"It's weird when you watch women's tennis now, with all the grunting and shouting. It's a bit like phone sex. So you have to be very careful not to get too excited." - ROBIN WILLIAMS, on the joys of a love game.

Weekend Box Office Ghost Rider 20.1 The Number 23 14.6 Bridge to Terabithia 14.2 Reno 911!: Miami 10.3 Norbit 9.8 Music & Lyrics 7.7 Breach 6.0 Tyler Perry's Daddy's Little Girls 4.8 The Astronaut Farmer 4.5 Amazing Grace 4.1 | | | | | | 0 10 20 30 40 50 Dollars (millions) BARE BONED             Nicolas Cage usually looks similar in most of his performances, growling beneath a slow scowl or being the king of sarcastic pronouncements.  It’s not a stretch to consider him for the role of Johnny Blaze, the so-called GHOST RIDER (Columbia, PG-13) of Marvel Comic fame because the prospect of having your head turn into a flaming skull at night can only be tolerated by someone with a dark sense of humor.  But couched somewhere between uber-shit and the self-important drivel of Terrence Malick, this film doesn’t bring out the deadpan well enough to pass for a cheesy incarnation, to the point where you’d consider Elektra a better churn out for a Marvel prospect.  Good job, Avi Arad.             In order to save his father, Johnny Blaze (Matt Long as a youngster, Cage as grown-up) gives up his soul to become the famed “Rider,” of Western legend (as articulated by the Caretaker, a God-bless his money-needing heart Sam Elliot), who works for Mephistopheles, or the Devil (Peter Fonda, cashing that paycheck, chewing that scenery).  Many years later, the seemingly indestructible dare devil finally gets called into action to stop the Devil’s problem child Blackheart (Wes Bentley), who’s trying to collect souls for himself without daddy’s permission.  Does that make the Devil a positive character, negative character, or useless character?  Who knows.  Flaming his head up into a skull, while reconnecting to his former girlfriend (still bland, but now played by Eva Mendes, whose only worthwhile performances was anchored by Will Smith anyway), Blaze/Rider gets on his motorcycle and, to the tune of semi-amateur effects, burns everything in his sight, including any semblance of logic, as he seems to be able to take on the son of the Devil as if he were his equal and not just some guy in desperate need of a few ice cubes from time to time.              The film’s confusion about itself is evident from the moment Cage comes on screen, and it meanders from one place to the next without ever managing to suggest that there are goals it needs to achieve beyond cool-looking fire effects that could have been seemingly done on the Avid-Edit 3000.  Mark Steven Johnson, who already raped Jennifer Garner (Elektra), twice (Daredevil), Michael Keaton (Jack Frost) and my already habitual nightmares, smacks around an inarticulate screenplay full of exposition at the beginning and lack of progress in the middle, epilogue that means nothing at the end, and the an empty desert and backwoods set effectiveness of the film throughout its running time.  Dozing off somewhere in the middle, when his powers are being explained to him, didn’t confuse me about what was going on – I was already there, ushered by a weirdly ho-hum story line and nothing, nothing at stake for any character.  Fuck, I mean, the damn Devil was the cheesiest, most pussiest Beelzebub I’ve ever had the displeasure to sit through two hours watching on screen.  And not even the two or three finely crafted lines (which I refuse to credit to Johnson’s abortion of a screenplay and instead credit Nicolas Cage, who must have figured out what shit he just signed up for somewhere in the middle of the shoot) can take care of the rest of the film, which flounders on the worst bit of obscene boredom and detrimental suckitude I have experienced since the last time Terrence Malick made me sit through three hours of Colin Farrell admiring his own chest hair in the wilderness of newly discovered America.              Many people will propound that Marvel comics is better at movie treatments of their properties – see Spider-Man as example.  But consider this film, Fantastic Four and the other properties mentioned and then compare with DC Comics’ spare adaptations, Batman and Superman being really the only ones, and then ask yourself if it isn’t better to hit one out of two then three out of many more underdeveloped side characters who barely survive to feature length status, let alone are of any interest to watch for anybody whose name isn’t Avi Arad, one of the most deluded producers poking around Hollywood today.  Ghost Rider, more than any film since Elektra two years ago, pummels the thought that with enough effects, a subpar comic story can acquire depth of character.  Instead, it’s caught between the devil and the deep, blue fuck shit.  D- A STORYBOOK REALITY             Guillermo Del Toro, creator of The Devil’s Backbone and the much more mainstream Hellboy (a film I was not totally impressed by) has always tried to mix in a foreign film sensibility into a Hollywood-ized production and what he’s been good at doing most of all is using money wisely to make the film explode with a visual flair one would not think could be achieved on the funds he’s been given.  In many ways, that expectation is exceeded by PAN’S LABYRINTH (Warner Brothers Pictures, R), a fairy tale in Spanish and a brutal look at fascism and escape.             