Shark-bite DVD Review: Heartbreak Kid: Fleecing the audience like the Patagonia product line

"You should go with the Patagonia. It's made from 100% recycled material."

Nothing will have you have you reaching for a bottle of antacids and chasing it with a gulp of de-fizzed Canada Dry like hammer-fisted product placements, and if you do manage to slip the first punch (a camera shot that lingers on the Patagonia sign in Stiller's sporting goods store) the ringing endorsement above will surely put you on the canvas.

The Heartbreak Kid is recycled material too. Enough to re-pave an LA freeway.

Or San Francisco, in this case.

Stiller plays the role that has lingered in a Hollywood blue box container for years, albeit more often with the fairer sex: the guy, in this case, who just can't seem to settle down/keeps meeting the wrong person, who has numerous character failings that are offset by being a genuinely nice guy (discovered by a 'nice girl' counterpart who at first doesn't take notice but gradually comes to do so---or not so gradually as it seems, as these romantic comedies are always criminally overlong).

Stiller is 'Eddie', the socially awkward, put upon, Bay City hard luck chump who bemoans his single-hood and is dispensed not so paternal advice ('you should be crushing pussy') from real life dad Jerry.

His good Samaritan ways capture the attention of the mugging victim, Swedish knock-out Malin Akerman ('Lila') and after six weeks of whirlwind courtship, an atmospheric event that unfortunately didn't send the pages of the Neil Simon script adaptation flying in a direction away from whoever green-lighted this--they end up in Cabo on a honeymoon.

This is where things begin to unravel. Unlike the charmer he was earlier: 'A UFO is an 'FO' to them [aliens], 'cause they know what it is', she is soon put off by most of his interests, and he by hers especially when finding out she is not really an environmental researcher (apparently, the phrase 'exactly what kind of research are you involved in?' or 'what did you study in college that led you down this career path?' didn't come up in the weeks leading up to their nuptials) but some kind of hippie granola volunteer who hands out pamphlets, and wants to move to Holland.

After suspecting their personalities aren't quite as compatible as previously thought, Eddie finds out this is the case sexually as well (apparently, their six week courtship was an abstinent one), with a painful, in both senses of the word, string of related gags.

Despite his warning that she don sunscreen, Lila suffers a debilitating sun burn and Stiller's Eddie does what any supportive husband would do: leaves her alone, goes down to the beach, drinks himself silly and hits it off with a southern belle and her charming family who he then proceeds to bamboozle in every way imaginable to keep up the single charade, until he's found out and has to make amends with all concerned.

If you've heard all this before, you have, except this time with the Farrelly Brothers stock-in-trade: obscene latrine humor and a really sick donkey sex sight gag with the beast of burden sporting wood.

While a similar gag actually worked in Clerks II, and at this point I can't believe there is a cinematic precedent, it, like all the others gags here, seems to fall flaccid. The camera lingers on for too long (especially harsh in this instance) and the brief bits of physical comedy just seem arbitrary and out of place. It should be mentioned, so does Seth Rogan, who pops his head into one scene for the briefest of cameos, hands someone a beer and seems embarrassed to be there and leaves.

And quite rightly.

Miles away from his San Francisco sporting goods store, Patagonia rears its head again, this time as a reference to a 'bunch of suppliers' Eddie supposedly met on the beach, a gambit to thwart his increasingly leery wife, a half-wit to the beguiling Stiller, but still undeserving of such cruel deceit while laid up in a hotel bed. Pleading with his suspicious bride Stiller blurts: "Patagonia is my biggest supplier. I carry their entire line".

The audience, nor her, are buying it and at the end of the day, are fleeced.

Chris, Toronto
www.thesharkguys.com

Shark-Bite DVD Review: Iron Man -- Dean Martin meets the Transformers

The appeal of comic books is, of course, in the escape they offer their readers. You might be some nerd who spends the first period of every high school day shouting for your freedom from the locker that bullies stuffed you in, but hey, Peter Parker was a dweeb too before a spider bit him and the resulting mutant powers from that incident gave him the ability to climb walls and swing pretty girls from building to building. You may be some brooding, miserable slob who’s lived in your mother’s basement for longer than society would deem seemly, but Bruce Wayne spends a lot of time in his basement and could also stand some cheering up, and look at all the cool stuff he does as Batman. Many comics offer their reader heroes that are troubled in some way that a teen can relate to -- the socially useless who become unbelievably heroic via their alter egos.

“Iron Man” is a different kind of comic book hero, and is played by Robert Downey Jr. a different kind of actor from the type we’d expect to see fronting a blockbuster. We know from the moment the film opens with Downey, as Tony Stark, motoring down an Afghan highway in a Humvee, with a highball in his hand and the AC/DC blasting that we’re in for a movie that is miles apart from a tale of a nerd getting revenge on that muscle freak who kicked his sand in his face on the beach. We’re in for a rock and roll good time, and that is certainly what the film delivers.

For those unfamiliar with the “Iron Man” story, the central character is Tony Stark, a weapons manufacturer and one hell of a fun guy. He is labeled a “Merchant of Death”, but he seems to be far more of a charmer than Viktor Bout, ending up, as he does, in bed with the female reporter who gives him the moniker shortly after she does so.

