Okay, before I tear into this movie, I should mention that I’m actually a pretty big Nicholas Cage fan. But like John Travolta, Nicholas Cage has a lot of die-hard fans and a lot of people who can’t stand him and relatively little in between. But love him or hate him, he’s just not a serious action star, despite constantly starring in action movies. He’s like a slighly more Hollywood-ized version of Jean Claude Van Damme (another of my personal heroes, of course), with slightly less punching.

Once again, Cage plays a role that doesn’t even remotely fit him - an ultra-lonely assassin who’s work carries him all around the world but prevents the development of any kind of social life, romantic or otherwise. Oh, and it also comes with all sorts of rules, which he is nice enough to narrate for us, such as “never get involved with anyone outside of work.” For those of you who can’t read between the smoking bullet holes, that means don’t get involved with anyone at any time ever. Because the only people he ever interacts with in person at work are the people that he kills.

That being said, it’s interesting the decision to cast Nicholas Cage in this role. He is known for playing

Hi, you don't know me, and I'm sorry to interrupt your dinner, but would you mind helping me kill four people?

guys who are down on their luck or involved in some kind of criminal scheme but with a heart of gleaming gold. And he does that here, but he also viciously kills a lot of people, which is uncharacteristic for him.

On what he swears is going to be his One Last Job (which is not the only disappointing cliche that Bangkok Dangerous has in common with last week’s Righteous Kill), he is heading to Thailand to carry out four high profile killings in the same location, but for this particular job he needs some assistance, so he approaches a young man who displays the skills needed by cleverly stealing some tourist’s wallet. Reluctantly, the gutter punk accepts, after a bout of obligatory bargaining.

And by the way, I never understand why people in movies react the way they do when offered a job to do some little thing and get paid like $2,000 a day. They’re always raising their eyebrows and doubting and bargaining and squinting their eyes and thinking and hesitating and debating. Personally I would just pick myself up off the floor and ask when I start. Unless I had to kill someone. Then I guess I would ask for more. I mean hesitate. I would hesitate.

Another boring day at the office.

Anyway, through a series of contrived scenes, their tenuous relationship grows miraculously stronger as we watch in confusion as Joe (Cage) systematically breaks all of the rules that he explained to us at the beginning of the movie. At the same time as he is trying to train Kong, his Thai helper, he is also falling desperately in love with a mute Thai woman who works at a local pharmacy.

The girl is cute and has a powerful charm, but watching Cage transform into a babbling schoolboy whenever she’s around sort of takes a little of the conviction away when he tries to look scary later. The Thai love interest is played by Chinese actress Charlie Yeung, who gives a good performance despite the romantic subplot being wildly out of place. The movie halts in its tracks so abruptly and so completely every time she appears that you can almost smell the brakes burning. And you can definitely hear them.

This is the badass piece of machinery that Nicholas Cage uses to race back and forth between the two totally incompatible movies in Bangkok Dangerous.

The other half of the movie is the one about the killings and the Thai sidekick, with Cage quite literally zooming back and forth between the two plots on a cool BMW motorcycle. I’m guessing that the sheer badassedness of these bikes is supposed to be distracting enough so that we don’t wonder why this guy, who’s been in Bangkok for a matter of days, has a whole stable of them at his disposal. Oh, and he also gives one to Kong, who shrugs and offers a half grin when tossed the keys. I love the gratitude!

Similar to Righteous Kill, however, by far the most disappointing thing about the movie is the ending, which doesn’t stop delivering the disappointment when it culminates in a shootout that takes place - you guessed it - in an old abandoned warehouse. I’m at a loss to explain why this scene is still being tacked onto the endings of action movies. This is the 21st century, for god’s sake. Maybe the locations are free to use. Whatever the case may be, such a climax hasn’t been exciting in untold decades. In the last 30 minutes of the movie, I fell asleep literally like half a dozen times.

But wait, there’s more. Remember the astonishing forehead-slapper that closed Babylon A.D.? Well, if you read my review you probably didn’t bother with the movie, but Bangkok Dangerous also comes with a closing shot that comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere, serving no real purpose but to provide a bit of footage that can be run at slow motion and make for a nice fade out before the credits.

Failed movie titles - "An American Cowboy in Thailand."

There are a lot of roles that Nicholas Cage can do really well. He was perfect in The Rock, he inhabited his roles in Adaptation and Matchstick Men, and he even played a good investigator highly disturbed at his subject in 8mm, but here we’re expected to identify with this guy who is having conflictions about being given an assignment to kill a politician who happens to be a good man. It creates a confusing feeling when we’re expected to aspire to the moral high-ground of a contract killer.

But most of all, for all of Cage’s strengths, he just can not do emotions and he can not do romance. Not ever. Remember that movie Next from last year? Holy crap. There was a scene where I thought I was wrong about the romance thing, it was incredible. He says to this woman something like, “The definition of beauty is that all things are arranged in such a way so that nothing needs to be added, changed, or taken away. And that’s you…you’re beautiful.”

That second sentence is a little obvious and redundant, I should think, but still not bad. But then he goes and blows it completely with this stupid magic trick. He woos her with these sweet words, and then he’s like, hey baby, wanna see me pull a magic rose out of my hat?

Dumbass!

In Bangkok Dangerous a good third of the movie is him with this goofy grin on his face, trying to think of something clever to say to this girl that can’t hear him or talk to him, and the rest of the movie he’s trying to get out of the assassination business while reluctantly training a young man to get into it as their relationship grows stronger. What? The numerous narrative directions are crazily inconsistent and incompatible. It commits the age old crime of trying to please too broad of an audience, and will probably end up pleasing no one.

Other than the immediate appeal of seeing Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino on screen together for the first time since Heat in 1995, there is very little special or interesting about Righteous Kill. And it’s too bad because there are elements of the movie that are so good and so fitting for each of them (like DeNiro grinning and threatening a child molester on his way out of the courtroom on a technicality) that it’s clear that the movie has a lot of what it takes to be a much better thriller.

DeNiro and Pacino play two veteran NYPD detectives who have been friends and partners for about as long as either of them can remember. Their latest case is lifted right out of The Boondock Saints - a vigilante killer who is systematically killing off violent criminals who have fallen through the cracks of the judicial system. This is, of course, a highly appealing premise - there are few things quite as satisfying as seeing a murderer or rapist or child molester getting shot at point blank range and then a four-line poem tossed onto their chest rhyming out the justification for their death. Well, it’s satisfying to see in a movie anyway. To be perfectly honest, I’m not all that into seeing anyone get shot in real life, poem or not.

