Reviews by lotr23

The Brothers Bloom starts out as what looks like it's on its way to being a fun and witty film with many an intelligent twist and turn. Around its halfway point, though, the movie basically runs out of steam: it stops being an interesting tale about cons and about figuring out who's lying and who's telling the truth, and it simply gets tangled up in all the zigzagging that the plot does before it reaches a climax.

Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and Bloom (Adrien Brody) become skilled in the art of conning people at a very early age. They were complete rogues as kids, constantly passed on by one set of adoptive parents to another. Now, as adults, they're fully committed to their role as con men, with the more assertive Stephen being the one who plans out the cons by literally writing them out as though they were stories. As Bloom describes, "Stephen writes the cons as if he were a dead Russian novelist, with me as the vulnerable anti-hero." They carry out their cons with the help of a Japanese girl who goes by the name Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi, who played the deaf-mute girl in Babel, and interestingly enough, though her character here isn't deaf-mute, she's still virtually silent throughout the film).

The more introverted Bloom decides he's had enough of this lifestyle, and informs his brother that he's done with accompanying him on all these deceptive expeditions. Three months later, the two brothers meet up again, and Stephen proposes to Bloom that they do one last con. Bloom is hesitant, but eventually gives in. The con involves Bloom wooing this apparently spoiled rich girl, Penelope (Rachel Weisz), who lives in a huge mansion and crashes her Lamborghini only to have another one immediately delivered to her. Bloom agrees to work on the con with Stephen and Bang Bang, and he's soon in the process of getting to know Penelope, who turns out to be very eccentric, with all sorts of odd, random hobbies (she "gets bored" and admits that she's "really bad at talking to people").

All of this setup, in addition to several really good moments during the film's first half give this the potential to be a very good second film from Rian Johnson, whose first film, Brick, was an awesome entry to the film noir genre, and one of my favorites of 2006. During an early scene of The Brothers Bloom we even get to see Nora Zehetner, who played the femme fatale in Brick, and to be quite honest, The Brothers Bloom would've benefited from giving her more screen time. The film does feature some hilariously weird moments during its first half, such as Stephen announcing "I must make piss," and Bloom getting literally scored by both Stephen and Bang Bang when he jumps in front of Penelope's Lamborgini.

So, what's the problem? The script just runs out of ideas after a while. Things become stale, and we stop caring all that much about what's true and what's a con, and this could've easily been redeemed by having some sort of huge surprise at the ending (which would've also been appropriate for this sort of film), but we don't get that at all. There are some particularly lame and unnecessary scenes, one involving a character who suddenly becomes aroused by a thunderstorm (the scene isn't played well enough to feel like a solid amusing moment), and another involving a character stealing an apple from a vendor and being chased after doing so.

This year's earlier Duplicity was a stronger and ultimately more entertaining film about the art of conning. I think that the fact that I enjoyed Johnson's directorial debut more than his sophomore effort may be due to the fact that Brick took itself seriously, while The Brothers Bloom tries to cram a lot of black comedy into its scenes, and not a lot of it works as well as he may have hoped. I guess my recommendation in this case is, well, don't get conned into paying $10 to see this in theaters, and perhaps wait to see it on DVD if this really looks like something you'd be interested in.

One of the things that often helps horror movies is when certain moments and images are left up to the imagination. If something is left up to the imagination rather than being displayed (however graphically) by the camera, it’s a lot creepier because each individual viewer is going to picture the horrific image in a different way depending on what he/she finds scary. This is why it’s so great that the makers of The Blair Witch Project choose to never show us whatever it is that haunts the protagonists, just like it’s great that during a scene in The Silence of the Lambs in which Jodie Foster’s character sees a dead body, we don’t actually see the body, but rather, we just watch her terrified reaction, while hearing someone tell her that they were able to save only one of the guy’s ears. So many horror films nowadays decide to show us things in all their, um, gory glory, thus leaving little room for any actual fear to develop.

