Austin Powers in Goldmember (IMDB) (Netflix)
Mike Myers has outdone himself, which is a mixed blessing. In addition to reprising Austin Powers, Dr. Evil and Fat Bastard, he surpasses Peter Seller's Dr. Strangelove trifecta by playing Goldmember, one of Myers's weakest characters. A very fun opening sequence starts this second sequel with a bang, providing big-name cameos from half of the entertainment industry. After that, the rest of the story is just a setup for the onslaught of jokes, which are focused mostly on the middle ground -- of the human body, front and back -- and play directly to the squealing teenage girls and snickering teenage boys in the audience. However, the sheer tonnage of gags wears down your defenses, and you end up chuckling and chiding yourself at the same time.

The guiltiest of legal pleasures, but not nearly the best.
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For a grown-up's antidote, rent Ronin, an extremely realistic and humanistic spy thriller starring Robert DeNiro and directed by the great and recently late John Frankenheimer. It combines Frankenheimer's passions for France and fast cars (he also did Grand Prix) in what turned out to be his last theatrical release. Not the most suspenseful story, but intelligent, well-written and well-acted, no special effects to speak of and an educational director's commentary track.

K-19: The Widowmaker (IMDB) (Netflix)
This is a bit of a rarity, a Hollywood film without any American characters or written from an American perspective, an action film from a female director (Kathryn Bigelow), and Harrison Ford playing a not-particularly likeable character (In What Lies Beneath they played up his usual good-guy persona to set up the reversal later). Inspired by a true story, K-19 is a gremlin-infested Soviet submarine rushed into service during the Cold War, and Ford is the kick-ass-and-take-names captain sent to replace the fatherly Liam Neeson, who's staying on the boat to help out. That's not a recipe for teamwork, and it seems that Ford's overwhelming sense of duty to the Motherland is writing checks his untested boat can't cash.

There's enough foreshadowing of doom to cover the ocean they sail in, but the movie rises slightly above the diminished expectations set by one of the worst trailers made in years. The key word, however, is "slightly." The exchanges between Ford and Neeson are trite, and even though K-19's based on a true story, Crimson Tide covered a lot of this ground with more verve. On the other hand, there's some decent character development over the course of the movie and a pretty damning indictment of the Soviet approach to management (create an environment destined to fail, then when it does, punish the people who were forced to use it). It's ultimately about why real heroes make sacrifices, not for God and Country, but for the guy in the next bunk.

Read My Lips (IMDB) (Netflix)
A French award winner, but don't hold that against it. Leading a life of very quiet desperation (she's almost completely deaf), a put-upon secretary connects with an even more hapless ex-con, and they begin to help and use each other for increasingly higher stakes. In other words, a relationship movie, but of the noir variety.

Although the secretary's lip-reading skills exist to enable a key plot point, the film also uses that as an opportunity to effectively take us into a different world (Helen Keller reportedly said that while her blindness cut her off from the world, her deafness separated her from people, which was much worse). There's an unremitting undertone of bleakness, a growing overtone of violence (sometimes bordering on gratuitous), and a secondary storyline that seems pointless even at its resolution, but at the end of the day, heart, uncompromised vision and artistic sensibility win out.

Reign of Fire (IMDB) (Netflix)
Mad Max meets Mothra. Not a favorite genre, but it was a slow day at the office and far too hot to go home.

Some Londoners dig a tunnel, awakening a swarm of fire-breathing dragons who go on a scorched earth rampage that leaves only pockets of survivors scattered around the world. Running the UK contingent is Christian Bale, who's holding his own against the beasts until Matthew McConaughey, crazier than George S. Patton on crack, drops in with his tanks, helicopter and "the best defense is a good suicidal offense" doctrine.

The dragons are decently menacing, but the whole enterprise has a broken steering linkage, careening between "that's cool" and "I don't think so." McConaughey seems to have decided "screw it, if it's gonna be this bad of a movie, I'll have some fun with it" but Bale keeps a stiff upper acting lip, thinking he can bring some dignity to the proceedings. He chose ... poorly.

No hearts pounding in this audience.

Road to Perdition (IMDB) (Netflix)
When sons find out what their fathers do for a living, it's often a moment for incomprehension, indifference or disappointment. But Tom Hanks is no abstract paper pusher, and when his 12-year-old discovers his profession, the bonds of trust will be tested, and people are going to get killed.

