DirkFlix

Basil Exposition Must Die!!!

2012-01-27T00:38:00.001-05:00

Last night was the preview of Touch, the new series created by Tim Kring (Heroes) and starring Jack Bauer himself, Keifer Sutherland. It was potentially interesting and I'll be watching it when it starts in earnest in March, but there were some instances of clunky writing that drove me up the wall. When discussing it with my girlfriend afterwards, she responded to one of my points with, "I knew that would bother you. Damn skippy! I've touched upon this sort of hackery before in my Avatar DVD review but seeing this junk happening over and over requires further discussion.

In case you're unaware, Basil Exposition is a character from the Austin Powers series of films played by Michael York who comes in and delivers the necessary expository (which is NOT something you stick in your butt!) background information in an info dump so the plot can get on with the gags. It's terrible writing, but that's the joke of it. What's not funny is to see so many shows which can't do this elegantly and heed the first rule of screenwriting: Show, don't tell.

As an aspiring screenwriter who has read a lot of books on the subject to help order my thinking and get a read on what a proper script looks like, over and over certain things are hammered upon, beginning with show, don't tell. It means don't have someone say, "Neo is the best kung fu master in the Matrix," when you can SHOW Neo opening a crate of whoop-ass on a hundred Agent Smiths.

What set me off on Touch was the ham-handed way Keifer's backstory was covered. When we meet him, we see him at his baggage handling job at JFK, but he used to be a newspaper writer. He has a son who has "mutism" (not sure if this is a real condition or not) and has never spoken in his entire 12 year life and doesn't like to be touched. His mother died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.

OK, that's the core of what needs covering. Widower dad, special needs (but magical) son, career changes, dead wife. How should that be presented? What Kring does is James Cameron/Basil Exposition level bad, using a social worker who has come to take the kid away as the mouthpiece to inform the audience. She comes in as a scold and then flat out states, "You used to be a writer for the New York Herald", in the context of sneering at Jack's (I'm gonna call Keifer "Jack", OK?) manual labor jobs that he can't keep because of the demands of raising his son. Later in the scene, Jack tells us that his wife was a stock broker and that's why they have a nice loft in the packing district. It's all very Basil Exposition. Later, he visits his wife's grave where we see the tombstone with the date of her death on it.

UPDATE: Here is where you can watch the full episode. (Link stays active until Feb. 21, 2012 or so due to the stupid setup online.) Jump to 13:30, after the first commercial break, to see what I'm talking about. I'll wait...

You back? Good. Moving on. The information isn't the issue - we should know about these people - but the manner in which it's conveyed is sooooo clunky; it would fail muster in an aspiring screenwriters class, so coming from a veteran show runner, I don't get it. How would I have handled this scene? Glad you asked. Something like this:

INT -- JACK BAUER'S AWESOME LOFT -- EVENING

There is a KNOCK at the door. Jack answers it to find SOSHA WORKAH. He lets her in.

SOSHA
I'm from Child Protective Services and
I'm here to take your kid away.

JACK
Dammit!

She looks at her files and then looks around the luxurious loft, taken aback. Jack notices.

SOSHA
It says here that you're
a construction worker?

JACK
That was three jobs ago. I work
at JFK handling baggage now.

She raises an eyebrow.

JACK (con't)
My wife was a stock broker.
She worked in the North Tower.

She acknowledges this and stops and looks at NEWSPAPER AWARDS on the bookshelf.

SOSHA
You were with the Herald?

JACK
Yes. Before.

SOSHA
I'm sorry.

JACK
Jake had to come first.

I've changed none of the plot points that Kring made, but in my not-so-humble opinion think it's much more subtle and subtextual. ~~I wish I could include the clip so you could compare.~~ As with the Avatar scene, there is no reason the writing needs to be this bad on anything after a first draft. With the army of craftsmen who come together to produce a movie or TV show, how is it that no one seems to recognize how lousy this stuff is?

As for Touch, I'll watch it when it comes back on, though the Magical Numbers conceit is already being worked by Ben and Jesus' Protective Services Agency, I mean Person of Interest. A lot of people hold the crashing and burning of Heroes against Kring like Star Trek fans spit when they hear the names of Rick Berman or Brannon Braga - I gave up on it about three episodes into the third season when I realized that, writers strike or not (which cut Season 2 short), they had no idea where they were going with the show. That it dragged on into a 5th season was surprising.

"Killer Elite" Review

2012-01-22T22:30:00.000-05:00

I almost forgot to review that I saw this movie. (It's two days later.) That pretty much sums it up, doesn't it?

Jason Statham and Robert De Niro are mercenaries in 1980. After a rough gig, Statham quits the biz and moves to Australia where he is repairing an old schoolhouse and making googly eyes at the chick from Chuck (whom I didn't recognize) whom I think he went to school with or something. A year after his retirement, a package arrives with a photo of De Niro showing he's being held hostage. He was hired by a sheik in Oman and failed and Statham has to complete his mission to kill three British SAS (the British version of Delta Force) men who killed the sheik's sons in battle. For some reason, Statham has to get confessions from them and make their deaths look like accidents. When one of Statham's crew is overheard nosing around a SAS bar, a local secret society of ex-SAS men dispatches Clive Owen to investigate and stop the killings. Little does he know that it's all going to be so dull.

I don't even care to hash out everything that's wrong with the misleadingly-named Killer Elite other than to say its neither. The politics of the caper are too obscure. It says it's based on true events, but we all know that means that England and Oman are real countries and everything else is BS. I found it hard to remain engaged and even the usual Statham ass-kicking antics don't elevate the proceedings much. I'm done here. Move along.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

Watching the trailer now really makes me marvel at how misleading it is. It really implies waaaaay more action and interaction than really happens. Heh.

Welcome To DirkFlix!

2012-01-10T23:59:00.000-05:00

If you're new here, please take a moment to read this so you'll understand what this site is and is not. Thanks for reading and enjoy your visit! Don't forget to subscribe to the RSS feed.

"Man On A Ledge" Review

2012-01-10T19:00:00.000-05:00

The reviews for these types of movies are so easy to write. Why? Watch this:

What do you think happens? Do you think he clears his name and is able to escape the conspiracy against him? Do you think that his brother and his superhawt girlfriend, played by Genesis Rodriguez, who looks like this...

...will be able to put off a jewel heist worthy of an Ocean's film to clear his name, thanks to just about everyone reacting exactly as necessary? Duh.

Man on a Ledge is a competently-assembled, sturdily-performed movie that's meant for watching on cable on a lazy, rainy day. It moves along the rails, checking off the requisite trope check boxes, and hopes you don't stop and wonder just how the hell they have the skills to pull off the caper. Also, what are the ramifications of breaking and entering and doing phenomenal amounts of damage in the name of clearing an innocent man's name. They don't care to think that deeply.

While I wasn't bored, the only thing that struck me as neat was when The Clash's "Police On My Back" started to play to segue into the end credits.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

"The Thing (2011)" Review

2012-01-02T22:00:00.000-05:00

John Carpenter's 1982 remake of The Thing is a horror classic. Kurt Russell trapped at the bottom of the world, menaced by a shape-shifting monster - the landmark work of Rob Bottin - from outer space. Good stuff. It opened with a dog running across the snowy plains of Antarctica, chased by a helicopter with someone shooting at it. Why were they shooting at the dog and what happened at the Norwegian research station they find abandoned and burned out?

This. (Watch the trailer to see the movie without the monster shots.)

In this totally unnecessary prequel, also titled The Thing, we get an almost beat-for-beat remake of Carpenter's Thing, which is pretty coincidental considering the storyline of an organism that mimics its host to near perfection. The only real changes are the addition of a couple of women, including star Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and the use of mostly CGI instead of foam latex to make the new (old?) monsters. Otherwise it's the same old song and dance. Who's the alien? BOO!!! There are a couple of BOO! jolts and a few good effects, but it doesn't really work, especially at the end with the alien ship and its jigsaw Tetris-looking thingie. How does a lifeform looking the way it does create and use a giant spaceship? Wouldn't it suffice to be just an organism with extraordinary infectious properties? The movie isn't interested in exploring the myriad ways for the world to be observed or building chills, it just runs a checklist of things the original remake did. (e.g. Remember that axe in the wall in Carpenter's film? Now you know how it got there. Put it on your resume.)

Half remake, half prequel, all unnecessary.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

"Fright Night (2011)" Review

2012-01-01T23:55:00.000-05:00

I never saw the original Fright Night, but I was familiar with the concept: A kid suspects his neighbor is a vampire. Hijinks ensue. It's a small-time horror-comedy (I think) classic, not really demanding a remake, but they did it. They shouldn't have bothered.

Anton Yelchin (Chekov in the Star Trek reboot) lives in a subdivision outside of Las Vegas with his cougar real estate agent mom. (No, that doesn't mean she sells land to mountain lions.) Though he's nerdyish, he's got an inexplicably hot girlfriend (Imogen Poots - whatever happened to Hollywood renaming actors whose names sound like they fart?) in the Disturbia vein. One day, his former best friend, McLovin (played by McLovin from Superbad), tells him his new next door neighbor, Colin Farrell, is a vampire. Anton doesn't believe him and tells McLovin to get lost because he's no longer into his nerd games. When McLovin disappears, Anton realizes something may be up with Colin and Colin lets Anton know that he knows that Anton suspects that...wait, where is this going? Oh, yeah....hijinks ensuing!

The real surprise of this lumpy tale is that the script was by Marti Noxon, writer of 23 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The structure is very awkward, with McLovin warning Anton and then getting knocked off in the first 20 minutes and then a short pause followed by one chase after another, all of it pretty much predictable. Farrell has a little fun sinking his campy teeth (heh) into the role, but if felt like warmed over Bullseye. Sofia Vergara's less-endowed-but-still-hot sister has a bit part and one of the recent Doctor Whos is funny as a Cris Angel/Russell Brandish magician/vampire hunter with a show at a casino. On the plus side, it's nice to see vampires stick to the rules for a change and blow up in sunlight and not have reflections. Take that, sparkly abominations!

On a Motion Captured podcast around the time Fright Night and some other remakes were coming out, Drew McWeeny was saying that instead of wasting money on IPs that aren't really aching for remakes, Hollywood should be just ripping off the themes for newer ideas without the the baggage of an old movie. With that in mind, after watching this, I pitched my girlfriend this idea: A kid suspects his next door neighbor is a vampire and try to prove it. Little does he know that there are vampires across the street and they're framing the neighbor. Hijinks ensue!

She liked it. She also fell asleep during Fright Night. It's not terrible, just needless and mediocre.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

"Melancholia" Review

2012-01-01T22:30:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year! The Mayans say that the world ends this year, so we decided to kick off the last year of Earth with Lars von Trier's Melancholia, in which the Earth is destroyed by the titular planet. Based on this movie, perhaps ending the human race would be a good idea because when the first movie of the year has guaranteed itself a spot at the top of your Worst list, how much hope can you have?

Gawd, where to begin? Opening with a series of Kubrick-wannabe imagery with soaring Wagner music, we see the Earth annihilated. Some of those images will be reprised later, but, oddly, many aren't. Then we get an interminable scene of a stretch limo unable to navigate a tight country road turn. In the back are newlyweds Kirsten Dunst and Eric from True Blood. When they finally walk up to the reception, they're two hours late and everyone has been waiting for them. Didn't they call? Couldn't have someone picked them up? Doesn't von Trier have a tripod for that shaky camera?

It doesn't get better as her father is doddering; her mother sneers a toast about how she doesn't believe in marriage; she has depressed moments which lead her to disappear to take a bath; her boss is there demanding her to create a tag line for an ad campaign; none of it seems real and no one acts remotely like a person on this planet. When she's too bummed out to consummate the nuptials, the marriage is effectively over at that moment. Didn't he notice her moods before proposing and buying her an orchard or did they meet two days earlier? REAL PEOPLE DON'T ACT LIKE THIS!!!!

The second half focuses on her sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) whose husband, Jack "DAMMIT!" Bauer, paid for Dunst's pooch (and intern; don't ask) screw of a wedding as she takes in her now-crippled-by-depression sis while the mysterious planet of Melancholia (so named because "El Destroyo" would've been racist) closes in for the End of the World®. Yawn. As the end nears, the previously catatonic Dunst becomes functional and everyone else falls apart. There's something about a horse not crossing a bridge and you get to check out Dunst's ginormous snoobs (link NSFW, so make sure the boss/kids/girlfriend aren't around), but by the end, you will have wished they'd ended the movie after the overture.

I've never seen a Lars von Trier movie before and now have zero plans on picking up his previous work. What is it about this garbage that attracted this cast? There isn't a single realistic character in the whole mess. Jack Bauer owns an 18-hole golf course and enormous mansion, but we have no idea how he's made his fortune. The wedding reception appears to last all night until the dawn and there's a trailer serving soup on the golf course and I can count the number of times I've even heard of such a thing happening on zero fingers. There's a little boy who doesn't react to anything crazy that's going on; no, "Hey, mom. Where's daddy? Why is it hailing? What's that gigantic planet in the sky? Didn't you have enough of von Trier after he had you cut your clitoris off in that last movie? Can I have the new Pokemon?" None of that.

Dunst won Best Actress at Cannes for her unimpressive performance; it's really limited by the script, but I guess if you cry and show your boobs, you can win. (Anne Hathaway joked about her nudity in Love and Other Drugs and how she thought it was supposed to get an Oscar nomination and after seeing this, she's got a legit beef.) The supporting players are similarly crippled, so I suppose if they made any impression, it's due to their talents and not von Trier's craptastic "writing" and direction. Someone needs to hit him with a planet to spare us all the misery of any other films.

Score: 1/10. Cue the asteroid!

"Blade Runner: The Final Cut" Blu-ray Review

2011-12-17T21:00:00.000-05:00

Do I really need to review this? Duh.

Score: 10/10. Buy it.

Two thoughts about the vision of November 2019 as viewed from 1982:

1. It's not gonna happen. We're eight years away and I don't think mass-produced Daryl Hannah sexbots and Off-World colonies are going to happen by then. Did they really think that 37 years from then all this would happen? Really?

B. It's amusing to see old movies presenting a vision of the future with interstellar travel, but all the computer monitors and TVs are big old CRTs. It's doubly ironic when watching on a giant flatscreen.

"The American" Blu-ray Review

2011-12-14T23:55:00.000-05:00

George Clooney is an assassin on the run after being ambushed by Swedes on a frozen lake (that looks like it's across the lake from where Hanna and her dad's place; heh) in The American, the latest effort from noted (and IMO totally overrated) photographer Anton Corbijn.

After the attack kills his lady friend - though you'll be shocked by the circumstances of her death - he is directed by his boss to head to an isolated mountain village in northern Italy to await his next mission: To construct a custom rifle for a woman who is planning a hit of her own. While marking time, he seeks companionship at a brothel and (of course) falls in love with his favorite whore, Violante Placido, who looks like this:

I know that the guy falling for some babe whom he met the way she meets all the other guys she's boinking - by paying her - is a hoary (heh) trope, but to believe that Clooney, even with his charisma dial turned all the way to the left, needs to pay for women makes disbelief suspension difficult. Yes, he's a loner under instructions to "not make friends" and all glowering and taciturn, but it's not like he's Patton Oswalt. (Never mind the whole conceit that prostitution is a good way for women to meet nice guys who'll take them shopping, as Bongwater once observed on their The Power of Pussy album.)

With very little action, The American is a languidly-paced film to the point of bordering on boring. What keeps you awake is the lovely cinematography and compositions that are well-represented by the Blu-ray as well as copious amounts of skin from Placido. (She'll be in the Ghost Rider sequel, but I don't think she'll be as naked there.) As far as plot, it's pretty much slight enough to fit on a business card and lacking in surprises overall. Corbijn keeps the mood going, but there's simply not enough to latch on to here as the story chooses skeletal inferences over engaging characters and exposition.

As I noted above, the Blu-ray looks great, but as far as extras go, it's only got some deleted scenes (most are just extended versions) and a brief making-of featurette; I didn't listen to Corbijn's commentary track.

Score: 5/10. Rent the Blu-ray if you're inclined; otherwise catch it on cable.

Oh, those wacky Canuckians.

"Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol" IMAX Review

2011-12-14T19:30:00.000-05:00

Tom Cruise is back in action with Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, a summer popcorn flick being released for some reason at Christmas. This also marks live-action directorial debut of Brad Bird, whose animated work includes The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Ratatouille.

Opening with a brief confusing prologue with Josh Holloway (in what's barely a cameo) and then a rousing prison escape sequence to spring Cruise from a captivity (whose reason is doled out throughout the plot), the IMF trio of Cruise, a returning Simon Pegg, and new face Paula Patton (she was the teacher in Precious) are on the move to Moscow to sneak into the Kremlin to find out who is behind the McGuffin of stolen Russian launch codes. But the bad guys are already there and the USA is framed for blowing the place up, leaving the IMF totally disavowed and on the run. To save the world and clear their names, the three and Jeremy Renner trek to Dubai and Mumbai - it's the *bai World Tour! - to stop the bad guys (and girl) from whatever they're up to.

And that's the problem with Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, the same issue weak James Bond movies have: lame villains. I think the head baddie is trying to end the world for some vague pseudo-scientific reason and the sidekicks are hired guns, but why are they helping a guy bent on triggering global thermonuclear war when they'll have to live on the ruined Earth? One scene implies that one bad guy is disguised as another bad guy, but it makes no sense. Other than a oblique video clip, we never get much sense of who the bad guy is and what he wants to do. I know it's a trope to have the mustache-twirling bad guy monologue about his schemes, but M:IGP could have benefited from a bit of expository detail. (No, that's not something you stick up your butt.)

Bird's action set pieces are quite good, especially Cruise's climb up the tallest building in the world and subsequent chase in a dust storm and the final fight in an automated car-parking tower. There isn't much shaky-cam, but they could've backed the camera up to capture the geography a little. The performances are adequate, but Pegg steals every scene he's in.

I'd heard good things about the IMAX presentation and was considering dropping the $13.75 to see it at the Henry Ford IMAX Theater, but I'm sure glad I didn't.* I sat dead center about four rows from the front and the normal frame most of the movie is in was so large that when it popped to the full 1.44:1 IMAX ratio, it was well above and below the the eyeline; it didn't feel like it was drawing me in more. Perhaps if I'd sat in the back - I was in the back of the line, so those seats were taken when I got into the room - the effect would've been more acute, but seeing it in a nice big normal movie theater will suffice.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is a quite acceptable action flick that puts more emphasis on the spectacle than the story and thus renders it superfluous. If you're missing the warmth of summer and want some cheap thrills, accept the mission to see it, but don't pay $14 for the ride.

Score: 7/10. Catch a matinee or dollar show at a big-screened theater.

* Because it was a free preview screening, they ran the film ahead past the previews and, most importantly, the hotly anticipated prologue from The Dark Knight Rises introducing Bane. Thanks for nothing, killjoys.

"(Tim Burton's) Alice in Wonderland" Blu-ray Review

2011-12-13T22:30:00.000-05:00

My review for the theatrical release is here and it stands; this review covers the Blu-ray.

After our beloved PimpVision® - a 51" Sony RPTV - blew its convergence circuits two weeks ago to the day, it was time to upgrade and we ultimately went with a 60" Sharp LED set which arrived today and after some calibration looks downright snazzy. After checking out some bits and pieces of Avatar, it was time to christen it with a movie and since the lion's share of Blu-rays were at home we cracked open the Blu-ray of Alice in Wonderland. We'd seen it in 3D at the show and frankly this is the first time we properly saw it. Without having to contend with the blurry image that fast action and post-conversion brings to the tea party, details we'd totally missed before like monkeys being used as candelabras in the Red Queen's castle were noticed. It looks great. On the extras front, it's a little lightweight, but generally informative especially on the special effects front where you can marvel at how little in the way of actual sets were built. There's a whole lot of green to be seen.

If you liked the movie, definitely pick up the Blu-ray.

"Red State" Review

2011-12-12T23:15:00.000-05:00

Kevin Smith says he's retiring after his next movie, the hockey flick Hit Somebody. Frankly, he should've quit two movies ago, thus sparing his former fans the one-two letdowns of simply awful Cop Out and now the jaw-droppingly terrible Red State. This has been Smith's passion project for over five years, something he always said was next after whatever he was making or promoting. Supposedly a horror film, the only horror is how bad it is.

A trio of horny high school boys seeking to hook up with a 38-year-old woman one met on the Internet walk into the most obvious trap ever and find themselves held captive by a family of religious weirdos with a ton of guns. (Think: Fred Phelps' godless hate mongers crossed with the Branch Davidians of Waco massacre infamy.) When a sheriff's deputy is killed at the cult's compound, the ATF arrives on the scene and things rapidly degenerate into what can only be described as government-conducted genocide. It's so unrealistic that even as satire, it stretches disbelief suspension beyond the breaking point.

Until these last two flops, my least favorite Smith film was Dogma in which I thought his ambition outstripped is directorial skills to manage his sprawling thesis, but that was his fourth movie; Red State is his tenth and other than some trademark potty talk, there is nothing which indicates this movie was made by Smith. The action direction is haphazard and mistakes shaky camera and narrow-angle shutter for kinetic technique and he is so in love with his script, he allows the sermons by Michael Banks (magnetic as the cult leader) to prattle on until I started nodding off. Less successful are the supporting performances, especially a shrill and unrecognizable Melissa Leo as one of Banks' daughters.

After the shenanigans Smith pulled at Sundance this year - retaining the distribution rights for himself to exhibit it on a road show basis to cover for the fact that no studio wanted to put it out, including longtime backers the Weinstein brothers - and the buzz about the clumsy religion-bashing, I'd been unenthusiastic about watching Red State, but nothing could've prepared be for just how bad the whole thing is.

There were several spots where I wanted to just shut it off, but gutted it out to see just how far down the elevator went. (Do I get a medal?) The characters never quite make it to being two-dimensional and thus with no one to root for and no understanding of the villains other than they be crazy inbred Jeebus rednecks, it's just a grating endurance test. It's sad to see that Smith has crawled up his own fat ass and died, insulated from the need to make competent movies by millions of Twitter followers who will lap up whatever he gives them. Robert Rodriguez has been slipping as of late, but he hasn't slid off the cliff like Kevin Smith. Yet.

Score: 1/10. Skip it. Seriously.

"Another Earth" Review

2011-12-11T23:30:00.000-05:00

What is an actor to do if they aren't getting good roles? They write one for themselves to star in, frequently leading to fruitful careers. Sylvester Stallone created Rocky; Matt Damon and Ben Afleck co-wrote Good Will Hunting and won an Oscar; Nia Vardalos wrote My Big Fat Greek Wedding which went on to be one of the biggest indie movies of all time. Now you can add Brit Marling to the list as the Sundance Audience Award-winning film, Another Earth, that she co-wrote with director Mike Cahill has launched her career into orbit. She's filming Robert Redford's next movie with more Oscar-winners and nominees to mention; another movie co-starring Ellen Page; and has Arbitrage, co-starring Richard Gere, already in the can. Talk about making your own breaks!

Marling stars as Rhoda, a brilliant young woman - she was accepted to MIT at age 13 - who gets drunk at a party and crashes into another car, killing a pregnant woman and young child, leaving the composer husband in a coma. She gets four years in prison and when she gets out requests a menial job as a high school janitor. She's isolated from the world, but decides to reach out to the man whose life was destroyed by her careless driving. She intends to apologize, but chickens out and pretends to be offering a home cleaning service trial. Over time, she brings order to his life as well as his house, but he doesn't know who she is - as a minor, her records were sealed.

Lurking overhead is the weakest aspect of the movie, the titular other Earth. If you watch the trailer below, you'd think that this mirror planet and the possibility of duplicates of us all is the major plot, but it's a fraction of the story that if it wasn't around, would hardly change the main story of redemption and healing. I wonder if some of the acclaim Another Earth has garnered is because of this superfluous detail, much as the Oscar-nominated nothingburger The Kids Are Alright glossed over its banal plot by making the leads boring lesbians instead of boring heterosexuals. (If you've seen it, I explore the biggest goof the other Earth premise doesn't handle below.)

I had a hard time warming up to Another Earth, but my girlfriend really loved it. I didn't think the relationship between the man - well-played by William Mapother (who will always have "Tom Cruise's half-brother" tag following him around) - and Marling really felt right and the contrived way he doesn't know this woman killed his family makes the inevitable revelation feel formulaic. The look of the film belies its low-budget origins a little too much as well. I also found the way the planets contact each other to be ludicrous. If you knew this other planet was there, you wouldn't try to contact them or send probes for YEARS?!?

While I seem hard on Another Earth, it's not because it's a bad movie but rather because I didn't connect with it; it's just too slight when it could've been more profound. It's a little movie, but that's no excuse for not having bigger ideas.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

*** SPOILER ZONE BELOW - ONLY READ IF YOU'VE SEEN THE MOVIE (or never plan to) ***

The theme of the movie is that the mirroring of the two Earths diverged when they became aware of each other as shown in the very last shot as the other, clearly more successful Rhoda appears. Now if that means the other Rhoda didn't ruin her life with a car crash AND still had the winning entry in the contest (what would've been her essay?) and came here, then it follows that Mapother's family is intact over there, INCLUDING DADDY! What's going to happen when he travels over to be with his not dead family and finds that they already have a father in the form of their version of him?

"The Ides of March" Review

2011-12-10T21:00:00.000-05:00

The Ides of March had Oscar-bait written all over it: Directed and co-written by Oscar-winner George Clooney, starring fellow winners Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei and nominees Ryan Gosling (who has starred in one of every three movies released in 2011) and Paul Giamatti, it should've been a slam dunk for nominations, but pretty much sank without a trace at the box office, shrugged off by the critics? What happened?

Gosling is a hot shot campaign consultant to Clooney, the Democrat (what else?) governor of Pennsylvania who is running for President and whose campaign is working on Ohio. Clooney's candidate is such a paragon of liberal tropes that he makes Obama look like a grubby Republican and if a conservative filmmaker was making this movie, it would've been an obvious satire of the Utopian blather Democrats spew. (e.g. Clooney says that we can prevent wars in the Middle East by having cars that don't use oil, so if elected he will command that all cars in a decade be alternative energy only, as if all that's holding this magical rainbow and unicorn fart-powered dream cars from happening is a lack of some emperor-wizard decreeing it be done.) For all his awesomeness, though, the nomination isn't in the bag as his undefined primary opponent whom we're told no one likes is still challenging, so he desperately needs the endorsement and delegates held by Jeffrey Wright, who isn't letting them go without extracting a plum gig for himself.

Gosling adores Clooney - he's a True Believer - but he's getting nibbles from the opposing camp and takes a meeting with Giamatti, which pisses off Hoffman and sets off a chain of events that intertwine with a scandal skeleton in Clooney's closet that eventually leads to an actual body being found. As Gosling sinks into the mud, his determination to drag everyone else down with him leads to an underwhelming conclusion.

