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NINJA ASSASSIN
NATURAL TRAINED KILLER
By Sean Chavel

Rain is a Korean pop star in a martial art flick where bodies are sliced in half by swords and throwing stars in Ninja Assassin, a movie likely to please its genre fans on the basis of its slick looks and propulsive action. As Raizo, Rain makes for a ripped, dexterous action star, one who sheds conceit in favor of being a little humble and self-effacing. Naomi Harris is a forensics expert for Europol, and while her occupation never feels pertinent to the plot you are engaged by her resilient hang-in-there presence.

But let's stick to the fundamentals. You mostly come to this movie for the action scenes. On those terms this is an entertaining exploitation flick that gives you lots of splatter, bloody geysers, mutilations and less concern for restraint. The movie contains cool training sequences and many requisite action combat sequences (some of it filmed in too many obscured shadows), including one of those action chases through a high-rise parking garage where the hero hops from hood to hood. Further appealing are those high-flying leaps by Rain, assisted by CGI (computer generated images). Also CGI are the blood squirts spraying the camera lens as well as close-up shots of festering wounds.

The hyperactive bloodletting is not as original as some of you may think. It has existed in such '70's kung fu flicks like "Five Fingers of Death," and was brought to a peak by the House of Blue Leaves sequences in "Kill Bill Vol. 1." But "Ninja" wants to utilize CGI in order to achieve new heights in excessiveness. If you get wicked chuckles from a scene of a man being sliced in half down the middle, then you'd be giddy to the extremes by "The Machine Girl," a Japanese import made a couple of years ago that really pushes the grind house limits (it is available on Netflix). For decapitations and eviscerations, it is the ultimate in exploitation schlock.

Bloodshed aside, every action movies needs leveraged with a human interest plot. "Ninja" finds two parallel sensitive stories to balance the carnage, both stories interconnecting. In the past, Raizo in his youth is forced by a secret society into a training camp which molds ninja killers. His first sweetheart is also a forced student, but killed cold-blooded within the camp in front of all the entire school for being too inconsequential. The present story, in a flash-forward in time, demands that Raizo gets revenge against Lord Ozuno (Sho Kosugi) as well as secondhand baddie Takeshi (Rick Yune). Raizo also has to evade German agents, but you feel that this is shoe-horned into the plot, just so the movie has something to take up time.

"Ninja Assassin" is an efficient example of today's Far East whizzy action spectacles made in mind for broader American consumption. The early scenes of blooming love between young Raizo and the girl have an appeal, but besides those brief moments, the film is short on sex appeal except for a mysterious beautiful stranger at a laundermat that demands a double-take. The humor is understated, even poking fun at the genre conventions: a character looks dead, oh my god, the suspense is she dead or not? Raizo takes a quick look and dryly observes, "She will be okay," in the most hunky-dory delivery imaginable.

That said nothing here is groundbreaking, but if any of this drives your interest then you might be wowed by the climactic action sequence that takes place inside a traditional style Japanese house. Your jaw might drop a second time, not in wow but in disbelief, when you see a Special Operatives squad that machine-guns the outside of the house long after there are any targets that are worth the bother to shoot.

BAD LIEUTENANT
PORT OF CALL, NEW ORLEANS
By Sean Chavel

Following the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Nicolas Cage's Terence McDonagh goes into a serious tailspin of drug abuse, not to mention corruption, in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans. His most intimate relationship is with Eva Mendes as Frankie, a prostitute who still has her looks even though she snorts along with Terence. Somehow Terence gets his woman entangled with a murder and a drug sting, but that doesn't stop Terence's tumble into debasement. He harasses an old woman dependent on an oxygen tank, stacks on a gambling debt, does some salacious bargaining with a young woman caught with drugs, and raids the evidence room at headquarters. Harvey Keitel played this role seventeen years ago in a film with a slimmer and more condensed screenplay.

