Superman in a bra.

Thighs shaved smoother than a cucumber. Cupid-bow lips. Armored breast. Screenings for Lesbians Only. The first ever feature film for the DC superhero WONDER WOMAN has already caused its fare share of controversy and orgasm.

It seems as if critics are only lauding this Patty Jenkins-directed film for fear of retribution from the female gender, and as contriteness for heaping such derision on the female-driven GHOSTBUSTERS last year. The first female superhero movie? Oh, it’s the best movie ever made! Best superhero movie by a mile! Totally “gets it” for women!

You lost me at lesbian screenings.

WONDER WOMAN is undoubtedly a thrilling tale, with excellent production values, an origin story not done to death like Batman’s or Spider-Man’s, its star an alluring neophyte in man-dribbling mini-skirt, with a scarring orchestral theme that halts armies and storms ramparts! (The bed of Hans Zimmer drums, the wailing banshee tritones of Junkie XL; insistent, vertiginous, clawing into your cerebral cortex!) Yet the movie fails to jolt into the upper climes of superherodom. Maybe it does for feminists and those boyfriends who need to gain access to feminist panties, however as part of the DC Extended Universe, WONDER WOMAN fails to grapple with the darkness and depth of MAN OF STEEL or BATMAN V SUPERMAN. It gets very close though. As close as a shaved thigh on a pouty face.

From Here To Themiscyra.

Wonder Woman’s origin story (created by William Moulton Marston in 1941) was originally set during World War II. WONDER WOMAN (written by Alan Heinberg, Zack Snyder and Jason Fuchs) is set in WWI, because the filmmakers wanted “social innocence” (read as women being treated like second-class citizens without repercussions: they wanted Diana to be out of place when brought to 1900’s London, yet unable to change the social climate).

Other than the era change, Wonder Woman comes to us as we remember her: embarrassingly patriotic red-white-and-blue garb, shield, sword (called the “god-killer”), Lasso of Hestia (aka Lasso of Truth), and tiny black nun’s panties covered with armored platelet and a gold-rimmed corset that makes us yearn after that and those.

A brief prologue shows Diana Prince aka Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) in modern times, looking at a vintage 1918 photograph of herself (see SIDEBAR). Then we are flashed back to a sun-soaked paradise island – Themiscyra, where we find a city of warriors bred for battle, ruling their land with wisdom and strength, running a society with ingenuity and intelligence, with no need for the opposite gender except for procreation; in other words, a society of men— Uh oh! Now I’m in trouble. No, not men – Amazons! Wild warrior women!

We meet young Diana (remarkable Lilly Aspell), mimicking General Antiope (statuesque Robin Wright, bringing her sensual venom from HOUSE OF CARDS and expressing it in real battle). Connie Nielsen is Diana’s doting mother, Queen Hippolyta, describing Diana’s birth (molded from clay by Zeus). And what is that accent they’re all using? Are they reverse-engineering Gal Gadot’s exotic Israeli accent into the full Amazon cast?

Baby Diana is trained by Antiope until she blossoms into Gal Gadot, faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap— well, you know. And that is the movie’s contradictory misstep: Diana and the Amazons are bred for one thing – battle against Ares (Hippolyta warned: “Ares the god of war turned men against one another and war ravaged the earth”) – yet when grown Diana wants to lend her fighting bosom to the World War because she suspects Ares’ meddling, the first thing the Amazons do is disown her, telling her The legends are not true!… See? Now do you get the reason why this movie is not credible? And you thought I was just being sexist.

Y’know, if you try to find a picture of Wonder Woman that ISN’T prurient – you will fail.

When American pilot Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) crash-lands on Themiscyra and inadvertently leads Germans to its shores, the warrior women launch into sexy battle and win. (Fist-up for woman empowerment and all that.) Sexy and kiddie-clean, as there is no blood whatsoever in this balletic battle utilizing blades, arrows and guns. Antiope even takes a bloodless bullet for Diana. (But I thought their armor was bullet-proof, or is that just Diana’s gauntlets? Even so, the pellets from these old-fashioned guns couldn’t have done that much damage – why not rush Antiope to that pool of rejuvenation that they put Steve in? Movies, huh?)

Steve, an American spy, importunes the Amazons to join him in the war effort, telling them of the villainous General Ludendorff (Danny Huston), and his chemical warfare mistress, Dr. Poison (Elena Anaya), from whom he stole deadly information. But the Amazons do not believe, as Diana does, that Ares is behind the “war to end all wars,” so decide to bravely sit out this world conflict. Diana is forced to steal the shield, lasso and sword, and sail off as a runaway with Steve. She’s painted as a rebel because Wonder Woman, like Superman, threatens to become a boring character if she is all-pure. Hippolyta laments to Diana, “If you choose to leave, you may never return.” (Uh, one good reason, please?)

