Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Fritz Lang (”Western Union”/”Siegfried”/”Fury”) directs his first
Western and color film that turns out to be a conventional and slow in
the saddle one that is not without some interest (filmed on location in
the deserts of California). It’s a fictional take on reformed outlaw Frank
James; a sequel to Henry King’s romanticized box office hit Jesse James
(1939), with Henry Fonda, Henry Hull and John Carradine repeating their
roles from the earlier film. Sam Hellman turns in the efficient script,
using a revenge story premise and whooping it up as a sentimental celebration
of the good ole frontier days. Gene Tierney makes her film debut in the
role of an Eastern reporter who falls for Fonda’s Frank James after she
wants to tell Frank’s true story to the world. The lady urges the outlaw
gone straight to give up his need to avenge his brother Jesse’s cowardly
murder in the back by Carradine’s Bob Ford and Charlie Ford, who after
they were convicted in court were pardoned by the governor and given the
reward money.

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Frank James, aka Ben Woodson, feigned his death to be a farmer in
the Ozarks, living in Liberty with his loyal ex-slave “Pinky” (Ernest Whitman)
and Clem (Jackie Cooper), the teenage boy he adopted. When Frank learns
in his southern friend Major Rufus Cobb’s (Henry Hull) newspaper that the
Fords escaped the hang man he robs the express office of McCoy (Donald
Meek), who put up the reward for Jesse. Clem ran away from Pinky to help,
against Frank’s wishes, and accidently fires his gun during the robbery.
This alerts the town’s people who shoot wildly into the office and accidently
kill the watchman. Railroad detective Runyan (J. Edward Bromberg) is hired
by McCoy to get Frank. 

Tracking the Fords to Denver, Frank and Clem concoct a phony story
to tell the pretty Eleanor Stone about Frank’s death. She gets the story
printed in her father’s paper, but learns from Runyan it’s a hoax. The
Fords are putting on a reenactment of killing Jesse James in the Denver
hotel, but flee when they spot Frank in the audience. While fleeing Charlie
falls off a cliff and is killed.

When Frank learns through Eleanor that the law is about to hang the
innocent Pinky for the express office murder, Frank says he’ll surrender
in Liberty after he gets Ford. But Runyon arrests Frank and Pinky is freed,
as Frank is brought to trial. But his peers refuse to convict him. Outside
the courtroom, Bob Ford kills Clem. Frank follows him into a barn and takes
care of Bob Ford. Populist hero Frank then is pardoned for this shooting
and bids proper lady Eleanor goodbye.

The film is short on action but long on courtroom melodrama, not
a good balance for a routine Western.

Ewan McGregor straight to video shocker! Danish director Bornedal was tempted by Miramax to remake his elegant 1994 chiller with American accents, and despite a screenplay place one’s faith to Steven Soderbergh, that’s fair-minded what he’s done. If it isn’t snort-for-provocation, it’s penny-pinching as makes no odds. McGregor is the law commentator who takes a drudgery working nights as a guard in the bishopric morgue, honest as a psycho torpedo starts terrorising the community, and falls suspect himself. Creepy atmospherics and lots of dead victuals suppose for a tense send-off, but significant problems soon surface: McGregor’s friendship with misogynist brave Brolin is not purely a glaringly contrived red herring, but also effectively precludes our ruth. Nice guys just don’t allow themselves to be jerked off by hookers in public - not in America; and there’s a indecent whiff about the treatment of women - abruptly or crowded - that goes beyond grisly kind requirements.

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Unlike the “Super Troopers” Blu-ray, the single-disc release of “Dodgeball” is an exact replica of the unrated DVD release. The audio commentary with Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn and writer/director Rawson Michael Thurber isn’t nearly as funny as you’d expect, while the deleted scenes fall short as well. Of the four production featurettes – including “Dodgeball Boot Camp,” “Anatomy of a Hit” and “Go for the Gold” – the best of the bunch is “Justin Long: A Study in Ham and Cheese,” a five-minute highlight reel of the actor’s best moments in the film. Rounding out the disc is a gag reel, as well as a collection of Easter eggs (ranging from outtakes to a hidden commentary track) that can be accessed by pressing “enter” on your remote every time Stiller’s character snaps his fingers. It’s not a terrible collection of bonus material, but it’s a bit disappointing that Fox hasn’t even attempted to include any new extras. A dodgeball game or a pop-up trivia track would have been a good start.

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No, the head of Disney's gaming division wasn't taking the bait and announcing Kingdom Hearts 3 here at the annual DICE convention near Las Vegas. But he did tell Kotaku that franchise paved the way for another big Disney game.

