Gina Carano might just be the next female action superstar, but it won’t be thanks to “Haywire.”

The new film shows Carana easily translating her MMA fighting chops to the big screen, and all that scrapping clearly didn’t mar her lovely features. But director Steven Soderbergh can’t leverage Carano’s unique screen presence, nor a cast far too good for such a rote spy caper.

“Haywire” marks Soderbergh’s second consecutive genre outing, and it’s clear he’s ill-suited for pulp. Last year’s “Contagion” couldn’t rouse our senses despite the fictional death of millions. Now, with “Haywire,” the soon-to-retire auteur wastes the debut of an electric lead.

Carano stars as Mallory, a private government contractor who takes assignments nations don’t want to claim as their own. The film’s electric opening finds her squaring off with a fellow agent (Channing Tatum, looking suitably hung over) in a diner and fleeing the scene in a stranger’s sports car.

It’s a grand introduction to Carano, who survives a splash of steaming coffee to the face and keeps on kicking.

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Few filmmakers have been more alert to the possibilities of working with non-professional actors than Steven Soderbergh. His 2005 “Bubble” was an exercise in trailer-park vérité, and the 2009 “Girlfriend Experience” provided a crossover showcase for porn star Sasha Grey.

Now Soderbergh has constructed a high-profile action picture around Mixed Martial Arts icon Gina Carano, a woman alarmingly skilled in the ways of head-kicking, gut-punching, throat-wringing and related modes of cage-match devastation. Unlike Angelina Jolie, Halle Berry, and other movie-land action chicks of the past, Carano demonstrates beyond doubt that if called upon, she actually could put you in the hospital.

“Haywire” is an old-school spy-versus-spy espionage tale. It would be nice if the story (scripted by Lem Dobbs, who previously wrote Soderbergh’s Kafka and The Limey) made a little more sense; at some points you might wish it made any sense at all. Carano plays Mallory Kane, a black-ops specialist in the employ of an international security firm run by her shifty onetime boyfriend Kenneth (Ewan McGregor).

When a shadowy figure named Coblenz (Michael Douglas) commissions Mallory’s services in extracting a Chinese journalist from bad-guy captivity in Barcelona, Kenneth dispatches her there with a team that includes the prickly hunk Aaron (Channing Tatum); she’s also told to coordinate with an ambiguous local character named Rodrigo (Antonio Banderas). The operation is a suitably tense undertaking, crowned by a back-alley smackdown in which Mallory, in an explosion of leg-sweeps and gob-smashes, reduces an oppo gunman to twitching insensibility. This is pretty great to watch, let me tell you.

Read the rest of the review at Reason.com

“Beginners” is a love story that refuses to follow any of the cinematic rules regarding romance.

Writer/director Mike Mills’ film, available Nov. 15 on Blu-ray and DVD, tracks the bond between a sad-eyed cartoonist (Ewan McGregor) and a flighty actress (Melanie Laurent). It’s the story nestled in between that makes the difference, a father-son bond complicated by the former’s coming out at the ripe old age of 75.

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Mills tells his story with a blend of movie tricks, from bursts of narration to a Jack Russell terrier whose thoughts are printed on the screen. It’s both raw and frustrating, for as much as the film romance formula demands to be broken, “Beginners” isn’t constructed well enough to fully commit to its atypical storytelling.

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In the 90’s, Jim Carrey established himself as a mainstream comedic actor with films like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Liar Liar. In recent years, he hasn’t often displayed the comic persona that made him a household name. However, that persona appears once again in the new film I Love You Phillip Morris.

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In the story, Carrey plays officer Steven Russell. Russell joined the police force to locate his birth mother but when he eventually finds her, she quickly rejects him. Soon enough, Russell quits the force and starts a new life with his wife and children. Everything changes once again when Russell is involved in a severe car accident. While recovering, Russell admits that he’s gay and begins a new life as a gay con man because, as he notes, “being gay is really expensive.”

Russell’s ex-wife (Leslie Mann), who is surprised by Russell’s new lifestyle, is portrayed as the typical “Hollywood” Christian. Once she discovers that her ex-husband has become a thief, she asks if his homosexuality has anything to do with his tendency to steal. That isn’t the first or the last time that the movie pokes fun at her religious values. (more…)

The most satisfying part of my “Ghost Writer” movie-going experience came after the last fade just as the credits started to roll. My screening took place in one of those art house theatres where the real price of admission is suffering through 22 agonizing minutes (I keep track) of trailers for those absurdly pretentious films insecure people pretend to like. The theatre was pretty full, much fuller than expected. But when the movie was all over even arthousey fans of director Roman Polanski couldn’t muster much enthusiasm. When someone behind me started one of those THE MOVIE WASN’T GOOD BUT THE POLITICS WERE CORRECT claps, he clapped alone.