It’s because of this that there’s a lot of promise in the first half hour of Pontypool, during which we watch three characters who work at a radio station take calls in which they hear details from people about this weird and apparently catastrophic situation taking place outside of a doctor’s office. These scenes are gripping, well-paced, and they make this film a solid piece of thrilling entertainment… for half an hour. Unfortunately, it all goes downhill once the film starts trying so hard at explaining the phenomenon that is taking place; in doing so, it becomes terribly ridiculous and convoluted.

Pontypool certainly brings a new spin to the zombie movie genre. It presents words and language as a potential catalyst for a catastrophic epidemic, and this is a great concept because of what it has to say about the way people communicate with one another, and the effects that what happens on this film has on that. That’s exactly why it’s such a shame that it descends into laughably bad explanatory dialogue that occupies scenes that should instead give us the same level of tension that we had gotten during the movie’s first act. The doctor whose office is apparently surrounded by chaos eventually arrives at the radio station, and the purpose of having his character show up is apparently to help us understand what is happening, but his lines are so awful, his moments of “Eureka!” so lame and poorly staged, that it made me feel so disappointed at how this film could go from being so good to being so thoroughly mediocre.

The final few seconds before the credits start rolling are meant to be jarring, and they are, but not in an effective way, and more than likely, they don’t achieve the effect the filmmakers were hoping for. Once the credits start rolling, we get some audio that is supposedly meant to clue us in to certain things, but by this point, it’ll be hard to think about anything other than how dumbfounding it is that this initially restrained and creepy film eventually gave in to becoming so dense and over-the-top.

Despite the inexplicable critical acclaim, there’s little point in trying to deny the fact that Drag Me To Hell is a mediocre entry to the horror genre. Here’s a film that tries to be scary with a couple of largely ineffective “boo!” moments, and it also tries to be funny with its cheesy and over-the-top dialogue and situations. While Drag Me To Hell is virtually unsuccessful at manufacturing scares (I think I only jumped in my seat once), I’ll admit that it does a slightly better job at being amusing. The only problem is that, with some of the ostensibly funny moments, it’s very hard to tell whether they actually are intentional and meant to make the audience crack up, or if we were actually meant to take the situation seriously. In fact, I think that the only moment in which it’s quite clear that the humor is intentional is when our heroine, Christine (Alison Lohman), is driving towards a cemetery, determined to carry out her plan, and yells “I’m gonna get some!” As for everything else in the film that may or may not cause laughs, it’s really hard to tell whether it’s intended, and I certainly can’t give the filmmakers credit for apparently providing entertaining material that they may not have actually thought up.

The scene that works best in the film is the one in which Christine’s boyfriend, Clay (Justin Long), takes her to meet his parents. There’s a nice sense of awkwardness, and the character of Clay’s mother benefits from the fact that, though she’s initially portrayed as a caricatured unwelcoming mother-in-law, there’s an eventual shift once she gets to know Christine better. When Christine hallucinates while an unwitting Clay and his parents continue eating their lunch, we pretty much witness the best material this film has to offer. However, the truly horrible séance scene that we get later in the film overshadows everything else, and in a very bad way. The obligatory twist towards the end is totally predictable (and this isn’t a spoiler, because anyone with half a brain will see it coming a mile away).

I’m aware that Sam Raimi’s latest film isn’t supposed to be a groundbreaking piece of originality, seeing as its intention is to be reminiscent of older horror flicks, but there’s just very little that Drag Me To Hell has to offer in terms of actual terror, and in addition to that, its caliber as a comedy is difficult to gauge. In fact, this year has actually seen a better attempt at giving us an old-fashioned horror movie, and that was My Bloody Valentine (which came out at the very start of the year, and could be seen in 3-D). It was quite clear that that movie was having fun with itself, and it moved along at a nicely fast pace, with a decent amount of shocks to keep viewers entertained. Raimi is responsible for one of my all-time favorite films, which is Spider-Man 2, even though what he did with the third movie in that franchise was incredibly disappointing. Drag Me To Hell leaves even more to be desired: while it’s not a, um, hellishly bad experience at the movies, it’s still a weak cinematic effort that seems more suited to be played by teenagers as background noise during a get-together on Halloween night.

