James Woods Page 2

This may look exactly like Gerard Butler's over-serious Olympus Has Fallen, but it's actually that film's smarter, sillier younger brother: the one you like even though you really shouldn't. As he did with 2012, filmmaker Emmerich has injected this huge action romp with a generous dose of tongue-in-cheek humour while never sacrificing the overwrought spectacle. So even if it's wildly contrived and ludicrously patriotic, it's so gleefully destructive that we can't help but have a lot of fun.

It starts out as ex-military man John (Tatum) tries to impress his estranged 11-year-old daughter Emily (King) by taking her along with him on a job interview at the White House. At that moment, home-grown terrorists strike, led by a disgruntled security chief (Woods). In the chaos, John gets separated from Emily, and as he looks for her he stumbles across the US President (Foxx). As John and the President work to subvert the villains, the politically savvy Emily is posting videos of them on YouTube, which helps the Pentagon command centre, overseen by security chief Carol (Gyllenhaal) and Speaker Raphelson (Jenkins), keep the nation from falling apart. But it turns out that one of the baddies (Clarke) has a personal vendetta against John.

As always, Emmerich infuses the film with a sombre tone then undermines it at every step with witty irony. Each scene is packed with quirky characters, snappy one-liners, knowingly corny sentimentality and bigger-than-necessary mayhem. For example, he manages to wedge a full-on car chase into the White House grounds, complete with a rocket launcher. At the centre, Tatum and Foxx are a lively double-act, bouncing off each other with feisty energy. Furrowed-brow gravitas is supplied by Gyllenhaal, Jenkins and Woods, while scene-stealers include King's plucky young hero and Simpson's megalomaniac hacker.

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Hollywood screenwriter David (Marsden) moves to the backwater Mississippi home of his actress wife Amy (Bosworth), who is immediately sucked back into local life. This includes her former flame Charlie (Skarsgard), who is now a contractor working on David and Amy's barn with his chucklehead hunting buddies (Coiro, Powell and Lush). But soon, the tension between Charlie and Amy erupts into sexual violence, as David is taunted about his manhood. And a simple-minded guy (Purcell) turns out to be the catalyst for an eruption of violence.

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Set in the mid-seventies, the plot follows the Lisbon family, with James Woods, a physics teacher at the local high school, as the scatter brained father, and Kathleen Turner as the uncommonly strict mother. Their five daughters are beautiful, naturally blonde, and the desire of every boy in the neighborhood. When the youngest, Cecilia, mysteriously attempts suicide, psychiatrist Danny DeVito recommends that she be allowed to interact more socially, especially with boys. So the Lisbon girls are introduced to the boys of the neighborhood, who have already been watching the girls from afar through half-opened window shades, binoculars, and telescopes. At a party in Cecilia's honor, the boys witness a tragedy that shocks them out of their wits. As a result, the Lisbons fall into a deep suppression shutting out the rest of the world by retreating into their own inner sanctum. It appears they will never recover until Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), the high school heartthrob, pursues the unattainable Lux (Kirsten Dunst). He attempts to ask her to the prom, but the only way her mother will allow him to take Lux is if all the girls go together. For the first time, the girls will venture out of the home to interact socially in an environment other than school.

Continue reading: The Virgin Suicides Review

Okay, scratch that last bit. Salvador is actually a gripping docu-drama about the horrors of the revolution in that country in the mid-1980s. From raped nuns to the mass dumping of dead bodies, Stone's gaze is unflinching on the horrors that occurred, and Wood's Boyle is there to document it all, despite an utter lack of charisma, money, or morality.

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And then its programming chief killed his wife and himself.

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There's only about 22 minutes of plot in "Any Given Sunday," Oliver Stone's innovative, bone-crunching ballet of sound and fury football, so lets get that out of the way right now:

Al Pacino stars as the embattled, old-school coach of a fictitious pro football team. Cameron Diaz, is the willful, profit-zealous daughter of the franchise's recently deceased owner. Jamie Foxx is a hotshot young quarterback whose know-it-all attitude and colossal ego threaten team unity. He's just replaced the injured, aging, Elway-esque veteran QB Dennis Quaid, whose compound back injury has spelled curtains for his career -- if only his ruthlessly ambitious, harpy of a wife (Lauren Holly) would accept that fact.

During the last two minutes of the fourth quarter of the Big Playoff Game that serves as the film's climax, each of these characters (especially the selfish ones) will have an epiphany about what's really important in their lives.

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Fifty percent groundbreaking, breathtaking computer-generated visuals, 30 percent New Age spiritual hokum, 15 percent generic post-apocalyptic science fiction and five percent lame action flick clichés, "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" is such a eccentric amalgam of methods and moods that it's unlikely to leave anyone terribly impressed in the end. But absolutely everyone will be agog at the first 10 minutes.

Far and away the most mind-blowingly photo-realistic computer-animated movie to date, "Final Fantasy" wastes no time showing off what its huge staff of renderers can do, opening the picture with a fantastical dream sequence that includes a truly transporting alien landscape unequaled in the history of sci-fi cinema.

Its billowy red sky, gigantic looming moon, crystalline rock formations and sweeping vistas feel as real as another world could on screen. This was most definitely not shot through fancy filters in a quarry somewhere.

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The bad guy in "Recess: School's Out" is a megalomaniacal ex-elementary school principal determined to do away with summer vacations by altering the orbit of the Moon so there's no more summer.

Voiced by James Woods -- one of Hollywood's greatest scenery-chewers -- this rakish, oily antagonist is by far the most amusing thing about this latest in a seemingly endless glut of cheaply animated TV 'toons cashing in on the purchase power of kids.

Such movies are not concerned with style, creativity or entertainment value for anyone of a discerning age. They don't even bother aspiring to be a "Toy Story," a "Pokemon") and rarely much more than just expanded episodes of the show that spawned them, blown up to 1.85:1 aspect ratio.

Continue reading: Recess: School's Out Review

Whether it's a skill learned hanging around the sets ofher father's movies or something in the family blood, SofiaCoppola has definitely inherited a distinguishable talent as a filmmaker.

"The Virgin Suicides" -- her moody, dark andwhimsical first feature from behind the camera -- is a mesmerizing andaccomplished directorial debut about an enigmatic quintet of innocentlyseductive teenage sisters who all kill themselves in the course of onemonth in the mid-1970s.

The story was adapted by Coppola herself from a best-sellerby Jeffrey Eugenides, and is curiously told from the perspective of a handfulof neighborhood boys, smitten and spellbound by the girls as teenagersand still haunted by their inexplicable deaths 25 years later.

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Technically speaking, "Scary Movie 2" is a real mess. The editing is pathetic, mostly because the script -- if you can call it that -- is just a series of unrelated horror movie japes put in almost random order and tied together by about two minutes of plot.

Characters disappear completely from the story without explanation and blatant continuity errors abound because some gags where left on the cutting room floor while the follow-up jokes were kept. In one scene a character is lying in a pool of blood, then a second later the blood is gone. Then it's back, then it's gone again, then it's back again. No attempt whatsoever is made to cover up this sloppy, choppy, rushed-into-production total lack of cohesion.

But comedically speaking, "Scary Movie 2" is an almost constant laugh riot of extreme gross-out humor and surprisingly limber lampoonery -- and this is coming from a guy who didn't think much of the first "Scary Movie" and was pretty irritated when the Wayans brothers (director Keenen Ivory and stars Shawn and Marlon) broke their promise not to make a sequel.

Continue reading: Scary Movie 2 Review