I Love You Beth Cooper does one thing right, it gives moviegoers one of those rare believable female characters in a movie dedicated to a teenage boy’s fantasy. Unfortunately while Beth Cooper may have some dimension, I Love You Beth Cooper is nothing more than a weak remix of 80’s high school movies, with a plot so predictable that you can guess what comes next before it even happens. And besides Beth, every single character in the movie is another annoying two dimensional cliche.

There’s the prototypical nerd, Dennis Cooverman, who has a bedroom full of Star Wars models, a plastic lightsaber he uses as a weapon and can name the boiling temperature of any liquid. If that wasn’t bad enough, he’s played by Paul Rust who demonstrates the scientific principle of negative charisma. There’s his best friend who’s supposedly in the closet, but is nothing more than a series of gay jokes, right down to him joining the cheerleaders in one of their routines. Beth Cooper comes with her own collection of stereotypes, including a slutty dumb friend and a psychotic marine boyfriend.

Like most teen comedies lately, I Love You Beth Cooper boils down into a road trip movie in which everyone runs around a lot, stuff gets broken, embarrassing accidents abound and closure comes from realizing that the whole point of things is the journey not the destination, the inevitable coda to any road trip flick. I Love You Beth Cooper isn’t anywhere as bad as Sex Drive or Fanboys, but it’s not as superior to them as it would like you to think. And though directed by Chris Columbus, of easy viewing hits like Home Alone and Mrs. Doubtfire, I Love You Beth Cooper suffers from awkward pacing and forced comedy. The gags are set up in plain sight and the only payoff is usually more humiliation for Dennis Cooverman, who winds up in his lucky underpants, bleeding, bandaged with tampons, beaten up repeatedly and saddled with a gay stereotype of a best friend who shoots movie lines at him non-stop.

I Love You Beth Cooper set out to deliver a more realistic female movie lead, and it did, unfortunately everything else about it is stale, worn and awkwardly unfunny.

During the process of making a movie, a rough cut of it is assembled, and the director, producers and editors will moan and wonder how they’re ever going to turn this into a movie they can release into theaters. Then they buckle down to the hard work of reshooting scenes, adding additional footage and in general polishing the final product until it’s theater ready. In the case of Terminator Salvation, they didn’t bother with any of that. Instead they just added the CGI and released it into theaters.

Long on angst and short on plot, Terminator Salvation is Mad Max without any of the fun, a joyless, character-less trip into a post-apocalyptic wasteland that forgets to give viewers any reason to come along. McG is so busy working on aesthetic credibility that he forgets how to edit action scenes or the movie as a whole, which feels like a disjointed collection of footage that has yet to be assembled into a final form. Almost a silent movie at times, perhaps because its foreign leads, Christian Bale and Sam Worthington struggle to produce any kind of convincing American accent, Terminator Salvation is a trip through a wasteland that leads nowhere. And much like another summer killer robots movie, the only thing memorable about it are the special effects.

The Terminator movies, even Terminator 3, focused on a fairly simple plot with a clear antagonist, a straightforward goal and explosive set pieces. Terminator Salvation jettisons everything but the last, sideswiping audiences who expected a good time at the theater only to get an action movie that models itself after a Cormac McCarthy novel. Had McG been less worried about being taken seriously, he might have actually applied the lessons of his work on the audience friendly Charlie’s Angels movies. Instead with We Are Marshall and Terminator Salvation, McG tries desperately to be taken seriously, but all he manages to do is be a downer.

Terminator Salvation is probably the most expensive post-apocalyptic B-movie ever made, that takes itself more seriously than most Academy Award nominees. But not only isn’t it entertaining, unlike the previous Terminator movies it doesn’t even have anything to say about human condition. Having aimed too high, Terminator Salvation doesn’t deliver on either front. Its absurd premise of a Terminator who thinks he’s human and dies when his heart is removed is an absurdly literary metaphor that not only makes no sense, but is painfully stupid to boot, leading to an ending with some trite observation about the human heart. An ironic preoccupation for a movie that bypasses both the heart and the mind entirely, for a final product that is as inhuman and cold as the machines who are its antagonists themselves.

All the Futurama movies have had that stretched out element that reminds you of a stand up comedian with a half hour set who just realized he’ll have to make the jokes stretch for an hour and a half, but on Bender’s Game the stretch marks are really obvious and very much in your face.

While the first two Futurama movies were certainly flawed, they at least had a big idea behind them, from time travel to deism. Bender’s Game has nothing like that. Instead Bender’s Game is nothing more than a mediocre Futurama episode with another story about Mom trying to take over things, stretched out with an extended Lord of the Rings and generic fantasy quest parody. There’s no big idea, but even worse there’s not even much in the way of comedy.

To shoehorn in the long fantasy quest parody, the first half hour of Bender’s Game brings us long unfunny scenes of the Professor’s clone and Hermes’ son playing Dungeons and Dragons. Arguably Dungeons and Dragons jokes are a little dated in the age of World of Warcraft, but so is an extended parody of the Lord of the Rings movies in 2008, and half of the jokes that fill Bender’s Game.

Bender however becomes obsessed with Dungeons and Dragons, until he actually believes he’s living in an imaginary fantasy kingdom and has to be institutionalized. Meanwhile Mom, who now runs an energy conglomerate, has cornered the market on Dark Matter, which the professor can undo by bringing his anti-crystal close to her crystal, the mission that will fill the rest of the movie. But not until even more tedious stories about Leela entering a demolition derby and getting a shock collar to control her anger are wrapped up.

The rest of Bender’s Game is dedicated to the gang trying to break into Mom’s arctic fortress only to be sucked into the fantasy universe, for an extended fantasy quest parody, which also holds the only funny elements in the movie. Unfortunately that means waiting around for the last half hour to get any laughs that don’t involve Mom’s sons posing as owl exterminators or Dr. Zoydberg pulling keys out of the professor’s stomach with a magnet.

And it’s Dr. Zoydberg’s occasional bits and the return of Roberto that are the only reliably funny things in Bender’s Game. Bender’s Game has all the staples of Futurama movies, the outdated references, the stretched out episodic feel to the whole thing, the bits of pointless cartoon nudity to remind everyone that we’re not watching this on FOX anymore, and the B Stories that aren’t funny and don’t really matter. But Bender’s Game has nothing to transcend those flaws the way previous movies did. There’s no big idea, just a half-assed series of stories divided up among the writers, that with their failure makes you really appreciate what the previous Futurama movies did right.

The difference between a provocateur and a filmmaker is that a filmmaker’s movies are about something, while a provocateur’s movies push buttons to hide just how little content they really have. Neil LaBute’s career has been that of a provocateur, but none of his movies have been more hollow than Lakeview Terrace, a generic thriller coasting off the wake of Crash and pretending to be something more than it really is.

Race is front and center, but as in Crash it’s a narrative devoid of substance. The one and only thing that makes Lakeview Terrace compelling is Samuel L. Jackson, as always giving his 120 percent as the movie’s Godzilla, the explosive mixture of racial and political tropes, Black, Conservative, LAPD Officer, and emotionally as much of a mess as he is politically. The interracial yuppie couple that moves next door to him may be the hero and heroine on paper and their relationship is meant to be transgressive, but they and even the fires that approach the neighborhood pale in comparison to Jackson’s Abel Turner, part fanatic, part son of a bitch and utterly real.

