The Mummy

There have already been quite a few summer action blockbuster movies this year, and the “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor” tries to sneak in and make an impact. It is not going to succeed. With “The Dark Knight” already getting incredible critical and box office success, any other movie following that one is doomed, at the best, to be mediocre.

The Mummy franchise returns for a third time and the tragedy of this instalment is just how much of a good thing it squanders. It had millions of dollars and some semblance of an interesting story. But it is unforgivable for the way it wastes some very fine Asian actors like Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh.

The film makers chose to ignore any kind of story and the potential good acting at hand, and chose to just go for as many explosions and as much noise as possible. The plot seems to be at the service of action and some exotic locales. It takes us to the deserts of China, the Himalayas and even allows us to encounter some snow animals called yeti.

Even the dependable actor, Brendan Fraser, gets very little from the script to build on. Another fine actress, Maria Bello, is not allowed to sink her teeth into the role. There is no chemistry between these two lead actors or between Fraser and Luke Ford, who plays his son. Ford could go down as the most bland character in an action movie this year.

The movie starts with a flashback from history of an ancient emperor along with his army being turned to clay by a spell cast by a woman. The woman is in love with another man and the emperor is against this union. Fast forward a few thousand years and Luke Ford’s character has discovered this tomb, and well, all hell breaks loose after this. This is also the point where the movies starts losing its wheels and just rambles on, taking us for an inconsequential ride.

The only good thing about this movie is the action. It delivers in some way.

There is nothing new in terms of technique or filming, but it does strive hard to thrill. Pre-teens may find this appealing and adults looking for a good break from anything cerebral might also appreciate the explosions.

The director Rob Cohen might have understood this a little too well and thinks he doesn’t have to offer anything more than that. The writers, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, are not interested in coming up with anything fresh or even aware of the sheer acting potential in all their actors. Each of these actors has won rave reviews for at least one other performance in other movies. They could have been given much more to handle in this one.

This movie works best when there are no expectations and demands. For the sake of pure thrill and mindless fun with action in exotic locales, this movie will satisfy.

Mirrors

Mirrors is a 2008 remake of the 2003 South Korean horror film Into the Mirror, directed by Alexandre Aja, director of the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, and starring Kiefer Sutherland. The film was first titled Into the Mirror, but the name was later changed to Mirrors. Filming began on May 1, 2007. The film was released on August 15, 2008. The film carries an R rating by the MPAA for strong violence, disturbing images, language and brief nudity.

Directed by : Alexandre Aja
Produced by : Alexandre Aja Grégory Levasseur
Written by : Alexandre Aja Grégory Levasseur
Starring : Kiefer Sutherland Paula Patton
Music by : Javier Navarrete
Cinematography : Maxime Alexandre
Distributed by : 20th Century Fox
Release date(s) : August 15, 2008
Country Romania : United States
Language: English
Budget : $35 Million

The movie starts with a man running away from something. He then runs into a room full of mirrors. He desperately apologizes to his reflection for running away in hopes of forgiveness. To his horror, the mirror begins to crack and a piece falls off. Trying to redeem himself, he picks up the shard with the intention of putting it back on the mirror. However, his reflection slashes his throat and the man dies.

Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland), a former undercover detective who was suspended after shooting another officer, takes a nighttime security job at a department store that was gutted by a fire. The department store used to be a psychiatric hospital that experimented in treating schizophrenia. In 1952, a mass killing took place and the hospital was closed. It was later reopened as a luxury department store, the Mayflower.

Ben’s round begins normally, though on his first night he sees a door open in a mirror’s reflection while it is actually closed. After investigating, he finds nothing. Following nights expose Ben to more intense visions, which he initially shrugs off as hallucinations. He also finds the wallet of Gary Lewis, the night watchman he is replacing. The only piece of information is a note that says “Esseker.” Ben further hallucinates being set on fire, as well as seeing victims in various parts of the store who were burned to death. Ben then receives a package from Gary Lewis that was sent several days before his death. The package contains newspaper clippings about the fire and other crimes. The man convicted of burning the Mayflower was also convicted of killing his wife and children.

Meanwhile, Angela, Ben’s sister, is getting in the bath and begins to relax, when suddenly her reflection grips her jaw and begins to slowly tear it off. She panicks, but eventually is killed as the jaw remains dangling by only a few muscles. Ben returns to the store and attempts to destroy the mirrors, but they prove impervious and even regenerative. He demands to know what the mirrors want, and ESSEKER appears on a mirror. Ben investigates and finds the name Anna Esseker, a patient of the psychiatric institute. She supposedly died in the mass killing, but Ben discovers that she was actually transferred out two days prior to the mass murder. He realizes that the mirrors will eventually kill his family if he does not find a solution. He attempts to remove or paint the surface of every mirror in his house, but his estranged wife Amy uncovers them and believes that he is undergoing a breakdown. She abandons these thoughts when she discovers her son Michael’s reflection in a mirror remains after her son leaves the room. Amy calls Ben, who immediately returns home, and together they cover the reflective surfaces. Shortly after, Ben discovers Anna Esseker’s home: a convent which she moved into after being cured. Anna explains to Ben that she was possessed by a demon, and while in the hospital she was confined to a chair and surrounded by mirrors, as the doctors’ believed the treatment would cure her schizophrenia. In reality, the demon within her was drawn from her and became trapped in the mirrors.

