There was no reason in the world not to kill her, I must confess. Her constant littering of the hallways with dropped sentence fragments, the participles left dangling from her lips, the millions of infinitives she so carelessly split ... in the end, there was no other choice. So I chained her to a wall in the basement of our house on Amontillado Drive, and began the laborious process of immurement.

Later, in the upstairs sitting room, before a fire that cackled more than it crackled, I was visited by a dark and ominous metaphor. Shaped like a raven, the symbolism spoke to me, not in the comforting words of absolutism, but in ambiguities and uncertainties. I would have given anything to hear a solid "Nevermore!", but the most this raven could offer was a non-committal "Perhaps", and "It may be". It was so typical, I reflected ... so very "raven".

Why couldn't I at least be visited by a flying fowl hell-bent on giving an inflexible answer, instead of this, the Magic 8-Ball of birds? We argued for the better part of the evening, as I slogged my way through his torrent of non-answers: "Ask again later", "It may be so", "Reply hazy", and "Cannot tell".

It finally occurred to me why this was happening. Perhaps if my ex-lover had been called "Lenore", the raven would have something with which to rhyme, and maybe I would have received the coveted "Nevermore!"

Instead, I settled for a woman called "Nadine", and this left my haunting visitor with very few options:

Quoth the raven, "Caffeine."

Quoth the raven, "Marine."

Quoth the raven, "Saline."

Quoth the raven, "Sun-screen."

I'm not sorry for what followed. But even now, to this day, I sometimes think that I can hear the dead bird's heart, quietly thump-thumping away beneath the floorboards.

Here's a fun article by Vicki Santillano about eight famous songs that are badly misunderstood, the lyrics having been brutally wrenched from their context and happily sung by the hoi polloi who are blissfully ignorant of what the songs mean.

My favorite example was "Every Breath You Take", by The Police:

How many people foolishly chose this song for their first dance as newlyweds? I’m not sure why this song is misinterpreted so universally as a love song. Do people listen to lyrics? If someone says to you, “Every game you play, every night you stay, I’ll be watching you,” wouldn’t you be more than a little creeped out? I guess that’s the power of Sting—even his stalker anthems are considered romantic.

Read the whole article here.

I will add just one more example to her list: "No One's Gonna Love You", by Band of Horses. The repeated anthem, "No one's gonna love you more than I do", along with lines like "anything to make you smile", make it sound like a tender tribute to The One You Love. But when you listen to the other lyrics, "we are the ever-living ghost of what once was", or "the whole thing is tumbling down", you realize that the refrain - "No one's gonna love you more than I do" - is actually a sad goodbye to a love now lost, and the singer's conviction that his significant other will never find a love like his.

My Life Coach is so weird, but she's sooooo cute when she stops taking her meds. She's helped me through a lot of hard times with her complete dedication to Life Coaching me, always helping me see the bigger picture, aways forcing me to take a deeper look at ME and how un-Coached my Life is, and whenever I start to feel like life is getting to be WAY too much, I just picture her, making that heart symbol with her hand - EAYAH!

And then I go back to eating my own hair and touching people I don't know.

Seen on an actual billboard, right here in the headquarters of Grand Rapids:

"Affordable Bankruptcy."

Followed by a phone number.

Hm.

Sounds like the ending to a bad joke.

"My family is so poor ... "

"How poor are they?"

"They're so poor, they can't even afford bankruptcy!"

[peals of completely forced and unwarranted laughter here]

I love this city.

The results are in: Benjamin "The Bradley" "Pitt-bull" Button has soundly defeated Claus "Thomas" "Waiting for Xenu" "Cruise-man" von Stauffenberg at the box office.

A short clip of the fight, captured by a hidden camera, is circulating around the Internet:



Congratulations, Sir Button. Of all the cases in the world, yours is decidedly the curious ... -er ... couriousest ... most curiousified.

Title: Bangkok Dangerous
MPAA: R
Runtime: 99 minutes
Director: Oxide Pang Chun

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

I think I am not entirely alone when I say that I often question the direction my life has taken, and that perhaps, just maybe, I should have been an assassin-for-hire. I think everyone has that thought at some point in their life. And so, when I watch a movie like Bangkok Dangerous, I can't help but live out my little fantasy in some small way ... the fantasy, that is, of eating an entire box of Cocoa Puffs, drowning in a pint of Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream. I'm sure this brazen act of self-indulgence influenced the way I later felt about Bangkok Dangerous.

