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Tom Hanks and director Ron Howard re-team after their last Langdon adventure The Da Vinci Code for this religious-lit thriller and undeserved hit Angels & Demons. There is really nothing about this movie that screams out for the necessity of its existence. Audiences will flock to this film much like they do to their churches but I can only think they will feel as cheated as I do by the story that unfolds onscreen. To the degree that it works, it’s as a lesson in the gravitational pull of a movie star’s accrued goodwill. Ditching the derided hairstyle of his first run-through as Harvard professor and religious symbology expert Robert Langdon, Hanks is the well-oiled pace car that keeps this entire thing moving at a sustained, reasonable clip.

Langdon joins forces with Inspector Olivetti (Pierfrancesco Favino) and Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), an enigmatic Italian scientist; together, they embark on a frantic dash through the Vatican’s secretive vault, old cathedrals, sealed crypts and dangerous catacombs, facing snide and stone-faced pushback from Commander Richter (Stellan Skarsgard, looking gassy), the head of the Swiss Guard, the pope’s personal security detail. While Cardinal Strauss (Armin Mueller-Stahl) insists on proceeding with the conclave that will choose the next pope, Camerlengo Patrick McKenna (Ewan McGregor) pushes for extra time and evacuation measures, all while hoping that Langdon and Vetra can untangle a 400-year-old trail of ancient symbols that serve as the Vatican’s best hope for survival.

The movie is severely lacking but credit of the movie’s box office success should go to Hanks, who is a smart and intuitive actor, quite apart from being just a likeable one. In addition to just having the authority to convey historical detail and theory in such a compressed fashion, Hanks also has a keen feeling for how much exasperation, assertiveness or swallowed panic to inject into a given moment; when he meets Commander Richter’s snootiness with a wry, “Hey, fellas, you called me,” or argues an important point of timeliness with a pair of Italian cops, it has the ability to blind less critically-leaning minds — temporarily, perhaps, but effectively — to the narrative’s implausabilities. That is certainly the definition of star power — the superhuman ability to effect suspension of disbelief.

Apart from Langdon, though, most of the characters in Angels & Demons does not hold on to one’s attention. McGregor’s is the flashiest, most substantive supporting role, and he does a fine enough job. As I watched I found myself trying to rewrite the story in my head faster than the story was being told to me on screen, and my version was more believeable which at the core is why this movie does not work. Having said that, if you’re a fan of the book or Code, then you’ll find a way to have faith in this film.

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Just so-so; use some discretion.

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From Dan Brown’s best selling book comes this mystery of warring sects, cascading symbols, anagrams, clues, plot twists and turns and endless reveals. The book was a runaway hit and so came the movie on the heels of a print phenom. At a little over two hours The Da Vinci film grips. Certain filmgoers may lose patience with so much hocus pocus in which nuggets of historical fact are embedded and even want to take metaphorical scissors to some of the film’s longueurs (that ending, for instance), but ultimately the Tom Hanks/Audrey Tautou starrer is a mystery thriller that entertains.

Robert Langdon (Hanks) is a Harvard professor of symbology giving a lecture in Paris who is set to meet a scholarly colleague, Louvre curator Jacques Sauniere (Jean-Pierre Marielle). Sauniere is brutally murdered by albino monk Silas (Paul Bettany) but has time before dying to plant a number of clues. Langdon is summoned to the crime scene by lead French investigator Bezu Fache (Jean Reno); fortunately, Sauniere’s granddaughter Sophie (Tatou), a police cryptologist, also arrives to covertly warn Langdon he’s in real trouble. Armed with leads deciphered from anagrams, symbols and references to several Louvre Da Vinci paintings, Langdon and Sophie embark on an adventure that will reveal Sauniere’s murderer and the vast conspiracy and Very Big Secrets behind the crime.

The biggest Da Vinci Code mystery might be just how such an imperfect package can add up to so satisfying a big-screen experience. Yes, the locations are stunning, but there is also the long-winded symbol-filled plot, the endless scholarly and pseudo-scholarly exposition and problem-solving, and the two so-so protagonists spearheading this tortuous intellectual and geographical journey. The answer may be as simple and obvious as the story’s final reveal-i.e., The Da Vinci Code just happens to be a darn good yarn that is hard to mess up.

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Certainly worth seeing.

This piece of filmmaking is overwhelmingly unique. Director David Russo accomplishes the discovery of an entertaining and far out story with his exploratory film. The audience is drawn in to investigate emotions, implications, and ideas in a story so far-fetched and unrealistic, and yet are so entirely immersed that you hardly have time to doubt. The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle is a character driven, feature length comedy that deserves to be seen.

