Twenty years ago, Arlen Faber (Jeff Daniels) was a man facing a very difficult time. His father had developed Alzheimer’s disease and in his desperation and pain Faber called out to God with questions and when God did not answer them, he decided to answer them himself. Well, the manuscript Faber wrote containing his Socratic dialog with God was accidentally seen by a young book publisher who took a chance on this unknown author and the result was a book titled Me And God that took the world of publishing by storm. Me And God has been read and adored by millions of people all over the world and it is now celebrating twenty years in print.

But Arlen Faber is not a soft, cuddly New Age guru with an open heart and an empty head; he is a misanthropic cuss who maintains a J. D. Salinger like existence eschewing all interviews, book signings and personal appearances. It seems like God is punishing Faber’s dislike of people who pretend to have all the answers by turning him into one.

Meanwhile, Chris (Lou Taylor Pucci) has just finished a 27-day stint in an alcohol rehab center and he returns to the used bookstore he manages only to discover it is very quickly going out of business. Adding to Chris’s troubles is that he lives with his alcoholic father whose major hobby is passing out on the sofa surrounded by liquor bottles. This is not a good environment for someone newly sober, but Chris is stuck and he does not know what to do.

Another character in this Philadelphia neighborhood is Elizabeth (Lauren Graham) who has just opened her own chiropractic business, but business is slow. Elizabeth also has a six-year-old son named Alex (Max Antisell) who she is trying to raise on her own ever since the boy’s father ran out on them.

In a nutshell this is the film The Answer Man.

There is a lot of set-up and back-story needed to get The Answer Man going, but once it starts, The Answer Man becomes a dramatic and intelligent comedy about three screwed up people and how their chance encounter with each other proves beneficial to them all. In lesser hands, this film could have been intolerable, like an Afterschool Special injected with high fructose corn syrup, but writer/director John Hindman, in his debut film shows admirable restraint in the mush department.

This is quite amazing since Mr. Hindman, who introduced his film today at the Philadelphia Film Festival/Cinefest 2009 said that he was hoping to make The Answer Man just like the old Frank Capra movies he enjoyed when he was younger. Let it be noted that director Frank Capra, for all his gifts, never showed any restraint when it came to inflicting sentimental mush on audiences.

Some people will think the characters chance meetings are too contrived, like in the film Crash; others may find the story resolutions (or lack of resolutions in some cases) to be too facile and generic. I can’t help you there. Either you will accept this film on its terms or you won’t. As for me, I accepted the plot and characters and I really enjoyed the sassy, sometimes bitter wit in the dialog and the simple visual style that makes this film a small unassuming little gem that I hope connects with a larger audience.

This could be tricky as there are no big denouements in The Answer Man. Mostly because there are no big problems. The characters are all stymied by the ordinary problems people face on a day-to-day basis. This might make some feel that The Answer Man is promising more than it can ultimately deliver, but if that’s the way you feel, then the film did exactly what I think it was trying to do, which is to make you realize that there are no gurus out there who have all the answers.

This is a tough lesson to learn. Many regular people are crushed when they discover that their idols (literary or other) are just ordinary human beings, but that is nothing compared to the crushing blow an idol feels when he discovers that fact. Who does the answer man turn to when he has questions? Fortunately, The Answer Man keeps the story small and tightly focused. The script and the actors all play out their little mini-dramas with no big scenes, but lots of small touching ones.

I have to single out Jeff Daniels for praise because it is his grumpy, cynical, yet not completely disillusioned author who carries this film. Furthermore, Daniels is an actor who actually looks like he could have written a book. Most movie actors barely look like they could even read a book.

The Greek philosopher Socrates once said that “The unexamined life is not worth living”, but truly, there is nothing scarier than self-examination. I mean, what if you don’t like what you discover? This explains why most people would rather pull off their fingernails with pliers than actually sit down and think. Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just turn to someone else who has already done the necessary hard thinking so all we have to do is follow their advice?

While it’s great to get people interested in reaching conclusions; how do you keep them from jumping to the wrong ones? Enter the contemporary self-help books; talk about a vast wasteland. I am consistently amazed that people will walk into a bookstore and completely ignore the great works by great minds like Schopenhauer, Hegel, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Confucius and instead purchase books by frauds and nit wits like Deepak Chopra or Dr. Phil.

The truth is that many people are looking for answers to life’s persistent questions and while they often put their faith in dubious practices like Feng Shui or astrology, they are still seriously trying to examine their lives so I have to give them an “A” for effort. It’s not easy.

The film Lake Tahoe acts as a very good lesson in no-budget filmmaking, but it also demonstrates that if your cinematic style does not jibe with your subject matter, it doesn’t matter how frugally you make the film, it simply won’t work.

