Perhaps you have grown tired of this year's burning Oscar questions: Did anyone actually stay awake for all of Benjamin Button?

Is Kate Winslet "self-deprecating and ordinary" or "drippy" and "vain"?

Will Hollywood slobber all over Mickey Rourke or are his Chihuahuas still his biggest fan? (And R.I.P. to the one who passed away this week).

Why not switch topics? NG Live showed all the foreign film nominees last weekend at National Geographic headquarters as part of its All Roads Film Project. In case you missed them, here's what you need to know to weigh in on contenders for the foreign film statue:

The Baader Meinhof Complex
In a nutshell: This two-and-a-half hour bloodbath chronicles the heyday of the West German terrorist group the Red Army Faction (RAF), which the German media dubbed the Baader-Meinhof Gang after founding members Andreas Baader and journalist Urlike Meinhof.
Origins: Adapted from a book by Stefan Aust, former editor-in-chief of the German news mag, Der Spiegel.
Opening scene: Meinhof's children frolic on a nudist beach. It's a moment of symbolic innocence before a decade of riots, bombings, and assassinations consumes West Germany.
Local reaction: Many German critics fear the film glamorizes the terrorists; others laud its courage to eschew the good-versus-evil paradigm.
Foreign flavor: German radical fashion in the ‘70s consisted of boots, skirts and Kalashnikovs.
Weird fact: The Baader-Meinhof Complex steals its title from the so-called "Baader-Meinhof phenomenon"—a person hears a weird fact for the first time, then encounters the same fact again and again. A Minnesota man allegedly coined the term when he wrote to a "Bulletin Board" column in the St. Paul [Minnesota] Pioneer Press and told how he first learned about the Baader-Meinhof gang and then what should happen soonafter but a second mention of ... the Baader-Meinhof gang.
Oscar odds: The violence might be too much for voters, but the film serves scenes to savor and epic themes to digest.
–Oliver Uberti

The Class
In a nutshell: A youngish French junior high school teacher in a "difficult" city school struggles to teach—and control--a class of often insolent students, many from immigrant families. There are clashes, there is frustration, there is wry humor at year's end when one student says she learned nothing, and the teacher says, "That's impossible," and she replies, "I'm the living proof."
Origins: Adapted from a semi-autobiographical book by a French teacher, who plays a version of himself in the movie.
Opening scene: The back of a man's head – it is the teacher, in a café, downing a fast coffee before going to a teacher orientation for the new school year.
Foreign flavor: You know it's France if students play soccer during lunch. Also: In a café, the teacher smokes a cigarette. A cleaning woman tells him to snuff it out but he persists and no one stops him! Seulement en Paree!
Local reaction: "Exciting from start to finish," said one French reviewer. They loved it at the Cannes film festival: In 2008, it became the first French film to win the top prize in 20 years.
Weird fact: If the movie is to be believed, student representatives sit in on frank faculty discussions of student behavior and academic performance.
Oscar odds: Said to be a front-runner because of its ultra-realism. Then again: the movie's two hours are spent largely in the teacher's confining classroom, highlighting adolescent ennui. Maybe some voters will look for a movie with a plot instead of vignettes highlighting the inability of the modern education system to reach unmotivated students.
–Marc Silver

Departures
In a nutshell: An out-of-work cellist and his young wife move from Tokyo to his hometown of Yamagata, where he finds a new career as a nokanshi --someone who prepares the dead for cremation.
Origins: Inspired by the 1993 novel Coffinman, an autobiographical account of Japanese writer Shinmon Aoki's career as a Buddhist mortician. 
Opening scene: "It's been two months since I left Tokyo to come back home," a narrator intones as a car glides along a snow-swept road. "It's been an awkward time." At their destination, two men in somber suits find a family mourning the loss of an attractive young woman. Midway through the formal rite of washing the body, the younger suit pauses, quizzical. The sorrowful onlookers suddenly look uncomfortable. The mortician's mentor steps in and confirms the discovery: The dead woman was a man.
Foreign flavor: Most audiences will relate to the young couple as just an ordinary pair. But subtle details -- an octopus writhing on the kitchen floor, locals socializing in a sento (communal bathhouse), incense burning in tatami-matted rooms -- are very Japanese.
Local reaction: Japanese critics have called Departures one of the best films of the year, and it has pulled in more than 3 billion yen ($33 million U.S.) so far at the Japanese box office.
Weird fact: In addition to a ritual cleansing, the nokanshi must shave a man's full face and wedge cotton plugs deep into a person's backside to control, uh, seepage.
Oscar odds: It may not have the high profile of The Class or Waltz with Bashir, but Departures is being praised as a simply shot film that offers a candid take on the life of an undertaker. Even if it doesn't win an Oscar, it does offer career possibilities in an era of job woes.
-Victoria Jaggard

