"Show me another super hero with a night light built into his chest," said Downey. "I can always find my way in the dark to the super bathroom for a super pee."

"And thanks to my Iron Manly gloves, when my hand gets really hot I can press trousers like nobody's business," he added.

Hey, "trousers" was Downey's word, not mine.

In the hot zone of Afghanistan, Downey is captured by terrorists who are convinced he knows where the best poppies are. Things look dire until Downey constructs a fully armed flying robot suit out of tin cans, aluminum foil, and some Silly String. And, as Sean Hannity likes to say, "If you can't escape terrorists in a fully armed flying robot suit, then you can't escape terrorists."

Downey has to fight his way out of one of those famous Afghanistan caves by firing missiles at the bad guys. Firing off missiles...in a cave? Hey, it makes perfect sense to me.

Not only does Iron Man mark the return of super heroes to the summer cineplex, it also marks something much more ignominious: The return of facial hair.

Downey, with his weathering face and midnight-colored goatee, looks less like a hero in a tin can and more like a magician in a tin can. "Watch me blast a rabbit out of my hat - and then lure it towards the night light in my chest," Downey announced.

And then there's Jeff Bridges who seems to have turned into an old man between his last movie and this one - and an evilicious one at that. There's no hair on his head because hair is scarce in a world with a beard that thick. "That kind of beard is normally reserved for accompanying Kevin Spacey to awards shows," quipped director Jon Favreau, and I can assure you I don't know what he means.

Bridges spends numerous minutes on-screen using an unlit cigar as a prop. Either light that thing, Jeff, or stick it back in your pants where it belongs.

Skipping the facial hair is Terrence Howard who looks terribly uncomfortable here, like a round peg in a square hole - or at least a rectangular hole sized to fit lots of legal tender. "Lots and lots of legal tender," muttered Howard.

And there's Gwyneth Paltrow, who is growing blander as she grows older. "I do anything and everything that Mr. Stark requires, even if it means polishing his headlight - so to speak."

Downey is a ladies man, because what dame can resist a dude who manufactures advanced weapons systems? "And don't forget the night light in my chest," said Downey, who knows a deal closer when he sees one. I mean, the man has a stripper pole in his plane. "It's a good thing I don't own a bike," he added.

Downey's company name, "Stark Industries," is stamped on every weapon he manufactures, right next to "sponsored by Coca-Cola and Burger King."

"The Iron Man suit's not actually Iron," Downey explains, "it's Gold Titanium Alloy. But 'Iron Man' sounds more like a super hero and less like the chassis of a MacBook Pro."

If only part of Downey's costume had been a gorilla suit, this could have been a dandy '50's drive-in flick!

Suited up, Downey takes to the sky, outracing jets as he views a busy set of video images rolling over his eyes. "Initiate evasive maneuver!" Downey commands his viewing screen, "and start up that new episode of Monk!"

The big climax has less to do with terrorists and more to do with Rock-em-Sock-em Robots.

Look, this movie was perfectly fine when it was called Transformers, and before that when it was called RoboCop.

Iron Man is acceptable early Spring fare, but it's no Spider-Man.

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Producer: "Any Dancing Excuses-for-Stars, kid?

Writer: "No, just The Wizard of Oz meets The Karate Kid."

Producer: "Jet Li, Jackie Chan, plenty of stunt people floating around like feathers in a breeze, and the ghost of Ralph Macchio, too? I'm sold!"

And so am I, actually. Forbidden Kingdom is loads of fun!

A kung-fu-obsessed teen browses a Chinatown pawnshop where a magical staff awaits its rightful owner.

"Do you want this magical staff?" asks the elderly Chinese proprietor, whose demeanor and caked-on makeup suggests a much younger actor who has never actually seen an old man unless he's in a movie played by a much younger actor.

"I'm a teenager," says the boy. "My staff is already magical. It just wishes it could conjure beyond that corner of my imagination where the cast of Gossip Girl lives."

Michael Angarano, who's usually cast as "young" versions of bigger stars with more screen time, is the teen who falls off a roof and, thanks to that magical staff, drifts through a dimensional portal into ancient China, suffering no ill effects in transit, except for noticeably puffed-out hair.

"The winds of space and time are nature's blowdryer," Angarano explains.

He looks around and is lost amidst fields of rice and a chest of hair.

Well, one hair anyway. But fields of rice!

This is the ancient China of warlords and swordsmen wearing vast quantities of sparkly eye shadow. "I will fight you to the death!" says the Jade Warlord, "but first...Aesthetician, where's my Ming Maybelline?! Cook, where's my hasenpfeffer?!"

"Blue eyeshadow went out in the 1280's!" Jet Li shouts at the Jade Warlord, and there's no kung-fu move stronger than hurling a catty cosmetics critique.

Enter Jackie Chan, a nutritious part of any kung-fu breakfast. He's a "traveling scholar," a.k.a. "homeless drunk." But a homeless drunk with mad combat skills! And he's not only drunk, he's immortal. Or maybe, like all drunks, he just thinks so.

Jackie regales Angarano with fifteen minutes of mythology to lay out the plot for this movie in language so simple even I can understand it:

Angarano must return the staff to the imprisoned Monkey King at Five-Elements Mountain, where all five elements will get Mischa Barton stopped for DUI. There, he must defeat the Jade Army, mid-ranked in value between the Silk Army and the Frankincense Army.

