Keepingitreal

Movie Review: A New Eden, Both Cosmic and Cinematic Avatar (Fox) (2009)

By MANOHLA DARGIS ~ With “Avatar” James Cameron has turned one man’s dream of the movies into a trippy joy ride about the end of life — our moviegoing life included — as we know it. Several decades in the dreaming and more than four years in the actual making, the movie is a song to the natural world that was largely produced with software, an Emersonian exploration of the invisible world of the spirit filled with Cameronian rock ’em, sock ’em pulpy action. Created to conquer hearts, minds, history books and box-office records, the movie — one of the most expensive in history, the jungle drums thump — is glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.The story behind the story, including a production budget estimated to top $230 million, and Mr. Cameron’s future-shock ambitions for the medium have already begun to settle into myth (a process partly driven by the publicity, certainly). Every filmmaker is something of a visionary, just by virtue of the medium. But Mr. Cameron, who directed the megamelodrama “Titanic” and, more notably, several of the most influential science-fiction films of the past few decades (“The Terminator,” “Aliens” and “The Abyss”), is a filmmaker whose ambitions transcend a single movie or mere stories to embrace cinema as an art, as a social experience and a shamanistic ritual, one still capable of producing the big WOW. CONTINUE READING...

'Michael Jackson's This Is It' Movie Reactions: What Did Fans Think?

Even in death, Michael Jackson looks poised to break records. With online ticket retailers swamped and lines snaking through theater lobbies and down city blocks, moviegoers geared up for the much anticipated 'This Is It,' a record of MJ's final days as he rehearsed the titular concert spectacle that would never be.

Between the film's limited two-week run and a legion of devoted fans still grieving his sudden death four months ago, curiosity has been high about the two-hour documentary, in which MJ performs some of his most beloved songs, as well as new material set to signature dance moves.

Given that Sony Pictures has already recouped its initial $60M investment in advance ticket sales and that the film earned early critical praise after a 12-minute preview last week, it's time to ask: Does 'This is It' live up to the hype as well as honor Jackson's memory?

One fan who attended the premiere reported, "This movie reminds you why Michael Jackson was the King of Pop. And double bonus: 'Thriller' in 3D!"  TWITTER YOUR THOUGHTS

Review: 'Fame' should be called 'Anonymity'

(CNN) -- Remember! Remember! Remember! Remember!  Yes, "Fame" is back, nearly 30 years after Alan Parker's movie dragged the MGM musical kicking and screaming into the 1980s.The 2009 edition retains the name and even the logo but sheepishly holds the naked ambition of the Academy Award-winning title track back until the end credits. Success comes in many forms, we're piously informed: in doing something that makes you want to leap out of bed in the morning, in finding friendship and love ... but not necessarily in, you know, money, adulation and immortality.

That may be true, but they didn't call the movie "Contentment."

Still, it's easy to imagine why someone figured the time was right for another term at New York's High School of the Performing Arts. Preteens have embraced Disney's "High School Musical" moppets, and our top-rated TV shows all seem to be variations on "American Idol." "Fame" presents the same playbook: talent show auditions and party pieces, criticism and approbation, interspersed with just enough offstage information to give us a rooting interest in individual students' success and failure. But there's really nothing here that you can't see on the reality shows for free. The original film's screenwriter, Christopher Gore, first conceived of "Fame" as a TV series -- it materialized in the wake of the film's success and ran for four seasons, 1982-86 -- and presumably that's the goal this time too. Allison Burnett's screenplay follows Gore's template, beginning with a new round of candidates trying out for the school and then following them through four years of heavily truncated life lessons.  Director Kevin Tancharoen, a veteran of Britney Spears' Onyx Hotel tour, also reprises some of the more memorable vignettes from Parker's film -- a brush with the casting couch; a close call with a subway car -- invariably to lesser effect.