The film begins with Juan (Diego Catano), a Mexican teenager accidentally running his car into a street post. After this, he can’t get the car started so he embarks on a slow, and I mean slow visit to every auto parts shop in the nearby area. This journey is filmed in very long takes with NO camera movement (except for a handful of shots, presumably filmed on the day the filmmakers either borrowed or rented a dolly). The set-ups are maddeningly repetitious. We will usually have a long shot of a garage or auto shop from across the street. Juan will walk into the frame (usually from the right to the left) and he will either stop at the store and ask about spare parts or he will just continue through the frame and out of sight. At this point, we will usually cut to black and this black will either be a silent or it will contain some sound effect like a car crash or a dog barking, but mostly, the black frames are silent.

Now, this happens again and again in Lake Tahoe and while I tried to empty my mind of ordinary film technique, I couldn’t help asking myself if these cuts to black were an attempt to compress time or were a way to show that our hero has walked a long distance. Certainly, if the director didn’t cut to black between shots and had simply continued with the long shots of Juan walking cut together in continuity, I would have gotten a sense of space and location, but by depriving us of this continuity of locale and not being clear about time compression, I was left wondering just what the hell was I watching.

Ultimately, we learn that Juan’s father has died, presumably very recently and that he, along with his mother and younger brother are trying to deal with their grief, but they don’t seem to be doing it very well. Mom simply sits in the bathtub chain smoking and crying. Little brother hides in his tent in the front yard or in the closet in the room he shares with his brother. Meanwhile, Juan keeps looking for a distributor harness so he can get his car repaired, but considering he makes several visits during the course of the day to his house, he must not have crashed very far away in the first place, but then again, without any indication of time or locale, I don’t know this for sure.

The rest of the film follows Juan as he deals with a variety of eccentric local people, but presumably, these people are his neighbors so I am at a loss to explain why he doesn’t know them. Juan meets an old man at a garage who asks him to walk his dog, named Sica, which the boy promptly loses. He meets a girl in a spare parts store who asks him to baby sit for her while she goes to a concert. He also meets another teenager named David (Juan Carlos Lara), about the same age as Juan who is a mechanical whiz and he manages to get the Juan’s car started again. David also invites Juan to see the film Enter The Dragon later that night when it plays in a local movie house. The upshot of the whole movie comes when Juan finally gets his damaged car home and he peels off a bumper sticker that say LAKE TAHOE on it which he was apparently given as a gift from his deceased father. Cut to the credits.

Now, all of these long shots and black outs are deliberate choices made by director Fernando Eimbcke and I haven’t the faintest idea what he is trying to say about grief by using this technique. Now, other directors have used long static shots followed by blackouts, most notably Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders, but here the style is just plain annoying and pretentiously quirky.

If you are going to eschew conventional filmmaking techniques, that is perfectly fine, but have a point for doing it. What is the director trying to communicate on a formal level with this heavy, deadpan style that could not be communicated with regular style? This doesn’t make Lake Tahoe stand out, it just makes it tedious.

Furthermore, it seems like the actors were all told to deliberately tone down anything like emotion in their performances. The only character who comes to anything resembling life is David, the boy mechanical genius and that’s because he happens to love the martial arts and is forever practicing his high kicks when he gets a chance. It’s not much to build a character on, but Juan Carlos Lara is the only person in this film with a personality.

By the end of the film, I was even more perplexed than I was at the start and I am still wondering what the actual Lake Tahoe has to do with anything. As a film lover, I know that Lake Tahoe was where Michael Corleone had his brother Fredo executed in The Godfather Part II and that the entire story for the great thriller The Deep End took place there, but what this fresh water lake in Nevada has to do with anything else in this film is too obscure for me to comprehend.

A better title for this film would be The Long, Long, Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Poor Fernando Eimbcke, the sophomore curse has struck again.

If you were to see Herb and Dorothy Vogel walking down the streets of Manhattan now, you would probably think they were just an ordinary old Jewish couple on their way to the Carnegie Deli for some lean brisket. You would probably be right.

But if you had seen them walking down the streets of lower Manhattan in So-Ho and Tribeca sometime in the early 1970′s (very unhip back then) you would have been very puzzled. Why would this tiny couple (they are both short) be walking around these rough neighborhoods full of punk clubs, drug addicts, scary leather bars, empty lofts and all kinds of disreputable people and why aren’t they scared? The reason is because they were probably on their way to see some emerging artist in his workspace or to attend some offbeat gallery show of minimalist art. Later you might have seen them heading back uptown on the subway or in a taxi with packages of art. You would have thought, well, this is just strange enough to be typical in New York.

