Good Efficient Butchery

VIOLET & DAISY
(US - 2013)

The directing debut of Oscar-winning PRECIOUS screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher, VIOLET & DAISY is an oddity that starts as an almost chick-flick version of THE BOONDOCK SAINTS before becoming a stagy character study. It's a little too "cute" at times, only very rarely crossing the line into "quirky." It could almost be a play, and it definitely feels like the kind of movie made by a screenwriter stepping behind the camera for the first time. Violet (Alexis Bledel) and Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) are two teenaged assassins about to start a much-deserved vacation when they get a call about a quick-money hit from their handler Russ (Danny Trejo): rub out a guy who stole some money from their boss. Wanting some time off but needing some extra money to buy matching dresses from the trendy clothing line of teen pop sensation Barbie Sunday (Cody Horn), Violet and Daisy take the assignment. Arriving at the target's apartment only to find he's out, they wait for him but fall asleep on his couch. When the schlubby target (James Gandolfini) arrives home, he covers them with a blanket and gives them cookies and milk when they wake up. The girls unexpectedly bond with the target, who turns out to be a nice guy who's had some shitty luck, and find it difficult to pull the trigger, causing them to re-examine their own friendship and working partnership while the boss sends his top assassin (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) to trail them in case they can't complete the job.

VIOLET & DAISY doesn't always work, and it belongs to that KILLING THEM SOFTLY and THE AMERICAN school of denying audiences the kind of payoff that the set-up seems to ensure (I imagine this would've gotten an "F" from the insipid CinemaScore had it opened wide), but it has its moments amid the inconsistencies. Ronan and Bledel are quite good, and they get a great intro dressed as nuns, mowing down a roomful of mobsters to the tune of Merrilee Rush's version of "Angel of the Morning." Other odd touches include the pair being prone to hopscotch and lollipops, riding a large tricycle to a job, and Daisy playing patty-cake with Russ while talking over their assignment. The joke, of course, is that they're basically little girls in a cold, violent profession, though Violet--played by a well-cast Bledel, who's about a decade older than she looks--hides that she's a bit more hard-edged and worldly and tries to shield that from the naïve and childlike Daisy; Violet is almost like a few-years-older version of Natalie Portman's Matilda from Luc Besson's THE PROFESSIONAL. At times, there's a bit of a SUCKER PUNCH thing going on here as well, though VIOLET & DAISY was shot in 2010, well before that film's release. It's also worth a look for the always-excellent work of the late and already much-missed Gandolfini, who died two weeks after the film's belated, 17-screen theatrical release in June 2013. At just 88 minutes, the film feels a bit hacked down (a pre-OFFICE and MAGIC MIKE Horn is in the credits but is only seen on a magazine cover and a billboard) and hits and misses in equal measure, but the fine performances of the leads make it an interesting curiosity, as does Gandolfini's brief reunion with his SOPRANOS co-star John Ventimiglia. (R, 88 mins)

DEAD IN TOMBSTONE
(US - 2013)

With films like DEATH RACE 2, DEATH RACE 3: INFERNO, THE MARINE 2, and THE SCORPION KING 3 to his credit, Dutch director Roel Reine is usually mentioned along with Isaac Florentine and John Hyams as a top name in the world of straight-to-DVD. The surprisingly entertaining DEATH RACE 3, in particular, demonstrated that Reine--who frequently functions as his own cinematographer and camera operator--was adept at making low-budget action films look like big-screen contenders. The idea of Reine helming a supernatural western is full of potential, but DEAD IN TOMBSTONE is a disappointment, primarily because he falls into the trap of shaky-cam action sequences that reduce everything to jittery, headache-inducing incoherence. Reine's camera never stops moving and swirling, and he also gets a little too distracted with directorial wankery, usually in the form of bizarre POV shots that bring to mind what a spaghetti western might look like if Sergio Leone had access to a Skycam.

The outlaw Blackwater Gang, led by Guerrero de la Cruz (Danny Trejo) and his half-brother Red Cavanaugh (Anthony Michael Hall), arrives in the small mining town of Edendale to steal some gold from a bank vault. They successfully steal the gold, but the psychotic Red kills the sheriff (Daniel Lapaine) and goads the rest of the gang into killing Guerrero. Trapped in a Purgatory that looks like a leftover SILENT HILL set, Guerrero makes a deal with the Devil--who appears in the form of a philosophical blacksmith (Mickey Rourke)--to save his soul in exchange for the six remaining members of the Blackwater Gang. A year later, Guerrero pulls a HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER and shows up in Edendale--now taken over by the power-mad Red and renamed Tombstone--to exact his revenge. There's no reason that this shouldn't be a fun B-movie, but Reine can't restrain himself and just shoot a sequence in a straightforward fashion. He wants to go for a classic Sam Raimi feel with a contemporary, video-game aesthetic--Reine's a talented genre director but he's not Raimi and the results are simply eye-glazingly dull. If he'd just buckled down and made a normal-looking western, he might've had a minor cult movie on his hands instead of the forgettable DTV throwaway it turned out to be. Trejo is perfectly cast, Hall has some fun playing a dastardly villain, and Dina Meyer is good as the sheriff's vengeance-obsessed widow. Rourke, presumably here because he torched the last remaining bridge built after his short-lived WRESTLER renaissance by walking off of SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS and trash-talking its director, Martin McDonagh (Woody Harrelson replaced him), looks even worse here than he did in JAVA HEAT. Reine directed the 2008 Steven Seagal dud PISTOL WHIPPED and seems to employ some classic Seagal tactics here as he has a bloated Rourke a) wearing a big duster in a hapless attempt to conceal his gut, and b) dubbed by someone else in most of his scenes. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why Rourke--who has a distinct sound--has an obviously different voice on and off throughout. Perhaps a plot point was changed and this was the best they could do rather than deal with him coming back to record some new dialogue? DEAD IN TOMBSTONE makes impressive use of some unlikely locations in Romania, utilizing some still-standing COLD MOUNTAIN sets that have been seen in several westerns since (the History Channel miniseries HATFIELDS & MCCOYS was also shot in Romania), but when it's all said and done, it's unfortunately a missed opportunity. Available in both R-rated and unrated versions, the R-rated running 99:59 and the unrated 99:58. What the hell is that all about? (R/Unrated, both 100 mins)

DALLAS BUYERS CLUB
(US - 2013)

Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee. Written by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack. Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner, Jared Leto, Steve Zahn, Denis O'Hare, Dallas Roberts, Griffin Dunne, Kevin Rankin, Michael O'Neill. (R, 116 mins)

One of the best things to happen to American cinema over the past couple of years has been seeing Matthew McConaughey actually giving a shit about acting and finally living up to the media hype that came with his 1996 breakthrough A TIME TO KILL. Up until a few years ago, after a string of vapid romantic comedies that was broken up by an occasional hit like 2006's WE ARE MARSHALL, his career bottomed out with 2008's SURFER, DUDE, a vanity project that reinforced every shirtless, laid-back, nude bongo-playing, stoner stereotype that turned him into a punchline. By then, even his most ardent defenders had grown tired of his schtick. He took a break and returned with 2011's THE LINCOLN LAWYER, followed by a universally-acclaimed 2012 that saw supporting turns in Richard Linklater's BERNIE and Steven Soderbergh's MAGIC MIKE, along with his terrifying performance and an instantly-legendary scene involving a chicken leg in William Friedkin's KILLER JOE. This year already saw one Oscar-caliber performance in Jeff Nichols'MUD. With the fact-based DALLAS BUYERS CLUB, McConaughey makes it known once and for all that he's a Serious Actor, losing nearly 40 lbs to play AIDS patient Ron Woodroof.

In 1985 Dallas, as Rock Hudson's death makes national news, Woodroof is a hard-partying, heavy-drinking, drug-abusing, rodeo-riding, redneck con man and electrician with a long history of casual, anonymous, and unprotected sex. When he's injured on the job, a blood test in the hospital reveals his HIV-positive status and he's given 30 days to live. Initially refusing to believe that he's got a disease that only affects "faggots and cocksuckers," the homophobic Woodroof tries to combat the illness with the illegally-obtained experimental drug AZT, which is just entering use in human trials after being developed two decades earlier for cancer treatment and shelved for its ineffectiveness. When the unregulated dosage and his continued alcohol and cocaine abuse destroy what's left of his immune system and he develops AIDS, he's ostracized by his good-ole'-boy buddies. Furious that many drug and natural or vitamin-related treatments haven't received FDA approval (the makers of AZT paid big money to get their drug approved, despite it only producing questionable results at the recommended dosage), Woodroof spends some time in a Mexican hospital under the treatment of a doctor (Griffin Dunne) who lost his license in the US for prescribing unapproved medication. Always looking for a quick-money deal, Woodroof starts smuggling large amounts of these vitamins and natural treatments into the US and creates the "Dallas Buyers Club," a member-based organization where dues are paid and medication is then free, thus disqualifying him as a "drug dealer." He also befriends an HIV-positive transvestite named Rayon (Jared Leto) and compassionate Dr. Saks (Jennifer Garner, given little to do in a largely thankless role), who rebels against her company-man boss (Denis O'Hare), who's committed to pushing AZT on all of his patients.

While it does admirably shine a spotlight on the relative ignorance and false assumptions of the early days of AIDS (Ron's friends think they can get AIDS by touching him), the script by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack doesn't really offer any surprises in its structure or character arcs. We have little doubt that the racist, homophobic Woodroof will see the error of his ways and change his attitude once his buddies reject him and think he's a closeted homosexual. We know that he'll come around to respecting and valuing the friendship of Rayon. We know that Dr. Saks will turn against her boss and fight the good fight. There's also an asshole FDA rep (Michael O'Neill), who's constantly hounding Woodroof and couldn't be any more dastardly if he was wearing a monocle and twirling his mustache. Where DALLAS BUYERS CLUB excels is in the performances of McConaughey and Leto. Leto, no stranger to altering his physical appearance for a role (he gained nearly 70 lbs to play John Lennon assassin Mark David Chapman in 2008's barely-released CHAPTER 27), has never been better and creates a sympathetic and truly tragic figure. As good as he is and as committed as he is to the project, McConaughey's physical appearance--think Christian Bale's weight loss for THE MACHINIST--makes a bigger impression than his acting here. He's very good, and an Oscar nomination is pretty much guaranteed, but he was better in both KILLER JOE and MUD, and his performance, like the entire film, has too much of an "Oscar bait" feeling to it. Looking back and replaying DALLAS BUYERS CLUB in your head, you may find yourself being more impressed with Leto when it's all said and done.

CURSE OF CHUCKY
(US - 2013)

After a nine-year hiatus, Chucky is back for the sixth entry in the 25-year-old CHILD'S PLAY franchise. For the most part, CURSE OF CHUCKY plays it surprisingly serious--as serious as a movie about a doll possessed by a serial killer can be--largely jettisoning the direction into outright comedy that writer Don Mancini took with 1998's BRIDE OF CHUCKY and as the director of 2004's SEED OF CHUCKY. It's hard to make Chucky threatening again after showing him getting caught jerking off to an issue of Fangoria, but CURSE is a mostly straight-faced and above-average DTV outing that allows Mancini to wear his love of cult horror on his sleeve. Filled with countless homages and winking references to things like PSYCHO, the "disabled woman in peril" and "old dark house" formulas, gialli, John Carpenter, Dario Argento, Brian De Palma, Pino Donaggio, elaborately-staged and very splattery OMEN-style murders, and one nicely-done shot that manages to include a shout-out to Carpenter's PRINCE OF DARKNESS while pulling off a De Palma split-diopter, CURSE OF CHUCKY has plenty more going on for horror fans than just the titular character's antics.

When her mother apparently commits suicide shortly after receiving the Chucky doll in an anonymous package, paraplegic Nica (Fiona Dourif, daughter of Chucky voice actor Brad) can't shake her odd feeling about the doll's strange presence. Nica is also dealing with her high-strung, control-freak older sister Barb (Danielle Bisutti) who's pressuring her to sell their mother's house because she and her husband (Brennan Elliott) are having serious financial problems that still don't prevent them from employing a full-time au pair (Maitland McConnell) for their daughter Alice (Summer Howell). After poisoning a family friend and local priest (A Martinez), it doesn't take long for Chucky to prowl through the house and start offing the obnoxious family members one by one before his final showdown with Nica. Chucky is still a wisecracking smartass (after electrocuting a female character, he quips "Women...can't live with 'em. Period"), but Mancini tones down the comedy significantly, and for much of its running time, CURSE almost functions as if BRIDE and SEED didn't happen. It frequently references "Andy Barclay," the young character played by Alex Vincent in the first two films and by Justin Whalin in the third, and goes into some events that led to Chucky storing the soul of Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif, now 63, sports a hilariously terrible black wig and looks like THE ROOM's Tommy Wiseau in a couple of newly-shot flashback sequences) prior to the events of CHILD'S PLAY. Only very late in the game does Mancini drop the ball when he starts piling on one false ending after another to make BRIDE and SEED tie in, and the final ending (well, not counting the additional post-credits ending that's only in the unrated cut) is pretty lame. While it doesn't work all the way through, CURSE OF CHUCKY is unexpectedly solid and unpredictable for a straight-to-DVD sixth entry in an aging franchise, Fiona Dourif makes a very appealing heroine, and horror fans will really enjoy spotting the many shout-outs and references. (R, 95 mins/Unrated, 97 mins)

EASY RIDER: THE RIDE BACK
(US - 2013)

At the end of the 1969 classic EASY RIDER, when two shotgun-toting rednecks blew away bikers Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper), do you remember thinking "Great flick, but I need to know more...like the backstory of Wyatt's younger brother and their cranky dad!"? Yeah, neither do I. But that didn't stop Cincinnati attorney and EASY RIDER superfan Phil Pitzer from somehow clearing the legal hurdles and self-financing one of the most unwarranted sequels in the history of cinema. Filmed in California and Ohio in 2009, the long-delayed (but not long enough) EASY RIDER: THE RIDE BACK is an amateur-night clusterfuck from the start, a total vanity project for Pitzer, who co-wrote the script and stars as Wyatt's brother Morgan. 40 years after Wyatt was killed, Morgan is summoned by his younger sister Shane (Sheree J. Wilson, who also co-produced), who tells him that their father Hickok (Newell Alexander) is near death. Riding Wyatt's refurbished old bike, Morgan hits the road with his buddy West Coast (Jeff Fahey), traveling cross-country to Shane's to reconcile with the old man. Through a series of confusing flashbacks, we see that Hickok, who still suffers from WWII-related PTSD and refuses to enter Shane's house until she raises a flag, was proud of the Vietnam service of his eldest son Virgil (yes, they're all named after the Earps), but resented Wyatt, who left home after the death of their mother. Wyatt was a big influence on young Morgan, who became what Hickok deemed a "gutless hippie" when he burned his draft notice and refused to serve in Vietnam. Virgil returned from Vietnam a changed man and disappeared, and with Morgan and the old man estranged, it's been up to Shane, who lost her son in Iraq, to take care of the irascible Hickok, who's still mad about how the 1960s destroyed his family.

Jesus, this movie is awful. In the hands of Pitzer and director/co-writer Dustin Rikert, a veteran of many of those no-budget westerns you see in the DVD new releases at Wal-Mart, this is really just R-rated, maudlin Hallmark Channel sentimentality that tries to shamelessly cash in on the legacy of an iconic film. Even if the film had a reason to exist, there's still no excuse for the wretched and appallingly wrong-headed execution. The mumbling Pitzer is one of the worst actors you'll ever see, immediately taking his place beside Tommy Wiseau in THE ROOM and John De Hart in GETEVEN in delusional vanity project infamy. Pitzer, who apparently didn't allot any of the film's budget to go toward acting lessons for himself, is so bad that he brings everyone else around him down, especially Wilson, who's not exactly Meryl Streep but the DALLAS and WALKER: TEXAS RANGER co-star has always been at least competent and professional. A scenery-chewing Fahey is limited to little more than "Woo-hoo"'s and "Yee-haaaah!"'s as West Coast, and if your TV screen is dusty and you squint really hard, he and Pitzer almost resemble Hopper and Fonda in their endless riding scenes set to generic country-rock songs that sound like watered-down Don Henley. Michael Nouri also turns up as Shane's asshole ex-husband, Cincinnati Reds great Johnny Bench has a bit as a baseball scout (is Pitzer his lawyer?), and Ron Howard's dad Rance plays one of Hickok's old war buddies, prompting even Clint Howard to look away in shame. There's no sense of filmmaking ability or competence on any level. The sound is so off that Pitzer, in what I strongly suspect will be a one-and-done venture into the movies, is often barely audible, and with no one around to stop him from going all-in on every self-indulgent whim, you get things like Morgan stopping off at a deserted ghost town while some Michael Bolton knock-off sings a piano-accompanied version of "America the Beautiful" as Pitzer's voiceover warns "We've got to start taking better care of this planet." Whatever it was that Pitzer was attempting here, he blew it. (R, 99 mins)

HOMEFRONT
(US - 2013)

Directed by Gary Fleder. Written by Sylvester Stallone. Cast: Jason Statham, James Franco, Winona Ryder, Kate Bosworth, Izabela Vidovic, Frank Grillo, Clancy Brown, Rachelle Lefevre, Omar Benson Miller, Chuck Zito, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Marcus Hester, Lance E. Nichols. (R, 100 mins)

Based on a 2006 novel by Chuck Logan, HOMEFRONT was scripted by Sylvester Stallone, who intended to star before deciding he was too old for the lead and handed the project over to his fellow Expendable Jason Statham. Stallone's script takes some liberties with Logan's novel, one of a series of thrillers featuring former Minnesota cop Phil Broker. In the book, Broker, his wife, and daughter move to rural Minnesota as Broker tangles with local meth cookers. In the movie, Broker (Statham) is a widower who moves with his ten-year-old daughter Maddy (Izabela Vidovic) to rural Louisiana two years after leading an undercover bust that resulted in the death of the son of biker kingpin Danny T (Chuck Zito). When Maddy decks a bully at recess, it sets off a chain reaction of violence and revenge. The bully's mother is white-trash tweaker Cassie Klum (Kate Bosworth), who goads her spineless husband Jimmy (Marcus Hester) into a fight with Broker, who easily kicks Jimmy's ass. Broker approaches Jimmy at his job and apologizes and the two men agree to let it go, but Cassie isn't satisfied and approaches her older brother and local meth lord Gator Bodine (James Franco). When Broker easily handles a pair of Gator's stooges, Gator pops into the Broker home and snoops around, stealing Maddy's cat, a stuffed animal, and some Danny T files in Broker's basement. Needing a powerful organization like Danny T's MC to help his meth distribution network, Gator enlists the aid of biker groupie and meth whore Sheryl (Winona Ryder) to bring in the incarcerated Danny T's crew, headed by the psychotic Cyrus (Frank Grillo), to take care of Broker and set up a sweet deal for himself in the process. Obviously, things don't go according to plan for Gator or the bikers.