Wow, the Monkey King looks the part! "I am the son Rip Taylor and Gwen Stefani never had," says his Furry Highness. "And I fight with the cuchi-cuchi of a hundred Charos!" he shouts as wires fly him to a guest spot on the Jerry Lewis Telethon.

And what would a movie about ancient China be without a brew offering everlasting life to he who sips it? "Today we call this brew 'a production deal with VH1'" said Ralph Macchio, wistfully.

"Teach me to fight," Angarano begs Jackie, "and to wear sparkly eye-shadow like a man, albeit transgendered."

All of this hassle over a staff.

"Where I come from we don't fight over a stick unless it's a beef one from Hickory Farms," said Country star Keith Urban, who arrived in Hollywood looking for wife Nicole Kidman, whom he hasn't seen since their wedding in 2006.

And then there's the moment we've all been waiting for: Jet Li vs. Jackie Chan:

Snake pose!

Remorseful David Hasselhoff pose!

Each pose more fierce and couture than the last, girlfriend!

Through the gate of no gate to fulfill the prophecy goes Angarano.

And I'm along for this ride all the way.

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Here’s an abbreviated transcript of my conversation with Dan. Check out the audio here for the whole thing.


MP3 File

Dan, your new movie is The Objective. What’s the story in a nutshell?

Well, basically, it revolves around a group of special forces guys that are led into the sacred mountains of Afghanistan by this CIA agent, and they're supposedly in search of this cleric to get a statement from him to help with their effort with the Northern Alliance, and it ends up being kind of a mystical search for a UFO that this CIA agent is on, and so strange things start to happen to these guys, and towards the end of their mission, you find out that they're up against something that none of them were really prepared to deal with.

So this is almost kind of like Iraq War meets X Files?

In a way, yeah. At its heart, it's a good old fashioned kind of psychological thriller.

So it’s more Mulder and Scully in fatigues rather than just being fatiguing.

Yeah, that's a good way to look at it.

So Scarlett Johansson's in this movie.

Not Scarlett, no. Her sister, Vanessa. It's funny how everyone goes, hey, the Johansson's, as long as there's a Johansson in there.

Is there really a Vanessa Johansson in this movie?

Yeah, yeah.

I was just making that up about Scarlett. I thought I was helping you, and obviously, you don't need any help.

No, actually her sister has a small little role towards the end of the film as the CIA agent's wife, so there is - we have one degree of -

One degree of Scarlett.

- of Scarlett there, yeah.

That's one enough for me. No Baldwins, though, you don't have any Baldwins.

No Baldwins, sorry.

Now, you guys filmed this in Morocco? I've heard that from other people who have shot other things in Morocco that the bugs there are the size of goats.

Well, we didn't run into a lot of bugs. We did run into a lot of goats though, so the goats are definitely the size of goats. But yeah, we spent most of our time out on the desert, and we didn't run into too much wildlife out there, except for the occasional camel and there's a few critters running on the ground, lots of scorpions.

Not to imply anything about this, but Michael Bay would have brought the desert to him.

Yeah, well, I think he has enough access to sand to do that, so he would build that on a stage somewhere.

Now, is it true that the Sex and City movie was filming right down the way from you guys on the desert in Morocco?

Yeah, I'm sure. It was a little glitzier production than ours was, but -

Yeah, well, you know, Carrie's outfits play off so well against the backdrop of mud huts -

Oh, yeah, I'm sure they coordinated that, the full color scheme.

When can we expect The Objective in theaters around the country?

Well, I hope soon. We are going to Tribeca with the goal of getting a distribution deal that will go domestic and hopefully theatrical, so that's kind of the holy grail for us and we have high hopes for it. We think it's a very cool and intriguing movie. It’s a thoughtful genre film that's a little bit out of the norm that I think Hollywood is used to putting out, and we hope it gets picked up.

You know, post-Blair Witch, there must have been tons of stuff thrown at you.

Yeah, certainly, it was fortunate that Blair offered us a lot of opportunities, and fortunately, there's - finding good scripts and good projects to get behind are rare. And we certainly had a lot of stuff thrown at us that, you know, I wouldn't have really considered high on my list of quality films -

I’m going to guess that you had next to nothing to do with that Blair Witch sequel, Book of Shadows.

Yeah, I mean, Ed and I -

Wait, here's my theory, and you tell me if this is true. You finish the first movie. It's this huge hit beyond anybody's expectations, and the suits come to you with a big wad of cash, and a really new, fast, sporty car, and they say, let us use the name “Blair Witch,” and this wad of cash is yours, and you can drive that big, new, sporty, fast car anywhere you want, as fast as you want.

Yeah, I mean, they had the cash, not the car. I should have asked for the car. I mean, it was sort of like that.

You remember all those idiots that made the Blair Witch spoofs?

Yeah.

I was one of those idiots.

Oh cool. I think you owe me a royalty or something.

Uh oh. Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned this. My idiotic spoof was called the Walt Witch Project, where I went to the wilds of Disneyland and was attacked at the end by Pluto, or as I called him at the time, a big goddamn dog.

Now, that's scary.

It was scary, and although, you know, the sequel, Walt Witch II, Book of Shadows is off in the distance somewhere for me.

