“The Social Network’s” David Fincher is as plugged into our technological times as any director working today.

Who else could turn the dawn of Facebook into a crackling drama worth a second and third look?

But with the 2007 film “Zodiac,” based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Robert Graysmith, Fincher dials down the technology to tell the kind of murder mystery too often ignored by today’s storytellers.

Fincher’s trio of tonally disparate leads transform a potentially leaden narrative into one of 2007’s finest efforts. What a shame the film’s box office haul didn’t measure up to its excellence.

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Below the fold is an email from a completely reliable source who has seen the final cut of the upcoming Jake Gyllenhaal terrorist thriller “Source Code.” After a look some time ago, my source forwarded the email below but asked, for very good reason, to remain anonymous. Now that the publicity for the film is ginning up (the release date is April 1st), this is a good time for a Sucker Punch Squad review. I would also like to point out that running anonymous reviews is nothing new. Ain’t It Cool News lives and dies by them and they’re not alone. 

**WARNING**

This email below is as full and complete a spoiler as there is, it completely unspools ”Source Code’s” plot and central mystery…

As with all of our SPS reviews, those of you who don’t want the film spoiled – DO NOT read further. I also suggest you do not read the comments of this post as the discussion is likely to give much away.

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True love is a hard thing to define, for there are as many ways to describe it as there are longstanding couples on this planet. For some, it’s about the romance, for others about being an emotional rock of support throughout life’s ups and downs. For still others, great sex is a key spice to a flavorful lifetime of happiness.

In the new romantic dramedy “Love and Other Drugs,” Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway play a pair who hook up – literally and figuratively – in 1996, just as Viagra entered the American marketplace and created a seismic shift in the romantic lives of countless couples. Jake plays Jamie, a freewheeling ladies’ man who enters the world of pharamceutical sales just in time to make a lucrative living hawking both Zoloft and the sexual wonder drug.

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Hathaway’s Maggie, however, veers between being way more reserved than Jamie , and engaging him in bouts of sexual abandon. She’s an artist who lives in a fancy loft (despite having no visible source of real income, a rare flaw in this film), and runs hot for Jamie as long as there are no romantic entanglements beyond the base level of wanton sex. Anything deeper suddenly drives her away, a fact that eventually drives Jamie crazy as he wonders what she’s hiding.

Yet the fact is, he already knows her worst secret: Maggie has Stage One Parkinson’s Disease. As Jamie starts to see the appeal of hot monogamy over emotionally cold promiscuity, he finds he’s falling hard for Maggie – and that fact will lead to plenty of complications.

“Love and Other Drugs” does have some cliched aspects to its plot (after all, do romantic comedies ever seem to end sadly?), and a couple of holes (how does an artist like her afford a place like that without any major sales depicted?, and why does the movie shift its attention completely away from the rollercoaster ride of selling red-hot drugs in the second half?). But what it does have going for it makes up for the problems in spades. (more…)

I only played the “Prince of Persia” game a couple times. Playing a game where you have the ability to reverse time and free-run is addicting, but not enough to make me go buy an entire game system. I might, however, pick up its cinematic counterpart. Jake Gyllenhaal stars in mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s latest epic “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” a swords and sorcery flick set in the desert of an ancient, fantastical Persian Empire.

Gyllenhaal as adopted-Prince Dastan wields wits and a time-altering dagger as he flees for his life after being falsely accused of assassinating his father, Persia’s King Sharaman (Ronald Pickup). Aided by a mysterious princess on a mission of her own (Gemma Arterton), Dastan searches for the truth of his father’s murder, a plot that would devastate the empire. To save the kingdom, he must expose the plot before time runs out. 

Given that the film’s underlying premise is a video game, it’s no surprise that the story is a little weak. Actors take too long to say what they mean, and corny jokes abound. The script’s dialogue just isn’t quite as polished as most Bruckheimer films.  (more…)

The Los Angeles Times has a sordid history of race baiting in its effort to pump up its progressive bonafides, despite a historic lack of diversity in their own staff. Their latest diatribe is a recent attack on Hollywood for “whitewashing” the Prince of Persia and The Last Airbender. They were quickly followed in lock step by the Huffington Post, publishing an AP article that seemed to be cribbed from the Times. And then the industry blog The Wrap took things a step further by calling this a “White Summer” for the “lack of diversity” in Hollywood films this season. Hear that Eddie Murphy, Jackie Chan, Common, Jaden Smith, Queen Latifah? You don’t have any movies this summer. Uh, wait.

Here’s the crux of their discontent. Prince of Persia and The Last Airbender have male leads played by white actors; Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia and Noah Ringer as Aang in ‘The Last Airbender. So, like the predictable hacks they are, they jumped on the racism argument. Dancing around the “R” word by reciting the industry’s history of casting white actors in non-white roles.

Yes, that did happen a lot in the past, and it does happen on occasion now. But here’s where the stupidity starts. Persians, aka Iranians, are ethnically white. In fact, most people of Eurasian stock are considered ethnically white. Casting a white actor as a Persian is hardly a racially insensitive move. And the Last Airbender is directed by Indian-American M. Night Shyamalan, who took exception to the criticisms his movie has gotten on this subject. (more…)

There are few things I hate more in life than movie trailers that give away the entire plot of a movie. One of the things I do hate more is the modern Hollywood war movie, which is invariably anti-war and, worse, reflexively anti-American or anti-troop.

So when I saw the previews for the new film “Brothers,” I was doubly annoyed. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, who starred in the egregiously offensive anti-American film “Rendition” (2007), as well as fellow liberal loudmouth Natalie Portman in addition to Tobey Maguire, “Brothers” had a trailer that seemed to scream out the entire plot: A soldier (played by Maguire) was presumably killed in battle in Afghanistan, which lead to an affair between his widow (Portman) and ne’er-do-well brother (Gyllenhaal) as the brother steps up to help her and her children recover from their loss.

The affair is then disrupted by the fact that Maguire is alive after all, his return heralded in the ads by horror-movie music that makes it look like the entire rest of the movie will center on him being a psychopathic animal, ultimately having a showdown with police in which he screams, “Shoot me!” (more…)

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Due out December 4th, “Brothers“ is a remake of a 2004 film called “Brodre,” which is summarized in part on IMDB with the following nugget:

Then Michael comes home with a full-blown case of post-traumatic stress disorder because of what he had to do to survive in captivity.

Leftist Hollywood loathes everything the American Military stands for: Honor, patriotism, selflessness and masculinity. Openly trashing the troops backfired decades ago, so the tactics had to change. Today, “support” for the troops is reflected in film after film after film stereotyping America’s best and brightest as victims, dupes, head cases and monsters. (more…)

There are few things more unappealing than the orgy of self-adulation one witnesses during a celebrity awards show.

Yes, the Oscar nominations are here, and America simply can’t afford to stand idly by anymore. Not after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had the audacity to misleadingly claim that Brad Pitt had not only engaged in acting this past year, but that he was among the finest to practice the craft.

Absurdity of such scope is one of the reasons the Oscars continue to lose viewers and hemorrhage influence. Sometimes it seems the academy has a desire to disconnect from the average moviegoer. Last year’s Oscar telecast, accordingly, logged the show’s tiniest audience on record. (more…)