Ladies, hold on to your boyfriends!  This is one terrifying movie!!  I, for one, cannot remember a time when I have screamed so loud in a movie theater.  Literally clutching the armrest, screaming!!  I really feel that those who dismiss this film as overrated and not all that effective are, quite simply, victims of their own pseudo-intellectual over-hype: they were scared, they just won’t admit it because that will bring them down to the level of the masses and their egos will not tolerate that.

Kristen (Liv Tyler) and James (Scott Speedman) return to James’s family vacation home late one night after a friend’s wedding.  Clearly he proposed and she did not accept and the resulting tension is evident.  He drowns his sorrow in ice cream, she takes a bath, they almost have make-up sex but are interrupted by a knock at the door (weird, since it’s 4am).  In a line that will become legendary in horror film buff circles, a girl at the door asks:

“Is Tamara home?”

Of course, they inform her she has the wrong house.  Again, weird, but things like this do happen, so not much thought is attributed to this episode and James ventures out to fetch Kristen some more cigarettes.  She will need them.  I needed them.

From this moment on, strap in.  The roller coaster does not let up for the next hour.

First time director Bryan Bertino hand delivers the suspense and stages his scenes in such a way that a lot of the time we, the audience, know more that the characters do.  For instance, we know well before Liv that she is not alone in that house.  The record player skips, the smoke detector is not where she left it, the phone lines are cut, etc.  We see masked figures moving in and out of the frame like ghosts, quietly stalking their prey, until…..that first “scream” moment.  And, boy is it a doozie!!! 

One of the things, among many, that Bertino gets right is characterization.  Kristen and James are not your standard horror movie dummies.  They are real people, not script inventions.  They don’t have the standard issue movie problems, such as repressed abusive childhood memories, daddy issues, or traumatic high school experiences.  They are real.  The situation they find themselves in is real.  Same goes for the psychopathic intruders.  They are not super-human, possessing extraordinary strength and ability to walk through walls, or what have you.  The whole film bases itself in earthbound reality and that, I think, is why it is so effective and downright scary.  It is just real people trapped in the real woods being stalked and terrorized by real psychos. 

Some people in reviews I have read have found fault with the script.  I didn’t mind so much, not only because it is not the film’s rasion d’etre, but because what the characters say is true to the situation.  Next time you find yourself in a circumstance when you are scared out of your mind, flip on a tape recorder and listen to it later (provided there is a later), and see how you sound.  Would you make sense?  Would you use big, Hollywood script-worthy words?  Or would you, more than likely, spew whatever came out of your fear-stained mouth at that moment?  This is not a literary movie where enormous emphasis is spent on the dialogue, but a horror movie, where characters should speak out of fear, not necessarily reason.  All motivations and details in the film are true to the circumstance and the characters, and as a result, ‘The Strangers’ bypasses the expected “stupid horror movie people” scenario moviegoers in this day and age have come to expect.

As far as performances go (there are only 6 people in the movie, not counting the two young boys who bookend the film), all of the actors perform far better than they are expected to.  Liv Tyler…who knew??  Not only is she a first-rate scream-queen, but she is able to register fear and dread with an extraordinary expressiveness.  Remembering my acting years, one thing I do know is that it is not easy to convey emotions and “act” with little or no dialogue.  That she is able to do so as effectively as she does is a testament to her talent, only sparingly utilized thus far in her career.  Scott Speedman, he of the ‘Underworld’ movies, plays the male lead as someone who has probably tried to be all alpha-male his whole life, but who is really just a big kid who can cry when he gets his feelings hurt.  This vulnerability suits the character well and, again, although he is given a bit more dialogue, he is able to register both the fear and the uncertainty that James feels during the episode.  Mention must be made of the three intruders (Kip Weeks, Gemma Ward, Laura Margolis) as well.  While given hardly any dialogue at all, and their faces hidden behind creepy masks, no less, the three of them manage to inhabit the psychos and, via the way in which they walk, turn their heads ever so slowly, move in and out of Bertino’s compositions, scare the ever-loving CRAP out of us!!

As a debuting feature director, Bertino shows incredible promise.  He knows his way around a horror movie, that’s for sure.  On the basis of ‘The Strangers’ alone,
America can look forward to a talented and unique new filmmaker, delivering product that is just this side of mainstream.  I just hope his head doesn’t start to swell and he ends up as another affected M. Night, churning out piffle like ‘The Village’ and ‘Lady in the Water.’  Now that would be the only thing scarier than ‘The Strangers.’

Look, I know nothing about Billie Holiday. I knew she was a jazz singer. That’s it. Funny thing is…I don’t know much more about her after having seen the movie based on her life. But that’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy the movie, on the contrary. I enjoyed it very much, primarily because of one thing…Miss Diana Ross.