"It forced us to challenge assumptions," Disney's game studio chief Graham Hopper said of the blockbuster series that mashes up Disney and Final Fantasy characters. Hopper recalled that, years ago and before he was working at the company, there were people at Disney who had said the game "was an abomination." But fans loved it, not minding its mixing of worlds and instead cheering it to great success.

Hopper pointed to the current sales success in Japan of the latest Kingdom Hearts, the PSP's Birth By Sleep. "That franchise is alive and its doing very well," he said.

And its influence on Disney's growing game-making ambition?

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"If you look at nothing else, you can look at Disney Epic Mickey taking the characters and showing them in a surprising way," Hopper said. Epic Mickey, the forthcoming Wii Mickey Mouse game from renowned game designer Warren Spector and his Junction Point Studios, puts Disney's lead mascot in a darker steampunk-influenced world, facing off with forgotten character's of Disney's earliest cartoons. (See Kotaku's extensive Epic Mickey chat with Spector)

Both Epic Mickey and Kingdom Hearts take creative risks with Disney characters that just wouldn't have flown years ago. Kingdom Hearts was the breakthrough.

Hopper added that the success of Square-Enix designer Tetsuya Nomura, who has creatively led the Kingdom Hearts franchise, helped prepare Disney for granting Spector his own creative influence on the Epic Mickey project.

In both cases, the games take Disney outside its comfort zone of what to do with its characters, and while Kingdom Hearts may have been considered an abomination in some corners of Disney before it was out, the tune has changed and the company is open to just that kind of unconventional design.

As for a Kingdom Hearts 3? Hopper had "nothing to say on it," declining to address whether the project is underway.

Hopper was talking alongside his boss, Disney interactive media group president Steve Wadsworth, who had just delivered the keynote address at DICE. Wadsworth had outlined what he described as Disney's consumer-first strategy of listening to its young customers, incorporating their ideas and striving to meet the demands of a generation that always had the Internet and wants their entertainment experiences connected across platforms. Wadsworth's talk highlighted successes such as Disney's Club Penguin — the executive said that even the DS spin-off has sold 1.5 million copies, with a billion Club Penguin coins uploaded from the game to the home web platform and announced that a DS sequel will be officially announced tomorrow. He showed trailer peeks at Split Second, Epic Mickey, the forthcoming Tron Evolution game, which he said would bridge the original movie with the new one, and the action role-playing game Pirates of the Caribbean Armada of the Damned.

Afterward, talking with Kotaku and other reporters, Wadsworth praised Kingdom Hearts as an example of showing how Disney's franchises, even those thought to be targeted at kids, could appeal to a core gaming market.

Both Disney men name-checked Marvel, which Disney recently acquired, but they said the transaction was too recent for any new gaming plans related to the characters to be fully formulated. In other words, your Kotaku reporter asked if they'd do a Kingdom Hearts-style mash-up game with Marvel and Disney characters — or, more seriously, if Disney hoped to eventually make Marvel games in-house — but they wouldn't say.

Hopper and Wadsworth were bullish on upcoming Disney racing game Split/Second. And Epic Mickey, obviously they're into it. Thanks, in no small part, it seems, to Kingdom Hearts.

Send an email to Stephen Totilo, the author of this post, at stephentotilo@kotaku.com.

Kindle in East Pakistan in the late ’60s, no more than before the civil clash that brought independence to Bangladesh, this delicate film owes a debt to Renoir’s The River and also the work of Satyajit Gleam. Similarities lie in how telling observations are offered in a quiet, humanist tone that affords each type his or her reasons, and in a child’s watch view of events reminiscent of Pather Panchali. The readiness to Islam of Kazi, a retiring homeopath, prompts him to send his young son Anu to a city boarding adherents known for its strict regime. Peaceably, Anu here befriends the outsider Rokon. Meanwhile, wary of the relatively hedonistic rites practised by innumerable local Hindus, Kazi is as adamantly opposed to the administration of allopathic medicine to his daughter as he is sceptical of rumours of Muslims bonanza Muslims. Others, to whatever manner, are all too au courant of the divisions between Sufis and mullahs, Hindus and communists. Director and co-author Tareque Masud’s handling of the social, political and religious forces at work at a parlous moment in his country’s history is deft ample supply to baffle the cinema becoming too foreseeable or schematic. Periodic lapses into melodrama may be a flaw, but the music, realistic images and all-embracing surety easily square.

