As for the rest of the movie, there opinion was sort of divided. It's intense, that's for sure -- during one especially tense scene, someone down the row was heard to tell her companion that she didn't think she could stand it anymore. I kept catching myself bracing to run away, just like the people on the screen. So in that respect, screaming success. Judging by the credits, I think half of the world's image effects companies worked on making the film just that overwhelming.

But (and you knew there had to be a but), in other respects, it's a little disappointing. Once or twice, the stuff being destroyed on screen actually looked like the miniatures they were, and with all the technology that was thrown at this film, that should never have happened. As for the science... well, you always expect some of it to be either distorted or just plain wrong. Sometimes what would actually happen just isn't dramatic enough, and the filmmakers have to make people want to pay to watch. I don't really know enough geophysics to judge how close they came as far as the overall cause of the disaster, but I can tell you that their grand scheme to rescue the human race is so full of improbabilities and obvious things being overlooked, that it could only have been designed by a committee, consisting entirely of contractors who gave the lowest bid -- you know, like the usual U.S. government project.

There isn't much of a plot, either, though that's also usual for the blockbuster disaster movies. John Cusack is struggling writer Jackson Curtis, who had one of those "brilliant debut novels that marks the appearance of a triumphant, powerful voice in fiction." It didn't sell, though, because those rarely do. On top of that, his wife Kate (Amanda Peet) left him and took their kids with her because when he was writing, he didn't notice anybody else was in the house with him. The kids are the adorable Lilly (Morgan Lily) and Noah (of course), played by Liam James. And yes, the movie is very cutesy with the references. That got kind of annoying.

John Cusack checking to see if the sky is falling yet.

Anyway, while playing Weekend Dad and taking the kids camping at Yellowstone, Jackson encounters a guy who apparently lives in the park, even though I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to do that, and who broadcasts wild conspiracy theories from his own little radio station in his trailer. The character (played by Zombieland's Woody Harrelson, clearly a very busy man lately) is called Charlie Frost, but I'm pretty sure he's meant to be Art Bell, only because this is fiction, Art Bell is actually correct.

Jackson doesn't really believe a word, but because Charlie is entertaining and generous with his beer, he hangs around and listens as Charlie explains that the world is about to end and the Mayans knew it all along. That's wrong, too, but it's like the Y2K thing. It's apparently more fun to be a doomsayer.

Right after Jackson gets the kids back home to LA, bits and pieces of the city start falling into brand-new canyons or slipping into the ocean, and from then on, the destruction only gets worse and worse. Seriously, just when you think things can't possibly get any worse for the human race, they do. Things break. Bad coincidences happen. Power-hungry government science advisor (weird as that sounds) Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt) gets all power-hungry at really bad moments. When the president is Danny Glover, you'd think a science advisor would know better than to mess with him, but this one has nerves of steel.

There are lots more characters, and they do a good job making a global disaster seem global, instead of being all about the U.S. like usual. And you do get to like the characters, even some of the minor ones. There's just nothing new here, though. Well, okay, I don't believe I've ever seen an airborne plane nearly struck by an airborne train, but I for one would've liked it better if everything hadn't played out exactly as I predicted it would.

As disaster movies go, it's pretty good. So comparing it to, say, Day After Tomorrow, it's wonderful. As blockbusters go, it's also not bad. The acting is all first-rate, even from the kids. But as movies in general go, the highest I can rate it is three idols out of five. It was an excellent effort all around, but in the end, the acting and the special effects can only distract you for so long. But it is kind of cool to see a tsunami coming over the Himalayas.

It's Virginia, 1976, and Norma and Arthur Lewis (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden -- Cyclops from the X-Men series of flicks) have two neat jobs (she teaches at a fancy private school, he works for NASA), a son named Walter (Sam Oz Stone), and a nice seventies house that's all gold and orange and brown, with some of the scariest wallpaper I've ever seen.

But it isn't all sweet and perfect. Norma limps, having lost part of her foot in a freak accident. Her boss has just informed her that she will no longer get the teacher's discount for her son's tuition. Arthur has just been told that his services as an astronaut will not be required, and he's stuck staying as just a technician, working on cameras that will go into space without him.

Enter the terribly disfigured Arlington Steward (Frank Langella, Nixon from Frost/Nixon) and The Box of the title. It's just a nice little polished wooden box, with a lockable glass lid and a bright, shiny, candylike red button beneath. He wakes up the Lewises at 5:45 in the morning so he can ruin their lives. His proposal is simple -- if they press the button, he will give them one million dollars in crisp one hundred dollar bills. (Remember, these are 1976 dollars. A million means foot surgery for Norma, tuition for Walter, and plenty left over.) The catch? Someone, somewhere in the world, who the Lewises have never met, will die. They have 24 hours to decide. No pressure or anything.

James and Cameron discussing the moral dilemma of accepting money for their work on this film.

So far, it's all just like the Twilight Zone, really. But they've got to fill up an entire movie-length time slot now, and this simple, clean little plot won't do. So they add NSA agents, "employers" no one can talk about, "employees" that are a lot more like slaves, mysterious nosebleeds, bell-ringing Santas, water that has a mind of its own, and all the space craze of the seventies about getting to Mars and finding little green men, or at least the artifacts they left behind. Actually, I'm not sure what that last part has to do with anything, unless the "employers" are supposed to be Martians. Which would be silly, but then, that wouldn't be unusual for this movie.