But sadly, the movie falls completely flat in its handling of the mystery of who the real killer is. There is a strong implication early in the movie (from the first frame, as it were) that the killer is one of the two main detectives, and there are two other detectives, played by Donnie Wahlberg and John Leguizamo, who are also working the case and increasingly develop the same suspicions.

But there is a cheap method of maintaining tension and dramatic tension that lower level thrillers and mystery movies use, which is to plainly and deliberately lead the audience in the wrong direction before wildly swinging the plot around like a carnival ride near the end. Righteous Kill gives us clues that seem so obvious that they appear to be storytelling techniques rather than plot points, but it’s no use here to try to figure out the mystery, just try to enjoy the ride. Clever moviegoers will see through the constant misdirection like grandma’s underpants, as Bart Simpson would say, but any predictability is based on seeing through cheap film techniques, not figuring out an intricate story.

Al Pacino tries to calm Robert DeNiro down from the shock of realizing that 50 Cent is this much bigger than him.

And most of the ride is enjoyable. There’s more talk than I like in an action thriller starring two of the biggest badasses in movie history, but the story never drags despite being so thin on substance. Curtis Jackson gives a pretty good performance as basically himself, a recording artist/nightclub owner/designer drug dealer (hopefully that last part is fiction) who becomes the focus of Detectives Turk and Rooster’s (DeNiro and Pacino) latest case.

But there are two conflicting stories going on here - there is the story of the two detectives trying to figure out who this killer is that’s killing off the people that the judicial system is too dumb to catch, and the story of us trying to figure out where the plot is going, because the movie presents itself as though it hands us the answer at the beginning and we have to figure something else out. There is some tension generated by other detectives getting closer to what we think is the truth, but don’t go assuming you know all the answers just because you’re told at the start of the film.

John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg react to the news that they will not receive top billing.

Director John Avnet also directed a recent action thriller starring Al Pacino called 88 Minutes, which was something of a critical disaster, not the least reason for which was because of its highly disappointing ending. Similarly, he doesn’t seem to know how to end Righteous Kill, so he gives us a massive cliche, the good guy and the bad guy in an old abandoned warehouse pointing guns at each other in what I suppose is meant to be a tense standoff, except that there is never for a second the slightest doubt about how it will turn out.

Despite coming at the very end of the summer, this is one of the more anticipated late-summer releases, especially among action fans eager to see the two film legends finally on screen together again. Unfortunately, there is more effort put into overcoming all of what must be the massive complications involved in getting two guys like DeNiro and Pacino into a movie together than there is into making it a good movie beyond their presence. They inhabit their roles, as is to be expected, but the rest of the movie feels like it is hanging off of them like a wet paper bag. It’s more fun than a swift kick in the ass, but to say that we should expect better than this from them would be something of an understatement.

Regardless of which party you support (if any), we live in dangerous political times in America. Anything remotely political is immediately labeled as right wing or left wing, and then accused by the opposite side of overtly pressing a political agenda. Traitor walks a fine line by approaching head-on one of the most pressing political issues of our time - terrorism - and presenting numerous different political and moral beliefs and perspectives on every side (both right/left and terrorist/non-terrorist), while still managing mostly to avoid directly supporting or condemning either side. This is not an easy task.

Don Cheadle plays a man living in modern Yemen with a complicated past and a morally corrupt occupation of selling detonators to the highest bidder (whether it be terrorists or the United States military doesn’t matter to him). He has been surrounded by violence all his life, and has developed an intense aversion to it, no doubt from having witnessed as a child his father’s violent death in a car bomb. But from these experiences, he has also developed an understanding of the world he lives in, an understanding of how to survive in it, and a whole list of personality contradictions.

Samir has to learn that you have to sacrifice a few pawns in order to win the game.

The film opens with Samir (Don Cheadle) selling detonators to a group of Islamic fundamentalists, when the FBI bursts in and arrests everyone in the compound. While in prison, Samir develops a friendship with Omar, one of the terrorists, who is then broken out of prison by some of his friends. Samir is now on the inside of a high-profile terrorist operation, which provides the film’s opportunity to comment on the differences between different factions of Islamic believers.

Samir and the terrorists have the same religion but totally different beliefs. One of the main goals of the movie is to show how religion can be twisted to represent almost anything you can imagine. Samir believes in a religion of peace, while Omar uses the same religion as justification for suicide bombings. There is an important scene where Samir mentions to FBI Agent Clayton (Guy Pearce) that the Koran says that if you kill someone, you kill all mankind. Clayton responds that the Koran also says that if you save someone, you save all mankind. I’m no expert on the Koran or the logical reasoning of terrorists, but it seems like it’s a bit of a stretch to twist such a thing into justification for mass killings.

Samir is often a difficult character to understand, because there are so many contradictions between his actions and his beliefs. There’s a scene where Samir is talking to his sister, who demands to know the truth about what’s really going on. “The truth,” he says, “is complicated.” But that’s what the movie is about. Nothing is ever black and white, you can never boil a situation like this down to good and bad, terrorist and innocent, even Americans and evildoers. To think you can, the movie says, is as dangerous as ignorance.

The other major moral dilemma that the movie deals with is how many innocent deaths are acceptable in order to prevent terrorist attacks. We learn that Samir believes that number to be smaller than the FBI does, but the movie never answers it because it’s a question that can’t be answered. The only thing we do know, both in real life and in the movie, is that the answer isn’t none.

Eventually, as we learn more about Samir’s history, we discover that he has ties to both the Americans and the terrorists, and it becomes a question as to who he is actually a traitor to. He clearly is not faking his religious dedication, so it’s unlikely that he’s a terorrist, but his actions also lead to innocent deaths. He’s in an impossible situation, and is forced to do things to protect his identity (he spends a majority of the movie undercover) that haunt him.

Agent Clayton - "It seems every religion has more than one face."

But the movie’s biggest success is that it brings up important political points without overtly supporting or condemning any of them. Like the best movies based on real events, or on political realities, it exists to increase knowledge and awareness and, even more, to generate debate, hopefully of the productive kind.