The problem with Lakeview Terrace is that besides Samuel L. Jackson proving that he can bring to life any character on a script page, the movie has nothing going for it. The script mentions race a lot, but the sum total of those mentions is to suggest that it’s a troubled and complicated subject. Neil LaBute throws in his share of clever visual references to race which add up to nothing more than clever visual references that say nothing. Given free rein, LaBute might have produced something more shocking than the generic thriller format for Lakeview Terrace allows, but there is no reason to believe that it would have worked any better.

Lakeview Terrace’s big selling point is race, but subtract the racial button pushing and you have virtually the same movie but without the camouflage of significance. If all its racial profundity has a message, it’s that racial roles aren’t so simple and yet they are a part of our society, which is the kind of wisdom you end up with from an afterschool special. Over 15 years after the LA Riots, Hollywood continues to try and make movies about racial tensions and the LAPD without actually having anything to say about the subject, and as a sign of Lakeview Terrace’s predictability, Rodney King and the riots themselves are referenced barely halfway through the movie. Bogged down by cliches and featuring a struggle between bland and mean, Lakeview Terrace’s real color is vanilla, a generic thriller trying to pretend to be something it’s not.

My Sassy Girl is to Elisha Cuthbert what The House Bunny is to Anna Farris, a great role in a fairly bad movie that proves she can be more than Jack Bauer’s annoying daughter. My Sassy Girl though isn’t nearly as bad as you would expect it to be, primarily because Elisha Cuthbert turns what could have easily been another “magic pixie dream girl” character into a real person. Keeping up with her is an awkward Jesse Bradford as a farm boy whose big dream was going to NYU business school in order to get a job for the traditional farm company his father works for.

In that way My Sassy Girl is initially a throwback to the classic screwball comedy with the ditzy dame and the straightlaced bachelor colliding as she wrecks his life but teaches him how to have fun, and that is how the movie is being promoted, but My Sassy Girl’s biggest problem, besides the name, is that it is a remake. My Sassy Girl might have jettisoned everything of the original but the idea and that might have worked, or it might have stuck to a detailed scene by scene and line by line remake of the South Korean original. Instead however My Sassy Girl tries to awkwardly mimic some of the stylistic touches of the original and suffers from schizophrenia unable to make the transition that the original made from a more conventional comedy to a more conventional romantic comedy.

My Sassy Girl works well enough in the first two thirds fueled by Elisha Cuthbert’s brave performance, but by the time the original’s plot twist kicks in turning the movie from comedy into saccharine melodrama and transforms her Jordan from an edgy, wild and bitter person and into a classic romantic comedy heroine crying lonely tears and rejoicing when hope against hope the man she was destined to be with meets up with her again. In a movie that began with a hint of Carole Lombard, My Sassy Girl ends squarely in When Harry Met Sally territory, an uncomfortable journey that reminds us again that some conventions of Asian cinema will just not translate well, especially not when they’re translated as haphazardly as they were here.

My Sassy Girl succeeds as much as it does because Elisha Cuthbert’s Jordan feels all too real in the same way that the carefully lit and spotless New York City subways or every other character in the movie from Jesse Bradford’s ridiculously squeaky clean small town Charlie to his obligatory fat perverted best friend, do not. The reckless pain and wild anger she projects is an all too real and all too human and the emotions and behavior she displays makes her character one you are far more likely to find in New York than the usual heroes and heroines of romantic comedies who have met here on the silver screen. But when My Sassy Girl has done milking it for its comedy value, it assigns a tritely sentimental meaning to everything she has done and the journey then becomes a means to clean all that away and present her as simply another generic heroine waiting to step into the happy ending that had been waiting for her all along. It’s a perfect Hollywood ending and one that shortchanges every real human emotion in the movie in favor of manufactured yearning that magically comes true.

Walden Media’s ongoing attempt to compete with the mainstream blockbuster by producing family friendly films reminds me of the wave of self-criticism in the Chinese film industry in the wake of Kung Fu Panda’s success, all focusing on the stifling atmosphere that prevents anything original or controversial from being created. Journey to the Center of the Earth, another Walden Media project thrust into the summer’s blockbuster season against such titans as The Dark Knight, is an all too unfortunate example of the problem.

Journey to the Center of the Earth has been made and remade over and over again, yet despite being a novel that captured the imagination of so many when thrown at the screen it has a way of turning into a lackluster film. Journey to the Center of the Earth is yet another lackluster entry, painfully family friendly and short on actual content. Despite its hefty budget and 3D come on, Journey to the Center of the Earth feels like a TV movie and plays out just as predictably as one. So predictably that even children in the audience should have no problem guessing what comes next, before it happens.

With only three characters and a plot involving, of all things, family, Journey to the Center of the Earth is meant to be the ultimate family movie. Unfortunately it’s the kind of family movie that condescends to the children and bores the adults out of their minds. Journey to the Center of the Earth isn’t so much a movie as an amusement park ride with lots of falling, jumping, falling on a water slide, being swept along a river and occasionally being propelled upward and once in a while being chased by a dinosaur. Some movies have the potential to be turned into amusement park rides, but Journey to the Center of the Earth is an amusement park ride in search of a movie. And that movie is hard to find.

Starring Brendan Fraser as Professor Trevor Anderson, a lecturer delivering lectures no one listens to based on his vanished brother’s theories, he’s forced to take in his nephew for a week, only to have the kid quickly unearth clues in a copy of Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth that leads them to Scandinavia, where Hannah, a pretty but skeptical mountain guide, takes them into the mountains where they naturally wind up finding their way to the center of the earth.

The nephew of course wears a ski cap and a hoodie and teaches his professor uncle all about the internet by accessing Google on his PSP. The mountain guide is of course pretty and competent while Fraser’s character is a klutz, until about halfway through the movie when the mountain guide strips off her outerwear, unaccountably falls in love with Fraser’s character and reverts to a sexist stereotype of femininity, clutching him and running away from danger, while he gets to be the hero.

For fans of the book, Journey to the Center of the Earth offers the occasionally interesting twist on Verne’s original methods updated by more modern science, but it’s unfortunately buried in unreal special effects and a lightweight cast. Brendan Fraser carries as much of the movie as he can with his naturally goofy affable personality, but he doesn’t get much help from his co-stars who seem completely out of their league on the big screen and once the amusement park ride is underway, there’s not much for him to do except panic, deliver the occasional quip and run around in front of a green screen.

If you need a good way to visualize everything that’s wrong with Journey to the Center of the Earth, think back to the CGI waterfall in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Remember how Jones and the crew go over one CGI waterfall and then another bigger one and a bigger one, until you stop caring anymore because none of it seems real and no matter how well the cast tries, they can’t make any of it seem like anything more than a bunch of people trying not to look silly while pretending to go over a waterfall. That’s 90 percent of Journey to the Center of the Earth in a nutshell.

There are nice touches in Journey to the Center of the Earth and even the glowing bird who guides the boy through every turn of the underground journey isn’t as annoying as it might seem. But Journey to the Center of the Earth still suffers from the tepid touch of Walden Media that under the mandate of producing family films, produces antiseptic and lifeless productions. Written by a man whose only previous experience was on War Stories with Oliver North and directed by the visual effects supervisor from The Day After Tomorrow, Journey to the Center of the Earth feels like an expensive and lifeless TV movie that’s short on ambition, originality, characters, plot and everything that makes a movie worth watching.