Ben begs Anna to come back to the department store so that the demon will leave his family alone. Anna refuses. Meanwhile, Ben’s family is attacked by the mirrors. Because he feels the demon in the mirrors is a friend, Michael cleans the paint from all reflective surfaces and turns all the faucets on . Amy is repeatedly attacked but saves her daughter from having her throat slashed. Amy calls Ben for help, and he abducts Anna at gunpoint. Anna returns to the mirror room and tells Ben to strap her tight, then leave immediately. Amy finds Michael playing in the water that is flooding the home and creating a reflective surface. To Amy’s horror, Michael is pulled through the surface of the water and is trapped on the other side.

As Anna opens her eyes and becomes repossessed, the mirrors explode. Ben returns to the mirror room and discovers that Anna can now crawl on the ceiling and walls and has superhuman strength. Ben shoots her but fails to wound her. He then impales her on a broken steam pipe that ignites a nearby gas line. He tries to escape the crumbling building but Anna attacks again and he is forced to fight her off. The building comes down on Anna, and Ben is able to escape.

At the family’s home, Amy claws at the surface of the water in an attempt to rescue her drowning son. Suddenly, Michael is released from the other side of the reflection and Amy is able to pull him to safety and revive him with CPR.

Ben, alive but injured, pulls himself out of the rubble and exits the building to the street. Police, paramedics and firemen are everywhere, but nobody stops Ben as he leaves. He realizes that something is different because the name on a badge is written in reverse; even a wound from earlier in the movie is on the opposite hand. Fleeing the scene, he happens upon a mirror and places his hand on it. The audience sees a mirror with Ben’s hand print on it. Ben is trapped in the mirror world.

Cast

* Kiefer Sutherland … Ben Carson
* Paula Patton … Amy Carson
* Cameron Boyce … Michael Carson
* Erica Gluck … Daisy Carson
* Amy Smart … Angela Carson
* Mary Beth Peil … Anna Esseker
* John Shrapnel … Lorenzo Sapelli
* Jason Flemyng … Larry Byrne
* Tim Ahern … Dr. Morris

Tropic Thunder

Let’s assume that any gimlet-eyed son in the high-energy household of famous comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara would have had a rare opportunity to observe creative self-absorption and celebrity neurosis at close range. Still, that accident of showbiz genetics doesn’t do credit to Ben Stiller’s unique powers of ruthless insight into the Homo thespianus, and to his talents for a hilarious conjuring of the species.

A good Stiller project, from Zoolander to Dodgeball, is likely to be about a voluble extrovert of exquisite short-guy egotism, with insecurity nipping at his shoes and fury goading him on to fine eruptions of pomposity as delightful for the audience as they are blood-pressure-raising for the blusterer. Now comes Tropic Thunder, the very best and funniest of them, about a small army of such strutting peacocks, a cast of actors off on an acting adventure on the set of a war picture in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

How up their own tushies are these paragons of overpaid Hollywood privilege? They wander into the middle of a real drug war that doesn’t conform to the rules of on-location productions — no assistants nearby with bottled water, no fake bullets — and they don’t even know it. This is Stiller’s Hellzapoppin’ Apocalypse Now — the ultimate fighting machine of comedies-about-the-making-of-movies. It’s raunchy, outspoken — and also a smart and agile dissection of art, fame, and the chutzpah of big-budget productions that just so happens to include a naked, bleach-blond Jack Black, as a drug-addled movie star, draped over the back of a water buffalo.

About that eyeball-searing image: Black plays Jeff Portnoy, a John Candy-like performer trying to show he can embody more than a flatulent fatty in the gas-passing comedy franchise that earned him his fortune. Stiller, who directed and co-wrote the script with Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen, plays Tugg Speedman, an action superstar no longer so super. (His Scorcher series has begun to die hard; his big attempt to stretch his range, playing the mentally handicapped title role in Simple Jack, was a failed attempt at prestige and yet undoubtedly more watchable than I Am Sam.) And in a virtuoso turn from everyone’s favorite redeemed virtuoso, Robert Downey Jr. elegantly dispatches the mishegoss of Method acting with his double-difficulty feat of playing Kirk Lazarus, an Oscar-loaded Australian artiste who commits to the role of an African-American soldier by undergoing skin pigmentation and speaking in a Shaft-meets-Uncle Ben patois even when the camera is off. Such shtick wears thin on the real African-American in the cast, a rapper-turned-actor played by Brandon T. Jackson.

There’s not even room here to linger on Tom Cruise’s eye-catching, image-salvaging romp as a puffy, crude, bald, hairy-chested Jewish producer; Nick Nolte’s authoritative turn as the grizzled technical adviser John ”Four Leaf” Tayback, whose Vietnam memoir is herein being dramatized; the maniacal antics of Pineapple Express’ Danny McBride as an explosives expert; or the crucial Brit-twit-comes-to-La-La-Land machinations of Steve Coogan (soon to be seen in Hamlet 2) as the overmatched British director of the bedeviled, behind-schedule, over-budget movie-within-the-movie (also called Tropic Thunder). The point is that with every character, and with every believably outrageous turn of the plot (beginning with fictional promotional movie trailers preceding the actual feature — each one a perfect comedy haiku), Stiller brings real insider knowledge of — and compassion for — the big business of Hollywood make-believe to bear on a comedy that is itself a superior factory creation of make-believe.

Like a postmodern magician, Downey shows how it’s really done — without detracting from the pleasures available to those who don’t care at all how it’s done, just that the entertainment includes explosions. Even an outsider with no obsessive interest in, say, how to rig the fake blood and severed limbs of movie battle will love Downey’s mid-gore Method struggle for character motivation. And all it takes to marvel, through non-PC tears of laughter, at the wisdom delivered by Downey about how to win an Oscar for portraying a handicap is a pulse.