THE FLAWS
Sadly, white filmmakers with “message” films about Native Americans — and make no mistake, the aliens in this film are intended to be stand-ins for Native Americans — usually render them as noble savages. The Hollywood version of Native Americans is an idealized “enlightened” people. They live simply, in generic harmony with generic nature. They are caricatures in feathered headdresses who teach the heroic white man in their midst wise pablum, so that the white man can then save them. Perhaps this is an improvement over their earlier incarnations as generic villains in early Westerns, but that’s not saying much.

In Avatar, the Na’vi are also wise, enlightened and in perfect harmony with nature in ways that instantly and uncomfortably bring to mind that Hollywood caricature. They even wear feathers in their hair, despite the complete lack of feathered birds in the movie.

This not only deprives the Na’vi of individuality, it disrespects the real histories and cultures of Native Americans. When we idealize them, we ignore the fact that they were and are real, honest-to-goodness people, with all the good and bad that implies. There has never been a race of people on Earth free of petty tyrants, liars, bad religious and political leaders, and flawed, complicated people. Take away their flaws and complications, and what you have left isn’t an accurate portrayal of a people.

Rating:

Staring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña

Written and Directed by: James Cameron

To add insult to injury, Cameron depicts the Na’vi as utterly ineffectual at dealing with the “sky people” (humans) without a white man’s help. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a marine who connects himself to an avatar — a vat-grown Na’vi body he can mentally take control of — in order to interact with them. In a ridiculously short three-month span, Jake goes from being a barely tolerated outsider — who hasn’t previously learned a thing about them — to a trusted leader who can speak their language and eventually saves them from the other humans.

We’ve seen this plot before, most recently in The Last Samurai. (Tom Cruise as a great Japanese hero? Really?) A white male oppressor earns begrudging acceptance among a close-knit, oppressed minority, and eventually leads them against his former compatriots. Why must Hollywood movies that purport to honor and respect other cultures always make white men their greatest heroes?

That’s not to say it’s impossible to tell a good story at the juncture between cultures in conflict. Little Big Man — with Dustin Hoffman as a white youth who grows up among the Cheyenne — is one example. He’s even the only white man to survive the Battle of Little Big Horn — mostly because he’s on the winning side. But he’s not depicted as the savior or greatest hero of the Cheyenne.

There were other problems with Avatar, but this was the one that really got under my skin.

GO SEE IT ANYWAY
Now, why should you see it anyway? For what they got right. First of all, while the Na’vi are definitely Hollywood Native Americans with blue skin, there are other details about them — both biologically and culturally — that helped negate some of the above problems.

Biologically, the Na’vi are fascinating. They’re humanoid, but about twice the height of human beings because of their world’s slightly lower gravity. They are capable of bonding physically with fierce and dangerous creatures that look nothing like them, yet share a strange proboscis with the Na’vi that allow them to telepathically link. Humans are, of course, linked to our ecosystems in a variety of ways, such as the food chain, but the Na’vi and their environment are essentially part of the same vast organism.

There were glimmerings of a more rich and varied cultural tapestry than what took up the majority of screen time, with lots of little touches of alien-ness that I really enjoyed. Zoe Saldaña as Neytiri does a good job with what should have been the most offensive character: the stereotypical love interest who falls for Jake because of his “brave heart.” She was simultaneously appealing and strange in her mannerisms, such as the heartbreakingly understandable yet completely alien-sounding cry she makes when a loved one dies.

Finally, the story itself, despite problems, is a good one. Right from the beginning, Cameron sets up Jake with some built-in problems that make his story arc — and eventually his life-changing decisions — make sense. The reason humans have come to Pandora in the first place — essentially, to strip-mine it — is sadly very believable. It’s not a unique story, but perhaps these themes are so often repeated because they are compelling ones.

