"Altitude" Review

For most of its run time the dumb-teens-on-a-small-plane-in-trouble flick Altitude is a constant stream of dumb contrivances, on-the-nose writing, and annoying characters consistent with a low-budget B-movie, but in the last five minutes it almost becomes something pretty neat.

After a Very Important Prologue in which we see a horrifying mid-air collision between two small planes, we meet our dead meat, er, plucky characters led by rookie pilot Sara, who looks like a cross between Neve Campbell and Amanda Peet. Her mother died in the prologue and she's secretly learned to fly and is taking her four stupid, er, best friends to a Coldplay concert. (Yes, a Coldplay concert. They all deserve to die.) There's a meathead jock (signified by his varsity jacket, constant brewski guzzling, and general stupidity); his filmmaker girlfriend (she has a video camera and tells us she's a film major); and two emo guys, one a musician (he has a guitar) and the other being Really Creepy and Probably Harboring a Secret About What Really Happened to His Parents. (Hint hint hint!)

Shortly after takeoff, a bolt comes loose, jamming the controls and forcing the plane to climb higher and higher into a storm front. They lose contact with the tower, the instruments go haywire, and are running out of fuel because Little Miss Spunky Pilot forget to check the gas gauge. Oh, did I mention the monster that may be hunting the plane, too? Yeah, that's a problem they have.

When the stupid people aren't doing stupid things and screaming at each other (stupidly), they're getting knocked off one-by-one and while it's always fun to see Coldplay fans die, anyone with a passing knowledge of how horror movies work can predict who the final survivor(s) are likely to be. (Nudge, wink.)

Where Altitude manages to do a little something different is at the very end when what's causing the situation and how it resolves itself plays out. I kind of predicted the cause, but the punchline was novel and almost redeems the dumb stuff that fills the other 95% of the movie. Almost.

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.

Jeez, they actually pretty much give away the twist in the trailer, so not quite.

November 2010 Review Roundup

Hardly saw anything; wrote even less.

Nov. 8 - The Social Network (9.5/10)

Nov. 20 - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (7/10)
Nov. 26 - Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (5/10)

Month's Movies Watched: 3
Previously Unseen: 3
Theatrical: 0
Home: 3
=====
Year-To-Date: 89
YTD First-Timers: 78
YTD Theatrical: 24
YTD Home: 65

October 2010 Review Roundup

Slow month without any reviews. Need to figure out why the Let Me In review didn't get posted when it looks pretty done in draft.

Oct. 2 - Let Me In (8.5/10)

Oct. 4 - Iron Man 2 Blu-ray (7/10)

Oct. 11 - Easy A (8/10)

Oct. 17 - After.Life (7/10)

Oct. 18 - Knight and Day (4/10)

Oct. 24 - Hollow Man Director's Cut Blu-ray (7/10)

Oct. 25 - Push Blu-ray/Commentary (?/10)

Month's Movies Watched: 7
Previously Unseen: 4
Theatrical: 2
Home: 5
=====
Year-To-Date: 86
YTD First-Timers: 75
YTD Theatrical: 24
YTD Home: 62

"Tron Legacy" Preview Thoughts

Tonight, Disney held a 23-minute preview for Tron Legacy in order to whip up some interest for the December release. As was done last year for Avatar, it was held at the LieMax pseudo-IMAX theater, but unlike the teaser for James Cameron's Biggest Movie Evar, I came out of this decidedly meh about it.

For starters, the Disney Gestapo wanded the audience and forced us to check our cell phones because they were afraid we'd use them to videotape the 3D IMAX picture and post it online. Morons. But what was more problematic was that after they announced we were the first people ever to see 23 minutes of 3D footage, the actual presentation opened with 8-9 minutes of 2D footage. A title card said the first scene was in 2D, but as it went on and on and on, I realized too much of this "3D" experience wasn't going to be that way.

Quick impressions:

• The kid playing Sam Flynn (I'm running out the door to a thing and don't have time to look him up; Garrett something) is stiff and not very compelling. The build-up to him being zapped into the Grid was slack and more a nostalgia kick for 40-somethings; I think today's kids are going to be restless waiting for something to happen. Using Journey's "Separate Ways" is a little on the nose.
  
• Once in the Grid, the Recognizers and tanks have been updated, but again, it relies on seeing the first one to be appreciated.
• The scene where four Galtier-looking models/programs slice off his clothes and replace them with GridWear is airless and the choreography distracting.
• Once outfitted, he's forced to play Killer Frisbees (or whatever) and of course wins because the movie would be over otherwise.
• The next scene has him escaping the Lightcycle game grid in a Lightcar driven by Olivia Wilde and she's pretty hella hot with a mischievous air. She was the most interesting anything in the whole preview.
• She takes him to meet his father, Jeff Bridges, and they have a tearful reunion which didn't move the care needle an iota with me. Perhaps there's stuff from the intervening scenes that makes this resonate, but it just plays too slowly and we know from the moment they get there who the man sitting facing away from the camera is, so teasing it out is annoying.
• Then they had a quick montage of bits that we've seen before in trailers and the recent Daft Punk soundtrack video.

As we left, a girl with a Flip camera asked the crowd if they'd like to tape testimonials. As I passed by I said, "You don't want my testimonial about this." After reclaiming our cell phones - why am I getting texts back from Chris Hansen? - another rep with a notebook asked if we had our comments. This time I shared that "It was underwhelming. For all the talk about 23 minutes of 3D we got a third of that in boring backstory. The kid can't act and the 3D wasn't that impressive. Last year when we saw the Avatar sneak peek, I couldn't wait to see what the rest looked like. This time, I'm thinking I don't need to see it in 3D and I'm not as excited as I was when I went in. Tell your masters that this didn't do them any favors." I'm sure Disney is crapping themselves over my feedback. Psyche! No, they're building another Scrooge McDuck-class vault for all the Gen Xer and their kids chedda they're going to stack when this comes out.

In the haze of nostalgia, people forget that for all the then-groundbreaking visual effects, Tron wasn't a very good movie. It was OK, but cheesy. The new darker look world reminded me of what I pictured the Metaverse in Snow Crash would look like when I read it back in 2000, but now it just seems...there. Why are their clouds over the dark cities in a COMPUTER? The 3D was alright, but after Avatar and even Step Up 3D, it didn't impress me much. They've been working on this for about 3 years and I think the tech has blazed past where they are here. After you've seen photo-realistic Thundersmurfs in a jungle, what's impressive about hard surfaces and neon?

While it remains to be seen how the full Tron Legacy plays out like, the "Tron Night" non-event didn't stoke that much interest in me. I can't declare it DOA (yet), but I'm not setting up a countdown clock here either. And whoever decided to have only one shot of the youthful CGI Bridges as the now-evil Clu - again snipped from the trailers and far less than the trailers show. There were grumbles on teh Intarwebz that it looked fake and this would've been a good means to knock them down. Instead, we're still wondering.

"Let Me In" Review

Film nerds gnashed their teeth in horror when it was announced that the pre-pubescent vampire movie Let The Right One In was being remade. "Stupid Americans won't read Swedish subtitles! Stupid Hollywood is gonna make the kids teenagers and have them be like Twilight! Stupid guy who made Cloverfield is going to film it in ShakyCamVision®! They won't be able to match the swimming pool scene! It's going to suck and be stupid! Waaaaah!!!" The casting of Kick-Ass's Chloe Moretz and footage shown at Comic Con eased some nerd fears, but doubts remained. Now that it's here, while reviews have been kinder, you still see the word "unnecessary" thrown around which is too bad because I found it more enjoyable and more than equal to the original. 

Writer-director Matt Reeves has set Let Me In in 1983 Los Alamos, NM and while there are several visual cues borrowed from the original like a snow-covered jungle gym in the apartment complex courtyard, it's clear that this is less a remake than an alternate take on the source novel. Thanks to Reeve's deliberate, tension-ratcheting direction which uses long lenses with shallow depth of field to isolate the subjects and amp up the isolation, this version feels more immediate without being too "Americanized" as the haters would say. (One notable detail is that we never really get to see Owen's mother - she's always out of focus, decapitated by the frame, or obscured by distance or obstruction.) 

