I can guarantee you this… the more you know about Matchstick Men the less satisfying your moviegoing experience will be. With that in mind, I will do my best to leave out any plot details that aren’t obvious from a casual viewing of the trailer.

The setup is simple. Nicolas Cage is Roy, a con man who suffers from a myriad of quirky psychological problems and phobias. He’s got his life pretty much in order, when he’s taking his medication. He runs low-level cons on unsuspecting people and makes a good living. However, just as he is on the verge of pulling off one last big swindle, his carefully ordered life becomes disrupted by the arrival of his 14-year old daughter Angela.

That’s all I’m going to tell you about the details of the plots. You will see the twists and turns coming from a mile away but I want to leave you a little suspense.

Like most of director Ridley Scott’s body of work, Matchstick Men looks great but is ultimately pretty mediocre. It is, however, highlighted by a couple of great performances and a very engaging visual style. 

The real highlight of the film is Nicolas Cage’s twitchy and agitated performance as the phobia addled con-man. It’s great to see Cage ditching the action-hero schtick and reverting back the full-on freak mode that made his earlier work so interesting.

Also of note is Allison Lohman’s dead on portrayal of Roy’s 14-year old daughter. Lohman is actually 24 years old but she is absolutely believable in this role, capturing both the look and mannerisms of a teenager. Lohman is so cute I found myself strangely attracted to her and therefore in somewhat of a moral quandary. Is it “okay” to be attracted to her, knowing she is actually 24 in real life. Or am I becoming even more of a creepy perv? (Please discuss in the forums)

Scott brings an impressive visual style and rhythm to the film. His use of jump cuts, extreme close-ups and color shifts allow us to experience Roy’s phobias first hand. And its is when the film focuses on Roy that it is most interesting. The combination of Cage’s powerful performance and Scott’s expressionistic direction bring the character vividly to life. We can feel for this character and empathise with his desire to be a father to his daughter and lead a better, more honest life. The relationship between Roy and Angela is also very engaging and believable.

However, it’s the plot that ultimately fails this film. After investing almost two hours becoming emotionally involved with these characters, we are subjected to an ending that feels like a cop-out. Sure you can see it coming, but it’s so obvious that you kind of hope the filmmakers have something better in store.

In the end, it’s the audience that has been emotionally conned by these Matchstick Men.

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Directed by: Ridley Scott
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Alison Lohman, Sam Rockwell
Screenwriters: Ted Griffin, Nick Griffin, Eric Garcia, Nicholas Griffin
Distributor: Warner Brothers

Raising Victor Vargas opens with a tightly framed shot of a teenage latino boy standing in front of a dingy wall. There is no music, just the sound of the city street outside. Victor Vargas strips off his shirt and licks his lips, casting a sensual gaze into the camera.  For the first few agonizing moments, I was afraid I was about to venture into Larry Clark (Kids) territory.

But then the camera turns and we see the object of Victor’s lust. An overweight and unattractive girl sits like a lump on an un-made bed beckoning for Victor to join her. Victor leaps across the room into her waiting arms. But as soon as he has started kissing her, he hears his friend shouting up at him from the street below. He peers out the window and accidentally reveals the fact that he has been messing around with the neighborhood’s least popular girl.

Thanks to Victor’s sister, word spreads quickly that Victor is screwing Maldonado. Victor finds himself the butt of everybody’s jokes. In order to get his reputation back he sets his sights on “Juicy” Judy, the most beautiful girl in the neighborhood. However, Judy is already wise to the way of men and she is more than a match for the lust-crazed Victor.

Director Peter Sollett uses Victor’s pursuit of Judy as a means for fleshing out Victor’s neighborhood and the community of people that surround him. Victor lives with his eccentric grandmother, annoying sister and younger brother. Victor’s grandmother loves the children deeply but can’t seem to make sense of the confusing modern world around her. She considers Victor to be a bad influence on the younger children and even tries to turn him into child services, not knowing how to handle such a supposedly wild kid.

By the second act of the film, I was no longer conscious of the ethnic traits or tough ghetto facades of the characters. Sollett has put us in a place where we totally empathize with everybody in the movie. Even Victor’s unrelenting lust begins to give away to genuine affection for his younger siblings and the beautiful girl who is genuinely hard to get. We get to see these characters at their best and at their worst and we are never given an artificially maudlin moment to make us feel better about things.

The entire film is cast with first time actors and frankly I was completely amazed at the quality of the performances. At times, the performances are so naturalistic and dead-on that the film feels like a documentary. Victor Rasuk is pitch perfect as Victor. This character could come off as a totally unsympathetic, nothing more than a horny teenager looking to get laid. Instead, Rasuk allows us to gradually witness the emotional maturation of this character.

In less talented hands, this film could have ended up as a preachy After School Special or sleazy teen sex flick. Instead the subject matter is handled so sensitively and realistically that it makes you remember what being in love as a teenager was really like - confusing, sexy, scary and sometimes pretty ***censored*** sad.

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The premise of The Core would have you believe that the inner core of the earth has stopped spinning, causing massive thunderstorms, electromagnetic surges that stop pacemakers and, well, something that causes birds in London to go absolutely mad. And that’s just for starters! College professor Aaron Eckhart believes that within a year, all life around the world will cease to exist.

