You would think the third film in a franchise would round out the series and bring some sense of closure even if that closure is false as we’ve learned with the Saw films and Friday the 13th franchise, among others.  It’s way different though with Paranormal Activity 3 in the sense there’s a hint at how all of this haunting activity came about or at least where it derives from.  Yet it’s ambiguous enough to leave you wondering what happens in the present, what happened in the past, and what’s going to happen the minute the lights go out.  Paranormal Activity movies are always a series of happenings and seem random but are also anxiously expected.  You know that with a camera panning a room or moving slowly toward the darkness that something is bound to happen, and you tense up ready for the worst.  And even when it is the worst you’re never quite prepared.  That’s the secret to these films that big or small the “boo” is always off center and always, always catching you off guard.  Or pushing you off your guard.  No matter how guarded you are.  And you will be guarded after the first one or two small incidents that occur in the film’s 40 minute set-up.  Actually, I’m looking at my watch 30 minutes in wondering when the action will start, like I did with the previous films.  The frightening always takes awhile.  But the chills you get once they arrive are swift and lingering.  The low rumble rises unexplained and with no clue of its origins strikes like a wrecking ball; the sound as ghostly as the entity it accompanies.  That’s Paranormal Activity for you.  And actually, this is just the beginning.

It’s that time of year for scary movies.  As I like to say with changing of the clock so too comes the changing of genres at your local Cineplex. The scare your pants off genre which coincides with less light, longer shadows and quickly approaching nightfall with a certain sense of anti-cheery melancholy the shortly-lived euphoric rise and fall of colorful leaves seem to bring.  Which brings us to Footloose, a perfect example of scariness Hollywood likes to spend money on in hopes of an easy return on “sure-thing” investments. Why isn’t anyone threatening to #occupyhollywood?  Probably because they on occasion do edify the emotions, or at least pretend to care about pleasing us.  I say sure-thing about Footloose but I really don’t know with today’s plugged-in generation, if they can tolerate kids juking and jiving themselves around camera ready to vent the frustrations of hardline scripture thumping parents from the Bible belt. Does the Bible belt still exist?  And maybe that’s why Halloween and October films seem to be so much more palpable; that the horror genre wakes up the senses and reminds us we’re still alive, that we’re not beaten down by “the man;” that though all that stuff on screen is fake it can still make us appreciate the smallest things in life like a smile from a McDonald’s employee. The following then are nine jump-out-of-your-seat horror and haunted films for October 2011.

What the heck are ides?  I’d say they’re the synth beats and horns that pop from John Williams style orchestral backgrounds during quiet, graceful and cinematic interludes in George Clooney's new directorial effort The Ides of March. Actually Ides of March is a Shakespeare and Roman reference, to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the Roman calendar day 15 of March (and 15th of a few other months, day 13 some months). I think the reference here is that Caesar was warned in Shakespeare's play not to go to the location of his eventual demise, his murder, on a specific day, the ides of March. And so it is with that sense of deeper meaning in this political drama starring some of the best actors in the business—Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Jeffrey Wright, Marisa Tomei—that Ryan Gosling's young idealist Stephen helps Caesar, I mean Clooney, with his run for the presidency. The film is surprisingly film noir in style at times while delivering a Sydney Lumet “lite” treatment of a pivotal moment during primaries on the rocky campaign road to the white house.

Based on a true story, Will Reiser was really sick. He’s the screenwriter who happens to be friends with Superbad (2007) writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. They talked about the idea of a comedy about cancer. How no one really confronts it by laughing at it, making fun of it, by being derisive yet angry about it. But rather how it’s always approached from an overly dramatic way. In telling his parents, Adam, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, uses the film Terms of Endearment (1983) for example as an opener to the conversation about his diagnosis of cancer. Challenging that great but also very sad film idea is an unlikely pair who face this thing together and do so in what feels like a very natural and realistic way. Surprising themselves I think as they skew this idea of facing death—Adam, who happens to have cancer, playing an unlikely straight man to Seth Rogen’s very funny bachelor friend Kyle. As it turns out 50/50 is a buddy film that feels like Zach Braff’s introspective Garden State (2004) with musical and cinematic stylings of something like Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967). But even as Radiohead’s High and Dry pinpoints Adam’s isolation like many a lonely man in film 50/50 punches its way to finding an audience as if it’s fighting a disease itself. And I think it finds its cure in trying to find its voice among other films within the genre.

