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  EW reviews: Great 'Hustle,' fun 'Bears'By Owen Gleiberman  Terrence Dashon Howard gives a brilliant performance in "Hustle & Flow," says EW's Owen Gleiberman. YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(Entertainment Weekly) -- Certain movies, like "8 Mile," "Rocky," or "Saturday Night Fever," walk an entrancing line between realism and pop mythology. They're tales, at heart, of Hollywood uplift -- of struggle and triumph, of an underdog's stubborn dream -- yet scene for scene, moment to moment, they are made with so much grit and spirit and verve, such a deep-dish flavor of the streets, that their inspiration is rooted in something authentic and rare. "Hustle & Flow," Craig Brewer's drama about a small-time Memphis pimp who pours his life into cutting a homemade crunk tape, is that kind of movie. From the moment we see DJay (Terrence Howard) seated behind the wheel of his ratty parked Chevy, rambling out a seductive monologue about the distinction between ''man'' (a mere dog, he says) and ''mankind,'' we're drawn to the exotic inside portrait of a flyweight urban hustler who knows how to cast a spell. When DJay speaks, in the smokiest of smoky drawls, the words come out slowly, sliding into each other, the cadences fused in a lyrical back-porch whisper -- a barely perceptible form of intimidation. He sounds, at times, like an old Southern man telling a story, and though DJay isn't old, exactly, the years are beginning to add up for him. Pushing 40, he's a veteran of the streets, one who's grown weary and a bit numb hawking his girls out of cars, using his casual gift for words to keep them in line. Terrence Howard, in the single most powerful performance I've seen this year, inhabits this character with a casual mastery that makes him a world unto himself; we're in touch with his ambition and sadness, his rage and longing, as if they were our own. DJay's hair is conked with old-school '60s-style curlers, and his flesh peddler's face is handsome yet puffy, as if he'd been presenting it to the world as a mask for so long that he'd forgotten what's under there. He may be an exploiter, yet he is not, by nature, a cruel man: Howard plays him with the hidden, bone-deep anxiety of someone who has spent his life coasting on outlaw instinct. The movie, which is sharply paced and terrifically shot, sketches in DJay's relationships with his working girls, furious Shug (Taraji P. Henson) and sexy, ignorant Nola, played by Taryn Manning like a deer in cornrows. DJay, by contrast, is a dog running out of tricks, so when he bumps into Key (Anthony Anderson), a sound engineer he knew back in his school days, and gets the idea to put some rhymes to paper, it's not just a movieish lark. He's out to save what's left of himself. The home-studio recording sequences in "Hustle & Flow" are funky, rowdy, and indelible. Brewer gives us the pleasure of watching characters create music from the ground up, beat by beat, take by take. DJay and Key, trapped in his bourgeois marriage, and Shelby (DJ Qualls), a gawky white church musician who's a wizard with a beatbox, are all out to escape the drudgery of their anonymous lives; that's what makes the sessions cathartic. As DJay works up a demo mixtape to give to Skinny Black (Ludacris), a hometown rapper-turned-platinum-selling star, some may accuse "Hustle & Flow" of softening a pimp's brutality, yet the movie, in an odd way, is never more honest about the violent and tawdry degradation of DJay's life than when we hear him chant his ripped-from-the-gut lyrics (''Whoop that trick -- get 'em!''). Those words imprint themselves on the audience. So does "Hustle & Flow. EW Grade: A- 'Bad News Bears'Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum  Billy Bob Thornton takes on the Walter Matthau role in "Bad News Bears." It's a Christmas miracle: The legend of "Bad Santa" has turned Billy Bob Thornton into the drunken, foulmouthed, lecherous lowlife most likely to have a salutary effect on young people who say ''enough already'' with the damn wizards and superheroes. In "Bad News Bears," director Richard Linklater's swell, fair-ball remake of the well-loved, anti-PC 1976 sports comedy, Thornton picks up the Beer Can of Unwilling Leadership from Walter Matthau to play Morris Buttermaker, a seedy washout of a onetime ballplayer scrounged up to coach a gaggle of kid-size athletic misfits into becoming a youth baseball team. Linklater and jovially dyspeptic screenwriters Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (they wrote "Bad Santa" -- their crud cred is good) know enough to leave Bill Lancaster's original structure alone. (They also wisely retain the goofy grandeur of a soundtrack driven by Bizet's opera "Carmen" -- ole.) Instead, the tweaks are subtle and unobtrusive, as Linklater -- proven in "School of Rock" to be a natural leader of yoots -- brings transgression up to code for the 21st century of PG-13. New-era losers (the cast is a cheery scrum of relaxed kids, led by genuine whiz pitcher Sammi Kane Kraft in the role created by Tatum O'Neal) now include a rotten kid in a wheelchair. And Greg Kinnear provides bonus smarm as Buttermaker's nemesis, a coach with a high regard for his own crotch. EW Grade: B+ 'Last Days'Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman In "Last Days," the writer-director Gus Van Sant draws us into the illusion that we're seeing the druggy, blithering, zoned-out final days of a rock star very much like -- no, exactly like -- Kurt Cobain. The fascination of Cobain's life and suicide is enduring, and that's a good thing for the movie, since it's doubtful that many would otherwise consider sitting through an art experiment as deliberately listless and meandering as "Last Days,: in which Van Sant presents the total absence of engagement or drama as an aging hipster's form of defiance. As ''Blake,'' Michael Pitt is shot mostly at a distance, his sandy blond long