Beautiful, yet uncompromisingly raw and disturbing, Sin Nombre could’ve easily chosen to be either a gangster crime drama or a tale about the hardships experienced by Latin Americans who attempt to illegally cross the border into the U.S. However, this audacious cinematic work chooses to weave both of those themes into its story, and admirably, it packs all of it into a short 90-minute running time. Sin Nombre is both a deeply compelling drama and an engrossing thriller. It moves along with a hefty amount of urgency as we witness these characters’ journey to the border, and the tension comes from both ends of the journey, as we fear that the gangsters who are following one of the characters will catch up to him, while we also feel on edge as to whether or not our characters will run into the immigration police.

Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) and Willy (Edgar Flores), who goes by the nickname “Casper,” start out their respective voyages quite differently. Sayra is trying to cross the border with her father and uncle in order to go all the way to New Jersey (where they have family). Willy is running from the members of a gang he belonged to, who are out to kill him. When Sayra and Willy first meet each other, something happens that immediately makes Sayra feel drawn to Willy and trust him, even though everyone is aware that this tattooed guy is a criminal, and that one should probably try to stay away from him. One of the many virtues of Sin Nombre is that it gives a character like Willy, whom we would normally find to be completely one-dimensional and lacking in any hope for redemption, to be more than sympathetic. We completely understand why Sayra feels an instant bond to him, and why she sometimes makes the seemingly drastic decisions she makes in order to be by his side. But the very best aspect of the film is that, while there’s certainly a romantic undertone to all of this, it’s all very subtle and understated because, clearly, the situation that Sayra and Willy face isn’t one that’ll allow any lovey-dovey moments to feel realistic. The moments they share are still oozing with tenderness, and they are the light in an otherwise particularly dark and bleak motion picture. These two characters rely on each other throughout the intense amount of adversity they face, and as much as I tried not to feel this way, the romantic in me was hoping that they’d both make it unscathed and that they’d be able to happily stay together.

In retrospect, I guess that the climax of Sin Nombre was inevitable, but it still shocked me severely. Even though the very last shot of the movie ends on a hopeful note, the ultimate outcome is tragic, which is fitting for a story that is partly a gangster crime drama and partly a study of illegal immigration. Some of the events related to the first component of the story rely on contrivances, but none of them stands out in a way that makes the story lose much of its authenticity. Sin Nombre packs a lot of power in its short running time, and while it’s not recommendable for the faint of heart or for those who can’t handle depressing movies, it’s well worth watching for those who can embrace this type of film.

As I've made clear in some of my other reviews, whenever a movie hits too many conventional notes, it tempts me to give it a rating on the lower end, and the reason for that is pretty simple: I watch a lot of movies, and as much as I love the medium, it gets tiring to see the same sort of thing over and over. However, that doesn't mean that I'm biased against all movies that are cliched. If a film is conventional yet manages to present its conventional material in a way that feels fresh and interesting, then that's perfectly fine with me, and that is precisely what happens with Rudo y Cursi (which is Spanish for "Tough and Corny"), the latest film from Carlos Cuaron, who cooperated with his brother a few years ago in writing the screenplay for the brilliant Y Tu Mama Tambien, which also starred Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna. The fact that Rudo y Cursi is helmed by Cuaron and that it stars the same two actors as the 2002 film will perhaps make some people expect this to be on the same level of cinematic quality as Y Tu Mama Tambien, but that's an incorrect approach, because the two films are quite different.

While Rudo y Cursi doesn't cover any new ground, it's still an interesting take on what happens when two people from a rural community who are entirely unfamiliar with city life and with the intensity of business-related situations (and the corruption that often surfaces during them) are suddenly thrust into the latter world. As soon as the film starts, we start getting very clear glimpses at the personalities of our two main characters, Tato (Garcia Bernal) and Beto (Luna), and once each of them (separately) makes the trip to Mexico City to become a professional soccer player, we get to see the different ways in which each character's personality reacts to the new environment, from the initial elation as a result of all the money they make, to the eventual frustration when things, predictably, take a turn for the worse.