That's a much bigger budget too, I'm sure.

Back to the original Blair Witch: I think people have completely missed the boat on something. Everyone keeps asking whether there will be another Internet-driven phenomenon like Blair Witch. I think the Internet didn't drive the movie at all. In fact, it was exactly the opposite. You guys created a magic show. I saw a few minutes of it on TV the other night and the documentary parts are really a hundred percent authentic. It was a magic trick, and while we were watching your hands, you had things up your sleeves, and I think people have underestimated the impact of that.

I agree with you a hundred percent. I think you know, definitely the Internet helped us get the word out and helped drive awareness of the film, but ultimately the movie and the core concept of the film is what really people got their teeth sunk into, I think. That concept of missing footage was very compelling for people, and the movie ultimately had to pay off, and so we were lucky that our execution had really not been done to that degree before, and it was kind of new and it was counter-programming to Hollywood stuff, so there was a lot that went into making Blair successful, but I always like to believe you had to have a good story, good characters, and good execution. Otherwise, it's just going to fall flat on its face no matter how much hype you have.

Do you have people asking you, "Hey, Dan, The Objective, is this going to be as big as Blair Witch?"

I mean, I don't think anybody can predict that. I'd be happy if it was a quarter as successful, even remotely successful as Blair Witch, you know? There's never going to be another Blair Witch again. There may be something like it or similar in its own way and huge and groundbreaking. But Blair came at a certain time, you know, and the genesis was five guys who got together and came up with this concept at a time when the Internet was coming up and reality programming was coming up. So all those things intersected at once to make it what it was, and they'll be another intersection of something else.

But The Objective, I like to think of as just a good, solid film. Hopefully, it'll be successful, and add to my body of work that isn't just about Blair Witch. It's about Blair and several other things, so that's my long-term hope.

By the way, has it occurred to you that the entire Iraq War is kind of a rip off of Blair Witch?

Well, yeah.

Because, after all, what did we go in there for, right? And we never found it, did we?

We never found it, and we didn't know what we were getting into.

Right, and now we're not going to get out alive.

It's much scarier, actually.

In Blair Witch you also tapped into something that defined “scary” in ways people didn't understand then and still don't understand now, because, fundamentally, the movie was about an invisible witch you didn't see who was really good at crafts.

Yeah.

Right?

Very good at crafts. That is spooky in its own right.

But here's my point: The movie was full of stuff that was a little bit odd, you know? It was the odd-ness of the climax that was terrifying, I thought. Just the fact that there's a guy standing in a corner facing that corner not moving was horrifying, and it was just a guy standing there.

Well, fear is rooted in the unknown, and that's what a lot of studios and filmmakers don't get sometimes. It isn't so much about throwing in some cliché that we think is scary. It's really rooted in our survival instinct that what we don't know and understand scares us. So within the limitations of budget, which is what we faced on Blair Witch, we tried to come up with ways to scare people that didn't require a lot of money to execute, and we just skewed on the side of keeping it unknown, allowing that fear to manifest itself in the audience's head rather than trying to conjure something up that we just didn't have the budget to do. Some of my favorite films of the past dealt in that realm of the unknown. What you don't see is much more terrifying than what you do, and I've always thought that that was more powerful.

But isn't it funny how filmmakers forget that all the time, and what have we learned other than if you go to a refrigerator and open the refrigerator door, and then close the refrigerator door, there's going to be something “scary” on the other side of that door which wasn't there before you opened it.

Right. Yeah. I mean, it's tempting. You get these big budgets, and you know, you've got all this cool CGI stuff, all these tools and to play with, and it's hard to resist.

Well, how did you deal with that on The Objective?

Well, we didn't have that much more money, so it was pretty easy.

Well, it certainly looks like there's some money on the screen and the trailers.

Well, there's certainly more than Blair, which is not saying much, but it depends on the movie and the conceit of the film and how of that you can get away with, because you know there are arcs to film and arcs to the “monster” and you need to have some sort of pay-off in the end, but it depends on how you reveal the “scare,” and I've always liked to convey a level of ambiguity about what you're seeing.

You're not quite sure how to kind of define it, and that I find is scary, so our scare, our “monster” in this film is something that's really kind of hard to define, and several people may have different opinions on that, but I like that. I like when films ask you to define what it is and pose those questions when you're watching them, rather than just giving you, oh here's the witch, here's the monster with big fangs, or whatever. I like when films force the audience to work a little bit.

Why don't we do that more? Why do we take the easy way so often?

Because it's successful. I mean, you can't argue with a lot of these films that make a lot of money at the box office, and until they stop making money, they're going to keep getting made, so it's a little riskier for studios that are putting millions and millions of dollars behind something to take those kinds of chances. I just personally feel as a filmmaker that they end up making better movies that way, but it's just kind of hard to push back against films that are much more mainstream that are making a lot of money.

What’s your take on the “CW network version” of Blair Witch, Cloverfield?

I thought it was very cool. You know, it's interesting how that kind of technique is still being employed, and I always thought that somebody should do it on a big scale like that. I think my only criticism of the movie was that they didn't go all the way with it. That it felt like the characters and actors felt a little too mainstream and I didn't find them to be as authentic as they could have been –

Are you trying to say you wish - you're glad they all got killed, is that it?

