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I've only written one or two movie reviews since November of last year so I'm going to fill up a couple of posts and get caught up. Here's the first. Ranked best to worst....

Slumdog Millionaire

*****

All those Oscars? It totally deserved them.

Milk

*****

Incredible work by Sean Penn, the plot has no trouble being compelling and moving even though we know how it ends.

Defiance

*****

Gripping, dramatic, action packed; lots of Nazi's get killed. What more could you want?

Australia

*****

Epic movie, great ending, fantastic sets and settings, compelling story, not much is missing from this picture.

Special

*****

Highly original indie movie starring Michael Rappaport as a guy who participates in a clinical trial and comes to believe that he really has superpowers. It's really extraordinary how it plays with reality, and plays with the theme of an ordinary everyday average person becoming special. Though low budget, a higher budget probably would have taken away from its artistic authenticity.

Smother

*****

With Dax Shepard and Diane Keaton, this has an original screenplay, wonderful oddball characters, and is quite funny.

Burn After Reading

****

Another fantastic movie from the Coen brothers, abrupt ending notwithstanding.

I Love You, Man

****

Feel-good, low-key comedy with good acting, writing. Jon Favreau, one of my favorite actors, has a great though limited role as a type-A A-hole. Peter Segal is perfectly cast and Paul Rudd maintains his track record of never making a bad movie.

The Hangover

****

Pretty darned funny, not as funny as Old School, but close.

Secret Smile

****

From BBC TV, a young woman (Kate Ashfield from Sean Of The Dead) gets entangled with a sociopath (David Tennant, I think he's the new/current Dr. Who). As a profile of a sociopath and how they manipulate people, bringing a victim's closest friends and family over to their side, it is really brilliant. In the ways she becomes assertive and tries to take control back, it may even be educational. But a silly twist ending mars what would otherwise be an important movie. It is a lot like the stuff on Lifetime but the two great lead actors and the London setting make it better than typical TV fare.

Let The Right One In

****

Weird, oddly quiet foreign movie about a child vampire. It draws you in, leading to a startling but satisfying ending.

Valkyrie

***

Good but not great.

RocknRolla

***

Some memorable characters, but it doesn't have the punch of Guy Ritchie's earlier movies.

The Rules Of Attraction

***

I liked Less Than Zero, one of the better movies from the 80's. I guess Brett Easton Ellis specializes in tales of the young, rich and privileged engaging in depraved behavior. Based on his novel, this screenplay of Ivy Leaguers getting all F'd up, certainly takes it to the extreme. A small cameo by Fred Savage as a dorm-room junkie is remarkable for its stark difference from Vice Versa or the The Wonder Years. Eric Stoltz has another well-played cameo. But ultimately, the film becomes uncomfortable, getting caught up in the nihilism of its characters, letting it speak for itself I guess. A suicide scene is well-edited and momentarily shocking.

Boiler Room

***

I rented this solely because it was on [Tucson film critic] Phil Villareal's top-100 list. It might make my top-1000 list but not top-100. Worth watching once. Giovanni Ribisi plays a kid caught up in a shady brokerage firm. A young Vin Diesel has a small role, and Ben Affleck manages to do pretty well as a fiercely driven manager. A scene that plays tribute to Wall Street is kinda neat. The storyline, with Ribisi's character struggling to impress his father really works, but weird snippets showing the downfall of a customer that Ribisi is sticking it too don't, because they don't fill in any of that backstory.

Bottle Shock

***

Loosely based on the true story of California's emergence onto the world-class wine scene in the 1970's, with Chris Pine as a hippie-ish Northern California dude, Bill Pullman as his gruff dad and Rachael Taylor as, well, Pine's character's smokin' hot love interest (the film goes terribly awry when an outdoor shower scene with her is cut short). I really liked the dialog and the wine country setting, though it does take a while for the plot to congeal or give a sense of direction.

The Day The Earth Stood Still

***

You know, if the biosphere can survive the impact of ~/50-km wide asteroids traveling at ~50 km/s then the notion of "saving the Earth" is truly ridiculous (except saving it from a hyperspace-bypass!). In the original it was about saving our species from ourselves, which is completely not ridiculous. That is about my only qualm with this otherwise great remake.

Quantum Of Solace

***

Didn't quite measure up to the prior Bond.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

***

Thompson was a genius writer, one of my all-time favorites and an exemplary American, taking full advantage of his freedoms (and then some!). This documentary starts out great, has some fresh techniques, but like the gonzo doc himself, gets bogged down in the 70's. It recapitulates the best known stories while adding little else. If you're not familiar with him, then this movie is a must-see.

