At least TMNT isn't yet another origin flick. It plays as a sequel to, well, something-or-other. The movie starts with Shredder having been defeated and the team members each doing their own semi-humorous or semi-serious thing.

This could be the reason this movie failed to reenergize the Turtles property. Any kid that had interest in it would have been born a maximum of eight years after this stuff was *cool* and therefore would not know the deep, ahem, backstory.

I'm still waiting for an impressive-looking Technodrome and Krang.

Bill Murray=Dr. Peter Venkman in "Ghostbusters"
Lorenzo Music=Dr. Peter Venkman on "The Real Ghostbusters"
Lorenzo Music=Garfield on "Garfield and Friends"
Bill Murray=Garfield in "Garfield: The Movie"

Timothy Dalton's two James Bond movies, "The Living Daylights" (1987) and "Licence to Kill" (1989), are among the most derided in the series, hovering somewhere around "The World is Not Enough" and "Moonraker" with most fans. In the latest Entertainment Weekly rankings, "The Living Daylights" comes in at number sixteen and "Licence to Kill," nineteen—out of twenty. The former mostly justifies the hostility, while the latter is defensible and even borderline excellent at times.

At this point, every Bond movie is compared to an aggregate ideal of the Perfect Bond Movie. Aggregate because no one Bond movie contains every perfect element—although "Goldfinger" is generally considered to come the closest. Too many modulations from the center are seen as deteriorations of the integrity of the series. Taking this kind of thinking too seriously has led to some of the series pitfalls, like the straightforwardly presented gimmickry of some of Pierce Brosnan's Bond films. An extreme example of this is the magical invisible car in "Die Another Day." "Licence to Kill" is the Timothy Dalton Bond movie that succeeds by willfully turning its back on the moldy conventions. As a result, the series is expanded and shows how unexpectedly deep it can be. (The new "Casino Royale" blows "Licence to Kill" away in this department, but it doesn't diminish its impact.)

Both films are typical relics of the eighties: "Daylights" clings to the Cold War dream of perfect, Godless Soviet villainy and "Licence" features speedboat chases in the Florida Keys.

The biggest failure of "The Living Daylights" is the poor definition of the bad guys. General Koskov (Jeroem Krabbe) defects from the Soviet Union but then returns because of plot mechanics too convoluted for me to remember. So he's the bad guy, right? If so, that means that James Bond is fighting for the Taliban against a general who is just trying to buy weapons for his army. However, the movie doesn't seem to think Koskov is the bad guy. Bond doesn't have a showdown with him at and he survives past the end of the movie. It turns out that the villain is actually this guy named Brad Whitaker (Joe Don Baker), an American military dude seen in only two previous scenes, who is selling the weapons to the Soviets so they can fight the heroic Afghanis. Whitaker's secret hideout is, um, a wax museum of warlords throughout history.

(To further confuse matters, Joe Don "Mitchell!" Baker plays an American ally of James Bond in two of the Brosnan outings.)

The main thing that "Licence to Kill" (yes, it's really spelled like that) has going for it is a credible bad guy. The other Fratelli brother from "The Goonies" plays Sanchez, a Colombian drug lord. Obviously, just dealing drugs is not enough to get James Bond's attention. What does is the fact that he feeds Bond's friend Felix to a shark and then turns his thugs on Felix's wife. He may be little more than a stock MacGyver villain, but at least he's got a massive hideout and a plan to take over the world with Nancy Reagan's inexorable threat of hard drugs.

The two most damning things a character in a James Bond movie can do are to declare close friendship with or love for 007. These characters' subsequent proximity to death is up there with counselors who have sex at Camp Crystal Lake.

Seemingly acknowledging the deficiencies of Timothy Dalton as Bond, "Licence to Kill" is a great movie because it does things differently. At times it's not necessarily a great Bond movie, but rather a great eighties action movie. Among other divergences, Bond has to violently break away from MI6 and beats up M in the process; Q works with Bond throughout the movie; and the stunt work and violence are ramped up and portrayed more seriously. The stunts in the film are outstanding—perhaps the best in the series—because we know they are not aided by computers.