Looking a bit like what might happen if Statham was dropped into the middle of WINTER'S BONE by way of STRAW DOGS, HOMEFRONT is one of the action star's stronger efforts, and he's helped by an unusual supporting cast and some unexpected turns in the script. I liked the way that the role of the antagonist kept shifting throughout the film: first, it's Cassie, and when she runs to Gator after Broker kicks her husband's ass, Gator has other things to do and isn't really interested in her Broker issues but does it because he's her brother. When Broker reaches a tentative truce with Cassie and her husband, it's too late to stop Gator, who now knows who Broker is and tries to use him to set up his deal with the bikers. When crazed Cyrus enters the story about an hour in, he's so obsessed with vengeance that even Gator decides to keep his distance from what's about to go down. For a few minutes, even Sheryl takes center stage as the villain when she kidnaps Maddy. Some of the character arcs--Cassie, especially--aren't the most plausible and organic, but there's enough good things in Stallone's script to help you overlook some of its dumber elements: maybe Broker should've found a better storage place for stacks of Bankers Boxes filled with top-secret DEA files than his basement. More importantly, if he wants to avoid the vengeful biker gang that's vowed revenge for his being a narc, perhaps Phil Broker should be hiding under a more stealthy name than "Phil Broker."

Other than young Vidovic, who seems like a natural and works very well with Statham, nobody really stretches their talents here, though the idea of Franco as the bad guy in a Jason Statham action movie works better than it sounds. Workaholic Franco (who has 12 IMDb credits for 2013 and ten for 2014) seems like an actor who will try every kind of movie once, and he handles the stock bad guy role well. There was a time when the idea of Ryder taking a supporting role in a macho action flick would've seemed unthinkable. Her career may not be where it once was, but she brings some credibility to the proceedings, and it's a nice to see her and Franco working together in a real movie after their LETTER triumph from last year. A frighteningly thin Bosworth doesn't have a lot to do after the initial plot set-up, but she really nails the bad-tempered, chip-on-her-shoulder, pissed-off-about-everything nature of her character. Director Gary Fleder (THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE DEAD, KISS THE GIRLS, DON'T SAY A WORD, RUNAWAY JURY) isn't really an "action" guy but he's in journeyman mode here, and gets the job done for the most part, except for a couple of unfortunate instances of shaky-cam and one dubious CGI car roll courtesy of executive producer Avi Lerner's usual Bulgarian clown crew at Worldwide FX.

OLDBOY
(US - 2013)

Directed by Spike Lee. Written by Mark Protosevich. Cast: Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Olsen, Sharlto Copley, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Imperioli, Pom Klementieff, James Ransone, Max Casella, Linda Emond, Lance Reddick, Hannah Ware, Richard Portnow, Elvis Nolasco, Rami Malek, Caitlin Dulany, Cinque Lee. (R, 104 mins)

Park Chan-wook's 2003 film OLDBOY was the second part of the director's "Vengeance" trilogy of stand-alone films connected by the common theme of obsessive revenge, coming between 2002's SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE and 2005's LADY VENGEANCE. OLDBOY was the first to be released in the US, in the spring of 2005, and it became an immediate hit with cult and arthouse audiences for its savage violence, stylish direction, and creative set pieces, most notably a long, single-take sequence where the hero takes on an endless hallway full of thugs while armed with just a hammer, plus an instantly-legendary scene where the lead actor eats a live octopus. Anchored by a galvanizing, ferocious performance by Choi Min-Sik and a devastating plot twist near the end, OLDBOY is almost universally considered a modern classic, so an American remake was inevitable. It marks an unusual project for Spike Lee, who's in total director-for-hire mode here, bringing none of his usual style to the proceedings (it's very telling that it's "A Spike Lee Film" and not "A Spike Lee Joint"). After a moderate level of hype in past months, FilmDistrict dumped this on just 500 screens for Thanksgiving with almost no publicity other than star Josh Brolin entering rehab just a few days prior, and both Brolin and Lee voicing their displeasure that the producers took the project away from Lee during post-production, cutting anywhere from 35 to 60 minutes out of it, depending on who's telling the story. This is also noteworthy as FilmDistrict's last release before folding and being absorbed by Focus Features, so it's obvious they're just doing the bare minimum here. As far as American remakes for the subtitle-phobic go, OLDBOY isn't bad. It frequently blunders and miscalculates, but admirably doesn't water-down or sugarcoat the shocking major reveal. Lee and screenwriter Mark Protosevich (THE CELL, I AM LEGEND) also alter the rationale for the villain's actions, and believe it or not, that particular element is even more dark and twisted than in Park's original version.

In 1993, Joe Doucett (Brolin) is an alcoholic, asshole ad exec and deadbeat dad who's late with child support payments and his ex-wife is running out of patience. After losing a lucrative deal when he drunkenly hits on the client's wife, Joe wanders around town in a stupor until he's abducted and held prisoner in a dingy hotel room. There are no windows and he's fed twice a day and given a bottle of vodka. He sees a news report that his ex-wife has been murdered and his DNA is all over the crime scene. Days, weeks, years pass. Every night, gas is released in the room and he passes out. He watches TV (the inaugurations of Clinton and Bush and the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina indicate how much time is passing), befriends a family of mice that's ultimately served to him for dinner, uses the time to quit drinking, clear his head, and exercise obsessively. He writes letters to his daughter Mia--who's been adopted by a new family and, as he learns from a TV show about his wife's murder and his own disappearance, grows up to be a cellist of some repute--vowing to prove his innocence and be a better father when he gets out. He writes an endless list of names of people he's wronged. He watches the inauguration of Barack Obama. After 20 years in this one room with no human contact, he's set free with a smartphone and wallet filled with money as he tries to piece together what happened and who is responsible. He meets Marie (Elizabeth Olsen), a recovering addict who works as a nurse at a free clinic, and after reading his letters to Mia, decides to help him in his quest for answers.

If you've seen Park's OLDBOY, then you know where the primary plot is headed. And yes, Lee stages his own version of the hallway/hammer fight (which was previously ripped off by the forgettable Jude Law sci-fi dud REPO MEN) that goes on longer and is more elaborate but doesn't work as well. Also not working as well is Lee's reliance on what looks like the finest CGI splatter technology that 1997 has to offer (one shotgun blast to the head is just embarrassing). While Choi's performance in Park's film is hard to top, Brolin's level of commitment is undeniably impressive. He both gained and lost weight for the role, then bulked up the muscle (in some scenes, he looks a lot like Brad Davis in MIDNIGHT EXPRESS). While Joe adapts to 2013 life rather quickly (this may have played out more believably in Lee's original cut), Brolin is very good with his halting walk and confusing looks, almost looking like an animal at times. There's even some chance for humor in some of his dialogue, as he incredulously asks Marie "I need to look at the Yellow Pages...where are all the pay phones?" Olsen is charming as the kind-hearted Marie, a damaged soul who sees a strangely kindred spirit in this helpless man who's lost two decades of his life. Where the film's biggest problems arise are with its villains. Samuel L. Jackson has a minor supporting role as the guy overseeing Joe's imprisonment, but he's just an employee. The real antagonist is billionaire Adrian Pryce, played by Sharlto Copley in a performance that can be charitably described as "odd." In the original film, Yu Ji-tae played the villainous Lee Woo-jin as ruthless and mocking. With perfectly-sculpted facial hair and eyebrows, and long, manicured fingernails, Copley plays Pryce as a preening, prissy hybrid of Vincent Price, Dr. Evil, and Paul Lynde. Lee Woo-jin is cold and calculating. Adrian Pryce is an effeminate, over-the-top Bond villain. It doesn't work at all, and while Copley's only doing what he's been directed and scripted to do, his performance is an unmitigated disaster. If I thought Lee watched any Eurotrash flicks at all, I'd swear he had Copley pattern his performance on some of cult actor John Steiner's more colorful turns in gems like SINBAD OF THE SEVEN SEAS.

Lee and Protosevich ditch the original film's hypnotism element, which proves to be another big mistake. By abandoning the hypnotism angle, they create some plausibility issues that Park managed to skate away from--for Pryce's plan to work, a lot of coincidences have to fall perfectly into place. And in compiling his list of those he's harmed, it never occurs to Joe or his childhood buddy Chucky (Michael Imperioli) to think of Pryce? The guy's a billionaire, so it's not like he lives an anonymous life. And Pryce can just walk right into Chucky's bar and Chucky doesn't recognize this billionaire with whom he went to school? And what did Chucky do with his private school education that he's now running a shitty bar? And how does Pryce have a camera set up in the backroom of Chucky's shitty bar? See? Too many things fall perfectly into place. At least in Park's version, you could say "Well, they were hypnotized and programmed to react a certain way when they heard this or saw that." But in Lee's version--at least in its released state, that is-- it's just a string of ludicrously easy trips to Plot Convenience Playhouse.

Brolin's performance makes OLDBOY worth watching, but Lee's film still pales in comparison to Park's original. Given the post-production tinkering and FilmDistrict's eventual dumping of it anyway, it has to be disheartening for the actor to have obviously invested a large amount of mental and physical exertion into his work only to have it go largely unnoticed if not outright dismissed. Choi is an impossible act to follow as the protagonist of OLDBOY, but Brolin does his damnedest to match him and almost makes it. It's too bad the same can't be said for the rest of the film. Unlike some remakes, OLDBOY doesn't insult its source, but it doesn't add much to it, either. Fans of the original will probably find it an interesting curio if nothing else.

ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE
(US - 2013)

A cult movie simply by virtue of an absurdly belated US release, the slasher thriller ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE was shot in 2006 and shown at that year's Toronto Film Festival, where it was acquired by Dimension Films and promptly shelved by the Weinsteins following the disappointing box office reception of GRINDHOUSE. It was released in most of the rest of the world in 2008 and Dimension sold the US rights to the doomed Senator Entertainment, who went bankrupt not long after that, leaving the film in legal limbo. Years later, the Weinsteins re-acquired the film--long available in bootleg circles--and finally dumped it on VOD and in a few theaters in September 2013. Debuting director Jonathan Levine, who has since gone on to make THE WACKNESS (2008), 50/50 (2011), and WARM BODIES (2013), and first-time screenwriter Jacob Forman really try to fashion a sort of self-referential slasher film, but unfortunately, the end results aren't all that different or any deeper than any random post-SCREAM or I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER knockoff. The story centers on a group outing at an isolated ranch where, among the expected group of unlikable teenagers, is one Mandy Lane (Amber Heard), an unattainable virgin who's lusted after by all the boys, from the jocks, to the stoners, to the dorks. Nine months earlier, one such boy--an overconfident football star looking to impress her--drunkenly took a dive off of his roof at the goading of Mandy's platonic best friend Emmett (Michael Welch, who went on to the TWILIGHT films). The in-crowd blames Emmett for his death and even Mandy distances herself from him. Meanwhile, out at the ranch, someone is offing the group--which includes Luke Grimes, who was recently cast in FIFTY SHADES OF GREY--one by one in various gory ways in an apparent quest to prove their love for Mandy Lane.

MANDY LANE takes forever to get going and by the time it finally finds some momentum in the home stretch, it's too late to really care. The killer's identity is so obvious--and Levine and Forman don't keep it a secret very long--that you'll have plenty of time to figure out the inevitable twist long before it's revealed. The filmmakers wanted to make a John Hughes homage in the form of a slasher film, but with one foot in the art-house and the other in the grindhouse, it doesn't really work as either, and by the time Levine breaks out the '70s-style freeze-frames in the climax, you might find the hipster cred-pandering more annoying than anything. There's an admirable nastiness to some of the brutal murders, and the camera does indeed love Amber Heard, but there's really nothing here--certainly not a long-buried cult classic waiting to be discovered. Were it not for its bumpy ride to a US release, ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE (a great title, by the way) would be a long-forgotten straight-to-DVD title cluttering $3 DVD bins at Big Lots locations nationwide by now. Instead, it'll be there by spring. (R, 90 mins)

THE FUTURE
(Chile/Germany/Italy/Spain/Switzerland - 2013)

Based on a novel by the late Chilean literary icon Roberto Bolano, THE FUTURE is an always-interesting but curiously empty art film that often feels like a present-day update to classic Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Taking place in an economically uncertain Rome, writer/director Alicia Scherson often channels the aura of Antonioni ennui and disconnect with its power lines, cell phone towers, and emphasis on artifice, while one of the central characters lives in the kind of decaying mansion-doubling-as-a-tomb that seems to come straight out of a Luchino Visconti/Burt Lancaster collaboration. The film is called THE FUTURE, but everyone is haunted by the past, as 19-year-old Bianca (Manuela Martelli) and her younger teenage brother Tomas (Luigi Ciardo) find themselves orphaned in Rome when their Chilean immigrant parents are killed in a tragic car accident. Given an orphans' pension, the pair continue to live in their family apartment as Bianca is declared Tomas' legal guardian. The money isn't as much as they'd hoped, and Bianca is forced to get a job as an assistant in a hair salon, while Tomas, when he isn't picking up sex tips from watching porn courtesy of their illegal cable hookup, frequently skips school to help clean up at a local gym. It's here where Tomas meets two new "friends," personal trainers Libio (Nicolas Vaporidis) and Bolones (Alessandro Giallocosta), a pair of dubious meatheads who basically move into Bianca and Tomas' place and take turns sleeping with Bianca. As money gets tighter, Libio and Bolones hatch a get-rich-quick scheme: have Bianca pose as a prostitute and ingratiate herself into the life of Maciste (Rutger Hauer), a blind and reclusive former Mr. Universe and '60s muscleman actor who's rumored to have a safe filled with a large amount of cash. Maciste, who adopted the name of his character ("They changed it to Hercules in America," he explains), lives alone in a massive, decrepit mansion, surrounded by workout equipment and relics of his past, and becomes a sexual mentor to young Bianca, who finds herself falling in love with the worldly old man ("Don't be silly," Maciste grumbles) and wanting to back out of the plan to rob his safe.