Revanche
In a nutshell: This thriller starts off as an unlikely bank caper plotted by Alex, an ex-con who’s a little soft around the edges, and his prostitute girlfriend. As soon as Alex utters the words, “Nothing can go wrong,” be assured that things neither unfold as planned nor as the audience might expect. While trying to escape Vienna’s red-light district they end up in the Austrian countryside altering the mundane lives of an old man and an ordinary couple.
Origins: Written and directed by acclaimed Austrian filmmaker Gotz Speilmann.
Opening scene: A cryptic object unexpectedly drops into the tranquil reflection of trees in a lake. The audience jumped a little. And about two hours into the movie there was a collective a-ha moment when the cause of the placid disturbance is revealed.
Foreign flavor: What’s for dinner: loaf of bread, hunk of cheese, cured meats. How Austrian!
Local reaction: “A meandering first half gives way to a spectacular psychological portrait of the deafening silence of pain and loneliness,” wrote a European film reviewer.
Weird fact: The German word “revanche” can mean either revenge or a second chance. Very apropos.
Oscar odds: Last year’s Oscar winner for best foreign film was Austria’s The Counterfeiters.  Although Revanche has received numerous awards and critical acclaim, a repeat Austrian win is unlikely.
-J.M. McCord

Waltz with Bashir
In a nutshell: Depicted in mesmerizing animation, an Israeli soldier turned filmmaker seeks out compatriots to bridge gaps in his memory about the army's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
Origins: A documentary of the director's own quest with a few actors filling in for reluctant interviewees.
Opening scene: Snarling dogs race along a rainy city street, snapping directly into the camera under a haunting yellow sky. A friend's recurring dream about the war, it spurs the director's search for answers.
Foreign flavor: Military service and war stories are part of everyone's life experience.
Local reaction: The Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote "It has to do with everyone who has been in a war here, which is everyone here." In Lebanon, where the movie is technically banned but available via bootleggers and back channels, the film drew one activist's praise for Israeli "courage to revisit events in which they were involved." Others thought it shirked blame for wartime atrocities.
Weird fact: It took nine hours to draw 37 frames—a second and a half of the film.
Oscar odds: Seriously stunning and stunningly serious. Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus won a Pulitzer. Bashir can win an Oscar.
-Brad Scriber

“There's an old Australian stockman, lying, dying…” begins the song "Tie Me Kangaroo Down," which gained fame around the world back in 1960. The lyrics mix a gritty sense of the outback with a fair bit of silliness. Australia, the new film from director Baz Luhrmann, essentially does the same. People still recognize the song. Some can even sing a few bars. But half a century from now, will audiences remember the film? Probably not.

Australia was clearly meant to be as grand and sweeping as the continent is wide and open. And it does deliver on landscapes. But with a running time of two hours and 45 minutes, the film’s only epic dimension is the endurance it demands from the viewers. Its plot is predictable. The characters are cardboard cutouts. The romance could have been lifted from any bodice ripper. The music swells too obviously. And every possible cliché about the Land Down Under loads it with dead weight. It’s Crocodile Dundee and Rabbit Proof Fence with a dash of Gone with the Wind. (Think of the overwrought Scarlet. And of Atlanta burning, burning, burning.)

This collection of flaws is a great pity, because admirable themes play out through the film—the harshness of life on a cattle station in the middle of nowhere, dust and dryness blessedly relieved by the arrival of the rainy season (known as The Wet), the richness of the native culture, the cruel attitudes and policies directed toward the Aboriginal population, the role of religion in enforcing those policies, and a chapter from World War II that’s little known outside of Australia.

[Spoiler Alert: If you're set on seeing the movie, stop reading now because plot points lie ahead—unless you're concerned that you'll doze off at key points and miss important moments. In that case, read on.]

The film begins with a stockman lying, dying—murdered, actually, as seen by a half-Aboriginal boy named Nullah. The plot revolves around this boy, and his voice breaks in frequently with a cheery, plucky, wise, mystical narrative. He quickly diverts the action to the UK, where the plot gets its wobbly legs.

Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman), an English rose if ever there was one, receives news of her husband, who has bought a cattle ranch called Faraway Downs in Australia. That just won’t do. The ranch must be sold. And so she’s soon winging her way to Darwin. It’s 1939, and the clouds of war are gathering.

Arriving via Qantas (of course) with her parasol held aloft, Lady Ashley lands in the middle of a cutthroat competition. Both her husband and cattle baron Lesley “King” Carney are trying to sell their herds of beef to the army, and only one can win.

Lady A hitches a ride to the ranch with a brooding hunk of a cattle drover (Hugh Jackman), who hopes to get the job of driving her husband’s livestock to Darwin’s wharf. Near the end of their journey, she inquires, “How long before we reach Faraway Downs?” The drover (nameless for the entire film) replies, “We’ve been on it for the last two days.” A wide, open country, indeed.

