Bloody mess

Elizabeth Shue seems like a fish out of water in this T&A gore fest

Graphic violence and mounds of T&A are driven to a new high (or low depending your point of view) in this deliberately over-the-top horror flick about what happens when a geologic fissure opens beneath an Arizona resort lake and unleashes a swarm of flesh-rending prehistoric piranha — during spring break, of course.
Composed like any number of slasher flicks, this one attempts to reshuffle the deck by using digital 3-D (for which you’ll have to pay an additional fee) to push naked young women, severed body parts, buckets of blood and gnashing teeth into the audience’s face.
What story there is concerns a teenage boy named Jake (Steven R. McQueen), who is hoping to take advantage of all the licentious action but winds up being tapped by his mom (Elizabeth Shue), who happens to be the local sheriff, to baby-sit his little sister and her friend.
Jake’s big conflict arises when a “Girls Gone Wild”-style video producer (Jerry O’Connell) hires him to find secluded locations for his latest nudie show. After a local girl (Jessica Szohr) who Jake is crazy about gets hired as one of the producer’s “models,” he decides he has to go along in order to watch over her while also making sure the kids are taken care of elsewhere. Playboy model Kelly Brook is another one of models on board too.
In the meantime, his mom the sheriff is investigating a mysterious killing involving a man named Matt (Richard Dreyfuss, in a ham-fisted reference to his “Jaws” character). That’s also when a team of geologists show up to look into an underwater tremor and discover that it has opened a channel to a huge cavern where ancient piranha have been trapped for millions of years, information we learn from a local fish expert played by Christopher Lloyd.
When the fish are turned loose on the spring break revelers, the action turns bloody and very gruesome.
Shue hasn’t been seen much in movies recently. One of her last appearances was in the hilarious “Hamlet 2,” which was shot in Albuquerque. Here, she’s not bad, but is clearly overqualified to be in a movie that essentially has her either being drooled over by horny frat boys or doing a lot of stunt-type work as she tries to rescue horribly mangled young people from a piranha feeding frenzy.
One thing to note is that a lot of the graphic violence is twistedly played for laughs, which means if you’re part of the narrowly defined target audience for this kind of movie, you’ll probably find it somewhat entertaining. If not, be warned. The extremely graphic violence and exploitive attitudes toward women is more vicious than the fish depicted in this movie.
And, speaking of those fish, according to scientific research, the image of a swarm of piranhas devouring humans or animals is a myth. “In fact,” according to COSMOS Magazine, “the little fish are so fearful of human contact that while (biologist Anne) Magurran and (Brazilian researcher Helder) Queiroz were studying wild-caught fish in a tank, they had to erect screens to stop the fish hyperventilating — flapping their gill flaps more rapidly, indicating stress — every time the researchers came too close.”
So there.
“Piranha 3-D” is rated R for sequences of strong bloody horror violence and gore, graphic nudity, sexual content, language and some drug use. It is showing at the Storyteller Cinema. Call (575) 758-9715 for show times or visit www.transluxmovies.com.

Twisted truth

Leonardo DiCaprio as Roger Ferris. Courtesy Warner Bros.

Body of Lies

MPAA rating: R for strong violence including some torture, and for language throughout.

Tempo grade: A-

Early on, Russell Crowe’s character, Ed Hoffman, a deeply entrenched veteran CIA spymaster, has a come-to-Jesus talk with some clueless politicos. He tells them that global terrorism is much more complex and dire than anyone has been led to believe, partly because we have deceived ourselves into thinking we hold all the cards. “Our world as we know it is much simpler … to put to an end than you might think,” he says.

We’re fighting a futuristic war using the most sophisticated surveillance and attack capabilities ever seen, right? But, if the enemy, who is indistinguishable from our allies, simply decides to not buy into modern technology — no e-mail, no cell phones, no credit cards — he essentially falls off the map, thereby making us the perfect target.

Ridley Scott’s new film is a brilliant examination of how this hard-core brand of warfare is being fought, and it is both a revelation and a real gut-churner because it rings so true. It is also one of his best films to date.

Perfectly titled, “Body of Lies” is based upon a novel by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Roger Ferris, a young CIA field agent working out of the Middle East to find intelligence on suspected Islamist mastermind Al-Saleem (Alon Aboutboul). Manipulating Ferris from afar, like a puppeteer pulling his strings, is his boss, Ed Hoffman (Crowe).

