Well, we have 4 pairs of reserved seats (for the “New Moon” 7:30pm screening at AMC Barrywoods 24 on November 18) and prize packs including a DVD, CD, and case of VitaminWater for four lucky winners, to be chosen at random.

That’s right. No waiting in line, no getting there an hour and a half early. Reserved seats.

The catch? We at Scene-Stealers want to make sure we are drawing from a pool of potential winners that are true fans of the “Twilight” books and movies.

That means you gotta answer some trivia questions.

You didn’t think we were going to let you off that easy, did you?

Answer these five questions correctly, fill out the form below, and you are entered to win:

One reserved pair of tickets to the “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” 7:30pm screening at AMC Barrywoods 24 on November 18.

One “Twilight” DVD

One CD soundtrack to “The Twilight Saga: New Moon”

One  poster of “The Twilight Saga: New Moon”

One case of VitaminWater Sync

Good luck!

cforms contact form by delicious:days

The Milla Jovovich thriller “The Fourth Kind,” opening today, purports to be about real events and claims its using real documentary footage right alongside actors portraying the same scenes. Turns outmost of it may not be real at all. Read on here.

Why is this so necessary? Can’t we just have well-told suspense stories with good writing?  Ugh.

The new thriller “The Fourth Kind,” which opens with star Milla Jovovich speaking directly to the audience about the movie’s authenticity, has raised some suspicions about the credibility of its claims and supposedly “real” footage. While the jury’s still out 100 percent, it’s safe to assume that the footage used and the alien abduction story upon which the film is based are a total crock. Simply put, it’s fake.

In 2006, the Anchorage Daily News did a story on the disappearances in Nome, Alaska (the town in which the film takes place) and provided the FBI’s conclusions about them. What were those conclusions? That the winter climate and alcoholism were to blame for the disappearances of 24 people over 40 years.

Additionally, All Business‘ article on the matter states that there isn’t even any evidence to support the movie’s main character ever existed at all. The movie uses what it terms “aliases” throughout.

To further propagate the film’s cheap reliance on its dishonest tactic, Universal has released a featurette with “paranormal researcher” Marie D. Jones (embedded below), asserting that the footage used displays genuine signs of alien abductions. Sure, but that’s because that information is only available inside the brains of paranormal researchers! It’s not something that could be found independent of their guidance and replicated in a film.

With films like this and “Paranormal Activity” being widely distributed, the horror pseudo-documentaries might very well become fashionable (or, at least, profitable) again. Let’s hope there’s a change of pace and the next ones to assuredly come out are substantially more convincing.

I saw “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” which may be the least offensive of the bunch, in that its just silly and unfocused and doesn’t amount to much. At least it has George Clooney and Jeff Bridges to make it enjoyable in parts.

Contributor Phil Fava saw “Disney’s A Christmas Carol,” with Jim Carrey voicing Scrooge and Robert Zemeckis employing motion-capture animation again, is a perfect example of an adaptation that loses track of what made the original such a classic.

Phil also saw “The Fourth Kind,”  a mixed-up attempt at melding “actual” footage (much of which feels staged) and Hollywood actors into a suspense movie. Maybe its filmmakers should have watched the terrific and underrated “American Splendor” for tips on how to do that better.

George Clooney stars in this adaptation of Jon Ronson’s non-fiction book and Grant Heslov, his producing/writing partner from “Good Night and Good Luck,” takes the director’s chair for the first time. Where Clooney exhibited measured control directing “Good Night,” though, Heslov is all over the map with “Goats.”

The movie can’t quite make up its mind about what it wants to be: a silly farce, a character drama, a military satire, a supernatural story, or the personal journey of a humiliated cuckold. This wouldn’t be a problem if it did all of things well and found a through-line, but “The Men Who Stare at Goats” doesn’t do that. Instead, it’s a random string of gags and scenes (some that work well, some that don’t) that all somehow ring familiar. What the film is lucky to have is an excellent cast that seems game for anything.

