DJ Rudy's space

The pantheon of power men (Super, Bat, Spider et al.) has expanded its membership to include a new kid on the sci-fi block. "Jumper" is his name. Teleportation is his game.

Actually, his given name is David Rice, and he's played by Hayden Christensen of "Star Wars II and III" semi-fame. Seems that some supernatural genetic anomaly enables him to transport himself instantly from somewhere to anywhere else -- a gift he discovered at age 5, around the time his mother abandoned him.

David's jumping skills turn him into an escape artist par excellence, providing a convenient way to dodge schoolyard bullies, his unhappy home and that mother (Diane Lane), who is inclined to eat her young.

But jumping is a curse as well as a blessing. He can slip through cracks in the time-space fabric to any city or country in the world: breakfast atop the Sphinx, lunch on the Champs-Elysees, dinner on the edge of Big Ben. But it leads him into temptation without delivering him from evil. He passes through walls into bank vaults, takes big bucks out with him, buys a penthouse and happily lives it up -- until discovering there's a global war against jumpers being conducted by the merciless secret order of Paladins, under the brutal leadership of Samuel L. Jackson.

"You're an abomination!" declares Sam. "Only God should have the power to be in all places at all times."

So much for theology. As for weaponry, the Paladins have nasty electronic "tethers," kind of like cattle prods with electrified tentacles that wrap around and fry a jumper into submission.

But at least David isn't alone. Soon enough, he teams up with a British Jumper-rebel named Griffin (played by the wonderful Jamie Bell, of "Billy Elliot"). He also has a cute, devoted girlfriend named Millie (Rachel Bilson). They'll help him in the Jumper-Paladin war that has been raging since the Middle Ages.

Don't ask for too much more of David Goyer and Jim Uhls' screenplay, based on Steven Gould's young-adult sci-fi novels "Jumper" and "Reflex." It's a fuzzy mishmash of minimally motivated mythology.

Suffice to say, the search for reluctant new superheroes never ends.

Neither does director Doug Liman's ("The Bourne Identity," "Mr. and Mrs. Smith") search for new CGI effects -- admittedly state-of-the-art stunning here, filmed in fractured fragments with hand-held camera dizziness. There's no denying the film's pace and energy (or its obvious intention for sequels). The best and most beautiful sequence takes place in Rome's Colosseum.

If only Christensen were a little livelier, in addition to petulantly brooding. Jackson, on the other hand, is lively evil incarnate. But Bell is the truly fun one to watch.

Overall, you're never sure what law of physics this thing is breaking or obeying, especially in the long, breathless finale -- a 'round-the-world chase involving something called The Detonator, with the combatants popping in and out of walls, caves, cars, electrical grids and each other's bedrooms. They're stirring up a mighty powerful lot of energy, as well as nonsense, for a would-be franchise that might be a Jumpin' Jack Flash in the pan.

 

Camera traces monster's path through urban field of screams

The revolution will not be televised, but the monster's rampage through Manhattan will be documented by digital camcorder.

The movie labeled "Blair Witch Project" meets "Godzilla" -- by its makers and anyone who's tracked the buzz since a mysterious preview debuted in July -- arrives today, and "Cloverfield" is a monster movie for our time.

That is, a world of cell phones, the Internet and YouTube, with television the first responder in any crisis. "Cloverfield" puts us behind a camcorder, and we watch New York being attacked, as if it were happening to us.

It's a brilliant (if herky-jerky) way to freshen a story that has been told before, as the movie purports to be digital footage found in a camera in what was once Central Park.

After some idyllic scenes filmed on April 27, the action shifts to May 22 and a surprise party for a New Yorker named Rob (Michael Stahl-David) who is moving to Japan for work.

His brother, Jason (Mike Vogel), and the brother's girlfriend, Lily (Jessica Lucas), ask a pal named Hud (T.J. Miller) to play filmmaker and get partygoers to say goodbye to Rob on camera. But the drinking, flirting and gossiping grind to a halt after 20 minutes when the city appears to be under attack.

The first TV report makes mention of a possible earthquake that capsized an oil tanker near the Statue of Liberty, but when Lady Liberty's severed head slams into the middle of the street, it's clear the tremors, roars and destruction are coming from a creature and not the heaving of the ocean floor.

"Cloverfield" follows Rob, Jason, Lily, Hud, plus friends Marlena (Lizzy Caplan) and Beth (Odette Yustman) as they try to make their way to safety amid a city in panic. Hud, who provides comic relief with his reaction or wisecracks, almost never puts the camera down.

"People are gonna want to know how it all went down," he insists. And they see and experience how. What they don't get is the why.

Writer Drew Goddard says the movie purposely lacks the scientist in white coat explaining what's going on; that may frustrate more traditional (i.e. older) moviegoers. They also may be the ones who end up with headaches or nausea due to the shaky camera; a woman in my row made a beeline to the restroom, vomited and returned.

The press notes provide some insights not apparent in the movie; the creature is a skyscraper-size baby, "confused, disoriented and irritable. And he's been down there in the water for thousands and thousands of years," says producer J.J. Abrams, who credits "Godzilla" as his inspiration.