The problem with The Ides of March isn't it's lefty politics - to hear howlers about how the poor decent meek Democrats need to learn how to fight dirty like the mean old Republicans and for left-wing looney bin MSNBC to be shown as a legit news outfit was to be expected going in - but how dull the scandal is and how it reflects on the characters. I suspect that Clooney and company wanted to make a statement about how politics corrodes the souls of good men, but they're too in love with government and power to make the indictment stick. (It's be like me trying to make a movie about how pizza and hot Asian babes are killing baby pandas and that's a bad thing.) A scorched-earth artist like Paddy Chayefsky (whose Network is my 2nd favorite film of all time and still rings true 35 years later) would've argued that evil men go into politics because they're too fat for robbing gas stations.

The performances are all top-notch, if not Oscar-grade, though I'm still baffled as to why Gosling is so adored. He just comes off too blank for me. Clooney is a good director and the script adapted from a play is OK, but the way the story loses gravitas when it should be upping the stakes and the makers unwillingness to really put their politics under an unbiased magnifying glass just makes the compelling parts of the plot less so.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.

"Act of Valor" Review

2011-12-07T09:44:00.001-05:00

Act of Valor is getting a lot of push well ahead of its Presidents Day weekend release next year - February 17, 2012 - from conservative media and it's easy to see why. The military for the past decade has been almost universally smeared by Hollyweird as crazed Rambos, stupid redneck racist gun freaks, poor minorities and general victims of the corporations that supposedly pulled Dubya's strings to go to war for oil or whatever madness the Left spews. Other than Michael Bay, who (in the words of an AICN writer) "shoots military hardware like porn" and makes icons of our soldiers, we've been treated to a decade of screeds like In the Valley of Elah and Redacted which used our fighting men and women as props to vent their hatred for America. (It must do some grunt proud to know he's wearing 80 lbs. of gear in 120F heat in Jihadistan so that Susan Sarandon can sit comfy in Manhattan believing that he's a time bomb waiting to go off.)

What makes Act of Valor different is that instead of the usual running actors through a mini-boot camp to get them into a semblance of looking and acting like soldiers, the filmmakers have used actual Navy SEALs to portray a fictional story and the result plays out like a fusion of Tom Clancy novels and the Call of Duty video games. Frequently slick and exciting, but somewhat awkward dramatically, Act of Valor has to be graded on a slight curve.

After a terrorist bombing in the Philippines kills the U.S. Ambassador, a female CIA operative in Costa Rica is abducted by a Chechnyan drug and weapons runner's outfit and brutally tortured in the jungle. The SEALs rescue her in the film's best action sequence and uncover evidence of a much larger, scarier plot to infiltrate jihadists with new undetectable suicide vests through drug smuggling tunnels on the Mexican border. As the plot grows, the SEALs trot the globe to hunt down the bad guys and save America.

The action scenes are the best as the SEALs precisely execute their maneuvers while coping with sometimes incredible odds. While I don't doubt the mad skillz of SEALs, the bad guy body counts and sheer percentage of head shots is more videogame than anything. The Call of Duty parallels continue with some nifty first-person views where we see the view through the holo sights and they use graphics to mark the transitions from place to place. If you've played the games, you'll recognize the style.

Where the movie suffers is in asking the SEALs to act in service of some of the hoariest tropes. The lieutenant looks like Peyton Manning and acts about as well as Manning does in commercials. The Charlie Sheen spoof of Top Gun, Hot Shots, made fun of Goose's doomed fate with a character named "Dead Meat" and it's unfortunate that we are able to predict immediately who is going to die. It's not spoiling when if you've seen one movie about a soldier with a baby on the way back home, you can tell what's going to happen. They even have a bit referring to foreshadowing which is too meta for the material.

This is where Act of Valor frustrated me: On one hand, the action is visceral and thrilling - I told the girl taking comments afterward that it was more exciting than Chicago being destroyed in the last Transformers movie - and allowing for some Hollywoodization, it's interesting to see the cool efficiency of the SEALs. (Unlike another Charlie Sheen movie.) The story is Clancyesque, but there are some intriguing aspects to the relationship between the bad guys as childhood friends grow radically apart. That said, the movie rides a wobbly line between pseudo-documentary grit and slick popcorn audience-pleasing and somewhat mawkish emotion in spots. Much of the cinematography is beautiful - really lovely and worthy of a Bay film - and the direction and editing is clear, but there were places that I wished a more traditional storytelling hand was steering things.

One thing that may've slanted my perceptions was at the screening there was a short introductory clip from the directors discussing the movie and how a few bits were done. I love behind-the-scenes stuff on DVDs, but seeing it before the movie made me think throughout about how what I was seeing was made and wondering what was really realistic and what was pumped up for entertainment. There were also no end credits or music; the film just ends. The film may undergo some final tweaks in the 2-1/2 months before it releases, but it looks finished to me.

The boosters of Act of Valor are pushing the great respect our brave fighters are shown. As I said, a decade of bashing has made it long overdue for some positive portrayals of the warriors who keep film critics like me safe to watch movies, but that doesn't mean the film doesn't have some rough edges. I suspect the liberal media will bash it as jingoism and the conservative media will hail it as the Greatest. Movie. Ever. If you want to make a statement of support for movies that don't hate the troops, then by all means hit a matinee and tell Hollyweird what you're willing to shell out your hard-earned cash for, not that they care. If you're less motivated to activism, it's worth watching later.

Score: 7/10. Rent it.

"Midnight In Paris" Review

2011-11-28T22:15:00.000-05:00

Woody Allen had the biggest hit of his career with the winsome Midnight in Paris, a winsome fantasia about nostalgia and artistic angst.

Owen Wilson has the Woody surrogate role as a successful Hollywood screenwriter on vacation in Paris with his shallow harpy of a fiance (Rachel McAdams) and her rich parents. He's struggling with writing a novel about a man who works in a "nostalgia shop" selling vintage knick-knacks. One night, while lost trying to find his way back to the hotel, he is picked up by a classic motor car and when he gets out, he finds himself in the 1920s, hanging out with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston, Loki from Thor, and Allison Pill, the drummer of Sex Bob-omb in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody), and many more. If you're an art or literature buff, it's a hoot. During his return visits, he is beguiled by Marion Cotillard because, well, she's Marion Cotillard and, unlike McAdams, she's not a grating beyatch.

I had a hard time getting into Midnight in Paris at first because of the typical Woody dialog in which everyone sounds like Woody - all hyper-literate and unrelated to natural vocal cadences. However, when Wilson starts time-tripping it mellows out and becomes a nice ride. It's been compared to his 1985 classic, The Purple Rose of Cairo, in it's conceit of impossible co-mingling but this isn't as good because the modern "reality" is clearly so deficient to the Roaring Twenties, but Woody addresses this in an insight late in the picture.

Woody will be turning 76 in a few days and he'd probably benefit from cutting back from his annual release schedule in favor of alternating years because for every little gem like Midnight in Paris or 2008's Vicki Cristina Barcelona - I still need to catch up with 2005's Match Point (are you noticing the pattern here?) - he's had twice as many facepalms that are watering down his legacy. (He will burn in Hell for Annie Hall winning over Star Wars, though.)

My girlfriend actually liked Midnight in Paris more than I did because she appreciated some of the references more than I did. (I had to pause the movie and have a lengthy riff involving a Jean-Paul Sartre play explained to me. Sue me; I went to public school.) It's not profound, but it is a nice light treat and worth a look.

Score: 6/10. Rent it.

This trailer is TERRIBLE! It focuses on the worst part - the modern day stuff - and consigns the magic to a few quick flashes. It's a miracle anyone wanted to see this movie based on what's here.

"Trespass" Review

2011-11-27T23:30:00.000-05:00

Peruse the shelves of your video store - whoops, I'm showing my age, I mean browse Netflix - and you'll see loads of movies starring Big Name Movie Stars that you've never heard of. I'm not talking Wesley Snipes either. How does a movie starring a pair of Academy Award-winners, directed by the generally competent Joel Schumacher get dumped straight to video and VOD? How did producers spend an estimated $35 million producing a movie to gross about $16,000 in theaters? Is Trespass - no relation to the Ice-T/Ice Cube flick from the early-Nineties - really that terrible?

No, but it doesn't mean it's all that good. Nicolas "Will meals be provided?" Cage and Nicole Kidman star as a rich couple with a minor problem. No, not their cherry bomb teen daughter who wants to go to a party but the gang of masked gunmen who want the millions in diamonds and/or cash they believe are in the safe. Hijinks ensue and by hijinks I mean lots of yelling and screaming and injury and yelling and screaming and "shocking" plot twists. Oh, and more yelling and screaming.

The script relies too much on red herrings and revelations to keep things moving, but by the end there have been a few too many double-crosses and crazy people delusions to keep things grounded. (On further reflection I realized that one revelation moots a whole bunch of other stuff they've shown us, so I'm not really sure what the heck was happening and I'm wondering if the filmmakers knew either?)

Schumacher hustles everything along and it's only 90 minutes or so, but at it's core, if it had less swearing and starred Ashley Judd and Bruce Boxleitner, it could've been a Lifetime movie. Cage's readiness to make anything for a check is legendary, but what was the attraction to Kidman? Did she see this as her chance to make a Panic Room, the movie she started shooting and had to drop out of after being injured early in shooting and being replaced by Jodie Foster? What happened to her career? She still looks good; can't Julianne Moore spare a part for her?

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.

"Sleeping Beauty" Review

2011-11-26T23:30:00.000-05:00

My one-sentence review for Stanley Kubrick's dying film, Eyes Wide Shut, was that he somehow managed to make a movie featuring naked Nicole Kidman and rich weirdo orgies boring. As ridiculous as that mess was, there's a new opaque hunk of supposedly erotic art house weirdness in town that manages to suck any remaining molecules of atmosphere from the already airless genre: Sleeping Beauty. No, it's not anything like the fairy tale.

Here's the major selling point of this thing: Emily Browning (Sucker Punch's Baby Doll) spends half the movie totally naked. That she's (willingly) drugged unconscious for wealthy old guys to paw over is the gruesome price you pay for seeing the goodies. While she's beautiful and so porcelain-complexioned that she looks like she's made of china, the movie is so listlessly skeevy and her character so poorly-defined that there's nothing to grasp on to. The Internet was invented to grant access to the "good parts" without have endure the aimless non-plot, so get to Googling, kids, cuz there's hardly anything to discuss about this as a movie.

Browning is a student who apparently needs to work several jobs and volunteer for medical research when she's not possibly whoring at an upscale bar when she answers an ad for a job that entails wearing lingerie while serving creepy old rich people. That the other girls are way more naked isn't really explained. Then she's offered a promotion: For more money she will be drugged into a deep sleep for guys to molest as they see fit short of penetration and the main thought I had while watching these scenes was how she managed to not react to the abuse she gets from one John in particular.

The problem is that we have as a non-perv audience is that we have no effing idea what Browning is about. There are allusions to her tramping, but no details as to what she's actually up to. She gets evicted by her roommates for non-payment of rent, but goes and rents a luxury apartment with her new income. Worst is when she lets a friend commit suicide rather than try and help him, ironically showing the most emotion in the whole piece. For a moment it seemed like writer-director Julia Leigh was going to fill in the blanks, but alas she doesn't. There is so little substance to Sleeping Beauty that I think most critics who are praising it simply projected their views of exploitation of women and other bogeymen upon the blank whiteness of the frame and read the imagined Rorschach. (I also think if a man had made this exact same film, he would have been pilloried. Somehow, having a woman calling the shots makes it all better.)

Unless you want to marvel at the naked, nubile Browning tossed around like a sack of grain without flinching, there's nothing here worth waiting for nothing to happen when you could spend the time watching an exciting muddled mess of a musing about exploitation of women, namely her Sucker Punch. She's a lot hotter in her little sailor girl outfit slaying dragons than totally nude here.

Score: 2/10. Skip it. Watch Sucker Punch twice instead.

"Tower Heist" Review

2011-11-19T21:30:00.000-05:00

Competently made but generally pointless, Tower Heist is a cut-rate Ocean's 11 wannabe that is so vanilla, it's hard to get to get worked up about it. I'm just glad I snuck into it.

After a sleazy Bernie Madoff-type Wall Street (Alan Alda) loses the pension funds of the workers of The Tower, a ultra-high-end NYC apartment skyscraper on Central Park West, the general manager (Ben Stiller) who asked Alda to manage the funds devises a complicated scheme to break into a safe in Alda's penthouse they believe holds $20 million. Needing some profession criminal advice, Stiller recruits his neighbor, Eddie Murphy. Hijinks ensue somewhat.

Tower Heist is a well-made movie with nice cinematography and some subtle character moments at times, but it never rises to anything remotely resembling rousing. Murphy just recycles three-decade old Reggie Hammond motormouth schtick unaware that no one says the n-word anymore in movies (other than Evil White People), but it could've been Chris Tucker, so we should be minimally thankful for that.

There are a few good laughs, but little ambition here. If it comes on cable on a rainy afternoon and you're not particularly motivated to surf around for something else, it won't make you suicidal to watch. (There's a quote for the DVD box!)

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

"Paul" Review

2011-11-14T23:55:00.000-05:00

You probably recognize the nerd stars, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, of the disappointing sci-fi comedy Paul from their pairing in cult genre comedies Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz so it's a little curious as to how flat Paul turns out despite the how it should have been with its pedigree. The story of a pair of British geeks who start off at the San Diego Comic Con and travel the Southwest in an RV and then encounter an honest-to-goodness alien named Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen) could've been a hoot, but ends up a slack - not slacker - yarn laden with cliches.

I think the problem begins with the script by Frost and Pegg. Pegg co-wrote Shaun and Fuzz with those films' director, Edgar Wright, but the swap of Wright for Frost and then having the pages directed by Adventureland and Superbad shot-caller Greg Mottola just never catches fire. Too many of the gags are really obvious Star Wars references and there's more interest in bashing Christians as ignorant clowns than really tweaking the foibles of the Nerd Nation who can take a punch and would revel in some humor that's smarter than a honky-tonk band playing the "Cantina Theme."

The CGI effects integrating the alien into the scenes are seamless and the performances are uniformly OK, especially Kristen Wiig as an aforementioned Bible victim who cuts loose; she manages what was written as a really nasty stereotype and manages to make it somewhat sympathetic. It takes a bit to get used to Rogen's basso voice coming out of the skinny alien body, but you'll eventually roll with it.

Proving far less than the sum of its parts, Paul isn't a so much a bad movie as movie that's not very good.

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.

Trailer is here; they didn't allow embedding.

October 2011 Review Roundup

2011-10-31T23:59:00.000-04:00

Another slow month as TV ate up too much time.

Oct. 2 - Wayne's World (8/10)
Oct. 4 - Footloose (2011) (4/10)
Oct. 12 - We Are The Night (6/10)
Oct. 15 - The Empire Strikes Back (10/10)
Oct. 16 - Real Steel (8/10)
Oct. 31 - The Crow (8/10)

Month's Movies Watched: 6
Previously Unseen: 3
Theatrical: 2
Home: 4
=====
Year-To-Date: 92
YTD First-Timers: 76
YTD Theatrical: 33
YTD Home: 59

"The Crow" Blu-ray

2011-10-31T23:30:00.000-04:00

The Crow has always carried with it a macabre mystique due to the tragic accidental shooting death of star Brandon (son of Bruce) Lee during production. (It's really easy to spot when they use a body double: If you aren't seeing his face, it's the double.) But there is more to its lasting appeal than Lee's death that's made it a lasting cultural touchstone which lead to even South Park making this crack a dozen years after its 1994 release:

Hell on Earth 2006
Get More: SOUTH
PARK more...

Killer, huh? (In case you haven't seen the full episode, Satan shows up dressed as The Crow.)

Anyways, it's been ages since I've watched the whole movie straight through and I'd forgotten how briskly paced, almost impressionistic the first half was in spelling out the scenario of Eric Draven and this fiance, Shelly, being murdered on Devil's Night, the day before their Halloween wedding and how Eric crawls from the grave a year later and with the invulnerability that a crow grants him hunts down and kills his and Shelly's killers. There is very little extraneous stuff in the first half, though it slows a bit as the original gang of knuckleheads is dispatched and the focus switches to their master, Michael Wincott, and his half-sister (Bai Ling in her American film debut) and their interest in this interloper with mystical powers.

Director Alex Proyas followed The Crow up with the similarly dark and moody Dark City in 1998, but the new millennium saw him making lackluster films such as Big Willie vs. the Evil Robots, er, I meant I, Robot and the Nic Cage Doomsday bum-out Knowing. The rain-soaked, monochromatic nighttime setting is pretty well rendered in this Blu-ray transfer. There was a little noise in the reds of the first optical shot showing the crime scene in the miniature's window, but it was isolated to there and it generally looks good and clear with all the black and black imagery. The audio was less impressive, but more a limitation of the source track than a problem with the disc.

On the extras front, I didn't listen to the Proyas commentary yet or watch the 33-minute interview with a seriously twitchy creator James O'Barr, but the archival interview behind-the scenes was interesting and sad as you realize how articulate and intellectual Lee was. The Extended Scenes are better described as Rough Cut First Edit Scenes as they feature much more violence, especially the addition of a poor woman at the arcade T-Bird and boys are introduced blowing up who is terrorized and left trapped in the exploding building.

The Crow isn't a flawless or unqualified "great" movie, but as a mood piece and Goth-comic touchstone it's got its merits. This new Blu-ray is available for around $10-$12 if you know where to shop, so there's no reason for fans to skip adding it to their collections.

Score: 8/10. Buy it.

"Real Steel" Review

2011-10-16T17:00:00.000-04:00

Imagine what a movie about a down-on-his-luck robot boxing fighter stuck with an 11-year-old son he barely knows from an ex-girlfriend who has passed away who finds a gutsy old sparring bot that the kid spruces up and they take to a title fight against the World Robot Boxing champ would be like? Got it in your head? Congratulations, you've just plotted out Real Steel! However, the movie manages to pull of a super neat trick: Despite not really having a single surprise in its entire story, it manages to be a rock 'em, sock 'em good time without insulting your intelligence.

It really could've been a corny, treacly mess, but the kid, Dakota Goyo, is cute and precocious without you wishing a robot would fall on him. He's bright and behaves exactly as a kid who has a robot that can mimic him dancing would act. Jackman is excellent as the shifty hustler who learns to have some integrity. (Awwwww...) And the robot fights benefit from having seamless digital effects and a clear sense of pacing and geography, not relying on shaky cam and edit fu to provide energy. I've managaged to miss all of director Shawn Levy's previous movies (both Night at the Museum flicks; the Steve Martin Cheaper by the Dozen and Pink Panther remakes) other than last year's nice Steve Carrell/Tina Fey comedy Date Night, but this is a slick bit of kit.

"Predictable" is usually a pejorative and it would apply to Real Steel if it wasn't just so well done. I saw a review that dubbed it ROCK-E and that's right on the money; the crowd at my showing was cheering and clapping. (The time I saw Rocky IV at the old Americana theater with an opening weekend crowd going nuts was a singular experience.) Even my girlfriend, whom I pretty much dragged along and went in expecting to hate it, grudgingly admitted to liking it. When family-friendly is considered another pair of dirty words, it's cool to see something for kids of all ages that doesn't make the older half feel dirty for being there.

A couple of quibbles: The kid doesn't seem to be too affected by the death of his Mom - if Disney flicks have no problem with whacking Mom, why so shy here, especially when it could've led to the improbably cute roboboxer mechanic Evangeline Lilly balking at being a surrogate mother. I suppose they didn't want to go too heavy on the maudlin. Also, for a movie set in 2027, the product placement is pretty 2011 - Sprint will still have the same slogan, Bing will have stadium naming rights, and Microsoft will only be up to the "Xbox 720" with the same logo design as the Xbox 360. Other than a few futuristic-looking cars and the cell phones and computers having transparent glass screens (have you ever tried to use a computer where the windows have transparency turned on so you can see through them? Then you know clear screens wouldn't work) there is little to indicate this is the future.

However, all told, unless you're a cynical indie hipster hater opposed to having fun at the movies, Real Steel is the real entertainment deal. Also, if you're in Detroit, it's fun to play "spot the locations."

Score: 8/10. Catch a matinee.

"We Are the Night" Review

2011-10-12T23:35:00.000-04:00

It's safe to say that vampires in pop culture these days are ubiquitous to the point of obnoxiousness. Whether in goth fashions at the mall to movies and TV shows populated with them, it's hard to swing a dead rat without hitting some sort of undead thing. While the various stories put their own twists on the genre - e.g. Twilight's abominations don't blow up in the Sun while The Vampire Diaries uses magic rings to grant daywalking privileges - it's hard to find new story blood in the old blood-sucking stones. In search of a different spin, we head to Berlin for We Are the Night, a slick German (I watched an amusingly dubbed version) production with a few twists before collapsing into convention.

Lena (you haven't heard of any of the actresses, so I won't bother) is a scruffy street urchin pulling petty crimes. One night, at a rave, she encounters Louise, who as we've seen in the prologue possesses some superpowers; she and her two younger companions have killed all the passengers and crew of an aircraft and flee the scene by merely hopping out the door in mid-air. She bites Lena, sending her on the path to vampiredom. On Lena's trail is a young cop who had encountered her before and is investigating the vampire gangs' crime scene. He realizes that she's mixed up in the hijinks and her forbidden attraction to him leads to the predictable complications for the vamps (see what I did there?) and him.

Where We Are the Night is best is in its edgy German energy and gritty, stylish visuals. (The way Lena's transformation is shown in one seamless CGI-enhanced shot is nifty. You can glimpse it at :51 of the trailer below.) While not as over-the-top as Run Lola Run, its use of European beauty sensibilities actresses immediately sets gringo viewers off-kilter. The rules of the world are mix of the traditional (e.g. fire BAD!) and novel (i.e. there are only female vamps and they have the ability to walk on walls and ceilings) and while that's cool, the story beats eventually slip into the trope rut leading to unsurprising developments. There is also some confusing inconsistency as to when they can eat people as one victim is offed, but their companion is somehow off-limits.

Perhaps all these vampire tales are doomed to run into the same sorts of plot ruts because there are only so many ways they can play out. But if you're bored of angst-filled glittery mopey vampire bohunks and willing to try some grrrl-powered Teutonic trollops, give We Are the Night a tumble.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.

"Footloose (2011)" Review

2011-10-04T19:00:00.000-04:00

Have you seen Footloose, the 1984 kids-gotta-dance movie starring Kevin Bacon? Sure you have. After some hayseed Southern town suffers a tragic auto accident that kills several high-schoolers, the town - at the urging of Rev. John Lithgow - bans dancing. In comes Bacon from out of town where he can't believe the yokels are so backwards, but he makes friends with Chris "Sean's brother, sorta like Jim Belushi" Penn and attracts the eye of Rev. Lithgow's wild rebellious daughter, Lori Singer. After several iconic Eighties pop tunes and montages, Bacon restores dancing to Yokelslavia and everyone buys the soundtrack cassette. The end.

Well, replace Lithgow with Dennis Quaid; Singer with some girl who looks a little like Jennifer Aniston and has really blue eyes; Penn with a hillbilly John Cusack; the friend played by Secretariat Jessica Parker with a black girl; and Bacon with a discount store Skeet Ulrich (himself a discount Johnny Depp); and toss in some modern country and Dirrrty South hip-hop and you've got the new - strike that - you've got the utterly recycled and unnecessary Footloose (2011 Edition). I'm not sure what co-writer and director Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow; Black Snake Moan) was trying to accomplish other than make a "green" movie because just about everything is recycled from the original.

Not only is the plot almost beat-for-beat ripped off (relive the Bible quotations scene again!), but they use Kenny Loggins' title tune (twice) and Deniece Williams' "Let's Hear It For The Boy" during the training-the-hayseed-to-dance scene. Just as there's a fine line between clever and stupid, the line between homage and laziness isn't blurred into irrelevance. (See below.) Really early on, I was bored and with a few exceptions, I never thought I was getting much out of this other than delaying getting home to do my laundry.

There is just no need for this movie to be remade now or ever. I saw it a quarter-century ago and haven't given it another thought since.It's not poorly made - the cast is OK and the stereotyping is kept under control - but other than showing the near-Utopian racial harmony (break dancing and boot scooting co-exist, though how in a town where dancing has been banned do they get the mad skillz to compete in a Step Up movie is a mystery), there's just nothing new here. It's just all so....unneeded.

I heard a young boy, perhaps 12, in the theater hall afterwards exclaiming that "it was awesome," so perhaps I'm just being an old fuddy duddy, but it's more likely that having been there and seen it the first time around, I don't need this lazy nostalgia trip.

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable if you've never seen the original before.

The feedback loop of the original and its place in the cultural timeline can be summed up by this video. The first half is the scene in the original where a frustrated Bacon blows off steam in an abandoned factory. (I'd forgotten the car; Skeet Jr. drives the same VW in the remake. More laziness.) What made me smirk during the movie tonight was the second half, from Hot Rod where Andy Samberg "punch-dances out his anger." The new Footloose unironically apes the first one's scene (this time with a greasy White Stripes tune), but after it's already become a punchline.

September 2011 Review Roundup

2011-09-30T23:59:00.000-04:00

An absolutely terrible month which proves that Hollywood's fear that television would kill movies was justified. A slew of new shows started that interested me and I was racing to plow through the second season of The Vampire Diaries in order to be ready for the third season's beginning. Despite my slamming it as Twilight: The Series when it started, my girlfriend was a big fan and was begging me to watch it for two years. She'd been right about Supernatural and once the show got past its more teeny-bop tendencies in the first 6-8 episodes, it's been pretty good stuff; check it out sometime. Regardless, movie watching lost out to the boob tube in September and nothing got a review finished. Fail.

Sept. 21 - Star Wars (10/10)
Sept. 27 - The Lincoln Lawyer (6/10)

Month's Movies Watched: 2
Previously Unseen: 1
Theatrical:0
Home: 2
=====
Year-To-Date: 86
YTD First-Timers: 73
YTD Theatrical: 31
YTD Home: 55

August 2011 Review Roundup

2011-08-31T23:59:00.009-04:00

Another decent month of viewing, up one from the previous month.

August 3 - Disturbia (5/10)
August 5 -Unthinkable (8.5/10)
August 6 - Bad Teacher (5/10); Super (3/10)
August 7 - Crazy, Stupid, Love (7/10)
August 7 - Rise of the Planet of the Apes (7/10)
August 8 - Blitz (4/10)
August 14 - Final Destination 5 (8.5/10)
August 15 - Green Lantern (0.5/10)
August 24 - Spread (3/10)
August 25 - Columbiana (4/10)
August 28 - Wet Hot American Summer (3/10)

Month's Movies Watched: 12
Previously Unseen: 12
Theatrical: 5
Home: 7
=====
Year-To-Date: 84
YTD First-Timers: 72
YTD Theatrical: 31
YTD Home: 53

"Wet Hot American Summer" Review

2011-08-28T22:15:00.000-04:00

From time to time there are movies that when you look back in retrospect are amazing for how many actors in them went on to Big Time Stardom or at least significant careers. American Graffiti had Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Harrison Ford, Richard Dreyfus, Mackenzie Phillips, Paul LeMat, Charles Martin Smith, and Suzanne Somers. The Outsiders had Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, and Emilio Estevez. Big groups of talent, all in one place, in service well-regarded movies beyond their casts.