Timothy Dalton never quite registers as a credible James Bond. In "The Living Daylights," he looks either pissed off or in the clouds for most of the runtime. He's kind of the same in "Licence to Kill," but at least the film gives him more to do, and more of a reason to do it.

Once the adventurous family has made it across the country successfully a few times with only an isolated snakebite or case of dysentery, the entertainment value of "The Oregon Trail" eventually wears off. This game can be rejuvenated with some alternative playing styles.

1. Give your family hope by playing moderately well to successfully for most of the game. Maybe foreshadow and put the fear of God into them by switching to meager rations for a spell. Make sure your family has enough money to take the Barlow Toll Road at the end of the game. When given the choice, forgo the Toll Road and choose to float your wagon on a raft down the Columbia River. At this point, crash the raft into as many rocks as possible to teach those snooty runaways a lesson!

2. Long before "Cabela's Deer Hunt" and its ilk became perennial favorites on Wal-Mart's shovelware shelves, "The Oregon Trail" made it safe—and educational—to digitally shoot innocent woodland creatures at length. Name your family Buffalkill, spend all your money on bullets, and try to find the most perfect conditions for absolutely nailing fauna. Try to fill the entire screen with the carcasses of bison and bucks. Just ignore the fact that only 200 pounds of meat can be carried back at a time; you're doing a service to the country. The forests in this game—and obviously in the real world back in the day, because the game is closely modeled on real life—are dangerously overcrowded.

3. Compete with your friends for the shortest game possible. Leave on the latest month, August, on a teacher's salary, and with the least provisions allowed by the game. This will be around twenty pounds of food, one bullet, one ox, no wagon tongues, etc. Move at a grueling pace and with meager rations. In no time, you'll be hearing the familiar "duh—duh-Dahm" indication-of-death music and seeing the familiar poorly rendered gravestone. The first person to lose their ox or their entire family—probably from starvation—wins! I mean, loses.

General Mills has brought back the fifteen-year-old spherical shape of Trix. They're inexplicably advertised as having a "new shape."

(Spoilers throughout)

"Pan's Labyrinth" is the story of a child escaping the horrors of war by creating a fantasy world.

This is a perfectly valid idea, worthy of elaboration in a film. Isao Takahata's "Grave of the Fireflies" shows the lesser-seen civilian perspective of war, in this case the Japanese in World War II. The young character of that film has to keep his younger sister oblivious of their destitution with heartbreakingly simple fantasies. The crush of the war makes brief but necessary appearances to frame the story.

The real world setting of "Pan's Labyrinth is portrayed with simple brushstrokes: Post-Spanish Civil War, rebels in the mountain (good guys), jackbooted military types fighting the good guys (bad guys), mentions of World Events, etc. A comically sadistic thug named Capitán Vidal (Sergi López) leads the Spanish military in the film. He's a guy who doesn't think twice about smashing a bottle again and again, a la "History of Violence," into a poacher's nose before shooting his (the poacher's) father in the face. Think Dennis Hopper in "Blue Velvet." Vidal leaves more of an impression in the film than anyone or anything else.

The experience of viewing "Pan's Labyrinth" is the experience of Vidal's stepdaughter Ofelia (Ivana Baquero)—oppressive dominance at every turn by the pathological Vidal. We get just the barest glimpse of the half-realized fantasy world that Ofelia, the ostensible main character, has created to escape her real world.

Only two sequences actually feature transportation into another world—the tree and the dining room. Both are claustrophobic and derivative, like poorly designed rooms in a "Silent Hill" (the game) sequel. In the second sequence, Ofelia has to walk down an L-shaped hallway to a dining room to retrieve a dagger, or something. She is warned not to eat any of the tempting food presented on a gigantic table, else a slumbering creature with eyeballs in its hands will kill her. In the ensuing (of course) chase, Ofelia barely escapes by drawing a door in the ceiling. This sequence is put together as rather effective horror, but the underlying reason for its existence is phony. Ofelia's—and by proxy, Guillermo del Toro's—imagination can certainly come up with something more original than a glorified fetch quest! Instead, Vidal's antics jettison more screen time.

