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film | Chortle kombat

2007-10-24T17:19:00.000-04:00

Perhaps the most ridiculous thing about DOA: DEAD OR ALIVE — and holy crap, there is a solid metric ton of ridiculousness in this movie — turns out to be its title. An invite-only fighting tournament summons the best brawlers from all over the world — among them, our heroines: scantily-clad babes with what my uncle would refer to as "bodacious ta-tas" — to a top-secret island compound, and you might think, based on the Dead or Alive part, that the losers and winners would very appropriately be determined by, y'know, who's dead and who's alive at the end of each round. But no, this Kombat ain't Mortal: Victory goes to the dude or lady who merely knocks out his or her opponent first. A pox on that pesky PG-13 rating! Actually, make that a double-pox, as DOA skimps equally on both the gratuitous violence and the gratuitous nudity that usually come attached to kind of Z-grade exploitation cheeseball, which means that broken limbs and inventive deaths are supplanted by the fakey wire-fu acrobatics of the Charlie's Angels films, and any and all bodacious ta-tas are kept snugly in form-fitting attire; it's like one of Andy Sidaris' tits-and-bandoliers action flicks from late-night Skinemax in the mid-1990s got edited for prime-time television.

At least two of the foxy fisticuffettes — My Name Is Earl's Jaime Pressly, the "superstar wrestler," and Aussie pop star Holly Valance, the "assassin and master thief" — seem fully aware that they're wading through campy garbage, but director Cory Yuen (The Transporter) forgot to prod Sin City's wooden Devon Aoki, the "shinobi ninja princess" (that translates as "ninja ninja princess"), into tossing a wink or nine into such goofy lines as "He says Leon killed Hayate above the Buddha head" and "I am not a cricket in a box!" Eric Roberts is cast the villain, of course, a psycho moneybags who secretly injects the gals with nanobots that upload their fierce fight moves directly to his designer Wayfarers. I guess it doesn't need to be explicitly said that DOA is based on a popular video game, and, well, you try to go easy on a brainless jigglefest that's this brazen about catering to preteen boys and their joysticks. C-

film | Braaaaaindead

2007-10-07T20:05:00.001-04:00

I'm not quite sure what the subtitle of RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION, this season's gore-spattered zombie smackdown, refers to. The human good guys don't, of course, end up vanquishing all of their undead foes; the undead foes don't, of course, end up devouring all of the human good guys; and — gargantuan of course en route — the movie's finale alludes to a Resident Evil 4, so you know that the franchise ain't goin' extinct either. And that's precisely the problem: This second sequel to 2002's Resident Evil — rote but surprisingly watchable — feels less like its own chapter than an extended previously-on-Resident-Evil recap that exists to merely set the stage for future episodes. Blame the script's rampant lack of imagination, which dooms too much of Extinction to repeat the same ass-kickery on display in better horror shows ... including, yes, Resident Evil. You dug the scenes in RE 1 where Alice (Milla Jovovich), a babelicious security officer who takes on the abominable grotesqueries created by a virus manufactured in the secret underground labs of the über-shady Umbrella Corporation, tussled with monster Dobermans, ravenous reanimated corpses, and tentacled mutant behemoths? Great! Because here they are again. On repeat. For 95 minutes.

So while a good deal of Resident Evil: Extinction has the mushy palate of microwaved leftovers, it still boasts one or two skillfully engaging action sequences. And hey, that's one or two skillfully engaging action sequences more than 2004's execrable Resident Evil: Apocalypse, a film that roused me only during the moment where Jovovich piloted her motorcycle through a stained-glass window, and that's mostly because I momentarily thought the theater projectionist had swapped out a reel of the film for The Great Muppet Caper. But put the entertaining bits aside — the nifty siege by zombie crows that skillfully spins what Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds woulda been like directed by George Romero on speed, a carnage-happy climax that kills off most of the irritating cast members — and you’re left with a greatest-hits montage of stock genre components: the sidekick (RE 2's Mike Epps) who gets bitten and keeps his transformation to slobbering monstrosity a secret as long as possible; the phony-baloney scares (phew! It was only a can of nails! Or a lamp!); the pompous-ass British scientist (RE 2's Iain Glen) whose chin-strokingly brilliant scheme to rehabilitate the Living Dead naturally doesn't turn out too well for him. In a year that's seen both wittier — Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse lark — and smarter — 28 Weeks Later, with its dire political subtext — riffs on the old zombie formula, this Resident Evil just doesn't cut the gristle. C-

film | The disillusionist

2007-09-28T14:10:00.000-04:00

In an old episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, one of the snarky robot commentators chides a film's horrendously nebbish leading man like so: "This isn't our star, is it? I will not accept this as our star! Can I see your supervisor, movie? This will not stand!" I thought the same thing during the opening moments of the botched techno-thriller NEXT, which introduce us to a low-rent Las Vegas magician played by a cringingly gallant Nicolas Cage under what might be the silliest receding mane of fake hair ever put on celluloid. As he dodges an array of bullets, explosions and bad-guy punches — he's a precognitive who can peek a whole two minutes into the future, because, you know, three minutes would really push that believability into the danger zone — you might wonder if you're watching Young Martin Van Buren: Action Hero or They Call Me MISTER Tesh!, Cage's bizzare New Age-y coif is so ridiculously distracting. And why wouldn't it be? Very loosely based on a 1980 book (The Golden Man) by famed sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, Next sports a dismally direct-to-DVD plot involving the government's attempts to nab Cage and use his psychic powers to thwart an impending terrorist attack, and if only I could also see two minutes into the future, I'd have tossed a pillow on top of my keyboard for when I dozed off writing that story synopsis. Ouch.

