No, I didn’t quit the site, despite what the lack of fresh words on this page may indicate. I’ve been writing quite a bit for The SF Bay Guardian, and all my reviews are being printed  for the paper each week.

You can see most of this week’s film reviews at the online version here, some local music previews in The Weekly Picks section, and video game and DVD reviews in the Blog.

I’ll be back here when I can, folks!

From Paris With Love concerns the forced pairing of a straight-laced ambassador’s aide (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) with a wildcard secret agent (John Travolta) as they strongarm their way through the Paris underworld. There’s something about a terrorist attack and a cocaine deal and a conference of diplomats, but I couldn’t quite nail it all down. Of course, coherence of plot is not the reason people go to movies like this anyway – they go for the action and hope for a few jokes. And, more or less, that’s what you’ll get here. The fight scenes are choreographed to the point of nonsense, but Travolta and Meyers seem honestly amused as they attempt to crack each other up for an hour and a half, and more than a couple of things explode.

No doubt, opinions about such a film are going to be divided. From a critical standpoint, the movie is hollow, cliché and nonsensical – but the sense of fun is there nonetheless. There’s the impression that no one was taking this thing seriously, a levity which can be contagious, though I’m not sure the screenwriter was in on the joke. Hoping to steer the viewer from pondering such things, the rapid-fire editing careens us from shootout to shootout at a pace that allows no time for analytical thought.

Say what you will about the ups and downs of his career, John Travolta has an undeniable presence, and his presence is even more appreciable when he’s the sole funny guy in a film full of  ‘straight men’. Sporting a bald head and goatee, his pairing with the lip-stachioed Meyers seems to strive for the classic buddy-movie mismatch, but it falls short of the chemistry that made Rush Hour (2002) the first in a trilogy. As I compare the two films, I can hear picture writer/producer Luc Besson salivating at the idea of a From Paris With Love franchise.

Besson once was the king of movies like From Paris With Love. In the early 00s he was the preeminent money man behind a slew of action movies that were just a little better than straight-to-DVD - The Transporter (2002) and Kiss of the Dragon (2001) come to mind. As vehicles for a variety of action stars, such films serve their purpose and assuredly make their investors’ money back quickly, but I sometimes wish Besson had more interest in returning to the gritty tableau that began his career. The Professional (1994) and La Femme Nikita (1990) were consummate examples of 90s action cinema, where characters had real stakes and action was rough and painful looking.

I mentioned earlier that people don’t go to action movies expecting a decent story anymore, and it’s a sad truth. Perhaps there’s just not enough money these days in putting decent screenwriting before slam-bang action. We seem to have forgotten that we can have our cake and eat it too. Though an embarrassingly entertaining diversion, From Paris With Love also reflects much of what is lacking in contemporary action films.

It’s a wonderful talent to be able to make hard work look effortless. In A Town Called Panic, Belgian directors Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar keenly mimic the innocent act of of a child playing with his or her toys by animating a horse, an indian and a cowboy in the painstaking process of stop-motion. The characters appear familiar – like cheap figurines fresh out of a childhood toy chest, they recall a time before such chests were home to Pikachus and Shreks – and the results feel spontaneous despite the incredible amount of work it surely took to pull off.

A Town Called Panic began in 2000 as a festival short called “The Cake,” before being picked up as a series on television stations across the world, an english dub handled by Wallace and Gromit’s own Aardman studios. Focusing on a small village where Horse, Cowboy and Indian live together in a house, the shorts were effortlessly funny, but never the most densely plotted bits of entertainment. Often the randomness of the trio’s adventures was to their advantage. Much like other recent animated forays into theatres such as Aqua Teen Hunger Force or The Simpsons, I feared that the series’ zany charm would not translate to feature length.

At the outset of the film, it is Horse’s birthday and Cowboy and Indian have forgotten to get him a present. A simple web-order of 50 bricks for building a barbeque goes wrong and soon Cowboy and Indian have to find somewhere to hide 50 million bricks. Their misadventures will take them to the center of the earth and beneath the sea, for reasons I can’t begin to recall, but it is the characters’ interactions that are easily the highlight, their high-pitched and panicky voices making good on the town’s name. They all have firmly developed relationships with each other, with the obvious hate-love relationship between Cowboy and Indian causing much of the trouble and Horse struggling to keep the peace. Their plastic-looking feet are often fixed to a toy-pedestal, forcing the characters to waddle to and fro, and you can almost picture a tiny hand moving them around.