Plotting isn't Scherson's primary focus with THE FUTURE. It's more about mood and feel, with a mournful, elegiac sense of Rome's cultural history (Bianca takes a tour of Cinecitta and visits the sets of Maciste's old movies, and footage from 1962's THE FURY OF HERCULES has Brad Harris being passed off as a young Hauer/Maciste). Bianca never feels at home in Rome, which gives her a spiritual kinship with Maciste, who came to Italy to work and simply never left, shutting himself off from the world after a car accident that cost him his sight. Martelli is good in the lead and her frequent nude scenes, as Maciste drenches her in massage oil, should make her popular on Mr. Skin. Hauer, so awful in Dario Argento's recent DRACULA, gets to display some genuine star power here. He's done so many money gigs and C-grade trash over the years that it's easy to forget how terrific he can be. As Maciste, Hauer gets to sink his teeth into a strong late-career role that any aging actor wants (it probably didn't hurt that he'd have a nude, oiled-up Martelli--30 but playing 19--straddling him for a good chunk of his screen time), and he delivers his best performance in years, even with a ridiculous line like "What's the color of my sperm?" THE FUTURE is well-acted and lovely to look at it (have I mentioned the massage oil and the nudity?), and it's rare to see something these days that harkens back to the likes of Antonioni and Visconti, but it's not a particularly deep film, which is surprising given the complexity of much of Bolano's writing. The few attempts at significance in some of Bianca's narration only succeed in coming across as hackneyed and pretentious. Still, there's a lot to appreciate in THE FUTURE, and it should be required viewing for Rutger Hauer fans. (Unrated, 99 mins)

OUT OF THE FURNACE
(US - 2013)

Directed by Scott Cooper. Written by Brad Ingelsby and Scott Cooper. Cast: Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson, Casey Affleck, Forest Whitaker, Willem Dafoe, Zoe Saldana, Sam Shepard, Tom Bower, Bingo O'Malley, Dendrie Taylor. (R, 116 mins)

Initially planned as a Ridley Scott film starring Leonardo DiCaprio (both stayed on as producers), OUT OF THE FURNACE is the second effort by CRAZY HEART director Scott Cooper, and it's an ambitious, often very subtle mood piece disguised as a revenge thriller. Set in the mid-2000s to the present day, FURNACE takes place in a small, blue collar Pennsylvania town and Cooper does a marvelous job of conveying that unique atmosphere of a town where smoke and steam are constantly billowing through the air, everyone works at the same mill, drinks at the same bar, and everyone knows everyone. It's the kind of place where time is not exactly frozen, but it seems to be about a decade or two behind. Generation after generation works at the mill, and no one ever really leaves. Rodney Baze (Casey Affleck) tries to leave by joining the military and serving multiple tours in Iraq, but he comes back a damaged, broken man. He doesn't want to work at the mill, even though it was good enough for his older brother Russell (Christian Bale) and their dad (Bingo O'Malley sighting!), who's dying of cancer. When playing the ponies only ends up with him deep in debt to local loan shark John Petty (Willem Dafoe), he decides to be Petty's fighter in a bare-knuckle brawling ring. Rodney takes a dive to help settle Petty's debt to Harlan DeGroat (Woody Harrelson), a snarling, almost demonic meth kingpin and "inbred Jersey" crime lord who's so vicious and dangerous that even the cops--both local and state--are afraid to go after him. Needless to say, things don't go as planned.

But the film isn't about Rodney. It's about Russell, and one of the strong points of the script is that it takes its time building the characters and circumstances. It's a good hour before the crux of the plot is set in motion and it works because it helps you know these people. It's uncommon in a lot of today's mainstream cinema to be this character-driven. It's the kind of construction that was commonplace in the '70s but has little place in today's multiplexes. To that end, you can probably file OUT OF THE FURNACE in that same burgeoning "refusing to give the audience what it wants" subgenre of low CinemaScore grades along with KILLING THEM SOFTLY and THE COUNSELOR. At least for a while, that is. But more on that in a bit.

Russell has always felt the need to bail his little brother out of trouble, and that's still the case well into adulthood. He wants to settle down and marry his girlfriend Lena (Zoe Saldana), but after one too many drinks at the bar where he goes to settle another of Rodney's debts with Petty, he gets in a car accident that kills the occupants of the other vehicle (including a child). The crash wasn't completely Russell's fault--the other car was backing out of a driveway and didn't see Russell's truck--but he was driving under the influence, and is sent to prison for five years, during which time his father dies and Lena leaves him for police chief Barnes (Forest Whitaker). When the shit hits the fan between his brother and DeGroat and the police prove predictably useless, family does what family does, and Russell and his Uncle Red (Sam Shepard) decide to take matters into their own hands.

Barnes makes an interesting comment to Russell at one point, trying to talk him out of going vigilante and explaining that DeGroat and his hillbilly brethren have "entire generations who have never come down off that mountain." You could probably say the same thing about the Baze family and their friends and neighbors. The script doesn't really explore those parallels since we don't learn much about DeGroat's clan. Once Russell and Uncle Red decide to take action, the film becomes inconsistent and skids a bit. It's never believable for a moment that Russell and Uncle Red gain such easy access to DeGroat's meth headquarters and are permitted to walk out upright. Nor is it plausible that DeGroat would just bring one flunky with him to meet a mystery man who's threatened him over the phone. The actors are almost all superb across the board, particularly Bale who, the disastrous HARSH TIMES excepting, can disappear into any role and accent, and a terrifying Harrelson, who's introduced in the opening scene and only appears fleetingly for the next hour or so, but his powerful presence is felt even in his absence. Shepard, who's aged into one of our finest character actors (if you haven't seen the barely-released BLACKTHORN, you're missing one of the best films of the last few years that no one's heard of), is a performer who can speak volumes without saying a word, and he's perfect as Russell's voice of reason. The only real botch in the casting is with Whitaker, who starts using some bizarre grunting voice midway through his performance that completely derails every scene he's in from that point. It's almost like he's trying to use Bale's Batman voice. Whitaker has historically been a fine actor and the guy's got an Academy Award. I haven't seen LEE DANIELS' THE BUTLER yet, but this is another in a string of embarrassing performances by the actor, who at some point apparently forgot how to act.

And then there's the ending. Without spoiling anything, Cooper has said that the final shot is an homage to THE GODFATHER PART II. Maybe it was in the script, maybe it wasn't, but if the film ended one shot sooner, it would be remarkably more effective. The terrible final shot destroys the ambiguity of what just came before it--which is where it should've ended--and feels not like an homage to a classic film but rather, a focus-group-suggested decision by the studio to spell everything out for audiences who want definitive closure. The shot before the final shot wasn't quite on the level of THE SOPRANOS as far as open-endedness goes, but it would've been a much more powerful experience if it ended there. In short, there's much to appreciate in OUT OF THE FURNACE, but some bumbling and stumbling in the second half unquestionably do it some irreparable harm.

JAYNE MANSFIELD'S CAR
(US/Russia - 2013)

Billy Bob Thornton hasn't had a lot of luck behind the camera after his 1996 breakthrough SLING BLADE. Harvey Weinstein sent DADDY AND THEM straight to cable in 2003 after five years on the shelf. In 2011, Thornton made THE KING OF LUCK, a documentary about Willie Nelson, and it's still waiting for distribution. The tactlessly-titled JAYNE MANSFIELD'S CAR is Thornton's first narrative directorial effort since Weinstein forced him to cut over an hour from 2000's ALL THE PRETTY HORSES. He needn't have bothered. Reuniting with his writing partner Tom Epperson, with whom he scripted 1992's ONE FALSE MOVE, 1996's DON'T LOOK BACK, and 2000's THE GIFT, Thornton hits bottom and drags a great cast down with him. This is a complete embarrassment for all involved. It's poorly-written, atrociously-acted, and hardly a scene goes by without some mind-boggling disaster. It's hard to tell what any of these people were thinking, but I hope they had a better time making it than anyone will have watching it. Released on just 11 screens after gathering dust for two years, JAYNE MANSFIELD'S CAR may not be the worst film of 2013, but it's likely the most wasteful of a quality ensemble of actors.

In small-town Georgia in 1969, cranky patriarch Jim Caldwell (Robert Duvall) gets word that his ex-wife has died. She left him and their four adult children 20 years earlier, married Brit Kingsley Bedford (John Hurt) and moved to England. Her dying wish was to be buried back home, so Bedford and his children--Philip (Ray Stevenson) and Camilla (Frances O'Connor) are on their way to Georgia. This doesn't sit well with Jim or his uptight eldest son Jimbo (Robert Patrick), though the other two sons, battle-scarred war vet Skip (Thornton) and aging hippie Carroll (Kevin Bacon) seem to welcome them. Jim has spent 20 years hating Kingsley, but the two bond over their love of the same woman (Tippi Hedren played this character, but Thornton ultimately granted the legendary Hitchcock muse the dignity of having her scenes cut) and talk of Jayne Mansfield's decapitated head when Jim takes Kingsley to an exhibit where the actress' alleged death car is on display. Meanwhile, Skip falls for Camilla, convincing her to strip naked and recite prose in her British accent while he masturbates, and the Caldwell boys' sister Donna (Katherine LaNasa) is drawn to Philip as she grows tired of her blowhard, ex-football pro husband Neal (Ron White). JAYNE MANSFIELD'S CAR tries to be a culture-clash character piece, Vietnam-era period drama, and raunchy comedy, botching all three and only succeeding in being one of the most appallingly ill-conceived pieces of cinema in recent memory. Character behavior makes no sense from scene to scene and Thornton seems to almost intentionally sabotage any momentum he gets going. Stevenson has a terrific scene where Philip defends himself against his father's drunken accusations of cowardice in battle, but then Thornton has Jimbo and his wife (Shawnee Smith) start making out on the couch for no reason while everyone watches. Skip walks into his dad's bedroom at one point with his war medals pinned to the dead skin on his burned and scarred chest, and all Jim can say is "Why don't you go get yourself some ice cream?" Who are these grotesque people? What planet do they live on? Duvall is a national treasure, but even his reliable "crusty old coot" act is played-out and tiresome here. It's the kind of film where, after seeing the Jayne Mansfield death car, old Kingsley gets philosophical and mutters "We all have a crash of some sort awaiting us." Indeed. That's some advice Thornton would've been wise to heed before he shit the bed with this unbearable misfire. (R, 122 mins)

BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO
(UK/Germany - 2012/2013 US release)

Not so much a straight-up homage to the Italian giallo as much as a mood piece inspired by the subgenre, BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO is an impenetrable puzzle that fascinates and frustrates in equal measures. Writer/director Peter Strickland is clearly a fan who obviously did his homework in terms of period detail and the work that went into producing an Italian horror film in the 1970s, but it does have some tedious stretches. Gilderoy (Toby Jones), is a meek, introverted British sound mixer hired to supervise the dubbing and foley work for an Italian horror film titled THE EQUESTRIAN VORTEX. With his sound-mix work history primarily in nature documentaries, Gilderoy can't quite figure out why director Giancarlo Santini (Antonio Mancino) is so eager to hire him. Gilderoy doesn't mesh well with producer Francesco Corragio (Cosimo Fusco) or the rest of the Berberian Sound Studio staff and can't seem to stop unintentionally offending them, whether he's adjusting some equipment or getting the run-around on being reimbursed for his plane ticket. He can't even eat a grape without pissing someone off ("it's a custom to swallow the seeds here"). With the lecherous Santini distracted by young starlets and tensions mounting with the bottom-line-watching Corragio, the homesick Gilderoy finds comfort in letters from his mum and starts growing increasingly paranoid and seems to begin losing touch with reality.

While not a giallo, BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO uses giallo tropes to ambiguously detail Gilderoy's slow descent into madness, eventually seeing himself in the film in events that just happened moments before, and already dubbed into Italian. Strickland does a masterful job at capturing the details of sound editing, particularly in the way the Italian film industry had to dub everything in the days of no direct sound on-set. We never actually see any footage from THE EQUESTRIAN VORTEX, a film ostensibly about the supernatural vengeance of a condemned witch (though Strickland does cleverly show its opening credits instead of BERBERIAN's opening credits; in retrospect, the first hint that fantasy and reality will fuse), but we see its profound effect on an increasingly disturbed Gilderoy as he hacks watermelons to get the right sound effect of a hatchet slicing through flesh, or recording the sound of sizzling grease to replicate the sound of a hot poker going into an accused witch's vagina. The horrors of THE EQUESTRIAN VORTEX are never shown, but heard with precision and clarity, and if nothing else, BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO is a triumph of cinematic sound. Jones, Fusco, and Mancino are excellent, Strickland undoubtedly knows his giallo history, and the score by Broadcast is very effective, but the film's languid pacing and general obfuscation sometimes do it a disservice. Highly recommended for cult film enthusiasts and those interested in the more technical aspects of filmmaking and genre history, but those looking for a mainstream horror film might find it a bit of an endurance test. (Unrated, 92 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

MAN OF TAI CHI
(US/Hong Kong/China - 2013)

A surprisingly straight-faced and credible directorial debut for Keanu Reeves, MAN OF TAI CHI is a martial-arts film that doesn't go the predictable route of snarky, reference-drenched, tongue-in-cheek homage but rather, plays it largely legit and serious throughout. He even went with Chinese and Hong Kong co-producers and a good chunk of the film is in Cantonese with English subtitles. Universal put up some of the $25 million budget, but perhaps following the tepid response to RZA's '70s kung-fu homage THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS, opted not to distribute the film in the US, where the Weinsteins' B-movie wing Radius-TWC acquired it and dumped it on 110 screens for a paltry $100,000 gross. Drawing from such influences as the "to the death" tournament video games and film genre and John Woo-inspired Hong Kong cop thrillers and fashioning it into a good vs. evil morality play, MAN OF TAI CHI has the titular student, Tiger Chen (Chen-Hu, who worked on the MATRIX stunt team), forgetting the peaceful Tai Chi ideals of his fatherly mentor (Yu Hai) as he's sucked into the underground fight club world overseen by the nefarious Donaka Mark (Reeves), an almost Satanic figure of such power that he can pause what's running on TV simply by pointing at it. Initially participating to get some quick cash so he can pay to restore his master's Ling Kong Tai Chi temple, which has been hit with code violations (!), Tiger gives into his violent impulses and becomes an increasingly vicious fighter in Donaka Mark's high-tech realm, where the fights are broadcast online to his obscenely wealthy clients. Will Tiger hit bottom and see that he's being led down the wrong path? Will he cleanse his soul and find redemption in a fight to the death with Donaka Mark? Have you ever seen a martial-arts flick before?

Working with legendary fight coordinator Yuen Wo-Ping, Reeves has put together an unexpectedly solid film, perhaps a bit overlong and draggy in spots, but the veteran actor must have been picking up tips from his directors all these years, because he makes MAN OF TAI CHI look like a film that cost much more than $25 million. Reeves probably could've trimmed 15 minutes from it and tightened it up a bit, and there's one laughable CGI car wreck, but he deserves some credit for being handed a large amount of money and not dicking off and turning it into an insufferable vanity project, opting instead to keep the focus on Tiger and only occasionally indulging himself with some overacting or an odd facial expression here and there. Also with Karen Mok as an obsessed Hong Kong cop trying to bust Donaka Mark, Simon Yam as the police superintendent, and THE RAID: REDEMPTION's Iko Uwais as one of Tiger's opponents, MAN OF TAI CHI is no classic, but it's better than anyone would've guessed upon hearing that Keanu Reeves was directing an Asian martial-arts epic. (R, 105 mins)

NEBRASKA
(US - 2013)

Directed by Alexander Payne. Written by Bob Nelson. Cast: Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach, Bob Odenkirk, Rance Howard, Mary Louise Wilson, Tim Driscoll, Devin Ratray, Angela McEwan. (R, 114 mins)

Bruce Dern, with his odd mannerisms and twitchy presence, is the kind of actor who only could've become a leading man in the more adventurous 1970s, the last time when the idiosyncratic, the offbeat, and the challenging were widely accepted in mainstream cinema. Dern was never cut out for the blockbuster films that took over in the 1980s. Even in his A-list heyday, he was usually called upon to play creeps and psychos, and in a rare instance when he was the hero, as in Walter Hill's THE DRIVER (1978), you still couldn't put your complete confidence in him as a good guy. Like most actors of his generation, Dern started out in TV in the early 1960s and moved into supporting roles (HUSH...HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE and HANG 'EM HIGH among others) and eventually became a fixture in biker and hippie films of the late 1960s, such as THE WILD ANGELS, THE TRIP, PSYCH-OUT, THE CYCLE SAVAGES, and THE REBEL ROUSERS. Dern's career really took off in the early 1970s, when he shot John Wayne in the back in 1972's THE COWBOYS, and with the same year's sci-fi cult classic SILENT RUNNING. Dern also attracted much critical attention with a pair of collaborations with friend Jack Nicholson, who appeared with him in some of those earlier biker/hippie outings before his EASY RIDER breakthrough: 1971's DRIVE, HE SAID (directed by Nicholson) and 1972's THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS. Neither film was a commercial success, but they, along with the general momentum he had going, were enough to catapult him to stardom and leave the drive-in movies behind with prestige projects like 1974's THE GREAT GATSBY and 1978's COMING HOME, which earned a him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod (he lost to Christopher Walken in THE DEER HUNTER). To this day, Dern has never stopped working, but his time in the spotlight was short. By 1981's TATTOO, his days as a headliner were essentially over and he moved into character and ensemble parts in projects of varying quality. He could've just as easily turned up in supporting roles in films like 1990's AFTER DARK, MY SWEET and 1992's DIGGSTOWN, or in post-nuke junk like 1988's WORLD GONE WILD. In recent years, he appeared on the HBO series BIG LOVE and assorted indie dramas and horror movies, usually typecast as a standard Dern-like weirdo.