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Allied to a ghost with a digital camera, an unidentified filmmaker finds himself in the Hermitage in St Petersburg in the early 1700s. As he glides auspices of the elaborate mansion admiring the fabulous works of astuteness wiles, he meets The Marquis (Sergey Dreiden) the only idol who can see or communicate with him; he turns commission to be a cynical French diplomat (surprised at his own precipitate ability to speak Russian). As the two men induce a specialist and occasionally shilly-shally-jumping tour of the imperial court of old Russia, they are witnesses to a myriad examples of sprightliness under the Tsars. They also exchange on numerous occasions wryly acidic opinions (often about Russia’s cultural grade in or gone of Europe) as they observe a unsurpassed have of art and history unfolding through the centuries, until the last Great Royal Ball of 1913, on the eve of the revolution.

Watching movies online have become popular with PC users who spend a lot of time online these days. These sites make it possible to watch full-length feature movies, and even streaming television shows right on your computer using a technology known as ?streaming-video.? On some of these web services you can even play interactive games in HD with 3D graphics. There are numerous websites providing these services, some free and others requiring paid memberships. The best free download movies site is watch-funny-movies.com

CONQUERING POWER, THE
(director: Rex Ingram; screenwriters: June Mathis/based on the novel Eugenie
Grandet by Honore de Balzac; cinematographer: John F. Seitz; cast: Alice
Terry (Eugenie Grandet), Rudolph Valentino (Charles Grandet), Ralph Lewis
(Pere Grandet), Edna Demaurey (Mrs. Grandet), Edward Connelly (Notary Cruchot),
Eric Mayne (Victor Grandet), Bridgetta Clark (Lucienna des Grassins), George
Atkinson (Cruchot's son Bonface), Guide Fenton (Monsieur des Grassins);
Runtime: 89; MPAA Rating: NR; producer: Rex Ingram; UnknownVideo/MGM; 1921-silent)

"The melodrama is outdated,
the romance is corny and the acting is ham-fisted, but it's Valentino."

After the smash hit of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse the previous
year, the now superstar Rudolph Valentino reunites with the same team of
skipper Rex Ingram, screenwriter June Mathis (credited with discovering
Valentino) and actress Alice Terry (Ingram's wife). Valentino hush didn't
get star salary (earned $350 a week) even all the same he without delay was one and when
he asked MGM for a raise of $100, he was given only $50. Account it
a slight, he left the studio repayment for Paramount. MGM realized they made a big
mistake, as his Paramount films of The Sheik and Blood and Sand were huge
hits. The look for speaks their lines in French, I think, to sustenance in the
mood of the testimony. It's based on the 1883 novel Eugenie Grandet by Honore
de Balzac, but the story is ruined by the crass commercially intended rewriting
by Mathis who built up Valentino's part while Ingram fought to built up
his wife's part. The melodrama is outdated, the romance is corny and the
acting is ham-fisted, but it's Valentino
.
The conquering power is, off course, love.

Charles Grandet (Rudolph Valentino) is the pampered son of a Paris
millionaire banker Victor Grandet (Eric Mayne), living a decadent life
as a playboy. On Charles' twenty-seventh birthday celebration his despondent
father sends his son to the Noyant countryside to live with estranged brother
Pere Grandet (Ralph Lewis)–the wealthiest man in the country. Charles
immediately falls in love with his angelic cousin Eugenie (Alice Terry)
but the mean-spirited and miserly Pere Grandet, who lives on the cheap
as if he were a poor man, is determined to keep them apart. The next day
Charles learns in the newspapers that his father committed suicide and
lost his entire fortune in speculation, which leaves him penniless. Victor
sent the following letter to his brother Pere: "My dear brother, After
twenty years, I am sending my son to you. By the time this letter reached
you, I shall be no more. My entire fortune has been swept away by speculation
on the stock market. I owe millions. In three days all Paris will say I
was a rogue and I shall be wrapped in a winding sheet of infamy. My dying
prayer is that you will be a father to my boy and may God bless you as
you fulfill this trust. Your despairing brother, Victor Grandet."

Pere Grandet schemes to cheat the youth out of his legitimate inheritance
and dispatches him to Martinique, not realizing that Eugenie gave him her
gold to pay for the voyage. When Charles writes that he invested the gold
and is able to pay her back, the father intercepts his letters and writes
that she married. While she's being pursued by two greedy families, the
Cruchots and the Grassins, with oafish sons, the skin-flint Pere plays
them off against one another as he milks the gold diggers for as much money
as he can while they pant at the possibility of marrying into such wealth.
Years later, Eugenie accidently discovers the letters of Charles's in Pere's
desk. She goes out to the garden to read them, where the two exchanged
vows of love, while the enraged Pere accidently locks himself in his room
and gets crushed to death when a chest of gold falls on him. Charles will
soon appear just before Eugenie was to marry the doddering son of the notary's,
Bonface Cruchot, and love will win out.