He’s more or less casual about his war profiteering, is a genius and seems to enjoy the tech side of blowing stuff up, and, perhaps most importantly, being rich enough to have his own private plane complete with stewardesses who know where the sake is kept and double as pole-dancers once it’s been served.

Stark takes that plane to Afghanistan where he shows American generals Stark Industries’ latest piece of scorched-earth war machinery the “Jericho” missile. Shortly after firing one off into the – hopefully unoccupied – mountains, Stark is on his way back to the army base when his convoy is ambushed and he is shot. He survives, but the tribe that captured him wants him to construct a “Jericho” for their nefarious purposes.

Stark has different plans, and he and his cellmate Yinsen put together the first crude Iron Man suit. Sleeker and benefiting from better paint jobs though the latter suits might be, the spectacle of the first is hard to top: Iron Man makes his screen debut all clanking metal amid heavy guitars and proceeds to flambé every bad guy in the camp.

Once out of Afghanistan, Stark has a change of heart about the evil weapons business. He wants to make love err… Well he does not want to make war. This launches Jeff Bridges, who plays Tony’s right-hand man at Stark Industries the wonderfully named Obadiah Stane, in from the background.

Given the press surrounding this film, it will probably not be revealing too much to say that Bridges plays the heavy in this one, and he plays it well, a swaggering, cigar-chomping industrialist who’d strap his own grandma to a warhead if it meant some more filthy lucre for the pile.

The villains in this type of movie, most of the time, end up being far more interesting than the heroes they torment; who would you rather hang around with for an evening’s drinks (provided your death was not on the menu) – lunatic billionaire Lex Luthor or Clark Kent? What makes “Iron Man” so much fun is that both hero and villain are equally entertaining and played by great actors who are willing to jump into their scenes with enthusiasm, as if they want to do more than just offset the scenes where things get smashed. Likewise, Gwyneth Paltrow, playing a character whose name is the only clear sign of the comic book’s 60s origins, “Pepper Potts”, brings a human touch to a role that could have been pure camp.

We’re in for a long summer of superheroes, and for some inexplicable reason it’s been decided that another “Incredible Hulk” movie is necessary (One more time that we’ll get to here those immortal words, “HULK!?! HULK, HIM SMASH! Editor's Note: For an excellent review of The Incredible Hulk, click here) and there’s the better film prospect of another in Christopher Nolan’s Batman series. But I doubt we’re in for another like this one. There are genre standards in this one – the trial and error scenes, for example, in which new powers get tested, causing significant structural damage to buildings, and, it would appear in this case, killing without remark passersby via traffic incidents – but what we’re left with is unique among the genre: a film for the guys in high school who missed first period not because of bullies, but because they were too hungover from partying the night before.

Noel. Bangkok

Click here for more superhero fun.

Shark-Bite DVD Review: American Gangster -- a drive-by on common sense

There’s a scene not too far into “American Gangster” in which the eponymous gangster, Mr. Frank Lucas, played by Denzel Washington, is in Bangkok and outlining his plans to his contact here on how he wants to revolutionize the drug trade in New York. He wants to cut out the middleman and buy directly from the source – in this case, the Kuomintang operating out of the Golden Triangle (Thailand, even then, was known for its OEM work). This, his wide-eyed contact explains, would be impossible. Why getting the heroin at its source would require going into the deepest darkest jungles of Northern Thailand!

Sitting with a bottle of Singha in hand, amid the din of Bangkok street life (well the modern day filmed-in-Chiang-Mai representation), Lucas is not to be deterred and delivers one of the movie’s best lines: “I’m in the jungle. Look around. They’re eating roaches and whatever the hell that is.”

As fun as this scene and another brief one set in the Vietnam “R and R”-era or, more accurately by all accounts, the “I” and “I” (intoxication and intercourse)-era of New Phetchaburi Road are, especially for Bangkok viewers, the Southeast Asia drug connection, the logic of it, when considered, sets in a seed of doubt that only grows throughout the rest of this overlong, three-hour film.

It’s later revealed that Lucas arranged his drug shipments by having the contraband inserted into the body bags and caskets of US soldiers killed in the Vietnam War. Forget about the organizational complexity of pulling off something like that and the utter corruption it would require at every level of the process used to repatriate soldiers’ corpses, but isn’t there something just a bit too poetic about this deadly scourge (the strength of Lucas’s heroin was such that many users overdosed on it) entering the country via the hated Vietnam War? With grainy clips of Nixon and soldiers in Vietnam littered throughout the film, there seems to be a muddled political message in there somewhere and this method of drug delivery reinforces that with hammer-over-the-head subtlety.

As the Bangkok Post’s Alan Dawson wrote in a recent critique of the film, there is no proof whatsoever that the alleged “cadaver connection” ever existed. “A few people ‘remember’ it happened,” Dawson writes, “but a few equally credible people also remember they were terribly abused by aliens who abducted them to a neighboring galaxy.”

In actual fact, it was a serviceman named Ike Atkinson who pioneered the Southeast Asia-US drug circuit – Lucas was merely a fortunate buyer who profited heavily from the connection. Dawson sums up his critique by saying that “…right down to the ludicrous scene where Washington drives from the airport to New Petchaburi Road in a pedaled samlor, ‘American Gangster’ is very much fact-free.” (If, by some chance, Lucas did get a pedaled samlor from Don Meuang to Petchaburi Road, one hopes he tipped accordingly).

