This is the North, where we do what we want." Welllll...unless you're Brian Clough, of course. After a rough start of Alice and Brooklyn on Friday, movies #3, #4, and #5 of last weekend righted the ship considerably. Those would be the dark and very worthwhile Red Riding trilogy, based on the four-book crime series by David Peace (also the author of The Damned United.)

Consisting of Julian Jarrold's Red Riding 1974, James Marsh's Red Riding 1980, and Anand Tucker's Red Riding 1983, these, unlike the various threads of Brooklyn's Finest, are three interlocking crime stories than actually enhance and deepen one another, all the while telling one story. And, like The Wire and unlike Brooklyn again, nothing is spelled out for the audience, and all the pieces matter. Over six hours, it all adds up to a grim, complicated, and often harrowing portrait of the Evil that Men do in deepest, darkest Yorkshire.

In the first and arguably best installment, it is the Year of our Lord 1974, and a young girl has gone missing. On the case right away is Eddie Dunford, an enterprising journalist just back from a long stint in London (Andrew Garfield, late of Gilliam's Imaginarium), who very quickly -- too quickly, for the cops on the case -- ties the disappearance to two earlier murders. But when the child's body is found, with swan wings stitched into her back, no less, the case officially passes into the hands of Jack Whitehead (Eddie Marsan, late of Sherlock Holmes), the paper's lead reporter and something of a worthless drunk.

Regardless, Eddie's interest is piqued, and he continues to follow the leads where they take him -- from the arms of a beautiful-but-sad Girl of the North Country (Rebecca Hall) to the clutches of the local developing magnate (Sean Bean), who holds grand ambitions and no small amount of pull in the community. And, while Eddie first thought his drinking buddy Barry (Anthony Flanagan) was a wee bit paranoid for ranting on about disappearances and death squads in li'l old Yorkshire, he starts to wonder about it some when Barry becomes the victim of a horrible sheet glass accident. Was Barry in fact murdered? And if so, how deep does this rabbit hole go?

Deep enough that Detective Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine) is still trying to sort things out six years later, in the Year of our Lord 1980. A Manchester cop reassigned to this beat to help catch the Yorkshire Ripper, or at least to figure out why he hasn't been caught after thirteen victims, Hunter and his team (Tony Pitts, Maxine Peake) uncover some...discrepancies in the case files of one of the victims. Either the police work is exceedingly shoddy, or the Yorkshire Ripper now has a copycat -- or maybe it's just convenient for some murders to look like Ripper victims.

This all brings to mind the last time Detective Hunter found himself in this godforsaken corner of the North. That would be six years earlier, when he was assigned to look into a bloody crime scene that left a few extra bullets and lots of unanswered questions. The problem is, some folks in town don't seem to want either of these mysteries looked into anymore, and Hunter has left himself dangerously exposed by recently engaging in an illicit office romance. Something's gotta give, and it doesn't look like it's going to be the wall of silence that surrounds so many of the sinister goings-on in this riding...

Cut to the Year of our Lord 1983, when, just as the Ripper's bloody swath through this area is at last fading into grim memory, another local girl goes missing. This conjures dismal memories of the case nine years earlier for Detective Superintendent Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey, a.k.a. "The Next Doctor"), one of the higher-ups on the Yorkshire police force, who we've seen engaged in some dodgy behavior in the first two installments. (He's known as the Owl, not to be confused with the Wolf, the Swan, or the Badger.)

Meanwhile, on a visit to his late mother's home, a local solicitor (Mark Addy, soon of Robin Hood) is guilt-tripped by his old neighbors into revisiting the case of the developmentally disabled man (Daniel Mays) convicted of the 1974 child murders. Suffice to say, there are some troubling holes in the prosecution's story, and they seem to point right back at "enhanced interrogation" practices in the Yorkshire PD. And when another local man (Gerard Kearns) is taken into custody for this new child disappearance, well, it starts to seem like this has all happened before -- and the good lawyer's father might have been deeply involved.

In all honesty, the story skips off the rails a bit in 1983 -- A medium becomes involved in the previously played-straight story, and the original village conspiracies get to be a bit too baroque for plausibility. (Even notwithstanding the huge body count at this late date, there would now seem to be [spoilers-highlight to read]two different and almost-completely unrelated shady operations at work by now.) And, in any event, the overarching three-film plot becomes so byzantine at times that it does get quite hard to maintain the thread. (I'm still unclear as to why [same]the cops shot up the Kirachi Club after Eddie left in 1974. What were their intentions anyway?)

