Review of "Due Date"

Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis deserve a better movie than "Due Date."Not that the film isn't funny. It is. Because it stars Downey and Galifianakis, two good talents on their own who have a fine comic chemistry together.

But this is pretty weak stuff considering the star power involved. It's a road-trip movie that starts at A and goes to Z with a series of ever-more-absurd skits in between. Most of the film's big laughs are in the trailer.

Beyond that, this is a dimwit movie, and we just had a dimwit movie a few months ago with "Dinner for Schmucks." Same basic premise, really, just without the road trip.

In a dimwit movie, one average guy (Downey here) ends up saddled with an overconfident dimwit (Galifianakis) who manages to mess things up every step of the way as they try to reach some goal together.

The average guy usually takes most of the pain while the dodo ends up unscathed. No matter what, they end up bonding and become unlikely best friends.

This shtick dates back to Abbott and Costello and beyond, so you can either look at it as classic or clichéd; but, at the very least, some new spin should be introduced if you're going to wheel it out again.

Director Todd Phillips' new spin seems to consist of leaning on car crashes and making the average guy something of a jerk. That's simply not enough.

Downey plays Peter Highman (Get it? Huh-huh), an architect scheduled to fly out of Atlanta back home to Los Angeles, where his wife (Michelle Monaghan) is due to give birth on Friday.

Unfortunately, Peter literally runs into Ethan Tremblay (Galifianakis), a portly-fuzzy aspiring actor, at the airport and Tremblay gets them both thrown off their flight and banned from further flights. Worse, Peter's wallet, ID and money are in his bag, which is on the plane he just missed.

So, desperate to be at the birth of his child, Peter accepts a ride with Ethan, and they set out on a cross-country trek filled with calamities, crudities and car wrecks, as well as some laughs.

There are cameos along the way — Juliette Lewis as a drug-dealing mom, Jamie Foxx as Peter's perfect friend in Dallas — but basically it's two guys and whatever car they happen to be in.

Director Phillips has built his name on big, dumb, off-color comedies ("Old School," "Starsky & Hutch," "The Hangover," heck, he even did "Road Trip") that clunk along with raunchy enthusiasm. This film will neither damage nor enhance his reputation.

But it had such possibilities considering its stars. Downey is a straight man who can also throw a solid comic punch (he does so here to great effect). This is an actor who can balance comedy and tragedy — give him something worth doing!

Here, he's just an unlucky jerk.

Two years ago, Galifianakis was virtually unknown. Post-"Hangover" he may be the hottest funnyman in movies. He earns the heat in this film with everything from his prancing walk to a slight lisp and his effortless delivery of lines such as "I have a photogenic memory."

But again, you keep wishing both actors were doing more than jumping through hoops. "Due Date" is funny enough, but it should have been funnier.

Review of "For Colored Girls"

"For Colored Girls" has to be one the most botched stage-to-film adaptations ever.

And the blame here clearly belongs to writer-director Tyler Perry, who obviously doesn't understand that just because something works on stage doesn't mean it's going to work on film. Especially when that something involves actors suddenly blurting out full-length poems.

On stage, you can frame such soliloquies with lighting and choreography; and perhaps Perry could have done so on film as well (it would have been tricky). But instead he just has folks burst into (somewhat dated-sounding) poetry.

It's like a musical without the music, and it looks and sounds ridiculous.

An adaptation of Ntozake Shange's 1975 play "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf" — which was more of a choreographed poem than traditional play — "For Colored Girls" also suffers from Perry's over-developed sense of melodrama.

Within the few days covered by the script the eight female characters involved deal with rape, HIV infection, alcoholism, cultism, the murder of children, adultery, traumatic stress disorder and abortion. Any one of these issues could drive a film. But stacked atop one another they become literal overkill.

Most of these characters live on one floor of an urban apartment building. You do not want to move into this place.

The great sadness here is that the actresses involved — and the actors, although men are near-universally vile in this film — deliver far more than the film is worth.

Thandie Newton, Loretta Devine, Kerry Washington, Phylicia Rashad, Whoopi Goldberg, Anika Noni Rose ... they're all working hard.

But Perry's sense of drama is working against them. Ham-handed, obvious, overblown and pretentious, "For Colored Girls" is a plain disaster.

Review of "Inside Job"

Wall Street owns Washington.

You might think you know this, but "Inside Job" makes you feel the enormity of it.

The documentary — which blasts members of both political parties, including President Barack Obama — is a succinct, breathtaking, hope-draining examination of America's corrupt financial façade.

It tracks the effect financial deregulation has had on both the country and the world, letting financiers sell products with impunity, knowing a house of cards is doomed to fall but raking in billions in the meantime. And by the way, this film explains crazy things like "credit default swaps" with startling clarity.

