AWN Blogs

There have been several Iraq War films, some of them have been quite good, but this is the best so far. Kathryn Bigelow's gripping thriller doesn't have a political message about this particular war, but has something to say about war in general. In following the elite bomb squad soldiers, the film delves into how war can be a powerful drug.

Sgt. JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie, NOTORIOUS) is trying to finish out his tour in the bomb squad following a terrible accident. In this unit, Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty, JARHEAD) is having trouble coping with the thin line between life and death. He lashes out in his counseling sessions with Col. John Cambridge (Christian Camargo, NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS), who he believes doesn't know what its really like to be out in battle. Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner, 28 WEEKS LATER) becomes their new leader, and compared to their cautious former leader Sgt. Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce, MEMENTO), he looks reckless.

After THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY hit big in 1998, raunchy sex comedies became bankable and popular. While many are sophomoric, the original AMERICAN PIE is surprising in how it lets its characters grow. The plot is like so many other films like it. Friends make a pact to get laid. But how it handles that pact comes from someplace very real.

Jim Levenstein (Jason Biggs, EIGHT BELOW) has little experience in the sex department and his many experiments have been embarrassing to say the least. Chris "Oz" Ostreicher (Chris Klein, ROLLERBALL) is a jocky lacrosse player who doesn't know how to talk to girls. Kevin Myers (Thomas Ian Nicholas, ROOKIE OF THE YEAR) has been dating Vicky (Tara Reid, URBAN LEGEND) for some time, but she wants their first time to be special and he's getting frustrated. Paul Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas, HAROLD & KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE) is an eccentric who enlists his free-spirited friend Jessica (Natasha Lyonne, SLUMS OF BEVERLY HILLS) to help him get girls. These are the four friends who will vow to loose their virginity before prom.

With Michael Mann's PUBLIC ENEMIES arriving in theaters this week, This Weekend's Film Festival takes a look at other cinematic tales of real-life cops and robbers. There's a tale of Ness and Capone. A story of two different undercover cops. The tragedy of a gangster turned rat. And the sexiest bank robbers ever to hit the screen. Join the crew and enjoy the ride.

Brian DePalma's THE UNTOUCHABLES tells the tale of Elliot Ness's crusade to put notorious criminal Al Capone behind bars. As I said in my original review, "This film is a gritty crime drama, which pits a good guy against a bad guy. However, in 1920s Chicago the line between good guys and bad guys is quite blurred…" Kevin Costner plays Ness as a by-the-books Washington agent who doesn't know how tough the streets of Chicago are. Jim Malone, played in an Oscar-winning performance by Sean Connery, joins Ness's team called The Untouchables, and becomes a mentor to the naïve fed. Along with rookie sure-shot George Stone (Andy Garcia) and nerdy accountant Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith), the team ruffles the feathers of Capone, disrupting his operations and ruining his dinner parties. Though Capone has murdered and robbed and run booze, the cops line up a tax evasion case on him. DePalma builds the story like a tense thriller, crafting a solid "men on a mission" mob yarn.

In 1972, Francis Ford Coppola perfected the gangster genre with THE GODFATHER. Martin Scorsese twisted that image in MEAN STREETS a year later. When Scorsese would return to the gangster genre in 1990 with GOODFELLAS, he showed us the wealth of stories that could be told in the genre. THE GODFATHER was epic, while GOODFELLAS was personal and dirty. It showed the glamour and the brutality of the lifestyle like it had never been seen before.

Based on Nicholas Pileggi's true crime novel WISEGUY, the story follows Henry Hill from when he was kid. He started parking cars for the neighborhood gangsters where he earned respect. He became drunk with their influence and power. Ray Liotta's performance as the young adult Hill is intense. He's a smart hustler who knows how the game is played. He makes a lot of money for the boss Paul Cicero (Paul Sorvino, DICK TRACY). His close friends are the paranoid Jimmy Conway (Robert DeNiro, RAGING BULL) and the loose canon Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci, CASINO).

