Sin Nombre

Sin Nomre is a film in Spanish with balls, set in Mexico and Central America with a lineage that's anything but Spanish. Director Cary Fukunaga is the ringer at the center of the maelstrom.
Born of Japanese and Swedish blood and raised in California, Fukunaga has fashioned a tale of intrigue and gang relations that many will compare to City of God, but the truth is that Sin Nombre's best moments are derived from the thrilling chase narrative that forms the last part of the film and not its chilling portrayal of young adult gangs.
Two stories combine in the middle. A young woman from Honduras, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), joins a caravan trying to make it across the US border. In Mexico a vicious gang led by multi-tattooed psychopaths are initiating new members. The entrance to the org can be had for simply killing another member. When one lad Smiley, not even at the age of puberty, is handed a zip gun you can feel his allegiance to ruthless power. It's in this gang that the leader Lil' Mago has killed Willy's girlfriend while trying to rape her. Playing Willy in a conflicted manner Edgar Flores rises to the opportunity to become the moral center of the film. 
The gang flourishes in Tapachula, Mexico and plans to rob immigrants who board the trains headed to the US. Tapachula is located at the very southeastern bottom of Mexico, close to Guatemala. Hopping the train still means several days of travel for Sayra and her friends to reach their goal.
Along the train top the mass of illegal riders, not unlike the impoverished settlers hitching in Days of Heaven, a kind of community flourishes and its here that Willy and Sayra notice each other. As much to revenge the death of his girlfriend as well as for a general sense of loyalty to the others Willie double-crosses Lil' Mago. This sets up the chase with Willie and Sayra teaming up for the border crossing and avoiding ambushes by the rest of Lil' Mago's gang at every junction.
Sin Nombre looks beautiful whether through atmospheric photography of the train at sunset or the sharp action images that dot its landscape. One guy falling off the train happens so quickly and yet so precisely that you'll marvel at the stunt choreography as well. A well thought out conclusion will only further impact audiences and have them anxiously wanting to talk about Sin Nombre as soon as it's over.

Observe and Report

Observe and Report should just be called Vomitus and Pubis because therein lies its spine. The fat guy's cock gets more screen time than Viola Davis in Doubt. Years from now film historians will recall how in 2009 Warner Brothers led the charge to more permissive male genitalia on display, first in the vastly superior Watchmen and now in Observe and Report.
Observe and Report digs deep into the ugly recess of the human soul only with a few jokes to let you know the writer/director (Jody Hill, The Foot Fist Way) doesn't take the senseless beatings and violence too seriously. There are moments that will make even detractors, of which I am one, laugh out loud. It works like this - I see you slip on a banana peel and I laugh quite hard even though I am seriously worried about your health. Observe and Report would've worked had it played its sociopathic revenge seriously in the manner of Taxi Driver or even more apt Der Starke Ferdinand (Strongman Ferdinand, a 1976 film from Alexander Kluge) since O&R seems to be modeled after that German films depiction of a sad sack fascist security guard who assassinates a politician and then when arrested asks to be made head of state security since he knows the system's flaws.
Hill's humor derives from portraying his characters as disgusting whether it's because of their beauty or lack of same or even because of their religious views. John Waters creates similar kinds of grotesque views of humanity but he gives his population humanity. Hill only gives us asshole after asshole and with no sign of redemption or especially coolness. Observe and Report exists only to chronicle obsession and stalking. Seth Rogen playing the mall security job has done better work in similar genre-mixing stews like Pineapple Express. Similarities to Paul Blart Mall Cop are mere coincidence yet indicative of the synchronicity of Hollywood to mainstream pap.
As if to hammer home how sophomoric his skills are Hill pleasures his audience with rhyming visuals. The sequence of the flasher being chased through the mall involves lots of traveling takes, lots of going around corner shots and since the naked offender is fully exposed some flesh colored nylon holding his cock in place. We can see the dangle but the movie dictates that it's not swinging to and fro. Earlier on Hill has done a weak montage of Rogen driving in his mall cart and the film uses dissolves and revolving tracking shots. As unsophisticated as this filmmaking comes across it fits the mall world as snugly as Anna Faris wears her all too brief role as the mall's ditzy cosmetics hostess. Michael Pena also wastes his time in an underdeveloped role as Rogen's assistant.
At one point in Observe and Report Ray Liotta, playing a police detective whose patience has been pulled taunt by Rogen, decides to stage a revenge prank. He invites Rogen to his office to give him the results of Rogen's admittance test to the police academy only beforehand he lets his detective buddy hide in the office closet to listen in. While Liotta is explaining to Rogen that his psychological profile indicates he's a danger to himself and others the guy listening in the next room walks out and states: "I was going to stay and laugh but this is too brutal." My feeling exactly.

