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Echelon Conspiracy

Watch enough movies and you start to notice patterns, coincidences, odd synchronicities. Watching Echelon Conspiracy, a thriller that played in less than 400 theaters on its release, comes to DVD with a plot where, if you hold it up to the light just right and squint, there's a strong resemblance to one of 2008's one-hundred-million-dollar blockbusters that was released just six months before -- a spacing too close to suggest that any deliberate plagiarism going on, just that two different writers heard something in the wires and the wind and the world. I can't name the film, of course, for fear of spoiling Echelon Conspiracy, but I will say that, with one exception, I liked how Echelon Conspiracy handled the central plot idea more than I liked how the big-money blockbuster did; whereas the multi-million-making version was bloated and a little silly in its excesses, Echelon Conspiracy stays relatively close to the ground.

Max Peterson (Shane West) is a blue-collar jet-setting high-tech hardware guy -- working with the computing equivalent of big iron, setting up a secure server in Thailand when we meet him. Preparing to check out of his hotel, he gets sent a package -- a new top-of-the-line cell phone. And he starts getting messages from an unknown sender who's always right, in some very interesting ways, which means that when the mystery texts recommend he head for Prague, he heads for Prague ... and follows the phone's hints and tips until he gets on the radar of both a Prague casino security head , John Reed (Ed Burns), and FBI man Dave Grant (Ving Rhames). Back Stateside, the head of the National Security Agency, Raymond Burke (Martin Sheen) is taking a special interest in Max's seemingly magical phone ... which is unusual, considering he's busy with trying to get an expansion of the NSA's powers rammed through congress. ...

Road Trip: Beer Pong

The there are plenty of indications along the way that Road Trip: Beer Pong might, in fact, be much smarter than it has to be, best summed up when Jenna (Julia Levy-Boken), the French-born young woman whose work as the face (and uh, other body parts) of the beer pong championships has inspired her long-lost love (and beer pong genius) Andy (Preston Jones) to drive from Ithaca, N.Y. to Atlanta, Georgia to reconnect with her, explains that she's going to behave when she and Andy are reunited: "I'm a lady ... who sells beer with her breasts."

And, like that contradictory and self-aware moment, Road Trip: Beer Pong sums up its own self: It's a good-hearted, smarter-than-it-has-to-be comedy ... that sells beer and breasts. Branded as a follow-up to 2000's Road Trip, Road Trip: Beer Pong inspires the skeptical question of why you'd follow up Road Trip with a direct-to-video sequel nine years later and the cynical one of why Paramount waited 9 years; if Universal's pumped out 7 American Pie films, clearly, we're in an age when the line between shameless profiteering and giving fans what they want is harder to find than the bottom line of profit.

The Maiden Heist

You would think that a comedy with four Oscar-nominated or Oscar-winning actors would have a high enough profile to make it into theaters, and yet The Maiden Heist, starring Christopher Walken, Morgan Freeman, William H. Macy and Marcia Gay Harden went straight to DVD. To be sure, there were specific business problems challenging its distributor, the Yari Film Group, but The Maiden Heist also faced the problems of the modern movie business in general, where studios seem averse to releasing any entertaining film that doesn't feature an immediately marketable hook like talking robots, talking animals or talking robot animals. If The Maiden Heist's cast were in a grim, grueling drama, that movie would probably make it into theaters for Oscar time; since they're in a light, bright and breezy caper comedy, and have an average age well above the industry's target demographic, someone somewhere calculated the cost of a release to theaters against the potential profits and made the call to put it on the silver disc of DVD as opposed to the silver screen of the theater.

And I'm not going to say that The Maiden Heist would have made buckets of cash if it played theaters, or rail against the way the movie business seems to be running these days, but I will say that The Maiden Heist works remarkably well on DVD, where it plays slick and slight and funny. Walken plays a security guard at a Boston museum, who loses himself for hours in one of the gallery's classic 19th-century paintings, a portrait of a lady by the sea. One day, though, he's told that to make room for more modern pieces, the painting of the maiden is bound for Copenhagen. This, to Walken is unacceptable; it turns out it's also unacceptable to Morgan Freeman's guard, an amateur artist who's fascinated by a painting full of cats, and William H. Macy, who's grown a little too attached to a bronze nude statue that's bound for Denmark as well. ...

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant

More and more these days, movies are presented to us not merely as films in and of themselves, not as something as simple and strong as a single story well-told but, rather, as the first installment of the franchise the studio would like to start up and running. You can sense it in the film's shape and structure; all laborious set-up, a climax that feels more like the lead up to the halftime whistle, the introduction of too many characters and an overall feel of pained, panicked over-exertion that's about as appealing as watching your waiter grow sweat-stains under the armpit of his shirt at a restaurant.

