"Traitor"

Too much narrative trickery takes away from the real talent in this post-9/11 thriller, Don Cheadle and Saïd Taghmaoui.

By Stephanie Zacharek.

Aug. 27, 2008 | "Traitor" is an earnest, efficient, serviceable thriller that makes a valiant effort to untangle some of the moral complexities of the post-9/11 world. But acknowledging moral complexities isn't the same as making us think about them, and the problem with so many post-9/11 drama-slash-thrillers -- from "Syriana" to "Rendition" to "Vantage Point" -- is that they're not necessarily better or more interesting than your standard old-school Cold War spy thriller. It's simply that they're topical, and thus poised to fool us into thinking they're deeper, politically or morally, than they really are.

"Traitor," which was written and directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, from a story by Steve Martin (yes, that Steve Martin), has been so liberally polished with the varnish of sincerity that it would be hard, for its first hour at least, not to take it seriously. Don Cheadle plays Samir Horn, an American (and a devout Muslim, as well as an explosives expert) who becomes involved with an Islamic fundamentalist group as the result of his friendship -- which flowered from a business relationship -- with Omar (Saïd Taghmaoui), a soft-spoken, well-educated, extremely likable terrorist. Samir has a complicated past that rouses the suspicions of American antiterrorist operatives. And in trying to figure out what's what, one wily FBI agent, Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce), tries to fit a bunch of disparate, jagged puzzle pieces together.

To tell this story, Nachmanoff uses that now-ubiquitous device, the mosaic narrative -- in other words, some pieces of the story are filled in before you know what to make of them, while others remain missing until long after you've stopped caring. The action in "Traitor" hopscotches from somewhere in Yemen to Marseille, from Washington to Nice; the movie keeps ricocheting, the better to make us feel dislocated in what's already a complex, confusing world. Nachmanoff shows some skill at navigating the story's plot twists: You may see them coming, but he at least finds understated, visually arresting ways of confirming them. The movie was shot by J. Michael Muro, who doesn't rely on clever camera angles to jazz things up -- its look is refreshingly austere. And Billy Fox's editing suggests the movie has been made for adults. In other words, it doesn't try to jack up our heart rates, falsely, by using lots of fast cutting.

But "Traitor" doesn't move forward with the power and confidence it needs. The picture begins to lose momentum about halfway through, and though I was intrigued enough to keep dutifully chugging along with it, whatever power it had over me dissipated minutes after I left the theater. Tricky plots are fun, but they don't necessarily serve actors well, and if "Traitor" had been streamlined and simplified just a little, it might have provided a better showcase for two terrific performers. Cheadle, in movies like "Hotel Rwanda" and "Crash," has become the go-to guy for roles that require bringing deep-rooted internal moral conflicts to the surface, and it's remarkable that he can play these parts so frequently without making them feel tired or programmed. Cheadle is deeply attuned to the cerebral and the emotional; in fact, he seems to make no distinction between them. In his portrayal of Samir, the anxiety and suffering we see in his eyes are a kind of electricity, a current generated by a brain that's whirring between the extremes of right and wrong.

Pearce may be the other big star in "Traitor," and while his performance is serviceable, it doesn't cut deeply. Taghmaoui, as a radical motivated by moral certainty, is the real actor to watch here. Taghmaoui is a French-born actor (of Moroccan descent) who has been appearing in French films for years. More recently, American audiences have seen him in pictures like "Vantage Point" and "The Kite Runner," and he played a fearsomely complex torturer in "Three Kings." Here Taghmaoui takes on the most thankless role imaginable, that of a sympathetic terrorist, and he's subtle enough to make the performance stick: He makes it possible for us to both like Omar and recoil from his actions (as well as his motivation). To his credit, Nachmanoff doesn't overstate the "terrorists are people too" case by giving Omar an adorable baby back home, or an anxious wife who worries about his welfare, or any of the other dumb tropes typically used to remind us of a character's humanity. (As if monsters don't sometimes have beloved wives and babies, too.) Omar is a solitary figure devoted to jihad, and particularly if you're a Westerner, what's to like about that?

But Taghmaoui doesn't court our approval, or even our understanding: All he does is ask us to accept his character's conviction, and we do. At one point, during a discussion in which Omar tries to explain to Samir the passion behind the terrorists' cause, Samir quotes Martin Luther King Jr.: "If a man hasn't found something worth dying for, he isn't fit to live." Omar waits a beat as he sizes up his friend, and then responds, "You're a very funny man." It's clear from the tone of his voice that the bitterness of the joke hasn't eluded him.