Roswell 50th vs. Alien Trespass

Here was my forked path: write a scathing review of the terrible Alien Trespass or recall an article from the vault that chronicles the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Roswell UFO crash from 1997.
Alien Trespass was directed without an ounce of suspense or recognition of parody. Basically it's a color version of 50s sci-fi melodrama, mainly It Came From Outer Space (1953, and originally in 3-D) with a touch of Invasion of the Saucer Men and a dash of The Blob. It Came From Outer Space had a great sense of timing, and that great speech by the sheriff about how people react according to the temperature. Alien Trespass has no sense or feel for satire, which is how this affair would work. The entire experience was like seeing something that should be on the Sci-Fi Channel (for those in the know, no longer known by that moniker) late at night.
So enough of that 50s retro tomfoolery. If I want to see horror or sci-fi homage done in style I'll stick to Joe Dante or Sam Raimi. Here is an article that recounts the 1997 July 4 celebration in Roswell, New Mexico.
Last year the July 4th holiday was invaded by movie aliens, the blockbuster Independence Day. This year's July 4 will mark the ghost of aliens' past when a keystone of the UFO fascination, the Roswell UFO crash, unfolds as a week long festival marking the 50th anniversary of the event.
All UFO-roads seem to spring from Roswell. You have your debris, crashed spaceship, dead aliens, government cover-ups with a cast of characters big enough to stock two Shakespeare plays, maybe even a top secret explanation. One thing is fact: There's a party going on in Roswell, New Mexico, starting Tuesday, July 1, and running until Sunday, July 7. It's likely this sleepy town of just under 50,000 will burst at the seams as thousands of UFO-crazed truth-seekers converge along its antiquated streets.
The quickest way to get to Roswell from Public News World Headquarters in Houston is to fly to Midland/Odessa, or Lubbock, or El Paso, or if you want a bit of distance, Albuquerque -- and then proceed by charter or vehicle to Roswell, nestled in southeastern New Mexico at the crossroads of state highways 285 and 380. Or, hop on your bike and head towards the sun on Interstate 10; just remember to take a Roscoe at 285 in Fort Stockton.
For those of you from another planet and unfamiliar with cultural meta-myth, in 1947, in a month chock full of UFO sightings, on July 3 (The cover story in this week's Time places this event in mid-June.) ranch foreman Mac Brazel found metallic debris in his pasture. Nearby, the 509th Bomb Group held down the only atomic weapons then in our country's arsenal at a base near Roswell. Within days the military had confiscated the material, and possibly located another site with a crashed spacecraft and dead or injured diminuitive gray aliens.
Three decades went by before people regained their collective memory about the event, whereupon the Roswell incident became the stuff of legend. It also became Roswell's primary industrial base (along with the manufacture of mozarella cheese). In fact, recent elections in Roswell voted in a mayor favorable to exploiting the UFO-tourist connection.
With two museums dedicated to the crash, the UFO Enigma Museum (located at the closed Walker Air Base, 505-347-2275) and the International UFO Museum and Research Center (505-625-9495), along with a symphony, park, and zoo, one doesn't have travel any further than the next state of mind to pray to the aliens.
Tours to the debris and crash sites are also available, though an article in the July '96 Forbes suggests that at least one of the crash sites is bogus, set up by the museum on U.S. Forest Service land.
Of course, we're talking something that happened so long ago that most of the people who were present at the time are dead. For those who like to talk about something a little more recent, try the UFO crash in Varginha, Brazil (January 20, 1996) and the upcoming First World UFO Forum, to be held in amphitheaters of the Legiao da Boa Vontade in Brasilia.
Roswell puts on its UFO celebration like a passion play, forever enshrining whatever the truth was in a veil of hype. The denizens of the Roswell even put on a community production of Ezekiel's Wheel (shades of Waiting for Guffman), an original one act play, starting July 2.
Event '97: The 50th Anniversary of the Roswell Incident segues into the UFO Conference on July 3, featuring a speaker line-up that's a who's-who of the unexplained and abducted. Holy chariots of fire, when the speeches are given by Erich von Daniken, Whitley Strieber, and Stanton Friendman, just three of 12 lecturers, it might be time to listen up.