The acting is good. They do what they can with a script that buries all the good stuff under a pile of cryptic comments and random slack-jawed people staring at the main characters wherever they go. It's supposed to be a character study, a test of what people will do when faced with a temptation that seems to have no real repercussions attached. And it tries to be. Cameron, James, and Frank are all acting their hearts out. But they couldn't save the film, and by the end, I just didn't care anymore what happened to anyone. I'm usually a credits watcher, but this time I bolted for the door. I'd already wasted too much of my Saturday afternoon by that point.

But I'll be generous and give it two idols. Everyone on-screen does do their best with what they've got to work with, and it isn't their fault that what they had was so dull. Apparently the screenwriter is also something of a misogynist, though I can't talk about that without giving too much away. Anyway, if you feel the urge to watch it, might I suggest instead tracking down a copy of the 1986 Twilight Zone airing instead. Season one, episode twenty. The faces aren't as recognizable, and the budget is tiny, but it's a lot more entertaining.

But! If you're interested, you can now follow me on Twitter, as MovieCriticND. MovieCriticNextDoor was too long, because EVERYTHING I want to type in Twitter is too long, apparently. See you there!

And it wasn't as horribly unamusing as I expected, either. It isn't a, um, "realistic" zombie movie like 28 Days Later, which helps it be funny. No one worried about having enough to eat or enough ammuntion; there's always a working vehicle and a safe place to sleep. Watching people struggle with issues like that isn't really very laugh-inducing, so the filmmakers wisely avoided them.

What they don't avoid is the gore. And the flesh-eating monsters. They went the disease route -- there's a zombie virus that makes you feverish, delirious, and so incredibly hungry that the person sitting next to you suddenly looks like a delicious meal. Interestingly, the zombies don't seem to eat each other -- maybe the virus makes people taste bad -- so like 28 Days Later, there's hope that humanity can survive while the flesh-eaters starve.

However, they're too busy showing the light-hearted side of post-apocalyptic life to talk about such things directly. When Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) and Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg, The Village), meet, about the first thing Tallahassee wants to know is when was the last time Columbus got lucky. They have city names because those are the places they're going -- Tallahassee says it's better not to get too attached by using real names and such. It's fun to say Tallahassee, but it's a pain to type.

Baseball, post-apocalypse style

When they meet two other survivors (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin, My Sister's Keeper), they get christened Wichita and Little Rock, respectively, though since they're supposed to be sisters travelling together, they really should've ended up with the same name. But even with only four people left alive and coherent, that probably would've been too confusing. Anyway, the sisters have what Columbus calls "trust issues", and that's a glorious understatement. You'd think that 99% of the world turning into raving flesh-eaters would make it easier to trust those who aren't trying to eat your brains, but apparently not.

But Wichita is a pretty young woman, and Columbus being a geeky young man, he's ready to stick with her in spite of all the times she and little sis threaten to shoot him and Tallahassee. This motley group ends up tracking a (completely unfounded) rumor of a zombie-free area to a California amusement park, where the electricity is miraculously still working perfectly and being scared of clowns is no longer a silly phobia.

In between, there's enough blood and guts to fill a slaughterhouse, and a few actual good laughs, which I really wasn't expecting. They're all typical survivor-movie types -- the obnoxious little kid, the nerd scared of his own shadow, the tough girl the nerd pines for, and the crazy guy that kills zombies gleefully in his search for Twinkies. Okay, the Twinkies part isn't usual, and that's true of the characters, too. They fit certain patterns, but they don't just fit those patterns. Tallahassee even cries. So it gets three idols. It's good solid entertainment, for those who don't have a weak stomach, and clearly everyone had fun making it, which is about all you can expect of a comedy.

But you want plot, I suppose. We've got some of that, too! It's some unspecified time in the future, and technology has made great leaps in one area: a method of using only a person's thoughts to control a human-like android. It's only a shell, incapable of independent reasoning or movement, but when a person is linked to their surrogate (surrey is the cute little nickname), they can walk, talk, grocery shop, cliff dive, pick fights with really large angry guys, and take countless other risks without ever leaving the safety of their comfy chairs at home. They do look very comfy, but I hope technology has improved there as well, or the entire population has some really awful bedsores.

The idea is that these surrogates, which everyone uses (except for the obligatory weird little fringe group called Dreads, who think that life should be for the living), have all but eliminated crime. I find that hard to believe, personally. It seems to me that this setup would just make crime easier. Presumably the surreys don't come with unique fingerprints, so I don't see what's stopping anyone who wants to from going house to house, robbing and/or murdering people while they're lying in those comfy chairs. Maybe they have some techy way of stopping that, but if so, they don't make it clear in the film. They mention a brand-new way of preventing such crimes, but who knows what they were doing before that. Probably crossing their fingers and hoping for the best.

New this year: FBI Ken and Barbie

Anyway, Bruce Willis has hair, or rather his surrey does, and also the same perfect, flawless, plasticky complexion that everyone else does. The makeup is really great in that respect -- everyone looks like a Stepford Wife, as close to perfect as one can get in this world. He's FBI agent Tom Greer (Ken), and he and his partner Agent Peters (aka Barbie, played by Radha Mitchell) have been called to the scene of a car accident where a bunch of surreys were smooshed and are now leaking green stuff everywhere. The FBI's there because one of the, er, victims is unregistered -- normally each one has a serial number that can be tracked to its owner. But not this one, and Ken and Barbie are puzzled.

