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This romantic comedy film stars Cameron Diaz as a  strait-laced, Type-A commodities trader who cuts loose in Vegas after being dumped by her pill of a boyfriend. There she bumps into irresponsible, irrepressible Jack, played by Ashton Kutcher who is in Vegas because his father fired him from the family business. They drink, they marry, they win $3 mil at the slots, they wake up with hangovers, they bicker and regret and rue the day. Then they return to New York and their respective hollow lives. Before granting their annulment, a fancifully creative judge (Dennis Miller) orders these Bickersons to live together for six months, or else no money. The screenplay by Dana Fox devolves into a series of humiliating pranks. 

 Joy and Jack cohabitate uneasily, whine to their respective best pals, drive each other nuts and eventually acknowledge that what they have is real. So they end up with love and money. 

 The movie is quite formularic. Actually not a bad performance by Kutcher. It would have been better with any co-star than Cameron Diaz. I do not understand why she is a drawing card. She is unattractive and always has a “pruney” look. She reminds me of someone who has spent too much time in the sun and whose skin has turned leathery and wrinkly. She is a horrible actress and alway winds up with the parts where she is always screaming and flailing around like a “valley girl.”

Not a real cinematographic event, but watchable and provides some senseless humor.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 Jalapenos

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay marks the triumphant return of these two hilarious, slacker anti-heroes. The movie stars John Cho as Harold and Kal Penn as Kumar, two stoners who can’t seem to get a break. Their last adventure found them traveling across country to find a White Castle hamburger in order to satisfy a weed-induced case of “the munchies.”

This time, the boys get themselves in trouble trying to sneak a bong on board a flight to Amsterdam. Now, being suspected of terrorism, they are forced to run from the law and try to find a way to prove their innocence. What follows is an irreverent and epic journey of deep thoughts, deeper inhaling and a wild trip around the world that is as “un-PC” as it gets.

This is an absolutely mindless movie not to be taken too seriously. If you can laugh at crude, stoner based toilet humor, then you will appreciate many of the moments throughout the movie. There is even bigger cameo performance by Neal Patrick Harris (as himself). He does however get blasted with a shotgun in this one … will he survive to appear in Harold and Kumar’s next adventure?

There is no stereotype or subject matter too taboo in “Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay.” So if you’re easily or even somewhat offended at the prospect of jokes about race, rampant xenophobia or even a cookout with the Ku Klux Klan, you might not appreciate the film’s decidedly anti-PC take on the world. For the rest of us, this is a wildly unapologetic comedy that will keep you thoroughly entertained and laughing right to the final credits.

Harold and Kumar” isn’t for the intellectual seeking a deeper meaning in their movie. It’s just dumb and goofy with a pair of stoners getting into one improbable situation after another and in this case, that’s all that’s needed for a funny, often hilarious film.

Rating: 4 out of 5 Tobasco Peppers for Ole Time Stoner, non PC humor

3 out of 5 Jalapenos for true movie value. Still worth seeing.

Not being famililar with the comic book version of this story, I have no idea whether it is like the Marvel comic version or not. However, this proved to be the first real blockbuster of the Summer. Let’s hope it’s just the start of a good movie season.

The synopsis of Iron Man looks something like this: “Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is the CEO of Stark Industries which produces advance weapon systems for the U.S. military. Tony’s father started the company after WWII, and after his death Tony inherited the company, worth billions. Tony lives the life as a hard drinking, rich playboy ladies man, but he is also a genius who has invented many high-tech items for the company. Tony flies to Afghanistan to demonstrate a new weapons test to the army. On his way back to his plane, his convoy is attacked by terrorists, and Tony is wounded by a Stark Industries missile. Tony is captured and held hostage in a cave with Raza (Faran Tahir), a doctor who saves his life. The terrorists force Tony and Raza to reproduce the new destructive Jericho missile Tony was demonstrating from parts of other weapons. Instead, Tony decides to build a suit of armor with Razas help. The suit gives Tony the strength and protection to be able to escape the terrorists. Back in America, Tony builds a better suit of armor which gives him superhuman strength with the ability to fly. With the help of his personal assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Jim Rhodes (Terrence Howard), Tony vows to protect the world as Iron Man.”

Robert Downey, Jr. is a proven quality actor. Why he crashed his career because of addictions like so many others, we will probably never know. At least he is still alive. He does look a bit beat up from all the drug abuse, etc., but his acting ability is still there. Who would have thought he would be comic book hero, but hopefully he can enjoy this success in this venue and get his promising career back on track.

The movie was fast-paced from beginning to end. It had meaningful dialog a decent plot and great special effects. I had to go back and check the cast for the actor who played the anti-hero. I kept thinking it was William Hurt but it was really Jeff Bridges. I guess I never considered Jeff Bridges because his character wasn’t autistic like StarMan.

A really good time. Well worth the price of full admission.

Rating: 5 out of 5 Jalapenos.