I was kind of rooting for them get eaten. I like the monster, but I'm that way on all those monster movies.

The movie is The Objective. It opens at Tribeca and, hopefully, theaters within the next few months. And Scarlett Johansson's sister is in there and probably a third cousin of Faye Dunaway if we look hard enough.

Somewhere in there, if you dig enough.

As far as I'm concerned, if you spend nine years re-taking the same algebra class and get slaughtered at your prom, you get what you deserve.

Especially if your high school is like this one, where a teacher wigs out and goes psycho in his obsession over one particular student who, you'd think, would be Angelina Jolie and Scarlett Johansson wrapped up into one PG-13 package. Not so. Brittany Snow, who's best known for being unknown, is cute and all, but according to the most recent SAT test, Brittany is to Angelina Jolie as Abigail Breslin is to Grace Kelly.

Brittany's got a tiny divet carved out of her forehead which was inviting almost as much of my attention as the EXIT sign glowing warmly in the corner, beckoning me to release myself from the misery that is Prom Night.

Johnathon Schaech is the cute killer with a jaw so square the cast was able to play tic-tac-toe on it between takes. Says Schaech, "I'm terrifying in the same way you're terrified by a giant underwear model on a billboard in Times Square."

In a cleverly devised fit of inspiration, our killer escapes from a high security prison through a vent, which is something prisons pretty much figured out to avoid by the time Billy the Kid spent quality time there.

The original Prom Night was satisfyingly campy and vastly superior (and I never thought I'd be saying that). It starred teen horror queen Jamie Lee Curtis, who's now doing commercials for a new variety of yogurt packed with enough microbial microflora to provide intestinal transit to the gross national product of Botswana.

Now that's scary.

Why in the world did this flick get a PG-13 rating? The deaths are about as bloody as a firm pat on the back. I saw more blood in Pixar's The Incredibles, and I mean inside the theater. If I want to see bloodless killing, I'll tune in some network war coverage. The blood is half the fun in movies like this, where the other half is envisioning anything other than movies like this.

"Oh my God, it's the killer!" said one prom-goer. "And he is revealed right at the beginning of this movie, thereby eliminating any tension whatsoever!"

"Couldn't they make it like Monk," asked another, "where we don't know who the bad guy is until the end?"

"No, that would require 'characters welcome,' which would add the pressure of creating characters."

"Shouldn't this film have a little humor if it lacks even the tiniest bit of tension?"

"No, humor requires writers who are funny - which requires writers."

"Is there at least going to be a twist ending to be disappointed in?"

"Nope! This movie accomplishes the impossible: It makes you disappointed not to be disappointed by a disappointing twist ending."

The only thing twisting at the end of this movie was my restless butt in the seat.

Prom Night belongs on the short bus.

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My relationship to Heston wasn't personal in the usual sense of the word. And it wasn't based on the classic performances which made him famous in his prime.

No.

My relationship to Heston was based strictly on the experience from a seat in a corner of a movie theater, decades ago.

These were Heston's late-era leading man roles. The hammy ones. The ones that stick in your memory, especially if you first witnessed them as a kid, humbled before that giant silver screen and the legends performing on it.

Nobody wore a turtleneck better than Chuck Heston.

Or a loincloth, for that matter.

Nobody swooped into the open cockpit of a 747 like Chuck Heston.

Nobody fought a planet full of simians better.

Nobody survived an earthquake in LA with more class - in Sensurround, even.

Nobody was a better last man on Earth.

With the death of Charlton Heston goes a tiny piece of my childhood.

And what kind of loss could be more personal than that?

About the only way for a period piece to capture the box office is for it to mount an army of Orcs or to be set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Leatherheads lacks the Orcs, but it does feature John Krasinski, better known as "the guy from NBC's hit comedy The Office."

In fact, there it is right in the credits: "The guy from NBC's hit comedy The Office."

Said one Hollywood spokesperson: "We're intent on making the guy from NBC's hit comedy The Office a star because, frankly, the Josh Hartnett and Chris O'Donnell thing didn't work out very well."

What could be more appealing than a movie set amidst the birth of pro football?

Anything, right?

Now I don't know about you, but unless pro football exits the womb with two heads and no appetite like Nicole Richie's baby, color me uninterested.

Jeepers creepers, it's 1925! And that "Brice" who's an American Idol is "Fanny."

So mind your potatoes, mac, and don't take any wooden nickels. And if you string together enough era-appropriate jargon you, too, might come up with a screenplay fit enough for George Clooney and Renee Zellweger.

Wouldn't that be swell?

Clooney swaps the aura of Cary Grant for the glow of Clark Gable in a role Gable is too dead to play. "Actually, I turned this one down," said Gable, who's touring with the McCain campaign. "Those leather helmets looked too much like penises. And if I'm huddling with a penis on my head, some palooka's getting socked in the kisser!"

Zellweger, meanwhile, channels her inner Rosalind Russell - or Jean Arthur - or Fay Wray - or any brassy dame who worked for the press back in the day, see?

And how!

There's Renee, with lipstick Rose McGowan-red and cigarette perched on her fingers like a totem, a graven image. Worship ye the bounty of North Carolina federal tobacco subsidies, mac! And stop with the heebie-jeebies!

Renee is "Lexy" and Clooney is "Dodge."

