300: Special Edition 
As the capabilities for better, more detailed, more technically intricate computer graphic work are applied to motion pictures, directors are finding a wide range of uses for that technology as they bring their artistic visions to full-motion life. As with any artistic medium, especially one still in its infancy, some of those choices are positively painful to have to sit through. Robert Zemeckis' freakish motion-capture kids' flick The Polar Express, for example, was populated by characters who looked like they'd been embalmed, covered in latex, and then painted by slave laborers in a third-world sweatshop (his upcoming Beowulf adaptation looks to be more aesthetically pleasing, although it does beg the question of why he felt the need for hyper-realistically animated versions of Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie when he could have just, you know, filmed the real thing.) But
some directors have found that advanced CGI techniques allow them to create worlds that would otherwise be impossible (or financially prohibitive) to film ... (Read more ...)
Pathfinder
Pathfinder (2007) would make a great double bill with Mel Gibson's Apocalypto (2007). Both are about a dusky-skinned, loincloth-clad fellow running around in the woods and killing the evil white men that want to wipe out his people, and both offer a solid menu of slashing, hacking, stabbing, and gouging. Surprisingly, though, it's Apocalypto that wins when it comes to actual story, since Pathfinder doesn't really have one. At the top of the film, it looks like it might actually be about something — a Native American woman spies a white horse and follows it into the woods, where she comes across a broken-down, abandoned Viking vessel filled with dead bodies. She also finds a young boy, still alive, and she brings him back to her tribal village. Some of the elders don't want to take the boy in, what with all the legends about strangers and betrayal, but the council members ultimately decide to keep the kid around. Flash-forward ten years or so, and the boy, christened "Ghost," has turned into super-hunky Karl Urban ... (Read more ...)
Starter for 10
As a young boy in working-class Essex, England, sweet-faced, good-natured Brian Jackson (James McAvoy of The Last King of Scotland and The Chronicles of Narnia) yearned to be "clever," so he obsessively watched TV quiz shows like the popular "University Challenge" and filled his head with thousands of bits of assorted trivia. When he heads off to college in mid-1980s Bristol, he flounders a bit in an alien environment filled with weird roommates, protest rallies, and snotty grad students, but earns a place as an alternate for the school's University Challenge team. He quickly makes friends with an opinionated, dark-haired girl with a political bent (Rebecca Hall) but becomes hopelessly smitten with a WASP-y blond who makes the quiz team (Alice Eve), leading to thoroughly predictable (but still delightfully entertaining) results. Produced under Tom Hanks' Playtone banner, Starter for 10 (2007) is very much in the mold of Hanks' That Thing You Do! (1996) — pleasant, funny, smarter than one would expect, and unchallenging in the most relaxing sense of the word ... (Read more ...)
