"The Amazing Spider-Man" Review

Throughout my viewing of The Amazing Spider-Man I had this thought in mind: "Didn't we just have this movie about a decade ago?" Sure, we have a new Peter Parker in the form of Andrew Garfield; mopey Mary Jane is out and Emma Stone is in as Gwen Stacy; there is some backstory involving Peter's parents; and they've tweaked some of the specific details as to how Peter becomes spider-powered, how he discovers his powers and how it effects people, but underneath it all, it's pretty much the same movie we saw with Tobey Maguire as Spidey in 2002, right down to the same accidental villain conceit in which a generally decent guy is turned evil by scientific misadventure.

Garfield is a marked improvement over Maguire, able to express the myriad of teen angst and issues he's going through without seeming like a little emo bitch about it. Stone is adorable and spunky, though not as much fun to see soaking wet in the rain, if you know what I mean. (Click here in case you don't. Hiyo!) The supporting performances from Martin Sheen and Sally Field as Uncle Ben (of rice fame, psyche!) and Aunt May are scene-stealers as well as Denis Leary's Capt. Stacy. I didn't care for Rhys Ifans as Dr. Curt Connors/Lizard, but that's because he's not really fleshed out, if you pardon the pun. 

I'd skip seeing it in 3D because the action is mostly at night, very fast moving, and too close to get a good sense of the geography. Director Marc Webb, who directed my fave film of that year with (500) Days of Summer, does OK with the action, but is better with the quiet character scenes. Those are also helped because they're the only fresh notes in the familiar tune of the overall story, many of the story beats are totally lifted from the prior films. Can't we just assume that audiences know the back story of the character and move on with new tales?

Score: 5/10. See it at the dollar show.



While I was blah on it, my girlfriend really liked it, especially odd because Spider-Man 2 had sort of put her off of comic book movies. She was so-so on The Avengers (yeah, sad isn't it?) and I had to drag her to see X-Men: First Class, which she grudgingly admitted liking. She enjoyed the story and the new details, probably because it wasn't so familiar to her. So, ladies, have at it.

At last year's San Diego Comic-Con, this neat moment happened. It's a total setup, but it was a great PR stunt and shows how Garfield was legitimately enthused about playing the part.

"Rock of Ages" Review

Let's get the Big Questions out of the way up front: Yes, Tom Cruise sings well and is a plausible rock star onstage in Rock of Ages. However, his character is the largest problem with this adaptation of the Broadway show.

I saw the touring stage show and had a blast with it, but the trailers for the film left me meh. Director Adam Shankman did the film of Hairspray and I really liked that, but from the plot changes (out: German developer; in: hot rock-hating Catherine Zeta-Jones) to the overall vibe, something didn't click for me and for most of the movie, I was feeling let down. There were cool moments and when the dance numbers ape the look and feel of Chicago it works well, but something was dragging me down.

In post-show discussion with my girlfriend, we figured it out: It's Stacee Jaxx, the Cruise role which has been significantly enlarged over the stage show. While it's understandable to give the Big Star (not to be confused with Alex Chilton's band) more to do, what harms the movie is the approach they took. In the stage show, Stacee is a cartoon, having had an "incident with a baby llama" in his dark past, a gag which pays off at the end. For the film, though, they decided to make him into a character and not a caricature and it results in the pace and energy screeching to a halt whenever the spotlight is on him.

Cruise is fully committed to the performance and they know how silly things are when they have him singing "I Want To Know What Love Is" to Malin Ackerman's panty-clad butt in one shot, but the collective decision to play him as a slow-moving, Scotched-out, waste case who is seeking deeper meaning saps momentum. Cruise is a team-player and it would've been hella funnier if they'd gone waaaaay over the top. They have a lot of funny stuff with his baboon sidekick, Hey Man, so it's too bad they just didn't go crazy with Stacee, making him like the Aldous Snow character Russell Brand played in Get Him To The Greek.

Speaking of which, Brand is a standout as Alec Baldwin's aide-de-camp at the Bourbon Room and they get one of the best numbers together. The other stars (look 'em up; don't feel like typing) are uniformly good as well, with Mary J. Blige providing the sole genuine vocal firepower as the strip club owner who takes Sherrie in.

It's too bad they goofed with Stacee Jaxx and dampened the fun Rock of Ages could've delivered. If you get a chance to catch the stage show, check it out; it's a hoot. (Read the linked review above.)

Score: 5/10. Rent it.

"Jeff, Who Lives at Home" Review

Whimsy can be hard to pull off. The awesome dearly departed TV series Pushing Daisies nailed it; mumblecore* movie Jeff, Who Lives At Home doesn't do as well due to its self-conscious oddness and mistaken belief that simplicity is profundity.

Jason Segal (stop me if you've heard this one before) plays a man-child stoner, Jeff, who, um, you know, it's in the title, and sits around all day smoking dope and watching TV. (Segal, really? No! Yes!) When a wrong number rings up looking for a Kevin, he sets off on an errand for his mother and begins following all the signs related to "Kevin" which leads him to misadventures and a little magical serendipity. Also occupying this world is his d-bag, a-hole brother (Ed Helms) who doesn't seem to understand why his wife (Judy Greer) is upset that he bought a Porsche while they live in a crappy apartment; and their mother (Susan Sarandon) who is being flirted with via IM by a secret admirer at her office.