The monster is not the only predator around, however, with oversize parasites ready to bite and claw at the flesh, too.

"Cloverfield," directed by "Felicity" creator Matt Reeves, seems a little underpopulated. When the world started coming to an end in "I Am Legend," the streets of Manhattan were choked with cars. Here, the subway tunnels are oddly empty and columns of pedestrians appear thin.

Nevertheless, the movie keeps us off balance and on edge. We never know where the monster is going to turn up next or exactly what it's supposed to be, except that it has the worst elements of beasts past, present, mythical and computer-generated.

Even the Army is clueless, as one soldier says, "Whatever it is, it's winning." And so is this next generation of storytelling, which takes "The Blair Witch Project" and turns up the societal stakes and the terror.

 

 

 

Attend the movie of Sweeney Gore.

Its London is dark like the Ripper's of yore.

It shaves the musical down to size

Suppressing the Sondheim to startle our eyes

With blood behind each and every door.

That's Burton and Depp

The demon duo of film shock.

"Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd" begins the signature anthem of Stephen Sondheim's bloody musical melodrama. Oddly, that's one of the songs that doesn't make it into this much-anticipated movie adaptation by the reigning poet of the filmic bizarre, Tim Burton.

It disappears, along with the rest of the musical's choral numbers, in the movie's focusing on intimate tragedy. This compression is with the active participation of the master, Sondheim.

So we are well warned not to expect the humongous quasi-opera that Hal Prince first put on a Broadway stage in 1980, or even the gradually more intimate versions of Susan Schulman (Broadway, 1989), London's National Theatre (1993) or Ted Pappas (Pittsburgh Public Theater, 1996). The most intimate yet is by John Doyle (Broadway, 2005), which slims the cast to just 10 and has them play their own accompaniment -- the version that arrives at Heinz Hall next month on tour.

For 25 years, in other words, the tendency has been to pare away and dig down into the musical's horrific heart, and Burton fits right in. In spite of beginning on the ship that brings Sweeney back to London, the occasional vistas and crowd scenes are of the sort the stage already does well. There's less "opening up" than you expect, because Burton goes right to the heart of the story, classically Greek in the vengeful finality of its family tragedy.

But why has Burton finessed so much of the music? There's a great deal of it there, but much feels just like movie music, which is to say, incidental. Gone is the larger reverberation of the chorus. Gone, also, is the musical glory of Sweeney himself, because, wonderful though Johnny Depp is, he really can't sing this role. As the comic Mrs. Lovett, Helena Bonham Carter is also wonderful, and she sings better -- but her songs don't have Sweeney's weight.

And then there's Burton's extraordinary visual palette -- relentlessly dark, occasionally brightening into sepia, with copious accents of brilliantly red blood, poured, sprayed and gushing with viscous insistence. High marks to cinematographer Dariusz Wolski and the production design and set decoration by Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo. It's all visually thrilling. But except for a few excursions into warm hues (mainly in flashbacks), it hardly varies. Eventually it becomes monotonous.

With some trepidation, I might say the same of Depp's Sweeney. A magnificent screen actor, he acts here mainly with his eyes, set in purplish pools. But he arrives maddened with vengeance, and the movie doesn't give him anywhere to go, not even the flashes of humor he gets on stage. So thank heavens for Carter's Mrs. Lovett. She's so much richer than in her Merchant-Ivory phase, and she gets to play the full range of matter-of-fact amorality shading into ghoulish delight and deep, distant despair.

As I once wrote about a stage "Sweeney Todd," Mrs. Lovett is lurid tabloid farce paired with Todd's heroic tragedy, the chintz-loving homebody and demonic avenger joined in zestful crime. But here, I don't feel Sweeney's frigid, wrath-of-God ferocity or the incisiveness of his Swiftian insight that a hungry God demands that man eat or be eaten. Burton isn't interested in the social dimension, just the personal.

The film boasts perfect casting in Alan Rickman's disdainfully haughty Judge Turpin, showing an appropriate touch of porcine fleshiness, and Timothy Spall's disgustingly sycophantic Beadle Bamford. Sacha Baron Cohen brings a spurt of color (yes, that's a double entendre) as the foolish Signor Pirelli.

The beautiful Laura Michelle Kelly effectively disappears into the mysterious Beggar Woman. Jamie Campbell Bower's Anthony and Jayne Wisener's Johanna are pretty interchangeable, beautiful young people whom we hardly care about compared to the monsters on display.

As to all the resulting blood, being squeamish, I closed my eyes a lot, but the movie gives fair warning every time Sweeney's gleaning razor is about to drink its fill. This London also has a lot of crawly vermin, which occasions some of Mrs. Lovett's best humor, and her ground-up meat is yucky. I sure wouldn't take children.

Anthony's surname is Hope, by the way, an emotion that must be abandoned upon entering Burtonworld. Todd, of course, is German for death. I haven't said much about the plot, but you really don't need more than the subtitle: "The Demon Barber of Fleet Street." I don't want to raise any ire. As the missing song says:

Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd,

He served a dark and a vengeful god.

What happens then -- well, that's the play,

And he wouldn't want us to give it away.

 

 

 

National Treasure: Book of Secrets" is a bit like fool's gold.