Warners suit takes issue with Indian film's title.

NEW DELHI, India (Hollywood Reporter) - Warner Bros. has filed a lawsuit against Mumbai-based producer/distributor Mirchi Movies related to the title of its upcoming film "Hari Puttar -- A Comedy of Terrors," which Warners feels is a tad too similar to its franchise about a certain young wizard.
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The case is being heard in the Bombay High Court and comes up for hearing Monday (August 25). "Hari Puttar," a comedy that centers on a 10-year-old Indian boy whose family moves to England, is slated for a September 12 release.

"We have recently commenced proceedings against parties involved in the production and distribution of a movie entitled 'Hari Puttar,"' London-based Warners spokeswoman Deborah Lincoln said. "Warner Bros. values and protects intellectual property rights. However, it is our policy not to discuss publicly the details of any ongoing litigation."

The Hari Puttar name began making the rounds here as a comic gag when the first "Harry Potter" film was released. Hari is a popular Indian name, and "puttar" means "son" in the Punjabi language.

"Since the case is sub-judice, we can't comment as of now," Mirchi Movies CEO Munish Purii said. "However, we registered the 'Hari Puttar' title in 2005, and it's unfortunate that Warner has chosen to file a case so close to our film's release. In my opinion, I don't think our title has any similarity or links with 'Harry Potter."'

"Hari Puttar" is directed by Rajesh Bajaj and Lucky Kohli and stars Jackie Shroff, Saurabh Shukla and Sarika.

Warners' next "Harry Potter" installment, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," is slated for release worldwide in July.

WALL-E

What's The Story?
After mankind abandons its trashed home planet, one garbage-collecting robot spends seven centuries cleaning up the mess. Over the years he evolves a personality that is considerably warmer and fuzzier than his rusty exterior. So when a sleek scout-robot checks in on Earth, the lonely and eccentric WALL-E falls head over heels in love. His pursuit of his paramour becomes a spacefaring adventure that will leave you speechless. Seriously. After about an hour you may literally forget how to speak.
Three Good Reasons

1. Guys like robots; gals like romance. This is a no brainer!


2. So far, Pixar has struck gold 8 out of 8 times. WALL-E could be smash hit #9, or Pixar's first flop -- either way you'll be part of movie history. (With Oscar-winning Finding Nemo creator Andrew Stanton directing, bank on "hit.")


3. Though WALL-E doesn't talk, per se, he'll have no trouble making himself understood. His "dialogue" is designed by Ben Burtt, who created the expressive electronic chatter of R2-D2.

Bet You Didn't Know
Think the movie's shots of a trashed Earth are pure science fiction? Maybe not. Imagine filling an entire football field six feet deep in trash. Okay, now, fill 81,999 more. Sound hard? The United States does it every year. That's just 4% of the world's population. Better get to work, WALL-E.

The Dark Knight (2008)

What's The Story?
Batman began three summers ago - now it's time for him to finish what he started. Bruce Wayne and his alter ego Batman hover on the verge of victory over Gotham City's corruption, thanks to the help of the stalwart Lieutenant Gordon and the capable D.A. Harvey Dent. But then a grinning, horrific specter rises up out of nowhere to thwart Batman at every turn... a devious anarchist who calls himself The Joker. In order to defeat him, Batman will have to explore the darker side of justice and risk becoming more villain than hero himself.
Three Good Reasons

1. Batman Begins proved to audiences that "a great superhero movie" could rise above the genre and become simply "a great movie." This sequel promises to live up to that standard, boasting the same director and exceptional lead actors.


2. While the film is packed with Oscar-worthy talents, it doesn't skimp on the high-octane thrills. Action junkies will get to see car crashes and explosions made the dangerous, old-fashioned way -- with hard metal and hot, hot fire!


3. No one will want to miss the extraordinary performance of Heath Ledger as The Joker, a chilling interpretation that was creating buzz even before the young actor's tragic death.

Bet You Didn't Know
Batman was born at the same moment that a real-life superhero, "The Iron Horse" took his final bow. On May 2, 1939, the same day "The Batman" debuted in Detective Comics #27, baseball legend Lou Gehrig benched himself due to the ravages of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, ending his record 2,130-game streak.

Tropic Thunder (2008)

War May Be Hell, but Hollywood Is Even Worse.