REVIEWED ON 6/7/2006        GRADE:
B-

Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"

© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED   DENNIS SCHWARTZ

(English and Russian dialogue)

Overblown, overlong and decidedly underwhelming on every level, Nikita Mikhalkov’s magnum opus “The Barber of Siberia” is a singular disappointment. This unwieldy melange of broad comedy (which at times would not be out of place in a “Police Academy” outing), pedestrian drama and utterly unbelievable romance impresses only with its sumptuous images of Czarist Russia. Pic probably will perform modestly in Europe, where the incongruities of the English dialogue will be undetected, but in Anglo territories it will open and close quickly. Lead thesps Julia Ormond and Richard Harris will be of little help in attracting audiences.

A long-term project for Mikhalkov, and his first since his 1994 Oscar winner “Burnt by the Sun,” “Barber” notably lacks the sentiment and charm of his best work, which has been on a far more intimate scale. This Euro pudding, though principally Russian, finds the director floundering with a couple of American characters (played by a British actress and an Irish actor) who remain stubbornly unconvincing.

The Russian characters are altogether more interesting, but the decision to pitch the first half of the film as a broad comedy proves disastrous, as these labored and undisciplined sequences refuse to work. About two-thirds through the overextended pic, Mikhalkov shifts gears in favor of romantic melodrama, but the lack of chemistry between Ormond and Russian actor Oleg Menshikov proves an insurmountable liability.

The film opens in 1905 in Springfield, Mass., as a woman, face unseen, composes a letter addressed to a young military cadet; content of the letter, in voiceover, underlines what follows.

The cadet in question, attending a cliff-top summer training camp (filmed in Portugal), has fallen afoul of his oafish sergeant (Mac MacDonald) over a ridiculous, and ludicrously protracted, argument about the worth of Mozart as a composer. The lad is punished by being forced to wear a suffocating gas mask until he recants his admiration for Mozart: Fact that he refuses points to his Russian sensibility, making the “secret” the letter writer keeps mentioning all too obvious from the very start.

The main story begins 20 years earlier in Russia as Jane Callahan (Ormond) travels by train to Moscow. During the journey, she meets some boisterous army recruits, among them Andrei Tolstoy (Menshikov), who, he assures Jane, is no relation to the great author. Andrei is smitten by the elegantly dressed American.

Jane has come to Moscow to help Douglas McCracken (Harris), who may be her father. McCracken has invented a fearsome machine designed for speedy and efficient logging of Siberian forests. He calls the monster the Barber of Siberia, and needs Jane’s help in persuading gullible Gen. Radlov (Alexei Petrenko), the officer in charge of the military academy, to seek financial support for the venture from the grand duke.

One of the pic’s more impressive sequences takes place as Jane arrives in the city just at the moment anarchists assassinate an official riding by in a coach. The cadets are parading in the area, and Tolstoy becomes involved in the subsequent shootout, though the sensitive youth deliberately allows one of the gunmen to escape.

At the military academy, Jane meets Tolstoy again while at the same time flirting with Radlov, who soon decides he’d like to marry her, using Tolstoy as his intermediary because the latter speaks English. This simple part of the plot takes an inordinate amount of time to unfold, punctuated as it is by strenuously unfunny slapstick scenes and sequences featuring the playfully rowdy cadets. A scene in which a formal ball is thrown into chaos because the floor has been so polished (by the cadets) that it’s exceedingly slippery might have worked — except that it’s extended long after the joke has paled.

After about two hours, Jane and Tolstoy finally get to consummate their love, and now the film shifts into high dramatic gear with confessions, misunderstandings and a lengthy separation as Tolstoy is carted off to Siberia for an alleged assault on the grand duke. Film’s climax, in which Ormond wears a distractingly unbecoming hat, is, like so much of the film, allowed to stretch on long after the viewer has gotten the point and worked out the supposedly deep , dark secret.

Ormond, even more out of place here than she was in “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” can make little of her pivotal character, though Menshikov is more convincing as the soulful young cadet. Harris is given almost no opportunities, and in one scene is allowed to sit with his mouth wide open for minutes on end.

Best performance comes from Petrenko as the rather pathetic Radlov. Anna Mikhalkova, the helmer’s daughter, is sweet as a servant girl who secretly loves Tolstoy. Mikhalkov himself appears, imposingly, as Czar Alexander III in a magnificent scene in which the newly graduated cadets meet their emperor — if only the entire film had been on this level.

Production values are polished in every department, with fine widescreen lensing by Pavel Lebeshev of spectacular Moscow streets and buildings in winter and summer. The Siberian forest sequences are also fine, though environmentalists may quail at the destructiveness of the titular Barber. Editor Enzo Meniconi’s indulgent handling of the material results in a film that overstays its welcome by about an hour.