There’s no obligation for filmmakers to stick with historical facts when retelling a story, but these little flights of fancy begin to unravel the internal logic of the movie, and by the time the closing credits tell us that Lucas’s testimony helped put away three-quarters of New York Drug Enforcement Agents for corruption, we’re left smacking our heads in disbelief. With the possible exception of traffic police in the land of smiles, has there ever been a group of cops more prone to having their palms greased than that? Of course, this fact too appears to be have been made up.

There’s also something deeply unbelievable about Denzel Washington’s version of Frank Lucas. At one point he is in his neighborhood diner – it’s his usual hangout, as he is a folksy, down home sort of New York City gangster – and lecturing a country relative he’s brought in to help him in the drug trade on the importance of family, honesty and hard work. Is he an honest joe selling quality men’s footwear or a vicious gangster pushing heroin that is killing junkies all around town?

The real Frank Lucas, as seen in press for the film, is a course-sounding guy from South Carolina, who pipes up mainly whenever an opportunity arises to inflate his own reputation. (The film likely worked gangbusters in that regard as in real life Lucas’s testimony did put away several drug dealers and one could assume that snitches don’t get much street cred). He bears no resemblance to the refined and noble version of him played by Washington. The performance that Washington gives bears many similarities to the one he gave in the equally bad – and for many of the same reasons – Norman Jewison film “The Hurricane.”

Filmmaker Ridley Scott puts the audience in an uncomfortable position by framing this one too in terms of race, even having Washington invoke the name of Martin Luther King at one point. He outsmarts the Italians, and goes where no black man has gone before in the history of the drug trade. Are we to cheer on Lucas for his successes in hustling heroin, as if we were watching the Jackie Robinson story?

There are certainly enough gangster-movie clichés in this film to give Coppala and Scorsese a run for their money, including the cursory involvement of a long-suffering wife drawn in by the glitz and glamour of her husband’s riches, but left weeping as their castle in the sky falls to shit. How dull and overdone – at least Carmela Soprano had a movie club and some hobbies.

There is another major portion of this movie that features Russell Crowe, giving a far better performance than that offered by Washington, in the role of Detective Ritchie Roberts, the man who would ultimately bring Frank Lucas down. He is an unapologetically straight cop, but without the noble bearing and pretence of the Washington character. When he’s in divorce court for a hearing on custody rights for his kid, for example, he leans over to his female attorney and suggests that they make good use out of an upstairs interrogation room he knows about.

But those welcome bits of character and Crowe’s performance are not enough to save “American Gangster” from its portrayal of Lucas and the damage done by the cock-eyed story it tells. This is the kind of movie that must have looked great on paper. With its two Oscar-winning stars and director and an album released concurrently by Jay-Z to hype it even further, its backers must have surely seen themselves uncorking the bubbly at this year’s Academy Awards. But with two nominations, and minor ones at that, the “American Gangster” table won’t be that festive. It fell apart in the details – from the samlor ride into Bangkok on.

Noel, Bangkok

Shark-Bite Movie Review: Hancock -- A Few 40 ouncers short of a party

In Bangkok, we get the kind of movies that Ignatius Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” used to relish going to see – the kind that were so terrible they would provide him with ample material, for the mocking running commentaries ("A negation of all human qualities") he enjoyed loudly voicing while watching them in public.

It’s an oft-heard refrain here – particularly oft-heard if you’re in conversation with this writer after his editor kindly reminds him deadline IS TOMORROW – that 90 percent of the Hollywood films that are released in Bangkok are pure crapole, but the truth of that statement doesn’t lessen with repetition. And here I’m not talking about the output from that Thai comedy troupe who turns every third film made in this country into a mess of whoopee-cushion-like sound effects and different takes on the “why transvestites are hilarious” theme, but rather the stuff that’s put out so studios can make back the millions they spent financing a movie that will be remarkable in 25 years only for how infrequently it is the subject of any remarks (and they also need to distribute internationally so stars like Will Smith can flirt with cute reporters while on international promotional tours).

That Hollywood blockbusters need to recoup the third-world debt-like sums that it costs to make them explains why when looking at what movie to check out at my local theater in eastern Bangkok, my very best option was a film like “Hancock” – which I would otherwise have only seen while trapped on an airplane* or if I were incarcerated and this was all that was being shown on movie night.

[*Editor's note: For our list of the Top 10 Actors Guaranteed to Ruin your Transatlantic Flight, click here]

The premise for the movie is promising and has some great satirical potential. Hancock does what Superman does, but whereas Superman is free to zip around skies that seem to have been cleared specifically for him, Hancock kills birds in mid-air collisions and has to dodge planes. What’s more, unlike Clark Kent – a character with the piercing depth of a carp – Hancock is a brooder, he hangs around in cheap bars, and when one woman remarks that she can smell booze on his breath, gets pissed off, “That’s because I’ve been drinking, bitch!” After the movie’s opening act, you get the mistaken impression that the whole film might be about a superhero with the disposition and bonhomie of a morning after Charles Bukowski.

We meet Hancock as he’s sleeping off a hangover on a park bench. Bullets bounce off him, he survives having a mack truck dumped on his head, but his superpowers do not extend to hangovers – cheap whiskey, it would appear, is this man’s kryptonite.

