Why do I see shit, you might (understandably) ask? Well, because in FD there is no other option. And, in this case, because I a) like chicks who kick ass and b) have a crush on Lucy Liu (I know, it’s confusing.)

But to the “film.” First, whatever else you might say about the preposterously-named “McG” (real name: Joseph McGinty Nichol), you can usually say he has a strong sense of motion. I particularly like the way Demi Moore (who looks pretty damn good) slides into a Ferrari Enzo and peels off in the trailers. It comes as a surprise, then, that for someone who seems so obsessed with the visual, this picture looks so bad. In one scene, broken glass clearly came from a computer, in another, flame licking through a stage floor has SFX written all over it.

Even worse, some of the outdoor scenes have the characters with a sort of purple glow. At first, the strange cast seems to be a stylistic choice, as it is first noticeable at a dirt bike race presided over by Pink (naturally.) Later, though, when the Angels are just walking around outside, they have that same edge problem whenever the background is sky. It’s very off-putting.

The action scenes, by contrast, are just annoying. Movies have a long tradition of exaggeration, of course. I remember reading once that some filmmaker had decided the actual sound of a handgun firing sounded too weak, so he spiced it up with samples from several explosions — including a nuclear blast.

Post-Matrix, it seems that many films have taken a similar departure from reality. Not that I expect everything to be French, but when you have a scene where the girls manage to pull a truck off a dam after a tank has fired on them at one end and a shoulder-mounted rocket is launched at the other then during the time the truck is falling, uncover, enter, detach and start a helicopter, well, suspension of disbelief is a bit too much to ask. (Although it does make the walking-through-fire scene that comes later seem almost tame.)

I know that perhaps it’s all intended to be this wry and knowing send-up of all the action movies that came before, but I just don’t care. It stank, and I’m pleased to see that in its second week it dropped 62% at the box office (the biggest dip in the top 10.) Word-of-mouth, anyone?

John Malkovich’s directorial debut did a good job of creating a mood surrounding his unnamed Latin American country, and Javier Bardem as Rejas was amazing in a subtle, understated way. Ultimately, though, the movie’s pacing was a drag, its central conflict resolved in somewhat unimpressive fashion and the love story, well, let’s just say I was unconvinced by the relationship between the characters.

None of that is intended to rip it apart, so much as to say it was very intelligent, in a somewhat boring, distant way.

Josh looked like shit, so there went my payoff for seeing this. Oh, sure, there were a few laughs (courtesy Harrison Ford) but for the most part, so slow I thought the projector must have been running in reverse*.

* I’m sure I must be borrowing this line from somewhere, but damned if I can remember where.

Let us take a moment, dear friends, to quietly appreciate the humble dollar theater. For it is at this second-run palace that we may indulge our discomfiting urge to see movies which we know, in every crevice of our bodies, will suck with a mighty force.

And after 100 minutes of schlocky rogue-cop-seeks-vengeance cliché nearly as tired as our poor buttcheeks, we can remind ourselves that it only cost a dollar.

A friend said she thought this was good, so I caught it at the dollar theater — and I had to disagree. True, I didn’t hate it, but at times I got close: the movie had a fundamental dishonesty, offering up boatloads of “twists” that made no sense.

Actually, it’s not accurate to say I got close to hating it, that would entail much more emotion than I actually felt. I simply didn’t care about it.

Yep, I went to see it, just as I’ve seen every other release (in theaters) from one of the most reliable studios in the business. And as with all the rest, I thought it looked great and was clever and funny. It’s also fun to try to identify the actors from their voices — especially when you don’t know their names, as with My Cousin Vinny‘s friend’s stuttering lawer guy.

(Though I still can’t believe some people actually protested because Ellen DeGeneres was a voice.)

(I offer no excuse. Okay, yeah I do: I was in Cedar Rapids, had some time to kill, had seen everything else, and was with other people. Plus the other option was Down With Love.)

Surprisingly unfunny, even when you allow for the fact that I’m predisposed to dislike the premise, this was the movie that was to take Jim back to his classic comic roots. It hit all the formulaic high-points and sure seems to have scored at the box office.

But for all that, there are more laughs in The Onion’s lacerating review of this pic than in the film itself.

Stylish, sometimes silent, and certainly not short.

Let it never be said that all theaters are the same. I was the only occupant for the 9.30 showing of Thief, my fourth flick of the day, but I still couldn’t find a good seat. The screen was up too high for the size of the venue, and the sound was poor.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t get too engaged in the story. Or maybe it was the distracting presence of Nutsa Kukhianidze, whose whiny 17yo skankishness was just irritating. (Though Nick Nolte gave a great performance — it’s almost as if playing an alcoholic has-been just comes naturally to him.)

It got better towards the end, though.

When it came to the end, I counted. There were more than 50 assistant camera people in Winged Migration, a 2003 Oscar nominee for Best Feature Documentary.

With cameras mounted on gliders, RC flying machines, helicopters, delta wings and all sorts of other rigs, the five crews followed birds across all seven continents during their annual migration.