There is a scene in the movie where one of the higher-ups in the terrorist organization, in preparation for an attack, announces that the American government claims to represent the people, so naturally it follows that the American people can be held responsible for their government’s crimes. This is a powerful statement in today’s American political climate, but besides betraying a massive lack of understanding of the American political system, it is nothing more than an effort to show us why terrorists think it’s acceptable to kill American citizens because of something that our government has done. Volumes could be filled with the number of terrible things that governments all over the world and throughout history have done while their citizens remained happily oblivious.

Personally, I think it’s more dangerous to use historical reasons to justify modern warfare, which is also done in the movie when one of the terrorists mentions, again as justification for attacking America, that Americans were originally terrorists against the British during the formation of our country. I’m not exactly sure how that logic works, but there you go. If history were acceptable justification for military attack, places like Japan and Germany would be in big trouble!

Despite being a thriller that weaves together story elements of political intrigue and espionage and top secret operations, there is nothing of the super fast-paced action and car chases and explosions with which a lesser movie would be overflowing. It’s a close look at some of the things that we take for granted, things that are little more than television sound-bytes to most Americans, things like student visas and terrorist training and the Patriot Act and racial profiling. The very mention of racial profiling, for example, is certain to cause instant protest, but there is at least one scene in the movie where it seems not only perfectly logical, but absolutely essential.

It’s so easy to hear some of these terms and make immediate assumptions about which are good and patriotic and which are evil and dangerous, but Traitor is all about how easy it is for those assumptions to be wrong. All throughout the movie, we root for Samir, we want him to be safe and successful and get away from this mess that he’s entangled in, even as we watch him walk away from the American Consulate building in Nice, France and press the detonator button that blows it up, killing eight people.

Thankfully, the movie avoids caricature characters. We can’t just label Samir in our minds as a terrorist, even though he has bombed buildings and killed people, and the real terrorists (who explain that they only use violence because it has been used against them) are not the cave-dwelling people with long beards and dirty robes that so many people imagine, they are wealthy, well-dressed people living in fancy, modern apartments who watch the news of their attacks on flat-screen TVs and decorate their walls with high art. This paints a whole new picture of our enemies.

Samir is Don Cheadle's most powerful and haunted performance since his brilliant work in Hotel Rwanda.

What we can understand about terrorism and terrorists from Traitor is that they really could be anyone (there are sleeper cells mobilized in the movie’s chilling third act that are astonishing in their appearance as everyday Americans), terrorists are sophisticated, often educated and successful people and, as one of the leaders explains in the movie, “terrorism is not about damage, it’s about a response. Terrorism is theatre.” Scary thought, because it’s also film!

There’s a key moment in the film where an important character (who’s role in the story I won’t reveal) tells Samir at a difficult moment, “This is war, you do what it takes to win.” To which Samir responds, “You know who you sound like, right?” My first assumption was that this was a jab at the GOP, but given the political restraint in the rest of the movie, I think it’s far more likely that he means the terrorists, and that this scene is an illustration of how easy it is to confuse American national security logic with that of terrorist organizations. It’s scary to think that people we consider to be evil murderers justify their actions by giving us similar labels as well, and one of the goals of Traitor is to get people to understand how easy it is to get the two sides confused when you boil down the basic beliefs.

Now, if I can just add something in as far as my personal beliefs, it seems to me that a movie like this, that illustrates the extreme complexity of a terrorist situation (since few other things seem at first to be so readily and cleanly definable as “good vs. evil”), calls into question a lot of the most basic tenets of religion. Not just Christianity or Islam, but any religion that comes with a day of judgement upon death and an ensuing designation to a life in paradise or unending suffering in a lake of fire. It’s comforting for us to be able to label people as good or bad, criminal or law-abiding citizen, terrorist or innocent. Traitor shows us how rarely such classifications fit cleanly.

Incidentally, a year ago I managed to get myself arrested in China and thrown into a Communist prison, where I was interrogated for seven hours under suspicion of being a spy. It was not fun, I'm telling you, but Samir fares much worse in this movie...

I have always felt that the belief that one’s own religion was the sole path ot heaven, while all other would lead to an eternity in hell, is the most bizarre thing. Invariably, that would mean that the vast majority of the human population would end up burning in hell (or the equivalent) for their faith, while only a small portion would be saved, and I just have a hard time accepting the image of a benevolent God that would allow so much of his creation to earn eternal suffering after their efforts to live their lives according to their own faith (or lack thereof?). It’s common, for example, for people to assume that atheists are automatically hellbound heathens, but what if, for example, a man (or woman) who didn’t believe in God managed to stop a terorist attack and save dozens or hundreds of lives? Would he still go to hell because of his lack of religious faith?

Traitor brings up all of these questions and debates and, rather than presume to give us the real meaning behind them, instead shows us that they are not ours to answer.

This poster is funnier than the entire movie.

Disaster Movie currently holds the coveted #1 spot on IMDb.com’s list of the ‘100 Worst Movies of All Time,’ based at the time of this writing on almost 10,000 user votes. Normally, I don’t place a huge amount of stock in things like a user rating, but when 85% of regular people rate a movie 1/10, I tend to think that it represents something real.

Interestingly, at this moment there are 468 people who have rated the movie 10/10. I’m willing to bet that if you were to count the people in the movie’s credits, it would come out to something like that. More than likely, they are scrambling wildly at this very moment to call all of their friends and family and get them to log on in an attempt to drive the movie further down that ‘Worst Ever’ list. Good luck. The badness in this movie is blinding.

I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve seen Scary Movie 1, 2, and 3, Date Movie, Epic Movie, and Meet the Spartans because the only thing I’ve gained from all of that lost time is that the formula used over and over by “writers” and “directors” (in the loosest sense of the terms) Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer is painfully obvious to me by now. Each time these guys come out with another movie, I always find myself wondering what their parents say to their friends at office parties when asked how their kids are doing and what they’re up to.

This random scene from Disaster Movie was meant to be funny. I can't remember why.

Personally, I think my own parents would be happier if I was making porn than making movies like these.

The formula is basically the most uninteresting and witless form of the spoof, which is a major comedy sub-genre. They take the most famous scenes from the most famous movies of the year, reenact them with talentless actors and throw in a lot of sex jokes.