This film could not have been released at a better time.  Just as baseball is reaching its fall classic summit here in 2011, both leagues fighting it out in the wild card race…if you’re a baseball fan this is a must see especially here on the brink of playoffs.  Moneyball is one of the first films adapted from a book where I felt like the movie was better than the book.  Usually it’s the other way around.  That may be because Moneyball is not necessarily a fiction book that weaves a narrative like Elmore Leonard or J.R.R. Tolkien.  It’s really more of a non-fiction story, a true story of how a guy named Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland A’s from 1995 to present faced with a low salary for his baseball team in 2001—39 million as opposed to the Yankees’ 114 million—how Beane had to find a different way to create his next team.  These days the Yankees spend over 200 million a year while someone like the Florida Marlins hover around a total team salary of 14 million.  Moneyball the film is a look into exactly how Beane went about it in 2002, the year after the A’s were in the playoffs and as a team could no longer afford the players who, because of their prior successful year, were now stars. Players like Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, and Jason Isringhausen.  Moneyball is about how Bean’s methods changed the game of baseball recruiting forever.  Starring Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Oakland A’s manager Art Howe, and Jonah Hill as player stats bean counter Peter Brand.

Straw Dogs is that rare remake that stays pretty true to its original balancing the artistry set forth by that earlier film’s cast and crew while infusing version 2.0 with the marketability, talent and mentored bite in movie-making pizzazz today’s audiences expect.  Which means this version goes to eleven with the psychological playfulness director Sam Peckinpah brought to the 1971 violent-before-its-time original. This Straw Dogs also exaggerates the very tricks of the trade slow motion master Peckinpah institutionalized for Hollywood—specifically the gun that literally blows a man off the ground and throws him several feet—touched up and presented nostalgically here by Rod Lurie (The Last Castle (2001), The Contender (2000)) as almost homage to Peckinpah.  The fact Lurie doe not employ slow motion however confounds me because Lurie is so verbatim in most of the retelling.  But confusion is a very small part of what makes this Straw Dogs so much more evocative.  Saying to Peckinpah, I saw what you did Obi Wan of the slow-mo violence and have learned much of your ways but now let me show you what I have unique within me while also honoring your tutelage.  Straw Dogs stars James Marsden in the role made famous by Dustin Hoffman, and also stars Kate Bosworth (whom Marsden starred with in Superman Returns (2006)).  Also starring James Woods and sort-of newcomer Alexander Skarsgard (HBO’s True Blood).  Straw Dogs is based on the Gordon Williams novel “The Siege of Trencher’s Farm.”  By the film’s finale you’ll see just why siege is such a correct term to describe Straw Dogs.

Think Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic from 2000 with a soundtrack from TRON: Legacy.  Director Steven Soderbergh who won the Best Director Oscar for Traffic and was nominated for directing Erin Brockovich (2000) works his talent for assembling a corral of stars (see Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven (2001)) in a multi-location, mixed-genre virus film which if anything is exemplary of how ensemble disaster films should be made.  Contagion is part science fiction, part crime thriller, part action film at times but mostly it works in the fear genre of horror.  Even Kate Winslet says it best, as Dr. Erin Mears on a mission to contain the spread of a new world virus, while people continue to ignore other more likely dangers it’s “a plastic shark in the water that will keep people from swimming.”  In addition to trying to define the unpredictable actions of humans in a situation like this she is making an appropriate reference to Jaws (1975), one of the greatest unseen villain horror films ever made.  Contagion isn’t necessarily any different from virus films like Outbreak (1995) or The Andromeda Strain (1971), or even AMC’s The Walking Dead for that matter, where suddenly there’s the appearance of a new SARS or H1-N1 type of infectious agent made downright monstrous for dramatic effect that no one seems to have a cure for.  It feels and looks like the flu but soon people are foaming at the mouth and convulsing with seizures before fixing their eyes with dying breath on something that could possibly be described as the devil.  Like those horror ghost films you see where the person literally dies of fear.  I recently saw it again in mix-genre master David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001)…a guy telling his account of a dream he had where he saw the face of a hideous man who lived behind a diner.  The incident was so scary and shocking for him in exploring the truth of his dream that he dies right there on the spot.  It’s that kind of death in Contagion that gets your attention.  And it’s Soderbergh’s kind of directing that keeps your attention for the duration of the film.

