Capsule Reviews

Seen recently:

Inkheart - Good solid fantasy fare. What Brendan Fraser gets paid to do nowadays. Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent should have gotten more screen time, and their characters should have wound up together at the end, a missed opportunity IMHO. Some potential sequel material.

Twilight - Why did I bother? SFX pretty cheesy, but the target audience won't notice. A very good teen angst romantic vegetarian vampire movie. A little unclear if Edward, who vamped out in 1918, has actually killed people, not really motivated to find out.

Transporter 3 - my first view of the series. Anti-hero with a heart of gold Frank Martin is forced to break his rules, transport skanky Ukrainian teenager across Europe, a trip with curiously few difficulties at border crossings. Car/train sequences at the end are fun.

Body of Lies - Crowe and DiCaprio. Not as noir as a spy thriller should be, too much an actioner. Crowe is Mr Ugly American, action at a distance puppeteer. DiCaprio is the humint, constantly frustrated by his handler's ham handedness. Every bit of local color that DiCaprio befriends dies for their trouble, except the beautiful, saintly Iranian nurse (Golshifteh Farahani). If this was a real spy film, she would have bought it. Upbeat ending = torture is worth it? Maybe in the Bush Era. Actually, the torture in the film never works, but somehow that doesn't stop the people using it.