Nicolas Cage plays Joe Assassin, while a Pygmy Three-toed Sloth plays Mr. Cage's hair. Joe, from what I can tell during the first 15 minutes of the film, specializes in Super-Duper Easy Kills, such as the kind that involve offing a high-profile prisoner who, for some reason, is being interrogated in an upper-floor tiny room with a GIGANTIC window, which is across the street from several tall buildings featuring corporate names like The Sniper's Nest (I am JOKING, of course ... the real name was The Sniper's NestCoTechDex). Joe is also extremely adept at knocking off young, fidgeting, nervous errand runners who come to drop off his salary.

Unfortunately, even though Joe runs the gauntlet of an incredibly high number of shoot-out scenes (more shoot-outs, in fact, than Shoot Out), no one manages to kill the pygmy sloth, and so Joe escapes the movie with his offensive hair completely unharmed.

The crux of the story is that Joe is on his "last job", which means two things: 1) he wants to get out of the killing business, and 2) there is no way he can survive this film, at least, not if the script is going to play by the rules. A life-long assassin cannot simply retire and go on to live a peaceful life on an island somewhere; he has to die, whether it be in a gun fight, a knife fight, a fist fight, or simply getting hit by a bus.

However! This is a Nicolas Cage movie, and there is absolutely no guarantee that it's going to play by the established rules of story-telling, so it's anyone's guess how this movie will end. All I know is that his hair doesn't die.

This "last job" of Joe's is a four-for-one; he needs to bump off four targets identified by his Bangkokian client. We get to watch him drive around and look hard at things for a long time, occasionally delivering lines in his iconic, monotone mumble: "We'd better get out of here ... something's not right", "This food is hot ... really hot", "I'll find a way in ... you just stay here." There's not enough Pepsi Max in the world to elevate this guy's heartbeat.

Meanwhile, as the movie unfolds, we will get to watch the veteran, battle-hardened, steel-faced, unfeeling killer undergo an unprompted transformation which, inexplicably, causes him to take a young protege under his wing and fall in love with a Bangkokette who speaks in sign-languge.

(FOR DISCUSSION: When a Thai woman speaks in sign-language, can an American man understand it? If her words are different from our words, will her signs be different from our signs? If not, will her signing come with a thick, impossible-to-understand accent?)

I learned one extremely important life lesson from the final shoot-out scene: if you need to dodge a bullet which has just been fired at you from close-range, just duck. You won't get hit. Seems odd, I know, but trust me - I saw it with my own eyes, several times, so I'm pretty sure it will work.

Please send more Cocoa Puffs and Ben & Jerry's. Oh, and if anyone can come up with a convincing story behind the name Bangkok Dangerous, feel free to throw in. Email themichaelodian at gmail.

Title: Pineapple Express
MPAA: R
Runtime: 111 minutes
Director: David Gordon Green

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

Ok, try this plot on for size: Dale is a stoner. Dale's dealer, Saul, is also a stoner. Dale witnesses a murder. The murderer is the guy two levels above Saul in the Drug Lord Corporate Hierarchy, and he knows Dale saw the crime. There! That should be enough to support a solid two-hour movie, right? I mean, all we have to do here is have the bad drug dudes chase the good drug dudes around for 100+ minutes, and we now have an empty framework in which to stuff as much stupidity as possible. It will be hilarious! Especially if we cast Seth Rogan as Dale, cast James Franco as Saul, and let Judd Apatow have a hand in writing the story!

It's a rare thing to walk away from a movie feeling actual, palpable annoyance and anger. But, congratulations, Pineapple Express, you did it. You found a way to turn Seth Rogan into even more of a rash-causing irritant. Stoners are, all by themselves, quite irksome in real life; I had a few stoner friends in the days of yore ("yore" is a specific period of time, less than "e'er" but more than "hence"), and they usually ended up being a nuisance, in the way that only a human being with a non-functioning brain and a strong desire for Twinkies can be.