They have a further shock in store when they track down the owner of one flattened surrey, a beautiful blonde woman, and discover a fat middle-aged man. (Okay, that’s not really a shock for them, but consider the implications. They say there are no real women on the internet, but now there are suddenly no real women anywhere.) No, the shock is that the owner is stone cold dead, killed by the same force that fried his surrey’s optic units.

Suddenly the ultimate way of being safe is kinda dangerous. It’s a public relations nightmare! Thank goodness we have our hero, Ken – except Ken’s broken, and suddenly he’s Tom again, walking around as a Meatbag, as the people hiding behind their surrogates like to call them. It’s like being a homeless person wandering around through an upscale neighborhood – you get stared at. A lot. But he’s on the job anyway, much to the horror of his wife Maggie (Rosamund Pike, of Fracture, and also Foyle's War, an excellent BBC series), who never ever leaves the safety of her surrey, and thinks he’s insane for going after bad guys in his real body.

You can see the ending coming a mile away, but it’s still kind of fun getting there. This was really sort of a last-minute summer flick – it makes you think about the implications of that sort of a world, but not too hard. Mostly you can just sit back and enjoy the ride. A friend of mine mentioned reading a review that said Bruce Willis hadn’t been in a movie that was actually good for years, but I think that’s too harsh. I’m giving this one a respectable three idols – they went for action over thought, and this could have been a very thought-provoking movie; but that doesn’t mean they failed. They set out to entertain, and they did. Bruce with hair alone was worth the trip.

Anyway, this is only a 79 minute movie, which seems weird. When you remember, though, that it's basically a 79-minute-long special effect, you get some glimmering of how long and complicated the making of this film might have been -- it took between three to four years. And it is based on an 11-minute-long short film, so it's already been expanded quite a bit.

It's the future, or maybe the present; but either way, it isn't the world you'd recognize. Somewhere around 1934, technology took a weird science sort of turn, and a war broke out between man and the very machines meant to help him. (But what can you expect when people build "machines of peace" that are mostly just giant walking guns?)

Like in Terminator, things don't go so well for the humans. So when 9 (voiced by Elijah Wood of Lord of the Rings fame), the tiny rag doll of the title, finally wakes up, he finds a desolate world that he doesn't understand at all. Luckily for him, he meets 2 (Martin Landau, from Sleepy Hollow and at least 157 other things), a rag doll gadgeteer who reinvents things like lanterns in micro-size. After encountering a freaky mostly-machine thing called simply The Beast, 2 is carried off and a wounded 9 wakes up again to find himself in a cathedral, hiding place for others like him.

There's 1 (Christopher Plummer, of Up and at least 175 other things), the fussy, cautious leader; 5 (John C. Reilly, The Aviator, but that wasn't his fault), 2's assistant; 8 (Fred Tatasciore, apparently a popular voice actor), the muscle of the group, who must be at least a whopping five inches tall; and of course 6 (Crispin Glover, who also voiced Grendel in Beowulf), the crazy one who nobody likes to talk about, or to.

Whew! And I haven't even mentioned Jennifer Connelly as the voice of 7, the ninja of the bunch; or the twins, 3 and 4, who don't talk but read up a storm. Since the humans died, it's only been them and The Beast, and though it's only the size of a housecat, when you're maybe three inches tall, that's huge. Plus it's very freaky looking. Did I mention that? It's got half a real skull in its metal head, and it's disconcerting. Anyway, 1 encourages a healthy fear of The Beast, and no one dares to disobey.

Then 9 comes along and screws everything up.

When a friend of mine, new to roleplaying, was learning the GURPS system, she thought it would be fun to take the disadvantages Curious and Impulsive. Yes, they're just what they sound like. As you might imagine, it didn't take long before she touched the wrong thing, set off a trap, and killed more than half the group -- not including herself. Well, 9 has Curious and Impulsive, too, and that's what sets off the second part of the movie -- and believe me, the second part is a huge, awful mess. And no matter how many times the others ask him what he was thinking, 9 never gives any real answer. It's like climbing Mount Everest because it's there, I guess.

If you find yourself facing an evil AI that's at least ten times your size, armed only with a flashlight, then you, too, probably have both Curious and Impulsive.

It's a fascinating movie to watch, even though it lacks any real plot. The look of it is amazing, with all the details that go into the characters -- the texture of the fabric, the different fasteners each of them have, even the individual little stitches holding them together. The machines are scary. They're all dark and spooky, ranging from the size of largish spiders that swarm everywhere; to giant bird-things that are basically just a lot of very sharp metal objects attached to black wings; to the Machine itself, the one that started it all.

But it really is just one long special effect. It raises some metaphysical questions at the end, so even if you don't think it's too scary for the under-thirteens (it is, though, trust me), don't bring them if you don't want to have to answer a lot of questions about souls and whether or not little walking, talking dolls go to heaven.

So it gets three idols. I hate to go higher -- once the technology progress and the novelty wears off, this will be a cute, quaint little film at best -- but it was entertaining, so I hate to go lower. It will probably lose something on the small screen, though, so best to catch it in the theatre unless you have a really giant screen TV. And that right there is probably the most telling argument for not going any higher than three idols.

If you remember the 1980's, you'll feel right at home here. It is set in the future, but the computers are the only things that have actually advanced. Everything else -- especially fashion, though I use the term loosely -- has regressed back to about 1984, which is perhaps the filmmakers' hideously unnattractive way of reminding us of the book 1984. Because Big Brother isn't just watching us, he's in our headz, stealing our brainz.