It also helps that his youthful cast - Moretz and Dylan Minnette (who plays the bully and was Jack's son on Lost) are now 13, Kodi Smit-McPhee is 14 - are spot on in their performances with none of the "kiddie actor" tells. Moretz already had a fan club for her awesome turn as Hit Girl, but this cements her place in the Pantheon with freakishly precocious actresses Jodie Foster and Dakota Fanning. A lot of ADULT actors would choke on the subtleties these children portray without a lot of dialogue; very nice work all around. Richard Jenkins as the vampire's caretaker and an unrecognizable Elias Koteas as a police detective investigating the killings are also solid. 

 If there is one knock I can lay against this movie is the use of really bad CGI when Abby is in killing mode. Considering the seamless FX work in Reeves' last film, Cloverfield 

As I'm writing this a couple of days later, the movie has already bombed at the box office, opening 8th with $5.3 million, a shade behind dreck like the Case 39 and You Again. In a time where vampires are hot to the point of overexposed ubiquity, no one went to see the best, creepiest, and smartest take on vampires in ages. Was the movie marketed incorrectly? Did people think it was just another teeny-bopper vamp flick like the execrable (and obscenely lucrative Twilight series) and give it a miss - though how they could get that impression from the trailer escapes me - or did the Internet haters dissuade them from seeing it? (OTOH, Internet fanboyism didn't really put butts in seats for Snakes on a Plane, Serenity, or Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, so perhaps their influence is greatly overrated.)

 Score: 8.5/10. Catch a matinee. (I'll be buying the Blu-ray when it comes out.) 

September 2010 Review Roundup

OK month of movie watching that unfortunately marked the start of a three month slack off on getting reviews posted. I'm hoping to backfill some of these if/when I get a chance.

Sept. 4 - Samurai Princess (2/10)
Sept. 5 - Breathing Room (6/10)
Sept. 6 - Machete (6/10); How To Be A Serial Killer (4/10)
Sept. 8 - Starship Troopers BD (6/10)
Sept. 11 - Sex Drive (8/10)
Sept. 16 - Galaxy Quest BD (9/10)
Sept. 27 - Teenage Paparazzo (8.5/10)
Sept. 29 - The Expendables (5/10)

Month's Movies Watched: 9
Previously Unseen: 6
Theatrical: 1
Home: 8
=====
Year-To-Date: 79
YTD First-Timers: 71
YTD Theatrical: 22
YTD Home: 57

"Sex Drive" Review

The "young virgin guy takes road trip to get laid" genre has be around for ages and includes films such as The Sure Thing and Losin' It. Since the plot is pretty obvious, what matters is the writing and execution and Sex Drive does a nice job of cutting what could've been just stupid raunch with some sincere sweetness.

Josh Zuckerman stars as your typical Dweeby Virgin. He's in love with his best friend, Amanda Crew, who can't think of him in "that way" since they've known each other forever, and is envious of his friend Clark Duke, who despite being a doughy fellow of questionable sartorial tastes manages to bag the babes and exhibit Jedi-level people skills. When a hot blonde he's met online offers to sleep with him if he comes to her (no pun), he borrows his brother's GTO and heads out on the highway for wild adventure.

What makes Sex Drive work is that it manages to walk the fine line between clever and stupid, outlandish impossible situations (e.g. a wild Amish barn party with Fall Out Boy playing) with heartfelt emotional moments. Rest assured, the laughs stick on the more juvenile side of things - with boobies! - but it's not as condescending or offensive as it could've been in lesser hands.

The director and writers went on to be involved with She's Out of My League (which was so-so) and Hot Tub Time Machine (pretty good with heart), but the best of their work is this gem that no one saw. When I described it to people, I just got blank looks until I mentioned the bit with Seth Green as a sarcastic Amish stunning them with his knowledge of cars - it's in the trailer below - at which point they had their bells rung a little.

Score: 8/10. Rent the DVD at least.

"Starship Troopers" Blu-ray Review

Picked up a used Blu-ray of this for six bucks and decided to give it a spin to see if time has been kinder to my memory of it being a mixed bag of action and silliness. It hasn't.

I read Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers back in high school and barely remembered much of it in 1997 when Paul Verhoeven's goofy film version came out. Verhoeven was returning to the sci-fi genre of his prior films Robocop and Total Recall after a detour into Joe Eszterhasville with the tag team of Basic Instinct and Showgirls.

The brightly-lit cheesiness of ST with big-teethed stars Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards along with a closer-to-Doogie Howser-than-Dr. Horrible bugged me (no pun) back then and it hasn't gotten better with time. The core problem I've always had with the movie is the utter stupidity of the military tactics: When you're fighting a monster foe on a barren planet with no cities or resources to preserve, what's the smart part of the idea that instead of just nuking the place from orbit (it's the only way to be sure) you should send legions of foot soldiers down there to shoot it out with a fast-moving, swarming, armored enemy that requires a clip of ammo to be emptied into their bodies to bring them down? Less cinematic, to be sure, but hella more sensible.

My comment about Richards when I saw the film in 1997 was, "We're supposed to believe she's this awesome starship pilot when she looks like she couldn't get the family's LeBaron station wagon out of a mall parking lot without denting the fake wood paneling." Put it this way: She makes Jessica Alba look like Helen Mirren in the acting department. Watching it now it confirms that her best performance was in Wild Things because all she had to do was be dumb and look good naked.

The Blu-ray is pretty good with a clean transfer and suitably booming sound. What's interesting to see in the clarity of high-def is how cheap the sets look. I watched Galaxy Quest a week later and what was supposedly a comic spoof had better production values. The bug special effects haven't aged that well, but are still pretty good by contemporary standards - it's just that the bar has been raised so high by films like Avatar and Transformers.

Score: 6/10. Buy it if you're a fan of the film, otherwise rent.

Note: The extras were done for a 2002 Special Edition DVD and really play up the liberal cast's take that the fascism they thought the film portrayed was being whipped up by the government post-9/11. I only started watching them, so if there's more to be gleaned, I'll update this section.

"How To Be A Serial Killer" Review

This black comedy starts off promisingly with an infomercial encouraging viewers to "stop ignoring the voices in your head" and attend the motivational seminar put on by Mike (Dameon Clarke, who's like a TV version of Edward Norton) and setting up the premise that he is willing to help a greasy video store clerk learn the dark arts of serial killing.

Using a mix of seminar snippets, straight narrative, and to-the-camera interviews with a criminal psychologist, Mike's girlfriend and the protege, it's not bad for the first 20-30 minutes and then starts to drag and lag before it gets frenetic and messy at the end. Perhaps it would've worked better as a short film of half the length.

Score: 4/10. Watch on a friend's cable.

"Breathing Room" Review

Another of my 50 cent Hollywood looting pickups, all I knew about Breathing Room was this cover...



...and the premise on the back cover. (Watch the trailer below which sets it up nicely.) For those unwilling/unable to click, a young woman (Ailsa Marshall, who looks like a prettier, more girly Katee Sackhoff) arrives naked (no skin, sorry) in a room that looks like a warehouse with 13 other people, none of whom know how they got there either. She's given a numbered jumpsuit and signs on the walls and floor warning of dire consequences for breaking the rules. Why are they there? Is this tryouts for a Slipknot tribute band or a struggle for survival in which all but one are promised to end up dead? (Survey says.....B!!!)

Shot for what looks like $50 with a camcorder - the actual budget was $25,000 according to Wikipedia and the camcorders were prosumer grade - Breathing Room benefits from having a decent, albeit unknown, cast with the ability to breathe some life into their thin-due-to-numbers characters. While you'll probably be able to figure out how it ends (though the final twist was a little less expected), the co-writing/directing team of John Suits and Gabriel Cowan pace things well and don't turn it into the Saw knockoff it could've been and it appears to be marketed as. I hate "torture porn" movies, so I'm glad to say this wasn't one in that sense.

While there are a few logical lapses - while there's a bathroom, no food or water is ever given and no one seems to complain about hunger or thirst; one player is killed and no one seems to notice their absence; people act like ninnies instead of trying to solve the puzzle of their confinement - it's to Suits' and Cowan's credit that I wasn't yelling, "Yeah, right!", more than a couple of times. While it's not a mandatory film to check out, it's far better than it could've been and it's worth checking out if you come across it.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable if it ever gets shown.