Writers-directors Mark and Jay Duplass are trying to make a low-key meditation on fate and the interconnectedness of everyone and everything, but it doesn't work because everyone acts stupidly, only to suddenly make personal breakthroughs as the plot schedule dictates. Segal does better-than-needed work here making Jeff into something of a rootable character, but the sense of ennui pervades everything. When all the plot lines come together at the end, it's too pat.

I read an interview with Mark Duplass (who's also a very busy actor) in which he states that he doesn't mind sloppy camera work, zooming in to catch the action. He's kidding himself. This movie had the most needless calling-attention-to-itself camera shenanigans since Roger Dodger, snap-zooming over and over for no reason. This isn't the documentary style of The Office where it makes sense; this is just jumping around to have something visual happening. Knock it off, kids.

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.



* In the same interview, Duplass says that he hates being lumped in with the "mumblecore" label because it makes it sound like something people won't want to watch. Um, yeah?

"Prometheus 3D" Review

The build-up and anticipation for Ridley Scott's return to sci-fi after a 30-year hiatus - despite making the original Alien and Blade Runner he's never touched the genre since the latter - probably ensured that no one would be totally satisfied. From the coy is-it-a-prequel-to-Alien-or-not posturing, to a clever viral web video campaign, followed by trailers that revealed too much (the international trailer below really gives the whole thing away), it would've been hard to live up to the hype and, unfortunately, Prometheus didn't. What makes it more maddening is the number of incredibly stupid choices the script makes.

While I was watching the movie, I was on board with the ride. It looks great and because it was natively shot (and edited) in 3D, it's a rare case that it's worth spending extra to see it. However, as soon as it ended, the "Hey, wait a second!" questions started to pile up and my score started to slide. After reading some of the nerd rage, it fell another notch. It's a testament to Scott's visual craftsmanship that it took two hours to really notice how freaking stupid it was overall, though I did have some instant quibbles at how it seemed to violate its own rules. (Semi-spoiler example: We're told how toxic the atmosphere is and we see how far the ship is from the alien pyramid, but a character who was lost in the pyramid AND had his helmet melted is somehow able to walk back to the ship. Huh?!?)

The potential for something provocative and intellectual is there; who wouldn't want to know where we came from if it was from the stars? The problem is that the logical failings of the script start gnawing away at you from the jump. Would a trillion-dollar scientific mission really wait until it reached its destination after a two-year journey to then inform the crew why they're there? Would so many of the red shirt crewmen be so undisciplined as to basically ensure their doom? The original Alien worked because they were basically interstellar truckers who got detoured into a situation they couldn't understand. Shouldn't everyone have been briefed and acted intelligently? These are script-level issues and while the Blu-ray cut is supposed to restore 20 minutes, I doubt that all the blanks will be filled in and if they are, why wasn't that version put in theaters.

It's really too bad the script is a let down because some of the performances are excellent, starting with Michael Fassbender as the android David. We're automatically suspicious of him, but is he evil or merely amorally inquisitive? Charlize Theron is icy hot and Idris Elba as the ship's captain makes the most of his thin writing. However, the actual lead, Noomi Rapace (the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) is blah. She's supposed to be a woman of faith and much is made of that tension against the science, but she never really becomes as three-dimensional as a character as the visuals are. (See what I did there?) The red shirts are so nondescript that they don't even rise to the level of generic labels, like, well, I can't even make something up.

It's getting more and more annoying how so many movies are structured to fail in the most basic phase: the writing. When you add in all the pre-game hype about how Scott and company were going to tackle weighty themes, it makes the letdown about the illogical behavior and unanswered questions all the more dissatisfying. Say what you will about the endless philosophical nattering of The Matrix sequels; at least the Wachowski Bros attempted to get the blather up on screen along with the empty visual FX wankery. Prometheus (named after the god who stole fire and gave it to man) never catches fire and leaves us stranded in a barren, but beautiful, universe.

Score: 6/10. Catch a matinee and see it in 3D.

Spoilerific!


If you've seen it, check out this video by the notorious Mr. Plinkett that really reams the plot holes:

"The Dictator" Review

After the faux documentaries of Borat and Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen turns to a scripted comedy with the hilariously raunchy The Dictator. Starring as Admiral General Aladeen, a Khadafy-Saddam hybrid, Cohen tells the tale of the titular dictator's misadventures when he comes to New York City and is betrayed, waylaid, shaved, and starts hanging up with hippie chick Anna Faris, who has a lock on these types of roles.

There's not really much of a plot, but more a series of bits and episodes meaning if something doesn't deliver the laughs, another bit will be along shortly that should work. It's ragingly offensive, politically incorrect, has a couple of surprising good-sport cameos from Big Stars, and is generally funny as hell. Sure, it punks out on how ruthless a dictator he really is, but wouldn't you rather see despotic tyrants you can laugh at like the way Kim Jong-Il was lampooned in Team America: World Police? 

