Here's the link to my new review of the Robert De Niro-directed CIA flick The Good Shepherd, which opens today. The review should be posted sometime mid-morning, so if its not up yet, enjoy the multitude of pictures for the flick I personally uploaded. Yes, I am that cool.

Hooray!

No, I'm not going to give you a blow-by-blow of the final I had to write three separate essays for that kept me up for 40 hours straight. Nor am I going to whine to you about the week long sound board duties I had for my department's annual 10 Minute Play Festival. And most of all, I'm not going to ask you to feel sorry for me for writing a total of 65 screenplay pages within two days (over 50 of which were done in a single 19-hour period) to finish my 103-page first draft.

(Poor, poor Michael.)

Nope, not going to do that at all.

What I am going to do is tell you that all my work is done, which means before Christmas you should be getting a handful of new reviews: the theatrical release The Good Shepherd (out on Friday), and a few DVDs: the four-disc Narnia set I promised a while back, and Spike Lee's epic documentary When the Levees Broke, which I've heard is nothing short of phenomenal. We shall see.

I also won't be reviewing these next ones for The Cinema Source, but I've also managed to recently see upcoming December movies Dreamgirls, Perfume, and The Good German. So at some point perhaps I'll give you all some brief opinions on all of those.

Oh, what the heck, how about now. Respectively: (1) Fantastic singing, totally generic story; (2) very well made, but made me way to angry to be even remotely entertaining; and (3) highly stylized and mostly cool all around, with a few minor issues.

And with that, I'm heading out to go catch a train home. If you don't check back before then, Merry Christmas.

So here's the deal...since my boss was extremely fond of Turistas whereas I was not, he decided to replace my review with another review on TheCinemaSource website. I'm definitely not gonna bother giving you the link to that one, because never fear, here is my original review. I realize it's not supposed to be the best movie of the year; I don't have a problem with the low-budget, guts-and-girls horror genre if the movies are entertaining. This one was just monumentally boring. That said, here you go:

Turistas

Review By: Michael Dance

Do not be fooled by the decent trailer, clever posters, and the hype that all say Turistas is not a “typical” horror movie. It is. It also seems to be something of a Hostel rip-off, but since I’m not a fan of the “horror-porn” genre, as the torture-heavy flicks are now being called, I missed that one. I’m of the camp that prefers suspense and fear in my horror movies, not dragged-out torture and gore.

No matter which camp you’re in, though, Turistas won’t deliver for you. The structure of the story has been done so many times its just boring, and the only gore in the flick is a particularly grisly fall and an extended surgery/torture scene. The victim in said scene, by the way, is a naked girl, furthering the pornographic link. I’m sorry: it’s a sad state of affairs when a helpless naked girl sobbing with her organs hanging out has moved out of the realm of snuff films and into the realm of mainstream entertainment.

But Turistas has bigger problems: namely, it’s colossally boring. If you’ve ever seen a horror movie – ever – you’ll be able to figure out, as soon as the characters are introduced, which ones will still be alive at the end. Heck, you could probably even guess the order in which the doomed characters die. Let me give you the archetypes: there’s Alex (Josh Duhamel from Las Vegas), who’s sensible and the clear protagonist; his sweet younger sister, Bea (Olivia Wilde); a nice and pretty British girl, Pru (Melissa George), who befriends Alex; Bea’s tagalong friend Amy (Beau Garrett), and two annoying British guys (Desmond Askew, basically reprising his role in Go, and Max Brown.)

The story actually starts out rather well. Everyone’s a tourist on a rickety old bus on a narrow road trying to reach some locale in Brazil (I think). It’s one of those buses you think is going to tip over or crash at any second but never does…but whoops, then it does. Everybody is able to get out in time before it tumbles down a cliff, which may be a tad implausible, but hey, it’s early in the movie, I’ll go with it.

In the aftermath, the afformentioned archetypes join together and decide to head down to a secret beach instead of waiting the eight hours for the next bus. There they find a cheap bar right on the beach, and at about the same time Amy decides to go swimming topless, everybody begins to think staying there might not be a bad idea.

Of course, it is a very bad idea, which is confirmed to us after the bartender calls a mysterious but undoubtedly evil man and tells him she has more gringos for him. (There was undoubtedly a point during filming where somebody said “we need to make sure the audience knows he’s evil,” because there’s a humorously pointless scene in which he stabs one of his subordinates in the eye with a kebob stick.) The next morning, the tourists wake up to find they’ve been robbed, and a kindly young Brazilian man offers to take them to a safe house deep in the jungle that his uncle owns. You can probably guess most of the rest.

