Review by Patrick Hodges

When one goes into a theater sporting 3D glasses, one expects one’s senses to be inundated with vibrant colors, eye-popping effects and a total immersion in the ambience of the story.  What one might NOT expect is that such a story, despite its just-shy-of-overwhelming accompanying visual stimuli, might actually emerge intact.

For that is the case with Alice In Wonderland, Tim Burton’s adaptation of the classic Lewis Carroll novel, and so, full credit must be given the actors in the cast, portraying their characters to the fullest, refusing to let their on-screen personas get lost in the shuffle of CGI. 

The movie begins with a six-year-old Alice Kingsleigh, haunted by the memory of her first visit to Wonderland.  Having dismissed her visit there as nothing but a recurring nightmare, she is comforted by her father (Martin Csokas), who tells her lovingly that yes, she has indeed gone mad, “but that’s all right, all the best people are.”

Fast-forward thirteen years, with Alice (Mia Wasikowska) returning to her now-late father’s estate in order to be betrothed to an aristocratic buffoon.  But when she sees the waistcoat-clad white rabbit from her dream beckoning to her, she can’t help but follow.  Falling down the rabbit’s hole, she finds herself back in Underland (a place that she herself dubbed “Wonderland” as a child).

But the old place ain’t the same.  The evil Red Queen (a bulbous-headed Helena Bonham Carter) rules with an iron fist, holding the entire land in her thrall, with any subversions punishable by beheading or worse, destruction at the hands of the dragon-like Jabberwocky that she controls.  Alice is told that she must fulfill her destiny by slaying the Jabberwocky and returning control of Underland to the beautiful White Queen (Anne Hathaway).

Of course, if a movie is being directed by Tim Burton, odds are, you’ll find Johnny Depp somewhere in the cast, and his goofy mannerisms and eccentricities are a perfect fit for the role of the Mad Hatter, whom he manages to make endearing without being annoying despite his precarious mental state. 

Depp’s is the only name above the title, which is understandable given what a huge star he is, but it’s also a little misleading, as the Hatter is merely a supporting player in the film.  The true star is Wasikowska as the titular Alice, and she does a tremendous job in carrying the role.  Fierce, independent and broad-minded, Alice plows through a story which includes one “impossibility” after another.

So kudos to the entire cast, including Bonham Carter, Hathaway, the voice talents of Alan Rickman (the Blue Caterpillar), Stephen Fry (the Cheshire Cat), Michael Sheen (the White Rabbit), and, of course, Depp.  They managed to take a children’s story that could have been laid out as a bad acid trip not only understandable, but endearing.  And it’s no mean feat that when I left the theater, it was the characters that I remembered more vividly than the effects, something the juggernaut Avatar couldn’t quite manage to do.

Review by Patrick Hodges

“These streets have an expiration date.”

These words are spoken by Don Cheadle’s character, an undercover officer who goes by the name of “Tango”.  He is one of three Brooklyn police officers whose story we follow in Brooklyn’s Finest, the latest gritty cop drama from Training Day director Antoine Fuqua.

The term “Brooklyn’s Finest” is meant to be a collective description of the New York borough’s police department, but in this case, it’s a bit of a misnomer, given that the three cops that are the central characters are anything but “fine”.  They are all extremely flawed individuals, doing their jobs with varying degrees of quiet desperation.

First, we have Tango, who has been undercover for years and very badly wants out.  His assignment has cost him his marriage and much of his sanity, and wants nothing more than a nice quiet desk job.  But the higher-ups who can make that happen assure him that it can’t happen unless they can break the dealer who Tango has been running with (Wesley Snipes, making his first big-screen appearance in six years).  The thing is, Tango is unsure just where his loyalties lie at this stage of the game.

Then we have Eddie Dugan (Richard Gere), a bitter cop mere days from retirement, frustrated at having to mentor gung-ho rookies looking for ways to get themselves stupidly killed.  His has no family, and only seems to find comfort in the arms of a prostitute (Shannon Kane).  He is angry, broken and possibly suicidal.

Then we have Sal (Ethan Hawke), who has long since crossed the line that cops are not SUPPOSED to cross; killing drug dealers and stealing their money.  His motives are good enough, I suppose:  he, his four kids and his pregnant-with-twins wife live in a tiny house plagued with mold that is seriously compromising his wife’s health, and he needs to find a great deal of cash in order to buy a new house.

Since the entire film takes place in the space of about a week, there’s not much room for character development.  Rarely do we see any of these characters on screen together (and when we do, they don’t interact or even notice each other).  Fuqua attempts a feat of sleight-of-hand at the end, when all three cops find themselves in the same place at the same time, all for different reasons.  Sadly, said plot device is heavy-handed and not even very interesting.

About the only character we are meant to like is Cheadle’s, and not surprisingly, his is the best acting job of the bunch.  The cliché-laden script makes the movie drag even more than its more-than-two-hour length does, and that pretty much took any hope of me enjoying this film right along with it.

