Ambitious but eventually imploding in a crescendo of cliches, Slumdog Millionaire will likely win this year’s Overhyped Film of the Year Award. The first forty minutes of this film are impressive and very natural; the best scene involves the extreme lengths protagonist Jamal will go through to get a movie idol’s autograph. The exposition is also a damning expose of the cruelty visited upon India’s children. One particularly harrowing scene involves Jamal and his best friend Salim running for their lives from a mob intent on killing every Muslim in sight; the two boys running into an Apocalypse Now level hallucination (or was it real?) of the god Rama. Weird, good stuff there.

Unfortunately, the film begins to collapse upon its own weight and pretensions with its clumsy, implausible character development, particularly in the case of Salim. After Salim, for all intensive purposes, severs his brotherhood with Jamal with a gun and rape, we fast forward to the men now as young adults, renewing their relationship. (One punch to the face makes amends). This contrivance allows Jamal to attempt to rescue his lady love Latika, and he hatches a frankly retarded scheme of whisking her away at an train station. Salim lurches back and forth between good and evil like Long John Silver on meth. All of these episodes is done in the context of answering questions to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, which only adds another layer of contrivance.

Slumdog eventually degenerates into Ye Olde Underdog Triumphs With Everyone Feeling the Tension flick, complete with a hackneyed cross section of demographic India cheering on the plucky chai-walla on an inexplicably popular TV game show. The closing scenes are so cliche that it fails the Mute Button Test. That is, you could hit the mute button, and say aloud what you think the dialog will be, and you’ll probably be right.

The fatal flaw of Slumdog, beyond the clumsy editing and ridiculous contrivances, is that Boyle utterly fails to capture an appropriate tone for the film. I suppose Boyle was attempting to capture a gritty portrait of the hardknock life of India’s poor, (which he brilliantly succeeds in doing in the first half of the film), but he makes the woeful misjudgment of directing the film towards a romantic adventure, complete with dastardly cardboard villains and a useless damsel in distress. The love story of Jamal and Latika is essentially shoehorned into the story, and the zero chemistry between Dev Patel and Frieda Pinto doesn’t help matters.

With its stilted dialog and three dozen plot conveniences, Slumdog Millionaire is a very frustrating film, particularly after the promising first half. Slumdog is a superbly-photographed, well-scored but ultimately mediocre film that veers away from its dark first half in favor of a crowd pleasing rags to riches story. So, if you’re in a crowd and only want to be pleased, this film is for you. Otherwise, give this sugar coated exercise in poverty voyeurism a pass.

***Warning: Spoilers Ahead***

It doesn’t matter whether you’re dealing with some hyper-realistic family drama set in modern day Cleveland, or a space opera involving bug-eyed aliens intent on Armageddon/Ragnarok. Films must adhere to an INTERNAL LOGIC,thereby creating a series of circumstances that a) are more or less seem plausible given the premise and b) involve characters who react in a plausible manner in the given circumstances, no matter how extraordinary or mundane.

But for feck’s sake, I’m not here to lecture you about internal logic. Develop an appreciation for this lost cinematic art on your own damn time.

Star Trek is a spectacular failure on any number of fronts. First, we’re introduced to a little kid who is, as far as I can tell, is borderline psychotic/suicidal. Lil’ Kirk drives an antique Corvette off a cliff, nearly killing himself. C’mon, just indulge me for ten seconds. When you were a wee lad, did it ever, ever occur to do something like that? Don’t you think the circumstances to drive a child to do such an extreme act are worth examining? Naaah…he’s just being a cool, reckless rebel without a cause. We also get a Nokia product placement because Nokia will still exist in the 25th century. Now there’s a scary thought.

Fast forward to Cadet Kirk. First we get this ridiculous contrivance that “all of Starfleet is tied up in one system,” so when Vulcan is under attack, let’s send an all-cadet fleet to protect Vulcan. Huh? Again, I’m no General Eisenhower, but that sounds like pretty piss-poor military planning to me. And what the devil was the entire, experienced Starfleet doing in one system? Never mind, it’s a (drumroll and fanfare please) PLOT DEVICE. You are hereby order to accept without question the all-knowing PLOT DEVICE, for without it, we have no plot.

And Lord have mercy, this movie should have been called Plot Device Trek. Cadet Kirk seemingly out of nowhere gets promoted immediately to First Officer without going through any ranks. And when First Officer Kirk gets insubordinate with rule stickler Spock, what does Spock do? MAROON HIM ON A ICE PLANET? Now I don’t have the blueprints to the USS Enterprise handy, but I imagine those starships do come equipped with a brig. So Spock does something nearly tantamount to murder (as Kirk is almost torn to pieces by not one, but two ice planet monsters in the film’s most flagrant theft of Star Wars), but it works out for the best, ’cause Kirk JUST HAPPENS to stumble upon the cave where Back to the Future Spock is residing. How convenient.

After a while, I stopped noting the Plot Devices, and just gritted my teeth as the storyline turned from confusing to downright incoherent…something about some pissed off Romulan miners with facial tattoos flying around in this all-powerful spaceship that can shoot antimatter into planets and blow ‘em up real good (inadvertently conjuring up John Carpenter’s Dark Star), and said Romulans waiting around for 20 odd years for Back to the Future Spock to show up. And they got this thick chain snaking down to the planet, and no one can do anything about it, but somehow everyone knows it’s for blowing up planets. Um, what?