Yet… as Hippolyta watches her daughter disappear over the waves, she proclaims, “The more she knows, the sooner he will find her,” meaning she ADMITS Ares is behind the war, also revealing she has not told Diana something important. We would learn later it is Diana herself who is the “god-killer.” And there was no reason to keep that secret. And if Hippolyta is so dubious of Diana’s battle prowess, why not just mobilize her army of lazy Amazon bitches and join the war effort?

You lost me at star-spangled underpants.

Back in smog-choked 1918 London, it’s fish-out-of-water time as Diana tries to fit in with a misogynistic society where women are subservient, like Steve’s assistant Etta (Lucy Davis, still a secretary; in THE OFFICE, sensual; here, frumpy). Diana enters the all-male House of Lords, led by David Thewlis. She berates the generals, not understanding how they can knowingly “sacrifice all those lives.” Answer: Because all men are pigs, right girls?!

Superhero sugar high.

Movie is funny in innocuous ways: Diana tells Steve, “Only an Amazon can defeat Ares.” He replies, “We need to get to London and try to find the men who can.” She retorts, “I’M the men who can!” It’s cute because it’s true.

Homage to SUPERMAN: they put glasses on Diana as a disguise; she stops a bullet in an alley mugging; she gads about in a big cloak to cover her armor/nakedness.

The old trope of Steve recruiting his men while they’re engaged in bar fights – Said Taghmaoui, Ewen Bremner and Eugene Brave Rock (very cool to include a Native American on this ragtag team); the three men who would be in that amazing cross-generational photo.

Quite childishly romantic, as Steve and Diana spend but one night together in a hotel room, before they will be separated by tragedy; although I’m thinking of the logistics on how a super-powered being can ever be satisfied by a mortal, even if he is the Captain of the Enterprise. Superman’s Kryptonian thrusts are two decades away.

At the front lines, the team is pinned down in a trench. Steve yells, “This is No Man’s Land; no MAN can cross it!” Oh, here we go – fist-up for substituting the word ‘woman.’ Thankfully, they don’t, and instead go for the jugular with the Wonder Woman reveal.

Slow motion, Diana climbs out of the trench, shrugs off her cloak, revealing the battle armor that wouldn’t cover a midget (prompting all male genitals to slowly “unfold”), and steps into the mud of No Man’s Land. Somehow, she has her sword and shield, boots, gauntlets, thighs, waterfall raven tresses babbling over naked shoulders, flap of groin-skirt sensually teasing, you could almost taste the pearbottom… In this hero shot, violins chug, smoke drifts, she looks like Linda Carter – the movie has won! –

Bullets scream at her, they ping off her gauntlets and shield, and then, the chugging is joined by those temple-throbbing drums – and the jarring tritone theme unleashes its fury. We almost wet our groin-platelets in ecstasy.

She takes on armed Germans, clobbering, swishing, deflecting bullets; flawless skin, vermilion lips, corded thighs, nun’s panties, raven locks… I don’t know where you’re looking, but my cinema experience is a wonder…

DC movies have started to follow a dangerous pattern (no, not just the new longer motion logo, which Cinema Sins will go ape over): their third acts devolve into eye-shattering CGI battles that would do TRANSFORMERS films proud. It was great in MAN OF STEEL, as Superman used his powers of flight and strength in ways that had never been visualized before; the city-sized explosions became a little tiresome in BATMAN V SUPERMAN, but here… they’ve bought the farm on predictable and overblown with Wonder Woman versus Ares, just clobbering the shit out of the greenscreen.

The villain gets to soliloquy on “wiping out Mankind and bringing paradise to the Earth,” which I can’t find fault with. She actually answers, “I can never be a part of that!” Give me one good reason why you don’t want paradise on Earth again? But the audience is not given the chance to ponder contradictions, as now Wondy is fighting a gigantic Viking special effect with a man-skort. How can she possibly win against this obviously stronger god? Answer: more special effects.

The big questions in play in WONDER WOMAN (Is Mankind worth saving? Will love save the world? Is every human both darkness and light?) become totally irrelevant due to the movie’s own plot. You see, after Wonder Woman defeats the Visual Effects Department (aka Ares), all the Germans break out of a trance and become good again. They’re telling us that all that “morality” and “love of war” has nothing to do with human free will, but possession by Ares! Which means that questioning Mankind’s dual nature, and capability for love, and busting out the painfully trite “They are warlike – yet noble” speech can all be boiled down to, “Just keep Ares away from them, they’ll be okay.”