Eckhart convinces enough military bigwigs that the situation is real and deadly, if they don’t do something – namely, drill down to the center of the earth and jumpstart the planet. Hey, whaddaya know, Delroy Lindo’s been working on just such a machine in the middle of the desert! So the two get in the ship (which looks like the world’s most dangerous dildo) with astronaut Hilary Swank, pompous scientist Stanley Tucci and a few others and get down to business.

Ludicrous, right? Of course. But isn’t all of science fiction? Men can’t go to Mars, scientists haven’t fused their DNA with flies and that whole time machine thing doesn’t work, either. It’s all about suspending your disbelief, and, for a while anyway, The Core plays it straight enough that you just buy into it. It’s not until the mission is well underway that said suspension starts falling apart, probably because the movie is just too darned long. And the mission – its Armageddon half – is actually the least interesting part of the movie. I much more enjoyed the setup – the Deep Impact half – where the disaster scenes carry a little mystery, the Space Shuttle is forced to land in a Los Angeles sewer ditch and citizens panic as all of Rome’s monuments are blown to model bits.

The acting isn’t all that bad, just the dialogue. Eckhart makes for a likeable all-brains hero, though this must be one of the easiest slum jobs for an Academy Award winner, as Swank has to do little more than sit in a chair and rattle off some numbers. The weakest link here, however, is Road Trip freak D.J. Qualls as a hacker named Rat. He likes Xena and Hot Pockets, and can do anything with computers – and is just plain annoying. He’s this film’s Jar-Jar

The DVD has a making-of documentary and several deleted scenes, but the movie itself is so padded, by the time it was over, I didn’t care to extend my Core experience. This film isn’t the disaster critics made it out to be; it’s just a disaster film that doesn’t know when to quit, but it’s certainly worth a rental.

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Rod Lott is the publisher of Hitch Magazine: The Journal of Pop Culture Absurdity.

The sly, rambunctious spirit of Evil Dead 2 lives on in Cabin Fever, an outrageous, balls-to-the-wall horror film that marks the directorial debut of David Lynch protégé Eli Roth. Without name stars, all bets are off as to who will survive (and what will left of them?) the flesh-eating virus that turns a week-long vacation into a nightmare.

Five college students (among them, Rider Strong of TV’s Boy Meets World and Jordan Ladd, the gorgeous daughter of Charlie’s Angel Cheryl) go to a remote cabin in the woods for a leisurely stay of sex, drugs and copious beer drinking.  Their bacchanalian plans soon go awry at the appearance of a hermit with sizzling skin. They “accidentally” set him on fire and he runs off, but their problems have only just begun. One by one, they start exhibiting the same symptoms, from oozing open sores to projectile blood-puking.

Though it has a few jolts, the film can’t truly qualify as scary, but Roth casts an ominous area throughout, even when it veers 180? into huge laughs. It’s part homage and send-up to ‘70s horror films, but never becomes in danger of stooping to the self-conscious level of Scary Movie. All the gags – from the kung-fu kid to the errant deer – work within the horror context; the humor doesn’t jar you out of the story nor does it wink at the audience. And nor would it need to, because you’re 100 percent into the ride.

Since I enjoyed every minute of it, Cabin Fever may be the most fun movie I’ve seen all year. Roth channels everyone from Raimi to Romero and whips up a zippy, delirious experience that hopefully is the start of a long and wonderful career.

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Rod Lott is the publisher of Hitch Magazine: The Journal of Pop Culture Absurdity.

In this English-language actioner from Hong Kong, two cops (one of whom is Aaron Kwok of Storm Riders, though they look so much like twins, I could hardly tell them apart) are out to quash a mob ring that, for the first time, is channeling drugs into mainland China. Heading the operation is cocksure Mark Dacascos (of Brotherhood of the Wolf and Cradle 2 the Grave), eager to work out the details of a $14 million coke transaction with his visiting supplier, played by rap star Coolio, who must’ve had it worked into his contract to have his character be named Coolio as well. Three times he says, “Man, I could get used to this ***censored***!” Assisting them is a mysterious cutie not afraid to strip naked when she’s accused of wearing a wire.

For all its flaws – not much of a story, Coolio – China Strike Force delivers in the action department. From the opening training sequence, the film moves to a foot chase on a busy highway with the pursued and pursuer eventually jumping from moving vehicle to moving vehicle. There’s also a great, high-octane car chase between a Lamborghini and a race car, plus several rounds of martial-arts showdowns. But the biggest and best stunt is saved for last, with the characters battling on a constantly tilting plate-glass window suspended high above the city.

Not surprisingly, old pro Stanley Tong – director of several Jackie Chan films, including Rumble in the Bronx and Supercop – is behind the camera. The affable leads all speak English very well, so no one can accuse Miramax of poor dubbing this time around. Be sure and stick around for the Chan-tastic ouch-takes at the end credits.

The DVD includes trailers for other martial-arts-related Dimension films, including Shaolin Soccer, Invincible, Equilibrium and Quentin Tarnatino’s hotly anticipated Kill Bill.

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Rod Lott is the publisher of Hitch Magazine: The Journal of Pop Culture Absurdity.