In addition to the excellence of Garcia Bernal and Luna's lead performances, one of the things that makes Rudo y Cursi work well is the solid writing, in particular when it comes to the voiceover we hear throughout the film from Batuta (Guillermo Francella), who is the guy who comes to Tato and Beto's hometown at the start of the film, and decides to recruit them to play professional soccer. The voiceovers are full of insight, particularly towards the end, and my only problem with them is the decision to have the character of Batuta be the one to do the voiceover (this also includes an ill-advised instance of looking at the camera, in one of the film's last few scenes). The character of Batuta is meant to embody that "money is all" mentality that our two protagonists are initially unaware of and ultimately fall victim to, so it seems a little odd that this character was chosen to provide the bits of wisdom - it may have been best to have the voiceover just be done by a non-character, as was the case in Y Tu Mama Tambien.

Once the year 2009 ends and I get to assess the films of the 2000s, it's very likely that Y Tu Mama Tambien will rank among my top 20 favorite films of the decade. People who feel similarly may be disappointed by the fact that this reunion of Cuaron and the two actors isn't as audacious nor as emotionally intense. However, those who take it for what it is and appreciate its entertaining approach to material we've seen covered by plenty of other films should feel rewarded by it.

To be completely fair, the opening scenes of The Education of Charlie Banks don't make it seem as though this motion picture has much promise. Everything that happens in these first few minutes leads us to believe that this is gonna be a fairly conventional movie in which a kid lives in fear of his neighborhood bully. Charlie (Jesse Eisenberg) is at a party with his friend Danny (Christopher Marquette), and Danny formally introduces Charlie to Mick (Jason Ritter), even though Charlie has been well aware of who Mick is since the fourth grade; Mick is the kind of guy you don't mess with. Indeed, at the party, Charlie is present when Mick beats up two kids, who nearly die as a result of their injuries. Initially, our title character decides to do the right thing and go to the police to inform them that Mick was the culprit of the attack. However, perhaps out of paranoia, or perhaps out of feeling bad for his friend Danny (who is close to Mick), he goes to the station to retract his statement, and Mick is released. Right here, I began waiting, frustrated, for the movie to unfold exactly as you'd expect after these events: I imagined that Charlie, Danny and Mick would continue as a trio of friends, with Charlie constantly on the edge of being discovered as the one who ratted Mick out, which would lead to all the predictable fights and lame moments of redemption that we've seen a bunch of times in other films.

Surprise of surprises, though, after Charlie retracts his statement and Mick is released by the police, the film takes a drastic turn by moving ahead a few years in time. Charlie and Danny are now college roommates, and it appears that Mick is long out of their lives. The best thing accomplished by The Education of Charlie Banks is that when Mick does re-enter Charlie and Danny's lives, it's not to resurface the issue of him having been arrested and of Charlie's paranoia of being discovered as the rat. Instead, the film chooses to examine how Mick weaves himself into this environment in which you'd expect him to be a fish out of water, as he's surrounded by overly-intellectual people who are also mostly of a higher social echelon. The title character of Charlie serves as our eyes to witness the observations that Mick makes about education and about the social classes. At one point when Charlie says he's about to go get a drink and study later, an outraged Mick asks, "You know how much your parents are paying for you to go here?" and forces Charlie to sit down and study. Later, when Mick dresses similarly to the other guys on campus (in dockers and whatnot), Charlie comments that "no one would ever know..." and then he pauses, with trepidation, and then continues "... that he wasn't some preppy kid from Connecticut." Mick begins sitting in on classes, and begins feeling hope that perhaps this world isn't necessarily out of his reach: "I've been auditing, and it's not like every room is full of geniuses." These are only a few of the insights that we get throughout this film on how overrated both education and financial success are, and how even someone who may seem like a hopeless thug could actually have a shot at improving things for himself.

Unfortunately, as I somewhat expected, the final scenes of The Education of Charlie Banks bring back what we thought was the long-buried subject of Charlie having turned Mick in a few years ago. The good thing is, though, that it all doesn't quite unfold as predictably as you might think: Mick is angry, but he doesn't drastically shift from being Charlie's friend to wanting to kill him, which is exactly what would normally happen in a more conventional film. The film would've failed had it chosen to put aside everything that we felt Mick had learned throughout the film and brought back "evil Mick" from the film's first 20 minutes, but thankfully, it doesn't do that, and so the climax isn't all that bad, as much as I would've appreciated something more subdued.