Now, I am not what you would call a “fan” of The Supremes. I enjoy their music, appreciate it for it’s place in music history, but don’t have any of their albums and don’t know much about them as a group, except that they inspired ‘Dreamgirls.’ So I really have no individual interest in seeing Diana Ross, the singer, in a movie, as an actress (unlike the fascination I had to see if Britney Spears could pull off the jump to film in ‘Crossroads’…she couldn’t). Ross is simply amazing in this movie! I mean, everything about her. Gimme a break…it’s not easy for a middle-aged actress to convincingly portray a 14-year old girl! She pulls it off so convincingly that you quickly forget that you are watching Diana Ross play an adolescent. But she doesn’t stop there. She is heartbreaking in the scenes in the sanitarium where she is completely out of it, writhing around on the floor and barely mumbling, her eyes wild and her twitches so believable that for a second you think you’re watching one of those HBO documentaries. And her singing!!! From what I understand from reading other reviews from other critics and doing a quick Wikipedia search, Ross wasn’t really trying to emulate Billie Holiday’s singing voice. She was simply doing Diana Ross singing a bunch of Billie Holiday songs. But who cares when your voice sounds like that?? The voice is gorgeous! So clear and filled with emotion. It’s beautiful.

The ferocity of her performance, however, doesn’t completely outshine the other performers, all of whom do standout jobs. Billy Dee Williams is smooth and charming and you can tell that his character, Louis McKay, clearly loves Billie with all his heart. (Again, from doing some basic research, I understand that in real life, McKay was her third husband and, like both of her previous spouses, was physically abusive.) But, in the context of the movie, their relationship is tender, loving and passionate, and Ross and Williams project some real chemistry. We believe them when they look into each other’s eyes and say, “I love you.” Richard Pryor, as Billie’s faithful piano man, is also noteworthy for his charismatic presence on the screen and his natural ease of performance. While director Sidney J. Furie clearly takes many liberties with Ms. Holiday’s life story, and doesn’t take any non-musical-biopic-genre-specific chances with the narrative, he directs the film with substantial style and grace. The production looks beautiful and expensive (it was produced by Berry Gordy…do you think he’d let Diana Ross out of the house if he thought this was going to be a cheapo production?). Many of Holiday’s songs are heard and they are wonderful, as interpreted by Ross.

But it all boils down to the performance of Diana Ross. I mean, the strength of the role and of her acting places this performance in the same league as other tremendous debut performances, like Dolly Parton in ‘9 to 5′ and, more recently, Jennifer Hudson in ‘Dreamgirls.’ It’s mesmerizing and stunning to watch. Watch the film for her, even better if you like the music. The movie, by itself, is good, but, trust me, watch it for her.

Well, what can I say?? This movie is almost un-reviewable. It is exactly what you would expect from a huge summer blockbuster movie. Pretty people put in unbelievable (read: unrealistic and moronic) circumstances that allow for a lot of explosions and collateral damage flying at the screen, all pumped up to the nth decibel level. Not that all of that is a bad thing. I mean, that’s what summer entertainment is! And, sometimes, it can be great fun. As is the case with Michael Bay’s ‘Transformers,’ based on the popular line of action figures from the 80’s. This is a great big, loud, expensive, special FX-heavy summer movie…just the kind of thing movie audiences expect to be released over the July Fourth holiday weekend (except for the absence of Will Smith).

At the outset, we are in Qatar at a military base where several soldiers are taking a well-deserved breather, when all of a sudden, big, machine-gun wielding robots show up and effectively annihilate the base. A small unit of soldiers (Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson among them) survives the attack. Cut to high school dweeb Sam (Shia LeBeouf) giving a lame presentation in his history class about his great-great-Grandfather, an Arctic Circle explorer. Sam’s Dad buys him a beat up old Camaro (a reward for good grades), which mysteriously appears at the Auto Shop of a cameo-ing Bernie Mac. The car is great and Sam hopes driving some cool wheels will help him score the resident hottie, Mikaela (Megan Fox). Once again, cut to the Secretary of Defense (Jon Voight) giving a press conference about the aforementioned attack in Qatar, indicating that the only identification of the mysterious attackers retrieved is a weird voice signal. The people gathered at said press conference are the #1 minds in the area of voice analysis and code breaking in the country who have been summoned in order to try and decipher the strange signal. Soon, the soldiers are back in the States to give eyewitness accounts of the alien attackers, Sam’s cool car starts acting weird by stealing itself in the middle of the night and transforming into a walking, talking robotic menace, and the analysts are discovering that the voice signal may be otherworldly. Of course, all of this set up is just an excuse to get to the real meat of this film’s existence: the computer generated FX of car’s transforming into giant robots, of which, we learn, there are two camps: the good Autobots, and the evil Deceptacons, both after (what else??) a source of ultimate power called the Allspark.