With such a charming concept in place, Aubier and Patar have done their best to inject more structure than usual into the film’s 75 minutes of run-time, but some of the gang’s exploits continue to come across as disparate episodes rather than a coherent whole. For those less forgiving of animated whimsy, I worry that  Panic’s progression begins to tiptoe a fine line between humor and nonsense.

Premiering at Cannes last year, it’s obvious that A Town Called Panic is finally receiving the critical attention that it deserves, and a stateside release of the feature is sure to please younger viewers who enjoy a nice bit of silliness. Children just pick the parts they like from films and forget the rest anyway.

Daybreakers has a great gimmick: In the near future, a vampire plague leaves the majority of the world’s people as vampires, and the remaining humans are harvested for their blood. In the early running, the dedication to exploring such a contrary world is a lot of fun. We see vampire children checking their cell phones and vampire businessmen on their way to work waiting for the subway. One such working stiff is Edward (Ethan Hawke) whose job at a medical company is developing a substitute for blood. Time is running out for Edward and the vampire race; humans are becoming a scarcity in this new world. His boss (Sam Neill) tells Edward he has one month to find a blood alternative before the blood supply runs out and all the vampires revert to bat-like monsters.

But as much as the ads for Daybreakers would have you believe otherwise, the film’s monsters are pretty extraneous; this isn’t a monster movie. The real gist of the tale is that Edward likes humans, he doesn’t want the human race to be extinct and, truth be told, he has some serious qualms about the human harvesting that goes on at his company. Edward would rather develop a cure than a substitute, making the vampires human again. Just his luck that he should run into one renegade human – played by Willem Dafoe – who may have stumbled on just such a cure.

Beyond the set-up, it all gets a little jumbly. Bouncing back and forth from Edward to a plot regarding the boss’s daughter (who is still a human) to the unrelated monster problem, what little fun the film offered in exploring this new world is quickly bogged down by threads that go nowhere. The film strives to take itself 100% seriously and, though Dafoe and Neill manage a bit of fun anyway, Ethan Hawke’s dour expressions may make him a fine vampire, but a depressing lead. If more wit had been allowed to seep into the story, I think a lot of the more ridiculous moments could be overlooked. Most irredeemable in this regard is the overreliance on the laziest form of action writing: the ‘out of nowhere appears.’ There are better ways to end a scene than to have someone completely unrelated save the day. If you do not stay true to the progression of plot, you’re just cheating the audience.

On the plus side, the film looks great. It has that cool, monochrome look that made Blade sexy in the ‘90s, and makes the blood really pop. And blood will pop – people explode in big gooey gouts that paint the walls. If red’s your thing, strap in.

Honestly, I’m surprised it took this long for someone to capitalize on a reversal of the vampire movie. The directors – an Australian duo whose last film, Undead, was a pretty silly zombie movie – have certainly upped the ante on their resumé. Daybreakers displays a good deal of inventiveness and a lot of technical skill, but mostly shows that the pair can handle a bit of subtlety. Unfortunately, what begins with good intentions mostly fizzles by the end, as if the directors painted themselves in a corner and decided to just tip the bucket and call it a day.

When director James Cameron announced earlier this year that he had almost completed his first film in more than ten years, people began to talk in a big way. Cameron has directed some of the largest blockbusters of all time, and, unlike other grandiose moviemakers such as Michael Bay or Jerry Bruckheimer, he’s managed to keep most of his dignity along the way. Cameron’s action films feel tighter, and his action is never at the expense of a story. And Titanic was kind of a big deal.