Despite what you may have read lately, the biggest target of ridicule in “Tropic Thunder,” a flashy, nasty, on-and-off funny and assaultive sendup of the film industry, is not the mentally retarded. Rather, the true targets of this extreme comedy’s free-flowing contempt are the stars, makers, brokers, miscellaneous supplicants and even die-hard fans of the movies, who are all portrayed as challenged in some fashion: intellectually, ethically, aesthetically, sartorially, chemically, longitudinally, you name it.

“Tropic Thunder” was directed by one of its stars, Ben Stiller, a professional offender and sometimes very funny man who also shares the movie’s writing credits with Etan Cohen and the actor Justin Theroux (missing in on-screen action here). Over the past decade or so Mr. Stiller has carved out a lucrative niche in the comedy of humiliation, his and everyone else’s. Though this is familiar comic turf (the joke has to be on somebody), he has made it a particular specialty by playing variations on the emasculated patsy — the guy with the penis literally stuck in his zipper in “There’s Something About Mary” and figuratively caught in other roles — who either triumphs over adversity or violently succumbs to it.

The joke is most definitely on, at least initially, Tugg Speedman, the preening, hard-bodied, soft-minded action star Mr. Stiller plays with such intimate knowing in “Tropic Thunder.” A blockbuster sensation who has maxed out the audience’s love with too many sequels and one misbegotten attempt to bait Oscar with a weepie called “Simple Jack,” in which he played a bucktoothed retarded man, Tugg is hoping to resuscitate his career by going gung-ho and grunt in a Vietnam War movie also called “Tropic Thunder.” With his co-stars — notably Robert Downey Jr. as Kirk Lazarus, an awards-laden Australian, and Jack Black as Jeff Portnoy, a comic partial to fat suits and flatulence — Tugg is headed, yup, into the heartless darkness.

That’s old territory for Mr. Stiller, whose most triumphant excursion into comedy’s dark places remains “The Cable Guy,” a scabrous, much-maligned 1996 riff on mass culture with Jim Carrey at his creepy greatest. “Tropic Thunder” is far slicker than “The Cable Guy” and, given the new film’s obviously lavish budget (the aerial shots alone could bankroll the next Sundance slate), understandably more eager to please.

Mr. Stiller has to seduce the audience he once skewered, which he tries to do by giving it Bruckheimer-size pyrotechnics (the lead actors go AWOL in the jungle) and crude laughs wrung from a host of human frailties. But ever the maximalist, he doesn’t just slice and dice his characters and their weaknesses; he tears them limb from limb, blowing both to smithereens.

And he does it with gusto, especially during the hyperviolent opening movie-set war scene in which body parts go flying, and one actor-soldier attempts to keep his innards from spilling out of his stomach wound. Though this bit is played for obvious laughs and is intentionally phony-looking (the soldier looks as if he had been hit with a big pot of cassoulet rather than mortar), the scene skews more yucky than yukky because Mr. Stiller has so little sense of modulation. He isn’t content simply to decapitate a character, the way, say, Graham Chapman hacked limbs in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”; he also has to play with the stringy bits hanging from the bloodied neck. Mr. Stiller doesn’t kill jokes: he stomps them to death.

That’s how he ends up blowing what might have been the film’s sharpest scene, involving Kirk’s explanation for why Tugg’s performance as a retarded man in “Simple Jack” doomed his chances for an Oscar, an elucidation that includes a clever taxonomy of all the ways it’s permissible to play intellectually challenged in Hollywood (“Forrest Gump” is statuette-worthy, though not “I Am Sam”) and a grindingly unfunny repetition of the word retard. If Mr. Downey — who at this point in his career apparently can do no wrong, even in blackface — can’t make this bit work, it’s because the bit is unworkable. The pomposity of the Oscars is the hook, but it’s the word retard that provides the squirm.

There’s a lot of bait-and-switch throughout “Tropic Thunder,” including its use of blackface, which, along with the promiscuous deployment of the word retard, has earned it much of its advance publicity. Though Mr. Downey’s character, who has undergone a skin-darkening procedure to play his part, has been cut from moldy Fred Williamson cloth, he’s also the most recognizably human character in a lampoon rife with caricatures. One of those is played by an actual black man, Brandon T. Jackson as Alpa Chino, a rap entrepreneur who peddles an energy drink called Booty Sweat and is mainly around to mock Kirk’s impersonation, which is the filmmakers’ way of having their chocolate cake and eating it too.

