Rudo Y Cursi (dir: Carlos Cuaron)

Rudo (Gael García Bernal) is a fearsomely aggressive goalkeeper who thinks he’s a gambler. Beto (Diego Luna), aka Cursi (which means “corny”), is a talented striker who thinks he’s a singer. Their talents lay on the field, but they’re pretty ill-equipped to deal with anything off the pitch: relationships, career, reality.

Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna

The half-brothers are country rubes dropped into the dazzle of the big city and media stardom, take their eyes off the ball on their whirlwind rise to fame and short-lived fortune. Beto is a dreamer who wants to springboard his soccer fame (football to the rest of the world) into a singing career. His cover of Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me” (accompanied by accordion) is as corny as the cheeseball music video that accompanies it – no wonder he got the nickname Cursi. Rudo takes his soccer more seriously and is indignant when Beto is recruited over him, but he’s no smarter or self-aware than Beto and he’s far more self-involved.

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Star Wars: The Clone Wars (dir: Dave Filoni)

Call it Star Wars: Chapter 2 ½, or Stories from the Clone Wars, or The Continuing Adventures of Obi and Anakin: When Darth Was a Boy.

I think we can all agree that the thrill left the Star Wars franchise a long time ago – the technology that once propelled the adventures increasingly started propping up Lucas’ desultory scripts and faltering direction and eventually became the entire reason for being, the author of the spectacle – but this animated sequel/prequel/TV series promo is really just going through the motions. The story – set between the live-action films Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith – is a bland boilerplate adventure. Young Jedi master Anakin (not yet seduced by the dark side, merely cocky and insufferable) is sent to rescue the kidnapped larva of Jabba the Hut and discovers an elaborate (well, actually fairly simplistic and bland) plot by Count Dooku (remember him? the bad guy in the last couple live action films?) to frame the Jedi with the kidnapping and thus prevent a treaty and blah blah blah. Oh yeah, he’s also saddled with a headstrong trainee, an orange-hued character with floppy dreads and doll eyes destined for action figure immortality, and together they fight their way through one laser-battle after another, escape, and then do it all over again on the next level. You can almost see the hit points counting down the side of the screen.

Pretty colors, pretty stiff

What’s really distasteful about the whole thing, however, is the way Lucas films feel like colonial dramas of superior races deigning to take charge of armies of lesser beings. Droids are cannon fodder, dim-witted robots who are not even considered worthy of regard. They may talk like people and have a modicum of personality but they are treated like tools and blown up for easy laughs. For all the “democracy” of the interstellar parliament, it’s built on aristocracies and monarchies and authority granted as a form of privilege, and they act like it.

I review the film for the Seattle P-I:

The computer animation, while adequate, is a far cry from the richly textured and endlessly inventive standards of Pixar. The stylized designs have a comic-strip look to them and the mechanical action is right out of Japanese manga, but the character animation and body language is stiffer than the actors in “Revenge of the Sith.”

It might be impressive as a made-for-DVD production, but coming from producer George Lucas, it makes for a cheap excuse for a big-screen spectacle.

Read the complete review here.

The Edge of Heaven (dir: Fatih Akin)

Much more moving and human than Lucas’ feature-length toy commercial is The Edge of Heaven.

In Fatih Akin’s compassionate and affirming drama, a professor of German literature (Baki Davrak) travels to Turkey to atone for his father’s crime while a Turkish political activist (Nurgul Yesilcay) flees to Germany and finds refuge and love, but at a cost. The film travels freely between cultures and countries but ultimately finds its place somewhere between the realm of identity (of both ethnic Turks in Germany and ethnic Germans in Turkey) and the embrace of human kinship beyond ethnicity. Akin doesn’t hide the fatal destinies of major characters – he titles the first two chapters with death announcements – but it’s the lives of the survivors and how they choose to carry on that carry these crisscrossing stories.

Read the complete review here.

If there is a cooler, tougher, more shrewd and self-sufficient private detective in the movies than Humphrey Bogart’s incarnation of Sam Spade in John Huston’s note-perfect adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, I’ve yet to meet him.

The classic 1941 movie wasn’t the first screen version of Hammett’s iconic novel, but it was the first one to get the hard-boiled toughness of the story and the utterly amoral universe of double-crossing characters right. Huston, who made his directorial debut with this production, reportedly blocked passages of the book directly into script form, but getting Hammett’s dialogue and attitude right was only part of the challenge. He had to cast an actor who could back up those words.

Enter Humphrey Bogart, a veteran character actor who was just breaking out of a career playing villains and supporting parts. His lisp, the result of an injury to his lip, added a distinctive edge to his gravelly voice, and his weathered gravitas gave Spade the look and feel of a man schooled in hard knocks.

This Spade is no stranger to the guile of shady clients and colorful suspects, and there isn’t a more iconic cast of characters in the movies than the rogues’ gallery he encounters here. And I do mean characters. This cast of unusual suspects is distinctive and quirky, and brought to life by actors who fill out those eccentricities and mannerisms with gusto.

One-time Hollywood nice girl Mary Astor goes blonde, brazen and absolutely ruthless as Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a soulless siren and the first great femme fatale of film noir. Peter Lorre makes the quietly mannered and impeccably attired Joel Cairo a mercenary dandy. Sydney Greenstreet’s Kasper Gutman, aka “the Fat Man,” rumbles with charming menace as he spews a stream of pulp philosophy (“I am a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk”). And don’t forget Elisha Cook Jr.’s rat-faced gunsel Wilmer.

They make for a vivid vipers’ nest of double-dealing thugs and con artists on the trail of a treasure. What they get is the sour twist of a cosmic joke, and Spade is the only one smiling. One of the greatest creations of the Hollywood dream factory, “The Maltese Falcon” really is the stuff dreams are made of.

Originally published as part of the “MSN Cadillac” series.

Years in the dreaming, months of procrastination, weeks in the making, my website is finally live, and I spend mere minutes to mark the occasion with my debut post!

I plan to use my blog largely to alert you, my dear readers, of my various pieces online, but once I get comfortable I hope to have add some original pieces as well.

In other words, watch this space!

Excelsior!

PS: My heartfelt thanks to friends and web gurus Felipe Lujan-Bear and Nick Henderson for all their help in making this happen. The art in the header was designed by Mr. Henderson of Henderson Graphics