Well, the mystery is finally out of the bag – the big secret is Avatar. Set on an enormous Earth-like moon named Pandora, Avatar follows the conflict between humans and Pandora’s native creatures, the Na’vi. The Na’vi aren’t as weird as you might expect, for the most part they look like oversized people except they’re blue and have cat noses. However, the Na’vi are sitting on a huge mineral deposit of something called Unobtainium, (yes, it’s really called that), that in the human market can fetch billions of dollars. To coerce the Na’vi into moving off the deposit and allow the humans to cash in on the rare Unobtainium, a private corporation has developed a system of transferring humans psychically into cloned Na’vi bodies and using them as avatars who are able to enter the moon’s jungles safely. These avatars have three months to figure out a way to get the Na’vi to move before the big bad armies of Earth bulldoze the whole place and kill everyone. Phew!

The first half of Avatar is eye-rolling. It’s beautiful - breathtaking even – to look at but it’s often like running through an alternate take of the montage in The Lion King where the young cub Simba grows into a strong lion. In Cameron’s parallel, a gruff marine learns to become one with the jungle and join the Na’vi tribe. Modern technology supports the film from beginning to end, but it is especially important in supporting these early sequences, which would falter without it. As the marine and his avatar go through their transformation and the conflict with the humans draws near, I was surprised to find that the technology was actually encouraging me to connect with the big blue pixels – not through good storytelling or believable dialogue, but viscerally, through the meticulous emoting of their CGI faces.

The Na’vi characters have expressions and movements that register as absolutely human even though they are computer-fabricated. Their speech may be stilted and cliche, but their emotions register to the viewer fluidly through their faces. For people who follow video games or saw that 30 Rock episode, you can stop worrying about the ‘uncanny valley’ that plagued many of Robert Zemeckis’ films which used a similar computer technology. This is the new gold standard in CGI.

As for the 3-D, I haven’t said much because it rarely registered, and I think that’s a good thing. It highlights a few impressive sequences, but mostly the effect was immersive enough that I had no notion of it to think on while I was watching. Of course the film ends with action, lots of bangs and whizzes as the humans and the Na’vi face off. The commotion and explosions inspire awe, but Cameron has always shown a firm hand for action, and it’s nice that he doesn’t disappoint.

I went in with some skepticism – the hype on this one! – but I emerged with a satisfied grin. Even if you find your eyes rolling towards the ceiling, Avatar is a constantly affecting visual experience. If you want to pick it apart, there’s plenty to shake a fist at. It’s absolutely silly and entirely predictible. It’s a popcorn film. But it’s a great time at the movies and a benchmark in CGI effects. I say, give James Cameron another 300 million – he spends it well.

Ryan Bingham is not a man you want to meet. Not because he is unlikeable, which he sometimes tries to be, but because Ryan fires people for a living. He flies from city to city, firing employees for companies too afraid to do it themselves. After so many years in the air, his sole personal ambition is to reach a million frequent flier miles, a feat only 7 people have accomplished. Ryan lives a solitary life and wouldn’t have it any other way.

But Ryan’s life is turned upside-down with the arrival of Natalie, a young upstart at his company who pulls him off the road and threatens to outsource his job to a new video-chat system. His last chance to save his jet-setting lifestyle – and his miles – is to take Natalie on the road with him and show her that firing people needs to be done face-to-face. It’s a breezy set-up, ripe for one of those industry manufactured summer rom-coms, but Up in the Air surprises by presenting a film that is thoroughly human-feeling.

Here, we have a movie that takes the time to create rich, multidimensional characters. These are people who make us laugh because they are funny, not players who appear always to be reaching for the next punchline. The character George Clooney has developed in Ryan Bingham is not an instantly agreeable one but he is believable. He’s that guy you can laugh with even while you mostly feel sorry for him. Anna Kendrick, who the internet tells me is in the Twilight film series but I remember being effortlessly winsome in the little indie gem Rocket Science, takes the role of Natalie, which probably looked pretty one-dimensional on paper, and makes it feel 10-dimensional.

Without punchline comedy, the actors in Up in The Air rely on smart writing, and this is an intelligent, well-written script. There’s a bit of the uncomfortable humor that has spread since the success of The Office, but much of the humor is more subtle, allowing the irony of Ryan’s situation play out to a logical – if somewhat unconvincing – conclusion. It’s a shame that after developing such interesting, human characters and avoiding being cloying and sentimental, Up in the Air gently veers towards a predictable finale.