It's pretty much official that Jesse Eisenberg must have some sort of fondness for playing intellectual kids from the 80's, as he's played that role in The Squid and the Whale, Adventureland and now here (though, to be fair, in The Squid and the Whale he was just pretending to be an intellectual - there's a scene in The Education of Charlie Banks in which he mentions that he's writing a paper on The Great Gatsby, and I appreciated how that was reminiscent of something related to his character in the former film). Eisenberg does very well here, even though he doesn't get as much room to show his range as he did earlier this year in Adventureland, and I do have to complain that in the voiceover we get from him during this film, it's often way too obvious that he's reading, rather than voicing the words as if they were personal memories. Jason Ritter is quite effective; we never lose sight of his insecurities and vulnerability, even in Mick's more over-the-top moments.

The editors who handled the reels of The Education of Charlie Banks make an awkward decision to have several fade-outs throughout the movie. I don't know if this is meant to make the production feel episodic, or to signal some sort of shift in the action, but I didn't find much point to it. Still, this doesn't take away that much from what is a mostly successful coming-of-age drama. While the plotline that is followed during the film's opening scenes and then resurfaces towards the end isn't particularly interesting, what we get in between is well-executed and thought-provoking.

I'm still amazed at how exciting, kick-ass and thoroughly well-made this movie is. The bar has been set so high for the upcoming "summer blockbuster" films that I really can't imagine that any of them will surpass Star Trek in terms of quality, even if they match its box office performance. J.J. Abrams' re-imagining of the classic series is the best kind of summer blockbuster: its title and the entertaining trailer would've been enough to bring in the big bucks, but the team behind this new version of Star Trek have gone way beyond the extra mile by creating an incredibly engrossing story that benefits from a surprisingly great sense of humor and likable characters. Combine that with a fast-paced sense of fun and A+ special effects, and you've got a superior piece of mainstream entertainment.

The fact that this is undoubtedly an above-average summer movie becomes quite clear during the first few minutes of Star Trek, during which we experience what initially appears to be a standard-order action sequence out of Sci-Fi Movies 101, and concludes with an emotionally-wrenching tragic moment that will immediately make the viewer feel much more invested in this than he/she would be while watching a more superficial film. To make things even better, the movie then proceeds to give us more than just short glimpses at the childhoods of our two protagonists, James T. Kirk and Spock. Before moving on to the story's main conflict, Abrams does a wonderful job of conveying the flaws that afflict each of these two characters and what's at stake for each of them, and the development of both characters is handled brilliantly.

The action sequences featured in Star Trek are impeccable. So many movies of this ilk take the route of having loud, choppily-edited scenes in which it's impossible to tell what's happening, but instead, here we get brisk action sequences that are buttressed by the blazing special effects. Once we get knee-deep into the action, Star Trek takes a rather interesting turn that may confound many, but will reward those who can appreciate an intelligent summer movie: the film brings in an element that has to do with timelines and with the ability to find out what will happen in the future by literally communicating (in person) with people who are from the future, thereby perhaps finding a way to affect destiny. This is a magnificent element of the plot, not only because of the complexity that it gives to the story, but because (especially towards the end) it foreshadows the great relationship of friendship that Kirk and Spock will have, and in turn, this is also a great way of foreshadowing what we can look forward to in a sequel (which I think has all the potential in the world to be astoundingly great, considering the precedent that has been set here).

In the lead role of Kirk, Chris Pine succeeds hugely at balancing humor and charisma with fierceness and vigor, often managing to shift from one to the other in a single scene without missing a beat. It's understandable for people to have been skeptical about him prior to watching the film, as the guy looked like he might have just been another Hayden Christensen, so let's thank God that he's the exact opposite. His comedic timing is excellent, but he's also great in the more serious moments, and also, it has to be mentioned that he's searing hot (if Star Trek weren't such a fantastic movie, seeing him in that black shirt would still be worth the price of admission). As Spock, Zachary Quinto has an even tougher job, because although this looks like a role in which the actor can just easily coast on blank stares, the fact is that the character of Spock is developed by the film into this half-Vulcan/half-Human who is constantly conflicted by the need to avoid his emotional human side, so this makes it a tougher role, and Quinto handles it remarkably.