The new Bad Lieutenant is somehow not a remake, a sequel or an update to Abel Ferrara's unforgettable 1992 film (rated NC-17) simply called "Bad Lieutenant." They shouldn't be compared, and yet somehow, you want to compare them. The first film is hypnotic, this new film gets stuck in plot-heavy sludge. Werner Herzog's film is scattershot, a smorgasbord of superfluous storylines - many of them I didn't care about. The last thing I wanted were a number of wispy scenes about the "big" case, a case I especially never cared about. There was also a big case in Ferrara's film but somehow it had spiritually-challenging impact that felt integrated to what was going on in the Lieutenant's inner life.

Understand that Herzog is one of the greatest. I still attest that "The Godfather" was not the best film of 1972, Herzog's "Aguirre the Wrath of God" was and it remains one of the most breathtaking films ever made. Herzog has made another half dozen masterworks and an assorted amount of other good films in his career. But in this case, it is learned that Herzog should stay out of urban American movies. Herzog crafts some good scenes and mercilessly gazes at the dilapidated underbelly of a tattered city, but spliced between are a lot of forced encounters and synthetic melodrama hubbub.

The end scenes are so bad that I was hoping it was a dream sequence. As an indicator of how unassured the project is, Herzog made an egregious error by thinking he needed to tie every thread of plot. This is the worst over-tidying Herzog has ever done. He has never not trusted his audience before, trusted that we can on our own connect the ambiguous parts together on our own.

I wanted the detective to revel in more bad behavior - the scene with Cage lambasting the pharmacist has believable stimulated aggression, and the aforementioned scenes demonstrate a powerful sordidness. But when Cage demonstrates his trademark facial vulnerability I felt like I was watching Cage channeling Jimmy Stewart on drugs. The more Cage goes over-the-top the better, and if anything, selected critic feedback has been wrong to accuse Cage of going over-the-top. I don't think Herzog accepted the idea to let Cage go all the way to make his character unsavory.

Which goes back to Ferrara's film. Now that we've seen another actor do this role it is more clear than ever that Harvey Keitel's 1992 performance is one of the greatest we've had on-screen, and now that Cage has done the bad lieutenant walk, we know now how fearless Keitel really went with the part. One unsuccessful film proves the greatness of another.

Fantastic Mr. Fox
By Rei Nishimoto

There is something unique about the fox, with its slyness and its sneaky ways to getting what it wants. This characteristic was portrayed in the Fantastic Mr. Fox, an animated version of director Wes Anderson's adaptation of author Roald Dahl's best-selling children's book.

Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) is a wily fox who spends his time outsmarting the three feeble-minded farmers - the fat Walter Boggis (Robin Hurlstone), squat Nathan Bunce (Hugo Guinness) and the skinny Franklin Bean (Michael Gambon). The story begins with Mr. Fox and Mrs. Felicity Fox (Meryl Streep) about to raid a local farm. They dodge a few traps until they eventually are caught. Mrs. Fox tells him that she is pregnant and wants him to find a new line of work.

Two years later, the Foxes are living in a hole with their son Ash (Jason Schwartzman). Mr. Fox has a new profession as a newspaper columnist and wants to buy a house. They find a house on a tree and he meets the super, Kylie the hedgehog (Wallace Wolodarsky), who has a tendency of zoning out during conversations. He buys the house after noticing the facilities owned by the farmers near by.

His lawyer and advisor Badger (Bill Murray) tries to talk Fox out of buying the house, but Fox does it anyways. He moves in with the family, fixes up the house, and then
gets a visit by their nephew Kristofferson, who their son Ash is extremely jealous of due to his superiority over everything.

Kristofferson is a fox who is quite different from the Foxes. He is a quiet fox who shows athletic skills like Mr. Fox, but also knows karate and practices yoga. His odd ways of thinking irritates Ash and creates tension between the two of them throughout the movie.

Mr. Fox and Kylie plan to raid Boggis' farm to steal chickens. They bypass the security traps and hit the beagles with blueberries with sleeping powder. Mr. Fox returns with the chickens, and when Felicity discovers their closet filled with them, he tells her he bought them on his way home from the local market.