“It’s about what you believe. And I believe in love.” Diana’s opening and closing maudlin narration makes us cringe, as the filmmakers try to tie Wonder Woman to William Marston’s original ethos – that she would combat hate (i.e. war) with love (i.e. breasts). “I have seen the terrible things men do to each other in the name of hatred, and the lengths they’ll go to for love.” My gorge is rising, as well as… “Only love can save this world. So I stay. I fight, and I give… for the world I know can be. This is my mission. Now. For ever.”

And a cheese factory exploded in London.

END

Noah’s Ark and Lang’s Metropolis on a Midnight Express.

SNOWPIERCER will make you question your place in society, the innate class system that drives humankind, and the ultimate meaning of freedom. It will also make you question what the hell Chris Evans is doing actually Acting and not just flexing his bulge-ceps to score all-American hooers.

Evans is Curtis, a “Tail-Sectioner” in a mighty world-girdling train called the Snowpiercer, a long great rolling joke that is a metaphor for human society; a perpetual-motion juggernaut created to house the last of mankind, after a chemical to curb global warming backfired and froze the planet to death. (Typical! Humans!) Like a shark, Snowpiercer constantly needs to move forward to process the perpetual ice for sustenance, and makes one revolution of the globe every year.

Geeks come running for the delicious taste of Soylent Green!

Tail Sectioners are clothed in rags, eat rubbery protein blocks and are covered in poo, overseen by armed guards. It’s Orwell’s 1984 on steel wheels. The further up the train you go, we are told, the more luxurious the living conditions, therefore the engine itself is regarded/indoctrinated as “the Sacred Engine.” A Yorkshire-accented man-woman named Mason (Tilda Swinton) lectures on the “eternal preordained order prescribed by the Sacred Engine: all things in their place, all passengers in their section,” calling the Tail Sectioners “feet,” adding “when the foot seeks the place of the head, a sacred line is crossed.” Unbeknownst to her, that’s exactly what the Tailers are planning to do…

SNOWPIERCER has been called the “horizontal METROPOLIS” but there’s a slight difference. In Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS, each segment of society did not know how the other segments operated; the leaders were inept at the workers’ jobs (as proven by Boy Romney trying to perform a worker’s job and failing) and the workers did not know how to rebel effectively (as proven by Metropolis exploding when they rebelled by ceasing to maintain their machines); “Head and hands want to join together but don’t have the heart to do it.” (Reminds us of SNOWPIERCER’s foot and head analogy…) But in the Snowpiercer (based on a French graphic novel Le Transperceneige, by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand, and Jean-Marc Rochette) the leader, known as Wilford, has specifically created the class system from the front to the back of the train, and has been a worker on his own train (as proven by his muscle-memory hand movements), sadly aware that this class system is the only way humanity can co-exist and survive.

He’s right. In METROPOLIS, the separation that the class system caused was the big bowl of wrong; it wasn’t the system itself. In SNOWPIERCER, in the face of extinction, we see that mankind needs the system to survive.

Now don’t get me wrong: this is not the message of SNOWPIERCER – the message is actually the opposite – that mankind should NOT be stultified with a class system and all people should be equal and free. But that point is made in the worst of ways, which we shall discuss later, complete with spoilers…

Poor Jamie Bell – since his breakout role in BILLY ELLIOTT, the poor boy always seems to be playing second fiddle. He’s Edgar, Curtis’s boy wonder.

The woman from THE HELP helps (Octavia Spencer). I find it slightly offensive (but mostly funny) how during the revolt, when the Tailers are shouting, “I’m sick of these protein bars!” the white folk shout, “We want real food!” and she shouts, “We want chicken!” Really? They made the black lady shout chicken? Louisiana fry with cornbread and grits?

Ewen Bremner is a Tailer, whose son is taken for the Engine (as many people are taken mysteriously from time to time), and he suffers a disturbing fate for resisting – his arm frozen solid and broken off!

Luke Pasqualino is a badass Tailer; Vlad Ivanov is an even badder-ass Enforcer.

And John Hurt, direct from his poo-decor totalitarian apartment in Orwell’s 1984, is the tacit leader of the Tail; missing limbs and youth, he keeps prompting the hesitant Curtis to rise to the occasion, “I am but a shadow of my former shadow.” And his name is – get this! – Gilliam. (As in Terry, the Python prince of dystopian futures?)

Kang-ho Song is Nam the Keymaster and Ah-sung Ko is his daughter Yona. They initially help the Tailers in return for the drug “kronole,” but Nam has another agenda, as we constantly see him preparing his daughter in subtle ways for life beyond the engine.

