FILM REVIEW OF ''THE GOODS: LIVE HARD, SELL HARD" (2009)

Freshman director Neal Brennan’s glib, irreverent, R-rated comedy “The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard” (* out of ****) qualifies as a clunker that delivers little but lame laughs about an arrogant used car liquidator. Nothing in this contrived comedy is a tenth as side-splitting as Robert Zemeckis’ supremely silly saga “Used Cars” (1980) that co-starred Kurt Russell and Jack Warden. “Talladega Nights” producers Adam McKay and Will Ferrell along with first-time scenarists Andy Stock and Rick Stempson sink their first-rate cast with nothing but stinking jokes and crude routines that flatten on impact. Nevertheless, Jeremy Piven, Ving Rhames, David Koechner, Kathryn Hahn, James Brolin and Charles Napier humble and humiliate themselves without a qualm. Napier is especially militant as a chauvinistic, foul-mouthed World War II veteran, while James Brolin’s masquerade as tired hubby gone gay who hits on straight guy David Koechner is more inept than funny.

You know you’re in trouble when the best gag in the movie has an Asian-American car salesman accepting an official bank money bag as payment for the vehicle as the customer swerves off the lot. No sooner does the salesman pop open the bag than blue paint from a canister inside blinds him. As he staggers away, he shrieks, “I feel like I just got jizzed by a smurf.” The next best joke has Piven quizzing an unsuspecting person with: “How much did the polar bear weigh?” As the puzzled respondent shrugs, Piven replies, “Enough to break the ice.” This gag gives him the opportunity to introduce himself.

Don Ready (Jeremy Piven of HBO’s “The Entourage”) makes his living selling cars that nobody else could pawn. He has been selling autos since he was a kid. He knew that he had the knack when he sold his hippity-hop ball with designer handles to another neighborhood kid for the latter’s deluxe, low-riding, plastic tricycle with streamers sprouting from the handle bars. Since then Don has been selling and he hasn’t looked back. Don has assembled an A-Team of used car sales people that include Jibby Newsome (Ving Rhames of “Pulp Fiction”), Brent Gage (David Koechner of “The Comebacks”), and Babs Merrick (Kathryn Hahn of “Stepbrothers”) who can clear car lots with their questionable tactics.

Don receives a call from Benjamin K. Selleck (James Brolin of “The Amityville Horror”) who is about to lose his family-owned used car lot to the bank. When our heroes arrive in the small California town of Temecula, Don mobilizes the local strippers, hires an obnoxious dee-jay, DJ Request (Craig Robinson of “The Pineapple Express”), who refuses to play anything that anybody requests, plants a gigantic inflatable gorilla atop the dealership, and a schedules appearance from the brother of a celebrity vocalist. They have to sell around 200 cars during the July fourth weekend. Matters are complicated somewhat by Selleck’s family, particularly his daughter, Ivy Selleck (Jordana Spiro of “From Dusk Till Dawn 3”), who is dating another car dealer in town, Paxton Harding (Ed Helms of “The Hangover”). In fact, she is Paxton’s fiancée, but this doesn’t dissuade Don from going after her and likewise. Meanwhile, Paxton’s father Stu Harding (Alan Thicke of “Alpha Dog”) wants to buy Selleck Motors so that his son can have a place to rehearse for his boy band. Don persuades Selleck not to sell, even promising him a night in the sack with Brent. Of course, Brent is happy with the prospect of such a rendezvous.

Meanwhile, Don and Ivy hit it off and she wants to learn more about him. Like most movie heroes, Don has a skeleton in his closet and he hasn’t exorcised this demon. Don lost one of his best salesmen, McDermott (Will Ferrell), during a car stunt gone wrong. McDermott dived out of a plane dressed like Abraham Lincoln and when he pulled the ripcord to his parachute, dildos flew out. Meanwhile, on the ground in the back of a car, Don is having sex with a woman in the back seat when he discovers that he has the parachute. McDermott dies and Don still feels the guilt. Eventually, Don and the ghost of McDermott with two female African-American vocalists in robes visit him and they straighten everything out.

Meanwhile, Don has abandoned his team because he feels so guilty about McDermott, but Selleck’s sales staff pulls together and they manage to sell every car on the lot, except for a sports car that was one of the many used on the “Smoky and the Bandit” movie that Selleck managed to acquire. Stu and Paxton come to take the keys to the car lot because the sports car is still on the lot. By this time, Don has gotten back and he manages to sell the vehicle to Paxton after he convinces him that he can use it as a prop in his boy band act. At the same time, another subplot concerns one of Selleck’s car dealers, Blake (Vince Vaughn look-alike Jonathan Sadowski of the new “Friday the 13th”) whose father left his mother and she had to raise him alone. Blake’s moves after he makes a successful car sale are an exact imitation of Don’s moves. Furthermore, Don hasn’t been in Temecula in for more than 20 years and Blake is 21, so Don imagines that Blake is his son. As it turns out, Blake isn’t his son, but that doesn’t keep Don from adopting him when he marries Ivy at the conclusion of “The Goods.” The epilogue informs us that Don and Ivy split up after two years and Blake moved on. While all this is going on, Babs has the hots for Selleck’s 10-year old son Peter Selleck (Rob Riggle of “The Hangover”) who has a pituitary gland problem so that he looks like a 30-year old man with a 10-year old trapped in his body. Babs stops selling cars and goes to work at a boys counseling school where Peter is set to enroll.