The nuttiest, or most bizarrely blatant, part of the equation is how the government keeps calling on the same people who've created and sponsored the problems to fix them. Guess what? Nothing gets fixed.

The rich are now far richer than ever, the middle class is disappearing and Wall Street is thriving. This isn't a political perspective; this is plain reality.

Directed by Charles Ferguson and narrated by Matt Damon, "Inside Job" begins in Iceland, a country virtually ruined in 2008 by unregulated banks that took on gargantuan loans. Then it moves to America and things really get grim.

Ferguson doesn't just look at the way Wall Street controls the government, he also makes the point that academia — the supposed experts in the field of finance — has also been co-opted. Many of the biggest names earn millions as consultants and corporate board members and by concocting bogus studies.

The film is beautifully shot, and Ferguson adds some musical spice here and there. But it's the clarity of old-fashioned talking-head narration, combined with some sweet gotcha moments and a blessed lack of ranting that makes it work.

That and the movie's grim message: We are owned, government and people, made and ruined, by those at the top.

Review of "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Lisbeth Salander has a bullet in her brain, one in her hip and another in her arm.

Her eyes are glazed and her face is covered in blood.

Shot by her father and brother, they then commenced to bury her barely alive.

She dug herself out of the grave and then planted an ax in her father's skull.

This is where "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest," the third and final chapter in Stieg Larsson's hugely popular Millennium Trilogy begins. And then things get really complicated.

In the first two books (and movies), Larsson, who passed away before the first book was even published, establishes Salander (the brilliant Noomi Rapace) as one of the great characters in modern fiction — a diminutive punk-hacker genius as strong in spirit and determination as she is severely emotionally damaged.

In the first film, she teamed up with journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) to capture a killer and expose a conspiracy; in the second she was on the run, falsely accused of three murders, set up by her own father.

With "Hornet's Nest," Larsson, and now Swedish director Daniel Alfredson, takes on the task of exposing the enormous government conspiracy that created and tried to crush Lisbeth.

It seems like a tough road because the story's most fascinating character — Lisbeth — is confined to a hospital room, and later a jail cell, for most of the movie. But Larsson pulled it off and so does Alfredson.

Alfredson wisely chooses to streamline the film version, dropping a Blomkvist love affair and completely ignoring another one of the book's major storylines. Instead, the concentration is on Lisbeth.

When she arrives at a hospital, Salander is still not safe. The false murder accusations are hanging around, and her father, who survived the ax, is just a few rooms down the hall.

Just as bad, her horrific half-brother remains on the loose and wants her head. And the secret organization that has sponsored her father has her on its death wish list.

That organization is also behind the monstrous psychiatrist, Dr. Teleborian (Anders Ahlbom) who abused the young Lisbeth and had her declared mentally incompetent. He wants her committed to his care for life.

Luckily, Lisbeth still has Blomkvist on her side — even though the two never talk directly. And now his pregnant, no-nonsense sister, Annika (Annika Hallin) has signed on as Lisbeth's lawyer.

What unfolds from there is a fast-moving conspiracy story in which paranoia becomes the norm for anyone attached even indirectly to Lisbeth. It's one of those shadow-government things involving old men who've been doing very bad things for a very long time.

Yet Lisbeth remains the film's center, even in her confined quarters. As the story reflects on all the evils visited upon her since childhood she actually gets stronger, both in body and conviction.

By the time she arrives in court she has regained her full punk, Goth splendor — her hair is a giant black spiked Mohawk, she's sporting black leather, her makeup is mascara madness. She's like some netherworld queen come to claim her rights and the effect is exhilarating. This woman will not be beaten down.

Pity poor Kate Mara, the young actress chosen to play Lisbeth in the coming Hollywood version of the saga. She will inevitably be compared to Rapace, who has captured just the right blend of psycho majesty and emotional cripple in the character.

Reading "Hornet's Nest" — which really is a wild hive of intricacies — it seemed near impossible to adapt to screen. And yet the film is a wonder of efficiency, considering.

If you haven't seen the first two films, do so and then see this one. If you have seen them, chances are you're already in the ticket line. "Hornet's Nest" has such a sweet sting.

The inconvenient truth about documentaries

It's 2010. Does anybody know what a documentary is? This week marks the DVD release of Oliver Stone's "South of the Border," an eye-opening, purposely controversial and maddeningly frustrating film about sweeping political changes in South America that have either been misreported or underreported here in the U.S. of A.

What's frustrating about the film is that even though it's clear Stone is making a number of valid and important points about both media manipulation and America's untoward political influence, he's also so obviously biased in his reporting on the political movement involved that the truth is always in question.