Which brings us to 2001's Wet Hot American Summer, a low-budget indie comedy with a cult following that was featured a couple of months back in Entertainment Weekly, marking its 10th anniversary. Check out this cast: Bradley Cooper (Limitless), Paul Rudd and Elizabeth Banks (both in Our Idiot Brother which opened this weekend), Janeane Garofalo (before she became the insane liberal hater she is today), David Hyde Pierce (Niles on Frasier), Christopher Meloni (Law & Order SVU), Amy Poehler and Molly Shannon (SNL), Judah Friedlander (30 Rock), and Michael Ian Black (all those VH1 retrospectives). They all seem to have loved making it and would be open to doing a sequel, but I have to ask one question: Why when the first movie is such a mess?

Set on the last day of summer camp in 1981, WHAS focuses mostly on various pairs of the camp counselors trying to hook up while egregiously ignoring their charges. (So many kids drown on Paul Rudd's non-watch that I'm surprised Camp Firewood didn't spawn more machete-wielding killers than Camp Crystal Lake.) While there are a few narrative threads, most of the film feels like they had index cards with ideas on them like, "Crazy 'Nam vet thinks a can of beans is talking to him; ends up humping a refrigerator," or, "Woman going through a divorce is comforted and finds love with 10-year-old boy." Part of this random non-continuity is deliberate, but some segments feel like they sprinkled PCP on their weed for breakfast and then made movie under the influence. There's a chase which culminates with a single bale of hay in the middle of the road acting as a roadblock which just made me scratch my head. Then there's the scene where the counselors run into town with a montage that starts off with them getting ice cream and beer and then rapidly descends into purse-snatching and shooting smack in a dope house before showing them returning to camp within an hour, none the worse for wear.

I like oddball humor, but too much of Wet Hot American Summer feels like the cast enjoying themselves - hey, it's like Cannonball Run II! - and we're on the outside looking in at all the familiar faces. I'd missed it when it first came out and I was still digging on Janeane (man, she went nuts; so sad) and had always been meaning to catch up on it. Having done so, I'm genuinely baffled at the cult fave regard it's held in. It's simply not that good other than as a good hub film for 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

Score: 3/10. Watch it on a friend's cable so you can both go, "Hey, is that...?"

"Columbiana" Review

2011-08-25T19:00:00.000-04:00

Hollywood loves sequels. However, for every Crazed Torture Porn Next Higher Number and Formula Katherine Heigl Rom-Com 2011 we get, there are plenty that we don't get. Where's Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League? More importantly, where is Matilda: The Professional in which a grown-up Natalie Portman reprises her debut role as a grown-up hit woman? Every so often, you'll hear teases of rumors that Natalie and writer-director Luc Besson would reteam, but nothing comes of it. Until now. Sort of.

In spots, Columbiana has imagery and themes which reminded me of Besson's Léon (bka The Professional) and his role as producer and co-writer are surely relevant, but it simply doesn't add up to tell a a consistent tale of hot babe murder and revenge.

Opening in 1992, we meet young Cataleya, a 10-year-old girl whose father is involved with a Columbian crime kingpin. He's leaving the boss' service and it seems amicable, but the father knows the boss will send people to kill him and he's right. He gives a SD card to her and is then promptly murdered with her mother. A bad guy tries to get it from her, but she stabs him and takes off in a parkour-style chase (ripped off from Casino Royale and Besson's District B-13), making her way to the American Embassy and safety in the USA with her uncle.

We then jump ahead 15 years (which makes no sense because that would be 2007 and she's been on the warpath for four years, it's revealed) when she crashes her car into a cop car and stumbles out looking like Halle Berry's crackhead in Jungle Fever. They toss her in jail and she proceeds to sneak through the jail to kill an associate of the crime lord's who is conveniently being held overnight in another area. How does she know all this? How come everything works out flawlessly? Just 'cause.

Her calling card left at the scene of her hits has a diligent FBI agent on her tail (a very good Lennie James) and eventually the kingpin realizes who's after him, so he sends minions to kill those close to her and she's got an artist guy who she goes and shags before leaving and he knows nothing much about this hot girl - to be fair, if Zoe Saldana showed up at my place looking for nothing but sex, I'm not gonna complain about not knowing her real name - and then there's um something and it gets slow and.....whatever.

Luc Besson is an assembly line for these action movies and it's really wearing thin. This is the same writing team and director (the awesomely-named Olivier Megaton) behind the franchise-killing Transporter 3 and while the ads tout that they wrote the badass Taken, the problem Columbiana suffers from is Megaton's weak pacing during the non-action scenes. Characters are tissue-thin caricatures and while it's a slight change-up to make your lead oblivious to the collateral damage she causes, there's not enough depth to get worked up over it.

Zoe Saldana is a hottie, but she's too thin to be credible as an ass-kicker. There are a few stylish shots and a handful of semi-interesting ideas, but it's just all done too half-assed and disinterestedly to really recommend things. Megaton's simply not visually innovative enough to grant a pass to the storytelling weakness in his game (he's no McG) and with a lackluster cut-and-paste script, there's even less for him to work with.

I like revenge movies. I love hot kickass babes with guns. This movie was starting off with an 8 before the lights went down and it just shed score all the way down. Pity. (Zoe, call me!)

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.

"Green Lantern" Review

2011-08-15T19:30:00.003-04:00

Dear gawd this was awful. Simply miserable. Tedious, dull, stupid, boring - about halfway through I looked over at my girlfriend and she looked miserable and I half-expected her to look at me and beg to go and I realized I didn't have a strong argument against getting up and leaving. We stuck it out because we'd paid our money and to see if anything interesting eventually happened.

It didn't.

The script is dull; the plot vapid; the direction listless; the action scenes inert; Ryan Reynolds is not believable; Blake Lively is almost passable in the beginning before the script gives her nothing to do; the villains suck though Parallax thankfully doesn't have daddy issues. Usually even terrible movies have a couple of good bits, but Green Lantern only almost gives hints of a possibly having a fragment of a good idea in a couple of fleeting spots.

I was miserable the whole time I was in the theater and when we got back to my girlfriend's place, I told her father, "Green Lantern blew goats. I will not be buying the DVD or Blu-ray. I will not be downloading it, so you'll be waiting for it to show up on cable before you see it and I implore you to not bother." He'll probably look at it to see if it's as bad as advertised.

It is.

Score: 0.5/10 (that's a half-point). Skip it. I'm not kidding. RUN AWAY!!!

I'm not bothering posting the trailer. Bah.

UPDATE (12/18/11): I picked up a used copy of the Extended Cut on Blu-ray to see if the extras explained why this movie was so terrible. About 30-40 minutes into the PIP mode, it seems like they're pretty satisfied with how it turned out. Self-knowledge was in short supply, it appears.

"Final Destination 5" Review

2011-08-14T17:30:00.001-04:00

After too many Freddie/Jason/Michael-type horror slasher flicks, the original Final Destination was a nice surprise because instead of a masked, invincible killing machine whacking kids, it was Death itself claiming the survivors of the movie-starting disasters. In case you've never seen one of these, the formula is the same: A gruesome accident that kills a bunch of people spectacularly is revealed to be a premonition by one character who then tries to warn everyone away. While he's able to save a handful despite their thinking he's crazy, the accident occurs and people die and they're still alive, thanks to him. At least until the survivors start dying off, one by one in the order they would've originally, in bizarre Rube Goldberg-worthy accidents.

The first film was clever. The sequel had a great opening crash chain reaction, but the subsequent kills were too obvious in setting up the mouse traps. The third entry was even worse as we could see the dominoes being obviously set up in preparation for the hapless victim's demise. It was getting so weak that I totally skipped the fourth film, The Final Destination, which hinted it would the last one of the series. HA! Fat chance! There's money to be made and thus we have Final Destination 5, or as I shall call it, Final Destination OOOOHHHH!!!!!!, because that what you're going to be saying. A lot!

It opens with a corporate retreat with a group of....you know what? Who cares? Here's what matters:

• The opening disaster is the best since the highway crash in FD2. You will exclaim, "OOOOHHH!!!!", and laugh three or four times in this part alone.

• The survivors are barely two dimensional nobodies played by cheap talent you probably won't recognize beyond the boss. Who were they? A guy whose cute girlfriend (she looks like a cross between Sarah Polley and Anna Faris) has dumped him; another guy and his not-that-cute girlfriend; an annoying dork; the a-hole boss; a hot chick; and a token black guy who looks like Mos Def. Names? Didn't notice. Care whether they survive or not? Not really. The reason?

• In Final Destination flicks, it's ALL about the killings and FD5 really brought its a game. I'm deliberating NOT including the trailer below because it gives away too many setups and payoffs. It'll be more fun to just go and see it.

What makes it work this time is that while we see the elements of the dominoes/killing mousetrap machine individually, but aren't sure how it all goes together until it is set in motion. There are some red herrings and a couple of the coup de graces are foreseeable, but for the most part they're wonderfully grisly in a Grand Guignol manner and usually have a bonus OOOOOOHHH! for good measure.

I wasn't that enthused to see Final Destination 5, but I'm glad I did. If they can keep this level of mayhem going, bring more on.

Score: 8.5/10. Catch a matinee.

We didn't see it in 3D, but could tell that several of the shots were totally cheesetastic stick stuff in the audience's faces stuff to the point I almost wish I had gone with 3D. It's not mandatory, though.

I hate when people hint at twists because you're always trying to see them coming, but I'm just going to say that there's a reason why everyone seems to have crappy old cell phones. Heh.

"Blitz" Review

2011-08-08T23:55:00.002-04:00

You expect certain things from a Jason Statham film: gruff, bald bloke beats the crap out of everyone; perhaps drives a car fast, too. With only a couple and rather notable exceptions - scenes that feel like someone felt obliged to have him clobber someone as fan service - the extremely British crime drama Blitz doesn't meet the minimum expectations. (BTW, I've tagged it foreign because it's really English. Perhaps not Attack the Block English, but definitely not geared for Yankee consumption; even more so than most Guy Ritchie movies.)

Statham stars as a cop who is a little too rough with the customers - though judging from the current riots in England, perhaps he's what the bobbies could use about now - in the rough Southeast section of London. When a psychopath calling himself "Blitz" starts murdering cops, he teams up with a new commanding officer, who isn't respected by the beat cops because he's gay, to track down the killer.

Blitz is a very oddly-paced movie, taking numerous side streets with subplots involving a lady cop who's fresh out of rehab, a young street thug she's trying to get out of crime, a squirrely informant who figures out who the killer is, a tabloid reporter who doesn't readily share what the killer is telling him with the po-po, and the original watch commander on leave because his wife as died. Instead of it all adding up to a rich tapestry, it feels like random plot arcs from a TV series spliced together badly.

The villain, Aiden Gillen, reminds me of a cross between Tom Waits and Michael Wincott channeling young John Hurt mimicing Gary Oldman's Sid Vicious. (I see he was Petyr Baelish, the Caesar-cut adviser on Game of Thrones whom Stupid Ned Stark didn't heed when he said not to trust him. Didn't recognize him here.) His reasoning for killing coppers is a little murky and the implication that Statham set him off somehow is sketchy. Statham is OK, but wasted in a narrow role.

If there's something to recommend Blitz it's the surprisingly arty cinematography and shot composition. It looks like a Wes Anderson film at times and the omission of all the usual London landmarks - Big Ben, the Millennium Bridge and Wheel, Parliament, that giant glass football building - makes the grit more visceral. Too bad the story wanders all over the place in between spots of the ultra-violence.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

"Rise of the Planet of the Apes" Review

2011-08-07T15:15:00.001-04:00

One of the lingering questions of the entire Planet of the Apes series has been how the monkeys managed to take over the asylum. How did they get so smart and mankind so dumb? Taking a plausible stab, albeit in an implausible manner, at explaining how it came to pass is Rise of the Planet of the Apes or as I call it, Rise o' da World o' da Monkees.

James Franco is a medical researcher trying to find a cure for Alzheimer's with a personal stake: his father, John Lithgow, is slipping away from the ravages of the disease. Thinking he's made a breakthrough, he is presenting his results to the Evil Big Pharma Company's board when the chimp he'd treated bursts in, gone crazy, and is shot dead by security. Game over. No more research - buy they give up easy - and the rest of the test animals are to be put down. (As in killed, not called names.) They discover the reason for her freak-out, she'd carried an undetected pregnancy - real sharp observers at this lab, eh? - and the baby was what she was trying to protect. Whoops.

Franco takes it home, names him Caesar, and discovers that he's inherited his mother's enhanced intelligence. He also treats his dad with the drug, apparently curing him. Things are fine for 8 years by with time Caesar has grow, both in size and smarts. However, when Lithgow starts to regress, Caesar's ill-conceived plan to protect him from a crappy neighbor results in him being shipped off to a primate preserve run by Col. Stryker from X-Men 2 and Draco Malfoy. Yes, it's a crappy place with plenty of abuse, but it's also where Caesar decides to make his own fortunes. Monkeyshines ensue.

The power of RotPotA comes from motion capture performer Andy Serkis (aka Gollum and King Kong for Peter Jackson's films) and the FX wizards at Weta who take the series past the limitations of the stiff rubber prosthetics of the first five films (and the ill-considered Tim Burton "re-imagining") into fully computer-generated chimps, gorillas, and orangutangs. With Serkis' on-set performance being capturing by motion and facial-tracking cameras, he has been transformed into Caesar, a completely realized character, not merely a special effect. There is talk that this may finally cause the Academy Awards to come to grips with the reality that these performance capture-driven CGI entities need to be considered as ACTING and not merely animation. Some idiot at Entertainment Weekly had a rant about why Avatar's actors didn't deserve consideration and it's still BS. Remember that Serkis got snubbed for his work as Gollum a decade ago. Perhaps the Actor's Branch needs to be forced to watch this:

There are a few instances where the monkeys look rubbery and the swirling camera movements make you aware of their physical impossibility, but for the most part you believe these are real, thinking creatures. So well executed are the apes, the people come off uniformly flat and underwritten. Franco is miscast, he's never plausible as a scientist; Frieda Pinto (from Slumdog Millionaire) is lovely, but just there to be a female character in an otherwise sausage fest movie; Brian Cox and Tom Felton are cliches; only Lithgow is slightly better off, but that's because he's playing a disease and not a person.

There are also several glaring logic and execution gaps starting with the passage of 8 years feeling like 8 weeks because there's no outward sign of the passage of time - no one grows older or changes hairstyle or changes jobs or anything. The company gives up instantly on developing the drug, but when Franco comes up with an improved version (and inadvertently setting off the extinction of the human race in a ham-handed scene), they immediately rush it into production without proper testing. When Sock from Reaper starts sneezing blood, he doesn't really make much of an effort to let anyone know that he's Patient Zero for the annihilation of the human race. Dumbass.

But when we're in the presence of the soon-to-rise apes, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is sublime. Everything cool about this movie stems from the artistry of Serkis and his fellow performers with Weta pushing mountains of realistic pixels to skin the acting in realistic fur. Everything lame involves the real living people. Kudos to director Rupert Wyatt for making what's almost a silent movie - I'd like to see the screenplay to see how it was originally written and structured.

Score: 7/10. Catch a matinee.

"Super" Review

2011-08-06T23:55:00.002-04:00

Hoo boy, this was a letdown. Hyped up in the nerd film blog world as being an even more subversive take on the do-it-yourself superhero genre (think Kick-Ass), Slither director James Gunn's Super was supposed to be an even darker indie take with The Office's Rainn Wilson as the Crimson Bolt and Ellen Page (taking a break from her past roles playing really smart 14-year-old boys) as his "kid sidekick, Bolty." Unfortunately, it looks and feels like a micro-budget indie production that would've starred people last seen as extras in Clerks if not for the presence of Liv Tyler, Kevin Bacon, Nathan Fillion, Linda Cardellini, William Katt (get it?) and Michael Rooker.

Wilson is a schlubby diner cook married to Tyler. When she leaves him for Bacon - and who doesn't like bacon, mmmmm, wait, what? - he snaps and inspired by the adventures of the Holy Avenger (Fillion, who starred in Slither) on the All Jesus Network fashions himself into the Crimson Bolt with the hilarious catchphrase, "SHUT UP, CRIME!" With comic book store clerk Page as his sidekick, they proceed to literally crack heads (with a pipe wrench) on their way to assaulting Bacon's mansion.

Put simply, Super isn't. It's pacing is leaden, the look is cheap, the stars were obviously paying back favors and appearing because they could be in and out in a day or two, and the tone never quite works as we're supposed to laugh at the brutal overkill - does cutting in line merit having your head smashed in? I mean, talking in a movie, sure... - and/or be freaked out by this increasingly out of control dork.

Ellen Page is the best thing in the movie as the manic sidekick. To see Juno basically raping Dwight Schrute and cackling as she crushes bad guys with a car while in her underwear is a hoot, but it's almost as if she decided to make her own fun. All the other performances are adequate, but they're lost in Gunn's barrel of mediocre meandering. Too bad.

Score: 3/10. Skip it and watch Kick-Ass again.

It's weird seeing Page play a girl, huh?

"Bad Teacher" Review

2011-08-06T22:00:00.003-04:00

Cool. The trailer saves me the trouble of synopsizing the plot. Watch it:

That's pretty much it. Gold-digger Cameron Diaz is a cruddy teacher looking for a man to take care of her and is only working to by the boob job she thinks is the key to achieving this goal. Hijinks ensue.

While it's clear the producers are trying to catch some of the aura of 2003's black comedy (as in dark humor, not Tyler Perry) Bad Santa in the title here, the key difference is that Billy Bob Thornton's thieving Santa was a moral degenerate and generally reprehensible lowlife and Diaz is just a goofy dame who is so close to being acceptable that she can clean her act up in an instant. Nothing wrong with that, but instead of calling it Bad Teacher, something like Classless Teacher would've sufficed.

Diaz is cute and funny as are Timberlake and Segel, but the consistent standout isn't Lucy Punch as many reviews have singled out, though she's fine, but Phyllis Smith (from The Office), as the timid portly teacher who befriends Diaz despite her shallowness. She puts a spin on her performance that makes it magnetic to watch, more so that the more familiar take Punch applies to her rabid Miss Squirrel.

The problem with Bad Teacher is that it's just not bad enough. But, it's OK.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

"Disturbia" Blu-ray Review

2011-08-03T23:55:00.001-04:00

Since Hollyweird has run out of original ideas and remade classic novels in updated forms (e.g. The Taming of the Shrew became 10 Things I Hate About You; Emma became Clueless); remade horror films that aren't that old (e.g. Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine, A Nightmare on Elm Street); along with endless sequels, reboots, cartoons, whatever, it was only a matter of time before classic movies from a half-century ago got the update treatment. Thus Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 thriller Rear Window (starring Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly, and Raymond Burr - Ironside!) becomes 2007's Disturbia (starring the kid from Transformers, the Asian guy from 21, and a cute girl who looks like a less-inflated Blake Lively w/0 the face mole).

Shia LeBeouf stars as a boy who, after his father is killed in a tragic auto accident, becomes a sullen, detached zombie who punches out his Spanish teacher. Confined to house arrest for three months on a tether which will summon the cops if he strays more than 100 feet from the base station. After his mom (Carrie-Anne Moss - Trinity's a mom?!?) yanks his Xbox Live and iTunes accounts, he entertains himself by spying on his neighbors, all of whom have nice big windows without curtains and one of which belongs to new neighbors, including hottie Sarah Roemer, who looks like this...

...and after catching Sam Witwicky and his pal, Aaron Yoo, watching her swim, actually joins in on their stakeout of a creepy neighbor (David Morse) who they suspect of being a serial killer. As usual, hijinks ensue.

The fundamental problem that Disturbia has is that it has a generally unappealing protagonist, a bunch of gaping plot holes and illogical missteps which cause the killer to be both supremely uncatchable and totally incompetent at basic murder-hiding, and it just marks time until the "thrilling conclusion." (Director D.J. Caruso and LaBeef reteamed on the substantially better Eagle Eye, though ironically that fell apart at the end after a strong start, the opposite of Disturbia.) There are sporadic moments between the kids that ring true, but they're sparse. Roemer is cute, but who isn't in Hollywood these days?

I hadn't seen this and my girlfriend said it wasn't anything much and she was correct. The Blu-ray's picture quality is sharp and colorful without many problems spotted - it is a good-looking, well-photographed and lit film - and the surround sound is OK, showing off most during the conclusion. The 15-minute making-of featurette is the usual mutual appreciation festival in which everyone loves everyone else's brilliance and blah-blah-woof-woof.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

I couldn't find an embeddable trailer, so you'll have to go here to see it.

July 2011 Review Roundup

2011-07-31T23:59:00.006-04:00

After a slow start, things closed with a bang including five big-screen flicks in the final eight days of the month. The 7-4 theatrical-home split was a change from the usual, too.

July 3 - Transformers: Dark of the Moon (7/10)
July 4 - X-Men: First Class (9/10)
July 10 - Hall Pass (5/10)
July 11 - Unknown (6/10)
July 23 - Captain America: The First Avenger (9/10); Mean Girls
July 25 - Drive Angry (3/10)
July 26 - 30 Minutes or Less
July 27 - The Change-Up (5/10); Friends With Benefits (8/10)
July 31 - The Hangover Part II (7/10)

Month's Movies Watched: 11
Previously Unseen: 9
Theatrical: 7
Home: 4
=====
Year-To-Date: 72
YTD First-Timers: 60
YTD Theatrical: 26
YTD Home: 46

"The Hangover Part II" Review

2011-07-31T16:40:00.003-04:00

The Hangover (reviewed here) was a modern comedy classic. The Hangover Part II is an unneeded but totally expected cash-in on the mega-success of the first. If you think it's going to be pretty much the same movie, but in a new location with a few twists, you're right.

This time the Wolf Pack is in Thailand for Ed Helm's wedding to Jamie Chung. How the dopey dentist scored such a hot babe isn't explained and frankly doesn't make sense. Whatever. Her dad hates Ed and insults him at the welcoming dinner. If this guy is so rich, why is he allowing his little girl to marry Ed. (No, I don't hate Ed. I'm just saying.) One thing leads to another and the trio wake up in a seedy Bangkok hotel room with a shaved head (Zach Galiafinakis or however he spells it), a Mike Tyson tattoo on his face (Ed), and otherwise looking dashing and handsome (Bradley Cooper). They're also missing the bride's little brother, but they've got his finger, so that's a start. Wait, what?

The element of surprise in the first one is missing this time. What made the original so clever was that the audience found out what was going on as the guys did. This time, others always seem to have the answers so if anyone had wanted to stop them and explain what had happened, well, there wouldn't be a movie, would there? As a result, beyond the new setting, director Todd Phillips and gang resort to a darker, meaner brand of humor which strays into disturbing territory enough that it gets a little scary which makes it less funny. We're down with watching these idiots get run through the wringer, but some of the stuff that happens gets pretty dark.

I saw a review bagging on Zach's performance and the character of Alan in general; basically saying that Zach is obviously so dangerous and stupid that there is no way in hell anyone would willingly hang out with him, especially with his track record of mayhem. That's pretty much right, because Zach has been really milking his time in the spotlight to push his weird humor. While that's always been his bag, I'm starting to sense he thinks it's really impressive when the charm before was he didn't seem aware that he was odd and that's what was funny about him.

On the plus side is Ken Jeong who is back as the manic Chow, the naked guy who jumped out of the trunk in the first one. He's still having clothing issues and I hope for his wife's sake he's not really hung, as Detroit punk poet Jimmy Doom would say, like a startled hamster, but he brings a zany angle that somewhat balances the meaner tone elsewhere. Jeong too has used The Hangover to springboard to bigger things (like Community on NBC), but he's lovably daffy unlike Zach's "keep the taser handy" comedy.

Ultimately, The Hangover Part II isn't a disaster - I laughed a lot - but it's just so lacking in ambition or purpose that it's hard to recommend it heartily. There is no real reason for it to exist other than make some more money and with an opening weekend gross of $135 million during the five-day Memorial Day weekend and a current worldwide take of $563 million, that's a big mission accomplished.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable.

"Friends With Benefits" Review

2011-07-27T21:00:00.002-04:00

Rom-com. If there are six letters that sum up a genre more devoid of originality and surprises than the abbreviation of "romantic-comedy", I can't think of them. (Granted, I'm writing this at the bar while on my 4th beer of the night, but...) The genre is so pitiful that even the trailers spell out every beat of the movie, thus saving you the time and money to bother seeing them. Is there ever a real question whether the couple who initially hate each other won't fall madly in love by the last reel? Exactly.

In a bonus dose of uncreativity, Friends With Benefits as the disadvantage of coming a half-year after the dreadful (according to my girlfriend who says she hates rom-coms yet watches any I download for her) No Strings Attached (starring Ashton Kutcher and Academy Award-winner Natalie Portman; yeah, that happened), but somehow turns out not only tolerable, but enjoyable. (The fact we saw it free after strolling in after a screening of The Change-Up can't have hurt.)

The setup is the usual: A pair of beautiful people (Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake) decide that since they can't find anyone meaningful - yeah, it's partly sci-fi movie - they decide to have a sex-only relationship. Will they end up falling in love by the end? It would be spoiling to tell, but let's just hint that YES THEY DO!!!!

When the conclusion is foregone, how you get there is what counts and where FWB succeeds in having very appealing stars enabled by a knowing script and the director of Easy A, Will Gluck, to keep the familiar feeling fresh. There are scenes with the couple watching a terrible fictional rom-com starring an uncredited Jason Segel and Rashida Jones and riffing about how awful it is. Even when the film ranges through the part late in the second act when all these movies find a way to break the lovers apart, it does so with a subtext saying, "Yeah, we know this is crap and a waste of time, but it's Hollywood rom-com law that we do it otherwise we lose our discount at Starbucks, man." A heavy subplot involving Justin's father having Alzheimer's is salvaged by having dad played by Richard Jenkins and allowing it to illuminate Justin's dilemma. That the movie didn't crash and burn there is a minor miracle.

It also helps that there are colorful supporting turns from Patricia Clarkson as Mila's a-little-too-free-spirited Seventies love mama; Woody Harrelson as the gay sports editor of GQ magazine; Jenna Elfman as Justin's single-mom sister taken care of Dad; and Emma Stone as the John Mayer-obsessed girl who dumps Justin in the beginning. Gluck plays everything fast and light and manages to hit all the tired cliches of these flicks without making us hate them as we should.

Will Friends With Benefits change your life or rehabilitate the tired rom-com genre? Heck to the no! But what it does do is not make you wish you were cleaning your place or getting your kneecaps sandblasted instead of watching this. It's frivolous, unsubstantial and otherwise unnecessary, but it's fun and doesn't actively insult your intelligence and that's a minor miracle these days.

Score: 8/10. Catch a matinee or pay full price for date night. (So says my girlfriend.)

