Manderlay – Lars Von Trier's second of three proposed films about America being stupid is much shorter, has a much higher body count, and more sex than the first did.  That's a recipe for success, if you ask me.  On top of that, he removed the controversial donkey-butchering scene, which is something I could do without seeing.

Just because Von Trier loves to challenge (read: piss off) his audiences, some of the same characters from Dogville return, but are played by different actors.  Some of the same actors return, but they're portraying different characters.  Nicole Kidman's Grace is back, but now her part is filled by the dull Bryce Dallas Howard, who comes off like a cross between a low-rent Claire Danes and a Breakfast Club-era Molly Ringwald.  On the way through Alabama, while her dad (James Caan turns into Willem Dafoe) looks for fresh hunting ground, Grace becomes involved in a slave dispute on a cotton plantation called Manderlay.  That's right: Slaves.  In 1933.

Grace sticks her uppity white nose where it don't belong, mostly to prove a point to Daddy, by "freeing" the plantation's slaves and introducing them to things like Democracy.  Things go badly, paralleling the current Iraq quagmire.  The freed slaves don't particularly want their freedom, or the power to make decisions.  They just want things to go back to the way they were.

Manderlay's sets are similar to those from Dogville.  People call the whole thing "Brechtian," but I'd sound totally pretentious if I said that (mostly because it makes me think of shampoo).  All I know is I love Von Trier's in-your-face attitude about everything, including the insane photo montage over the closing credits, which are set to David Bowie's "Young Americans."  Solid acting all-around (aside from Opie's kid), especially from Danny Glover, who I never thought much about as a talent.

Tim Burton's Corpse Bride – If you've seen the trailers/commercials, you already know the deal: Victor Van Dort (voiced by Johnny Depp) is about to marry Victoria Everglot (Emily Watson) when he accidentally marries the corpse of a dead woman (Helena Bonham Carter).  There isn't much else to the latest Tim Burton animation project: It's a 78-minute movie with four major song-and-dance numbers, so there is little time for anything else.

Bride is spectacularly colorless and its characters, other than being either impossibly round or impossibly skinny, aren't nearly as messed up as you might hope (especially if you're familiar with Burton's book, The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy), but things chance once Victor is dragged down below the frost line for the first time.  I wish somebody had brought up the issue of the Corpse Bride potentially not having enough flesh remaining to consummate their marriage, but I suppose this is a kiddie pic.

Bride's animation is cleaner and much slicker than Burton's A Nightmare Before Christmas.  I kind of like the jerkier, old-school stuff, but that might just be me (give me Jason & the Argonauts over The Polar Express every day of the week, please).  Danny Elfman's score is wonderful, and despite the predictability of the script, I got a little misty at the end.  But I'm blaming that on a serious lack of sleep.  And if you tell anyone, I'll deny it.

Bubble – Bubble is set to be the first offering in a series of six Steven Soderbergh digital films which will be simultaneously released theatrically, on DVD, and on Pay-Per-View.  But it will kind of be like a tree falling in the woods: If nobody cares about the film, does it really matter how many formats it attempts to conquer at the same time?  I mean, mainstream America sure isn't going to go out to see/rent/order up a tight character study featuring actors they've never heard of or seen in their lives.  Anybody looking for Ocean's Thirteen is going to be sorely disappointed.

Even members of the Soderbergh faithful might feel the same way, much like we did about the filmmaker's sole disaster to date, Full Frontal, which also happened to be penned by Bubble screenwriter Coleman Hough.  The film focuses on the lives of two factory workers in an economically depressed town in West Virginia.  Their routines and repetitious activities are thrown out of whack upon the arrival of a new hire, who injects herself into their lives in immediately devastating ways.  Maybe there's a message I missed somewhere, but this is simply a nicely photographed, carefully edited picture with amateur actors filling the cast.  I still couldn't take my eyes off of the screen, but I'm not sure I can recommend this film.  I'd say at least one-third of the audience at my press/industry screening fled Bubble for the safe arms of Brokeback Mountain's gay cowboy sex.

Adam's Apples – I suppose the greatest compliment I could give a film is to say I laughed out loud at the scene where they shot the cat (you know, on account of me liking cats much more than I like people).  And that's exactly what I'll say about the latest from Anders Thomas Jensen, the brilliant writer/director who penned half of the original four Dogme films and made the very entertaining Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself.

Apple's premise will sound hokey, and not accurately portray how dark its humor is.  The film is about a recently paroled Neo-Nazi named Adam (Ulrich Thomsen) who comes to stay at a rural church run by Reverend Ivan (King Arthur's Mads Mikkelsen), whose unconventional means of dealing with conflict are either extremely stupid or beyond brilliant.  Ivan tries to get Adam to set a goal for his 12-week stay, and ends up assigning the shocked skinhead the task of caring for an apple tree and making a cake from its fruits.  Yes, Adam ends up learning a lot of important life lessons, but this isn't sappy storytelling.  There's the cat shooting, for starters.  Also gags about brain tumors, among other things.  Mikkelsen is wonderful and funny as all get-out, and of course, Paprika Steen makes an appearance, as well.

The President's Last Bang – Now don't go making jokes about Clinton and his interns.  This film, instead, is about the 1979 assassination of South Korean President Park Chung-hee.  It's not entirely factual, with writer/director Im Sang-soo likely opting to make the story more cinematic instead of searching for the truth.  The set-up is decent, and the actual assassination plot is pretty dynamic stuff.  What follows, though, is a little dull.  And I know this is probably going to sound really bad (or maybe I'm just being influenced by Sarah Silverman) but Bang had a huge male cast (there are two women), and I really had trouble telling a lot of the actors apart.  In my defense, I have the same problem with white men on reality television shows.  That made the story tough to follow.

Anyways, it goes without saying that Bang was met with some scandal in South Korea.  I'm not sure anyone without a history of that country's politics is going to get much out of this, other than it having a big, cool blood bath in the middle.

a/k/a Tommy Chong – Just when you thought there weren't any more reasons to hate America, along comes this documentary, which chronicles the John Ashcroft/Justice Department's one-year, $12 million post-9/11 investigation into a glass bong internet business run by comedian Tommy Chong's son.  In case you didn't already know, Chong recently served a nine-month sentence in the Federal pokey on a plea bargain agreement taken to keep his wife and son from going down.  The Canadian audience was even more mystified that any American audience is likely to be, and they booed and hissed Dubya off the screen before he could even manage to utter a malapropism.

In addition to seeing Chong preparing for, serving, and returning home from his sentence, we get a lot of background into his childhood and career, where along with Cheech Marin, Chong became both a counter-culture hero and half of the last great "American" comedy duo.  It'll get you mad, but a/k/a should be mandatory viewing for all Americans.  Chong, by the way, arrived at the screening in a low-rider van marked "Correctional Facility."

And of all the night's for the Midnight Movie to start on time, it would have to be the one I couldn't make on time.  So no review of the Luc Besson-produced 13th District.  Sorry, kids.