In addition to Stoners, Seth Rogan is also an aggravating screen presence, all by himself. This is hard to comprehend, I realize, what with his usual wanton spewing forth for 90 minutes of that pinch-throated, hoarse, growl-yelling that he insists on calling "acting", but which usually just ends up sounding like a sore-throated Kermit the Frog after a 48-hour weekend of chain smoking and doing whiskey shots.

Put these two ingredients together - Stoners' antics and Seth Rogan - and you have Pineapple Express, a movie that belongs to that rare class of films known as the Most Likely to Have You Praying for a Reservoir Dogs Ending category.

I fail to see the humor in watching two grown men bungle around on screen, trying to get a caterpillar high by blowing marijuana smoke at it, discussing the possibility of hanging out to look at "crazy stuff" on the Internet, draining their car battery by falling asleep for several hours with the car radio on, attempting to flush a full-size portable phone handset down the toilet, and any number of other similarly retarded pursuits. This is not even to mention the repeated instances of typically stupid Stoner Philosophical Statements uttered by various characters, which I suppose, are supposed to have me in stitches precisely because of their inanity. For example, Seth Rogan would like me understand that there are really two karmic options for future reincarnation: you can either be an evil person, and come back as an anal bead, or you can be a good person, and come back as Jude Law.

HA HA HA! Pardon me while I spasm uncontrollably with laughter and become temporarily incapable of typing! HA HA! Anal bead! Jude Law! Wooooooo-heeeee!

Next point: car-chase scenes, even if they do include a lot of things getting smashed up, and even if they do feature several sustained minutes of James Franco and Seth Rogan delivering their best panicked, frightened screams ("DO SOMETHING!", "AHHHHHHHHHHH!", "LOOK OUT!", etc., ad nauseam), are not automatically funny. I promise. It may not even be entertaining at all, especially if it involves the aforementioned this-is-supposed-to-be-funny-because-we're-so-panicky screaming sequence. (Have we learned nothing from the Macaulay Culkin Movie Blight of 1990 and 1992?)

But a movie such as this cannot survive on inane humor and faux-danger alone, right? So the writers decided to also include the element of Human Relationships: we get to see Dale and Saul go through something of a lover's spat, which (we hope!) will be reconciled before the movie ends. Except ... it's asking a lot to want the audience to even care. Saul is a drug dealer, Dale is a stoner, and they've known each other for all of two months. The writers could have done the utterly unthinkable and unconventional, actually killed off these two main characters, and I would have raved about their creative genius in keeping the audience on their toes. I also would have saluted the decision to have any Seth Rogan character die on screen.

Yes, it's a rare thing to actually be irked by the time a movie ends, but just as one grows irritable when a stoner friend comes over and refuses to leave for two hours, while eating all of the carb-based food in your pantry, so also does one find oneself wishing that this movie would just, please, please, go away and bother somebody else until it's sober again.

If you like "humor" so devoid of intelligence it crosses below "potty humor" and into the Void, if you like movies that feature sled-loads of F-bombs (yes, sadly, even uttered by young kids), if you are, in short, a stoner yourself, then I have the perfect movie for you ... The Wizard of Oz (you'll have to supply your own F-bombs). Don't ever see this movie.

Burger King (aka Hungry Jacks) has unleashed a new horror upon the world:



And you just know they are deadly serious about the levels of all-out rage contained in each and every furious bite of this new burger, because the voice-work was done by a man earnestly impersonating an Australian accent, and Australians are known the world over for their fierce tempers. Just take Arnold Schwarzengger, who angrily said, "Hasta la vista, baby!", and then blew stuff up! Don't try to tell me that Australians aren't a mean bunch! (Note: I just realized, when correcting today's cross-word puzzle, that Arnold Schwarzengger is Austrian, not Australian, which explains why the rest of this puzzle wasn't coming together - but I think I've made my point, regardless)

So I went to Taco Bell first, because of their high level of commitment to making absolutely, positively sure that, come hell or high water, they will screw up my order. Feeling sufficiently angry, I was ready to come face-to-face with the Angry Whopper. I won't lie to you: I told the helpful (in the sense of "breathing") BK associate to go ahead and make it a double Angry Whopper. I guess I was feeling cocky. I assume, then, that my burger was taken into a back room and subjected to several minutes of merciless provocation and "Your Mom"-based harassment, in order to make it doubly angry, because I didn't actually get my combo meal in hand until some 15 minutes later.