A guy named Ken Castle, Ubergeek (Michael C. Hall, of "Dexter" and "Six Feet Under"), has usurped Bill Gates' title as the world's richest man by inventing two games: the first, Society, gave everyone a chance to control a Sim that was actually a real live person. You dress them in little outfits that look like they belong on extras in a bad eighties music video or low-budget sci-fi flick, force them to walk into raves filled with similarly unfortunately dressed people, and make them trade ridiculous one-liners before crawling off to bed together. The hapless Sims, you see, are being paid to let Castle's little nanite things run around in their heads, replacing brain cells with an interface that lets anyone with the cash dance inside your skull. I hope it's at least good money, but I'm not sure that it is.

Castle's second brainchild is Slayers, billed by him as the solution to prison overcrowding. Take one death row inmate, offer him the chance of freedom if he can just survive 30 death matches against other equally desperate inmates, add lots of guns, exploding things, and a few half-destroyed city blocks to play in (I'm sure no one was using them anyway), and you have the ultimate cash cow, apparently. Sadly, it probably would be just that profitable in the real world, if we only had the tech for it.

But there are some characters besides Castle! Kable (Gerard Butler, 300, and all I can say is thank heavens this film didn't slow down to "bullet time" nearly as often as 300 did) is the only man to reach a whopping 27 matches and live, and the world is watching anxiously to see if he'll be the first to collect on that free pardon. In his case, it's okay, because he's not quite the usual cold-blooded murderer you'd expect to find on death row, but I don't quite get why everyone's so excited at the idea that someone slated to be executed, who got the chance to fine-tune his murdering skills thirty times over on live TV, will then be released out into the world at large where he can kill anyone who looks at him funny.

Just a small sample of the hideousness that is the wardrobe for this film.

His wife, Angie (Amber Valetta, who was in Premonition), waits faithfully for his return, crying every time she sees her husband's plight advertised on all the giant billboards and video screens on the buses and such. She's also one of the unfortunate Sims for Hire, and has fallen into the clutches of an especially greasy and awful gamer who seems to have the worst dress sense of all. The poor woman has to spend half the movie running around in turquoise short shorts and the most dreadful pair of platform boots imaginable -- with gym socks with red stripes on besides. Seriously, those Sims all deserve hazard pay themselves. Milo Ventimiglia of Heroes is even there as a particularly horrible specimen of Sim, who got thrown out of the Rave. Thrown out. Of a place specifically designed to let you fulfill all your weirdest and wildest fantasies. Clearly he's trying to avoid being typecast as a good guy.

Anyway, there's a tiny group of Robin Hoods (the Humanz), also living in the eighties with their air hockey table and Galaga video games, who are working to stop Castle under the leadership of Chris 'Ludacris' Bridges (also in Max Payne, but we'll try to forget that); a rapacious news reporter named Gina Parker-Smith (Kyra Sedgwick) who wants the real story at all costs; and a teenage Ubergamer named Simon (Logan Lerman), who is the head to Kable's hands, as Kable himself puts it.

All added up, it comes out to about three and a half idols. It's way bloody, but you have to expect that, though I nearly docked them a quarter idol just for making me look at all those awful clothes. There are a couple of other fun guest stars that I won't mention so you can have the pleasure of spotting them yourself; it's got techy stuff for the geek in all of us; and lots of death and explosions for those who want a little mindless violence in their Labor Day weekend flicks. Not exactly a movie for the whole family, and the ending is way too pat, but not a bad way to spend your movie-going dollars this week.

To be fair, these aliens aren't exactly pleasant company. Many of them are apparently not particularly bright -- they seem to have some sort of hive mind, according to one of the sociologist-types they interview, and can't think so well without their leaders, who are nowhere to be found -- and most of them seem to have nasty tempers. Though it's hard to tell if they're normally like that, or if they're just annoyed at being stuck in tiny little shacks, given human names they can't pronounce, and having no way to get back home, which would make anyone testy, I'm sure. They also seem to get high on cat food, which must have made that a booming industry.

Anyway, the film is done in the pseudo-documentary, let's-jiggle-the-camera-around-a-lot style that's so popular these days. It fits the subject well, but it's still dizzying. To start with especially, it really is a documentary -- it's only later that we get any real main characters. Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley, who's apparently making his acting debut here, at least as far as being a major character) starts out as more a sort of narrator. He's middle management for a company called MNU (Multinational United) -- a typical, geeky-looking pencil-pusher, whose own mother calls him "not very bright, but a good son," and who's getting ahead thanks to marrying the boss' daughter, Tania (Vanessa Haywood, also debuting on the big screen). He seems genuinely crazy about her, though, and in spite of the fact that she's gorgeous and filthy rich, the feeling is mutual.

The gimmick to start us out is that Wikus is being interviewed by the documentary filmmakers about how MNU is handling the problem of transporting the aliens (the humans have at last gotten their way, and the "prawns", as they're called -- shrimp to those of you who speak American English -- are being moved a hundred miles from Johannesburg), and the film doesn't really have a plot as such until about halfway through.

This means you!

But that's good. The rapid-fire documentary style pulls you in to start. Wikus is trying painfully hard to do a good job, very aware of the cameras and his father-in-law, and he views the whole thing as a sort of game much of the time as he goes from shack to shack, asking the aliens to "put their scrawl" on the official eviction notices. Thousands and thousands of official eviction notices, and every alien ticked off at being pestered by the humans, and all of them faster and stronger than humans, which is why the troop of heavily-armed mercenaries is along. (Ever notice how that always seems to happen? Just once someone should find an alien race that's weaker and less intelligent than humans.) Anyway, Wikus talks about it being "Christmas" every time they find a cache of illegal weapons, and he describes the burning of a nest of alien eggs with way too much excitement.