Cohen is the new Peter Sellers and The Dictator made me laugh a lot. What more do you want from a comedy.

Score: 8/10. Rent it.

This trailer barely hints at how funny the movie is. Perhaps too much of the good stuff was too dirty?

"The Darkest Hour" Review

A pair of idiotic dot-com wannabe tycoon twits travel to Moscow, get their idea stolen, roll over and play dead at the offense, go to the club and then get caught in an alien invasion in the maddening sci-fi thriller The Darkest Hour. Seriously, right off the bat the movie digs itself into a hole by having annoying jerks as protagonists and then saddling them with a pair of girls (will they become love interests at the end of the world?) and the guy who ripped them off and we're supposed to root for their survival.

It's odd that after the crappy first impression, the survivors actually start showing some signs of intelligence, not that it doesn't flee them at inconvenient moments in order to cause another one's demise. The way they suss out the limitations of the aliens power and figure out how to detect the invisible invaders presence is clever, but it's frustrating to see the novel concept with its cool disintegration effect sitting adjacent to some of the stupidest stupid you could not want to see in a movie.

As happens too often, The Darkest Hour lives and dies by the smarts of its script and as unique as its idea is, it's just too laden with dumbness to succeed overall. Too bad.

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.

"Clueless" Review

I haven't seen Clueless all the way through since it was in theaters in 1995. I don't even recall catching chunks on cable or anything, so there was plenty I didn't recall, though nothing I've been missing. It's still cute, but has aged terribly due to waaaaaay too many cultural references of that time. (Marky Mark, really? Who calls him that now? Besides everyone, I mean.)

I've never cared for Alicia Silverstone (the Non-Stick Bimbo, as I used to say) and the way she landed a two-picture, $10 million deal as if she was the reason this movie was a hit bothered me. Without Amy Heckerling's script and direction (she also directed Fast Times at Ridgemont High and created the Look Who's Talking series), would she have become a brief star and had her chubby bod squeezed into the Batgirl suit for the series-killing Batman & Robin? I think not. (OK, the weight shot was a little cheap. She's just round in the face like Jennifer Lawrence and one scene had her in a skirt so short, I was going "whoa!") To be fair, I can see why Hollyweird thought she had the goods; she's absolutely sparkling and charming. She makes what could've been a shallow, spoiled, annoying twit into a good-hearted semi-mess.

Which brings up the biggest problem with Heckerling's script: It's herky-jerky lack of flow, jumpy plotting, whiplash character shifts (S'stone's and Brittany Murphy's falling out and reconciliation feels like reels are missing; other stuff, too) and heavy reliance of pop culture references make it feel episodic, like a random selection of sit-com scenes. There's some good lines and moments which are still funny (e.g. "You're a virgin who can't drive." "You see how picky I am about shoes and they just go on my feet.") but the levels are all over the place. Cher is supposed to be ditzy and unprepared in school, requiring finagling to get better grades, but she drops a college-level vocabulary in her dialog.

It's also interesting to see the protozoic version of Paul Rudd's passive-aggressive demeanor before he got big. I'd remember that Murphy was heavier back then - a factor that led to the heavy dieting and body abuse that contributed to her tragic death at 32 - but she is unrecognizable with the brown hair and Brooklyn accent.

I'd almost picked up a cheap Blu-ray of this (EDIT: I have the Whatever! Edition DVD), but I'm glad I didn't because for all its cute moments, it doesn't hold up. (Now I'm worried about the 10 Things I Hate About You and She's All That Blus I have.) Instead, I watched it in HD from Amazon Instant Prime on my Xbox for free. That's the way to go. As if!

Score: 6/10. Stream it.

"Dark Shadows" Review

Watch this:



Almost every laugh and pretty much all the story is contained in the trailer, which benefits from fast-cutting and plot condensation. Despite looking like another Tim Burton and Johnny Depp trifle, the experience of sitting in the dark shadows of a movie theater is an exercise in experiencing eternal torment. It simply doesn't work on any level - as a straight horror story, a horror spoof, or a fish-out-of-time comedy. Characters don't arc at all and are so superfluous that when the plot wanders back to including them in a scene, my reaction was consistently, "Oh, this one again." I can't even muster much effort to tear it apart because it's so pointless and boring.

Depp brings his usual focus to his portrayal of Barnabas Collins and it's a testament that he's able to command our attention when there's nothing much he's actually doing. A lot of good actors - Michelle Pfeiffer, Chloe Grace Moritz, Jackie Earl Haley, Helena Bonham Carter, and Eva Green (who should replace January Jones in the Matthew Vaughn X-Men: First Class series) - are similarly left adrift with a business card-length character for 105 minutes. Burton doesn't even step up to provide his specifically creative sensibility to the film's look. He seems to be phoning it in and as a result, everyone just marks time along with the audience.

The only good thing I can say about our viewing of Dark Shadows is that the price was right. (We'd walked in after another show had let out.) My girlfriend had been willing to pay full price ($10) to see it and is very glad she didn't. I just want my time back.

Score: 2/10. Skip it.