A few attempts are made at character development. Alex is protective of his sister and tells her to order all her drinks without ice because he’s terrified of disease. Pru, the British girl, is the only one of the group to know Portuguese. (We Americans can’t be bothered to learn about other cultures, I guess.) And the bad guys even have a semi-original motivation for wanting to kill the tourists, which I guess would be kind of interesting if it had been explored at all (and since it wasn’t, I’m guessing it has little basis in reality). And the camera work is decent, going for the grainy-and-shaky realism akin to director John Stockwell’s earlier films, namely Blue Crush and Into the Blue.

Heh. Apparently he only had a two-picture deal for movies with “blue” in the title. This time he overcompensates with a ton of underwater work, thanks to a few too many scenes in a series of submerged underground caverns.

And actually, it was the ridiculously overlong water chase through said caverns that finally convinced me that Turistas is not just clichéd and forgettable, but also legitimately bad. No attempt to provide light is made, which is fine for realism but terrible for figuring out what the heck is going on. I get the approach: we only see what the characters see, it’s all just a mess of confusion and noises – but random noises and rustling figures are not the makings of entertainment. It’s not just the underwater scenes, either – even in the night scenes outside in the forest, it’s almost impossible to distinguish one character from another. At one point I was pretty sure Alex had been stabbed, but nope, it was just some random dude.

I recently finished watching the entire third season of Las Vegas and had gained a bit of respect for Josh Duhamel’s confident acting. I doubt his appearance in this will hurt his career much, and Melissa George’s effortlessly warm performance of Pru actually managed to make a pretty decent impression on me. In fact, all the actors do a decent job, acting pretty much exactly like anyone would in their circumstances. Not everything in the movie is sub-par and sloppy. Just the plot, character development, climax, lighting, pacing, and lack of horror or anything resembling entertainment.

Movie Grade: D+

Well, in the last episode of 2006, Aaron Sorkin finally acts on his impulses and goes for unabashed sentimentality. Professions of love, beautiful (and socially conscious) trumpet music...even mean old Jack and Creepy Boss (Ed Asner's character) share a cute little moment. It was hard not to get sucked into the show's Christmas spirit. Odd, for a show (as well as its show-within-a-show) that's prided itself on bashing fundamentalist Christians. But I won't get into that this time.

The not-quite-a-bombshell that Jordan dropped last episode -- she's pregnant -- was followed up rather quickly, with her claiming that the father is the ex-boyfriend she mentioned in the pilot -- you know, the one who tipped her off to Danny's drug test. It's a strangely low-key resolution to a burning question, so I still think the answer may be in doubt -- but from the look of it, the father definitely doesn't seem to be Danny. That leaves, as my roommate presupposed, Jack. I agree with him that were that the case, it would be awesome.

Speaking of Jack, who I've warmed to ever since he was one of the few bright spots in the "Nevada Day" arc: he suddenly found his nerve. Sort of. During a live interview with a combat soldier overseas, an RPG went off nearby and the soldier dropped the F-bomb. Now the FCC is ready to smack down millions of dollars -- and maybe more -- in fines unless Jack agrees to time-delay the news to allow for censorship. (Would people outside of the television industry really think a five-second delay was that big of a deal? I know, I know, it's the principle and everything.) Jack, who's decided he doesn't want to be the FCC's pansy boy, can't let it happen, so he offers his resignation to studio owner Ed Asner. Say what? Ah, but never fear: Asner is on his side, and says he's not scared of the FCC -- "this is the fight I've been waiting for," he proclaims. It was an odd switch since previously Asner has been portrayed as the power-hungry future owner of the world, what with his dealings in China and everything. But once again Sorkin lets himself speak through his characters a little too much -- no doubt HE would love a network to stand up to the FCC, but I doubt Asner's character would give two craps about it.

In other news...Matt finally kisses Harriet, a move which is immediately upstaged by the much cooler budding relationship of Danny and Jordan, the former of whom professes his love to the latter. All this goes on during a very cool trumpet ensemble featuring trumpeters from New Orleans, who stand in front of a background flashing images of their rebuilding city. It was hard not to be touched.

So my website looks a little different but it's still exactly the same, except for the re-instating of the About section and the full Links section, both of which you can access from the sidebar. It's part of my continuing effort to make it more like a wicked awesome website and less like a generic blog.

By the way, 100 points awarded to everyone who immediately gets the reference in the headline.