It’s often said that “time heals.” Although it’s true that time heals a lot of things, we can’t forget that it reveals a lot of things as well. And one of the things that time has most recently revealed is that President Obama’s 2008 mantra of “yes we can” has actually turned into “we probably can’t, but I’ll never admit it.”

Obama is on a downward slide everywhere in the country, except in 10 of the most liberal states in the union (i.e., these states that would still vote for FDR or Woodrow Wilson were either miraculously resurrected and placed back on the ticket). As a matter of fact, Obama-nomics have been so disastrous to America that one of the DRUDGEREPORT’s most recent headlines was “BARACKALYPSE NOW.”

So what’s Hollywood’s response to the first two and half years of Obama? Wel,l duh, they’re helping him out by producing an October 2012 surprise that will highlight the killing of Osama bin Laden just in time to get voters excited for The One again.

In all fairness, let me say that from the moment I first learned bin Laden had been killed, I immediately thought Obama would release the pictures of the terrorist’s body during October 2012 in hopes of making us think he really is a war president worthy of re-election. Now it appears he won’t have to do that, because Hollywood is going to use a gazillion dollar movie set to provide us scenes that look even better than the real ones. At least they’ll look better to Obama: our wonderful president who, after meeting SEAL Team 6 said, “They looked less young and fearsome than he expected, and more like guys working at Home Depot.” (According to Maureen Dowd)

The movie, directed by Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow and written by Oscar-winner Mark Boal, will likely cast Obama isn the most positive light possible and the White House is so desperate for eager to get some kind of boost in the polls that they’ve even allowed Boal into parts of the White House and Pentagon that are normally off-limits (which included allowing Boal into a “CIA ceremony celebrating the hero seals”).

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“Fast Five,” the fifth entry in the “Fast and the Furious” series, begins where the fourth film ended. Dominic Torreto (Vin Diesel) has been arrested and is being transferred to a new prison in a police van. His friends, including his one-time adversary Brian O’ Conner (Paul Walker), are following the van. As “Fast Five” begins, a high-speed car chase ensues and the long-time criminal is freed.

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Eventually, the action moves to Rio, where Toretto and O’ Conner plan a major heist against a local criminal.  Their scheme forces them to recruit some of their accomplices from the earlier films bringing back many of the cast members who have helped make this series so successful. The details of the robbery aren’t important; nor are many of the supporting characters who return to participate in it.

The only important characters are the two lead actors (Vin Diesel and Walker) who guide this story through its ridiculous plot, and Dwayne Johnson, who joins the cast as Luke Hobbs. Hobbs is a government agent charged with tracking down and arresting Toretto. Unlike some of their earlier adversaries, Hobbs is an actual threat to both Toretto and O’Conner. He’s a fierce officer who usually catches his target and eventually faces off against Toretto in a graphic fight scene. (more…)

The long-running “Fast and the Furious” film series recently returned to theaters with “Fast Five.” Since its release, this fifth installment has broken numerous box office records showing the continued strength of this series. With that in mind, I recently watched the first four “Fast” films to see why this franchise has kept its engine humming for so long.

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The Fast and the Furious (2001): Paul Walker stars in the original as Brian O’ Conner, an undercover police officer investigating a string of truck robberies. The investigation leads him to Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), a car-racing criminal. O’Conner befriends Dom and starts dating his sister, while hoping that his new friend isn’t the culprit behind the robberies.

Out of all five films, “The Fast and the Furious” continues to be my favorite. It’s a fun and exciting adventure with “cool” characters and a few great action scenes, including a climactic scene during a truck robbery. The story isn’t great but it’s a fun way to spend an afternoon. (more…)

I’ll never cease to be amazed at which films manage to spawn a sequel, much less an entire series of followups. There have been a dozen versions of “Friday the 13th,” 10 versions of “Halloween,” three versions of “Porky’s” and at least six variations of “American Pie” (counting the direct-to-video releases) balancing off more entertaining efforts like the five “Lethal Weapon” films and six “Star Wars” movies.

But I never thought I would possibly enjoy a “Fast and the Furious” film, with the seemingly mindless concept not even enticing me to see the first three movies in the series on television. But two years ago while visiting a friend in Boston, I was dragged into the fourth “Furious” film, “Fast and Furious” (inventive!) despite my complaints that I wouldn’t understand the plot without having seen the first three movies.

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“Don’t worry about it. It’ll be like you haven’t missed a thing,” said my friend. And boy, was he right. The movie was indeed as stupid as I expected, but it also lived up to its name as fast and furious fun. And my friend was right: despite having missed three entire films – six full hours – of the characters’ prior lives and adventures, I understood it completely and without taxing my brain at all.