The argument could be made that Vidal's ugliness is inflated in order to increase the audience's hatred of him—that what we see of him is actually the exaggerated perspective in Ofelia's mind. In that case, the whole movie would be a fantasy. However, it seems that great pains are taken to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Entire needless scenes play out without Ofelia, so they can't possibly be from her perspective. Adult characters pointedly do not see any evidence of the fantasy world when they should.

Guillermo del Toro is like a middlebrow Peter Jackson: pandering and bereft of style. He certainly has Jackson's technical gift to get the most out of low budgets and to seamlessly link analog and digital effects. He just can't seem to move a story forward without resorting to dismaying bursts of violence. Perhaps the definitive del Toro scene is the climactic battle in "Blade II," in which Blade dispels of Bad Guy using wrestling moves cribbed from Vince McMahon. (Said moves are made to look "extreme" because the characters fly an extra twenty feet in the air. Lame.) WWE is a form of entertainment that similarly uses violence to advance a simple narrative. At least it doesn't take itself so seriously.

In defense of the brutality, Guillermo del Toro states, "the violence actually becomes progressively more offhand. It starts in close and starts pulling back until the last couple of deaths in the movie are in wide shots, with no coverage." This is regrettably not true—his bloodlust remains intact throughout. The shooting (in the face, naturally) of Vidal, the second-to-last person to die in the movie, is seen in great detail.

"Pan's Labyrinth" is nothing more than a freak exercise in audience stamina masquerading as high art. During Vidal's first outburst—the murder of the poachers—the full impact of the violence is sufficiently sold. In a better movie, this scene would be used as exposition, showing us the lengths to which this guy is capable of going. Instead, this is just the prelude to increasingly distracting insanities. By the time Vidal is sewing his knife-split mouth back together, the film has gone completely astray. What should be cringe inducing is simply more of the same.

One thing that "Saw III" has over "Saw II:" it's easier to say that you saw it too.

Other than that, the series has now officially lost it. This is easily one of the ugliest movies ever released, in form and function. The filtering and color-correction seem ramped up to maximize the appearance of freckles and pores on the victims and perpetrators. The nausea-inducing jerky frame inserts only set up the audience for the sickest scene in the movie. The scene that I could hardly look at: in which rotten, maggot-infested pigs are methodically liquefied in order to drown a victim.

Sorry if I spoiled "Saw III" for anyone. The creativity of the "games" in the series is probably its biggest draw. And in this one, Jigsaw—or the sick mind who wrote the screenplay—has outdone herself. Along with the aforementioned scene, people get twisted to death, acid-burned and disemboweled, and frozen solid, among others. But any kind of entertainment to be had is quickly tempered by questions of logic: How can the killer take up so much real estate without being noticed? Where does she get the raw materials and access to professional metal engineering equipment? How does she pay for food? How does she pay for her teeth-whitening service, for that matter?

This movie should be called "Padlock." The title inanimate object only makes a cameo appearance this time (again) and padlocks feature in all of the traps.

"Saw III" ends with a shameless—and artless (look what happened ten seconds ago! Oh my God!)—lead-in to the next movie, so I'll probably be there at the five dollar Tuesday show next Halloween for Saw IV. I need to know who gets tortured to death next!

For a while, it seems as if Pedro Almodóvar's latest film "Volver" is suffering from dueling-plot syndrome. This affliction occurs in movies (or books or TV shows) that have a clearly superior distinct plot among two or more. The classic example of a film with dueling-plot syndrome is "The Godfather, Part II." Upon seeing a prerelease cut, George Lucas (I know, master of narrative tidiness, but bear with me) reportedly told Francis Ford Coppola that he had two movies and that he should get rid of one of them.

The flashback half of "The Godfather, Part II," with Robert De Niro as a young Don Corleone working his way up the ladder of crime, is far more resonant than the Al Pacino half. The former benefits from a gorgeous setting and tangible character direction. The latter has a busy hollowness that meanders to nowhere in particular. (Plus it has Lee Strasberg's distractingly hairy chest.) Furthermore, the two stories cut back-and-forth arbitrarily; they don't add any meaning to each other.

At least in "Volver" the characters are contiguous and the action is all taking place around the same time. Through a few chance happenings, Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) finds herself successfully running a neighbor's restaurant. This is initially the superior story in the film. Raimunda incorporates her challenges into a rousing rebirth, connecting and reconnecting to nearly everyone in her tidy world.