But when I finally bit into that tormented, enraged clump of reheated meat, bread, condiments, etc., everything came to a head. Yes, there were some heated words exchanged, and I know I said some things I didn't mean, but after we'd both had a chance to cool down a bit, Angry Whopper and I were able to work things out and just agree to disagree. We still aren't best buddies or anything like that, and I'm probably going to "forget" to call Angry Whopper the next time I'm going to hang out with a group of friends, but I think we've at least reached a level of understanding where we can bump into each other at choir practice and still say "hi" from across the room - and really mean it.

The lesson? Try to make sure your next combo meal is free of acrimony. Praemonitus praemunitus.

Title: Righteous Kill
MPAA: R
Runtime: 101 minutes
Director: Jon Avnet

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

New on DVD this week! A very stale story, supported by a clunky script, and subjected to an hour and forty-five minutes of attempted resuscitation by two very talented (if also very old) actors.

I know, I know - I really haven't narrowed the field of possibilities, have I?

Robert De Niro and Al Pacino play "Turk" and "Rooster" in Righteous Kill, the story of two cops - partners, of course - on the trail of a Vigilante Justice Killer with a rather high body-count, who may or may not be either Turk or Rooster. Please, don't laugh, I'm not making this up. John "Lispy" Leguizamo and Donnie "Get Me the Hell Out of this Saw Contract" Wahlberg play Detectives Riley and Perez, who are also on the trail of this serial killer, and who are more than a little suspicious that their "perp" (a police slang word meaning, "the perp") is himself a police officer.

Hilarious high-jinks ensue, followed by crazy antics, and a good deal of wacky horseplay throughout.

Not really. I just wanted to see what it would be like to actually write a sentence like that.

The dialog in this film is quite funny, but unintentionally so. For example, consider this actual sample, taken from a scene in which Lt. Hingis (played by the ample-necked Brian Dennehy) confronts Turk with the fact that the evidence is beginning to point in a Turk-ward direction:

Turk: Am I a suspect here, Lieutenant?

Lt. Hingis: No. But these bodies are starting to smell ... a lot of it is drifting in your direction.

Turk: Drifting? Or being pushed?

I'm not sure exactly what imagery writer Russell Gewirtz was trying to conjure up here, but the idea of decaying body-funk being pushed in any particular direction is disturbing. I can see the notion of an odor wafting or drifting one way or another, but being pushed? This will require a great deal of further reflection and, possibly, continued research.

The one line in the film that actually made me laugh out loud (or "had me ROTFLMAO", to use the current popular parlance) was delivered by that great orator and respected thespian, 50 Cent (not his real name, of course - his real name is Half Dollar):

Det. Riley: Do we have a deal or not?

Spider: Yeah ... but [if] your boy come in here and go Hannibal Lecter on my ass, I want Jody [edited]ing Foster comin' through the door!

Perhaps you had to be there.

There is a half-hearted attempt at a plot twist near the end, but unfortunately the script spends so much time blatantly telegraphing the punch that when it finally lands, it's already yesterday's news (unless you are eat-an-entire-pound-of-Fritos high, in which case, this movie - as well as anything you watch on QVC afterwards - will be extremely profound and entertaining).

De Niro is as good as he can be, given the circumstances, but I was very disappointed that Pacino didn't give his usual eccentric performance. It might have redeemed this movie somewhat if he had treated the audience to at least one good eye-bulging, red-faced, oddly punctuated tirade lightly seasoned with some well-worn cliches.

Save this one for when your only other option is Beverly Hills Chihuahua, and even then, it's probably best to just roll over and take a nap.

Title: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
MPAA: PG-13
Runtime: 159 minutes
Director: David Fincher

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is the story of two people, Benjamin and Daisy, who are headed in completely opposite directions - chronologically speaking. Daisy was born a normal baby girl, whose body gets older with each passing day until she eventually grows up to be Cate Blanchett, at which time she must give shelter and gifts to Frodo and his companions, and also try to steal the Crystal Skull from Indiana Jones; Benjamin, on the other hand, was born an old man, whose body gets younger with each passing day until he eventually turns into Brad Pitt, a transformation which causes him to be immediately struck by a car, killed, and possessed by the Grim Reaper until he falls in love with Claire Forlani. This, as best as I can tell, is Benjamin's "curious case", although it is quite possible that I am incorrect, and that the truly curious case to which the movie alludes is Brad Pitt's unsettling resemblance to Robert Redford - a resemblance which is conclusively demonstrated below:

Please keep in mind that this movie is not to be confused with the story of one man's bizarre habit of conducting post-reconnaissance on banks he has already robbed (i.e., The Curious Casings of Benjamin Button), or with the story of an interior designer who insists on installing hinged, swinging window sashes so that they always opened inward instead of outward (i.e., The Curious Casements of Benjamin Button).