"Samurai Princess" Review

While I was looting a going-out-of-business Hollywood video, I picked up this DVD for 50 cents:



I overpaid by 50 cents and 85 minutes of my life.

With the success of gonzo mutilation Japanese horror splatter flicks such as The Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police, it's natural that their would be more, but unfortunately all the creativity is going into the yucky effects at the expense of the story, characters, comprehensibility and anything that would make it more than something to be cut down to a YouTube highlights reel.

Since I don't care to waste time on this, here's the plot from Wikipedia's page:

A band of criminals who have raped several school girls is attacked by the Samurai Princess. She is a cyborg, created by the scientist Madness from the parts of the gruesomely murdered girls. The criminals maintain they didn't kill them, but the princess kills them anyway. She now sets after the responsible Red Dragon and Butterfly, who see their murders as artistic.

The star, Aino Kishi (me neither), wasn't hired for her acting or martial arts skills and isn't all that hot. (BTW, she never wears the outfit on the cover.) The style of the film is utterly random: it starts off in "the Infinite Woods" with what appear to be medieval warriors, but they have video cameras, chainsaws, boob grenades (not making this up), and cybernetic enhancements. Suddenly, the two good guy characters are in what appears to be a empty hotel conference room before going into a lackluster soft-core sex scene. The end of the film ends up in warehouses.

It's all a boring mess and I wanted to shut it off several times but kept slogging on in hopes that something, anything, either really awesome crazy or hot would happen, but it never did. I've put it into my sell box. Even if you like this genre, don't waste your time on the Samurai Princess.

Score: 2/10. Skip it.

August 2010 Review Roundup

While it was a higher than average month in the terms of movies watched, it was probably the worst on average as far as quality went. Had to go to the theater to see something above-average.

August 1 - Cop Out (1/10)
August 2 - Repo Men (3/10)
August 9 - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2/10)
August 15 - The Book of Eli (5/10)
August 16 - Stolen (4/10)
August 21 - The Other Guys (7/10); Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (8/10)
August 22 - Saving Face (6/10)
August 23 - Brooklyn's Finest (7/10)
August 29 - MacGruber (2/10); Kissing Jessica Stein (6/10)


Month's Movies Watched: 11
Previously Unseen: 11
Theatrical: 2
Home: 9
=====
Year-To-Date: 70
YTD First-Timers: 65
YTD Theatrical: 21
YTD Home: 49

"Kissing Jessica Stein" Review

This 2001 film gets lumped in with other lesbian indie films like Go Fish when it's more about finding mutual companionship and sexual intimacy between two people, regardless of what's filling their underwear.

Jennifer Westfeldt (last seen playing the reporter dubbed "Blonde Ambition" in my 24 S8 recaps) stars as the titular Ms. Stein, a stereotypical hyper neurotic New York City Jewess. In a rapid montage we see her having a half-dozen of the worst dates with guys and we get it: maybe it's time to try chicks.

On the side is Helen (Heather Juergensen), a over-sexed straight art gallery manager who has different men to satisfy her different moods, but decides that it's time to broaden her horizons. With the help of a pair of gay friends, she writes up a personal ad that catches Jessica's attention, though she's clearly too skittish at first.

Once you get past the overly wordy script by the stars that betrays its off-Broadway origins and need to allow the writers to show how they'd act the heck out of it, there's a surprisingly chaste tale that's hardly about gay soapboxing as one might expect. Both women start off straight and by the end, one still is and the other isn't, but could probably revert. The conflicts and "Oh, no! No one can see us together!" moments on Jessica's part could happen if the pair were rich/poor, black/white, conservative/liberal, whatever/whatever. There's no sex or nudity shown - unlike the happy skin bomb in the middle of Saving Face - though that leads to one of the biggest laughs as a hard-up Helen grouses, "Who do I have to blow to get some p*ssy?"

Since both writer-actresses are straight - Westfeldt has been partnered with Jon Hamm since 1997 and Juergensen is married - that may explain the slight remove the story is viewed from as well as the appreciated lack of "gay experience" sledgehammering that so option grinds these movies to a halt. (The problem is that many gay filmmakers frequently think the most important part of gay characters is their sexuality, not what they do outside of bed. Tip: No one watches straight characters and wishes that the story stop so we can watch them muse on their hetero-ness.) I also wasn't too crazy about the sub-plot about Jessica's editor which is really amped up in the trailer, but feels crammed in during the movie itself.

Score: 6/10. Rent the DVD.

"MacGruber" Review

[Sing along, kids.]

MacGruber!

They've taken the Will Forte SNL sketch and made a feature movie!

MacGruber!

It bombed at the box office and it easily to see-a why-eye!

MacGruber!

It's raunchy, foul-mouthed, tedious but only rarely funny!

MacGRUBER!

Score: 2/10. Skip it.

Note: The best thing about it is the rich, colored lighting and cinematography. It looks like a vintage music video, but so what?

"Brooklyn's Finest" Review

Antoine Fuqua, who guided Denzel Washington to an Oscar in Training Day, comes back to the gritty cop genre with Brooklyn's Finest, a film which takes a little too long to get to a bewildering and somewhat unsatisfactory ending.

It intertwines a trio of plots involving Richard Gere as a burned-out, undistinguished patrolman a week from retirement; Ethan Hawke as a stressed-out family man with a wife and four kids in a moldy house and twins on the way; and Don Cheadle as a deep undercover operative in a drug gang whose real life is disintegrating and is looking to get out of his cover and get behind a desk. Gere is apathetic about everything; Hawke (looking pretty haggard; I thought he was Kevin "Johnny Drama" Dillon at first) is trying to steal drug money to pay for the down payment on a new home; Cheadle is torn between taking down the drug lord (a very good Wesley Snipes basically playing a later-life Nino Brown from New Jack City) who saved his life when he was undercover in prison.

Other than a couple of coincidental brushes during the story, the three never cross paths until the very end and even then don't interact. The ending was a mess because one cop's tale doesn't make much sense from a motivational standpoint and another's is rather predictable; the third's is a really heavy-handed bit of irony. Fuqua spends too much time showing the characters thinking and not enough time showing them acting out. It's too bad because the performances are all better than the underbaked script would provide lesser talents to work with. It's for the performances that I recommend watching Brooklyn's Finest.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable.

"Saving Face" Review

For once, I'm smart enough to look at the trailer before before spending the time to synopsize a movie's plot, so watch this:



Joan Chen is a 48-year-old divorcee who comes up pregnant and is thrown out of her father's home in Flushing (which is apparently a big Chinese enclave in NYC), showing up on her surgeon daughter's doorstep. Meanwhile, super-cute lesbian Michelle Krusiec is being pursued by Lynn Chen (no relation AFAIK), a ballet dancer whose father is Michelle's boss at the hospital. (Much is made of the tight-knit community, but come on.) Culture clash hijinks ensue.

Saving Face is a pleasant-enough, slight, light sorta romantic comedy/culture clash movie with a distinct Asian flavor, down to being almost half in subtitled Chinese which makes the presence of Will Smith (yeah, THAT Will Smith) as a producer a surprise. What's odd and earns the film its R-rating is one rather explicit - and totally awesome! - scene of the young, nubile, beautiful lovers canoodling topless. It's not that explicit - we're not talking Bound or Chloe-grade hands-on action - but it comes from nowhere to transform an overall innocuous movie into THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER MADE!!! (If Prop 8 opponents were smart, they would've run a clip of this scene and asked, "Do you really want to prevent this?") Not that I'm complaining - believe me, I'M NOT COMPLAINING!!! - but it does come from left field. Beware watching with children.

Score: 6/10. Rent the DVD.

"Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" Review

The balance sheet going into - OK, sneaking into; I made this the back half of an impromptu double-feature - Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was this: I like Edgar Wright's work (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz); I hadn't read the graphic novels it was based on; I'm a regular visitor to Toronto and photographed a New Model Army show at Lee's Palace last year; I "get" the videogame and anime aesthetic that the trailer showcases; and I'm on record as thinking Michael Cera is an empty hole on the screen.

