Year: 2003

I am a white person. I am passionless. I’m probably intolerant and likely harbor racist attitudes. I don’t know how to shake my booty. I wear khakis. What I need is a sassy black friend to invade my house and throw wild parties and teach me how to get down. You know, for my own personal enlightenment. Because guns and felonies add spice to life, breaking and entering is cool, and being some kind of freaky is what being real is all about.

Can we just send Bruce Willis and Monica Bellucci to Iraq? Cuz then we’ll know that the Right things will be done and that everything will turn out Okay in the short term and that Love will Shine in the eyes of the Beautiful and Noble brown people of Iraqi and, most importantly, that we won’t have to deal with the possibly ugly aftermath of intervention because that all happens after the credits are over and the lights come up and we’ve gone home.

Overheard at the concession stand: ‘Hey, you got hip-hop gangsta movie in my kung-fu flick!’ ‘You got kung-fu flick in my hip-hop gangsta movie!’

Of all the traumas we experience and the realizations we come to when someone we love dies, one of the strangest is surely the sudden discovery of how that person connected us to the other people in our lives in ways we’d never considered before. A broken strand in that web of human interconnectedness is at the heart of *Lawless Heart,* from the writing/directing team of Tom Hunsinger and Neil Hunter.

Oh. My. God. Somebody actually made *Habeas Corpus.* You know, the ‘serious’ Hollywood film about the death penalty — the one that, if we’re gonna be honest about it, really isn’t even a Hollywood film at all — in which someone white and smart and well-off is sentenced to execution, because ‘that happens.’

Line up philosopher-generals with fabulous uniforms and terrifying facial hair on either side of grassy fields. Advance ragtag lines of anonymous young boys and old men into musket- and bayonet-fueled battle against one another. Survey the legions of dead and dying who’ve given their lives for political concepts they scarcely grasp. Rinse and repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

If the Animal House guys tried to recapture the wackiness of fraternity life when they were suddenly faced with the real-life demands — wife, job, kids, house — that come in one’s 30s, the result would be as sad as this would-be comedy. Luke Wilson (The Royal Tenenbaums) is a charmer, as always, but his … more…

A rogue veteran police officer breaking in a naive new partner. The corrupt boss sending them down a dangerous path for his own sinister benefit. Brutal, cold-blooded felonies and murders. A racially charged cityscape ready to explode. The usual clichés get trotted out in this hard-bitten tale of the thin line between cops and criminals, … more…

There, up on the screen! It’s–! It’s–! It’s Ben Affleck in a leather jumpsuit.