If this description of the plot doesn’t dissuade you from wasting your time on “The Goods,” then you may actually like this numbskull comedy.

FILM REVIEW OF ''HALLOWEEN" (2007)

You’ll have to look long and hard to find a remake more reverential to its source material than director Rob Zombie’s version of the 1978 John Carpenter classic “Halloween.” Before Zombie took on the daunting task of making “Halloween,” he had two fairly decent but horribly depraved epic under his belt with “House of 1000 Corpses” and “The Devil’s Rejects.” I preferred “Corpses” over “Rejects,” and I didn’t have high hopes to the blasphemy that he would visit on the first Michael Myers outing. Surprising, Zombie’s take on Carpenter’s “Halloween” is just about the best remake that anybody could have dreamed. “Halloween” (**** out of ****)doesn’t even look like it was helmed by the same guy who made either “Corpses” or “Rejects.” Sure, Zombie made some heavyweight changes to the story, but everything comes together without a hitch. Despite all of the freaky problems that Zombi recounts on the commentary track to the unrated & uncut “Halloween,” this remake should make John Carpenter feel great and anybody who like the original “Halloween” should have a soft spot for Zombi’s remake that he not only directed but also wrote. The casting choices for the new “Halloween” are right on the money, too.

The original “Halloween” contained a brief prologue about murderous Michael Myers, but Zombie devotes almost 40 minutes to setting up the action that takes place some 15-years after Michael breaks out of person. Actually, apart from the extended prologue that scrutinizes Michael’s early years, Zombie doesn’t make any radical departures from the John Carpenter & Debra Hill screenplay. As the story unfolds, we find ourselves in a battlefield of a household with Deborah Myers (Sheri Moon Zombi of “The Devil’s Rejects”) preparing breakfast for young 10-year old Michael (Daeg Faerch of Dark Mirror”), her second husband Ronnie White (William Forsythe of “Once Upon A Time in America”), her teenage daughter Judith (Hanna Hall of “Forrest Gump”), and her infant daughter Laurie. Ronnie is a foul-mouthed reprobate who cannot give his stripper wife a hard enough time and he has nothing but contempt for young Michael who he constantly refers to as a faggot. Although Zombi doesn’t go into details, Michael slices up his pet rat in the first scene before Deborah dispatches Judith to bring him downstairs for breakfast. If the merciless barrages of profanity that Ronnie launches at him are not enough, Michael has to endure ridicule from school bully Wesley Rhoades (Daryl Sabara of “Spy Kids”) who shows him a newspaper strip joint clipping about his mother and makes several sickening comments about her to his face. This fracas in the boys’ restroom attracts the attention of school principal Chambers (Richard Lynch of Cyborg 3”) and Chambers later discovers a dead cat in a plastic bag in young Michael’s locker.

An angry Deborah comes to the school at Chamber’s request and refuses to believe that her angelic son could be a sadistic little brat who tortures helpless animals. Later, Michael stalks the slimy Rhoades and attacks him the woods with a big stick and beats him to death. Back at home, Michael wants to go trick or treating, but nobody wants to take him. Mom has to strip at the joint and Judith wants to make out with her boyfriend. Again, Michael must suffer through another profane barrage from the evil Ronnie. Eventually, Ronnie runs out of steam and falls asleep in his recliner. Zombi does a splendid job of showing young Michael’s dejection as he sits outside the house and watches other trick or treat while his mother has to strip to support her family. Zombi uses the pop tune “Love Hurts.” Michael snaps, goes back inside, duct-tapes Ronnie to his recliner and slashes his throat. Meantime, Judith’s boyfriend shows her his Halloween mask, which is a replica of the one from the original “Halloween.” Later, Michael stabs the boyfriend to death and finishes off his sister. Naturally, Deborah is devastated when she comes home. Earlier, at Michael’s school, a psychologist Dr. Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell of “If”) had been called in by Chambers.

Michael is sent to a mental asylum where he endures hours of interviews with a sympathetic Loomis, but Michael gradually retreats behind the masks that he makes rather than discuss his life. Deborah gives up all hope and commits suicide while watching home movies of Michael. At this point, about 40 minutes has elapsed and Zombi has done a simply brilliant job of providing Michael’s back story. Fifteen years elapses and Loomis has to throw in the towel where Michael is concerned but not before he authors a book about the evil that is Michael. The next time we see Michael, he has grown into a powerful, seven-foot man. Mind you, in the hands of anybody else, this sudden transformation into a walking redwood tree would be hilarious, but it actually works for Zombi. Michael (Taylor Mane of “Troy”) escapes after a couple of crazy redneck attendants invade his room with a catatonic female inmate and brutally rape her while calling virginal Michael a faggot. Michael snaps again. He kills both of them and then massacres everybody else, though we never see him kill the female patient. Any sympathy that we might have conjured up for Michael vanishes when he kills the one orderly, Ismael Cruz (Danny Trejo of “Con-Air”), by drowning him. Michael sets out to track down Baby Boo who has grown up to become Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton of “Sleepover”) who lives with her foster parents, Cynthia Strode (Dee Wallace of “10”) and Mason Strode (Pat Skipper), back in Haddonfield.