"Men In Black 3" Review

I wasn't particularly enthused about seeing Men in Black 3. It's production was a disaster - they started shooting without a completed script in order to get Will Smith and then shut down for months to figure out the rest of the story - and nothing in the trailers begged my attendance, though Josh Brolin's mimicry of a younger Tommy Lee Jones was apparent even in the few syllables the trailers showed. But my girlfriend wanted to see it more than Avengers and was paying, so away we go.

The story itself is pretty thin: An extremely nasty alien named Boris the Animal ("It's just Boris!" he frequently barks) has escaped from a rather unique prison and somehow gone back in time to kill Agent K (Jones/Brolin), forcing Big Willie to also go back in time to try and prevent history being changed and the Earth's destruction. I'll give you exactly one guess as to whether they succeed.

To their credit, they don't just go back and revisit the same characters from the first two movies and there's a twist involving a famous person whom you'd expect to be an alien based on how these movies work. (Whoops! The trailer gives it away. Weak. I'd missed that or forgotten that detail.) Brolin kills it with his channeling of Jones; Emma Thompson gets some fun moments; there's an alien with the ability to see alternate timelines that's a different type; there are a good assortment of gags and laughs.

However, Smith seems flat - not tired in a jaded character sense, but because he's too old and too removed from his early persona. If you look at his resume, you realize it's been a decade since he's played what we recall as the typical Fresh Prince role. I've seen reviews saying Jones looks like he's wishing he wasn't here, but it's Smith who seems reluctant to retread old riffs. (It's like what Eddie Murphy would be like reprising Axel Foley or Reggie Hammond.)

Overall, we could've easily lived full and complete lives without Men in Black 3 in them, but even as a cynical cash grab, it's not militantly offensive and has enough fun to make it worth a watch eventually.

Score: 6/10. Rent it.

"Underworld: Awakening" Review

After the blah Underworld: Rise of the Lycans - in which someone thought what we wanted/needed was a prequel explaining the origins of the least interesting aspect of the Underworld universe - the series brings back Kate Beckinsale for Underworld: Awakening, though a title of Blunderworld: Snoozening would be more accurate.

After a quick recap of clips and narration recapping the story (minus the prequel), we're told that humans got hip to the existence of vampires and werewolves (must've been all the Twilight merchandise) and have set out to kill 'em all. When Becks and her hybrid sweet baboo who looks like the tool from Creed try to escape, they're captured and/or killed by The Man. Jumping ahead 12 years, she's thawed out from the lab she's been held at and with her badass leather and rubber clothes and boots conveniently stored in glass cases in the room, she kills a bunch of guards (one of the few cool bits) and escapes.

What happens next is a blur of jumbled blather that I can barely recall 12 hours later.  A bunch of really ropey-looking CGI werewolves chase her; she meets her hybrid daughter, though it's not clear how she lost the baby weight while frozen; there are some pissed-off vampires who don't appreciate her and the kid bring the wolves to their cave; and a secret plot to make super-Lycans. Or something.

At least than an hour-and-a-half, it also manages to be slow-paced and uninvolving. Five writers supposedly typed this thing up and there is so little of import rattling around, it makes me wonder if they thought having a super-sized werewolf was enough. The fact that this uber-wolf is played by the guy who plays Dyson, the werewolf cop, on Lost Girl shows how lazy type-casting gets. At least Michael Sheen gets a break from gnawing the scenery as Lucien. Next time, Kate should take a powder as well. Let poor Milla Jovovich keep making weak sequels with her hubby. She looks great and kicks ass, but we're getting to Resident Evil levels of suckitude now.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.



One particularly laughable detail is how the security desk for the evil biotech company is out in the courtyard of the building, where it's constantly raining. Several scenes are set out in this exterior and I began to wonder if the filmmakers couldn't get permission to shoot inside. How bad is it to work there?

"Mission: Imposible - Ghost Protocol" Review

I reviewed the IMAX version last December and upon second viewing, the overall score remains the same, but I should add that the pace really bogs down after the Burj Dubai tower/sandstorm sequence with a lot of talking and not-so-exciting capering trying to get access codes from the guy from Slumdog Millionaire. I got sleepy and the girlfriend fell asleep after having been alert for the first half.

Score: 7/10. Rent the Blu-ray.

Speaking of which, in another nasty example of retailer exclusives, only Beast Buy has a Blu-ray package with an extras disc which presumably would include the details of how they did the stunts like in this clip:



Guess I'll be waiting for a sale.

"Haywire" Review

If there is a more apt for Steven Soderbergh's misbegotten Haywire, I don't know what it is. What else can be said for a movie that manages to take a supporting cast with Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, Bill Paxton and Channing Tatum in service of a script by the writer of Soderbergh's The Limey and a genuine kickass babe and make it boring and confusing.

The trailer below spells out the plot in rather spoilery detail, so I won't rehash it here except to say that there's far less action overall than the trailer would imply and that the dull parts aren't really filled with much in the way of deep characterization or intricate plot. While it's nice to have an action chick who doesn't look like she'll snap her arms throwing a punch (see: Angelina Jolie after Mr. & Mrs. Smith; Charlize Theron; Milla Jovovich; Zoe Saldana; Maggie Q) and to have fight scenes that don't rely so much on shakycam and edit fu, it never amounts to anything. The double-crosses and misdirections just keep things confusing as well as a superfluous flashback story structure - this could've been told in a linear fashion and may've made more sense, too.