This is only Sam Mendes's second film (following the critical and commercial success American Beauty) after dominating the London stage scene, but he's learned a great deal from the early days of his directorial career, when Steven Spielberg had to sit him down with the dailies and explain to him how to shoot footage that would actually cut together. It also helps that he has three generations of acting pros in Hanks, Paul Newman and Jude Law, a hall-of-fame cinematographer (Conrad Hall), and a haunting score by Thomas Newman. Chicago and the Illinois plains haven't looked better, and Mendes's theatrical sensibilities exploit this larger Midwestern canvas to great effect. Paul Newman nails his supporting bit as patriarch of the extended Rooney family/gang, Hanks adroitly balances the father-as-hit-man duality (although he could be a little more evil when he's in enforcer mode), and Law is enjoyably unsettling as the crime photographer who creates his own subjects.

The overall effect is perhaps too restrained, possibly from the actors being so respectful of each other's abilities that they're overly afraid to "get caught acting" by their peers, but this is straining to find flaws. At the risk of creating unmeetable expectations, pencil pretty much all concerned in for Oscar nominations. (For a very different family-man-as-hit-man drama, try the unjustifiably unseen Panic, with William H. Macy, Donald Sutherland, Barbara Bain and Tracy Ullman.)

Patton (IMDB) (Netflix)
"God help me, I do love it so." The 1970 biography of George S. Patton, warrior, philosopher and glory hound, co-written by now-famous director Francis Ford Coppola, and winner of seven Oscars. Tempted by the chance to see it on the big screen, and melting in the heat, a hundred or so moviegoers (many of whom had only seen the movie on TV, about 30 times for one fan) crowded into the local revival house for the movie that George C. Scott was apparently born to play.

That first scene, with Patton addressing the troops in front of a frame-filling American flag, is itself an award-winner, and kicks off a tour de force performance by Scott, and a vivid portrait of one of the most interesting and successful generals in U.S. history. The crowd ate it up.

Men in Black II (IMDB) (Netflix)
Director and former cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld has come a long way since Penny Marshall tried to fire him off of "Big," and even further from his days of paying the bills by shooting porno films. Will Smith ("J") and Tommy Lee Jones ("K") are back, as is Rip Torn ("Zed"), the worm guys, Frank the Pug and Tony Shaloub as the slimeball whose head grows back. Lara Flynn Boyle (Jack's girlfriend in real life--yes, him) is the one-woman axis of alien evil, and emerging ingénue Rosario Dawson is the girl in jeopardy and the object of J's affection.

The crowd was delighted by a constant barrage of action, gags and quips, and the MIB franchise remains fresh, because the movie stays locked onto its mission of fast-and-sly entertainment. Will Smith can do this in his sleep after carrying the whole load in Ali, and the rest of the cast pretty much holds up its end, although Dawson's part is under-written, giving her little to do except look winsome. Summer ephemera at its best.

The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat) (IMDB) (Netflix)
The professional reviews are almost universally glowing, friends liked it, and some French people gushed afterwards "I cannaught believe dat it wos almost tree hours longue--de time flew like a leetle sparrow" but put me down for "pending further review." I missed the crucial first minutes, couldn't clearly distinguish the male characters (Sara--sorry to disappoint), and was distracted by the constant clicking of some audience member's artificial heart (one assumes), so getting through this first-ever Inuit language film was a struggle and I'll need a replay to give it a fair shake.

It's filmed on location in the Arctic with a mostly amateur Inuit cast, and tells the tale of a tribe beset by more intrigue and shenanigans than Peyton Place, putting the lie to the romantic canard that those simple folks live in unfettered peace and harmony. The acting is what you'd expect, but the photography is pretty impressive in a documentary sortof way, plus you get to see a naked guy running on snow and ice for an impressively long time and some cool Inuit-style sunglasses made of animal bone (Oakley: take note). Very much in the tradition of Himalya: L'enfance d'un Chef.

The Emperor's New Clothes (IMDB) (Netflix)
The emperor in this speculative fable is Napoleon (Ian Holm), chafing in exile on St. Helena, and his new clothes come from Eugene (Holm again), a seaman who becomes his double to support Napoleon's plan to escape and regain control of France. The early trading-places scenes of The Little Corporal awkwardly fitting in as a member of the proletariet, and the nebbish Eugene getting in touch with his inner emperor are clever and amusing enough, but complications ensue, and the movie quickly extends beyond a conventional fish-out-of-water comedy, and deepens into a more enduring story about understanding what and who is really important.

To hold together a character study like this, Holm (one of the busiest film actors ever with over 100 roles--he was the Ash the android in Alien) needs to be terrific, and he is, as is the new Meryl Streep of accents, Iben Hjejle, the wonderfully naturalistic Danish actress who was John Cusack's girlfriend in High Fidelity. If only she'd be co-opted by Hollywood so we'd see more of her work.

