Armed only with his mysterious mental connection to the feral minds of studio executives, the Movie Guru reveals just how good or bad this week's new releases will be:

Daredevil (PG-13)
A guy (Be Affleck) gets super powers from an accidental encounter with radioactive materials, loses a loved one to crime, then dons a skin-tight costume and vows to fight for justice against bad guys (Michael Clarke Duncan, Colin Farrell). You'd do the same, wouldn't you?
Prediction: Current fanboy buzz says it's better than Spider-Man. However, since it's got so much in common with that arachanoid movie, it will have to be a LOT better to outdo Spidey's box office.

Jungle Book II (G)
The further adventures of man-cub Mowgli and Baloo the Bear.
Prediction: Disney's laughing all the way to the cash register at what movie-goers will watch.

The Quiet American (R)
Michael Caine is a cynical London Times correspondent in 1952 Saigon, who chances into a friendship with an idealistic American (Brendan Fraser). After Caine's character introduces Fraser's to his young Vietnamese mistress (Hai Yen), a lethal triangle of love, betrayal, and murder ensues.
Prediction: Caine has been nominated for another Oscar for his performance as the dissolute journalist, Thomas Fowler. The story itself is supposed to pack a wallop, and Yen and Fraser are pretty to look at.

Talk to Her (R)
After a chance meeting, two men, Benigno and Marco, encounter each other again at a clinic where Benigno works. It seems that Lydia, Marco's girlfriend, is in a coma, and coincidentally, Benigno is obsessed with another woman in a coma. The characters' lives become intertwined, with unexpected results.
Prediction: This is supposed to be far more "conventional" than director Pedro Almodóvar's previous movies (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie me Up! Tie Me Down!). But maybe it's just that he's gotten more subtle. Expect to leave with new perspectives on love and sexuality.

Standup, Siddown!

Margaret Cho's latest concert film, The Notorious C.H.O. (2002, R), is not to everyone's taste. If you enjoy some thought-provocation on tough, personal subjects, sometimes colorful ethnic character-playing, and the occasional zingy one-liner, Cho's stand-up routine may entertain you. If you are offended by lots of raw rap about gay and lesbian sex, heterosexual oral sex, sadomasochistic sex clubs, drugs, drinking, prejudice, various bodily functions, weight and eating disorders, along with pretty healthy helpings of stereotyping and preaching, pass this by.

Another study in crude ethnic humor (crude as in both "unfinished" and "vulgar") is Richard Pryor: Live and Smoking (1985, NR), a low-low-budget film of a young Pryor working on his new style of in-your-face comedy at the cramped New York Improv in 1971. The camera stays mostly in one position. You never see the audience. Only occasionally do you hear laughter. This is Pryor with his edgy attitude fully developed, but an unpolished sense of timing and delivery. Like Cho's, Pryor's routine is built on a trash heap of topics uncomfortable to middle-class white America: race relations, homosexual sex, drugs, profanity. Pryor is clearly nervous during the routine, chain-smoking his way through it. He has the attitude, but not the self-assurance. Only fitfully funny, the 46-minute film is more of interest as a documentary of a developing comedic force than as entertainment.

Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks have been spinning new versions of The 2,000 Year Old Man (1982, NR) since their days on Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows. Reiner plays an erstwhile interviewer, Brooks, the 2,000-year-old man. The humor derives from the old man's daffy observations on life as it was 2,000 years ago, and has a distinctly ethnic sound (Jewish, to be precise). In this 25-minute offering, a live routine appears to have been set to a cartoon. The sound quality isn't great and the humor seems flat. (But "the 2,000 year old man" routine is considered a classic, so you might try finding one of Reiner's and Brooks' old comedy albums.)

—Scott McNutt

February 13, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 7
© 2000 Metro Pulse