In several telling scenes, we see how the aforementioned delusion is illustrated as we watch Hoffman offhandedly advising and giving orders by cell phone to Ferris while eating a bowl of cereal in his suburban back yard or getting his kids ready for school. And in another, how the bad guys avoid high altitude surveillance by simply driving a group of cars around in circles creating a cloud of dust that masks the exit of a target vehicle, much like a street magician’s shell game.

But, these guys know that the only way they can draw Al-Saleem out of his comfort zone is to create a situation that offends his power-mad ego. So, Ferris concocts a plan to create a fictional al-Qaida group that takes responsibility for a faked bombing that instantly grabs the world’s headlines. To do this, Ferris must weave a web of lies that includes a favored ally in Hani Salaam (Mark Strong), Chief of Jordanian Intelligence, and a man who puts great stock in friendship and trust. In the meantime, Hoffman has his own agenda and is not above withholding information even from Ferris if somehow the desired effect is achieved.

Making Ferris’s work more complicated is a budding relationship with an Iranian nurse named Aisha (Golshifteh Farahani). In an otherwise well crafted and painstakingly authentic plot, this is the one element that seems a bit contrived. This film holds some similarities to his brother, Tony Scott’s “Spy Game” (2001), but instead of the CIA analyst in Washington acting as a benevolent mentor to his younger counterpart in the field, Crowe’s Hoffman is less ingenuous and more willing to cut him free if his sense of moral outrage gets the better of him. In that, we see how the modern world has become less a place for niceties to exist.

For those who may be squeamish, there are some grisly special effects that might be hard to watch.R for strong violence including some torture, and for language throughout.

Guilty pleasure

Jennifer Carpenter is under "Quarantine." Courtesy Screen Gems

Quarantine
MPAA rating: R for bloody violent and disturbing content, terror and language
Movietracker grade: B-

Following in the shakey-cam footsteps of B movie horror shot as amateur video like “The Blair Witch Project” and “Cloverfield,” comes this flick that attempts to outdo them all by using relatively recognizable TV and film actors and better production values. But, those are also its drawbacks.

What we see is reportedly raw footage for a TV show featuring peppy and telegenic reporter Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter), shot by cameraman Scott Percival (Steve Harris), as they document a Los Angeles fire department working through their night shift. This preamble is a set-up designed to introduce us to these everyday heroes before the doody hits the fan. And it does when they get a call for assistance at a rundown apartment building.

What starts out to be a medical emergency soon escalates to terror when residents of the building begin showing signs of a rapidly communicable virus that turns them into mindlessly vicious killers. Worse, everyone inside, including the cops and firemen, are prevented from leaving the building by armed soldiers and HAZMAT-suited agents of the Centers for Disease Control. Their communications inside also are cut-off, from cell phones and internet to the electrical power itself, which makes the zombie-like killers even more hard to avoid.

Lots of paranoid terror and gore follow.

Based upon a 2007 Spanish film titled “Rec” by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, which has quite a cult following, this version takes the viewer out of the sense that this is real footage as soon as we see folks such as the Alma Award-nominated Jay Hernández (“Hostel,” “Lakeview Terrace”) and veteran Serbian character actor Rade Serbedzija (“24” and “Surface”). Plus, and this is just a technical quibble, I don’t know of any cameraman who would consider such darkly shot footage to be considered broadcast quality.

This does have some pretty decent jolts, though, and gushy stuff that might make the squeamish think twice, but it certainly does not look like “found footage.”

Criminal behavior

“The Bank Job” is rated R for sexual content, nudity, violence and language.

Tempo grade: B-

It’s hard to believe that film director Guy Ritchie has had such a huge influence on the modern British crime caper movie, but it’s all too obvious in the way this one plays out.

Of course, infusing irreverent comedy is nothing new, but the style of punctuating laughs with graphic violence has Ritchie’s fingerprints all over it. Director Roger Donaldson, who shot his own crime picture “White Sands” in Taos in 1991, has made his mark in the action genre as well (“No Way Out,” “Thirteen Days,” “The Recruit”), but not so much with black comedy. Here, it would seem there are inherent yuks within this tale of a gang-that-can’t-shoot-straight getting the caper of their lives, but once the torture begins and the bullets start to fly, audiences may wonder what they’ve signed on for.

A car dealer with a dodgy past and new family, Terry (Statham) has always avoided big-time scams, but, when a former girlfriend, Martine (Burrows), offers him a lead on a foolproof plan to hit London’s Baker Street Bank, Terry recognizes the opportunity of a lifetime.