It's a testament to Wright's skill that he is able to make a visually dense pastiche that holds together and holds our interest despite two factors that would normally kill a movie dead: a leading man who is not plausible as a hero and a leading lady without any discernible qualities that make her worth fighting 7 Evil Exes over. Other than her changing hairstyles, Ramona Flowers is a self-involved snot. Newcomer Ellen Wong as Scott's platonic girlfriend Knives Chau is a burst of sunshine and energy and for a moment it appeared they'd put him with her, but the Hollywood formula that made Pretty In Pink faceplant at the finish line is at work here.

Perhaps the point was that Scott is projecting something interesting on her, but that doesn't work because Cera's such a mousy drip, just as he always is. While there are moments here where he breaks out of his default mode, he spends most of the movie playing the same character he always plays. The movie bombed at the box office primarily because he is poison. By all rights, his career should be pretty much over. Time to go to college, Mikey.

It doesn't help Cera that he is spanked by Kieran Culkin as his gay roommate in every scene. (Pun intended.) About halfway through I stopped trying to imagine how Jesse Eisenberg would've been better and started wishing Culkin was playing Scott. (I'm sure the producers felt the same way on Monday morning after its opening.) The evil exes are good, especially a fun Chris Evans and almost unrecognizable Brandon Routh as an ex who is a current with Scott's old girlfriend and is such a strict vegan that he has superpowers.

But the ultimate star of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is Edgar Wright who hopefully won't suffer too many career repercussions from having an empty hole in the middle of his lively frames. I'm looking forward to picking up the Blu-ray to soak up the details that whizzed by at the show. If you're looking for fizzy fun, you'll find it here; you just won't get much intellectual soul or emotional meaning.

Score: 8/10. Catch a matinee.

BONUS: Check out the official trailer (below) and then the absotively BRILLIANT mash-up that some masterfully put together (really below) using the same audio, but cutting in Matrix footage. Genius!

"The Other Guys" Review

The only real question that needs to be asked and answered about the latest collaboration between Will Farrell and writer-director Adam McKay (Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Stepbrothers) is whether it's funny or not? Answer: It is, sometimes hilariously so, but overall it's only slightly above average as the story interferes.

After supercops Samuel L. Jackson and The Rock are knocked out of commission, it's left to "the other guys" to step up and attempt to fill their shoes and the odd couple of Will Ferrell and Marky Mark try to get to the bottom of things while clashing in personality and methods. As with previous McKay-Ferrell collaborations there are plenty of oddball bits, many of which hit (e.g. a surreal argument involving lions and tunas killing each other; Ferrell's college activities and a running gag about the kind of women he attracts) and quite a few miss (e.g. another running gag in which their captain, Michael Keaton, keeps quoting TLC lyrics while claiming to not). Eva Mendes is hot and funny as Ferrell's wife, but Steve Coogan is wasted, not that he's a comic titan that was misused.

While I laughed a lot, as I was walking down the hall to sneak into Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, I found the experience evaporating from my memory with every step. It's no Anchorman, but it's worth a rental.

Score: 7/10. Rent the DVD.

P.S. There is a really weird bit of heavy-handed liberal politics during the end credits when people heading for the exit are lectured via animated charts about how much CEOs make compared to the janitors - who needs a blooper reel? - but since no one is paying attention or there for a Huffington Post screed, it's just McKay stroking himself. Wank, wank.

"Stolen" Review

Stolen (aka Stolen Lives) is one of those movies with so many recognizable names that you wonder why it never got released? Then you see it and it's not that it's really bad as much as not really good.

Jon Hamm stars as a police detective whose young son disappeared eight years before when he ducked into the bathroom at a diner during a fair. Understandably tormented, he's obsessed about the case and grown distant from his wife Rhona Mitra until one day the badly decomposed body of a young boy is discovered in a toy chest at a construction site. When it's immediately determined not to be Hamm's son, the mystery of who this kid was and how he got there takes over.

We flash back to 1958 where struggling family man Josh Lucas is begging the bank not to foreclose on his house while his wife is hanging herself at home, leaving the now-widower with three sons. A sister-in-law's family takes in two of the boys, but the third, a sweet, mentally-challenged boy is sent along with Lucas who struggles to keep his day laborer job while tending the kid. One night, while having a tryst with a smoking hot Morena Baccarin (Firefly, V), the boy is taken from his car and meets his inevitable fate as the boy in the box.

Director Anders Anderson uses a slightly disorienting transition technique to bounce us back and forth between time periods (e.g. Hamm is in a bar and we see a bar maid take a tray of drinks and as she walks toward the other end, we're back in 1958 with Lucas and company), but never manages to orient the audience to the drama of the situation. Since we know early that the little boy is doomed, we're just left to trudge to the point where we find out who put him in the box and how it connects to Hamm's story. With just flat melodrama to fill the felt-longer-than-it-was running time, it never pays off. If you're a fan of Mad Men, the most interesting thing is to see Hamm with his hair messier than it gets after one of his numerous illicit shags.

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.

"The Book of Eli" Review

Watch this:



Done? You've pretty much seen all there is to see in The Book of Eli. There's been an Apocalypse that has washed all the color out of the world and a lone badass walks the land with a Bible that a bad guy wants. Stuff gets blown up, people get shot, and we're wondering how Mila Kunis looks so fresh and babalicious in the dirty ruins. Some have praised the spirituality of the film, but I didn't really see much along those lines and the final "twist" wasn't. Overall, it's an OK movie, but nothing we haven't seen many, many times before.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

OK, with that out of the way, can we talk about how trope-bound this genre is? EVERY post-Apocalyptic movie seems chained to the same checklist of bullet points: biker gangs who have gas for their choppers when no one has water; the good guys have almost no ammo while the bad guys seem to have cleaned out Cabella's; cannibals; smoking ruins; no animals except for an isolated cat or dog; few, if any, children and only a handful of people who remember "the way it was before"; after decades, water is precious but the bars still have booze; the cause of The End is never really specified nor the time frame. After The Road and news of a new Mad Max-universe flick, Fury Road, I'm ready for a new vision for the end of the world. I just wonder who'll be bold enough to present one?

Attack of the Johnny One-Notes! (Commentary)

Johnny could only sing one note
And the note he sings was this
Ah!

Poor Johnny one-note
sang out with "gusto"
And just overloaded the place
Poor Johnny one-note
yelled willy nilly
Until he was blue in the face
For holding one note was his ace

"Johnny One-Note" from Babes in Arms by Richard Rogers and Lorez Hart.

There used to be a time when actors deathly feared being "typecast," meaning that as much as they may've wanted to or been able to play different kinds of parts, they were only offered variations of the same thing - i.e. Mafia tough, ditzy blonde, etc. I'm not talking about roles which they're most identified with like John Wayne as a cowboy, Humphrey Bogart as a guy in a trenchcoat or George Clooney as a very handsome man, but those who get stuck in the Danny Trejo rut (i.e. because he always plays ditzy bimbos, wait, what?) though they went to Julliard or studying with Lee Strasberg. Occasionally an actor pigeon-holed into one type is able to rattle the preconception cage and surprise us with an unexpected performance that they probably had to beg to play - think: any gorgeous actress who gets ugly, fat and/or beaten for a dramatic role (right, Farah, Charlize, and Nicole?) - but few are that lucky.

The past decade or so has seen a major uptick in actors so limited in their range, seemingly happily so, that they fall into a couple of categories: those who we know by name regardless of the character's name and those who we know only by their seminal character's identity and then proceed to call them that for the rest of their lives. How does this work? Quick: Who's co-starring with Will Ferrell in The Other Guys? If you said, "Marky Mark," you're living what I'm saying. How about this: who are Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Seann William Scott? Ring any bells? OK, who are the actors who played McLovin in Superbad and Stifler in American Pie? (For the answer, please look back three sentences.)

While there are still versatile actors like Will Smith and Angelina Jolie who play all sorts of roles equally well and have (and will have) long varied careers, where do Stifler, McLovin, Jonah Hill and Michael Cera go from the roles they've always played? Does anyone seriously see them playing anything but what they always have? Even Ethan Hawke took a plausible stab at Hamlet. Hell, JACK BLACK, has attempted to not be his tubby slacker self a little.