A word on the special effects: The bar has officially been raised. Once every few years a movie makes a leap in what’s possible that practically demands future science fiction and fantasy films follow suit. In 1993, Jurassic Park made me forget that the dinosaurs on screen were digital tricks. In 1999, The Matrix introduced “bullet time” to the masses, and gave movie makers the technology to digitally recreate and move around in any scene they wanted to. And now, Avatar has done something I didn’t think possible: It has overcome the uncanny valley, the visceral response we have to that which looks and moves almost, but not quite, like a living thing. Forget the previews and trailers, they don’t do it justice. When you watch this movie, you forget — despite its beauty, despite its strangeness — that you are watching a movie in which every single scene is digitally rotoscoped. The humans look absolutely real, and so do the aliens. I realized, afterward, that it seemed like the human actors had simply turned themselves into giant blue people for the roles. In other words, it didn’t look like special effects at all.

There is a wonderful scene in which Jake, inhabiting his avatar body for the first time, runs through the woods and stops to feel the dirt under his feet. Look at his feet carefully and watch how his toes wriggle in the alien soil. You’ll be able to imagine the tendons moving under his skin, the muscles flexing. It looks absolutely real, and it’s such a minor, quick scene, it’ll be easy to forget you’re witnessing something that would have been impossible even five years ago.

There’s a lot to be offended by in this movie, if for no other reason than that Cameron’s obviously heartfelt environmentalism was utterly mistranslated. But there’s also a lot to love, and this is the kind of movie that should be seen on the big screen, flaws and all. Go see it.

As a viewer, I’m lucky. I enjoy those manic spectacles (even the boobs) but as someone who loves science fiction stories, I’m usually left unsatisfied. The depth of character I like to read about is most often missing. The problems people face in sci-fi movies are always galactic in scale, not human.

“Moon” is human. “Moon” satisfies.

It begins simply enough. In the near future, a single corporate-paid astronaut is stationed on the far side of the moon. His name is Sam Bell and his job is to oversee the automated harvesting of Helium-3. Sam has lived on the moon for almost three years. His contract is about to expire and he’s itching to return home.

Rating:

Directed by: Duncan Jones

Written by: Duncan Jones, Nathan Parker

Staring: Sam Rockwell

It’s hard for me to imagine what life so long alone would do to a person, but actor Sam Rockwell does an excellent job of portraying a man who can handle it – yet has become a little crazed. He moves in an understated shuffle, he twitches, he wears a ragged beard and marks the few remaining days as a series of smiley faces on a discreet corner of his moon base.

The look of the base is also understated and pitch-perfect. The smooth white curves of a NASA future are dented and scuffed. It’s stocked with timelessly chunky, overbuilt equipment. One of these is Sam Bell’s only companion, a robotic assistant called GERTY (voiced by Keven Spacey).

GERTY is little more than a computer screen and a robotic arm attached to a track on the ceiling. It talks to Sam in a too-calm voice very reminiscent of the amoral computer HAL from “2001, A Space Odyssey.” GERTY, however, is surprisingly honest and pure, even when his goals aren’t in Sam’s best interests. GERTY becomes a kind of anti-HAL.

This reflects the charming honesty of much of the movie. Many times when I expected cliché twists, it shocked me by playing straight. I kept expecting a plot of cheap-thrill deceptions but “Moon” transcended that with a steady hand, even when the story started to go weird.

And it does go weird. The plot reminds me of Fredric Brown’s famously short story:

The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.

In this case Sam Bell is called onto the surface of the moon to correct the course of a roving hydrogen-3 extractor. This machine looks like a huge combine harvester crossing moonscape so colorless it might as well be Dorothy’s Kansas, stripped down to dust. When Sam finally reaches the machine, he finds someone already there.

“Moon” is, at heart, a mystery.

Since the movie dips into themes of identity, change, solitude, and perceptions of reality. I would have expected the kind of sleight-of-hand movie that never really tells the audience what’s going on. That’s not it at all – in fact it speaks to the brilliance of this film. Certainly, some of the threads are left for us to decide their meaning. Most notability, Sam has a brief hallucination and it is up to the observer to decide if it had any meaning beyond expressing that he was very ill. Some viewers might find these annoying, but I felt that every mystery important to core plot was resolved. I like a movie that asks me to pay attention and draw my own conclusions.