When the Hellboy movies were rendered by Guillermo Del Toro from comic book to the big screen something went missing, not just the stark shadowed lines of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, but its original dark spirit. When Mignola’s Lovecraftian universe is rendered into CGI and made Hollywood family friendly, it turns into a fantasy version of Men in Black, all jokes and special effects, but no suspense or soul. When you consider Del Toro’s other films, it’s odd how plastic and upbeat his Hellboy movies are, and Hellboy II The Golden Army is as plastic and upbeat as any of them.

Suffering from CGI-itis, Del Toro seems unable to let a single frame of film go by without splattering it with CGI as if he were possessed by the spirit of George Lucas. Hellboy II The Golden Army boasts a virtual CGI bestiary from great to small, but like all CGI it’s slick, unreal and disconnects the viewer from believing in the reality of what is taking place on the screen. Set in a New York City we barely see, Hellboy II The Golden Army drifts through cliched banter while following a disconnected plot that seems to exist only to foist one CGI spectacle on us after another. The visuals are gorgeous as are the sets, but there’s little life in Hellboy II The Golden Army.

Ron Perlman as Hellboy and Selma Blair as Liz Sherman going through the motions of a bad sitcom relationship are trite, and only Abe Sapien’s love for Princess Nuala has a spark of heart to it, but is painfully short on development. Hellboy II The Golden Army assembles a good cast and wastes them on one cliche after another. Hellboy II The Golden Army assembles some very elaborate CGI and makes it the center of the movie pushing the characters off to the side. Just as in the first Hellboy, Guillermo Del Toro never manages to bring the stark interwoven spirit of Mike Mignola’s creation into the room, a creation that easily mixed pulp comics and Lovecraft. Instead Del Toro creates another empty and expensive visual spectacle that suffers all the more by comparison to The Dark Knight, a movie in which the characters genuinely struggle over something, while in Hellboy II The Golden Army they struggle to get to the end of the CGI ride.

As both writer and director Del Toro must take the credit for blowing a second Hellboy movie and for failing to make a live action Hellboy that is even half as good as the animated films were. Instead Del Toro delivers a lifeless and family friendly Hollywood product, chock full of cliches and devoid of anything remotely dark or scary, let alone compelling. For a movie that begins by promising to remind us why we used to be afraid of the dark, Hellboy II The Golden Army instead reminds us why were afraid that Hellboy II would fail as badly as the first Hellboy did.

The Dark Knight will inevitably be compared to Tim Burton’s Batman, but while both movies share plot elements and a common villain, they are worlds apart in the fabric of their storytelling. Tim Burton’s Batman was the Batman as myth, as the battle within a comic book universe brought to life with larger than life heroes and villains in the stylized world that exists between the panels of a comic book and the imagination. Christopher Nolan’s Batman is something else entirely, Batman as he might exist in the real world, a world that is grimly real and ruthlessly relevant yet philosophically ponderous. Both movies exist in separate universes, they are two ways of looking at Batman, as myth and man.

The Dark Knight easily exceeds Nolan’s first effort Batman Returns, showing us a Batman who is still learning the tools of his trade while at the same realizing that the fight against evil will not be easily won and that if he wants to fight it, he will have to become something larger and darker than he has been until now. In Batman Returns, his enemies, Scarecrow, Ra’s Al Ghul were men with an agenda. In The Dark Knight he faces madmen. The rule of the mob, the battle between crime and law is about to give way to a war of myths and archetypes, a battle that will involve everyone in Gotham and that will carry a terrible cost. That is the slippery edge Batman has stepped into it, and it is the abyss that Michael Caine’s Alfred warns him about.

The Dark Knight is Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke transposed to a storyline that has more in common with 7even and its preoccupation with the tension between order and disorder and human limitations in the face of chaos. Like Tim Burton’s Batman and unlike Batman Returns where the villains were barely a presence, the villains rule over The Dark Knight, from Dent’s bright ascent and fall, to the Joker, who is always on screen, even when he is unseen. But in Christopher Nolan’s universe the villains themselves are demystified and the masks often don’t hold up. The Scarecrow emerges as a petty criminal making a deal in a parking complex, the Joker is a violent thug who on screen has more in common with a Tarantino character than the Clown Prince of Crime and though Aaron Eckhart does his best, his Two Face is never really more than an emotionally upset Harvey Dent. The flip side of Nolan’s realistic take on Batman is that there is no real room in it to make the monsters and freaks that populate Batman’s universe believable.

This realistic take on Batman has its strengths, from Lucius Fox’s casual dismissal of a blackmailing attempt by a lawyer who has found out the real identity of Batman to a visit to China and a skyhook extraction. It allows Nolan to fill the screen with a believable large scale Gotham that is not at all stylized and is completely plausible. Yet it makes the masks and capes that much harder to accept. Chaotic editing of the action scenes, which are surprisingly infrequent in a comic book movie this long, doesn’t help matters either. In the final take, The Dark Knight is more 7even than it is a comic book movie, a dystopian police thriller with a man who dresses in a cape and mask as a supporting character.

There is no question that the Nolans deliver on the script, The Dark Knight is more of a companion to their starting effort Memento, than to Batman Returns, a painstaking look at a city and at three men searching for themselves in the face of a brutal monster who has chosen to embody the forces of chaos. Nolan brings Chicago as Gotham to life long after the point where New York City could no longer plausibly reflect the grim urban center of an American crimetown. The twists and turns keep coming as the Joker pulls off one plot twist after another making him a nemesis not only for Batman but for all of Gotham and for humanity itself. In comic books and comic book movies the villain’s threats against the rest of the city or the world are often a sideline to the battle between superhero and supervillain. In The Dark Knight it is the threat against the people, the ordinary people without capes and masks, that counts. Batman is a sideline to the real drama, the human drama.

Many people will go to see The Dark Knight for Heath Ledger’s performance, but Ledger is easily overshadowed by the rest of the cast. Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman sparkle with good humor and seasoned wit in their small parts. Maggie Gyllenhaal makes a good substitute for Katie Holmes’ more inexperienced and naive Rachel Dawes. Aaron Eckhart plays Harvey Dent as every inch the reckless but shining knight in a two piece suit that he should be and more. He can’t really sell him as Two Face, but it’s not clear that anyone could. Gary Oldman serves as the emotional and moral center of Batman, carrying the weight of everyone’s choices, and serving as the ordinary man who represents the human middle ground between the extremes of Dent, Batman and the Joker. Christian Bale continues to oversell his Batman, piling on the harsh vocals, but looks much more comfortable in the part than he did in Batman Returns. Heath Ledger though is the movie’s weak point, delivering an uneven and erratic performance that is painfully awkward in the beginning but grows increasingly confident and smoother toward the second half as he becomes more comfortable with the role. Had Ledger lived, reshoots would have likely improved the final product. As he did not, we’re stuck with what we have. Because of the timing of his death Ledger will no doubt get an Oscar nomination, he may even get the golden statue posthumously, whether he deserves it is another matter.

There is no question that The Dark Knight is a powerful cinematic event. I doubt that it will stand as the final interpretation of Batman and I suspect strongly that after Nolan, Batman will revert closer to his comic book roots. But at the same time the comics and the movies have been influenced in waves by each interpretation and reinterpretation as Nolan’s Batman will emerge in the comics and add to the accreted mass of snapshots whose whole is the iconic character of the Batman.