Benjamin Button is the focal point of the story, of course, because it's his name that is in the movie's title, but as I said, the story is really about Benjamin and Daisy, and the ways in which their paths intersect throughout their lives. The movie begins, in fact, with Daisy on her death bed, helping to re-tell Benjamin's story through a series of journal entries and memories. In other words, the movie steps up right from the bell-clang and delivers a serious roundhouse kick of Somber right to the side of your head, followed by several left jabs of Poignant Sorrow to your nose - and it doesn't stop whaling away for nearly three hours. I think there are more death scenes in this movie than in the entirety of Quentin Tarantino's body of work.

This is part of the reason why I disliked this film. It was top-heavy with melancholy wistfulness, but without ever delivering anything of substance, so that the viewer ultimately walks away from the film with a rather empty feeling. On top of that, the nature of the plot - an old-young man who falls in love with child, hooks up with her when their counter-aging meets in the middle, and ends as a young-old man in love with an old woman - was just a wee bit creepy. Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post said in her review that "at its weakest 'Benjamin Button' hews too closely to [Forest] Gumpian schmaltz and easy sentiment", and she is correct. I will up the ante just slightly: Benjamin Button, with its "schmaltz" and uncomfortable creep-factor, is the love-child of Forest Gump and Harold and Maude.

On the plus side, the visual effects were pleasing; Brad Pitt does a very good job of playing a child stuck in an old man's body, keeping the childish mannerisms, facial expressions, and speech patterns very realistic; and the recurring "struck by lightning" gag (I will say no more) is good for a few laughs throughout the movie. However, the movie also loses points immediately for a) treating the audience to a gratuitous shot of Old Man Rump (which, for some reason, is expected to be immediately funny), and b) having a child blurt out the F-dash-dash-dash word (which is never funny, unless it is Samuel L. Jackson delivering the line).

I left the movie with several vaguely unsettling feelings. It was an entertaining film, in the same sense that watching a bearded midget woman with four legs juggle upside-down would be entertaining. Interesting, yes, but with just a bit too much Nightmare Kindling thrown in. And with the heavy undercurrent of unsubstantiated nostalgia running throughout the film, the end result was a feeling of resigned sadness (with a sprinkle of "ewww" on top).

If you do go to see the movie, make sure you have a Forest Gump chaser close at hand to help cleanse the palate.

+++++++++++

This review was made possible in part by the generosity of Celebration Cinemas in Grand Rapids, MI. Feel like taking in a movie tonight? Celebration has a broad selection of films, stadium-style seating, a clean environment, and best of all, they never show commercials after the advertised showtime. Visit Celebration Cinemas online.

Title: Burn After Reading
MPAA: R
Runtime: 96 minutes
Director: Joel and Ethan Coen

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

When I review movies, I always like to start out with some kind of synopsis (from two Greek words, "syno", meaning "arbitrarily concise", and "psis", meaning "stuff I made up"). I won't lie to you: I watched Burn After Reading almost four days ago, and I have been sitting in front of my computer ever since, hands on the keyboard, trying to think of some way to summarize the plot. I'm getting very hungry, and the lack of sleep is starting to cause hallucinations (for example, I watched M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, and it appeared as though there was no "twist" at the end of the movie, which is impossible), so this is the synopsis I'm willing to go with:

"Burn After Reading is a movie. There are a crap-load of characters, all of whom will remind you of someone you know. Stuff happens to these characters. Then more stuff happens. Then there are so many freaking sub-plots crawling up out of the floor, the drain, the base-boards, and the vents, all vying for primary status and attempting to kill off the other sub-plots, and just when you're about to call in the exterminator because you can't keep track of what's going on, somehow one of the sub-plots emerges as the Dominant, which then viciously slaughters and consumes the others, and quietly returns to the hole from whence it came."