Meanwhile, Raimunda and Sole's (Lola Dueñas) dead mother, Irene (Carmen Maura), reappears to Sole. Since Irene and Raimunda did not get along in life (clues to this effect are doled out tantalizingly throughout), Sole does not tell her. Although this is the half of the film that includes a ghost, it looks and feels much more naturalistic than Raimunda's adventures. Most of the scenes here feature talking heads in a single apartment. With pigmentation alone, Raimunda has the upper hand with her fabulous wardrobe, her fetishistic (at least in the way it is filmed) sopping of spilled blood, and her restaurant's delicious margaritas.

Luckily, nothing in the early scenes of "Volver" is cause for worry; Almodóvar is way smarter than that. Late in the film, various tumbling pieces of the plot finally lock into place. The most important revelation, which comes as a genuine surprise, retroactively instills the movie with heartfelt pathos. As a result, Raimunda comes to terms with pent-up feelings that she has been carrying for almost her entire life. The detailed plot explanations are a slight overkill here. Luckily, any extra screen time with these vibrant characters is welcome.

Personnel-wise, "Volver" is a mirror image of Almodóvar's previous film, "La Mala Educación." Whereas that film was an all-male noir with a transvestite femme fatale, the screen in this film is filled with X chromosomes for at least eighty percent of its runtime. The men of any substance are abruptly dispatched with in different melodramatic ways: the husband on the end of a knife and the restaurateur with a vague explanation about going away for a while.

"Volver's" wholesale quality isn't realized until the third act and main character Raimunda's basic arc seems dispatched from a Nicholas Sparks novel. Yet the film works..magnificently..thanks to humane acting, some ravishing turns by inanimate objects, and, um, parts of the anatomy, and Almodóvar's unerring good taste.

Now here's an obscure find: "It Runs in the Family" has been (recently?) renamed "My Summer Story" in order to capitalize on the fact that it is the sequel to "A Christmas Story." (Note that this is a film from 1994, not the Kirk Douglas-and-spawn vehicle from 2003.)

"My Summer Story" is as forgotten as "A Christmas Story" is overplayed. It is impossible talk about "My Summer Story" without comparing it to "A Christmas Story" because the predecessor informs its every moment. In turn, the (forgotten) greatness of "A Christmas Story" is realized by the problems in "My Summer Story."

The only substantial common personnel elements of the two films are Bob Clark, the director, and Jean Shepherd, the narrator. Kieran Culkin now plays Ralphie. Charles Grodin and Mary Steenburgen play the dad and mom, respectively. Also, that "Shermanator" guy is in it. Each of the three main characters has a meager, one-joke plotline. A fourth plot attempts to dovetail the characters and teach an important life lesson.

The most obvious loss here is Peter Billingsley, who played Ralphie in "A Christmas Story." Kieran Culkin barely registers, partly because his Ralphie is not as hilariously pathetic and partly because Jean Shepherd eats up the scenery with his insistent, plaintive narration.

The structure of the separate and lengthy plotlines severely limits the fun that can be had from "My Summer Story." The haphazard plot of "A Christmas Story" amplifies its anarchy and rewatchability. One moment Ralphie is being pushed down a slide by disgruntled elves and the next his classmate has his tongue stuck to the flagpole.

"A Christmas Story" is a film that needs to be shown only once around Christmas. Part of the fun of Christmas as a kid was figuring out which cheap local station had picked the movie up in syndication. If you missed out, you just had to wait until next year. The Christmas Eve twenty-four-hours-in-a-row-stravaganza cheapens what used to be an enjoyable yearly rediscovery.

Every moment of "My Summer Story" is played for the fact that it is teaching young Ralphie some sort of life lesson. Like clockwork, the music swells, Jean Shepherd's yearning voiceover resumes, and any lingering subtlety is thrown out the window—kind of like the beginning, middle, and end of any episode of "The Wonder Years." In fact, this film seems to be some kind of atonement for the sarcasm of the first film that eventually found its way into many subsequent Christmas entertainments—"Christmas Vacation," "The Simpsons Christmas Special," and, yes, even "Bad Santa."