Most people remember the original Starship Troopers for its combination of ruthless warfare, gore and satire doling out heavy doses of action scenes, political commentary so pointedly ironic it could cut and bloody corpses by the planetload. Starship Troopers 3 Marauders makes the effort, but despite taking place during an actual controversial war, is curiously bloodless, both on the battlefield and in its storytelling.

A decent but uneven effort from original Starship Troopers screenwriter Ed Neumeier, Starship Troopers 3 Marauders does its best to simulate its big screen ancestor with a small screen budget, but the action scenes and special effects just aren’t there, and even the satire is oddly weak and watered down. If anything marked the original Starship Troopers, it was its complete commitment to being the most ruthless embodiment of itself with officers and soldiers who showed no hesitation or mercy, with blood poured out by the buckets and satire that mocked military and political propaganda, even as the movie showed us the realization of a truly fascist government faced with a ruthless and inhuman enemy. It wasn’t Heinlein’s vision, but it stood on its own. Starship Troopers 3 Marauders does not.

Starship Troopers 3 Marauders still serves up some of the violence, nudity and satire of the original, but much of it is directionless and comes off as an attempt to compensate for the small budget, as battle at a doomed outpost on a farming planet leaves the Skymarshal, Lola, played by Jolene Blalock and the usual cast of mismatched characters, a drunken doctor, a cowardly cook, a religious aide and a tough Chief stranded on a planet inside the Arachnid quarantine zone who have to be rescued by the Marauders, a team wearing the powered armor from Heinlein’s novel, led by a court martialed Johnny Rico, fighting the bugs and a power mad Admiral’s coup.

The characters are no longer the ruthless bastards they used to be, even the Federal Network has been watered down, giving equal time to the other side running polls on whether blowing up planets is immoral. The Skymarshal sings and dances on television and sells merchandise with his picture on it. Almost half the movie focuses on Lola stumbling around the desert with a group of mismatched characters, none of whom follow orders, and who spend most of their time complaining. There’s Holly, the aide slash stewardess who sings religious hymns and insists everyone pray with her. There’s the deranged Skymarshal who never stops smiling and insists everyone pray with him, while talking about his god. There’s Jingo, the annoying frightened cook who winds up running away and right into a group of bugs. Where the recent Mutant Chronicles at least gave us a SciFi version of the Dirty Dozen, Starship Troopers 3 Marauders, give us the Whining Six. Even Lola comes off as childish and indecisive over the long trek. They’re every bit the sort of people that Michael Ironside’s Rasczak would have shot out of hand before marching on to the next objective.

Reimagined as a satirical judgment on both Heinlein’s novel and militarism, the original Starship Troopers pointed the guns at the bugs and let the satire come from the war effort. Starship Troopers 3 Marauders instead goes light on the action and seemingly borrowing from Battlestar Galactica’s religion oriented story, introduces a Lovecraftian uberbug half the size of a planet that the bugs and the Skymarshal worship as god. In a virtual regurgitation of a portion of the first film’s plot, the uberbug turns out to be the ultimate brain bug who wants to tap the Skymarshal’s knowledge of the fleet and uses his betrayal to penetrate and destroy an outpost.

Starship Troopers 3 Marauders’ one saving grace is the return of Caspar Van Dien, who isn’t much of an actor, but knows this is his one lead role and gives it everything he has, delivering ridiculous lines with the complete conviction of a man who really believes them. The movie is at its best when Johnny Rico is paying homage to the original, it’s at its weakest when it’s lost in the desert with Lola. Unfortunately the movie is more desert than anything else, and by the time the Marauders are thrown into the fight, they prove to be so ridiculously indestructible and the special effects so hopelessly bad, that there really isn’t much point to it all except to introduce a closing portion heavy on religious satire with Holly reimagined as the Virgin Mary and the Marauders as heavenly angels.

Light on action and stuck with some really poor special effects and unable to even produce blood that looks like blood instead of Heinz 57, Starship Troopers 3 Marauders loses out on the action and its satirical jabs are weak and all over the place, at once mocking the Federation and the anti-war protesters and religion, and mostly failing to deliver. There are understated references to everything from Stalin’s introduction of religion after Hitler’s invasion to the JFK assassination and 9/11, but none of them manage to connect to anything larger. Marauders’ plot is even weaker, compensating for the low budget with an extended desert scene with some of the most annoying characters you’re likely to find in any movie. Aside from the introduction of religion into the Federation most of the plot developments in the movie go nowhere. General Hauser and Rico become friends then enemies and then friends again. The Admiral’s coup against the Skymarshal turns out to be completely justified. The Uberbug has apparently been destroyed and yet the war shows no sign of ending. A seeming love triangle between Rico, Lola and Dix never goes anywhere either.

Overly ambitious, Starship Troopers 3 Marauders never really manages to get anything right. Considering the budget and that Ed Neumeier is a first time director, Starship Troopers 3 Marauders can be excused for a lot of this, but that doesn’t make it worth watching.

If Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Resident Evil had a particularly unfortunate direct to video love child it might look something like The Mutant Chronicles, a movie which shares the aesthetic of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and the script of Resident Evil for a turgid combination of atmospheric 1920’s war movie melodrama and zombie attacks. There are no shortage of bad movies that are made all the time, but The Mutant Chronicles is not a bad movie, instead it’s a misguided one that has the elements of a much better movie within it, but manages to squander them time and time again.

The Mutant Chronicles miscasts Ron Perlman as the leader of a monastic order given to delivering long speeches on faith he can hardly pronounce and then squanders John Malkovich on a brief scene in a corporate tower. It displays the striking if unreal cinematography and green screen effects of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow to mimic an early 20’s and 30’s world with some steampunk touches, but like Sky Captain itself, never manages to make the world itself come to life or to make the characters who inhabit it matter. The worst failing of The Mutant Chronicles is in its script, a misguided mess from the writer of Event Horizon, that alternates between obscenities and lectures on faith.

With the slow pacing of an ambitious epic, The Mutant Chronicles takes 40 minutes before the “Dirty Dozen” set off on their mission to blow up the alien machine. An event that is preceded by sonorous and unnecessary voiceovers from Ron Perlman that set forth a completely mangled history involving the devil, an alien spaceship and a secret order of monks who keep its secret; after which we’re told that it’s the year 2700 something, corporations rule the world and are currently fighting WW1 Doughboy style somewhere around France. Naturally they wake the evil machine which begins to turn the entire world into zombies.

It’s not too clear why the combined resources of the world’s armies prove to be no match for the zombies whose only mode of attack are their clawed arms and who need to tow away the dead and the living back to their machine to turn them into zombies. The actual mission which depends on attaching a device that might be a bomb which has to be detonated with a key they don’t actually have is an even worse idea. But none of that stops Thomas Jane’s Hunter or the rest of the cast of disposable characters from going on the mission in exchange for evacuation passes for someone they care about, the only worthwhile element in the script. This commences an hour or so of playing hide and seek with the zombies through the art deco ruins of a lost city, itself a good deal scarier than the zombies.

There are moments in The Mutant Chronicles that actually work. Hunter breaking up the evacuation blackmailers. Malkovich’s Constantine calmly asking the mob of zombies if they have a name. The characters trading quips and revelations over their passes in the compartment. But most of it is simply a waste of time. Too slowly paced to work as an action movie and too devoid of content to be anything else, The Mutant Chronicles is both too dumb and too pretentious for its own good. Like many Hollywood movies, The Mutant Chronicles mistakes empty platitudes about faith for depth and tosses aside even this faint attempt at depth when its ending depicts the act of faith that instead of exploding the enemy ship, instead directs it to Mars against the remaining survivors of the human race. The Martian Chronicles clearly means to carve out a suspenseful moment for a sequel, but instead it tops its own absurdity into complete irrelevance.

