MORE REVIEWS IN A HURRY for Winter 2007 Shoot ‘Em Up (2007, 86 min, R) **1/2 – starring Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti, Monica Bellucci.  I would have loved it when I was 14.  “Shoot ‘Em Up” belongs in the same tradition as “Desperado” and “Kung Fu Hustle,” that is, movies whose plots and characters are excuses kept as minimal as possible to make space for colossally improbable and usually comically gory fight sequences.   The clothesline is that the hero (Clive) has the baby, the baby is the maguffin, and the bad guys (led by Paul Giamatti) want it back.  They tear-ass across an unnamed metropolis, chewing scenery and blowing up everything along the way while Clive mows down reams of bad guys.  Clive is helped out by sexbomb Monica Bellucci as the hooker with the heart of gold.  I’d settle for her just being a hooker.  “Shoot ‘Em Up” acknowledges its cartoonishness by giving Clive a Bugs Bunny carrot to eat all the time (and dispatch villains with), while Giamatti spews forth locker room-style obscenities and misogyny at every turn.  But it’s hard to keep the energy going in these types of movies; even “Desperado” kind-of runs out of stuff to do 35 minutes in.  Speaking of “Desperado,” with its Latin score and its orange and sandy hues, it’s probably Robert Rodriguez’s most beautiful film that wasn’t storyboarded by Frank Miller, whereas “Shoot ‘Em Up” is another drab gray-and-grime affair set to heavy metal.  “Shoot ‘Em Up” ultimately isn’t inventive enough with its stunts to justify feature-length, but it’s a good try. Spider-man 3 (2007, 139 min, PG13) ** - Directed & co-written by Sam Raimi, starring Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, and Thomas Haden Church.  Overlong, overstuffed, and kind of boring in places, but not terrible.  There are 3 villains, 2 love interests, 2 jealous boyfriends, 2 powerful fathers, and amnesia.  In fact, the new love triangle is almost identical to the old love triangle, except this time the girl has the powerful dad instead of the jealous boyfriend having the powerful dad.  The emotionally-moving scenes toward the end demonstrate why the filmmakers gave in and threw too many elements into “Spider-man 3.”  Even the amnesia doesn’t seem all that stupid.  The best villain is the black goo from outer space that infects Peter Parker / Spider-man (Maguire) and turns him from the likable nerd he is at the beginning to the mean-spirited id he is in the middle.  Then he does stuff like bring one girl around just to humiliate another.  Like “Spider-man 2,” “3” features Peter Parker in a giddy musical number, this time with his evil persona strutting down the street, mistaking himself for a ladykiller.  Before that, he and girlfriend Mary Jane (Dunst) have the kind of well-meaning and impatient misunderstandings that afflict many young couples.  As Parker’s competition at the newspaper, Topher Grace is his usual fun, making everything he says sound vaguely sarcastic; Bryce Dallas Howard has an ethereal, if underused charm; and JK Simmons’ magnificent newspaper editor is identical to the parody of himself that he played on “The Simpsons” (for some reason I misread the credits in the first two parts of the trilogy and kept calling him Bill Nunn).  Peter Parker’s aunt (Rosemary Harris) still shows up to spell out the movie’s themes in a tone that borders on smugness.  But the whole contraption is just another teen-oriented superhero soap opera with a stronger-than-average lead and comic relief, and while I’ve no idea why so many people were gaga about “Spider-man 2,” I at least admired its tightness, which this film lacks. Reviews in a Hurry for Winter 2007.
Michael Clayton (2007, 119 min, R) *** – Directed & written by Tony Gilroy, starring George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, and Sydney Pollack.  A movie about places.  “Michael Clayton” is the directorial debut for “Bourne” screenwriter Tony Gilroy and it begins with a monologue that had me worried.  I feared that Gilroy, like many screenwriters directing for the first time, was going to go the wordy, talky, chatty, fifty-words-to-do-the-job-of-one route.  But beneath that monologue is a montage of early morning locations that are about to become useful:  offices, corridors, board rooms, filing cabinets.  Lamps hiss and air conditioners hum.  There’s a lot of dialogue in “Michael Clayton,” but most of it is incomprehensible and largely unimportant; it’s more musical than anything else.  (The phrase “we have a situation,” oft used in the “Bourne” movies, is spoken 3 or even 4 times; Gilroy has an unhealthy fixation with this particular TV-friendly hack-phrase.)  Instead of going the all-writing route, Gilroy’s legal thriller indulges in all the toys that he didn’t get to play with as a writer.  “Michael Clayton’s” titular fixer (Clooney) drives and drives, walks cold city streets, stays up all night, sleeps briefly in antiseptic hotel rooms, and trades tough words with suits whose windows overlook the New York skyline.  Engines hum, screen doors rattle, tires crackle over wet pavement.  We’re cold when he’s cold, tired when he’s tired.  He’s on assignment to smooth things between his law firm and their client company when things go very, very wrong, and he has a crisis of conscience.  (SPOILERS!)  The end of “Michael Clayton” is kind of a fairytale and the movie cribs from Gilroy’s own “Bourne” screenplays, in which an establishment ball-buster “can’t do it anymore” and a living character is presumed dead.  Yet the fake death and the fairytale might cancel each other out.  The death might not be fake and the fairytale might be just that:  what he wishes he had done, in his last instants. Ratatouille (2007, 111 min, G) **1/2 – Directed & co-written by Brad Bird.  I really admire “Ratatouille’s” attempt at a democratic spirit.  Almost all kids’ films lately are about Chosen Ones With Special Powers Who Are The Offspring of Magical / Royal Parents.  I guess if you’re a kid with self-esteem issues who feels like If I Just Disappeared No One Would Notice, Harry Potter and The Seeker and The Little Princess and the girl from “Pan’s Labyrinth” all want you to identify with leads who turn out to have been Magical and Special All Along, and who would cause the World To Stop If They Disappeared.  The lead character does not have to earn what makes him special; he’s born that way, telling kids that they don’t have to work hard to be accepted, but just be loved for who they are.  But, as a wee one, I tended to side with the non-magical, non-special people in movies like that.  The main relationship in “Ratatouille” is between the rat Remy, who longs to be a chef, and his human friend Linguini, whom he manipulates to make his dishes for him.  “Ratatouille” goes to pains to show the rat busting his ass to learn how to be a chef, while the human, who is actually the son of a great chef, can’t cook to save his life.  David Mamet once said there’s no such thing as talent, only hard work.  Still, aside from that, “Ratatouille” is a standard Pixar kid’s film, detailed and well-crafted if not quite beautiful, and I got bored.  You know what’s going to happen long before it does.  Kids might like it though.  The finest piece of animation finds Remy shivering in a jar in animal fear.  His plight is the standard plight of movie animals who act just like humans:  doesn’t it suck to be a human trapped in an animal’s body?  Here’s a wild idea:  why not make an animated movie about animals who act like animals?