The asylum alerts Dr. Loomis about Michael’s escape and he heads to Haddonfield to alert Sheriff Lee Brackett (Brad Dourif of “Dune”) who doesn’t believe a word. At this point, Zombi makes some minor changes, but basically replicates Carpenter’s “Halloween,” even with the scene involving the boyfriend wearing the white sheet like a ghost as he has sex with Brackett’s daughter. Meanwhile, Laurie has no idea that she is being stalked until all hell breaks loose and Michael comes after her. Before he embarks on his second killing spree, Michael recovers the mask from his old home and takes his mom’s cemetery tombstone. He catches Laurie’s friend but he doesn’t kill her in a refreshing change of pace. The last 20 minutes are simply tour-de-force with Michael stalking Laurie and Loomis hot on their trail. The cast is superb, even in the minor roles with “Monkees” star Micky Dolenz playing a gun salesman and Sybil Danning as the asylum nurse that young Michael slaughters with a fork. A number of other good thespians flesh out the cast in minor roles with effective performances. Look for Sid Haig and Bill Moseley in cameo along with Udo Kier and Clint Howard. The music is pretty much the same and you can see excerpts from Howard Hawks “The Thing” and Bela Lugosi from “White Zombie.” One of the ironic scenes occurs after Michael returns to Haddonfield and he gets to watch the ending of “The Thing,” the same movie that he started watching on the night he snapped and went on a murder spree. Here he invades another house and watches the scene without a word while a little girl sits in front of him watching the movie without a clue that hulking Michael stands within an arm’s reach of her. Rob Zombie’s remake of “Halloween” is nothing short of brilliant and he deserves to have praised heaped on him. He shows incredible restraint in duplicating Carpenter’s legendary chiller and looks as if he were deliberately soft pedaling what could easily have been a savage yarn.

FILM REVIEW OF ''INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS" (2009)

“Pulp Fiction” director Quentin Tarantino has taken Italian filmmaker Enzo G. Castellari's cult World War II thriller “Inglorious Bastards” (1978) and reimagined it as a cinematic atrocity entitled “Inglourious Basterds.” Castellari’s riveting mission-behind-enemy-lines thriller about a group of court-martialed Allied deserters led by Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson qualified as an electrifying actioneer with charismatic characters and several surprises. Tarantino’s tasteless tale not only lacks charismatic characters but it also boasts no surprises.

A bombastic piece of wartime crap containing Brad Pitt’s worst performance, “Inglourious Basterds”(* out of ****)--with its deliberately misspelled title--is as appalling as Sasha Baron Cohen’s homophobic movie “Bruno.” Hopelessly pretentious with its tactless Jewish revenge plot, this polished looking pabulum takes its own sweet time unfolding at a torturous two hours and thirty-three minutes. Garrulous dialogue scenes, erratic characters and a convoluted plot that all defy good taste much less credibility undermine what might have been a good movie.

Initially, the action—which Tarantino breaks into five chapters--opens during 1941 in the scenic French countryside. Unctuous Nazi "Jew Hunter" Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz of “GoldenEye”) arrives at a farm house with several German soldiers and questions the owner, Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet of “Hannibal Rising”), about Jews. Landa succeeds so well at ingratiating himself with LaPadite that the poor Frenchman breaks down and exposes the helpless Jewish family holed up in his basement. The Nazis turn the basement into Swiss cheese with fusillades of machine gun fire. Miraculously, as only miracles in a movie can happen, one of the Jews, a young woman, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent of “Snowboarder”), manages to escape.

In the next scene, U.S. Army Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt of “Ocean’s Thirteen”) assembles a team of Jewish Americans to infiltrate enemy lines and slaughter as many Nazis as possible. In fact, Raine demands that Sergeant Donny Donowitz (“Hostel” director Eli Roth), Private Smithson Utivich (B.J. Novak of TV’s “The Office”), Private Omar Ulmer (Omar Doom of “Death Proof”), Private Gerold Hirschberg (Samm Levine of “Club Dread”), Private Andy Kagan (Paul Rust of “Semi-Pro”), and Private Michael Zimmerman (Michael Bacall of “Undertow”) take 100 Nazi scalps. So much for the time-honored Geneva Convention!

In the next scene, Adolph Hitler (Martin Wuttke) clamors that their troops must stop talking about the “Bear Jew.” The Fuehrer rants that the nickname German soldiers have saddled Sergeant Donowitz with is undermining Nazi morale. Indeed, Donowitz wields a baseball bat with ghoulish gusto. In one scene, he takes sadistic pleasure in smashing the skull of a Nazi soldier with a Louisville slugger. Moreover, Raine and his ‘Holocaust’ dogs display no qualms in scalping dead Nazis. When Tarantino isn’t showing Americans carving the scalps off the fallen enemy, he has them slashing swastikas in the foreheads of live prisoners.

Our psychopathic heroes have even gone so far as to rescue a renegade Nazi, Sergeant Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger of “Driven”), who has acquired a notorious reputation as a serial killer among his own ranks. Mind you, “Inglourious Basterds” is too comically cretinous to distinguish between good Germans and bad Nazis. Like the politically incorrect cavalry westerns of yesteryear, the only good Germans in “Inglourious Basterds” are a dead Germans.

Three years have elapsed since Shosanna eluded Colonel Landa. She resides now in Paris and owns a cinema. A lonely Nazi soldier, Frederick Zoller (Christopher Reeve lookalike Daniel Brühl of “The Bourne Ultimatum”), befriends her. Shosanna doesn’t know Zoller is a war hero. Singlehandedly, he shot over 200 American G.I.s dead from his sniper’s lair atop a bell tower. Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth of “Stalingrad”) has produced a movie about Zoller’s exploits with Zoller playing himself. Moreover, Goebbels plans to premiere this epic in Paris for the high-ranking Nazi elite. Among those scheduled to attend are Hitler, Martin Bormann, Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, and famous German actor Emil Jannings. Of course, when Goebbels imposes on Shosanna to show the movie, she has no alternative. She does, however, have quite a barbecue cooked up for the cream of the Third Reich.