Here’s another remake but The Debt seems to be going more for Oscar gold than blockbuster extravaganza. A kind of moral dilemma spy thriller with an all-star cast—Oscar winner Helen Mirren, Oscar nominee Tom Wilkenson, Avatar’s Sam Worthington, and Ciaran Hinds of Munich (2002) and Road to Perdition (2005)—as Mossad agents in the late 90’s, and as the same in 1965 hunting down a Nazi war criminal known as the surgeon of Birkenau.  Played by Jesper Christensen (Casino Royale (2002), Quantum of Solace (2005)), he’s one of those Josef Mengele types that used humans to perform horrific medical procedures, the results of one such case mentioned in the film is blindness in which herr doktor tried to change the natural color of a person’s eyes.  Red-headed beauty Jessica Chastain (brilliantly portrayed mother in Tree of Life) plays a younger version of Mirren’s character who bravely and cleverly tussles with the Nazi, while in the stirrups of his gynecological chair.  It’s one of the most creepy and spine-tingling film moments this year.

If you can imagine, you’re sitting outside Apres Diem in Midtown enjoying espresso and some exotic dessert waxing poetic about the economy when a dozen or so Ferraris pull up and proceed to back into velvet roped-off parking spots.  You could almost hear the distinctive whining of the engines coming off of I75 making their way down 10th Street to Monroe before slowing to the rumble of gargling horsepower the sound of the engines make as if all 10,000 horses are grumbling about having to come to a stop.  And where the Ferraris go so do the Porches and the BMWs.  The front of the Landmark Midtown Art Cinema looked more like a car show than the restaurant and entertainment hub called The Promenade.  All of them here to pay respects to the Brazilian Formula One driver Ayrton Senna who won an unprecedented 33 plus victories as a driver and was crowned Formula One’s World Champion three times before his untimely death at the age of 34. Senna the documentary gets into the head and heart of Ayrton who took an intellectual and emotional approach to driving that was always as much a spiritual drive as it was a passionate one.

Fireworks light up the night sky in the opening of this Science Fiction urban dramedy set in and around a city block in a SoLo neighborhood (South London). A single lady in her mid-twenties walking home to her apartment building (the dark towering building always lingering in the background like King Kong) comes across a group of sinister thugs wearing hoods and bandanas to hide their identities. The leader, Moses, pulls out a knife, gets in her face and threatens some serious bejeezus out of her until she coughs up everything she has, including a ring she’s rather fond of. She’s not happy about the whole incident, afraid, yet cocky enough to tell these kids where to go. Turns out kids are exactly what they are and we get the impression they use whatever little cash and pawn-able items they can get to buy candy and soda, kid stuff, to enjoy while playing FIFA soccer on their Xbox or Playstation. A bulk of their booty however goes to the block’s real menace, a rapping, kingpin boss drug dealer named Hi-Hatz who threatens Moses into compliance. Hi-Hatz is paranoid Moses will rival his domain, his block, while at the same time making Moses his number one, his consigliore (or whatever the SoLo version of that is). Keeping his friends close but his enemies closer. In an instant we can see dilemma in Moses, his face shows it all: Do I really want to be the boss of this block? Will I get my block knocked off? Who does this guy with a name like Hi-Hatz think he is? What’s my next move? It all sounds like an introspective, classic hard-boiled film noir gangster film the likes of John Huston’s Maltese Falcon (1941), a good yolk within a bad shell; or an undercover cop film like Ringo Lam’s Hong Kong gangster film City of Fire (1987), the film Tarantino used for portions of Reservoir Dogs (1992)—essentially a man stuck in a dilemma conditioned to be someone he’s not. Seriously, Attack the Block is less serious than all of that, but it has that tone…as if drugs and crime are the attackers on the block. When actually it’s monkey-like beasts from outer space.