It’s beautifully shot in ocher grays, with gunslinger direction and whipcrack action pieces, with a casual futuristic élan that doesn’t need explanation, yet there are admittedly a few faults and plot holes, because movie is not literal, but a surreal parable. (We see rows of cooked chickens and sides of beef – but where are the cars that house the live cows and chickens?)

Despite the American and European presence, keep in mind this is a South Korean production, helmed by director Joon-ho Bong (or Bong Joon-ho; I guess it depends which hemisphere you’re standing upside down in), who also co-wrote with Kelly Masterson, so there is a disturbing sense of disorientation built into the way the film is shot, the nonchalant gore, the offhanded swearing, plot points that blindside us, sacrifices that shock us (“You know what I hate about myself? I know what people taste like. I know that babies taste best.” What a line!), and the arthouse shots that drive us to delve deeper than the dustups.

”The Last Supper” by Ken Shabby.

At first SNOWPIERCER is about the battle of the breakout; as the journey progresses, it becomes allegorical, and as our heroes near the Engine, a startling revelation looms…

A horrifying moment as a gate is opened to reveal a carriage packed with burly warriors, all wielding axes and dressed in black hoods. This must be the Republican car. An American movie would have launched into action that hurts our eyes with cam-shake, but these hooded thugs first soundlessly pass around a big fish that they take turns gutting with their axes… Why are they faceless soldiers? Because they’re truly faceless soldiers doing the Sacred Engine’s bidding. Mason at their head, decreeing, “Exactly 76 percent of you will die.” (This percentage formulation is all part of the grand scheme explained later.) The incongruity when they pass the annual mark and everyone stops battling to wish each other Happy New Year…

We follow through the sauna car, the greenhouse car, the aquarium car, the opium den car, the Duran Duran car (where everyone is a New Romantic in an ecstasy nightclub) – “the train is the world” – the propaganda car aka the school car – and we are slyly fed exposition on the origin of the Snowpiercer and Wilford its creator, in the form of a school lesson video. Where we realize the most disturbing propaganda of all issues from the mouths of babes who are born into it: “I heard all Tail Sectioners were lazy dogs and drink their own shit.”

We find Wilford isolated in the Sacred Engine (with a chunky bimbo as his bottom bitch – nice work for a chick whom we wouldn’t look at twice). And Wilford is Christof! As he did in THE TRUMAN SHOW, Ed Harris runs the place like an absent-minded pajama god. But he’s every bit as conniving as Christof, and irony descends on us like a dog in heat in these climactic payoffs as one horrifying revelation after another…

It is here that Curtis must become a true hero or a part of the machine – and to become hero, he must become machine! – by thrusting his arm into the cogs to sacrifice it…as Gilliam’s arm was sacrificed for another more dire reason decades ago… We will never see Chris Evans more alive than in this role where he immerses himself in revenge, guilt, regret, torment, redemption; all his sins coming together to either crucify or free him.

Wilford simultaneously cajoles and grooms Curtis: “You need to maintain a proper balance of anxiety and fear and chaos and horror in order to keep life going. And if we don’t have that, we need to invent it.” (From The Book Of Cheney, Verse 9.) Wilford reminds Curtis that people in their “preordained places” all add up to humanity. Curtis shoots him down with “That’s what people in the best places say of people in the worst places.” Sounds heroic but the truth is, Wilford’s right: humanity is at its optimum efficiency when the majority are herded like sheep.

That’s not the movie’s message though, and a big explosion punctuates what the writers are trying to say… that you need to destroy one closed system to start an open system; that mankind are better than class systems, that the rich need not feed off the poor for humankind to survive; that a true leader of men should not be clinical but compassionate… There are worthy elements to all those messages – but what happens in the movie also sends the opposite message.

ACTION: The people who are trying to escape the system – Curtis’s rebels – blow up the train, causing an avalanche that destroys the whole train, killing everyone onboard. Two survivors – a young woman and boy – climb from the wreckage to see, on a faraway ridge, a polar bear looking back at them. Cut to black.

REACTION: Trying to make a better world and killing everything was exactly what the scientists did with the global warming chemical! Noble sentiments – but inept execution. Destroying the train also destroyed all the resources that the next generation might have used for survival. The message of the movie then seems to be: in trying to make a better world, Mankind will always fuck up because hey, it’s Mankind. Noble sentiment, inept execution.

2ND REACTION: The people onboard the train were indoctrinated that all life was dead on the surface. Seeing the polar bear meant life survived, and is survivable, on the outside.  If it was a squirrel or a caribou, we’d receive the correct message, but when it’s an apex predator… the message that life exists outside the train is surely secondary to the fact it’s a polar bear! And I think it looked straight at us!

