Everyone’s favorite bumbling cops have made their way to the big screen. “Reno 911! Miami” is the movie based on the popular Comedy Central series “Reno 911!” which follows the members of the Reno Police Department. The officers are in Miami for a national police convention when the convention center is attacked with an unknown biological agent. Luckily, or unluckily depending on whose point of view you take, the cops from Reno were on the outside at the time. Being the only cops anywhere close, Lt. Jim Dangle (Tom Lennon) and his crew are called upon by the Homeland Security to protect Miami, find out who planned the attack and find the antidote before the cops on the inside are dead.
This movie is basically a longer version of the show with a lot more cursing and a few explosions. Fans of the show will love this movie. It brings the deadpan comedy that has made the show popular and transitions it to an uncensored R-rated version. Even one of the more memorable residents of Reno, the lying, drug addicted, male prostitute Terry (Nick Swardson) makes an appearance in Miami. He is integrated into the movie without the non-fans feeling left out because they do not know who this man is. While the cops are talking to him, they provide just enough background to let everyone know this character’ s history. The movie moves along a lot like the show; a main story mixed in with a montage of the cops answering their various calls; a beached whale on a topless beach, a crocodile in a pool, Terry getting called in for lewd conduct and many more simple situations made complicated by their incompetence. Though much of the movie is devoted to these smaller outings, it all comes back to the bigger story line of helping the trapped cops. 
Adapting a television show to a movie is a tricky thing. There is a need to attract more then just the fans of the show. The movie starts out in Reno and we get to see just how the cops handle the situations that they face. Once they get to Miami, both new and old viewers know what is in store for the rest of the movie. 
There are a few surprising cameos that pop-up through out the movie; actors you would never expect to take part in such a lowbrow comedy. The biggest and most surprising of these is Danny DeVito. He is the caliber of actor who would you not expect to stoop to be in a movie with such a unknown cast. His appearance may be brief, but it is memorable none-the-less.
“Reno 911! Miami” is only 84 minutes long. It is the perfect runtime for this movie. In a world where movies go on for an average of over two hours, this movie knows exactly when to call it quits. They keep the story simple, the comedy raw and end it within a reasonable time without over doing it.
If you are a fan of this show, go see it. It is just as funny as any episode of “Reno 911!” without those annoying bleeps to get in the way. All your favorite characters are there and give you just what you have come to expect form “Reno’s Finest.” For those unfamiliar with the show, this is a good introduction to the unusual methods of the Reno police force.
7 out of 10
MPAA: R
Runtime: 84min
In 2001, the FBI finally caught the biggest trader in the history of the United States. “Breach” is the story of how Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper) finally got caught. He had been working for the FBI for almost 25 years and selling secrets to the Russians for almost as long. The FBI knew that he was doing this, but did not have anything that would hold up in court. They tapped Eric O’Neil (Ryan Phillippe) to bring him down. O’Neil was an FBI upstart who wanted to become an agent and he knew this chance was a guaranteed fast track that position. The only thing standing in his way is outsmarting the man who had been outsmarting the FBI for years.
Chris Cooper has spent his career under the radar. Even though he has won an Oscar, he still is not a household name. The majority of his career has been spent playing the supporting character and has been doing it well, in some cases out shining his more popular counterpart. He does it again in “Breach.” Hanssen is a complex character. He is a religious man who is also a sexual deviant, a quiet man who hides a horrible secret. He pays attention to every detail and can read people like a book. When he first meets O’Neil, he asks him to list five things about himself, one of them a lie. O’Neil lists the five with no hesitation. Where he went to school, that he got all badges in boy scouts except archery, his favorite drink is vodka and so on. Hanssen looks him in dead in the eye and says, “So what IS your favorite drink?” Even with all the bad things the viewers know about him, you just cannot hate the man. It is a credit to Cooper as an actor. He can play even the most evil character and still give him a heart.
Ryan Phillippe has never really impressed me much. Maybe it is because I feel sorry that Reese Witherspoon dumped him for her Oscar, but lately he has really impressed me. He always seemed like a cold, humorless guy. Every time I saw him he had a straight face and looked like he was mad at someone. Then, when I looked at his IMDb profile, I saw he was in Outkast’s video for “Hey Ya” (yes, I checked and it is him and he is actually kind of funny). He has also been is some great movies lately. I saw him in “Crash” and “Flags of Our Fathers” and saw that he could actually act and now I just can’t muster up the distaste for him anymore. He is a surprisingly good actor and I have got to say that I was wrong about him. In this movie he has to lie to Hanssen, his wife and anyone else not directly involved in the case. He has to outwit a man who has been doing it for years and has not got caught. All of this stress takes its toll on his marriage. Phillippe is as good in this role as he has been in the past year and is on his way to being more then the former Mr. Witherspoon. 