The cuckold’s tale

Ewan McGregor plays Bob Wilton, the reporter who stumbles onto the story of the First Earth Battalion around the same time his wife leaves him for a one-armed man. His discoveries about a New Age branch of the Army headed by long-haired Vietnam vet Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) should be enough to get him interested, but instead it’s being dumped that gets him to Iraq, talking quite coincidentally to Django’s star pupil, Lyn Cassady (Clooney). His backstory seems forced from the get-go, but when the absurdities of the situation start piling up, it’s easier to forgive.

Silly farce

From there, the movie has a lot of fun filling in the details of this psi-ops Army division. Few actors today can do furious deadpan delivery like Clooney, but some of the stuff he has to convey is so preposterous that when the film asks you to believe in its characters, it’s just impossible. The exception: Bridges is quite sympathetic as a man who’s faith and hope are always teetering on collapse. On the level of farce, however, the film works for a good hour or so.

Military satire

The suggestion that the Army would pursue psychic exploration—and put up with a flower-carrying troop that stands for everything contrary to Army policy—for the sole reason of weaponizing it, is pretty funny. Screenwriter Peter Straughan gets a lot of mileage out of the notion, hoisting awkward notions of peace right up there against men in military outfits who start behaving strangely. But just when the movie feels as if it ought to be getting somewhere comes the sad realization that it has actually begun to wind down.

Character drama?

When all the characters from this flashback-riddled and disjointed movie finally converge, it’s the biggest letdown of the film. All the possibilities that the script hinted at earlier are unwisely scuttled for a lame escape attempt with no real consequence or purpose. It’s hard to get involved in the characters’ plight, especially when the road that they take is so arbitrary all of a sudden.

Supernatural story

Kevin Spacey plays a career-minded psychic warrior who brings unwanted change into the New Earth Army and therefore confirms our suspicions that all of this mind-literally-over-matter stuff is hogwash. Or is it? “The Men Who Stare at Goats” has an unconvincing and unfunny ending that wants to have it both ways, but just comes off as pandering.

The movie is uneven for sure and ludicrous in conceit, but that’s not to say that it isn’t entertaining at times. McGregor is saddled with a tiresome everyman role, but Spacey, Clooney, and especially Bridges make some of their scenes work better than they should. If only Heslov had been able to make a cohesive film out it …

Milla Jovovich, bathed in white light, steps into the foreground. As the camera circles her and abruptly changes angles, the actress delivers a spiel about the film’s production, its authenticity, our freedom to draw our own conclusions, and she wraps things up with the caveat that “some of what [we]’re about to see is disturbing.”

If you start things off with a proclamation like that, you’d better have the goods to back it up.

Set in a small town in northern Alaska in October 2000, the movie purports to use real video and audio from various interviews conducted by Dr. Abbey Tyler with several of her patients who were experiencing alien encounters in conjunction with dramatizations of those interviews and events. With that premise, one would think having convincing documentary footage would be the logical place to start. One would be wrong.

Right off the bat, “The Fourth Kind” can’t get its act together. The footage that kicks off the actual feature is of Dr. Tyler being interviewed by the film’s director, Olatunde Osunsanmi, and it’s so awkward and obviously scripted that the immediate effect is incredulity.

This persists throughout the entire film. None of the footage is convincing and the insinuation that it’s authentic becomes insulting. It doesn’t do itself any favors when it goes into split screen, either, showing the dramatized action alongside its allegedly real counterpart, often revealing the former to be more startling.

With that crippling problem set aside, Jovovich, playing Dr. Tyler, turns in a surprisingly decent performance. She’s convincing as a woman grieving the death of her husband while juggling motherhood and her duties as a psychologist.

Elias Koteas is good, too, as her visiting colleague who champions hard evidence, the scientific method and…yet…denies the validity of his own extraterrestrial encounter later on in the film.