"Ya know, doll, when we get hitched our kids will be 'Packard' and 'Flivver,'" said Clooney, whose imagination is limited only by whatever jalopy's in front of the juice joint.

"You got moxie, kid," says Clooney.

"Four months of marriage to Kenny Chesney and a history with Jim Carrey will do that, bud." says Zellweger.

Picture The Natural without anyone who actually is. Visualize a jazz-age Randy Newman score that feels as warm as a knickerbockered newsboy shrieking "Extr-ee! Extr-ee! Read all about it! Clooney pic opens to guffaws and yawns as Kevin Spacey Vegas Romp trounces in second week!"

Gin mills go goofy on the news!

There's plenty of good-natured slapstick here. But instead of laurels and hardy laughs we get Laurel & Hardy.

This confection couldn't be lighter if it was spun from cotton candy and floated like an airship over the World's Fair. You'll forget this movie by the end of this sentence.

What movie, right?

I don't want to be a wet blanket, boys, but here's the skinny: Unless it's raw Clooney-ness you seek (and that cup of Vitalis runneth over), or unless you think Zellweger's gams are the cat's meow, then scram before you upchuck.

This picture's a stinker, and it ain't worth your jack.

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Owen Wilson tried to kill himself after this movie, and now I know exactly how he feels.

Owen is a lost homeless soul with an uncharacteristic sense of personal hygiene - because the only thing more sympathetic than a clean homeless dude is a clean homeless dude with puppies.

"If something stinks in this movie," says Owen, "it's likely to be everything except me."

He poses as a bodyguard for some high school kids who need protection from the school bully. Yes, this movie deals with that momentous topic of schoolyard bullying, a topic I considered sewn up after The Karate Kid I, II, III, and IV.

But let's face it, Hollywood is ground zero for the kind of screenwriters who spent their formative years nose to the concrete. "I visualized more than my share of hero archetypes as I was wiping blood from my face," acknowledged actor/writer Seth Rogen, who has followed up Superbad with a movie that really is.

A "high concept" is the idea behind the movie, Seth, not the state you're in when you're being conceptual. If you're going to pass the bowl while planning all-new ways to spend Paramount's money, share some bud with the audience! Because when we ask "was the writer of this movie high?" we mean it as an expression.

It's the first day of high school and two geeky kids accidentally wear the same horrendous shirt to school, thus marking them for a reign of terror second in ferocity only to the Spanish Inquisition.

Or something like that.

"A lily-white Southern California suburban high school can be a very dangerous place," warned Rogen, whose idea of danger is taking a week off from having his car detailed.

This movie reaches its crescendo during a rap battle on the school steps. Yo, yo, yo, it's like 8 Mile - if all eight miles were traversed in a limo with a driver.

Word has it that these kids were x-rayed before entering the school and a wide variety of hidden Dolce & Gabbana Handbags and Rebecca Taylor Leopard Print Jacquard Coats were found. "This was bound to spark violence," said a security guard, as he confiscated a pair of Versace shades.

And what qualifies Owen Wilson to be a bodyguard? Primarily his camo-pants and a nose broken by too many screenings of You, Me, and Dupree.

To fit in at school, Owen masquerades as a teacher and, thanks to some fast thinking, poses as "Dr. illbit." Strangely, the rest of the teachers, including Dr. Acula and Dr. Akkar Noir, notice nothing unusual.

And definitely nothing funny.

Hey, Drillbit Taylor is also an action film! Unfortunately, our heroes run from bullies in a high speed chase where a mailbox and the dignity of the audience are the only victims.

This concept is so thin I can look right through it to see Owen's soul being swapped to Satan in exchange for more co-starring roles with Ben Stiller.

Next time Owen gets his own star vehicle, let's hope it's filled with gas.

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"What part of 'I'm no Martin Scorcese' don't you understand?" asked 10,000 B.C.'s producer, director, writer, gaffer, aesthetician, amateur bowler, paralegal, and personal shopper Roland Emmerich.

"You know," Roland added, "making a movie that earns 100 million bucks isn't hard. Making one that people care about 100 minutes after it opens, that's hard."

Witness an ancient tribe of early humans which seems to be led by Wyclef Jean and the Fugees! They hunt to survive - and perhaps hunt for a new record label while they're at it.

"We must kill that mastodon or wooly mammoth or whatever it is, then squeeze in time for a recording session!"

I don't know about you, but if I want to get excited about an ancient mammal I'll tune in Janice Dickinson.

Look, the hunt is on! Primeval man's strategy seems to equate to this: Sneak up on your prey, then stand up and scream like a fool!

Our hero claims the white spear and the woman with blue eyes. "In my experience, women with blue eyes tend to prefer the black spear," said Emmerich, "but that's another story I'll adapt poorly from different non-original sources later."

In his zeal for authenticity, Emmerich has crafted (and I use the term loosely) an ancient world where everyone speaks perfect English. "It was either English or more subtitles," said Emmerich, "but this movie was already sub-so-many-things that I didn't want to add titles to the list."

Just how much research did Roland do on ancient man?

"On the DVD Director's Cut you'll see the savages shout 'yabba-dabba-doo' when the whistle blows at the quarry," he whispered quietly.

Sigh.

Back to the movie:

"Four-legged demons will put an end to our world," predicts a soothsaying witch-doctor lady, as Emmerich and his collaborators crawl by on their way to the mudhole of mediocrity that spawned them.