A satisfying anti-blockbuster with plenty of enjoyable little moments.

Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (IMDB) (Netflix)
A friend asked just the other week, "when are you going to really paste one of these movies in a review?" I explained that that would be unlikely, since I only see movies that I expect to like, and don't go in for the summary judgments you get from those professional reviewers. Then the projector started...

The title seemed so forthright and self-effacing, but what got delivered was a shining example of Tom Stoppard's "imagination without skill gives us modern art." The Sprecher sisters, Jill (director and co-writer) and Karen (co-writer), mix the multi-threaded story structure of Short Cuts and Magnolia with a dollop of the reverse sequencing of Memento (I think, I'm still not sure) to needlessly confuse and torture the audience , while an assortment of fairly miserable people whinge about why they're unhappy and how fate controls our lives ("Have a few story ideas kicking around, but none of them add up to a complete movie? No problem, just jam 'em together into one feature and call it art!"). I usually avoid reading other reviews to avoid contaminating my own blinding cinematic insights, but after reading several of the many favorable ones just now to discover what I missed, I still don't get the genius of all that is Sprecher, or the fifteen producers (go ahead, count 'em.)

There are action-driven popcorn movies and there are character-driven art films, and then you've got muddled efforts that puzzled-but-insecure viewers assume must be brilliant. Or they're a lot smarter than me--one or the other.

Minority Report (IMDB) (Netflix)
The year is 2054, and pre-cognitive humans can foresee murders up to four days in advance, allowing the cops to arrest you before you've done anything--Attorney General John Ashcroft's recurring wet dream scenario. Tom Cruise runs the PreCrime unit, which is infallible, or so everyone thinks, but Cruise somehow is "tagged" for a murder he has no intention of committing, and is soon on the run from his own men, who have jet packs, robot spider scouts and "sick sticks" that make you puke your guts out if they touch you. It's the old find-out-who's-framing-you-before-the-cops-catch-up scam, but done with extra verve and intellectual depth.

Minority Report is based on short story by Philip K. Dick, one of the most imaginative writers of the past century, and probably one of the craziest. He wrote the books that inspired Blade Runner ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and Total Recall ("We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"), plus is said to have planted the seed for The Truman Show. Dick's a good source for Steven Spielberg, who has been increasingly attracted to darker, more complex material as his kids grow up.

The film has been processed to bleach skin tones and blow out the highlights, hinting at what botched LASIK eye surgery feels like, but looks terrific. I was less enthused about the camera shaker used during the action scenes--the theater's projector seemed about have a meltdown. The reach of the CGI effects often exceeds its grasp, there are one or two plot points that don't hold water, and the endgame is straight out of the thriller screenplay pattern book, but this film has something for just about everyone: action, plot twists, creepy characters and wit (the large number of product placement bits look like my old consulting firm's scenarios about future of consumer shopping, serve nicely as comic relief, and probably funded a fair chunk of the budget). Underlying the glitz is a tender and affecting commentary on the nature of loss, and Samantha Morton is especially touching as one of the pre-cogs.

The best big movie of the year so far.

The Bourne Identity (IMDB) (Netflix)
The bad guys always rely on extreme negative reinforcement ("the price of failure is death, Number 32"), which doesn't seem like a very good recruiting or performance management strategy. Matt Damon is the man who can't remember his name or why he has two bullet holes in his back, but starts to put the pieces together with the help of Franka (Run Lola Run) Potente while fending off a bunch of hit men sent by his CIA handler, Chris Cooper, who has been ordered to clean up the mess Damon created, but can't remember.

This is an old-fashioned thriller that thankfully doesn't have a terrorism angle, special effects or more than one explosion, just lots of bent sheet metal from a Paris car chase (the vintage Mini Cooper almost steals the movie) and a creative way to break one's fall. Damon is well cast as the vulnerable-but-competent killer, and Potente compares almost favorably to Faye Dunaway's terrific performance in Three Days of the Condor (a highly recommended rental). It doesn't have the emotional depth or suspense that "Condor" had, or even the more recent "Ronin" (another rental recommendation), but there are some nice moments between Damon and Potente, and a sense of realism that very recent thrillers have missed.

