If there's been a zombie apocalypse and you're road-tripping alone through the wasteland, you could do worse than run into Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a bourbon-swilling bad-boy butt-kicker with a really cool car. This is where the careful hero of Zombieland, a kid nicknamed Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), finds himself early in the film, and you can hardly blame him for hitching a ride with this swaggering Alpha Male. Still, they have their hands full not only with gibbering zombies but also with two sisters (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin) who will stop at nothing to reach a Disneyland-like amusement park in L.A. Although Zombieland gets off to a rocky start with Columbus's overly-cute narration (he's got a list of rules for surviving in the zombie world), it settles into an amusing comedy, regularly interrupted by bouts of blood-letting. The road-trip stuff is enough fun that when the movie does arrive at its version of Disneyland, the air goes out of it a little; sure, there's a giant zombie blowout, with entrails flying, but it's not quite the same. Director Ruben Fleischer keeps the gags coming, although the movie is often funnier in its odd little asides (both Eisenberg and Harrelson are expert at this) than in its official jokes. Comic high point: an interlude at the home of a very famous movie star, who plays himself--and we'll leave the spoiler unspoiled, in case anybody hasn't heard about this funny extended cameo.
Crank 2: High Voltage
The critics have not been very kind to Crank: High Voltage. But what do they know? Here’s what this movie has going for it: gratuitous nudity, mindless violence, constant profanity, and a ridiculous storyline. Add to that stereotypes galore (gay, Asian, Latino, the neuropsychiatrically disabled, you name it), strippers with guns, a strike by porn actors (with a cameo appearance by Ron Jeremy), and a guy who refers to his heart as a "strawberry tart," and one can only wonder what’s not to like. In fact, writer-director-producers Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s sequel to 2006’s CrankCrank: High Voltage ain’t exactly Masterpiece Theater, but this is without a doubt one of 2009’s most entertaining films. is an absolute hoot, a non-stop assault of crazy sights and sounds that will leave you breathless and laughing. As the action starts, Jason Statham’s Chev Chelios has not only survived the fall from a helicopter that ended the earlier film, but is now on the operating table, awake and watching as some Chinese villains harvest his "tart" in order to implant it in their aging leader (a wacky turn by David Carradine). Chev quickly dispatches the bad guys, but the fun’s just starting; the mechanical ticker they’ve put inside him needs constant recharging, so as Chev pursues the real organ, he must use whatever’s available (jumper cables, a police taser, a car cigarette lighter, high voltage power lines) to keep the fake one going. Storywise, that’s about it. But it’s plenty, as the filmmakers’ ultra-kinetic style--with its manic edits, cartoony subtitles, and other envelope-stretching effects--and amusing performances by Amy Smart (as Chev’s girlfriend), Dwight Yoakam (as a "doctor" who helps him figure out what’s happening), and others keep things going. No,
The Hurt Locker
The making of honest action movies has become so rare that Kathryn Bigelow's magnificent The Hurt Locker was shown mostly in art cinemas rather than multiplexes. That's fine; the picture is a work of art. But it also delivers more kinetic excitement, more breath-bating suspense, more putting-you-right-there in the danger zone than all the brain-dead, visually incoherent wrecking derbies hogging mall screens. Partly it's a matter of subject. The movie focuses on an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team, the guys whose more or less daily job is to disarm the homemade bombs that have accounted for most U.S. casualties in Iraq. But even more, the film's extraordinary tension derives from the precision and intelligence of Bigelow's direction. She gets every sweaty detail and tactical nuance in the close-up confrontation of man and bomb, while keeping us alert to the volatile wraparound reality of an ineluctably foreign environment--hot streets and blank-walled buildings full of onlookers, some merely curious and some hostile, perhaps thumbing a cellphone that could become a trigger. This is exemplary moviemaking. You don't need CGI, just a human eye, and the imagination to realize that, say, the sight of dust and scale popped off a derelict car by an explosion half a block away delivers more shock value than a pixelated fireball.
Inglorious Bastards
Although Quentin Tarantino has cherished Enzo G. Castellari's 1978 "macaroni" war flick The Inglorious Bastards for most of his film-geek life, his own Inglourious Basterds is no remake. Instead, as hinted by the Tarantino-esque misspelling, this is a lunatic fantasia of WWII, a brazen re-imagining of both history and the behind-enemy-lines war film subgenre. There's a Dirty Not-Quite-Dozen of mostly Jewish commandos, led by a Tennessee good ol' boy named Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) who reckons each warrior owes him one hundred Nazi scalps--and he means that literally. Even as Raine's band strikes terror into the Nazi occupiers of France, a diabolically smart and self-assured German officer named Landa (Christoph Waltz) is busy validating his own legend as "The Jew Hunter." Along the way, he wipes out the rural family of a grave young girl (Melanie Laurent) who will reappear years later in Paris, dreaming of vengeance on an epic scale.
Paranormal Activity
Like The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity is an impressive and harrowing indie chiller that derives much of its terror--and there is quite a bit of that in its brief running time--by playing on the most basic of human fears: that which cannot be seen. Though one might assume that the point-of-view aesthetic had been worn out thanks to Cloverfield and Quarantine (and, lest one forgets, Blair Witch), Paranormal makes excellent use of the single-camera technique, which helps to not only preserve the film's central conceit--a new-minted couple records the increasingly threatening supernatural phenomena that have invaded their home on a camcorder--but underscore the realism needed to drive home the low-fi (if completely persuasive) special effects. The approach is also crucial to the film's suspense, which unfolds in long, largely broken takes to nerve-rattling effect. Not every horror fan--or moviegoer--will fall for the film's spook-show approach. Those that found Blair Witch's less-is-more approach aggravating will feel the same way about Paranormal, but the sleight of hand exhibited by first-time director Oren Peli, and assisted by his two leads, relative newcomers Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat, should provide adventurous viewers with fresher and stronger scares than anything from Hollywood in recent years.
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