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant is based on a series of young adult novels by Darren Shan; interestingly, or creepily, the hero's name is Darren Shan (Chris Massoglia), a good-hearted teen drawn a little to the dark, who is eager to bear witness, along with his friend Steve (Josh Hutcherson), when the creepy Cirque du Freak comes to town. One of the Cirque's lead performers, Mr. Crepsley (John C. Reilly) is a showman to die for who's never going to die; he's a vampire. And soon -- to save Steve's life -- Darren is as well, and hurled into the war between the immortal-yet-moral vampires and their bloodthirsty brethren, the vampineze, while the malevolent Mr. Tiny (Michael Cerveris) looks on waiting for a long-prophesied war to begin ... which, yes, sounds like pretty much every other work of young adult fantasy in the past 100 years, doesn't it?

Blood: The Last Vampire

It is a truth universally acknowledge that any story that has made a good fortune in one medium must be in want of an adaptation. Books become movies, comic books become TV shows, animated series become live-action films ... and now and then these adaptations work and now and then they do not. But in many cases, these adaptations are not as simple as they look; a huge novel often doesn’t squeeze down into the confines of the big screen, or a children's book can't expand to fill the theater. Blood: The Last Vampire is a live-action adaptation of an Japanese animated film, its animated action and stylishness now brought to live with flesh-and-blood actors and click-and-drag effects.

That original 50-minute film's spawned a comics series, a three-novel-long trilogy and a 50-episode animated spin-off, so the idea of a live-action film must have felt as potentially pleasing as it did potentially profitable. The plot follows Saya (Gianna Jun), a young woman who isn't; she's a vampire-human hybrid set loose by human masters to destroy the demons loose in 1970's Tokyo. As usually seems to happen with these things, her overlords -- her grizzled, paternal mentor Michael (Liam Cunningham) excepted -- are, in fact, not on the side of the angels. Saya goes on the run, along with the Alice (Allison Miller), the daughter of the American military man who was one of the first to die as part of the conspiracy's masterstroke. And this is about all the plot you get, with the revelation that the evil god who wiped out Saya's family and cursed her is, of course, behind it all.

The Quick and the Dead

Movies are, in many ways, like time machines -- watch the right ones, and you can see the slow sighing fall of a star as their fame turns into minor roles in B-movies, or the millisecond when a striving actor becomes a star. The Quick and the Dead, Sam Raimi's goofy-but-grisly 1995 Western, offers not just one but two of those moments. It's Russell Crowe's first American film, and it's an early high note in Leonardo Di Caprio's career; the irony is that neither of those things would have happened if it hadn't been for the insistence of star Sharon Stone, whose star power and heat were what made the movie bankable in the first place; she was attached even before a director, and she insisted on not just Crowe and Di Caprio but also Raimi.

The other side of the equation is that for all of The Quick and the Dead's good fortune -- finding Crowe and Di Caprio as they were in need of great parts, and finding Raimi just as he was hoping to jump from independent and small-scale movies to the bigger canvas studios could provide -- it's a hell of a lot of fun. The plot revolves around a small Western town, Redemption, ruled over by John Herod (Gene Hackman, doing a ripe, rich re-hash of his work in Unforgiven). Herod sets taxes, takes money out of every cash transaction in town, rules with a hard heart and a lightning-fast gun hand. Every year, he holds a very special competition -- a quick-draw competition, gunfighter against gunfighter. If you win, you get a fortune. If you lose, you die. Ellen (Stone) has come to town to enter the competition with her own agenda; the Kid (Di Caprio) has his reasons for taking part, as well. Cort (Crowe) doesn't want to compete, but Herod, his old boss is making him, even though Cort's sworn to never kill a man again.

Pandemic

To re-phrase the old saying, "A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing ... to your enjoyment of a movie." Specifically, Pandemic -- a directorial effort from Jason Connery, son of Sir Sean -- works fine as a low-budget medical thriller as long as you don't know a lot about 1970's B-movie history and don't watch the DVD extras -- which reveal it was shot in 12 days for $200,000. Now, Pandemic doesn't look like it cost multi-millions, to be sure, but there's something disconcerting about knowing how little it actually took to make, as if someone had left the price tag on a Christmas present and you both didn't quite know what to say when it that became apparent.