When Hancock stops a gang of street toughs from shooting up the freeway, he’s not troubled by hero-worship. If you’re a taxpayer forced to foot the bill to have a bad guys’ car removed from the spire of the Capital Records building, you might be less than appreciative of Hancock’s efforts. Later, he rescues a man whose car is stuck in the path of an oncoming train. He does this by slamming his fist into the oncoming train and causing a wreck. Rather than being applauded for saving the life of a stranger, he’s heckled: “Why didn’t you carry the car up and away rather than stopping the train with your fist?”, he’s asked.

Jason Bateman plays Ray Embry, the guy he rescues from the oncoming train. To pay Hancock back for saving his life, Embry offers him the only thing he can – unsolicited PR advice. He suggests that the first step towards Hancock improving his image would be to answer the countless subpoenas out there for him and actually serve some time in jail once he’s convicted. Hancock does this and the filmmakers get some comedic mileage out of a jail sequence – the prisoners, all of whom Hancock put there, are still inexplicably of the impression that they could take him in a square-go and attempt to bully him in the tradition of welcomes given to all new prison arrivals. He makes them pay for it by using one man’s head and another man’s anus in a way that is probably funny to 14-year-olds, but anatomically hard to believe.

After “Juno”, a deserving entrant in the blog/book “Stuff White People Like”, Jason Bateman it would appear is the face of the white liberal whose heart is bleeding so profusely it no longer circulates anything to important arteries. He has a Woodstock poster in his house and basically he makes Al Gore look like the kind of guy who would pee in or otherwise foul the town water supply. Aside from one scene in which he takes an unexpected and highly welcome swipe at Bono, Ray Embry is a grating weenie. At one point in the movie, Hancock helps a giddily drunk – this guy doesn’t get drunk, he gets squiffy – Embry to his bedroom and after that it seems like Hancock might make a move on Bateman’s wife Mary, played by Charlize Theron. This scene was one of the few in recent memory in which I can actually recall wishing a cuckolding on a character in a film.

The film’s second half springs out of the tensions between Hancock and Mary, and, while it did have the element of surprise on its side, this was tempered by the fact that it this major plot turn was ludicrous, arbitrary and that it came at a point when I had long ago stopped caring about how this film was going to resolve itself.

What we’re left with is a good performance from Will Smith, he makes a good mean-whiskey drunk and that's no small compliment, and some fun goofs on the superhero genre – the best of these being Hancock’s attempt to save the life of a beached whale by flinging it back into the ocean... just his luck that a sailboat would be there to meet it at the landing point. Mostly though, it’s a movie with no concerted focus, one that starts out as fun satire and quickly degenerates into the very kind of film it was making fun of in the first place.

Vincent Ngo is credited with the screenplay and apparently it's been “in development” for the past 10 years. When the film came out, Ngo kept out of the spotlight, saying only that his Hancock money would be used to finance a school in Vietnam. The original script was given the unfortunate title, “Tonight He Comes”, (insert your filthy joke here and swap them with your friends) and reportedly was completely different from what went up on screen. Collider.com tells us though that this was not the case of Hollywood stomping a great artistic vision; their hilarious review of Ngo’s original script ran with the headline, “Original Hancock Script Approximately 9 Billion Times Worse than Hacky Studio Rewrite”.

What we're left with then is a film that was never that good. A fun idea and a solid premise that may have been turned into something satirical from start to finish, but one that's used up in the first half hour of the film. One imagines that Ignatius, him of the sensitive heart-valve, wouldn't have made it through this one.

Click here for a review of a movie that got the drunk superhero idea right.

Top 10 Actors Whose Crappy Movies are Guaranteed to be Shown on a Plane!

As a captive audience for PS I Love You, and not the kind of captive audience that could at least interrupt the proceedings by shanking the warden, it seems there are certain actors whose films are more likely to be shown on commercial flights than others.

Unlike a typical movie theater audience, for whom dozing off would be a common, though unintended outcome for many of these movies, in-flight screenings are to 300 plus worn out travelers, who'd rather be sleeping before the rolling of either the opening credits or the drinks cart.

Like trains before them, the first commercial flights were long ago associated with all the glamor and prestige of a champagne and orange juice breakfast rather than today when they're more commonly linked to microwavable butter chicken/unidentifiable protein plastic tray repasts.

These days, unless you're in first class, where cherries dipped in Belgian chocolate are dangled into eager mouths, you're more likely to encounter nose-hair singeing B.O. re-circulated throughout the cabin, howling infants who due to FAA restrictions unfortunately cannot be stowed in overhead compartments and limits on how many rum & Cokes can be downed before a stern reprimand and a dip into that duty free gin that sits in your carry on.

The in-flight movie is meant to be a two-hour diversion from such unpleasantness, not to mention the strain of patella bones jammed into eye sockets with the impromptu reclining of the seat in front, whose occupant then goes on to remove their socks, an apt sensory accompaniment to the on-screen 'entertainment'.

The problem is, these bottom-feeding MOR vehicles don't dare offend anyone, so what the weary traveler is left with, are some of the films listed here.