Though the rest of the cast is also very good, the one issue to be had with Star Trek is that it doesn't quite develop its villain, Nero, as effectively as it should; to be plain, Nero simply isn't in enough scenes in the movie to get us to find him all that menacing. Eric Bana does a fine job of playing him, but the character could've benefited from more screen time. This is forgivable, though, when you consider that, by not developing Nero quite as fully as they could have, the filmmakers instead chose to use more of the movie's running time to do a supremely great job of developing our two protagonists, which is ultimately more helpful in drawing the audience into the story.

Considering what has been accomplished here, I pray that J.J. Abrams' reinvention of this classic series gets to live long and prosper. This movie had the need of dealing with a lot of narrative/background story issues, since it was the first film of the reboot. So, in its future entries, the franchise has all the potential in the world to continue exploring these characters and to move into even deeper thematic territory, and I absolutely can't wait for that. While we impatiently wait for the sequel, though, we can rejoice in the fact that this first film is a nimble, witty and hugely entertaining work of cinema.

An emotionally flat motion picture that mostly squanders the endless potential it had, especially considering the themes it explores. I know this sounds like pretty negative criticism for a film that was created by a director of Steven Soderbergh's caliber, but there's no avoiding the truth: save for a few scenes, The Girlfriend Experience is a dramatically inert movie.

Every once in a while, Soderbergh takes a break from having fun with the Ocean's Eleven caper franchise, and gives us small indie films that tend to be more thought-provoking. Twenty years ago, he gave us greatness using that approach with sex, lies and videotape (which I watched again a few weeks ago, and I'm amazed at how its insights on psychosexual matters still feel so relevant). He aims to achieve equal greatness with his latest dialogue-based indie film, and while the movie's not without its moments, it misses the mark, falling way behind the 1989 film and several of Soderbergh's other cinematic efforts.

The film tells the story of a Manhattan call girl who works for one of those escort service companies. Chelsea (Sasha Grey) deals with several situations she comes across in that profession, while trying to balance that with maintaining her relationship with her boyfriend Chris (Chris Santos), who works as a trainer at a gym. There's another key part to the storyline, and it's the fact that it's set in October 2008 during the few days prior to the presidential election, and focuses on the general paranoia that there was at the time about the financial hardships the U.S. was facing, and the economic proposals that each of the two candidates was making.

The Girlfriend Experience gets off on the right foot, particularly in terms of weaving the political and financial subjects into the problems that both Chelsea and Chris face, but curiously, the movie loses sight of this, and eventually, we forget that it's set during the pre-election days because it no longer seems to have relevance to the plot. Even worse, the film's last scene makes a cheap attempt at reminding us of this, by having a character suggest to Chelsea which candidate she should vote for, and this is very clearly an instance of "Oh, crap, we forgot to have more of the political subtext during the middle chunk of the movie; let's just insert this line in the last scene."

But this would be a minor quibble if everything else in The Girlfriend Experience worked effectively, which it doesn't. Initially, the audience gets to listen to voiceovers in which we hear what Chelsea writes down in her "book" (which is a journal in which she makes note of all the details of her dates), and these voiceovers are a great way to get a glimpse into our main character. Sadly, they disappear suddenly, and instead, the film takes an awfully jarring turn by showing events out of order - it's an editing technique that has worked amazingly well in plenty of other films, but serves very little purpose in this one.

The dramatic scenes in this film that should radiate emotional power are instead dull and lifeless. Sasha Grey is a former adult film star who is making her first appearance in a non-porn movie, and it's quite clear that she was a great casting choice for this role based on her past experience, but the film just doesn't give her much room to display her range (there are several problematic scenes in which Soderbergh seems to deliberately choose NOT to show us her face, when we are actually in severe need of seeing her reaction in order to develop some form of emotional investment in the character). Chris Santos speaks his lines as if he were acting on neutral - no higher or lower levels of intensity. He merely recites, rather than controlling his voice inflections so that they reflect what his character is going through, and this brings disastrously bad results particularly during a scene in which boyfriend Chris confronts Chelsea about wanting to go away for a weekend with one of her clients.

