FX’s modern-day, marshal-come-to-town western “Justified” is another bullet in the chamber for cable television and another bullet in the gut for network prime time crime drama.

The basic cable channels born of reruns and old movies have stolen the shield from powerhouse networks that once delivered innovative, complex dramas such as “Hill Street Blues,” “NYPD Blue” and “Miami Vice.”

While FX – along with partners in crime TNT and AMC – has honed its crime-story skills with sharp characters and combustible, yet sensible, story arcs, the old (lets say “aging”) networks are turning out the flabby, doughnut-eating beat cops of crime drama.

There are no gimmicks in “Justified.” Our hero can’t see the future, talk to ghosts, or magically tell if someone’s lying. His stories aren’t “ripped from the headlines,” and he doesn’t plunk evidence into the science machine to track down bad guys. He’s just a good man trying to make sense of a moral morass where his quest for justice and order is challenged by complicated relationships and hometown loyalties and allegiances.

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Nine alien adolescents are being hunted by aliens, one by one, in the recently-released thriller “I Am Number 4.” The aliens hunting the teens, who are referred to as numbers, are called Mogadorians and they must kill them in chronological order. After the first three are murdered, “Number 4″ must hide out to protect himself. Alex Pettyfer plays the lead character in this solid but unspectacular story about an alien teen who has to contend with aliens trying to kill him and high school bullies trying to embarrass him.

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As the story begins, John (Pettyfer) is posing as a typical teenager. However, when a bruise starts glowing on his body, he is forced to move away from his friends to escape their questions. John is accompanied by his “protector” Henri (Timothy Olyphant), whose main objective is to keep John safe.   The duo eventually moves to a small town in Ohio, where John starts attending the local school.

The story continues as a typical high school drama. At school, John meets Sam (Callan McAuliffe), an amiable teen who is being bullied by the school’s resident jocks. John inevitably befriends Sam and starts developing feelings for a pretty classmate named Sarah (Dianna Agron). Unsurprisingly, one of the bullies who enjoys taunting Sam also has feelings for Sarah. The Mogadorians eventually arrive in town and John is forced to confront them.

Number 4’s protector tries to protect John from the aliens but one only wishes that Henri could have protected John from some of the lame aspects of this story.

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High school outsiders have it rough enough already, feeling like aliens in the social universe around them. But for John Smith, the alias of the lead character in the new sci-fi thriller “I Am Number Four,” things are infinitely worse.

John’s the new kid in the Norman Rockwell-esque small town of Paradise, Ohio, having just moved there after fleeing his previous home near a California beach. In fact, John’s constantly running because in reality, he actually is an alien known as Number Four, who is one of only a few specially-gifted members of his species to survive a vicious attack on his home planet from an evil alien race known as the Mogs.

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The Mogs have seized control of John’s home planet, and live in fear that the specially-gifted young aliens such as John may someday lead a rebellion to take back their planet. Therefore, vicious Mog killers are tracking the heroic young aliens down around Earth and killing them – with John’s number literally coming up next.

With only a fellow alien warrior named Henri (Timothy Olyphant) to protect him, John must keep his identity secret while blending into yet another small town high school. But things get extra-complicated this time because he falls in love with Sarah (Dianna Agron), a good-girl cheerleader whose ex-boyfriend is the school quarterback and lead bully and who wants to kept the two new lovebirds apart.

John teams with the school’s long-established nerd Sam (Callan McAuliffe), whose father mysteriously died while investigating alien and UFO appearances, to fight off the Mogs and save Paradise. But can they do it alone, or will the hot blond girl (Teresa Palmer) who keeps walking away from explosions have to help them? (more…)

Most film critics start off each year with a list of their top 10 movies for the year before, an act of timing that often masks the fact that the first week of a new year is used to dump on an unsuspecting public the absolute worst garbage produced. This year is no exception, with the godawful-looking “Season of the Witch” coming out on Friday.

And so it is that I’ve taken a look back over the more than 100 movies I’ve seen in 2010, picking my 10 personal favorites. I won’t presume to say that they’re objectively the 10 best — I would have had to see more than 250 films last year to give an honest assessment of that. And while I know “The Social Network” is great filmmaking and appears to be the unanimous favorite for this year’s Best Picture Oscar, I think it’s too easy to simply agree with the pack. So, instead, I’m offering up 10 flicks that moved me, made me laugh, or thrilled me the most. Many of them were underrated and little-seen, but they are well worth renting now.

1. “Cyrus.” This indie film came out in July and served up what appeared to be the most unusual love triangle ever: Marisa Tomei as a lonely single mother, John C. Reilly as the even lonelier guy who is saved by her love, and Jonah Hill as her grown-up son, Cyrus, who seems way too close to his mom. Thankfully, nothing is as it first appears, and this crazily funny and surprisingly touching film winds up being my favorite gem of the year. (more…)

Tuesday was the finale of what I’ve come to believe is the best show on TV: “Justified.” I say that not because I’m enamored of the lead, Timothy Olyphant – and who would not love that hat? — but because of the show’s iconoclastic portrayal of the South. 