I’d recommend “Moon” to a wide spectrum of tastes. If you like science fiction, mystery, human drama or slow-boil adventure – see this. Pass on it only if you’re in more of an exploding-gun-fight/cheeky-sidekick mood, and don’t want a movie that asks anything of the audience.

Hey, everyone has nights like that.

This is a movie about Humans.

“District 9″ follows five days in the life of Wikus Van De Merwe, a minor government official in South Africa who has been given a big project. Johannesburg has become home to two million displaced insect-like aliens (derogatorily called ‘prawns’ by most) who were stranded on Earth by a mysterious failure in their enormous ship. Although their technology is impressive, individually the aliens are unintelligent, savage, and impulsive. Their segregated home in District 9 has become a slum and frictions with the human inhabitants of the city lead the government to relocate the entire population of aliens to a new camp far outside the city. Thanks to a bit of nepotism, Wikus gets the job and rapidly begins to discover there is far more going on in District 9 than he had any idea of, and soon he finds himself questioning where his loyalties really lie.

Ironically, the existence of “District 9″ is fallout from the cancellation of the Halo live-action movie that director Niell Blomkamp was picked to direct. When the Halo project fell through, Peter Jackson gave Blomkamp a consolation prize of thirty million dollars to make anything he wanted. It turns out what he wanted was to remake a short movie called “Alive in Joburg” from early in his career.

Rating:

Directed by: Neill Blomkamp

Written by:Neill Blomkamp & Terri Tatchell

Staring: Sharlto Copley

The cinematography is a bit scattered. The first hour or so of the movie is done in a documentary/interview style, providing background on the presence of the alien ghetto, the feelings of the human population of the city, and the character of Wikus. This format is abandoned about halfway through for a more traditional approach once the action starts to get serious. The shift is a bit jarring, and makes the movie seem a bit schizophrenic, but I can’t honestly think of how the same material could have been covered any other way.

Although thirty million is a pretty small budget for a CGI-heavy action movie, you can’t tell from the result. The CGI is excellently done, and very nearly seamless. There is a good balance of action in the movie, enough to be exciting without overpowering the story. The action is fairly graphic, the squeamish may be put off by the frequency of head explosion and blood-on-the-camera-lens.

It’s easy to let the superficial layer of action movie distract from what’s really going on. “District 9″ is heavily influenced by Blomkamp’s experiences with apartheid as a child in South Africa, and it’s the themes of justice, cruelty, and humanity that really make the movie interesting. Wikus is one of the most dynamic characters I’ve seen in a long time, and it’s his journey of self-examination that really elevates this film above other generic summer action flicks. It’s easy for both Wikus and the viewers to initially dismiss the aliens as sub-human. They’re dirty, savage, and seem to have few redeeming qualities. A more traditional movie might spend its time showing that aliens are actually just like us, and that we should feel guilty for mistreating them. “District 9″ is a bit more ambitious.

There is a saying that goes something like this : “The true measure of a person’s quality is shown by how they treat the weak.” Does it really matter how much the aliens are inferior to us, if it’s how we treat them that defines our own humanity?

“Ponyo” is very loosely based on “The Little Mermaid,” but its story is an original creation by master animator Hayao Miyazaki. While playing on the shore of his tiny Japanese fishing village, five-year-old Sousuke (Frankie Jonas) finds a goldfish stuck in a bottle. Sousuke decides to rescue the girl-faced fish, names her Ponyo, and takes on the big responsibility of caring for her. Ponyo (Noah Lindsey Cyrus) loves Sousuke for it, but at the moment she professes her love, she is washed back into the sea, swept away by her sorcerer father.

Ponyo’s father, Fujimoto (Liam Neeson), shunned human society to become caretaker of the sea, longing for the day where the balance between sea-life and the human world will be restored. He’s not as much of a villain as he is a curmudgeon and protective father, but he is unable to restrain Ponyo. In true little-girl fashion, she defies her father and grows up into a human, through her own powers and force of will. Fujimoto is powerless to stop Ponyo, and decides to call upon her mysterious mother to help control their unfettered daughter.

