Even when he tackles darker subject matter, Tim Burton always manages to bring a touch of whimsy to his films.  On the surface, Alice in Wonderland seems to be the perfect tale for the eccentric filmmaker to put his own spin on. With Alice oscillating wildly between giant and diminutive proportions, two queens vying for control of the land, and anthropomorphic fauna and animals, the tale seems ripe for a wild re-imagining.

Trouble is, Burton leaves the enchantment at home along with warmth and heart. The resulting movie is rather cold, devoid of color and brightness (save for the mad hatter’s shock of orange hair and startling green eyes) and not a lot of fun. I’m not saying that makes it bad, but it was very different from what I was expecting.

In this particular retelling, Alice is a grown woman instead of a little girl. At a large party she learns she is to marry a stodgy bore of a man. She rushes off to be by herself and falls down the rabbit hole into the “underworld.”  There she encounters the characters that we are all familiar with. There is the white rabbit (voiced by Michael Sheen), the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), the stoned-out-of-his-cocoon caterpillar (Alan Rickman), and of course, the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp.)

This version of the  Mad Hatter is a more tragic character with a brutal back story to explain his madness.  I found Depp’s portrayal of the Hatter annoying and frenetic, crazy for the sake of being crazy. He drifts in and out of a heavy Scottish brogue for reasons not immediately clear.  I wish the character had been toned down a bit as I think it would have made him a little more likable.

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Not many people say it, but Nicolas Cage gets a bad rap. Often, even from me. Sure, he’s made some questionable script choices in the past, and been known for a few colorful and even over-the-top performances, but if there’s one thing he is known for, it’s consistency in a role. That’s exactly what he brings to the table with Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

The film is an almost-modern-day reboot of the 1992 film starring Harvey Keitel. This time, rather than the rough streets of New York City, the setting has been changed to a post-Katrina New Orleans, with crime high and morals low, the only thing left to keep the streets safe is a deranged lieutenant on a path to his own personal hell.

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Score: 7.5 – Nintendo Wii – $49.99

Bakugan. Two years ago, much like name like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh and various other soon to be Japanese trends, the word “Bakugan” would have meant nothing to the average person, and especially not to any children or parents. Now, it is an obsession selling DVDs and tiny shape changing balls that play a game that could be described as a combination of Magic: The Gathering, the Transformers and marbles. Activision has taken this license that has become popular enough to earn itself a spot as this month’s McDonald’s Happy Meal toy and brought it in to the video game world.

Gameplay:

As mentioned above, the Bakugan game plays much like a combination of a collectible card game and marbles. Players place cards on the field that contain magnets in them. They then take turns rolling their Bakugan, trying to land on a card. Players try to steer their ball towards the appropriate card while their opponent takes pop shots to divert the ball in the opposite direction in a shooting gallery style minigame.

When they do, the small Bakugan ball will pop open, revealing the monster inside. When two monsters land on the same card, their stats are compared and extra cards are played to enhance the power of the monster. The Bakugan with the highest total wins. This formula ends up translating really well in to the video game format.

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There are a few types of Summer blockbusters out there these days. Of course, you’ll have the big “tent pole” films that cost $200 million and make triple that. You’ll also get the ones that cost a fortune and fizzle out fairly quickly. But every once in a while you’ll also get a film that comes virtually out of nowhere and leaves your mouth agape. District 9 is that film.

District 9 takes place in Johannesburg, South Africa, where aliens landed nearly 30 years ago. Since then, they have been subjected to living in slums while their defunct mothership hovers above the city. On the macro level, the world is split between people who wish to embrace the differences of the aliens and people who discriminate against them and wish to kill them. On a micro level, an MNU field operative, Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), contracts a mysterious virus that begins changing his DNA, making him neither human nor alien.

At it’s core, this film is many things. It’s not just a sci-fi action film. It has some serious undertones from oppression and bigotry to the evil things that man is capable of. It is many things, but if one were to stand out, it would be “smart.” From the first moments of the film where a collection of news and documentary footage helps introduce us to this world where aliens are real and have been inhabiting the planet for some time all the way to the conclusion, this film delivers.

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Two years ago, there wasn’t much to be said about a film that was only based off of a toy line. Then a dude named Michael Bay came along and changed all that, making over a zillion dollars with two films about robots that change into other things. The movies weren’t exactly rich with story or character development, but they did the source material justice, which is all most fans wanted. One would think that a movie about a secret squad of soldiers would be more believable, but sadly, this wasn’t the case.

There is more than enough source material to play with, given the G.I. Joe toys, comics, and many incarnations of the TV show and Director Stephen Sommers’ other projects including Van Helsing and The Mummy have a decent story and are both relatively entertaining. For this film, however, it felt like Sommers left the passion and creativity he had for his previous films at home when reporting to the set of Joe — which is pretty evident in the first five minutes of the film.