After all these years Goa’uld System Lords are still hard to get rid of. As Stargate Continuum gets started, Ba’al is finally about to be killed by extraction in a prolonged ceremony that has brought the SG-1 gang and Jack O’Neil together for the occasion. But as it turns out a clone of Ba’al has a time machine which he uses to go back to 1939 when the Stargate was being transported to America, take over the vessel and insure that there is no Stargate program. This wipes the Tokra out of history and Stargate command as well, except for our gang who manage to get to the gate before everything goes to hell and then return to an earth with an alternate timeline in which Stargate command never existed.

It’s not exactly the first time Stargate has done an alternate timeline that wipes out Stargate command story, but no one really expects originality from Stargate anyway. Unlike Ark of Truth, Stargate Continuum isn’t based on an idiot plot and boasts some fairly decent locating shooting and special effects. At its best Stargate Continuum focuses on the SG-1 team as stranded on an earth in an alternate timeline that doesn’t trust them and doesn’t want them anywhere near the Stargate, leaving them little choice but to live their new identities in a world not quite their own while waiting for the worst to happen. And when it does and Goa’uld scoutships are crisscrossing the sky and playing tag with F-15 fighters on the evening news, they’re the last hope for cleaning up the disaster even as the bombardment of earth begins.

At its weakest though, Stargate drags us right back to the endless Goa’uld politics of the System Lords, which by now I doubt even dedicated Stargate fans care about. Ba’al might have made for a better villain following his initial plan to approach as humanity’s benefactor offering peace and technology, which would have made for an intriguing story with the SG-1 team as the only ones to know for certain what a mistake listening to him would be. Instead though Ba’al is assassinated, Te’alc as First Prime reunites with the remains of the SG-1 team in a hurry leading to the usual, but fatal race against time to go back in time. The ending is a bit anticlimactic, though adequate enough, but leaves you wondering just how one of the team can age 10 years without anyone actually noticing. Even assuming that he managed to time travel back with whatever gadget Ba’al brought along with him.

Twenty-seven years ago Indiana Jones first arrived on the screen in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Since then he’s made three sequels and been subject to endless novelizations, games and parodies. We’ve gotten to know Indy pretty well over this last generation, well enough to recognize Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for what it is, a pastiche of the first three movies mixed together with heaps of nostalgia and George Lucas’ own derivative brand of mythology and alternative archeology.

When Indiana Jones makes his appearance after 19 years in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, it’s clear that he’s gotten a lot older and softer, but it’s also clear that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have gotten a lot older and softer too. Like its lead, its director and its visionary, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull still has some energy, but it’s bloated, slow and guilty of repeating itself.

The adventurous hero is gone replaced by a tired old man, a former government agent who worries about his job, defends his war record and clings nervously to the back of Shia LeBeouf’s motorcycle. A silly character who flails panicked in the swamp at the thought of grabbing onto a snake until Shia LeBeouf calms his fears by telling him it’s a rope. Lucas and Spielberg leave in just enough heroics for us to recognize the old Indiana Jones, but it’s a disappointed recognition like meeting a favorite uncle only to realize that he’s grown senile and can barely go to the bathroom on his own.

Much of the blame goes to George Lucas, the man behind the rewrite of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, who doesn’t spare Indiana Jones from the same ravages he inflicted on Star Wars. Not only is the old Indiana Jones gone but he’s virtually a supporting character in his own movie which teams him up with Shia LeBeouf as his bratty long lost son, Mutt Williams, Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood, Ray Winstone as Mac and finally John Hurt as a mentally challenged Professor Oxley who speaks in riddles. Indiana Jones always had his sidekicks but in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, it’s more like he’s another member of the Indy gang, which is exactly what Lucas likely intended.

Where Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom began in foreign locales, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull begins in exotic Nevada and then heads off to an even more exotic Ivy League college campus. Over a third of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull goes by before Indiana Jones even leaves American soil. Once he does there’s a single plane trip and then it’s a generic South American locale, complete with generic tribesmen with painted faces. Indiana Jones movies were always journey movies, but even that is lost as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull focuses its attention on two sprawling complexes, the Area 51 complex and the lost city and the area around it. There’s no real adventure because there’s hardly any room for adventure.

So what’s left? Steven Spielberg seemed terribly worried that spoilers would leak out to the audience, but every single plot twist and revelation in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull can be easily seen coming. Is there anyone in the audience who really doesn’t know well beforehand that Mutt Williams will turn out to be Indiana Jones’ son. Or that Mac is really working for the Russians even when he pretends not to be. Or that the crystal skulls belong to aliens or even that the pyramid will likely be a spaceship or that in the tradition of Indiana Jones villains, Irina Spalko will get exactly what she wants and it will destroy her. But Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’s script is too determined to spoil it for you in case you can’t figure it out for yourself by actually having Indiana Jones come right out and tell her that early on in the movie.

Where the classic Indiana Jones films had the edge of the politically incorrect serials combined with the best scares, twists and action scenes that Spielberg could pull off, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is safely toned down and kid friendly. The creatures that pop up in the movie, from monkeys to red ants to a giant snake are safely CGI and look as unreal as anything in the Mummy films. To make Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull fully family friendly, Lucas and Spielberg even make sure that there’s a family on screen having actual adventures. It’s as if Terminator got remade by the director of Lassie.

By the time Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ends with an on screen wedding and Indiana Jones and Mutt Williams tussling for his signature hat, a not too subtle symbolic suggestion that Shia LeBeouf will be the star of the Indiana Jones movies pretty soon, it’s clear that while Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull isn’t quite another Phantom Menace, it’s so watered down and weak that it barely connects not only as an action movie or an adventure, but as anything beyond a diffuse nostalgia trip and a merchandising opportunity. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is Indiana Jones on life support, not so much because Harrison Ford got old, but because George Lucas and Steven Spielberg did, and seeing it reminds us that while Indiana Jones is still capable of cracking the whip, the men who made the gutsy movies and created the modern blockbuster are the ones who have lost their edge.

Most superhero movies look to cast an actor who can vanish inside the suit and the persona of a classic comic book character while getting drowned out by a 100 million dollars worth of special effects. Robert Downey Jr. doesn’t vanish inside the suit, he owns the suit and everything around it, pulling off a performance in Iron Man that has more energy than any of the movie’s many action scenes or special effects.

But Iron Man doesn’t stop with a charismatic performance from its main star, it runs on three great performances, fueled by the screen presences and pitch perfect acting of Downey, Paltrow and Bridges, and the movie’s energy is powered by their quirky meaning-laden interactions. Director Jon Favreau tops it all off by planting them in a movie that has its own nervous energy where things seem to constantly be on the verge of going wrong, only to be salvaged at the last minute.

Tony Stark’s blatant self-confidence is challenged by disaster after disaster as he attempts to take charge of Stark Industries and clean up his own messes in a superpowered suit, which time after time fails him or comes off as inadequate to the task. With a hole inside his chest, Stark goes off on mission after mission equipped not with the stoic heroism of conventional superheroes, but with a mixture of thrill seeking overconfidence and the inner demons of his own guilt leading him into situations he isn’t remotely ready for. But audiences don’t need to cheer on Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark or root for him, he does all his own cheerleading too.