"The Change-Up" Review

2011-07-27T19:00:00.003-04:00

Summarizing The Change-Up is easy: It's Hall Pass meets Freaky Friday with dudes. Jason Bateman is a happily-married father of three who is on the verge of becoming partner at his law firm. (He's Owen Wilson's Hall Pass character crossed with his part in Horrible Bosses.) Ryan Reynolds is a stoner slacker, a permanent man-child who's been Bateman's best friend since 3rd grade (as the script helpfully tells us.) One night, after drinking and having a mutual case of grass-is-always-greener-over-there-itis, they pee into a magic fountain while wishing they had each other's lives and wake up in each other's bodies. Hijinks ensue.

I was never really able to get on board with The Change-Up for some reason. The whole time it felt off-kilter and choppy and frankly I'm bored stupid with poop humor. In the first minute we're treated to a close-up of a baby boy's CGI-enhanced farting butt presaging a torrent of chocolate pudding poo blasting all over Bateman's face. So funny. Not. (Has any movie with a baby-changing scene passed up having some hapless chump peed/pooped upon? Grow up, Hollyweird!) It goes slightly uphill from there, but it never strays far from the toilet. What ever happened to people getting punched in the junk? That's still slightly amusing.

The episodic nature of the "story" isn't helped by the overall familiarity of the bits. Will Ryan in Jason's body screw up the big deal, but redeem himself? Duh. Will Jason in Ryan's body be appalled at the Skinemax "lorno" movie he has to perform in? (BTW, if it's fake porn, why does he have to stick his thumb up the terrifying actress' butt?) When Jason/Ryan gets to go out with the smoking hot Olivia Wilde, a law associate at his office, will he ultimately punk out because he misses his wife and family? Yawn...

There is one scene where they attempt to tell Jason's wife, Leslie "Mrs. Judd Apatow" Mann, about the body switch when they try to use the "Ask me something only I'd know" gambit and (surprise!) Jason doesn't know his wife while silly Ryan/Jason knows. That this predictable bit happens isn't the problem; that a while later Leslie cries to Ryan/Jason about how weird Jason/Ryan is behaving and she's afraid he doesn't love her and never stops to think that it may be because THEY'RE IN EACH OTHER'S BODIES is a problem. It's as if no one read the whole script and spotted that nothing aligned. Another problem is that the performances aren't as defined as they need to be. When we look at Jason and Ryan, we never really think we're seeing Ryan and Jason's characters.

All these complaints make it sound like I hated The Change-Up, but I didn't. I just found it lumpy, lazy and mostly obvious. What is good? Olivia Wilde's hottie hot girl co-worker. When she goes out on non-date with Ryan/Jason and suggests that they keep doing stuff because it's still early, I was hoping she'd suggest they go kill hobos because that would've been HAWT!! (Ahem.) Like she did in TRON Legacy, Wilde manages to make a flatly-written character fascinating. Mann is also good, though there's no way she did that nudity; she's never done it before and while she's a very attractive woman, the boobs they CGI onto her body are from a girl half her 39 years. CGI is also utilized for some funny stuff involving Jason's babies. However most of the humor is mostly shock-based. (I guess simply writing funny stuff is too difficult for Hollywood these days.)

I've given an extra point to the score for Olivia Wilde and to compensate for any possibility I may've been out of sorts and thus not appreciating the true awesomeness of The Change-Up, but no matter how you slice it, it's a wait for cable flick.

UPDATE: After further consideration, I've decided to knock it back down a point to an unadjusted 5/10. It's just too much of a mess.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

"30 Minutes or Less" Review

2011-07-26T19:00:00.002-04:00

If something about the setup of 30 Minutes or Less seems familiar, it's because you're thinking of the weird case in 2003 where a middle-aged guy in Pennsylvania walked into a bank claiming he had been jumped and fitted with a bomb shackled around his neck and if he didn't get money for his attackers, he'd die. Captured by the police after failing to get away, he was sitting on the pavement waiting for the bomb squad to arrive when the bomb went off, killing him. Who did this to him and whether he was party to scheme was a mystery and even though there were eventually people held accountable, there is still some speculation whether the masterminds were actually punished.

Fortunately, director Ruben (Zombieland) Fleischer's movie downplays the grimness and merely uses the bomb vest device in a totally unrelated story. Danny McBride is a moron (no typecasting here!) who hates his father and concocts a scheme to have him killed in order to inherit the rest of his Lotto winnings. In order to get the money for a hitman, he and his dim-but-technically-savvy buddy lure pizza delivery guy Jesse Eisenberg to an isolated spot where they jump him, chloroform him, and strap a bomb to him. With orders to get $100,000 within 10 hours or BOOM!, Jesse goes to his best friend, Aziz Ansari, whom he's on the outs with after admitting he'd slept with Aziz's twin sister years before. Hijnks ensue.

Fast-paced at only 83 minutes long, 30 Minutes or Less delivers plenty of profane, low-brow laughs along with some sly observational gags (e.g. McBride's riff on proper mix tape construction for crime) and it's obvious that there was plenty of improvisation happening. If there's a flaw with the movie, it's that the characters don't arc much even within the limits of a movie that all takes place in one day. The performances are all good and Eisenberg continues to make anyone who thought Michael Cera deserved a career regret their naivety. (Judging from Cera's IMDB page, the failure of Scott Pilgrim, Hollywood has finally discovered he is box office poison.)

Compared to Zombieland, which had a much better script, 30 Minutes or Less feels a tad slight. It's worth seeing, just not trekking to the theater for.

Score: 6/10. Rent it.

"Drive Angry" Review

2011-07-25T23:17:00.000-04:00

Remember when Nicolas Cage was an actor? He actually won an Oscar, but judging from the string of scenery-devouring B-movies he's been making, it's getting hard to remember when he wasn't a joke. Every few years, he'll make something decent like Matchstick Men, Lord of War, Kick-Ass, or Adaptation, but mostly it's been crap like The Wicker Man, Season of the Witch or Drive Angry here.

The premise and execution sound promising on paper: Cage plays John Milton (not the guy who wrote Paradise Lost, but same name, get it?), a man who escapes from Hell in order to save his granddaughter from being sacrificed by a Satanic cult who want to usher in Hell on Earth. (Why this kid? Never explained.) He hooks up with a hot sassy waitress played by Amber Heard and they head cross-country to save the baby, pursued by a mysterious man calling himself The Accountant (an awesomely creepy William Fichtner). Shot in 3D (and not post-converted), there are plenty of moments of stuff sticking out of the screen (note: I watched it on 2D video). It should be a fun grindhouse-style popcorn muncher but it doesn't gel into anything much.

Nailing an appropriate over-the-top tone is a trick that is harder to pull off than it looks. The Crank movies did it; Planet Terror did it; Shoot 'Em Up (from which a scene where the hero fights off attacking baddies while having sex is cribbed) was a live-action Bugs Bunny cartoon; but Drive Angry oscillates between trying to be arch Grand Guignol with oodles of CGI blood and gratuitous nudity - not that there's anything wrong with that - and a serious Satanic cult movie. It just doesn't work and at the end, it calls into question just what the Satanic cult led by Billy Burke was actually going to accomplish.

Cage is Picking Up A Check Cage here. 'Nuff said. Amber Heard is spunky and hot. (Too bad she's a lesbian in real life with a hotter girlfriend than you for the double fail, kids.) The best thing in the movie is Fichtner who sorta channels Christopher Walken's off-kilter vibe as the Accountant, telling people when he'll be seeing them next and the scene with Heard's crappy boyfriend is awesome.)

It's also shot in this hot, overexposed style which is frankly ugly and not in a good way. You know how terrible photos taken in the noonday sun look? Like that.

Score: 3/10. Watch it on a friend's cable.

"Mean Girls" Blu-ray Review

2011-07-23T23:55:00.004-04:00

Amy Winehouse was found dead today, to the surprise of absolutely no one. After her critical and commercial success with her Grammy-winning debut, she descended into a tabloid fodder hell of drugs, booze and reckless self-destruction. Glimmers that she'd pulled herself together always proved illusory. Now she's gone and will probably be remembered for everything but her original talent.

This prompted me to finally pop in the Blu-ray of Mean Girls I'd picked up for a few bucks a couple of months back. I haven't seen it since it was in theaters in 2004 and already had an unwatched DVD lying around.

Lindsay Lohan has had a rather tragic, albeit not Winehouse-grade awful, career self-immolation path since Mean Girls blew her up as the Hot New Thang. Whether it was getting bombed in the Gossip Girl clubs of NYC, hanging with Paris Hilton in a toxic frenemy relationship, to being a lesbian with DJ Samantha Ronson (who had a tune on the soundtrack), to various run-ins with the law and getting dropped from movies that were meant to reignite her career, Lindsay has been in the words of the Lit song her own worst enemy.

Watching Mean Girls now is interesting because in the ensuing several years, much of the cast has gone on to interesting careers:

• Writer/co-star Tina Fey was still on SNL when this came out and she then left to create 30 Rock, the show that was supposed to be the poor doomed runt sibling to Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. (While 30 Rock is heading into its sixth season, Studio 60 got Old Yellered before the first was done airing.) It's striking to see how many stock 30 Rock tics like rapid cutaways to illustrate past events are evidenced here. That's the way Tina writes.

• Rachel McAdams (the evil queen bee here) went on to The Notebook and tons of rom-coms.

• Amanda Seyfried (as the sweet but dumb-as-dirt one who thought she had "a fifth sense...like ESPN") was the doomed Lily Kane in the first season of Veronica Mars and then took her awesome rack to the big screen.

• Almost unrecognizable Lizzy Caplan - so snarky and hot in Cloverfield and True Blood - was a chubby, sarcastic goth here.

• Lacey Chabert has never gotten her career going, typecast as the hot girl with big boobs, not that that's a bad thing, but she's like a less-successful Jennifer Love Hewitt.

And then there's Lindsay. Sigh. She wore these outfits in the movie:

When stardom called, she did a GQ spread with pictures like this:

She was a hot cherry bomb being compared to Ann-Margaret. But it just wasn't her looks - if looks were everything, we wouldn't be worried about Megan Fox's career opportunities now - but her talent that makes her career and life slides so sad. Having done impressively in the dual roles of the remake of The Parent Trap when she was 11 (Hayley Mills was 14 when the original was done) and recreated the Jodie Foster role in the Freaky Friday remake at 16, she was only 17 when she made Mean Girls and to look at her fresh face in the movie now and then look at the hard, bleached-out, skank (harsh, yes) woman she is now, barely past 25 and looking a decade older, it only makes one sadder.

As the fish-out-of-water new girl in school, having been home-schooled by her folks and living in Africa for the past 12 years, she's first earnest before succumbing to the charms of popularity. There's a lot of subtext in her performance which is why hopes for her career were so high. Sure, Herbie Fully Loaded was a speed bump and obviously a result of her Disney ties, but she hasn't made a major movie where she's been more than a sideshow freak, like her body-doubled bit in Machete. Her "big comeback" in the Linda Lovelace biopic seemed more desperate and daring and as her legal problems mounted, she was dumped in favor of Watchmen's Malin Ackerman.

Compounding her problems is the legion of impressive, attractive, and crazy-talented actresses who have arrived in the past few years starting with Emma Stone who with Easy A pretty much declared to Lindsay that "all your career are belong to me!" What Stone did to build to that point was very savvy in that she killed it in a series of supporting roles in films like Superbad, The House Bunny, Zombieland, The Rocker and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (coincidentally directed by Mean Girls' Mark Waters) before taking the spotlight. Now she's got two big movies coming out shortly and is Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man reboot next summer. Lindsay, I think, is making a TV movie about John Gotti. People adore Emma's geeky awkwardness on and offscreen - she's basically if Lindsay had stayed true to her 17-year-old self and didn't compete with her mother for Party Whore of the Year awards. (Again, harsh, but...)

How is a mess-up like Lindsay supposed to compete for roles when, in addition to her co-stars from Mean Girls, she has to fight Jennifer Lawrence, Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning and various CW network actresses. What producer is going to stake a movie that costs tens of millions of dollars on an actress who hasn't made a positive impression in the media or onscreen for seven very long years?

Can Lindsay resurrect her career and recapture her skills? Perhaps. Does anyone really remember Drew Barrymore's wild grade school drunk days? Hasn't Robert Downey Jr. had a remarkable run since he cleaned up his act? (Fun fact: He was paid less than Terrance Howard for Iron Man and the studio didn't even want his washed-up, ex-druggie, ex-con ass in the role; Jon Favreau had to fight for him.) Whether Lindsay can pull a rabbit out of someplace will be a neat trick to see. Until then, we still have her at her luscious best in Mean Girls.

As a Blu-ray, it's an OK release. The transfer is clear, though there are some trouble spots of noise in a couple of sections. The audio track is all front side - it's one of those non-surrounding surround tracks than make me wonder if something's wrong with my receiver. I haven't listened to the commentary, but there's a short blooper reel and some odds and ends that comprise the lean extras.

Score: 8/10. Buy it cheap.

"Captain America: The First Avenger" Review

2011-07-23T14:45:00.002-04:00

With the clunky-but-needlessly-thought-necessary-because-everyone-hates-America-named Captain America: The First Avenger (or as I call it Captain America (F*ck Yeah!), Marvel Studios turns the hat trick of superhero movies in 2011. Along with the good fellow Avengers setup film Thor and the sublime X-Men: First Class, Marvel has soared while rival DC had their Green Lantern fizzle out. (On the upside, this should free up Ryan Reynolds for a Deadpool movie. Make it so!)

If X-Men went retro with its early-1960s setting, Captain America is true to its WWII origins with scrawny Steve Rogers (a digitally-diminished Chris Evans in a career-changing role) trying to enlist but being turned down for being scrawny, asthmatic and generally a 90-pound weakling. He's got gumption, but that's not what the Army is looking for. Fortunately, it is what Stanley Tucci's scientist is seeking for his Super Soldier project in which serum and vita rays are meant to turn him into the ultimate fighting man. That the last guy who'd tried it turned into the Red Skull is problematic, but that's because he was a bad guy.

Keying the whole show is Chris Evans' portrayal of Cap, both before and after his transformation. It would've been very easy to play the noble, patriotic Steve Rogers as a bit of a stiff, a steroid-infused Boy Scout, but it works because Evans makes us feel the frustration of wanting to contribute, but being on the wrong end of the genetic card deal. If you only know the cocky Evans from his Human Torch role in the lackluster Fantastic 4 movies or light comedies, he's a revelation. (If you saw Sunshine, Danny Boyle's sci-fi "trip to reignite the dying Sun" movie, it's a little less of a surprise.)

It helps that he's surrounded by a top-notch cast including Tommy Lee Jones, the luscious Hayley Atwell as a spunky, sexy English agent, and Hugo Weaving as Red Skull. Dominic Cooper plays Howard Stark, Tony's father (who was played by John Slattery in Iron Man 2), and it's interesting to see how his influence on his son would've manifested.

The most valuable player (after Evans) has to be director Joe Johnston whose film The Rocketeer and his work as visual effects supervisor for Raiders of the Lost Ark prepped him ably for the period look and feel of a slightly sci-fi'ed up version of WWII. Giant flying wings and airplanes that look like rockets with giant pusher propellers feel matter-of-fact and that guileless tone makes the more fantastical elements go down easily. The way they handle his costume, which would

There was some angst from conservative quarters about the tacking on of "The First Avenger" part and initial concerns it would be released without the Captain America half in order to placate supposed anti-American sentiment around the world (only Russia, South Korea(?) and Ukraine chose the alternate title) and a couple of particularly stupid hacks at Big Hollywood whined that it wasn't jingoistic enough for their tastes, but take it from me, there's nothing to their complaints. It's patriotic and not the least apologetic about the inherent goodness of America and doesn't try to temper its pro-USA tenor other than not piling on needless flag-waving on top of a star-spangled avenger battling evil. We get it; stop crying, bitches.

Captain America (F*ck Yeah!) easily joins other top shelf Marvel comic book movies like X-Men 2 and Iron Man and nicely sets the table for next year's Joss Whedon-helmed The Avengers. Bring it on!

Score: 9/10. Pay full price.

"Unknown" Review

2011-07-11T23:00:00.002-04:00

I love it when the trailer spells out the plot and saves me the typing. Watch this:

As Unknown spun its tale of replaced identity, it genuinely built suspense as I wondered who exactly Liam Neeson and his deal were. I started having wild fears of a possible explanation which would be so silly as to render the whole movie a waste of time. However, when they finally do explain the deal, it just lets all the air out of the movie, rendering the last act an exercise in mild tedium because I just didn't care about the somewhat silly plot twist. They tried for clever and landed in stupid.

Liam Neeson is good here as is Bruno Ganz as a former East German Stasi spook who agrees to help Liam sort out the mystery of his life. On the other hand, I thought January Jones was flat. I thought nerds were bashing her so-so turn as Emma Frost in X-Men: First Class partially because they hate her as Betty Draper on Mad Men, but watching Unknown right after an episode of Hammtown (as my girlfriend calls it), I'm noticing the same flat iciness in everything she does. It's a little off-putting.

While Unknown isn't a bad movie, the way it fumbles the payoff after such an interesting setup magnifies the disappointment. I dropped it a point from where I'd thought it was at by the time things wrapped up and have decided to dock it another point for only being 2/3rds a good thriller before tripping within sight of the finish line.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable or, better yet, watch Taken to see Liam Neeson rampage through Paris.

"Hall Pass" Review

2011-07-10T23:00:00.002-04:00

After a quartet of hit comedies in the Nineties - Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, There's Something About Mary, and Me, Myself and Irene - the Farrelly Brothers (Peter and Bobby; where's Greg?) - hit the skids in the new millennium with a streak of critical and commercial disappointments and outright flops. With their latest, Hall Pass, they still are back to form, but they do deliver some big laughs from time to time.

Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis are two dopey (but not dumb) guys married to Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate respectively. Owen and Jenna have three kids and have been togther about 20 years; Jason and Kelly Bundy have no spawnlings. When the wives get offended by their hubbies mild ogling of other women, they take the advice of shrink pal Joy Behar - well, there's a mistake right there! - to give their husbands a "hall pass," a week off of marriage when they can do whatever they want. The wives will go to vacation places on the shore and Owen and Jason can see just how studly they really are.

Compared to lowbrow-yet-with-heart movies by Judd Apatow like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, the Farrellys have a tough time balance the tart and sweet aspects. The often hilarious raunchy gross-out bits clash with the more tender moments to show that the couples really love each other and don't wish to stray, even when they take a step off the straight and narrow. There is little danger or risk and the "shocking" full-frontal male nudity in one spot is so clumsily handled, you just feel embarrassed for everyone involved.

The performances are good (though Sudekis is an awful lot like he was in Horrible Bosses; limited range?) included the pals of the pair and the hot coffee shop babe (Nicky Whelan) Owen has his eyes on. Hall Pass takes forever (for a comedy) to get going, but when it's on, it's funny; it's just a lumpy mixed bag overall.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

"Transformers: Dark of the Moon" Review

2011-07-03T15:50:00.002-04:00

What can be said about Transformers: Dark of the Moon? It's proof that bigger doesn't always mean better.

Watch the trailer below for the plot: Shia LaBeef (sp?) has a new hot girlfriend (thus assuring this is a science fiction movie) and there are giant talking robots and bad robots blow the hell out of Chicago and blah-blah-woof-woof. Do we go to these things for plot? Who said yes? Get out of my blog, weirdo!

Here's what you need to know: Rosie Huntington-Whitley is hot and cute and less skanky than Megan Fox (which is why she's Jason Statham's girlfriend in real life and not Shia's). There are several funny nerd-meta jokes which riff off of Leonard Nimoy's voicing Sentinel Prime. Sam's goofy parents are back, but unlike most people, I like them. There are some new Autobots and Decepticons, but other than shorthand stereotyping like the new Ferrari one having a "It'sa me, Mario!" accent, they're just more metal. There is also some slightly clever writing explaining the true origins of the Space Race and how some have collaborated for decades with the Decepticons.

Not that you care about characters, but there's a smarmy boss of Rosie's played by Patrick Dempsey; a slumming Frances McDormand as a prickly NSA chief; and John Malkovich apparently deciding that he wants Christopher Walken's career in a schizophrenic role which starts of one way and then changes into something totally different for no explained reason. Ken Jeong also has a small bit part that he works hard for laughs.

But you don't go to Transformers movies for plot and characters; you go for the BAYHEM! As long as you see giant fighting robots tearing sh*t up (as my girlfriend stated as her bare minimum for satisfaction from the first film in 2007), it's all good, right? Normally I'd agree and while there are some truly epic action scenes here, it gets so crazy and chaotic for so long at the end, it starts turning into noise that you can't focus on anymore. Look at the last shot of the trailer before the title card goes up. Look at all the whirring rotating teeth and whatnot. The level of detail in the robots and environments is so minute - the 'bots have multiple gears in their eyes now, for instance - that there simply is no way to take it all in so it actually goes unnoticed.

The movie is also too damn long at over 2-1/2 hours. The distribution of action is also too backloaded. The finale involving several set pieces, each of which would be the grand finale of another action movie, runs nearly an hour and by the time it's over, you're just numb from sensory overload and I saw it in plain 2D on a big theater screen. They could've cut the end down to a half-hour, taking the other 20 minutes and spread them out over a sub-2 hour movie and been the better for it.

My first remark to the girlfriend afterwards was, "Well, I'm set for my fighting robot movies*. I don't need anymore."

Score: 7/10. Catch it on a huge screen at a matinee or dollar show.

* Not counting the upcoming Hugh Jackman movie, Real Steel, which was shot in Detroit and coincidentally, I was in one of the locations used today (as I write this review).

"Horrible Bosses" Review

2011-06-30T19:45:00.002-04:00

First things first: No, Jennifer Aniston does not show off her boobs in Horrible Bosses. The rumors that she shot a scene topless - I think I know where that could've happened - but they didn't know if it was going to get used (yeah, right - who wants to see that?) as far as this version goes, are bogus. Drat.

Secondly, watch this, cuz why should I type out the plot when it's pretty much all here?

A bunch of the funny bits are blown here, but fortunately it doesn't give away all the goods as the profane and outrageous comedy Horrible Bosses does manage to build upon the PG-rated antics shown here. (Jamie Foxx's character is named after the 12-letter euphemism for Oedipus.) As circumstances spiral out of control, it gets predictably frantic, but there are a few twists and turns to keep you guessing. The ending is a bit of an abrupt letdown and deus ex machina and the final gags are flat, but overall it delivers a goodly amount of laughs.

The key to comedies success or failure (after the script and direction) is the performances and the cast is appropriately manic. Jason Bateman is...well, the same as he is in every movie; Jason Sudekis is in amped-up lunkhead mode; I'm not familiar with Charlie Day from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia but he gets a little shrill and, I'm sorry, as they comment on in the movie, being sexual harassed by someone like Aniston is something worth going to work for. (Yeah, she's crazy, but yo!)

On the villain side, Kevin Spacey is a weasel, but that's sleepwalking for him. No, the revelations are Colin Farrell, sporting a gross combover, fat gut, and enough sleazy lowlife antics to make it hard to remember his leading man days. (There are tons of improv outtakes in the credits with him from a scene not in the movie, so look for a packed video release.) While some may be surprised by the man-eating, potty-mouthed Aniston, anyone who's seen her oddball flick Management knows she can be game for some wild stuff. She's a hoot, even without showing her hooters.

In case you're desperate to know, you see about this much:

Jamie Foxx is also good as the "murder consultant." Hard to believe that between him and Spacey, there are three Oscars in this movie.

Score: 7.5/10. If you're gung-ho to see a show, pay matinee prices; otherwise you can wait for a rental and it'll probably have even more deleted/alternate material.

What Gossip Girl Has Taught Me. (Updated)

2011-06-25T11:57:00.000-04:00

When I post Clicker updates as to what I'm watching, the ones that get the most snide replies from my Facebook friends are those relating to Gossip Girl, the soapy teen series following the lives and trials of vapid Upper East Side trust fund brats in expensive clothes. While I never watched much, if any, Beverly Hills 90210 or Melrose Place (either back in the day or their recent incarnation) and didn't really show much interest in the show for the same reasons, I blind-bought the first two seasons on DVD during Black Friday 2009 because they were cheap - only $13 apiece.

They sat unwatched for months and my girlfriend sneered at my purchases the same way she did when I started buying Buffy the Vampire Slayer seasons. Finally, we ran out of ways to avoid watching them and started in with her grousing about why we're watching this, but as she'd done then, she rapidly became hooked on these twits (mis)adventures and when we finished the 2nd season, she became agitated over the fact we didn't have the 3rd on hand and there were no good deals around until after Christmas.

While we've been having a lot of fun with the show - other than the fact that Serena is a simpy twit who was only hot during the couple of episodes where she was bitchy to Blair at Yale - but some tropes have become unavoidable, thus requiring comment:

The drinking age for rich kids in NYC appears to be 14. In pretty much every episode, everyone but the poor Humphrey ragamuffins is shown guzzling cocktails, sometimes at home (where their folks, if they happen to be around, never suggest having cocoa or a Pepsi), but frequently at bars, clubs, restaurants, etc. When Lindsay Lohan was blowing up as the star of Mean Girls and promptly started on her downward spiral, over and over she was spotted drinking in clubs under the legal age of 21 and I wondered who wasn't watching out for this. I'm always hearing about Detroit bars getting busted for serving underage customers, but in Gossip Girl's Gotham, membership in the upper class appears to have its privileges.

UPDATE: In episode 3.7, Chuck's bar was shut down for having a fake liquor license. The cops came and grabbed the booze and shooed the patrons out the door. They didn't seem to notice all the sub-legal kids in the bar. This didn't happen when Rudy ran things!
No one owns an iPhone. This is the real headscratcher for me. The iPhone came out in June 2007 and as of the 3rd season - we're watching on DVD and are a year behind - which began airing in Fall 2009, no one is using one. Apple has sold approximately eleventy gazillion units - they're so ubiquitous that almost anyone who wants one has one, no one is impressed by them anymore and it carries about as much cachet as saying you watch American Idol - but on the Upper East Side, the kids who take limos everywhere, wear expensive designer fashions and basically want for nothing are still using feature phones, some with T9 keyboards. What the hell?!? The producers slave to create this fantasy universe of privilege and then have people boarding private jets to Europe making calls on phones you get for free with a service contract. This year Blair got a Blackberry, which puts her on the cutting edge. Of 2007. I haven't noticed a pattern of models that would indicate a reality-destroying product placement deal, but something's wrong.

UPDATE: In recent S4 episodes, there has been some really obvious Microsoft product placement in the form of people using Bing to search for things, WinMo phones, and laptops with monochrome Windows logos where the Dell or HP logo would be. (M$ doesn't make a branded computer in North America like this.) Still no sign of an iPhone with 2 episodes left, meaning that as of May 2011, the iPhone still hasn't taken Manhattan in any of its four guises.
Money fixes everything. Self-explanatory. The greatest crime on the show, as in real life, is to be poor and the Golden Rule (i.e. he who has the gold makes the rules) is in full effect. Nate's family stories really put this across, but over and over, all trouble is swept aside with a spray of the money hose. Someone drown and a student needs expulsion from the school? How about a new library donation? (I wonder if this private academy looks at their upgrade wish list and then seeks out problem children to pimp for donations from concerned parents.)
Never tell an easy truth when you can tell a hard lie that will always backfire on you. Over and over and over and OVER, these twits choose to baldly lie about EVERYTHING to each other. After the inevitable being caught out, the lied-to frowns and makes noises about never being able to trust the liar again, but they move on and rinse and repeat the same credibility-shredding behavior, over and over and OVER. When will they learn that everyone would be cool with whatever if you told the truth in the first place?