Alexander Payne's NEBRASKA offers Dern the kind of late-career triumph desired by any 77-year-old actor who's been schlepping it for over 50 years and has been out of the spotlight for years. In a role first pitched to the likes of Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, and Robert Forster, Dern is Woody Grant, an 80-ish Billings, MT man who seems to drift in and out of coherence. He's convinced he's won $1 million in one of those magazine sweepstakes mailers, and is determined to get to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect his prize. He keeps trying to walk there--several states away--which frustrates the local cops and his blunt, tells-it-like-it-is wife Kate (June Squibb). Out of frustration but thinking maybe a couple days of entertaining the fantasy might make his dad happy, Woody's son David (Will Forte) decides to take a few days off work to drive him to Lincoln. On the way, they stop at Hawthrone, Nebraska, the small town where Woody grew up. This leads to an impromptu family reunion with Woody's brothers, and even Kate and their oldest son Ross (Bob Odenkirk) make the trip. David, Ross, and Kate repeatedly try to convince Woody that he hasn't won anything, but he'll hear none of it. Soon, his extended family and the rest of the town, including Woody's glad-handing old business partner Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach) start swarming around Woody like vultures, not even masking their eagerness at getting a piece of the prize winnings.

Written by Bob Nelson, NEBRASKA has a lot in common with past Payne films like ABOUT SCHMIDT (2002), SIDEWAYS (2004), and THE DESCENDANTS (2009) with its road trip and family squabbling. Payne's decision to shoot NEBRASKA in black & white serves to llustrate the stark emptiness of the decrepit farm towns in this part of the country. Many of the shots achieved by cinematographer Phedon Papamichael could almost function as still photographs. Visually, it's beautiful and haunting, and the story is powerful yet simple in its execution. David is a grown man stuck in a rut who has never really understood his father. It's mentioned by a relative that the Grant boys (meaning Woody and his brothers) "don't talk much," and there's some dark humor to be found in the scenes of several of these old guys sitting around, silently watching a football game with nothing to say, until one (Rance Howard) pipes up, asking another "You still have that Chevrolet?" and the response being "Never had a Chevrolet...had a Buick back in 1979." David's never really talked to his dad and during this trip, finds that there's a lot he doesn't know about him. There's no big twist or huge revelation, but rather, it's a quiet and very perceptive little film about life, choices, regrets, unfulfilled dreams, and family dynamics that will resonate with many.

Of course, Dern is the show here, but it's almost fitting to his entire career that he's nearly upstaged by his supporting cast. SNL vet Forte demonstrates some chops here that you would've never suspected if you just knew him as MACGRUBER and "The Falconer." Keach and Odenkirk are both terrific, but it's 84-year-old Squibb who steals every scene she's in as Kate. Opinionated and never suffering fools gladly (Ed: "Kate always was kind of a bitch"), Kate insists she can't put up with Woody anymore but she obviously still loves him. Squibb finds a perfect balance between being a mouthy smart-ass and a loving matriarch, and does so without resorting to the old "senior being raunchy" standby. Her cutting remarks toward departed family members during a cemetery visit ("There's your dad's sister Rose...she was a whore...don't get me wrong, I loved her dearly but my God, she was a slut!") and the bit where she goes off on Woody's greedy relatives are absolutely priceless. Beautifully shot, intelligently-written, excellently-acted, thoughtful, and darkly hilarious, the low-key NEBRASKA is one of the 2013's best films and a potent reminder of what a gifted actor we have in Bruce Dern. He shouldn't have had to wait this long for the role of his career.

VIOLENT CITY
aka THE FAMILY
(Italy/France - 1970/1973 US release)

Directed by Sergio Sollima. Written by Sauro Scavolini, Gianfranco Galligarich, Lina Wertmuller, Sergio Sollima. Cast: Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas, Jill Ireland, Umberto Orsini, Michel Constantin, Ray Sanders, Benjamin Lev, Peter Dane, George Savalas, Goffredo Unger. (R, 109 mins)

Charles Bronson (1921-2003) was a late bloomer when it came to mega-stardom. A working actor in movies since 1951, he became a reliable supporting actor throughout that decade, acting under his real name "Charles Buchinsky" until 1954. With small roles in classics like HOUSE OF WAX (1953) and VERA CRUZ (1954), and countless TV gigs, he made his presence known and in 1958, got his first lead in Roger Corman's MACHINE GUN KELLY. But it was still mainly supporting roles after that, though he found some degree of fame as part of ensembles in blockbusters like THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) and THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963). Even as Bronson was co-starring in big-budget extravaganzas like BATTLE OF THE BULGE (1965) and THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967), he was still doing TV guest roles and felt like he was spinning his wheels. After two more supporting roles in the 1968 westerns VILLA RIDES and the French/Italian/Mexican co-production GUNS FOR SAN SEBASTIAN, Bronson opted to test the waters of the European film industry and it proved to be the best move he could've made. With his career stalled at home, European audiences embraced the veteran journeyman actor and turned him into a superstar. 1968's FAREWELL, FRIEND (better known these days as HONOR AMONG THIEVES) paired him with French icon Alain Delon, and he had one of his signature roles as Harmonica in Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1969), a film that bombed in the US when released but is now considered one of cinema's essential westerns. Over the next few years, Bronson occasionally dabbled in American films like YOU CAN'T WIN 'EM ALL (1970) or the British LOLA (1970), which gave the 49-year-old actor one of his strangest roles as a 38-year-old writer falling in love with a 16-year-old (Susan George), but his run of generally Italian and/or French films from 1969-73 made him the top box office draw in Europe. Most of these films would open in the US--often belatedly--and some, like 1971's RED SUN and 1972's THE VALACHI PAPERS, would become hits, but never on the level that they did in Europe. Bronson was the king of the European box office and by 1972, he gradually started to work his way back into American films with that year's THE MECHANIC and 1973's THE STONE KILLER. 1974 was the turning point of Bronson's career: on July 17, MR. MAJESTYK opened, and a week later, the vigilante thriller DEATH WISH was released. DEATH WISH provided a template for every vigilante film that followed it, and it became a blockbuster smash and a hot-button controversy that addressed very real concerns of crime in 1970s NYC. Over two decades into his career and at 53 years of age, Bronson was finally a Hollywood A-lister, global megastar and, it's worth mentioning, aftershave pitchman for the Japanese market.

Telly Savalas' career path was remarkably similar to Bronson's in many ways, even intersecting in BATTLE OF THE BULGE and THE DIRTY DOZEN. Savalas (1922-1994) was another jobbing actor who spent a lot of time in supporting roles and on TV and didn't even make his big-screen debut until he was 39 years old. He got a Best Supporting Actor nomination for 1962's BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ, his fifth film, and even played nefarious 007 villain Blofeld in 1969's ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE. Savalas' Oscar nomination (he lost to Ed Begley in SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH) kept him busy but didn't really open any doors to stardom for him, and he was back on TV the next year (though one of those TV roles was in the legendary TWILIGHT ZONE episode "Living Doll," where he's a cruel disciplinarian stalked by his stepdaughter's angry doll Talky Tina). Usually cast as villains and psychos, Savalas was in constant demand but, like Bronson, grew frustrated with the predictability of the work. He spent most of the early 1970s in Europe, where he still played villains and psychos (his performance in 1972's REDNECK has to be seen to be believed), but was granted the VIP treatment that came with being a big-name American guest star in European genre fare, which explains why a lot of aging American actors of that era (Joseph Cotten, Lee J. Cobb, Richard Conte, Arthur Kennedy, Mel Ferrer, etc) logged a lot of time in Eurotrashy projects that were usually beneath them. Savalas' career was all but dead in America until he took the lead in the CBS TV-movie THE MARCUS-NELSON MURDERS (1973), playing tough NYC cop Lt. Theo Kojak. The movie was a ratings hit and it spun off into the hugely-popular TV series KOJAK, which ran from 1973 to 1978. With his signature lollipop and his "Who loves ya, baby?" catchphrase, "Kojak" became virtually interchangeable with Savalas himself, and the actor comfortably coasted on that image for the rest of his career.

Bronson and Savalas becoming American pop culture icons at roughly the same time led to an extensive backlog of their European movies flooding US theaters and drive-ins as late as 1976. That, coupled with the success of 1972's THE GODFATHER, led to the tardy US release of Sergio Sollima's VIOLENT CITY, a 1970 Italian/French gangster thriller that paired the two for the third time. Retitled THE FAMILY, with one-sheet art blatantly copying the GODFATHER font, the film was given a small rollout in 1973, then expanded nationwide in 1974 to capitalize on DEATH WISH and KOJAK being all the rage.

Opening with a killer Ennio Morricone score and an impressive Virgin Islands car chase that's hampered somewhat by some rear-projection work from inside the car that pays close attention to continuity but still looks a bit shoddy, VIOLENT CITY has professional hit man Jeff (Bronson) and his girlfriend Vanessa (Bronson's wife and frequent co-star Jill Ireland) pursued by hit men, with Jeff shot and left for dead by his friend Coogan (an uncredited actor whose identity has never been verified), who runs off with Vanessa. Hospitalized and sent to prison, Jeff is eventually paroled and obsessed with finding Vanessa and Coogan. He does this against the advice of his lawyer Steve (Umberto Orsini) and with the help of his smack-addicted hitman buddy Killain (Michel Constantin, dubbed by the gravelly Robert Spafford). Coogan, a champion stock-car racer, isn't too hard to find and Jeff shoots out his tire during a race at Michigan International Speedway, causing a fiery crash and explosion. But someone took pictures of Jeff in the act. He's being blackmailed by the minions of New Orleans crime boss Al Weber (Savalas), who's been trying to lure the fiercely independent Jeff into his organization. Jeff has no interest, but placates Weber by hearing him out only to discover that Weber's hot young wife is Vanessa. Steve, who essentially functions as Weber's consigliere, knew this all along, and was trying to keep Jeff from finding out.

VIOLENT CITY finds Bronson in what would become his typical "vengeance" mode, but rather than taking out some punks who harmed his family and friends, a motif that would come to define his screen persona post-DEATH WISH, his Jeff is more of an enraged, heartbroken sad sack. His quest for revenge becomes more of a suicide mission as he plots to take out Weber's entire organization, all as a buildup to his revenge against Vanessa. Spaghetti western vet Sollima (THE BIG GUNDOWN, RUN MAN RUN) and his co-writers (among them a just-starting-out Lina Wertmuller) pull a nifty bait-and-switch by making you think Savalas' Weber is the antagonist, but it's really Vanessa. Weber is just another of her victims. Never a particularly strong actress and largely dismissed by critics because she was Bronson's wife and acted almost exclusively in his movies after she left MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. co-star David McCallum for him, Ireland delivers what might be her best performance in VIOLENT CITY. Vanessa is revealed to be a classic femme fatale who destroys every man with whom she comes into contact. Witness the way she turns the strutting, larger-than-life Weber into a cuckold in dorky Coke-bottle glasses that constantly keep sliding down the bridge of his nose. Savalas plays this subtle shift beautifully, introduced with a completely self-aggrandizing monologue to Jeff and all but begging for his life when he realizes that he never really was in charge once he married Vanessa. But Sollima saves the best for the climax, a beautifully filmed, mostly silent set piece with Vanessa and the bottom-feeding Steve--who becomes her latest doomed paramour once Weber's out of the picture--in a glass elevator as Jeff, now the subject of a citywide manhunt after Weber's murder, takes them out from the top of a nearby building...and calmly waits for the inevitable. You could argue that Bronson is miscast in the role--he seems too old at times, especially when Weber and Killain both make references to his youth and inexperience in mob life; Bronson was a year older than Savalas and three years older than French actor Constantin. Sollima has said that the script was first offered to Jon Voight, then riding high on MIDNIGHT COWBOY, but when he declined, it made its way to Bronson, with whom Ireland came as a package deal. Putting Voight in the role of Jeff, things probably make a lot more logical sense, but Bronson obviously works because he's Bronson.

With its fusion of the gangster and film noir genres, its scenic New Orleans location shooting, and Morricone's memorable score, VIOLENT CITY easily ranks alongside Rene Clement's RIDER ON THE RAIN (also 1970) as the best of Bronson's star vehicles during his European sojourn. It became a modest hit throughout 1974 in the US after being retitled THE FAMILY, and aired in prime-time on CBS in 1975 before becoming a regular late-night TV offering in syndication in the '80s. After DEATH WISH, Bronson had the clout to make the kinds of films he wanted to make, which resulted in oddities like the romantic western FROM NOON TILL THREE (1976), which of course co-starred Ireland, but fans wanted him in DEATH WISH mode. After a string of box-office disappointments like LOVE AND BULLETS (1979), CABOBLANCO (1980), BORDERLINE (1980), and DEATH HUNT (1981), Bronson relented and gave the fans what they wanted with DEATH WISH II (1982), and while he continued to make entertaining actioners for B-movie icons Golan & Globus (most notably 1985's insane DEATH WISH 3), he rarely exerted himself after that and as his fans got older, the action heroes got younger, and the movies got bigger and louder, nobody was going to see the geriatric Bronson in things like MESSENGER OF DEATH (1988) or KINJITE: FORBIDDEN SUBJECTS (1989). After the drug overdose death of his stepson Jason McCallum in 1989 and Ireland succumbing to a long battle with breast cancer in 1990 at just 54, Bronson's heart really wasn't in movies anymore. He went to the vigilante well one more time with 1993's tired DEATH WISH V: THE FACE OF DEATH, and took a stab at being a character actor with a small role in Sean Penn's 1991 directorial debut THE INDIAN RUNNER, playing the father of the two protagonists (David Morse and a young Viggo Mortensen). Bronson only has a couple of scenes early in the film, but he's quietly powerful and undoubtedly drawing on his own grief as his character commits suicide after the death of his beloved wife. It was the first time in years that he was actually required to act, and though his screen time was brief, it was enough to show that he still had it. After turning down the role of Curly, the intimidatingly leathery trail boss in CITY SLICKERS--quite angrily, according to Billy Crystal--only to see Jack Palance get an Oscar for it, Bronson then appeared in a handful of made-for-TV movies, eventually retiring from acting altogether by the late '90s. Always private even at the height of his fame, Bronson's final years found him completely off the radar, and only near his 2003 death was it revealed that he was in the final stages of Alzheimer's. Bronson remains a screen legend, and while most of the films from his European phase have fallen through the cracks over the years (you don't hear much about COLD SWEAT, CHINO, or the underrated psychological thriller SOMEONE BEHIND THE DOOR these days), they were vital in challenging him as an actor and for establishing the Bronson that we knew for the last 30 years of his career.

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG
(US/New Zealand - 2013)

Directed by Peter Jackson. Written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro. Cast: Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Orlando Bloom, Benedict Cumberbatch, Luke Evans, Evangeline Lilly, Cate Blanchett, Lee Pace, Stephen Fry, Ken Stott, James Nesbitt, Aidan Turner, Sylvester McCoy, Graham McTavish, Jed Brophy, Mikael Persbrandt, Ryan Gage, Manu Bennett, Lawrence Makoare. (PG-13, 161 mins)

The second installment of Peter Jackson's HOBBIT trilogy is a no-expense-spared visual stunner, but again suffers from the bloat of Jackson and his writing team padding a 300-page book into what will amount to somewhere around nine hours of cinema. I'm not saying there's an etched-in-stone rule for film adaptations of books, but if you can read the book in less time than it takes to watch the movie, you might be overdoing it. Jackson was able to convey the entire epic LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy in three films, but the recurring--and justified--criticism of this latest venture is that The Hobbit is a comparatively smaller-scale, less grandiose novel, but it's still taking him three overlong films to tell the story thanks to the addition of material from Tolkien's The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales. There's simply no reason other than the greed of getting fans to pay for three movies that this couldn't have been one three-hour film. This frequently becomes a problem when a visionary filmmaker unveils a game-changer and is then granted carte blanche to do whatever they want. He may not be the insufferable asshole that James Cameron is, but that doesn't make Jackson's self-indulgence any less problematic and off-putting.

Harsh words, perhaps, but I didn't dislike THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG. It looks terrific (I saw this in regular 3-D instead of the stagy-looking High Frame Rate 3-D, which is Jackson's preferred vision), the performances are excellent, and there's some inspired set pieces, most notably the barrel escape from the castle of Elvenking Thranduil (Lee Pace). That's just one stop on the journey of Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), who's accompanying a group of dwarves led by the heroic Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) to obtain the Arkenstone from the dragon Smaug, who long ago took control of Lonely Mountain from Oakenshied's ancestors. SMAUG really consists of a handful of set pieces stretched out to extreme lengths. Whatever spectacle is achieved--the giant spiders, the barrel escape, and eventually, the showdown with Smaug (wonderfully voiced and the face motion-captured by Benedict Cumberbatch)--each goes on forever. Before the heroes end up imprisoned in Thranduil's castle, they cross paths with elves Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly). Legolas, a fan favorite of the LOTR books and films, is the son of Thranduil but was not in Tolkien's The Hobbit, and is only here to make Bloom part of this trilogy as well (he's also been given that distracting, waxy CGI sheen that the original trilogy's returning actors got in AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY to make him look younger, though considering Legolas is already several hundred years old, it hardly seems necessary). Tauriel is a character completely invented by Jackson, and much time is devoted to her mutual crush on dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner), a subplot that the audience will find almost as irritating as Legolas does. So, it's not enough that he's bloating the novel into three films by incorporating material from other Tolkien works, but now he's creating additional characters and plotlines? Just adapt the book, Mr. Jackson. I'm no Tolkien purist and it's been years since I've read it, but you're fixing something that isn't broken.