And Hakeem Kae-Kazim as Dr. Awolowa Odusami (said to be an alias), a scholar of ancient languages, provided the film’s one sincere moment of intrigue and disturbance when he discussed the relationship between aliens and ancient Sumeria.

But then we have Will Patton as Sheriff August (another alias) who brings things to a screeching halt with his self-aware, arbitrarily hostile and unreasonable antics which make no sense and do further damage to the credibility the film so desperately needs.

He acts the way only a character in a bad movie would: ignoring evidence, making hasty, irrational decisions that negatively affect just about everyone, withholding basic information about Tyler’s husband’s death without purpose. Did Osunsanmi honestly think we wouldn’t find his character insufferable?

If for nothing else, the film fails by not living up to its own hefty proclamation. It isn’t scary in the slightest. The interviews seem fake and so much of the action borrows from “The Exorcist” and other possession films that it’s laughable. The scares that do occur are simply surprises and couldn’t haunt you if they wanted to.

I have a friend who’s never watched “E.T.” all the way through because he’s terrified of aliens. Just the other day, he was whining to me about being bullied into seeing “Signs” in theaters and how it nearly ruined his life. This wouldn’t faze him.

There’s so much in the film rife with potential and I frequently caught glimpses of what it could have been. But, sadly, it just didn’t amount to much.
For one thing, it’s operating at cross-purposes. The contents of the story as well as the vernacular employed throughout are not child-accessible. And you know what? I appreciate that. It’s consistent with Dickens’ tale of a man being haunted by various spectres on Christmas Eve that essentially frighten him into festive compliance.

But that serious narrative approach winds up being completely undermined by the visual and sonic strategy, which is, apparently, “more is more.” More shrieks. More thuds. More bright lights. More flying, swirling, twirling scenes. More falling from great heights. More chases. All that time spent assaulting us could have been used to build up necessary emotion.

Jim Carrey is a perfect fit for this material. He plays Ebenezer Scrooge at every stage of his life exceedingly well and the motion-capture is startlingly realistic at times. And I was pleasantly surprised when it occurred to me that Gary Oldman was the man imbuing Cratchit with all that neurotic humility.

However, in Carrey’s case, Scrooge becomes nothing more than a rag doll to be thrown around and dropped on his head and chased through city streets. Instead of being invested or amused, I spent most of my time wondering how a man his age could endure such tremendous physical strain. How about a subdued optical and aural experience to leave room for some Christmas spirit?

All this begs the question: Who exactly was this supposed to appeal to? Certainly not adults. For us, it’s akin to seeing your favorite uncle drink too much at a wedding and embarrass himself on the dance floor. For kids, it’s a gloomy, frightening experience fraught with purposeless eye candy (one family at my screening actually left within the first half hour because their kid got spooked).

The people that were apprehensive about “Where the Wild Things” because it was a bit despairing are the same people that are going to come out in droves to see this thing. And that’s really disappointing. “Where the Wild Things Are” was profusely soulful and heartfelt and honest. Whatever was dark or scary about it had its roots in a very authentic place. This behemoth, on the contrary, has all the emotional honesty of an elaborate fireworks display.

Look, I know it’s a 3D flick. I saw it IMAX and was as unimpressed by 3D as I’ve ever been. Dare I say that Charles Dickens wasn’t the right authorial choice for a big-budget Disney adaptation to be shot in 3D and play on IMAX screens? Zemeckis directed “Forrest Gump.” You’re telling me he couldn’t have made a delightful live-action version of this?

I actively wanted to like this movie. It certainly has some qualities. The themes are intact and the recreation of mid-19th century London is really captivating. Also, the animated characters are extremely expressive. But, again, why did they have to be animated in the first place? The only justification for that is the visual freedom permitted by animation, but that freedom is utilized in such a way that it robs the tale of its spirit almost entirely.

I’m a sentimental pushover and it doesn’t take a lot to put me in the Christmas spirit. This film didn’t. For all its sound and fury, it’s pretty forgettable.