Over time, we started noticing a corollary to this rule...
When falsely accused of wrongdoing, never speak up in your own defense. If someone came up and accused you of doing something that could cost you your education, job or the trust of your friends, would you deny it and call out the slanderer or meekly act guilty and slink away. Maybe you'll eventually be exonerated, but in the meantime the damage will be done. What would you do? If you said, "Defend myself," then you're not on this show! Vanessa and Serena have both taken major hits in S4 because of this nonsense.
You are supposed to follow your destiny at all costs until the writers suddenly forget all about it. This is specific to Baby J, but also applies to the other Humphrey boy. Jenny has been set up as a Brilliant Fashion Designer for the better part of two seasons. First as making stylish school clothes, Pretty In Pink style, then as an intern for Eleanor Waldorf's fashion house, saving the day with her great style acumen. She then quits and sets off on her own with a crazy model friend, ultimately staging a guerrilla fashion show that made her the toast of the town with people begging to put out her designs. Even her killjoy fuddy-duddy father allowed her to basically drop out of school to pursue this break until...well, nothing. Suddenly, she was back at Constance, playing the mean girl reindeer games and not a peep about her success was heard. Last night, we watched episode 3.8 and she appeared to throw away her precious sewing machine. WTFF?!? It doesn't help that Taylor Momsen got taller and skinnier over the hiatus, but now she looks like a junkie skank and is acting like a beyatch. Again, WTFF, writers?!?

I'll be adding to this post as more lessons reveal themselves. Feel free to chime in on the comments with suggestions as to what lessons we may have missed.

"Sucker Punch (Extended Cut)" Review

2011-06-22T23:45:00.001-04:00

The extended cut of Zach Snyder's interesting mess Sucker Punch is online ahead of next week's Blu-ray release. Being an impatient fellow and wanting to see if it was a drastic enough change to warrant rushing out and buying it immediately, I checked it out. Does the additional 18 minutes make Sucker Punch a great movie? No, but they certainly do a lot to punch up the action and somewhat fix the bumps in the theatrical cut.

Rather than rehash the whole plot and review (which can be viewed here) I'm just going to run thru the major differences:

• The opening scene where Baby Doll accidentally kills her sister is clearer because she shoots TWICE; the second time winging her stepfather's arm making it more logical that she hit her sister.

• The "Love Is The Drug" number glimpsed in the end credits (it's still there, too) is shown as a splashy montage early on illustrating the operation of the club/brothel. We see bits of the other girls' dances (which was a glaring omission based on the press at its release) and it eases us into the milieu better.

• The WWI battle scenes are much longer, including cool shots of Jamie Chung's pink bunny mecha, Vanessa Hudgens wasting legions of steampunk soldiers, and much more brutal trench warfare. This was apparently cut to get a PG-13 rating, but it really beefs up the badass babe ratio and should've been left in.

• The dragon castle sequence has more killing and trademark SnyderVision® (I just made that up!) camera speedramping, giving Rocket and Sweet Pea some good moments. All the extended battle stuff gives the other girls moments to shine; the theatrical cut was weaker for their removal.

• Finally, there is a scene with Jon Hamm's High Roller character which somewhat explains his reaction to what Baby Doll did as he did his work.

I noticed a few other odd bits and pieces of business, but nothing drastic.

The fundamental head-scratcher of the movie - what the heck happened and what was real? - isn't really resolved, but in the Cinefex magazine discussing the FX work of the film, such as this...

...being ENTIRELY CGI(!), Snyder mentions that the whole fantasy aspect is based on the structure of a short story I've never heard of called An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge in which a man imagines a whole life in the time it takes to be hanged. While it's interesting that he was using a conceit that's been used successfully before, I'd wager that 99.44% of the people who saw Sucker Punch had no knowledge of the story and the validity of a narrative based on a dying man's final imaginings, so they were left in the cold as far as comprehending what happened. Ironically, Snyder somewhat failed by OVERestimating the education of his audience, not by pandering or dumbing down his story. Too bad.

While the Extended Cut doesn't totally elevate Sucker Punch into unqualified success territory, it is an improvement and I'll be getting the Blu-ray with even more interest in the extras. This is the cut I'll be watching in the future.

Score: 8/10. At least rent the Blu-ray.

"Super 8" Review

2011-06-15T19:30:00.003-04:00

I saw this when as a fluke. My pal McHatin and I were supposed to see an advance screening of Green Lantern and were within site of the box office when they announced it was sold out. Unlike the disastrous preview of The Hangover Pt. 2 we'd been shut out of a few weeks back, the theater generously offered free admission to anything showing within the next hour. Since I was on a tight schedule, leaving for Toronto in the morning for NXNE, we chose the movie starting at the same time as our preview was supposed to: J.J. Abrams' homage to Spielberg, Super 8.

Set in 1979, it follows Joel Courtney (me neither), a 13-year-old boy whose mother was killed in a steel mill accident, leaving him alone with his distracted sheriff deputy father who can't relate to his kid's interest in filmmaking. Joel and his classmates are making a Super 8 zombie movie and Joel provides the makeup effects. (That he's not the director is a different angle than you'd expect.) When the director asks Elle Fanning, a classmate, to join the project as a love interest, a smitten Joel is agog. However, there is something regarding her drunken white trash father and his possible responsibility for Joel's mom's death hovering over them.

While filming a scene at a train station at night, they witness their high school science teacher cause a MASSIVE - it's like something from Transformers - train derailment, barely escaping harm. They can't understand why he did it, but when the military arrives in force and weird things, from people disappearing to cars engines on a sales lot going missing, lead them to guess that something escaped from the train. (They must've seen the trailer.) Is it the monster from Cloverfield or what?

Super 8 is two movies, one of which is very good and interesting; the other tacked on in such half-hearted fashion that it almost feels as if Abrams sabotages himself in self-loathing for having to put it in to satisfy modern studio demands for BIG ACTION. The part focusing on the kids is quiet and well-played. The look of Spielberg films of that era like Close Encounters and E.T. is aped well (with a dose of lens flare to get the Abrams-haters knickers in a twist), but it's the performances of young actors born over a quarter-century later that makes it work. (There are a lot of hideous sideburns on display. It looks more 1974 to me, but whatever.)

The monster stuff doesn't work as well. We never get a decent look at it until the end and the whole aspect of what it is and how the Evil Military is abusing the poor thing that just wants to steal enough junk and kill enough people to get home is hackneyed. The connection of the science teacher to the creature is laughable and handled in a clumsy voiceover that made McHatin chirp, "Message!" Remember when the U.S. military were portrayed as heroes in Spielberg movies? Apparently he doesn't. Lazy, stupid, and distracting. It's just that a small film about filmmaking kids is impossible to sell to summer audiences, but you can tell where Abrams heart was because it's called Super 8 and not Train Monster.

The breakout performance here is Elle Fanning, previously known best for being Dakota's little sister who played the younger versions of Dakota's characters. (Look at her IMDB page for yourself.) While Dakota has always been good, though throwing off a bit of a Jodie FosterBot 2.0 vibe, Elle made me think of Michelle Pfeiffer or Charlize Theron which for a girl who was only 12(!) when this movie was made is amazing. She's definitely one to watch.

While Super 8 is a bit of a muddle, the parts that work more than overpower the fluff that doesn't. Also, there's a nifty bonus movie during the end credits!

Score: 8/10. Catch a matinee.

"Source Code" Review

2011-06-11T21:30:00.004-04:00

Part Groundhog Day, part The Matrix, part Quantum Leap, director Duncan Jones' (fka Zowie Bowie, David's son) follow-up to the underseen gem Moon (with an Oscar-overlooked performance by Sam Rockwell) is an occasionally provocative, though ultimately insubstantial and inconsistent if you really think of the logic it portrays.

Jake Gyllenhaal wakes up on a train and discovers he's in another man's body. While trying to figure out what's going on, the train explodes and wakes up strapped in what looks like a wrecked plane. He's an Army chopper pilot in Afghanistan, so what's going on. Vera Farmiga appears on a monitor and asks him about the explosion and then tells him he's going back and has 8 minutes to find the bomber so they can prevent a greater tragedy. The story then rinses and repeats.

The way they show Jake rapidly cutting through the early stages of each trip into the source code simulation is logical, but when you see who the bomber is, you realize that the premise has a logic gap you could drop a bomb-laden train car through. Without spoiling things, if it is possible to capture the residual memories of people after they've died, then the bomber shouldn't be present in the recreation since he's not dead at the scene, no matter what the found wallet implies. Also, the revelation about what Jake's condition is, while somewhat ballsy, falls apart when you actually see how he is; it's frankly medically impossible.

Then there's the pretty girl, played by Michelle Monaghan. Why is he smitten with a girl he never spends more than a couple of minutes with? Why save her? Because she's cute? What if she's a psycho hose beast and it only becomes obvious to everyone after they've endured her for 10 minutes? The final trip through the Matrix, er, source code also breaks the rules they've set up along the entire story. (Something similar happened with Minority Report and the leap didn't do that film any favors either.)

While it's not as good as Moon, it's an OK rental for those with a decent tolerance level for inconsistency. Good performances, including the always awesome Jeffrey Wright, and a neat idea; too bad they don't stick the landing. Maybe next time. (Heh.)

Score: 6/10. Rent it.

In an inspired meta detail, Jake's father is played on the phone by none other than Scott Bakula. (Think about it. Hilarious, no?)

"Dance Flick (Unrated)" Blu-ray Review

2011-06-07T00:48:00.003-04:00

23 minutes into this movie and I've laughed 2-1/2 times, one of which was a throwaway sight gag. Hit eject. Put in sell box. Review done. Next!

Score: DNF/10. Skip it.

No, I'm not going to look up the trailer to post here.

"Red Riding Hood" Review

2011-06-06T00:43:00.002-04:00

The problem with Red Riding Hood isn't that it's so bad, but that it's so bland and uninvolving. It passes before your eyes and despite some lovely cinematography and compositions, it's a snooze.

Amanda Seyfried lives in a medieval village where she's in love with a poor woodsman, but here mother has arranged that she marry the blacksmith's boy. (Both of these vapid twits are typical 21st Century boy-men with no acting skill, better suited for a CW show.) The werewolf that has terrorized the town for generations has killed her sister, prompting them to summon werewolf-killing priest Gary Oldman, who is your go-to guy when you want some scenery mauled with dignity, not Nic Cage style.

Fr. Gary says the wolf is in the town, hiding amongst them and blah-blah-woof-woof. Amanda gets the titular garment and Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke tries to keep the mystery of who the wolf is going to the point of making the movie into Red Herring Hood. I just couldn't stay focused on the movie because I didn't care.

Score: 3/10. Catch it on cable.

"X-Men: First Class" Review

2011-06-03T00:01:00.002-04:00

11 years later, it's easy to forget how seminal the original X-Men movie was. Comic book films were a joke. Batman & Robin had run that horse into the ground with camp, nipples, and a tubby Batgirl. Other than Blade, a third-string comic that I'd bet 99% of the audience didn't know was originally a comic, not much was going on with the genre.

But after Bryan Singer's film, everything exploded and a decade later, theaters are an embarrassment of riches with Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger (who will join Hulk and Iron Man for Joss Whedon's ultimate nerdgasm flick, The Avengers) representing Team Marvel and Green Lantern hoisting the DC banner until The Dark Night Rises and Man of Steel will arrive next year with the rebooted Tobey Maguire-free Amazing Spider-Man.

But I've always been partial to the X-Men movies; X2: X-Men United is my pick for the best comic book movie ever. I don't get the nerd rage against X3: The Last Stand. It wasn't as good as X2, but that's like saying Angelina Jolie in Wanted is a dog compared to the way she looked in Mr. & Mrs. Smith because she's too skinny. The Wolverine movie was a bit of a botch, but compared to Ang Lee's Hulk or Elektra, it was X-Men. The ironic connection between the maligned X3 and the new X-Men: First Class is that director Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass) was slated to direct the former before leaving the project, forcing the rushed job Brett Ratner did, and with one fell swoop, reinvigorates the franchise with verve and style.

Because it's after ~~3:30~~ 4:10 am, I've got work in the morning, and the Duke Nukem Forever demo came out after 14 years of waiting, I'm gonna make this a short and sweet Q&A format review.

Is it any good? Absotively YES! It's easily the near-equal of the first two films.

How are the new stars? Uniformly good from top to bottom with few exceptions. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender don't make us forget the stellar Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen as Professor X and Magneto, but they don't make us miss them either. By setting the story in 1962, the age differences are mooted.

Jennifer Lawrence is going to be a huge star off of this, setting her up for mega-stardom when The Hunger Games hits next spring. She's got a ripe, voluptuous face and figure which may not match vintage Scarlett Johansson for sheer vavoom, but the fact she doesn't seem up her own fine ass with smugness counts for a lot. With ScarJo banging Sean Penn now - all together now....ICK!!! - after dumping Green Lantern, she's about to be less the object of nerd desire than she was when cast as Black Widow in Iron Man 2.

Kevin Bacon is a pimp here and he makes playing "6 Degrees" a hella lot easier now that he's in the same movie as Ray Wise, Michael Ironside and James Remar. The other mutants on each side get short shrift on screen time, but they make it count. Ironically, January Jones as curvy Emma Frost seems the flattest. She doesn't wreck things, but could've been livelier.

They were still shooting this thing about four months ago. How badly rushed does it look? It doesn't. The special effects look slick; the score is dialed in; perhaps a few tweaks in editing may've made it even better, but it doesn't look or feel slapped together. If anything, the hectic pace and locked-in release date may've worked in its favor since Vaughn didn't have time to Kubrbick out and shoot a zillion takes of people opening doors.

I hear they've messed with the comic book timeline. They do to a degree, but oh well. The biggest change from previous films is the prologue of X3 where a walking Charles and Erik go to meet a young Jean Grey has been retconned out of existence as we see how Charles got put in the wheelchair here.

How's the Stan Lee cameo? There isn't one, much to the nerd rage consternation of my sidekick, McHatin. However, a very crowd pleasing (and not really unexpected) cameo does occur. (Hint: Snikt! Snikt!) UPDATE: Reading around the Intartoobz, there appears to be a 2nd cameo from a familiar face, though I totally missed it for they aren't as recognizable as you'd think.

You want to play Duke Nukem, so what's the bottom line? It's really, really good. If the were selling Blu-rays at the popcorn stand on my way out, I would've bought one. I hope they make more along this line with Vaughn helming. X-Men: First Class is a first-class movie indeed.

Score: 9/10. Pay full price if you're an X-Men fan; do a matinee if you're casual.

"Resident Evil: Afterlife" Blu-ray Review

2011-06-01T23:45:00.002-04:00

When it comes to dumb action movies, I'm pretty easy to please: I can cope with stupid as long as I'm not bored. But hack director Paul W.S. Anderson - not to be confused with self-absorbed twit Paul Thomas Anderson of Magnolia shame - manages to be both stupid, boring AND make his wife and baby mama Milla Jovovich come off as not-that-hot in Resident Evil: Afterlife.

The story, such as it is, opens with an army of Alice clones (revealed at the end of Resident Evil: Extinction) attacking the underground headquarters of the Umbrella Corporation in Tokyo. After much slo-mo gun and sword play with shockingly poor split-screen effects - the SFX quality is all over the map in this movie - the complex, along with most of Tokyo is destroyed and Alice has been rendered merely human after the bad guy, who acts like a smarmy Val Kilmer, injects her with something that shuts down her superpowers.

Six months later she's a plane to Alaska, seeking a supposed safe haven only to find an empty beach with Ali Larter from the last movie attacking her, under the control of a huge ruby-and-metal spider thing attached to her chest that gives her amnesia. Alice frees her and the fly to L.A., spotting survivors on the roof of a prison surrounded by zombies and then there's a ship and a big guy with an axe the size of a Buick station wagon and a final fight ripped off from The Matrix about a decade too late and then it's over with a cliffhanger and a supposed shocking ending scene in the credits that's spoiled by the cast credits ahead of it.*

It's a testament to his hackitude that Anderson makes wet and dirty Milla and Ali kicking ass both not hot and not entertaining. When the red shirt characters get bumped off, it's handled so offhandedly, we don't even miss them as if we even cared whether they survived. The pacing is leaden, the performances stiff - though Milla's quiet despair in her video diaries is good - and the action flat and lifeless for a movie that showed in 3D. It's just a snore and a waste of a good B-movie franchise. Stick with the first and third installments.

While the movie blows, the Blu-ray's transfer is crisp and clean thanks to the sharp digital photography from the Pace/Cameron Fusion system (though not in 3D here) that was invented for Avatar. The soundtrack is booming, too. Too bad the movie doesn't merit making it a show-off-home-theater disc. The 45 minutes of featurettes are mostly EPK fluff full of happy joy talk about how awesome everyone thinks everyone is and makes me wish I could see the movie they thought they were making.

Score: 2/10. Skip it.

* SPOILER ALERT! In the cast, they have Sienna Guillory listed as Jill Valentine, the game character she played in 2004's previously worst-in-series Resident Evil: Apocalypse. I was scratching my head (figuratively) wondering where she had been in the movie? Then they show the interior of the incoming attack choppers and she's got one of the spider devices on her and she's leading the assault. She looks totally different - before she had short, brown hair; now it's long and blonde - and if she hadn't been listed 20 seconds earlier, I wouldn't have gotten the gag.

May 2011 Review Roundup

2011-05-31T23:59:00.003-04:00

The pace slowed down this month, but not bad overall. Almost evenly split between home and theater.

May 7 - Thor (8/10)
May 10 - Catfish (8/10)
May 13 - Event Horizon (6/10)
May 16 - Fast Five (6/10)
May 18 - The Hangover (Unrated) (9/10)
May 19 - Urgh! A Music War (8/10)
May 24 - Pandorum (6/10)
May 25 - Attack the Block (7/10)
May 28 - The Roommate (3/10)

Month's Movies Watched: 9
Previously Unseen: 7
Theatrical: 4
Home: 5
=====
Year-To-Date: 51
YTD First-Timers: 41
YTD Theatrical: 13
YTD Home: 38

"The Roommate" Review

2011-05-28T23:55:00.003-04:00

When's the last time you saw Single White Female? You know the movie: Jennifer Jason Leigh is a mousy woman who moves in with Bridget Fonda and, being a psycho hose beast, takes over her life and identity. It came out in 1992 and I don't think I've seen it all the way through since then, but the basic themes have been absorbed by the general culture and due to Hollywood's need to recycle the familiar rather than try to come up with something new, it's been prettied-up and dumbed-down as The Roommate for kids who watch the CW Network. (Seriously. Three stars are from CW shows and a fourth is married to Jensen Ackles from Supernatural.)

Minka Kelly is a girl from Iowa going to college in LA. (That she's 30 in real life is fun trivia.) Her roommate is Gossip Girl's Leighton Meester - which prompted me to snark that this was called Single Waldorf Female - who as we know from seeing the trailer is crrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaazeeeeeeee! She's clinging and possessive and...oh, watch the trailer, almost the whole movie minus a subplot involving Billy Zane as a lecherous professor is in there.

The best thing in Single Waldor...er, The Roommate is Meester's psycho hose beast performance. Yeah, it's predictable and poorly motivated - she's off her meds and had some obsession with a girl in high school - but she has fun with it, while not overplaying too much, and I hardly thought of Blair while watching her. (Bestest moment is how she deals with the earrings Minka lends her.) The others are blah, but there's nothing for them to really do and the pacing makes it feel longer than the 90 minutes it runs.

To refresh my memory, I looked up Single White Female at Wikipedia and the number of plot points cribbed should entitle SWF's writers some credit or perhaps a check and no association with this roommate.

Score: 3/10. Watch Single White Female again for the first time.

"Attack The Block" Review

2011-05-25T19:00:00.003-04:00

Public Enemy said, "Don't believe the hype." Hype is a double-edge sword for while it can raise awareness and generate interest, it can also result in a big letdown when whatever was overpraised is given a lukewarm, "It was OK, but it wasn't all that." Shaun of the Dead, Little Miss Sunshine and even Fast Five could stood for a little less up-front praise. Now riding a heap of buzz from its Midnight screenings at SXSW comes the British inner city vs. outer space sci-fi/action/monster movie Attack the Block. It doesn't have a US release date yet - probably sometime this fall after an appearance at Comic-Con - but to capitalize on the SXSW bounce, screening were held tonight and once again, it was OK, but it wasn't all that.

I find it fascinating sometimes when pulling the trailers for these reviews to watch them to see how divorced from the movie they're advertising. Many times I've wished I could've seen the movie the trailer was selling because the actual film sucked. I've said that movie trailers are the highest form of false advertising, though I suppose political ads are worse. ("Call your Representative and ask them to stop drinking kitten blood while listening to Train.") To understand what most of the people lauding Attack the Block are conveniently leaving out, take a look at the trailer:

OK, it looks like sassy British kids with Jamaican-sounding patois (it's really, REALLY heavy in the movie, though not so bad as to need subtitles) fighting off monsters with pluck and fireworks. Did you notice the bit where the five mostly-minority kids are surrounding the white woman and robbing her at knifepoint, yanking her ring off her finger, etc.? No? Well, that's how the movie opens, by introducing the supposed heroes in a manner usually reserved for villains. While it sets the stage for the obvious redemption story arc, it's off-putting because we're not sure if we should be rooting for the thugs or the monsters trying to eat them.

When the mugging is interrupted by a meteor smashing into a nearby car, the woman flees and in the process of looting the wreckage, the leader Moses (no symbolism there), is clawed by something that scurries off into the night. The kids hunt it down and beat it to death and drag the carcass back to their council estate block. Later, more meteors land and legions of eyeless beasts that look and move like wolf-gorilla hybrids with rows of glowing neon teeth emerge, hunting the gang down. Hijinks ensue, though how eyeless monsters have interplanetary spaceships is never explained.

Once it gets past the misguided opening, Attack the Block is actually a respectable sci-fi/comedy/horror/action mashup with many good moments. The script is smart about setting up details that pay off later at crucial moments and the kids, once their crawl out of the sympathy sub-basement that writer-director Joe Cornish starts them in, are an appealing bunch. While the opening attack sets up the weird aspect of the gang and their victim crossing paths and changing their minds about each other - *SPOILER ALERT!* - they could've showed the hopeless dead-end lifestyles of the poor and unfortunate differently through some old-fashioned property violence and hooliganism, not tread into A Clockwork Orange territory.

As for the wild overpraise, if this movie was set in an American project block or ghetto, the same critics would be excoriating it as full of racist stereotypes, but because it's foreign, it's A-OK. (Look for 50 Cent to play Hi-Hatz and Allison Brie to play Sam in the inevitable remake with a bunch of Hispanic actors as the street thugs. Believe!)

Score: 7/10. Rent the DVD.

We were supposed to see The Hangover Pt. 2 two nights ago, but the screening was waaaaaay overbooked into a too small theater. This show was held at the Emagine Theater in Novi and I was decidedly unimpressed with the place. The Sony drones running the screening were only good for threatening the audience to not use their cell phones because when the movie started and was obviously out of focus - and I even called out, "How about focusing?" - nothing was fixed and the room full of sheeple sat and accepted the sub-standard presentation. Madness.

"Pandorum" Blu-ray Review

2011-05-24T23:45:00.002-04:00

I've had Pandorum kicking around on DVD since Inception was new in theaters cuz I bought it from a closing Hollywood Video store for a buck. I'd heard it was similar to Event Horizon, but that it wasn't that hot. Needing a 5th title to get the 5/$20 Blu-ray sale at Blockbuster, I bought it again. Since I just watched Event Horizon last week, I figured it would be time to catch up on Pandorum.

It starts off with an interestingly: A giant spaceship is traveling the cosmos when they receive a message from Earth that seems to imply that the planet was about to be destroyed and the people on this ship are the last of the human race. Ben Foster (last seen being creepy in The Mechanic) awakes from his hypersleep chamber in a dark cold room. He doesn't remember who he is or where he is, relying on clues from his uniform for his name. He spots Dennis Quaid asleep in his pod and thaws him out. He's a lieutenant and believes he's part of Foster's flight crew, judging from the tattoo on Foster's arm, and takes command.

They're locked in the room, though, so Foster climbs thru the vents, seeking a way to get Quaid out and find out what's going in. He rapidly discovers things have gone seriously wrong as the ship is dark, grimy, and lousy with bizarre vampire mutant monsters, booby-trapped crewmen, a kick-ass chick (German actress Antje Traue*) with a great rack who doesn't want to play the Basil Exposition role, and other weirdos. What happened to the ship, the Elysium, which they eventually remember was being sent on a 123-year voyage to colonize an Earthlike Eden called Tanis?

Pandorum starts out well with a lot of building tension for the first half-hour. However, as the monsters appear along with survivors who either don't speak English or aren't interested in answering the simple question, "WHAT THE UNHOLY HECK IS GOING ON HERE?!?!?", it starts to get annoying and when it's over and you start to ponder the gaping logic holes of the movie, it really starts to deflate. The explanation for the monsters doesn't make sense, especially when the length of time that's supposed to have transpired; they should've starved.

I wasn't aware before watching, but it was produced by Paul W.S. Anderson and Jeremy Bolt who did...wait for it...Event Horizon. The attention to mood and production design clearly is evident, but they also brought the attitude that slick visuals will paper over the plot holes. Why go through all the trouble of creating a world and not telling a cohesive story in it?

While it ends up a mess, the performances are good - Quaid is turning into Harrison Ford a little - it has style and, for a while, some good tension.

Score: 6/10. Rent it.

* Hello there!

"Urgh! A Music War" Review

2011-05-19T21:00:00.001-04:00

The seminal punk/New Wave concert film Urgh! A Music War has attained near mythic status because for decades, it's been almost totally unavailable for viewing and was never officially released on video. Bootlegs cobbled together from various tapes of the various versions can be had, but until recently, when a nearly-complete DVD was issued by Warner Bros. Warner Archives imprint, it was more the stuff of legend.

Collecting three dozen raw live performances filmed in 1980 in New York, LA, London and France, the line-up of Urgh! and be broken down into acts everyone knows (e.g. The Go-Go's, The Police, Devo, Oingo Boingo, Joan Jett); acts most people have at least heard of, if not actually heard (e.g. XTC, The Cramps, Dead Kennedys, Pere Ubu, Gang of Four); and then the acts that 99.44% of the general public have never even heard of like Athletico Spizz 80, John Otway, and Invisible Sex, whose only performance ever (if Wikipedia can be believed) is captured in the film. One after another they come in a tidal wave of music.