Substituting a PG rating for the original's R, the new movie has rounded off the rough and the raw, but all the handheld camera work in the world can't make it feel real. There is talent here. The standouts are the singers: Naturi Naughton has a big voice and is plausibly cast as a potential star in the Alicia Keys mold. Asher Book has the smile of a teen idol and the pipes of James Blunt.  But if you're looking for personality, the faculty dominates with minimal expenditure of effort. The staff includes "Fame" alumni Debbie Allen as Principal Simms, Charles S. Dutton, Kelsey Grammer and Bebe Neuwirth. Sadly, the latter two -- TV's Frasier and Lilith -- aren't on screen together. The young cast sing, they dance, and they act their socks off, but simple human interaction seems beyond most of them. It doesn't help that the dramatic scenes are so clichéd they might as well be acting exercises, but if there's a future De Niro here or a budding Streep, I must have blinked. SOURCE:CNN.COM

It’s the Age of a Child Who Grows From a Man

EXCERPT FROM NYTIMES -- “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” which occupies around 25 pages in the collected works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a slender piece of whimsy, a charming fantasy about a man who ages in reverse, descending through the years from newborn senescence to terminal infancy. As Fitzgerald unravels it, Benjamin’s story serves as the pretext for some amusing, fairly superficial observations about child rearing, undergraduate behavior and courtship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From this odd, somewhat unpromising kernel, the director David Fincher and the screenwriter Eric Roth have cultivated a lush, romantic hothouse bloom, a film that shares only a title and a basic premise with its literary source. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” more than two and a half hours long, sighs with longing and simmers with intrigue while investigating the philosophical conundrums and emotional paradoxes of its protagonist’s condition in a spirit that owes more to Jorge Luis Borges than to Fitzgerald. While the film’s plot progresses, with a few divagations, in a straight line through the decades of Benjamin Button’s life, the backward vector of that biography turns this “Curious Case” into a genuine mystery. And the puzzles it invites us to contemplate — in consistently interesting, if not always dramatically satisfying ways — are deep and imposing, concerning the passage of time, the elusiveness of experience and the Janus-faced nature of love. Above all, though, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a triumph of technique. Building on the advances of pioneers like Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson and Robert Zemeckis — and on his own previous work adapting newfangled means to traditional cinematic ends — Mr. Fincher (“Fight Club,” “Zodiac”) has added a dimension of delicacy and grace to digital filmmaking. While it stands on the shoulders of breakthroughs like “Minority Report,” “The Lord of the Rings” and “Forrest Gump” (for which Mr. Roth wrote the screenplay), “Benjamin Button” may be the most dazzling such hybrid yet, precisely because it is the subtlest. While he does treat the audience to a few grand, special-effect showpieces, Mr. Fincher concentrates his ingenuity on the setting and the characters, in particular — and most arrestingly — on the faces of his stars, Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt. Ms. Blanchett is Daisy, a dancer, bohemian and all-around free spirit who ages gracefully, before our eyes, into a stately modern matron and then into a wasted, breathless old woman. Mr. Pitt, for the most part, plays Benjamin, who is born, looking like a man in his 70s, into a prominent New Orleans family in 1918. I say for the most part because near the end of the movie Mr. Pitt is replaced by younger and younger children and also because, at the beginning, he is evoked by an uncanny computer-generated confection that seems to have been distilled from his essence. This creature, tiny and wizened, is at once boy and man, but in every scene the ratio is readjusted, until the strapping figure of a familiar movie star emerges, gradually and all but imperceptibly.CONTINUE READING...

Movie review: Will Smith in 'Seven Pounds'

EXCERPT FROM SFGATE.COM -- Will Smith is interested in emotional pain now, in the dark side of American life, in people who are sad or sick or just plain unlucky, and he's found a partner in the Italian director Gabriele Muccino. The team collaborated on "Pursuit of Happyness," a 2006 film that told the true gutter-to-riches story of a brilliant, talented man who still almost fell through society's cracks. Their new film, "Seven Pounds," is a spiritual successor to "Pursuit," but darker and more oblique. In fact, the movie is so roundabout and cryptic that it takes half the running time just to figure out the general nature of what's going on. "Seven Pounds" makes a mystery of its lead character and of what he's pursuing, and for a very simple reason: If the movie were to announce its subject and story in the usual straightforward way, it would seem so ridiculous, far-fetched and borderline distasteful that no one would want to watch it. It might even seem funny. So Muccino's task is clear, if difficult - to generate enough magic and to work up just the right mood so as to cast a spell on viewers. That way, when the movie's intentions and meaning are finally made clear, nothing will seem discordant or strange. All will make sense. For the most part, Muccino accomplishes this precise balance that Grant Neoporte's screenplay requires. Going in, all we know about Ben (Smith) is that something terrible has happened in his past, and that he feels responsible for it. That's all. Everything else we gradually piece together, through a fractured narrative that jumbles the time sequence. We learn that he is an IRS agent. Later, we see that he does field audits, but audits of a very particular and repugnant kind. He seems to specialize in hounding people for back taxes when they're in the hospital, sometimes with serious illnesses. There's anger in this guy. In one scene, he talks on the phone to a food company's customer service representative (Woody Harrelson), and when he finds out the man is blind, he goes ballistic and starts taunting him, making withering, demeaning remarks and shouting into the phone. Obviously, this is not the usual Will Smith, and that difference is half the appeal of "Seven Pounds," to see a familiar screen presence show new sides of himself. Smith has made a point of stretching in recent years. Even in the title role of "Hancock," which was in most ways a routine action movie, Smith had to build a character different from his usual rambunctious action persona, tapping into reserves of sorrow and disillusionment. But he goes much further in "Seven Pounds." His breeziness becomes a shallow act, and his smile becomes downright eerie, a strained mask that hides pain, wards off hostility and expresses aggression all at the same time. It's a smile with dead eyes. Throughout, "Seven Pounds" has a distinct quality. The pensive score, the subjective cinematography and even the muted aspect of the featured performances all contribute to a sense of being trapped inside a waking dream, or nightmare. Ben leads a hollow existence, a death in life, and the people with whom he comes into contact are the forgotten, who have dropped out of the world. CONTINUE READING