At the ranch, Lady A discovers that her husband is the murdered stockman. But she decides that she can be as tough as any bloke. In short order she hides Nullah from officials who want to haul him off to the white man’s school, sacks the slimy ranch manager (who then goes to work for Carney), rounds up 1,500 head of cattle with a skeleton staff—herself, the drover, Nullah, a grizzled alcoholic accountant, a few loyal Aboriginals, and a Chinese chuck-wagon driver—and sets off for Darwin. Nullah sums up their mission: “We gotta to get those no good big bloody bulls into that metal ship.”

Carney’s men, acting under the orders of the former manager of Faraway Downs, sneak up on them one night and start a stampede. But Nullah uses Aboriginal magic and a Pulp Fiction pose to stop the crazed critters mere feet from the edge of a precipice.

The accountant has been trampled, but with his dying breath he tells the drover the secret of the stockman’s death: A white man made it look like Nullah’s grandfather ran a spear through him.

The drive continues. Lady A has loosened up by now, and romance sizzles amid thundering hooves and soaring violins.

The Faraway Downs folks make it safely to Darwin and race their cattle to the army’s supply ship, beating out Carney by a nose. Phew!

That evening, Nullah sneaks into the local theater to see The Wizard of Oz. He then adopts "Over the Rainbow" as his magic song. (A whimsical connection between the fictional Oz and the Oz that’s modern Australia’s nickname, perhaps?)

Meanwhile, Lady A is here to stay. Dressed in a fetching frock, she appears at a charity ball—the scene of the truest, most intriguing scene in the film. Carney, played by the ever-riveting Bryan Brown, takes his defeat with good grace, dancing with Lady A, then laughing and tipping back a cold one as she sashays off with the drover. In those brief minutes, the character reveals himself as a real son of the outback—fiercely competitive but fair, and up for a good time under the right circumstances.

With the romance of Lady A and the drover now on the front burner, it’s time for Nullah to join his grandfather on a walkabout, the traditional spiritual journey that connects Aboriginal Australians with their landscape. Before they get very far, though, Nullah’s grandfather is arrested for the murder of Lady A’s husband, and a priest hustles the boy off to a proper school for Aboriginal children.

Then, on February 19, 1942, Japanese airplanes swoop in to drop bombs on Darwin. Ships sink. Houses burn. Columns of smoke choke the sky. It’s the largest foreign attack ever launched against Australia, and the first of about a hundred to come during the rest of 1942 and 1943.

In the midst of the chaos, Lady A believes the drover is dead but hopes against all odds that Nullah has survived. The drover thinks that Lady A is dead, and maybe the boy too. With his school under attack, Nullah is sure the drover will come to his rescue. Cue "Over the Rainbow" as a key signal in this muddle.

Baz Luhrmann reportedly shot several endings to the story. The one he chose for U.S. audiences is true to the glowing, hopeful way in which he depicts Aboriginal people throughout the film. An epilogue soberly reminds us that in 1973 the government abandoned its policy of Aboriginal assimilation in the Northern Territory, and that in 2008 Australia finally issued an apology to its Aboriginal community for generations of ill treatment.

The credits for a film this long are inevitably dense, but buried in the middle there’s bit of fun: A nod to Rolf Harris for playing the wobble board. It’s an instrument he invented—a hardboard made for artists, wobbled back and forth— which made the whoopwhoopwhoop sound in his hit "Tie Me Kangaroo Down." I couldn’t help it—I left the theater singing. “There's an old Australian stockman, lying, dying…and he says: ‘Watch me wallaby's feed, mate, watch me wallaby's feed.
They're a dangerous breed, mate, so watch me wallaby's feed.
All together now! Tie me kangaroo down, sport. 
Tie me kangaroo down….’

-Ann Williams

During the final days of Liberia's civil war, women whose only authority consisted of the silk-screened logos on their T-shirts helped bring the country back from the verge of national suicide. The "Women's Peace Building Network" practiced a shrewd and audacious African brand of feminism that won the activists a voice in a society that long barred women from power. They did this despite the degradations of a conflict that cast women as displaced people, rape victims, and helpless bystanders doomed to watch their husbands murdered, sons conscripted, daughters violated, and children forced to go without food. Pray the Devil Back to Hell, a film that will be screened in at least ten U.S. cities, documents the gentle but determined uprising. If you want a feel good movie, this is it. If you're in the mood to think, this is it, too.

To make themselves heard, the women first off embraced religion--both Christianity and Islam. They put on their version of "sackcloth and ashes": white T-shirts with slogans, head ties instead of elaborate hairdos, no makeup, little jewelry, and white lapas (cloths wrapped around their waists as skirts). Then they took their message to churches and mosques and the streets. When challenged or thwarted, they used their traditional roles for leverage. Wives refused to have sex with their husbands until the war ended. They demanded respect from police and soldiers. Turning the passivity that had been their lot into a tool to shame those in power, they gathered by the main road leading from President Charles Taylor's house into the capital of Monrovia and sat there day after day, in the hot sun, and in the driving rain, until he was forced to take notice.