The Girlfriend Experience does deserve credit for some moments in which its matter-of-fact approach to business-related affairs is both eerily realistic and entirely relevant to the current state of affairs, and it's also hard to ignore what a great concept for a film this is. Sadly, it's all so lackluster and frustratingly incapable of capturing emotion from its characters, that it's impossible to consider it a cinematic success. There's a scene in the movie in which we hear a guy giving Chelsea a lukewarm review of her, um, performance as an escort. I'd consider this one of the script's stronger moments, were it not for the painfully obvious scene that follows it, in which we hear someone singing the words "Everybody's a critic." Still, the words that that guy uttered in his lukewarm review of Chelsea's performance ("definitely will not show you a great time") are appropriate, because those words would fit just as easily into a review of this film.

The incredibly lame and uninspired title, combined with what appears to be a completely generic plot, seems like a definitive warning against paying money to see this movie. So, you might wonder why I did, and the reason is very simple: the last time that Dito Montiel wrote and directed a movie (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints), not only did he manage to give emotional potency and verisimilitude to what looked like another run-of-the-mill, throw-away drama, but he also managed to get a very good performance out of actor Channing Tatum (whose work in movies like She's the Man and Step Up left a lot to be desired). As it happens, with Fighting, he's working with the same genre and with the same actor, so I knew I definitely had to give the movie a chance. I was still skeptical, though, because of two reasons: 1) it was apparently a movie about fighting that, even worse, was titled Fighting, and 2) last year's Stop-Loss made me lose faith once again in Tatum's ability to perform well. Fortunately, however, Montiel doesn't disappoint in the least bit, giving us a film that is every bit as good as his prior effort, and with Tatum giving a lead performance that is just as good as the one he gave the last time he was directed by Montiel (if there's any doubt that even the worst of actors can be directed to a good performance by a talented director, here's all the proof you need).

Authentic dialogue and a gritty/realistic depiction of life in the city were prevalent in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, and they come across just as effectively in Fighting. Of course, the trailer is leading people to believe that the movie's all about the fighting sequences, which is deceptive as heck; there are, in fact, only three fighting sequences in the entire movie. What's even more interesting is that the fight sequences are the least refined element of the movie. They are very restrained, not really featuring that much intensity, or showing that many cringe-inducing moments in which the audience will go "Ouch, that must have hurt!". The downside to this is that it'll disappoint those who go into it looking for a bunch of awesome street-fighting scenes (and, um, given the title, it's pretty fucking understandable that a lot of people will go into the film hoping for this), but the upside to it is that it made me happy, because Montiel chooses instead to have the dramatic, dialogue-driven scenes be the more refined aspects of the movie. The relationships of Shawn (Tatum) with Harvey (Terrence Howard), the scam artist who inducts him into the world of street fighting, and with his love interest Zulay (Zulay Valez) are handled expertly well. Even the twist of sorts that comes across towards the end, and involves a secret that Harvey and Zulay were keeping from him, is handled with finesse, despite representing a convenient tweaking of the plot.

Dito Montiel already has an in-development project for 2010 titled The Brotherhood of the Rose (hey, at least it's a better title), and apparently, that movie will star Channing Tatum yet again, and seeing how well the actor-director collaboration has unfolded in these last two projects, I think it's definitely something to look forward to. While A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints was an effective dramatic examination of several characters, the individual character study that we get in Fighting works just as well. The horrible title will make many people stay away from it, and it'll make others go see it and then be disappointed by the somewhat inert fight sequences, but others will feel rewarded by the solid script and the quality of the performances.

When it comes down to it, I suppose that it's pretty much gonna be impossible for me NOT to give a fresh review to a movie with a script that uses the word "copacetic," unless the film is downright awful. To be fair, though, the usage of that term is only one of the several good things that 17 Again has going for it. It's more pleasant/charming than it is laugh-out-loud funny, but more importantly, it's a movie that can actually be enjoyed by people outside of the subset of Efron-obsessed teenage girls.