Quantum of Solace (2008) 007 Is Back, and He’s Brooding

EXCERPT FROM NYTIMES By A. O. SCOTT -- A reviewer may come to a new James Bond movie — “Quantum of Solace,” directed by Marc Forster and opening Friday, is the 22nd official installment of the series in 46 years — with a nifty theory or an elaborate sociocultural hermeneutic agenda, but the most important thing to have on hand is a checklist. It’s all well and good to reflect upon the ways 007, the Harry Potter of British intelligence, has evolved over time through changes in casting, geopolitics, sexual mores and styles of dress.But the first order of business must always be to run through the basic specs of this classic entertainment machine’s latest model and see how it measures up.So before we proceed to any consideration of the deeper meanings of “Quantum of Solace” (or for that matter the plain meaning of its enigmatic title), we need to assess the action, the villain, the gadgets, the babes and the other standard features.The opening song, performed by Jack White and Alicia Keys (an intriguing duo on paper if nowhere else), is an abysmal cacophony of incompatible musical idioms, and the title sequence over which those idioms do squalling battle is similarly disharmonious: conceptually clever and visually grating. The first chase, picking up exactly where the 2006 “Casino Royale” left off, is speedy and thrilling, but the other action set-pieces are a decidedly mixed bag, with a few crisp footraces, some semi-coherent punch-outs and a dreadful boat pileup that brings back painful memories of the invisible car Pierce Brosnan tooled around in a few movies ago.Picturesque locales? Bolivia, Haiti, Austria and Italy are featured or impersonated, to perfectly nice touristic effect. Gizmos? A bit disappointing, to tell the truth. Technological advances in the real world may not quite have outpaced those in the Bond universe, but so many movies these days show off their global video surveillance set-ups and advanced smart-phone applications that it’s hard for this one to distinguish itself.What about the villain? One of the best in a while, I’d say, thanks to a lizardy turn from the great French actor Mathieu Amalric, who plays Dominic Greene, a ruthless economic predator disguised as an ecological do-gooder. The supporting cast is studded with equally excellent performers, including Jeffrey Wright and Giancarlo Giannini, both reprising their roles in “Casino Royale.”And the women? There are two, as usual — not counting Judi Dench, returning as the brisk and impatient M — one (Gemma Arterton) a doomed casual plaything, the other a more serious dramatic foil and potential romantic interest. That one, called Camille, is played by Olga Kurylenko, whose specialty seems to be appearing in action pictures as the pouty, sexy sidekick of a brooding, vengeful hero. Not only Daniel Craig’s Bond, but also Mark Wahlberg’s Max Payne and Timothy Olyphant’s Hitman.CONTINUE READING...