3RD REACTION: Run!

END

Pearl Before Swine.

In garish detail and stunning investigative probing, PEARL HARBOR digs deep below the surface of the gasoline embargoes and jingoistic fomenting and reveals exactly what this WWII conflict was all about – the love triangle between three young American Models.

You see, Ben loves Kate. And Kate loves Ben. But Ben’s best friend, Josh, also likes Kate. And there’s a war with Germany or something happening. Ben is a hot pilot, and reports to somewhere overseas that is Not America for hot dogfights that make his biceps thrum with the need to hold Kate.

Ben is shot down and reported Missing In Action back in the United States, a land where every waking hour is spent looking to get laid (if you were a nurse like Kate) or looking to get laid (if you were a flyboy like Josh). So when Ben is reported missing, Kate cannot face the next five long days wondering if she will ever get laid again, so she falls in love with Josh.

Now Josh loves Kate. And Kate loves Josh. But Ben comes back. And he hits Josh for falling in love with Kate. Then they have a beer. And then the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. The end.

Don’t even want to go into the real politics behind that Day of Infamy, December 7, 1941, when the Japanese launched a surprise attack that wasn’t really a surprise on the American Pacific Fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. God knows, director Michael Bay doesn’t.

Remember, if it weren’t for those young models in love, none of this woulda happened. Written with emotive overkill by Randall Wallace (BRAVEHEART, 1996, THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK, 1998), HARBOR reminds us of TITANIC (1997), where the insufferable love story sucked all the oxygen out of the movie until James Cameron redeemed himself with that magnificent CGI boat-tipping.

Michael Bay movies are like the women I date: beautiful but stupid. Discounting the three-way pap between Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett and Kate Beckinsale, PEARL HARBOR’s redeeming war scenes are why we go to the movies: fictional cinematography at its best! And by that I mean, this attack is not really happening, but onscreen, with CGI, models, mattes, process shots, etc., Bay has created Real War, scrappier and more authentic than every single war movie released before 1998. Spielberg never took to the air in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998) – he still holds the crown for best ground skirmishes – it takes Michael Bay’s sweeping cranes to now claim the crown for best air-to-sea battles and best dogfights. Affleck gets to fly a Spitfire – the coolest fighter plane ever – in rampaging skirmishes that put us so square in his hot pilot’s combat seat that we can feel the sweat puddling on the backs of our patriotic thighs.

The scenes of the stealth Japanese planes flying low over American farmers and people out enjoying the world, thinking the war was in some other country, look surreal enough now – imagine how it must have looked in 1941. The thunderous grumble of amassed Zero engines splitting the rural morning, each plane loaded with one bomb each, tilting low over fields and schools, under American radar, Bay’s characteristic American Blond Kids in slow motion below them.

The Pearl Harbor attack is launched with a tracking shot of a bomb loosed from a Japanese plane down to the USS Arizona, silently falling, then exploding and actually undulating the ship like a steel snake spasming. From there, the incredible realism of old school battle is more exhilarating than walking in on Kate Beckinsale sandwiched between Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett.

Bay and cinematographer John Schwartzman have such a knack for creating iconic images that even whilst we cringe at the melodramatic slomo and hero framing of certain scenes, they wring a tear as well, with their beautifully evocative composition. The art overshadows the story.

Cuba Gooding Jr. fires a big deck gun. Tom Sizemore runs around his airfield and swears. Jon Voight shucks off his Republican idiocy to play Democratic president, FDR with great empathy. Obvious that Bay believes HARBOR to be his MIDWAY (that 1976 war epic with A-Listers piled on A-Listers: Heston, Fonda, Coburn, Mitchum, Mifune, Wagner…), as he populates his film with numerous “names” in smaller roles: Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Garner, Mako, Colm Feore, Dan Aykroyd, Ewen Bremner…

Beckinsale – ever the female double standard bearer – asks boxer/cook, Cuba Gooding Jr., “So why do you have to fight with your fists to get respect?” completely forgetting that her own boyfriend is gunning down strangers in planes to keep her respect, with his big Spitfire-shaped penis.

Kate tells Josh as he’s going off to war, “I love you and I’ll be here waiting for you when you come back.” Of course, that’s provided you don’t go MIA and my thigh twitch compels me to turn to the Next Best Thing…

Cuba looked pretty hot on that big gun…

END

SNATCH will grab.