Meantime, British Intelligence General Ed Fenech (Michael Meyers of the “Austin Powers” movies) and Prime Minister Winston Churchill (Rod Taylor of “The Time Machine”) have concocted their own secret mission. They plan to send British Lieutenant Arch Hicox (Daniel Day-Lewis lookalike Michael Fassbender of “300”) behind enemy lines to masquerade as a Nazi. He will accompany one of their most trusted double-agents, German film starlet Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger of the “National Treasure” movies) to the film premiere. Unfortunately, things go awry for Hicox and Bridget before they can rendezvous with Raine. They encounter a suspicious Gestapo officer in a basement tavern and a massacre ensues that nearly scuttles the mission.

Evidently, the last thing Tarantino wanted to make was a patriotic World War II movie. Instead, he has tweaked history so that “Inglourious Basterds” amounts to a revisionist Holocaust fantasy of far-fetched proportions. It is one thing to ridicule the Nazis as supremely stupid swine, but quite another to depict Americans as murderous morons. Colonel Landa’s outlandish incompetence at the premiere where he thwarts one plot but wholly overlooks another is hilariously awful. Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine, a clownish Tennessee hillbilly with an ersatz Jethro Bodine drawl, is Tarantino’s homage to late B-movie hunk Aldo Ray. Actually, Ray starred in the Italian WWII thriller “Suicide Commandos.” Pitt plays the leader of this nasty little band of scalphunters without a shred of subtlety. Indeed, “Inglourious Basterds” is about as subtle as a baseball bat to the brains. The only thing Tarantino forgot to do was dress his Jewish-American commandos up in grease paint, wigs, and phony accents like the Marx Brothers.

FILM REVIEW OF ''CRISS CROSS'' (1949)

Yvonne De Carlo smolders as a sultry femme fatale who juggles both fall guy Burt Lancaster and bad guy Dan Duryea in “Son of Dracula” director Robert Siodmak’s “Criss Cross,” (*** out of ****) an above-average but predictable exercise in film noir that boasts gloomy atmosphere, a gritty urban environment, and solid performances. Burt Lancaster gives an exceptional performance as the vulnerable protagonist who cannot conceal his sentiments about the De Carlo character from anybody, even the supporting characters. Speaking of supporting characters, “Criss Cross” boasts its share and they take an active part in the proceedings. Percy Helton as a bartender, Alan Napier as a crime planner, Joan Minor as the lush, Griff Barrett as Pop, Isabel Randolph as the hospital nurse and Tom Pedi as Dundee’s accomplice all contribute memorably to the action. Tony Curtis appears briefly without credit as a gigolo dancing with De Carlo and Raymond Burr puts in a similarly momentary appearance as a gangster.

Although the film noir elements aren’t as oppressive as in Siodmak’s earlier and superior collaboration with Lancaster on “The Killers,” “Criss Cross” is unmistakably noir. For example, a larger number of scenes in “Criss Cross” take place during the day rather than at night. Siodmak never wears out his welcome here and the use of an extended flashback 14 minutes into the action that takes us back for important exposition is expertly integrated into the narrative. Siodmak stages the action nimbly without lingering unduly on anybody or anything. A Dresden-born German, Siodmak is a highly underrated helmer who has never received the well-deserved recognition accorded Fritz Lang. Mind you, Siodmak doesn’t have Lang’s cinematic flair with staging scenes, but his films are nevertheless robust.

Scenarist Daniel Fuchs, who later won an Oscar for “Love Me or Leave Me” (1955), based his screenplay on Don Tracy’s crime novel with tough guy dialogue and continuity supplemented by William Bowers that emphasizes the theme of fatalism so essential to film noir. Moreover, Fuchs received an Edgar nomination for his “Criss Cross” script. Everybody in “Criss Cross” is destined to lose in some way or another. Lancaster’s doomed character, however, suffers the greatest anguish by comparison. De Carlo’s siren is second in line. Surprisingly, Fuchs and Siodmak generate more tension among their scheming principals in the first half of the action than they do with the gripping armored truck heist in broad daylight during the second half of the movie. Interestingly, the police don’t figure prominently in “Criss Cross, though they hover on the periphery in the form of Lieutenant Frank Ramirez. The heist is still pretty engrossing material from its carefully planned stages to its skillful execution.

The production values of “Criss Cross” look first-rate. Universal doesn’t appear to have confined either Siodmak or the film--despite its B-movie subject matter—to claustrophobic studio sets. The armored truck set looks terrific, particularly when they load the truck up and leave with a tilting high angle shot that shows them exiting the building. “Champion” cinematographer Frank (later Franz) Planer’s evocative black & white photography is a considerable asset. Planer’s location lensing is top-notch in several scenes, especially the multi-layered Round Up Bar and later at the factory where the heist occurs. Planer does an exceptional job of photographing the Lancaster character after he winds up in the hospital with his arm in traction. An interesting slice-of-life moment occurs early in the movie during a conversation between two employees at the armored truck firm when they discuss about the competitive price of two grocery stores and how one store undercuts the other with their prices o soap and tomato juice that enhances the 1949 setting.

