PLANET SICK-BOY MOVIE CAPSULES

Let me just say this up front – I did not see all of Tango. I literally ran out of the theater about 45 minutes into it. And I was way up in the balcony, so you could actually say the film is "breathtaking". Luckily, there isn’t a theater in the world built strong enough to keep me watching something this boring.

The film is about a guy directing a film about dancing. When he’s not filming dancing, he’s thinking about dancing. And when he’s not thinking about dancing, he’s asleep and dreaming about dancing. Dancing, dancing, dancing. Dancing, dancing, dancing. Bored reading about it? Then why would you want to watch it?

Granted, Carlos Saura’s movies are an acquired taste, but I can’t see why a film this tedious and uninteresting can be nominated for Best Foreign Film while something daring and original like The Celebration is ignored. The film does have an appealing look thanks to cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now), but if you’ve seen Saura’s previous dancing flick Flamenco, there is no need to see Tango. Better yet, go rent Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom. In Spanish with English subtitles (1:55 – for adult situations)

Jurassic Park brought dinosaurs to modern time, but here in T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous, a young girl is transported back to the time the giant lizards roamed the Earth. The girl is sixteen-year-old Ally Hayden (Liz Stauber, Mark Wahlberg’s wife in Three Kings), who is the daughter of archeologist Dr. Donald Hayden (Peter Horton, Brimstone). The pouty Ally is always disappointed because she isn’t old enough to accompany her dad on the big digs.

When Dr. Hayden discovers what appears to be a dinosaur egg, Ally accidentally cracks it open and finds herself in the Cretaceous period. She hooks up with the famous archeologist Barnum Brown and early dinosaur artist Charles Knight. Oh, yeah - she also meets a hungry T-Rex.

There isn’t really too much to offer in terms of plot or character development, but heck – you’re not going to see that stuff. You’re going to watch 3D stuff jump out of the screen at you. And it does. The film’s visual depth is quite stunning, but the appearance of the frightening dinosaurs are few and far between. (0:45 – but contains some scary dinosaur stuff that may frighten youngsters)

From the guys who made Kingpin, which is the Holy Grail of American comedy in the 1990’s. Ben Stiller stars as a high school geek who, twelve years later, seeks out his one true love (Cameron Diaz) from the high school prom. He hires a private eye (Matt Dillon) to track her down, but he falls for her, too. There’s some other stuff that happened, but I think that part of my brain fell out of my nose from laughing so hard. Let’s just say that Mary breaks new ground in sight gags and political incorrectness. And that’s such a good thing. (1:58 –

for language, sexual undertones and general raunch)

Terrence Malick (Days of Heaven) sure picked a bad year to make his comeback. The reclusive writer/director, who hasn’t made a film in over twenty years, chose to tell an epic tale of man’s struggle against itself and nature during an integral battle on a small island in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. It would be just his luck to have it come out in the same year as Saving Private Ryan. The comparisons will be inevitable, but completely unfair as Ryan was more of "big-bang" action picture while The Thin Red Line is more of an intense character study of the effects of war on its combatants. Malick offers a lot more characters and they aren’t the typical "cookie-cutter" roles as previously seen in Ryan. Intensely beautiful, the film is as powerfully long as it is moving and in a pre-Ryan world, it probably would have been a heavy Oscar favorite. (2:48 –

for graphic violence and language)

Five secondary school students and a stray cat star in this sluggishly paced but otherwise harmless drama about coming of age in South Korea. Each have different wants and goals, which we learn as the cat is passed back and forth between the girls like the talking stick at a Management Team Product Development Retreat and Team Building Seminar. One is a yuppie go-getter with a dead-end job, one does volunteer work, and another dreams of studying abroad even though she lacks the cash to do so. A pair of Chinese twins seem fairly jovial (they're the comic relief) even though they don't have much going on. A nice slice of life about young women from the port town of Incheon, which we last saw when South Korea's win over Portugal put the US into the Round of 16 in this year's World Cup. (1:52 – )

I'm sure there are a lot of people who would get excited about the prospect of a feature-film version of Puccini's Tosca. Those individuals are known as opera fans. I can't imagine anyone other than them beating down the theatre door to see a two-hour film full of people singing in another language. Then again, my opera knowledge was culled strictly from Bugs Bunny cartoons, so what the hell do I know?

Is Benoît Jacquot's big-screen version beautiful? You bet. There might not be a more glowingly photographed film all year. Is the acting solid? Hell, yeah. Is there enough chemistry between the characters? There's even a bit to spare. Is the story interesting? Maybe. It's a tragedy, and I like tragedy, but I'd still rather watch a rerun of The Powerpuff Girls than a filmed opera. Now, if somebody made a documentary about the making of Tosca (like last year's look at Zhang Yimou's take on Puccini's Turandot), I'd be a little more interested. Most people who aren't into opera are probably going to feel the same way I do. (1:59 – )