That's not to say that the filmmakers aren't well aware of the fact that their lead actor is the movie's biggest selling point. In fact, it's completely obvious that they purposely rush through the scenes involving 37-year-old Mike (played by Matthew Perry) in order to let Zac Efron dominate the screen time. While this will certainly please the film's main target audience, it does come across as problematic during the first few scenes of the film, where we start out with young Mike's decision in 1989 to abandon his basketball game and marry his pregnant girlfriend, and we move immediately to 2009 where an adult Mike has already been thrown out of the house by his now wife of 20 years. Obviously, the normal thing in terms of logical plot development would've been to show a few scenes of Matthew Perry and Leslie Mann playing the married couple, and then move on to the fight that leads to Mike being thrown out of the house and to his sudden transformation back into his younger self. But nope, the makers of 17 Again want to bring Zac Efron back to the screen as quickly as possible, and that's exactly what they do. The teenage girls will be happy, but to me, it was a very jarring plot transition. Similarly, at the very end of the film, once Mike goes back to being his old self, the movie comes to an abrupt end, since it's obvious that we won't be seeing the heartthrob again after that.

Luckily, despite these missteps at the beginning and end of the film, what we get in between is pretty good. 17 Again focuses on Mike's efforts, as a 37-year-old trapped in the body he had 20 years ago, to not only mend his apparently ruined relationship with wife Scarlett (Leslie Mann), but also to discover how unaware he was of the great difficulties that both his son Alex (Sterling Knight) and his daughter Maggie (Michelle Trachtenberg) are experiencing as they traverse the toilsome high school experience. In terms of the movie's development of Mike's relationship with each of these three people, two of them are developed very well, and one of them is handled somewhat poorly. His efforts to help his son Alex avoid being bullied, get into the basketball team and work up the courage to talk to a girl make for some of the best material in the film, as Mike sort of doubles as Alex's father and his buddy at the same time, and the two roles never feel like they get jumbled or unnecessarily intertwined. However, the movie deserves even more credit for handling the scenes between young Mike and adult Scarlett as innocently as possible: it's inevitable to get a feeling of "inappropriateness" while watching Zac Efron flirting with Leslie Mann (Scarlett just thinks Mike is this friend of Alex's who "looks just like my husband"), and it's an even tougher thing to traverse for a comedy that isn't R-rated and is aimed more at the under 18 crowd. So, it's impressive that they handle these scenes as carefully as they do, and any feeling of discomfort that people may have felt during the scenes will surely be assuaged by the scene towards the end that takes place in a court room: it's an undoubtedly sweet/heart-breaking moment that also gives Efron the opportunity to show that he can do more than just give charming smiles for the camera (he displays emotion far more effectively than I would've expected). Unfortunately, Mike's attempts to mend things with daughter Maggie aren't handled nearly as well by the filmmakers; in fact, curiously, Mike and Maggie don't sit down to have an actual conversation until right around the film's one-hour mark. I suppose it's hard to jam so much into such a limited amount of time, but it was a tad disappointing that this happened, especially because Michelle Trachtenberg is a very good young actress, and so, it would've been interesting if it had been explored beyond just having Mike get into a fight with Maggie's jerk of a boyfriend.

Oh, and there's a subplot involving a romance between Mike's friend Ned (Thomas Lennon) and the school principal (Melora Hardin) which initially seems like a completely disposable time filler, but eventually takes a very nice twist in which the two of them discover that they are huge Lord of the Rings dorks, and this makes it feel like it was a worthy subplot to insert (the line that leads to the discovery involves the character of Gandalf, and it is simply brilliant and among the funniest moments in the film).

Zac Efron's charm does go a longer way than I expected it to, but that alone wouldn't have been enough to make the film recommendable. Thankfully, the movie itself has such a big heart that it's basically one of those that's impossible not to like. The teenage comedy genre produces tons of mediocre movies every year, so let's be thankful that we get something like this every once in a while.