“For die-hard fans of the Fab Four — and anyone who was touched by the magic of the ’60s — the film is a strange, nostalgic, suitably outrageous ode to a very real revolution in consciousness.” – William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

This is a very interesting and entertaining movie that is worth the experience just for the musical arrangements of 33 Beatles’ songs. As one who was coming of age in that era – with the draft, Viet Nam, and student rebellion and protest – this is a nostalgic journey back through time. In fact that essentially sums up the basic story line. A 20 something blue collar Brit comes to America to locate his Father who had had an affair with his Mother leaving her with a child in the oven. Unfortunately Pop is a Janitor at Princeton. While there he runs into a “Richie Rich” type and they establish a friendship that results in our Brit attending the typical dysfunctional upper class Thanksgiving dinner where he meets the sister. Of course our college boy has no ambition and as a result goes on an extended road trip to the Village in NYC taking along his new found friend. The sister soon follows, a love relationship ensues, she becomes politically active, brother gets drafted, and our illegal alien Brit is an artistic pacifist.

It’s a loosely bound plot. More a menagerie of music videos than story lines. Very well done and the arrangements are by far more superior than the originals – from a musical standpoint. This ain’t rock and roll, it is a compendium of functional lyrics set to real music – probably more suited now to those who grew up in that era and are becoming more placid and traditional.

Although this is a 2 hour and 11 minute movie, it actually goes too fast. It is definitely worth the price of admission just to hear the arrangement of “Let it Be” and the accompanying video clips.

A great stroll down memory lane and actually a pretty good overview of the attitude and mores of late 60’s and early 70’s.

This lengthy movie is base on a true story. A very good overview has been published in Men’s Journal online and I will give you excerpts here to review the storyline: “

Fifteen years after an enigmatic 24-year-old walked Into the Wild, the site of his death has become a shrine. As Hollywood weighs in with a portrait of the young man as a saintlike visionary, has the truth been lost? Inside the strange life and tragic death of “Alexander Supertramp.” –Matthew Power

“Fifteen years have passed: 15 howling Alaska winters and 15 brief frenzied summers, and the ancient bus on the Stampede Trail still rusts in the wilderness, almost exactly as Chris McCandless left it. Twenty-two miles from the nearest road, shaded out by alder and black spruce on a moraine rise above a creek, the green and white WWII-vintage International Harvester looks surreally out of place, like an artifact from a vanished civilization. The bus doesn’t at first seem a likely time capsule of American mythology, a shrine to which people from around the world make pilgrimages and leave tributes in memory of a young man whom they see as a fallen hero. It doesn’t look to be the sort of place that would inspire a best-selling book, much less a major motion picture. But that’s exactly what it is. Fireweed and wild potato grow up in the wheel wells. On the side of the bus fairbanks 142 is still legible in paint that has been bleached and scoured by the seasons. A few bullet holes have starred the windows; whether they were fired out of anger or boredom is unclear. Other than that, the people who have made the trek out here, out of respect or superstition, have left the site largely untouched. The vertebrae of the young moose McCandless shot lie scattered. The bones, and a smattering of feathers, add to the spooky aura of a charnel ground. Inside, near an old oil-barrel stove, McCandless’s jeans are neatly folded on a shelf, knees patched with scraps of an old army blanket, seat patched with duct tape. And the bed is still there too, springs and stuffing bursting from the stained mattress, as if a wild animal’s been at it. The same bed where they found his body. It was a haunting tale, capturing the imagination of the country. September 1992, deep in the bush of the Alaskan interior northeast of Mount McKinley, in an abandoned bus on a disused mining trail, the decomposed body of a man was found by a moose hunter. The remains weighed only 67 pounds, and he had apparently died of starvation. He carried no identification, but a few rolls of undeveloped film and a cryptic journal chronicled a horrifying descent into sickness and slow death after 112 days alone in the wilderness. When the man’s identity was established, the puzzle only deepened. His name was Chris McCandless, a 24-year-old honors graduate from Emory University, star athlete, and beloved brother and son from a wealthy but dysfunctional East Coast family. With a head full of Jack London and Thoreau, McCandless rechristened himself “Alexander Supertramp,” cut all ties with his family, gave his trust fund to charity, and embarked on a two-year odyssey that brought him to Alaska, that mystic repository of American notions of wilderness, a blank spot on the map where he could test the limits of his wits and endurance. Setting off with little more than a .22 caliber rifle and a 10-pound bag of rice, McCandless hoped to find his true self by renouncing society and living off the land. But, as Craig Medred would note in the Anchorage Daily News, “the Alaska wilderness is a good place to test yourself. The Alaska wilderness is a bad place to find yourself.” No one ever saw McCandless alive again. Fifteen years later his story continues to resonate as a quintessentially American tale, and its hero has assumed near mythic status, blurring the lines between living memory and the creation of a legend. When writer Jon Krakauer first heard McCandless’s story, he later told a reporter, “the hair on my neck rose.” Krakauer’s profound empathy for his subject and obsessive research yielded Into the Wild, a heartbreaking portrait that has sold more than 2 million copies and become the authoritative version of the McCandless story, around which all discussions are framed. In Krakauer’s telling, McCandless represents the human urge to push the limits of experience, to live a life untouched by the trappings of culture and civilization. Now that portrait has been taken up by the ultimate mythologizer: Hollywood. This film was written and directed by Sean Penn and filmed on location in the many places McCandless traveled. Woven through with the timeless themes of self-invention, risk, and our complex relationship to the natural world, the enigma of Chris McCandless is once again being debated, more vociferously than ever. Was his death a Shakespearean tragedy or a pitch-black comedy of errors? What impact has the tale and its renown had on our perception of Alaska? And perhaps most tantalizingly: Did Krakauer, and now Penn, get key parts of the story wrong? ” This is a short summary compared to the 2 hour and 38 minute film. It was a haunting movie – even when you already knew the outcome. It was a sad movie because of the outcome. This is another one of those movies that makes you think. I came away conflicted. I appreciated that this young millenial student rejected his calling to be narcissistic and unproductive and struck out to find the meaning of life. Dramatized in the end is the true essence of reality in that we cannot successfully get through this world alone. We may reject the world but we should not reject human relationships. Many questions could be raised about why he didn’t look for an alternative way to cross the river and get back to society after he had survived the worst of the Alaskan Winter. Why did he not get more prepared in wilderness survival? Did he become mentally unbalanced as a result of the isolation from people or was he really potentially schizophrenic? Did he really not want to go back to civilization after he had accomplished his goal and simply gave up? One could attempt to psychoanalyze for decades but we will never have the real answer. What are the great lessons learned here? Part of happiness in living comes from the interpersonal relationships with other human organisms. Some solitude is often necessary so that we can listen to that still small voice by whatever name you want to call it. And, there can be joy in life without “stuff.” The bottom line is one must know their limits and everything must be done in moderation. See the movie. I would suspect it will speak to you. Maybe not the same way it did to me or to anyone else for that matter. I do think it speaks to us at whatever place we are in our journey of life. And like anything else, too many movies like this can be hazardous to your mental health. We all need a little slap-stick humor, vampire horror, gratuitous violence, and film noir drama from time to time.