This remake of the 1985 film keeps the concept intact.  A neighbor moves in next door who happens to be a blood thirsty vampire and proceeds to suck down blood from the necks of neighborhood kids like their bodies are shamrock shakes in spring.  And the only man ballsy enough to do anything about it is a teen all of about 17 years-old who seeks the help of who he thinks is a vampire killing professional.  Charlie Brewster (not to be confused with Charlie Bartlett (2007)), played here by star-of-the-future Anton Yelchin of Star Trek (2009) fame, the guy who played Chekov, and who played Ben Foster’s sweet baby brother in the 2006 Alpha Dogs, is the kid next door.  And the vampire?  None other than Collin Farrell who puts a twist on the classic vampire antagonist by offering up a semi-cocky, bachelor version who likes to work in his yard, eat green apples and drink domestic beer.  He sounds and looks pretty normal, like Farrell in any of his other films, driving his late model pick-up and choosing to settle down in a suburban neighborhood that rivals the planned community suburbia of Levittown, NY.  But unlike a good neighbor, an altered state is there.

Here’s a pizza delivery comedy horror story if ever there was one.  Horror in the sense I’d hate to be the guy delivering pizza’s in this situation.  Opening with The Hives’ “Tick Tick Boom,” pizza delivery guy Nick played by Oscar nominated actor Jessie Eisenberg drives his early ‘90s era Mustang through town racing through traffic lights and near accidents like he’s being chased by the zombies he helped Woody Harrelson and Emma Stone kill in 2009’s Zombieland; like he’s gunning it for his life only to beat the 30 minute timer on his dash or else the pizza he’s carrying is free.  But he’s no dummy.  When he gets to the house of the guys who purposefully asked for a delivery outside of a 30 minute driving radius he assess the situation and notices these stoners are under age.  “I bet it’s going to go good with beer,” he says.  “You do have beer, right?”  At which point the kids give him well more than the pizza’s worth and Nick is the better for it pocketing the money and letting his loser manager deal with the loss.  There’s just enough of this kind of wit and make-shift action to keep 30 Minutes or Less interesting.  This is director Ruben Fleischer’s first film since Zombieland (if you haven’t seen Zombieland go get it today), but 30 Minutes or Less relies more on a ticking plot clock than it does bending the rules and traits of a genre.  Here we have a heist film where the pizza delivery guy is forced to rob a bank or suffer the consequences of the bomb strapped to his body with Kenny “F’n” Powers at the controls.  As in mullet master Danny McBride.  And it’s all loosely similar to an odd “collar bomb story” from 2003.

Marvel and DC Comics aren’t the only ones with origin films this year.  This sort-of remake of the 1972 Conquest of the Planet of the Apes has an adorable little chimp named Caesar that grows to be the speaking leader of a revolting group of apes who want nothing more than to climb the redwoods of Muir Woods right outside of San Francisco.  The film, starring James Franco as Caesar’s surrogate father, Will, and Andy Serkis the near-contortionist performer behind Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as Caesar, gathers a very subtle collection of key sound and creature elements from all of the Ape films, from the first one, Planet of the Apes in 1968 to Tim Burton’s remake of that film in 2001, to re-open the Darryl and Richard Zanuck produced 20th Century Fox goldmine for what will most likely be another decade of talking Ape films.  And I’m not talking Dr. Doolittle here.  Audience members new to this story line will be drawn in by the cute, emotional, human element of Caesar, how he grows, how he discovers what freedom is, what fear is, and ultimately what power is.  And they’ll be blown away by Serkis who will most likely, or should anyway, be recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences next year with a nomination for best actor for this fascinating portrayal of the primates’ best representative on screen since Reagan’s Bedtime for Bonzo (1951) or Tarzan’s Cheeta.  And yes, Grape Ape and King Kong to name a few others.