But taken as a whole, this glum trilogy has an admirably dark mojo to it. I mentioned The Wire early on, but perhaps the best analogue for these films is to think of them as sort of an extended British version of Zodiac. If you can handle the violence, the accents, and the unrelenting Yorkshire gloom, the Red Riding trilogy is worth the trip...just be careful who you talk to while you're there.

"The jetpack is made from carbon fiber, with a touch of kevlar in the rotors, and generates 600 pounds of thrust. Because the center of gravity is below the 'center of thrust' (a notional point between the engines), it is self-righting: If the pilot lets go of the controls, he hovers steadily in one spot." Where is my jetpack? Ah, it's right here, for the paltry sum of $75,000-$90,000. [You can see it in action here.]

"Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth...[T]o keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session - a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding - the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus."

But it's not torture or anything: Recently-released CIA documents explain exactly how we went about waterboarding suspects during the Dubya era. "'It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water,' Nance wrote in the New York Daily News. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning."

"Without getting into specifics, the key thing that makes the third film a great possibility for us is that we want to finish our story, and in viewing it as the finishing of a story rather than infinitely blowing up the balloon and expanding the story. We have a great ensemble, that's one of the attractions of doing another film, since we've been having a great time for years." Christopher Nolan discusses Batman and Superman (but no World's Finest)

So, in an attempt to get the unfortunately atrocious Alice in Wonderland out-of-mind as quickly as possible, I pulled an audible last Friday night and decided to follow it up immediately with Antoine Fuqua's conflicted cop saga Brooklyn's Finest. And, well, I'll give Fuqua's film this: At least it turned out to be weirdly lousy, rather than just straight-up lousy like Alice.

Still, despite some quality performances throughout, Brooklyn's Finest is not a movie I can really recommend. In its gritty street rhythms, shades-of-gray plotting, and all-star cast of dirty cops with streaks of nobility, the film clearly aspires to the greatness of The Wire. (In fact, Michael K. Williams (Omar), Hassan Johnson (Weebay), and Isiah Whitlock, Jr. (Clay Davis) are all in this movie, the latter prompting an hilarious chorus of "shheeeeeeeeeits" at my late-night showing.)

But, for all its admirable ambition, this movie ends up feeling a lot closer to Crash. Like that film (and like another considerably over-praised film of the same type, Babel), Brooklyn's Finest tells three disconnected stories, seemingly in the hope that they might add up to more than the sum of their parts. But, other than the fact that some of these cops work in the same precinct, and all of them rather implausibly end up in the same apartment block in the climax, they don' t really have anything to do with each other. Unlike The Wire, where actions on the street (say by Bubbles, or Herc) will reverberate through the system and have unintended consequences that affect the highest levels of the Game (say, the Mayor's office), nothing that happens in any of these stories has any effect on the other tales being told. In other words, these dirty cop vignettes are basically stovepiped, and, as such, they're somewhat redundant.

So, instead of one story, you get three. And, also like Crash, the writing's pretty ham-handed in all of them. For an excellent example of this tendency, look no further than the opening minutes, as -- message alert! -- Vincent D'Onofrio gives an on-the-nose speel about there being no right or wrong, just "righter and wronger." Alrighty then. (Speaking of D'Onofrio, between he, Will Patton, and the Wire guys, Brooklyn's Finest sometimes feels like a Recovery Act-funded jobs program for cop and robber actors. I spent much of the movie half-expecting Michael Rooker to show up.)

So, with the writing dropping the ball rather egregiously, the actors involved have to carry Brooklyn's Finest on their own for its two and a half hours. And, as it turns out, they're mostly up to the task. As the working-class Catholic cop in desperate need of some drug money to fix his mold problem (yes, you read that right), Ethan Hawke gives a variation on his twitchy loser from Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and is better than the material warrants. (Strangely enough, he's also once again paired up with Brian O'Byrne.) Meanwhile, Richard Gere is miscast as the lousy, alcoholic peace officer a week out from his pension -- I would've gone Fred Ward -- but he struggles through, despite some excruciatingly embarrassing scenes involving his hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold girlfriend. (One involving fellatio, the other the Honeydrippers.)

And the best third of Brooklyn's Finest involves Don Cheadle as the Departed-style cop "lost in the Game," i.e. so deep-undercover he's forgotten which way is up. This is not only because Cheadle is great, as per the norm, but also because he's got the ablest supporting cast to work with -- the aforementioned Will Patton as his handler, Wesley Snipes in a nod to his New Jack City days, Michael K. Williams as the anti-Omar, and a couple of scene-stealers in Hassan Johnson (who, outside of a well-placed Busta Rhymes track, has the funniest line in the movie) and Ellen Barkin (who aims to prove she has the biggest cajones in the film, by a country mile.)