“Criss Cross” starts out suspensefully as we learn that Anna (Yvonne De Carlo of “Brute Force”) and Steve Thompson (Burt Lancaster of “Elmer Gantry”) are hiding in the parking lot of the nightclub called The Round Up where they are necking. The story unfolds chronologically to begin with because Anna is married to notorious gangster Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea of “Black Bart”) who is looking for her at that very moment inside the Round Up. Dundee gives Anna the third degree later when she comes back inside about what she was doing. Steve cautions her earlier that they must be discreet or they could blow the entire set-up. Later, Steve enters the Round Up to gate crash on Dundee’s party. You see, Dundee and company plan to relocate to Detroit and he is giving a farewell party. Los Angeles Police Detective Lieutenant Pete Ramirez (Stephen McNally of “Winchester ‘73”) tries to dissuade Steve from butting in where he hasn’t been invited. Steve blows him off and moments later Ramirez gate crashes the party himself after Dundee has pulled a knife on Steve. Ramirez is Steve’s friend, though we never know the basis of their back and forth relationship. Whenever Steve calls Ramirez ‘lieutenant,’ Ramirez has him call him ‘Pete.’ When Ramirez is all business because Steve has crossed the line, he makes Steve call him ‘lieutenant.’

Steve drives an armored truck and Dundee and his henchmen plan to rob the armored track company that employs Steve. Sure, “Criss Cross” has the stock-in-trade message that ‘crime doesn’t pay’ and it is emphasized by everybody but the optimistic Steve. Initially, an armored truck official brags, “Nobody ever got away with the heist on an armored truck in 28-years. Matter of fact, they don’t even try any more.” Later, Finchley (Alan Napier, who played Alfred the Butler on TV’s “Batman”) objects to the robbery because they always end in failure until he listens to Steve’s inside idea. Vincent (Tom Pedi of “The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three”) raves about the interjection from another henchman that everybody on that robbery wound up dead or in the chair. Later, in the hospital, Ramiez reiterates the same message to Steve that you cannot rob an armored car and get away with it.

Initially, the armored truck robbery seems to be a spur-of-the-moment scheme by Steve to prevent Dundee and his henchmen from take reprisals against Anna for sneaking out to see Steve. The subplot about Steve and Anna is very interesting. They were married, but they divorced after two years. Steve leaves Los Angeles to get Anna out of his blood and knocks around the country performing odd jobs as a blue-collar laborer. Nevertheless, Steve is still smitten by Anna and she still has something for him. Eventually, Steve feels himself drawn back to Los Angeles and everybody from Ramirez, the bartender, the lush, Steve’s mom, and Steve’s brother’s girlfriend know that he has feelings for her. They rekindle some of their love but also their drama. As much as they rub each other the wrong way, they also rub each other enough that they get together. As it turns out, Anna has been dating a crime figure and she marries him, probably to keep herself in jewelry. Steve is as hopelessly drawn to Anna as she is to money. Anna mistakenly believes that she can manipulate Slim for his money as she can Steve for his love. Before long Anna realizes that Slim is a force to contend with and worries about Slim learning about how she is two-timing her. These two characters are puppets to their own mistaken notions of love and money. Nothing that they can do will save them from their mutual obsessions. Ironically enough, it isn’t the law that brings Steve and Anna to their demise but the jealous Slim.

Siodmak and Planer do a good job staging the heist. The criminals set off smoke bombs so that everything takes place in a kind of limbo with Steve trying to thwart the robbery after shooting breaks out that he didn’t want. The paranoia in the hospital scenes where Steve feels trapped is gripping as is the ill-fated ending that Anna and Steve meet at Dundee’s hands. Siodmak stages this final scene much the same way that he did the scene at the beginning of “The Killers” when the two hitmen knocked off the Swede. We see Slim enter the house where Steve and Anna are hiding and he fires his gun repeatedly at them off-camera. We don’t see the muzzle of Slim’s revolver belching smoke, we only see the smoke and his irate face as he watches them die in each other’s arms.

FILM REVIEW OF ''FIRESTORM" (1998)

You cannot see the trees for the testosterone in director Dean Semler’s synthetic outdoors action saga “Firestorm” (** out of ****) starring sportscaster Howie Long as a stalwart smoke jumper who parachutes into raging Wyoming forest fires to rescue little gals and grown-up gals from getting cremated. Any sparks that Howie ignited as an actor in John Woo’s “Broken Arrow” sputter in “Firestorm” with Long’s pulp diction performance. Chris Soth’s one-dimensional script doesn’t help Howie much as escaped convicts and flaming infernos challenge his physical prowess. There is nothing compelling about Howie’s character and his charisma cannot compensate for this monolithic hero. Leanly plotted as a sapling but predictable as a plunging redwood, “Firestorm” kindles minimal excitement with its prefabricated plot and Howie’s Styrofoam heroics. Of course, juvenile-minded audiences who don’t demand much from their cinematic exercises may find this half-toasted tale tolerable.

What modicum of merit the movie musters lies in its premise. Ultraviolent villain Randy Earl Shaye (William Forsythe of “Once Upon A Time in America”) cons his shyster lawyer (Terry Kelly of “Christina”) into committing wildfire arson. Shaye wants out of the Wyoming State Penitentiary to get his $20-million. It seems that the prison dispatches short-time convicts to help extinguish forest fires. Shaye plans to use the forest fire as a cover for his escape. Stabbing a friendly prisoner on the fire detail, Shaye disguises himself as the dead man, and then sneaks out of the joint. Soth asks us to believe that a man could escape from prison based largely on a tattoo worn behind the ear.