hair falling into his face, so that his thick placid features and strong stubbled chin make him look eerily like Cobain's double. For long stretches he wanders through the woods, mumbling to himself like a zombie Popeye, or stands around the mostly empty cavernous rooms of his remote, dilapidated house, munching on Cocoa Krispies (he's so out of it that he puts the cereal box, instead of the milk, into the fridge), scrawling in his diary, and engaging in random blitzed activities like parading around in a black slip as he diddles with a shotgun. "Last Days" makes Van Sant's perversely antipsychological Columbine meditation, "Elephant," look blandly mainstream, and at times the film wrung my patience dry. Yet there is a method to its madness, since the madness here is really Cobain's. "Last Days" mythologizes his suicide as a haunting act of fulfillment: the consummation of a life that had already ceased to be. EW Grade: B 'The Devil's Rejects'Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman Rob Zombie, the founder and lead savage of White Zombie, isn't the first rock star to direct a horror movie (let us all pause for a moment to forget Dee Snider's "Strangeland"), but he's the first to put his pierced-punk death-metal demon credo right up on screen, turning horror into a depraved rock & roll blood feast. In "The Devil's Rejects," Zombie's second effort as a grade-Z-and-lovin'-it auteur (the first was 2003's "House of 1,000 Corpses"), he directs like someone who has spent far too much time soaking up the most psychotic images of violence he can find: "Chainsaw" (natch) and "Cannibal Holocaust," Manson docs and "Faces of Death" videos, "Natural Born Killers" and "I Spit on Your Grave." "The Devil's Rejects," a wild-ass road movie of down-home slaughter, recalls many other tales of homicidal sadists in the rocky American Southwest. The difference is that Zombie doesn't pretend to be on the side of the victims. He makes no bones about his identification with the sexy outlaw serial killers, a brother and sister played by the hippieish Bill Moseley and the Marilyn Chambers-like Sheri Moon Zombie (the director's wife), who commit many squalid and hideous acts, terrorizing their victims with knives, axes, and shotguns, all in the name of sociopathic cool. They're the movie's ''rock stars'' incarnate. Zombie's characters are, to put it mildly, undeveloped (he features two kinds of women: sexy young sluts and beat-up old whores), but there's no denying the leeringly grotesque egghead-devil charisma of Sid Haig, who returns from "House of 1,000 Corpses" as Captain Spaulding, the clown so ugly you forgot to laugh. EW Grade: C+ '9 Songs'Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum It's true, there are nine songs in "9 Songs," including concert performances by such cachet headbangers as Franz Ferdinand, the Dandy Warhols, and Super Furry Animals. It's also true that nobody will go to see Michael Winterbottom's sexually explicit, novelty-act drama -- a naughty peep show for sobersides, disguised as a nature documentary -- to hear the songs; everyone will go to see the shagging, which occupies the majority of the screen time. Wait, that's not entirely true: A few fetishists turned on by "March of the Penguins" may want to check out "9 Songs" for the occasional shots of icy, shifting Antarctic land masses that Winterbottom includes, with deadpan art-house seriousness. The sex, you see, is being remembered in all its mutability and low-lit, musky, non-French grittiness by Matt (Kieran O'Brien, who also worked with Winterbottom on the director's bopping "24 Hour Party People"), a glaciologist who misses the heat of his short love affair with Lisa (newcomer Margo Stilley). Lisa was American, she was young, she was free and wild and hot to trot. And the couple trotted often and enthusiastically, between bouts of which they went to rock concerts and made out to the beat of Primal Scream and the Von Bondies. But while Matt (a British blank) was in love, Lisa (an even blanker American) was more in like. And then she left for the U.S., causing Matt to abandon their bedsheets for ice sheets. Which is why Matt tells his story from a frigid platform at the ends of the earth. In deference to the seriousness of global warming (plus in light of the couple's responsible use of condoms), the film is being released here unrated. Anyhow, back to the shagging. It's real -- or as real as it can be between two actors naked in front of a camera -- and sometimes it's arousing. (That's one woman's opinion; results may vary.) But get this: The filmmaker has said he wants "9 Songs" to be drama about real sex that's not erotic. As if an admission of erotic intent somehow cheapens the aesthetics. And so a viewer's question might reasonably be, Who are ya kidding? And also: Did Matt see any penguins Doing It down there in the Antarctic? EW Grade: C 'November'Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum In "November," Courteney Cox plays Sophie, a photographer whose boyfriend (James Le Gros) is murdered during a convenience-store robbery. And in keeping with the arty look of the indie drama (shown at Sundance in 2004), director Greg Harrison's somber story of guilt, memory, and darkroom techniques can perhaps be described as an homage to the work of David Hockney: Just as Hockney assembles smaller, overlapped Polaroids that don't necessarily make sense into a big picture that does, so Harrison, working from a script by Benjamin Brand, reveals the full circumstances of a violent crime through a flickering series of scenes modified in repetition. The depth of the story and the characters (including Anne Archer as Sophie's mother and Nora Dunn as her therapist) is awfully slight to bear the weight of such fancy editing. But the performances are crisp and in focus, with Cox in particular showing a photogenic feel for expressing grief. EW Grade: B- Click Here 
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