Here, I’ll explain the difference between a good spoof and whatever it is you would call this tripe that these guys come up with. The entire point of these kinds of movies, like The Naked Gun, Mafia!, Wrongfully Accused, and (my personal favorite) Spaceballs, is to squeeze in as many hilarious homages as possible so that the audience can entertain themselves trying to recognize them all, even if the humor is just a little too childish for them.

I can't imagine needing more reason than this never to watch this movie...

Though originality is largely sacrificed, people enjoy seeing characters they know return in other movies (or books). It’s almost like seeing family.

In Disaster Movie, however, the “homages” (again, the loosest sense of the term) and pop culture references are so obvious and so inept that it is difficult to find a proper term for them. “Jokes” just doesn’t seem to fit.

Like so many other “Movies” from this bizarre team, the plot is as unimportant as the plot ever gets in a movie. It is nothing more than a flimsy line along which to string a lot of tasteless skits, but if you’re really interested, it’s about a guy who dodges asteroids while trying to reunite with his girlfriend. Fascinating!

You know, as much as Epic Movie made me want to throw myself out of a moving vehicle, I was actually impressed with some of the straightforward production values. The movie looked good from a purely aesthetic point of view most of the time, and the make-up and the re-created characters from the spoofed movies was actually pretty impressive.

Sorry about the rant, but if I don't let my emotions out about Disaster Movie, this could be me any day now.

Not this time. I may be being too hard on the movie (note: I’m not.), but I think by this point I am just so sick and tired of the trash coming from these guys that I have nothing nice to say. They say if you don’t have anything nice to say you shouldn’t say anything at all, but on the other hand, if I bottled up all of my suffering from watching this movie into a little ball in the back of my head, there’s no telling when I might just snap and fly into a violent rage sometime in the near future, and I just can’t afford any more trouble with the police, you know?

So my advice is to avoid this movie like some kind of infectious disease. It is, however, a great way to be voluntarily tortured through your eyes for an hour and a half, if you’re into that kind of thing…

F

I know what you're thinking, - the Hulk, right? Nope, this is actually just some guy I snapped a picture of on the way out of the theater yesterday. Evidently he was unimpressed as well.

My first reaction to Babylon A.D. was that it’s not nearly as bad as its own director, Matthieu Kassovitz, has been claiming it is, although that reaction came to me before I got to the end of the movie. The movie has a cool set-up and a few good action sequences, although they suffer from that all too modern symptom of having been put together by editors who must have been on some kind of amphetamines. Like so many other recent action films (Death Race, for example), the fight scenes and chase scenes and whatnot are cut together so fast that they fly by with dizzying speed, and you move on with the rest of the movie with only a vague impression of what just happened.

Vin Diesel stars as Toorop, a hardened loner of a mercenary whose latest mission is to escort a mysterious young woman from a convent in Russia to America, where he is listed as a terrorist, although like so much of the rest of the movie, we never learn why. Michelle Yeoh comes across as a bizarre casting decision for a bizarre character. She plays Sister Rebekah, Aurora’s guardian. This woman I just don’t get. She’s Chinese and plays a kung-fu fighting nun in Russia.

She and Toorop have an immediate power struggle, and then during the mission Aurora exhibits more and more strange powers and abilities. She can feel other people’s pain, she can operate old submarines, and can predict the future. The rest of the movie is basically Toorop’s mission to get her to New York alive, avoiding the mysterious figures pursuing her for their own agenda, and figure out what’s wrong with her along the way.

Toorop - "Life's simple. Kill or be killed. A survivors' code. My code."

The movie moves along from one on-location set piece to the next, with action scenes and fights popping up out of nowhere and then wrapping up nicely as our heroes rush off screen to the next set. But I would argue that at least most of the action is fun along the way.

Unfortunately, I happened to have learned before watching the movie that a 160-minute version would be released in Europe, compared to the 90-minute version I just saw, and let me tell you, you can really feel the blank spots. There is, for example, a major, major plot development revealed in the third act of the movie that is so bizarre that it’s almost like someone slipped in a page from a completely different movie. It comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, and adds nothing to the movie except provides a spot to slide in the ending, which leaves you with the feeling that the writer was hit by a truck or they ran out of money or just lost interest. The end is so sudden and so witless that the movie immediately transformed in my mind into an endless maze of loose ends and confusion.

There is a brief scene in the movie where Sister Rebekah explains hers and Aurora’s history to Toorop, but it doesn’t explain anything and doesn’t really matter anyway, because the story is so clearly just a backdrop to the futuristic landscapes and the cookie cutter fight scenes, many of which are hilarious in their badness. There is one scene, for example, where the trio outrun not only a couple of what look like futuristic Stealth bombers, but also their missiles, and they do it on snowmobiles!

Always when I'm eating...

I don’t think we ever learn the exact time period, but the futuristic element of the film is badly incoherent. New York City is jam-packed with neon advertisement, fold-out road maps are like Google Maps on paper and touch sensitive, and taxis have scrolling message boards on their sides, but Coke Zero is still around and advertising on passenger jets and the bad guys drive vintage, mint-condition 2008 Range Rovers. They must really like classic cars.

I have to say that Babylon A.D. left me with the feeling that it could have and should have been so much better than it was, and I’m guessing that was the money-hungry hand of the studio that swept away all of the good parts of the movie. I’m hoping that when Babylon DVD comes along it will include the uncut, 160-minute version that the Europeans saw, along with an explanation of why it was so badly butchered before released to American audiences. At any rate, any Director’s Cut is sure to be a different movie entirely. I recommend waiting for it.

So Jason Statham is by now one of the biggest action stars in the world. He reminds me of a young Bruce Willis, although he’s had his share of hits and misses. Death Race is what I would call a critical disaster, because it has nothing but action and carnage. This thing is thin on everything - plot, story, acting, characters, etc. But what else would you expect from a movie with a title like Death Race? It’s fast, loud, vulgar, and violent, and as far as I’m concerned that’s all that it promises. Works for me.

It seems that in the distant future, the American economy is in shambles, inflation is through the roof, and things have gotten so bad with prison over-crowding that, now that they’re run for profit by private corporations, they have resorted to allowing inmates to kill each other off in webcasted death races. And by “distant future,” of course, I mean that the movie takes place in far-off 2012. If nothing else, Death Race certainly has little faith in whoever will turn out to be our next president.

