Rarely in the history of film are we ever given the chance to witness a collaboration of the greatest living actors working cohesively. Attempts have been made in the past with films like Heat, but most of the time audiences are left disappointed. I learned my lesson years ago while trying to figure out why NFL's Pro Bowl was so boring, finally coming to the realization that runs parallel to stockpiling great actors in films-- we anticipate too much. In The Score, director Frank Oz pulls off the near impossible by managing three generations of great actors, all while meticulously crafting a great old-fashioned, trust-no-one heist film.

Robert Deniro stars as Nick, a thief who is coming to terms with his life as a criminal. He's ready to give up on his "night job" and come clean, when he comes across the opportunity of a lifetime, the final heist that will allow him to be financially set for life.

In order for Nick to pull this off, he has to work with Jackie (Edward Norton), who is a young cocky unknown thief. Jackie is the inside man, and is the only one who knows all the details of building, cameras and security and must be trusted, which is where one of Deniro's dilemmas lie.

So the big question is, "Do we get to see the Brando, Deniro and Norton share a scene together?" The answer is yes, and unlike the aforementioned Heat which involved Pacino and Deniro, these scenes work. The synergy between this group of actors works wonderfully, as each person knows his place unlike other films where everyone wants to steal the spotlight.

It's unfortunate that Brando (considered the greatest living actor) is only used in four or five scenes, but when he shares his screen time with Deniro, it's bittersweet because you can see the legacy of the method actor being passed on to the next generation.

Edward Norton holds his own as well. His performance as a mentally challenged janitor makes us forget his performance in Primal Fear. Most scenes in The Score are between Deniro and Norton, and they seem to work flawlessly.

Frank Oz does a great job of setting the mood of this film. Most interior shots are done using non-traditional lighting, having most of the actors sit back partially covered in shadows, which adds more mystery to each character. For a man most known for work with puppets and comedies (Bowfinger, What About Bob?), Oz does a great job of breaking out of his mold and moving up the ladder.

In a world where most heist films involve over-the-top characters and plots (Snatch, Jackie Brown), The Score (maintaining a small cast and a solid storyline with a surprise ending) demonstrates a quality that has been lost over the years-- less is more. B+ --Neal James

MOVIE REVIEW

LEGALLY BLONDE

I hate L.A. I especially hate L.A. when its own perception of what's great about L.A. turns out to be exactly what the rest of us hate about it. Legally Blonde stars Reese Witherspoon (you're much better than this, honey) as a Valley Girl named Elle Woods. Now, the Valley Girl has been a tried and true stereotype since Frank Zappa introduced the concept to the world, and films have been falling all over themselves to make fun of Valley Girls for years now. It's the same genre as the Beauty Pageant film (also enjoying a renaissance right now): look how shallow these people are! Don't we feel superior to them, even though they have more money than us and look better than us and don't have a care in the world? Sure, it looks like these Valley Girls have everything, but they're stupid! At least we've got brains!

It was a nice cathartic genre, really. After all, Valley Girls don't actually exist (do they?). They're just straw dummies we set up and beat up to feel better about whatever situation we're in. Good clean fun. Then came Clueless, which ruined everything. In Clueless, we're supposed to root for the Valley Girls. Why? Fuck 'em. It was a twisted Hollywood attempt at getting across a moral of acceptance and tolerance ... but must we really tolerate a subset of ditzy idiots who are only a fictional comic relief stereotype? I don't care if they have hopes and fears and love their step-brothers. Let 'em rot.

Legally Blonde takes it one step further. You see, Elle is smart. A smart blonde. A smart blonde Valley Girl. She's so smart that with a little pluck, determination, and plot contrivance, she manages to get into Harvard Law School, win a coveted internship at a prestigious law firm, depose that law firm's partner as the lead lawyer in a major murder trial, and, of course, win that trial. Obviously a fairy tale, and I wouldn't have minded (as much) if it were played as a fairy tale, but Legally Blonde is made in such a way that part of Elle's growth is her gradual transformation into a (somewhat) real person.

In the beginning, she's all pink and poofy, a Cosmopolitan collector, a chihuahua owner, a homecoming queen and sorority dame. Her Delta Nu sisters are like courtesans. This is all played with maximum style, so much so that I felt violently ill with each new outfit, squeal, and line of inane blonde dialogue. Then, for reasons too stupid to enumerate here, she goes through the above plot and emerges essentially unchanged, just less stylized. She doesn't wear as much pink, isn't as poofy, and her best friends are an upper-crust East Coast preppy girl and a lesbian with a Master's in feminine studies. And every pluck and swell of the score is egging you on: "Cheer! Cheer for her, the princess of the movie, your God!"