I suppose in a more charitable mood, I could deal with the clumsy plotting were it not for the destroyed planets in question. Again, indulge me for a moment. Close your eyes, imagine you’re in the Star Trek universe, working somewhere other than Earth. You just got the news that Earth got blown to pieces, along with the six billion people on it.

Now open your eyes. If you have any scrap of humanity in you, you’d probably start screaming, smash your head against the nearest wall, and lose your mind for a good month or two as you come to grips with your whole reality being shattered. Hell, that premise alone could be the entire movie. But not in Movie Land. The wholesale destruction of Romulus and Vulcan are…yep, you guessed it…PLOT DEVICES. Spock does freak out a little bit, but he just glibly remarks, “Now I’m an endangered species” because now there’s only like, 10,000 Vulcans left. Oh well, shit happens.

Star Trek even fails in its main conceit: the character development of the Star Trek icons. We’re only given cursory looks at Kirk and Spock’s past, and we learn next to nothing about Sulu, Chekov, Uhura, and Scotty (a horribly miscast Simon Pegg), other than they show up for the obligatory “the gang’s all here” scenes. The only character that I found intriguing was Dr. McCoy, played by a grizzled and wonderful Karl Urban. We learn he’s freshly divorced, about two beers short of six pack, and has some serious hangups. Urban nails this character with perfection, and honestly, he was the only character I really cared about.

And therein lies the source of Star Trek‘s miserable failure. Star Trek is an extremely timid film, pandering to both anal-retentive fanboys who must have everything just right, and middle-brow blockbuster zombies who like big explosions and the complete avoidance of anything challenging their suburban preconceptions. If you really examine the characters of the original series, all the characters were seriously off their rockers. Kirk was a textbook narcissist, Spock smothered his human side to maniacal levels, Scotty cared more about machines than people, Chekov was probably on meth, and Sulu and Uhura were Vulcan wanna-bees. All of these psychological hang-ups could have made for beautiful cinematic fodder…an examination of what kind of nutjobs would risk their lives and fling themselves in the merciless vacuum of space. But noooo….we can’t afford to offend, confuse, or otherwise frighten the fanboys and SUV moms & broods.

So let’s stick to the Michael Bay game plan of a surefire moneymaker and crowd pleaser. I will bet you dollars to donuts that you will completely forget about Star Trek the moment you step out of the theater. For Star Trek is the most forgettable film since…Jesus, when was the last memorable Star Trek film?

But to end this review on a positive note…Bless my heart, Wrath of Khan just gets better and better with age.

The mockumentary was an unfortunate byproduct of the Neorealist movement, using a genre associated with “truth” to portray a fictional story, either to fool the viewer or add a layer of verisimilitude to something that’s inherently false. Redacted is an abhorrent story, atrociously acted and filmed in a deliberately amateurish fashion with cheap prosumer cameras. Are we supposed to be impressed that Brian De Palma is conducting a masturbatory exercise in “cinema verite” to deliver the old saw about war making monsters of decent men? He already made that point, badly, in Casualties of War, only this time the events take place in Iraq and aren’t exactingly framed and choreographed. Was it really necessary to repackage the same message for the YouTube generation?

Okay, so anyone with a decent Internet connection has access to any number of filmed atrocities, anyone who subscribes to a newspaper has an ever changing gallery of horrors for their reading pleasure. In the future, the level of detail and breadth of information can only increase. The thesis of Redacted seems to be “this is what you’re not seeing”, as would be suggested by the title. Yet the film doesn’t tell us anything of worth, pretending that the fact of collateral damage is in itself worthy of magnifying and rubbing in the audience’s face. Most insultingly, De Palma must cheat to convey information that the mockumentary framework is too weak to support; reverse angles and mysterious POV shots indicate that this “realism” is really just the same obsessively choreographed procession of ugliness found in umpteen Serious War Dramas.

What of the “villains”, who might as well paint their camo helmets black and twirl their mustaches? High school caliber acting aside, their characters have no motivations or humanity under their husks of personae. The hero seems to have ESP and keeps his camera running constantly, never needing to change batteries, rest or deal with technical problems. This was easy to oversee in Cloverfield, but here the story is so drawn out, obvious, and unpleasant that one’s mind invariably wanders. Is there even a reward for sitting through 90 minutes of one-dimensional “drama”, self-righteous arguing in favor of something to which no one is opposed, shakycam, and choreographed “reality”? Sure, there’s some shots of mutilated corpses, charred corpses, bleeding men and women who’ll soon be corpses, ad naus.

Anyone who’d exploit real deaths to further his own agenda does not deserve to be called an artist, anyone who’d stoop so low deserves to have his directing privileges revoked for life. The awful coda of Waltz with Bashir committed a similar sin, but Ari Folman was actually present at said scene and the preceding 90 minutes were endlessly inventive. Brian De Palma is a fucking hack who’d be damned if he ever would set foot in an actual war zone, so he did the next best thing and damned himself by making this atrocity.