Gina Carano has been dinged in some reviews for her performance, but considering the script is crap, I don't think much blame should be assigned to her. She looks and sounds remarkably like Linda Fiorentino, albeit a shorter, buxomer version who looks like she could actually fight. (She's a MMA fighter whom Soderbergh built this whole mess around.) It's indicative of how freakish "Hollywood beauty" is when a woman who looks like this...



...is considered fat. (She's 5'8" and fought at 143 lbs, but she was pretty ripped then; I'm guessing she's 10 lbs. heavier in the movie.) As I saw someone caption a sports-bra-and-shorts-clad weigh-in photo of her, "I'd hit it, but it might hit me back." Yep.

On top of the poor script and pacing which feels flabby at less than 90 minutes - more happens in a typical 42-minute episode of Nikita - is Soderbergh's craptastic cinematography under the nom de screen of Peter Andrews. He can shoot a decent looking frame as the Oceans' movies show, but too often (since Traffic) he prefers to shoot and grade so that everything is a single color like yellow or red. It's junk, not style. He says it's to provide guidance to the audience as to where things are, but compare his sloppy methods to movies like The Matrix where scenes in the Matrix are a sickly yellowish-green while the real world is blue-gray, but not totally those colors. (i.e. Underworld movies which are basically black, blue and white.)

I was seriously let down by Haywire, a movie that I'd planned on seeing in theaters and ended up glad I didn't waste money on.

Score: 4/10. Skip it or catch it on cable while you're multi-tasking.

"The Cabin in the Woods" Review

The Cabin in the Woods, the brilliant meta-horror deconstruction co-written by Nerd God Joss Whedon and Cloverfield scribe Drew Goddard (and directed by him), has been held hostage by MGM's bankruptcy for a couple of years, finally making it's way into theaters now. It premiered at SXSW and all the reviews were uniformly rapturous but with a common element: They all said to take their word for it that it was very good and you should see it but to avoid learning anything about it because it will spoil the fun.

This is another one of those reviews.

As the trailer below shows, it's about five young people who go to the titular cabin and then bad things happen to them. What the trailer only provides glimpses of (and even those spoil things a little) is what's behind these events and it's impossible to even hint at what's going on without defeating the purpose of taking this ride.

What's interesting about the storytelling is that instead of waiting until the end to reveal what's going on, Whedon and Goddard are dropping details every step of the way while still leaving viewers wondering WTF is going on? I'd pretty much figured out what was happening and why about 2/3rds of the way through, but there was still plenty more to come.

Sorry to be so vague, but I diligently avoided spoilers in the run-up to visiting The Cabin in the Woods and only want you to have as much fun as I did. You're welcome.

Score: 8.5/10. Catch a matinee.

"Jiro Dreams of Sushi" Review

In a Tokyo subway station is a tiny 10-seat sushi bar that is run by an 85-year-old ninja (euphemistically speaking) who has dedicated his life to mastering preparing the world's best sushi and as a result it is the only sushi-only restaurant to receive Michelin's top three-star rating. The story of Jiro Ono, his two sons, and the restaurant (Sukiyabashi Jiro) is the subject of the whimsical documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

Despite the inauspicious location, reservations are taken a month in advance and customers pay in the neighborhood of $400 for dinner, with Jiro serving up approximately 20 pieces of sushi of his choosing. There are no drinks or appetizers or fancy-shmancy rolls - just sushi. (I'd have to win the lottery to be able to eat there and, even if I had the means, I don't see how I could possibly enjoy a piece of fish, no matter how wonderful, that cost more than I'd pay for a Blu-ray or some games. It's not as if you get a souvenir waitress to take home.)

Jiro seems driven by a combination of strict Japanese work ethics and a touch of OCD - he takes the same turnstile on the subway every day - but the results speak for themselves. His relationship with his two sons, one of whom started his own place that's literally the mirror of the father's, is interesting and there's a fascinating twist towards the end about who served the Michelin's inspectors. However, for all the discussion about the process of purchasing and preparing the fish, some basic details aren't addressed, starting with how did he manage to gain such notoriety in such a pedestrian location and what of the mother of his sons who obviously raised them as Jiro admits not being around much while he worked.

If you like sushi and want to see how the stuff you'll never be able to try is made, check out Jiro Dreams of Sushi, but prepare to be very hungry for some sushi before it's over.

Score: 8/10. Rent it.

"Abduction" Review

The werewolf kid from the Twilight abominations dumps the sparkly vampires and dippy love interest to step into the tweener-action hero spotlight with Abduction, a occasionally fast-moving but inherently banal actioner with an improbable plot, even by the standards of the genre.