In PS I Love You, shown on a recent Amsterdam to Toronto flight and mercifully, not the reverse as well, or else the integrity of the cabin door would've been tested for a quick exit into space, either Jennifer Garner or Hilary Swank portray a woman haunted by posthumous letters left by her husband.
[Editor's note: it's very likely Swank and Garner are the same person, though confirmatory calls to her/their agent have gone unreturned]

These dispatches, carefully prepared by the hubbie while he knew he'd be dispatched to that great, big, airplane hangar in the sky, were designed ostensibly to help her 'get on with her life'. This, despite what is obvious to everyone else on screen, the cockpit crew, your seat-mate who is drooling like a bull mastiff and anyone who's stowed luggage under their seats--- that it is in fact doing the exact opposite, and is undeniably creepy.

Here is a list of the top actors in Hollywood who are most likely to make you wish you'd remembered to pack a sleep mask, or decided against that Tampa time-share.

Perennial 30-something slacker, Matthew McConaughey has a film resume peppered with in-flight staples (Fool's Gold, Failure to Launch, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Sahara), films so lengthy and wretched, you'd wish Air France would re-commission the Concorde to make that transatlantic trip in 3 hours, long enough to ensure that once meals are served, complimentary peanuts doled out, and supersonic gas fumes inhaled, there wouldn't be time left to take in any of his rotten oeuvre.




Sandra Bullock. On a trip to Milan, Italy several years back, I was initiated into a select fraternity: not the Freemasons, which would've meant bypassing the lineups in the country's finest museums and voting in their election, but along with several hundred or so of my fellow passengers, we were forced to sit through Miss Congeniality, not once, but twice. In this ostensible comedy, which guffaw for guffaw, easily matched that of the Asian tsunami disaster, Bullock plays an FBI agent who, to thwart a bombing, must go undercover in a beauty pageant despite being old enough to have given birth to all the contestants. Her latest work, 'All About Steve' is currently in post-production, and judging by the title alone, you'll be treated to it on that trip to Heathrow or Charles de Gaulle sometime next year.

Kirsten Dunst. Though still quite young, the fanged blonde has a lengthy career in commercial aviation-related entertainment ahead of her, having shown great potential in Bring it On, Drop Dead Gorgeous, and of course, Spider Man I and II.

Owen Wilson earned his wings in several charter-ready flicks, including the extraordinarily unwatchable Drillbit Taylor, The Darjeeling Limited, You, Me and Dupree, Starsky & Hutch, Night at the Museum.



Ryan Reynolds has a crappy in-flight movie resume longer than the runway for the new Airbus A380, with Definitely Maybe, The In-Laws, Chaos Theory and Just Friends. Apropos of nothing, he was once engaged to the ironically talented Alanis (Why the long face?) Morissette.


Kate Hudson. Since giving a decent accounting of herself in the Cameron Crowe period piece Almost Famous, the offspring of Goldie Hawn and somebody almost famous named Hudson, has rung up a string of flicks that have been shown while cruising at 30,000 feet. These include How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Alex & Emma, Le Divorce, Raising Helen, You, Me and Dupree and Fool's Gold. Her place in this list will be solidified well into 2010 with the filming of Bride Wars and My Best Friend's Girl (currently in post production), flicks that passengers will comfortably doze through shortly, barring any kind of heavy turbulence or hijacking threats.


Dermot Mulroney. With Griffin & Phoenix, The Family Stone, Must Love Dogs and the Wedding Date under his belt, Mulroney is a shoe-in for the world of fixed wing propulsive thrust cinema.






Robin Williams. Unlike leg-warmers and hairspray, the hirsute Williams' coke-fueled 'humor' has not seen a resurgence in popularity from the 80s. The guy responsible for not only writing the book on family-friendly, barely serviceable comedy, but penning the foreword and editing it as well, RW has added to the dreariness of modern flight with RV, Man of the Year, Night at the Museum, License to Wed, Patch Adams, Goodwill Hunting, Mrs Doubtfire, Toys, Hook, Awakenings, and Dead Poets Society.



Julia Roberts Roberts is the queen of feel-good fare that should have an FAA restriction on it, Notting Hill, My Best Friend's Wedding, Runaway Bride, America's Sweethearts, Full Frontal (in which she isn't) Closer, and Mona Lisa Smile, though it's more of a smirk.

Hugh Grant. The undisputed king, the Sovereign of the Skies and the only member of this list, whose each and every film could upset stomachs between in-flight meals.

Shark-Bite Movie Review: Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian -- My Kingdom for a Squirrel

One of the more interesting author friendships was that of Chronicles of Narnia writer C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien (the former’s name stood for Clive Staples and the latter John Ronald Reuel, so it was a sound call made by publishers to initialize the pair of them). Lewis was enthusiastic when Tolkien published his first Rings book, but when Lewis came out with “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe”, his buddy was nonplussed, saying, “Hey mate, read your book, it was shite, went too heavy on the religious allegory you did.” Or a cleaned up version of that said while smoking a pipe.

Tolkien was himself a deeply religious man; he is said to have been a major influence on C.S. Lewis’s conversion (and judging by his output in later life which consisted of volumes like “God in the Dock” and “The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses” the conversion took). Still though, he found the religious aspects of the Narnia books to be so obvious and pushy that he felt they would alienate the reader. Surely in the first film and book “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”, we get a dose of Lewis’s religious fervor that couldn’t have been any more obvious even if the creatures of Narnia had started seeing the face of Aslan in their breakfast burritos. The lion was clearly meant to represent Christ with some scenes lifted wholesale out of the bible.