Bullet Tooth Poffy

Released on the heels of his stylish, dangerous LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS, SNATCH simultaneously solidified the grit-edged, flamethrower directorial style of Guy Ritchie, even as it launched Jason Statham into his TRANSPORTER leading man roles; heralded an altogether explosive performance from Alan Ford as Brick Top; proved yet again the go-to value of Rade Sherbedgia as generic Slovakian Hard Guy (even though no two publications can agree on the spelling of his name); saw Dennis Farina reprising his smarm-jockey from GET SHORTY; was a hilarious continuation of Vinnie Jones’s unbalanced contract killer from LOCK, STOCK, and marked Bradley Pitt’s first foray into incoherent mumbling whilst covered in poo.With a soundtrack as impertinent as its plot and as foreboding as the felons who populate it, edited with a verve which could snap your cervical vertebrae, and shot with a style that will make your eyebrows bleed, SNATCH is a Molotov cocktail of a movie; a careening, chain-wielding maniac of a film.

It’s about incompetent thugs and incomprehensible gypsies. It’s about Desert Eagle point five-oh’s and fist-sized, dog-swallowed diamonds. It’s about bare-knuckle street fighting, for gangsters who breed people-eating pigs. No good guys and no bad guys – only bad guys and badder guys.

Indescribable at best, inexplicable at worst, who knows exactly what is going on in SNATCH, except maybe Guy Ritchie – and only when he’s drunk.

Compulsive gambler, Frankie Four Fingers (Benicio Del Toro) must deliver from London to New York an 86-carat diamond to Cousin Avi (Farina), but Boris the Blade (Sherbedgia) gets in the way, via his small-time help, Vincent and Sol, simultaneously igniting the wrath of sadistic underworld kingpin, Brick Top (who would just as readily suffocate you with a plastic bag or feed you to a pig as deign to scathe your manhood with his cockney insults). So Cousin Avi must jump-cut travel to England and employ Bullet Tooth Tony (Jones) to retrieve the gem.

Disparate plots and subplots intertwine like choker vines – with comedy so sharp you could paper-cut your tongue on it, in dialogue so lushly British you could smell the fish ‘n’ chips frying in three-day-old oil.

In a seemingly removed throughline, Turkish (Statham) and his marginally-tolerated sidekick, Tommy (Stephen Graham) get themselves deep into devil dealings over bare-knuckle boxing matches with Brick Top and must tactfully employ the very fighter who put their star fighter out of commission – the “harder than a coffin nail” gypsy, Mickey (Pitt). Refusing to play the game of taking dives, Mickey gets Turkish and Tommy into deeper devilry when his freight-train right hook fells Brick Top’s bet-winning boxer.

Freeze frames, crash-cuts, slomo, chronological reversal, whip zooms, strobed film, contrast-treated frames, screen wipes, follow-frames, Batman angles – Ritchie relishes throwing the baby and the bathwater at the viewer, garnering his fair share of detractors. Ultimately, SNATCH is not for THE WEDDING PLANNER set.

In the final few minutes, the disparate threads coalesce and the diamonds and dogs and boxers and blaggings all somehow crazily make sense.

But only when you’re drunk.

END

Unmatched.

There is such a brilliant hook in Woody Allen‘s MATCH POINT that to say anything about it would ruin its impact.

So I’m going to anyway. It’s the woman in me.

Writer-director Allen leans so heavily on the tennis idiom (from opening the film with a tennis analogy dependent on luck – a ball nicking the top edge of the net – to the lead character being an ex-tennis pro, to the title of the film itself) that he hooks us wholeheartedly into the idea that any ball that nicks the net needs to go over the net to win.

Advantage: Poffy

Then the movie does exactly the opposite. To say any more would be far too feminine…

Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is that ex-tennis pro turned instructor at an exclusive London club, where – as luck would have it – he befriends a painfully upper-class British tennis student, Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), who invites him to an opera, where his sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer) then falls for Chris. And like any good friend, Chris promptly falls for Tom’s fiancé, Nola (Scarlett Johansson).

In a situation which might have easily degenerated into a tiresome love-quadrangle farce, MATCH POINT instead adopts a stance contrary to that of any given formulaic “American” Love Story. In other words, it is not a complete waste of time, brain cells, funding, resources and talent.

How Woody Allen, a steadfast New Yorker, managed to capture the upper-class British idiom so concisely is a wonder. Sure, employing British actors helps, but the writing seems inherently British from the outset. For example, when Nola comments on her fiancé Tom being handsome and asks whether Chris also finds him handsome, without any hesitation, embarrassment, or sophomoric gay innuendo, Chris replies, “Very.” Decidedly NOT an American response.