My problem with the movie is that it leaves you with the feeling that a better movie is taking place outside the prison. The movie is essentially an advertisement for the inevitable video game, so I’m willing to accept the ludicrous premise about giving our most hardcore future-criminals heavily armed, high-powered vehicles, but I’m more interested in seeing what’s going on in America where the United States military has decided that the best use for their mounted machine guns, laser-guided, armor-piercing RPGs, rocket launchers, and nothing less than napalm, would be to put them in the hands of prison inmates so they can kill each other off for the purpose of online entertainment.

But therein you have your message to America about the American economy and our place in the world. Our economy has crashed, so clearly we’re no longer the world’s #1 superpower. The races are sold to the public for a whopping $250 per race (which, given our economic situation, must be a mostly foreign audience), and since they regularly pull in tens of millions of viewers, evidently America has been reduced in the world to a source of violent entertainment.

Then again, I’m probably reading far too deeply into the material than was intended. They do, after all, bus in teams of stunningly hot female co-pilots for no decipherable reason. I’m not sure which is a more dangerous thing to bring in to a prison, rocket launchers and napalm or hot women.

But of course what really matters is the cars and the carnage and there’s plenty of both. Many of the modifications make no sense, like the 6-inch steel armor plate on the back of Statham’s Mustang, which must weigh double what the car weighs, but for full-throttle violence and mayhem you can hardly do better than this.

But if there is one thing that I’ll have a hard time forgiving the movie for, it’s the way the weapons are activated. Joan Allen made a surprising career decision in taking a major role in this movie, which leaves her little to do except be a cold, heartless wench and call for manhole-sized buttons on the track to be turned on and off. Sort of like the little prizes and things that you have to run over on the track in order to get enhanced weapons.

The original Death Racers...

The similarity to old Nintendo games is a little too much for comfort. Also, remember how if you hit one of those little oil patches your car would go spinning wildly into the wall? That happens here, too.

Ultimately the movie raises an interesting moral debate, whether or not it’s worth it to give violent criminals a chance to win their freedom if they manage to bring some money into the ailing economy and kill off a few of their fellow hardened criminals in the process.

The movie is basically The Fast and the Furious without all the shiny prettiness of it. The cars are not high-powered speed-racers, they are assault weapons with wheels and untold horsepower, and aesthetic appeal is unimportant compared to sheer power of destruction. I was a little disappointed to see that the movie didn’t have the narrative drive of something like Crank or The Transporter, it’s a watered-down Statham action movie.

Must...look...angry!!

He’s got a tremendous screen presence, showcased best in Snatch, I think, but all he’s given to do here is look pissed behind the wheel and periodically kick the crap out of some skinheads. You may rediscover that you enjoy seeing white supremacists get their asses kicked, and if you are interested in deadly car racing you may enjoy this one. But given that most half-baked action flicks of this variety tend to spawn endless sequels (4 fast 4 Furious is on its way, for example), I just hope that Death Race 2: Full Throttle takes place on the mainland.

There’s a scene in The House Bunny where a key character inquires as to whether Shelley is, in fact, “that dumb.” One of her fellow sorority sisters immediately stands up and says, indignantly, “She’s not dumb!” This is an important scene, and my immediate assumption was that we, the audience, were meant to shake our fists at the screen and say, “Yeah!” But then I remembered that for well over an hour by that point, the movie had been scrambling frantically to get us to laugh at how genuinely and spectacularly dumb she is.

This is a contradiction that permeates the entire movie, with strange results. When I saw that scene, I was immediately relieved that I had so far found the movie so completely unamusing, otherwise I would have felt guilty for laughing at this girl, who, I understand, is “not dumb.”

So, in order to flaunt my superiority, I turned around in my chair and shook my fist at the drunk, cackling teenagers at the back of the theater and yelled, “Yeah! She’s not dumb! See? You little punks!” Strangely, this only brought more laughter.

Shelley begs for a PG-13 rating.

The House Bunny, by the way, is PG-13, which should cause the majority of the male audience to lose interest entirely and confuse anyone over 17 as to why anyone would find such a movie interesting. The story is centered around the life of a Playboy bunny who is ousted from the Playboy mansion. Playboy’s founder himself, Hugh Hefner, plays a sizable supporting role. Would one be out of line to expect a little gratuitous nudity? In this case, yes, because this is a soft porn movie for kids age 13 and up. Nice.

The story is basically Legally Blonde in a sorority house, so it’s obvious that the movie’s message must have something to do with superficiality and obsessions over appearance and other such nonsense.

"Bodaciously going where no bunny has gone before. College." Incidentally, like me, Anna Faris has a degree in English Literature. Can't you tell?

Shelly, played by Anna Faris, is booted out of the Playboy mansion and finds herself homeless, so she decides to shack up with a sorority of uncool girls and teach them how to turn themselves into male fantasies.

It’s sad that the movie fails so completely because there is so much potential there, but, unfortunately, they just don’t know where to stop with the cartoonishly overblown outcasts. These are not your typical college nerds, these are girls that don’t know better than to walk up to some guys in a bar and say, “Hey, where’s the crapper? I gotta drop off some timber.”

Timber!!!

I feel like, in order for the comedy in a movie like this to be successful, we need to be able to point to a few characters and say, “Hey I know someone like that!” Not in this movie. You don’t know anyone like anyone in this movie. But you have, however, seen people like the people in this movie.

Remember that goofy teen comedy She’s All That? One of the cool kids takes a bet that he can take the ugliest, most uncool girl in school and turn her into the prom queen. So we meet little Laney Boggs, the weird art student always covered in paint and unable to get a date to save her life. Zach, the cool guy choosing to accept the mission impossible, has his work cut out for him. But — surprise! — she takes off her glasses and combs her hair and she’s hot! What a relief that the transformation was so easy!

When we meet the girls of Zeta Alpha Zeta, they are genuinely frightening social outcasts. Bitter, confused by social interaction, and more clueless about fashion than your average homeless person, they are quite a spectacle to behold.

But, surprise! Wouldn’t you know it? With the addition of the right, ahem, outfits, a little hip hop bumping in the background, and just the right amount of slow motion, they’re all crazy hot! Who would have guessed?

Interestingly, it isn’t until the very, very end of the film that you will truly realize how purely and incredibly meaningless it is. The movie is about Shelley’s efforts to turn a group of social outcasts into frat party favors, but then it tries to feed us this message about not worrying about what other people think and just being yourself. What the hell?