What prompts this long simmering commentary is the opening today of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World starring the non-entity called Michael Cera. After enduring his same meek mouse act in I can't say how many films, I described him this way on Facebook: "Michael Cera is an empty hole in the middle of the screen whose presence is only discernible by the surrounding environment. Just as a donut hole is defined by the donut around it, we only know Michael Cera exists because everything else is around him. I wouldn't be surprised if his scripts come with his character named 'Michael Cera.'" Mind you, it's not that I hate Cera - I have more opprobrium for humidity - but he is such a rangeless actor that as snazzy as it looks and liking Edgar Wright's other films (Shaun of the Dead; Hot Fuzz) and the concept (haven't read the books), I feel that the whole endeavor is going to be crippled by putting the drippy noneness of Cera at the center of everything.

This has been a problem for Cera in movies like Youth In Revolt*, Juno, and Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist as we've been expected to believe he was the dream guy of otherwise intelligent females. Juno was a whip-smart 14-year-old boy (note: obligatory Ellen Page crack) and we're supposed to believe that she wanted this void to fill hers? The most ridiculous conceit of N&NIPL is that Kat Denning's character had never orgasmed until the Mightly Hand of Cera gets on the case. (I turned to my girlfriend at that point and said, "So this is a science fiction film?") So wussy is Cera that the heavy ex-boyfriend of Norah was played by Jay Baruchel of She's Out of My League and Undeclared semi-obscurity. Perusing the reviews for Scott Pilgrim, even the most laudatory only assign faint praise to Cera's portrayal and it sounds a lot like those who didn't think Ben Affleck ruined Daredevil.

Final quiz item about Michael Cera: Name one of characters he's played in movies - not TV, cuz the fact he was named George Michael on Arrested Development is a gimme - that isn't in the movie's title, meaning "Scott Pilgrim" or "Nick" aren't acceptable answers. I'm waiting...

The next actor-known-only-by-his-name due a beating is Jonah Hill, aka "that fat annoying guy in all those movies." As my Get Him To The Greek review said, "Jonah Hill plays a variation of the same fat guy he plays in everything." Amirite? Since he's never had a title character like Cera, I honestly couldn't tell you what the name of his character has been in anything he's done. Even Judd Apatow didn't bother, naming Hill's part in Knocked Up "Jonah." (Probably to ensure he'd respond when spoken to when the cameras were rolling.) I hear he's good in this Cyrus movie, but as with Cera and Scott Pilgrim, I don't even pretend to believe he's going to be any different.

Now the other variant on this theme are the known-by-their-role actors like McLovin and Stif...whoops, see what I mean? Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Seann William Scott. Those guys. Remember? Jeez, we just talked about them a few paragraphs ago! OK, McLovin and Stifler it is. While McLovin showed a little growth as Red Mist in Kick Ass, his part in Role Models was so similar to his Superbad role, I'm wondering if it wasn't McLARPin in the script. He seems like a nice kid, but I hope he's investing his earnings with his broker, Urkel.

As for Stifler, well, playing the role in three American Pie movies and falling back on the persona in flicks like Bulletproof Stifler (ne Monk) and The Rock and Stifler in the Jungle (bka The Rundown) pretty much seals his fate, doesn't it? He did do a good job with a dual role as twins in Southland Tales, but the movie was an epic mess of effed-upness that no one saw. Most recently endured in the execrable Cop Out, where he played someone who may as well have been named "Shitfler," I'm not betting on any big transformations coming in his future.

Looking over this rogue's gallery, I'm struck by the lack of women on it. Is it because there are so few female stars with even archetypal characters? Bonnie Hunt usually shows up as the sardonic tart sister or friend; Anna Farris typically plays bubbly comic parts, but has done other stuff. Some might be tempted to suggest Summer Glau whose Hottie Terminator on the show of the same name (in my mine; my g/f called it "Sarah Chonic") was just a mechanized verson of River Tam from Firefly/Serenity but as similar as they were, along with her part on Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, I caught her on an episode of The Unit and she was so different it didn't seem like her.

While the fates of a quartet of one-note actors doesn't add up to a hill of beans in this crazy world (as Sam Marlowe would say, wait, what?), it's odd to see that instead of fleeing typecasting as actors past would've, they've basically embraced it for immediate reward vs. having a future. (When Michael Cera wants to get his Olivier on and perform Othello - HA! Yeah, right! Like cross-racial performances like that would ever happen these days! - who's going to do anything but stare at him, give him a noogie and tell him to get outta here?)

The problem for movie makers is that in casting these Johnny One-Notes, they're polarizing the potential audience pool because some people won't even entertain seeing films featuring them because they JUST KNOW that so-and-so will "suck and be no different than he is in everything else." Surf around and read the nerd-rage comments on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World - many who may've been interested because they've read the books or like the director are loudly announcing they're not interested because Cera's in it. As audiences reject his boy-boyish-man persona over and over, how long will it be until no one wants to hire him to sing his single note?


* I was going to link to my Youth In Revolt review, but to my surprise I never even logged when I saw it, much less wrote a review sometime in June. It wasn't that bad, but I can't believe I didn't notice it got left off. Says a lot, doesn't it?

=====

UPDATE: Two days after writing this, Scott Pilgrim's opening weekend B.O. was a meager $10.5 million, opening #5, and this HitFix piece mulls over why it flopped. Of particular note was this:

Hollywood and the media still thought Michael Cera was a star then, which brings us to the first problem:

In 2010, Michael Cera hurts you at the box office.
After "Superbad" and a supporting role in "Juno," many mistakenly believed the "Arrested Development" cast member was the next quirky, unexpected star who could relate to the millennial generation. Well, not so much. His follow ups either were puzzling, but quality misfires ("Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist," "Youth in Revolt") or outright bombs ("Year One"). That string of negative results basically stung Cera's likability with audiences. Unfortunately, he'd already been selected as the lead and shot "Pilgrim" before the biggest turd, "Year One," even hit theaters. Universal quickly realized the problem, but while they could hide his face on the poster, it was hard to take Scott Pilgrim himself out of the trailers or TV spots. And frankly, if you're Cera's agent, you better be hoping that "Arrested" movie actually gets off the ground or HBO comes calling about a TV series after this weekend.

You heard it here first.

"The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" Review

Here's all you need to know about The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: the original Swedish title is - I'm not kidding - Men Who Hate Women and the movie is 2-1/2 miserable, boring hours of that theme. I haven't read the book, but it'll be interesting to see how the slated David Fincher-helmed, Daniel Craig-starring remake handles the seething brutal misogyny of the source if it's anything like this Swedish film.

For all its running time, the plot is rather sparse: A disgraced journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, is hired by an uber-wealthy industrialist to solve the disappearance of his niece off the family's island - accessible only by one bridge that was blocked by an accident that day - 40 years previously. While he digs into the case, we see that he's being monitored by a mysterious goth hacker, Lisbeth Salander, who was hired to vet him before his retention and remains interested in his doings. When she gives him crucial hints based on documents he's scanned, she makes it easy for him to track her down and he enlists her in his quest to uncovered the sordid secrets surrounding the missing girl's fate.

While this all sounds capery and Lisbeth has been turned into a minor pop culture icon with Ellen Page leading the speculation for remake duties - a sign of how lazy and unimaginative Hollywood is in casting (not that Page isn't a good actress; she just looks like the Swede in the original) - what isn't obvious from the hype and marketing is what a punching bag Lisbeth is. I don't usually spoil on movies, but you should know that within the first 45 minutes you will be treated to her being beaten up by subway hooligans; forced to perform oral sex on her court-appointed guardian (we don't know why she's beholden to him until near the end of the movie) in order to get her own money; and then her brutal beating and rape by the sadistic creep when she tries to get more cash. Since we don't know who she is as a person - we barely do by then end - we're forced to watch her punched in the face, handcuffed to a headboard, tied spread-eagle with electrical cords, sodomized and then staggering home. (Don't forget to make some popcorn for the boisterous fun!!!) While this leads to a supposedly awesome turnaround on the guy - she secretly videotaped her two-hour ordeal - it's just ugly. Not Monica Bellucci getting raped in Irreversible ugly, but nasty and unnecessary enough.