David Dobkin, director of Wedding Crashers (2005), has done with Atlanta in his new film The Change-Up what Woody Allen does with New York and Paris which is feature it as a prominent character in the film and highlight its beauty to add a certain romance to the story.  It’s the best treatment of the city to date, beating the pants off of Freejack (1992), or Fluke (1995); or more recently the Farrelly Brothers’ film Hall Pass which didn’t show any of Atlanta, and didn’t mention any streets or restaurants, nada about the city, which was disappointing.  As if it’s suppose to be “Any City, U.S.A.”  But it was filmed in Atlanta.  So let’s see it.  And that we do in this switched-bodies comedy of errors, a Freaky Friday (1976) for adults that is sort of Farrelly Brothers-esque (speaking of the brothers) if we might be talking their best effort ever.  That’s to say it gets silly at times, involves physical humor and potty humor if you want to use that term, and mostly from a male perspective.  But it also has a Frank Capra moment or two in that our crisscrossed heroes, Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman, learn a few things about themselves they wouldn’t have known otherwise.  Like Ebenezer Scrooge and George Bailey, theses are guys that get a glimpse of their lives lived differently, for better or worse.  While we the audience get glimpses of Atlanta that is better than any ad campaign the city could buy.

Cowboys and Aliens, the play on “cowboys and indians” kids used to say as they imagined themselves in a John Ford western, or in the old Tom Mix silent films, is the latest genre mix from Iron Man (2008) and Elf (2003) director Jon Favreau.  Yes it is part western and part sci-fi not dissimilar to Priest released earlier this year which had the extra genre of horror.  I suppose Cowboys and Aliens has a little horror if you think alien autopsies could be horrific, and in one scene I suppose emotionally it’s pretty horrific for our hero Jake played by Daniel Craig.  He’s a real cowboy in the sense of the loner, Clint Eastwood man-with-no-name type of rolling stone of the Sergio Leone collection, and of Eastwood’s own Pale Rider ( 1985), High Plains Drifter (1973), or even Unforgiven (1992)…the cowboy in search of something if not a small bit of redemption the audience isn’t necessarily privy to.  Cowboys and Aliens is no Unforgiven, that’s for sure, and it lacks a visual style that Leone would have applied, or even Favreau himself applied to Iron Man.  But it also stars Harrison Ford, Clancy Brown, Sam Rockwell, Olivia Wilde and Paul Dano who collectively empower Favreau’s film with a sense of a real throwback to the westerns of the ‘80s.  1980s to be exact.  A decade we might not necessarily think of in terms of westerns but a period where Favreau most likely discovered his love of film.

My thoughts on this are that “The First Avenger” came as an afterthought.  Almost as if the studio didn’t think the film itself couldn’t carry on its own beyond preview audiences, that adding “Avengers” to the title piques the interest even more.  Underestimating audiences as usual.  Why does Captain America need that?  This is Cap!  He doesn’t need that extra title.  All of the Marvel films of late have been tagged with a Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) S.H.I.E.L.D. visit, S.H.I.E.L.D. standing for Supreme Headquarters International Espionage Law-enforcement Division.  This in anticipation of The Avengers film due out next year featuring a kind of Marvel collection of greatest hits: Iron Man, The Hulk, Thor, Captain America (who made his first appearance in 1941 and then a comeback in the sixties with The Avengers comic book series).  The group also includes some X-Men.  But it’s almost like we’re in a hurry to get there, so much of a hurry in fact that films like Thor aren’t getting the kind of solid treatment other films like Iron Man and Spiderman are getting.  I feel like the Thor film was more of a sales prelude, watered down and created quickly to make an appearance, to make a buck, to give audiences a preview of and sort of string us along in a Lord of the Rings manner toward a climactic episode which I’m guessing is The Avengers movie, or an Avengers trilogy.  The kind of thing they did with B-movies of Captain America’s era.  Captain America: The First Avenger could almost be included in that kind of “preview” category, sort of tepid in its bang for the Sci-Fi Action Adventure buck.  That’s not to say it’s bad though, it’s actually pretty good but in categories we might not expect.  I’d say patriotic nostalgia being the most prominent.

Not a car on the road. No cops, no people, no busses. If you want to rob a bank do it on the night of a new Harry Potter release. I haven't seen lines around buildings and concessions eight lines deep since Star Wars, and recently The Dark Knight. Theaters were sold out across the board even 3AM screenings early Friday morning (one theater manager said he had it on 14 screens). And the recent high school grads had an occasion, an event to break out their graduation gowns once again. If the last Potter film is anything it is an event, and will probably be one of the greatest film events of this decade if not the century. It's not the best movie ever, you have to start there. But technically some of the best filmmaking in terms of sound design, visual effects, digital imagery, editing, even lighting and cinematography, historically. There’s no denying that the one thing the Potter films have had since the first one, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, way back in 2001, is polished craft and style that is visually stunning and at times truly magical. I say way back in 2001 to exaggerate the sense of era we’re talking about here.

