The Last Samurai

Bearing the same tenuous relation to actual Japanese history that Gladiator did to ancient Rome, The Last Samurai is clearly meant to overwhelm with the sheer weight of its production values. Tom Cruise plays a self-hating ex-Indian fighter hired in 1876 by the progress-mad Japanese emperor to train his new, Western-style army and to suppress a rebellion of outmoded samurai warriors. After the rebels rout his still-green troops, Cruise is captured by the samurais' leader, the charismatic Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe, nearly stealing the show with his quiet intensity). During his captivity Cruise becomes enamored of the samurai code and eventually sides with Katsumoto in a desperate last stand. For a movie about courage, there's very little that's brave about The Last Samurai. Treading the same ground that's been pummeled to mud in Dances With Wolves and Braveheart, among others, there are the rote flirtation with exotic cultures leading Cruise to a facile Zen-lite epiphany, the stilted 30-second history lessons we are expected to forgive in Designated Epics, and the themes of honor and redemption, which are so baldly stated that nothing is left to the imagination. Despite its many faults, the film may be worth seeing for the costumes alone.

Timeline

Based on yet another Michael Crichton weird-science beach book, Timeline is the story of a group of archaeologists who follow their missing leader all the way back to 14th-century France via an accidental time portal created by blind corporate techno-hubris. When they arrive, they must extricate their leader from the midst of a war between the French and the English, facing homicidal feudal overlords, bewitching maidens, and the usual you-can't-kill-your-own-grandpa time-travel paradoxes.
Assembly-line action-flick master Richard Donner (Superman, the Lethal Weapon series) has stripped all but the merest scraps of gee-whiz stuff and characterization away from the story, and the whole film feels like an off night at Medieval Times. Just when you're ready to graze on the appetizing setup, it's whisked from under your nose and your undercooked entrée is slapped down while minimum-wage combatants desultorily poke each other with rubber swords.
The sins of this movie are those of omission: The editing is so sketchy that some key plot points occur with all the logic of spontaneous combustion, and the usual Crichtonian pseudo-science has been rendered laughable. Paul Walker (The Fast and the Furious, Joy Ride) is a surfer-dude deadweight as the hero, but some of the rest of the cast attempts to rise above the occasion. The always likable Frances O'Connor does what she can as the Spunky Gal Archaeologist. Ethan Embry, as the Tough Guy Archaeologist, has a certain poor man's Russell Crowe bravado, leavened with self-mocking humor that suggests he could do better and knows it. But everyone is limited by dialogue that has been condensed into leaden, trailer-ready sound bites.
The one thing Donner can do in his sleep is action, and pulses do get raised intermittently once the claret starts flowing. But the swords 'n' shields bar has been set so high by The Lord of the Rings that anything less than a total elf invasion looks like a Society for Creative Anachronism picnic. Timeline has just enough cheap thrills to suggest it may have made the grade a few years ago, but now its B-movie production values and woefully hasty composition have consigned it to an eternal future of late-night cable.

The Medallion

Jackie Chan is arguably the greatest action star of all time. But The Medallion is a throwaway effort with lackluster action that serves only to heighten the incoherent plots and minor-league acting that his once-dazzling skills concealed in earlier films. This haphazard rehash of The Golden Child centers on an attempt by the vaguely nefarious Snakehead (Julian Sands, doing his best "Sting, only more evil" act) to suborn a lama-like child, possessor of a magic MacGuffin that can revive the dead and give them superpowers. Hong Kong cop Chan and an inept Interpol agent (Lee Evans) pursue Sands' character from Hong Kong to Ireland, where Chan is mawkishly reunited with an old flame (Claire Forlani), another Interpol agent, of the Ass-Kicking Hottie branch, and they all go off to fight the bad guy together. Good guys and bad guys get magically supercharged, goons get beaten up, and the movie ends in the usual showdown. All involved try their very best but are hard-pressed to overcome the cringe-worthy scenes establishing the chemistry-free romance between Chan and Forlani and Chan and Evans' generic buddy-movie rivalry. Coupled with the cut-rate action, this movie serves only as a reminder of Chan's earlier, funnier films.

Duplex

A young couple (Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore) can't believe their good luck when they find a beautiful, affordable New York City apartment. The only hitch: The place comes with an upstairs tenant (the benignly dotty Eileen Essell). Assured by their real-estate agent (Harvey Fierstein) that she won't be around for long, they settle in. What begin as minor requests from the surprisingly chipper and manipulative old lady escalate into never-ending Herculean labors that take a disastrous toll on the pair. Trapped into staying by some dubious plot twists, they attempt to get rid of her in increasingly outlandish ways, and hilarity almost ensues. Under a defter hand, this film might have been funny. But the vicious, dull-witted ghost of director Danny DeVito's Louie character from Taxi prevails (see also The War of the Roses and Death to Smoochy). Although Essell gets some good lines, the humor consists primarily of ham-fisted slapstick or offensive "old people are gross" sight gags. The denouement and not-shocking shock ending come so abruptly and make so little sense that it seems part of the film is missing. That's probably a good thing.

Various useful, amusing, distracting or curious websites:

Musical stuff

Ambiguous City Records

home of the Maginot Line and many other fine bands

The Maginot Line

a band with which I am affiliated

Goofy Stuff

Homestar Runner

Quite frankly, why the "World Wide Web" was invented.

Engrish.com

My love of Japanese disposable culture and mangled English is always sated here.

Lords of the Rhymes

Hip-hobbits? Either the best or worst cross-sub-cultural pollenization I've ever seen

Coming soon...actual useful stuff, I promise.