When the feds finally capture Cage, they strap him to a chair, attach a pair of the Ludovico speculums from A Clockwork Orange to his eyelids, and force him to watch the evening news. I think they're hoping for the day's headlines to trigger Cage into foretelling what city the nondescript Eurotrash villains — they're Russian, though I'm pretty sure they're speaking French — intend to blow up, but this is a woefully sketchy idea, not in the least because a warning window of two minutes ain't terribly reassuring when you're talking about a nuclear siege on unspecified American soil. Anyway, Cage seems less concerned with matters of national security than protecting the damsel-in-distress school teacher (The Illusionist's Jessica Biel) Next laughably asks us to accept as his tagalong romantic interest. Her character makes zero sense, as she's required to stick with — and sleep with! Ick! — the increasingly erratic Cage well after a reasonable gal would get skeeved out and boogie, but then neither does much of the rest of the movie, especially the fantastic Julianne Moore lending her talent to the thankless role of the FBI agent on Cage's case. (Seriously, Julianne: I mean, it's great to see you and all, but what the hell are you doing here?) However, just in case you're wondering, both Biel and Moore's locks look positively luscious, so that's one tic for the plus column right there. D

film | Poor bloodsport

2007-09-26T21:52:00.000-04:00

So this might be, like, the most obvious review opener ever, but THE CONDEMNED, a moronic thriller starring and produced by the action figures of World Wrestling Entertainment, ain't gonna win this year's Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. As a Special Ops spook who's plucked from a corrupt Central American prison to compete in a grisly Internet showdown against other unscrupulously-assembled death-rowers from across the globe, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin — he of the sitout three-quarter facelock jawbreaker, the aesthetically bizarre hulking-frame/skeletal-face combo, and the Wal-Mart poster bin — gets bupkis in the way of crackling dialogue. You'd think screenwriters Scott Wiper (who also directed) and Rob Hedden would've tossed at least a couple of decent kiss-off one-liners his way, but he mostly just growls variations on the same old boring-ass fight taunt:

"Let's go!"
"Let's go, sweetheart!"
"Let's dance, asshole!"

And if you think I'm a bit outta line whining about the sophistication of the writing in a WWE flick, well, I'm not, cuz The Condemned takes itself seriously enough to betray its mindless-action-junk trappings and instead grandstand as a sanctimonious indictment of both violence-as-sport purveyors and hungry-for-blood spectators. Uh, hello, this movie was: A) bankrolled by an organization that makes scads of money from folks who watch with rabid enthusiasm as the overzealous man-ogres on their payroll pound each other in the face with folding chairs; and B) released by Lionsgate, the studio that plops one of those skanky Saw cesspools into theaters every Halloween. The Condemned, then, is almost amusing in its finger-wagging foolishness. Almost. "I want a fucking Arab! A child-killing, Koran-ranting, suicide-bombing Arab!" screams the sleazeball snuff producer (Robert Mammone), a real equal-opportunity offender, of the his program’s racial diversification; later, the worm predictably turns for a few of his tech lackeys who are shocked — shocked — when a female "contestant" is brutally dispatched, like, live on the Intarweb and everything! (Er, wasn't this in the job description?) As the feds frantically race to find this extremely illegal competition’s secret island location — why they don't think to simply ask the Diane Sawyer-esque journalist who was there shooting a segment for her TV show is beyond me — you'll feel increasingly like you just survived a sweltering jungle deathmatch yourself: i.e., in need of a very long, very hot shower. D

film | Dim sum

2007-09-19T08:53:00.001-04:00

If nothing else, THE NUMBER 23 gave me a brand-spankin'-new entry on my List of Stuff I Never Ever Want to See in a Movie Again: Jim Carrey in the throes of kinky sexual make-believe. ("Pretend that you have a knife. Cut my shirt. Cut me! Cut me!") This ridiculous mystery-thriller from notoriously spotty director Joel Schumacher (Phone Booth [good], The Phantom of the Opera [not]) miscasts the erstwhile Pet Detective in a wonky dual role: a mild-mannered dog catcher who receives a mysterious secondhand paperback as a gag birthday gift from his wife (Virginia Madsen), and — as he reads along and visualizes the story — the book's main character, a Goth-noir private eye entangled in a seedy web of lust, murder, suicide, and a very peculiar obsession with the titular digits. As Literal Carrey allows himself to get sucked hard into Literary Carrey's paranoid fantasia, he starts to sputter kooky declarations like "I was born at 11:12 p.m.! 11 plus 12? 23!" and "Waco, Texas and the Oklahoma City bombing both happened on April 19th! 4 plus 19 is 23!" Yeah. Okay. And? The film is never clear about what all these dire mathematics mean, other than that you can probably finagle a 23 from just about any given numerical sequence depending on your strategic placement of addition, multiplication and subtraction functions. That's less a terrifying movie scenario than, y'know, a rudimentary brain-teaser.