Rating:

Directed and written by: Hayao Miyazaki

Staring: Noah Lindsey Cyrus, Frankie Jonas

Ponyo makes her grand return to the human world, accompanied by Joe Hirashi’s Wagner-esque riding music. The princess of the sea brings an unnatural storm with her; wild winds and rain worry the coastal town. Sousuke’s mother hurries him home while Ponyo chases them atop the swollen sea.

At first, we think the storm may be Fujimoto’s reaction to losing Ponyo, but the storm clears when Ponyo falls asleep, and we learn her true nature. Ponyo is a dervish of a girl, devouring every new experience with a joyous ferocity. She discovers light, tears, and the wonders of ham.

The adventures of Ponyo and Sousuke are the real strength of the film. We typically look to live action films for expressive faces, but in his art, Miyazaki perfectly captures a child’s bold expressions: the stuffed sleepiness of a food coma, bright eyes brimming with tears, innocence while sleeping. Ponyo’s an animated film before all else, and through its visual medium, it’s a rainbowed spectacle to behold, whether the action takes place in an undersea palace or in a retirement home.

The story is fine-tuned for children. Instead of being an adult’s faded memoir of what it means to be a child, the story is told from a very child-like perspective. There are dangers, but precious little fear or tension, even in the adults. The supernatural exists, but the human world is quick to accept it. The resolution doesn’t necessarily move quickly, or in a straight line. There are still classic lessons of love and devotion (and even a few on preparedness and respect for elders), but they’re very gently fed. The real locus of the story is how much fun Sousuke and Ponyo have together, and how natural it is for them to love one another.

“Ponyo” will make you remember what you love about children and what you miss about being a child. The story may be aimed at the very young, but its warmth will be felt and appreciated by all.

Viewers older than 13 might find that “history” here is similar to that in “Time Bandits” (1981) and “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” (1989) - written by European generals and American presidents. While “Night of the Museum” (2006) enlivens such low-key personalities as Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams) and Sacajawea (Mizuo Peck), its sequel goes for broke and adds Napoleon (Alain Chabat) and Abraham Lincoln (Hank Azaria) and many other History 101 personages.

So wait, why are all the museum exhibits coming to life? As was revealed in the the first installment, the Tablet of Akmenrah has been bringing the exhibits at New York’s American Museum of Natural History alive from every sunset to sunrise  since 1952. Down-and-out Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) takes a job as a night guard at the museum to provide a model of stability for his son, and assumes the task of managing the nightly chaos and protecting the tablet.

In “Battle of the Smithsonian,” we find Larry’s luck has turned: he’s now a respected inventor and businessman. Is this his destiny? The film sprinkles in some business about Larry returning to his true calling (his magically-enhanced minimum-wage job) but overall, the writers are not concerned with a moral lesson. Their true goal is balancing childlike wonder with savvy humour, a goal somewhat met.

Rating:

Starring: Ben Stiller, Amy Adams, Hank Azaria

Directed by: Shawn Levy

Written by: Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon

There is much on display here that no doubt dazzles children (CGI critters having become far more convincing since 1995’s “Jumanji”), but older viewers are likely to look to Larry for the proper reaction. His “seen it all before” attitude is overplayed, making each encounter with a living artifact a run-of-the-mill situation. Since the Natural History museum figures have been shipped to the Smithsonian for storage, they are joined by a rather larger cast from Washington, D.C.’s 19 museums. From miniatures to giant statuary, wax figurines and art pieces, Larry remains unfazed.

It’s handy, then, that Larry is given a real antagonist this time around: Kahmunrah (Hank Azaria), an Egyptian pharaoh and brother to the gentle, previously-seen Ahkmenrah. (Rami Malek) Using the additional powers of the tablet, Kahmunrah wants to open the portal to the underworld and, naturally, take over our world. In one crazy night, Larry and his sidekicks must outwit the pharaoh and restore the world’s largest museum to order.