Guns N’ Poses: Thugs, Drugs and Style in Shady London

Guy Ritchie reshuffles a worn-out deck in “RocknRolla,” a return to the shady stylings that characterized his earlier flicks “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” and “Snatch.” The on-screen names have changed, and the edited rhythms have been somewhat slowed, but more or less everything else follows formula: pump up the volume, tilt the camera, flex the muscle, strut the stuff, bang bang, blah blah.There are the usual villains with funny names — a nice-and-easy Gerard Butler plays One Two, while the underdeployed Idris Elba plays his partner in London crime, Mumbles — committing the usual villainy while spouting the usual argot. There’s the big, bad boss, Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson), a thug in bespoke pinstripes who comes with an iron fist in a velvet glove called Archy (Mark Strong). There are drugs and a rock ’n’ roll druggie, Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell). There’s the requisite femme fatale in stilettos, Stella (Thandie Newton), and the de rigueur scary, scarily rich Russian, Uri (Karel Roden). There are double-crosses and right hooks and ha-ha scenes of grim torture that come with throbbing musical accompaniment. It isn’t all bad — many of the lads look lovely, and there’s a chase sequence that nicely devolves into an impressionistic blur of herky-jerky faces — but there isn’t much to chew on or mull over. The violence is idiotic and brutal (the story is just idiotic), but it’s also so noncommittal that it doesn’t offend. Like the filmmaking itself, the violence has no passion, no oomph, no sense of real or even feigned purpose. For Mr. Ritchie, a man who clearly appreciates fine tailoring (and kudos to the costume designer, Suzie Harman), a fist in the mouth or a bullet in the head is just a stylistic flourish, some flash to tart up the genre clichés he never seems to have bought in the first place.But that’s the thing about genre clichés: you need to believe in them before you can twist, upend or abandon them. To judge from his crime flicks, Mr. Ritchie seems to have gravitated to the underworld primarily because of some misbegotten and vague sense of cool. The history of real and imaginary British crime certainly gives him fodder, including the real East End criminals the Kray twins (who were put out of nasty business in 1968, the year Mr. Ritchie was born) and the nattily dressed, lethally armed Michael Caine in Mike Hodges’s vicious “Get Carter” (1971). American criminals have the bigger guns, but the Brits lock and load like dandies, a fact that, more than any other, seems to have shaped Mr. Ritchie’s oeuvre.SOURCE:NYT.COM

'Miracle At St. Anna' Film Review

Spike Lee has been waiting to make a war film for the longest time. Having seen few Blacks or none at all in past war films only increased his desire to get it done. There are plenty of stories from black soldiers who fought in World War II that haven't been told and some of these guys were in the front and center of it. With funding coming outside of the studio system, Lee set out on telling a story based on the novel from author/ screenwriter James McBride, 'Miracle at St. Anna'.The cast includes Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso, Omar Benson Miller, Matteo Sciabordi, John Leguizamo, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Valentina Cervi, Pierfrancesco Favino, Michael K. Williams, and Kerry Washington.While the film does highlight Blacks and Latinos in the war, specifically the Buffalo Soldiers, the direction that Lee took to make the film was jagged. At the end of this nearly three hour movie, what you have is a noble attempt thwarted by uneven artistic choices. It's the 1980s and we have an elderly postal clerk (Alonso) watching the John Wayne film, 'The Longest Day', in which he mutters to himself, 'We were there too.' We then see the clerk working in the post office when another elderly man steps in front of his booth looking to buy stamps. Suddenly the clerk pulls out his service revolver and shoots him dead after recognizing him. Taken into police custody without uttering a word for the shooting, a journalist (Gordon-Levitt) is let in to get his side of the story. While the cops are searching his apartment for any evidence, they discover a statue that apparently was stolen from Rome during WWII. The postal clerk then decides to tell his story to the reporter about the statue and how he ended up with it. It all began 40 years ago. CONTINUE READING...

Sex and the City: MOVIE REVIEW

SPOILER ALERT! CLICK AWAY NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW ANY PLOT DETAILS FROM THE SEX AND THE CITY MOVIE! As a Darren Star series on HBO, Sex and the City may have come in tidy half hours, but what those sparkling and fizzy episodes added up to, in spirit, was the great chick flick of our time. The show was that rare thing, a fairy tale you could believe in. Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), the lovelorn single-girl newspaper columnist, and her devoted trio of BFFs — randy Samantha (Kim Cattrall), wide-eyed Charlotte (Kristin Davis), and neurotic taskmaster Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) — all took the fruits of feminism for granted: independence, equality, the right to sleep around, etc. Yet what they found was a new kind of liberation. High on their pink drinks and showpiece handbags, literally high on their designer heels (and on the prospect of turning the search for a mate into another form of shopping), they embraced the holy right to be cosmetic, acquisitive, and — yes! — superficial. If Carrie's desire for love had an element that was undeniably...aspirational, what of it? Wasn't that true of Jane Austen's heroines? The glory of Sex and the City is that it turned the cosmopolitan high life of girls who just want to have fun into a new feminine mystique. The movie version of Sex and the City, written and directed by Michael Patrick King (always the show's savviest writer), is 2 hours and 22 minutes of love, tears, fashion, depression, lavish vacation, good sex, bad sex, and supreme tenderness. It's as long as five series episodes, a big sweet tasty layer cake stuffed with zingers and soul and dirty-down verve (it's not above having one of the girls poop her pants). Given the running time, though, not that much happens, and what does has several shades more gravitas. That's as it should be. We want Sex and the City on the big screen to be true to the show yet to feel more like a movie. And it does. Now that Carrie and her crew have left the bittersweet college of cosmo hedonism, the film treats them, shrewdly, as cynical wised-up fortysomethings facing life on the other side of the adult divide. The movie is about the situations Carrie can't just write off with a quip. SOURCE:EW.COM