There you have it. A perfectly accurate synopsis that somehow manages not to squeak out even the slightest whiff of a plot spoiler. You can worship me later.

The point is, the Coen Brothers are amazing. And Burn After Reading is so multi-layered, with so many cross-threads and connecting points in its convoluted story, you will be applauding when the Brothers Coen manage to pull it all together in the end (please make sure you are alone - it can be embarrassing to start spontaneously applauding in public). If you know anything about the Coen Brothers' corpus of cinematic literature (Fargo, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Miller's Crossing, No Country for Old Men, etc.), then you know what to expect here - although, with some slight variations.

The Coen films are usually a bit on the dark side, and Burn is no exception, although it somehow feels a bit more polished than other Coen films. Not by much, just a bit. You can expect dialog that is unbelievably real, you can expect scenes to linger over real-life details (the Coen Brothers don't do "sound-byte" scenes), you can expect some top-notch performances, you can expect a wee bit of gore and violence, and you can expect to laugh out loud at some of the story's incredible situations and the way the characters deal with those situations.

John Malkovich is great in this film (as the washed up CIA agent who needs new direction), because he is allowed to be Malkovich; the movie cries out for some seriously over-the-top Malkovich-ing, and no one does a better John Malkovich than John Malkovich. George Clooney is hilarious as the paranoid womanizer - his facial expressions and inflection are, at times, cartoonishly funny. J.K. Simmons (you know him as J. Jonah Jameson, editor extraordinaire, in the Spiderman movies) has a bit role as the CIA Superior that affords him maybe three or four scenes, which is a shame - his performance is probably the show-stealer. Brad Pitt is also in his element as the slightly off-his-nut and flighty gym trainer, turning in some surprisingly funny moments.

Now then. I've praised Burn for its pleasantly complex story, its very believable realism, and the performances put in by the quite talented cast. But the Coen Brothers are always, always going to be comparable to British beer: it's strong, it's dark, it makes you burp, it can give you nightmares, it's very hearty and substantive, but if you're used to draining pop-top cans of Carbonated American Horse Urine (an image not at all intended to conjure up associations with the Clydesdales that are the well-known mascot of a certain American brewing company), then the British beer is going to seem harsh and bitter. The Coen Brothers take some getting used to (I recommend popping a few antacids before you start the film).

I'm not sure if it's because the Coen Brothers aren't afraid to show humanity on film, and humanity is (let's face it) pretty ugly sometimes, or if it's because the Coen Brothers like to inject a few radical and extreme elements into their stories to keep audiences on their toes (call it "shock factor"), but their movies can be a bit off-putting at times. As good as Burn is, it has a lot of crude language, a few quick injections of rather gruesome violence, and some sexual content that features ... well ... I can't say it out loud, so I'll just wink and clear my throat loudly, and then say, Don't go Inside Larry and Don's Optometry supply Store, ok? OK?! (If you still don't get it, I can draw you a picture)

Still ... if you've been suffering through "comedies" like Tropic Thunder, Pineapple Express, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Step Brothers, The Love Guru, and You Don't Mess with the Zohan, then I think Burn After Reading will be a welcome breath of fresh air. Lots of good stuff here, and if you watch it with a group of other people, there will be plenty of topics for discussion after the film (not the least of which will be, "Gosh, Brad Pitt seemed really natural in that role ... do you think he's a Poofter?").

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Title: Valkyrie
MPAA: PG-13
Runtime: 120 minutes
Director: Bryan Singer

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

What is a Valkyrie? Being committed to accuracy and factual truth, even if it takes hours of painstaking research, I looked up "Valkyrie" on Wikipedia. I realize that someone may object: Wikipedia is a free-for-all encyclopedia, written by laymen and untrained amateurs who have no special training in the subjects they address - anyone can write anything on any subject they want, even if it's not true. To that objection, I would point out: yes, anyone can make up anything they like and post it as "fact" at Wikipedia, but since it is a free-for-all encyclopedia, anyone else is free to come along and edit the factual errors of others, replacing them with other made-up stuff.