If Downey was an unconventional choice to play Stark that paid off beautifully, Jeff Bridges was at least as unconventional of a choice to play villain Obadiah Stone. Bald, bearded, bulking; Obadiah is a long way from the Dude, equally at home being casually amiable and casually menacing, he’s the believable Ballmeresque CEO you see grinning on the covers of magazines and stabbing everyone in the back in the boardroom. Along with Terrence Howard’s straight man Colonel, Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts completes Stark’s triad of human connections, taking a seemingly thankless sidekick role and investing it with human vulnerability, empathy and humor to make her Stark’s true other half.

Most of Iron Man’s key action scenes can already be seen in the trailer, a common failing of many action movies, but unlike those movies, Iron Man is invested in a lot more than its action scenes. The real movie is not in the fights or the special effects, it’s in the complete package tied together by the three main characters and held up heroically by Downey. It’s in that restless coolness that he brings to the table that makes watching Iron Man an adventure, the way great action movies are meant to be. It’s in that sense of daring unpredictability that the best action movies from Indiana Jones to James Bond have unleashed on audiences and Iron Man rides that unpredictability right down to its final moment, a complete shocker and yet absolutely in line with every single thing Tony Stark has done throughout the movie.

Where so many comic book movies get it wrong, Iron Man gets it right, going beyond the suit to the man. Any 200 million dollar summer blockbuster can toss special effects at the screen but no amount of money can buy the energy and the drive that connects Iron Man back to the great blockbusters of the 80’s. With Iron Man Jon Favreau demonstrates that he is on track to be the rightful successor to Steven Spielberg, and Robert Downey Jr comes back in a big way. Iron Man is more than just a great comic book movie, it’s a great movie. Period.

Most of the comedy in Walk Hard The Dewey Cox Story could be boiled down to 5 minutes. That just leaves the movie with 91 other minutes to try and fill with something, with anything. Like just about every parody movie these days, Walk Hard The Dewey Cox Story doesn’t take long to begin flailing around, going on tangents and trying to rope in random jokes from anywhere. But the real problem is that 5 minutes of comedy is spread thinly across 96 minutes of movie making it a long slow road without a lot of laughs to get to the end.

Even at only 96 minutes Walk Hard The Dewey Cox Story feels almost as long as its inspiration, Walk the Line, because like it Walk Hard moves at a lackadaisical drawling pace, occasionally trying for a joke or two along the way. But where Walk the Line was condensing a man’s life, Walk Hard The Dewey Cox Story has nothing to condense, it’s just trying to fill dead air and it doesn’t have much to fill it with. Walk Hard The Dewey Cox Story spoofs the standby rags to riches to drugs to redemption cliches of the rock and roll biopic but its jokes are as boring and shapeless as the target. And when they’re done we have to endure scene after scene that turns Walk Hard The Dewey Cox Story into a mediocre version of a rock and roll biopic itself with few laughs along the way.

John C. Reilly is a naturalistic actor and plays the part that way, would be all right if we were meant to take it seriously, instead it puts him in a different movie than his TV comedy co-stars. Unlike them Reilly doesn’t seem to know he’s in a comedy and often neither does Jake Kasdan, who shoots scenes filled with naturalistic performances and scenery that are as slow paced as molasses.

There are some funny moments in the movie, such as the meeting with the Beatles and the reactions to Cox chopping his brother in half and his first concert, but the common element is that they involve performances by someone other than Reilly. And Judd Apatow’s script predictably underplays the comedy and overplays the R rating, somehow not realizing that a woman’s bare breasts are not actually funny, neither are money shots of Reilly or any of the movie’s other awkward sex scenes.

Walk Hard The Dewey Cox Story sets out to parody the rock and roll biopic and winds up being as awkward, flat and tedious as any of them. It has some half-decent songs and a cast wasted by a movie that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to do and how to do it.

Doing a biographical movie of a man based on an entire persona that was in the public eye and available on video is a fool’s errand but it’s not one that is unique to Milos Forman’s Man on the Moon. Man on the Moon’s unique triumph is to produce a movie so execrable that it almost makes you glad Andy Kaufman is dead. Which makes Man on the Moon the sort of biopic Andy Kaufman might have appreciated in its effect on the audience rather than in its execution which by turns combines sappy self-righteous arm-waving melodrama with utterly pointless restagings of events most people have already seen.

The opening of Man on the Moon attempts to play with the audience in the Andy Kaufman style but it’s a weak attempt and the closest Milos Forman comes to trying to imitate Andy Kaufman’s methods. Instead Forman settles for a tear jerking tribute that follows Jim Carrey along through a fragmented narrative of major moments in Andy’s life and career and a finale that attempts to leave open the question of whether Andy Kaufman is alive or dead, yet fails because Milos Forman has spent too much of the movie showing us Kaufman’s tricks behind the scenes.

Where Andy Kaufman valued the unexpected, Milos Forman produces a movie that is entirely predictable and turns Andy Kaufman’s life into a closed book through melodrama and sentimentality without ever having a clue as to what moved him or motivated him. Jim Carrey does an excellent imitation of Andy Kaufman aided by some talented makeup artists but in the end the energy of Carrey’s performance is his own and clashes with Kaufman’s slower paced routines. But even Carrey at his best is merely doing an imitation of Andy Kaufman rather than giving us anything new. We don’t learn more about Andy Kaufman and we know the outcome to even his most maddening routines. Man on the Moon is nostalgia for people who don’t need it because they remember the real thing and that leaves Man on the Moon is devoid of everything that made Andy Kaufman so exciting to watch.

In some parallel universe, Charlie Kaufman would have written the screenplay for Man on the Moon, Robert Downey Jr would have starred in it and Michael Gondry would have directed it. That movie might have captured what Andy Kaufman did, if not what made him tick. Man on the Moon though is simply a hagiography of a man who resisted hagiographies, reason, schedules, formats and simple answers. It isn’t the movie he deserved but the movie that the same sort of people who refused to understand him throughout his career churned out as the lowest common denominator response to a dead celebrity. Man on the Moon is a miserable moviegoing experience, suffering from a fragmented narrative and could have been replaced by a collection of Andy Kaufman clips for about a 100th of the price. Rather than a tribute to Andy Kaufman, Man on the Moon is a tribute to our culture’s need to venerate and create a false sense of acquaintance with celebrities, even with one as determined to resist the simple cliches of culture consumerism as Kaufman was.

The most surprising thing about Dungeon Siege In the Name of the King is that it really isn’t a bad movie, at least not in the way you would expect it to be. Out of the gate Dungeon Siege In the Name of the King has three strikes against it, it’s directed by Uwe Boll, it’s a video game adaptation and it’s populated by a mismatched cast of often miscast actors and while it never quite overcomes any of those problems, Dungeon Siege In the Name of the King has the elements of a marginally good fantasy epic scattered about that it never can quite bring together into a complete whole.

There’s a good reason for that. Cut apart Lord of the Rings and Eragon and paste back the pieces and you have 70 percent of Dungeon Siege In the Name of the King. Uwe Boll and Doug Taylor weren’t adapting Dungeon Siege the game, they boiled together the basic elements of the fantasy movies that had already been made into a fairly generic plot. The problem is that the plot is generic and the bits of backstory scattered through the movie that suggest the story and the fantasy universe of Dungeon Siege In the Name of the King might be more complicated than it appears are thrown in at random and never explained. We don’t learn that the Kingdom was torn apart by battles and that King lost a son until the Magus decides to inform the King that Farmer is his long lost son.