Amidst the endless and eventually exhausting action sequences--yes, Jackson resorts to that zoomy, circling video-game look with characters pinballing around the frame--there's a lot to appreciate in the performances. Freeman is spot-on as Bilbo and Armitage is again a strong Oakenshield. The camaraderie among the dwarves is nicely-handled, Luke Evans does some good work as Bard, a widowed, down-on-his-luck boatman who helps smuggle the crew into Esgaroth, and Stephen Fry is amusingly hammy as the callous Master of Lake-town, a sort-of Middle-Earth one-percenter prone to bitching that the commoners want food, shelter, and work. Jackson made some late-in-the-game editing decisions and bumped some scenes to next year's THERE AND BACK AGAIN, resulting in Hugo Weaving (Elrond), Andy Serkis (Gollum), and Christopher Lee (Saruman) getting cut from SMAUG, and Cate Blanchett (Galadriel) reduced to one shot. Presumably, these changes affected Ian McKellen's Gandalf as well. McKellen gets top-billing here but only has a few scenes. After leaving Bilbo and the dwarves to attend to other business, he runs into Radagast (Sylvester McCoy) and has a confrontation with the Necromancer (also Cumberbatch), and...that's it. Absent for long stretches of time, McKellen's got maybe 10-12 minutes of screen time here, and it's one of the film's major letdowns. He owns this character and it's an absolute joy watching him relish playing it. But hey, at least we've got a budding romance between Kili and Tauriel to look forward to in the next film.

ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES
(US - 2013)

Directed by Adam McKay. Written by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. Cast: Will Ferrell, Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, David Koechner, Christina Applegate, Kristen Wiig, James Marsden, Dylan Baker, Meagan Good, Harrison Ford, Greg Kinnear, Josh Lawson, Judah Nelson, Fred Willard, Chris Parnell, June Diane Raphael. (PG-13, 120 mins)

Back in 2004, the $25 million ANCHORMAN: THE LEGEND OF RON BURGUNDY made more than triple its budget but never topped the box office and dropped out of the top five after two weeks. The film became a modern comedy classic on DVD and cable, where it amassed a devoted cult following when people discovered how consistently hilarious and quotable it is. Star/co-writer Will Ferrell left SNL two years earlier and had the hits OLD SCHOOL and ELF, but it was ANCHORMAN that would become the defining work of his big-screen career and his partnership with director/co-writer Adam McKay, though I contend that 2010's THE OTHER GUYS is their masterpiece. It's nearly a decade later, and after what must be the longest, most aggressive, and all-encompassing marketing campaigns in cinema history, ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES arrives just before Ferrell resorted to going door-to-door across America in his Ron Burgundy wardrobe. With double the budget, probably to accommodate the increased star power and salary requirements of Ferrell and Steve Carell, it's obviously a bigger movie. And a louder movie. It's also bombastically self-indulgent as Ferrell and McKay seem to be making it up as they go along. Nine years ago, they had enough outtakes and abandoned subplots from the first film to assemble the straight-to-DVD spinoff film WAKE UP, RON BURGUNDY. There's no such restraint here. Running nearly 30 minutes longer than the first film, Ferrell and McKay gather up seemingly every discarded comedy idea they concocted since the first entry and throw everything against the wall to see what sticks. Its rapid fire assault of gags might sound ambitious but it comes off as sloppy and desperate, almost like they could be working on a higher level than we're expecting but more likely they're just punking us with an almost Sandlerian level of audience contempt. There's no doubt the coming weeks will find passionate defenses of the film and you'll see terms like "anarchic,""absurdist,""subversive,""Dadaist", and maybe even, and I can't believe I'm writing this, "Bunuel-ian" tossed about with wild, pretentious abandon as if there's some deeper shit going on, but even as a fan of Ferrell, the first film, and absurdist humor, I found ANCHORMAN 2 to be jaw-droppingly unfunny and a dumpster fire of a movie, the kind of catastrophically awful train wreck where it's not hyperbolic to suggest that it's Ferrell and McKay's GIGLI or THE ADVENTURES OF PLUTO NASH.

Opening in 1980 to the sounds of Christopher Cross'"Ride Like the Wind," the first of countless soft-rock tunes used where simply hearing them is supposed to be the joke, ANCHORMAN 2 finds news anchor Ron Burgundy (Ferrell) and wife/co-anchor Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) relocated to NYC from San Diego, with their six-year-old son Walter (Judah Nelson). When Veronica is called up to the network by boss Mack Harken (Harrison Ford), who subsequently fires Ron, their marriage falls apart. After a botched suicide attempt, Ron is contacted by Freddie Shapp (Dylan Baker), who's scouting for news personalities for Global News Network, a new 24-hour cable news network bankrolled by Australian billionaire Kench Allenby (Josh Lawson). Lured by the promise of stardom and seeing it as another chance to do what he was born to do, Ron decides to reassemble his news team: reporter Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd), weatherman Brick Tamland (Carell), and sportscaster Champ Kind (David Koechner). Saddled with the 2:00-5:00 am graveyard slot, Ron finds a rival in prime-time anchor Jack Lime (James Marsden), and comes up with an idea to give the audience the news they want instead of the news they need. With his focus on vacuous entertainment stories, cute animals, high-speed chases, debates devolving into shouting matches, and smoking crack on-air, Ron becomes the country's biggest news star and inadvertently brings about the downfall of television news standards.

Those digs at today's cable news--which are obvious and don't really threaten to erase memories of Paddy Chayefsky and NETWORK--are about as thoughtful as ANCHORMAN 2 gets. Aside from the use of early '80s radio staples, the film constantly utilizes future debacles and scandals as a source of easy, lazy humor ("Sponsored by BP: Nature's Best Friend," and Brian cites O.J. Simpson, Phil Spector, and Robert Blake as his posse who call themselves "The Ladykillers"), and it's funny once or twice, but by the 20th time, it's a little stale. There's a certain expectation of callbacks and references when you're dealing with a comedy as revered as ANCHORMAN, and that film's first invocations of "Great Odin's Raven!" or "By the beard of Zeus!" were hilarious. Not so much here, when Ferrell is bellowing nonsense like "By the hymen of Olivia Newton-John!" What? And I haven't even gotten into an extended subplot where Ron goes blind after a head injury and spends his days in seclusion at a lighthouse and bottle-feeding a shark before freeing it into the open water. Ron Burgundy was always a pompous chauvinist, but here's he's just a bleating, tone-deaf asshole. Sometimes, it's as if he's not even playing the same Ron Burgundy from the first film, but rather, an even more cartoonish parody of Ron Burgundy. Indeed, ANCHORMAN 2 is so scattershot, random, and over-the-top that it makes the comparatively sophisticated ANCHORMAN look like BROADCAST NEWS. When Ron gets involved with African-American, female boss Linda Jackson (Meagan Good)--this is after he first meets her and can't stop the Tourette's-styled barking of "Black!" at her--he has dinner with her family, where he steers the conversation to the level of her "stank" during sex and throwing out a "Say what?" to her mother. Has Ferrell even seen the first ANCHORMAN recently? Does he remember making it?

But that's nothing compared to what's happened to Carell's Brick Tamland. Carell wasn't a star back in 2004 and was primarily known as a DAILY SHOW correspondent. In the ensuing decade, he's had considerable success with THE OFFICE and several movies. Brick was a minor character with some funny bits in ANCHORMAN, but now that Carell is arguably as big a star as Ferrell, they probably had to give Brick stuff to do to entice Carell back. What transpires is nightmarish. Carell plays Brick not as a low-IQ, amiably naive man-child, but instead like a thousand-yard-staring psychopath prone to shrieking and screaming for no reason. He gets an endurance test of a subplot where he falls in love with an eccentric, incompetent GNN secretary named Chani (Kristen Wiig), and their endless, laughless scenes play out like bad improv or an exceptionally awful 12:55 am SNL skit where you can almost hear crickets chirping in Studio 8H. No one's having a good day here--it doesn't help that Rudd and Koechner have almost nothing to do, so they at least emerge from the wreckage largely unscathed--but there's simply too much of this reconceived Brick Tamland in this and Carell turns in what may very well be the worst performance you'll see in a major movie in 2013.

Even by the standards of a Judd Apatow production, there's too much of everything here--except comedy. I get the "anarchic" spirit the filmmakers might be going for, but when I hear that term, I think of the action in BLAZING SADDLES crashing over into Buddy Bizarre's musical at the end. Every rambling, overlong sequence in ANCHORMAN 2 plays like something that only the actors think is funny. You can actually see Carell and Wiig almost breaking during some of their conversations, and I'm sure there's plenty of bloopers with the two of them losing it. But what's onscreen is just not funny. It's not even "weird" or "offbeat" funny. Joke after joke after joke lands with a dead thud. Did anyone at Paramount actually watch this, or did they just figure they'll get the $50 million back before the toxic word-of-mouth spreads? Even the expected rival news crews Battle Royale--one of the original film's best scenes--is restaged here with a ridiculous amount of cameos and other out-of-nowhere additions (Brick hoisting a sci-fi ray gun?), but that's it. Once you see the famous faces and all of Ferrell's buddies who showed up to hang out, there's not really anything else there. So why not have John C. Reilly play the soul-sucking ghost of Stonewall Jackson or Harrison Ford sprouting fur and turning into a "were-hyena" for no reason? Sure, it's insane but is it funny? Ranking somewhere between CADDYSHACK II and SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT PART 3 on the comedy sequel scale, ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES is an excruciating Will Ferrell home movie where the legend of Ron Burgundy has gone to die.

AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS
(US - 2013)

There's some serious Terrence Malick/Robert Altman hero worship on the part of writer/director David Lowery with AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS, an artfully-shot but dreary and dull '70s-set mood piece. Young lovers Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck) and Ruth Guthrie (Rooney Mara) are wrapping up a crime spree when they're cornered by police, an accomplice is killed, and Ruth fires a shot that injures young cop Patrick Wheeler (Ben Foster). Ruth is pregnant, and for the sake of her and their baby, Bob surrenders to the police, takes the blame for the shooting, and says he acted alone. Four years later, Ruth has stayed out of trouble and is a single mother looked after by Skerritt (Keith Carradine), the father of their dead friend and a dangerous man with criminal ties. Patrick and Ruth have a tentative friendship that's leaning towards a relationship when he gets word that Bob has busted out of the joint and with the authorities and three killers hired by Skerritt on his tail, is headed straight back to town to pick up Ruth and their daughter and live life on the lam.

On paper, AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS sounds like a solid drama. But Lowery is more interested in the aesthetic element, which would be fine if the film wasn't so dark and drably shot. Sure, there's some shots that have an almost still photo quality and Lowery's obviously a disciple of Malick's every stylistic move (I'm talking early, BADLANDS-era Malick when he still bothered with trivialities like narrative construction), but shouldn't there be more than that? Lowery also seems to paying special tribute to Altman's 1974 film THIEVES LIKE US, which had a similar "young couple on the run and she's pregnant" element and starred Carradine and featured Tom Skerritt in a supporting role, very likely the source of Carradine's character name. SAINTS boasts a strong and internalized performance by Foster and an excellent one by Carradine, in what's probably his best role in years and the film's most interesting character (Lowery even lets him sing the closing credits song and his voice hasn't lost a bit of that "I'm Easy" magic), but the film can't overcome its stale plot, sluggish pacing, and a pair of ineffectual performances by Affleck and Mara. Affleck's naturally mumbly delivery has worked in his favor before, particularly in his Oscar-nominated turn in 2007's THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD and the recent OUT OF THE FURNACE, but here he underplays to the point of catatonia. He and Mara both sound like they might doze off in mid-sentence every time they open their mouth. By the time it's over, you may find that the film's high points are the performances of Foster and especially Carradine, who obviously has a huge fan in Lowery. Now that he's got a fake Malick film out of his system, maybe next time Lowery should write a script specifically tailored for Carradine. That sounds like a winner. (R, 96 mins)

THE HUNT
(Denmark/Sweden/Belgium - 2012/2013 US release)

Ghost-produced by Lars von Trier, THE HUNT is one of the top feel-bad movies of the year. Directed and co-written by Thomas Vinterberg (THE CELEBRATION), the film stars Mads Mikkelsen as Lucas, a mild-mannered nice guy who's divorced and has a teenage son who's thinking about moving in with him permanently. A teacher by profession, Lucas was laid off after the school closed, but now he's helping out at a pre-school in the small town where he lives. He works, hangs out with his buddies, and leads a generally quiet life, and things are starting to progress romantically with co-worker Nadja (Alexandra Rapaport). All that goes to shit when he's accused of sexually abusing young Klara (a remarkable performance by Annika Wedderkopp in a very difficult role). Klara is the daughter of Lucas' best friend Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen) and trusted family friend Lucas frequently walks her to school. Klara develops a harmless crush on Lucas and in one of those awkward moments where kids imitate adults, kisses him on the lips when he's horsing around in the school playroom with some of the boys. Lucas handles the issue in a way that's sensitive to Klara, but she's embarrassed and makes up a story using verbiage she overheard her older brother and his friend using when they were looking at a porno mag. Lucas' boss Grethe (Susse Wold) handles the matter in the most overzealous manner possible, properly notifying the police but then immediately telling all the parents and even calling Lucas' ex-wife, who lives out of town with their son Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrom). The cops questioning little Klara practically put the words in her mouth and before he even realizes what's happening, Lucas is the town pariah, ostracized by everyone, banned from all business establishments, and Theo and his wife Agnes (Anne Louise Hassing) want nothing more to do with him, even after Klara confesses that nothing happened and she made it up. The damage is done and a mob mentality forms throughout the town, with more parents coming forward with allegations that Lucas molested their children as well.

THE HUNT mellows out as it goes along, but for a while, it's a harrowing experience. The tension mounts as Lucas grows increasingly panicked over the situation and can't get a straight answer out of anyone, and it's hard not getting angry at the "villages storming Castle Frankenstein" reaction of his friends and acquaintances as the situation quickly and plausibly spirals out of control. The resolution probably wouldn't work if this got an American remake, which seems likely. A mainstream take on this would've turned Lucas' plight into a STRAW DOGS-style siege situation leading to a vengeance saga. There is an element of that here, and in the fate of one individual, but Vinterberg doesn't proceed in that direction, instead going for that arthouse ambiguity in an ending that doesn't provide closure, which is probably the whole point. THE HUNT is a top-notch suspense drama with an outstanding performance by Mikkelsen, who took home the Best Actor prize at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival for his brilliant work here. (R, 116 mins)

DEVIL'S PASS
(US/Russia - 2013)

As found-footage continues its status as the horror subgenre that refuses to die, largely because it's cheap to produce and it's a way for young filmmakers to get their feet wet, it can also function as a last-ditch place for long-established filmmakers to run when they find themselves in a career rut. It worked surprisingly well for Barry Levinson with THE BAY, and now DIE HARD 2 and CLIFFHANGER director Renny Harlin, who hasn't had a hit since 1999's DEEP BLUE SEA, as he belatedly hops on the bandwagon with the barely-released DEVIL'S PASS. Written by reality TV vet Vikram Weet (whose production associate credits include THE REAL WORLD and KEEPING UP WITH THE KARDASHIANS), the film ostensibly tries to get to the truth behind the mysterious Dyatlov Pass Incident, which took place in the mountains of northern Russia in 1959. Nine mountain climbers were found frozen to death, many displaying inexplicable injuries like severed tongues and crushed chest cavities with no exterior bruising, and one had an exceedingly high amount of radiation. The official word from the Russian government was hypothermia, but there's long been conspiracy theories about everything from UFOs to nuclear testing to a yeti attack. University of Oregon psych student Holly (Holly Goss) has been obsessed with the case for much of her life, and gets a grant to shoot a documentary where she attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery. Joining her on the project are her platonic friend and cameraman/conspiracy theorist Jensen (Matt Stokoe), sound operator Denise (Gemma Atkinson), and experienced guides JP (Luke Albright) and Andy (Ryan Hawley).