Does "A Christmas Story" have a tidy ending like this? Even having seen it at least ten times, I can't remember. The last part of the movie I can remember is that dinner is ruined and the Parkers have to go to the Chinese restaurant with the horrifying braised duck. I guess what's important is that the movie proper is so crazy and hilarious that it doesn't matter if a phony uplifting denouement is tacked onto the end. We don't remember it anyway.

The nearly unimpeachable "Children of Men" contains the most believable future seen on film in a long time. The key to this production design is the proper mix of plausible regression, stasis, and steps forward. In other words, the future is actually the past, present, and the future. It's the best movie I've seen in the theater in years.

A completely obvious idea—yet one that only a movie this smart would think to include—is the fact that pets have replaced children. This is partially regression, due to the volume of pets seen, and partially the same as today; childless people are more likely to have a pet. The film is bursting with pets, farm animals, and mediated animals. The symbolism of these animals alone could probably equal that of "Animal Farm." To convey the richness of "Children of Men," this is just a tossed off aspect of the background.

All three animals of Pink Floyd's "Animals" make an appearance at one point or another in "Children of Men." The most memorable dog of many belongs to Jasper Palmer (Michael Caine), and it seems to have the same world-weariness that Theo (Clive Owen) carries. Or it could just be stoned from the hippie Jasper's "strawberry cough" ganja. Either way, it has a valid reaction to the state of this world. The sheep are seen in passing and are an obvious metaphor. The pig—and the reason I bring this up in the first place—is seen as a giant tethered balloon. In front of Battersea Power Station. The transparence of this image and the nagging questions of the logistics of keeping it afloat are negated by the fact that the filmmakers recreated the cover of the album! And no mention's even made of it! Theo and Nigel (Danny Huston) just have a conversation in front of the window framing it, much like the WTC scene in "25th Hour." I would like to believe that the image is part of the Ark of the Arts that Nigel curates, no less important (okay, actually much less important, but still important) than Picasso's "Guernica," seen on the facing wall. This is somewhat validated by the reverence given to "classic" music by the world of the film.

The present is recollected through the parallels in the war and war torn scenes in the film to the Iraq War. Quoting the most famous Abu Ghraib image, a pointy-hooded prisoner with arms splayed is seen in passing through a bus window. An Arabic faction of displaced immigrants marches down the street firing rifles into the air. Finally, the Department of Homeland Security is the branch of the army charged with relocating or otherwise discarding of the immigrants in the country.

Since the future essentially ended around 2009 when babies stopped being born, the technology in the film is not much better than it is now. Every television screen is a widescreen HDTV (one thing, BTW, that "Strange Days" got right back in 1995). The computer monitors at the Ministry of Energy are widescreen as well and slightly fancier than those today. TV and the Internet have taken a few steps closer to each other; the same news broadcasts are shown on both. The most futuristic technology is that which propagandizes and/or anesthetizes the nation. The sides of buildings and buses advertise with constantly moving images and sounds. The video game played by the Nigel's son keeps him (blissfully?) transfixed.



The only unfortunate thing about "Children of Men" is an etymological choice. The illegal immigrants are called refugees, or "fugees" for short. Now, this is a valid and forward-thinking slang invention. It's just that one doesn't want to think of Lauryn Hill et al while watching this important work of art.

The virtuosity of the film is matched only by its cynicism. Think about this when watching the hell that is the setting of "Children of Men:" England is the one country that's got it going on. Revealed through clever expository hints: Seattle is in day 1000 of a siege, New York is presumably completely blown away, and dozens of other cities are seen on the news as either gone or going.

The darkest, most cynical joke in the film comes towards the end. The first baby that any person has seen in eighteen years is brought out of the center of a battlefield. The refugees and soldiers stop battling in awe of this miracle. For about a minute. Then they get right back to killing the shit out of each other. Writing it down now, though, exposes it as a point made (not as well) by many other anti-war films and by the facts of any misguided war in history: trees for the forest. In the film, the fighting has gotten to this point because there are no babies! "Children of Men" is saying that the endgame for humanity is going to look the same no matter what the impetus.