Arthur Penn's BONNIE AND CLYDE was like a shotgun blast to cinema. Of course, the violence was more graphic than in any mainstream movie before, but it also dealt with other adult topics untouched by Hollywood previously. It put two anti-heroes in the limelight, which connected with the counter culture of its day. And yet the film feels as fresh today as it probably felt when it opened. Why is it so? Because the youthful longing that it captures is as true today as it was then.

Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty, REDS) strolls into the small town where Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway, CHINATOWN) lives. He brags about being a bank robber and she calls him on it. So Clyde goes and robs the general store. She hops in his car faster than a cat in heat. Clyde is dangerous and exciting, something her small town life could ever give her. But it's not quite how she imagined it would be. As Clyde tells her, he's not a lover boy, if you know what he means. The robberies are thrilling, but the rest of the time they're usual holed up in motels with their dimwitted associate C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard, MELVIN AND HOWARD), Clyde's loud mouthed brother Buck (Gene Hackman, NIGHT MOVES) and Buck's shrill wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons, RACHEL, RACHEL). And then there's the possibility of getting killed at any moment.

With WALTZ WITH BASHIR arriving on DVD this week, This Weekend's Film Festival takes a look at soldiers reflecting on war. BASHIR is an animated documentary where the director tries to piece together the war atrocities he has blacked out of his mind. Other films deal with the mind-numbing boredom of combat. Another deals with the regrets. The Sunday lineup looks at an injured soldier's reflections and an aged soldier's sadness over the way the young officers have no respect for him. Enlist in this week's fest below.

Ari Folman's WALTZ WITH BASHIR chronicles the filmmaker's attempts to remember his combat experiences during the Israel-Lebanon war. Ari meets with various friends and commanders piecing together fact from fiction. The trauma of the war left Ari's memory of his service blank. He only has one strong image of swimming naked in the ocean with bombs raining down on the city. But is it a real memory or a dream? The film shows powerfully the toll that bloodshed plays on the mind of young soldiers. As I said in my original review, "Folman collects the pieces of his past, some reveal part of the bigger picture clearly and some only fade it more… the move into the massacres shakes the film alive, as those stories do for Folman’s memory. The director makes a stylistic change right at the end that makes a powerful impact. No wonder he wanted to block these memories out of his mind."

Kenneth Lonergan's indie drama brought to the attention of Hollywood Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo. The two actors play siblings who have a love-hate relationship. They know each other very well and that might just be their problem.

Linney plays Sammy Prescott, a single mom who tries her best. She has told her son Rudy (Rory Culkin, SIGNS) little about his absent father to protect him from the harsh truth. Her brother Terry (Ruffalo) hasn't contacted her in months and all of a sudden she gets a letter from him. She's disappointed when the welcome surprise turns out to simply be a visit for him to beg for money. He's been in some trouble lately. Things get worse for him, so he decides to stay. He strikes up a friendship with Terry, but he isn't the most reliable babysitter.

It's been several weeks since I've had a chance to put together a Getting Buzzed column. Right as I was going to give up on the whole thing, the trailer for Martin Scorsese's SHUTTER ISLAND hits the Net and I had to share it. Along with that I have 14 other trailers worth checking out. Too many of the films have no U.S. release dates yet, which is depressing. But we can hope that they'll be in theaters soon.

Ice Cold
OLD DOGS makes the memory of the days when Robin Williams was funny fainter and fainter. Fade your own memory with this trailer.

Getting Buzzed
15) The Canyon (Oct. 23)
Trailer
Newlyweds want to go to the bottom of the Grand Canyon on mules for their honeymoon, but they can't find a guide. Well, one happens to be at the bar where they're crying in their beers. He's pretty shady looking. You think this one is going in a cartoony way, but the trailer makes it look more like OPEN WATER. That's got me interested.