The other thing about Pandemic, for me, was how closely it hews to the plot of George Romero's 1973 (and soon-to-be-remade) The Crazies. In both, a small town comes under siege from an illness, and the military quarantine set up around the town raises the question of if they're really there to help or have a more ominous purpose. In Pandemic, local veterinarian Sydney Stevens (Alesha Clarke) becomes curious about the Army's purpose as a disease leaping from livestock to people starts killing her townsfolk; conspiracy-minded local Spenser (Peter Asle Holden, suitably grubby and sweaty) thinks that the Army's not isolating an accident but testing a weapon; General Matthews (Ray Wise) calmly and clearly assures her that's not the case. ...

The Stepfather

The Stepfather, which wasn't screened for critics until the morning of its release, is another in a long-ish line of '80s horror remakes being brought to you by Hollywood, the town where "institutional memory" is, through some miracle of compression, a four-letter word. The original The Stepfather had a few things going for it: It had a great lead performance by Terry O'Quinn (now best known as Locke on Lost), solid direction by Joseph Ruben and a script by Donald Westlake. Westlake (who passed in early 2009) wrote very funny crime novels under his own name and very serious crime novels under the name Richard Stark, and perhaps that explains the morbid charm of The Stepfather -- the mix of suburban social satire and slasher-film stabbings and slayings.

The new iteration follows the basic plot of the original all too closely: We start with a man calmly trimming his beard and tidying up before he leaves a suburban home ... with four dead bodies in it. Gerry (Dylan Walsh, best known for TV's Nip/Tuck) is next seen a few months later in Portland, pulling a flirty bit of meet-cute with recently-divorced Susan Harding (Sela Ward); flashing forward again, Susan's son Michael (Penn Badgley) is coming home from military school to his girlfriend Kelly (Amber Heard), his sister and his brother ...and his mom's new fiancée, David, who we know (and they don't) is also known as Gerry. ...

Law Abiding Citizen

In Law Abiding Citizen, a classic sub-genre -- the decent-man-pushed-too-far-by-the-weakness-of-the-system action film -- gets a new-millennium makeover, and while the makeup is a little thin in some spots and a bit clownishly garish in others, there's enough grit and greasepaint in F. Gary Gray's soulless-but-competent thriller to keep your eyes on the screen and off your popcorn. In keeping with the traditions of the sub-genre, Law Abiding Citizen opens with a crime, as two thugs burst into the home of engineer and family man Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) and kill his wife and daughter. The lawyer assigned the case in the D.A.'s office, Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) looks at the case and the evidence and makes the tactical decision to accept one of the thug's confession and testimony, earning him a three-year stretch -- and the death penalty for his partner. Clyde doesn't think this is exactly justice, but as Nick explains, "It's not what you know, Clyde, it's what you can prove in court."

Flashing forward 10 years, Nick goes to see one of the thugs be executed. And in the interim, Clyde has been busy. Very busy. Clyde's made a series of arrangements -- to punish both the thugs, to have the hiccups in the workings of justice smoothed out by a brute blast of vengeance. And once the people the justice system let off easy are punished, Clyde's got a plan to make the entire justice system pay for what it did. ...

Adoration

Atom Egoyan's made unusual choices as a director not only throughout his career but, more importantly, with his career. He's walked away from every chance to go Hollywood, while Hollywood actors as respected and famed as Liam Neeson, Kevin Bacon, Julianne Moore and Colin Firth have gone to great lengths to work with him. He's kept his budgets low and stayed in Canada, the nation his parents settled in after his birth in Egypt; he's never been afraid to tackle topics like desire, religion, immigration, power -- all the stuff that most Hollywood directors shun in favor of easier, softer fables of love, faith, belonging and fairness. If you've never seen Egoyan's masterpieces The Sweet Hereafter and Exotica, you're missing out on two of the best-written, best-directed, most intellectually and emotionally involving films of the second half of the 20th century, films that are brilliantly cinematic and yet as emotional and evocative and sensitive as the best novels.

But, to paraphrase Julius Caesar, I come not to praise Egoyan but to review his most recent film on DVD, Adoration -- and the worst, most depressing, most damming thing I can say about Adoration is that it feels less like an Atom Egoyan film than it does like another, lesser filmmaker trying to deliver their take on an Atom Egoyan film. All of the ambition and intelligence and brilliance we've come to expect in an Egoyan film are there, to be sure; the elegance, humanity and care of craft are not. Egoyan's earlier films, for all of their complexity and trickiness and thematic concerns, danced; Adoration stomps around in heavy boots, blatant and blaring.