As villains go, Shaye shows early promise as a worthy adversary, until the filmmakers contrive obvious flaws in his character that assure his mortality. Veteran heavy William Forsythe supplies appropriate plug-ugly menace as Randy Earl Shaye. When we initially see Shaye, he resembles Sean Connery from the “The Rock,” with a beard and blond messianic coiffure. The filmmakers emphasize Shaye’s villainy by showing not only the character of Shaye but also Forsythe’s sneering face together in the same shot with the man that he kills. Driving the point home, director Dean Semler wants audiences to realize that Shaye is clearly an unrepentant sadist. Sadly, the events of the plot turn more on Shaye’s sadism than on his criminal ingenuity. Shaye’s comeuppance is horribly graphic but richly deserved for his murderous demeanor.

“Firestorm” follows clench-jawed Jesse Graves (ex-Raiders football star Howie Long) as he thwarts Shaye’s escape. The Spartan Chris Soth screenplay tosses in a woman to liven things up. “Titanic” supporting player Suzy Amis appears here as Jennifer, an ornithologist who finds herself trapped by the wildfire blaze. Fleeing from the fire, she runs smack into Randy Earl and his armed and stupid henchmen masquerading as Canadian firefighters. You must have stupid henchmen in “Firestorm” so that they can brag about their means of escape. When Jennifer finally gets away, Shaye cannot afford to let her live because she knows his plans.

Meanwhile, when Jesse learns about the forest fire, he skydives into it singlehandedly. He stumbles into Shaye, Jennifer and Shaye’s other henchmen. In other words, “Firestorm” constantly moves ahead in terms of storytelling, but with little efficiency, plausibility, or imagination. When Shaye tries his bogus Canadian firefighters story out, Jesse is neither impressed nor convinced. Matching fists and wits with Shaye’s motley crew, our brawny firefighter hero sneaks off with Jennifer and they evade Randy Earl until a climactic fight on a lake about to be engulfed in a withering blaze.

“Firestorm” derives its title from the phenomenon which occurs when two fires collide and suck all of the oxygen out of the air, creating one of Mother Nature’s nasty nuclear-style blasts which destroys everything in it. Soth’s script contains those suitable elements that any decent he-man actioneer should boast. The effect, however, is less than incendiary. The problem with Soth along with uncredited scenarist Graham Yost of “Speed” and “Hard Target” is that their characters are a poorly developed bundle of stick figures with neither depth nor complexity. Randy Earl Shaye is supposed to be a homicidal genius who goes so far as to impersonate a prisoner (brutally killing the convict by stabbing him in the neck), but doesn’t know squat about forest fires. Jennifer claims to be the offspring of a third generation Marine. Boasting that she can field strip automatic weapons like an AK-47, she fails to notice that the auto-pistol that she swiped from a sex offender isn’t loaded.

“Firestorm” does other things wrong, too. A neat gimmick--ping-pong balls that explode to start fires—is lamely utilized. The first time that they use it as a trick during a ping-pong game, and the second time, Howie uses it to start a backfire to divert oxygen from the first fire. But the ping-pong balls disappear afterward, never to be used again. There is a running joke about axes that the filmmakers bungle, too. At one point in the plot, Jesse and Jennifer lay a trap for Shaye and his sex-predator henchmen that goes afoul because it is so ineptly planned with half-baked results!

The biggest problem with “Firestorm” is its star Howie Long. Howie desperately needs acting lessons. He wears a big, silly, corn-fed smile throughout the action and delivers his lines as if he were giving a pregame interview. Physically, Long is right for the role, but he doesn’t make you believe that he is a smoke jumper, much less a character.

The only surprises in “Firestorm” are provided by rugged Scott Glenn as battle-weary smoke jumper Wynt Perkins who is crippled while rescuing a dog from a burning house. Revealing more about his role and character would cut down on what little energy “Firestorm” contrives. Sentimentality drips off the script at points, especially at the end when Jennifer learns that she has been incubating two bird eggs during this maelstrom of action.

The essence of “Firestorm” is tough guys proving how masculine that they are in a hot spot. Hurling axes, slinging chainsaws, jumping out of “perfectly good planes,” leaping cliffs with motorcycles, and slugging it out with each other should keep the juvenile-minded happy. “Firestorm” is the kind of movie where the bad guy is so evil that he spends his time murdering his own men. Even though Jennifer gets taken hostage, the bad guys find themselves too preoccupied to rape her. Sexual content is pretty mild. The best scene has Jennifer setting her signal fires faster than Howie can torch his own fires so that they can be spotted on radar from the fire tower. Oddly enough, the writers neglect to add any kiss-kiss to the bang-bang in the plot. There is no love interest so they must have been appealing to beer drinkers and juveniles. “Firestorm” might have been more fun if Jennifer and Jesse had gotten a little hot and bothered around all those blazes.

“Dances with Wolves” Oscar-winning photographer Dean Semler makes his less than inflammatory directorial debut with “Firestorm.” When he takes his cameras up for aerial shots of British Columbia, you find your breath catching in your throat. Sadly, Semler doesn’t breath the same magic into the thin, adolescent storyline. The special effects of the firestorm aren’t that imaginative. You feel like you’re trapped by expensive looking computer graphics instead of a real wildfire.