Then everything goes terribly, bizarrely wrong for him, and I won't say exactly how because some of you might hate me for spoiling that surprise. I mean, it isn't a shocker, and I know the spoiler's out there, but I won't put it here and risk ruining things for any of my twelve loyal readers. Suffice to say a few gross things happen, and he goes from comfortable, boring, middle-class guy to highly wanted fugitive in the space of a few hours. Talk about a bad day. It's about that point that the plot kicks in, and instead of narrating, Wikus is the star. I can't exactly call him a hero, though, at least to start.

So here we have a good story, good acting, good directing (as far as I could tell around the wobbly cameras), and an all around good movie, for a refreshing change. I made myself watch The Collector when that came out, and couldn't even bring myself to write about it. (Actually, I can sum up all you need to know here in just five words: by the writer of Saw.) But with District 9, the movie industry is trying to make up for that debacle.

Four and a quarter idols. It was definitely too icky in parts for my taste, but it wasn't gore for the sake of gore, like in some OTHER movie I might have mentioned in the previous paragraph. Even if you don't like sci-fi, give this one a try. These aliens are a lot more human than you might think.

This is based on a book called Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34, but no one really cares about that, clearly, because as expected it ends up being more of a general outline. Most of the things that happen in the movie did happen, but some happened in a different order or in a different place, and lots of them have a slightly different spin on them. It's Hollywood! We have to jazz it up for the ticket buyers!

Movie plot: Charming outlaw John Dillinger leads a daring escape from the very beginning of his second jail term, embarks on a life of crime, part two, and wins over the public with his polite ways (he offers his coat to a chilly hostage), care not to shoot anyone who isn't already shooting at him, and crooked little smile. He meets a pretty girl named Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), falls in love, robs more banks, falls in with a bad crowd -- a worse crowd, I mean -- and finally proves that Crime Doesn't Pay.

Real story: Dillinger gets rescued by his friends at the beginning of his second jail term and actually does win over the public (see above), but not his wife, who divorced him while he was still in prison the first time around. But he still meets a pretty girl and falls in love, but her name is Evelyn Sparks, born Frechette, who sometimes used the alias Billie -- Mrs. Evelyn Sparks, to be precise, but neither of them lets that little detail get in the way, as the unfortunate Mr. Sparks was in prison anyway. She apparently liked bad boys. And he was bad -- John apparently also still had a favorite brothel, and later a favorite lady of the evening, but he was still very upset whenever he and Billie/Evelyn couldn't be together.



Twins! Okay, maybe not, but the attitudes match.

That all had to be tidied away for this, of course, but honestly, films like this just about have to ignore stuff like that. It was almost two and a half hours as it was. There was a good crowd, though -- parts of it were filmed not very far from where I live, which makes sense, since John did spend most of his life and criminal career in the upper midwest. Little Bohemia Lodge, for instance, where Dillinger and "Baby Face" Nelson had a massive shootout with federal agents, is in northern Wisconsin. You can still go up there and find cartridges and see bullet holes and some luggage the gangsters left behind, because the owners of Little Bohemia know a good tourist-attracting scheme when they see one. Anyway, lots of people who live around here were extras for some of the street scenes. The two bank robberies that actually took place in in Racine, WI, and Sioux Falls, SD, were filmed in Oshkosh, WI, which isn't terribly far from where I'm sitting right now. Several people in the audience could be overheard pointing out buildings they recognized.

Now, because I write these, I always try to avoid other people's reviews. I don't want to be influenced one way or the other, though I suppose I just end up looking silly if I disagree with absolutely everybody. So I usually don't read reviews after I write mine, either. Anyway, the point is, this time I'm borrowing the overheard assessment of the other two people who stayed behind to watch the credits with me: Not great.

That translates to three idols. Not a sad score by any means, but a lot less than I was hoping to give. Like a lot of biopics, it was a little too long, and a little too twitchy sometimes, which will happen when you have to cut out large chunks of your subject's life to avoid making a four-hour movie, but is still kind of a shame, and kind of annoying. Because they all worked hard on this. They used Little Bohemia, and the movie theatre where Dillinger was shot, and everything looked wonderful. But in the end, there wasn't really a character who I could sympathize with. Johnny Depp and Christian Bale as determined FBI agent Melvin Purvis both act up a storm, but the agent is too distant and the character not developed as much as I would have liked, and Dillinger was, well, Dillinger. He may have been a gentlemanly crook, but he was still a crook, so there's only so much you can do with him.

Instead of Walter Matthau, we have Denzel Washington as beleagured civil servant Walter Garber (not Gerber), though he's still dressed sort of the same. The original character was Zachary Garber, but they changed it here as a nod to Walter Matthau. Nothing against Walter Matthau, but Denzel is easier on the eyes. Instead of Robert Shaw as big bad guy Mr. Blue, we have John Travolta as big bad guy Ryder (not as in subway rider -- this is a tribute to the original Mr. Blue, whose real name in the first flick was Ryder).

And instead of a mere one million dollar ransom, we have a demand for $526,315.79 per person, or ten million dollars and one cent. The penny is Walter's broker fee, apparently, though I'm pretty sure that's a little low. I was also a little off on my earlier guess of a fifty million dollar ransom, in more ways than one, but you'll see about that when you watch the movie.