The second film “Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” does not contain any scenes as blatantly allegorical as the lionine crucifixion in part one, but it’s run through with the same themes. Lewis wrote in a letter that Caspian was a story of “the restoration of the true religion after a corruption" and we are given grim examples throughout the film of what supposedly happens to a country that loses its faith. The only truly happy person in the opening part of the film is Lucy because she is an innocent child and hasn’t lost her faith like everybody else. Losing your faith here means misery, unless you’re a heathen Telmarine and if so, well, now would be a good time to take out a life-insurance policy.

This may be unsettling for someone whose religious observances consist of thanking a deity when a pregnancy test comes back the right way, but can the Narnia series be enjoyed without looking through this Christian lens? The answer is yes and that’s because the best parts of both of these films are also the most universal. Adults who count the Narnia books as among the first they ever read (or remember reading) will not remember the clumsy religious symbolism with Aslan the Lion in the role of Christ, but the spirit of adventure that was invoked by the possibilities of another world existing beyond the hum-drum in which average kids – the Pevensky four of Peter (who looks like Prince William in what was surely an intentional bit of casting by the UK filmmakers), Edmund, Susan and Lucy – become knights, have sword fights, meet magical creatures, and are, well, movers and shakers just like the grown-ups.

The four return to Narnia after a surprisingly short time in the present day, but enough to establish the present day as a place that stinks – Peter and Edmund get in a fight in the stairs of a subway station, Susan must fend off a nerd – and that is enough. Shortly thereafter we go from the mundane to the magical. The Prince of Caspian is an undeniably good looking film, with lush exteriors that rely less on computer-generated effects (though the CG animators earned their pay in the battle scenes and with the Narnian creatures) and more on the natural beauty of the filming locations (among them New Zealand).

The four kids are dropped into a Narnia that is startlingly different from the one they left. The heathen Telmarine – who seem to be Spanish for some odd reason – have taken over the land and the Narnians have long ago been driven underground. Some of the animals have become downright uncivil – a bear tries to maul little Lucy who must have been thinking of all the high teas she used to enjoy with wild creatures in the good old days.

The title character, Prince Caspian is involved in a “getting back the throne that is rightfully mine” cookie-cutter plot, and his uncle, though played with a devilish glee is a stereotypical character found in countless films along these lines. He does though provides a possible love interest for Susan, whose romantic prospects have improved immeasurably since she was back in London and had a nerd hitting on her at the newsstand. But Prince Caspian himself is not that interesting – it’s as if Inigo Montoya, Mandy Patinkin’s character in the Princess Bride, fathered a really dull son.

For the most part the supporting characters, like a chivalrous and deadly squirrel, pass us by unnoticed. A key exception here is Peter Dinklage who plays Trumkin the dwarf who helps out the lead characters, but whose skills as an actor – watch his face as he’s in a boat staring down his Telmarine captors – shine. He was excellent in his star-making turn in “The Station Agent”, and he might just become the first dwarf actor regularly cast into roles that do not necessarily call for a dwarf because of his skill.

Caspian is not on the level of the first Narnia movie. The awe of a first-time discovery – finding the magical wardrobe – cannot, of course, be repeated. But it’s a faithful adaptation of Lewis’s classic tale, a fun swashbuckler and an escape from the tedium, which is when the Narnia tales, when they were at their best, were all about.

Noel, Bangkok

Shark-Bite Movie Review: Rambo -- Expat Executioner's Song

Vietnam vet John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) is an impressive specimen of the Thailand expat species. He speaks the language fluently, is comfortable outside of a serviced condominium – indeed he’s on more intimate terms with Thailand’s backwoods than a forest monk – and one would assume, given his demeanor, that he’s utterly unconcerned about visa runs. And he might have had to make a couple; after all he’s been here 20 years, or so we can assume from the continuum established in the earlier films.

“Rambo III”, you’ll remember, began with our bandana-wearing friend dividing his time between restoring a temple and bashing people with sticks for a fistful of 100 baht notes in Bangkok pit fights. Still, this was Rambo’s “Phra Farang” (Western monk) period: his stick-fighting money went strictly to temple upkeep. Rambo, like many farang temple dwellers, was on a journey of self-discovery and he eventually found out that restoring Buddha statues to their initial glory was just not in his genetic makeup – staging one-man wars is though and he did that teaming up with err… the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

And now, in “John Rambo” (“Rambo” in the US), we find our hero once again in Thailand and he has still yet to answer the call “Rambo, to thine one self be true.” Rather than indulging himself in the work he loves and is obviously incredibly skilled at – the wholesale slaughter of baddies – he instead has a job that may not even be included on the list of jobs forbidden for foreigners simply because it would not have occurred to a Thai bureaucrat that a foreigner would ever want the gig: poisonous snake-catching in Northern Thailand. How exactly did Rambo get here and what has he been up to in the intervening 20 years? What did Rambo think of the coup and who did he vote for on Academy Fantasia? Perhaps the next movie could focus on Rambo’s life as an expat: Som Tam Rambo: He came for the killing, he stays for the spices.

But, of course, Thailand is just a jumping off point in this film. The focus of this one is Burma, specifically the plight of the Karen ethnic minority there. Rambo is approached by a group of Christian missionaries looking to get into a Karen village and they’ve heard that Rambo knows the Salween better than anyone.