The total sum of humour is less than it should be considering the cast of comedians: Stiller, Azaria with a lisping English accent (meant to reference Boris Karloff in 1932’s “The Mummy”), Ricky Gervais as museum director Dr. McPhee, Christopher Guest as Ivan the Terrible, Owen Wilson as miniature cowboy Jedidiah, and Steve Coogan as the equally diminished Octavius.

Amy Adams is a cute addition as Amelia Earhart, with an chipper manner of speech that even she admits is a bit of stretch. Her energy, Stiller’s everyman groundedness, and Azaria’s grandiose carry the film.

The most successful jokes are likely ad-libs, with the not-so-successful ones running too long.  Some jokes are repeats of those in the first film, or those earlier in this film (For example, Larry’s encounter with security guard Brandon, followed by Larry and Kahmunrah’s climactic stand-off.) Also, one suspects that in for the sake of remaining “safe”, Stiller chose not to push his humour to extremes as he did with say, “Zoolander” (2001) and “Tropic Thunder” (2008). As such, “Battle of the Smithsonian” is smile-inducing rather than gut-busting.

The film is most imaginative and high-concept when Larry and Amelia take the tablet into the National Gallery of Art. They are able to leap inside paintings and photographs and trap their pursuers, while abstract semi-personified art pieces roam about. It’s fun to watch Larry and Amelia learn the new rules of the tablet’s spell, and how to solve problems using them.

It’s unfortunate, then, that all for the zaniness Battle of the Smithsonian wears on its sleeve, the film is pretty tame. In order to be “family friendly” and as widely appealing as possible, it takes too few risks. Still, when the alternatives are thrashing metal (”G.I. Joe,” “Transformers”) and rubbery aliens (”Area 51,” “Aliens in the Attic”), “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian” is a welcome return to past children’s entertainment.

“Salvation” opens in 2003 with the execution of Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington). Before he’s executed, he agrees to donate his body to science, raggedly foreshadowing what we’ve already suspected from the trailers. (”He thinks he’s human.”)

Flash-forward to 2018 during the war of the machines, just before John Connor’s rise to leadership of the human resistance. Connor (Christian Bale, miles away from Batman) is sent out on a mission to sabotage the robot-corp Skynet’s operations. Instead, he uncovers Skynet’s plot to kidnap humans to make a new line of Terminators.

In Los Angeles, Marcus Wright awakes to scenes of urban holocaust and meets Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin, also known as Chekov in this season’s “Star Trek”). Reese is meant to be John Connor’s father. Reese helps Wright into the new decade, but will not follow Wright to Skynet for a flimsily-constructed revenge quest. Reese and Wright don’t get to resolve this conflict before Reese is kidnapped by Skynet as part of the Terminator R&D project.

Rating:

Starring: Christian Bale, Sam Worthington

Directed by: McG

Written by: John D. Brancato, Michael Ferris

Through a series of coincidental events and single-use supporting characters, Connor meets Wright, and Wright discovers he’s the first of the new hybrid Terminator line. Connor is looking for his father; Wright knows where Reese is. Dismissed by the token submarine military authority, Connor rebels and turns to Wright for help rescuing Reese from Skynet.

The plot is rather moth-eaten, and sports many lines that will make audiences groan aloud. (What else can we expect from the team that brought us “Primeval” and “Catwoman”?) Fortunately, most of the time is spent on action sequences, which are mostly stunning. If you can suspend your disbelief into synchronous orbit and ignore basic physics, you can enjoy a good half of the movie. The giant robot scene is particularly nice, eschewing jiggly-cam and fast editing for tracking shots that jettison Reese and Wright from an exploding gas station to a car chase, an aircraft chase, and eventually, the bottom of the a river gorge.

The film is predictably cinematic, with half of its scenes taking place in the pouring rain. The palette is alternately dusty and chrome, accented with lots of red. Skynet seems particularly fond of open flames, hanging wires, and strobelights in all of their facilities - perhaps this is the robot equivalent of New Colonial decorating. They even feature such amenities as unsecured computer terminals in standing water, open vats of molten steel, and nuclear power sources, all in keeping with the robot lifestyle choices we know from some of the previous Terminator movies.