Here, you would be wrong.

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There is not that much titillation to be found in the German documentary 9 To 5: Days In Porn. Sure, there’s an occasional flash of nudity, but that’s part and parcel of the fact that this is a look at the porn industry and the people who populate it. Culled from a year’s worth of filming, director Jens Hoffmann takes us on a tour that reveals that the business side of the adult film industry’s particular brand of show is surprisingly normal as any other office job and perhaps even a bit dull at times. But the film itself is about as sexy and erotic as a glimpse behind any other industry would be, that is to say, virtually not at all.

Moralists and their ilk will probably be distressed to learn that the documentary doesn’t present the adult stars as a bunch of strung out junkies or naive waifs lured into the business as they stepped off the bus from middle America onto the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Instead, the adult stars interviewed give various reasons for entering the field, none of which involved coercion. Some definitely are in it for the quick money that they can earn. But rising star Sasha Gray seems the most considered, offering some thoughts on how she sees pushing boundaries in her own adult film work as a method of empowering women to fully explore their own sexuality. No matter what their reasoning, though, their eyes are open about what they do, the limited amount of career time they may have in front of the camera and where they might go afterwards.

One former porn starlet is Dr. Sharon Mitchell, who used some of the money she earned in the industry to set up the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation. Now one of the leading industry watchdogs, Mitchell illuminates us for us the regular health testing that all p-rn actors go through and describes the steps that would be taken if a performer was to test positive for a sexually transmitted disease. If her statistic that the STD rate in the industry is 12% less than that of the comparable age-range of the general population is correct, then they must be doing something right.

Sure there are a couple of sleazy characters that pop up – Yes, talent agent Mark Spiegler we’re looking at you – but a majority of the people in the industry are just working stiffs, if you’ll forgive the pun. One small producer has his mother handle all the shipping of his product. On porn film sets, there is as much standing around and waiting while technicians set things up and make adjustments as there is on more mainstream film sets.

The film also poses some interesting question pertaining to people’s consumption of the porn industries product. With $12.7 billion in revenue, there is no denying that there is consumer demand for porn, though Adult Video News publisher Paul Fishbein suggests that the market may have reached an oversaturation point. But is the industry’s increase in producing more extreme product a side-effect of producers trying to put out films that will stand out on overcrowded video store shelves or is it just a greater recognition of what consumers, i.e. society, secretly desires? It’s also acknowledged that the internet is currently transforming how consumers access pornography, so it is possible that 9 To 5: Days In Porn might also serve as a snapshot of an industry on the verge of transformation.

Sam Bell is going a little bit stir crazy.

Coming up on the end of a three year stint stationed on the dark side of the moon, Sam (Sam Rockwell) has been the only human manning a station that monitors automatic mining vehicles that gather a mineral needed for energy production back on Earth. His only companionship is the station’s artificial intelligence Gerty (voiced by a monotoned Kevin Spacey). While heading out to one of the automated miners, Sam accidentally crashes his lunar buggy and blacks out. He awakens to find himself in the base sickbay, Gerty reassuring him that he is safe. However, Gerty very pointedly ignores any questions from Sam as to how he got back to the base from the crashed buggy. But solving that mystery only reveals a myriad more.

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Paramount has released the final theatrical poster (below, click to enlarge) for J. J. Abrahm’s upcoming Star Trek, and I have to say t hat I’m of two minds on it.

Deep inside me, the old school Trek fan that wasn’t quite killed off by the franchise’s decline through the 1990s likes the poster alot. It conveys a sense of speed and is just a touch abstract.I would definitely be tempted to hand this on the wall of my office.

But I wonder if the approach that brings the poster out of the realm of ordinary film posters towards a more serious artistic approach will possibly turn off the average ticket buyer. The franchise has a lot of goodwill to win back after the dismalness that was Star Trek: Nemesis and the publicity for the film that we’ve seen so far hints that this return to the franchise’s roots could be just the thing it needed. I’m noit sure that this poster, as beautiful as it is, will help to contribute to that .

Star Trek hits screens on May 8.

In 1998, three of the five films nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award were films that dealt with World War Two from three very unique perspectives. Though none of the three would win the Best Picture Oscar, they would all provide differing looks at different aspects of the conflict.

In the previous two installments of our series,  Michael McGonigle has taken a look at why Life Is Beautiful and questioned the taste of filmmakers who feel compelled to try to find an uplifting message in the absolute horror of the holocaust while his examination of Saving Private Ryan, questioned director Steven Spielberg’s ability to suppress his impulses to make a crowd pleasing action film.

