The film opens with a tough guy Yakuza gang leader having a tattoo inked on his back by a mysterious old man who talks about the four nobel professions, the five rings, and other cliché Japanese cultural mumbo-jumbo. The set piece changes when a henchman enters the lair and announces "I got something for you, boss". Turns out it's an envelope that's just full of black sand. Nothing else. 

The old man (Randall Duk Kim) explains that it's a sign that he's seen before, seconds before everyone around him was slaughtered by ninjas. He shows them a scar on his chest where his heart would normally be "but I was born differently, my heart is on the other side of my chest."

Seconds later the ninja assassins descend and without ever seeing more than a fleeting glimpse of any of them, the entire room is graphically, methodically slaughtered. The "splattered blood on the wall" motif is established and subsequently appears again and again as this astonishingly  violent film proceeds to its predictable, but still reasonably satisfying climactic scene.

The indie film Best Worst Movie is a documentary about Troll II, about how an unassuming group of actors who never really had any successes in their careers got pulled into a ridiculously low budget film written and directed by surly Italian auteur Claudio Fragasso.

That's why it was interesting - and darn cool - when Disney sent me the entire Awards Screener package for Up, known in the business as a "For Your Consideration". Awards?  It's none other than the Academy Awards and it's the package sent to members of the Academy with the hopes that it'll influence nominations and voting and generate more awards for the film.

Since I'd never seen a full Awards Screener package before, I thought I'd share with you so you could see what showed up in an otherwise surprisingly nondescript brown envelope earlier this week...

Tapping the considerable voice talents of George Clooney (Mr. Fox), Meryl Streep (Mrs. Fox), Bill Murray (Badger), Michael Gambon (Franklin Bean), Owen Wilson (Coach Skip), Willem Dafoe (Rat) and Jason Schwartzman (Ash), director Wes Anderson has managed to take the quirky children's story of the same name (by the talented Roald Dahl) and craft an engaging movie that is simultaneously edgy and delightful.

Like Where the Wild Things Are, the story of Fantastic Mr. Fox is deceptively lightweight: Mr. Fox, upon learning his wife is pregnant, swears off mischief and thievery, but in a sort of vulpes version of a mid-life crisis, later can't resist the urge to pull off one more great caper. His nemesis?  The three farmers across the valley, Boggis, Bunce and Bean.

Boggis (voiced by Robin Hurlstone) runs a chicken farm, Bunce (Hug Guinness) has a pig farm and Bean (Gambon) has a turkey farm and apple orchard, the latter of which he uses to produce hundreds of gallons of alcoholic cider. They are perfect targets for the sly and savvy Mr. Fox with his incessant plans. What he doesn't plan on is their aggressive response to the thefts...

Adding to the mix, Mr. Fox's brother is suffering from double pnemonia and nephew Kristofferson (Eric Anderson) comes to stay with them, pushing out their son Ash (Schwartzman), who acutely feels his inability to measure up to the talents and mystique of his cousin.

I wasn't entirely sure I liked Fantastic Mr. Fox when I first walked out of the theater, but it grew on me as I thought more about the story and how Anderson has turned a children's book into a film about finding yourself and your true purpose in life. A bit edgy and not without its moments of adult language and dialog, it's an interesting addition to the Christmas movie mix and worth seeing, though perhaps not for the youngest in your family.

This is also the starting point for the lackluster but amusing Planet 51, starring the voice talents of Dwayne Johnson (as NASA captain Charles Baker), Justin Long (as the boy Lem), Jessica Biel (as Neera), Gary Oldman (General Grawl) and John Cleese (as dorky Professor Kipple).  It seems NASA has mastered galactic flight and has sent the dashing Charles Baker across the universe to explore an uninhabited, but Earth-like planet.