Wikipedia tells us with absolute certainty, until someone edits the entry, that a "Valkyrie" is a mythical goddess figure from Norse mythology. The valkyries choose who will live or die in battle, and they take the fallen heroes to their glory in the afterlife. They also appear to enjoy riding a lot, based on the title of the famous Wagner piece from his opera, Die Walküre. The piece is instantly recognizable to the culturally well-rounded, by which I mean, of course, anyone who has watched Bugs Bunny cartoons.

But this post is, as far as I can tell from the title, a review of the movie Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise and bunch of other guys whose faces will have you distracted for the entire movie, thinking, "What movie did I just see him in?!" (the answer, in order, is Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Batman Begins).

As the movie begins, we find Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Cruise) writing in a diary, giving voice to his sincere feeling that he has had it up to here with Hitler and the Nazis - which is rather unfortunate, since Stauffenberg is, technically, a high-ranking officer in the German army. Even this would not be so difficult a problem, if not also for the rather inconvenient fact that World War II is in full swing, which puts Stauffenberg in a bit of a pickle.

Luckily, he is then horribly maimed in battle, which gives him a reason to decide, "Ah, the hell with it, I think I'll assassinate Hitler and save Germany." And Stauffenberg's plot would probably have succeeded, except that Valkyrie just opened in theaters on Christmas Day of 2008, while Steven Spielberg's epic film Schindler's List, in which Germany loses the war and Hitler kills himself, has been a wildly popular movie since the early 1990s - so Stauffenberg was doomed to fail.

The movie runs for an even two hours, the first hour being dedicated to the planning and plotting of the assassination, and the last hour showing how the first hour was a complete waste of time. Personally, I would have liked to have seen a little more build-up in the beginning; by the time we meet Stauffenberg, he has already resolved his internal crisis of where he stands - he must oppose Hitler in order to truly serve the Germany he loves. It would have been nice to see what led him to that conclusion. If The Matrix: Reloaded and Spiderman 3 could run over the two-hour limit, surely a decent historical movie like Valkyrie could be given a little more room to explore its subject.

The movie title, by the way, comes from the name of the emergency military operation that Stauffenberg hoped to trigger after he bumped Der Führer. Operation Valkyrie gave power to the German Reserve Army in the event of Hitler's death and subsequent revolt of the people living in occupied countries; Stauffenberg revised the military operation to also include the arrest of S.S. and Gestapo leaders.

In a pivotal scene in the movie, Stauffenberg and his family are hiding in their bomb shelter during an air raid, while a record player upstairs is cranking out Wagner's Die Walküre. The theme phrase from "Ride of the Valkyries" hits Stauffenberg's ears, and gives him the idea to use Operation Valkyrie as the foundation of his plot. I think it goes without saying that Stauffenberg would have succeeded in his plans if, instead of listening to Wagner's opera, he had been listening to Queen's We Will Rock You.

All in all, it was a very good movie. Lots of high drama and suspense, despite the fact that you know darn well how its going to end, before the movie even begins (this is known as the "Titanic Syndrome"). None of the actors used put-on German accents, a directorial decision that I applaud with unusual intensity. I don't know if I could have sat through a two-hour movie that featured Tom Cruise slushing his way through a faux German dialect.

And the message, as I understood it, is inspirational: not all heroes succeed, because success is not the measure of a hero; the measure of a hero is the determination to do what is right, even if it means you lose everything. Stauffenberg and those who stood with him will be honored by having their story told through this movie, which highlights the fact that not every German citizen was a Hitler groupie.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some ripping good yarns to post at Wikipedia.

+++++++++++

This review was made possible in part by the generosity of Celebration Cinemas in Grand Rapids, MI. Feel like taking in a movie tonight? Celebration has a broad selection of films, stadium-style seating, a clean environment, and best of all, they never show commercials after the advertised showtime. Visit Celebration Cinemas online.

Title: Eagle Eye
MPAA: PG-13
Runtime: 118 minutes
Director: DJ Caruso

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Hey. Psst!!! Quick, over here! I want to say a few things about this new-on-DVD movie, Eagle Eye, but I have to be short and to the point - THEY are watching. You know who I mean ... THEY. The ones who killed JFK and covered it up; the ones who know the truth about Area 52 (yeah, that's right, they only want you to think it's called "Area 51" - don't be so naive my friend); the ones who arranged the sinking of the Titanic (the movie, that is, not the actual boat); the VERY SAME "they" who are probably, right this moment, adjusting the browning level on your toaster by just a fraction of a percent, so that you will be vaguely aware in the morning that something about your breakfast is slightly off, though you will be unsure of exactly what it is, and this will cause you to go about the rest of your day with a nagging sense of unsettledness about life in general.