I think Urgh! will probably be most interesting to aging Gen Xers looking to reconnect with their high school years when bell-bottomed classic rock was supplanted by spikier hair and music to match. The sheer number and variety of performances starts to work against it after a while. Standout bits like Devo's surprisingly raucous "Uncontrollable Urge" (see below) or the pre-Kathy Valentine Go-Go's (with a really tubby Belinda Carlisle) "We Got The Beat" are shoulder to shoulder with weird artsy crap like Pere Ubu, but like Michigan weather, if you don't like something, give it a few minutes and it'll change.

The screening I saw had something weird going on with the sound leaving half the acts with buried vocals. I can't believe it was mixed improperly, so it's probably a safe bet to pick it up. While there are rumors of even more material in the vaults, the same music licensing and rights issues that have kept it off the market all this time will likely preclude anything better.

Score: 8/10. Buy it.

"The Hangover (Unrated)" Blu-ray Review

2011-05-18T23:45:00.001-04:00

I scored preview tickets to a screening of The Hangover Part 2 next Monday, so I decided to refresh my memory of the first film by watching the original. I haven't seen it since it was in theaters.

Is it still funny the second time around? Yes, but the neat mystery structure in which we share in the Wolf Pack's discovery of their bender's path is lost because we know what the mattress on the stahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giftue means and that a naked guy is in the trunk. *SPOILER ALERT!*

What's different in the Unrated version? I'm not sure. There's a web site with a list of differences, but despite the 8-minute longer run time, I didn't notice anything that stood out as new until looking at the linked site. Most of the changes are extended scenes. They didn't hurt the pacing, but were mostly extraneous. (The theatrical cut is also included.) The last of the camera photos - the ones in the elevator with Zach Galifinakakakakakakis (sp?)- are uncensored (i.e. not pixelated like the DVD was), but they were clear in the theater as well.

The Blu-ray's image quality is super sharp and clear. Audio isn't too impressive, but that's by design. I haven't watched the extras yet other than the start of the reel of Ken Jeong improvising like a maniac on his scenes. (Fun Fact: This guy was a doctor before Judd Apatow made him a comic star.) I'll update this section if/when I do.

Score: 9/10. Buy it.

"Fast Five" Review

2011-05-16T21:00:00.002-04:00

The buzz going into Fast Five was that the series had reinvented itself as a heist caper flick, moving away from its "ricer porn" street/drift racing roots. Many reviews lauded this change, calling it the best of the series.

It isn't.

To be brief, it's too long with too much talky-talk and not enough zoomy-zoom. Paul Walker still can't act (was Running Scared a fluke?); all the lousy characters from 2 Fast, 2 Furious (the worst of the bunch) are included; and the presence of the Japanese dude who died in Tokyo Drift (but was in Fast & Furious; the 4th movie) means that this movie is set in between #4 and #3. Huh? (i.e. The chronological order of films is 1-2-4-5-3; the world ends with Tokyo.) M.Rod, who was foolishly killed of as an inciting incident is still gone. Or is she? (Tune in below.)

There are some crazy action sequences that defy fundamental physics and reality - that chase with the bank vault being dragged as wrecking ball through the streets of Rio goes on forever - but the biggest, baddest special effect is Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as the FBI specialist sent to catch Vin Diesel and his merry men. He is JACKED and when he and Vin throw down, it's like watching two slabs of beef brawl.

When it's not trying to be deep and just making a mess, Fast Five is decent popcorn fluff. However, if they plan on continuing in this vein, they'd better get over listening to the sound of their voices.

Score: 6/10. Catch it at a dollar show.

OK, slight spoiler/teaser time: In a mid-credits coda, Eva Mendes (who was in 2F2F) is shown bringing a dossier into The Rock's office. Inside are photos of someone who robbed a armored car in Germany. Who is it? M.Rod! They're going to bring her back from the presumed dead?! WTF? OK, I'm down. I missed her. Bring it!

"Event Horizon" Blu-ray Review

2011-05-13T23:55:00.004-04:00

Since seeing it when it came out in 1997, but not since, I've remembered Event Horizon as a cheesy sci-fi horror flick with really excellent production design. Watching it again, not much has changed, though it did make me wonder why a giant spaceship in 2040 looks like a steampunk bondage dungeon with most of the technological workings being made of iron.

The titular ship disappeared without a trace and was the largest disaster in spacefaring history. Seven years later, in 2047, it has reappeared in low orbit over Neptune and a ship under the command of Laurence Fishburne has been dispatched to investigate, bringing along Sam Neill, the inventor of the gravity drive that powered the Event Horizon. When they arrive, spooky things start to happen. Hijinks ensue.

The production design still looks terrific with the use of elaborate practical sets. It has the gritty tactile appearance that made the Nostromo in Alien convincing, though there are more sharp edges than you'd think a safety-first spaceship should have. The smokey cinematography by the late Adrian Biddle (whose first film was Aliens) almost makes hack director (and Milla Jovovich's baby daddy) Paul W.S. Anderson's film into a film of minor significance, but the thin script - is the ship itself evil or just converting the crew's inner demons into physical reality, a la the planet in Solaris - and reliance on BOOM! loud noises to provide the shocks holds it back. While the sets and models look great, the primitive CGI effects really stand out now in their shiny plasticness.

As a haunted house in space flick - right down to lighting and thunder(!) in the exterior shots - Event Horizon could've been an effective psycho-thriller if only the script and direction were more competent. Why did Neill's wife kill herself? Did he cut corners in the design of the gravity drive? Why are some crew member's guilt manifesting as apparitions while others seem to be driven made or totally unaffected? We don't know.

After a scary few moments of the extremely grainy Paramount logo, the Blu-ray transfer is really great to look at with a clean image with lots of depth and detail, all the better to reveal how poor the CGI is. Grain isn't an issue, but they haven't scrubbed it with DNR to leave waxy skin textures. The surround audio isn't as impressive, but that's more by the audio design than technical problems.

On the extras front, I haven't listened to the commentary, but there's an making-of documentary that manages to stuff perhaps 40 minutes of information in a 1:45 package so slow and droning that I watched it over three or four nights, dozing off each time. The biggest takeaway is that the film was probably crippled by a ridiculously shortened post schedule.

Directors are contractually allowed 10 weeks to make their first cut, but Anderson waived it to six weeks and then lost two of those while shooting 2nd unit material. With only four weeks to slam together an FX-laden film and crippled by a poor mix, the first test screening was a disaster. Slashing out hunks of the film, the 2nd screening went better, but they ran out of time, so what we have now is pretty much the 2nd or 3rd cut. Because this slightly pre-dated DVD, apparently no one thought to keep the extra footage, so there are few deleted scenes on the disc and no hope for a proper director's cut. The first Star Trek picture suffered the same short-post/botched mix situation and when it was released on DVD, the fixed that up somewhat.

Score: 6/10. It's cheap enough to buy if you think you'll watch it twice, otherwise Netflix it.

"Catfish" Review

2011-05-10T23:55:00.003-04:00

There has been a glut of fake "documentaries" lately. I don't mean liberal propaganda pieces that dishonest folks - excuse me, fat lying bastards - like Michael Moore or Al Gore make and win Oscars for, permanently damaging the genre for REAL documentary makers in the process. I'm referring to movies like the Paranormal Activity series or the upcoming (and reportedly awful) Apollo 18 which comprise the "found footage" genre in which the audience is supposed to accept that what they're seeing really happened. (Or at least go along with the setup because, as Johnny Carson noted, "You buy the premise, you buy the bit.")

I've been avoiding watching Catfish because I haven't been in the mood for a fake shock doc which is sort of implied by the trailer and was leery of the "real Facebook movie" hype it has around it, playing off The Social Network. I may've totally given it the miss if my girlfriend hadn't watched it, told me it was good, and then started nagging me to watch it so we could discuss it. Persistently nagged, as in when we spoke on the phone earlier tonight and I was mulling my entertainment options, she said, "Why don't you watch Catfish? It's only 86 minutes long. I instead played a videogame until I realized I was sucking at it and gave into the movie.

It's impossible to discuss the events of the movie without spoiling the surprises, so all I will say is that you're not going to totally guess where it's going and that no one gets their heart ripped out. Literally. Figuratively, though...

Catfish follows co-director Ariel Schulman's brother Nev as he strikes up a relationship with a young girl, Abby, from Ishpeming, MI (pop. ~6700). An artistic prodigy, she paints renditions of his photographs and sends them to him in New York City. Nev speaks on the phone with her mother, Angela, and gets into a Facebook romance with Abby's sister Megan, a hottie with really good photos on her profile page. They talk on the phone, send hundreds of sexy texts messages and really seem to be falling for each other. Then Nev starts discovering that big chunks of Megan's story aren't passing the smell test, confusing him. Something is clearly screwy and looking to get to the bottom of the story, Nev decides to pay the family a visit in their remote Upper Peninsula town with the cameras in tow. What he finds is fascinating even though it's expected; he just didn't know how far down the rabbit hole went.

What makes Catfish odd is that it's like the Oscar-nominated fake documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop - I'm in the camp that believes the whole thing, including Mr. Brainwash, is an elaborate long con by real artists Banksy and Shepard Fairey - in that there's enough tugging around the edges to make it seem fake, but by the end it seems really hard for it to be anything but real, because if it turns out to be even a semi-hoax, there are some other issues with what's shown that should be addressed.

The opaque title is explained (somewhat) at the end, but what sticks is what the film says about relationships, connections with people who are supposedly our "friends," and the lengths some people will go to make these connections. I haven't read around yet to see what's supposed to be true or false about the movie, but I did see an IMDB thread that goes into heavy psychological analysis of the architect of this all and I think they're over-thinking it. (Write me after you see it and I'll tell you what I'm talking about.)

Sorry if this review leaves some basic elements out, but like EARLY M. Night Shyamalan movies, the less you know going in the more effective it will be. Suffice to say that this Catfish is worth catching (ouch!) and that if you mull over what it subtly implies, you'll probably want to stay in "meatspace" for companionship.

Score: 8/10. Rent the DVD.

"Thor" Review

2011-05-07T16:45:00.003-04:00

The journey down the path to Marvel's The Avengers movie next year takes another step with the arrival of Thor, director Kenneth Brannagh's - yes, the Shakespeare movie guy - big operatic take on the Norse God of Thunder. While generally epic in scale, it's held back by some thin writing on the Earthly side of the ledger.

Chris Hemsworth - best known until now as Kirk's ill-fated father in the prologue of J.J. Abrams' 2009 Star Trek reboot - is Thor. A brash, arrogant young god, he angers his father, Odin (Anthony Hopkins rocking Christopher Plummer's metal eye patch from Star Trek VI), after he leads an attack on the Frost Giants world after a sneak attack on the day he was to be made King of Asgard. Stripped of his powers and hammer, he's cast down to New Mexico until he learns some humility and become worthy of the power of Thor.

I don't know why the trailers downplay the Asgard side of things because those are the best parts. Brannagh manages to take material that could go waaaaaaaay over the top and keep it appropriately over the top with more bacon than ham in the performances. Hemsworth is really good, playing the fish out of water/humbled god arc well, and Tom Hiddleston is interesting as half-brother (and full villain) Loki. Some reviews have claimed he almost seems sympathetic, but I don't see him that way. Yeah, he's got daddy issues and a case of ingratitude, but how hard has his life really been? Twit. And as the traditional post-credits scene indicates, he'll be back as the Avengers villain.

Where the film runs flatter is the Earthly portions with the wasted Natalie Portman as Jane Foster, upgraded from a nurse in the comics to an astrophysicist of some sort. (The way they dispose of the Dr. Don Blake facet of the original comics is a neat touch.) Her research isn't given any greater significance and while she's more plausible as a scientist than Liv Tyler was in The Incredible Hulk, it's a nothingburger of a part. Kat Dennings as her tart, slacker assistant is cute (though why cover up that body?) and delivers much of the comic relief. While on the subject of women, look for Jaimie Alexander, who is Sif, Thor's kickass warrior chick pal, to become a major nerd icon as she looks like a cross between Missi Pyle (Galaxy Quest) and Lucy Lawless, which leads to the largest LOL in the whole movie.

Overall, Thor, is entertaining and slick to look at with above-average performances. It's just that it feels like it could've been longer and punchier with more for Portman to do.

Score: 8/10. See on the big screen at a matinee. Don't bother with 3D; it's dark and fast-moving.

This trailer is rather mediocre in selling the spectacle.

"Scream 4" Review

2011-04-30T22:10:00.002-04:00

The biggest point of interest for me about Scream 4 (or Scre4m in l337 m0v13 sp33k) was that it was shot in the Detroit area. It wasn't even a movie I was planning on seeing theatrically but got stuck paying full price for when the showing of Fast Five we'd planned on catching with a free ticket was sold out. Drat. While it's not worth full price, it's not bad so I didn't feel too chapped.

Pretty much the whole gang that wasn't killed in previous chapters is here as Neve Campbell's Sydney is coming home to promote her book about surviving the other three movies. Courtney Cox and David Arquette are married (fun fact: their marriage was falling apart during the shoot) and he's the Sheriff of Whereverville these movies happen in. Of course, people start dying and the question is who is wearing the Ghostface mask this time.

The thing about the Scream series from the very beginning was that it was tweaking the conventions of the genre. It's hard to remember what a shock it was for Drew Barrymore's character to get whacked in the opening scene when she was prominently featured on the poster. As a decade has passed, the requirement for how Scream changed the format to be addressed is cleverly handled by series creator Kevin Williamson very meta script. From the very beginning Scre4m knows what it is and makes a running commentary about what it's doing and why. (Check out the trailer for a taste.)

You'll probably figure out the final twists since we're all so cynical and on guard for them in the first place, but director Wes Craven runs things fast enough that we don't have enough time to ponder what's coming. While not even evolutionary, Scream 4 manages to not be a Ghostface-come-lately cash-in. We didn't need this movie; but it's not something that should be killed and buried behind the garage. It's worth a rental, just as I'd planned all along.

Score: 7/10. Rent the DVD.

Weird detail: Marley Shelton, who plays a deputy and was the woman who Josh Hartnett killed in the beginning of Sin City, looks a LOT like Heather Graham; so much so that when a clip of Stab, the movie within the movie in Scream 2 (IIRC), is shown with Heather, we thought it was Marley again.

"Middle Men" Review

2011-04-17T23:20:00.003-04:00

The origins of the online porn industry are flashily portrayed in Middle Men, a brisk and frequently amusing flick that bogs down somewhat in the middle before ultimately telling the viewer at the end that they've been wasting their time if they've been thinking they were learning something.

After a pair of drugged-out morons in L.A. develop a method to collect credit card payments for porn, they rapidly start rolling in dough (and drugs) and their lack of business acumen causes the business and their lives to be in danger. In steps clean-cut nice guy fixer Luke Wilson, a Houston family man who is so straight he wears a suit and tie almost all the time. He straightens up the business and comes up with a means to hide the nature of the charges on credit card statements so that wives don't know what smut their hubbies are blowing the grocery money on.

Of course, the good times can last forever, especially when you're dealing with a pair of idiots, a crooked lawyer, and Russian mobsters and the stakes rapidly rise to life-threatening levels. Also, his Luke's Boy Scout nature is tempted by an affair with the only porn star who doesn't do nudity - come on, Hollywood, it's like the starlets who don't take off their bra while having sex; cast actresses who are willing to give up the goods! - and when the Idiot Twins start their own side bunch of sites, the Feds close in.

While Middle Men starts off with a lot of energy it sags in the middle before pulling it together in the end. The performances are good and it's pretty entertaining except none of it is real. While it's advertised as "inspired by true events" a card in the end credits reveals that while it's kinda sorta based on real events, all the characters, names, places and events have been fictionalized or composited from different people; in other words, it's a total work of fiction based on real events, like Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor. Way to waste the viewer's time, folks.

Entertaining, but not enlightening, Middle Men is an also-ran for anyone who was genuinely curious as to how the modern Internet was won.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.

"Hanna" Review

2011-04-17T16:10:00.003-04:00

Rather than waste time recapping the plot of Hanna, watch the trailer for me, please:

If it looks like an artsy take on the Hit Girl character from last year's Kick-Ass, you'd be wrong for the most part because Saoirse Ronan's (The Lovely Bones, Atonement) Hanna is a polite girl whose father, Eric Bana, has raised in total isolation in the Arctic Circle with a single purpose: to kill Cate Blanchett, the CIA spook who killed her mother. I don't think she swears once.

When she sets off on her mission and escape, Hanna finds herself in a world she's only read about. She can speak fluent Arabic, but has never seen a TV. When she hooks up with a Australian family of pseudo-Bohos, her inexperience with basic social situations leads to some hilarious awkward moments. ("As opposed to what?!?" is the funniest line of the movie.)

With a taut score by the Chemical Brothers (who beat down the overrated Daft Punk and their TRON Legacy bloops and beeps), good performances all around including the poorly-dressed, creepy German bar owner/assassin Blanchett sets after Hanna, and a very European vibe and look that avoids the usual locations for spy movies, Hanna is a more cerebral take on the adolescent murder girl genre. Yeah, you'll be able to predict the last line of dialogue, but it's OK.

Score: 8/10. Catch a matinee.

"Death Race 2" Review

2011-04-16T23:30:00.003-04:00

OK, this movie sucked, so let's make quick work of it. Here's the trailer for this direct-to-video steamer:

Did you see the part about how the first half of the movie is spent with gladiator battles? How about how the charisma-free leading man who the producers thought would be an acceptable substitute for Jason Statham? Is it clear that it's a prequel even though the higher number would indicate sequel? OK, that it does, but who cares?

Low-rent and unnecessary - and not even willing to have decent gratuitous nudity to go with all the CGI bloodshed - and not much fun, Death Race 2 is one death race too many.

Score: 2/10. Skip it.

"The Next Three Days" Review

2011-04-11T22:30:00.003-04:00

The trailer tells the tale:

All that's missing is the details as to how Russell Crowe breaks Elizabeth Banks out of prison. Wrongly convicted - or was she? - of murdering her boss, Crowe reaches out to Liam Neeson (who escaped many prisons and wrote a book and is in exactly one scene) for advice and then plans how to get her out when her final appeal fails. When she is suddenly slated to be moved to another prison, he has only three days to execute his plan.

Written and directed by the most dishonest screenwriter in Hollyweird, Paul "Crash, In the Valley of Elah, Million Dollar Baby" Haggis (which is a gross Scottish dish), it manages to not be as revolting as those stories, but at the cost of being dull and ultimately forgettable. (I'm writing this review on June 24th and can barely remember what it was like.) Crowe is miscast as a desperate husband while Banks is good in a thinly written role. A hot single mom (Olivia Wilde) Crowe meets on his son's playground doesn't even act as a temptation, so why is she here at all? Seriously. I get being all loyal to your wife and baby mama, but she's going away for 20 years or more and OLIVIA WILDE IS RIGHT THERE AND AVAILABLE!! Dude!!!

Finally, without spoiling whether he breaks her out successfully - oh, come on; what do you think happens? - I have to say that getting into Canuckia is a hella lot harder than they show it here. Bah.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.

"Takers" Review

2011-04-10T22:45:00.002-04:00

Familiarity makes Takers an exercise in mehness. A slick gang of bank robbers gets a tip on a Big Score from a former crew member who got caught on a job and served five years in prison and is back out. Based on the armored truck robbery scheme from The Italian Job, they put together an audacious plan which works after a fashion until the inevitable double-crosses and bad breaks start to cause serious problems and blood loss.

The action scenes are OK and the story structure is a little different - the big heist is in the middle of the movie, hinting that there's more easy-to-guess plot to come - but it tries a little too hard to be stylish with dramatic lighting and color timing. Co-produced by co-star Tip "T.I." Harris, it's an old heist movie story dressed up in slick threads and a mostly minority cast - Matt Dillon, Paul Walker and Hayden Christensen are the only gringos in the top-billed stars - but all the polish can't make it shine.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

"Ghost in the Shell 2.0" Blu-ray Review

2011-04-08T23:30:00.003-04:00

There are certain anime movies and shows that every self-respecting beginning otaku (Japanese term used to refer to people with obsessive interests, particularly anime, manga, or video games) is expected to have seen: Akira, Cowboy Bebop, and 1995's Ghost in the Shell which was updated in 2008 by director Mamoru Oshii to Ghost in the Shell 2.0 - not to be confused with his 2004 sequel Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Confused? Let me explain.

Oshii has gone back an redone several sequences with CGI animation meaning shots of helicopters and the city and computer screens and the Major's iconic strip-naked-turn-invisible-jump-off-building-kill-people scene are buffed in in 21st Century drag. The problem is that when we revert to the 1995 hand-drawn animation, it's jarring. Purists may hate it, but I liked it.

It's been ages since I've seen GitS and it was probably on VHS so I thought this new Blu-ray looked and sounded terrific. However, in looking up some info on it, I discovered there is some controversy involving the new footage, the color timing changes to make it look like the sequel (this I tend to agree with now that I've seen the comparison), and the voice cast. This guy's video review goes into quite a lot of depth with his criticism (do yourself a favor and skip to the 4:00 mark to get to the pertinent info; the intro is simply stupid and screams, "I'm a nerdgin!") and illustrates his beefs with the update.

It should be noted that the original cut is included on this disc, though it's apparently an uprezzed version of the DVD master and opinions are generally negative toward it. The above-linked video talks about how a proper BD of original version is available via import, but a glance at Amazon's Japan site shows it's about $125 for the three disc set! Pass!!

At the core of Ghost in the Shell is a story about the tenuous grip on humanity a person who is basically a cybernetic vessel encasing her spirit (or "ghost" as they call it) may have and how other A.I. constructs may feel about their existence. It frequently gets dully philosophical, but it's not as talky as the sequel was. For all of Innocence's striking beauty, it was mostly characters quoting philosophers at each other like college students one-upping each other.

Ghost in the Shell was never a flawless movie - though unlike Akira, it doesn't utterly fall apart in the end - and the updated visual bits don't change the ultimate story, but it should be seen by all seeking to have a well-rounded appreciation for disparate forms of entertainment. If you've never seen (or don't remember) GitS, then this 2.0 version is fine if you can rent it or get on sale someplace for $10 or less.

Score: 7/10. Buy it if you're a fan and can get it cheap.

"Arthur (2011)" Review

2011-04-04T19:30:00.003-04:00

When they announced the totally unnecessary remake of the classic 1981 comedy Arthur with Russell Brand taking over Dudley Moore's role, Helen Mirren as a gender-swapped Hobson (that won Sir John Gielgud an Oscar), and Greta Gerwig (me neither) blonding up the Liza Minnelli role, I had the same question as everyone else which is the same question that is asked when a beloved family member dies, a natural disaster occurs, or Michael Anthony is booted for Eddie's kid Wolfgang: WHY, GOD? WHY?!?

The need to remake everything regardless of whether it's needed re-doing or not has been a close second to sequels as a sign of Hollywood's fearful timidness and general disinterest in originality. You can imagine the pitch meeting for this thing: "Hey, let's remake Arthur with that annoying skinny English twit from Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him To The Greek. We'll get that GILF Helen Mirren to be the butler and it will be automatic win and profit! If only it were so simple.

If you've seen the original, you've pretty much seen this one. Arthur's a drunk man-child whose mother orders him to marry the daughter (Jennifer Garner) of a rough and tough, but very wealthy, contractor (Nick Nolte speaking in a worse voice than Batman) in order to provide stability and trust in the family business. He's dated her before, but dumped her because he didn't fancy her, something no other man had done to her before. When he tells Mother that he's not going to do it, she tells him he'll be cut off from his billion dollar trust fund if he doesn't close the deal. He meets a kooky, free-spirited, self-appointed tour guide (Gerwig) at Grand Central Station and is smitten by her. Will true love will out over money or will a tragic murder-suicide cap off this flick?

I'm not much of a fan of Brand's and it has nothing to do with his exclusive access to Katy Perry's glorious joy globes. He's struck me as an annoying one-trick pony and he doesn't disabuse me of that idea still, but he's not as terrible as I'd feared. As Arthur makes his inevitable arc into semi-maturity, Brand does OK. Mirren is as tart as could've been expected, but woefully underused. It feels as if they cast her and figured their work was done and didn't bother to write much for her. What a wasted opportunity.

This Gerwig person is one of those critic's darling babes that all the critics fawn over because she was in a movie you've probably never heard (think: Greta Scacchi), in this case Greenberg, the Ben Stiller blockbuster that grossed $4,234,170 domestically. She's sorta cute in an indie movie way, but feels underwritten. The weird standout is Garner who plays Susan, the arranged bride, as a craven shark with barely any veneer of romance; it's all about Arthur's Benjamins, baybee!

Are there laughs? Sure, but not as many as there should've been and in a far lower ratio than a typical well-done sitcom. (Really, why is it that TV shows can deliver more laughs in an average 22-minute episode for free than a 100-minute charges $10 for?) My girlfriend likes Brand (figures) and found the line he delivers during an AA meeting to be the funniest thing she's heard all year. There are some moments of sweet whimsy, like their first date. However, for most of the time during Arthur 2011: The Unnecessary Remake, I was wondering when a proper DVD release of the original would happen - it's never been released in widescreen format. This movie isn't evil, just irrelevant.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

"Country Strong" Review

2011-04-03T22:15:00.004-04:00

It's easy to make fun of the title of Country Strong - which itself sounds like the Hulk titled it - with things like Country Wrong or Country Weak or Country Cheese and the idea of Hollywood blue blood and English resident (married to the singer of Radiohead Lite) Gwyneth Paltrow launching a side career as a country singer has gathered hoots, but the main problem the movie has is a scattered, trope-laden script that stumbles along aimlessly before doing something at the end which turned a mediocre movie into something epically terrible.

Since I'm going to have to spoil the living daylights about the plot, for those unwilling to heed my good advice and skip this movie, this is the end of the road for you. Gwynnie can sing; Garrett Hedlund is actually quite good acting and singing, a shock considering he was last seen utterly stinking up the Grid in TRON Legacy; Leighton Meester almost shakes her Gossip Girl image, but is much better singing; but, overall the movie is a mess before it veers into disaster.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

OK, here's where the SPOILERS begin, so you've been warned. To understand what's wrong with Country Strong, you have to look at the trailer to see how it was sold:

OK, got that? It looks like a redemption story with All About Eve elements. Gwyneth overcomes scheming rookie Blair with the help of young country hunk Beau. Did you catch the part where Beau is the actual protagonist and Gwyneth KILLS HERSELF about a minute after telling Blair, "That's how it's done."? They show someone slumping to the floor - that would be Tim McGraw, real-life country star who isn't a musician here and is married in real life to Faith Hill whom Gwyneth is clearly patterned after - at the news of her death, but it comes from nowhere in the movie. Movies don't need to have happy endings, but this is so cheap and meaningless it just shows how slipshod the storytelling is.

Let's start from the beginning: It opens with Beau and his band playing for a smattering of oldsters at a honky tonk. He then goes to work and his clothes indicate he's some sort of orderly. He's told to stay away from Gwyneth, so of course we cut directly to him and her collaborating on a song, passing an acoustic back and forth during an obvious roll in the sack. What's their relationship? We don't know. Tim comes in and asks what's going on and announces that she's checking out. Beau protests that it's a month too early and he's her sponsor. OK, she's in rehab and he's her sponsor and apparently f*ck buddy. Moving on...