I seriously feared for the collapse of civilization.

You see, white L.A. has come to identify itself with the Valley Girl -- she's its mascot, its Statue of Liberty. At first, this was an ironic identification, an acknowledgement of Hollywood's shallow money-grubbing tendencies and obsessions with appearance. Now, it seems the irony has gone away, and Hollywood is asking us to celebrate it because of its shallow money-grubbing tendencies and obsessions with appearance. After all, Hollywood worked very very hard to get smart, so that makes everything else okay, right? It deserves applause and recognition and success for that, okay? Like, love us, because, like, we try really hard, and aren't we cute?

No. A Valley Girl is a Valley Girl. I usually don't harp on this kind of thing, but you've got to wonder how in touch Hollywood movies are when a film about an underdog (a rich, beautiful, smart, charming underdog) overcoming stereotypes contains the following minorities: a gay Cuban pool boy and a fat black nail technician who can breakdance. The rest of the cast is a WASP hive surrounded by beauty queens. I won't cheer for that. Ever. Valley Girls can have their cake and eat it, too, once people with real problems are taken care of.

Until then, I'll continue to tell blonde jokes, legal or otherwise. D -- Chris J. Magyar

MOVIE REVIEW

FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN

There's not too much to say about this movie. If you've seen the promos on TV, you know the animation is absolutely incredible, rendering human figures to a degree more accurate than ever before. The craft displayed in Final Fantasy is, or should be, overwhelming. After all, it could signify the impending doom of the movie star.

The flick, however, is not overwhelming. In fact, it's decidedly underwhelming. While there was technically nothing wrong with the animation, I didn't 'ooh' or 'aah' even once. The action on screen was cool, the aliens were original and extremely well-conceived, and the direction (even the voice acting) was outstanding. Still, I felt ... I don't know, kind of blah about the whole thing.

My dad has had several arthroscopic knee surgeries, and each time, he gets to watch on video while they probe into his leg and destroy the bad cartilage with lasers. He brought the video home one time and invited us to watch. We did, reluctantly, because we all expected it to be gross. It wasn't. Actually, it was kind of boring: red gook here, white junk there.

Now, if my dad had taken a saw to his knee, cracked it open, and invited us to peek-- that would have been gross.

Special effects depend entirely upon suspension of disbelief. The audience has to buy it. Movies have looked to CGI as a more effective way of selling effects, since it requires less suspension of disbelief to buy something that looks utterly real than, say, a puppet. Or so you would think. What's becoming more and more apparent as effects get closer and closer to a facsimile of life is that people don't believe everything they see.

When you see a shakily-animated clay dinosaur crawling across a jungle set, it's easier for you to believe than a CGI T-Rex chasing after a Jeep, simply because your imagination has to fill in for the crude dinosaur. No imagination is involved with the CGI, so if it couldn't happen in real life, your brain tells you it's not happening, no matter how 'real' it looks.

That's why the best uses of CGI to date have been in historical pictures like Titanic and Pearl Harbor. These are scenes we know happened, and CGI supplies us with a 'real' recreation of true, believable events. In Final Fantasy, there's simply no precedent for pinkish ghosts invading the Earth to steal our bluish souls by swooping around like Chinese dragons. Because of that, Final Fantasy would have been better off using hand-drawn animation, forcing us to imagine what it would be like if this were true. As it is, our disbelief has no reason to go on suspension, and Final Fantasy's vision of the future, no matter how fantastic it looks, remains a mere exercise in 1s and 0s, not a work of art. C --Chris J. Magyar

MOVIE REVIEW

LOST AND DELIRIOUS

I was amped to pull a movie about hot young lesbians (one of them a Coyote Ugly girl) in a private all-girls academy through "The Man Show" wringer. But instead of succumbing to Lost and Delirious' innate skinemax after-dark charms, I found myself lightly buying into its after-school-special mystique.