What makes these early scenes bewildering is that while she is shown bedded down with another woman at home, she promptly hops on Mikael's junk for a ride, hopping off and going back to her room the moment they get off. Deceased author/journalist Stieg Larsson clearly viewed Mikael as his alter-ego, so that he thinks that a troubled lesbian wants nothing more than to take dictation - ifyouknowwhatImean - from Mr. Reporter Man suggests that he didn't have to dig to deep to find issues with women to project upon the characters. And if you think the origins of Lisbeth's back-covering tattoo are discussed, even in passing, forget it; as I said up front, the tattoo isn't in the original title. It's savvy, if cynical, marketing. Who would pay money to watch Men Who Hate Women (and Beat, Rape, and Murder Them)?

Score: 2/10. Wait for the remake in case they delouse the plot.

Check out the difference between the trailers and note what's not mentioned in either.

"Repo Men" Review

While it sounds like a sequel to the punk cult flick Repo Man, the Jude Law and Forest Whittaker-starring Repo Men actually has more in common with the similarly-titled and themed Repo! The Genetic Opera except that it's not a musical and it's not very good.

In a not-so-distant future that looks like Blade Runner, replacement body parts, artiforgs (artificial organs, get it?), for ailments are available for hefty price - a pancreas is over $600,000 - and if you're unable to make the easy payments, after three months Jude and Forest show up to reclaim your parts...by tasing you and hacking them out of your soon-to-be-dead-cuz-it's-not-as-if-they're-stitching-you-back-up-and-you-kinda-needed-that-thing-they-just-took-in-the-first-place body.

Jude's a top repo man for The Union, the Evil Corporation that supplies the artiforgs, but after a mishap on a job, he wakes up to find he is now a customer with a new robo-heart. Unfortunately, his change of heart (har-har!) leads him to be unable to perform his duties as he suddenly realizes that the people he's been hacking open with great alacrity have families and it makes him sad. It also makes him fall behind on his payments and that eventually makes him - I know; who saw this coming? - a fugitive from the company and his best friend who's sent to reap-o him.

While Repo Men starts off well with a good look and energy, it rapidly goes off the rails due to seriously lumpy pacing and story problems. His marriage is shown as being pretty lousy to start, so when it goes south, it's not big deal and makes the wife's return toward the end a head-scratcher. The economics of the artiforg business don't make much sense and despite a blithe blow-off about how customers shouldn't pay no nevermind to the rumors in the media about what happens to people who fall behind in payments, that there are literal piles of bodies accumulating so why isn't some eager reporter on the case?

For that matter, any social commentary that could've been made about the health care system and whether it's moral to make a buck of the dying - regardless of how you feel about the subject - is bypassed in favor of incoherent action that rapidly becomes obviously borrowed from other movies like Minority Report. Speaking of ripped-off, there is a fight scene so obviously nicked from Old Boy that it's all the more outrageous because they totally botched the homage/gank. If you're going to steal, steal properly, people!

Despite Jude Law's new drabbed-down look, there are too many potentially interesting themes that go unexplored and an overall lack of logic and focus that make Repo Men a movie best left unpurchased in the first place.

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

"Cop Out" Review

This movie sucked. The end.

Score: 1/10. Skip it.

OK, why did it suck? Because it's unfunny, has a sloppy story, it's unfunny, Tracy Morgan is unfunny, it's tedious, boring, and unfunny. Oh yeah, it's not funny, either. Kevin Smith - directing from someone else's script for the first time, though you can tell he stuffed some of his childish humor in - must've thought he was making a homage to Eighties cop-buddy flicks like Beverly Hills Cop, but as Cop Out painfully proves, Morgan ain't no Eddie Murphy and having Harold Faltermeyer do the score doesn't put it in the same league. I laughed a few times at total throwaway gags, but so what? I'm a fan of Kevin Smith, but if I meet him, I'm going to punch him in the junk and demand my two hours back for wasting my time.

July 2010 Review Roundup

Finishing off some TV seasons dented the at-home movie viewing this month, but we hit the theaters every weekend this month, something we used to do all the time, but haven't in ages. As a result, the theatrical/home numbers are seriously upside-down.

July 3 - The Road (5/10)
July 4 - Toy Story 3D (7/10)
July 5 - Date Night (7/10)
July 11 - Predators (8/10)
July 18 - Inception (8.5/10)
July 25 - She's Out of My League (5/10)
July 26 - Salt (9/10)
July 27 - Step Up 3D (6/10)

Month's Movies Watched: 8
Previously Unseen: 8
Theatrical: 6
Home: 2
=====
Year-To-Date: 59
YTD First-Timers: 54
YTD Theatrical: 19
YTD Home: 40

"Step Up 3D" Review

I went into the preview screening for Step Up 3D - the latest in the needless Step Up series of dance flicks with this review's lede already drafted: "Step up to a new dimension of suckitude." After my experience with its predecessor, Step Up 2 The Streets, and seeing how the 3D cow was being milked to death to the point it was worth avoiding most of these movies, I had less than zero interest in hanging wit da dancin' wiggaz for another go around. However, when the opportunity to catch a free screening came along, well, free's free and...

It was surprisingly....ummmm.....hmmmm. See, good" isn't the best word for it because the story - air quotes - is so predictable that it's hard to believe it took TWO writers (compared to five choreographers) to type it up, but the dance numbers are presented in a manner that if you look at it as a extended dance routine mix video, it's respectable and frequently impressive.

The story is that Moose, the nerdy kid from last movie, is off to college to study engineering and he gets into a dance battle in the park and meets Luke who has a loft full of dancers and they're gonna win $100,000 in a contest otherwise they'll lose the loft and club and there's a girl, but she's got a secret and there will be a betrayal you'll see coming two reels earlier and all is lost and BIG DANCE CONTEST FINALE and they live happily ever after. [jazz hands] Spoiler alert!

Since people watch dance films for the characters and dialog the way people watch porn to learn of the existential angst of pizza delivery boys, let's cut to the chase and talk about the dancing. Due to the constraints of properly presenting 3D in an intelligible fashion (i.e. not like how Clash of the Titans did it), director Jon Chu has to refrain from hyper edits and close-ups and let routines pass before the camera at a distance that allows the effect to not be broken by the edges of the screen. He doesn't turn it into Singing in the Rain by any means - though more on that theme in a moment - but unlike the last film, the calmer style, while still vibrant, works with the intended 3D effect, not against it.

And hoo boy, does the 3D work! I don't know for sure why the effect was so well-presented - I think it worked better here than even in Avatar! - and if my sitting in the back of the theater gave a different perspective, but the lighting and frame composition of the whole movie is stunning. The dance battle numbers are shot with a wide-angle lens that gives an extremely exaggerated sense of depth - the stage feels a football field deep - and the frequent instances of people sticking their heads and hands out at the viewer really sell the effect. This is directly attributable to the film not being slap-dash post-processed into fake, ViewMaster-style, 3D from 2D production footage by greedy studios to score quick sucker bucks (and already starting to backfire in reduced ticket sales), but being shot with the Pace/Cameron Fusion Camera System; the same setup that shot Thundersmurfs of Pandora. I'd occasionally close an eye to see how it looked in 2D and I really missed the depth, something that Toy Story 3D didn't provide as much of.

What really won me over to my surprise was a sweet number about 2/3rds of the way through between Moose and his best friend, a girl he doesn't realize pines for him, set to Fred Astaire's "I Won't Dance" which is presented in one long shot like an old-fashioned musical. They toss in a few hip-hop beats and moves, but for the most part it wouldn't look out of place in one of those classic MGM musicals. Combined with an interesting tango before this, it's nice to see something other than samey booty-popping to the latest Flo Rida tune. It was probably a big risk for them to make the intended audience sit thru, but I liked it.

I'm in a quandary as to how to wrap this up because Step Up 3D is at its empty-headed core a trifle of a movie with adequate-to-laughably-bad acting, by-the-numbers storytelling, and not much reality between the two of them. BUT, the 3D makes a big difference and most of the dance scenes are fun. While I can't recommend the movie as a movie, it really should be seen as a spectacle. Yeah, that's contradictory and unlike the audience last night would require spending money that you don't really want to even in a good economy. Unfortunately, video and dollar show versions won't deliver the experience. It's a conundrum alright.