Beginning with the story about a Playboy bunny that just happens to be rated PG-13, everything in the movie cancels out everything else. There’s a scene at the end that is meant to tie everything together and make it all make sense, but it is one of the biggest forehead slappers I’ve seen in recent memory.

I’ve noticed lately, particularly with movies like Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder, that there are a lot of new things being done in the comedy world. The House Bunny is unsurprisingly unaware of these new ideas and experiments and is merely feeding us the same childish tripe we’ve seen countless times before. One can only hope that, since they are now resorting to a PG-13 Playboy theme, they must surely be running out of ideas….

Actual quote for the 13 and over crowd: "Eyes are the nipples of the face!"

I think we’ve all been spoiled by good music movies, like Almost Famous (which, incidentally, Rainn Wilson was actually in) and School of Rock, or at least funny ones, if not necessarily good, like Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny. From the trailer you can quickly gather that The Rocker is not a serious movie; it’s about as serious as Step Brothers. What you can’t gather from the trailer is that The Rocker is also as dumb as Step Brothers.

It immediately starts out with intolerable goofiness, as Robert Fishman is kicked out of his 80s caricature band and turns into a movie monster. He chases his terrified bandmates down the street on foot at 60mph, jumping on top of the van and clawing his way across the roof using his drumsticks as hooks to pull himself along. When they slam on the brakes and send him flying into the street, first he appears to be dead but soon sits up like a zombie and turns his head like he’s possessed. Thus is the tone set and your eyes can safely glaze over for the rest of the movie.

Cut to 20 years later, where he is working a dead-end job sitting in front of a computer (I’m just now realizing the irony of me sitting here writing that last sentence), while his former bandmates have gone on to massive superstardom. Luckily, he soon finds his calling when a bunch of whiny high school kids ask him to play with their band as the drummer for their senior prom.

The tortured artist, the token fat guy, the old rocker, and the brooding chick with black nail polish and perpetual sneer.

All of the typical scenes are thrown in, the auditions for the new drummer where you get a whole stream of bizarre lunatics doing something ridiculous on the drums or the electric keyboard, the drummerless bandmates whining and lamenting their terrible luck when their idiot drummer boy gets grounded for bringing hash brownies to a Spanish convention at school, the caricature characters, etc.

The Rocker is a bland, flavorless combination of things like Youtube, MySpace, cheesy 80s rock, mind-numbing product-placement and, say, some kind of cardboard breakfast cereal. It is so uninteresting and so unfunny that it’s amazing to me that the thing was ever made. I get the feeling that it is purely because of the success of other rock comedies that this one was even considered.

What happens is, through his lack of understanding of modern technology (despite having a 40-hour a week job working in front of a computer), “Fish” does a virtual rehearsal one day with his band completely nude, thinking the webcam is a microphone. The video winds up on Youtube and it’s an instant hit. Record labels come knocking on the door, and the gigs start lining up.

What follows is an exercise in coming up with scenes where Fish can act as inappropriately as possible, showing that he not only failed as a musician, but fails as a human being in understanding even the simplest things about interacting with other people. Does rock really corrupt the mind like that?

Dominoes. More fun than The Rocker.

Almost without exception the jokes fall completely flat, like dominoes. Do you ever do that thing with dominoes where you stand them up all in a big line all over the house and then push one over and watch them all fall down and then you laugh and cheer and then immediately start looking dejectedly at the big mess you now have to clean up? Well, I haven’t done that for quite some time now, but I remember enjoying it much more than I enjoyed The Rocker.

Of course the good looking but perpetually depressed lead singer in the high school band is going to eventually start to notice the brooding and perpetually depressed girl in the band in ways that he hadn’t noticed her before. At a key moment in the film, he asks her if she’d like to have dinner with him, and he has to ask twice before she gets what he’s saying. In response, she smiles for the first time in the movie, and I slap my forehead in disgust for about the 200th time. The development of their little crush is so goofy and so childish that it’s almost weird. And no, I’m not going to apologize for ruining the kiddie romance at the end of the movie. If you don’t watch The Rocker because you read this review, you should thank me!

Grandpa's rocker. Also more fun than The Rocker.

As is to be expected, there comes a time when Fish and his new high school band must open for Vesuvius, the band that Fish was booted out of 20 years before. Incidentally, Vesuvius is headed by lead singer Lex, a Bret Michaels lookalike played by Will Arnett, who should have had the lead role in the movie. I’m sorry, but Rainn Wilson is just not funny. The superstar band has what their jerkoff manager calls an “Ashley Simpson situation,” and they’re booed off stage. The subsequent chanting of “A.D.D.” (the high school band’s name, possibly the most creative thing in the entire movie) over and over again is currently topping my list of Most Predictable Scenes of 2008.

Oddly enough, the only thing that wasn’t flat-out stupid about The Rocker is Christina Applegate’s character, who is well-written and performed, at least until late in the movie when she begins to adjust her behavior in order to adhere to the necessary Hollywood ending. She has clearly come a long way as an actress, but as is the case for just about everyone else involved, The Rocker is a huge step backwards. I recommend checking out Jack Black instead or, if you really want something good, check out where it all started…

The Holy Grail of rock comedies.

Okay, that’s kind of a goofy title I admit, but with the release of the new horror film Mirrors, I have been moved to put up a few recent movies for those of you who enjoyed it and want to see something similar, or for those of you who don’t want to waste your money at the movies but still want to see something similar. I’m always down to check out a good psychological thriller, so feel free to make any suggestions if you think I missed any…

THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE (2004), R, Crime/Drama/Horror, 119 mins.

Quite possibly the most genuinely scary movie I’ve ever seen. At first glance it seems like a rip-off of The Exorcist, but The Exorcism of Emily Rose is very much its own movie. It’s a courtroom legal thriller about a death resulting from an exorcism, and it would make John Grisham proud. Laura Linney plays the attorney assigned to investigate the man who conducted the exorcism, and we join her as she searches for the truth about what really happened.

It’s an epic battle between science and religion in the courtroom, which I can’t say that I’ve ever seen before. Laura Linney delivers an outstanding performance as the ambitious lawyer, but the real standout is Jennifer Carpenter as Emily Rose. She gives such a brilliant horror performance that they almost don’t need any effects or music. See this one.

THE HAUNTING (1999), Horror/Thriller/Mystery, PG-13, 113 mins.