Still, even tho' I recently made the case for "actors workshop"-type movies with 44 Inch Chest, actors can only do so much. And, despite the occasional well-performed scene, Brooklyn's Finest is just too fumbling and Haggis-y in the writing department to really warrant the time investment. Put briefly, Brooklyn's Finest is to cop movies what Milwaukee's Best is to beer -- only a worthwhile option if you're intentionally slumming it.

"The problem with Granny D...is that she makes the rest of us look like such schlumps."-- Molly Ivins. R.I.P. campaign finance reform activist Doris "Granny D" Haddock, 1910-2010.

In the trailer bin this morning, Russell Crowe grimaces once more for Ridley Scott as the titular character in his take on Robin Hood, also with Cate Blanchett (Maid Marian), Mark Strong (Evil Henchman), Max von Sydow (Pa Marian), Mark Addy (Friar Tuck), Kevin Durand (Little John), Oscar Isaac (King John), Danny Houston (Richard the Lionheart), and William Hurt (William Marshall).

Well...ok. But how many times have we seen this movie now? (Not the Robin Hood tale, but the King Arthur-ish "story behind the story" period war epic.) For that matter, how many times has Ridley Scott made this movie now? As such, it's hard to get too excited about this.

The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings. And why this film was stinking rot, and so darn bad it stings... Sigh. Well, if you were going to see Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, the box office numbers seem to indicate that you probably already have. Nonetheless, I'm sorry to report that -- Mia Wasikowska, some of the art direction, and perhaps a scene or two notwithstanding -- this Alice is a thoroughly woeful enterprise, and just an aggravatingly bad adaptation of Lewis Carroll's world. If you hold any fondness for the book, trust me, you'll leave Mad as Hell.

I say Lewis Carroll's "world" because, as you probably already know, this is not a straight-up adaptation of (the often-combined) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass. Rather, this movie takes up Alice's tale as a teenager on the threshold of womanhood (Wasikowska), who, while weighing the pros-and-cons of betrothal to a rich, haughty, and very Burtonesque suitor (Leo Bill), finds herself Down the Rabbit Hole and back once again in, uh, "Underland." So, in other words, at best this iteration of Alice already feels like reading somebody's random Lewis Carroll fan-fiction on the Internets.

Worse, the fan in question seems to have really dug The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, to the point of just grifting liberally from Narnia to write this sequel-story. Now, Alice is basically a Pevensie-ish "Daughter of Eve" prophesied to free Won...uh, Underland from the tyranny of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter). Note the picture of Alice at the top of this post, brandishing the sword and armor on the battlefield(?), and standing next to Hathaway the White like she's at Minas Tirith -- Does that look anything like Alice in Wonderland to you?

So yeah, all the playful word games and off-kilter logic puzzles of Carroll's book, and your usual Alice adaptations for that matter, have been thrown out the window here. Instead, we are left with...well, basically your average dumb summer movie. The Mad Hatter has become a major character, for seemingly no other reason than to accommodate the presence of Johnny Depp. We are told Alice is destined to slay the Jabberwocky early in the second reel, which means we spend the rest of the film just sitting around waiting for this prophesied shoe to drop. And -- spoiler alert -- when our heroine finally accomplishes the deed at the Big Battle and puts the dragon (and by extension the audience) out of its misery, she even gets to throw in a John McClane/Schwarzenegger one-liner. ("Off with your head!)

Put simply, this is just a blatantly stupid movie, and looking back on it, I can think of only one or two grace notes worth mentioning. As you might expect from most any Tim Burton production, the art direction is quite impressive at times (The 3-D, on the other hand, is muddy, and really doesn't add anything to the experience.) So, for example, the design of the Red Queen's soldiers is rather appealing, but these flourishes still aren't really enough to keep things moving along. There's one very brief scene involving frog and fish servants of the Red Queen that made it seem like the overall film would be much more fun and imaginative. And, while Wasikowska herself is actually quite solid throughout the movie, this Alice only manages to capture some of the real Wonderland magic in the Eat Me/Drink Me sequence early on.

Otherwise, tho', hoo boy. While Tim Burton and the screenwriters clearly deserve the lion's share of the blame for this fiasco, there's more than enough Terrible to go around. (For his part, Depp is strange as usual, but is neither a plus nor a minus, really -- Just don't get me started on the breakdancing scene.) Somehow, someway, Crispin Glover, a.k.a. the one-eyed Knave of Hearts, seems like he's overacting even when surrounded by talking dogs, rabbits, and pigs. But even he isn't as lousy here as Anne Hathaway, who is high-school-production-bad. (I should know -- I was in one.) As the White Queen, I couldn't tell if Hathaway was trying to riff off of her Princess Diaries co-star Julie Andrews, or whether she was just totally lost amid the CGI, Natalie Portman-style. Either way, this isn't a career highlight.