The three year project involved some 14 cinematographers and promised that no digital special effects were used in the filming of the birds. (More details about the filming can be found on Sony’s elegant Flash site.)

When all this comes together, the result is some amazingly rich and up-close pictures of fascinating animals traveling extreme distances (some fly more than 6,000 miles each year) to produce offspring.

It’s also a lot of silence — the narration makes up perhaps 10 minutes out of a 90 minute film, and there sometimes seems to be no rhyme or reason to the structure. In addition, a digital special effects house was credited and some shots were clearly dramatized (e.g., birds being shown at such a height the continent outlines were visible) so it left me wondering what was real and what was doctored.

Perhaps it was just the fact that it was my 3d movie of the day, but I left wondering if the material would have been better presented as a tightly-edited PBS hour.

An intriguing examination of two contrasting lives that intersect thanks to some soluble aspirin.

Weathered-looking Milan (the Man on the Train) rolls into town with no place to stay, but thanks to a chance encounter in a pharmacy he soon has a place under the roof of retired poetry teacher Monsieur Manesquier.

The film unfolds by examining the men’s two lives as each sizes up the other. The result is a compelling examination of what it’s like to realize that perhaps you didn’t take the right path after all, done in an unhurried character-driven style that seems somehow very French.

A moment ago I looked up the proper spelling of this film’s title, and it was only then that I realized it won the Oscar for best foreign language film this year.

That’s not really a surprise. This gorgeously shot picture has a fresh perspective on the second World War: rather than being set in the cold, desolate ghettos most recently recalled by The Piano, the Jewish characters in Nowhere in Africa make their home on the bright, sunny land of Kenya.

The film is just as much about the marriage of the lead characters, which undergoes tremendous stress. It’s a fascinating to watch lead actress Juliane Köhler as Jettel, the woman who first treats the “Negroes” as the help, even as her peers are being rounded up in her homeland. Jettel, like her daughter and husband, is deeply affected by her situation, a fact brought into relief whenever a letter comes from Germany with “the stamp that always brings tears.”

Husband Walter has strong ideas about what it means to be German, and his unbending stance leads one to question how much of being a citizen is about birth and how much is about will.

Gorgeous, and good.

Hey, how does a French movie, set in Spain, that tells the story of college students from all over Europe sharing an apartment grab you? As irresistible? Me too.

The film follows Xavier, a French student of Spanish, as he moves to Barcelona to learn the language as part of the Erasmus exchange program. Along the way he finds himself in a house with fellow students from Germany, England, Spain, and the Netherlands.

Together they have good times and bad, and while the movie works fine on its own, it particularly resonated with me — not just because I recognized some parts of Barcelona that I had visited, but also because I thoroughly enjoyed my own time living with several other people whose accents were drastically different from my own.

Basically the whole thing made me want to go back to Europe. Like, right now. (Oh, and note to subtitle-phobes: 1) Get over it — there’s tons of good stuff out there that’s not in English. 2) This movie is a good place to start; fair-sized pieces of it are in English, so you don’t spend the entire time reading.)

(I actually saw this last Saturday at a sneak. Of course my lazy ass would only get around to posting this on the day it actually comes out.)

Look at a poster for The Italian Job and it seems to have a lot going for it. Specifically: attractive guys (including that new guy with the huge arms whom Confidence put on my radar screen), good actors (Sutherland and Norton), plus a serviceable plot (gotta love heist pictures.)

Yet there are potential minuses as well: Charlize Theron is an annoying wench who should be forever shunned for Reindeer Games (umm, not that I saw it) and her sometimes similarity to fellow sucksmith Ashley Judd. And would the movie suffer from a desperate desire to be Ocean’s Six?

Turns out it’s fine. While it’s certainly not art, it flows comfortably and is fun to watch. Some of the gags run too long (a cameo in Seth Green’s backstory is great, but then they milk it dry) and somehow Wahlberg managed to convince them to let him keep his shirt on, but by and large it’s a good guy movie. Even Theron isn’t annoying.

Oh, and the sneak started as ushers walked slowly up and down the aisles (then stood at the front for a brief time) on the lookout for camcorders. For those who didn’t get the hint, a big disclaimer also appeared: Warner Bros. reminds you that filming the movie off the screen is illegal.

The interesting part: Job was a Paramount release.

I actually downloaded Beckham from the Internet many months ago. As I’m not a fan of watching features on my computer, I put off seeing it. Then I heard that Fox Searchlight was releasing it in the US, with rumors that Posh and Becks had so enjoyed the movie (which was made with stand-ins) that they volunteered for re-shoots so that they could actually appear in it.

Now that I’ve seen it in the theater, I know that David and Victoria play a very small part, and that’s OK. The story is just as much about main character Jesminder as it is about the football star. Her quest to play footie in a traditional Indian family (delightfully captured by this poster) plays much more successfully than My Big Fat Greek Wedding, its closest analogue.

This movie is funny, warm, and welcoming. Good to see if you like that little touch of Britain, and a perfect choice if your basketball-playing sister happens to be available.