10,000 B.C. is the perfect movie for you if your taste runs to movies with no stars, no one who will ever be a star, no one who has ever seen a star, and no one who knows that a star has five points - as opposed to 10,000 B.C., which has no point.

"In my book," explained Emmerich, "'star' is a four-letter word - like 'good.'"

If Raquel Welch taught us anything, it's that nothing should come between a prehistoric woman and her fur bikini.

Let's likewise hope that nothing comes between Roland Emmerich and early retirement.

The 80th Annual Academy Awards!

I mean, Best Actress to Marion Cotillard in a French movie about Edith Piaf? There are people who would actually rather die than see this movie, no matter how good it is or how good she is.

And leave it to the French to express their gratitude like this:

Thank you life, thank you love, and it is true, there is some angels in this city.

Did she just thank life and love? And since when do life and love deserve to be thanked before Jesus?

No matter how much time marches on, why is it that the Oscars always looks like a black-tie Carol Burnett Show?

Look at those sparkling song and dance numbers! This is how TV looked when producers spent money on it. Who's Carol's guest this week, Bernadette Peters or Sandy Duncan?

To be sure, the show included more than its fair share of ear-tugging. Is a tug on the ear the new cocaine-induced physical affectation, or something? There was Daniel Day Lewis, giving it a tug. And the Coen brothers, too - who looked like they would prefer to be encased in any other brothers' skin but their own.

I don't know that I've ever seen winners less surprised and pleased than the Coens. Perhaps they would have shown more excitement if their pig had taken a blue ribbon at the county fair.

The show seemed a little jauntier than normal, coming in at about 3 hours and 18 minutes - or about 2 hours and 18 minutes longer than it took me to skim through on my DVR.

Presenter Katharine Heigl just about passed out, and all she had to do was read the TelePrompter! What are you nervous about, Katharine? Save your butterflies for Dr. McDreamy! Just be bored like the rest of us!

Congratulations to Tilda Swinton, who won not only Best Supporting Actress but Actress Most Closely Resembling Eric Stoltz.

What happened to John Travolta's head? It looks as if he has a team of stylists micro-trimming the black tar that substitutes for his hair. Does that hair actually grow, John, or does it need to be regularly re-paved?

"Best Ink in a Featured Role" goes to the shoulder-tattooed Diablo Cody, writer of Juno, and - as Jon Stewart put it - a former "exotic dancer." Not "stripper," but "exotic dancer." That's right, Jon, she was working in a "burlesque house" with a chorine named Trixie.

I don't know what it is, but the Oscars just aren't that much fun to watch, perhaps explaining why so few folks will. It's like a pageant without swimsuits. It's got all the epic sweep of Lawrence of Arabia in an era when America prefers to watch Jeff Conaway act out in rehab.

It's a show out of step with the times, and one that increasingly rewards movies and performances detached from the mass audience ABC expects to watch the TV show.

There's nothing wrong with rewarding those who deserve it, of course. But don't expect an audience along for that ride.

Here are the big category winners:

BEST PICTURE
No Country for Old Men

BEST DIRECTOR
Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men

BEST ACTOR
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood

BEST ACTRESS
Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Diablo Cody, Juno

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Ratatouille

Thousands of cheering spectators are waving flags and wearing tee-shirts that might as well have big black bullseyes on the back.

On assignment from Global Fictional News Network is actress Zoe Saldana who has not only never been an international reporter but evidently has never seen an international report - unless you count an episode of America's Next Top Model dubbed into French.

She is killed off early but is, as her stylist calls it, a "pretty corpse." Some actors look so good dead you wonder why it's so hard for them to pretend to be alive.

Vantage Point would earn more points if it featured fewer vantages. Every time we explore a new vantage point, this movie literally rewinds back to the beginning. This is a ten minute movie repeated six times! And after the first couple, the audience in my theater counted aloud!

And with each retelling this story gets ever-more outlandish, not unlike each new season of The Apprentice.

William Hurt is the President. Unfortunately he seems to have left his hair on the campaign trail in 1988. Come to find out, all Presidents have doubles. I don't know what's more surprising, that William Hurt has an exact lookalike or that they both lost their hair in 1988.

Think of it: Two William Hurts, both without hair, both competing for acting jobs and scheming their casting strategy. "This ought to give Jeff Daniels and Beau Bridges a run for their money," said Hurt #1 to Hurt #2, clearly aiming high.

Dennis Quaid is a Secret Service agent who took a bullet for the President, just as he took one for Tom Hanks when he married Meg Ryan, and just as the audience took one for Quaid in Jaws 3-D. That's the sequel where the late, great Roy Scheider uttered the immortal line, "You're gonna need a bigger Anheuser-Busch-owned aquatic theme park!"

The fate of the free world is on Dennis Quaid's shoulders, just as the fate of William Hurt's hair was once on his own shoulders.

Terrorists were puzzled by Hurt's Secret Service code name: "Kiss of the Spider Woman is on the move" said one agent into his thumb because, the Writers' strike settlement notwithstanding, the thumb is the only thing in Hollywood which is opposable.

Sigourney Weaver is the TV news director who opens up this flick, then quickly disappears into legitimate theater for what must be the best Vantage Point of all.