So, to sum up, Alice in Wonderland is pretty much just a travesty. (Or, to quote the lady of the hour: "Of all the silly nonsense, this is the stupidest tea party I've ever been to in all my life.") One way or another, and just like Alice, Tim Burton has managed to accomplish an impossible thing here. He's taken a beloved children's classic that seemed very well-suited to his strengths, and somehow managed to suck all the magic out of it.

"Dad...long time." "You have no idea." Just so everyone is privy to the new s**t, that spiffy new teaser for Tron Legacy is now officially online. This is, plain and simple, a great teaser. And I've already said this several times here, but I kinda love the "Flynn's gone all Col. Kurtz up the datastream" approach they're taking here. Plus, hey, Academy Award winner Jeff Bridges is in it, not to mention Bruce Boxleitner, a surprisingly young CGI-Bridges, Michael Sheen doing his best Jemaine Bowie, and a very fetching Olivia Wilde. (But can we get a David Warner cameo?)

Update: "There's a time dilation effect where time scales in the inside world about 50 times faster than it does in our world. So even though it's been 20 years since Kevin disappeared, that's been almost 1000 years in the computer." Director Joseph Kosinski walks us through the teaser, shot-by-shot.

"Within 40 small craters, one to nine miles wide, they estimated 600 million metric tons of water. Perhaps most notably, 'It has to be relatively pure,' said Paul Spudis, the principal investigator for the instrument that made the discovery."

By way of a friend, scientists find more evidence of lots of water on the moon. "That is significant, because the ice in these craters could be easily tapped by future lunar explorers -- not just for drinking water, but also broken apart into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel." Hmm. Maybe it's time to start thinking of ways to get up there...

Congrats to the 2010 Oscar winners, which I got...mostly right. The back-to-back Best Director and Best Picture wins for Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker were a nice surprise, particularly given all the grief the film's been getting lately. (I was also kinda glad to see The Secret in Their Eyes upset the Best Foreign Film category, given that I didn't much care for The White Ribbon. As for Sandra Bullock...well, ok. I'm still not seeing The Blind Side.

Five movies this past weekend and I didn't catch this one (although I did see the fun Tron: Legacy teaser): With Sam Rockwell's Justin Hammer making an appearance, here's the second trailer for Jon Favreau's Iron Man 2. This is only two months away? Wow, that was fast.

Imagine a festering, stinking bog, where old cars, bloated corpses, and sundry other sins and secrets disappear into the murk. The Dead Marshes? Try Denmark. I took a chance on Henrik Ruben Genz's enjoyably bizarre Scandinavian crime story Terribly Happy (Frygtelig lykkelig) last weekend in part because of the very solid trailer, and in part because of this endorsement from Variety therein -- It "plays with genre in a manner that can be compared with the Coen brothers or David Lynch."

Well, David Lynch...not so much. (I presume the reviewer was thinking of Twin Peaks, but there really aren't very many Lynchian flourishes here -- There's no Roy Orbison, red lights, flaring matches, or dream logic to be had.) But Terribly Happy definitely wears its Coenesque heart on its sleeve, paying brief homage to three of the Coens' oeuvre in the first three minutes. The movie begins exactly like No Country for Old Men -- a grizzled voiceover talking about crime and the olden ways, over shots of the strangely forbidding Danish countryside. We are then warned, a la Fargo, that this is based on True Events. (In fact, it's from a novel by Erling Jepsen -- Before that, provenance unclear.) And, then we cut to behind a police car on a long stretch of highway, one that pretty quickly conjures reveries of Raising Arizona.

Of all the Coens' output, tho', Terribly Happy ultimately feels most like Blood Simple -- a sordid tale of small-town crime, seedy bars, and village ne'er-do-wells. (See also: great small-bore, character-driven crime flicks like One False Move and A Simple Plan.) This is not to say that Terribly Happy is derivative, because it isn't. Rather, the film feels like it tips its hat to its influences before setting off on its own quite unique story. (In fact, Happy seemed unique even tho' this is the third fish-out-of-water crime story I've seen in a row, and despite its reliance on the tried-and-true "new cop in an old village" tradition that includes Hot Fuzz, The Wicker Man, the aforementioned Peaks, and any number of old-school Westerns.)