Even with a slight, third-act betrayal, the film showcases a great talent in Jason Reitman, who is a strikingly skilled writer/director when his talents are not overshadowed by the aura of Diablo Cody. With Thank You For Smoking, Juno and now Up in The Air, it is apparent to me that Reitman has a knack for reflecting our contemporary culture in a way that many mainstream films fail to understand. It’s not how many pop-culture references you can throw in, it’s whether or not we believe in the people saying them.

Ninja Assassin opens with its most successful sequence. In a non-descript hideout in Japan, a group of Yakuza gangsters laugh aloud in the manner of mad scientists as an old-timer warns them to be careful, of what – he cannot bring himself to utter the word out loud – ninjas. Suddenly, the men are attacked from the shadows by an invisible and really accurate force, swords and sharpened metal stars sever body parts left and right. The action is rapid-fire and plenty-cartoonish – it favors gouts of CGI blood over the more traditional exploding squibs – but it’s successful because at its essence, it is suitable to its genre.

Unfortunately, the opening scene is the only comfort food served up in Ninja Assassin, a film that might well be as confused as it is confusing.

Thrust into a series of flashbacks, we gather that a boy named Raizo was taken at a young age and trained to be an assassin in a secret training castle high in the mountains. Breaking up the flashbacks, in the present day we meet a pair of Europol agents who think they’ve discovered a pattern to every high-profile assassination in the past hundred years: the very same ancient clan of ninjas. IMDB trivia tells me that writer J. Michael Straczynski was hired to rework a less-than-satisfactory script, pulling off a rewrite in 53 hours, and there’s no doubt that it shows. The dueling timelines feel like a storytelling crutch; perhaps if the story had been told in a more straightforward manner it would hold more impact.

Still, I can suffer any number of contrivances and silly character decision-making if an action film delivers the thrills. I’ll be the first to trumpet a successful visceral experience. Too bad the action scenes onscreen are up-close and in the dark – sure, ninjas hide in the shadows – and much of the time it’s difficult to decipher what who’s fighting who. When I can make out the stunts, the ninja acrobatics by Korean pop-star Rain are impressive enough, and didn’t appear to rely much on wire work.

On the subject of Rain, his transformation from singer to actor seems to be a subject of contention in some circles. Although Rain isn’t an especially emotive actor, I found his performance in Speed Racer held a certain amount of charisma, but I confess I could find none of that charm exhibited here. However, if perpetual shirtlessness can be a skill, he is skilled indeed.

Maybe I like my ninjas old-fashioned, but I didn’t care much for the clash of genres that takes place in director James McTeigue’s Ninja Assassin. Pairing a traditional tale of revenge and redemption with a contemporary government conspiracy thriller was a conflicting choice, and I hope we can all agree from now on that guns have no place in ninja movies. If McTeigue’s film marks the beginning of a ninja comeback, then I’m all for Ninja Assassin as a means to an end, paving the way towards exposing the genre to a new generation of audiences, but let’s hope better and brighter entries lie ahead.

Everyone loves an underdog story. From The Bad News Bears to perhaps a more suitable comparison, Braveheart, people love seeing the little guy pull through against all odds. At its heart Red Cliff is an underdog story set in the war theatre of ancient China, and it delivers all the fist-pumping you would hope for a film of the genre. For John Woo, a director known for delivering action experiences like Hard Boiled and The Killer, Red Cliff is a delightful change of pace, and it is made perfectly clear Woo is very much at home trading guns for swords.

Loosely based on the 600 year-old text “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” Red Cliff is set in 208 AD China. Cunning prime minister Cao Cao has convinced malleable Emperor Han that the best approach to uniting China is to ferret out those in the south who would oppose his rule, and a formidable force of 700,000 soldiers journeys south to defeat the peaceful tribes. But the heads of the southern territories refuse to surrender their lands, and instead unite their meager forces against Cao Cao’s daunting army.