Further, in crafting the film on location in London, the censorious MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) seem to exert less of a stranglehold on “injurious” themes, especially their insulting edict, “no crime shall go unpunished.” When unpunished crime, abortion or infidelity arise in MATCH POINT, there is no moralism attached, no proselytizing or justification. Whereas wide-release American movies have reached a point where they must explain or justify every action for their dim-witted, lazy demographic (thereby becoming a collective insult to their own audiences by their very pandering existence), this movie floats free of those strictures, and is crisper, more mature and infinitely more powerful for it.

Realizing that operatic themes were nothing more than the pulp fiction of their day, Allen slyly uses the melodrama of opera as a backdrop, enabling him to push the pulp envelope. When Chris Wilton is forced into deciding which woman he wants to retain in his life, the faux-operatic extremities he takes are congruent with the opera soundtrack enhancing the surrealism. Like Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Chris remains unrepentant; like Verdi’s La Traviata, his lover is a whore, and like Eastwood’s HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER he’s going to resolve the problem in very stylish pants.

In true European idiom, Chris thankfully does not assess which woman he “loves” more; he assesses his future – and acts accordingly. At last: Truth in a movie! Though the American Teen Power Phrase “Do you love her?” was brought into play for the Great Unwashed to sink their blunted teeth into, it is never dwelt upon, this story intelligently illustrating how codifying or measuring “love” does not resolve harsh realities. Unlike the formulaic drivel that informs ninety-percent of character motivation in films, Chris’ final, fateful decision is not made because he feared losing love, but because he feared losing his enablement.

Like a more intense Ewan McGregor, Rhys Meyers’ aloof intensity is something that American actors must work hard to attain (excepting Clint Eastwood). His reptilian charm defines the term “smooth criminal.” We discover how smooth in the film’s final frames.

The UK cast – down to the smallest bit parts – are flawless, including Brian Cox and Penelope Wilton as Chris’ in-laws, Ewen Bremner and James Nesbitt as flustered detectives and Rupert Penry-Jones as a tennis pro friend and Margaret Tyzack as a doddering neighbor.

Jonathan Rhys-Meyers wins Casual Friday.

Scarlett Johansson is almost not ready to be placed amongst this cast, as her jarring American acting training clashes irreconcilably with the fluid ease of the UK ensemble. Satirizing Shatner has become passé, for what comedian Kevin Pollak termed his “pause acting,” yet Shatner merely accentuated a certain American Method. In American movies featuring American actors all purveying this Method in varying degrees, it goes unnoticed. Held against the naturalistic European Method, it is virtually unwatchable, Johansson’s most irritating Shatner occurring during the scene where she opens up to Rhys Meyers after a failed audition, Rhys Meyers’ potent, uninflected replies colliding with her heavily inflected “acting” responses. Though she shines with a flirtatious, needy light in this scene, all that keeps springing to mind is, “Khaaaaan!”

Woody Allen is like Clint Eastwood – well, not in terms of Man With No Name, raptor-eyed, deadly screen presence – but as a film-maker. The older he gets, the more mature and well-made his films become. Or maybe it’s just ME getting older and able to discern the film-making process more intelligently; either way, we’re all getting scarier.

As Eastwood never shies from antisocial and politically-incorrect themes, Allen’s subtexts in this movie are hilarious for their blackness:

As soon as Chris’ wife Chloe makes “getting pregnant” her raison d’etre and as soon as his lover Nola actually gets pregnant, they both become insufferable. With his wife, mechanical, passionless sex, with his mistress, maddening whining and threats, to the point where no amount of bra-less t-shirt-wearing will save her. It is unlikely that women will ever glean the subtext: that it is not sex, marriage or infidelity that drives a man to madness – it is anything to do with pregnancy. Then there is the deeper irony which Woman will refuse to see as long as the species must procreate: that the very thing which she believes seals her future with her mate – pregnancy – in actuality rends his psyche from hers irreconcilably.

Via Woody Allen’s magnificent art, that’s coming straight from the Man in all of us…

END

AVP: Audience Versus Padding.

The question is not whether an “Alien” can overcome a “Predator” (ignorant semantics, as the two non-human species in this film are both “aliens” and “predators”); the real battle is pitting the movie’s Audience against its interminable Padding scenes. Can – we – survive? With my leg bloodied from the onslaught and a gaping wound in my side, I struggled out the theater exit, leaving two friends gurgling in the seventh row – hey, I’m no jarhead – I make no empty promises to “leave no one behind”… If the subterranean walking scenes didn’t finish them off, the inane talking scenes did.

Padding: 2. Audience: 1.

AVP: ALIEN VS PREDATOR is a nippled Batsuit – a franchise gone too far. It fulfills its purpose of keeping 14-year-old boys off the street and thereby less likely to shoot up a school or get your daughter pregnant, which is small respite; all we can hope for – until the next over-breasted Lara Croft video game release or somnolent Harry Potter movie. But as adult entertainment – and let’s face it: present-day adults, not kids, are the demographic weaned on the ALIEN and PREDATOR movies – it is diversionary, but not involving; good but not great, glittering but no prize.