So imagine my surprise with “Fast Five,” the fifth film in the series, which opens today. Even after having liked the fourth film on a visceral level, I thought this would be just milking the cash cow dry. But instead, the filmmakers – including director Justin Lin and writer Chris Morgan, who have now presided over the last three films of the series – have somehow decided to step up their game and establish the film as a classic of the action genre that will surely stand as one of the biggest and best entertainments of the year and hell, maybe even the decade.

It really is that good.

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Like the everyday pizza it so closely resembles, the new Fast Five offers one thing and one thing only. Forget fancy toppings and artisanal crusts; sometimes you just want something round and reddish. This movie is that pie. And like Domino’s, it delivers.

If you remember The Fast and the Furious, the first entry in this 10-year-old franchise, you’ve already seen this picture. Like the four previous installments, Fast Five gives only the most minimal of nods to plot and characters, concentrating instead on high-end hot rods, screaming tires, and general vehicular mayhem. The stars, once again, are Vin Diesel, playing ex-con street racer Dominic Toretto, and Paul Walker, as ex-lawman street racer Brian O’Conner. Also on hand one more time is Jordana Brewster as Mia, who is both Dom’s sister and Paul’s girlfriend and, when pressed, a pretty fair wheel-girl, too.

This time out, the three leads have gone to ground in Rio de Janeiro, on the lam following the barrage of action that opens the movie. Their attention is soon drawn to a local crime lord named Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida), who disdains banks and instead keeps his ill-gotten multimillions in safe houses around the city. Dom and Brian want this money. To rip it off, Dom puts out a call to several actors who’ve been resting up from various earlier films, and soon we’re joined by a team of heist specialists that includes Tyrese Gibson, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, and onetime Miss Israel Gal Gadot (whose prize-winning butt plays a key role in the proceedings). To reveal that this crew ultimately manages to separate Reyes from his money spoils, I’m sure, nothing.

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I just finished voting for the Screen Actors Guild awards and after wading through the five “screeners” they sent me I started wondering about the leading men of today.In this day of confused metro-sexual male stars one might wonder where all the real men have gone. 

Look at the leading men of today. When I saw Leonardo DiCaprio as a tough guy in Gangs of New York I wasn’t sure if it was a drama or a comedy. Matt Damon isn’t too bad but I‘m not convinced he could take a punch. I like Bill Pullman but he looks like he is always on the verge of breaking into tears. George Clooney, please my sister could throw him down and twist him up like a pretzel.

Here are my top five unrecognized real men of filmdom. I skipped the obvious choices like The Duke and Clint and went for some guys who are well known but not often looked at as Alpha dogs. Can you imagine any of these guys sitting in anything but a leather barber chair? Can you see any of them wondering if they should get frosted tips or a mani-pedi? Just being a tough guy wasn’t enough for my list they also had to have the craft of acting down too! (more…)

He is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer. Self-effacing, self-forgetting, still he is a killer. . . All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. — D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

Every once in awhile an action film comes along that revives. That proves that — no matter how strong the political correctness of an age, no matter how pale and pathetic its notions of masculinity, no matter how much Ritalin is force-fed to little boys, no matter how many toy guns, xylophone mallets, and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots get banned from stores and playgrounds — there are certain aspects of the male soul that are inviolate, and certain primal yearnings that are evergreen. Taken (2008) is one of those films, and its release last week on DVD and Blu-ray should be heralded by lovers of all things red-blooded, hairy-chested, and morally sound.

When this movie appeared in the doldrums of Hollywood’s off-season, it was expected to die a quick death in a marketplace filled with audiences either too sophisticated or too sophomoric to respond. Modern theatergoers, the theory goes, increasingly want their “heroes” to be either brooding Abercrombie & Fitch nymphets like Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, feckless stumblebums like Ben Stiller and Paul Blart: Mall Cop’s Kevin James, quirky class cut-ups like Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp, or silly video-game tough guys like Jason Statham, Vin Diesel, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. When an actor does put some honest testosterone in his performance — Daniel Craig in Munich (2005), Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino (2008) — it’s inevitably to make a much larger point about violence breeding only more violence, all of it equally reprehensible, a product of way too many pesky males wreaking havoc in primitive bursts of knuckle-dragging temper. (more…)

In my Final Weekend Tracking column posted on Wednesday, I predicted that X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Fox) would reach $92M on opening weekend, despite soft reviews (now only 38% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes). My first fearless forecast of the 2009 summer blockbuster season appears to be close to dead-on (missed by only 5%).

Star-turned-producer Hugh Jackman has scored his second-biggest opening ever and, easily, his biggest as a solo star. Wolverine has mauled the competition with a massive $34.75M opening day (including $5M or so in Thursday midnight sales). That could translate to a 3-day of $86.8M, getting Hollywood’s most lucrative season off to a spectacular start.