Hey, there's Forest Whitaker with a video camera in the crowd! Anytime there's an Oscar winner in a crowd scene, you can assume he's not filling in his discretionary time with background work, but this role is not far from it. Note to Forest's agent at WMA: "What part of 'starring Dennis Quaid and William Hurt don't you understand?'"

"Hey, isn't that Uganda dictator Idi Amin in the crowd?" asks one Secret Service agent.

"No, that's Jazz great Charlie Parker!" said the other.

"In a Dennis Quaid/William Hurt movie?!"

"You're right. Maybe it's Bernie Mac."

The second half of this flick is way better than the first, once the film stops its incessant rewinding.

Every plot point converges at the end, as the story ties itself up in a tight little bow in the hope that you can re-gift it to a friend when you decide that no matter how many vantage points you have on a Hickory Farms gift basket...

...it still contains a beef stick.

Leave it to the geniuses in Hollywood to design a movie around the least interesting part of Jessica Alba, the part staring expressionless into space as she delivers lines like she's dictating the recipe for Rice Krispies squares.

Yes, I'm talking about The Eye.

You see, Jessica is blind, the pretty kind of blind with lovely, opaque blue eyes. The kind of blind one wears like a cute outfit from a darling boutique.

"I studied with actual blind people to learn to be blind - just as I studied with a litter of puppies to learn to be cute," Jessica explained.

Fortunately, Jessica's lips are so absurdly full they form their own Braille allowing her lipstick to stay precisely within the lines, although with an ocean of lip like that its remarkable the lipstick doesn't vanish into the Bermuda Triangle between her nose and chin.

Jessica is a classical violinist. Yes, that's right, the first classical violinist who dots her "i's" with smiley faces. Who needs years of training locked in a practice room when you can spend years training topless on a beach, followed by paparazzi?

Violin? At first, Jessica balked: "If I'm going to put strings near my chin they'd better be connected to a puppeteer with some acting training."

Just in time, Jessica has a cornea transplant, which is surely the only thing on her which requires an upgrade.

No sooner does she have new corneas than she begins to see things seen by the eye donor! It's called "cellular memory," where the cells of the body supposedly remember stuff and carry those memories around like Amy Winehouse carries around a portable stomach pump.

"Let's hope my corneas remember where I left my keys," said Jessica, hopefully.

She sees one ghostly hallucination after another. "Have you seen my report card? Have you seen my report card?" Jessica is trailed by an approval-seeking spectral youngster who seems to think that her corneas have been perusing some supernatural Lost & Found.

"Have you seen my report card?"

"No! I have not seen your damn report card," she says. "Why don't you go haunt Pokemon or an Xbox! Send back Patrick Swayze, and tell him I want to sculpt some clay!"

It was at this point that my corneas began to wander, as my cells strained to remember whether I made the bed or not this morning.

Now at some point you'd think the doctors would try a new set of corneas, because not only would this solve her problem but there would be no movie, thus solving our problem.

"This surgery was supposed to make me normal!" she complains.

"Why would you want surgery that does that?" says her doctor, trying to knock some sense into her. "Normal wants surgery to be you!"

Meanwhile, the camera cuts quick and the shock-noises abound to simulate the kind of scares that everyone in the audience would need new corneas to see for themselves.

Wait, my cells are trying to remember if I watched Judge Judy yesterday.

And then there are explosions - replayed over and over. Because if a movie company is going to spend this much money on a big boom they want you to see it from every angle.

That way, when you tell folks that The Eye blows...

...it won't be just a cellular memory.

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More about this movie at AskMen.com

Hey kids, let's all go see Grambo! Right after Teen Wolf, Vision Quest, Weird Science, and just saying "no" to drugs.

Listen, if you're the kind of person who has been wondering when Rosanna Arquette and Madonna would re-team for Desperately Seeking Susan 2, have I got a sequel for you.

Making Rambo must have been a breeze since most of Sly's former co-stars are repped by by the same agent, the Grim Reaper. "As agents go, this one always calls," said the late Richard Crenna, "just not with good news."

There he is, 60-year-old John Grambo hiding in the jungle and hiding the jungle of hair growing in his ears. He's capturing snakes by hand and fish by impaling them with an arrow.

"I have to make the world safe for dudes in headbands," mumbled Sly with a serpentine curl in his lip.

But this time, Sly has company:

"I'm Sarah Miller," murmurs sexy Julie Benz, "and I've doted on doddering fools younger than you."

"Who are you people?" he asks.

"We're a band of missionaries."

"A band? Who plays the lead guitar?" asks Sly.

"No, we're missionaries," says Julie.

"You mean like in the grotto at the Playboy mansion?"

Sly's new acquaintances are captured and held prisoner by Burmese military dudes, and that makes an American in a headband angry!

So Sly forges his own machete - because the man who can find a cosmetic surgeon, a spa, a hair colorist, a pharmacy, and some sterile needles in the jungle can't find a knife there.

"Thanks to my plastic surgeon, now I literally do have the Eye of the Tiger!" exclaimed Sly.

"Poor tiger!"

Sly's arms ripple with the kind of muscle that comes from drinking a mixture of raw eggs and raw pituitary glands. His face, according to its designer at DreamWorks, "has more expressions than Shrek, but fewer than Donkey."

"My face is lifted so high you can buy advertising on it as it sails over the Super Bowl!"