For more than 15 years, David Russo has been making films, short films, funded out-of-pocket or by arts grants, rarely seen by a general audience. Until recently, they have been the creation of a solitary artist carving personal visions out of the world around him. His animated shorts typically combine painting, sculpture, photography, music, poetry, and soundscapes on unique moving canvases. In Pan With Us (2003), he takes the cel off the studio animation stand and makes it a canvas floating freely through space. As his paintings are photographed frame by frame on 35mm film, then transformed into a flowing, flying image, the surrounding throngs of people become pixilated, jittery, impermanent things.

In Dizzle there is Dory, a white collar worker, loses his job and finds himself working as a night janitor at a market research firm. He soon discovers the janitors are being experimented on surreptitiously, with unexpected results. Co-Executive Producers are Garr Godfrey, Menno van Wyk, Malayka Gormally, David P. Glickman, May L. McCarthy, A. Joel Eisenberg. The film is being produced by acclaimed veteran film producer Peggy Case, and executive produced by Michael Seiwerath, Executive Director of Northwest Film Forum.

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Certainly worth seeing.

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As is happens with many great films these days with two versions, an original and a remake. The 1974 original of Gone in 60 Seconds, which has become a classic among car guys, is a raw and gutsy piece of art. The car-crash, car-chase scene that the movie is made around at its core is a combination planned dance spliced together with ad hock guerilla movie making.

The tale of a car thief’s quest to steal 48 four-wheel gems in a few days’ time, it features 93 car crashes during a single 40-minute chase scene and includes hair-raising footage shot on the Harbor Freeway and the streets of Long Beach, Torrance, Carson and other south Los Angeles County cities. The star car is Eleanor, a bright yellow souped-up Mustang of 1973 vintage that is pinched from the parking garage of the International Tower in Long Beach.

The film is written and directed by H.B. Toby Halicki who also stars in the film. In a notable scene, Eleanor is clipped by a Cadillac as a result of misjudging the freeway exit, spins out and collides with a lamp post. This scene was, in fact, a real accident, as Halicki misjudged both the lane and speed of the Cadillac. Halicki was injured in the crash, but the scene was left in, and Eleanor is seen driving away from the accident and as chase continues. It is this type of filmmaking for which the film is a cult classic.

The jump scene at the end of the chase is also notable and set the standards for a number of subsequently produced pictures. Acting as the climax to the lengthy chase sequence, Eleanor is seen jumping over the scene of a traffic accident unrelated to the chase, after a hood leaning on a car, allows him to catch air. The jump manages to achieve a height of 30′ over a 128′ in distance – a feat which would not be easily replicable without the use of modern CGI techniques – and the Mustang barely manages to land safely as it meets the ground in a rather awkward fashion, injuring Halicki once again.

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Gone in 60 Seconds was classified as an independent film – H.B. Halicki wrote, starred, directed, produced and even did his own stuntwork in the film, which, at the time, was phenomenal. In a contemporary context, however, the portions of the film preceding the chase sequences are seen as typical of a badly acted – and poorly received – 70s movie. The reason for this view is that Halicki employed family and friends (instead of professional actors) to play parts in his movie to keep the budget low. Therefore, the acting is somewhat substandard when compared to other films of the time. The characters depicted as being members of the emergency services were actual police officers, firemen, or paramedics. The then-mayor of Carson, California, Sak Yamamoto, also appeared as himself.

The scene where the Mustang tags a car on the highway and spins into a telephone pole at 100mph was a real accident. Halicki was badly hurt and filming was stopped while he recovered. According to people on the set, after the mishap the first thing that Halicki said when he regained consciousness was “Did we get coverage?”. The scene was left in.

H.B. Halicki compacted ten vertebrae performing the “big jump” in the Mustang at the end of the movie, which reached 30 feet high and cleared 128 feet. Fortunately the injury was not very serious, although according to director of photography Jack Vacek, Halicki never walked the same again.

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Excellent – A Must See Film.

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Never has a more sentimental view of the Civil War been put forth than in the movie classic Gone With The Wind. In Margaret Mitchell’s masterpiece story the “Old South” takes the place of Camelot and the war was is portrayed as more about inconvenience and how people of wealth were made to temporarily suffer or sometimes be replaced if they were not able to keep their wits about them. The war is hardly a war at all aside from some well placed scenes to remind you there was something bigger happening that Scarlet O’Hara’s ego. Still the movie is now 70 years old and is still considered a landmark film. The novel won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize by Margaret Mitchell. There is little debate that the story it tells is intriguing and well told. While the movie appears at glances to tell the story of the war, we have to realize the story is much more highly localized in the character of O’Hara.