It’s easy to pick on G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra for its poor dialogue or predictable story because when you force lines like “he’s a real American hero” into a scene, it warrants ridicule. When it comes to the story, it’s predictable because it is a blatant ripoff of another film, when the main villain brainwashes his victims to do his bidding, identified by a small lesion on the neck. It’s also funny how you can call this movie The Rise of . . . when the entire film is lacking in any rising action.

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Once in a while, a movie comes along that is almost impossible to write about. Moon has been shrouded in mystery in both trailers and other marketing, and it becomes incredibly difficult to review the film without ruining the most important plot points and discoveries made throughout its 96 minutes. With that said, this film does a fantastic job of blurring the line between big budget sci-fi films and actor-driven “indie” films.

To keep things as ambiguous as possible in this review, Moon is about astronaut Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), assisted by his computer GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), at the end of his three-year stint on the Moon where he sends back to Earth a resource that accounts for 75% of the all energy. From there, things begin to go a bit haywire.

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2009 has been pretty heavy with blockbusters so far. But when it comes to preposterous action movies, the list begins and ends with Crank 2: High Voltage, the sequel to 2006’s Crank. While this movie may have been pretty ridiculous from start to finish, it was still a fun and entertaining way to spend 85 minutes and $10. There isn’t much to the movie story-wise (it’s no Casablanca), but it certainly did the franchise justice and may not even be the last time we see these characters.

For those not “in the know”, the original Crank was about Jason Statham’s character, Chev Chelios, being injected with a synthetic poison that forced him to keep his adrenaline pumping in order to stay alive. This new film essentially keeps the same premise, but ups the ante by replacing Statham’s heart with an artificial one, and the only way he can stay alive this time is to keep the mechanical heart electrified — by any means necessary. Even for a comic book movie, this premise would seem farfetched. But one of the great things about this film is how it doesn’t take itself seriously at all. This becomes abundantly clear when one of the lines in the movie describes Statham’s character as “the guy from that Transporting movie”.

The movie continues with it’s video game-like action to a point where you feel it could easily be a live-action adaptation of the Grand Theft Auto video game series. Statham defies just about every action movie conceit and would probably make even John McClane cringe. The use of ultra-violence, excessive nudity and more “f*cks” than you can shake a stick at didn’t diminish in this sequel and are, in fact, even more abundant this time around.

Even with all the over-the-top action, violence and nudity, the film does offer a great number of interesting cameos. From Corey Haim to David Carradine, Ginger Spice and John de Lancie (Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Q), the movie pulls no punches when it comes pumping up it’s C-List celebrity quotient.

There isn’t really a whole lot to pick apart in this film. It is what it is. I suppose the worst thing you could say about it is that if it were a Troma movie, I wouldn’t have blinked twice. The ridiculousness of Crank 2: High Voltage had the audience both laughing and cringing at the same time but it is a great movie to run out to on a weekday afternoon if you’ve got nothing better to do. Or, if you want to make it an even better experience, after a few drinks.

After all this, where could they possibly go for a third film? Of course, nobody really knows what’s in the minds of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the film’s writers and directors. But if I were throwing out ideas for the next one, may I suggest Crank 3: Diabetes?

Verdict: B+

For someone who isn’t up to speed on the 25-year-long Dragonball story-line (that’s right, I wiki’d it), I figured I’d be able to at least enjoy a fun action/sci-fi combo movie without comparing every frame to it’s source material like I did back in March (why didn’t Hollis Mason Die?!?!?). Well, It seems the cast and crew of Dragonball: Evolution had something else in mind for their audience, as they sat us down to 90 minutes of three-dimensional actors pretending to be two-dimensional characters in a three-dimensional piece-of-junk. Occasionally, this is alright (see Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?). But here, it reached new levels of what is commonly known in the film industry as “crap”.

This project even managed to bring together actors like Chow Yun-Fat, Buffy’s James Marsters and…Ernie Hudson, of all people. But C-list names like these couldn’t save the film from the rest of the cast. In spite of the high school drama-level acting, the action was at least entertaining enough. One of the first lines of the film is: “The first rule is: there are no rules.” This is nice because it helps suspend the disbelief that Asian folks can fly and shoot fire from their hands.

Speaking of fire-hands, the special effects were on-par, or a bit of a step down from, last year’s Speed Racer. It seemed like much of the secondary sequences were done at the last minute, while the big scenes, including the final fight scene, looked pretty good. The most impressive effect in the film was the ability to get Justin Chatwin’s hair to stand up on end without looking as bad as Twilight’s Robert Pattinson.

The third act of the film gets real dicey and involves, in no particular order, a warlord alien, a were-monkey (like a werewolf, but with a tail), an over-the-top aerial fight scene, and a wish-granting dragon. If that wasn’t enough, the creative intellectuals behind this picture send the audience home with the classic Rocky 3 ending which is about as hight as they seem to want to aspire. So if one, or all, of those things are your cup of tea and seem worth the ten bucks, feel free to go catch Dragonball: Evolution. If not, wait for it to hit basic cable.

Rating: D