For about 2/3 of its running time, DEVIL'S PASS is on the high end of the found-footage genre. The characters aren't too irritating, Harlin stays fairly consistent with the camera work, and the frozen, desolate surroundings are always effective for horror films. There's a couple of brief glimpses of figures lingering in the snowy background, and strange footprints start appearing near their camp. JP and Andy think Holly is playing games, but of course she isn't. The film only starts stumbling when it busts out the night-vision and the requisite "running around screaming with a shaky cam," gets sloppy with the consistency of the camera operation, the dialogue starts to sound a little too scripted, and Harlin and Weet start piling on everything from alien abductions, psychic and paranormal phenomena, wormholes and teleportation, time travel, the Philadelphia Experiment, and even the Mothman. It's not for nothing that JP is seen reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five at one point. It almost threatens to turn itself into a found-footage take on THE CABIN IN THE WOODS, but Harlin eventually buckles down for a twist ending that's goofy but mostly works. Just don't expect any serious examination of the Dyatlov Pass Incident and you'll be reasonably entertained. There are some undeniably chilling moments throughout, but it's getting difficult at this point to get excited about anything related to found-footage. (R, 100 mins)

ALIEN UPRISING
(UK - 2012/2013 US release)

Originally titled U.F.O., this British alien invasion sci-fi outing combines elements of INDEPENDENCE DAY and ATTACK THE BLOCK into something a bit too derivative for its own good. After a night of clubbing, a group of Derby friends--Michael (Sean Brosnan, Pierce's look/sound-alike son), Robin (Simon Phillips), Robin's fiancée Dana (Maya Grant), Vincent (Jazz Lintott), plus Carrie (Bianca Bree), a vacationing American who hooks up with Michael, wake up to find the power's out, the clocks are stopped, and phones and radios are dead. Soon enough, a giant spacecraft is hovering in the sky above and all hell breaks loose as the quintet tries to make their way to the isolated compound of Michael's ex-Black Ops/survivalist uncle George (Jean-Claude Van Damme). Writer/director Dominic Burns relies far too much on handheld, jittery shaky-cam and he's got a bad poker face, showing his hand way too early for his twist ending to work. When Carrie is quoting Roy Batty's "All those moments..." speech from BLADE RUNNER and says she's "not a 'phone home' type of girl," I think Burns intends for it to be winking fun but it comes off as insulting to consider that he might think the target audience isn't savvy enough to figure out where he's heading with it. He also tries to shoehorn in some shallow, heavy-handed social commentary in the form of a grizzled old gas station attendant played by the great Julian Glover ("Survival of the fittest," he mutters, "...maybe they'll just sit back and watch us all turn on each other"), and chooses the dumbest possible time for the immature Vincent to reveal his secret feelings for Dana. Still, Burns' enthusiasm buys him some wiggle room, he gives Sean Pertwee a couple of scenes to ham it up as a homeless guy, and he does offer one legitimately surprising fate for one of the leads in addition to staging a few decent action sequences and one epic fight in the vein of Isaac Florentine.

ALIEN UPRISING isn't very good, but it would be a bit better if Burns had a more competent star than Bree, a beautiful but astonishingly inept actress whose presence is likely a contractual demand to secure the guest-star participation of her father: Jean-Claude Van Damme. JCVD has put his daughter and son Kristopher Van Varenberg in most of his own recent films (Kristopher sits this one out), but Bree has never had this much screen time before. But this isn't really a Van Damme vehicle: he appears in a couple of two-second cutaways early on and isn't properly introduced until around 75 minutes in, exiting approximately 12 minutes later. He's sleepwalking through his one day on the set and is just here for distribution value and to get his daughter a leading role, and while I'm sure he loves his little girl like any dad would, Bree is just absolutely god-awful. Brosnan, on the other hand, has enough of his old man's screen presence that he could probably have a future in DTV actioners. If Burns can nix the shaky-cam and deliver a sci-fi action flick that pairs up JCVD and young Brosnan, he might have something. (R, 101 mins)

SIGHTSEERS
(France/UK - 2012/2013 US release)

The third effort by British filmmaker Ben Wheatley (DOWN TERRACE, KILL LIST) is a misanthropic, absurdist road movie/black comedy that almost plays like Mike Leigh remaking NATURAL BORN KILLERS. The humor is of the darkest sort and most of the laughs come from discomfort as awkward, sheltered, mom-jeans-wearing Tina (Alice Lowe) is 34 and lives with her controlling mum (Eileen Davies), who won't let her forget about a freak knitting accident that resulted in the death of her beloved dog ("It was an accident!" Tina pleads. "So were you," Mum replies). Tina has just started dating affable caravanner Chris (Steve Oram), an alleged writer who wants to take his "muse" on an "erotic journey" as they hit the road for inspiration for his latest book. On a tour bus, Chris gets irate with a litterer and later, accidentally backs over the guy, killing him. Tina is horrified and Chris tries to shield her eyes from the gory sight, but the grin of satisfaction on his face tells us there might be more in store than an erotic journey. Yes, Chris is a serial killer who mainly takes out people who piss him off, like a successful writer he pushes off a cliff (and steals his dog to give to Tina), or a guy who yells at Tina in a park after the dog defecates and she has nothing with which to pick it up. Tina finds the killing a turn-on, but when she tries it herself, it puts a strain on the relationship, as does Chris' man-crush on a bicyclist (Richard Glover) they meet on the road. Executive produced by Edgar Wright and written by Lowe and Oram, along with Wheatley's KILL LIST co-writer Amy Jump, SIGHTSEERS is decidedly not for all tastes with its morbid, deadpan humor and moments of comically over-the-top gore, but if you appreciate this sort of thing, it's a worthwhile film, an often subtly, grimly hilarious study of two lonely, murderous souls lucky enough to find one another. It also shows Wheatley coming into his own after the inexplicable acclaim bestowed on KILL LIST, which was very well-made but had a plot that was stale and predictable, a WICKER MAN retread with the filmmaker telegraphing the twists far too early. SIGHTSEERS is a major improvement. (Unrated, 88 mins)

AMERICAN HUSTLE
(US - 2013)

Directed by David O. Russell. Written by Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell. Cast: Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Louis C.K., Jack Huston, Michael Pena, Shea Whigham, Alessandro Nivola, Elisabeth Rohm, Paul Herman, Colleen Camp, Anthony Zerbe, Barry Primus, Said Taghmaoui. (R, 138 mins)

In his "fictionalized" chronicle of the late 1970s ABSCAM scandal, director David O. Russell wears his love of Martin Scorsese on his sleeve, shooting much of the film in that same propulsive, electrifying style that's made GOODFELLAS one of the great American movies. Imitating Scorsese is nothing new, but the trick is to not let the hero worship trump everything else. Paul Thomas Anderson got that with BOOGIE NIGHTS and Russell accomplishes it here. Working with screenwriter Eric Warren Singer (who wrote Tom Tykwer's underrated THE INTERNATIONAL), Russell reassembles most of the main actors from his last two films (2010's THE FIGHTER and 2012's SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK), changes the names of the principles involved in the scandal, and creates one of the most vividly compelling films of 2013: it's suspenseful, hilarious, brilliantly-acted, filled with rich characters, bad fashions and horrible hair, and mostly succeeds in capturing the period, except for one major gaffe where a character mentions reading Wayne Dyer's The Power of Intention, which wasn't published until 2004. Oops.

Sporting a gut and an unsightly combover, Christian Bale is Irving Rosenfeld, a small-timer who owns a dry-cleaning chain, mainly as a front for his con jobs, primarily in art forgery and the bilking of gullible investors. His partner-in-crime is Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), who puts on a flawless British accent to pose as one Lady Edith Greensly, a supposed tangential member of the Royal Family. The pair met at a party years earlier and bonded over a shared love of Duke Ellington, with a romance blossoming even though Irving is married to the unstable, needy Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) and is a devoted father to their young son. Irving and Sydney fall into the web of ambitious FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), who busts Sydney for embezzlement but offers both of them a way out if they agree to set up a sting involving Camden, NJ mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner, looking a lot like Steve Lawrence), a politician fiercely devoted to the people of his city and one who understands that palms need to be greased and under-the-table deals need to be made and if his corruption is for the greater good, then so be it. Along with a Hispanic FBI agent (Michael Pena) posing as a sheik, Richie, Irving, and "Lady Edith" try to get Polito to coordinate a business deal between some rich Arabs and an Atlantic City casino, which gets complicated when aging Florida mobster Victor Tellegio (Robert De Niro) wants in on the action and tells them that the Sheik has to be a US citizen for any casino deal to happen. This leads to the increasingly edgy, reckless Richie and his bosses (Louis C.K., Alessandro Nivola) launching a larger operation to bust Tellegio, a top capo to Meyer Lansky, along with the bribing of several Congressmen under the guise of getting US citizenship for the Sheik. And if that wasn't enough, Rosalyn is enraged about her husband's involvement with Sydney and starts seeing one of Tellegio's underlings (Jack Huston) and, as is the norm with the manipulative Rosalyn, starts talking way too much about the things she knows and even more about the things she doesn't

Russell's use of music, narration, and long tracking shots are pure Scorsese, and the editing team of Alan Baumgarten, Jay Cassidy, and Crispin Struthers do a spot-on imitation of the rhythms and momentum established by Scorsese and his regular editor Thelma Schoonmaker. It doesn't have the continuity errors that plague even the undisputed Scorsese masterpieces (because he and Schoonmaker go for the takes that "feel" the best and he isn't overly concerned with continuity), but the film has the loose, improvisational feel of vintage Scorsese while also exhibiting the discipline and vision of the master filmmaker. In lesser hands, this could've turned into a pale imitation, but Russell very credibly brings it to life with a cast that's at the top of their game. Few of today's actors can disappear into a role like Bale (an Oscar-winner for THE FIGHTER), whose Irving has layers of humanity and a conscience beneath his dodgy, fast-talking exterior, and Cooper, who just a few years ago had "rom-com lightweight" written all over him, continues to show impressive range under the guidance of Russell, who directed him to an Oscar nomination in SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK. Adams (nominated for THE FIGHTER), Renner, and Lawrence (a winner for SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK) are expectedly top-notch, as is De Niro in his one scene (he's both a Russell vet and the very embodiment of Scorsese's films), but another standout is C.K. as Richie's exasperated, bottom-line-watching direct supervisor, who gets a running gag about not finishing an ice-fishing story (also keep an eye out for Cooper's dead-on impression of C.K., which feels like an ad-libbed moment and it works beautifully). Though he doesn't go as far as to include Scorsese's favorite song, the Rolling Stones'"Gimme Shelter" (and he mercifully excludes Blondie's "Heart of Glass," which is a seemingly mandatory inclusion for any film set in the late 1970s), Russell's song selection is impeccable: America's "A Horse With No Name," Chicago's "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" Steely Dan's "Dirty Work," Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," Tom Jones'"Delilah," ELO's "10538 Overture," and "Long Black Road," a new song from ELO leader Jeff Lynne, plus Lawrence shrieking Wings'"Live and Let Die" while cleaning the house in a blind rage. AMERICAN HUSTLE, which was conceived under the title AMERICAN BULLSHIT, is hypnotically, relentlessly fast-paced entertainment that hooks you in from the first grainy shot of the 1970s Columbia Pictures logo and never lets go. One of 2013's very best films.

CAESAR MUST DIE
(Italy - 2012/US release: 2013)

The latest from revered Italian filmmaking brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (1977's PADRE PADRONE) is an improvement over their last effort, 2007's LARK FARM (released straight-to-DVD in the US in 2010), a misfired look at the 1915 Armenian Genocide and a multi-country co-production that asked us to buy German actor Moritz Bleibtreu (RUN LOLA RUN) dubbed into Italian and playing a Turkish officer named "Youseff." Mired in near telenovela-level histrionics and tacky splatter effects, LARK FARM was so appallingly tone-deaf that it seemed the aging siblings--Paolo is now 82, Vittorio 84--had completely lost it. CAESAR MUST DIE is an OK rebound and won the Golden Bear at the 2012 Berlin International Film Festival, but it's really not that good. The Tavianis indulge in a little smoke & mirrors what what they're doing here, setting up CAESAR MUST DIE as a documentary, only to reveal itself as a mock documentary that becomes a meta commentary on itself. With rare exception (BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and THE CABIN IN THE WOODS are two examples), these meta movies usually end up being exercises in pretension and directorial wankery. But the mostly black-and-white CAESAR MUST DIE is deceptively simple in its premise and execution, which makes you wonder why they chose to go with the ruse in the first place? A straight documentary on the same subject would've been fascinating: inmates in the high-security wing of Rome's Rebibbia Prison take part in a therapeutic theater workshop putting on a production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. The inmates are not actors (except for Salvatore Striano as Brutus; Striano was in Matteo Garrone's GOMORRAH and served time in Rebibbia but was released and pardoned), but the action is staged. We're not watching a documentary of rehearsals--we're watching a staged re-enactment of rehearsals in the guise of a documentary. Comparisons to Abbas Kiarostami's CLOSE-UP were numerous, and I don't really see what the Tavianis are trying to accomplish by staging the film in this fashion. The inmates rehearse around the prison, so at times it resembles Julius Caesar re-imagined as a gritty prison drama, and again, that strikes you as another concept that would've been more intriguing than another meta venture.

For not being professional performers, some of the inmates are surprisingly credible actors with undeniable screen presence (Giovanni Arcuri as Caesar and Cosimo Rega as Cassius are standouts). Regardless of what acts they've committed--ranging from drug trafficking to, in Rega's case, murder--putting on this play gives the men purpose and a chance to immerse themselves in art. It's a point brought home in the final scenes as they return to their cells after their performance and it's a powerful image that the Tavianis ruin by having Rega look into the camera and make the heavy-handed proclamation "Since I got to know art, this cell has become a prison." Really, guys...we would've gotten the message. CAESAR MUST DIE is a mixed-bag and a bit of a missed opportunity, but it has its moments. (Unrated, 77 mins)

BLACKFISH
(US - 2013)

Produced by CNN, BLACKFISH is a harsh condemnation of the practices of SeaWorld. Focused primarily on Tilikum, a six-ton orca at the Orlando SeaWorld, the film follows the killer whale from his 1983 capture to the present day. Tilikum has killed three people and has shown signs of aggression since his early days at the Canadian water park Sealand, a decrepit facility where part of his training involved being bullied by the other whales. It was there that he killed a trainer in 1991 and the park closed shortly after. He was moved to SeaWorld despite his record of aggression, primarily because the park was in need of a breeder. We see interviews with numerous former trainers juxtaposed with old camcorder footage of these same trainers during their SeaWorld days. All reiterate a consistent pattern of SeaWorld sweeping Tilikum's violent history under the rug. An unauthorized visitor was found dead in Tilikum's tank in 1999, after having snuck into the park in an apparent attempt to swim with the whale. Tilikum's most infamous act came in February 2010 when he attacked and ate trainer Karen Brancheau just after a performance (the film opens with a 911 call to an incredulous operator who responds with "A whale...ate one of the trainers?"). The former trainers, often holding back tears, tell of a systematic, calculated burying of information by SeaWorld executives who they felt had an obligation to inform them of the past incidents involving Tilikum, who still performs at the Orlando SeaWorld today. SeaWorld representatives declined to be interviewed for the film, but of course dispute its findings. Cowperthwaite clearly has an agenda, but she keeps the vitriol even-keeled and matter-of-fact, often letting archival footage and court records tell the story. Footage of baby whales being captured and the anguished cries of their mothers are absolutely gut-wrenching to witness, as is the notion of these great, majestic beasts being confined to tanks, psychologically defeated, their fins turning down (SeaWorld claims this is natural but the film asserts it only happens to 1% of whales not in captivity), and, in Tilikum's case, used essentially as a sperm donor. The film also notes that a few of Tilikum's 21 known offspring have been involved in other acts of captive aggression, indicating that the whale has a genetic predisposition to such behavior. Emotional, enraging, and often terrifying (the footage of a trainer being yanked by his foot and remaining calm as he's held underwater by one whale is one of the most frightening sequences in any movie this year), BLACKFISH is a must-see. (PG-13, 83 mins)

SHEPARD AND DARK
(US - 2013)

Actor/writer Sam Shepard has been friends with Johnny Dark since 1963. Even as their lives drifted in different directions and they'd go a year or more without seeing one another, their bond remained. Shepard, of course, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and busy Hollywood character actor. Dark lives a quiet life in Deming, New Mexico, working at a supermarket, content to live among his books, smoke a little weed, and write stories and essays on his ancient PC. In 2010, Shepard was asked to donate his personal papers to the University of Texas and takes the opportunity to go through some letters he received from Dark over the decades. Dark, meanwhile, saves and archives everything and has his life meticulously mapped out in scrapbooks and photo albums. Shepard reaches out to Dark to share the letters sent to him and put their decades of correspondence in a book. Shepard tells Dark that he set up the book deal because he's got no money coming in (Shepard doesn't appear to live extravagantly, but it's doubtful that needs the money), but part of it is that he wants to help his old friend out and build him a bit of a financial cushion. As the two men reconnect and reminisce, it's great fun watching them laugh at decades-old inside jokes as they sift through letters in a corner booth at Denny's (there's also some footage at Shepard's 67th birthday dinner, where he's joined by pals Harry Dean Stanton and T-Bone Burnett). But as they get deeper into the project, director Treva Wurmfeld gradually reveals vital details to the audience: Dark's late wife Scarlett was the mother of Shepard's first wife, actress O-Lan Jones. The four lived together for years and they all took care of Scarlett after she survived a brain aneurysm. By 1983, Shepard's acting career was taking off and he met Jessica Lange, eventually deciding to leave his family and run off with her. It was a decision he agonized over, especially since he was hesitant to leave his and Jones' 13-year-old son Jesse, but he did it anyway, leaving Dark to be a surrogate father to the boy. Shepard and Lange were together until 2009, and the breakup is still heavy on Shepard's mind at the time of this book project. Dark surmises that this project was really just Shepard's way of dealing with it and being able to put it away and move on. Shepard is clearly haunted by his decisions, he's critical of his selfishness ("I've hurt people," he says, shaking his head) and going through the letters rips open old wounds and takes him back to a place he wasn't ready to go (not just with Lange, but with his alcoholic father), or at least isn't ready to share with Wurmfeld.