Windtalkers (IMDB) (Netflix)
Director John Woo (Mission Impossible II, Face/Off) reaches beyond his center, which is the slick, modern-day action pic, and make a World War II movie about the Navajo codetalkers. The U.S. developed a code based in the Navajo language, which at the time had never been translated into German or Japanese, and used Navajo soldiers as human encryption/decryption machines, which resulted in an incredibly efficient and unbreakable communications system. Taking the story beyond docudrama is the screenwriters' assumption that the military valued the code so much that they assigned minders to protect it, meaning first to protect the codetalkers, but more importantly, to kill them if they were in danger of being captured by the Japanese. Nicholas Cage is the self-loathing Marine assigned to one of the Navajo and, given that a bunch of his buddies just died because he followed orders, he's not at all happy about this unsettling assignment.

As you might imagine, the battle scenes are pretty intense, although not as impressive as you'd expect from Woo (the grenade and mortar explosions are juiced past credibility, and he seems otherwise constrained by the restrictions of a period piece), it gets hokey and there's a redneck racist storyline that doesn't work very well, but Cage does a great job of riding the curmudgeon/hero ridge and his performance is one of the few things that makes this effort worth a visit.

Bad Company (IMDB) (Netflix)
It's uneven, it's derivative and the action scenes are sub-professional, but it's got Chris Rock strapping this action comedy on his back like Magic Johnson did with the Lakers in Game 6 of the 1980 Finals against the Sixers (Kareem was injured and Johnson, a guard, played center and scored 42 points). The Lakers won the game and the series, and Bad Company manages to keep the audience in the movie, with difficulty.

Rock is the screw-up ticket scalper and chess hustler whose girlfriend is about to leave him, and to add to his problems, the CIA insists that he help them save the world by impersonating the twin brother he never knew he had and buying a suitcase nuke off of the bad guys before some worse guys do. There are the typical training scenes, some "I don't think he's going to be ready in time" hand-wringing and off course the love-hate relationship between Rock and a slumming Anthony Hopkins (Merchant and Ivory must be on sabbatical). With all that going against it however, Rock's boyish irrepressibility camouflages the film's many flaws. As one exiting patron said, "much better than Sum of All Fears."

CQ (IMDB) (Netflix)
In the Francis Ford Coppola family, everyone makes movies, and CQ is son Roman's first theatrical film as director. It's a meta-movie, set in late '60s Paris, with Jeremy Davies (the coward in Saving Private Ryan) as the editor of Barbarella-like sci-fi flick that's missing an ending, and Angela Lindvall as the leather-jumpsuited super spy. Davies is also making a pretentious, "honest" personal film about his life, and finds himself bouncing between art and commerce, and reality and movie reality. It doesn't help him that Lindvall, a supermodel-cum-actress, is almost perfect as the bimbosity-free sex kitten distraction, and that he becomes responsible for salvaging the film after the director gets fired by producer Giancarlo Giannini (you may not recognize the name, but he's been the premier Italian actor for four decades).

I went to this because I had just finished his dad's biography, liked the preview, and had sat next to Roman on a flight from Paris to Chicago a couple of years ago (probably while he was working on this movie). We didn't say a word to each beyond "hello" (he has that kind of face that doesn't invite conversation, and a famous person's way of not making eye contact). There are a host of themes running through the film (obsession about work, wanting an alter ego, the need for self-expression)--maybe too many, because none of them really stick emotionally, and Davies isn't able to get you to really care about his problems. For lovers of the filmmaking process and slightly campy bad-movie humor.

The Sum of All Fears (IMDB) (Netflix)
My frustration stemming from this latest Tom Clancy thriller exists on two levels: the flawed, creaky and politically wussified plot and the all-too-vivid reminder, particularly given the real-world revelations of the past week or so, of the government's inability to communicate vital information in a timely manner.

Calista Flockhart's beau Harrison Ford has been traded in for a younger Jack Ryan model (no doubt Ford's ex-wife thinks that's fitting), Ben Affleck, as the CIA analyst who, straight out of The Hunt for Red October, is the only American with 20-20 insight into the Russians, who are being set up by some Neo-Nazis (a convenient oil-free villain) as the patsy for a successful nuclear explosion in the U.S. (no spoiler here, check the trailer). Affleck discovers some key information that even the FBI would have passed along, but of course he can't, which escalates everything into a cliffhanger that Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove handled more courageously.

The above rant is mostly a time-delayed detonation of my own that's occurring while thinking through this review--there are plenty of things to enjoy, like Affleck being a worthy successor to the Ryan mantle, Morgan Freeman gives his usual mensch-like performance (he badly needs some roles that exercise more of his skills, however), Liev Schreiber adds some depth to wet-work spook Mr. Clark. Director Phil Alden Robinson manages to give this Clancy episode a much artier look than its predecessors (Field of Dreams is his sole other film of note--the "directed by Phil Alden Robinson" tag line in the commercials made it sound like he was a Francis Ford Coppola-esque auteur, which is ironic, since he clearly went to school on Coppola's montage technique for the ending). The safety tip for this one is: go ahead and see the movie, just don't reflect on it later.

