This Week in Film: May 9 2008

I love a good David Mamet movie. His dialogue and plot twists are always top-notch, putting his signature speech patterns on every character he writes. Witness The Untouchables or Glengarry GlenRoss or The Spanish Prisoner, movies with plots that are not dumbed down for a mass audience. They're full of smart, intellectual characters who speak in rhythms and puzzles, pushing the viewer to use their brain rather than give standard expository dialogue to move the story along and make it easier for a wide audience to digest. Luckily for us, his new film Redbelt opens this week. It stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as a martial-arts instructor who gets forced into participating in a prize bout against his will through a series of typically shady Mamet-esque circumstances. Featuring a supporting cast that includes Joe Mantegna, Emily Mortimer, Ricky Jay and Tim Allen (!) as a washed-up actor, Redbelt has been getting slightly mixed reviews, but for Mamet fans, like myself, that won't stop us from going to see it first weekend.

Ashton Kutcher returns to give more reasons for an assassination attempt in his new film What Happens In Vegas..., starring with his female equivalent Cameron Diaz. It's about two predictably zany people who get drunk and wake up to find out they got married. My question is didn't this already happen in an episode of Friends? I hate to defend that show but you know generic Hollywood comedies are running low on ideas when they start ripping off a 10-year-old episode of Friends.

Legendary documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War) returns with his new doc Standard Operating Procedure, following the abuse and torture of suspected terrorists at the hands of U.S. forces at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. It plays exclusively at Tinseltown.

The Wachowski Bros. have come out of their matrix for the new kiddie adventure Speed Racer, starring Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci, Susan Sarandon and John Goodman. Obviously based on the old TV series, it's about a young race car driver who is obsessed on winning the cross-country rally race that killed his older brother. It's been said that if you like fast cars, CGI or have ADD, Speed Racer is a perfect antidote.

John Leguizamo, Katherine Waterston and Cynthia Nixon star in The Babysitters, director David Ross' drama about a teenager who turns her babysitting operation into a call-girl service for married men. It plays exclusively at Granville 7 Cinemas.

On May 12 at Pacific Cinematheque you can catch a double bill of Milos Forman's Czech films Black Peter and Audition/Talent Competition and on May 14, the book launch of DAMP: Contemporary Vancouver Media Art, a special evening featuring screenings, performances and lectures by various writers and media artists.

From May 14-May 15, The Ridge Theatre holds screenings of Hoodwinked: The Myth of Free Trade, a feature documentary which examines the effect of NAFTA on Canada. For more information, check out www.hoodwinked.ca