This movie is like “Titanic” in that you know how it is going to end. The movie opens with then U.S Attorney General, John Ashcroft, announcing capture of Hanssen, but that does not take the drama out of it. There are a few interesting twists and turns that could lead anywhere. Hanssen is so careful that you wonder just how he got caught. Cooper and Phillippe play off each other really well and give this movie the tension that it is always on the verge of losing. It is one of those movies that will go unnoticed because it doesn’t have big name actors, big explosions and is based very much on the characters and not the special effects.
7 out of 10
Rated PG-13 for violence, sexual content and language.
110 min
When he was young, Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage) sold his soul to save his father. Now he is the Ghost Rider, the devil’s bounty hunter. It is his job to collect the souls owed to the devil (Peter Fonda). When the devil’s son, Blackheart (Wes Bentley) comes to earth to take over, Johnny Blaze is called upon to become the Ghost Rider and stop him. 
“Ghost Rider” is the latest in the line of comic book movies and while it not as good as “Spider-Man” or “X-Men,” it is not as bad as “The Hulk” or “Daredevil.” My advice, should you go to see this movie is, don’t expect too much. The cheesy dialogue and an awkward love story are what keep this from being able to contend with its more successful predecessors. The problem is that to be successful, comic book movies have to offer something that everyone can enjoy and “Ghost Rider” was just to comic “booky” to find the success that “Spider-Man” has had. A lot of the dialogue was cheesy and full of clichés. Some of the lines from “Ghost Rider” you would expect to hear Adam West say in the 1960’s Batman television show. One of Blackheart’s cronies lives in the wind and when he gets into a fight with Ghost Rider he says “you can’t capture the wind,” then laughs an evil laugh. It was one step away from seeing “pow” whenever someone got hit.
The thing about acting is that you are supposed to separate yourself from your character, and while I like Nicholas Cage under most circumstances, there was very little separation between the person he is and the character he was playing. Johnny Blaze acted and sounded too much like Nick Cage for there to be any way to forget that he was supposed to be acting. I sat in the theater and thought, “Why is Nicholas Cage going to jump all those helicopters? That just seems unnecessary.”
As lacking as Nick Cage was, Eva Mendes, who plays Roxanne, Johnny’s love interest, was even more so. She was hired for two reasons and I’ll let you figure out what those were. (Think anatomically). She was just so dull; it was like watching paint dry whenever she was on screen.
Non-acting aside, the special effects in this movie looked really good. Ghost Rider is the best part of the movie. Personally I think that the movie could have used more of that character and less of Nicholas “I’m not even trying anymore” Cage. It is not a good sign that the best acting in the movie was done by a computer-generated character. I have heard that the flame effect has always been the hardest to do digitally because of the nature of fire. Even a small breeze affects how it looks. The flames that engulf the skull head of Ghost Rider, looks and acts just as fire should. With every thing else going on in this movie, the special effects could have been a whole lot worse. 
Overall this movie was disappointing. The dialogue was cheesy and predictable, the love story was forced and mostly unnecessary, the main actors barely seemed to try, but the special effects were good. Not worth the outrageous price of a movie ticket at Regal though. I don’t know that much about the history of Ghost Rider, but I’m fairly certain that purists will be very disappointed with the movie. Long and short of it is, just wait for the DVD.
6/10
Rated PG-13 for horror violence and disturbing images.
Runtime: :114 min
Who knew that cholera could bring two people together? If only others knew of its marriage saving power, maybe the divorce rate would go down. In “The Painted Veil” Walter (Edward Norton) and Kitty (Nomi Watts) get married purely for convenience and not for love. Walter loved Kitty, but knew the only reason she was marrying him was to make her mother happy, but he went through with it anyway. They go about their lives ignoring each other while keeping up the appearance of a happy marriage. When Walter finds that Kitty is having an affair with Charlie Townsend (Liev Schreiber), he takes her into the heart of the cholera epidemic in China. Walter is there to help stop the spread of the disease while Kitty spends time at home. She begins to feel restless and eventually volunteers at the local orphanage. Once there she sees exactly how caring her husband is and starts to see him in a new light.