Basic premise here is concert cellist with domineering father has one night stand with Irish guitar player and lead singer in a band. It’s love at first site. Girl’s father presses her on, lovers miss each other at rendesvous point, girl is pregnant, has child, father tells her still born, child winds up in orphanage for 11 years and “hears the music in the universe.” Child runs away from orphanage, hooks up with Oliver Twist-like street musician, can play any instrument on cue, continues to wander around, winds up as child prodigy at Julliard, and writes rhapsody to be performed at annual concert in the park. Mother finds out, starts searching for child, winds up as guest cellist at same annual concert. Father’s current girlfriend leaves him, he reunites with brothers and they crank their band back up, he winds up also in New York while searching for lost love. You get the picture to the ending. One of those “Ultimate Gift” happy endings. Nonetheless, worth the price of admission. In the beginning, you wonder if this kid is a few cards short of a full deck – maybe autistic or idiot savant. Well, he winds up just being gifted and a little bit naive for today’s 12 yr olds. Jonathan Rhys-Myers does a great job as the Irish musician a la the same brooding shown as King Henry in the Tudors. Freddie Highmore does a great job as the run away prodigy looking for parents. Although in the final scenes when conducting his Rhapsody, one would expect him to be a little more in musical beat rather than looking like a flapping penguin. Obviously a bad bit of dubbing. Robin Williams is the Oliver Twist Fagin and although good hearted at times is typically mercenary, and typically overacted. He is the character you love to hate and cheer when he gets bashed with a guitar. Keri Russell plays the cellist mom and does a good job. She is the new Meryl Streep looking frazzled and like she is going to burst into tears every time the camera shows her. She could have done something with her hair other than just sticking her finger in a lamp socket. Anyway once you cut through the schmultz, the movie has its moments and if you are truly moved by the power of music, then this movie will speak to you. EW gave it a D+, I would give it a C, and it is certainly better than watching stale reruns on TV. Don’t buy any concessions and you will then feel better about the price of admissions.

Timothy Olyphant retains some of his persona from his recent bad guy role in Die Hard or Live Free albeit shaved head and bar code tatoo. The movie is based on the video game. A simple mindless premise of contract killer who gets framed by the company while being pursued by a relentless lawman played by Douhray Scott. The movie is very formularic and a basic plot you have seen before. However, if you are looking for some basic entertainment with a mixture of martial arts, gunslinging, and head buts, then the movie is for you. Not a bad matinee time killer with sufficient gratuitous violence to at least make Monday a relatively serene day back at work.