And now Michael turns his critical gaze to the third World War Two-themed film that was nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award in 1998- director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line. Michael notes that Mallick himself warns us to suspend our expectations of what a war film is and should be early on through an offhand line of dialogue, “They got fish that live in the trees.” But does Mallick succeed in subverting our expectations for the genre? Read on to find out…

“This is a thoroughly delightful romantic comedy that is actually romantic and above all funny,” writes contributor Michael McGonigle about the film 500 Days Of Summer.

“Joseph Gordon Levitt is just getting better with each passing year. If this film does not mark some kind of breakout for him, than I don’t know what is wrong with people.

“Gordon-Levitt plays Thomas, a writer for a greeting card company based in LA. He has been a romantic since high school when he compulsively watched The Graduate and listened to British bands like The Smiths and Joy Division. A narrator informs us that Thomas believes in finding that one true love. His true love turns out to be Summer played by Zooey Deschanel. She comes to work at the greeting card company as an office assistant and they both fall into a somewhat passionate affair, at least from Thomas’s perspective. Summer however, is a bit more cautious.

Continue reading review…

With only three movies out under their own shingle, Marvel Studios have become a force in Hollywood. Now, the company has taken steps to expand their film portfolio by bringing some of their other comic book heroes to the big screen.

Variety reports that Marvel Entertainment is hiring a team of writers with the purpose of writing scripts for properties it wants to bring to the screen.

The group will consist of up to five writers who will sign on for one year of service. They will work developing pitches Marvel gives them, which might include long in development options or completely new characters.

Characters listed in the article include long in the works characters such as Black Panther, Doctor Strange and Iron Fist, and fresh ones such as Nighthawk, Vision and Cable.

Nighthawk is an interesting one because the character is a Marvel doppelganger for DC Comics’ Batman. It should be interesting to see if that character gets to the filming stage, how much it resembles Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.

The focus overall appears to be one bring Marvel’s lesser known characters to the spotlight. Some may forget that Marvel first made its splash into cineplexes with one of its lesser known characters–Blade. The character was a B-level one in the comic books when it was optioned, yet the film was a worldwide success and spawned two sequels.

 1. Monsters vs. Aliens (Paramount/Dreamworks, 4,104 Theaters, 94 Minutes, Rated PG): Wow, talk about a wide release! You hardly ever see a film open in that many theaters. As a matter of fact, I think that if this isn’t a record, it’s pretty darn close.

Yeah, I think its pretty safe to say this film is going to dominate the box office this weekend. I mean, something would have to go majorly wrong for it not to. And that’s not just because of the theater count.

Let’s look at the voice cast. You have both Reese Witherspoon and Renee Zellweger (which it think is a some kind of violation of the space-time continuum), several members of The Apatow Repertory Players, several cast members from the Office and Arrested Development, the leads from two of FOX’s most popular shows , and, oh yeah, Steven Colbert as the President.

Add to that the massive marketing blitz for the movie, and Dreamworks track record for creating hits, and you have the making for a sure-fire hit. Maybe.

2. The Haunting in Connecticut (Lionsgate, 2,732 Theaters, 102 Minutes, Rated PG-13): Groan. Yet another “based on true events” horror film. Which means that one time there might have been a place, it could have been in Connecticut, and there might have been a rumor that it was haunted. Outside that, pretty much everything else if fabricated.

And since the film is rated PG-13 (remember what we say kids, never trust a PG-13 horror film), the scares be rather toothless to boot.

And the gross factor, based on the ads with what looks like a character vomiting chocolate milk straight up (which was on a poster, which is decided not to use for this post), should be turned up to 11. Yeah, not a fan of scares replace by gross out moments.

But that’s just me. If you can’t get in to Monsters vs. Aliens, maybe you can take the kids to this.

3. 12 Rounds (FOX, 2,331 Theaters, 108 Minutes, Rated PG-13): Or you can take them to see this one. It’s PG-13 too.

It’s the latest in the WWE’s attempt to make John Cena into the next Rock…er…Dwayne Johnson. But, this time, the odds are a little better,

The words “Die Hard 2“ and  “Speed” in the title don’t just refer to the director (Renny Harlin) and producer. This film seems tied thematically to those two films.

The plot involves Cena’s girlfriend being kidnapped by a criminal he put away year before. The bad guy will kill the girl unless Cena completes 12 devious tasks the villain has come up with.

Yeah, the story doesn’t seem all that plausible and Cena might not be the best actor. But, you know what, Commando wasn’t all that realistic and Arnold didn’t win any awards for it, but it was still a great popcorn action flick. And Cena can have a good career doing those if he pulls this one off.