IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY

IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY

Written and Directed by Angelina Jolie

Somewhere amidst raising countless kids and attending to the demands of being a giant star, Angelina Jolie found the time to write and direct her first movie. Set against the backdrop of the Bosnian war in the early 1990’s, IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY tells the story of Danijel and Ajla (Goran Kostic and Zana Marjanovic), new lovers torn apart by the war who find themselves struggling to keep their love, or even just the idea of it, alive despite being on different sides of the conflict. Jolie shows promise as a filmmaker but she also shows us so much atrocity, that at times, the film is just relentless and borderline preachy.

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THE TOURIST

Written by Florian Henckel von Donnersmark, Christopher McQuarrie and Julian Fellowes

Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmark

Starring Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Paul Bettany and Timothy Dalton

Frank Tupelo: You're ravenous.

Elise Clifton-Ward: Do you mean ravishing?

Frank: Yes, I do.

Elise: You're ravenous.

Some poor sap of a math teacher from Wisconsin is sitting on a train en route to Venice from Paris when it happens. A devastatingly beautiful woman enters his car and spots the empty seat in front of him. Her gaze throws him completely off balance and from the moment she sits down, he doesn’t stand a chance. Who is she? Why would she sit with him when she could sit with any man she wanted? You just know that by the time they get off the train, their lives will be desperately intertwined. This is how Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, two of today’s biggest stars, meet in German director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmark’s first American foray, THE TOURIST. It’s all so old Hollywood but sadly it’s also all so transparently so.

Sometimes star power can have a blinding effect. The wattage can burn so bright that you don’t necessarily see how distracting it is from the actual film. And with stars as big as Depp and Jolie in your picture, it isn’t surprising that von Donnersmark, the man behind Oscar winner, THE LIVES OF OTHERS, didn’t notice that they were not necessarily the best choices for their roles. Depp, with his beautiful hair and instinctual charm, is anything but a believable sap. Still, that charm inevitably saves him from coming off farcical and his decidedly anti-Bourne jaunt across shackled rooftops is certainly amusing. Meanwhile, Jolie seems to have been directed to walk around like a fembot of sorts, cold and false, from her perfect walk to her supposedly British accent. They are stars for a reason though and before long, the impossibly pretty people in the pretty foreign place lull you into comfortable and classical state of intrigue.

The setup for THE TOURIST is straight out of a Hitchcock movie. All the elements of a tantalizing mystery are there but all the goods are given away upfront so there is nothing left to guess at. Of course, seeing as how we don’t live in classical Hollywood, modern necessities like twists and surprises must occur and they are neither twisted nor surprising but at least they aren’t insulting. And so like a real tourist on a mediocre vacation that promised to be so gorgeous in the brochure, the stay is acceptable, at times even enjoyable, but we are happy to know we are going home when the credits roll.

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SALT

Written by Kurt Wimmer

Directed by Philip Noyce

Starring Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor

Evelyn Salt: I'm not who you think I am.

The tagline for SALT poses the question, “Who is Salt?” and after sitting through the incredibly fast-paced spy thriller, I can honestly say that I have no idea who this Salt chick is really.  I can say that the movie that is named for her is riddled with plot holes but when the heroine is as hot and adept at avoiding those holes as Angelina Jolie is, I don’t think it really matters.

When I see a Jolie action film, I’m not looking for anything particularly challenging in terms of depth.  This bodes well for SALT as what little depth director Philip Noyce tries to infuse into the film is shaky at best.  Jolie is Evelyn Salt, a CIA operative who has done incredible things for her country in her time with the agency.  As to what country’s interests she actually serves, well, her loyalties are a little gray there.  When a Russian defector walks into the CIA building and announces that a Russian operative named Evelyn Salt is going to kill the Russian president, her credibility is shot despite her achievements.  She couldn’t possibly be a Russian spy, right?  Wrong.  She could actually be part of a decades-old Russian project that trained spies as children and then implanted them into the United States to lie dormant until the time came years later for them to do what they were always programmed to do.  Like I said earlier, as long as Jolie is running around, being her bad-ass, awesome self and narrowly avoiding defeat while she jumps from one moving vehicle to the next, I can accept a plot as insipid as this one.

Jolie makes SALT.  She doesn’t make it into any sort of masterpiece but her commitment to the character, from the numerous stunts she is reported to carry out herself to her intoxicating Russian accent, elevates what would have certainly been a tired rehash of the Bourne films into a similar franchise for the ladies.

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