Being a supposed snapshot of realism, a microcosm of “life on the streets”, perhaps this is not the kind of movie I’m supposed to enjoy.  But if that’s the case, I would have hoped that it was the kind of movie that I could take some kind of deeper meaning from, but beyond the truism that formed the opening line of this review, I really can’t  think what I was supposed to learn from Brooklyn’s Finest.  So, in the end, all this really is is a the kind of movie that I can’t recommend.

Review by Chris Maitland

Buddy cop films have been a staple of American cinema for a long time; films like 48 Hrs. are considered to be classics. Can Cop Out, the latest film in this genre, make the grade in the ever-expanding world of buddy cop flicks?  I would say yes.

This film centers around the duo of Jimmy Monroe (Bruce Willis) and Paul Hodges (Tracy Morgan). Their unorthodox methods of police work get them in trouble with the chief, and they are both suspended.  This presents a problem for Jimmy, who needs to pay for his daughter’s wedding before her rich stepfather (Jason Lee) steals his thunder, and to do so, he is forced to sell a rare baseball card that he owns.

In the process of selling it, unforeseen circumstances arise, the card ends up stolen and a powerful Mexican drug cartel comes into play.  The pair is then sent careening across New York City looking for the baseball card while simultaneously trying to bring down this powerful cartel.

 This is a solid comedy.  Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan have really solid chemistry and you can tell they had a blast making this film, especially Morgan, who is simply hilarious.  He has great comic timing and just the way he conducts himself, a cop who loves to steal dramatic dialogue from well-known movies, is terrific. Seann William Scott is also pretty solid in his supporting role as a, shall we say, “dense” thief. 

This film does have its flaws though, especially when it tries to get overly serious with the plot.  Said plot, which is already far-fetched enough, isn’t terrible, but it sometimes tries too hard to convince us of that fact.  (And the subplot involving Paul and his wife was both inane and unnecessary.)

Overall, I would recommend this to anyone looking for a pretty good laugh, or, indeed, any Kevin Smith fan. This isn’t Kevin Smith’s best work by any means (probably because he didn’t write the screenplay himself) but it is still fun to watch his work. This won’t join the ranks of buddy cop classics like the aforementioned 48 Hrs. as one of the all tine greats, but it is a solid film that does its job and not much more.

Review by Eoin O’Faolain

In many ways The Crazies feels like the last gasps of a dying genre. A remake of a George Romero (the man behind Night of the Living Dead) movie, it embodies all the problems of horror movies. And these problems are becoming increasingly evident to media-smart masses who can dissect cinema’s language and are frankly getting bored of the way horror is going (just look at the track record of horror flicks over the past year. Even the Saw franchise has been cut down to size). The usual, lazy ways of thrilling and chilling us are not working anymore. Instead, the immediate eeriness of reality-horror films like Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield seem to appeal more and more to the emerging YouTube-raised generation.

The remake deals with a small, relatively isolated sleepy U.S. Corn Belt town. The local doctor (Radha Mitchell) is married to the local sheriff (Timothy Olyphant), and everyone gets together during baseball games. Only during one match a disturbed local with a gun wanders onto the field, causing a tense standoff between him and the sheriff. And it’s only a matter of time before other people in the town start going loopy and get homicidal. But the dastardly old American government only wants to seal off the area and kill everyone, crazy or not, to stop the mysterious virus, and so Doc and Cop must escape the area while avoiding both loons and trigger-happy marines.

Romero has praised the modern version of the film as a true remake. But considering how awful Diary of the Dead is, Romero’s taste may not be in the best of conditions. Romero’s probably just happy there’s some sort of political reference in there, having spent the last few years detesting the vacuous torture-porn sub-genre. But the criticism of the U.S. for its gung-ho military attitude has been done to death so much it’s almost a cliché by now. And The Crazies is nothing more than a summary of all the clichés of horror movies, especially in the last few years. It has the running zombie-like enemies that 28 Days Later so brilliantly started and no longer have the same impact. And The Crazies commits some of the worst crimes of horror cinema:

1) No Peripheral Vision. Seriously, are we supposed to believe movie characters are donning invisible blinkers whenever they enter a room? In one scene Doc enters a bedroom and completely misses the deranged crazy in the corner. And considering she’s already been assaulted several times, you’d think she’d be cautious about any rooms she enters? Horror directs want to scare us by tricking us into thinking a space is safe when it isn’t, but it’s at the expense of any natural sense of caution us humans even, even when under duress.

2) Splitting up for no reason. “Right, so we’re in a dimly lit building we barely know. I know… you stay in this open, visible area while I stroll through creepy corridors!”  Or so reasons the protective Cop over his beloved Doc. Again, it’s completely contrary to human instinct. If you’re scared, you naturally want to remain together. Strength in numbers, more eyes covering more angles, etc. It’s just common sense! Again, it’s a device for allowing more jolts (see below), but the problem is that it takes us out of the situation (and thus dampens the impact of the mood) and comes across as plain silly.

3) Gotcha jolts.  You see them a mile away. It’s when the music and sound effects suddenly go all quiet, and the camera angle places our hero far enough to the side to allow for someone to jump into frame and scream loudly. Or else it’s our hero’s friend tapping him on the shoulder to say hello (but of course the friend must have tiptoed behind to not be heard!). It’s cheap, it’s predictable, it’s usually unlikely, and it’s really only to scare your nervous teenage girlfriend so you can put your arm around her.

