'Eagle Eye' flys high

**1/2 out of ****

What if the government is watching you read this review right now? Listening to your conversations through your phone’s speaker, looking at you from your webcam and following every move you make through your cell phone’s tracking device. This is the essence of the thriller Eagle Eye which lacks the anxiety of the idea that technology is surveying you everywhere.

Everyman star Shia LaBeouf (Transformers, Indiana Jones 4) leads; reteaming with director D.J. Caruso (Taking Lives, Two for the Money) who put him on the map with the modern-day revamp of Rearview Window, Disturbia. Borrowing and modernizing elements again from Hitchcock (this time North by Northwest) and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Caruso makes a thoroughly entertaining thriller that dabbles more into action than smarts.

Jerry Shaw (LaBeouf) is a Stanford dropout who works at Copy Cabana, living in the shadow of his identical twin, Air Force Cadet Ethan (LaBeouf, again).

Getting a call from his mother that his twin was killed in a traffic accident, it isn’t long after the funeral that Jerry gets another fateful call. Coming home to find his apartment filled with terrorist weapons, Jerry gets a phone call from a mysterious woman to flee his apartment and if he doesn’t obey, he will die.

Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan) is an overworked paralegal who sends her son (Cameron Boyce) off by train to perform at the Kennedy Center. Shortly after, she gets a call from the mystery woman. Rachel is told if she disobeys, the train her son is on will be derailed.

Slacker Jerry and divorced mother Rachel get paired together on the mystery adventure by the phone calls. Realizing whoever is pulling their strings somehow sees every move they make. Making traffic lights go from red to green, surveillance cameras going blank and machinery operate robotically (that’s only the tip of the iceberg).

Shia LaBeouf once again gives an outstanding performance, showing that he can carry a movie, going the extra mile to make a fully-developed character. Michelle Monaghan (Mission: Impossible III) has a motherly element towards Jerry while unselfishly going on with the requests to save her son.

Billy Bob Thorton is an FBI Agent and Rosario Dawson (Sin City, Rent), playing an Air Force Investigator, round out the talented cast, trying to track down Jerry and Rachel. Julianne Moore goes uncredited as the threatening monotone voice that stipulates the instructions over the phone.

D.J. Caruso fills Eagle Eye with edge-of-your-seat car chases and action sequences that have you enthralled. When the action stops, the plots ridiculousness seeps through and the hokey ending is disappointing for the film that started off strongly. Perhaps executive producer Steven Speilberg and the many people (John Glenn, Travis Adam Wright, Hillary Seitz and Dan McDermott) that wrote the film’s screenplay are to blame for the plot going from engrossing to unnecessarily dense.

Alive with fun, solid performances, adrenaline and intrigue Eagle Eye will certainly have your eyes glued to the screen.

"Indiana Jones" is back

**** out of ****

Everyone’s favorite globe-trotting, artifact-digging, whip-cracking, fedora-wearing professor is back in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Harrison Ford graces the silver screen again as Indiana Jones, exactly 19 years after 1989’s Last Crusade; Crystal Skull is the franchise’s 4th installment.

Not quite the Indiana Jones we know from Raiders of the Lost Ark, there is still plenty of nostalgia from start to finish, appeasing the older generation as well as today’s, bringing out the excitable kid in all of us.

The year is 1957 and Indy is once again in peril, being captured by Russian radical sword-wielding psychic scientist Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett). Spalko forces Jones to search for a mysterious magnetized artifact in a government warehouse, but just in the knick of time, Indiana escapes…temporarily.

Young greaser Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf) meets up with Indy for his aid in finding lost colleague, Professor Oxley (John Hurt), who was previously kidnapped by Spalko to find the legendary city of gold, El Dorado. But the gold is not at stake, rather a crystal skull. The crystal skull is a supernatural object that grants its retriever unimaginable powers.

Setting off to South America and the deep, dark dangerous jungles of Peru, Indiana Jones, with Mutt in tow, fight off creepy-crawlers, hoards of ants, ancient tribes and the Soviets with non-stop action and adventure at every turn.

Harrison Ford is back in action as the adventure-seeking, wise-cracking Indiana Jones. Even though he is well into his sixties, Ford still can crack a whip. Also aging well is Karen Allen reenacting her role as Marion Ravenwood. Indiana’s tough-girl love interest in Raiders, Allen is pleasurable in her scenes next to Ford.