What starts out as two friends jovially reconnecting after some time apart turns into a devastating self-examination for Shepard. It's hard watching him reflect on the choices he's made and the guilt he still feels over leaving his wife and son. There's a line in a Shepard play that Wurmfeld spotlights about "how unprepared we are to face the truth," and Dark illustrates just how much of Shepard's life--his father, the guilt over leaving his family, the recurring "responsible brother" figure (meaning, Dark)--is in his work (think of Stanton leaving his son in the care of brother Dean Stockwell in Wim Wenders' Shepard-penned 1984 film PARIS, TEXAS). Dark is content with his life and never had the restlessness or the need to wander like Shepard has, though he does confess that he frequently feels more like Shepard's sidekick than his best friend. Wurmfeld very cleverly and deliberately lets the story build as it goes places no one--Shepard, Dark, the viewer--expects it to go, and she doesn't sugarcoat things to make Shepard look better. A frequently remarkable gem, and one of the best films of this year that you've heard nothing about. (Unrated, 88 mins)

GETAWAY
(US/UK/Switzerland/China - 2013)

It took four countries, location work in a fifth, and 25 credited producers to shit out this borderline-unwatchable car crash porno that leaves no stale cliché unutilized while wasting some death-defying work by an apparently insane Bulgarian stunt crew. Director Courtney Solomon (DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, AN AMERICAN HAUNTING) hyped the film's "real" car chases and crashes and the absence of CGI. I'm calling bullshit on the "no CGI," but yeah, most of the crash stuff is real. The problem is that it's shot and edited in the most anti-entertaining, headache-inducing way imaginable, using multiple cameras with varying image quality (don't worry, that's written into the plot), and it's such a garbled, noisy blur that it's impossible to get a feel for any of it. Solomon wanted the crash and stunt work to be real, but I suggest he take a look at John Frankenheimer's RONIN. I've seen John Frankenheimer films. I've studied John Frankenheimer films. Courtney Solomon--you're no John Frankenheimer.

Acting as if he arrived on set and never shook the jetlag, Ethan Hawke is the improbably-named Brent Magna, a former racing wunderkind who bombed out on the circuit and fled to Europe to become a wheelman-for-hire. He's looking to settle down with his Bulgarian wife Leanne (Rebecca Budig), but he arrives home to find she's been...taken. Faster than you can say "Liam Neeson," Magna is being harangued on his cell phone by a mystery man (a mostly-unseen but heard-too-much Jon Voight, who sounds like he's doing an Armin Mueller-Stahl impression), who orders him to steal a tricked-out Shelby Super Snake and go around Sofia following his orders (leading cops on chases, driving the car through crowded parks, etc) or Leanne will be killed, all the while taunting Magna and boring the audience with such hackneyed bad-guy zingers as "We're just getting started, my boy," and "You're running out of time...tick tock, tick tock." Magna is soon joined by The Kid (Selena Gomez), who actually owns the car and is the key to the mystery man's plot: Magna and The Kid are pawns in his plan to steal computer files from an investment bank whose CEO is The Kid's dad. With a dozen cameras in and out of the Shelby, the mystery man is constantly watching them, but The Kid manages to hack into the mystery man's server through her tablet and fool him with the old "same footage looped" trick, crossing her fingers and hoping he's never seen SPEED. In a truly magical happenstance, The Kid is whatever the story needs her to be at any given moment: whiny rich kid, gearhead, ace hacker, and expert in international investment law. Bravo, screenwriters! I guess if you like crashes, shattering glass, screeching tires, a complete void of logic and suspense, and zoom-ins to Ethan Hawke making constipated faces as he pretends to drive a car, GETAWAY might be entertaining. But for everyone else, it's an incoherent jumble with a dumb twist ending, and for all the work that went into the car chases, you can't make heads or tails of what's going on. Also with Paul Freeman and PASSENGER 57 villain Bruce Payne in tiny roles, GETAWAY opened Labor Day Weekend and tanked in ninth place. Offering nothing worthwhile and looking cheaper than any Bulgaria-shot DTV NuImage production, it's amazing that this actually made it to theaters at all. (PG-13, 90 mins)

PARANOIA
(US/France - 2013)

Can we just admit that no one gives a shit about the Hemsworth brothers despite Hollywood doing its damnedest to make them happen? Sure, Chris is a decent-enough actor who lucked into THOR and THE AVENGERS and got to co-star in THE CABIN IN THE WOODS (made long before THOR, but released after), but elsewhere, audiences haven't really warmed up to him: no one cared about the RED DAWN remake and Ron Howard's racing drama RUSH flopped. But Chris is a mega-star next to little brother Liam, who's in the HUNGER GAMES franchise, co-starred in a Miley Cyrus vehicle, and got killed early in THE EXPENDABLES 2--all films that don't depend on him--but has been met with crickets and tumbleweed everywhere else: LOVE AND HONOR and EMPIRE STATE barely got released, and his big summer headlining splash with PARANOIA fizzled badly, opening in 13th place to become one of the biggest DOA duds of the summer. The franchise gigs are good for them now, but does anybody really care otherwise? When's the last time you heard anyone say "Man, I gotta see that new Chris Hemsworth flick!"? PARANOIA is bad, but it's not all Liam's fault. Sure, he's got no presence as a leading man and is really out of his league sharing scenes with three legends in the "just pay me and I'll ham" phase of their careers, but it's just a dumb, predictable, clichéd thriller that's so bored with itself that it never really tries to be anything more than a time-killer. If ever a movie was made to fold laundry and balance your checkbook by, it's PARANOIA, and as such, it fits right in with auteur Robert "Still coasting on LEGALLY BLONDE" Luketic's other triumphs, like 21 and two Katherine Heigl rom-coms (THE UGLY TRUTH and KILLERS).

Hemsworth is Adam Cassidy, an ambitious cubicle drone at tech giant WyattCorp. Driven for success and saddled with medical bills that insurance won't cover for his sick father (Richard Dreyfuss), Adam is convinced he's designed the next big thing in social networking. When he bombs the presentation to sneering CEO Nicholas Wyatt (Gary Oldman) and he and his team lose their jobs, Adam treats them all to a $16,000 night at the club on his still-active corporate credit card. An irate Wyatt then threatens to press charges unless Adam agrees to partake in some corporate espionage and infiltrate Eikon, another tech megapower owned by Wyatt's rival and former mentor Jock Goddard (Harrison Ford), to steal trade secrets so Wyatt can run Goddard out of business for good. You know you're in for some cutting insight when Adam and Wyatt are shown playing chess (SYMBOLISM!) and Wyatt snottily declares "Checkmate!" (See! Adam's a pawn! Get it?). Of course, Adam becomes pupil to the master Goddard and falls for his top marketing exec Emma (Amber Heard), and they have no idea he's Wyatt's plant. Or do they? Hemsworth is bland enough on his own, but he and Heard are one of the most chemistry-impaired screen couples you'll ever see. The film only really comes alive in the two instances where Oldman and Ford are onscreen together, but it's hardly the highlight of either actor's career. If anything, it may well prompt you to watch AIR FORCE ONE again. Oldman plays the pompous ass to the hilt in a performance that sounds like a tribute to Vinnie Jones ("Yaw ay-out when oy sigh yaw ay-out! Oy eewn you!"), while Ford is indifferent and seems vaguely annoyed that he was talked into being in this. For all the shit Robert De Niro takes about phoning in his performances and coasting on his past accomplishments, it seems we've let Ford off the hook. There's a younger generation of moviegoers who see Ford as the guy who used to play Han Solo and Indiana Jones but is now just a grumpy old fart with an earring on talk shows. Ford hasn't challenged himself in years (and this is his second bad tech flick, after 2006's absurd FIREWALL), though he does seem to relish the moment when he tells Hemsworth's Adam "Shut up...you're nothing but a convenient tool, an empty vessel." Scripted line or Ford ad-lib? Discuss. (PG-13, 106 mins)

GRUDGE MATCH
(US - 2013)

Directed by Peter Segal. Written by Tim Kelleher and Rodney Rothman. Cast: Robert De Niro, Sylvester Stallone, Kevin Hart, Alan Arkin, Kim Basinger, Jon Bernthal, LL Cool J, Anthony Anderson, Paul Ben-Victor, Barry Primus, Camden Grey, Griff Furst, Jim Lampley, Michael Buffer. (PG-13, 114 mins)

GRUDGE MATCH caps off a busy 2013 for stars Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone, but it's too bad they couldn't have teamed up on a more inspired project. They worked together before, on 1997's underappreciated COP LAND, a film that's just gotten better over the years, but this finds them squarely in a safe, predictable, "geriatrics behaving badly" comedy that gets bogged down with forced, feel-good blandness and a plethora of jokes that fall flat due to lack of humor or just bad timing on the part of the actors. And, my God, the montages! "What Makes a Good Man" and "How You Like Me Now?" by The Heavy? Check. "Boom Boom" by Big Head Todd and the Monsters? Check. "Here I Come," by The Roots? Check. And sorry, but there's no excuse for a boxing movie with De Niro and Stallone to contain a montage set to Phillip Phillips'"Gone Gone Gone." None. Well, I guess it could be worse. They could've used "Home."

30 years ago, two rival light heavyweights, Billy "The Kid" McDonnen (De Niro) and Henry "Razor" Sharp (Stallone) were about to square off in their third fight when Razor abruptly backed out and disappeared from public view and The Kid retired from boxing to open a bar and car dealership. When an HBO documentary sparks renewed interest in their story, fast-talking promoter Dante Slate, Jr. (Kevin Hart), the son of the crooked manager who screwed the two fighters over back in the day, talks them into doing some motion capture work for a boxing video game. Still bitter enemies, the pair get into a brawl in the studio and the resulting footage goes viral. Before long, the long-postponed title fight--now called Grudgement Day--is back on as Razor recruits his old trainer Lightning (Alan Arkin) from the nursing home, and The Kid, after being turned down by his now-retired protégé (LL Cool J), teams up with B.J. (Jon Bernthal), the son he never knew, who's grown up to be a high-school football coach. The Kid fathered B.J. with Sally (Kim Basinger), who was Razor's girlfriend, but had a brief fling with the Kid while Razor was away training. That's the source of the animosity, and it's something Razor's never been able to put behind him.

Oh, but there's more drama: The Kid and B.J. finally get a chance to bond as father and son after 30 years (De Niro seems to be in physical pain uttering the line "I need you in my corner," and just as B.J.'s about to bail on him, the Kid pulls out a scrapbook filled with old photos of B.J.'s high school and college football days, showing that he's been with him all along!), and The Kid finds out he's got a grandson, Trey (Camden Gray). They've only now connected but the script by Tim Kelleher (FIRST KID) and Rodney Rothman (a former writer for THE LATE SHOW WITH DAVID LETTERMAN) is so lazy that there's one scene where B.J. makes an off-the-cuff remark about doing something "like you used to show me." Wait a minute...didn't they just meet for the first time? There are some genuinely funny bits in the early going, and some winking nods to the past that fans will find amusing (Stallone repeats the "drinking raw eggs" bit from ROCKY, but worries about the cholesterol), but then the laughs start to get cheap, repetitive, and too easy, like Arkin, cast radically against type as "Alan Arkin," talking about far-east hookers and ping-pong balls and telling Razor he should be "getting some snapper" and "doing the bone dance" with Sally, fulfilling the mandatory "old guy being pervy" requirement as set forth by the Burgess Meredith Amendment. Stallone, whose Razor is the perpetual underdog against the boorish Kid, gets a chance to do some serious acting and handles it nicely despite the hackneyed lines he's forced to read. He's trying his best, but the main problem is that he's played this part and a similar enough (on his end, at least) scenario before in 2006's surprisingly solid ROCKY BALBOA. He does the sad sack loner bit effectively, but does the script have to make him so befuddled and out of touch? There's a running gag about Lightning being angry that Razor doesn't have a TV, but for a guy who, sure, is a bit of a loner, but works in the everyday world and isn't a complete hermit, is there any reason other than a cheap laugh for how Razor possibly couldn't understand how caller ID works? How has he never heard of it before 2013? He understands video games and iPads, but caller ID is just way over his head?

There's also too much time spent on The Kid coming to the realization that he's been a total dick, which results in one of the most nonsensical sequences in any film this year. Wishing to bond with Trey (I know it's wrong to pick on child actors, but this kid is unbearable), he asks B.J. if he can take him out to dinner and a movie. Using a 12-pack of beer as a car seat, The Kid instead takes Trey to his bar, leaving him in the care of his bartender buddy Joey (Barry Primus) while he hooks up with a hot young fan. Later, a tired Trey finds the 12-pack in The Kid's office and takes it outside to sit in the driver's seat of his grandfather's SUV, where he finds the keys, starts the SUV, and shifts it into gear. Cue The Kid and the hottie popping up from the cargo space of the SUV as it rolls into the street and Trey can't reach the brake. OK, I have several questions about this comedic set piece: 1) where's the humor? 2) how did The Kid and the girl not hear him open the car door, plop the heavy 12-pack down, climb in, grab the jingling keys, put the keys in the ignition, start the SUV, and shift it into gear? 3) Why, before getting laid in the cargo space of the SUV, would The Kid feel the need to take the time to remove the 12-pack from the seat and walk it all the way into his office inside the bar when he would just need to bring it back out again to get Trey home? It's not like it was obstructing the path to the cargo space. None of this scene makes any sense at all, and it's all crammed into place to get Trey in the driver's seat of the vehicle. And the less said about the forced, labored, beat-to-death gag about B.J.'s initials, using the term "butterscotch jellybeans" as a euphemism for blowjobs, and The Kid advising his grandson that "not all girls like butterscotch jellybeans," the better.

Naturally, director Peter Segal (TOMMY BOY, 50 FIRST DATES) tries to turn it into a feel-good man-weepie by the end, but the emotion and the character arcs are so perfunctory that it doesn't feel earned. Pitting RAGING BULL against ROCKY could've been some late-career comedy gold for these two screen legends, but aside from some effort put forth by Stallone, who's written enough solid screenplays to know how shitty this one is, no one really cares. De Niro coasts by on the expected De Niro schtick and mannerisms, though on a couple of occasions, he tries so hard to sell a gag that it's actually uncomfortable to watch (there's one excruciating bit where he's emphatically and repeatedly listing three options in a different order and it lands with such a thud that I'm shocked it made the final cut). Arkin is a national treasure, but even his patented grouchy curmudgeon act is feeling pretty spent. He gets some laughs and his banter with Hart isn't bad, but you've seen it all before. GRUDGE MATCH is hardly the worst film for either of its iconic headliners (it's not even the worst De Niro film of 2013--that would be THE BIG WEDDING), and there's enough laughs that it's not a complete waste of time for completists, but it's among their most instantly forgettable, especially with the run Stallone's been on lately with the hugely entertaining EXPENDABLES franchise, BULLET TO THE HEAD, and ESCAPE PLAN.

INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS
(US - 1973)

This drive-in and late-night TV staple was previously released on DVD by MGM as part of the late, great "Midnite Movies" line but is back on DVD once more, kicking off a rather random four-film Shout! Factory "Cult Movie Collection." A sci-fi satire on Women's Lib, INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS is a sterling example of early '70s exploitation trash as men in a college town are being screwed to death by a hot-and-heavy band of radiation-mutated hotties under the command of entomologist Dr. Susan Harris (Anitra Ford). The government sends in State Department security agent Neil Agar (legendary B-movie badass William Smith) to investigate. Teaming up with campus librarian Julie Zorn (Victoria Vetri, aka Angela Dorian, 1968's Playmate of the Year), and local cop Peters (Cliff Osmond), Agar is expectedly one step behind as one lecherous prof after another turns up dead. BEE GIRLS was directed by Denis Sanders, whose credits include 1962's WAR HUNT (the film debut of Robert Redford) and the 1970 concert film ELVIS: THAT'S THE WAY IT IS, and written by Nicholas Meyer, who would go on to direct such highly-regarded films as TIME AFTER TIME (1979) and STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982). It's silly and stupid, but it seems to know it's silly and stupid, which really helps. 1.78 anamorphic. (R, 86 mins)

THE DEVIL'S 8
(US - 1969)

This low-budget DIRTY DOZEN ripoff from AIP is sort of a hybrid men-on-a-mission/moonshine actioner that's noteworthy for its cult-ready cast and behind-the-scenes personnel who would go on to much bigger things in the coming years. Fresh off the ABC series THE RAT PATROL, Christopher George stars as Faulkner, a Federal agent undercover on a chain gang so he can stage an escape and round up a group of convicts for an elite mission: infiltrate and take out the operation of backwoods moonshine king Burl (Ralph Meeker). Among the convicts are Fabian, Tom Nardini, Robert DoQui, Joe Turkel, Larry Bishop, and Ross Hagen as Frank, whose brother was killed by Burl, who's also taken up with Frank's girl (Leslie Parrish). The clichés abound and the film, directed by Burt Topper, runs a bit long and would've been a lot tighter if it was cut down to 80 minutes or so, but what a fantastic cast. Expanded from a story idea by future 48 HRS/PREDATOR/DIE HARD producer Lawrence Gordon, THE DEVIL's 8 was the screenwriting debut of a pair of recent USC graduates hired by AIP: Willard Huyck (MESSIAH OF EVIL, AMERICAN GRAFFITI, INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, HOWARD THE DUCK) and John Milius, who would go on to write a ton of guy-movie classics like JEREMIAH JOHNSON, MAGNUM FORCE, APOCALYPSE NOW, and EXTREME PREJUDICE, as well as directing CONAN THE BARBARIAN and RED DAWN. There's some vintage Milius tough-guy jawing throughout and some smartass one-liners. When asked "How'd you get this job?" George's Faulkner growls "They had a popularity poll. I lost." Known mainly as a TV actor up to this point, George's big screen career never really took off outside of a friendship with John Wayne that kept him busy in late-period Duke films like EL DORADO, CHISUM, and THE TRAIN ROBBERS. He starred in the surprise 1980 hit THE EXTERMINATOR and had one of the all-time great death scenes as the villain in 1981's ENTER THE NINJA, but primarily became an in-demand TV guest star, B-movie and exploitation fixture by the late '70s until his death from a heart attack in 1983 at either 52 or 54, depending on the source. He's terrific here, more than adept at playing a gritty, cynical tough guy, especially when Meeker's Burl says "You're crazy" and a grinning, wide-eyed George simply replies "Yeah." You can definitely see and hear Milius' style popping up in its infancy throughout THE DEVIL'S 8, and while the film leaves a bit to be desired with its really draggy middle and the corny, repetitive, TV-level shitkicker score, there's certainly some historical value for B-movie addicts and Milius completists. Also with Cliff Osmond as Burl's dopey flunky, a young Ron Rifkin as a rookie agent helping Faulkner, and George's then-girlfriend and future wife and regular co-star Lynda Day (soon to become Lynda Day George) in an uncredited cameo. 1.78 anamorphic. (M, re-rated PG-13, 98 mins)

THE UNHOLY ROLLERS
(US - 1972)

Cranked out quickly to cash-in on MGM's Raquel Welch hit KANSAS CITY BOMBER, the Roger Corman production THE UNHOLY ROLLERS is a meaner, grittier look at the world of Roller Derby. Chronicling the rise and inevitable fall of Karen (Claudia Jennings) as she quits her job at a cat food factory and aces a tryout for the L.A. Avengers, THE UNHOLY ROLLERS doesn't really break any new ground as far as these kinds of stories go, and gets off to a slow start, but director Vernon Zimmerman (best known for the 1980 cult horror film FADE TO BLACK) and veteran Corman screenwriter Howard R. Cohen eventually find their groove. It's helped by a strong performance by Jennings, the troubled 1970 Playmate of the Year who would die in a tragic car accident in 1979 at just 29. Zimmerman and Cohen take a risk in making Jennings' Karen a frankly unlikable, self-absorbed bitch from the start, and it makes a little too easy to see her downfall coming, especially when team owner Mr. Stern (Louis Quinn) makes obviously prophetic statements like "Every #1 started out as a #2." So, just the way Karen toppled the team's star player Mickey (Betty Anne Rees), so shall happen to her with the introduction of Beverly (Charlene Jones). Karen soon becomes an out-of-control liability as her success turns her into a monster and alienates her from her teammates. Jennings does a great job playing a thoroughly despicable person, and Zimmerman handles the Roller Derby sequences very well, probably with some assistance from editor Martin Scorsese, who made BOXCAR BERTHA for Corman the same year and would soon hit the big time with 1973's MEAN STREETS. Also with Roberta Collins, Alan Vint, Candice Roman, Victor Argo, and Kathleen Freeman as Karen's trailer-trash mother, who rejects a kiss from her estranged daughter and responds to her financial gift with "I got my cigarettes, I got my TV...what more do I need?" The packaging indicates full-frame, but it's actually 1.78 anamorphic. (R, 88 mins)

VICIOUS LIPS
(US - 1987)

The prolific Albert Pyun has made nearly 50 films over the last 31 years, and none of them were as good as his debut, the summer of 1982 sleeper hit THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER. His productivity has tapered off in recent years as he's been focusing on what are basically home movie-level semi-sequels to his earlier hits (ABELAR: TALES OF AN ANCIENT EMPIRE was a SWORD follow-up and his latest, CYBORG NEMESIS, combines the titles of past Pyun films CYBORG and NEMESIS). Another recent project, ROAD TO HELL, was a sort-of follow-up to Walter Hill's STREETS OF FIRE, a film which didn't even involve Pyun. Whatever promise Pyun might've shown back in 1982 was long-gone by the time he made 1990's infamous CAPTAIN AMERICA, which ended up going straight to video, which is where Pyun's stayed since. It hasn't been all bad: he made a few films for Cannon that were OK (1986's DANGEROUSLY CLOSE, 1987's DOWN TWISTED, and their last hit, 1989's CYBORG), and a couple that weren't (1988's ALIEN FROM L.A. and 1989's JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH--credited to Rusty Lemorande--a botched grease fire where Pyun's footage for an ALIEN FROM L.A. sequel was spliced in with Lemorande's unfinished JOURNEY remake, though it solves the age-old question "How bad does a movie have to be for Albert Pyun to demand his name be taken off the credits?"), and his early '90s work like 1991's DOLLMAN and 1992's NEMESIS were very popular video store staples. And the less said about his Bratislava-shot "Gangstas Wandering Around an Abandoned Warehouse" (© Nathan Rabin) trilogy, the better.

VICIOUS LIPS is still early Pyun, and he's already in decline in his only film for Empire Pictures. A sort-of companion piece to his 1986 film RADIOACTIVE DREAMS, VICIOUS LIPS centers on an all-girl new wave band called Vicious Lips, who've just hired a new singer, Judy Jetson (Dru-Anne Perry), rechristening her "Ace Lucas" before taking a lucrative gig on a distant planet. On the way, they crash-land and they're chased around the ship by a crazed wolfman-type creature. There's also a lot of fighting and yelling, and some extended rock montages. The whole thing ends up being some weird fever dream about Judy being driven mad by her quest to be a star. There's about ten minutes of plot stretched out to an interminable 81 minutes, though in all fairness, the songs are pretty good. VICIOUS LIPS is pretty much an amateur-night endurance test across the board, and it's hard to believe that it's by the same Pyun who showed so much promise just five years earlier with SWORD AND THE SORCERER. Like the similarly-derided Uwe Boll, Pyun can be a competent director-for-hire when he wants to be, but he seems to have self-deprecatingly embraced this whole "straight-to-video-era Ed Wood" niche he's carved for himself over the years. With its '80s time capsule look, effects work by Empire mainstay John Buechler, with contributions from the Chiodo Brothers (who went on to direct the immortal KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE the next year), I suppose VICIOUS LIPS is campy enough to have attained a small cult, and the climactic production number features a club MC who looks like ALF's hard-drinking uncle, but other than some of the music, there's nothing here. Still, Pyun's recent announcement that he's retiring from filmmaking due to health issues related to multiple sclerosis was sad to hear. The guy's been such a regular fixture in bad movies for so long that it seems unthinkable that he won't be cranking out any more. But he made one very good one and a small handful of decent ones, so we'll always have those, and fans of bad cinema will have...well, just peruse his IMDb page and pick something. VICIOUS LIPS may be terrible, but a part of me is glad that it exists. 1.78 anamorphic. (R, 81 mins)

The madness continues in CULT MOVIE MARATHON VOLUME TWO

ANGELS FROM HELL
(US - 1968)

Shout! Factory's second "Cult Movie Marathon" set gets off to an inauspicious start with ANGELS FROM HELL, a loose follow-up to 1967's essential HELL'S ANGELS ON WHEELS, and one of the dullest entries in the late '60s biker subgenre. After supporting roles in films like THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD (1965) and THE DEVIL'S BRIGADE (1968), Tom Stern was about to find a brief niche in these things with ANGELS FROM HELL and HELL'S ANGELS '69, but his time in the spotlight was over before it started. Here, Stern plays Mike, the leader of the Madcaps of Bakersfield motorcycle club who returns from Vietnam to take his MC to the next level. He hangs with a hippie commune, gets involved with a Hollywood producer and tangles with local sheriff Bingham (Jack Starrett), who, interestingly, is actually sympathetic to bikers and reminds his deputies that they have the same rights as everyone else. Tensions keep flaring, but nothing really happens, Stern is a terrible actor, and the dialogue is atrocious (Mike, laying out his agenda to the rest of the club: "I'm gonna lay some jazz on your minds..."), though it does have a memorably nasty leg break and a gut-punch of a final shot that might make you think you saw a better film than you did. But for 85 of its 86 minutes, ANGELS FROM HELL is a snore-inducing drag and Jerry Wish's script lays the verbiage of the era on so thickly that it starts to sound like it's trying entirely too hard. Also with Ted Markland and Arlene Martel, and songs by The Peanut Butter Conspiracy. Director Bruce Kessler only made a few features, most notably 1969's THE GAY DECIEVERS, a sort-of proto-I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU CHUCK AND LARRY where two buddies pretend to be gay to avoid the draft, and the 1971 cult horror film SIMON, KING OF THE WITCHES, and went on to become a busy TV director until the late '90s. Most of these biker movies haven't aged very well, but this one especially feels like it was laughably dated the moment it was released. (R, 86 mins)

CHATTERBOX!
(US - 1977)

Easily cinema's all-time greatest talking vagina film, CHATTERBOX! is mildly amusing at times and plays like an R-rated sitcom pilot. Nice hairdresser Penelope Pittman ('70s drive-in icon Candice Rialson) finds her vagina (called "Virginia") is suddenly capable of talking, singing, and in the case of her overconfident boyfriend Ted (Perry Bullington), roasting ("You call that a fuck?" Virginia screeches after Penelope and Ted have sex). Virginia initially causes all sorts of problems for Penelope, especially at her job (Rip Taylor plays her boss!), but the pair soon become a media sensation, going on the game show The Mating Game, appearing at the Rose Bowl parade, and performing such elaborate musical numbers as "Cock-a-Doodle Doo," and "Wang Dang Doodle." CHATTERBOX! has quite a B-movie pedigree: the screenwriters were involved in such films as THE GREAT TEXAS DYNAMITE CHASE and SAVAGE STREETS, director Tom De Simone went on to make HELL NIGHT (1981), THE CONCRETE JUNGLE (1982), REFORM SCHOOL GIRLS (1986) and ANGEL III: THE FINAL CHAPTER (1988), and doubled as a gay porn director using the name "Lancer Brooks." And of course, Rialson (1951-2006) logged time in several Roger Corman productions, like CANDY STRIPE NURSES (1974) and HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD (1976) before retiring from movies in 1979 to focus on raising her family. CHATTERBOX! is pretty bad, but it has some entertainment value as a nice snapshot of late '70s softcore porn in the guise of a markedly less-sophisticated Mel Brooks-style smutty comedy. It's nothing spectacular, but if you see only one talking vajayjay movie in your life, it should probably be CHATTERBOX! Also with Larry Gelman (THE BOB NEWHART SHOW, MAUDE) as Penelope's doctor, Jane Kean as her mother, and Professor Irwin Corey as himself. 1.33:1 (R, 73 mins)

THE NAKED CAGE
(US - 1986)

Three years after his legendary 1983 cult classic CHAINED HEAT, director Paul Nicholas, a pseudonym for German exploitation vet Lutz Schaarwachter, returned to the women-in-prison genre with this entertaining trash for Cannon. Nice girl Michelle (Shari Shattuck) is in the wrong place at the wrong time when her ex (John Terlesky) and psycho bad girl Rita (Christina Whitaker) rob the bank where she works. The ex is killed and the cops think Michelle was in on it, so like most WIP protagonists, she's a dewy-eyed innocent (and she has a horse!) who's about to get schooled. And of course, it's a prison filled with rape by drooling male guards, drugs, racial conflicts, and the corrupt warden (Angel Tompkins) has lesbian hookups with inmates. Not quite on the level of CHAINED HEAT, but really, what is? This could probably use a slumming big name or two, but there's enough hilarious dialogue and nasty violence (one inmate is force-fed a large mirror shard) to make it required viewing for fans of such delightful sleaze. Also with Lucinda Crosby, Aude Charles, the frightening Faith Minton (who looks like a roid-raging Mark Gregory), the inevitable Carole Ita White, and "Tuff Enuff" by the Fabulous Thunderbirds, thereby fulfilling THE NAKED CAGE's apparently ASCAP-mandated obligation that it be featured in every film released in 1986. 1.33:1 (R, 97 mins)

SAVAGE ISLAND
(US - 1985)

Empire Pictures and future Full Moon honcho Charles Band acquired two sleazy Italian/Spanish women-in-prison films from 1980--ESCAPE FROM HELL and ORINOCO: PRISON OF SEX--both shot back-to-back by Italian exploitation vet Edoardo Mulargia with much of the same cast (Anthony Steffen, Cristina Lai, and transsexual Eurotrash icon Ajita Wilson), and had them re-edited into one film. The resulting cut-and-paste hack job, was then bookended with new footage shot five years later in Los Angeles with Linda Blair and HOGAN'S HEROES co-star Leon Askin, and released to drive-ins and grindhouses in 1985 as SAVAGE ISLAND--probably to cash in on Blair's 1984 drive-in hit SAVAGE STREETS. It's as much of an incoherent mess as you can imagine, but bad-movie lovers will rejoice at such sights as night switching to day in the middle of the same action scene, constant back-and-forth wardrobe and hairstyle changes, the same actor playing two different characters, and one character getting killed only to have same actor turn up later and get killed again--all the inevitable results of carelessly trying to fuse two movies into one. The credited director on SAVAGE ISLAND is Nicholas Beardsley, who has no other IMDb credits before or since, so it may very well be a pseudonym for someone in the Empire stock company. Empire, or Beardsley, or whomever, obviously didn't even know who some of the actors were. Wilson is credited as Maria and Lai as Muriel, when it's vice versa, the venerable Luciano Pigozzi is credited as "Paco," but plays the prison warden, and not the guy everyone calls "Paco." Luciano Rossi also seems to be playing the warden in some scenes, because he was in ORINOCO and Pigozzi wasn't.

Blair and Askin worked one day on the wraparound scenes. A slumming, career-in-the-toilet Blair, who claims she was "conned" into appearing in this and urged fans to stay away from it while happily starring in things like the wretched POLICE ACADEMY ripoff NIGHT PATROL, plays Daly, a former inmate in a South American prison who shows up at the office of emerald dealer Luker (Askin) after killing his security guard (Penn Jillette!). She's there to explain that women forced into slave labor are procuring his precious jewels, and then the two haphazardly-assembled Mulargia films proceed, with intermittent voiceover from Blair in a hapless attempt to pull the plot together. It's all for naught, and Beardsley eliminates most of the sleazier elements. He does leave some nudity--Lai plays an entire action sequence with her breasts popped out of her top--but the focus is ultimately more on action, with some nice over-the-top gunshot splatter near the end. Also with Stelio Candelli and WIP sleaze fixture Serafino Profumo, who looks like the Italian Sid Haig, and played similar sadistic guard roles in such dubious Nazisploitation gems as S.S. EXPERIMENT LOVE CAMP and S.S. CAMP: WOMEN'S HELL. Barely watchable and feeling endless even at 79 minutes, but aficionados of truly awful cinema will have a strange appreciation for it. 1.33:1 (R, 79 mins)

Also check out CULT MOVIE MARATHON VOLUME ONE

On DVD/Blu-ray: VIOLET & DAISY (2013) and DEAD IN TOMBSTONE (2013)

In Theaters: DALLAS BUYERS CLUB (2013)

On DVD/Blu-ray: CURSE OF CHUCKY (2013) and EASY RIDER: THE RIDE BACK (2013)

In Theaters: HOMEFRONT (2013)

In Theaters: OLDBOY (2013)

On DVD/Blu-ray: ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE (2013) and THE FUTURE (2013)

In Theaters: OUT OF THE FURNACE (2013)

On DVD/Blu-ray: JAYNE MANSFIELD'S CAR (2013); BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (2013); and MAN OF TAI CHI (2013)

In Theaters: NEBRASKA (2013)

Cult Classics Revisited: VIOLENT CITY (1970)

In Theaters: THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG (2013)

In Theaters: ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES (2013)

On DVD/Blu-ray: AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS (2013) and THE HUNT (2013)

New on DVD/Blu-ray/Netflix Streaming: DEVIL'S PASS (2013); ALIEN UPRISING (2013); and SIGHTSEERS (2013)

In Theaters: AMERICAN HUSTLE (2013)

On DVD/Blu-ray/Netflix Streaming: CAESAR MUST DIE (2013); BLACKFISH (2013); and SHEPARD AND DARK (2013)

On DVD/Blu-ray: Special "Late Summer Box-Office Bombs" Edition: GETAWAY (2013) and PARANOIA (2013)

In Theaters: GRUDGE MATCH (2013)

New from Shout! Factory: CULT MOVIE MARATHON VOLUME ONE

New from Shout! Factory: CULT MOVIE MARATHON VOLUME TWO