David O Selznick who produced and had the original vision for the film was able to release Gone With The Wind at just the right time for the story to be effective with an audience. The character of Scarlett O’Hara is not so much an invention of the 1860s but more of the 1930s. She is a free-spirited, willful modern woman of that age. This woman was a natural progression of the times and of the economic times of the reality of the Depression, which for the first time put lots of women to work outside their homes. Scarlet is very much a sex symbol of the times. She is a woman who wanted to control her own sexual adventures which is a key element to her appeal.

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Excellent – A Must See Film.

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By far Star Trek is the greatest movie adventure of all time. The story of Star Trek and its Enterprise crew should be well known by now, it is a part of our American Mythology. The characters are well known, the story is thought to be well known and in some cases fans have searched out every bit of minutia they can surrounding the story of Star Trek. But, just in case you were hiding in a cave… The Enterprise is a starship from Earth’s 25th century and the crew’s mission is to seek out new life and to boldly go where no man has gone before. Way back in the day, 1966 in fact, came the original Star Trek television series. Then in 1979 those original characters came to the big screen of the movies in the form of Star Trek The Motion Picture. There have been other television series over the years and 10 movies. Now in 2009 the original version is coming forth again. Those original characters of Captain Kirk and the Vulcan Spock, only this time we’re getting a fresh new batch of actors.

This film allows us to explore Kirk and Spock before they have become their legendary selves. We meet James Kirk and learn how he was challenged from his home in Iowa into joining Starfleet, equivalent to our NASA today. We meet Spock who is tortured between his Vulcan heritage and his human nature and emotions. The other characters also come into our view for “the first time” and even though the actors faces are fresh the characters are very familiar. This is quite a challenge to the actors playing them and an equal challenge to real fans of the series who have embedded themselves and love of the characters with those original actors.

For Trek fans you’re going to love this movie. It is fresh yet familiar. There is lots of new material here to keep you going for two hours. It is great to see this reboot of the characters and see them unfold from the beginning again. You’ll love seeing Spock and Kirk save the galaxy for the first time. However, also for Trek fans the reboot isn’t going to be able to follow every reference or look and act the same as it did in 1966 or 1979. When the series first rebooted itself with the 1979 release, little was thought about making everything match the t.v. series – thank god. It worked great. So hopefully Trek fans will see the choices made in 2009 as reasonable ones.

For normal movie goers this film is a marvel of modern CGI and everything looks so real that it is hard to believe that it is not real. It is a gorgeous looking film and that is hard to argue. J.J. Abrams, the film’s director has done a remarkable job in getting this project off the ground and also pulling this movie together considering the special effects. It’s almost like pulling a movie out of thin air. Just as the model making was incredible in the earlier films it is the computer imaging that makes this movie look breathtaking.

The Enterprise, which is a character unto itself, has never looked better nor more techie or trekie. The designers have taken the original ship and pushed it into the technical world as far as any of today’s audiences would have let them get away with. The ship is a combination of Enterprise-B with TNG’s Picard Enterprise-E ship together with a nice taste of 1960’s non technical Sci-Fi. The controls are designed as mostly touchscreen much like the TNG. This movie does deliciously remind me of an Apple computer type user interface with lots of glass and slick white finishes. If you’re looking for the 1960s Enterprise, you won’t even recognize her –– that is to say that she is familiar on the outside and full of surprises on the inside, which is a good thing.

The acting in the film is a bit uneven and unbalanced. The actors certainly had enough reference material to pull from and while I wasn’t looking for any type of impersonations from the actors, the characters are pretty much set in stone from the books and previous movies. This might be where Trek fans are most critical. From a non Trek point of view, the development could have been much deeper that it was. One of the surprise performances comes from Simon Pegg who plays Scotty, the ship’s engineer. His delivery and skill takes many of the scenes that he is in.

As fir Chris Pine (James Kirk) and Zachary Quinto (Spock), their chemistry together has a certain flair, but the spark never ignites fully. They play their parts very light without letting themselves go too deep into these characters. The tension of friendship is there but at times I just wasn’t convinced that these guys had the bravado necessary to save the galaxy. If their chemistry doesn’t do it for you, don’t worry. There is still some sexiness to this geeky film. Just like its predecessors, this film finds a way to work in some sex appeal.

I am forced to admit that I am a Trek fan. Therefor I like the movie. I think I’m able to be unbiased enough though to say that non-Trek fans will like this movie too. It is a great sci-fi ride with some awesome graphics, great fighting, some twists and turns and all around good fun. If you’re not a fan this movie just might make a fan of you. *

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Excellent – A Must See Film.

* So far I know of 21 versions of the movie poster including the 2008 Comic Con poster. I am quite sure there are more posters and will be more as the movie makes its way into other countries. There is almost no way to collect them all and believe me, just by the nature of the series these posters will all be collected. Below are some of the other teaser posters that have been released.

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