Balancing between reality and fantasy, it’s a story of Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a young girl moving to the middle of nowhere with her pregnant mother (Adriana Gil), where her new husband, Capitan Vidal (Sergi Lopez), the Nazi commander of Franco’s army in 1944 Spain, is fighting communist resisters to the new fascist government.  He’s a man of calculated coldness and brutality, and very Third Reich with his efficiency (he more than once glances at his pocket watch and shakes his head that other people are late to the party…or execution).  Ofelia doesn’t want to be anywhere near this hostile environment and, because she’s a reader of fairy tales, she gets caught up in one of her own.  Walking into a strange labyrinth on the property, she’s entreated by a faun (Doug Jones) to complete three tasks in order to prove she’s a long lost soul of an underworld princess that has finally come back to reign in her underground kingdom.  The tasks range from defeating a big toad and saving a tree’s roots to walking through a food-laden table guarded by a Pale Man (Doug Jones, again), whose eyes rest on the table like an appetizer until he’s disturbed, at which point they go in his palms (because, you see, he has no other eye-sockets).  All the tasks lead to redemption and away from this horrid place, where a battle between the rebels and Vidal is mediated by the treacherous spying of the estate nurse Mercedes (Maribel Verdu), as a symbol of bravery caught in an unwinnable war (for students of history, this will not be a spoiler, as we all realize Franco ruled until the early Seventies, where he handed the reigns back to the King’s family upon his death, the only dictator to ever control his power in this way – making him a conflicting figure on the historical stage).              Del Toro stages the fairy tale segments of the film as the antithesis of reality.  Where Vidal represents a confining prison, Pan and the underworld kingdom represent the freedom of salvation, of being able to escape this mortal coil for the promise of an immortally better life.  And you root for her to escape, when Del Toro sets up an almost instant challenge for the viewer: is the fairy tale a second reality or a hallucination of a literate young girl, who’d rather believe in Santa Claus than realize that the devil that sits among us cannot be escaped?  In a twisted way, this is the “Total Recall” dilemma, although by the end of the film, you should have a pretty good idea as to where Del Toro is leaning, and it’s a haunting, cathartic realization that moves you to want to watch through the story again to see where you might have seen it coming.              Pan’s Labyrinth is visually stunning.  The underworld is a massive special effect and the make-up for Pan and the Pale Man, as well as the fairy are in turn creepy and humorous, with Doug Jones doing a marvelous job at balancing between the two emotions as well.  At some points during the film he overplays it to the point that we almost figure out what the deal is and where the parallels are, but the control held by Del Toro in reaching for the soul of all these characters is to be commended.  It’s not perfection, of course, as the film could have pushed a little more in its climax, but it is as close to one as a fairy tale film has done in a while and puts to shame Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm as a hack work from a staggeringly misused genius.  The ads for this film shirk the true fact that the film is in Spanish with English subtitles and I’m here to tell you that, in giving a positive review, I urge you to disregard that fact (if “reading” a film is the only thing it takes to force into seeing an alternative, you’re worthless as a film consumer).  The film is visual more than literal and could be viewed by a deaf man who can’t read English.  Surrounded by a bitter-sweet lullaby of a score, Pan’s Labyrinth is a work of subtle art, a parallel of desire to rid the world of people like Vidal and entities like the toad and the Pale man.  As you move towards the climax, you start to realize how one is as parallel for the other, really one stories told two different ways, with different results, and divergent conclusions.  It’s dirty, it’s bloody and it’s very good, a salvation for cinema in an age where the great artistic merit is not usually being spent telling children’s stories with an adult state of mind.  A HAVE GUN WILL BLOW SHIT UP                 Joe Carnahan’s last film, Narc, was as gritty take on a police drama and drug-hunting film, and it’s taken him a few years to gather up his next, probably because in the interim he was one of the directors involved with M:I 3, for almost a year, before leaving the project and letting the usually reliable J.J. Abrams take a crack and fail more or less to bring in an engaging film.  From the looks of Carnahan’s SMOKIN’ ACES (Universal, R), I would have loved to see his take on the impossible mission force.  This film, concerning a race to save and or assassinate a mob witness in a Lake Tahoe hotel and casino, is so kinetic, stylized and bloody, it would have been a knock to the head of any franchise heretofore directed by more auspicious artists with a finer sense of violence.                  But what Carnahan attempted to, and did, in creating Smokin’ Aces is a hyper-violent film based strictly on a gonzo ability to move the action forward without stopping for more than a few seconds to catch one’s breath.  