What’s most notable about the film’s use of blackface is how much softer it is compared with the rather more vulgar and far less loving exploitation of what you might call Jewface. Hands down the most noxious character in “Tropic Thunder” is Les Grossman, the producer of the movie-within-a-movie, who’s played by an almost unrecognizable Tom Cruise under a thick scum of makeup and latex. Heavily and heavy-handedly coded as Jewish, the character is murderous, repellent and fascinating, a grotesque from his swollen fingers to the heavy gold dollar sign nestled on his yeti-furred chest. At one time Mr. Stiller wanted to adapt Budd Schulberg’s brutal satire about a Hollywood hustler, “What Makes Sammy Run?,” to the screen, a long dormant and now perhaps lost project that haunts this otherwise safe film like a wrathful ghost.

“Tropic Thunder” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Extreme carnage and language.

Iron Man

What's The Story?
Playboy billionaire Tony Stark redefines "mid-life crisis" when his business trip to Afghanistan ends in a terrorist abduction. His captors, hoping to put his genius to work (and not being exactly MENSA material themselves), give him a high-tech workshop and demand that he build them a super-weapon. Of course, he builds a suit of super-armor instead and uses it to escape. Meanwhile back in the States, a nefarious plot has hatched in his absence. What's a now-virtually-indestructable guy to do but foil it?
Three Good Reasons

1. Robert Downey, Jr.'s bad-boy reputation makes him the perfect guy to play this conflicted, unlikely superhero. Downey's clean, sober, fit, and ready to save the world.


2. The classic comic's 21st-century makeover consists of more than just trading Vietnam for Afghanistan. The plot's ethical shades of gray give it more dramatic weight than you'll find in a standard funny-book adapation.


3. Not convinced yet of Iron Man's gravitas? Try counting up the stars' Academy Award nominations. The cast of this little comic book movie has earned a total of seven Oscar nods.

Bet You Didn't Know
The Black Sabbath song "Iron Man" has nothing to do with the Marvel comic, but Paul McCartney wrote a song called "Magneto and Titanium Man" that mentions two of Iron Man's nemeses (Titanium Man of course, as well as the Crimson Dynamo).

Hancock

What's The Story?

What happens when a wisecracking, homeless, alcoholic superhero meets a determined PR exec? Hancock, who just saved the life of idealistic Ray Embrey, is about to find out. Embrey is determined to rehabilitate the down-and-out Hancock, clean up his image, and make him into a true hero the world can adore. Embrey's wife Mary, on the other hand, isn't so sure it's a worthy endeavor, particularly when Hancock starts hitting on her in the midst of his big comeback. The "Big Blue Boy Scout" he ain't.
Three Good Reasons

1. Will Smith and Jason Bateman are both masters of dry comic timing. This is the first time we've had the chance to see them play off of each other, and the results should be classic.


2. The market's a bit flooded right now with weighty epics of tortured-yet-beloved superheroes... so it's a bit refreshing to get a look at great power without great responsibility.


3. It's the Fourth of July weekend. That means three things: cookouts, fireworks, and Will Smith blockbusters.

Bet You Didn't Know
That poor stranded gray whale that Hancock tosses back into the ocean in the trailer? The one that lands on a sailboat? That whale would weigh about the same as two city buses (with passengers). More about Hancock on Yahoo! Movies.

The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

What's The Story?

For two thousand years, the Dragon Emperor and his 10,000 warriors have slumbered in terra cotta, a grand army of destruction captured in harmless clay. Enter adventurer Alex O'Connell, who is to mummies what car alarms are to city-dwellers. When Alex realizes he's awakened an ancient evil, he does what any dashing young hero would do: he runs to tell Mom and Dad. And so it is that Rick O'Connell and his wife Evelyn get pulled into yet another perilous adventure, with their wayward spawn in tow.


Three Good Reasons:

1. Two words: Rick O'Connell. Or is that three words? At any rate, the witty, good-natured, courageous adventurer played by Brendan Fraser always shows audiences a good time.
2. China is awesome. Director Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious) agrees, and the chance to shoot on location there was a driving force behind his interest in the film.
3. With kung fu icons Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh in the cast, it's safe to say there will be more leaping, kicking, and smashing heads than in any Mummy movie to date.


Bet You Didn't Know

The ancient Egyptians immediately pulled out and discarded the brain before beginning the mummification process, because they considered the strange goopy substance to have no important purpose. This may explain the behavior of most movie mummies.