4) Saved at the last moment. You’ll see this is almost every episode of Lost, and there are some prime examples in The Crazies. Our hero is being attacked (a buzzsaw aimed at Cop’s groin, the pitchfork guy mentioned above), death is imminent, we all internally scream “how will he survive that”, only for a random character armed to the teeth to pull the plug/shoot the loon at the very last possible second. Again, it’s used so frequently that we now expect it and the tension is lost from the outset. Why not have our hero do it himself, or just be honest and show the friend arrive earlier? It may spoil the last-minute surprise (which we’re already expecting) but you can salvage it with other devices of tension, such as the struggle to pry off the deranged murdered, or the stress of aiming right and not taking out our hero by accident.

There’s also the fifth cliché, which is the awfulness of dialogue and performance rife in the horror genre, but that’s a much more difficult problem that isn’t just applicable to horror.

Now, that is not to say that The Crazies doesn’t have its moments. The opening scene will strike a chilling chord with anyone who has been paying attention to the many unprovoked gunman attacks seen around the world in the last few years. In another scene Doc is strapped to a hospital bed as a crazy with a pitchfork nears the panicking doc as he skewers every restrained patient in sight. The apocalyptic vision of a mass of infected people swarming through an area still has some resonance.  And there’s even a redemptive moment for one of the faceless marines. But there’s too many conventional devices and clichés to make it any more than a dumb, passable waste of time if you’ve nothing better to do on a Saturday night.

It’s frustrating to see a film like The Crazies when we know there’s life in horror, or specifically, reality horror. Sure, there were some problems with Paranormal Activity (some found the build-up too slow, and some of the decision made by the couple were counter-intuitive). But if you truly want to unnerve people, especially if you want the effect to last beyond the three seconds it takes to recover from a “Gotcha” jolt, then reality-horror seems to be the way. And the real task is whether it can marry its new documentary-style techniques with the traditions of storytelling (plot, theme, characters). Now, rather than the passable 100 minutes of The Crazies, that’s something I’d actually like to see.

Review by Eoin O’Faolain

Like the war film, the crime film feels like a dried-up old hag of a sub-genre. How many more assassinations, betrayals, and prison scenes can we endure, especially when HBO, who produced three of the best TV shows dealing with crime (The Wire, The Sopranos, Oz) and, excusing the pun, killed the crime movie stone dead? What we have seen since is a slate of average at best films that veer towards explosions and loud noises, possibly in fear that the use of drama will only pale in comparison to their TV counterparts. And France appears to see a resurgence of their 70’s tough-guy crime flicks, with the likes of the 2-part Mesrine film. And while Mesrine mostly fit into that ‘average’ category, it’s a pleasant surprise to find the Oscar-nominated A Prophet to be an utter joy to watch.

In plot, the film appears to be nothing more than middle-of-the-road. A young man from an immigrant background, Malik, is thrown in prison for six years. Almost immediately he’s preyed upon by thieves and sexual predators. But worst of all, an entrepreneurial Corsican gangster known as Cesar sees the potential in using Malik to get access to the “Arab” section of the jail. And so Malik must decide to kill the enemy of the Corsican or face being killed for disobeying. But Malik turns the table himself, and begins to develop a drug business through his multiple connections.

Director Jacques Audiard has found a true star in newcomer Tahar Rahim. Rahim manages to convey both a conniving thug and a vulnerable kid at the same time, constantly unsure of whether to choose the moral life or exact revenge on those who hurt him. The initial scenes of the film where Malik wrestles with his conscience are powerful, as is his reaction to a murder committed later. It’s refreshing to see the tough-guy façade gradually build and solidify as opposed to assuming it’s constantly there in a criminal. But Audiard deserves accolades also. He manages to combine the gritty reality of prison life while also inserting a certain subjectivity without causing a tonal clash. Throughout the moviem Malik shares his cell with one of his victims, not as some ghastly apparition, but rather as a visual reminder of his uneasy conscience. The film also manages to present an emotional side to the story with a sub-plot involving cancer.

Yet despite this, the film ends on a sour note. It seems that Audiard (who also wrote the script) got so caught up in his character that he himself forgot the morality of his tale. The film is so invested in Malik’s rise that there’s no sense of consequence from leading such a life. There’s no sense of tragedy that we get in The Godfather, no sense of failure that we get in Goodfellas, or sense of “live by the sword, die by the sword” that we see in the Mesrine films. It almost makes Malik to be a hero. Sure, you can argue that we alone can infer the immorality of the situation, but with A Prophet the director needs to show us he’s aware of it too. And even the moments of conscience, driven by the previously mentioned visions, trail off without any narrative resolution.

And so we’re left with a film with a powerful first half, one that is both scary and moving and most importantly, it feels real. But the film feels too long after the second hour, and despite the film’s superior qualities, the closing moments can only leave a bitter taste in your mouth.