In China, the story unfolds across two separate film releases, but the US version is condensed into one film and the approach is immediately apparent. A narrator breaks down the set-up, his ‘Moviefone guy’ voice sounding out of place, and the main characters are introduced quickly, almost in passing on the way to battle. I understand why the film was condensed – interest in “The Three Kingdoms” might not be the immense draw it is in China – and I expected some confusion knowing that hours of footage were cut. But my initial displacement disappeared quickly, and I was caught up by the time we reached the first real battle. I don’t know what this version was missing, but I understood what was happening and we westerners are just here for the battle scenes, right?

The battle scenes are impressive – Woo knows how to film an action scene, guns or otherwise. Working on such a grand scale, the director keeps the battles in perspective by following the major players and, in a pleasant turn, scenes are not filmed in the frenetic, up-close style that has become all the rage following Paul Greengrass’ Bourne films. Rather the action is often slowed down, sometimes to slow-mo, to punctuate the impossible wire-fu feats that some of these warriors employ. The film’s second half is a symphony of war-related delights and the detail in the set-design is fantastic to see before it’s blown up. And yes, there are doves, plenty of doves.

If the battle scenes are not impetus enough for your viewing, you might come away disappointed in Red Cliff. Moments off the battlefield are posed as a grand game of Risk, the two sides planning their attacks, consulting subtle changes of the wind and expounding on the philosophies of a good cup of tea. For war enthusiasts the concentration on strategy might be captivating, but focusing on the intricacies of tactical maneuvers leaves little time for character development, and many motivations rely on the machinations of archetype over true sentiment. In stunting the emotional territory, Red Cliff feels mostly familiar despite introducing Western audiences to a classic Chinese story.

Nonetheless, I was never bored, and for a 2 ½ hour war movie, I think that’s enough of a recommendation.

There are many breathtaking, enduring images in The Road. I suppose that’s largely what the film is, a succession of breathtaking images. Director John Hillcoat has created an utterly convincing presentation of what the world would look like after a major, earth-crippling disaster – the trees are burnt black, the buildings vacant and ominous and no one is around for miles. Everything feels chilly and desolate, and the tone of the movie is grim. I’m not sure this is one for the Thanksgiving crowds.

We’re never told what ended the world. Viggo Mortensen wakes one night to screams and flames outside his window, and he just knows. He fills the sink and bathtub with water, preparing his family for the long wait for help but no help comes. Years later, people have begun to starve and die out, and those left must be either very smart or very cruel. It is in such a world that the man and his son, born after the apocalypse and who knows no other world, struggle to make it to the coast seeking warmth. The story follows their contacts with other survivors as they cross the countryside, attempting to avoid the dangers of the road.

Life in the post-apocalyptic world is bleak, and the terrors that the pair encounter are unique to a world dismantled. Confronting thieves and cannibals, Hillcoat’s camerawork is open and lingering, but his refusal to shy away from the horrors of the road never feels like exploitation for shock, instead it gives the film room to breathe and creates a rhythmic pacing. Those looking for an explosive action film ought to look elsewhere, there is no bombast in these encounters, facing death is just another day on the road.

All the memorable scenes from Cormac McCarthy’s book are intact, so fans of the book who cried foul at some deviating images in the trailer can stop sharpening their knives. There are a few extended moments with the boy’s mother, possibly to give more screen time to Charlize Theron, but they are short and I think add to the narrative in a nice way. Viggo Mortensen always throws himself into his roles in truly impressive fashions, and this is no exception. His body is frail and filthy and he has no movie-star qualms about appearing ugly in front of the camera. Aside from the man himself, the wonderful cast of supporting players includes Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Garrett Dillahunt and Michael K Williams, some of whom are truly unrecognizable under their makeup and the filth that covers everything in the film.

The Road is meandering and depressing, no arguments there, but so was Cormac McCarthy’s book. What father and son will find when the reach the coast they don’t know, but can anything really change in a world like this? What matters is a father’s love for his son and the lengths he is willing to go to to make sure he lives a life of purpose. The son once mumbles under his breath that he wishes he were dead. His father is aghast, instructing the boy that he must never say that – there is always hope. Hopefully audiences can find the hope in The Road underneath all its grime.