It then falls to Terry to find a gang to pull it off. Gleaning low-rent villains from among his friends isn’t too hard, and it works to their advantage, These guys wouldn’t send up red flags anyway because who’d suspect them in the first place? Apparently, the bank will be closed for a week in order to effect repairs on its security system. So, all they have to do is rent a vacant storefront nearby and tunnel underneath, grab the loot from safety deposit boxes and be on their way before anyone opens the time clock-operated door to the vault.

What they don’t know is that sinister eyes are following their every move.
A few years earlier, certain compromising photographs were taken of a member of the royal family. The man who took them has risen to become a wannabe-black radical and is now threatening to expose the scandal. Guess where he’s been keeping the incriminating photos?

That’s when British secret services got into the act and started looking for a way to retrieve the pictures without getting their hands dirty. Just then, Martine gets popped on a drug charge and is given an offer she cannot refuse.

That’s not all.

Safety deposit boxes exist to a large degree because the stuff people put in them is deemed to be secret and protected from prying eyes, stuff like ledger books detailing payoffs, for instance. Once Terry and his gang enter the bank, several plot lines begin to converge, revelations are made and suddenly it dawns upon them all that they don’t just have the police to worry about.

Donaldson keeps the action tight and executed with machine-like efficiency, but in some respects it’s a bit too slick. There’s a lot of Hollywood glam coating the plot where you’d expect a bit of British grime should be. Maybe we’ll have to wait until Ritchie gets back into the fray. Then, we’ll see.

This review was published in the April 3, 2008 edition of Tempo, the arts and entertainment magazine of The Taos News. See it and more at www.taosnews.com.

Rewind not kind

“Vantage Point” is rated PG-13 for sequences of intense violence and action, some disturbing images and brief strong language.

Tempo grade: C

The trailer for this movie was by far one of the best I’ve seen in a long time. Suspenseful, action-packed and intriguing, it knocked my socks off almost as much as the one for “Cloverfield.”

Alas, the pay off wasn’t as good.

Still, this is a relatively serviceable thriller , but only if you can wrap your brain around the clunky conceit of its design. Director Peter Travis, making his feature film debut after working on television movies, executes a plot that quickly kicks into overdrive and then grinds to a halt at its apex, rewinds back to the beginning and then does it again from a different character’s point of view. Again, and again.

It’s so frustrating, I’m sure a lot of people can come up with their own, ahem, analogies involving romantic encounters.

The action involves a visit by a United States President (William Hurt) to Salamanca, Spain where he plans to make an important policy statement regarding the war on terror. An assassination attempt suddenly turns the scene into utter chaos, followed by a huge explosion. Veteran Secret Service Agent Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid), who already took a bullet once before for the chief executive, hits the ground running in search for the shooter. What he doesn’t know, and what we gradually come to understand via several rewinds, is that a complicated conspiracy has been launched.

Caught up in the action are a TV director (Sigourney Weaver), a fellow Secret Service agent (Matthew Fox), an American tourist (Forrest Whitaker) and various innocent and not-so innocent bystanders and conspirators. While I applaud Travis’s courage to think outside the box, the effort was wasted on an audience who usually like their thrillers quick and to the point.

I know, there’s another analogy lurking there too.

This review is published in the Feb. 28, 2008 edition of Tempo, the arts and entertainment magazine of The Taos News. See it and more online at www.taosnews.com.

Cutting edge

“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” is rated R for graphic bloody violence.

Tempo grade: B+

Review by Rick Romancito, The Taos News

Chiaroscuro is generally a visual art term used to describe the use of light and dark to convey an emotional quality or mood. Aside from the film noir genre, popular movies today tend to be overly lit, the idea being that explicit rendering is what audiences require to understand the subtleties of an actor’s performance.

Tim Burton isn’t one of those directors, and yet his work rises above the fray despite heavily relying on chiaroscuro to both illuminate and obscure that which is essential to his storytelling. There is no better example of this artistry than his work on “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” his stunningly staged film interpretation of Stephen Sondheim’s Tony award-winning Broadway musical.

Burton’s characters swim amid Dickensian pools of light, darting from the deepest burnt sienna shadows and charcoal black depths while directing our gaze to marvel at the rich scenic details offered by set designer Francesca Lo Schiavo and director of photography Dariuz Wolski, who, incidentally, shot all three “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. But it’s Johnny Depp who breathes life into this menacing tale of murder and vengeance.

