THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE WEIRD is Great!

THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE WEIRD is a deliriously fun postmodern hodgepodge of Western themes and modes with an interesting backdrop of Japanese/Chinese politics of the early 20th century. If that sounds a little too highbrow for you, let me break it down like this: there's a train robbery. A gunfight in the centre of town. A climactic race through the desert involving guys on horses and an entire army division.

Oh, and then there's the part where there's an extended RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK reference sandwiched around an EMPIRE STRIKES BACK reference.

Seriously, check it out. I don't think you'll be disappointed. I've read some criticism of this film since then (trying to figure out why it didn't receive a larger release) and reviews like this one seem to feel that it might be simultaneously too light and too heavy - i.e too narratively dense while having fun. While the narrative is fairly complex in putting a lot of parties in play (I saw it with two friends and there was a lot of "Who's that guy working for again?"), it's still a party. Great fun, and highly recommended.

TAKEN: Luc Besson may have lost his edge

TAKEN is no LEON. It's not even MAN ON FIRE.

But it is admirably tense and no-nonsense, as Liam Neeson has four days to save his kidnapped daughter before she vanishes into the sex trade. You've seen this movie before, and while there is nothing particularly new or interesting, it does an effective job in reminding you why the formula works: a pissed-off father is a terrifying thing.

Especially when that father is Liam Neeson, who does an excellent job of believably kicking ass and taking names, and he's backed by a billionaire and years of government training in these types of shady dealings.

The script adds some nice elements that keep this from being a paint-by-numbers affair - the first of which is the inclusion of Neeson's estrangement from his kidnapped daughter and her fondness of her stepfather (Xander Berkeley, in a refreshing change of role from the usual snotty traitor he seems to be typecast as). There's not a whole lot there, but it's enough to keep the relationships a bit fresher than say, oh, DEATH WISH 4. The only really two-dimensional character is Famke Janssen, who isn't given much to do in the role of "The Ex-Wife". Putting in particularly fine work is Olivier Rabourdin, in the role of Neeson's beleaguered French counterpart who has a few nice scenes to show some unexpected depth.

The movie's greatest failing is how unrelenting it is in some aspects, and how commercial it is in others. In one particularly strong scene, Neeson threatens the innocent lives of one man's family to get the information he needs, and the movie is strongest at moments like these, where characters veer into some very dark territory. There are some horrifying things in this movie, like how the prostitution ring uses drugs to control the kidnapped women, and there are some particularly effective scenes where Neeson is forced to confront women who are eerie future versions of his daughter.

But for all this bleak darkness, the film has a shockingly optimistic ending, which is all the more disappointing for how the film plays with those dark melodies. The endings of MAN ON FIRE and LEON: THE PROFESSIONAL stressed the consequences of going to dark places to rescue innocence, but TAKEN seems to be quite content to take the opposite approach, never really ruminating on the horrors it shows you, and for that, it ultimately fails.

THE LOVELY BONES: But where are all the orcs?

My first Zip DVD came in the mail the other day and proceeded to sit on my living room table for four days. If that doesn't speak to the mixed reception of Peter Jackson's choice for follow-up to his two epics, I don't know what will.

THE LOVELY BONES is a very, very strange movie, and while I haven't read the book, I have to imagine the emotional fidelity to source material that served Jackson, Boyens and Walsh so well in THE LORD OF THE RINGS is at fault here. One-half of the movie tells the story of a young girl who is molested and murdered and how that destroys the lives of her entire family. This is, by far, the best part of the movie. Unfortunately, the other half of the movie deals with the murdered girl, Susie, as she spends time in a strange purgatory of her own design, as she looks back on her family and her murderer.

This device serves two masters: it gives Jackson some space to create some nifty visuals, and completely splits the focus of the story, with the effect that I desperately wanted to get back to the "real world" scenes (Marky Mark and all) whenever they came on. The "heaven" scenes bear almost no emotional weight, with Susie drily narrating as she prances around in Victorian dress and walking by trees with leaves that become birds.

There may be an argument for the value of the symbolism in these scenes, but it doesn't matter to me if I don't care about Susie. Her death is most dramatically interesting to the journeys of her father (Mark Wahlberg, in an admirable imitation of acting) and mother (the sadly-underused Rachel Weisz), but the film keeps cutting away from the two most compelling characters to look back at what Susie's up to. It's a frustrating effort, and the conclusion feels like it was written by a 12-year old girl who's gone to Sunday school one too many times.

It's almost impossible to reconcile this shockingly traditional movie with Jackson's ouvre. DEAD ALIVE showed a canny knack of approaching tried-and-trued themes through the horrifying and unusual, and his epic trilogy and even the remake of KING KONG showed that he could still wring emotional truths out of the absurd or fantastic. Compared to those three films, this feels like an overwrought TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL episode.

Welcome to the blog!

I've fallen out of writing lately. Like, completely, totally out of writing. A capital-F Fall on the scale of Tarsem. Or a David Bowie-Nicolas Roeg type. And I miss it.

Combine this with my newest venture, an account at Canadian Netflix-rip-off Zip.ca, and I've had an admittedly not-too-creative-but-nonetheless-compelling idea: start a blog and follow my progress as I make my way through movies. I'll try not to "review" movies in the typical sense, just comment on what I found interesting, boring or infuriating, and even if no one else reads it, keep it as a journal of sorts for me.

What I like about Zip and other services like it is that I have limited control over what will be sent to me at any time. I'm interested in seeing almost everything, and having something new coming consistently to me is refreshing. I'll also be trying to work my way through my three To-Watch piles of stuff I've bought and never worked through, so there should be enough content to make this a daily post.

So welcome, stranger, and feel free to get into a flame war with me about the ouvre of Tony Scott. Spoiler alert: I'll win, because Tony Scott is awesome.