By Clarence Yu
Contributor

I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money, but what I do have is a particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that will be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you. I will find you. And I will kill you.

WITH these few lines of dialogue, the stage is set for Taken. You pretty much know where you are going to end up as you step into the theater. But this is a kind of movie where you want to go along for the ride nonetheless.

Directed by Pierre Morel, Taken stars Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills, presumably an ex-government agent who retired in California to live close to his daughter. He wanted to make up for all the lost time while he was away on active duty.

Mills is a loving father who is estranged from his wife (Famke Janssen) but wants to be there for his daughter.

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By Clarence Yu
Contributor

SOMETIME ago when I heard that Oliver Stone was making a biopic of President George W. Bush, something just didn’t feel right inside my stomach. After all, what else can you expect from the director extraordinaire who brought us Nixon, JFK and Platoon, among other films? Then maybe I thought he had a conspiracy theory thing going on, which would shed light on what really happened these past eight years.

Then I read initial reviews about the film–it was indeed a true-to-life biopic, so how could one get serious with it? Turns out, there are plenty of reasons.

History will probably judge George W. Bush as one of the worst presidents ever, and, at best, one of the most controversial. Stone however, doesn’t want us to have any more of that. We know it. We’ve been seeing the news, reading the papers, and watching all the comedians. Instead, he gives us George W., the frat and party boy, the alcoholic turned born-again Christian, the man who for the most part of his life stood in his father’s shadow.

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Editor’s note: This is to correct an earlier version since Season 3, Volume 4 of Heroes–which will run 12 more episodes, is scheduled to air on February 2 to April 20). Thanks to our readers for pointing this out. We apologize for the confusion.

By Marjorie Gorospe
INQUIRER.net

IF you have extraordinary powers, would you rather become a hero or a villain?

Throughout the third season of Heroes, that dilemma has been the recurring theme. Heroes turned villains. Villains turned heroes. As some heroes desired for more power, some went astray. It was now a question of, “Are you one of us, or one of them.”

As the saying goes, power corrupts. Now, having extraordinary powers, one can be eventually lured to the dark side. In the past seasons, Peter Petrelli has been undoing things his brother Nathan Petrelli had done. But in doing so, he has been changing the future (not once, but many times). Despite his purest intentions, Peter has continued to play god in first half of the Season 3, traveling through time and deleting events that he hope would change the future. But as his mother Angela Petrelli would keep reminding him, there are consequences.

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Lawrence Casiraya
INQUIRER.net

I seem have a natural attraction for Woody Allen movies. Maybe because they reaffirm my faith in the one ingredient I deem important in a movie: the story.

“Vicky Cristina Barcelona” is a typical Woody Allen film, meaning there’s always a cast of characters and it ultimately explores human relationships.

This time it’s a love triangle–Barcelona is a metaphor, of course. Meaning there should be sex involved and that Scarlett Johannson is somehow part of it.

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Agence France-Presse

SAN FRANCISCO–Ashes of “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and his actress wife will blast toward the far reaches of the cosmos in keeping with the show’s famed opening line “Space, the final frontier.”

Majel Roddenberry died in December, two months before her 77th birthday, and will posthumously fulfill a “dream of journeying through space with her husband,” according to Celestis Inc, the US company behind the memorial flight.

Celestis sent some of Gene Roddenberry’s ashes into orbit around the earth in a premier Founders Flight rocket launch in 1997.

Gene Roddenberry died six years earlier with a wish to explore space in keeping with characters in his adventure television show that first aired in the late 1960s and still has a strong cult following.

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