It starts out with all the beloved soft-core porn elements. The timid new girl on campus "Mouse" (Mischa Barton), the rebellious young firecracker (Piper Perabo), and the chesty all-American beauty (Jessica Pare) are all roommates in a girls' private academy, for shit's-sake. Opening with some spiked punch and rock-n-roll, the action quickly moves to girls kissing and then on to some steamy dorm-room sex between Paulie (Perabo) and Victoria (Pare). So I should have brought some beer, and my buddies to high-five. But soon after the sex, the movie becomes a torrid stew of metaphors and heartbreak as Victoria dumps Paulie rather unapologetically so her God-fearing parents don't find out she likes chicks.

Paulie trains this wounded hawk that she finds and starts calling herself "The Raptor," and Kicking Bird from Dances With Wolves (Gahram Greene) plays this wise old gardener, Joe. So with the hawk you get the fly-away-from-all-of-this-pain-and-madness metaphor, and from Kicking Bird, you get growth, change, and rejuvenation talk. All the men in the film, spare Joe, are kind of bratty and horny, so maybe there's something to all of the fencing that Paulie does in her spare time. You know, swords. And perhaps Victoria is rather Victorian with her actions and hang-ups. Oh yeah, and hawks eat mice right?

The three girls share their losses with each other in an earlier scene, and after the breakup, their individual heartbreaks begin to deepen.

Paulie was adopted by a rich family and is waiting to hear from her biological mother. Mouse's mother has died, and her father is an ass. Victoria resents her parents but needs them in her life. These problems all kind of swirl together as Paulie's obsession with the cold Victoria festers. Mouse serves as a narrator sporadically throughout the picture. She is sort of the hapless victim of the situation who tries to help Paulie and Victoria.

All this conflict and resolution is actually pretty interesting, and pretty fucking emotional. I kind of got into this movie. But keep in mind that for some reason, I really like Steel Magnolias. Maybe I should be stopped before it's too late. C --Josh Tyson

DVD REPORT

THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES (1971)

Vincent Price had three superior periods as a horror movie star. The first was in the '50s, when he starred in such cheesy William Castle flicks as House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler. In the '60s came the famous faux-Edgar Allen Poe 'adaptations' he made with Roger Corman. Then in the '70s he starred in some enduring black comedies. The Abominable Dr. Phibes and especially Theater of Blood are mini-classics, with Dr. Phibes Rises Again remaining a more than decent sequel.

The British seem to have a better feel for this sort of thing, probably because their actors tend to be more understated and shaded in their performances. The film follows the adventures of anti-hero Anton Phibes. Phibes apparently perished in a fiery car accident while rushing to a hospital to be with his injured wife. She herself would also die on the operating table.

Years later, a series of improbably grotesque and baroque deaths begin to occur. The police are at a loss as the bodies begin to pile up, victimized by bats and bees and other bizarre like. One fellow is even found frozen to death on a summer's day inside his car. Eventually the pieces fall together: Phibes, a mechanical genius, is indeed alive (sort of), and is wreaking his revenge on those he believes responsible for his wife's death. His methods are based on the ten Biblical plagues that God visited on Egypt.

I can't really stress how much fun this film is. As with all successful horror/comedies, this one works in both directions. The acting is top-notch, the script clever and the direction inspired. And for a film that undoubtedly sported a comparatively meager budget, it looks downright sumptuous. If you ever want a good handle on what the word 'droll' means, this film is the very definition.

Only the film's trailer is included here, but it's a doozy. It's pretty elaborate, in fact, so you might want to watch the film before viewing it. I'd like to take a second to commend MGM on their cult DVD output. They have come under much criticism for releasing a slew of bareboned discs. All I can say, speaking as a veteran of the 20-year reign of the VHS tape, is that DVD fans have apparently gotten way too spoiled way too fast.

While companies like Warner Brothers sit on huge catalogs of films and seemingly release discs with an eye-dropper-- at this rate it'll be a decade before even outright classic WB movies like Them! and The Thing From Another World are released-- MGM is putting out a veritable flood of enjoyable schlock with often gorgeous, (usually) widescreen transfers and selling them for a pittance. With a MSRP of only $15, discs like this one can often be found on the web selling for less than $12 or even $10.

Compare this with the Image's prolific Wade Williams collection of '50s and '60s sci-fi schlock. Don't get me wrong, I love their stuff. Even so, they are equally bereft of extras and generally bare at a MSRP of $25, ten bucks higher than the MGM stuff. Yet they haven't come under nearly as much criticism by fans. Meanwhile, stuff like The Things With Two Heads, never even released on VHS, will soon be released in editions so superior to video that there's no comparison and at a price half of what tapes in their heyday ever sold for. B+ --Ken Begg

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