A remake of the 1963 classic (which in turn in an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s incredibly eerie 1959 novel “The Haunting of Hill House”), the 1999 version of Jackson’s story features one of the more peculiar premises that I’ve seen in a horror movie. A group of people are brought together and whisked away to a cavernous, allegedly haunted mansion in the middle of the empty woods in order to conduct research about sleeping disorders.

Now, I’m no psychologist, but wouldn’t such a location just introduce all kinds of bizarre variables into the experiment? Soon the experiment turns out to be something other than what they were all told, and ultimately all of the characters find themselves trying to escape for their lives from this haunted mansion.

Starring: Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta Jones, Owen Wilson
Director: Jan de Bont
Written by: David Self, based on the novel by Shirley Jackson

THE HAUNTING (1963), Horror/Thriller, rated G (!!), 112 mins.

Despite a prohibitively tame rating, this is a much creepier film than you might think. They say the original is always better, and this is no exception. Black and white photography allow for more disconnection between yourself and the characters, but somehow make the tense atmosphere more effective. This time, a Dr. Markway is doing research into the existence of ghosts, so he concentrates his investigation on Hill House, which has a frightening history of violence and insanity.

With him are a young skeptic named Luke, a clairvoyant Theodora, and the insecure Eleanor who happesns to have psychic abilities that give her a special ability so sense anything supernatural going on in the mansion. Soon the house begins to manifest itself in horrific and deadly ways…

Starring: Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, Russ Tamblyn, Lois Maxwell, Fay Compton
Director: Robert Wise
Written by: Nelson Gidding

HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1999), Horror/Thriller, R, 99 mins.

Despite the harder rating, this one wasn’t much better than the fairly disappointing The Haunting, released the same year. This time we are made to wonder what we would do for a million dollars, as an eccentric billionaire offers a group of people a million bucks each to spend the night in a haunted mansion with a murderous past. They walk into the deal confident that it’s all just a made-up story, and they’re not about to fall for it.

The setting of a former mental institution is far cooler than the former department store in Mirrors, and Geoffrey Rush is wonderfully creepy as Stephen Price, who came up with the devilish plan. The opening scene of the movie shows us how he got rich in a wonderfully scary ride on the new amusement park ride that he has just designed.

Before long, the house automatically seals itself shut and the attitudes of the people inside change radically. There is some chillingly effective imagery brought back from past psychological experiments that were conducted in the hospital, but also plenty of disappointing CGI. Also don’t miss the 1959 original, which stars the great Vincent Price in the lead role…

Starring: Geoffrey Rush, Famke Janssen, Peter Gallagher, Taye Diggs, Ali Larter, Chris Kattan, Bridgette Wilson
Director: William Malone
Screenplay: Dick Beebe

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IN DREAMS (1999), Psychological Thriller, R, 100 mins.

One of my favorite horror thrillers of the 1990s, In Dreams tells the story of Claire Cooper, a middle-aged mother who begins suffering from disturbing recurring dreams. She dreams of a little girl in her neighborhood being kidnapped, and then her own daughter in kidnapped shortly thereafter, triggering the beginnings of the unravelling of Claire’s sanity. She becomes convinced that her mind and the kidnapper’s mind are connected, but is unable to convince anyone else. A suicide attempt lands her in a padded cell, where she begins having dreams of her husband’s murder.

Robert Downey Jr., who has arguably the best role in Tropic Thunder, was highly underrated when this movie came out. He was having a lot of problems in his personal life, but he has a scene at the end of the movie involving a mirror that surpasses anything in the recently released Mirrors. I remember shouts of surprise throughout the theater when I saw it in 1999.

In Dreams is not for everyone. It has the rare distinction, I think, that there will be people who loved it, people who hated it, and people who just didn’t understand it, with probably not much in between. Unfortunately, it was much more effective on the big screen than on video, but with a healthy twist of the volume knob, it can be made to have virtually the same effect. Just don’t watch it alone if you live out in the woods!

Starring: Annette Bening, Aidan Quinn, Stephen Rea, Robert Downey Jr., Paul Guilfoyle
Director: Neil Jordan
Written by: Bruce Robinson and Neil Jordan, based on the novel “Doll’s Eyes” by Bari Wood

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HAUNTED (1995), Horror/Thriller/Drama, R, 108 mins.

In turn of the century England, a young boy named David loses his twin sister while playing by a lake. He feels responsible for his sister’s death, but he and his family move to the U.S., where they live for nearly the next quarter century before he returns to English to teach at Cambridge University. He’s now a teacher and an accomplished author who exposes false mediums and spiritualists.

After numerous requests, he accepts an invitation from a Miss Webb to investigate so bizarre goings on in her remote mansion, known as Edbrook, where she claims to be tormented by spirits. The movie stars Aidan Quinn and a young Kate Beckinsale. Low on the gore but surprisingly effective.

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SESSION 9 (2001), Horror/Thriller, R, 100 mins. “Fear is a place.”

Probably my favorite in this whole list, Session 9 is one of my favorite underrated horror movies to recommend (it’s lack of wide success may be attributed to the unfortunate fact that it was released three days after Sept. 11th). It’s sort of a character driven story about an asbestos cleaning crew working on cleaning an old insane asylum. Hardly an original setting, but it cleverly works together the conflicting personal lives of the characters with the increasingly strange and frightening surroundings that they find themselves in. Director Brad Anderson (who also directed Christian Bale in The Machinist), knows how to create and maintain tension, and there are more than a few scenes that will have you cringing in your chair. If you only watch one of these movies, this should be the one.

Starring: David Caruso, Stephen Gevedon, and Paul Guilfoyle
Written by: Brad Anderson and Stephen Gevedon

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MADHOUSE (2004), Horror/Thriller, R 91 mins. “Let the insanity begin.”

How could you go wrong with a byline like that? I saw Madhouse on the same day that I saw Session 9, and while this was definitely the less impressive of the two, it still has an interesting story and good tension, but it is also one of those movies that takes place in a mental hospital that is clearly a movie set. You know the type, everything is dark and wet with a greenish tint, and there are always distant, creepy sounds echoing down the hallways.

Lance Henriksen’s talent is wasted here as the hospital director who appears offended that some rookie psychologist intern would insinuate that his filthy, filthy hospital could use some renovation, and he is promptly brought upstairs to the level 5 ward, which of course is without electricity. Nice.