Taylor Lautner is a knucklehead jock dumbass who parties hard and doesn't have a care in the world. I mean, other than the father (Jason Issacs) who picks his hungover ass off the lawn of the crime and then makes him fight like a twisted scene from The Great Santini. However, he's not an abusive pop, just someone who's training Shark Boy for the rest of the plot. When Taylor finds a photo on a missing children website that looks like him, his attempt to find out about his past leads to his present being literally blown to pieces and the couple who raised him being killed by bad guys. With the CIA and Russian baddies chasing him and not knowing whom to trust, he takes off with the cute classmate from across the street (Lily "My daddy drums for Genesis" Collins) and the hijnks ensue.

Since the target audience is horny teenage girls, it's understandable how much superfluous rigmarole has to take place up front, in the middle, and at the end. While the action staged by director John Singleton (in his first feature since 2005's lackluster Four Brothers) is occasionally exciting and Lautner is a credible butt-kicker, the pace is too languid for such a threadbare plot. How do the bad guys manage to tap into the CIA's comms without fail? What exactly is the McGuffin they're chasing and why are we supposed to be surprised someone doesn't turn out as they initially appear? Can Taylor act or us he just a square-headed caterpillar with some charm to go with that prison-ripped bod? I'm the wrong audience for this movie, aren't I?

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

"The Sitter (Unrated)" Review

Judging from this trailer...



...The Sitter, starring Academy Award nominee Jonah Hill, looks like a stupid, raunchy retread of Adventures in Babysitting with the loutish, porcine Hill doing his usual loud moron schtick and for the most part, that pretty much sums things up. However, there is actually a little more depth and heart to the flick, though it doesn't maintain enough consistency in the laugh department.

For those who didn't watch the trailer - and why didn't you? - Hill is a tubby slacker who gets stuck babysitting for a friend of his mother's when he gets an offer of nookie from his fickle sorta girlfriend. Of course, the kids are punks - a mopey emo with "issues" (played by the kid from Where the Wild Things Are), a celebrity-obsessed girl, and an adopted El Salvadoran terror who spends half the movie blowing stuff up and relieving himself anywhere and everywhere - and hijinks ensue.

Where The Sitter actually scores some points is in making Hill not quite the disaster he initially appears, but more of an unmotivated victim of his own problems, which he eventually confronts and overcomes. Where it really gets crazy is when it pit stops in the crazy lair of a drug dealer (an unrecognizable Sam Rockwell) which is so genuinely weird that I don't even want to spoil the surprises in case you catch this sometime.

It's all meaningless and won't change your life, but if you burn 90 minutes on the couch viewing it, you won't wish you were dead. (There's some box copy!)

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.

Judging from the credits and the IMDB parent's guide, there's not much more that has been added for this "unrated" version other than a quick scene of two people shagging with a brief glimpse of bare breasts. While much of the vibe is sort of like Eighties teen comedies, there is no nudity in the regular cut; the R comes from the barrage of F-bombs. It's the 21st Century; how are we getting more Victorian?

"Young Adult" Review

The writing-directing tag team that brought us Juno, Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman, team up again with Charlize Theron for a dark drama with comic accents, Young Adult, which unfortunately doesn't live up to its pedigree and potential.

Theron is a 37-year-old divorcee in Minneapolis who drinks too much, sleeps around, plucks the hair out of her scalp in spots, barely cares for her Pomeranian, and makes her living ghost-writing a young adult series of books set in a high school. The movie's title has a dual meaning that her arrested development makes her able to capture the voice of her characters. It also helps that she always seems to be near teenage girls in time to overhear them say something she can crib for her books.

When she receives an email announcing the birth of a child to an old flame (Patrick Wilson), she obsesses over it until finally deciding to return to her home town of Mercury, MN and rescue him from the horrible life of domesticity she feels he's trapped in. While setting up her plan, she encounters Patton Oswalt, a dumpy guy who had the locker next to hers throughout high school whom she never noticed. Hobbled by a savage beating (more on this later), he quickly becomes her Jiminy Cricket, trying to talk her out of her plan. Of course, she's not listening.

While there are some hints of greatness throughout Young Adult, it simply doesn't gel up into a cohesive whole. Theron is unlikeable, which isn't a problem since she's supposed to be a boozy deluded mess, but her realizations and growth are undercut by Cody's script which seems to forget its points at the end. I thought Reitman's last film, the George Clooney-topped Up In The Air, fell apart in it's last act and ending and something similar happens here with the precisely wrong thing happening and then everything that could've been learned tossed out the window in a single scene in which someone basically tells her that her wrong-headed views were right all along. I honestly had no idea what the movie was trying to say at the end.

Theron is very good, managing to make an unsympathetic character earn our pity. (If you know the difference between sympathy and pity, you'll get the distinction I'm making.) She almost manages to make us overlook the gaps in the plotting like how Wilson seems to act as if they merely dated a short while in high school when it's revealed later that their relationship was much, much more involved. I place blame for this on Reitman who let him play it as if there had been little between them.

I had been enthused about seeing Young Adult because of the players involved, but it shows that past prowess provides little guarantee of future competence. I wonder if the makers have become too big for their britches and aren't being held to the standards of polish that others would (and should) be held to? While not especially bad, it's not particularly good in the final analysis because it manages to undercook the characters. Also, if you hated the Teenage Fanclub song "The Concept", you may want to steer clear of this movie because it gets played about five times and will stick in your head the next day.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.