For today’s youth, Shia LaBeouf, who seems to be Speilberg’s favorite actor (producing most of his films), joins the crowd as the young spelunker. Cate Blanchett dons a heavy Russian accent as our villain, but probably is one of the weakest dastardly characters in the series with a underdeveloped part.

Steven Speilberg and George Lucas team up again and still have the magic touch. Lucas, who dreamt up Star Wars, also came up with idea for Indiana Jones. However, David Koepp (wrote Speilberg’s War of the Worlds, The Lost Word: Jurassic Park) pens the fun script that at spots gets murky.

Speilberg keeps up his outstanding credentials with stupendous sequences that you must see to believe. In particular, a jungle car chase with plenty of swashbuckling and bullet flying action that will keep anyone on the edge of their seats.

With plenty of familiarity too it, one reason why this Jones feels slightly different from the others is its CGI. Still with plenty of practical special effects (reportedly only 30% of effects were CGI), the graphics in some scenes can’t help but go unnoticed, though they are of course top-notch. Also, the extraterrestrial subject matter doesn’t feel too Jones-ish.

With exactly the perfect amounts of danger, humor, adventure, romance and swashbuckling, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is nearly impossible not to enjoy.

Bobby Wins the Vote

***1/2 out of ****

Bobby is an up-lifting and at times heart-breaking semi-fictional drama focusing on 22 people, played by some of Hollywood’s most famous actors, showing their affection for Senator Robert F. Kennedy; a man that was being called President even before he was elected.

The story begins June 6th, 1968, the day of Kennedy’s assassination. It takes place at the Ambassador Hotel a.k.a. election headquarters and the story ends up at the point of Kennedy’s assassination.

The first piece of the story is with John Casey the Hotel Greeter (Anthony Hopkins) reminiscing about the past with his friend Nelson (Harry Belafonte). The next story is with Kennedy campaigners Wade (Joshua Jackson) and Cooper (Shia Labeouf) who decide to blow off campaigning for the day to do LSD with hippie/drug-dealer Fisher (Ashton Kutcher).

We then meet the kitchen staff, (Laurence Fishburne, Freddy Rodriguez, Jacob Vargas) who talk about the death of Martin Luther King and how Kennedy is the future to continue his path against discrimination, racial equality and about ways to get along with the ruling white majority.

The next story-line is with the hotel’s beautician Miriam (Sharon Stone) who is in a position to meet many of the Hotel guests, married to the hotel Manager Paul (William H. Macy), whom is sleeping with the switch-board operator Angela (Heather Graham). Miriam meets Diane (Lindsay Lohan) who is frivolously marrying her classmate William (Elijah Wood) so he doesn’t have to go to Vietnam in fear for his life. Miriam also meets the aging-booze-hound-cigarette-in-one-hand singer Virginia Fallon (Demi Moore) who often says hurtful things from fear of losing her audience. Virginia’s husband Tim is played by Emilio Estevez, who produced and directed the film.

The next story is of Czechoslovakian journalist Lenka Janacek (Svetlana Metkina) who wants to interview Bobby but has a hard time securing a meeting because she is representing a Socialist country.

The final story is with Samantha (Helen Hunt) a woman who finds “happiness” only in shopping for the latest fashion trends and her depressed husband Jack (Martin Sheen) who points out to Samantha that finding true happiness is their love for each other.

In the end all of the characters come together at Bobby’s assassination, showing their sorrow and the good that they found in his beliefs and what they could have done for us all.

All of the scenes with Robert F. Kennedy are archive footage of him; including the assassination. The ensemble of 22 actors and actresses, all are superb and give compelling emotional performances. However it seems as if the younger cast members steal the show such as Lindsay Lohan, Elijah Wood, Nick Cannon as Dwayne the head poll-counter at Campaign central, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Susan, a waitress at the Ambassador aspiring to become an actress.

Bobby is a film to see for all age groups. It is a tribute to those that remember what Robert F. Kennedy stood for the day he was assassinated and an engaging history lesson for the rest of us showing why Robert F. Kennedy was undeniably a person to be remembered.