The two then raid Bunce's duck and goose farm with the same success. But when they raid Bean's cider cellar, they meet Rat (Willem Dafoe), Fox's enemy and Bean's security guard. Ray attacks with a knife, but they trap him in a cellar. They narrowly escape after Bean's wife walks by them in the cellar, but also have bad vision.

After these farm raids, Bean decides to pay the Foxes a visit and counterattacks their home. The three farmers start by tearing into the tree house, but eventually learn that the Foxes went underground. The story continues with their adventures of the farmers digging further into the ground to find Mr. Fox and making him pay for his stealing.

The puppeting and the animation behind each of the characters and the entire story are well crafted. Anderson pieced together all of the characters to interact in a way where the various emotions behind each character is noticeable and keeps viewers interested in what happens next.

Throughout the movie, there are close ups on many of the characters, including the Foxes, Kylie and Badger, where their various emotions are captured very well. Mr. Fox has a distinctive look up close, where his slyness and his thinking up his clever ways of getting out of his mess is captured perfectly. Anderson's portrayal of Mr. Fox's sneaky ways never loses a step and keeps the audience interested in what his next move will be.
The Fantastic Mr. Fox is a fun movie that is enjoyable for the entire family. The story is kept easy enough for everyone to follow, and plenty of hilarious moments to keep on their feet. It has many cat and mouse type of tendencies that will keep audiences engaged, and there is rarely a dull moment within the film.

'PRECIOUS'
ARTISTIC WEIGHT
By Sean Chavel

Hard to recommend a movie where the protagonist is damned in hopelessness, but there must be reason to justify Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire. Simply put, it is one of the great artistic achievements of the year. Now is where it is hard to find a way to inspire you to attend. For one, it is clear that director Lee Daniels has found ways to counter-measure its darkness by interspersing grace and acts of kindness into a bleak story.

The title character (played wrenchingly by Gabourey Sidibe) is a very obese 16-year old girl from Harlem who is told early on she can no longer attend high school after it is learned she is pregnant with her second child, both of them conceived out of consent. A school administrator expels her but makes a house visit to inform her that she can go to a private school for girls with special needs. On route, she meets a social worker (Mariah Carey, de-glammed) and a teacher (Paula Patton) with infinite patience and willingness to make sure Precious gets the attention and tending that she needs. The girl can barely write or read. She barely musters the desire to speak, often living in her own silent and withdrawn world.

Her home life is a nightmare dwelling, lit in dank yellow light and enclosed by deteriorating wallpaper, and she's hectored constantly by her mother Mary (Mo'Nique) to cook dinner for her. And re-cook another meal if the first one is wrong. The abusiveness goes beyond, including multiple scenes of Mom throwing things at Precious' head. This is where it must be said that Mo'Nique, stretching from broad comedies like "Phat Girlz" and "Soul Plane" is a towering, monstrous presence. She is the Robert DeNiro of fat African-American actresses. Her performance is perhaps the equal of the great DeNiro performance of "This Boy's Life" in which DeNiro also played an abusive stepfather.

One of the film's elemental and uncompromising pledges is to make the Mom as oppressive, narcissistic and abusive as possible. By establishing this within Mo'Nique's first scene, you root for Precious to gain the courage to transcend above her mother. She is only 16-years old but for her benefit, and ours, she must find a way to succeed which means moving out of the house and finding a life of independence. Asking that much of a 16-year old is, of course, a lot. You wonder to what lengthy degrees Mrs. Weiss and Ms. Rain, the social worker and teacher, are going to be able to help her. Mom wants her daughter strapped because her welfare check depends on it. The film tracks Precious' gathering awareness of where to search for autonomy.