While Tim and Faith (heh) are driving out, we hear on the radio a news report that she was coming out of rehab after an incident in Dallas several months before in which she was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct while 5-1/2 months pregnant during a show. Hmmm, sounds bad. What happened to the baby? Tim addresses the media that she's ready to get back on the road. So he's her manager? OK.

Next thing, they're in bed together, but it's obviously chilly between them. Oh, he's her husband and manager. Happens all the time. She wants to talk about Dallas but he doesn't. I'm guessing she lost the baby - when someone gives her a "gift" of a box with a bloody doll inside with a note reading "BABY KILLER!" that seals it - but Tim says something about "putting him down" like they have a kid. What the heck is going on here?

We then see Tim checking out potential opener Beau and Blair at some Nashville bar. Blair is a former beauty queen prone to stage fright and she freezes until Beau bails her out. Tim offers them the opening slots on Faith's comeback tour. Huh? Some guy who appears to be banging your wife and a scared girl are the best you can get? After the doll incident, Faith freaks out on stage and starts crying, ending the show and she disappears on a second gig leaving the giant arena gig in Dallas on the line. Fortunately, Faith makes out with the promoter of the gig and it's back on? WTFF?!?

All along, there seem to be TWO triangles going on: Tim-Faith-Beau and Faith-Beau-Blair. There's an attraction between the kids and after a night of drinking - wait, wasn't he Faith's rehab sponsor?!? - they almost seal the deal, but Faith is floating around the perimeter and I found myself shopping for video games online during this long stretch of nothing.

Blah-blah-woof-woof and the Big Show goes down. Beau rocks the house, Blair doesn't freeze up in a packed arena only a few gigs after tanking at the honky tonk, Faith comes out and puts on a triumphant performance, and after the show, she goes to her dressing room and locks the door. Beau notices she's not at the party and goes to her isolated dressing room, kicks in the door and finds her unconscious from an overdose of pills. Wait, WHAT?!?!??!

At this moment Country Strong jumps the shark, nukes the fridge, and makes me wonder what the whole movie was about and how everyone involved in the movie thought this was a good idea? Why did we spend two hours watching this woman try to redeem her life only to take it? A: Because she's not the main character, Beau is. It's not about Faith getting her life together, but Beau getting his career in gear, just like the trailer DIDN'T show. The whole marketing campaign is a bait and switch.

Now it may not have mattered if the movie managed to coherently tell its story, but it doesn't. We don't learn that Faith fell 10 feet off the stage in Dallas causing her to lose the baby until 80 minutes into the film. Why not mention that up front? How hard would it have been to have the radio report wrap all those details up in two sentences? "Not Faith Hill was released from rehab today, only months after an incident in Dallas in which an intoxicated, 5-1/2 month pregnant Not Faith Hill fell from the stage, causing a miscarriage." There, we're all up to speed and not scratching our heads.

There is also a subplot about an orphaned quail she finds on the facility's grounds that she's trying got nurture. Get it? The bird is her lost baby and need to be a mother. Except she takes the box it's in to the bar, gets drunk, and forgets it; something that we never see, is covered in dialogue and never factors into the story again. Again, huh? Did anyone look at a cut of the film before it was duped and sent to theaters? I'll bet I could recut the movie without any of that and it wouldn't be missed.

Because we are never clear about who is doing what and why, nothing ever gels. Hedlund is quite believable as Beau, with a strong baritone voice and charismatic manner and Gwyneth does what she can with the script and sings well, but it doesn't matter and the way she checks out is stupid. She could've slapped down Blair while walking offstage, gone to her dressing room, and had Tim come in to cheer her and say she's back and have her say, "No. I'm done. I'm retired and running off with Beau," or something to get her back in control of her life. Why suicide? Because it would've gotten Paltrow an Oscar nomination? That worked. Not.

Writer-director Shana Feste has no sense of how musicians actually think and act - lots of singing doesn't make it a musical - and the general confusion of the plot started at the script stage and didn't get better. As I detailed up top, we are thrown into a confusing set of relationships and have to unravel the facts as best we can. (This isn't Memento, dammit!)

Only waste your time on Country Strong if you want to see how NOT to tell a story.

March 2011 Review Roundup

2011-03-31T23:59:00.011-04:00

After stumbling in February, we picked up the pace substantially, doubling the year's total in a month and hitting the theater four times.

3/2 - True Grit (7/10)
3/6 - The Adjustment Bureau (9/10)
3/7 - The Mechanic (4/10)
3/9 - Memento Blu-ray (9/10)
3/11 - Lemmy (5/10)
3/12 - Vanishing On 7th Street (3/10)
3/13 - Battle: Los Angeles (8/10); Morning Glory (4/10)
3/14 - Paranormal Activity 2 (4/10)
3/24 - Sucker Punch (7.5/10)
3/27 - Limitless (9/10); Due Date (6/10)
3/28 - Love and Other Drugs (2/10)
3/31 - Run Lola Run (7/10)

Month's Movies Watched: 14
Previously Unseen: 13
Theatrical: 4
Home: 10
=====
Year-To-Date: 28
YTD First-Timers: 23
YTD Theatrical: 5
YTD Home: 23

Cyberspace Open 2011 Scores and Feedback

2011-03-30T01:29:00.003-04:00

I learned last Friday that my entry into this year's Cyberspace Open screenwriting contest hadn't made the cut for the final round and that was OK; you can't win 'em all.

Unfortunately, once again I managed to snag a reader who didn't know how to read, resulting in hair-tearing feedback as they were so busy missing the point that they probably forgot to DVR the Two and a Half Men marathon that was on. Let's check this twaddle out:

Structure: 24
Dialog: 22
Style: 21
Originality: 22
Total: 89

"There is some interesting use of subtext, and this is a great subject for these types of characters to address. However, this is more of a one-sided conversation that might work better with a less ambiguous conclusion and more obvious conflict. It all comes off very causal, and there is nothing at stake so the conflict is minimal."

I defy anyone with a working knowledge of the English language to read my scene and tell me that it was ambiguous or needed more obvious conflict!

My greatest fear was that unless I hammered all the subtext with underline and italics and a Post-It note explaining everything, it'd get missed by the sub-literate wannabes making a few bucks reading these. My greatest mistake was assuming qualified people would judge this charade. My bad. Dumb me.

The next round is this weekend and I'm going to look at the scene prompt and think about doing what I did last year. Heh.

"Love and Other Drugs" Review

2011-03-28T22:15:00.003-04:00

There were only two reasons why I had the slightest interest in the alleged romantic-comedy-drama Love and Other Drugs: Anne Hathaway. I call her Yummy Girl and find her just delish and when it was heavily hyped that she was naked (i.e. nekkid, nude, showing the goodies) for 40% of the movie, I was willing to overlook my natural aversion to rom-coms to see it. Yes, I'm a pig who will sell out for a look at teh bewbz. Yummy Yummy Girl boobs.

Big. Mistake.

To properly tear this thing a new one, we need to look at how it was sold:

OK, it looks like a rom-com about a playboy (Jake "Peter Sarsgaard's brother-in-law" Gyllenhaal) sales rep for Viagra who meets a cute babe and falls in love with her, but - oh noes! - she gets sick and he must love her even more even though she runs away but they'll probably live happily ever after since these sort of movies rarely end up in a murder-suicide. Right?

Here's the way it really goes: Jake's a charmer selling boom boxes and big HDTVs in the mid-Nineties. If you're already thinking that one of those things was big in the Eighties and the other wasn't invented yet, you're on my wavelength about how sloppy the details are. After he loses his job for banging a co-worker's girlfriend in the stockroom, we see his family who find him such a disappointment compared to his fat, slovenly brother (Josh Gad, who should change his name to Egad) who is a dot-com millionaire when he looks barely able to spell "Vic 20."

After being set up with a job selling Pfizer pharmaceuticals, we see him turning on the charm with the receptionists to get at the doctors he needs to write prescriptions for Pfizer's Zoloft over competing Prozac. While shadowing a doctor under the guise of being an intern, he meets Yummy Girl, a 26-year-old artist with early-onset Parkinson's. Right away, he knows she's sick and she details all the drugs she needs to take. She pays for her care with a wad of cash, but we are never shown how she's able to afford all this and her giant loft apartment on her wages at a coffee shop. (Perhaps she's turning tricks in the alley?)

She's blunt about just wanting to have sex without entanglements (since she's got a degenerative disease, I suppose, and not that she's just a garden tool) and I'm watching this thinking, "OK!" They proceed to rut about and he falls in love with her and then Viagra comes out and sells itself - seriously, I could sell Magic Boner Pills® when otherwise I'd have trouble selling water to people on fire, so what's Jake's feat? - and Fat Brother's wife kicks him out so he comes to sleep on Jake's couch (that's the scene at the end of the trailer) because that's what successful millionaires do and....wait, what?

Movies usually live and die on their scripts and Love and Other Drugs dies a most horrible death due to disjointed and hackneyed writing. The first 10 minutes are like a bad impression of Aaron Sorkin at his soapboxing worst as characters bray paragraphs of facts and figures at each other like the people with search overload in the Bing commercials. It doesn't get any better as it lurches from incident to episode to theme to whatever and back. There's a section when YG goes to an "unconvention" where we see a parade of Parkinson's patients showing us how funny and human they are so don't look at them as freaks, you judgmental audience members! As if that's not enough, there is a whole passage which devolves into Lifetime shmaltz territory as Jake flies YG all over the country trying to find a cure, which also informs his final decisions in the movie.

The only thing that saves Love and Other Drugs from being an unmitigated disaster is the appealing stars. Jake isn't Donnie Darko and Anne is just magnetic to watch with her big brown eyes and voluptuous lips and alabaster skin and.....................OK, I'm back from my bunk. Where was I? Oh yeah, she's really good at making her character someone who want to hang with even though nothing that the script puts her through is believable. She's so appealing that it made me want to stick with it despite the lousy writing.

Really early on I was starting to feel bad for Jake and YG because the script was such hacky crap that's tonally all over the map. For example, after a breakup, Jake goes to a pajama party (read: orgy) and the physician host gives a little speech about how it sucks being a doctor with all the patients he needs to see every day and all the paperwork involved cuz that's what you do at an orgy. This leads to Jake having a three-way almost against his will, Fat Brother getting laid by some hottie who as the IQ of an air fern, and then Jake having the inevitable Extra Long-Lasting Viagra Boner which makes for wacky fun! Not.

The lumpy structure - it felt like it had six acts and more endings than Lord of the Rings - and general scattershot tension between rom-com and weeper and broad comedy conventions render Love and Other Drugs dead on arrival. And if you're still interested to see Yummy Girl's yummy girls, dude, this is the Internet - go find 'em and save your time. Besides, there's not THAT much skin compared to movies from the Eighties or whatever Kate Winslet's doing now. It's just that it's such a rarity for A-list talented actresses to give up the goodies, it made over-hyped headlines.

Score: 2/10. Watch on a friend's cable so you can make fun of it whenever Yummy Girl isn't showing her wares.

My girlfriend has been informed that in my ideal three-way, the other girl will be Anne Hathaway. (The first is Olivia Wilde.)

"Due Date" Review

2011-03-27T22:30:00.001-04:00

In getting the trailer for Due Date - The Hangover director Todd Phillips' raunchier version of John Hughes classic Odd Couple travel movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles - I see that almost every funny bit and moment is included. You could almost watch the trailer and save the time on the whole movie unless you want to see what's in between.

Robert Downey Jr. is Steve Martin, an uptight guy trying to get home from Atlanta to L.A. for the birth of his child. Zach Galifianakis (pronounced "that weird guy with the beard") is John Candy, a sad man-child-beast thing who drives Downey crazy. Will Downey get home in time and will these mismatched travelers find love and respect for each other? Duh.

Due Date isn't a bad movie, just a familiar one with occasional outbursts of funny (which are even funnier if you've forgotten or haven't seen the trailer) which are spread too far apart for a 95-minute movie. If you're offended by Downey spitting on the dog shown in the trailer, you may want to steer clear of this one because the best laughs are of the "Oh man, that is so WRONG!" class. I wasn't even sure how to allude to them without spoiling, but dog spitting isn't the worst of it.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.

"Limitless" Review

2011-03-27T17:15:00.001-04:00

The trailer below sets up the simple premise of Limitless: Bradley Cooper is a struggling writer until he gets a Magic Pill that unlocks 1000% of his mental ability, leading to instant fame and riches and he lives happily ever after. The end.

Just kidding. It all has a downside, like it's a question of whether the drug will kill him before the people who want what he has do? Will he survive the wide open world that chemicals can provide him?

While it's a simple concept and the overall plot doesn't really go to unexpected places, what Limitless does is tell its potentially overly familiar tale with blazing style and momentum thanks to a tight, snappy adapted script by Leslie Dixon (whose CV has some really good AND awful movies on it) and some flashy direction by Neil Burger (The Illusionist) which puts us in the head of Brad as he's seeing the world thru drug-enhanced eyes. While some of the visual details are cribbed from Fight Club, it works.

Cooper is excellent, but it helps when you're handsome with piercing blue eyes, so screw him. (Figuratively.) Abbie Cornish (seen just four nights ago in Sucker Punch) looks like a plumper Charlize Theron and it really bespeaks how lame Robert De Niro has been for quite a while when you've got to praise him for merely making an effort, not that he's also good here.

While Limitless isn't flawless - a subplot with a loan shark shouldn't have happened and a death is never explained properly - it is quite a rush which will leave you satisfied and entertained. This is the first movie of 2011 that I can recommend dropping the full ticket price on. (No refunds to dissatisfied customers!)

Score: 9/10. Pay full price at the theater.

If you watch this again after seeing it, you'll notice a few lines that are changed or don't happen in the actual movie.

"Sucker Punch" Video Review

2011-03-23T22:00:00.004-04:00

Rather than just type up a quick review in a half-hour after getting home from the show after 12:30 am, I got the stupid idea that such a visual film should have a visual review. If I get a half-hour of sleep before I get up for work, I'll be lucky. (UPDATE: I didn't and almost fell asleep driving in and spent the morning nearly hallucinating. Note to self: Get the reviews up whenever.)

(Hit the link to see it in 720p HD at YouTube)

Score: 7.5/10. See it at a nice theater on a matinee. (I'll be buying the Blu-ray.)

"Paranormal Activity 2" Review

2011-03-14T22:15:00.002-04:00

The original Paranormal Activity is the most profitable movie ever made. Shot for $14,000 - which included the cost of the camera, software, and computer to edit on - it went on to gross over $108 million. Of course a sequel was called for, so Paranormal Activity 2 was made and despite the incremental increase in number, this is actually a related prequel to the first film.

The connection to the ill-fated couple from PA is the sister of the wife. She's the 2nd wife to a widower with a teen-aged daughter. They have a new young son and weird things are starting to happen. When their house is ransacked, they install a video security system which documents the...wait for it...paranormal activity over a period of nights. Augmented with camcorder footage including visits from the PA couple, the demonic connection between the sisters is drawn out.

And drawn out is Paranormal Activity 2's largest problem. It mistakes taking their sweet time for building tension. It's well past the halfway mark before the first major incidents happen and the last 10 minutes or so devolve into standard spooky movie tropes. While there are a few good moments of creepiness, the familiarity with the "found footage" genre and too much traditional Exorcist-style shocks undercuts the potential of the material. In trying to make it bigger and better, they ended up making a smaller and less satisfactory serving of shocks.

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.

"Morning Glory" Review

2011-03-13T23:30:00.001-04:00

Morning Glory can be summarized the same way that the Earth was in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Mostly harmless.

Rachel McAdams turns the plucky cuteness knob up to 12 as the executive producer of the worst-rated morning show on 4th-place network IBS. (The movie must take place in a universe where Fox doesn't exist.) Thinking a dose of gravitas to counteract the bubbly Diane Keaton is necessary, she dragoons grumpy Harrison Ford into the gig by exploiting a clause in his contract. He naturally refuses to play ball leaving the show in the lurch and on a countdown to cancellation unless McAdams turns things around. Think she'll be able to save the day?

Really? You're wondering?

The biggest (to be charitable) laughs are from Ford's grumpy, appalled reactions to the indignities of morning television. The obligatory romantic interest, Patrick Wilson, is so superfluous that if he disappeared entirely from the movie it wouldn't change a single thing in the plot. And for some reason, she can't figure out how to mute hew Blackberry so that when she doesn't want to be disturbed, she tosses it in the freezer. Hardy-har. Ahem.

The trailer touts it's from the writer of The Devil Wears Prada (which came from a best-selling novel), 27 Dresses and Laws of Attraction (the last two which I haven't seen but my girlfriend says sucked), so perhaps it's best to watch Prada again and sleep in on Morning Glory. Even better, watch Working Girl again to see this sort of story told so much better including a still-awake Harrison Ford.

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.

"Battle: Los Angeles" Review

2011-03-13T17:20:00.003-04:00

If you go into Battle: Los Angeles looking for Marines vs. Aliens or Black Alien Down - crazy urban combat with hearty hoo-rah jarheads battling weird mech-aliens - then you're pretty much going to get your money's worth. It's crazy, frenetic, shaky-cam chaos with almost non-stop action and mayhem.

Where the movie stumbles a bit is in grafting on a truckload of war movie cliches: Staff Sargeant Aaron Eckhart has already had his retirement papers signed when he's called upon; one platoon member is getting married; one's a virgin; one's from Nigeria; one's brother died on Eckhart's command and thinks it's his fault; and so on. It really feels like the studio ordered up some tropes as if we were going to be able to tell anyone apart once the booming starts and feel something when they buy it. Other than Michelle Rodriguez as the ditzy, blonde Valley girl...just kidding, she's a kickass Latina Air Force intel officer like she sort of was in Avatar, Eckhart stands alone as having a "character."

While the dialogue breaks are frequently rote and predictable, the action manages to be something special for being epic in scale while intimate in detail. We're going to have to wait for the next Transformers movie this summer to get the Bayhem-grade boombitty, but this is plenty asplodey enough.

Score: 8/10. Catch a matinee on a big, loud screen.

One quibble with the plot (not really spoilerish): It is theorized that the aliens are here to steal our water. OK, the surface of Earth is 70% water - why not just land in the middle of the ocean and take what you want without having to blow up the locals?

Also, I think of lot of the negative reviews have come from angry liberal critics who can't stand the idea of American military being portrayed as brave, resolute and heroic. After years of anti-Iraq/Afghanistan war movies that have smeared soldiers and bombed at the box office, they fear this movie being a hit will lead to more movies being made with heroic warriors and are trying to dampen enthusiasm. What babies.

Another thing: Would it kill Hollywood to show a Lieutenant who isn't some book-learned recent graduate of the service academy who is immediately in over his head and needing bailing-out by the veteran sergeant? Yeesh, it's Lt. Gorman from Aliens all over again.

"Vanishing On 7th Street" Review

2011-03-12T22:00:00.002-05:00

An even-less-populated-than-usual Detroit is the setting for the small-time suspense-horror flick Vanishing on 7th Street, starring Hayden Christensen, John Leguizamo, Thandie Newton, and newcomer Jacob Latimore. If you're from the Motor City, it's fun to spot locations and local Channel 7 newscasters, but there's not much for general audiences to appreciate.

It starts spookily enough with the adults being introduced in scenes where there is a blackout and when the lights come back on, everyone else has disappeared, leaving their empty clothes and possessions where they were when they vanished. Creepy shadows close in held at bay by the dimming flashlights and glow sticks. They eventually end up in a bar with a kid whose mother had gone for help, never to return. A rickety generator is providing light for this sanctuary, but isn't going to last forever.

Director Brad Anderson (who coincidentally helmed last night's Fringe episode) does alright with keeping things creepy, but is stranded without much of a script nor an ending that makes going for the ride worthwhile. Hayden does nothing to erase his "Mannequin Skywalker" rep - what happened to the guy who was decent in Shattered Glass? - and the others aren't given much to do. Even worse, the nature of the shadows is never explained or even speculated upon; they're just a menace to trick and pick off the survivors. Everyone disappears and those who don't have no reason for their fortune. Bah.

Score: 3/10. Catch it on cable.

"Lemmy" Review

2011-03-11T22:30:00.000-05:00

To understand the reverence to which Motorhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister is held, let's take this moment from the movie Airheads:

While Lemmy may be God, it's also a man whom is given a simultaneously over-detailed and superficial treatment in the documentary Lemmy: 49% Motherf*cker, 51% Son of a Bitch. Chock full of fawning testimonials from rockers including Slash, Scott Ian, Dave Grohl, Dee Snider, Henry Rollins and Alice Cooper, we get to see Lemmy in his cluttered LA apartment (which looks like a candidate for Hoarders and made me feel less bad about my place), playing videogames (Crimson Skies on Xbox!), indulging his video trivia habit at bars, jamming with Metallica, and generally being one of the coolest mofos on the planet.

However, for all the access the filmmakers had and the fact that Lemmy doesn't seem to have much he's not willing to talk about, Lemmy is a so-so introduction to the man's long life and career - he was 63 when this filmed and was in bands in the Sixties, having seen the Beatles in the Cavern Club and once roadied for Jimi Hendrix - heavily padded with material which would've been better left in the DVD's Deleted Scenes area. Do we really need to see him and Billy Bob Thornton hanging out and discussing royalty checks? A tighter focus and a half-hour shorter running time would've helped.

Best for those who are already fans, it's got some useful information for those will to slog through the fat to get to the bones of the seemingly unkillable Lemmy.

Score: 5/10. Fans should rent the DVD, otherwise catch it on cable.

"The Mechanic (2011)" Review

2011-03-07T22:30:00.003-05:00

Jason Statham is in a bit of a rut lately. Sure, with few exceptions like The Bank Job where he can act a bit, he's mostly been recycling his signature persona to the point that I joke whenever he has a new movie coming out, I put on the Movie Announcer Voice and snarl, "Jason Statham is Jason Statham in Badass Bald Driver Guy Kicks Ass 2011!" What was the Death Race remake other than The Transporter in prison without a nice suit?

Continuing with remake parade is The Mechanic, originally a Charles Bronson flick. Statham is an elite assassin working for a shadowy international assassination company. (Are they in the Yellow Pages? Kids, ask your grandparents what those were.) When his friend and mentor, Donald Sutherland, is fingered for being a traitor to the firm, Statham is forced to kill him. When Sutherland's good-for-little son, Ben Foster, shows up looking for revenge and asks Statham to train him in the ways of the mechanic. Awkward.

While there are some hellacious fight scenes, the action and overall pace are flat. Director Simon West (Con Air, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - the first one) has never been very good and infusing his movies with energy and he's still not good at it. Statham has a place out in the bayous near New Orleans that he accesses by boat but has cars and there's obvious road access, so why the boat? He's shown having a $2000 turntable to listen to his classical records, but is so alone his only female companionship is some Swedish hooker who has no butt.

While it's a step up from Transporter 3 - how did they manage to screw up the formula so badly there?!? - The Mechanic needs too much work to get it going to be worth seeking out. Watch some older Statham movies instead.

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.

"The Adjustment Bureau" Review

2011-03-06T16:50:00.004-05:00

The never-ending debate between whether we are the unwilling subjects of destiny or individuals with free will in control of our fates underpins The Adjustment Bureau, a romantic-fantasy take on an old Philip K. Dick short story that no one has read but the angry Dick nerds who are the source of most of the negative reviews you may've read about this movie. Ignore them. Listen to me.

Matt Damon plays a New York Congressman whose hopes for advancing to the Senate are dashed at the last moment by a minor scandal. Preparing to give his concession speech, he encounters wedding crasher Emily Blunt in the same hotel - because people get married on a Tuesday night, wait, what? - and in their brief meeting he is so smitten with this woman that he goes out and gives a concession speech that sets him up for greater things.

A few years later, two men discuss Damon and the need to spill coffee on his shirt. However, the one tasked with making him miss his bus dozes off and he makes the bus, finding this mysterious woman on there. They chit-chat and things seem fine until he arrives at work and catches a crew of men apparently erasing the minds of the frozen-in-place folks at the office. He runs, but is caught and has the rules explained to him: He must never see her again or else his mind will be erased by these Men In Magic Fedoras.

Who are the MIMFs and how do they control the world to an extent is the tricky part to discuss because to know too much going in spoils the fun. Suffice to say there is a Chairman in charge of the Plan for Damon's (and everyone's) life and if he just goes along, everything works out well for everyone. But what if he doesn't? What changes and what is gained or lost?

The script by director George Nolfi manages to cover just about every question or loophole that could crop up and he tells the story with alacrity, culminating in a whirlwind chase through the MIMFs portal system that allows them to fast-travel around New York City. One unplugged plot hole that really bugged me though was how Damon has never had a woman in his life. We're supposed to believe a politician isn't a craven power monger, OK; but he doesn't have a wife, ex-wife, dead wife, fiancee, nothing? The significant other who may be a complication for Blunt comes and goes only when needed to muck up the plot.

Damon is a good choice for the role and there is a chemistry between him and Blunt that helps bull past the little plot niggles which pop up. The suporting cast including John Slattery, Terrance Stamp, and Anthony Mackie are also quite good. However, the meaty core of story that you'll probably end up discussing with co-viewers is how much of our lives are just chance or the result of divine intervention. It could make you paranoid if not for Nolfi allowing for the element of chance in a world of omnipotent and omnipresent beings.

Balancing the mix between heavy philosophy, romantic desire, and grand scheme destiny, The Adjustment Bureau is a great date flick for couples who want to get deep into the other's headspace regarding fate and fortune. Highly recommended.

Score: 9/10. Catch a matinee.

"True Grit" Review

2011-03-02T21:34:00.003-05:00

The Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan, have made a lot of good movies like Fargo and Miller's Crossing, but after O Brother, Where Art Though went on a long streak of mediocrity that led their No Country For Old Men to be wildly overpraised and awarded. (Really? Best Picture for a movie with one good scene with one great line of dialog? Bah.) Their follow-up, Burn After Reading, was an OK trifle, but the execrable A Serious Man was so terrible that I turned it off. When it was revealed they were remaking the John Wayne classic True Grit, I didn't have much hope for them despite barely remembering the original and not having a stake in whether they were faithful to the source novel.

Fortunately, True Grit avoids being true sh*t thanks to a dryly ironic script by the Coens and powered by a star-is-born performance by 14-year-old Hailee Steinfeld who was mis-nominated for Best Supporting Actress even though she's in almost every scene while Jeff Bridges (who got a Best Actor nod) and Matt Damon come and go from the story. It's probably the best debut by a young actor since a 12-year-old Natalie Portman arrived in Leon: The Professional.

As the trailer shows, Steinfeld's daddy has been killed by Josh Brolin and the plucky recruits drunken crotchety Rooster Cogburn to go into Indian country to track him down and bring him to justice. Hijinx ensue. My largest problem with the movie is Bridge's take on Rooster. His slurry, mumbled delivery makes him hard to understand and I didn't think he was very layered as a character. Damon is more comedic and the supporting roles are well-played, but core is Steinfeld and she's likely to have a good career ahead. (She's being heavily buzzed for the lead of Katniss in The Hunger Games.)