Fans of the genre are sure to have a good time and it’s an interesting installment in the psychological thriller genre, although not necessarily one of the best.

Starring: Joshua Leonard, Jordan Ladd, Natasha Lyonne, and Lance Henriksen
Director: William Butler
Written by: Willian Butler

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WHISPERING CORRIDORS (2005), Drama/Horror, R, 105 mins.

This Korean horror thriller borrows a lot from the horror films that have been pouring out of Japan lately and, while it doesn’t necessarily cover much new ground, it’s still a pretty entertaining thriller. Interestingly, I found that the best thing about the movie were the performances, some of which were outstanding. Acting prowess is generally not something you look for in horror films.

I expected Whispering Corridors to be scarier than it was, but I was still impressed with the consistently creepy mood that permeated the film.
It’s an interesting film that gives some insight into some of the surprising teaching methods practiced in Korea as well as a fairly interesting story. There’s nothing new about haunted schools, but the mixture of that foundational premise and the Korean schoolyard environment make for a pretty interesting combination.

Written, Directed by, and starring a lot of Korean people with Korean names. Just go watch the movie…

Alexadre Aja, the man behind the intensely creepy 2003 film High Tension and the intensely crappy 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes has now brought us something in between. Kiefer Sutherland adds credibility to the otherwise unoriginal horror film Mirrors, about an exiled New York City cop who soon finds himself battling a mysterious force hidden behind every reflective surface that is endangering his sanity, his life, and the lives of his family.

The movie opens with a terrified night watchman running for his life. From what, we don’t know, until he begs forgiveness from a mirror for trying to escape. The mirror cracks angrily in response.

There is a strange force in Mirrors that is able to torment members of the living, or members of the three dimensional, or members of whatever land the mirror-forces are unable to occupy. It is at least an hour and a half into the movie before we learn much of anything about the deadly force that is tormenting Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland), and that’s more than a little too long.

Ben Carson has recently been put on mandatory leave from the New York police department after a tragic shooting, and his life is increasingly spiraling out of control. Not the least of his worries is the strange fact that the only job he is able to get is as a night watchman, a caretaker, if you will, of a department store that burned down five years earlier.

I’m a little confused about that whole setup, by the way. The building is standing but is nothing more than a skeleton of its former self, and is clearly beyond repair. What is a nightly caretaker meant to do? Upkeep is obviously unimportant. Are they worried about teenagers or homeless people wandering in? Isn’t that a job that, say, a good fence can do?

It’s definitely the worst job ever, but it’s a great setup for a horror movie. A guy under tremendous pressure is forced to take a job where he has to wander through an enormous, burned building every hour or so in the middle of the night. Personally I would walk off the job and quit as soon as the mirrors showed me on fire, but not Ben Carson. He didn’t start browsing the classifieds even when he learned that his predecessor suffered a mysterious death involving mirrors. This guy has balls of solid rock!

Complicating the matters of Ben’s unraveling professional life is the fact that his wife doesn’t want him coming over to see his kids without calling first, he’s an alcoholic, and his sister, who is providing him with a sofa to sleep on, is a bartender. This guy needed professional help before the mirrors started talking to him! But apparently he doesn’t know that, because even when he becomes the prime suspect in his sister’s grisly death, he doesn’t know better than to go around telling people that

Ben and his wife stare in shock at how obvious this metaphor is.

mirrors are talking to him. Not exactly the best time to go talking crazy, you know? Here’s a sample of his reassuring dialogue, “Amy, I’m not crazy, these mirrors are dangerous!” He then proceeds to take a mirror out in front of her house in broad daylight and shoot it.

The scenes inside the derelict department store are actually pretty effective, but it becomes clear very early on that far too much stock is put into the scares of his nightly walk-throughs and not nearly enough put into developing a real story. There’s a story, of course, it’s just that the movie feels like a lot of Funland Haunted House tours intermixed with an occasional break to explain a few things, and then back to the haunted house.

A good horror movie will either make you fear something that previously seemed harmless (like the dark or hallways or dolls or children or the like), or instill in you the fear or interest that there might be something more going on right under our very noses. Mirrors attempts to do both - to make us fear not only mirrors but all reflective surfaces, which are all dangerous in the movie, and also to suggest that there is a whole other world going on behind those mirrors, that those pesky handprints that won’t wipe off are really someone on the other side with their hand on the glass.

Ben ponders which side of the mirror he's on.

I doubt that the movie will succeed in making many people afraid of mirrors, although it did have a fair amount of good scares and a genuine feeling of tension when it was supposed to. Naysayers will balk at the idea of paying real money to watch Jack Bauer scream at his reflection for two hours, but even though this is basically a strange combination of several previous movies and there’s not much original going on, you could definitely do worse. It’s a major improvement on the horror movies that we’ve seen released in the last ten years or so. I had started to lose faith completely in the entire genre. Mirrors is not going to save the horror genre from being sacrificed to the box office gods, but I’m happy every time I see a scary movie these days that doesn’t star a lot of sorority girls in halter tops and idiot pretty boys.

The movie takes a bizarre turn in the third act when Ben goes in search of a mysterious someone named Esseker, about whom he knows nothing. The only thing he knows is that the mirrors will not let him or his wife and kids live unless he provides this Esseker. His investigation leads him to a super-creepy farmhouse in Pennsylvania where a nice old man is remarkably forthcoming to Ben about past family tragedy. He must have been impressed with Ben, who claimed to be a grad student writing a research paper about schizophrenia.

Amy Carson saves her kids from the forces of evil and looks hot at the same time.

Ben finds a way to win his family’s safety at the same time as we learn what is really going on behind those mirrors. Unfortunately, just as Ben discovers how to save his family, they are at home being tormented by all of the mirrors in the house. The climax of the film is effective enough except that Ben’s crazy hot wife is running around the house in a wet t-shirt barely able to contain her glistening cleavage, which is a little distracting from the action at hand. The good kind of distracting, I guess, but distracting nonetheless.

But for all of it’s weaknesses, as a creepy horror film it’s hard to say that Mirrors isn’t successful. It might even be a pretty good date movie, although there are dozens better that you could watch at home. But the ending, I don’t mind telling you, is better than everything else in the movie, and it’s almost worth going to see it just for the last five minutes. Horror fans, if nothing else, will enjoy picking out the homages…

Oh, and one more thing…

This CAN'T be a coincidence...