And in many ways it works through it’s almost two-hour running time.  The plot is driven by Buddy “Aces” Israel (Jeremy Piven), a washed-up illusionist in Vegas who got himself involved in mob interests a long time ago and knows the entire operation.  He’s now been targeted for assassination and his heart has been commissioned by the boss for $1 million.  So every hitman worth his salt, including the Tremor Brothers (Kevin Durant, Maury Sterling, and George Fisher), who are neo-nazi lunatics liable to destroy everything in their path to acquiring the target, Taraji Henson and Alicia Keys as a pair of tough-ass bitches with guns, Ben Affleck as a bail-bondsman, Nestor Carbonnel as a disguise-prone Spanish assassin, and Alex Rocco as a shape-shifter Serna.  On the other hand, the FBI, trying to bring Buddy in for cooperation is trying to get to him before the mob does – Andy Garcia is the Assistant Director, Ray Liotta and Ryan Reynolds as the team heading up the filed operation.  Add in Jason Bateman as a fetish-loving lawyer and you have a cast of formidable actors running around in one place, busting caps in each other’s asses and all over the place.  Carnahan, who wrote the screenplay as well as directed the film, eschews with any desire for a deeper significance to the film and just enjoys having fun with characters he and we both know we never want to actually meet  in real life.  He dispatches several characters early just to screw with us and keeps the ultimate twist of the film unspoken, though from the actions of several characters, it is not so hard to figure out at least an hour in advance.                  What this film does perfectly well is the mise-en-scene set-up and the use of location and characteristics of his actors.  Special commendation goes to Alicia Keys for showing me a side her piano-playing ways never could, and to Jeremy Piven, who infuses Ari Gold (Entourage) into his thankless role as a guy holed-up in one hotel room over the course of the film cursing and snorting cocaine.  In an exaggerated manner, we feel his demise coming and we feel bad because he doesn’t look like the hardened evil criminal of the mob organization but as some schmuck who got his ass so far over his head, he doesn’t know which side is up anymore (to the extent that he’s using his agent, played by nerd Curtis Armstrong, as his lawyer in negotiating with the Feds).  And when the bullets fly and the blood spills, the film acquires an almost Tarantino-esque elegance of fetish violence, one conducted by a kid who obviously held a desire for a long time to just unfurl his AK-47 and blow the shit out of everything in his way because he was pissed-off at the world.  Usually, films like that come out in the summer months, where the teenage audience that gobbles it up is out of school, so it’s heartening that studios are willing to release this essentially blockbuster-generating film in the dead of winter, and it’s one of the better films that has come out in January in a long time.  But what he doesn’t accomplish as well, and it’s a product of focusing so much on style over substance, is keep his film contained within itself and from spinning out of control.  He has characters, especially Garcia’s Agent Locke, fire out exposition like it was a bullet in a gun, and some of it is essential for us to know if we’re not going to be confused at what is going on.  Having it delivered as almost throw-away gets old after a while, especially when we really need to unfurl what the shit just happened and why one character is so pissed, he’s willing to piss away everything to remain pissed.  It becomes, towards the end, and until the last few minutes, a convoluted mess of a story.  In the last minute or two, it settles down to an ending with is entirely cathartic and beautiful, scored to a soundtrack at once kinetic and sublime, and you wish the film took a few more scenes like it through the film just to give us a sense that anybody in this film actually sits and thinks before he reloads and shoots.  Some viewers, by the time their load is shot on the screen and their ears combusted, may not care anymore about the central plot, but they will leave the theaters and instantly forget the film they just saw.  For the majority of the running time, this film begs to be remembered as a fine entry in the ever-worsening action film genre and it’s a shame that Carnahan fails to cement that status by making all interchangeable and the explanation forgettable and confusing.  He basically keeps a well-premised film from shining simply by keeping it moving too quickly.  It’s a criticism not many get and it’s one that cannot be anticipated in the first few moments after watching it, but hangs on you later, as you try to decipher what you just saw and realize the truth is hidden behind the smoke and gunfire you were previously admiring.  B Click here to see reviews for the movies below Ira and Abby The Holiday The Good Shepherd Alpha Dog Children of Men Night at the Museum Dreamgirls Rocky Balboa Blood Diamond For Your Consideration Deja Vu Casino Royale The Fountain Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan Fast Food Nation A Good Year Stranger than Fiction Marie Antoinette Catch a Fire Flags of Our Fathers The Prestige Man of the Year The Departed Employee of the Month