The plot could be drawn along a straight line with various mushroom clouds interspersed along it to represent points of great carnage: Rambo takes the missionaries to Burma, they get kidnapped and imprisoned, a priest requests that he and a group of soldiers of fortune go in and rescue them and they – outnumbered by scores of Burmese soldiers – do just that with the parts of more than one Burmese soldier landing in a separate postal district along the way. The mercenaries could seemingly have been picked out of any low-rent backpacker district in Thailand; one of them throws an empty Beer Chang into the Salween River during the boat trip, while a hard-arsed Brit oddly curses a stick-wielding Burmese major by saying “Come on and have a go at me you ladyboy cunt!”

The violence in this one is something you won’t see outside of gorefest video games. This is the most violent film I can recall and is said to have a kill count of 236, a Rambo record (the Rambo character only had 59 confirmed kills throughout his entire tour in Vietnam, so he’s really made the most of civilian/mercenary life) and that the film averages 2.59 killings per minute. There are guts galore in this one and more than one case of an exploding person to contend with – indeed this would be a truly horrific thing to see in 3D with the various body parts shooting every which way at top speed.

Stallone says the violence was meant to underscore the genuine horror of what’s going on in Burma. As a recent Asia Times article points out, those on the ground say that as vicious as the Burmese Army is in Karen areas and as horrible as the crimes they committed are, the scale of what’s taking place in Rambo could only come out of the movies. Rapes of Karen villagers by Burmese soldiers are common, but cases crop up in ones and twos – the hellish red-smoke-filled rape orgy that punctuates the film’s early rescue scene is a fiction, they say.

That observation is fair enough, but the fact that international Burmese activist groups have lauded this movie and actual Karen soldiers have reportedly been making its catchphrase “Live for nothing, die for something” their own should be enough to spare Stallone from critiques who say he’s exploiting the Karen situation for his own wallet. A more realistic account of the Karen situation couldn’t be done under the Rambo franchise: villagers being forced to starve in mountains by army officials just does not lend itself to the video-game blast-em-up cathartic action that is the reason people go to see Rambo movies.

This is the most entertaining and best directed of the Rambo films since First Blood, and if, along with this, a fraction of this film’s enormous international audience went online and researched a little more into the truth of the Karen situation in Burma, then Sly’s revisit of the Rambo franchise was doubly worth it.

Noel, Bangkok

Shark-Bite Movie Review: Soul's Code -- Khun Pleum belongs on a Wheaties box

ML Nattakorn Devakula, or “Khun Pleum", is Thailand’s answer to Brad Pitt. If you don’t believe me, just ask him; according to an entertainment column published in The Nation, Pleum himself made the claim in an email sent to friends encouraging them to see the movie. He likened his turn in “Soul’s Code” to Brad Pitt’s performance in the David Fincher film “Seven”.

Surely that’s an exaggeration Khun Pleum?! “That's not an exaggeration," The Nation quotes him as writing. "Must see it whether you like me or not [this is an odd condition to place in an email to friends]. This will be one of my legacies of the year to remember."

Khun Pleum might soon be the most “legacy”-heavy man in all of Thailand. He’s stacking up a pile of them. Those who aren’t familiar with Khun Pleum can quickly cure that ignorance by a) turning on the television: he’s on a host of programmes, even a game show! b) reading the Bangkok Post where he’s a columnist c) turning on the radio: he reads and discusses the news, and has even cut a pop album or d) merely looking up: he’s bound to be on a billboard or moving advertisement selling cars or toothpaste somewhere near you.

In “Soul’s Code”, Pleum plays elite Department of Special Investigation officer Kanon, who is assigned to investigate the case of a teenage girl found bludgeoned to death and stuffed into a cardboard box left behind a monastery. Fingerprinting of the box at this juncture might well have saved the DSI from having to pay overtime hours later on, but why split hairs?

Pleum plays the classic “tough cop with a history that you’d better not ask about for fear of a tongue lashing or worse”. Fortunately, the movie stays away from anything much having to do with the internal workings of the Kanon character and thus avoids overtaxing Pleum, who is at his best in quick moving scenes that require little more from him than a hard stare. When the camera lingers, as in the scene in which Kanon surveys the monastery where the body was found, Pleum’s lack of rhythm shows in the long pauses preceding the delivery of his lines.

Pleum’s other major thumbprint on this one is the presence of Nissan cars throughout. Take note of a scene where Kanon is an on all-night stake out in his Nissan. See how comfortable he looks with the front seat reclined– not a hint of lower back pain despite all that sitting! What comfort! What a car!

Ning’s (Napat Bhunjongjit-pisan) story is tied to that of Cee, a pop singer on the way down. When he finds out Ning is a hooker, making outcalls out of an Internet parlour to high rollers so that she can support his unemployed yet-to-be-discovered ass, he dumps her and takes up with Prae, a wealthy “model” who he can also mooch off and who eventually helps him realize his dreams of pop stardom. (Isn’t the artist’s life grand?)

In the interim, Ning gets brutally murdered. The main suspect is “Mister X”, a mafia boss who digitally records himself having it off with prostitutes. Ning waits until randy Mister X hits the shower before she copies these little vignettes onto her mobile phone. Included among them is “X” rigging a bid on a public-works project and Kanon assumes that he had her rubbed out to keep her from spreading this information. Cee, unceremoniously dumped by Prae and driven to alcoholism at the news of Ning’s murder, pushes him to solve the case.

