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By Cole Smithey

‘Kung Fu Panda’

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Jack Black inhabits the animated panda called Po with so much of his signature whimsy that audiences get a double dose of Black’s comic persona. Po is an adopted child to a family of Chinese cooks and is expected to carry on the family business, but Po dreams only of becoming a great kung fu master. At a high mountain temple, lives the great Master Oogway (Randall Duk Kim), who chooses Po to become the temple’s new Dragon Warrior over its highly skilled “Furious Five” monks (voiced by Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu, David Cross and Seth Rogan). In order to protect the temple from the wrath of escaped prisoner and kung fu snow leopard Tai Lung (Ian McShane) Po must master the Secret of the Dragon Scroll with the help of a miniature wolf named Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman). In spite of its strict adherence to limited formula constraints, “Kung Fu Panda” is an enjoyable kid’s movie full of zippy cartoon imagery and heartfelt vocal performances.

I once asked Black what he liked to do in his spare time, to which he amiably replied in his instantly recognizable way, “I likes to doodle.” It’s the kind of answer that wins you over for its irreverent sense of childish liberation. Black has made a career of refusing to grow up, and his infectious rebellion is enough to open the floodgates for audiences to follow their bliss. Coincidentally, it’s a similar message that “Kung Fu Panda” offers; even if some jaded adult audience members get the feeling that such ethics of personal realization are excessively redundant.

Po is a lazy, overweight panda with enough desire in his heart to get him up the Temple Mountain on the day when the next keeper of the great secret will be chosen. Like Neo in “The Matrix,” or Michael Angarano’s young character in “The Forbidden Kingdom,” Po is groomed as the next great defender. He will have to learn discipline, respect and a brand of confidence that can only come from facing his greatest fears, namely entering into combat with the deadly Tai Lung.

Objectively, there isn’t that much of a difference between “The Forbidden Kingdom” (starring Chan and Jet Li) and “Kung Fu Panda” except that the latter is better suited to younger children. The animation on display is top-notch, but it’s Black who steals the show. CV

By Jared Curtis

‘The Strangers’

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Have you ever been wandering in the dark searching for a light switch and imagined that when you turn the light on, someone is in your room waiting for you? Or how about when you get inside your vehicle and check the back seat to make sure no one is there? Well that is the feeling I had as I walked out of the theater after watching “The Strangers.”

First time writer/director Bryan Bertino takes the audience on a tension filled rollercoaster ride that is bound to leave you with a case of anxiety. James Hoyt (Scott Speedman, “Underworld”) and Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler, “Armageddon”) are a couple heading to Hoyt’s parents country home after a friends wedding. Through flashbacks, the audience learns that Hoyt asked McKay to marry him, but she declines.

After being shot down on the marriage proposal, the two still venture to the house, their faces full of emotion. McKay takes a bath while Hoyt drinks celebratory champagne as he sets up the house for a romantic night of post engagement bliss, only to feel like an idiot for all the effort he has put into this night and the relationship. After talking about what happened, the two seem to have patched things up when a loud knock (the first of many loud knocks and bangs) at the door interrupts them. “What time is it? Like four in the morning,” Hoyt says as he looks at the clock reading 4:05 a.m. At the door a young girl stands, her face hidden in the shadows. She asks for “Tamara,” but Hoyt informs her she has the wrong house and she goes on her way. Little do they know, this is only the beginning of their emotionally drained night.

Bertino does a great job of keeping the suspense high. Letting scenes linger longer than they should makes the audience uncomfortable, taking away the power of guessing where the next scare is coming from. When Hoyt goes for cigarettes, McKay is left alone and it’s during this scene where a man wearing a sack mask, steps out of the shadows, letting the audience know he is there but keeping our heroine in the dark of his existence.

Although the three masked evildoers are the main villains of the story, a scratchy old record player playing soft and happy tunes throughout the film is just as evil. As the record cracks and skips, the hair on my neck stood up. Never have I been so creeped out by the warm sound of vinyl.

Both Tyler and Speedman succeed at making us care about this couple and they actually think and act like normal people, instead of the ever present stupid ideas everyone seems to have while trying to survive a thriller/horror film. They lock the doors, find weapons and even have a perfect, wait it out until morning scenario, until Hoyt’s pal Mike (Glenn Howerton, “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”) stops in to pick his broken hearted friend up and take him home.

“The Strangers” is not a perfect horror/thriller film, although it is one of the better ones I’ve seen in a while. I sat in suspense, jumping at every loud bang and continually looking around to make sure everything was O.K. The final scenes could have been better, but the meat of this movie is the game of cat and mouse the creepy, masked stalkers like to play.

It’s always been a rule in horror films that if you can make it until the sun comes up, the monsters will go away. The only problem is, “The Strangers,” are not monsters, they are just evil people (whose faces we never fully see) bored with life, looking to torture and ruin someone’s night. I think that is the scariest realization of all, there are people like this running around America, committing random acts of violence. No matter how safe you feel, they might knock on your door next. CV

‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’

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From the “daan-dadaduun-tuun-duun” opening notes of its famous John Williams musical score, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” announces itself as a matinee serial cliffhanger-inspired sequel that’s built like a brick smokehouse where audiences will be spoon-fed with infectious exuberance.

An amalgamation of nearly every successful adventure movie franchise, the movie is dotted with immediately recognizable nostalgic elements that play to the kid in everyone. Teens drag race their convertible roadster with U.S. Army personnel on a Nevada rural route, circa 1957, before we discover that the military officers and soldiers are actually a team of wily Cold War Russians taking Jones and his intermittently double-crossing sidekick Mac (Ray Winstone) to the government’s notoriously secret Hangar 51 to find the contents of a certain crate.