The questionable choices aren’t limited to Skynet’s retinue. Humans make some head-scratchers too, like not using the anti-robot codes to protect their own facility once Connor has developed the codes. Plot holes have ever been the bane of action movies, but many manage to patch them with efficiency. “Salvation” seems too wrapped up in its Serious Business to see its own security breaches.

The casting and acting don’t help. It’s hard to tell who to blame for this - the actors or the director McG (of “Charlie’s Angels” and “We Are Marshall” fame). Bale screams half of his lines in a way reminiscent of his now infamous tirade. He shares a very awkward face-off with Worthington that was meant to be a dramatic turning point, but read more like two bulldogs barking at each other from the ends of choke chains: ineffectual.

For your own Salvation, I recommend waiting for a DVD release so that you can turn the sound off and provide your own industrial or hard-rock soundtrack, a-la Pink Floyd with the Wizard of Oz. You may also want to leave the movie right after Connor escapes from Skynet. The last five minutes of the movie were apparently covered with processed cheese food product, and making an early escape may help you retain the movie’s good qualities instead of losing them in the ensuing goo-massacre.

Expectations for a new Star Trek film have not been this high since the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979, the first since the TV series’ cancellation a decade earlier. That film certainly laid bare Gene Roddenberry’s ambitions, since he was no longer constrained by TV convention and budget. Viewers, meanwhile, struggle to stay awake during drawn-out effects sequences and exposition.

Most viewers prefer 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, a rousing action adventure and big hit. Elements from Khan have been revisited in nearly every Star Trek theatre outing up to and including 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis. The vengeful villain, the heroic sacrifice, and the mix of campy humour and oblivious melodrama: present and accounted for. However, these elements alone do not stack up to a successful movie, since Nemesis was a flop with fans and a non-entity to the general public.

Director J.J. Abrams (creator of TV’s Lost and Fringe) moves eons away from Nemesis’s ageing Next Generation cast, grim look, and limp writing, by going back in time to Captain Kirk’s youth, in 2009’s Star Trek.

The Original Series characters are back, played by energetic young actors. Chris Pine is Captain Kirk, who takes Shatner’s swagger and bravado but not his hammier aspects. Zachary Quinto (Sylar on TV’s Heroes) is Spock, capturing the Vulcan’s poise and inner conflict. Karl Urban uncannily channels DeForst Kelley as cranky Dr. McCoy, while Simon Pegg is basically himself while tackling Scotty. Uhura (Zoey Saldana), Sulu (John Cho), and Chekhov (Anton Yelchin) are on their way to becoming fleshed-out characters, something they have never been.

Rating:

Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban

Directed By: J.J. Abrams

Written by: Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci

After the opening scenes in which a mysterious ship attacks Kirk’s father’s vessel, and we glimpse both Kirk and Spock’s childhoods, we meet up with our cadets at Starfleet Academy. All are summoned to the newly commissioned flagship the U.S.S. Enterprise to confront an interplanetary threat from the Romulan Nero (Eric Bana). Lively chases, tense drama, time travel, and dubious science follow.

Lest anything transpiring on screen jar the nitpicking fans, thinking ” It didn’t happen like that!”, Star Trek (2009) is set in an alternate time line, wherein events occurred differently than in The Original Series and the films that followed. “Old Spock” (Leonard Nimoy), who travels back in time, is from the time line we recall. This is a very Star Trek spin on retroactive continuity.

It’s puzzling that given the freedom to do just about anything with the source material, Abrams and his production crew, well, don’t. Batman Begins (2005) and Casino Royale (2005) - doubtless models for a viable franchise relaunch - were unafraid to make surface-level changes (Batman trains with ninjas, a blond Bond) since these changes led to better final products. (Martial arts training suits Bruce Wayne, Daniel Craig is a superior 007.)