Dogtown and Z-Boys (IMDB) (Netflix)
A narcissistic but entertaining documentary of a group of skateboarders in the 1970s, who grew out of the Southern California surfer culture, transformed the sport and, in their eyes, were the inspiration for the X Games and snowboarder culture. This film shows how you can take a bunch of grainy photographs, 8mm footage, and present-day interviews and put together an interesting, evocative story about the birth and evolution of a sub-culture. Were the History Channel this edgy...

Narrated by Sean Penn (holy shades of Ridgemont High), it chronicles the history of Dogtown, which connected the south of Santa Monica, Venice and Ocean Park, California, and the wrong-side-of-the-tracks kids who translated surfing to the dried-up pools of the California drought, took advantage of new technology (from clay to urethane wheels) and created a big-business sport. The only downer at the end is the realization that the film was made by some of the Z-Boys themselves, adding after the fact a sense of self-promotion and re-living of the past, but it's a piece of Americana that hasn't been shown, at least not nearly this definitively.

About a Boy (IMDB) (Netflix)
My mom said, "nothing special" and after all it stars Hugh Grant, so I was prepared to not like this message comedy much at all. He's is a self-professed emotional island who's happy to live off his dad's song-writing royalties, and would be quite the cad if he weren't such a ne'er-do-well. He does need the occasional girlfriend, however, and cooks up what he thinks is the perfect solution--recently single moms who need a transitional guy for awhile until they realize they're not ready for a deep relationship, and will dump him before he has to do the same to them. Brilliant strategy, but the execution is flawed, and he ends up being adopted by a hasn't-hit-his-stride kid with a mom with more than enough issues to make Hugh look like a role model.

Well-managed expectations aside, "Boy" does have a few things going for it, such as a Nick "High Fidelity" Hornby novel for a starting point that keeps the sap from flowing too heavily, and a Grant who's lost the prep school 'do and is virtually stammer-free. Unlike the TV sitcom Seinfeld, in which the point was that there was no point, "About a Boy" is very much about the message; our relationships are what makes it all worthwhile. Women will be satisfied by the ending, and guys can give in on the "which movie" decision without only a little pain, and build up points for Sum of All Fears or Undercover Brother.

Insomnia (IMDB) (Netflix)
They say that cops and criminals live two sides of the same psychosis, and any number of films and books have worked this theme, but few as smartly as this drama. A teenage girl has been murdered in small Alaska town, and two Los Angeles detectives have been dispatched to ostensibly help solve the case, but also to get the hell out of Dodge as an internal affairs investigation heats up. Al Pacino is the famous homicide dick with some secrets, Hilary Swank the eager, hero-worshiping local and Robin Williams as the key suspect, and the three get hung up in a complex cross-linkage of motivations and, for lack of a decent piece of non-jargon, co-opetition, that knocks together means, ends and living with consequences.

Director Christopher Nolan, who wrote and directed the innovative Memento, adapts a well-regarded 1997 Norwegian film of the same name (currently playing on the Independent Film Channel). Because this is a remake, you can bemoan the lack of Hollywood creativity (this is a summer of remakes and sequels), but the fact is that very few people saw the original, and a lot of people are going to pay to see this version--and they should. It's atmospheric, clever, and well-acted all-around; Pacino is at his weariest, Swank hits all the right notes as she loses her naïveté, and Williams exudes a restrained schtick-less creepiness that shows just how scary-looking a guy he is when he's not mugging for the audience.

The Salton Sea (IMDB) (Netflix)
A stylish, imaginative, violent noir featuring Val Kilmer's first decent role in years. The film begins near the end, with Kilmer playing trumpet in a room that's becoming enveloped in flames, then flashes back to show how he got to that sorry state. The setting is Southern California's methedrine sub-culture, which is not for the easily appalled--Vincent D'Onofrio is the completely warped "cook" and dealer nicknamed "Pooh Bear" because he lost his nose to the drug and wears a plastic substitute ("Badly done facial prosthetics--the anti-drug"). Why Kilmer gets mixed up in all this and what he does to extricate himself makes for an original, if more than a little disturbing story. Peter Sarsgaard has a nice turn as Val's naive, trusting fellow tweeker, and there are sprinkles of I-shouldn't-be-laughing-at-that humor.

If you liked Memento and/or Sexy Beast, you'll probably be on solid ground.