nesfilmreviews

"Tempus" is a contemplation and examination of time's passage, created with visual flair while possessing a poetic soul that produces an uncanny effect. Director Ian Clay displays a sensitive touch, maturity, and a prowess for digital filmmaking. While Clay demonstrates his technical virtuosity, Jason Shulman's striking visual effects and Ben Griffin's cinematography seamlessly blends together setting the stage for this unique meditation on mortality. Additionally, Jose Villalobos's affecting musical score adds a dimension of delicacy and grace to the proceedings. Spellbinding and expertly crafted, a lovely elegy to both youth and age.

"Sin City" is pure film noir and crime pulp and one of the best — if not the best — comic book adaptations brought to film ever done. Extreme brutality and full of rampant violence, visually arresting cinematography, and nothing short of pure genius. Robert Rodriguez uses a combination of live action performed by real actors while incorporating a technique of colorization and filming in black in white to transform Frank Miller's graphic novels into moving pictures. There isn't a screenplay written for the film --instead-- it's more like a comic book brought to life and pumped with steroids. While other directors have attempted to remain faithful to the look and "feel" of their source material, Robert Rodriguez has taken things a step further by using Frank Miller's graphic novels as storyboards and immersing the audience neck-deep in the noir currents of Miller's immorality. The end result is a one-of-a-kind film that's both incredibly offensive and undeniably entertaining,

Given his past ability to explore complicated issues in compelling fashion, you might expect Oliver Stone to offer up an intriguing look at drug trafficking. Working from the book by Don Winslow — who spent six years researching the DEA and cartels, would give Stone a solid resource from which to draw. A welcomed return to Stone's darker side; "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" and "World Trade Center" were almost insultingly faceless, a definite problem for a director whose best films exude righteous anger. Unfortunately, "Savages" generates little momentum from its moments of ruthless savagery with far too much downtime in between.

California dudes Ben and Chon (Aaron Johnson and Taylor Kitsch) are dragged into a turf war with the expansion-minded Mexican cartel run by Salma Hayek's drug-war widow Elena, and her brutally amoral deputy Lado (Benicio del Toro). The Mexicans regularly show their power by creating and disseminating videos documenting torture and a litany of beheadings. Meanwhile, eighty miles over the border in Laguna Beach, Ben and Chon supply their ultra-potent genetically engineered strains to legal medical dispensaries but make their real money illegally shipping out-of- state. The product and its profits fuel the boys' lifestyle of neo-hippie decadence, embodied by the business partners' enthusiastic bedroom sharing of eco-friendly, hippie Ophelia (Blake Lively).

The Mexican Baja Cartel decides to move into their turf and demands that the trio partners with them. The merciless head of the cartel, Elena, and her brutal enforcer, Lado, underestimate the unbreakable bond among these friends. Ben and Chon -- with the reluctant, slippery assistance of a dirty DEA agent (John Travolta), wage a seemingly unwinnable war against the cartel. And so begins a series of increasingly vicious ploys and maneuvers in a high stakes, savage battle of wills.

Soul is something "Savages" sorely lacks and it feels inherently hollow. The screenplay (co-written by Stone) is a bit of mess, sloppily assembling a wide range of characters. One of serious issues with the movie usually occurs when the film's three young leads occupy the screen. Though they're competent, Taylor Kitsch, Blake Lively, and Aaron Johnson are hardly scintillating. Their performances fail in comparison to the completely outrageous performances delivered by Benicio Del Toro, Salma Hayek, and John Travolta. Plus, the young threesome and their love triangle never convincingly seduce the audience. "Savages" is a waste of Stone's time as he falls back on old habits of mayhem and provocation best left in the past.