If it seems like I'm just comparing Terribly Happy to other movies rather than talking about the film itself...well, best not to give away too much. But, in brief: Robert (Jakob Cedergren) is a Copenhagen cop who had a little bit of a breakdown, and has subsequently been dispatched to the sticks to rehabilitate his name. In the tiny hamlet where he ends up, people say "Mojn" like Hawaiians use "Aloha." The village elders play cards all night long, short-handed. A local woman (Lene Maria Christensen) keeps showing up at the station with new injuries. The entire town seems deeply frightened of her husband Jorgen (Kim Bodnia). A strange little girl (Mathilde Maack) insists on wheeling her squeaky baby carriage around at all hours of the night. And people keep disappearing...

So, yes, there's something rotten in the State of Denmark -- more than a few things actually. And, as you might expect, it is Robert's task to get to the bottom of it all. But in the Danish lowlands, the bottom can be treacherous, and our White Hat here is, well, not entirely stable, particularly after a beer or six. In fact, he's the type of fellow who might just draw on his own kitty-cat, especially when it also starts saying "Mojn" back at him. (And, really, can you blame him? It's only a short step there to "I can haz...")

Sure, there are a few tells along the way -- the last five minutes are telegraphed pretty much from the start. Still, Terribly Happy definitely takes a few jags I was not expecting, and the journey is the reward regardless. It doesn't have the artsy ambition of The White Ribbon (and I have yet to see the well-regarded A Prophet), but nonetheless, Terribly Happy is my favorite non-English-language film of the year so far. It is, simply put, a solid crime story, well-told. (And if you get a chance, check it out before the inevitable American remake.)

I'm still working my way through the very playable Mass Effect 2 -- Paragon now, Renegade later -- and Bioshock 2 is competing for my attention as well. Nonetheless, Aperture Science waits for no man: Portal 2 is on the way, and Game Informer is making a month out of it.

Oh, word. It's hard to overstate my satisfaction...but let's hope the cake is real this time (and the Companion Cube isn't ticked.)

Much has been said of the Muppets of yore...In the venerable tradition of "I still think of you, Jim Henson," a pious Kermit the Frog gets more than he bargained for as the Muppets are mashed up with The Wicker Man (and I mean the creepy-great 1973 original, not the godawful Neil LaBute-Nicholas Cage stinker.)

Word abounds that the Tron: Legacy trailer will be popping up very shortly on the petticoats of Tim Burton's Alice, but no sign of it yet.

Until then, Zack Snyder follows up Watchmen with Hugo Weaving and animated owls in the rather meh trailer for Legend of the Guardians. Eh, doubtful...As per the Snyder norm, he lost me with the cruddy frat-rock.

And, for some more encouraging rock 'n' roll, Dakota Fanning is all grown up as Cherie Currie to Kristen Stewart's Joan Jett in the second trailer for Floria Sigismondi's The Runaways. Hmm, maybe...I can see Michael Shannon being a good bit of fun.

Tho' I doubt it will get much favorable play in Tony Blair's household, Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer, which I caught last Saturday, is a brisk and competently-made 70's-style paranoia thriller that also manages to be subversively amusing for most of its run. If you enjoyed the "noir exercise" aspects of Scorsese's Shutter Island, and you have no strong moral qualms about throwing money Polanski's way these days, I'd say it's definitely worth checking out. (Note: I briefly discussed my thoughts on Polanski's criminality in my nod to The Pianist (#41) on the Best of the Oughts list two months ago. That's still about all I have to say on that ugly subject.)

Like Shutter, The Ghost Writer is a highly cinematic thriller in-the-key-of-noir that probably works better as a mood piece than it does in terms of plot. (For that matter, once again we have a cast of ne'er-do-wells at a remote island off the coast of Massachusetts, acting suspiciously under gray, portentous skies.) The film is also, not to put too fine a point on it, a resounding eff-you to Tony Blair. Based on a 2007 book by Robert Harris (Fatherland, Enigma), it clearly sets it sights on the ex-PM for getting-in-deep with Dubya and subsequently greenlighting torture in the UK.

If that makes The Ghost Writer sound heavy or preachy, it isn't, really. The torture and "Special Relationship" stuff forms the background and connective tissue of this particular 70's-style conspiracy, yes. But the movie cares less about the details than its does just the existence of a nefarious plot at all. In other words, just like Marathon Man or Three Days of the Condor, most all of the political content here is really just a device to get Ewan MacGregor's low-key, amiable, and boozy-but-talented "Ghost" slowly and inexorably in over his head...and increasingly having to look over his shoulder.

Here, unlike the last time we saw him, MacGregor's scribe isn't looking for "the Story" at first so much as a fat paycheck. So, when the ghostwriter for former British PM Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) washes up dead off the coast for America, he -- after being talked into it by his unctuous agent (Jon Bernthal) -- puts his name in the hat as a well-paid replacement, even though he doesn't give a whit about politics. And after getting looked over by a gruff Haldeman-ish aide (James Belushi) and an obviously sleazebag lawyer (Timothy Hutton), he somehow, miraculously, ends up with the job.