Score: 6/10. If you like these kinds of movies, see a matinee in 3D; if you don't, skip it because watching it on cable isn't really the same.

You can see the depth of field in the trailer here.

"Salt" Review

Is there another actress that combines Angelina Jolie's unreal beauty, genuine acting chops, AND can plausibly kick as much ass - and get her ass kicked - like she does? While there are many who can fill in two of the three boxes, I can't think of anyone who turns the hat trick like AJ.*** Finally back on screen for the first time in 18 months since her Oscar-nominated turn in Changeling, she's got a gun back in her hands, kicking muy booty as Salt.

As the trailers and ads tell you, she's a deep cover CIA agent whom a random Russian walks in and names as a Russian spy. Immediately suspected by counter-intelligence agent Chiwetel Ejiofor, especially when she takes off on the run, the chase is on to find out what's behind this accusation and the plot to kill the Russian President. What isn't hinted at in the trailers and I hate to even risk spoiling is what happens and who the real good and bad guys may or may not be. Suffice to say it gets really twisty and turny as director Phillip Noyce (who directed Jolie in 1999's The Bone Collector) keeps the proceedings moving at a rapid pace so that you won't have time to ponder the big plot "huh?" points until you're in the car going home.

By the time you're attuned to sniffing red herrings, you'll probably see the final twists coming, but when it's Angelina Jolie kicking ass and not bothering to get names, who cares? (I have to say that even under winter coats, she's still clearly too damn thin like she was in Wanted. Eat something, Angie!!! Get back to your Mr. & Mrs. Smith body, PLEASE!!!) With an ending clearly intended to set up a sequel - AJ as a female Bourne? Yes, please! - I can say that I certainly wouldn't mind having some more Salt in my diet.*

Score: 9/10. Catch a matinee.

False Advertising Alert: The shot toward the end of her humping someone in her underwear isn't in the movie. DAMMIT!!!



* Official Entry for the Gene Shalit Memorial** Horrible Puns in Reviews Contest.
** He's not dead; it just sounds better as a contest name.
*** A few months later, while watching some Brandon Flowers (singer from The Killers) video, I realized that Charlize Theron qualifies.

"She's Out of My League" Review

Stop me if you've seen this one before: A nerdy guy with esteem issues somehow attracts the affections of a super-hot babe, to the disbelief of his slacker pals and her bohunk ex-boyfriend and stodgy parents and her friends. While he's a decent bloke, even he can't believe his good fortune and finds a way to screw everything up, thus forcing everyone to work together to get these crazy kids back together. (Spoiler alert!)

Jay Baruchel (Undeclared, Tropic Thunder) plays the nebbish and Alice Eve (nothing I've seen though she's set to be Emma Frost in the next X-Men movie) plays the supposed hottie - she's like a more pneumatic Reese Witherspoon and I didn't think she was that hot - he's suddenly with and while they're an appealing couple, the rote opposites attract formula machinery really drags what in spots is an inspired bit of lunacy with absolutely hysterical throwaway lines and bits. Written by the duo who penned the somewhat unappreciated Hot Tub Time Machine and the really overlooked Sex Drive, I suspect studio interference for pasteurizing the final product.

While the overall product is only OK, I recommend watching She's Out of My League because when it drops the comic bombs on target, it's a scream. There are several conversation scenes which just go nuts (wait until he hear about and see Stainer's band) and points must be given for pushing the envelope of bad taste in a couple of spots including a ridiculous scenario involving junk shaving that could've been horrific, but ends up a hoot. Krysten Ritter, who plays the snarky friend/business partner of Alice, really caught my eye and I'm going to check her out further.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

"Inception" Review

In the middle of a dull summer where most everything seems to be a sequel or an adaptation of a videogame or comic book (or combination of all of the above), how does an ambitious original movie like Inception get made for a reported $200 million budget? Easy; writer-director Christopher Nolan's last movie was The Dark Knight and it made a metric ton of money and in exchange for securing his services for the hat trick of Batman films (that began with Batman Begins, or as I call it, Batdude Starts) Warner Bros. gave him a check to follow his bliss. Whereas Peter Jackson squandered his post-Lord of the Rings indulgence with the bloated King Kong remake (in which he thought what was missing from the original was Naomi Watts poor show biz fortunes and the reading list of sailors), Nolan serves up a complex, detailed creation that is very easy to admire, but somewhat hard to love.

Since the ads are very oblique as to what it's actually about, here's a spoiler-free thumbnail: Thanks to a device that combines the tech of Strange Days and The Matrix people are able to share dreams. Leonardo Di Caprio has mastered this tech to become a highly-paid corporate espionage agent, breaking into the minds of client's competitors and stealing their secrets. Unable to return home to his family due to slowly-revealed reasons, he takes the proverbial One Last Big Score job for an exec who doesn't want an secret stolen, but an idea planted (the titular "inception") in the mind of a competitor. In return, all of Leo's problems are promised to go away. What could go wrong? Well, plenty.

As the caper piles dreamstate upon dreamstate - by the end we're coping with FIVE levels of existence (note that I didn't say reality) - Nolan relentlessly drives the story along to the point that it becomes too much. If you thought the last half-hour of The Dark Knight (i.e. the ferry boat scene) was more than was needed, then you'll feel the same by the time the last fifth of Inception unspools. We only need our minds blown so much before it starts making our heads hurt and at the end, the logic that glued together the previous 80% doesn't seem to be applying. At no time does it get very confusing - efficient editing reminds us as to what's happening on all the playing fields - but the last step is a bit of a doozy.

I've found Leo's recent work to be a bit "screw-faced" and mannered - thinking Shutter Island and The Departed - but he's very good here as a man who's made his own dream Heaven into an endless Hell. The rest of the cast is solid and it's nice to see Ellen Page playing an actual young woman in what's otherwise a total sausage fest. And while she doesn't look like this in the movie...



















...Marion Cotillard is real purdy as Leo's wife. There's something simply lovely about her.

If there's a real impediment to latching on fully emotionally with Inception it's because there is so much plot to cover we're thrown in fast and never given much respite to reflect on what's happening and what it means. Other than new girl/audience-surrogate Page to show us the ropes and rules of the dreamcatching game, there is little room for levity and I can recall only one out-loud laugh in nearly 2-1/2 hours; not that it's a comedy or needs to be played lightly, but I can think of a few spots where a bon mot calling out the absurdity of what's happening would've been appropriate. The special effects are seamless and it's notable that no matter how crazy the dream situations get, the dream worlds never look anything less than naturalistic and real. No Van Gogh skies or Dali landscapes here; just freight trains running down streets and Paris folding upon itself.

It seems mean to fault a film for being too ambitious, but it's not fair to give bonus points for effort when it doesn't completely pay off. As brilliant as 85% of The Dark Knight was, the last half-hour was too much and by the time we hit the "basement" of Inception, I was thinking that I was about to be offered a wafer-thin mint at any time now. I'll be buying the Blu-ray for sure and it'll be fun to see how the Internet slices and dices their theories about what it all meant, but don't be too caught up on the nerd hosannas. Inception is an very, very good film stuffed with interesting moving parts. It just doesn't run as smoothly as it could.

Score: 8.5/10. Catch a matinee.

UPDATE: Some interesting theories about What It All Means can be found here and here and here. Don't read them until AFTER you see the movie!

"Predators" Review

Despite three other movies with "predator" in their titles, it's taken 23 years for a proper sequel to the 1987 Ahnuld classic Predator to finally drag itself out of the jungle and the gap is to its benefit because if the Robert Rodriguez-produced and Nimrod Antel-directed Predators (with an "S" on the end, you see?) had come out in 1990 like the mediocre (OK, lousy) official next-number-increment Predator 2 had, it would've been ripped for hewing too closely to the original's story beats and set pieces.

It starts off with a nice grabber opening as the first thing we see is a long shot of a man falling from the sky. When we get close, we see it's Adrien Brody. Oh, he's unconscious, too. He wakes up and realizes he's falling which induces a panicked reaction. (Duh.) However, his parachute is rigged to only open when the mechanism wants to and he barely decelerates enough to survive the landing in the jungle and as he lies there we get the title card like the end of a Lost episode.