FILM REVIEW OF ''THE JACKAL'' (1997)

Watching horrible movies like “The Jackal” (*1/2 out of ****) is enough to make you howl in derision. This Bruce Willis & Richard Gere assassination saga ranks as a pallid remake of director Fred Zinnemann’s classic 1973 thriller “The Day of the Jackal.” Typically, Hollywood remakes are inferior when compared with the original, and “The Jackal” indisputably proves the point beyond a shadow of a doubt. Sluggishly paced, abysmally written, and hilariously performed, “The Jackal” has managed nevertheless to sucker large audiences into cinemas, based undoubtedly on its stellar cast, rather than its narrative.

“The Jackal” draws its inspiration from scenarist Kenneth Ross’s “Day of the Jackal” script. No screen reference appears in the opening film credits for novelist Frederick Forsyth who penned the international bestseller about a lone assassin gunning for French president Charles de Gaulle. Whereas the original “Jackal” took place in the 1960s, the “Jackal” remake unfolds in a contemporary setting. What made the original “Jackal” a tense, spellbinding, but imaginative actioneers was how the filmmakers got around their obvious dead end ending. Everybody knew that De Gaulle was never shot down by an assassin, so Zinnemann and his write Kenneth Ross had to dream up a plausible resolution. They did. “Memphis Belle” director Michael Caton-Jones and scenarist Chuck Pfarrer, however, come up with nothing to match the original’s clever conclusion.

That’s not to say that “The Jackal” isn’t an elegant looking epic with some interesting high-tech firearms. The moviemakers have spared no expense in rehashing the original. The story globe trots from the new Moscow to Helsinki, then London, England, and finally the United States. The problem is that director Caton-Jones and scenarist Pfarrer have eliminated the best parts of Ross’ original script and replaced them with their own brain-dead plotting. When the characters in “The Jackal” aren’t acting like imbeciles, the people who made the film are.

FBI Deputy Director Carter Preston (Sidney Poitier) storms into a Moscow disco on the heels of Russian Intelligence officer Major Valentina Koslova (Diane Venora of “Wolfen”) and her policemen to bust arrogant Russian mafioso Ghazzi Murad (Ravil Isyanov of “GoldenEye”). When he cannot bribe Koslova, Ghazzi whips out a knife. During the ensuing struggle, Koslova shoots Ghazzi at close range and kills him. Terek Murad (David Hayman of “Walker”) is furious when he learns about Ghazzi’s death. Terek is so upset that he buries an axe in the head of the mafia soldier who brought him the bad news.

The vindictive Terek hires a lethal assassin known only as “The Jackal.” Demanding bloody retribution, Terek pays the Jackal the sum of $70-million dollars, half in advance and the other half on completion of the killing. Specifically, Terek demands the head of the FBI killed in spectacular fashion. The Jackal orders Terek to hole up somewhere outside of Russia until he has iced the FBI chief. Meanwhile, Russia authorities abduct one of Terek’s bodyguards.

Under gruesome torture the bodyguard yields the word ‘jackal.’ Koslova informs an incredulous Preston that the KGB once used the Jackal’s services. Moreover, they learn that somebody is alive who can positively identify the Jackal. The catch is that the FBI doesn’t know where they can lay their hands on Isabella (Mathilda May of “Lifeforce”). The best that they can come up with is her old flame, IRA terrorist Declan Mulqueen (Richard Gere of “Internal Affairs”), who is pulling a 50-year stretch in a Massachusetts lock-up on a weapons charge.

Reluctant initially to reveal the whereabouts of his ex-girlfriend, Mulqueen decides to help the FBI. Not only does he tell Preston that he has seen the Jackal, but also that he can recognize the Jackal’s methods. Caton-Jones and Pfarrer cross-cut between the authorities tracking down the Jackal and the Jackal’s painstaking efforts to elude capture and devise a failsafe scenario so he can get away without a trace. As the tight-lipped, amoral, icy-hearted eponymous character, Bruce Willis turns in a Dr. Jackal and Mr. Hide performance. Willis’ hitman travels incognito with several identities and passports to get him through customs anywhere he goes. Talk about dressing up. Half of “The Jackal” is wasted as we try to spot Bruno in his next outlandish disguise. Willis has more fun dressing up than shooting people. None of Willis’ disguises are as ingenious or playful as the ones Val Kilmer wore in “The Saint.” Now, you “Die Hard” fans are going to be disappointed with “The Jackal.” One of Bruno’s disguises is playing a homosexual, and we get to see Bruno kiss another homosexual. No, you don’t see their lips smack! Willis and the filmmakers photograph the kissing scene tastefully so that you cannot actually see Bruce’s lips on the other fellow’s mouth.

Although Willis makes a tolerable villain, he is supposed to be the deadliest hitman in the world. Truth of the matter is that the guy cannot hit the side of a barn with his pistol. In an early shoot-out with Valentina, the Jackal misses practically every shot! Later, in a subway gunfight with Mulqueen, the Jackal incredibly cannot put a bullet in the ex-IRA gunman! Here’s the Jackal behind a pillar swapping lead with Mulqueen who is standing out in the open without a bit of cover, and the Jackal cannot hit him! Which brings me to the Jackal’s sophisticated Gatling gun weapon. Does he want to make the shoot-out a bloody one with a weapon that can empty its clip of ammunition before the first shot tears into its target? Or is it simply that the Jackal is a pathetic marksman?
Richard Gere looks hopelessly miscast as an honorable IRA gunman. His emerald accent is acceptable, largely because he doesn’t have to utter a lot of singsong dialogue. The moviemakers do everything that they can to whitewash Mulqueen’s character.