Yes, THEY are watching. And THEY are observing us right now, so again, I must be brief, and I must speak in very guarded and coded language about this movie, because THEY will be very angry if I say anything critical about it.

Jerry Shaw is the central character, MAGNIFICENTLY played by the hyper-active, fidgety, and stammeringly WONDERFUL Shia LaBeouf (literally, "I am terrified of the beef"). Jerry and his female counterpart, Rachel (Michelle Monaghan), run around the countryside in a frantic and nervous fashion, taking orders from a cell phone.

Actually, to be more exact, they receive their instructions from a female voice over a cell phone, and this female voice is the voice of THEM, which I believe to be ultimately traceable to and identifiable with ahdhakwe ad;h2hge2 jfkhgip8ef nahg83 ad;gy8hajfhdjvnn.

As is appropriate for a techno-thriller of this sort, THEY keep tabs on and communicate with Jerry and Rachel through every technological means possible: street-level video cameras, GPS devices, cell phones (even ones belonging to other people), computer usage, the drive-through speaker at Wendy's, digital marquee signs, computer-controlled traffic lights, and Facebook application requests ("You have one Be a Pawn in Our National Conspiracy or We're Going to Kill Your Family request pending"). Perhaps the most chilling scene in the entire movie is when THEY remotely seize control of Jerry's iPhone and force him to watch countless hours of M. Night Shyamalan films. (You don't find that terrifying? Have you ever actually watched a Shyamalan film after you already know what the "twist" is going to be?!)

There is plenty of running around, driving real fast, blowing stuff up, motor-mouthing (thanks to Mr. The Beef, whose most memorable lines are, as usual, "No, waitwaitwaitwaitwaitwaitwait!!!" and "Come on, movemovemovemovemovemovemovemove!!!"), and crashing through glass. Side characters are brought in by the box-load, and then quickly killed off by THEM before you get a chance to become attached (or even care), in order to keep you, the audience, fully aware of how suspenseful and thrilling this movie is. IT IS THE MOST MASTERFULLY SCRIPTED AND EXECUTED STORYLINE I HAVE EVER SEEN. My honest, absolutely blunt and un-filtered opinion about this film is that it 73hjdfb ay fgelabfd y f89a e k fa;hd faggdad95.

The carrot at the end of the stick, so to speak, is the mystery of what exactly is the plot. You keep watching the film because you want to know certain fundamental things: Who is it that is ordering Jerry and Rachel around? Are Jerry and Rachel ultimately being used by the Good Guys or the Bad Guys? What is it that THEY are ultimately trying to accomplish through Jerry and Rachel's involvement? Is Big Brother really this powerful? Who in their right mind, having a surname of "LaBeouf", would name their son "Shia", and then encourage him to get his name up in lights?

Yes, much of this film is implausible (NO IT ISN'T! THEY ARE ALL-POWERFUL!), so get ready to suspend disbelief for a while. That comes with the territory, I guess, and that's why we watch movies in the first place, I think. We like a bit of "no way" to break up the predictability. However, when all the shooting, jumping, stammering, running, sweating, yelling, and techno-terrorizing is over, the grand finale is going to strike you as somehow ... familiar. Even "borrowed". Perhaps even "plagiarized from another movie or movies". (EXCEPT THAT THIS MOVIE IS ENTIRELY ORIGINAL AND BRILLIANT, AND ALL OTHER FILMS PALE IN COMPARISON)

In other words, I enjoyed the film while it was happening, even if I did shake my head a few times and laugh, and when it was all over I rolled my eyes and said, "Ok, that was entertaining, but seriously, HOW WILL I EVER FIND ANOTHER MOVIE THAT COMES CLOSE TO THIS MOVIE'S PERFECTION?" So go for it - it's a cheap rental, and you'll probably have some fun watching it, despite the fact that Shia LaBeouf is, technically, in the film.