Street Kings: MOVIE REVIEW

Police corruption is roasted over an open fire in "Street Kings," the latest motion picture to look into the black heart of the LAPD and come out confused, covered in blood, and gasping for air. Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) is a burned-out, alcoholic vice cop who specializes in bending the law to suit his crime-solving needs. Under the care of Captain Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker), Tom's sins have been covered up for years, keeping him tight with his fellow officers (including Jay Mohr and John Corbett) and allowing him a lawless existence that's turned into a prison. Now, when his former partner-turned-informant (Terry Crews) is killed in a vicious convenience store attack, it instills Tom with a newfound twitch of moral fortitude, and he sets off to hunt for the killers with the help of a young detective (Chris Evans) who's eager to partake in a clandestine investigation. The screenplay, credited to three writers including the great James Ellroy, is a juicy selection of intrigue and paranoia, placing Tom in the middle of a tornado of evidence tampering, the attention of internal affairs, and his own self-loathing, which has thickened his skin to such a degree that he barely comprehends injustice anymore. The script is ripe with tongue-twisting dialogue and rotating motivations, and it's too much for Ayer to handle at times. Outside of the fact that giving Reeves platefuls of complex technical language is a mistake (he's a fine actor, but needs to be wielded carefully or his limitations are revealed quickly), "Kings" doesn't know how to unwind itself; it prefers an excruciating "Bond villain" explanation in the third act to untangle the complex plot, severely undercutting the labyrinthine structure of the earlier scenes. By the end of "Kings," Ayer hands the material over to operatic sways of spastic melodramatic acting (I think Whitaker is convinced he's in a silent film) and semi-believable turns of logic. The network of corruption that "Kings" itemizes is compelling groundwork for something more intellectually explosive than the action film clichés of the final stretch, and the film loses much of its zest when Ayer scrounges for an ending that can both satisfy and stimulate. SOURCE OF THIS STORY

The Souls of Black Girls

Filmmaker Daphne Valerius takes a stark look at the relationship between media images and the self-esteem of African American women in her moving documentary The Souls of Black Girls. Here, she shares the purpose behind her passion, and thoughts on what it takes for us all to start loving what we see in the mirror.
Q: What made you name your film, The Souls of Black Girls?
The title “The Souls of Black Girls” derives from the seminal book by W.E.B Dubois “The Souls of Black Folks” where he discusses the double-consciousness condition where there is a duality of being a Negro and an American in the United States. I was inspired and intrigued by this concept when I was first introduced to it and I was inspired to name my piece, The Souls of Black Girls because I attempt to expand upon the duality of people of color but I wanted to include gender within that very same concept presented by Dubois. So I’ve chosen to expand on the idea that as Black women we have a “triple consciousness” condition where we have to be a Negro, a woman and an American and within that identity we also struggle to define our own standard of beauty.
Q: When did you find that film making could be your “voice” to speak out or express yourself?
This piece was done as a journalistic broadcast piece and so when given the opportunity to focus and concentrate on one area to develop my final master’s thesis I chose to focus on this topic and issue building upon research that I conducted as a Ronald McNair Scholar on this very same topic. So I found my “voice” by during my studies as a graduate student of Broadcast Journalism at Emerson College.
Q: A documentary of this poignancy is much needed in today’s oversaturated culture of bling and booty. When did you get to the point where you decided to do something about what we see on the screen and in the magazines?
This piece actually came about as a result of my own insecurities growing up as a young black girl in our culture and society. For me I was always very much “into” media images and entertainment as an aspiring performer but I always felt very much invisible and uncertain of myself as a result of not seeing a reflection of those who look like me in magazines, advertisements, or television and of the women of color that looked like me there were few. And in my youth I can say that I felt very much like Pecola Breedlove of Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” to a certain degree. So for me in putting together this documentary, it was very much a selfish exploration of my own feelings and understanding how and why I was influenced by media images. But also realizing that this can’t just be me and so as I was in search of trying to answer these questions of myself I was also hoping to foster open and honest dialogue among women because I knew it wasn’t just “me.”
Q: The documentary includes interviews from some of the most intelligent and passionate voices of our community; most importantly—voices that work directly in the media in some form (film, print, television, etc). How did you decide on who all to include and/or interview?
I can honestly say that God decided for me who would be included in this piece. But it also came as a result of relationships that I had built over the years. Chuck D was the very first individual attached to this piece. I had a relationship with both Chuck D and Regina King prior to me putting together this piece and so I simply asked if they would be interested in being a part of this piece and God took care of the rest. SOURCE OF THIS STORY