**Major Spoilers Coming**

Budgeted at $45 million, “The Ghost Writer” is yet another (by my count: 17) multi-million dollar sortie in Leftist Hollywood’s ongoing effort to enable the evil of terrorism by siding against the West. And for this reason, what starts out as the witty, fast-paced and involving story of a young writer (a charming Ewan McGregor) hired to aid former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) to write his memoirs, quickly gets buried under the trappings of a muddled and ultimately, very stupid thriller.

In Polanski’s morally confused world, saving innocent lives with the use of water boarding is an absolute wrong and Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision (he’s quite obviously the Brosnan character) to join America in the liberating of 25 million innocent Iraqis can only mean that he’s Bush’s poodle and a stooge for the CIA – a CIA that we’re told is always working against America’s best interest because of their Middle East policies and, yes, support of missile defense. (more…)

When Franz Kafka wrote “The Metamorphosis” he may have had someone like Roman Polanski in mind. I don’t know much about Swiss justice but why does it take more than twenty minutes to decide that they should send a fugitive from justice back to face the music. He’s not a political prisoner or a dissident, he’s a rapist.

What is even more puzzling to me is why Hollywood liberals would stand behind a pedophile. Maybe they’re afraid to upset the applecart lest other famous deviant directors and producers would not hire them for future projects.

Polanski’s latest film “The Ghost Writer” is having its premier at the Berlin Film Festival and writer Robert Harris would like us to believe that in reference to Polanski legal troubles that, “I never discussed it with him. It was never relevant.” In Mr. Harris’ world the fact that a man has been avoiding justice for thirty years isn’t relevant. In Mr. Harris world the art justifies the means. As long as Polanski keeps grinding out “artistic” films his personal life is of no consequence. Perhaps Mr. Harris is a member of the Leni Riefenstahl Fan Club as well as the Polanski Admiration Society. (more…)

Give the military-industrial complex an unlimited budget, and it’ll find unlimited ways to kill people. From megaton nuclear missiles to Donald Rumsfeld’s allegedly humane, small-scale nuclear “bunker busters,” and from robot soldiers to Barack Obama’s beloved predator drone planes, our nation’s finest scientific minds will find ever-newer ways to obliterate anything that gets in the path of the American Way. 

Of course, our enemies do the best they can on the killing front as well, and at one point it was widely believed that the Soviets were engaged in training soldiers in psychic warfare. British journalist Jon Ronson stumbled across America’s response to those mental-murder programs and wrote about them extensively in his humorous nonfiction book “The Men Who Stare at Goats.” 

Now, with the help of screenwriter Peter Straughan, who has invented a streamlined story in which to connect the book’s hilarious and almost impossibly wild anecdotes, “Goats” has hit the nation’s movie screens. Fast-moving, funny, and supremely subversive entertainment of a kind that Hollywood rarely takes chances with anymore, it also arrives at a rich historical moment, as President Obama’s own decision on whether to surge or pull troops out of Afghanistan hangs in the imminent balance.  (more…)

With so many tales of military heroism left to tell, Clooney and Company choose this… (more…)

There’s a lot of “It’s better than ‘The Da Vinci Code‘” flying around about director Ron Howard’s “Angels & Demons,” but that’s a lot like saying “It’s smarter than Nancy Pelosi” or “It’s less involved with the Nazis than George Soros.” For starters, A&D is not better than “Da Vinci,” which at least made some sense in helping us to understand how the mind of Symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) worked. Instead, this follow-up offers the same plodding plotting, outrageously dishonest Catholic bashing and numbing over-length … but now Langdon’s mental methodology is made completely incoherent to the point of gibberish.

The Pope is dead and to elect the new Holy Father, the ancient ritual of the Conclave is set to begin when the four Cardinals most likely to be chosen, the preferiti, are kidnapped. An ancient brotherhood known as the Illuminati takes responsibility. They have no demands and only wish to teach the Church a lesson for a violent purging of their scientific “free thinkers” hundreds of years ago and to do that they have promised to violently kill one Cardinal an hour, each in a different location, with the grand finale being the complete destruction of Vatican City with an anti-matter bomb stolen in the film’s opening scene.

The only clues offered that might save the day are also meant to further the Illuminati’s pro-science stance. Each clue is based on the four altars of science: earth, air, wind, and fire and to help unravel these symbols, Harvard Professor Robert Langdon is called in. Joining him is Vittorio Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), the gorgeous Italian scientist who helped create the anti-matter and the best hope to disarm it. (more…)