But, be careful what you wish for: Within an hour of landing the gig, Ewan's Ghost gets mugged on the street for carrying what appeared to be a copy of the current manuscript. (It was a ringer -- Nihilists, dude.) Soon thereafter, he finds himself whisked away to Lang's Island, where he spends his days with a distracted and often visibly angry ex-PM, the beautiful-but-distant missus (Olivia Williams, who I love, but she's too young for the part), a sultry top assistant (Kim Cattrall, doing her thing), and more security than you can shake a stick at. And when Lang becomes the center of a huge media maelstrom, on account of revelations that he authorized illegal detentions and torture when he was prime minister, well all of a sudden Ewan's Ghost finds himself trapped in a very well-oiled and dangerous Machine...

Speaking of ghosts in machines, I'll concede I was probably more tickled by The Ghost Writer than a lot of people might be, just because this is a movie about my trade. Who knows? Maybe cops, lawyers, and doctors feel like this all the time. Still, his irritating penchant for reading everything out loud notwithstanding, when Ewan was puttering around the island on his bike and/or typing away in his schoolboy sweaters, I confess I felt a twinge of happiness that here was a thriller-type movie where I could actually see myself in the predicament. (Speaking of which, yes, there are a lot of dramatic licenses taken with the job of ghostwriting here, but you're not going to see me complaining to Newsweek about it. That's what movies do.)

But, all that being said, I think The Ghost Writer has enough of a sneaky sense of humor to it that it would've worked for me even without the j-o-b connection. For example, one running gag throughout is that, as per movies of this type, all sorts of shady operators desperately want their hands on Lang's manuscript. But, like the vast majority of political memoirs in real life, this ghostwritten Maguffin is so platitudinous and vapid ("My years at Cambridge...") that Ewan's character can't figure out why the hell anybody wants to go near it.

And, while the actual conspiracy here is even more implausible than the last turn in Shutter Island (and, again, doesn't make much sense given what's come before in the movie), I chuckled at the sheer screw-you audacity of it -- You'll know what I mean if you see it. So, all in all and despite its occasional goofy turns, I found The Ghost Writer a pretty fun afternoon at the movies. I just wish that one of the film's other driving conceits -- that the world will rise up and demand criminal accountability for Dubya-era torture -- didn't seem quite so far-fetched to me as it does these days.

"In April, the world will celebrate the quinquagenary of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, so it seems a good time to take stock of the silence. Three new books tackle the issue in three different ways. One, an immensely readable investigation of the SETI enterprise (with a surprising conclusion); the second, a technical guide to what we should be looking for and how; and the third, a left-field argument that the alien question has already been answered."

In New Scientist, Michael Hanlon surveys three new books about the continuing search for alien life, and attempts to grapple with the Fermi paradox."Today it is rare to meet an astronomer who doesn't believe that the universe is teeming with life. There is a feeling in the air that light will soon be shed on some of science's most fundamental questions: is Earth's biosphere unique? Do other minds ponder the universe?"

"The change is negligible, but permanent: Each day should be 1.26 microseconds shorter, according to preliminary calculations. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second." So, on the bright side, I guess that means we'll all live to be a little older. The devastating 8.8 earthquake in Chile has apparently permanently shortened Earth's day.

"Such changes aren't unheard of. The magnitude 9.1 earthquake in 2004 that generated a killer tsunami in the Indian Ocean shortened the length of days by 6.8 microseconds. On the other hand, the length of a day also can increase. For example, if the Three Gorges reservoir in China were filled, it would hold 10 trillion gallons (40 cubic kilometers) of water. The shift of mass would lengthen days by 0.06 microsecond, scientists said."

"The second law states that a force is proportional to an object's mass and its acceleration. But since the 1980s, some physicists have eyed the law with suspicion, arguing that subtle changes to it at extremely small accelerations could explain the observed motion of stars in galaxies." Also on the subject of spinning, a new experiment finds a way to test Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) on Earth, which, if successful, could revise Newton's heretofore ironclad 2nd law...and explain away the longstanding dark matter problem. (By way of my new favorite Twitter feed, @newscientist.)

As of today, Berkeley -- GitM's ombudsdog and my roommate, power animal, and all-around sheltie-american enabler -- is now ten years old [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9].

After one does the dog-to-human-year conversion, that puts him at exactly twice my age. Here's hoping I'm as spry, convivial, good-natured, and slightly deranged when I reach his years. Happy b-day, l'il buddy.