Well-photographed by Roger Deakins, True Grit may not fully redeem the Coens from their decade of failness, but it's certainly a step in the right direction though Unforgiven is a much better Western.

Score: 7/10. Rent the DVD.

Ranking The 2011 Oscar Best Picture Nominees

2011-03-02T14:15:00.003-05:00

I finished watching the Coen Brothers' True Grit last night (review pending, but I didn't hate it unlike most of their recent work) and thus completed seeing all 10 of this year's Oscar Best Picture nominees.

Last year, if I had a ballot, I would've voted for District 9 in the #1 slot. Here are how I would rank this year's picks. The #3-#8 entries are sort of fungible in their ordering, but the others are pretty much locked in their respective places.

The Social Network
The Fighter
Inception
127 Hours
Toy Story 3
The King’s Speech
Winter's Bone
True Grit
Black Swan
The Kids Are All Right

Disagree? Leave it in the comments.

UPDATE: Just caught this great video from the How It Should Have Ended guys (check out their oeuvre at YouTube) and they should've run this for the Best Picture nom montage.

February 2011 Review Roundup

2011-02-28T23:59:00.001-05:00

After the quick start to 2011, things slowed down drastically due to the girlfriend being busy every weekend thus limiting our viewing to just Oscar Best Picture nominees. I didn't have time to write up reviews, but The King's Speech was overrated, Winter's Bone was bleak, and The Kids Are All Right has no business being considered a Best Picture with a shallow, cliched screenplay which relies on the novelty of a lesbian couple to mask the truly banal story.

2/5 - The King's Speech (7/10)
2/7 - Winter's Bone (7/10)
2/21 - The Kids Are All Right (5/10)

Month's Movies Watched: 3
Previously Unseen: 3
Theatrical: 0
Home: 3
=====
Year-To-Date: 14
YTD First-Timers: 10
YTD Theatrical: 1
YTD Home: 13

2011 Academy Awards Livesnark

2011-02-27T20:38:00.019-05:00

• Opening filmed bit riffing on Inception was cute.

• Franco's Grandma: "I just saw Marky Mark." Ha! But opening banter was stiff.

• Alice in Wonderland wins Best Art Direction. I hate it when historical movies based on real places win, so I was afraid a sweep for The King's Speech would rob a genuinely original creation.

• Somewhat of an upset as Wall Pfister wins Best Cinematography for Inception over Roger Deakin's work on True Grit since Deakins has been nominated nine times without winning. No complaints about the win, though.

• First segment felt off-kilter and stilted. Franco and Hathaway are too giggly.

• Kirk Douglas is out and doing shtick which is rough considering his stroke. Cute that he milked the envelope opening moment.

• Melissa Leo wins for Best Supporting Actress for The Fighter. Terrible speech. Whoa! Had to bleep her. They should've given it to Halle Steinfeld, but she was really a lead part.

• Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis are absolutely horrid with banter. Jeez, who writes this stuff? I hosted a poetry and music festival for five hours last night, pretty much winging most of it off the cuff and it was tighter and funnier than anything so far here.

• Gee, Pixar wins Best Animated Feature. Again. There should really be more than three nominees in the category. Haven't seen the other nominees yet, but I wasn't crazy about Toy Story 3.

• 40 minutes in and I'm bored.

• Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem - co-stars from No Country For Old Men - are dressed as if they're going to be serving drinks at the Governor's Ball.

• Aaron Sorkin wins for The Social Network and gives props right off to Paddy Chayefsky's titanic Network. Best dialog of 2010.

• David Siedler, age 74 or so, is the oldest winner of Best Original Screenplay for The King's Speech. I was unimpressed by that movie as well.

• Anne Hathaway shows off her impressive lungs - singing voice, that is - and Franco comes out in Marilyn Monroe drag. Scary. She looks hot in a tux.

• Russell Brand and Helen Mirren (co-stars in the Arthur remake) are the first good presenters with banter. A Better World wins for Best Foreign Language, but the woman giving the acceptance was a mess.

• Christian Bale wins, as expected, for The Fighter. No problems with this win. Hard to believe he's never been nominated before.

• It's ironic that The Fighter is up for Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Support Actor and two Supporting Actress noms, but the star and producer, Marky Mark, gets bupkiss for his performance.

• It's a long way from Cleveland for Trent Reznor as he co-wins Best Original Score for The Social Network's ambient, futuristic soundscape.

• Inception wins for Sound Mixing and Editing Oscars. Nice to see it picking up the technical categories. Everyone's been thanking Chris Nolan, who was snubbed for Best Director by the haters in the Directors Branch of the Academy.

• Rick Baker wins his 7th Oscar for Best Makeup for The Wolfman. Does anyone even remember that movie.

• Colleen Atwood wins her third Oscar for Costume Design for Alice in Wonderland. Remember her dress made of American Express Gold Cards when she won for Chicago?

• Randy Newman is OK, but his chronic presence at the Oscars is no different than the Coens Brothers getting automatically nominated for anything they put out in a year. I've already forgotten his song from 2010 Pixar Movie.

• Something wins Best Documentary Short. God of Love wins Best Live-Action Film and director-star Luke Matheny gives the best speech so far, "I should've gotten a haircut."

• The Auto-Tune The News Internet meme sails over the head of Hollywood as they do a montage of "musicals" that came out last year.

• Cute moment with Anne Hathaway twirling her dress. She's so yummy.

• I haven't seen Best Feature Documentary Inside Job yet - I've got it downloaded and waiting - but as long as Exit Through The Gift Shop didn't win, I'm satisfied. Not that it's not a good movie (haven't watched it yet, but I'm sick of FAKE "documentaries" by liars like Michael Moore winning a category that implies truthfulness in its very title.

• "Surprise" presenter - only if you don't read Deadline Hollywood - Billy Crystal comes out to into a montage of Bob Hope hosting bits. And then he's gone. Big whoop.

• Inception wins for Best Visual Effects, continuing the irrelevant technical honors sweep. Sherlock Holmes co-stars Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law do OK banter.

• The Social Network wins Best Editing. I seem to recall hearing that it's unlikely to win Best Picture without winning Editing. Hmmm, could The King's Speech be getting passed over?

• Randy Newman wins. Yawn. That he's only 2-for-20 in winning says something. Terrible song. Can't even remember the tune. Funny speech, though.

• And yet again, they don't use Jim Carroll's "People Who Died" for their In Memorium montage. Heh, they use a clip from Blue Velvet for Dennis Hopper. They must have commanded that no applause be given, so there's no winner for the Most Popular Dead Person.

• A sort of upset as Tom Hooper wins Best Director for The King's Speech. Even those who thought it would win Best Picture thought David Fincher would win here. Good speech thanking his mother for tipping him off about the script that led to his win.

• Queen Amadala wins for Insane Lesbian Ballerina. I had a headache watching her, so this is merited. Good thing Annette Bening didn't rob her for a Lifetime Achievement Award. She thanked everyone on the crew, but none of her co-stars. None of them. Tacky and stuck-up.

• Sandra Bullock looks Botoxed to near-lethal levels. Funny intros to the actors though.

• Colin Firth wins Best Actor for The King's Speech and last year's A Single Man, thus filling in the Free Space box on every Oscar Pool bingo card. Dull acceptance speech.

• Good mention by Spielberg of the movies that did NOT win Best Picture: Raging Bull, Citizen Kane, The Graduate. Interesting montage using the king's speech to underscore clips from all the movie.

• The King's Speech wins Best Picture. Snooooooooore. So overrated. The Oscars refuse to step into the present, much less the present. This is Harvey's big comeback.

• James Franco seemed ill-at-ease the whole night and contributed nothing to the proceedings. Anne Hathaway was yummy and cute and looked great in all her outfits, but didn't do much. Bring back Steve Martin!

• Who the hell are these kids from PS22 in Staten Island and why are they singing "Somewhere Over The Rainbow"? Were they in a movie or did someone just think this was a good idea. (Hint: It wasn't.) Having all the winners come out for a mass bow was an OK touch.

• Pop Quiz: What films won the past two years, since they're triumphs of the cinematic arts? Exactly! Next year, who will remember this year's winner? Exactly!

Cyberspace Open 2011 Entry

2011-02-22T13:12:00.003-05:00

Rather than rehash what this screenwriting contest is again, please read last year's entry and my comments about how the judging differed from what was advertised. I still need to post up what I sent in for the Final Round that I didn't qualify for, but still got my entry scored. Heh.

The scene prompt this year was a tricky one and I think a lot of writers are going to crash and burn on the particulars. Here's what I had to write about:

Your PROTAGONIST and his or her LOVE INTEREST are at odds. One of the protagonist’s schemes has gone terribly awry, and the love interest has had it. Write a scene in which they have it out – but in an unconventional way. Their words seem measured and reasonable; but the subtext says another thing entirely. You may use additional characters other than the ones specified.

Note From Contest Management:

This is going to take some crafty, non-on the nose writing here. For example, they can talk about boiling water, but it’s clear they’re really talking about something else. Use sarcasm or body language or timing or other means to convey your true meaning.

Egad. In case you're not sure what subtext means, it's the difference between what is being communicated by the words and what the actions convey. If someone is saying, "I love you!", while punching someone in the face, there's subtext happening.

I listened to a screenwriting seminar where the beginning of Pulp Fiction was offered as an example of text vs. subtext. The text is Vincent and Jules talking about Royale with Cheese and whether foot massages are like cheating. The subtext is two hit men driving someplace, getting out their guns, and then getting Marcelus' briefcase and killing people. Other than the comment, "We should have shotguns for this gig," there is no clue as to who Vincent and Jules are and what they're doing until they get into the apartment.

So, without further fondue, here is my entry, Afternoon Delight:

EXT. A MEADOW - DAY

We are high above a large green meadow, looking down. Dense
woods border the perimeter. The sky is blue and the clouds
are fluffy, floating over the rolling countryside.

A BURST OF FLAME appears small on the ground. The flames
rise upon a pillar of smoke toward us as a SMALL ROCKET races toward us and EXPLODES! The FIREBALL and SMOKE and DEBRIS obscure our view, but rapidly fade as we descend through it.

We near the ground and see a VAN with three people nearby -
ADRIAN (30s, average-looking scientific type), NEIL (early-
20s, indie rocker style), and SARAH (late-20s, hot librarian
type) - gazing up into the sky.

Adrian looks aghast; Neil looks annoyed; Sarah looks bemused.

SARAH
You're right. This was a totally
better use of our money than building
a deck with a hot tub.

ADRIAN
I don't understand what happened.

SARAH
Being a biochemist means I'm not as
versed in this astrophysics stuff,
honey, but I think the scientific
term is, "It blowed up real good!"

Adrian turns toward a LAPTOP perched inside the van.

NEIL
I told you we needed intermix chamber
heaters to prevent cyrofractures.

ADRIAN
They would've added too much weight.

NEIL
Not that much and it would've
prevented this.

ADRIAN
We won't know what really caused the
failure until we examine the debris.

NEIL
It looks like most of it came down
over there. Good thing it wasn't
windy. Let's go pick up the pieces.

Neil starts off but stops when he realizes he's alone. He
turns and sees Adrian scrutinizing the laptop.

NEIL (CONT'D)
Hey, you stay here. I'll go get it.

Sarah looks thoughtful as she watches Neil trudging off.
She reaches past Adrian in the van and produces a BEACH BAG,
pulls out a TOWEL and spreads it on the grass.

SARAH
Such a lovely day.

She strips off her clothes, revealing her BRA and PANTIES.
Adrian doesn't notice.

ADRIAN
(muttering to himself)
Manifold pressure at ignition was
nominal. Control surfaces were
responding nominally.

Sarah pulls a tube of SUNTAN LOTION out of the bag and begins to slather it on. She takes the CLIP off her hair, letting it cascade down her shoulders. Everything is in slow motion.

SARAH
You know he looks up to you? He
worships you like I did...at first.

Adrian is focused on the computer screen and traces the graph with his finger.

ADRIAN
Pressure builds at mark-15 seconds,
but within anticipated parameters.

Neil disappears into the woods. Sarah lays back and closes
her eyes, basking in the sunlight.

SARAH
Neil and I have a lot in common.
(quieter)
Like utterly inoperable bullshit
detectors until it's too late.

ADRIAN
There's a spike at mark-17, but it's
inconclusive when failure occurred.
The rez of the beamed telemetry isn't
fine enough. We'll need the FDR data.

He turns from the laptop and sees Sarah lying there.

ADRIAN (CONT'D)
What are you doing?

SARAH
Since you boys will be sifting clues
for a while, I'm going to do some
experiments in UV radiation exposure.

ADRIAN
Wearing that? Come on, someone will
see you.

SARAH
Who? Neil or someone investigating
whether Canada has attacked?

ADRIAN
It's not appropriate.

SARAH
My bikini covers less. Would you
care if someone saw me in that?

ADRIAN
Don't be trite.

She stares at him with a then-what's-the-problem expression.
He shrugs and turns back to the laptop. A long silence.

ADRIAN (CONT'D)
What do you think happened?

SARAH
You didn't listen.

ADRIAN
I heard him. It just wasn't a
practical idea.

SARAH
Since when has practical been a
sticking point for you?

ADRIAN
Always.

SARAH
I'm sure Felix would disagree.

INT. LABORATORY - DAY

Cages with LAB ANIMALS - RABBITS, RATS, MONKEYS - line the
walls. Nothing unusual other than the LARGE CAGE on the
floor with a sign reading "FELIX" and A RABBIT THE SIZE OF A
GERMAN SHEPHERD in it. It turns to us and speaks.

FELIX
You know, I had a computer programming
class with Mark Zuckerburg once. He
invented Facebook.

EXT. A MEADOW - DAY

Adrian turns back to the laptop, shame-faced.

ADRIAN
That was...unfortunate.
(defensively)
I apologized to him.

SARAH
I wish you'd let Walt take a look at
him. He may be able to...

ADRIAN
Mossberg is a quack and none of his
research is going to amount to
anything grand! He lacks vision,
which should be obvious to you on a
daily basis there.

SARAH
Oh, I've appreciated the differences
between you two, working there. He
is certainly not at your level.

Neil returns dragging the MANGLED TAIL SECTION of the rocket.

ADRIAN
Where's the rest of it? Where's the
nose and FDR? I need that; the
telemetry was too coarse here.

Neil tosses the wreckage at Adrian's feet.

NEIL
It's stuck up in the branches of a
tree. You're going to need a tall
ladder and a pole to knock it down.

ADRIAN
I think the school's maintenance
shed has some ladders. We'll get
one and come back.

NEIL
You do that. You should consider
bringing a rope, too.

Adrian drags the wreckage behind the van and loads it in.
Neil notices Sarah on the blanket, glistening in the sun.

NEIL (CONT'D)
Uh, hey, Sarah.

Sarah props herself up on her elbows and looks seductively
at Neil. She lightly brushes her hand down her stomach.

SARAH
Neil, have you ever considered taking
a position where your input would be
more greatly appreciated?

NEIL
Ummmm...What do you have in mind?

Adrian comes back around the van toward them.

SARAH
Well, Mossberg is looking for someone
more like you and is always interested
in exploring new ideas and techniques.

ADRIAN
(scoffs)
Yeah, someone should clue the guy
in. Let's go. If we hurry, we can
get the ladder and back here before
it's too late.
(to Sarah)
And put your clothes on, will you?
You're making Neil uncomfortable.
(to Neil)
Sorry, Neil. She doesn't get it.

NEIL
So I've gathered. You know, despite
the obvious, I think this day may
lead to a triumph.

SARAH
I agree. A notable huge success.

Adrian sighs and looks at the others.

ADRIAN
Thomas Edison had a thousand failures
while inventing the electric light.
Perhaps today should be properly
viewed as a learning experience.

NEIL
I certainly learned some things today.

ADRIAN
Excellent! One day, you'll thank me
for this, Neil.

Results are due in about a month. Stay tuned, sports fans.

January 2011 Review Roundup

2011-01-31T23:59:00.007-05:00

Kicking off the new year with a bang and nearly a dozen movies. Got the Alien Anthology box set on Blu-ray from Amazon.UK for $25 less than US Amazon wanted; it's region-free and exactly the same discs, just in more cumbersome fold-out packaging.

Jan. 1 - Cliffhanger (9/10); Vertical Limit (6/10)
Jan. 9 - The Tourist (4.5/10)
Jan. 16 - Dinner For Schmucks (4/10)
Jan. 18 - The Fighter (9/10); Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (7/10)
Jan. 22 - 127 Hours (6/10)
Jan. 24 - Aliens (Special Edition) (9.5/10)
Jan. 25 - Alien (Special Edition) (7/10)
Jan. 30 - Megamind (8/10)
Jan. 31- Unstoppable (6/10)

Month's Movies Watched: 11
Previously Unseen: 7
Theatrical: 1
Home: 10
=====
Year-To-Date: 11
YTD First-Timers: 7
YTD Theatrical: 1
YTD Home: 10

"Unstoppable" Review

2011-01-31T21:52:00.001-05:00

While his brother Ridley gets most of the critical respect, Tony Scott has had a long career in cranking out popcorn flicks like Top Gun, Enemy of the State and True Romance. Like Martin Scorsese had Robert DeNiro and Leonardo Di Caprio and Tim Burton has Johnny Depp as repeated collaborative partners, Scott has teamed up with Denzel Washington five times in the past 15 years. After a gap of nearly a decade from their first collaboration, Crimson Tide, four of Scott's past five films have starred Washington: Man On Fire, Deja Vu, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 remake and their latest train trip, Unstoppable.

Co-starring Chris Pine (bka Captain Kirk from the Star Trek reboot), it's a simple - real simple - story of a runaway train. After fat, stupid (and typecast) Ethan Suplee lets a train loaded with explosive chemicals get away from him, it becomes a chase against time before the train hits a tight elevated curve near fuel storage tanks in Pine's hometown where his kid and estranged wife are. (Why not put an orphanage next to the tanks for giggles?) Denzel is 18 days from a forced retirement by the greedy bastard railroad company. Ya think he might die in the process? (They even remark on this trope near the end.)

While the scenario is novel and the execution slick as Scott keeps things chugging along at a breakneck clip (har!), Unstoppable is a disposable bit of fluff, beneath the talents of all involved. Never minding the unrealistic portrayal of everything like television news choppers supposedly whipping along at treetop level and the way they constantly restate what we already know via impossibly immediate computer simulations, where Unstoppable sort of goes of the tracks (har! 2X) is that the soap opera beats feel rote and despite a few cool crashes, the action never really takes off and flies. (Because it's trains, not planes. Duh.)

What is up with Denzel anyway? Has he decided that he's going to follow De Niro's career model of doing respectable, acclaimed acting in the early part of his career and then waste it all on "getting paid" parts in the back half? He was badass in the whackass The Book of Eli, but where's another Oscar-worthy performance? It also doesn't help that Jay Pharoah, a new featured player on SNL this year did a sketch as Denzel that NAILED all of his tics and mannerisms. It's so spot on, I've embedded the spoof of Unstoppable's spoof below instead of the usual trailer to do double-duty.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.

"Alien (Special Edition)" Blu-ray Review

2011-01-25T23:00:00.002-05:00

For all it's "classic" status, I've never been overly enthused about Alien. Yes, it had that wild H.R. Giger bio-mechanical design; some all-time iconic moments like the chest-burster and knocking Ash's block off; and what 12-year-old didn't thril at the sight of Sigourney Weaver's coin slot at the end? (Though looking at it now, all I see is that she has no booty to speak of. It's a little unnerving.)

Perhaps it's because I'm more attuned to the heavy metal action of James Cameron's stellar Aliens (which I watched last night), but the deliberate pacing (my polite way of saying sloooooooow), while allowing plenty of time to soak up the details, allowed me to start getting distracted by the logical gaps as well as noticing how suspicious Ash looks all along at what's happening. (It's like when you watch The Usual Suspects the second time and realize that when they show Verbal looking around the room at the beginning, he's not killing time as much as gathering his story elements.) The damp bowels of the ship, cluttered with gear, lend a gritty authenticity as long as you don't start wondering why all that stuff is there for what is principally a big interstellar freighter with a crew of seven.

I can't remember who the big name science fiction author was with whom I read an interview in which he hated on Alien as little more than a "haunted house" picture and how stupidly the characters behaved when he wanted to yell out, "Just get in the space suits and blow the airlocks to suck it out." Given the size of the ship, that would probably have been impractical, but the way they wander off and get picked off makes them seem like teenagers at Camp Crystal Lake.

On the new Alien Anthology Blu-ray, the visuals are just about as perfect as you could hope, accurately reflecting the cinematography and look of the film. I was startled at how piercingly blue Veronica Cartwright's eyes were in the scene after Dallas gets nabbed. The audio end is frustrating, with all sorts of muffled dialog and unbalanced levels, but they're more a product of the limitations of late-Seventies technology. I popped in Alien Resurrection and watched a little and the difference between the 1997 movie's surround mix and the one made in 1979 was apparent. Yay progress.

In the intro to the Special Edition cut, Ridley Scott talks about how after a quarter-century, he's seen things that he wishes he could've tweaked. The major noticeable addition is Ripley stumbling over Dallas in a cocoon and granting his death wish, but there are a few other scene extensions that add some flavor without padding thing too badly, unlike how some of the additions to Aliens do slow things detrimentally. There is an option to have new footage indicated by an icon that pops up.

While I'm not in love with Alien, I'm glad to have a very slick copy of the film in the collection. If you're a big fan, it's a must-get.

Score: 7/10. Buy the Blu-ray.

"127 Hours" Review

2011-01-22T21:00:00.000-05:00

Titles inform. While 127 Hours refers to the amount of time Aron Ralston spent trapped by a boulder, a more informative title would've been the book's Between a Rock and a Hard Place or, better yet, Call Me Lefty: The Story of How I Cut My Own F*cking Arm Off. Top That, Bitches!

James Franco stars as Ralston and as he's really come on as an actor in recent years, it's hard to believe this is the same guy who was so stiff and terrible as Harry Osbourne in the Spiderman movies. He anchors this story of a man anchored by a rock and how he eventually choose to survive at all costs.

Director Danny Boyle is also improving - I've pretty much thought he was overrated and incapable of not letting his films go off the rails in the third act (e.g. 28 Days Later, Sunshine) - but his follow-up to the Oscar-winning (and pretty much forgotten) Slumdog Millionaire is solid, though occasionally hallucinogenic. He's now two for two in not botching the endings of his movies.

The big problem is that we know where this is going - Ralston cuts his own arm off with a dull knife - so the trick is in making the time spent before the punchline interesting. However, even at a brief 93 minutes, it feels padded and a little self-indulgent as Boyle indulges in crazy dream sequences involving Scooby Doo and a flood. Whether Ralston imagined these things and wrote about them is unknown (didn't read the book), but it feels like padding for a story which is little more than, "Man goes hiking. Gets stuck. Cuts arm off."

Score: 6/10. Rent the DVD.

One thing I learned from news stories I looked up after watching was that a few months earlier, Rolston survived being nearly buried in an avalanche while skiing; why couldn't this have been mentioned as a sign perhaps he needed to start staying home and playing videogames? Also, 10 years earlier, a fisherman cut his leg off below the knee when trapped. I wonder if he wishes he'd written a book?

"Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work" Review

2011-01-18T23:00:00.000-05:00

Watch this trailer:

While Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work was released last year, it was shot over a year starting in 2008, the year she turned 75 and her career was in a lull. Winning The Celebrity Apprentice and Fashion Police were still over the horizon and this documentary shows the legendary comedienne (whom we learn believes herself an actress more than a comic) struggling to stay relevant as she hustles for work and tries to mount a one-woman play she's written.

As an unvarnished look at how even the rich and famous still have to slug it out, the documentary is quite effective, but as a retrospective of her life's previous 74 years, it's annoyingly thin at times. While there are plenty of vintage TV appearances shown and some testimonials, there isn't enough context for What It All Means and if someone thought that her inspiring Kathy Griffith is something to brag about, well... More This Is Your Life type content wouldn't have hurt.

Still, it's hard to deny the old broad isn't working for her living. We get to see the crappy conditions she occasionally has to work in and how she handles a heckler(!) who is offended by a Helen Keller joke. (Is it still too soon for those?) The disappearance of her long-time manager happens, but we don't get his side of the story.

Ribald and raunchy - do we really want to hear a grandmother discuss anal sex and how her daughter should've done Playboy and held out for more money and "show her [kitty]" - Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work works best at showing the soft person under the hard, mouthy exterior.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable.

"The Fighter" Review

2011-01-18T21:30:00.001-05:00

Christian Bale is probably going to win an Oscar for his role here. In looking at the trailer, I was surprised to see that while co-stars Mark Wahlberg, Amy Adams, and Melissa Leo are all past nominees, Bale has never been recognized. That's right: Marky Mark was nominated for an Oscar while the latest and greatest Batman (as well as Patrick Bateman!) has never gotten recognized. Well, The Fighter is going to fix that oversight right up.

The titular fighter is actually Wahlberg's Mickey Ward, a journeyman slugger from Lowell, MA whose older brother Dicky (Bale) was a boxer whose claim to fame was knocking down Sugar Ray Leonard in a bout, but then went on to being a crack addict. Represented by his mother (Leo), Mikey is set up with lousy matches that have sapped his will to go on. Then he meets a brassy barmaid (Adams) who inspires him to try and move beyond his co-dependent family, a development they resent even though it works best for Mickey's interests.

Director David O'Russell has gone 11 years since his last good movie (Three Kings) with only 2004's unbelievably craptastic I Heart Huckabee's in between. Fortunately, he's back on his game here with a film that makes a good back half for a double-feature with Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler. (Fun Irony: Aronofsky is an executive producer here.) What is really commendable is that he manages to now succumb to the typical Hollywood temptation to overtly sneer at the lower-class blue-collar people of the town. Coastal elites hate the poor, but O'Russell manages to capture the local color without coloring them as white trash caricatures.

Bale lost over 60 pounds to play the hollowed-out (physically and spiritually) Dicky and while has the splashier role, it never devolves into ticks and nonsense. He's a screwup and eventually realizes it, but we see the charm that many addicts have that sustains their existences. Wahlberg underplays his part again and frankly I'm really bored with his schtick. When he first started in bigger movies like The Big Hit and Boogie Nights, the sight of him not being Marky Mark was enough to impress, but after over a decade of this act, it's no longer an interesting trick. Oh, he's fine in the performance and provides a quiet contrast to Bale's bigness; it's just we've seen it over and over before.

Adams is also a revelation as she kicks her sweet princess acting past to the curb as the tramp-stamped sorta floozy who tossed her athletic past away, but won't let Mickey give up. The scene where she tussles with Mickey's sisters delivers the one punch that made us go, "Ohhhh!" Leo is also fine. I've seen some criticism for the boxing scenes being lackluster, but I think it doesn't matter because O'Russell wisely doesn't attempt to ape the operatic style of Raging Bull or the visceral popcorn thrills of the Rocky flicks.

Score: 9/10. Catch a matinee.