Road to Perdition
This dark, prohibition era, film is a bit hard to swallow. By design it is unlike The Untouchables where good triumphs over evil. Human life does not count for much in a Mafia-ruled Midwestern town. The film has a number of technical flaws that disturb the attentive viewer. The most intriguing feature of the film is how the narrative begins and ends. The opening words run: There are many stories about Michael Sullivan. Some say he was a decent man. Some say there was no good in him at all. But I once spent 6 weeks on the road with him, in the winter of 1931. This is our story. The final words bring the narrative to a wonderful closure: I saw then that my father’s only fear was that his son would follow the same road. And that was the last time I ever held a gun. People always thought I grew up on a farm. And I guess, in a way, I did. But I lived a lifetime before that, in those six weeks on the road in the winter of 1931.
The Invisible
High School Movie. Not long until graduation. Boy wants to become a writer in New York, escaping his controlling widow mother. Girl, after losing her mother, is angry and assumes the role of a violent troublemaker and gang leader. Girl kills boy, smacking him once too hard on the head. But there is a twist. Taking the Christian idea of an eternal soul, boy is somewhere between life and death, between a bodily and merely spiritual existence. The boy has a body that is invisible to everyone except other dead creates and us viewers. The virtually dead body of the boy is lying dying in a hole in the woods and now his invisible self tries to get in contact with the living before he cannot be brought back to life. It one point towards this film reminded me of Romeo and Juliet, only with a different ending…
Ratatouille
Brad Bird (writer, director) and Pixar have done it again. I continue to stand in awe of the dazzling imagination this team is bringing to the movies. Visually and conceptually Ratatouille is exquisitely pleasing. You don’t feel that this new film is a tiny bit repetitive of their previous effort The Incredibles. Guenter Grass selected the rat as the central character in his 1980s fable about human self-destruction and an apocalypse after which only rats will survive on our planet. Bird turns Grass on his head. Bird’s rat Remy does not want to live off human garbage but instead desires to eat the best human cuisine can offer. Remy’s inspiration is France most famous chef Gusteau, whose book “Everyone can cook” Remy has studied extensively. Remy also watches Gusteau secretly on TV. When Remy is washed from the French countryside to Paris, an incredible culinary adventure awaits him. Join Remy in Paris!
Next
The film invents a skill that no human has ever possessed: to see for two seconds reliably into the future. Such a capability comes in handy. You can win against the Casino, you can prevent a robber from killing two people, and more.Yet our hero (Nicolas Cage) is ambivalent about his skill. It helps him with his small-time magician act in Vegas and allows him to improve his income by beating the blackjack dealer. But during childhood, it also subjected him to a visit with an endless number of psychologists and counselors who wanted to help this strange little kid. When the government now identifies him as someone who might be able to stop terrorist from triggering a nuclear bomb in LA, our hero is not eager to sign up. But a dedicated FBI agent (miscast by Julianne Moore) and the terrorists who learn about his skills are not willing to let him mend his own business. Meanwhile our hero has discovered that in one instance he can see more than two seconds into the future: a beautiful girl promises to be his life partner. The beauty of girl (played by Jessica Biel) more than the nuclear bomb threat propels the film forward.
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Ocean’s 13
Ocean’s 11 struck me as sterile. The third episode of the George Clooney’s star vehicle has considerable charm. An old friend of Ocean (Clooney) gets screwed by a ruthless Vegas casino owner (Al Pacino). Ocean rounds up his gang of thieves to rectify this injustice. I loved the final sentence when George Clooney and Matt Damon say “good-bye” to each other on the Vegas airport. Damon: “I see you when I see you.”
Spiderman 3
It takes imaginative writers to stretch a story across multiple films. Spiderman 3 lacked such talent. Compared to the first two installments, the film feels uninspired, repetitive and contrived. Audiences can only stomach so much transformation in the lead character before they will turn way.
The Last Mimzy
On a previous flight this film was offered to me for lunch. I passed. Without any sound the beginning looked slow and quite lame. On this new flight I tuned in and discovered that the story has unexpected depth. Extraterrestrial creatures have come to earth to recapture what was lost in perfecting their ability to clone people: the human soul. The ET creatures have one last chance to copy that human quality before they will be too far away to reach earth. For those of us who had security blankets for many years, the film conjures up familiar feelings from childhood.
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Fracture
Anthony Hopkins plays a sociopath similar to the one he portrayed in Silence of the Lambs. Hopkins’ character shoots his wife when he discovers she is cheating on him with a police officer. Without any remorse, he tries to get off the hook for the murder by outsmarting the good-looking district attorney. The film is not terrible, but it also contains one basic flow: we don’t know the husband well enough to understand why he would kill his wife. What propelled him remains an utter mystery, lending the whole movie an artificial character.
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Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Isn’t it interesting that people have such a soft spot for bank robbers? Forcing a grandmother to hand over all her savings and shooting her right in the head would not make a good story. But robbing a bank does not stir peoples’ indignation. The impersonal bank is not perceived to be a real victim. And if clients are scared to death during the robbery, does this upset the public? Well, if no one gets hurt during the action that’s just the cost of an exciting robbery. It requires some brinkmanship and the clients should be grateful for being part of such a coup! Buch Cassidy (Paul Newman) and the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford) make a living robbing trains and banks in the waning days of Wild West. The tolerance for such a line of work is clearly on the decline out West. Butch and the Kid find it harder and harder to make ends meet. The movie starts slow but it turns out to be a very special Western.
The Bourne Ultimatum
How would you feel if you suddenly found out that you were a totally different person until a few years ago and if you did not remember anything about your previous life? (My fear is that I might discover out that I was George Bush. 
) For two installments Jason Bourne has been trying to recover his personal history. So far his enemies have prevented him for finding out who is really was before he lost his memory. In this third episode Bourne pulls out all the stops to discover his identity. This is the best action movie of the summer. Paul Greengrass directs the film with a sure hand, changing the pace frequently enough for the viewer to breath before the next action sequence glues you back into your seat.
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