Star Trek (2009), by contrast, celebrates surfaces, with visual cues, parroted lines, and recreations of events already familiar to fans, like Spock’s childhood bullying and Kirk’s Kobiyashi Maru test.

Abrams fails to strip the layers off Star Trek and arrive at its core: telling thoughtful science fiction stories using the Enterprise as a framing device. The best Original Series episodes, such as The Devil in the Dark and City on the Edge of Forever, take the living-room familiarity of the Enterprise bridge and contrast it with something strange and new. The Motion Picture, for all its flaws, remains the best because Kirk and Co. truly encounter the unknown.

The five Original Series films that followed were insular and character-driven, riffing on established situations and personalities. They are safe, satisfying dramas befitting a crew heading into their twilight years, and an audience reaching middle age.

2009’s Star Trek, as a prequel, lacks the back story that, say, The Wrath of Khan or 1992’s The Undiscovered Country draw from. Nonetheless, the producers assume that the characters and setting can carry the film, with only decorative plot elements in place.

Admittedly, the characters (all pop culture archetypes) and the setting (the woolly Alpha Quadrant and its anomalies) do carry the film as far as it need go for assured box office success. But it’s not anywhere they - and longtime viewers - haven’t previously been.

Still, in the optimistic spirit of the franchise, one hopes that Star Trek (2009) is the launching pad for further films,  showcasing thoughtful science fiction stories, in the near future.

TAKE 1 DRINK:
- Each time claws or swords emerge from someone’s skin in slow motion
- Each time a new mutant is introduced
- Each time an exotic locale is revealed in an an aerial shot.
- Whenever an item is shown for the sole purpose of re-enforcing something that was said in dialog just seconds before.
- Whenever an item is shown for the sole purpose of destroying it
- Whenever Wolverine accidentally destroys something or injures someone
- Each time a non-Wolverine mutant says something snarky
- Each time a character implies or discusses Wolverine being “an animal”

LADIES ONLY: TAKE 2 DRINKS
- Each time Hugh Jackman is naked or partially naked

TAKE 2 DRINKS:
- Whenever Wolverine walks away from a combat when he totally had an opportunity to kill his foe
- Whenever a mutant engages in solo combat, even though other mutants are around to help him/her
- Whenever the moon is mentioned or shown
- Whenever you see an ax

POUR DRINKS FOR EVERYONE ELSE
- When a character loses in combat, even though they had the tools/knowledge to prevent a loss
- When a character *realizes* they had the knowledge to prevent a combat loss

DRINK YOUR NEIGHBOR’S DRINK
- Whenever Wolverine switches sides (or the sides switch for him)
- Each time Wolverine shouts “NOOOOO!” “ARGHHH!” “RAWRRR!” or another one-syllable expletive

City Without End, the third book of four in the “Entire and the Rose” series, is essentially a power struggle between several mutually antagonistic groups. Titus Quinn has failed to stop the Tarig’s plan to burn our universe for fuel, and is desperately searching for a new way to save his home. His alienated daughter Sydney has been recruited by the High Legate Cixi to be part of her plan to supplant the Tarig with a human dynasty ruling over the Entire. The Tarig themselves are the ultimate proponents of Stability at Any Cost, willing to do anything imaginable to keep the Entire running the way it always has. The ambitious Helice Maki, brought to the Entire with Titus, has given up on her home universe and, with the help of the Miranda Corporation, seeks to buy an accommodation with the Tarig to ensure human survival.

Book 3 of “The Entire and the Rose” series


“He still had dirt under his fingernails from his grave. His massive hands with their knobby joints sported thick fingers, now grimed with soil. He had hoped for burial in a cloth sack. When he came to consciousness in a box with the sounds of shovels and light welling through the slats, he knew he’d have to work quickly.”

There’s a lot going on then, and the plot moves along very swiftly. The stakes are very high and everybody is desperate, because the end of the world is coming, for someone at least. This is actually the weak point of the book, because things move almost too swiftly. We have very little time to get to know any of the new characters or places that are introduced, because the story moves on almost immediately to the next point of action. It reads almost more like an airport bookstore thriller, something that wants to drag you along at breakneck pace so you’ll be done with the novel by the time you land in Dallas.