Regarding Oswalt's beating ** SEMI-SPOILERS **: He was supposedly beaten with a crowbar by a pack of jocks because they thought he was gay - this is how Theron remembers him, as the "Hate Crime Guy" - and it was quite the scandal until it was learned that he wasn't gay; then it became a socially acceptable attack of jocks on a fat guy. That she doesn't seem to feel this is anything to whine about despite his walking with a cane and having mutilated junk makes the ending that much more questionable.

"The Dilemma" Review

What the hell happened to Ron Howard? When Opie (if you're old)/Richie Cunningham (if you're not so old) stepped behind the camera, he had a respectable run of decent to near-great (and in the case of Apollo 13, genuinely great; it should've won Best Picture) movies like Splash, Cocoon, Backdraft, and Ransom. Then around the turn of the millennium, things got dicey culminating in his contracting a lethal dose of Oscar Curse when he won Best Director and Picture for A Beautiful Mind, a movie so lackluster that I sold the DVD, something I almost never do. In the ensuing decade, I've only seen two of the six features he's made - The Da Vinci Code (which sucked) and Frost/Nixon (so-so and I was surprised to see he made it when I looked it up now) - because I simply haven't been interested in what he's been putting out and if the others were as terrible as The Dilemma, I'm missing nothing.

The Dilemma gets the ignoble honor of being the first movie of 2012 that I couldn't finish watching. I made it through 70 minutes of its 1:51 running time and if I laughed once, I don't recall. It was straining and struggling and feeling wrong from the very first scene and never got better. My girlfriend fell asleep early on (I was yawning a lot myself) and whenever she woke up, she'd ask, "Why are you still watching this?" When the window we had in between TV shows ended - which we'd agreed beforehand that if the movie was OK, we'd miss Fashion Police's Oscar special - there was no dilemma, we switched over and never went back.

Since I'm supposed to be reviewing this I guess I should....wait, does the trailer spell everything out? Check it out:



Pretty much! The only things unclear are that Vince and Kevin are making booming speaker systems that pump out the noise and vibration of a muscle car that is electric and that Kevin is the brains of the outfit - you didn't think Vince was, did you? - and that for him to learn his wife is cheating on him may be a company-killing distraction. However, I think the trailer does a good job and showcasing the incredibly unfunniness of The Dilemma. Howard and company mistake being REALLY LOUD for being energetic and at no time did I believe that these were people in the real world. The bit in the trailer about dancing takes place in the second scene and was a huge warning flare that this movie would blow.

Around the edges, there were slight hints that perhaps a total rewrite of the script and a different director could've made a barely interesting movie, but it didn't happen. The only one who actually tries to make this crap come to life somewhat is Winona Ryder, whom I've mourned her career exile as Angelina Jolie cruelly stomped her Oscar dreams in Girl, Interrupted, pretty much sending poor Noni into a personal death spiral that took Lindsay Lohan to erase from the public eye. The only thing that may have made me finish slogging through The Dilemma would've been to see how Winona's side of things turned out, but it wasn't enough overall.

Score: DNF. Skip it.

2012 Academy Awards Livesnark

Unlike the past couple of years when I'd seen all the major nominees, I've only seen 4-1/2 of the 9 Best Picture nominees: The Artist (very sweet, but overpraised), The Help (stunningly mediocre and overrated), Moneyball (very good, but not great), Midnight in Paris (cute, but also overpraised), and half of The Descendents. I want to see Hugo, but have so little interest in War Horse, Extemely Incredible and Closely Loud (sp?) and whatever the other one is that I couldn't even hazard a guess as to when I'm going to see them. So, with little interest in who wins, let's snark this mutha up! (Refresh for updates all night.)

• The fashions on the red carpet have been blah. No one seems to know how to get clothes fitted. One exception: Natalie Portman with a cute red dress and tasteful jewelry.

• God Himself (i.e. Morgan Freeman) does the cold opener. BFD.

• The filmed opener was funny then got lame. "It's Time For Oscar" song was meh.

• Instead of opening with Best Supporting Actress, they've one-twoed Cinematography and Art Direction, both of which went to Hugo. The harbingers of an upset?

• They have a cruise ship band in the balcony with Pharrell Williams playing drums. Why?

• Nice touch with the nominations for Costume Design and Makeup to have people talk about their intent while showing clips from the movie. The Artist and The Iron Lady.

• Movie stars talking about their first movies. Who cares? What makes their experiences special? Oh, that's right, they're famous. Pfft.

• A Separation (from Iran) wins Best Foreign Language. The director makes a speech referring to the political tensions, but doesn't speak against the mullahs who've made Iran the terrorist pariah state they are. One guess as to why.

• Octovia Spencer gets Best Support Actress for The Help and loses it. Come on, it wasn't a surprise. Pull it together.

• Semi-amusing spoof of focus groups done with the Christopher Guest posse.

• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a surprise winner for Best Editing. They should've edited out their terrible speech. With all the technical awards Hugo is racking up, it's surprising Thelma Schoonmaker didn't win.