Body Of Lies

***

Thankfully, this Ridley Scott movie doesn't try to hard to have a message about the "global war on terror" or whatever we're calling it these days. But I found the plot to be absurd when the two CIA characters, played by Leo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe, go above the law. They set up a middle eastern businessman by staging a bombing (with cadavers) to draw out the real terrorists they're after. The most interesting aspect of the movie is how Crowe's character manages all these remote ops over his bluetooth while at his daughter's soccer game, at the grocery, etc.

The Woods

***

Horror movie set in a girl's school (sorry guys, nothing titillating here). Not too bad, but not remarkable either. Very Stephen King-ish, without measuring up to his better stuff.

Frost/Nixon

***

A nice history lesson, but not terribly entertaining, somewhat lacking in drama.

New In Town

***

A light-hearted comedy. Renee Zellwegger is a high-powered executive who steps in from the big city to shut down a small-town factory in Minnesota. Harry Connick Jr. is the rugged union rep fighting for the jobs. The film suffers from an overly conventional plot; how you imagine the story playing out is exactly what happens.

Twilight

**

Entertaining at times, but I thought sap would start running out of the DVD player when she's like "from that moment on... I was completely and irrevocably in love...".

Nobel Son

**

A letdown, just kind of crazy, throws everything against the wall and not much sticks (a sexy scene with Eliza Dushku was the high point for me).

Caprica (Battlestar Galactica spin-off)

**

Galactica was one of the best television series ever and this TV movie is about average. Has some interesting sci-fi-ish elements (VR, robotics and simulations) but lacks the passion and grit of the series.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop

**

Kevin James is funny as usual, but the overly conventional plot where his character must face up to villains taking over his Mall drags it down quite a bit. They could have done this as a parody of Die Hard but it's nowhere near that clever.

My Bloody Valentine

**

Several lengthy nude scenes are about all this movie has going for it. I figured out who The Miner was very early on, and I never catch on to those things.

In The Electric Mist

**

Another in the series of James Lee Burke mysteries with detective Dave Robicheaux (hooray, I think I actually spelled that right and only looked once!), this time with Tommie Lee Jones instead of Alec Baldwin. It's just weird and dissonant how in this film he's taking names and kicking ass like Charles Bronson. Peter Sarsgaard, normally brilliant, is oddly miscast as a rehab-ready celebrity. And John Goodman doesn't fit as a local gangster boss. Maybe the humidity in Louisiana got to everyone, because it feels like they're doing a read-thru much of the time.

My Name Is Bruce

**

Bruce Campbell.

Blindness

*

Unbearable. We made it maybe twenty minutes in before it went back into a the red envelope.

Wendy and Lucy

*

Terrible. Unwatchable. I gave up after ten minutes. Poor sound, film school quality production. And I like many rambling incoherent art films.

In Frog Mountain Blues, Tucson author Charles Bowden makes a passionate argument for the conservation of the Santa Catalina mountains. The largest and highest peak, Mt. Lemmon, towers a mile and a half above the adjacent city of Tucson and was known by the Tohono O'Odham as Frog Mountain. I really liked some of his quotable quotes regarding conservation. Here are my favorites.

• "Any proposal for a national forest that means there will be less national forest still standing in the end is a bad idea."
• "What kind of national forest are we running where the existence of black bears is a problem and the existence of a bunch of cabins, ski runs, and a lodge is not?"
• "Land Of Many Uses is the slogan of the Forest Service. But so far as I can see, there is actually only one use: anything goes for one species, human beings."
• "The way we live and work kills wild ground and when the wild ground is gone, we will vanish also."
• "All the wild ground our ancestors called tractless wastes--now those spots are our last memories of a better world."

Written a quarter century ago, the book is still timely. Luckily, not much has changed. Well, let me qualify that. The city has sprawled right up to the edge of the national forest, the road has been widened, the village of Summerhaven is still rebuilding after a disastrous wildfire. Restrictions have apparently failed to prevent the extirpation of bighorn sheep. A horrible bear attack some years ago led to many being captured and relocated to more remote areas. People have completely freaked out when mountain lions showed up in a popular recreation area.

But a lot of what Bowden poetically writes about in the book, the remote canyons and rocky peaks, remain completely wild. Many have been decimated by fire, but are slowly coming back.