It’s not just the pace that’s troublesome. Characters are introduced that rather blatantly exist only to move the plot along in a particular direction, then vanish forever. There is a particularly bothersome deus ex machina introduced specifically to prevent the developing reconciliation between Tidus and Sydney in order to allow further conflict between them.

This sort of thing isn’t uncommon in series writing: as the action picks up, the desire to rush the action forward becomes difficult to restrain. I expect publishing deadlines may have had a bit to do with it as well, it’s hard to really indulge in rich detail when just getting the book finished on time is a challenge.

This is not to say that the book fails. Anybody coming to City Without End will be here because they’re already a fan of Kenyon’s epic scale, and there’s no shortage of that here. Kenyon is still the only current author successfully following in the footsteps of past visionaries like Phillip Jose Farmer, and make no mistake, City Without End is still a very good read. I only wish she’d take a bit more time and capture more of that luscious detail of setting and character that made Bright The Sky so brilliant.

Watchmen takes place in the mid 80s that never was. Richard Nixon is spending his fourth term nervously fingering the big red button that will send the world into nuclear holocaust. The Watchmen are bound to stop this, but Tricky Dick legally disbanded their team when public pressure turned against the vigilante justice. The Watchmen we’re introduced to in this movie are actually the second generation of super (and not-so-super) heroes. The opening credits nicely montage the first Watchmen’s progress, demise, and retirement.

This second crop theoretically kicked some ass in the 70s, but we don’t see them really spring into action until the second half of the movie. Through the first half of the movie, we’re not even sure what their superpowers are, with the exception of the Vishnu-like Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup). The movie begins with sketchy Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) investigating the murder of the ironically named Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). There’s also a love triangle between Manhattan, Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) and Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson). With all these subplots and seven characters worth of backstory, the movie is slowly muddled over three hours.

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Starring: Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson

The visuals are great, though sadly, most of the stunners were revealed in trailers. True to great comic movies before it, Watchmen features lots of dark or high-contrast lighting and sharp camera angles. The use of slow-motion is a little overused, but helps to frame the action in the same way a graphic novel or comic does. The movie accomplishes the rare coupling of both frequent and relevant CGI. I do think someone should get Dr. Manhattan a thong so we don’t see his dongle waggling back and forth as he strides through important dramatic scenes. (Maybe it’s just my dirty, easily distracted mind.)

That’s not the only distracting feature of Watchmen. Women are frequently brutalized through the film, and some of the violent themes are a little difficult to stomach. A vivid sexual assault and a child’s death are particularly gruesome if not graphic.

Though the art direction is generally very good, if not a little open-handed, the music is often painful. Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” meets the tone and has a great lyric match as two heroes stride up to a villian’s fortress. Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable” is incongruous with a violent murder, and I understand that artistic dichotomy. Nena’s “99 Luftballoons” serves only to remind us it’s the 80s as Nite Owl and Silk Spectre meet for a sensual dinner: not appropriate. But Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” took the cake and ground it into the dirt by ruining what would’ve otherwise been a perfectly steamy sex scene. So much for my dirty, easily distracted mind.

Apart from having a slow start and two main characters that never get developed, Watchmen does have some interesting story and dialog. Rorschach’s contempt for the scum of the earth, The Comedian’s fatalism, and Manhattan’s neutrality are all built with internal dialog that occasionally reads false, but is generally engaging. There are even a few great coup de grâce lines, but these vie for attention with all the movie’s bad one liners. I loved the bittersweet ending, but many of the subplots wrapped up in cliched reveals.

I’m not sure what place Watchmen has in comic movie history yet. You can’t watch the three hour movie with earplugs in and enjoy the eye candy; it’s just not that kinetic. You can’t hail this as message-heavy Cinema either, as the attention paid to deeper social issues is rather slipshod and rushed in the reveal. I have a strong suspicion that if these themes are interesting to you, you’re better off reading the comics.