Later we find he's following the Wall-E inspired "Rover" probe, which vanished once it landed on the planet, but at the beginning the film starts by showing us an idyllic suburban small town a la Hill Valley in Back to the Future. The setting is mostly the 1950's (hence the "51" in Planet 51, presumably, because it's hard to imagine a stable solar system with over fifty planets) though there's a bit of 60's hippie bleedover, including a VW van covered in peace slogans and the long-haired teen rebel Glar (Alan Marriott).

The film starts out with an animated sequence that explains the widespread corruption in Mexico, focused specifically on manipulation of the stock market to enable the low cost acquisition of a Mexican mining company. Then a slick narrative device introduces us to the main story, surveillance footage assembled into a cat and mouse game between dying loser Juan (Hernán Mendoza) and an agent of a shadowy syndicate Emiliano (Juan Carlos Remolina). The setup?  That Emiliano can erase all of Juan's debts and set his family up for the future - including a lovely little house - if Juan will assassinate a well-known former presidential candidate.

This is the same basic moral dilemma as the recent Cameron Diaz movie The Box, but with a considerably more thoughtful approach. The caja negra of the title refers to the recording device that's used in airplanes to analyze the events leading up to an accident or crash, and the entire central portion of the movie, presented as roughly edited surveillance camera footage, serves the same narrative purpose.

What makes Caja Negra so interesting isn't the animated introduction or Emiliano's back story about being kicked out of the Stanford PhD program and coming back to Mexico in shame, just to be pulled into the syndicate, but how Juan and Emiliano play each other as the situation unfolds. Shot primarily in an abandoned warehouse, we see them studying video footage of the target and Juan walking up to a mannequin and shooting it repeatedly in the liver because "we need some time for the media campaign."

Back and forth, Juan threatens Emiliano and refuses to do the job, and Emiliano reminds Juan that the power dynamic of the situation is not with Juan at all, and that "you forget I can kill your wife and children at any time. is that really what you want?"

Or maybe it's just the sound of people gnashing their teeth in frustration as they try to follow the cliché-ridden storyline that loosely holds together the mayhem and destruction that is at the heart of Roland Emmerich's new end-of-the-world film 2012.

To be fair, I was quite impressed by the first hour of the film. It unfolded very well, starting with Indian scientist Dr. Satnam Tsurutani (Jimi Mistry) explaining to US government scientist Dr. Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) anomalous neutrino count measurements due to solar flares.  "Neutrinos," he explains, "appear to have mutated into a new kind of particle, and it's heating up the Earth's core."

Turns out those savvy Mayans, hundreds of years ago, foresaw the alignment of our solar system on December 21st, 2012, and predicted that day would be the end of the world as we know it. More recent experts, notably a chap from back in the 1950s called Professor Hapgood, theorize about Earth Crust Displacement, the idea that a sufficiently cataclysmic event (like heating up the Earth's core) will cause the tectonic plates to shift quite significantly which ends up as the heart of this exciting special effects rollercoaster.

If you're going to strap in for the ride, though, make sure you go to the restroom first -- it's incredibly long with a theatrical release of 158 minutes (just shy of 2 1/2 hours) -- and make sure you check your credibility at the door. The dialog, the quiet interstitials, uh, sorry, scenes between the main characters are often so painfully banal and tedious that I almost wanted to see the "all destruction!" version where they just edited out those scenes.

Any film that's built around the fabulous music of the mid-1960's starts out with one thing going for it: a great soundtrack. That Pirate Radio goes beyond that and offers up an entertaining and poignant story about the loss of innocence is what makes it a film well worth your time.

There was so much rock and roll coming out of Britain in the 1960's that it's generally referred to as the "British Invasion", and it included bands like The Beatles, The Animals, Manfred Mann, Petula Clark, Herman's Hermits, The Rolling Stones, Donovan, The Who, The Kinks, and The Dave Clark Five. What you probably didn't know, though, was that the British Broadcasting Corporation (The "Beeb") refused to play this "seditious" music and that the only rock that could be heard on the Brit airwaves was from pirate radio stations set up on old freighter and tanker ships anchored off the coast of England, in international waters.