Look out, here comes the inevitable dream sequence where Sly flashes back to previous Rambo movies. Better him than me.

Slam-bo, Wham-bo, thank you ma'am-bo! This film actually speeds up during the action scenes, as if to get them over with quicker.

Sly cuts a man's throat with his bare hand. If only I could do that to myself right now.

Rambo is a love story between a man and his body and his body of work and the work to his body.

As this movie winds down, there's a long and loving stare and the music swells and Rambo retreats to....the back corner of the Blockbuster, where men are men and The Karate Kid will live forever.

"This is who we are," says Sly, encapsulating the theme of this movie in a space small enough to fit snugly within the fortune cookie that spawned it, "Live for nothing, or die for something."

Here's hoping that from now on Sly will die for something else.

Grambo, meet Hambo.

How self-absorbed must you be to shoot your own personal reality show in the midst of a tragedy of giant lizard-like proportions?

"I hate it when the rich kids have to evacuate Manhattan!" said Lilly. "Especially when it's in heels and without a doorman."

"No worries, Lilly," said Jen. "New York's underclass will lay down end-to-end and form a bridge to safety."

"People are gonna wanna know how it all went down," said "Hud," the self-appointed documentarian in our cluster of anonymous Manhattan luxury high rise evacuees.

"Maybe we post this video on YouTube," he added, "and then, when we monetize it, we can allocate a fair share to the Writers' Guild, assuming the Guild headquarters is not in the path of any giant monsters, and assuming the Guild and producers are able to come to terms."

"That's right," said Rob, "Hud's" friend. "Without writers virtually every movie will likely feature unknown actors running away from a stampeding CGI monster speaking only in grunts, moans, and shrieks."

Cloverfield is what you get when you cross Godzilla with MTV's The Hills.

It's Hillzilla.

Filmed by your kid with a video camera.

Where do I line up for that?

Many folks left this theater because the jumpy handheld images left them queasy. And usually Hollywood saves "queasy" for romantic comedies starring Kate Hudson.

Hillzilla opens with anonymous twenty-somethings engaged in romantic complications....Will Lauren go to Paris? Er, I mean, will Rob go to Japan?

You can't see the monster for most of Cloverfield, and that's a good thing. Because it's disconcerting to know that somewhere in the universe a T Rex has mated with a frog.

If that's not justification for a surly attitude, I don't know what is.

After way too much time setting up some complicated emotional calculus that is as fascinating as watching really pretty paint dry, the monster finally strikes Manhattan.

What is it that monsters have against New York City?

I mean, there's no legroom!

Why not attack a Kansas plain - you can at least stretch out!

"Why is that monster stampeding around Manhattan?" asked Beth.

"Because he can't get orchestra seats for Young Frankenstein," said Rob.

Look out! The head of the Statue of Liberty has just been used as a projectile!

"Speaking of projectile, I need to binge and purge," said Beth. "Wait for us!" shouted half of the Upper West Side.

Will Rob save Beth before the monster gets them? And if not, can she at least die on camera?

Headache and heartache amid devastation - and I'm talking about me in the audience.

The original style of this movie has much in its favor, as long as it doesn't spark a shaky handheld cam trend. And the absence of the monster from most of the movie is a smart move.

Cloverfield is above average for its genre, but by its end we're left with annoying kids we don't care about and a fairly routine monster movie.

Maybe Lauren should have gone to Paris.

Here are some red carpet highlights, courtesy of VH1:

Here's my "behind the scenes" story on the radio with Rocco DeMarco from 104.7 FM Pittsburgh. Give it a listen, it's good:


MP3 File

The idea behind - but not far enough behind - One Missed Call is that you get a cellphone message and it's from you in the future at the exact moment you're about to die.

If only my future self could have left a message for my past self, I could have skipped this movie altogether and enjoyed a root canal instead.

You know, it wouldn't hurt if your future self also messaged you a Lotto number or two while he or she is going to all the trouble.

Ed Burns makes two kinds of movies: The commercial kind that nobody sees - and the Indie kind that nobody sees.

"If I had only befriended Matt Damon as a youth, I could have grown up to be Ed Affleck," said Burns, fuming over the fact that his movies would be more popular if they featured Mentos dropping into exploding Diet Cokes.

Ed pulls a hard candy out of a corpse's mouth. Because what moviegoer and CSI-watcher hasn't seen just about every clue under the sun emerge from the mouth of a dead victim? Please, victims, stop eating clues!

Hey, there's comic Margaret Cho as a cop with a gun, meaning she can finally kill an audience and do it without the torture of a one hour set!

One Missed Call tells us that death has its own ringtone. Does it also have its own two-year contract and free night and weekend minutes?

This is the first movie ever to feature the exorcism of a cell phone. I'm not kidding! And without a demon in the phone there are fewer dropped calls and better coverage, too!

The key to this puzzle, unpuzzling and unscary as it is, is one particular dead woman in one burned out building.

Says Shannyn Sossamon with a completely straight face, "What if her body is still inside and her spirit is moving through the phones, attacking people?"

And what if angels shoot out of your asshole, order a round of Venti Caramel Macchiatos at Starbucks, and retreat back into your asshole without paying?

Hey, it's possible!

One Missed Call is soul-crushingly bad.

Let this one go to voicemail.