The climax of their struggle came in mid-2003, six years into Taylor's corrupt and brutal rule. Rebels were closing in on the capital of Monrovia. The women's dogged petitions and protests had helped bring both parties to peace talks in Ghana. But negotiations were going nowhere. Taylor, indicted for war crimes, had just left the bargaining table and fled to Liberia, vowing to fight to the end in the besieged capital. A top  rebel commander promised to kill everyone in Monrovia and repopulate the city with his supporters. The women were sitting outside the room where the negotiations were being held seemingly to no effect. They continued to chant and sing for peace, but some were breaking into tears of frustration. Finally, one of their leaders, Leymah Gbowee, decided they must blockade the hall and force the men inside to experience the hunger and thirst people in Monrovia were suffering—the misery the women heard about everyday as they phoned home. So the activists formed a human chain across the entrance. Immediately, a security guard arrived to arrest Gbowee. It seemed as if the women's act of civil disobedience would quickly be defused. But in a moment of cultural genius, "General Leymah" undid her head tie and made as if to strip naked. The officer stopped dead.

"What?" readers in the U.S. may be wondering. But, as the film explains, it is considered a curse in West Africa for a man to see his mother naked, especially if she has purposely taken off her clothes. Gbowee, assuming the role of the guard's mother, asserted her control of the situation (in West Africa, younger men often address older women who have children as "ma," as a sign of respect, even if they are not their actual mothers). The women's blockade continued until they extracted a pledge from the rebel and government leaders to be more serious. After this pledge, the tone of the negotiations changed and progress became possible. Soon, there was an enormous breakthrough. Charles Taylor agreed to go into exile on August 4, 2003, and the rebels agreed to halt their offensive and allow U.N. peacekeepers to enter Monrovia. Thousands of lives were saved.

It is hard to communicate the courage of these women. The film does a good job by repeatedly showing the sinisterly impassive face of Charles Taylor, eyes hidden behind sunglasses—a charismatic rebel leader turned president who was single-handedly responsible for the war's beginning and many of the conflict's atrocities. Taylor never displays a hint of guilt or remorse. The women have to literally face down this ruthless, increasingly paranoid ruler. "Come out!" Taylor taunts them in a radio announcement. "I'm waiting for you. Nobody will get into the street to embarrass my administration." Viewers of the film might think that perhaps the women activists drew some sense of security from their appeals to God and their white dress, with its religious symbolism. But there was nothing sacred in wartime Liberia. At the start of the conflict in 1990, St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Monrovia, where the group's leaders were often shown rallying women to their cause, had been the site of a terrible massacre. More than 600 civilians who sought sanctuary were slaughtered by soldiers of the soon-to-be-overthrown Doe government firing their guns into a cowering crowd. In 1992, five American nuns, beloved for their service to the poor and thought to be immune from the violence because of their nationality and high profile, had been brutally murdered by Taylor's rebel forces in a suburb of Monrovia. Their white habits did not save them.

Here is the film's challenge: Who among us is more powerless than these women were during the midst of the war? Who is more at risk? If they could turn their position around and so influence those in power, any of us can. There is no excuse not to act.

-Karen Lange

In every James Bond movie, the suave spy travels the world, bedding beautiful women and beating up bad guys. You know who else travels the world? National Geographic. Although not quite as dangerously, and with gadgets that run more to the camera and notebook.

The latest Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, doesn’t rise much above the mediocre mark, but it’s still good world-traveling fun. Here’s a guide to the movie’s locations, Geographic-style:

Early in the movie, Bond visits Siena, Italy, during the Palio, a twice-a-year horse race held in the town’s central piazza. Of course, by “visits” I mean “chases a bad guy and breaks a lot of glass.” National Geographic’s first story about the Palio appeared in the August 1926 issue, still to be found in some grandparents’ basements; here’s a photograph from a 1988 story on the race. Falling off horses, as one of the riders does in the movie, is a pretty standard part of the Palio – the jockeys ride bareback, and a riderless horse can still win the race.

Bond’s travels include a number of visits to London. Everyone knows it always rains in the movie version of London, and this movie’s London follows the trend. How much does it rain in real-world London? Ok, about half the time, according to this BBC chart on London weather, which shows 11 to 15 “wet days” a month. National Geographic Traveler can tell you all about visiting the city yourself. (Take an umbrella.)

In Bregenz, Austria, Bond takes in an opera. By “takes in” I mean “kills people at.” The opera in question was a real production of Puccini’s Tosca at the Bregenz Festival, where the audience watches performances outdoors on a stage that floats on Lake Constance. You missed your chance to see Tosca at this year's festival, but one imagines the 2009 Bregenz Aida could also be quite stunning.