He's practically in a nonstop group hug with the figures he's talking about — most frequently with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who has been demonized in America. It's like a cheerleader doing a documentary about her home team; it may be accurate but it's so skewed you get the feeling it's incomplete.

This is, of course, common among documentaries today. Objectivity rarely seems to be the goal; for the most part advocacy is the goal.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. The biggest doc in America right now is Davis Guggenheim's "Waiting for 'Superman

,'" a grim examination of America's broken public schools system. Guggenheim transformed climate change into a much-needed topic of world discussion with "An Inconvenient Truth."

With modern television news reduced to so much cross-network pots and pans banging balanced by the monotone hum of whatever passes for the day's "respectable" stories, we need this stuff.

We also need the rabble-rousing spirit that Michigan homeboy Michael Moore has introduced to the documentary form — the political activism and entertaining gotchas of "Sicko" and "Fahrenheit 9/11." Love or hate Moore, he gets people talking. And people need to talk.

But watching "South of the Border" drives home the possibility that maybe documentaries have become a bit too much of a soapbox medium; films that preach far more than they observe. Films that — whatever their good intent — can border on propaganda.

The entire definition of documentary was blown open earlier this year when a film called "Exit Through the Gift Shop" was released. Made (supposedly) by the guerrilla artist Banksy, it told the story of an eccentric guy who liked to photograph street artists who then decided he himself was a street artist.

So he put some art up for sale and, despite lacking a whiff of discernible talent, made millions.

By the end of the movie you had no idea how much, if any of it, was true. What had been documented was the impossibility of documenting anything.

It was a nice trick, but let's hope it hasn't come to that. The truth is out there, and if it can't be absolutely captured, it can be described.

Perhaps the most fascinating film in theaters right now is "Catfish," the story about how a young guy became involved with a family in Michigan's U.P. and traveled there in hopes of meeting the love of his life.

His brother and a buddy taped the entire relationship. And it just so happened to become much more than a love story.

There's no political agenda to the film. No one even knew where it was going until it arrived there.

There's room in the documentary genre for all sorts of approaches. But let's not forget the one that simply captures the wonder of life.

It's 2010. Does anybody know what a documentary is?This week marks the DVD release of Oliver Stone's "South of the Border," an eye-opening, purposely controversial and maddeningly frustrating film about sweeping political changes in South America that have either been misreported or underreported here in the U.S. of A.

What's frustrating about the film is that even though it's clear Stone is making a number of valid and important points about both media manipulation and America's untoward political influence, he's also so obviously biased in his reporting on the political movement involved that the truth is always in question.

He's practically in a nonstop group hug with the figures he's talking about — most frequently with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who has been demonized in America. It's like a cheerleader doing a documentary about her home team; it may be accurate but it's so skewed you get the feeling it's incomplete.

This is, of course, common among documentaries today. Objectivity rarely seems to be the goal; for the most part advocacy is the goal.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. The biggest doc in America right now is Davis Guggenheim's "Waiting for 'Superman,'" a grim examination of America's broken public schools system. Guggenheim transformed climate change into a much-needed topic of world discussion with "An Inconvenient Truth."

With modern television news reduced to so much cross-network pots and pans banging balanced by the monotone hum of whatever passes for the day's "respectable" stories, we need this stuff.

We also need the rabble-rousing spirit that Michigan homeboy Michael Moore has introduced to the documentary form — the political activism and entertaining gotchas of "Sicko" and "Fahrenheit 9/11." Love or hate Moore, he gets people talking. And people need to talk.

But watching "South of the Border" drives home the possibility that maybe documentaries have become a bit too much of a soapbox medium; films that preach far more than they observe. Films that — whatever their good intent — can border on propaganda.

The entire definition of documentary was blown open earlier this year when a film called "Exit Through the Gift Shop" was released. Made (supposedly) by the guerrilla artist Banksy, it told the story of an eccentric guy who liked to photograph street artists who then decided he himself was a street artist.

So he put some art up for sale and, despite lacking a whiff of discernible talent, made millions.

By the end of the movie you had no idea how much, if any of it, was true. What had been documented was the impossibility of documenting anything.

It was a nice trick, but let's hope it hasn't come to that. The truth is out there, and if it can't be absolutely captured, it can be described.

Perhaps the most fascinating film in theaters right now is "Catfish," the story about how a young guy became involved with a family in Michigan's U.P. and traveled there in hopes of meeting the love of his life.

His brother and a buddy taped the entire relationship. And it just so happened to become much more than a love story.

There's no political agenda to the film. No one even knew where it was going until it arrived there.

There's room in the documentary genre for all sorts of approaches. But let's not forget the one that simply captures the wonder of life.