It all starts out basically the same: the guns might be a little fancier, but Ryder and his goons still all board the train separately, do their maneuvering, and the next thing you know, there they are in the middle of a dark tunnel, just them, 19 hostages, and one indestructable laptop computer. See, they can be techier now, and they are, but they do a good job. I mean, it isn't just techy for the sake of being techy. I really need to find out if this is a return to the original novel these movies were based on, or if they're getting farther away. Yeah, just what I need, another book to read.

The New York Transit Authority, keeping the world safe for democracy!

Because this is the 21st century, it isn't just the bad guys who have skeletons in their closets. Thanks to the internet, everyone's little secrets start slipping out as things move along, making everyone distrustful. I was surprised people didn't start suspiciously interrogating themselves. Google has much to answer for. Also, Ryder isn't the calm, collected bad guy that the first Ryder was. John Travolta actually foams at the mouth at least once. Seriously. But he is organized, and very John Travolta-like. I'm not entirely sure myself what I mean by that, but he does have very similar styles for his bad guys. And his good guys, come to that, but it works for him. He's actually very unnerving when he calls Walter his hero. Would you want to be the psychopathic killer's hero?

Anyway, the supporting cast is just as good. John Turturo (The Good Shepherd) plays hostage negotiator Camonetti, and Luis Guzmán is Phil Ramos, one of the hijackers. I swear, that guy's never out of work. He was also in The Bone Collector with Denzel Washington as a forensic tech -- your official MCND trivia for the day. And it's a good movie, worth a solid three and a half idols. The half is because they didn't do any product placement. Hooray! Except for John Travolta's watch, which is a Breitling, which he's the spokesperson for. Crap. Okay the half is because they remembered their roots and gave a nice tip of the hat to the original main characters. There.

They didn't mess with time travel this time around, though, so they'll have to watch it if there's ever a fifth movie. It doesn't seem like there could be, really, but I don't underestimate the writers' ingenuity, or possibly their desperation if they've got higher-ups demanding more. It does take some ingenuity to keep going past the world ending, after all... and this time, they even start out by killing one of the main characters. And they don't time travel, like I said, nor is he a zombie. He's Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington, another one of those Australian actors who keep coming to the U.S. to steal acting jobs. Oh, and he was in Hart's War.) and he's on Death Row when the action kicks off. But when Cyberdyne gets involved, even death isn't quite final.

You probably know from the previews (skip ahead to the next paragraph if you somehow managed to avoid the previews) that Marcus turns out to be a sort of hybrid, and I don't mean a hybrid SUV. Every Terminator can look human, but this one believes that he IS human, which makes him extremely convincing, as you might imagine. It's really cool, though, how they drop all the little clues as to what's going on -- the way he sometimes moves and acts like Arnold from the original, and even a little reference to him being heavier than he looks.

Because you need to have the dramatic image of John Connor and a scary, scary Terminator facing off.

Anyway, he's pretty confused, unsurprisingly, when he wakes up to discover that the world's been bombed within an inch of its life. The Machines are even more confusing, but luckily for him, he finds help in the form of the Los Angeles Resistance group. There are only two members, though they don't make it clear if there were always only two of them, or if they just had some horrible casualty rates. In charge is one Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin, Chekhov from Star Trek), and following along to help keep everyone out of trouble is Star (Jadagrace, who hasn't been in anything before, but then, she is only maybe ten years old, tops, so give her time).

They join forces with Marcus, and believe me, they need the help. The Machines are doing something new, namely taking human prisoners, and the Resistance is worried. Enter John Connor (Christian Bale, the new go-to guy when you need an obsessed, driven, brooding sort of guy), leader of the Resistance -- sort of. He actually isn't, apparently, though he is in charge of a decent-sized segment of it, and lots of people seem to think he really is the last, best hope for humanity, like they've said all along. His wife, Kate (Bryce Dallas Howard, finally getting more lines than she had in Spider Man 3, at least) is there, too, now graduated from veterinary tech to people doctor, apparently.

You can't blame them for not wanting to trust anything that smacks of the Machines, and in the grand Terminator tradition, things go amazingly wrong before they finally start going right. Now that the technology has caught up with the vision, things explode and machines turn into other machines like Transformers and people get half their faces blown away to reveal very realistic looking cyber parts. And it's great to watch. The plot is a touch iffier in places, but really you don't care while you're seeing it all happen.

A solid three and three-quarter idols. The Terminators aren't quite ruthlessly efficient enough, but the bad guys need to be slow sometimes so the movies aren't too ridiculously short. But the characters are well-done, and the plot holds up if you don't squint at it too much, and it's just so fun to have another Terminator installment. (Rumor has it there might be two more Terminator installments, but we'll have to see about that.) There are tons of little references to the previous films, but my favorite has to be the little boom box from T2, the one that we last saw blasting out Guns 'n' Roses "You Could Be Mine," while the young John Connor and his friend with the terrible hair were cruising the streets. It gets to do that one more time, and that was really nifty.

So yes, Vulcans still bleed green and practice never showing emotion; and Spock (Zachary Quinto of Heroes fame) is still half-human. But now his mother is Winona Ryder, and there are two Spocks. Sort of. See, since this is a sci-fi series, the writers took advantage of that fact and also rebooted it internally, so to speak -- there's a pinch of time-travel and a dash of alternate reality in this recipe, too, so if you want to believe that the entire original series is real and this is just a pale imitation spinning off from that timeline, you can do that. So I'm not sure why there are Star Trek purists up in arms about this movie, though admittedly I was never a Star Trek purist myself.