But for every new discovery, such as the joy of being able to write a page in a journal and make it sound literate, Precious faces setbacks and hardships that faze her. Precious' mentor and girlfriend support is there to help inspire her. She finally makes the awful, but desperate, confession of what kind of abuse she has endured at home. Her story is out, it's off her chest, and she has friends to listen. The movie avoids in offering any easy solutions. Life is tough, life is a struggle, but a better life is now worth struggling for. Mom the tyrant is always around the corner to make attempts to weaken and suffocate her own daughter, that's an obstacle that won't go away too easy.

When Precious is smacked with her worst difficulties, director Daniels creates pop fantasy sequences to demonstrate how this girl wants to avoid her life, avoid facing decisions. Rarely have fantasy sequences worked so well in a movie - there's one heartbreaking moment where Precious sees herself in the mirror as a thin Caucasian blonde. Here's a girl that uses fantasies as a crutch, a solace retreat, the only place where she live grandiosely and without judgment. Daniels knows better than to revert to the cliché, he doesn't evolve the fantasies into something "better" or more "practical." There is nothing wrong with them for Precious, if that is what comforts her. But Daniels knows this is also the story of a girl who learns to live in reality, and how to survive among people. Not needing to live in withdrawal is the film's first catharsis.

THE ROAD
THE ADAPTATION OF McCARTHY
By Sean Chavel

As a master of playing characters with a good and evil duality, Viggo Mortensen is the only actor in the world that could have played the father in "The Road." Although the father isn't exactly evil, he is a good man that has disposed his better virtues because he believes it is better for his son's and his own chances for survival. On an ash incinerated earth, a little boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) gradually exceeds the faith of his own doubting father and matures beyond his age. In a life that feels as if it is not worth living, the boy in his transcendence finds a connection between the embrace of what's left of humankind and the dream of a better future.

The world catastrophe that has scorched the earth is undefined in both the novel by Cormac McCarthy and in the movie, but what remains is the constant panic of unavailable food and bands of cannibals and slave-herders. Something I closely observed is that two major grueling scenes in the book were left out of the movie, and if you've read the book you should be able to detect which are those two scenes. Such details are something I paid extra close attention to since McCarthy's work is my favorite novel of the last ten years. It is a novel of unceasing adrenaline and immediacy, a novel of simple human poetry and complex earth-nature and destruction poetry.

What the filmmakers can't (and no filmmaker can) is capture and translate an author's idiosyncratic language, McCarthy's symphony of words. Still, a movie can exist independently on its own terms and be successful. What John Hillcoat's ("The Proposition") movie has is some the best demolished and destroyed cities visuals you will find in an apocalyptic setting, some shots were staggeringly accurate to how I pictured them in the book. Moreover, the one weakness in McCarthy's book was the final exchange by man and wife (as seen in flashback), but Mortensen and Charlize Theron bring amazing vitality to that scene.

Midway through the movie Robert Duvall makes a haggard, withered Old Man who is found on the road by father and son, who squabble over whether to divide their rations to feed this old man. First-timers to this story might find Duvall mesmerizing in his disintegrating but dignified appearance. Somehow though I find that Duvall is simply too intellectual and arch over the material - the same words in the dialogue are used in the book but Duvall is too in control of them, too "whole" of a man and not as withered as he appears. If you read McCarthy, it is one of the most haunting passages you will ever read in a novel.

Often the tone and manners of the movie disagrees with me. The visceral nature of the book made it feel like the most ultimate nightmare marathon of all-time, the endless ticking urgency that the characters must keep moving to stay alive. The movie has schmaltzy exchanges and show-stopping sentiment that is misused, and the music score is too pushy and tear-inducing.

On its own terms, "The Road" is very watchable. I shouldn't guess audience reaction, and yet I offer theory that audiences will be very moved by the film. I say read the book first, but ultimately, everybody should acquaint themselves with this story. There is a reason why "The Road" is published in more languages worldwide than any modern book. As for me, I was constantly curious and intrigued every moment in the way in how it was going to be "adapted," tickled and enticed by every choice and decision the director was making. I guess that's what happens when it is my favorite book that I've read twice.

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