Much of Quantum of Solace takes place in Bolivia’s high desert. You’re in luck – National Geographic has had a lot to say about Bolivia recently. Why do women wear those little bowler hats? See here. The spy might have had a different experience if he’d hooked up with some Bolivian women wrestlers—now that is a Bond girl. Various locations stood in for Bolivia during filming, including Chile’s Atacama Desert, subject of an August 2003 magazine story, “The Driest Place on Earth."

— Helen Fields

In the new film Synecdoche, New York, a physically, domestically, artistically tormented theater director receives a vast grant and sets out to make something “big and true and tough; you know, finally put my real self into something.”

Of course, since it’s a Charlie Kaufman picture (think Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), the protagonist goes right down a rabbit hole, decamping from upstate Schenectady to New York City, transforming a decrepit warehouse into a full-scale replica of Gotham, and peopling it with stand-ins for everyone in (and out) of his life … including, eventually, himself.

It’s all very punning ("synecdoche"/"Schenectady"), reflexive, absurdist, and meta—according to Webster’s, “synecdoche” means “a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole, the whole for a part, the species for the genus, the genus for the species, or the name of the material for the thing made”—to say the least. It’s also very good, if you like your alternate-reality popcorn buttered with Really Big Questions about life, death, love, and why anything and nothing matters.

But that’s not why we’re posting today. No, we at Pop Omnivore are going down a rabbit hole of our own: the, uh, geographic one that houses full-scale replicas of famous landmarks in unlikely locations.

One we know about is the Parthenon—in Nashville, Tennessee, built in 1897 for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition. Another? The Lighthouse of Alexandria—in Shenzhen, China’s Window of the World Cultural Park. And of course there’s Stonehenge—in Maryhill, Washington, dedicated on July 4, 1918 as the first U.S. monument to honor the dead of World War I.

While there’s no shortage of Statue of Liberty knockoffs in France—at least five, by most lights—that’s probably not so surprising: It was France, after all, that presented America with the real deal, as a goodwill gift, circa 1886.

Anyway, those are just a few. We’re sure plenty more exist, and we’d love to know all about them—where they are, when they were built, why they were built, maybe even who's or what's behind them.

Can you let us know?

- Jeremy Berlin

We’ve all scoured our homes for a misplaced manual when an appliance goes on the fritz. Now, imagine the appliance is a 200-year-old generator that single-handedly powers a subterranean city. Did I mention this is where all of humanity is hiding out until the dust clears on a post-apocalyptic surface world? Talk about an epic oops!

City of Ember is a family-friendly parable that joins the Emberites in just such a bind. The bunker town was meant to sustain the survivors’ descendants for two centuries. The builders assumed the one thing their offspring would remember is where they left that darn box with instructions for returning to the surface. Instead of clicking open in the hands of the mayor, as planned, the misplaced box pops its top in a cluttered closet in the home of the film’s spirited teen heroine, Lina Mayfleet. Her toddler sister gets to it first, tearing it to shreds and even eating a chunk. Lina and buddy Doon Harrow team up to piece together the manual and find the route out of the city.

In the meantime, the urban underground is showing its age. Its failing generator is spawning blackouts. The overhead constellation of lightbulbs goes dark longer and longer each time. Huge piles of garbage are accumulating around the edges of the city. Repair materials are scarce, and officials are hoarding food.

Ember’s plight is fanciful, but figuring out how to keep cities powered-up is more than a fairy tale. For some guidance on what Ember’s architects got right, and where they might have been a bit brighter, I turned to a chapter in the Worldwatch Institute’s 2007 State of the World Report that looks at how best to energize our cities.

On the plus side, Ember’s generator uses local power with a renewable energy source (an underground river). So Ember isn’t struggling with fuel shortages or strained transmission lines from faraway sources (Worldwatch points out that some 7 percent of electricity is shed as it is carried to cities on far reaching grids). The cavernous site also makes good use of the insulating properties of the earth, without even relying on heat pumps that are helping some aboveground cities keep temperatures under control. And Ember has the ultimate green roof.

On the other hand, they might have squeezed a few more generations out of that generator. Landfill gas from all that garbage could be feeding the grid, as it does in cities like São Paulo, Riga, and Istanbul. Another tip: Switch lightbulbs. Emberites could have used compact florescent bulbs, or light-emitting-diodes (LEDs), instead of the traditional filament bulbs that dangle above the subterranean rooftops.

- Brad Scriber

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, the third movie in the mummy series starring Brendan Fraser, is supposed to depict an epic confrontation between good and evil. But it begs such a willing suspension of disbelief that it doesn’t feel that grand—or even particularly engaging. It’s puzzling, for starters, because there’s no real mummy. And it’s more about treasure hunting than archaeology, with a dust-roiling explosion employed as part of a tomb “excavation” in one of the early scenes. It’s not even a compelling adventure fantasy, with one predictable plot twist after another, and dialogue that’s not campy enough to be delightful.