Kanon’s colleague Nicha (Premsinee Ratanasopha) cautions him that all is not as it appears. In a telling scene, she warns him that because he was educated abroad (in more than one Thai movie, an education abroad robs the recipient of common sense), he relies too much on “facts”. Back in the old days, she says, and indeed even now, detectives worked closely with “special assistants” i.e. the souls of the murdered. “Let the spirit guide you”, is essentially what this high-ranking policewoman is advising.

Kanon responds with the logical question: If the dead woman is actively involved in the case, why doesn’t she give him some hard evidence; couldn’t she just plop the murder weapon down next to his morning coffee and save everybody a headache?

But this is a ghost movie, though one with little suspense that isn’t artificially created through clichés of the genre: characters in these films should avoid lingering in front of mirrors, and theatre sound systems are a director’s best friend when it comes to using brooding music and a subsequent loud crash to drive home a fright.

This is a film made boring by convention where the interesting bits are to be found at its edges – in the characters living in rundown stinking apartments in Lat Prao who consort with pimps and live off their callgirl girlfriends and the thin veneer separating all of this from the capped-tooth world of the “superstar”. There’s a movie to be made in these margins, and perhaps, if Khun Pleun has not become prime minister or the first Thai astronaut by the time a sequel comes up, he can take the starring role.

Noel, Bangkok

Editor's Note: After this review was published in Sukhumvit Eye, Khun Pleum announced that he was running for Bangok governor. The other three horsemen of the Apocalypse are saddling up. And for more on Thai movies, check out the best English-language site on the Internet about Thai film -- Wisekwai's Thai film journal.

Shark-Bite Movie Review: I Am Legend -- I Make Bad Movie

The idea of one day being “the last man on earth” holds a dark and undeniable appeal. Perhaps it has something to do with the thought of all the women who would have to reconsider their declaration that they wouldn’t date you, even if you were just that – living up to that promise when all other male options have succumbed to some horrible plague, might be more difficult than they imagine (provided we’re talking about a gender-selective purging). Or maybe it’s the thought of having your surroundings open to you like some sort of giant abandoned amusement park. Throngs of sweating fellow tourists and their screaming kids would be a thing of the past, and you’d never be forced to pony up for an exorbitant park-entrance fee again (or pull out your work permit and explain to a guard that you’re due the local price). It’s here, in this realm of fancy, that “I Am Legend”, the blockbuster film that set a box-office record for ticket sales in the US in December, works best.

The film opens with Will Smith, as Dr. Robert Neville, zipping around in a sports car through a post-apocalyptic New York, so familiar to those who have been there or those who know it through films, but one that has gone to seed, with weeds breaking through the pavement, and deer running around – they are highly motivated to run, both because of the lions on the loose throughout the city and Dr. Neville, who hunts them on Park Avenue (which is a bit strange: why, with his endless supply of canned food, would he bother?).

Still, it’s fun to watch, and exhilarating too to think of the possibilities – knocking golf balls from the deck of the aircraft carrier Intrepid, while your German Shepherd stands sentry looks like a lot of fun, though Neville’s imagination has its limits: at one point it is revealed that he has devoted a significant portion of his time in solitude to memorizing the dialogue of the kid’s movie “Shrek” line-by-line. Well, nowhere is it written that the last man on earth has to be cool. The fun and imagination of the first part of the film is outdone by the rest of it. Without going into too much detail, Neville faces a crisis at one point that is resolved in a way that wholly contradicts the rules already established by the film.

Other reviews have pointed out logical faults in this one, but there is perhaps no greater one than seeing all bridges to Manhattan blown up and then having a key plot point rest on the absolute need for that not to have happened. There are hints, here and there, in the fun of the first act, of the sorry third act that is to come. The opening scene is the most revealing of all. Emma Thompson, in a cameo as a scientist, is being interviewed after the good news that she has just cured cancer. It is her cure for cancer that mutates into this terrible plague that turns humans into obvious CGI-generated monsters (film critic Roger Ebert made the very sound point “How, I always wonder, do human beings in all their infinite shapes and sizes mutate into identical pale zombies with infinite speed and strength?”) that come out only at night for psychotic violence and destruction.

Yes, this is the first movie I’ve seen where the cure for cancer is the enemy. That little tidbit and a few others provide hints of what is to come, but nothing that fully prepares the viewer for the movie’s conclusion. Again, without spoiling it (though is there fault to be found in spoiling a terrible ending?), the movie’s theme, raised by the Emma Thompson character’s careless meddling on behalf of science reaches a “faith-based” conclusion, and a closing scene that will make you cringe.

It’s a disappointment because up until it went down that road, it was a fun movie and certainly far better than the most recent attempt to bring Richard Matheson’s novel “I Am Legend” to the big screen, Charlton Heston’s “The Omega Man”, which has aged so terribly that it can only be enjoyed as camp. That this movie was such a major draw in the US hopefully points to Will Smith’s star power – after all he did draw people in droves to see the terrible “Bad Boys” pictures – and not the public embracing its overall prehistoric, anti-science theme. Now that would be a cause for concern.

-- Noel, Bangkok