That's the basis for Pirate Radio, and the story, set in 1966, is simultaneously of the cast of characters that were the DJs and staff of the station and the British government officials who earnestly spent almost a year trying to find a loophole in the law that would let them shut down the broadcasts forever.

I really enjoyed Pirate Radio, both for the wonderful music and the witty storyline. I had no idea that this really had happened in England (and I was born there!) but sure enough, unlike the mock "based on real-life events" films like The Fourth Kind, you can justify seeing this funny movie by saying "mum, it's a history film. really." 

The Box is actually two movies clumsily grafted into a single narrative story line. It starts out with a provocative ethical dilemma: would you push a button that you knew would kill someone, somewhere, a stranger, if you were to be paid a million dollars?  That's the movie I was hoping to see, and to be fair, the first 30-40 minutes of the film are focused on just this situation.

But then Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz) presses the button (hold on, that's not a spoiler: the trailer already revealed that this happens).

At that point the film seems to get tangled up in an X Files storyline, where there are aliens, a government conspiracy, mind control and all sorts of goofy plot twists that ultimately ruin the movie, dooming us to an unsatisfying ending because, well, there was nowhere for the story to go.

If it were the late 1950's, the latter part of The Box could have been a satisfying story about mind control, the dangers of conformity and the slanted portrayal of foreign leaders as coming from other planets, because how could they possibly be human and not embrace good old American values?  It could have been a fascinating film in the same vein as the terrific Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the original, not the pointless remake).

Unfortunately, it's not. To put it plainly, if you want a clean, logical storyline, this is not a film for you.

The story of Ebenezer Scrooge is a classic Christmas tale, where he's the stingiest, most unhappy man in Victorian London, responding to cheery "Merry Christmas" wishes with "bah, humbug". As voiced (and acted) by Jim Carrey, he's a suitably sour person, an accountant who has long since given up on humanity and instead prefers the tangible benefits of gold and money.

The look of the film is a visually stunning but surprisingly flat (even in 3D), and it utilizes the same animated motion capture of live action that was first unveiled in the awkward and unsuccessful Polar Express, and unengaging Beowulf, both also directed by Zemeckis. A tip to you, Mr. Zemeckis: motion capture isn't really working. You're getting caught up in the technology and the results continue to be unpleasantly lifeless.

More to the point, though, there aren't just a minute or two of terrifying imagery in A Christmas Carol as you transition from one scene to another, there are sustained scenes where the imagery is more suitable for Sam Raimi's Drag Me To Hell than a Disney animated feature being released for Christmastime.  If you have kids, you'll definitely want to skip this one.

The tone of the film also reminded me of Matt Damon's witty The Informant! where part of the fun is the astonishment we, the audience, have at how seriously the characters in the film take the unfolding storyline. The premise? That in the 1970's the U.S. Army funded a squadron of psychic warriors trying to create supermen, men who could fight purely with their minds, the New Earth Army.

The squad leader is Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), a gray-haired hippie with a long braid and a great 70's iconic light brown fringed leather jacket, and the squad includes star psy-warrior Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) and frustrated sci-fi writer Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey, in one of his best roles since The Usual Suspects).

Decades later, it's Ann Arbor Daily Telegram reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) who has stumbled into the story by interviewing former New Earth Army member Gus Lacey (Stephen Root). During the interview, Lacey shows Wilton a video of him killing his hampster with just the power of his mind. Except, well, it's about then that you realize you've just jumped onto a satirical roller coaster...

I really enjoyed The Men Who Stare At Goats and found that it kept me chuckling as it unspooled. If you go into the theater expecting a serious film -- for whatever reason -- you'll probably find this a bit bizarre, but if you can appreciate satire, you'll agree that Clooney and team have another hit on their hands. Heck, even goat lovers will like how it all unfolds!