"[I]f James, Wade and Bosh truly want to make history, they could do the unthinkable and split the Knicks' $33 million three ways. It would cost them salary money, but can you imagine how much they'd make on the back end if they started reeling in NBA titles? In New York?" No, I'm afraid I cannot imagine it. I'll have to see it for myself... ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski makes the case for the top tier of NBA superstars all signing with New York this summer. Hey, a guy can dream, can't he?

"Why are you screamin'? I haven't even cut you yet." Speaking of dreaming, AICN passes along the second trailer for the Nightmare on Elm Street revamp, with a very Jackie Earle Haley-sounding Freddy Krueger and lots of pretty teenage insomniacs to work through.

Hmmm...well, the production values look great, I'll give it that. But all signs (and particularly the ones that read "Michael Bay" and "Platinum Dunes") suggest this will be another needless and thoroughly schlocky remake of a horror classic. I'm posting the trailer here only because I feel like i owe it to the original film, which scared the bejeezus out of me as a kid.

"An application that lets users point a smart phone at a stranger and immediately learn about them premiered last Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Developed by The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), a Swedish mobile software and design firm, the prototype software combines computer vision, cloud computing, facial recognition, social networking, and augmented reality."

Well, that should really facilitate the stalking (and now everyone will know right away I like sunsets and long walks on the beach...) The Atlantic's Derek Thompson reports in on Recognizr, a smartphone app soon likely to cause all kinds of consternation and unwanted advances in a town near you.

"To start with, only simple tissues, such as skin, muscle and short stretches of blood vessels, will be made...[H]owever, that the company expects that within five years, once clinical trials are complete, the printers will produce blood vessels for use as grafts in bypass surgery. With more research it should be possible to produce bigger, more complex body parts. Because the machines have the ability to make branched tubes, the technology could, for example, be used to create the networks of blood vessels needed to sustain larger printed organs, like kidneys, livers and hearts."

Also in the Brave New World dept. and by way of a friend, The Economist takes a gander at new "bioprinter" technology. "As for bigger body parts, Dr Forgacs thinks they may take many different forms, at least initially. A man-made biological substitute for a kidney, for instance, need not look like a real one or contain all its features in order to clean waste products from the bloodstream."

"'This is the earliest that the Center has ever offered an estimate,' Krumholz said. 'As election observers across the political spectrum work to assess the impact of Citizens United, this prediction offers a solid baseline to compare new spending levels against.'" Before even taking the torrents of campaign cash expected in the wake of the Citizens United decision into consideration, the Center of Responsive Politics estimates that the 2010 midterms will cost over $3.7 billion. (FWIW, the year 2006 clocked in at $2.85 billion.) Sigh...fasten your seat belts -- It's going to be a bumpy ride.

"I'm so proud of this particular group of programs,' says 'Masterpiece' executive producer Rebecca Eaton. 'These three series say everything about what 'Masterpiece' aims to be: iconic, rich with wonderful actors, witty, literate, and timeless. I can't wait to see them all.'" Along with Upstairs, Downstairs and a take on the Aurelio Zen novels, Sherlock Holmes will get a 21st century revamp for BBC's Masterpiece Theater, starring Benedict Cumberbatch (of Atonement, although I don't remember him) as the eponymous detective and Martin Freeman (i.e. the original Tim and most recent Arthur Dent) as Dr. Watson. In addition, new Who guru Steven Moffat is co-producing. (Via Dangerous Meta and cdogzilla.)

"36,000 Feet: The Challenger Deep, lowest known point in the ocean. It is believed there are lower undiscovered points, as only 10% of the ocean has been mapped." There are old, foul things in the Deep Places of the World: By way of DYFL and Lots of Co, a rather off-putting graphic of the Mariana Trench to scale. Venturing out into the Great Beyond of space always sounds exhilarating to me. But, for some reason, being that far down below the murky depths...not so much.

"I was inspired a great deal by the work of Simon Page and his astrology series. If anyone enjoys this style of art I would highly recommend they check out his work. I also drew ideas from old Art Deco style prints and vintage science fiction posters from the 1960/70's." The LA Weekly talks with Justin Van Genderen, designer of the spiffy minimalist Star Wars posters above.

I've been watching the casting fly-by on this without commenting, and I still kinda wish they'd gone with Mad Men's Jon Hamm for Hal Jordan over the getting-overexposed Ryan Reynolds (who already has two other comic properties to his name in Deadpool and Blade III.) Nonetheless, Mark Strong has joined the cast of Martin Campell's Green Lantern as Sinestro, the Lantern's arch-nemesis. He joins Reynolds, Blake Lively (Carol Ferris), Peter Sarsgaard (Hector Hammond), and Tim Robbins (Sen. Hammond, Hector's pa.)