Of course, the big question is whether Depp can sing. Actually, he can, and he’s not bad even though he sounds a bit like he’s channeling David Bowie. Depp plays a barber who started out as Benjamin Barker. In his youth, Benjamin was happy and hopeful, having married a beautiful woman (Laura Michelle Kelly) and becoming father to a lovely little girl. But all that changed when the wicked Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) took that away, leaving Benjamin broken, dispirited and ultimately changed.

So changed, he goes away and returns to London years later as Sweeney Todd, a skilled barber in need of a venue. He finds it above a meat pie shop run by Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), who is one of the few Londoners familiar with Benjamin’s former life and who winds up becoming an accomplice and vague paramour of Sweeney Todd’s. The reason for all this is cloaked in revenge. But before he can set to work, he must establish his reputation and does so by besting the flamboyant barber Signor Adolfo Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen) and stealing away his young assistant, an orphan boy named Toby (Ed Sanders).

As Sweeney begins plotting for ways to get Judge Turpin into his chair he learns that the judge has a young ward living in his home, a pretty young girl named Johanna (Jayne Wisener), who just may be Sweeney’s long lost daughter and who is the object of desire for a boy named Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower).

But before Sweeney’s machinations approach fruition, he has certain tensions that must be released, tensions that result in blood, buckets of it. To keep from being found out, Mrs. Lovett comes up with an ingenious and terrible scheme in which the bodies falling from Sweeney’s upstairs chair become ingredients for her meat pies.

She is an overnight success.

What I haven’t mentioned here is the element of symbolism which lies heavily as a subtext to the music and artful staging. At this, Burton is a master. Few directors are willing to approach the understated and unsaid, preferring the brilliance of an overly lit stage and overwrought theatrics, but here Burton presents ideas that are at once uncomfortable and shocking, and yet vividly attractive. We certainly don’t want to see so much blood in a movie musical and yet we cannot look away.

It’s the light and the dark of our own minds that Burton has found a way to expose. Hats off to an Oscar-worthy effort.

This review was published in the Feb. 7, 2008 edition of Tempo, the arts and entertainment magazine of The Taos News. Visit www.taosnews.com.

Cyber pulp fiction

“Untraceable” is rated R for grisly violence, torture and some language.

Tempo grade: C+

Review by Rick Romancito, The Taos News

If there’s one thing that can be gleaned from the pulp fiction at the soul of “Untraceable,” it’s that the Internet has become a cesspool of humanity’s worst intentions and that we should be grateful there are cyber-cops surfing with the aliens.

The setup is simple. Someone in cyberspace has created a Web site that opens with a teaser question, “Kill With Me?” Upon entering, visitors see a real human being hooked up to a device that will gradually kill him or her depending on the number of people who log on. Alongside the live video feed is a chat room where visitors can add their comments, which generally tend to egg on the proceedings. This, of course, makes everyone who visits the site an accomplice to the murder. Because of the Web’s perceived anonymity — which, big surprise, is known to appeal to the worst instincts of users — the site is an instant hit.

There is a real promo site associated with the movie called www.killwithme.com.

When you go to it and click on “enter,” a prompt appears that says, “Warning, visiting this site could cause harm to innocent people. Do you still want to enter?” If you click “yes,” prepare to have your little hand smacked by a statement that says “91 percent of you ignored the warning. Where are your morals?” Ouch.

Back to the movie: The daily grind for single mom and FBI cyber-crimes agent Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) is usually made up of investigating illegal download providers and ferreting out potential child exploitation creeps. At first, when she and her team find out about the site, they think it might be a hoax, but a little more digging reveals that the victim is real and what happens is equally as genuine.

What follows is a fairly suspenseful cat-and-mouse thriller that comes off as one of those bad paperback suspense novels you pick up at a flea market because you had a couple of nickels rattling around in your pocket, something in which Director Gregory Hoblit (“Fracture,” “Primal Fear”) seems to specialize.

Deriving much of its momentum from hints of torture porn hits like “Saw” and TV police procedurals like “CSI,” Hoblit’s movie banks on the fact that quite a few Web-users still regard this investigative domain of basic instinct as mysterious and somewhat magical. This can only explain why filmmakers continue to depict tech-savvy criminals and cops conducting clearly impossible hacker tricks. But mixing obviously fake wizardry with for-real functions makes a movie like this seem plausible to anyone who used that free disc they got in the mail to obtain their Internet service.

That’s not to say somebody could come up with a heinous concoction like this, but with real cyber cops out there peeking in on your IP address, who’d want to try?

This review was published in the Jan. 31, 2008 edition of Tempo, the arts and entertainment magazine of The Taos News. Visit www.taosnews.com.