This leads to several scenes where ordinary machines transform spectacularly into enormous, dangerous robots from another planet! Surprisingly, this is not the movie’s greatest strength. We all knew the effects would be terrific…do you really think Michael Bay (and Exec. Producer Steven Spielberg) would’ve let this movie leave DreamWorks if the effects were not spectacular? This movie does not disappoint in that department at all. The transformation sequences are truly a terrific wonder and achievement in computer generated graphics. It all looks seamless and beautifully blended with the live actors, mere playthings in a movie like this. No, the greatest strength, in my opinion, of this film is the tongue-in-cheek approach the movie adopts. This is evidenced almost immediately, in the opening credits, where a title card reads “In Association With Hasbro,” the same Hasbro that makes Hot Wheels and half of the toys that most of the moviegoers played with as youngsters. At this moment, everyone in my screening knew what he or she was in for. Further, there is a moment when Mikaela asks Sam if he thinks she’s shallow. His answer: “There is more than meets the eye…with you.” This is, of course, a reference to the Transformers cartoon tagline, “More than meets the eye.” This movie doesn’t try and reinvent the source cartoon or try to update it for a new generation. It just takes the basic premise for the cartoon (Autobots vs. Deceptacons) and creates a fairly simple story around it.

Performances in this type of movie are typically barely worth mentioning. Here, the acting is perfectly fine, no major thesping going on here, just a lot of running and ducking and shouting. LeBeouf, Fox, Duhamel, Voight, Gibson all do what is required of them fine (LeBeouf actually showing a bit of charisma and confidence in a leading man role), as does the rest of the cast (which, in addition to Bernie Mac, also includes Anthony Anderson as an uber-hacker, and John Turturro as a super secret agent).

But the real calling card here is the Transformers themselves: Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Megatron and the rest. They look great and Bay has definitely succeeded in bringing the classic cartoon into the 21st century for both older fans and younger action hounds to enjoy.

My favorite line: While running down the street, fleeing from a Deceptacon attack, one bystander shouts to a friend of his, “This is so much better than ‘Armageddon!’” ‘Armageddon,’ of course, being a similar Michael Bay, blowing things up, summer blockbuster from a few years back.

An extremely intense, brilliantly performed two-person character study centering on an adolescent girl (Ellen Page) and a pedophile (Patrick Wilson) who connect with each other over the internet. One of the reasons that I think this movie is so effective and disturbing is that it deals with a scary subject matter so timely and in-the-present in this age of not only technology, but where young girls dress, act, and sound like they could easily be adults. Of course, this does not come close to excusing the behavior of pedophiles (nothing could), and this film asks what would happen if a would-be victim got to her attacker first, and put him through the abuse and terror that he would, no doubt, expose her (or someone else) to sooner or later.

The set up is simple: Hayley, 14, (Page) and Jeff, 32, (Wilson) virtually meet over the internet in a chat room and eventually decide to meet up at a local coffee shop. A few hours later, after establishing a friendly vibe, the two decide to head back to Jeff’s place. It’s never explicitly vocalized that they are going back to his home for sex, but that is definitely the implication. I will stop there in terms of describing the story because I wouldn’t dream of ruining it for someone who may want to take this journey. Suffice it to say that what transpires is NOT what you would expect or could even imagine in your most vivid imaginary construct.

I am still astounded (I saw the film a few days ago) at the superior level of acting in this picture! I mean, if this film were not an indie and did not deal with such a taboo subject matter, Ellen Page would have easily walked away with an Oscar nomination. She is simply captivating. She maintains a sense of innocence, purity and girlishness, all the while presenting a much more vindictive and extremely frightening side to her character. It’s incredible to watch and her focus and dedication is miraculous. Wilson is just as good in some unbelievably intense scenes that will make your mouth drop to the floor as mine did. He, perhaps, has an even bigger challenge than Page in designing a character that isn’t textbook slimy as would be the easy way to portray a pedophile. He sees Jeff as a normal guy with a bad habit, really, and he presents him in such a way that the audience initially sees him as such, before coming to their senses and taking a step back and realizing he is what he is. He and Page are perfectly matched…I really can’t say enough about the brilliance of these two performances.

Sometimes with intimate character pieces, there is a risk of producing a film that looks and feels stagy (see ‘Hurlyburly,’ which even had a few more cast members than this piece, but still seemed like a glorified stage production). However, director David Slade, undoubtedly realizing this tendency, nicely overcomes this potential problem with fluid camerawork (invaluably assisted by cinematographer Jo Willems) and inventive angles to keep the viewer’s eyes moving instead of just resting on simple two-shots. The direction from Mr. Slade is assured and confident and he (along with Brian Nelson, screenwriter, and his amazing actors) creates a powerful and unsettling piece of cinema. It’s amazing that something this careful and top-notch was assembled in such a short period of time (18 days according to imdb). That’s just a nod to the extraordinary commitment and devotion of a remarkably talented company.