Attention grabbed, we're rapidly introduced to seven other characters, all badasses from around the world (except for a doctor), who grudgingly trust each other if only because they're all confused as to how they showed up there after the last thing they remember, a white light. They realize when they see the sky with other planets and moons in it that there aren't in Topeka anymore and that they're being hunted. Dun dun DUUHHNNNNN!!! Hijinx ensue.

While you'll be able to figure out who the likely survivors are within 10 minutes, Antel does a good job keeping the tension on as their encounters with growing danger result in dwindling numbers. There are a couple of cool plot twists, but for the most part Predators reruns the formula of its father, but it seems fresh because the intervening films - the aforementioned Predator 2 and the Alien vs. Predator crapfests - wandered so far afield from the series' roots. It succeeds by not sucking with style and energy.

Brody is an actually believable hard-ass badass and it'll be interesting to see how they use him in the sequel. Oh, did I spoil that he doesn't get his spine ripped out in this movie? Sorry. (Like you really thought he'd get croaked.) The other's are as good as they need to be, but special mention has to be made of Lawrence Fishburne's loony tunes part as a guy who...well, you'll see. I wasn't crazy about the design of the Predators' helmets and weapons, but they aren't dealbreakers.

Overall, Predators, delivers the goods better than expected, if you're hunting for this sort of game.

Score: 8/10. Catch a matinee.

"Date Night" Review

Gentle and not particularly surprising, Date Night delivers the expected goods from a light comedy. While that may sound like damning with faint praise, it's actually a good sign that if you go in with appropriate expectations, you'll be satisfied.

Steve Carell and Tina Fey are a New Jersey accountant and real estate agent with two kids and a marriage that's fallen into a bit of a rut. Concerned when a couple they know announce they're getting divorced, Carell decides to break them out of their "date night" routine of salmon and potato skins by going into Manhattan to a chi-chi restaurant called Claw that is so upscale, will.i.am ("You know. From Fergie," Fey says) eats there and the snooty maitre d's answer the phones, "Hello, Claw. You're welcome."

Naively thinking they could get a table on a Friday night at 7:30 in Manhattan without a reservation, it appears that they'll have to leave until he presents themselves as the couple for a table that appear to be no-shows. A pair of goons, thinking they're the absent couple, haul them out into the alley and threaten to kill them unless they give back a USB key drive with blackmail material. Unwilling to believe their story, Carell decides to bluff them by pretending to know what they're looking for. Hijinx across the city ensue.

Movies like this with ludicrous premises live and die on the execution and what keeps Date Night afloat is the great comic timing and chemistry of Carell and Fey. They're likable and you root for them while they fumble around town trying to outsmart their pursuers. Great cameos from Marky Mark, Kristin Wiig, Mark Ruffalo, James Franco and Mila Kunis pop up and when things slow down to talk about their relationship, it doesn't grind to a halt, thanks to the tight 90 minute run time.

What's best is the crazy phrases that these clearly too-square-to-be-hip pair spout off with and as the end credits bloopers/alternative takes clips show, the two of them improvised their butts off with Fey capping her reel with a line that absolutely kills Carell. (Tina, if you're reading this, me want to go to there.)

While not one for the Comedy Hall of Fame, Date Night is a worthy rental and a must viewing for fans of the stars.

Score: 7/10. Rent the DVD or catch at a dollar show.

"Toy Story 3D" Review

Pixar is the new Disney - the studio name that almost guarantees quality movies. Their films are beloved and are huge money-makers and as a result, they tend to be overpraised by critics and too-stridently defended by fans; a lesson I learned the hard way when I wasn't sufficiently circumspect in my review for Cars, the only truly bad film to come out of the House That Luxo Jr. Built. (Seriously, I could've burned an American flag at Arlington on Memorial Day and gotten less grief than that review brought.) So, it's no surprise to see the third installment of the franchise that launched Pixar into features, Toy Story 3D, rocking a 99% Fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes, but what was surprising was how disappointing the film actually is. It's not a failure, but coming after what I consider the best Pixar film of all, Toy Story 2, it was a big letdown.

The story is slight: Andy has grown up and is going to college - a good move since it almost tracks in real time with the 11 years that have passed since the last film - and through misadventure, the toys have ended up at a day care center. While they are at first happy to finally be played with again, it quickly turns into a nightmare as the kids thrash them around and they learn that the seemingly friendly Lots-of-Hugs bear that rules the center is a nasty bit of work. The toys' plan to escape and get back to Andy, even if it means getting stored in the attic, occupies the bulk of the film.

While the story is simple, the plotting is quite complex with plans and maneuvers and as a result, there's very little time to just hang out and enjoy the cast of characters. Everything feels forced and rushed because they've got to move the details along. The new toys introduced aren't given much time beyond Lotso and the choice to depict the Ken doll as a self-absorbed metrosexual (bordering on totally queer) is just laziness. What would've been unique would've been for Ken to be a Jack Bauer-grade badass who is slapping G.I Joe around and complaining that being forced to live in a Dream House with a bunch of poofster disco clothes in the wardrobe insulting to his machismo. That would've been cool; Pixar took the easy way out. Lame.

The last really great Pixar movie was 2004's The Incredibles and everything they've made since - Cars, Ratatouille, WALL-E, and Up - have had serious flaws in their tone control with some rather heavy emotional material and downright cruelty sneaking in. There has always been threat and menace in Disney and Pixar cartoons, but it's getting out of hand. When the toys - characters we've loved for 15 years - hold hands in preparing for what seems to be certain destruction in an inferno, even though we *know* that they aren't going to die, it's a depressing and fatalistic image that is needlessly mean since we know they'll manage to escape. Just as with the scene in Up when Kevin is trapped in the net, it's too specific, too horrifying, too real for the audience. This isn't Woody getting packed off to Japan to live in a collection.

There are also too many recycled elements like the trash compactors from WALL-E and the conveyor belt chases from Toy Story 2. But if there is one very special thing Toy Story 3D does well it's to show the importance of imagination and playing with REAL toys. Grabbing a doll and creating situations for them is something no video game can deliver and the film's opening sequence and the coda when Andy passes his friends on to another to enjoy really provide a subtle nudge that parents would do better for their kids to buy them the tie-in toys and not the official video game. It's too bad the rest of the movie didn't strive for that sort of depth.

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

The 3D effects are minuscule and not worth the extra money over 2D. The depth of image on the Blu-rays is fine and you aren't missing a thing in 2D.

"The Road" Review

To call The Road the "Feel Bad Movie of the Year" is easy; to understand why they bothered to make a feature film out of Cormac McCarthy's Oprah Book Club pick (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) novel is harder to figure. Even with the built-in fan base for this well-regarded best-seller, expecting people to shell out the cash for tickets, snacks, babysitters, whatever, to watch Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee starving to death in a post-Apocalyptic wasteland devoid of life and hope is a tall request. (Even The Cure makes happy music now, you know?)

Some unnamed cataclysm was decimated the world, killing all the animals and plants, and other than the Man and Boy (as they were called in the book, which I've listened to about half of the audio version), the only other survivors seem to be predatory road gangs and cannibalistic clans. The two trudge along, stumbling into misfortune after misfortune in the gray wastes and by the end I was desperately in need of watching Chicago or something lighter like Wall-E.

The problem with most post-Apocalyptic movies is that beyond the protagonists there never seem to be any other types than monsters and victims and The Road is no exception. At one point, they stumble over another cannibal camp and witness a rather clean looking mother and child getting hunted down. Assuming it's been 8-10 years since Armageddon, how did those two manage to survive all this time only to get trapped so foolishly? Another encounter in which our pair are ambushed ends abruptly when you'd think there'd at least be a conversation along the lines of, "Why the hell are you shooting at us?!?"

Some environmental wackos have glommed onto The Road as a cautionary parable about ecological destruction but that's just stupid like they are. The speculative consensus is that the disaster is either a comet/asteroid strike or super-volcano eruption, how is this mankind's fault to prevent? As a story of the human spirit enduring in the face of certain doom, it works somewhat but I think that despite looking good (in a terrible manner) and being well-acted, McCarthy's spare prose just doesn't work when literally presented on the screen with the specificity films portray.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.