Here's one where the concept is greater than the content.  I mean who doesn't want to see a balding, receded hairlined Colin Farrell?  Of three bad mannered bosses he’s the one advertised as the tool.  But Horrible Bosses also has Jennifer Aniston, touted as the sexually harassing maneater.  Why isn't she bald?  See that just doesn't work because no matter how bad or horrible a boss Aniston is in this comedy directed by Seth Gordon (Four Christmases (2008), The King of Kong: A Fistful of Dollars (2007)) she still looks great.  And so does third horrible boss “psycho” David Harken played by Kevin Spacey.  Oscar winner Spacey can turn on the bad-ass anytime while being “horrible” and still come out aces high.  So just how horrible are these bosses?  Not so bad really.  In fact the beginning of Horrible Bosses has these three champion actors, Farrell, Spacey, and Aniston in the entertainment hot seat driving the film so well that the characters the stories revolve around played by Charlie Day, Jason Bateman, and Jason Sudeikis look like candy-faced tykes wetting themselves in the backseat, as they take a backseat to these densely packed performances.  But that’s just the way it’s written, see.  A decent introduction to Horrible Bosses.  As the second act develops we get a heck of a lot more of Bateman, Sudeikis and Day and the playing field starts to even out.

After the first film in 2007 I was comfortable in saying I wasn't a fan.  That yes I liked the cars and yes the nostalgia of Transformers from my childhood, and yes Megan Fox, but the cacophony of mega muscle visual and sound effects and lack of story substance just left me deflated of protein, a movie watching diabetic from all the filmmaking sugar. Then Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) came out and annihilated any hopes of recovery...Fallen was like a cancer where I was concerned. I would never want to see another Transformer film again only forcing myself to go to others in an ability to continue on this passionate study of film and critical writing, as a duty to myself and to stay somewhat on top of the latest film news.  And so what a shock to see improvement here in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and what looks like an advancement toward a cure for an overindulgent style and heavily augmented type of visual storytelling I had long ago labeled Michael Bay disease.  The antidote it seems is in the mix of analyzing the failures of prior transforming robot character concoctions and getting serious help in looking for ways to improve the snake oil.  After all, Paramount Pictures, Steven Spielberg and Bay all have reputations on the line.  Part of finding a vaccine is fighting 3D bacteria because Dark of the Moon certainly gives it a shot, while giving the audience an intravenous shot of patriotism to make them feel better about money they’re spending at the box office.  What I’m trying to say here is not only is Dark of the Moon the best in the franchise but finally we get a summer blockbuster film worthy of its moniker.  

This could be Cameron Diaz’s best film, and the same can be said of director Jake Kasdan.  Both have flirted with great work, especially Diaz who has had Golden Globe nominations for Best Actress in films like Vanilla Sky (2001), Gangs of New York (2002), Being John Malkovich (1999), and There’s Something About Mary (1998).  Most of those films were dramas but humor like in Mary can go a long way in fooling us in to believing something is worth its weight in gold.  And Bad Teacher is funny.  Yeah, this review stuff is pretty subjective.  How can you tell if a film is really funny, it it’s only funny to the reviewer, me, or will it be funny to anyone else?  The test of that I believe is in the character and often times the expectation of what we know a character’s role should be.  In this case the stereotypical mentoring, caring, matronly, disciplined and dignified middle school teacher.  It’s ironic then that the teacher we’re introduced to, Elizabeth Halsey played by Ms. Diaz is a) smokin’ hot, b) could care less about the students and avoids their emotional needs at ever cost, c) takes drugs and drinks alcohol while on the job, and d) doesn’t teach but rather puts movies on about teachers that teach like those in Stand and Deliver (1988), or Lean on Me (1989) while she sleeps at her desk. That irony works well in that it’s not what you would expect, and Diaz has the freedom to take the role to levels that only a pro can take it meaning low, and I mean really low, before reaching the high road that lovable characters in good movies generally get to.