Well, first off, this movie really depends on your tolerance and personal enjoyment of Andrew Dice Clay and his particular brand of comedy, as this is a vehicle specifically designed for him. So, if you’re not a fan, there’s really no reason for you to see this movie and, therefore, you probably aren’t even reading this review. To be honest, I don’t count myself as a die-hard Dice fan, but, incredibly, I found myself chuckling at bits and pieces of this idiotic time-waster about a supposed “Rock N Roll Detective” investigating the murder of an outrageous shock-jock (Gottfried). I mean, with a cast including Dice, Priscilla Presley, Gilbert Gottfried, Ed O’Neill, and Wayne Newton (!), how seriously can you really take this stuff?

Ford Fairlane (Dice) is “Mr. Rock N Roll Detective,” an Elvis-inspired, chain smoking, bimbo loving private eye specializing in the music industry. One night, the aforementioned shock jock, Johnnie Crunch, (who also happens to be a childhood friend of Ford’s, natch), calls on Ford to locate his missing daughter. Driving away from this meeting (and thinking to himself in endless, unnecessary voice-over narration), Ford hears what sounds like a particularly violent radio broadcast from Crunch’s station. Busting into Crunch’s DJ booth, he find him strung up and in the process of being electrocuted. The next morning, Priscilla Presley shows up at Ford’s door and offers him $5000 to find the same girl as the dead Johnnie Crunch wanted found. Hmmm??? The easy part is finding the girl; whose name, ZuZu Petals, is classic and who probably has to be the dumbest, most innocently naive rock groupie ever to walk the planet! It’s her responses to things and general bubble headedness that give the film a lot of its giggly moments. More often than not, I was laughing at her, not Dice, which is a problem in a star vehicle when you laugh more at the supporting character than at the star! Anyway, once Ford locates ZuZu, he, with the help of his ridiculously sexy assistant, Jazz (Lauren Holly), must find out why Johnnie was killed and who wanted him dead. Throughout his investigation, he has to deal with the requisite by the books “other detective on the case,” Lt. Amos (Ed O’Neill), a former disco singer; a slimy record producer (Wayne Newton - very slimy, but I’m sure his hair gel didn’t help!); a crazy goon (Robert Englund - Freddy from the “Nightmare on Elm Street” movies); and assorted other weirdos.

I think Renny Harlin was a good choice to direct this piffle-piece of a cinematic pixie-stick. His slick, rock n roll visual style isn’t suitable to every movie, but suits this material well. His shots are fast and constantly moving, the edits are quick, and the whole thing looks like it could be re-cut into a three minute music video. Having grown up in the age of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer movies (of which this is NOT one), I am a sucker for the highly stylized, rock music heavy, little substance movie. If nothing else, the picture is pleasant to look at. Plus the fact, this film is wall-to-wall hot chicks, complete with an insanely fantasized vision of a sorority house, with nubile coeds actually having pillow fights and doing aerobics on the balcony! Harlin stages this sequence with camera tilts, flashy colors, booty cams…the works, and choreographs the whole thing to the Billy Idol tune ‘Cradle of Love,’ which became a mainstream top ten hit. I mean, really??? You have to love the sheer spectacle of it all!

In his first leading man starring role, Dice actually isn’t so bad. I mean, the film ain’t “Lawrence of Arabia,” but he exhibits a breezy confidence that exudes a sort of screen presence. His humor is offensive, clearly misogynistic and sometimes downright mean, so that “screen presence” thing only goes so far, but, as I said before, the only reason you will be watching this movie is if you are already hip to Dice’s shtick. He seems to be having fun in the movie, which is good for any actor in a comedy - whether you like them or not. The rest of the cast seems to be having a good time too, well, except Priscilla Presley whose facial expressions, or lack thereof, indicate that the botox has paralyzed her entire face! The rest, however, are fun. Wayne Newton is interesting to watch as a total slimeball, Ed O’Neill (from “Married…With Children”) is amusing as he embarrasses himself singing and dancing to the worst disco song of all time, Gilbert Gottfried does his usual screeching, and Maddie Corman is quite funny as the dim-bulb, ZuZu, forever snapping her gum and acting as though her head is filled with helium.

I’ll say it again…if you don’t like Andrew Dice Clay, there is absolutely no reason for you to see this film because you’ll just upset yourself. But, for admirers of Dice and his politically way-incorrect jokes, there will be times when you laugh, though you’ll never bust a gut. But at least you can sit back and look at the pretty pictures!