For a September, it was a very good month at the movies.  But now is when things really start picking up through the end of the year, with Oscar contenders cropping up here and there for the next four months.

No Micro Reviews this month.  There was a Perfect Storm that limited my viewing of new DVD releases.  1) I caught a lot of the new releases at the theater, and have already reviewed them.  2) College and Pro Football has started in earnest, limiting my time.  3) The movies that I hadn’t caught at the theater were ones that really sucked.  I didn’t want to see them then; I don’t want to see them now.

The only exception was “Prince of Persia: Sands of Time”.  Meh.

It wasn’t bad, and if you compare it to other movies based on video games, it’s pretty good.  But that’s like saying you have more teeth than a Pittsburgh Steelers’ fan.

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Ben Affleck completes a most unlikely career resurrection as the director, co-screenwriter, and star of the gritty heist thriller “The Town”, a riveting character driven cops and robbers film that proves Affleck was no one-hit wonder behind the camera after his brilliant directing debut with “Gone Baby Gone”.

Affleck is a bit more ambitious in his second effort.  While his brother Casey carried the acting weight of the first film, Ben chooses this time to take the lead role himself, playing in essence a version of the Bostonian working class schlub he portrayed in “Good Will Hunting”.  Here he plays Doug MacRay, a Charlestown criminal who almost made it out of the environment he was born into.  Growing up with a single father who was a bank robber, you would have expected nothing less, but Doug was a talented hockey player who was drafted in the NHL.  Alas, his career never took off, and instead of using the opportunities sports gave him to break away, he fell right back in with the same old crowd.

Similar to “Good Will Hunting”, which Affleck also co-wrote, it is all about the close group of friends one hangs with when it comes to living life in Boston, but this group is a lot more dangerous than the Southies led by Matt Damon in the other film.  Here, his number one friend is the highly strung Jimmy Coughlin (Jeremy Renner), a sociopath of the first degree, and definitely a bad influence on Doug.  Worst yet is that he is the brother of Doug’s sometimes girl-friend Krista (Blake Lively), an oxycontin addicted single mother.

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If you really liked the movie “Desperado”, but thought that it needed:

• Less Plot -
• More bloody gore -
• More gratuitous nudity -
• Less emphasis on acting ability -
• A much uglier hero -

Do I have a movie for you!

“Machete” delivers all of these things, and then some. 

You want to see an actor once thought as the greatest in his generation selling out for a cartoon role?  I give you Robert De Niro as a racist state senator taking pride in being filmed shooting an unarmed illegal immigrant.

You want former “stars” playing characters less fleshed out than DeNiro’s?  Say hello to Steven Seagal and Don Johnson competing for the saddest case of “We used to be hot studs, but now we are fat and old.”

You want really hot looking women attracted to possibly the ugliest actor in Hollywood?  Feast your eyes on Michelle Rodriguez, Jessica Alba, and Lindsay Lohan all lusting after Danny Trejo.

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There has been only one time before now when I have reviewed a DVD viewing of a foreign film that had limited release in the United States.  That movie was the Irish indie “Once”, and it was a case where I thought the movie to be so special as to warrant a review so that others who had perhaps not heard of it might give it a try.

Today I will do a second-ever review of a film out on DVD, and this will be the first time ever that I’ve reviewed a foreign language film.  The reason for that is that I’m not a huge fan of the standard, avant-garde artsy-fartsy Bergman/Fellini type films.

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” does not fall into that category.  Instead, it falls primarily into the “Mystery/Thriller” category, and could probably be described most succinctly as a Goth-Girl “Silence of the Lambs” set in Sweden. 

Although that description is accurate, it does not tell the full story of this extraordinary film.

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