Hollywood has always stereotyped the South as full of ignorant rednecks and racists, and the Mason Dixie line became synonymous for Yankees like me, especially dark-skinned Latinas, as an area to avoid. Nevertheless, I met my husband forty years ago in the deepest of the South — Florida — and had an opportunity to form my own opinion. 

I learned that the N- word was routinely used by blacks and whites to describe any black and I was probably called a half-breed “spic” behind my back. That didn’t bother me, and as the years passed my in-laws grew up, so did the South.  One thing I did note was that none of the Southerners I met had any resemblance to the Hollywood boobs in the movies or on TV. They were bright, articulate and romantic. My husband reminded me that some of the best American literature is by Southerners and about the South.  (more…)

From a short story by crime legend Elmore Leonard comes Justified, a new FX drama written and produced by showrunner Graham Yost,  best known as the writer of the 1994 action movie Speed. Starring Deadwood alum Timothy Olyphant, Justified takes us to the wilds of modern day Kentucky and follows the exploits of Olyphant’s character, Marshall Raylan Givens, who is like a throwback  to an old Western sherriff. He’s a no nonsense straight shooter who tries reason in tough situations, but is quick with a draw when talk won’t cut it.

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The title of the show stems from a shooting in the first episode where Marshall Givens smoked a criminal in Miami who had done him wrong. The shooting was deemed “justified”, but it gets Raylan reassigned to his home state of Kentucky where he becomes reacquainted with old friends, foes and kin. The state seems very lush and beautiful on the show, full of old towns and houses, but also full of ornery natives or the occasional Yankee who’s living there in exile and dreaming of “civilization.”

Justified has a feel that plays very true to Elmore Leonard’s style which usually involves introducing some quirky losers and a hero of some kind, and then throws them into a situation involving money that they all end up fighting over. Having read all of his books, the series makes me feel like I am watching one of his stories come to life. (more…)

There is a scene in the movie “The Crazies” where a couple of men investigate to see if there was a plane crash in the area. Instead of going for easy thrills (i.e. people popping out of dark places to frighten the characters), the scene builds up drama and then ends with a  creepy camera shot.  Unfortunately, unlike this particular scene, the movie often relies on quick and easy scares rather than building up tension and intelligent thrills. 

“The Crazies” revolves around a small community where a virus takes over the population. One of the first scenes in the movie shows a tranquil baseball game with the sheriff (Timothy Olyphant) in attendance. Out in the distance, a man walks onto the baseball field carrying a gun. A confrontation ensues between the sheriff and this seemingly drunk man and soon thereafter other people in town start acting strange. As more people begin acting out of character, the sheriff  investigates what caused this change in behavior and why people are acting like zombies.

For its scares, the movie often relies on “the crazies” popping out of places and scaring people. Wherever the characters go, there always seems to be someone hiding in a bedroom, in a kitchen and even (in a creative sequence) in a car wash. Unfortunately, this is part of the film’s problem. Instead of relying on interesting and original sequences, the plot just moves the characters from one setting to another where zombies appear from nowhere. (One wonders how long crazies stand in one place silently waiting for the lead characters to show up so that they can jump out and surprise them. Do crazies pay board games while they wait for potential victims?) (more…)

Hollywood’s problems are such right now that the only way they can make any money is through soul-killing popcorn films that everyone sees, no one likes, and fewer of us are buying on DVD. We are simply no longer willing to pay for any film that looks anything close to “serious.” But can you blame us? After a decade-plus of being relentlessly beat over the head with anti-American, anti-troop, anti-Bush, anti-Southern, and anti-anything that isn’t elitist Blue State and all things Meterosexual, if the trailer doesn’t contain a whole lot of explosions or some kind of romcom meet-cute, we just aren’t going to risk being insulted.

One way Hollywood might earn a smidgen of our goodwill back would be to lay off the American military. If these Hollywoodists were just a little flexible and willing to meet us halfway — if they were just willing to treat the American military with half the respect they show for a child-rapist director, there could be a mutual quiet area in this ongoing culture war that would benefit all of us. 

After all, how hard would it have been to make “The Crazies‘” evildoers — those who bully, terrorize, and murder the innocent civilians of a small Iowa town, something other than our military? There’s a whole world of bad guys out there but as our guys risk and sacrifice everything to liberate 50 million people they’ve never met in Iraq and Afghanistan, as they do God’s work in Haiti, I’m supposed to sit back and accept them being portrayed as no better than concentration camp Nazis? (more…)