The point is, it's a good sci-fi movie; but if you go in expecting a big-screen version of the original series, you'll be disappointed. It's good to know the series and the movies -- there are in-jokes all over the place, of course. Most of the audience either laughed or went, "Ooh!" when Bones (Karl Urban from The Bourne Supremacy, totally channelling the spirit of DeForest Kelley) first asked Spock if he was out of his Vulcan mind. Ditto when Bones insisted, "I'm a doctor, not a physicist!" And they keep threatening San Francisco in these movies, I suppose because Starfleet Academy is there.

Left to right: The pointy-eared hobgoblin, the Russian wunderkind, Uhura (no longer first-nameless), the captain, the Scotsman, helmsman Sulu (who gets to swordfight!), and the crusty old Southern doctor.

Most of the crew is in the Academy, though they had to strain credibility a little to do that. For one thing, they don't quite explain why Bones, who could be anywhere from thirty to fifty but is definitely not a young pup like everyone else, is there. I seem to recall that in another movie he mentioned being drafted (though I'm pretty sure Starfleet doesn't do that), but here he seems to have signed up to avoid being bankrupted by a vengeful ex-wife. He and a young Jim Kirk (Chris Pine) become friends because they're the only two cadets not wearing the bright red uniforms. All the uniforms kinda look like they came from Old Navy, actually.

Kirk hasn't grown into his luck yet. He's usually right about the best strategy and such, because if he wasn't he wouldn't be Kirk, but he fumbles through everything, sort of like Indiana Jones. He gets beaten up in a bar fight (though to be fair, he was seriously outnumbered), and Spock somehow manages to have better luck with the girls, so you know this is an alternate reality. But it's got a lot of the feel of the original series, that recklessness, and now that they have a budget, they can really make this an action flick, with high-tech gadgets, black holes, and alien spaceships that were designed by someone with absolutely no sense of spatial relationships or even the simple ability to walk, safely, from one computer station to the next. The Enterprise even looks like the Enterprise -- more modern and sleek than the sixties version, but without looking very different, really. Except on the inside. There, everything's all white and blue and shiny and absolutely nothing like it used to be. Only a few of the noises are the same.

In spite of the time travel angle, the plot actually isn't terribly confusing. For a while, I was waiting for everything to get weird and inexplicable, but that never happened, thankfully. So for avoiding that pitfall, for making this a sometimes funny movie without making fun (or making me cringe), and for letting Scotty (Simon Pegg from Hot Fuzz, which seems like a really weird casting choice but actually works out quite well) get one more chance to say, "I'm givin' it all she's got, Cap'n!" this movie gets four and a half idols. I think this is what Star Trek would've been like all along, if Gene Roddenberry had been around to think it up now, and I like that idea.

It's all political, though, I know that much. Ben Affleck plays Stephen Collins, the rising star of one political party or the other. They don't say, so no one has to dislike his affiliation. He's on a crusade (of course), running a committee that's investigating government spending in the middle east. But this involves a big, rich, powerful corporation (naturally) that doesn't care for being investigated (who would?), and when Collins' head researcher for the committee gets crushed under a subway train, it looks like someone's out to get him. At least, that's old Ben's story. Unsurprisingly, most people don't believe him, especially when it turns out that he was having an affair with said researcher.

Russell Crowe to the rescue! He's Cal McAffrey, mild-mannered reporter for the Washington Globe. Okay, not mild-mannered, but he is a reporter; and he was Collins' college roommate, so he believes, or at least acts like he does. I think maybe he believes just because no one else does and he feels sorry for the guy. He does look pretty hapless. And the affair is huge news, of course, much to Cal's special chagrin, because not only is he Steve's best (and apparently only) friend, he has a giant crush on Mrs. Collins (Robin Wright Penn). It's so huge that even the paper's bunch of 18-year-old bloggers are on it, and one particularly brash specimen, Della Frye (Rachel McAdams, who is apparently around mainly to look dewy-eyed and innocent, and attract the male audience) tries to get a scoop from Cal. I don't know if they really still call them scoops or not, but anyway. For some reason odd little questions like that are sticking in my head better than the plot.

Cal helps prove my Good Guys Have Messy Offices theory.

A thief gets shot, along with an innocent bystander pizza delivery guy. Congressional hearings drone on and on, while Collins does his best to look impassioned about his quest to expose corruption. Reporters ask annoying questions, not least of all Cal and his eventual faithful sidekick, Della. Jeff Daniels (the blind ex-druggie from The Lookout) as Senator George Fergus is actually pretty good at looking friendly and sinister at the same time. The evil corporation looms evilly over everything. And Cal and Co. tie it all together into a neat little package for the front page. Okay, not completely neat, but they try.

And it isn't bad. Jason Bateman (Hancock) gets to steal a couple of scenes as a strung out minor bad guy, and Helen Mirren as editor Cameron Lynne steals every scene she's in, because she's just that cool. Cal's a little scared of her, and rightly so. So it's easy to overlook the little loose ends and weird coincidences and just enjoy.

Three and three-quarter idols. The plot's fairly predictable, but not so much to be boring, and the dialogue is good, though some of that may be thanks to its original British roots as a TV miniseries. Maybe it's just me, but I think British writers are often better. But it was translated over to American pretty well, thankfully. Best of all, I think Ben's finally found his niche, just like Keanu.