There is a whole tribe of women who swing from trees and seem to command the power of leaves led by Uwe Boll regular Kristinna Lokken but there is no explanation for who they are. The Magus tells his daughter that their bloodline has now been contaminated but doesn’t explain either. Uwe Boll forgoes actually making any sense of the story in favor of action scenes that have Farmer chopping down legions of Krugg with the same one two three combination attack, much like a video game.

Dungeon Siege In the Name of the King is often pretty with plenty of sweeping vistas shot from a helicopter or designed in CGI and at times openly steals shots from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. Indeed Dungeon Siege In the Name of the King begins to look a lot better in shots and montages that were likely done by a second unit director. The action scenes by contrast are a confused mess amateurishly shot and cut together.

The actors are at once the only real strength of Dungeon Siege In the Name of the King and its greatest weakness. The cast has no consistency and give the impression of never having met each other before and are often acting in different movies. Jason Statham is miscast and out of his depth and the least plausible heir to the throne ever. Burt Reynolds is better than you would think playing the King as a hard and ruthless bastard who has grown tired of it all. Ray Liotta phones in his usual sweating cokehead performance that he’s been giving ever since Goodfellas. If the trailer led you to hope that Ray Liotta would be hilariously over the top, that honor instead falls to Matthew Lillard who gives the best deranged performance on the movie, somehow restraining himself from chewing actual scenery. John Rhies Davies phones in his usual capable work as the Magus while Leelee Sobieski turns in the movie’s one other good performance as his daughter and seems to be enjoying herself. Most of these actors have name recognition but they have no level and Uwe Boll clearly doesn’t provide one and isn’t fond of multiple takes. The results are rough hewn and dizzying as half the actors never really blend into the fantasy setting and their performances repeatedly clash with each other.

The plot itself depends on the characters repeatedly doing stupid things, such as splitting up and breaking into the evil fortress, but it still makes much more sense than Uwe Boll’s movies usually do. Doug Taylor’s script has fragments of good dialogue, just enough to make you regret all the bad. But in the end Dungeon Siege In the Name of the King is a collection of strung together action scenes, most of which don’t make any sense. It reaches a head when the King marches his armies into the forest for a battle with the Krugg. To which the Krugg respond by bringing catapults into the forest, setting themselves on fire and loading themselves into the catapults and firing themselves at the King’s men. In a forest. I presume it’s supposed to be some sort of commentary on the War on Terror, but it’s more like flaming lunacy.

In the end Uwe Boll does well enough with Dungeon Siege In the Name of the King to lift it marginally out of the realm of Uwe Boll movies and into the realm of pointless video game adaptations like Mortal Kombat the movie, Doom and Street Fighter. There’s enough good in Doug Taylor’s script, the performances and even some of the direction to make you regret the sheer waste that is the other 75 percent of the movie.

The Darjeeling Limited opens with Bill Murray dressed as an old fashioned businessman riding at frantic speed in a Sikh taxi to reach his train. And then the movie begins and instead of Bill Murray, we’re forced to spend the movie with Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman and worst of all, Owen Wilson. And The Darjeeling Limited never recovers from that.

The Darjeeling Limited tells the story of the three Whitman brothers, each one more lacking in identifiable character traits than the other, who go on a trip to India to reconnect after the death of their father. Normally a film whose script was written by the three actors starring in it should have been filled with ways for each actor to stand out with meaty lines and revelations. The Darjeeling Limited however is a movie virtually devoid of dialogue, yet unfortunately it is not completely devoid of dialogue.

Had The Darjeeling Limited been completely without dialogue, it would have been a silent journey through a beautifully photographed India with the lush use of color of a National Geographic special and the elaborate kitschy set design that Wes Anderson has made his movies’ specialty. Unfortunately it is burdened with just enough dialogue by the three brothers to make even that impossible as each brother has just enough dialogue to make watching their Indian journey unbearable.

Owen Wilson, a standby in Anderson movies and easily the most annoying thing about The Royal Tenenbaums, gets the lion’s share of the dialogue and the characterization. This would not have been nearly as much of a disaster if Owen Wilson had not been completely miscast as a tightly wound and controlling yuppie older brother. This is tantamount to casting Cheech or Chong as General Patton. Since Owen Wilson can only really play mild laid back characters who are minor variations on Owen Wilson, we instead get a control freak as played by a mildly stoned actor who can’t even bring any heat to exchanges when he’s cursing out people over the phone. Later on we learn that he seems to get these traits from his mother, but it’s a hollow revelation with no real meaning behind it.

Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman meanwhile don’t play characters so much as they portray mannerisms and bits of biographical information. They have virtually no dialogue and nothing to do except tag along after their older brother. Jason Schwartzman somehow makes this work infusing Jack Whitman with the quiet energy of a pint sized Lothario while Adrien Brody flails around completely out to sea, making you wonder which of the actors really deserves that little golden statue.

Wes Anderson tries to infuse their trip through India with bits of physical comedy but they are too few and far between and these human voids fighting against the magnificent background of India gives you the impression that the Three Stooges had decided to stage a soap opera in the Louvre.

Like most Anderson movies, The Darjeeling Limited has troubled prosperous characters traveling toward some inchoate revelation that brings them to a state of being at peace with the world. The fundamental difference that makes The Darjeeling Limited into such a tedious and unrewarding journey is that it lacks that figure in Anderson movies who reflects a striving for life and the joy de vivre, Jason Schwartzman’s Max in Rushmore or Gene Hackman’s Royal Tenenbaum in The Royal Tenenbaums or at its weakest, Bill Murray in The Life Aquatic. The Darjeeling Limited has no such character ready and willing to push the boundaries of life, to dare the impossible and crash and burn and learn to fly again. Instead it has three mopey yuppie brothers wandering aimlessly through India and finally discarding their baggage in a metaphor so trite that involves them actually discarding their baggage.

Wes Anderson fills The Darjeeling Limited with color and even some cinematic energy but he cannot overcome the essentially static and uninteresting characters who are at its center. He transforms the train, The Darjeeling Limited itself, into a character and the bold cutaway during the funeral and the train dream scene that connects all the characters together is a beautiful moment but while the canvas is there, there is no one whose portrait is worth sketching in the foreground and so The Darjeeling Limited emerges as a visually beautiful but dramatically barren failure that neither the landscape of India, nor its cinematography nor any of the seemingly endless musical montages that fill the movie from beginning to end can redeem.

If Be Kind Rewind doesn’t feel like any movie you have seen in a while, there’s a good reason for that, Be Kind Rewind is a throwback to 80’s moviemaking. Just as the majority of the movies that Mike and Jerry remake are from the 80’s to early 90’s, the theme of Be Kind Rewind is the end of one era that held the kind of gritty personal appeal embodied by the videotape, Mr. Fletcher’s shoestring tenement video store and the 80’s movie, and the rise of another smoother glossy era embodied by DVD’s, chain video stores, high priced condos and a filmmaking that is is artificial and soulless.