“The Jackal” could have been a great cat-and-mouse thriller, but all it manages to be is a wedge of cheese with a thousand holes in its storyline.

FILM REVIEW OF ''DISTRICT 9" (2009)

Director Neill Blomkamp's freshman, feature-length, dystopian sci-fi thriller "District 9" (* out of ****)qualifies as both grotesque and grungy. Worse, heavily-laden with anti-apartheid messages, it emerges nevertheless as an uneven blend of Monty Python skits with a serious polemic about alien rights. Does anybody remember director Christopher Columbus’ “Bicentennial Man” (1999) with Robin Williams and lack of concern for alien rights? Despite some visceral action sequences that attest to Blomkamp’s expertise at staging action, this nimble but numb-skulled nail-biter puts the protagonist in a thoroughly impossible position. Essentially, “District 9” exemplifies those supernatural films that occur primarily on Earth with the 'aliens among us’ theme. Mankind knows that the aliens have arrived. In fact, not only have we accepted them, we have grossly taken advantage of them! These aliens are neither as lovable as “Wall-E” lovable nor as cunning as the “Terminator.” You could call “District 9”: 'The Day the Aliens Stood Still.'

Indeed, Blomkamp and co-scenarist Terri Tatchell encapsulate the action in a fictional expose television documentary. Intermittently, Blomkamp indulges himself with adrenalin-laced dramatic footage that no documentary film could have captured without staging it. At other times, Blomkamp cross-cuts black & white footage from surveillance cameras to show our woebegone hero at work. Essentially, he is following the same scenario as “Cloverfield,” except for those few sequences that do not fit into the documentary. Indeed, “District 9” borrows from a number of science fiction films. A gigantic alien spaceship visits Earth like in "Independence Day,” but this spacecraft cannot leave. The spaceship hovers over Johannesburg, South Africa, for three months before the authorities board it. The skeletal aliens that humans find inside are malnourished, and the good folks in Johannesburg, wind up confining these aliens in what constitutes a huge slum. The humans treat the aliens like second-class citizens and allow them to sink into squalor. The aliens resort to crime to make ends meet and are often at odds with the authorities. No, "District 9" shares little in common with the conventional "Alien Nation." These aliens look like they walked off the set of a "Predator" movie and--unlike most alien invaders--they are not as intimidating as their counterparts. These aliens remain largely at our mercy, and Blomkamp renders humanity as brutal and unscrupulous in their treatment of the aliens.

“District 9” opens with several talking heads as part of a documentary about the scandal involving the protagonist. Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copely) is an ordinary field representative for Multi-National United, (MNU), a private company that has dominion over the aliens. Escalating alien crime and violence has prompted the government to move some 1.8 million of them to new District 10 camp located outside of Johannesburg. They are being served eviction notices by MNU field representatives who are backed up by armed helicopters hovering above them. Our hero’ s father-in-law, Piet Smit (Louis Minnaar) assigns him to head up the mission. During one of his visits to a domicile, Wikus discovers a suspicious cylinder among an arms cache. When he fumbles with it, a black liquid squirts into his face, contaminating him with alien DNA. As the story open, Wikus is already under investigation. The tabloids carry pictures of him mating with aliens. We are given a recap of the story and then the second half opens as Wikus grows flippers on his left hand. Suddenly, Wikus becomes the most prized human alive with the alien DNA polluting his bloodstream. Alien guns that scientists could never have fired now discharge at Wikus’ half-breed DNA touch. Mind you, Wikus refuses to fire the weapons, but his captors shock him with cattle prods until he accommodates them. Wikus goes berserk and escapes from the laboratory. He joins forces with an intelligent, inventor-type alien named Christopher. Christopher wants to rekindle the energy of his command capsule so he can get back to the spacecraft overhead and haul freight.

Basically, "District 9" appropriates the ‘what if’ sci-fi theme and employs it as a metaphor for a social consciousness sermon about racial xenophobia. Neither Blomkamp nor Tatchell regard humanity in a sentimental light. Worse, we are asked to sympathize with a hero who is a complete imbecile. The theme of man's inhumanity to aliens comes through 'loud and clear.’ Imagine a science fiction movie that takes place in a third world country and you've summed up "District 9." These aliens aren't cool. They look like big bugs and they speak in guttural language. Everybody refers to them disparagingly as ‘prawns.’ Blomkamp translates the alien lingo in white subtitles. They are as pathetic as the hero who behaves as if he were in a Woody Allen comedy. He is a naive moron, a patsy, a fall guy. The important part of the plot transpires when he undergoes a quasi-alien metamorphosis a la Franz Kafka meets "The Fly."

Blomkamp lenses "District 9" like a documentary, and its bureaucratic hero makes an ass out of himself. He couldn't be any more abject if he were John Cleese in a Monty Python skit. Eventually, after he gets contaminated, he begins his transformation into an alien with one hand turning into an alien claw. Yes, the aliens do resemble huge insects which make them appear less hostile but far from appealing. Indeed, Blomkamp creates a very convincing alternative universe in that the story is credible and as down to earth as any sci-fi you can imagine. Eventually, the alien along with the Wikus Van De Merwe bureaucratic hero launch a one-man/one-alien war against the repressive organization MNU that keeps the alien cooped up in the worse circumstances. The section between Merwe escaping and then teaming up with Christopher is action packed, but there are no surprises in this flat movie. I cannot believe that so many people are going ape about this asinine little flick.