Well, that's a pretty solid cast on the villain side. But I fear this is just going to feel like an attempt to cash in on DC's second-tier (a la Iron Man on the Marvel side)...unless they go really big and space-age with it. Like Green Lantern Corps, Oans, etc.

Well, at the very least, I'll say this: Martin Scorsese's fun but flawed gothic-noir Shutter Island is much less of a disaster than the other big budget, mid-February dumping of late, The Wolfman. True, despite a smart and engrossing first hour or so, Scorsese's film eventually wears out its welcome, and its (very-telegraphed, even in the trailers) Twilight Zone-y ending goes on for several beats too long. Still, it's an unsettling and reasonably entertaining mind game for awhile, and probably worth a rental if you weren't among the many visitors to the Island this past weekend.

Admittedly, the opening moments of our tale are more than a little creaky, as Scorsese -- as per his 1991 remake of Cape Fear -- perhaps over-telegraphs the fact that we're in noir-homage territory here. The year is 1954, and as a rickety ferry chugs along beneath an ominous, very cinematic-looking gray sky, a seasick US Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo di Caprio) fills his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) in on all the requisite exposition. To wit, these two seafaring gumshoes are checking out a mysterious disappearance on a creepy Island for the Criminally Insane. Teddy's beloved wife (Michelle Williams), whom he still sees in visions, has passed on account of smoke inhalation after an apartment fire. And -- wouldn't ya know it -- one of those Gimongous Storms that fill the nearby Gloucestermen with dread is bearing down on this remote Massachusetts madhouse, right at about the time our two heroes will disembark.

This is all rather ungainly revealed in the first ten minutes or so. But, when our two fedora-topped detectives are met by the officious and strangely aloof deputy warden of the complex (John Carroll Lynch), Shutter Island starts to find its nightmare-at-Arkham groove. It helps that we then meet a few old pros to move things along in that regard. First, the benevolent-seeming Man of Science running the asylum, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley). And then his avuncular, hail-fellow-well-met, and vaguely sinister colleague (old pro Max Von Sydow), who happens to have a Teutonic tendency toward slipping consonants. And that, coupled with the waifish cheekbones of the missing patient (Emily Mortimer), sets off all kinds of unpleasant memories for Teddy of W-W-eye-eye, and the liberation of Dachau...

It is in this first seventy-five minutes or so where Shutter Island really works best. For awhile there, with its melancholy remembrances, plush smoking rooms, fifties detectives, and lurking horrors, the movie is a real triumph of atmosphere. I felt like I'd settled into a really good noir text-adventure like Deadline, Suspect, or even Maniac Mansion, where the crimes are sordid, the suspects range from kindly to malevolent, the atmosphere is gothic through-and-through, the backstory is ever-so-slightly overripe (there may be Nazi-style experiments funded by HUAC going on), and the environment is finite and well-bounded -- Nobody's getting off the island in this here Storm of the Century. And there's a nightmare at one point, involving Dachau and Ms. Mortimer, that set my teeth on edge as much as anything I've seen this side of the Grady sisters. (Some borrowing from The Ring here too, quite frankly.)

Unfortunately, the increasingly aimless Island doesn't manage to sustain this splendidly eerie vibe throughout its run. Instead, it starts to pile incident upon incident, until the rotting manse of cards eventually tumbles over. When Elias Koteas and Jackie Earle Haley turn up as horribly scarred prisoners of the complex an hour or so in, I thought, ok, this could be creepy. When Patricia Clarkson pops up as a haggard escapee half an hour later, I was thinking ok, but it's a bit late in the game to be introducing all-new characters like this. And by the time Ted Levine of Monk gets his turn as the exceedingly weird Chief Warden who, in this day and age, would probably relish gladiator movies and the Discovery Channel, I wondered if Shutter Island was actually building toward anything at all.

The answer is, yes, but it too takes awhile. [Some spoilers ahead.] As you may well have expected going in, there's a Shyamalan-style ending to the case that takes us in a new (but not entirely unforeseeable) direction. The problem is, this ending takes about 25 minutes to play out when it should've taken five, including a long digression into a past event that we have fully pieced together on our own by now. I wouldn't call this ending a cop-out, really, although several earlier scenes (and most notably Ruffalo's behavior in them) don't make a lot of sense once we're privy to the new intel. The problem is more that, like an aircraft taxiing to the gate, it just takes far too long to close the story once this final act is set in motion.

Still, as I said, Shutter Island has its moments. As far as exercises in noir cinema go, I've definitely sat through worse than these two and a half hours of Scorsese playing with his haunted mansion playset. If nothing else, you can tell that Marty has a deep and abiding love of the crime-noir genre. And, for at least a good hour or so, his madness is contagious.