The problem with Be Kind Rewind though is that virtually all of the movies that Mike and Jerry shoot look like they might be a lot more fun than Be Kind Rewind itself. While Be Kind Rewind has the trappings of the sort of movies Hollywood used to make, before movies turned into smoothly polished demographically targeted products devoid of texture, it lacks the energy of the best 80’s movies. With Be Kind Rewind, Michael Gondry finds the texture of a great 80’s comedy like Brewster’s Millions, Let It Ride or Major League but none of the energy.

For all its scenes of whimsical amateur tributes to movies like Robocop and Ghostbusters, Be Kind Rewind is surprisingly downbeat and soppy. Jack Black is the only actor in the movie who appears to be having any fun delivering one of his usual manic over caffeinated performances, while Mos Def and Danny Glover mope relentlessly through a 100 minutes of the movie. The biggest hole in Be Kind Rewind is Mos Def whose awkward stilted performance makes it seem as if this is his first time on a movie set. Had Michael Gondry followed his original plan of casting Dave Chapelle as Mike, Be Kind Rewind might have been an entirely different movie that you could imagine John Candy and Richard Pryor starring in once upon a time. Instead it’s the movie Danny Glover limps through and Mos Def apologetically sidles through as if he wants to avoid calling any attention to himself on camera.

Be Kind Rewind is billed as a comedy but it’s barely funny, instead like Jerry it’s caught up in its own sense of importance and like Mike it’s too busy feeling down to actually have some fun. Michael Gondry’s own sense of playfulness is highly present when it comes to the Sweded movies but absent from most of the rest of Be Kind Rewind which adopts the worst cliches of the 80’s movie, without any of its spirit.

If you had John Hughes remake Rushmore the result might faintly resemble Charlie Bartlett, but it would still have more originality, heart and meaning to it. That’s no accident because Charlie Bartlett is basically a mash up of some of the more current R-Rated High School movies like Rushmore, Brick and Napoleon Dynamite. Or to put it another way, imagine that Max from Rushmore was also the drug dealer from Brick with a hint of Napoleon Dynamite and you basically have Charlie Bartlett laid out for you.

How dead on is it? For starters Charlie Bartlett copies the first 2 minutes of Rushmore. Rushmore didn’t invent that opening but it’s not too hard to figure out where Charlie Bartlett got it. Directed by Jon Poll, best known as Jay Roach’s editor on a handful of movies, it has all the pre-processed hallmarks of a Jay Roach movie and is completely devoid of any originality, unsurprising since Jay Roach is also on board as the producer.

Charlie Bartlett stars Anton Yelchin, who seems to have Walter Koenig’s offbeat intonation, as the title character, who just wants to be popular. When he’s kicked out of private school, after about 5 minutes of bullying, he instantly becomes the most popular kid in school by selling medications to the student body and playing bathroom psychiatrist.

Charlie Bartlett is however an annoying character and his incredible popularity is completely unbelievable and reminds me of Peter Parker under the influence of Venom twirling around New York City and seducing women just by looking at them. It’s not Anton Yelchin’s fault though, Gustin Nash’s script expects us to like a rich boy whose great tragedy is that his father is in jail for tax evasion. Then if that wasn’t enough of an uphill challenge, 10 minutes in and for the entire movie, everyone in the movie is in love with Charlie Bartlett, not even the Indian kid whose eyes roll the first time Charlie Bartlett does his shtick or Robert Downey Jr’s Principal Gardner who presses charges against him, can resist Charlie Bartlett.

Where characters like Rushmore’s Max or Napoleon Dynamite were outsiders who never quite fit in but managed to triumph through their awkward enthusiasm, Charlie Bartlett triumphs because he has some hypnotic power that causes everyone to love him. The depiction of the Western Southern High School (Ha Ha) is just as unrealistic as that and it begins when Charlie Bartlett stumbles on campus and immediately is menaced by stoners, punk, goths and skateboarders in that order as all the cliched cliques are laid out only never to be seen again.

Charlie Bartlett’s worst crime as a movie though is its Popular-like insistence on having something relevant to say. Act after act, Charlie Bartlett strings you along with its self-importance only to realize that it’s basically just Kids in America with an indie flavor and less meaning to it. Had Charlie Bartlett gone straight as a comedy, it would have been The New Guy. Instead it constantly batters you over the head with its promise of some important message about what being a kid in High School means while underplaying the comedy only to throw a musical montage at you as its ending, clumsily trying to tie everything together with a song in the way that bad indies do.

Robert Downey Jr’s Principal Gardner is the only redeeming thing about Charlie Bartlett and the only thing that grounds it in any kind of objective reality. As Charlie Bartlett’s equivalent of Rushmore’s Herman Blume, Robert Downey Jr. wears the same bitter unspoken regrets and self-destructive apathy that Bill Murray displayed in Rushmore, but Charlie Bartlett makes no pretense that Garden and Charlie are equals. Instead Charlie gets Gardner fired, preaches at him, rescues him and finally completes the process of turning Gardner into the last character in the movie to learn to love Charlie Bartlett.

The first time I saw Go, I didn’t just see another intersecting storylines movie of the sort that had become popular in the wake of Pulp Fiction’s success, I saw a movie that casually balanced offbeat humor and action and that was brilliantly directed. The only time I actually watched an episode of the O.C., it was the pilot and it was only because Doug Liman, who had directed Go and Swingers, was directing it. While the story was mediocre overwrought teen soap opera of course, Doug Liman’s brilliant direction brought an effusion of natural light to every scene, bold yet carefully calculated shots and the other hallmarks of Liman’s style made it worth sitting through. Yet as weak as the O.C. pilot was, Doug Liman’s Jumper passes it on the way down and not even Doug Liman’s hand on the camera serves to redeem Jumper.

Many critics complain that movies are becoming video games and Jumper is a case in point, with 88 minutes that shift between frenetic action and tedious moping by Hayden Christensen, it’s more of a video game than a movie. Comparing Mass Effect and Jumper, any serious critic would be forced to decide that Mass Effect is a film on a console and Jumper is a video game on the big screen. When George Lucas decided to create his Star Wars prequel trilogy, he helped usher in digital movies filled with special effects that turned them into hollow CGI confections where nothing meant anything anymore and the actors were cardboard characters animating themselves against a bluescreen. In Jumper, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith’s Hayden Christiansen waters down the Attack of the Clones formula even further mixing wooden acting with bouts of special effects that never add up to anything.

David Goyer’s scripts are very much hit and miss and they depend on the director but Doug Liman’s sensibility completely fails him here. Christiansen’s David Rice is a blank with superpowers and nothing the movie does changes that. Jumper reunites Christiansen with Samuel L. Jackson, who has never turned down a bad movie yet, and Jackson charges into his role with his usual screen devouring enthusiasm. What makes Samuel L. Jackson so worth watching is that he clearly enjoys whatever he does on the screen but in Jumper, he’s the only one having fun. Liman’s bold directorial perspective is swallowed by the scope of the special effects and Christiansen swallows Goyer’s dialogue leaving Jackson to romp through the movie like a big kid in a sterile playground.

Jumper smacks of an attempt by Doug Liman to grab onto a paying project in the wake of the fallout over his role on Bourne and there is little doubt that he is phoning it in. Like its director and star, Jumper is devoid of ambition and like many action and comic book movies Jumper can never move beyond trying to wow audiences with its premise to actually deliver a watchable narrative. Instead like its main character’s journey across the world, Jumper is sadly fragmented. Watching Jackson chase the white bread Christiansen, I could only think what a far more interesting movie Jumper would have been, had it reversed the two men’s roles.