But it does have one thing worth seeing: glorious special effects that bring China’s famed terra cotta warriors to life and propel them into battle.

The character who kicks off the story is based on a historical figure: Qin (pronounced “chin”) Shi Huang Di, the third-century B.C. emperor who united much of what we know today as China, built the first version of the Great Wall, and commissioned the creation of more than 7,000 more-than-life-size statues—singers, dancers, acrobats, government officials, generals, archers, charioteers, and foot soldiers, each with unique, individual details—to accompany him in the afterlife. In his tomb, they were all situated facing east, as if holding an eternal line against people who had been conquered by the emperor and might rise in revolt in the next life.

Uncovered in 1974 by farmers digging a well near the city of Xi’an, the emperor’s tomb is one of the world’s most astounding ancient treasures. And it may yet hold surprises, with more than 3,000 of the figures yet to be excavated. No wonder it captured the imagination of movie moguls.

In the beginning of the tale, the ambitious emperor battles against rival rulers. His defeated enemies are forced to build his great wall, then are buried beneath it. But there’s one enemy he can’t vanquish by brute strength: death. For that he turns to a sorceress who knows where to find the secret to immortality. They have a falling out, and she casts a curse on him and his army, turning them to terra cotta in an ingenious sequence of scenes. Clay pours down cheeks like tears, bodies become boiling mudpots, and muddy figures burst into flames that fire them as thoroughly as a kiln. So in this weird murky way, the soldiers are “mummified” by mud.

Fast forward a couple of millennia. Rick O’Connell and his wife, Evelyn, the central characters in the first two mummy films, are living in a grand British estate, bored to befuddlement in retirement. The Foreign Office comes to their rescue, sending them to China to return the Eye of Shangri-La, a huge ancient diamond smuggled into the UK several years before. Arriving in Shanghai, the couple visit Evelyn’s brother, Jonathan, who owns a King-Tut’s-tomb nightclub—where Anubis guards the stairwell and other bits of Egyptomania make brief appearances. The year is 1947, neatly avoiding the rise of chairman Mao and any parallels between ancient and modern empire-building.

Meanwhile, the O’Connell’s son, Alex, has discovered the tomb of the emperor, and has opened it with a blast of dynamite. Inside stand the legions of armed warriors, along with horses and chariots, in long, precise rows—a scene that impressively conjures up the real-life emperor’s eternal army. The emperor is there, too, in an ornately carved stone sarcophagus. Inevitably, an evil Chinese general sets out to revive the emperor. It’s a very bad idea. If the curse on the emperor is ever lifted, he will rise to enslave all mankind. The key to the emperor’s revival? Why, the Eye of Shangri-La!

The emperor comes back to life, of course, bursting out of his terra cotta casing with his eyes ablaze. Fights and chase scenes ensue, with the O’Connells and their friends allied against the emperor-demon from the great beyond. (In one nifty scramble down a Shanghai street, the Ben-Hur axle attachment on the emperor’s chariot rips a jagged hole along the entire side of a parked Rolls Royce.) The emperor is now a shape shifter, taking the guise of a three-headed dragon in one scene—hence the title of the movie. He finally snatches the magical Eye from the O’Connells and succeeds in reanimating his warriors. On a dusty plain they rise from great rectangular pits and begin to march in vast regiments with spears at the ready, crossbows cocked. Cecil B. DeMille couldn’t have staged it better. The evil multitudes are heading into battle against an assortment of good guys: the O’Connells and their friends, the sorceress and her daughter, and the emperor’s once vanquished enemies—who now spring from their graves at the foot of the Great Wall looking much more like mummies than the emperor or his minions. If the emperor’s troops succeed in crossing the wall, it’s curtains for the civilized world.

Can’t guess who wins? You’ll have to see the movie. And stay long enough to see the subtitle in the final scene—it’s a clue to the location of The Mummy, take 4. But the filmmaker should be wary. Plans for a sequel could fall victim to the curse of a bad opening weekend at the box office.

-A. R. Williams

The new X-Files movie, subtitled “I Want to Believe,” left me wanting to leave.

There was plenty of X-Files camp, the way X-Files fans like it: overwrought dialogue, cliché spooky music, constant foul weather, and perpetual furrowed brows. And there was no shortage of severed body parts in the snow, creepy Russian doctors hefting stolen bodily organs, and long-haired Irish pedophile priests who commune with the dead and bleed from the eyes. (Ok, there’s only one of those.) But I wanted more conspiracy, and I wanted more funny. More dry wit to make the other stuff more bearable. More moments like the one at the pedophile compound when Mulder suggests they “stay out of the activities room.”