Predapoff

An ancient pyramid is discovered beneath the snows of some snowy country, where Aliens are kept imprisoned in labyrinths, for Predators to send their teen warriors in and achieve predatorhood via slaughter. Sounds great on paper.

Both ALIEN (1979) and PREDATOR (1987) were sui generis movies, the former, through canny screenwriting and an uncompromising lead heroine, spawned three above-average sequels while the latter spawned an adequate-bordering-on-lame sequel (Danny in lieu of Arnold?!). Now, like the HIGHLANDER franchise, the mythos of both creations is sullied to the level of soap opera and with the Marketeers wielding their pimp-witted power, no longer will any successive ALIEN or PREDATOR movies exude the mystery or excitement of their progenitors, but rather, bombastic, overblown CGI and gratuitously-tweaked explosions for the action-figure teenboy market.

As a stand-alone movie – forget it! AVP’s existence is predicated on our cognizance of the last 25 years of these iconic monsters. Without that foreknowledge the very existence of these creatures and their interaction will appear contrived. The plot seems cobbled together from drafts made by 14-year-olds playing with their action figures (much like George Lucas writes his plots). The concept of the battling races at first seems mildly plausible, but then we realize the whole backstory is shoving square storyline into round plot holes and demystifying not one, but two rapacious extra-terrestrial cultures. Casting one’s senses back to those heady days of the original movies, our enjoyment was piqued precisely because their antagonists were inexplicable; they were truly… “alien.” Now they’re just Philo Beddoe in a barroom.

Except for Lance Henriksen (renowned B-movie “That Guy”), all human characters are instantly forgettable, except for a guy whose cultured locution could easily get him mistaken for a black James Bond (Colin Salmon, who actually had a small recurring role in the three Brosnan Bond films) and the young female expedition leader (Sanaa Lathan), i.e. Black Ripley; in essence, humans are this movie’s McGuffin, for any agent could have unearthed the battle-pyramid and a text crawl could have explained the backstory of the Alien-Predator symbiosis. Only reason we meet humans at all in this film is to mayhap invest a modicum of interest in this tale which, literally, has nothing to do with our species.

It’s a B-Actor hoedown: Sanaa Lathan and a cast of glorified extras.

Henriksen’s role is anomalous: his character is familiar with Aliens (from ALIEN 3), yet when confronted by one, instead of becoming Mr. Corporation (as would be his character’s wont), he burbles incoherently with the rest of the B-Actors. Then when confronted by a Predator, instead of dollar signs cha-chinging in his eyes at the discovery of yet another alien species, he goes Rambo on it and gets, subsequently, dead. But I will leave that trite conundrum to the fanboys to clarify.

Terming one species Alien and one Predator is a point of irritating contention for me; these terms only exist in our viewer-reality, for in the movie, the creatures are only superficially identified as “serpents” (Aliens) and “hunters” (Predators). The substitute terms are a dead giveaway: hunters are “noble”; serpents, well… do we need to extemporize on a well-trodden metaphor? From the outset, we are led a merry road by the film-makers to perceive the Predators as “good guys.” No surprise, for in being prejudicially human, we are prone to siding with the more anthropoid of the two aliens and ironically, the Predators assume the Arnold role in this movie – the musclebound “heroes,” as it were. The movie rationalizes, sensibly, that the Predators only try to kill our human B-actors to re-acquire what the B-actors stole – their weapons. Which puts paid to the movie’s tag-line, “Whoever wins – we lose.” Well, not exactly, for the Predators are portrayed as sentinels keeping the roistering Aliens at bay… So only if the Predators lose, we lose.

Battle scenes ensue – with the predictably close-cut action and blurred whiz-banging – but the fights are only adequately directed and rather short, and it is just too incongruous viewing these two iconic monsters on screen together. Something just don’t click. Either this would be a good Alien movie (for the Aliens are animated excellently, combining live puppetry with CGI) or a good Predator movie (the rugged masculinity of those 7-foot behemoths was enough super-cruel to power a small township), but – as Offspring advised – “you gotta keep ’em separated.”

And for the record, the “AVP” acronym is so IGNINTLY “skoolyard-bitchin” that it reeks of Marketeers grappling with the long-dead spirits of their nerd youth in pathetically trying to ramp up the street-cool of this geek-square movie.

Now gimme that spear – after witnessing those man-tastic pecs on the Predators, I’m going in – I’ve got two friends to save in the seventh row…

END