Cate Blanchett is a black-bob-haired Ukrainian commandant named Irina Spalko who chews her vowels like licorice-coated borscht. With a smirk and his whip, Jones turns the giant hangar into a carnival of set piece action before escaping the enclosure to its dubious outer limits.

Back in the relatively safe confines of the college he teaches, Jones is fired as a result of an FBI investigation into his loyalty to homeland America. It’s not just the Cold War that’s breathing down Jones’s neck, but McCarthyism to boot. A malt shop meeting with a “Wild One” era Brando-inspired motorcycle greaser named Mutt (Shia LaBeouf), convinces Jones that a trip to the jungles of Peru to look for an archeological object of desire, the Crystal Skull of Akator, is in order.

Once there, the newly-bonded duo of Jones and Mutt rescue one very insane Professor Oxley (John Hurt) and obtain the Crystal Skull, which resembles an elongated cranium of the creature from the “Alien” movies. Spalko and her troops catch scent of the skull that they too desire and offer hot pursuit that fuels a long-running series of eye-popping slapstick chase sequences involving giant ants, a hoard of monkeys and the dramatic use of one very long snake for rescuing a certain snake-hating hero.

With Oxley and the Crystal Skull in tow, our daring trio become four when Mutt’s mother, Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen reprising her role from “Raiders of the Lost Ark”), is delivered into the story like a romantic reward for Jones, for whom it’s clear she is the only woman.

Any film school professor will tell you that the easiest way to entertain a film audience is to create a chase scene — they exist in one form or another in almost every movie, regardless of genre. Spielberg’s mastery of the chase form layers elements of small and grand scale spectacle in an orchestrated way so that every increase in speed and obstacle is matched with humor and foreshadowing of things to come.

The slaps and tickles arrive with undeniably entertaining sword fights and jumping or falling stunts that delight in a magical way that adventure cinema should. The filmmaking on display here is so far ahead of quest movies like “National Treasure: Book of Secrets” that it’s embarrassing to even mention them in the same breath. The Indiana Jones ensemble of actors, crew, special effects teams, designers and the rest, understand Spielberg’s way of reaching into iconic physical elements like a city of gold, or a series of gigantic waterfalls for example, to extract cinematic joy deeply rooted in childish dreams and fantasy.

David Koepp’s script may not be a perfect example of balanced exposition and dramaturgy, but it doesn’t matter because the message is clear. We love to be taken with our surrogate family of heroes on pretend adventures to unbelievably beautiful and dangerous places where anything is possible, and where the surprises are beyond our wildest imaginations. We always want to go back. This is a movie you will want to revisit again and again. CV

‘War, Inc.’

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The would-be comic lampoonery, about a time when all wars are outsourced, mirrors the realities of America’s corporate-enabled occupation of Iraq. John Cusack plays Hauser, a disaffected hit man sent by a former U.S. Vice President-turned-corporate-shill (Dan Aykroyd) to the fictional country of Turaqistan to assassinate an oil magnate known as Omar Sharif. Hauser’s cover as the organizer of a U.S. trade show that features state-of-the-art prosthetics, is just enough of a distraction from his actual purpose to seduce a lefty journalist named Natalie Hegalhuzen (Marisa Tomei). Hilary Duff injects the movie with a spunky pitch as Middle East pop star Yonica Babyyeah, who develops a crush on Hauser in spite of her pending wedding to her bodyguard. There are some inspired touches of humor, as when Hauser knocks back shots of straight hot sauce before springing into action, or when he shoves a former boss into a garbage truck, but the comedy never gels.

A recent New York Times article revealed that without the continued support of Blackwater Worldwide, the discredited company responsible for providing trigger-happy security to American diplomats and convoys in Iraq, America’s occupation of the country could not continue. Unlike the Cold War era when Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964) foretold of global annihilation at the hands of phallic-obsessed politicians, “War, Inc.” comes during a clashing era of climate change and a trademarked war for raw corporate profits. Enabled by commercial entities ranging from surveillance-complicit phone companies to gouging oil alliances, Americans are increasingly treated like host bodies ready to be sucked dry.  

This isn’t to say that “War, Inc.” couldn’t have been a funnier movie, merely that the writers (Mark Leyner, Jeremy Pikser and Cusack) had a more complicated job cut out for them. Cusack’s Hauser is just as concerned with creature comforts as any SUV-driving suburban mom is. In one of the film’s most inspired moments, a super-caffeinated whoa-yelling soldier derails Hauser’s impending public hit on Sharif in order to give the assassin his newly cleaned laundry. Hauser is glad to get his clothes, and nonplussed about missing the opportunity to fulfill his assignment. The poor soldier is stuck in a permanent state of radically elevated excitement. He’s recognizable as a walking war causality unable to ever return to civilian life regardless of any political outcome. The scene is notable for the feeling of resentment it evokes for the audience at Hauser’s ineffectiveness as a hit man. We want to see Hauser kill Sharif, for no reason other than to see the murder happen.

But after relating to Hauser’s calm at getting his laundry delivered, our focus shifts to similar ideas of material comfort and we accept him for being easily sated like us. The problem with “War, Inc.” is that commerce, fear and military occupation, are already inextricably linked to the way Americans live their daily lives. There’s no longer a separation between the way American citizens are treated by cops and the way Iraqi civilians are treated by military police. No matter how dark your sense of humor, the Bush Administration’s joke has become a harsh reality. There’s no spark of humor when you’re staring into an abyss. CV

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