But why dwell on the film when there are scientific questions to be answered? What I really wanted to know: Is it possible to do a human head transplant? Those Russian doctors in the movie appeared to think so, and might have succeeded had the dynamic duo of Scully and Mulder not intervened. In real life, surgeons are now capable of doing a face transplant (from a cadaver to a live recipient). But a whole head?

In the 1950s, Soviet scientists stuck a puppy's head on another dog's body. The results were reported in a National Geographic documentary that aired in England. In a nutshell: The second head barked for a couple of days, but the two-headed dog soon expired.

What about today, with all the advances in science? Is a head transplant possible?

“Theoretically, I’ll give you a resounding maybe,” wrote Paul Pietsch, professor emeritus in the Indiana University optometry department, in an email. The man would know. He managed to graft an embryonic salamander head onto the eye socket of another salamander (that had its own head already). The graft developed normally, with working eyes and snapping jaws. (There was a purpose to the madness— Pietsch is no Frankenstein—something about a study requiring radioactive isotopes injected into eye muscles.)

Whether a human head transplant would function is questionable. Writes Pietsch in response to the idea, “Egad!” And: “The donated human head probably would not integrate into the host’s body (even if we prevent its rejection). While it could be spliced into the host’s blood supply and thus kept alive,” it would be just “a living hunk of proud flesh (ugh!).” And finally, wisely, he notes, “Who in the heck would want such a thing?”

Well, in the X-Files movie, apparently the demand is there. The ugly old bald guy wants to keep his own head (that in and of itself begs questions) but needs to replace his failing body. (If the guy's severed noggin wakes up and finds his cronies have attached him to a young woman swimmer's body, I suspect heads will roll.)

My take-home messages: Rent (or skip) the film. Oh, and be an organ donor.

-Jennifer Holland

In Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, an apocalyptic good-versus-evil battle toggles between antiquity and modernity, myth and reality, New York and New Jersey. So what else is new?

For starters, the “Troll Market,” a bazaar of misshapen, magical peddlers hidden beneath the Brooklyn Bridge’s east tower. That’s where a particularly important scene takes place in the movie—and where Pop Omnivore’s geographic and historical interest was piqued.

Of course, there are no trolls under the iconic span, which was built 125 years ago by John Augustus Roebling and his son Washington and, at 6,000 feet, is one of the longest suspension bridges in the world. If there were such a marketplace, its inhabitants would surely be grumpy: 150,000 people traverse the East River each day via the Brooklyn-to-Manhattan bridge.

But it turns out that the span does have its share of surprises. Ted Timbers, spokesman for the New York City Department of Transportation, told us about a curious find a couple of years ago. During a routine structural inspection, some NYCDOT workers came across a secret chamber that looked a lot like a Cold War bunker. Inside was an honest-to-goodness survival cache: water drums, boxes of medical supplies (including tourniquet bandages and IV drips), a pile of blankets marked “For Use Only After Enemy Attack,” and some 350,000 high-calorie crackers in sealed tins. Most of the items were dated either 1957 or 1962.

Brooklyn Borough Historian Ron Schweiger has his own opinion. To him, the most unusual things on the bridge are the cathedral-like anchorages at either end. They’re mostly closed off, but in 1983, when the bridge was celebrating its 100th anniversary, he led tours through the eight, 50-foot-tall rooms on the Brooklyn side.

“Gorgeous, cavernous, unbelievable,” he says. “For years it was just storage space. But it also used to be a restaurant, and an art gallery. There are art shows there every year now. It’s a hidden part of the bridge, past and present. A real marvel.”

Further proof the bridge doesn’t need trolls to make it special? P.T. Barnum supposedly proved the span’s safety by parading 21 elephants across it in 1884.

And, of course, there’s the sought-after factor. No one’s quite sure where the expression “selling the Brooklyn Bridge” comes from, but the tribute to gullibility didn’t bubble up from the collective unconscious. According to The New York Times circa 1928, two different confidence men, William McCloundy and George C. Parker, each did hard time after completing their respective “sales.”

-Jeremy Berlin

Over four decades, Werner Herzog has shot films in the African bush and the Amazon rainforest, the jungles of Thailand and the wilds of Alaska. Yet the oft-honored German director never thought he’d get to Antarctica, much less make a documentary about it. But after applying for and receiving a National Science Foundation grant, he spent six weeks at the South Pole. The result is Encounters at the End of the World, an odd, beautiful look at the people, animals, and ideas one finds on Earth’s coldest continent.

Herzog recently spoke with Pop Omnivore about Antarctica—plus space travel, the end of the world, and goat-riding chimps, among other things.

You’re exploring Antarctica in your new movie, yet you allege that the quest for fame and glory has ruined the spirit of exploration.

