However, when he reaches the old man's house, there are cops outside who tell him that he is dead.

Arjun leaves with the manuscript leaving his phone number behind. He then goes to a publisher who insists he sign a contract with his name as he is the writer. The book, as expected flies off the shelves and soon it lands on the desk of Yashwant Deshmukh (Sunny Deol) who works in the crime branch in Goa. The book is titled 'Fix the FOX' and its content is on lawyers. From then on, the film picks up speed as Arjun is arrested. The reason; the crimes mentioned in the novel have actually happened and the detailed description proves beyond doubt that he is the murderer because no one will know such minute details described in each of the five murders of the lawyers.

I will just deviate from here. You know there is something amiss when the old man first befriends Arjun because of his huge belly and out of shape face. That is bad make-up which the director tries to hide with long shots. This is where the twist lies in the tale. But the surprise is stored for the end when you know that this FOX has really been fixed. But by who? That is the puzzle that has Yashwant, Arjun and Urvashi in a fix. Together they try to unravel the mystery.

Though the scenes in the beginning remind you of the films of old, the film soon shapes into an interesting thriller. The end, indeed, is quite novel. Director Deepak Trijori has done a fairly decent job.

Arjun Rampal is moving from strength to strength. He is confident in his role; as a lawyer and then as the one who has been fixed. Sagarika Ghatge is convincing too. The girl has potential. She sums up the scene before delivering her dialogues. Sunny Deol as the tough cop who is out to help Arjun is right on target. This FOX is a thriller worth watching.

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Review Extract (R) 1/2

Mike Judge's Extract has some huge belly laughs, a terrific ensemble cast and more than a few instances of inspired comic brilliance.

So why doesn't the movie ever really take off? Judge, the creator of TV's Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill and director of the little-seen Idiocracy and the much-beloved Office Space, knows how to write a great gag and has a sharp observational wit. But he still hasn't learned how to blend a roster of characters and story incidents into a satisfying whole.

Although never boring and almost continually amusing, Extract doesn't work as a movie because you don't buy a minute of it, even as silly satire. You can't anchor a film with a likable, smart, normal protagonist -- self-made businessman Joel (Jason Bateman), owner of a successful flavor-extract company -- and then surround him with characters so resoundingly broad and stupid they make Looney Tunes seem like quantum-physics documentaries.

Everyone in Extract either lives in the real world -- like Joel and his wife Suzie (an underused Kristen Wiig) or the beautiful con artist (Mila Kunis) who has trained her sights on the extract company, which is about to be bought out by General Mills -- or hails from an alternate universe where the barest semblance of human intelligence is fabled and elusive.

The utter preposterousness doesn't detract from the humor of characters such as Joel's next-door neighboor (David Koechner), a comically bland and dull man unaware that people fear he may bore them to death, or the forklift operator (T.J. Miller) at Joel's company who is obsessed with promoting his thrash-metal rock band.

Ben Affleck practically steals the movie as a bartender with a drug -- and a drug-spawned idea -- to solve any problem (a scene in which he convinces Joel to smoke pot is one of the film's best), and Gene Simmons is hilarious as a slimy personal-injury lawyer.

Extract has no shortage of fine performances, and Bateman, as on TV's Arrested Development, forms the nobly suffering toward which they all gravitate. But the lack of connection to anything resembling the real world renders the film as a series of strung-together moments. (Part of what made the summer hit The Hangover so effective is that you completely bought into the surreal circumstances that the movie thrust onto its characters.)

There's nothing plausible about Extract's main plot, which follows Joel's efforts to recharge his sex life by hiring a slack-jawed gigolo (90210's Dustin Milligan, amusingly making everyone else seem smart) to seduce his wife. Yes, the plot is admittedly hatched while Joel is under the influence. But still.

Nothing is ever at stake in a movie in which you can't believe, so Extract amiably floats along from gag to gag, effectively killing 90 minutes without leaving a trace. The picture is funny enough to live forever on home video and cable TV, like Judge's Office Space did. But at the theater, Extract leaves you still hungry for a movie.

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Jetsam Movie Review

Gritty and involving, this small British thriller is like Memento crossed with The Bourne Identity as it reveals its secrets through a fragmented structure that involves espionage and memory. When a woman (Reid) wakes up on a beach, she's not sure what happened to her or who she is.

As her memories start trickling back, she remembers being involved in a corporate spying case in London, working for one man (Shaw) while keeping an eye on her boyfriend (MacAninch). But none of this is quite adding up, and she'll need more clarity to remember the whole story. But first, she's got to get away from this stranger (Draven) who's chasing her.

As filmmaker Welsford defines the characters and offers tantalising details, we begin to realise that this woman perhaps shouldn't trust her own memories. We learn why later on, as the twisty plot resolves into a clever exploration of identity. This flickering around in a woman's confused memory is sometimes hard to follow, plus the constantly shifting point of view, but everything ultimately comes sharply into focus with an emotional kick.

Welsford and cinematographer Zac Nicholson shoot this in striking widescreen hi-def. The beach scenes have a wonderfully surreal sense to them, and it feels like even the weather was following Welsford's direction. The editing is tight and effectively disorienting, while Mat Davidson's music adds plenty of atmosphere. It's a remarkably enveloping film for such a low-budget production, and a terrific calling card for the cast and crew.

Reid is superb at the centre, both on the beach and in flashbacks as a woman who has perhaps thrown herself too fully into her job. She makes her character surprisingly engaging for someone who seems unable to sort real memories from slanted perceptions. The other actors also create complex, involving characters that surprise us as the story shifts and settles.

At several points, we get the feeling that each person is spying on everyone else. And indeed, concepts of data and identity theft are major themes here. It's rare to find a movie that so adeptly captures the feeling of living in an age when information is the most valuable commodity. But at its heart, this is just a terrific little thriller. And it also marks Welsford as a filmmaker to watch.

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The Final Desination 3D Movie Review

Come on world, what do you really expect from The Final Destination? The first movie, all the way back in 2000 was fun and stupid, the horror equivalent of American Pie.

But now it’s nine years later and there’s a list of sequels nobody likes to talk about as we watch the original on TV syndication for the 11th time.

The first movie was decent because it took a stupid concept (the bad guy is Death), and executed it well with crazy Rube Goldberg-esque kills.

But each of the sequels has stuck faithfully to the original stupid concept, while falling farther and farther away from even the meager charm and entertainment value achieved by the original.

As with each Final Destination film, the main characters are a group of teenagers who, by virtue of a sudden and never-explained psychic vision, manage to sidestep the gruesome end that Death had planned for them.

Now, Death is hot on their trail and the only way to avoid being picked off one-by-one in increasingly unlikely ways is to piece together clues from more unexplained visions.

The Final Destination is now the fourth film and has attempted to bring new life to the franchise with crazy Rube Goldberg-esque kills (*booming echo-y voice*) in 3D-D -D-D!And to a certain extent, it works. The 3D effects are extremely well executed and look great giving new punch to what may have otherwise been lackluster maimings. Unfortunately, most of these really great 3D effects take place within the first 20 minutes of the movie, after which point, those 3D effects that remain are significantly less emphasized than their predecessors.

And the crazy Rube Goldberg-esque kills? About half of the deaths in the movie are indeed truly excellent, but that leaves the other half in the category of “vaguely unlikely and distinctly uninspired.” Clearly Death is getting bored with the game.

You, on the other hand, world, clearly are not bored. The Final Destination sat at the top of the US charts its opening weekend, beating out horror competition Halloween 2. If it’s just because of the 3D, then you might be able to say that you were tricked, but if you actually thought The Final Destination would be a good movie? Well you need to go sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done.

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