10,000 B.C. MOVIE REVIEW

BC' is a terribly outdated way to classify periods of time, it was replaced by BCE, to denote "before common era" and AD was replaced by CE (meaning "common era"), these changes were made specifically to remove religious references, and Jesus and science are simply incompatible. None of this phased Roland Emmerich, with his latest film, '10,000 BC', which could best be described as a lame re-imagining of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. It covers much of the same ground, but is set much further in the past, and does not quite pay as much attention to authenticity. Take, for instance, the fact that out of the tribes of cavemen we see here, some speak English and some don't. The special effects are not even that impressive, despite the large budget. The Mammoths and Sabertooth Tigers were actually rendered much more convincingly in Ice Age with computer animation. I half expected to see dinosaurs lumbering about, even though they had been extinct for millions of years; that is one detail Emmerich got right. Humans were still in the early stages of evolution, up against hostile environments and more imposing mammalian creatures that outweighed them by several tons. The mammoth, for its parts, was pretty much harmless, unless you make them mad, like a furry elephant really. The main character, D'Leh (Steven Strait) hunts mammoths, and tries to deal with the stigma of being the child of a coward, since his father left the tribe when he was a boy. D'Leh will eventually emerge as the leader of his tribe, its strongest warrior, but he will have to overcome the trial of rescuing his love, Evolet (Camilla Belle), from those who have taken her, as both slave and sacrifice, which will of course prove his worth, and show his willingness to avenge the tribe after its village has been attacked and plundered. There are some battle sequences, the best one probably with the Sabertooth, but there also groups of human enemies to beat up, as well, slice and dice perhaps, but the camera constantly cuts away so as to safeguard the PG-13 rating by not showing much in the way of gore. A few severed limbs here and there would not have been so bad. The movie runs out of steam rather early, becomes long-winded and tedious, largely because it takes itself a bit too seriously and does not contain enough action. The romantic aspects of the story are not explored too deeply, and we can all be grateful for that. Strait provides a superficial and forgettable hero, but he does display his chest a lot, which may be a plus. Some of the buildings here look like they were inspired by Mayan and Egyptian architecture, which is strange, but then temples are always more elaborate than anything else in ancient civilizations. The cinematography does have its moments, accentuating the natural beauty of the various settings, which include deserts and rain forests, habitats that are not usually that close together, so I wonder where exactly these events are supposed to have occurred. SOURCE OF THIS STORY

WELCOME HOME ROSCOE JENKINS

The latest Martin Lawrence vehicle, the crude and intermittently humorous Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, is like Big Momma's House without the drag. Lawrence has an easy screen presence and his reactive facial expressions can be fun—but only when the material matches and that is rarely the case. The racial inside joke-driven Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, laden with the N word, is not an exception. Neither too gross nor too slaphappy, this all-star pap is a purely predictable waste of talent, including Lawrence's and those of actors such as James Earl Jones (unforgettable in Martin Ritt's The Great White Hope) and Margaret Avery (one of the best things about Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple). Sometimes it seems like Hollywood studios won't be content until every credible actor has been reduced to a humiliating comic flashback. Here, Lawrence plays the title character, a successful talk show host who returns to his hometown in the South with his son and his girlfriend. Anyone who's seen Sweet Home Alabama knows that Roscoe will rediscover traditionalist values before the gag credits roll and, frankly, that's another drawback.The values, as set down here, are neither constructive nor situationally comical. Nothing wrong with mocking sanctimonious vegetarianism, as this does in a scene with finger-lickin' ribs, but their flaws are presented as superior to Roscoe's health-conscious choices (he's in decent shape, unlike his predominantly overweight family). Some cultural jokes work, mostly in the hands of a brother named Reggie, played with good timing by Mike Epps, playing a wisecracker as usual. SOURCE OF THIS REVIEW