Well, we’ve already damaged the dignity of Mount Everest and the South Pole. And there are all these absurd quests nowadays to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records. [I think real] adventure ended with the crazy race for the North and South Pole. I mean, adventure in its original sense—of the medieval knight setting out into the unknown and coming back having changed his perspective, his life—belongs to earlier centuries. It started to die out when men would meet for pistol duels at dawn, and damsels in distress would faint on couches. That was a time when adventure still had some validity. Now it’s over. It’s over. If you want to book an adventure trip to New Guinea, to the “headhunters,” then do that.

You say the divers in Antarctica’s frigid water look “like astronauts floating in space.” What’s the real final frontier—space or Earth’s oceans?

Probably oceans. There are still a lot of unexplored areas out there. Besides, our solar system—and whatever is beyond our solar system—is not reachable for us. No matter what technology is coming up, we won’t reach it. Period.

So you don’t think a Star Wars version of space travel is possible?

No, that’s only in the movies. The next star outside the solar system would take hundreds of thousands of years to reach. It would be 550 generations [till the first humans would arrive on Alpha Centauri]. But those people wouldn’t even know why they set out and who they were—they would be complete freaks, breeding in madness.

So it’s impossible for us. We will not reach it. Period. And it’s beautiful that it remains the fantasy of Star Wars.

Tell me about the “professional dreamers” you met in Antarctica.

Everyone there has an unusual biography. In the galley you find a retired judge who washes dishes. The man who drives the Caterpillar is a philosopher from Bulgaria who speaks profoundly and wonderfully about our planet and our existence here.

What about the animals? In one scene you show a “deranged” penguin that breaks from its flock and makes for the distant inland mountains. What did you think about that?

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of whether there is such a thing as insanity among animals. Why is it—and I posed this question at the beginning of the film—that only humans ride horses? Why is it that such an intellectually highly developed creature as an ape, a chimpanzee ... why does a chimp not straddle a goat and ride off into the sunset? Why is it that certain species of ants keep flocks of plant life as slaves and milk them for droplets of sugar?

Those are unusual questions, but I pose them anyway. I believe that sometimes a question is better than the answer.

Humanity, you say, evolved out of “violent” ocean life, and we see images of single-celled organisms with “borderline intelligence.” Why?

When you take a close look at underwater life, it’s immediately evident there’s a constant and permanent danger out there, and the food chain down there is absolutely relentless. So I have the feeling it must be sheer hell to live in the oceans as one of these creatures, [and that we did well to] crawl out from this terror, onto solid land, to get away from this hell underwater.

The “ecstatic truth” you seek in your films: Did you find it in Antarctica?

What I always try to do is to go beyond the mere facts—to find something deeper, something that illuminates us, that moves us in a state of almost ecstasy, where we step out of our own existence and experience something that’s different from what you normally experience when you watch television. Because I think the facts per se do not constitute truth. That was always the mistake of cinéma vérité.

But here [I shot] images that are beyond what we had experienced [before], of what we had seen in cinema. The underwater footage, for example, is absolutely wonderful. It’s like being in outer space somewhere.

Scientists in your film say that our “presence on this planet seems unsustainable,” that the “end of human life is assured.” Do you agree?

Yes. And it doesn’t make me nervous, either.

Why?

These scientists are looking at the history of biological life on our planet, and it’s been a constant chain of cataclysms and catastrophes. We had the time of the trilobites, and they disappeared. We had the time of the dinosaurs, and they disappeared. And we’ve had a very, very short period for Homo sapiens. It’s quite evident that this is not sustainable, for many, many reasons.

[The end of the world] is not going to come that quickly. But it doesn’t matter whether it comes in 5,000 or 50,000 or 500,000 years. It doesn’t really matter.

What if it happens sooner—like in your lifetime?

Martin Luther, the reformist, gave a great answer when he was asked, “What would you do if tomorrow the world came to an end? And he said, “Today I would plant an apple tree.” My answer is, “Today I am going to make a movie.”

Are we hastening our own demise?

We’re certainly accelerating it. But there are other factors that may be the more important. There are microbes out there that want to finish us off. An asteroid might hit the Earth. And of course we’re wasting too many resources. There are too many human beings. That’s the problem of problems—the sheer number of human beings.

Environmentalists, the green movement: Are they addressing the right things?

Those in the green movement are too [concerned with] certain plants and animal species. No one ever speaks about the disappearance of human cultures and human languages. Within 50 years nearly 90 percent of all spoken languages will be gone forever. That’s the worst concern.

Last question. This film was dedicated to Roger Ebert: Why?

I dearly love the man, because he’s deeply insightful into cinema. And he’s very deeply afflicted by illness: He’s battling cancer, and he’s lost the ability to speak. But he’s still battling on; he’s a soldier. I love the good soldiers of cinema, and he’s one of the very last ones. And I always try to be a good soldier of cinema myself. So I am saluting my dear comrade.

And besides, I got to say: “Roger, here’s a film you can’t write a [bad] review about. It’s dedicated to you, so you aren’t allowed to review it.”

-Jeremy Berlin