While this is a decent movie, it is also a slow movie. It seems to drag on and on and never go anywhere. Nomi Watts and Edward Norton save this movie from becoming as bad as the disease it is about. Both have had mainstream success, but it is in these smaller movies that they shine. They give powerful yet quiet performances. As a viewer, you want to hate Kitty, but Watts makes her someone you can’t hate as much as pity. Kitty is spoiled and only gets married to get her mother to stop trying to set her up. She never really gets to know Walter. She uses him and he uses her. Watts is a good actress who has had an erratic career. She has been in big movies, with mega budgets like “King Kong,” but then has movies like this one where she shows her acting ability and shines. She plays Kitty as someone who seems to have no good qualities and stands little chance of turning it around. Once she starts working at the orphanage, we see another side of her and she becomes a better person in the eyes of the audience.
The one performance I was worried about at first was Edward Norton. He is one of the best actors working today. He is an actor who consistently delivers amazing performances, but for the first 20 minutes or so, I was worried he may have finally failed. When he tells Kitty that she has to come with him to China or he will divorce her, resulting in public embarrassment for her and her lover, he was once again the actor I had seen before. We should feel pity for Walter, but he is just as cruel to Kitty as she is to him. He knows she did not merry for love, but he does not care. He goes along with it and was as miserable as she is with their “marriage”. Norton turns Walter from a one-dimensional pawn, to a vengeful, spiteful husband who wants to see his wife suffer. When Kitty starts working, he sees that she is not cold hearted and has a caring side. He begins to warm up to her and his love is rekindled. 
“The Painted Veil” was not painful to sit through, but ultimately, the movie leads nowhere. Watts and Norton save it from its self. The movie moves along at a snail’s pace, achieves much less then it was aiming for and in the end be just another notch on the acting bedposts of Watts and Norton. Not exactly a must see, but the performances are enough to warrant at least a rental.
7 out of 10
Rated PG-13 for some mature sexual situations, partial nudity, disturbing images and brief drug content.
Runtime: 125 min
When one sees as many movies as I do, you tend to notice the same stories told over and over. For the most part the inspiring, feel good, “based on a true story” movies are a dime a dozen. “Freedom Writers” is at the top of the list. Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank) is a new teacher at newly integrated Wilson High School teaching freshman and sophomore English. Her students are all inner city kids from different ethnic backgrounds. All teachers have given up on these students; they feel that they will never amount to anything so they don’t bother challenging them. Erin feels otherwise. She pushes them to forget their differences and accept their similarities. She takes the chance on them that the other teachers will not.
When an actor revives an Oscar for their performances, they are expected to bring that caliber of acting to every performance. Swank fails to impress in this movie. She comes off as way to cheerful and way to optimistic. I felt she should have been committed to some type of asylum because she was smiling way too much. They students are the standouts in this movie. They are all unknowns and deliver some of the more emotional performances. Once scene comes at the beginning of sophomore year. They each give a toast to the class. One gets up and reads how he was kicked out of his home over the summer and his life was tough, but when he saw the kids in his class at school that day he felt better and that English class allowed him to forget about the struggles and just be with his friends.
Many of the students are in gangs, have seen friends killed, been shot at and have this hate of others so ingrained in them from an early age. They put on an act of toughness on the streets. They have to in order to get by. The classroom is the only place they can be themselves. All loyalties are gone during English class, they talk to the kids that they would not talk to on the street. For that time during English class, they are all the same. When they see how Mrs. Gruwell fights to give them a better education, they put in the effort to keep their grades up and do better in school.
One thing that really bugged me and got in the way of really enjoying this movie was the other teachers who didn’t like what Mrs. Gruwell was doing. They were always telling her not to bother and wanted never put in any effort to help her. They were racist in their thinking. They thought that because these students were minorities they would not amount to anything. Maybe I’m just hoping that people are just not that mean, but they were unrealistically ignorant. 
There have been so many movies of this genre, where some teacher takes a chance on the students that others have given up on. These are the inspiring stories that people watch for the feel good aspect. A person triumphing over adversity is a plot device that everyone seems to love. This one is exactly like every other movie of its type. The students are really the standout performances in this movie and what make this better then the average “feel good.” It is worth seeing if you are a fan of this genre, or if you just want to see some standout performances by actors who aren’t getting paid millions to be there.
7 out of 10
Rated PG-13 for violent content, some thematic material and language.
Runtime: 123 min