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The great thing about a sequel is that it has a built-in audience. The problem with sequels is that, as the numbers after the title go up, so does the production budget. Very hard to know for sure, but sources have told me that the production budget for X-Men was in the $75M range. X-2: X-Men United may have had a budget of about $110M, while the cost of X-Men: The Last Stand was, in all likelihood, as much as $210M. Why doesn’t it make sense to just churn out X-Men 4?

Look at these numbers.

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Recording superstar Beyonce Knowles is building a bankable resume for herself as an actress with Sony Screen Gems’ Obsessed as the latest title burnishing her resume. Co-starring the excellent Idris Elba (The Wire), this low budget, PG-13 genre pic has scored a far-above-expectations $11M on Friday, and it will likely reach $27.5M for the weekend. That is the best opening yet for the former Destiny’s Child lead vocalist as an above-the-title star, topping 2003’s The Fighting Temptations and Cadillac Records from late 2008.

Beyonce does battle with the sexy Ali Larter (HEROES) in OBSESSED

OPENINGS FOR BEYONCE MOVIES
1. Austin Powers: Goldmember – $70.3M opening
2. Obsessed – $27.5M opening (projected)
3. Pink Panther (2006) – $20.2M opening
4. Dreamgirls – $14.1M wide break (after a platform start)
5. The Fighting Temptations – $11.7M opening
6. Cadillac Records – $3.4M opening

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The final weekend of April has never been Hollywood’s favorite release date. In fact, it is generally considered to be among the worst release dates on the calendar. Whatever opens on the final weekend of April gets absolutely crushed by the official start of the summer blockbuster season on the first weekend of May.

The 4 new wide releases and 1 major specialty release set to debut this weekend will face an onslaught of mega-hits over the next month. How can Obsessed (Sony), Earth (Disney), The Soloist, (Dreamworks/Paramount), Fighting (Rogue) and The Informers (Senator) possibly find an audience with X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Fox) and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (Warner Bros) arriving next weekend followed by, in successive weeks, Star Trek (Paramount), Angels & Demons (Sony), the combo of Night at the Museum 2 (Fox) and Terminator: Salvation (Fox) and Disney/Pixar’s Up?

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With 400,000 Americans showing up every year at the Indy 500 and 200,000 more buying tickets to see NASCAR’s premiere event The Daytona 500, you would think that the most creative minds in Hollywood would be looking for a way to cash in with more movies about car racing and car culture. NASCAR has an estimated 75 million fans, and it is second only to the National Football League in terms of television ratings, so where are all the good racing movies?

Jordana Brewster is reunited with Vin, Paul and Michelle in FAST & FURIOUS

Universal seems to have answered that question by getting its successful street racing franchise back into the fast lane this weekend with Fast & Furious. The movie, which reunites Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez for the first time since 2001’s original surprise blockbuster, has exploded to a high octane $30.11M or so on Friday and that could mean a $70M opening weekend. That would make it the all-time #1 opening for a car racing movie.

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Universal’s Fast & Furious will be “burning rubber” this weekend at America’s multiplexes as the original street-racing cast reunites after some sub-par chapters of the franchise.

The original The Fast & The Furious hit theatres in 2001 under the direction of Rob Cohen who had shown a knack for action with Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story ($35M US cume) and Sly Stallone’s Daylight ($33M US cume) and a savvy feel for bigger-than-life characters in his Golden Globe winning biopic The Rat Pack (which, if you’ve never seen you should put in your Netflix cue and prepare to be amazed by Don Cheadle’s turn as Sammy Davis, Jr.). In tow, he had a 34-year-old Vin Diesel in only his second starring role following the surprise low budget hit Pitch Black ($39M cume) and 28-year-old Paul Walker, who had just starred in Cohen’s forgettable The Skulls. Also in the cast was Jordana Brewster (As the World Turns) and a pre-Lost Michelle Rodriguez, whose most notable credit was a gritty little indie called Girlfight.

Vin Diesel returns for FAST & FURIOUS

The result was box office jet fuel. Seemingly out of nowhere, The Fast & The Furious scored a scalding $40M opening weekend and reached $144.5M domestic and over $200M worldwide. But Diesel, whose signature line in the original movie is “I live my life one quarter of a mile at a time,” didn’t like the script for the sequel (or they wouldn’t pay his asking price depending on who you ask). That led to the 2003 sequel 2 Fast 2 Furious directed by Academy Award nominee John Singleton (Boyz n the Hood) starring Walker along with rapper Tyrese Gibson and Eva Mendes. Despite Diesel’s conspicuous absence, 2 Fast still delivered $127M in the US. (more…)