Granted, I freak out easily. I always have. But I wasn't the only one this time. Half the audience was sniffling, trying not to sob openly, and I was staring bleakly at the screen, forgetting to blink, for long enough to make my eyes hurt. It was... depressing, yes, but that's not quite enough. These days depressing is a pretty overused word, so maybe bleak is better, but I'm still not sure that captures the full, awful scope of this.

I'll try and stick to the cold, hard facts as much as possible. Nicolas Cage plays John Koestler, an MIT professor whose wife was recently killed in a tragic hotel fire. (Fires are always tragic. I mean, they are tragic, but for some reason that's usually the adjective used.) His son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury, who played one version of Benjamin in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), has a hearing problem of some sort, wherein the spoken word sometimes sounds jumbled to him. So when he starts hearing odd whispers, they blame it on the hearing aid he wears.

The whispers start when a time capsule, buried fifty years ago, is unearthed at Jacob's school. The children of 1959 had all drawn pictures of what they felt the future would look like -- all, that is, except for Lucinda Embry, the odd girl out, who looks kind of like a young Christina Ricci. Her contribution is a page covered with row after row of seemingly random numbers. She's played by Lara Robinson, who also plays Lucinda's granddaughter Abby; and Rose Byrne (28 Weeks Later -- she apparently makes a habit of disaster movies). The pictures, sealed in envelopes, are passed out to the children of 2009, and Caleb gets Lucinda's, of course.

While drinking to forget his late wife, John sees the numbers and decides that trying to work out if they mean anything might be good therapy. He hits on the date of the World Trade Center attack (of course) and from there matches up set after set of numbers as dates and numbers of dead. The numbers in between, that he can't match up, he ignores. Really, though, even I guessed what they were, so he definitely should have known.

This fails to capture the enormity of a crashed jet, but it was the best I could find.

It was pretty silly of Lucinda to have let them bury that list, though, because by the time anyone sees it, all but three of the dates have slipped by. John discovers that one of them matches the fire that killed his wife, which makes him extra determined to try and stop the remaining disasters. It's really hard to stop disasters, though. He almost gets himself killed I don't know how many times, and almost arrested once or twice, but he's stubborn and just keeps trying. I mean, that's a natural thing to do, of course, but it's seriously scary, too. I mean, I've seen lots and lots of movies where things get blown up and people die horribly. But this movie still freaked me out. I'm not even sure exactly what it was, but something about the sight of those particular disasters just made me terribly unsettled. I drove home very, very carefully.

So on that level, as something meant to make you think about the fragility of life and whether there's any such thing as fate or if life is simply random, it's really a very good movie. Unfortunately, they don't stop there. The movie goes on and on, and gets sillier and sillier, until by the final scene, I was left wondering if the projectionist had somehow managed to switch to a different movie. Except it had the same actors in it, so that didn't work too well as an explanation.

The point is, the first hour and a half? A good film. The last half hour? Shades of Next. It just... faded away into bizarreness, and I could only watch helplessly.

So averaging it out.... say about four for the first part, and one and a half for the last... two and three-quarters sounds about right, actually, though it's a shame that all the promise of the start went to waste. For one thing, no one has learned from the terrible mistake of Signs, and they just keep on showing more of the spooky aliens than they should, because I don't care how sophisticated CGI gets, the imagination is still better because it doesn't have a budget. Unfortunately, simply not watching the last thirty minutes or so isn't practical, so you just have to put up with the one and a half idol part. I recommend Ben & Jerry's ONE Cheesecake Brownie to help you cope with the resulting depression.

If you've seen the previews for the new version, you already have a good idea of what happens. A group of heavily armed men hijack a subway train and take a carful of passengers as hostages. When they contact the authorities, they demand one million dollars ransom... which means they'll probably want fifty million at least in the remake, if they want to be able to have the same shocked and appalled reactions to the amount of the ransom. Reluctantly, they give in and arrange for the money to be delivered -- but of course everything goes wrong. There's no such thing as a simple hostage negotiation, not even in 1974.

Beating Reservoir Dogs by eighteen years, the bad guys all have color names, and Mr. Blue is the leader. He's cool, calm and collected -- which must mean something really weird is going on, because while it's relatively easy to hijack a subway car (at least thirty-five years ago), it's a bit trickier to manage any kind of getaway from a subway car, stuck in the middle of a long, dark tunnel. This is where Walter Matthau as Lt. Garber gets to stretch his suspicions and pester the powers that be into being suspicious right along with him. Denzel Washington should be pretty good at that, I'm thinking; and John Travolta is actually getting scarily good at playing psychopaths.

Also on tap this year were the British Television Advertising Awards and the usual collection of short films, which I will again spare us all the effort of attempting to review in any real way. However, one of them is available to watch here, for anyone who's curious.

I also saw a film called Vogelfrei, which looks like German, but is apparently actually Latvian, a hard to translate phrase that means things like free as a bird, and bird hunting season, that sort of thing. There are a lot of birds, but mainly it's the story of one man growing up and growing old, told in four parts by four different directors. Latvian might look like German, but it sounds a lot more like Russian, by the way. Also, apparently the entire country likes to design bathrooms with the light switches on the outside, which as you might have guessed is just asking for all sorts of trouble.

In short, another fun year, in spite of slightly iffy weather. We'll never compete with Cannes, but I like it just fine.