• Hugo wins for Best Sound Editing and Sound Mixing. I'm really wishing I'd caught this. I'll put it on the top of the stack.

• The Cirque du Soleil number was impressive, but how did it really capture the experience of going to the movies.

• Above-average schtick with Iron Man and Pepper Potts. They cut the mike off on the Best Documentary winners.

• Chris Rock brings some much-needed edge to the proceedings with a great bit about how it's not hard to do animation for the actors.

• Rango wins Best Animated Feature. I still haven't seen this, but heard it's pretty good.

• I just adore Emma Stone, but that stupid bow on her dress sucks. Great schtick with Ben Stiller. She's got a future in this business.

• Hugo wins Best Special Effects. Got nothing to say about that yet, but Sucker Punch should've been nominated.

• Christopher Plummer sets the record for the oldest Oscar winner at 82 for Beginners thus leveraging never having won despite an illustrious career and playing a gay guy for the gold. Classy speech.

• Cute bit where Billy tells us what the people are thinking.

• The Artist wins for Best Score, which makes sense because that was the only sound in 99.9% of the movie. We will never hear from this guy again.

• Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis are funny, especially the latter mangling his own name in his introduction. They're willing to play the fool.

• The traveshamockery of the Best Song category results in "Man or Muppet" winning the coin toss. When other numbers like "Star Spangled Man" (from Captain America: The First Avenger) weren't even nominated, this category is meaningless. Either do it right or cut it.

• Angelina Jolie = YOWZA!!! Pop that leg out. Funny when Jim Rash apes the pose when The Descendents wins for Best Adapted Screenplay.

• Woody Allen wins Best Original Screenplay for Midnight in Paris. Meh, I guess so.

• The cast of Bridesmaids gets to hand out the awards that no one cares about. Harsh, but true.

• What's with the popcorn girls handing out snacks during the breaks.

• Billy Crystal keeps making these jokes pandering to the class warfare rage that the Left preens their support for. Is there anyone in the front part of this house who isn't in the top 1% of the supposedly evil 1%.

• Michel French Guy wins Best Director for The Artist, so if you had Hugo in your Oscar pool, The Walking Dead rerun is starting in five minutes.

• James Earl Jones and makeup artist deity Dick Smith won Honorary Oscars and Oprah gets the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. My life remains unaffected.

• The People Who Died montage was really heavy on behind-the-scenes personnel. I'm sure, "Who?", was the most-often voiced reaction.

• Jean Dujarden wins Best Actor for The Artist. Is he the next Roberto Begnini? (I'm not even going to look up whether I spelled that right.) We'll probably never hear from him again here.

• WHOA! Meryl Streep upsets Viola Davis for Best Actress. I'm sure Spike Lee is tweeting about how racist this is. Streep hasn't won in 30 years and this was her 17th nomination. I suspect the Academy figures Davis will be back soon. Yet another Oscar win for a performance which has a real-life person to mimic as opposed to creating a character from scratch. Don't actors understand this stuff? Guess not.

• The Artist wins Best Picture to the surprise of no one. Of the movies I've seen, I enjoyed this the most, but I want to see Hugo now.

Overall, it was a meh show. Billy Crystal seemed too impressed with his Borscht Belt jokes, but would Eddie Murphy have been better?

Score: 6/10. Whatever.

"Gone" Review

When I saw ads for Gone, my initial reaction was, "So Amanda Seyfried is the new Ashley Judd?" As this trailer spells out, it sure looks that way:



What the trailer doesn't tell you are the little details which make it a slightly above-average thriller. Seyfried has a history of mental instability and was committed and her history of crying wolf whenever another girl went missing has worn the cops down. The screenplay by Alison Burnett (Untraceable, the new Underworld: Awakenings) is very cagey and takes its time setting up the fact that the missing sister has some issues, too, and made me wonder how they were going to wrap it up; with her being crazy or actually solving the mystery.

Familiar faces like Debra Morgan from Dexter, that creepy kid from American Beauty who put Rachel Nichols in a plunging nightie in P2, the nerdy scientist guy from Avatar, and Eddie from Eddie and the Cruisers show up briefly, but Gone is fundamentally a one-woman show and Seyfried is effective as a haunted, driven, but resourceful young woman. It could've easily been played shrilly or "crazy", but Seyfried does well in a drabbed-down, no glitz role. Other than a totally gratuitous shower scene in which we see her smokin' hawt body silhouetted through the curtain for a moment - not that there's anything wrong with that - it's all acting for her.

Along the way are some serious "just go with it" leaps in logic - I'm talking real "Why would anyone do THAT?" howlers - which if you think too hard about will derail your enjoyment, but Brazilian director Heitor Dhalia manages to keep things taut and not drag it out longer than its 90-minute (minus credits) running time. If you liked Untraceable, then this is about as good. As I left the theater, the girl from the screening team asked me for my thoughts. I told her (and now you)....

Score: 6/10. Rent it.

Basil Exposition Must Die!!!

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

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.

"Man On A Ledge" Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Parks (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

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

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

Act of Valor is getting a lot of push well ahead of its Presidents Day weekend release next year - February 17 24, 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.