Actually, "rudimentary brain-teaser" is a good way to encapsulate The Number 23. The script, by first-timer Fernley Phillips, wants to flaunt twisted smarts in its portrayal of a fragile psyche collapsing in on itself, but it's mostly a load of stylized conspiratorial hooey that maybe never seems quite as awful as it truly is because of distractingly impressive technical credits. (Seriously, the cinematography by Requiem for a Dream's Matthew Libatique and the production design by Down With Love's Andrew Laws are worth checking out for at least 23 minutes.) Carrey's unflappably game, but he's not an actor who can pull off the Raymond Chandler-esque narration or the tough-guy body tattoos; in fact, the movie's increasingly rampant nuttiness (sample straight-faced dialogue: "It's all over, Topsy Kretts!") amplifies Carrey's ingrained wacky persona to the degree that he begins to seem smarmy and disingenuous — like he's mere moments away from talking with his ass or busting out a "Somebody stop me!" — as Number enters its gloomy homestretch. And though Madsen is a warm and lovely presence in any film, her character does things that make no sense ("I took the skeleton, but I didn't write the book!"), and I'm a little concerned that her acclaimed comeback in 2004's Sideways has yielded the same wifely duties in this, The Astronaut Farmer and last year's Firewall. She deserves better parts, and there were only 22 letters in that concluding observation. Ha. Suck it, 23. C-

film | Dud of winter

2007-09-12T11:43:00.000-04:00

In the frigid thriller WIND CHILL, two college kids driving home for the holidays take an ill-advised shortcut on a remote backroad, wind up stuck in a snowbank as night falls and temperatures plummet, and then realize they're not alone out there — you know, in the bad way. It's a boilerplate horror clothesline, but whatever Wind Chill lacks in novelty is initially offset by its promising pedigree: George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh produce, The Devil Wears Prada's fabulous Emily Blunt stars, and for the better part of a half-hour, she and Ashton Holmes (A History of Violence), as the unlucky (and unnamed — they're listed on the credits as "Girl" and "Guy") travelers, are real and relatable enough to juice a weary movie scenario with engrossing, what-could-possibly-go-wrong-next? dread. Unfortunately, what does go wrong next is the film, which turns into a supremely half-assed ghost story — our photogenic leads are spooked by the spirits of a murderous state trooper (The Opposite of Sex's Martin Donovan) and his frostbitten victims — when the implications that Holmes might have stalker-ish designs on Blunt were already goosebumping just fine, thanks. From here, director Gregory Jacobs (2004's Criminal) focuses on the ho-hum supernatural jolts — a disfigured phantom vomits a snake, a car radio plays old Christmas jingles as sinister musical portents — but they're so murky and nonsensical that a tertiary stock character, the helpful tow truck driver, is needed to drop into the movie's climax merely to provide a psuedo-explanation. It has something to do with Nietzsche's theory of Eternal Recurrence, which I think is the idea that watching a puzzling shocker like Wind Chill can seem like a infinite loop of the same doofy scare. C-

film | The mildest game ever played

2007-08-30T21:10:00.002-04:00

BALLS OF FURY would be a terrific wink-nudge title for a porno James Bond adventure — picture this: Goldfingerer and his henchman Handjob steal the royal orbs from Suckingham Palace, and it's up to Agent 0069 and the spicy seductress Queef Latina to retrieve them — but instead it's a terrifically eye-rolling wink-nudge title for the latest silly sports spoof to emerge from the musty basement locker room of Hollywood's discount comedy warehouse. Not that the name ain't apropos. I mean, the movie's about a vicious underground table tennis tournament held at the secret Central American jungle compound of a bloodthirsty arms dealer, so it's actually a pretty good fit. But if you're already groaning at the sight of the poster or TV ads, you're reacting on the right track, as Balls of Fury isn't anywhere near as funny as, say, 2004's shockingly subversive Dodgeball. But it's also not so dreadfully unfunny that I'd be averse to paying it a few sundry compliments. And by that, I mean, y'know, it made me laugh every once in a while. Oh, and it sets the bar admittedly high for computer-generated Ping-Pong ball effects. And Christopher Walken performs a karaoke version of Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me" during the closing credits, which is something you don't see everyday, so there's that.

Walken — who must be a big fan of Ping-Pong and/or director/co-writer Ben Garant's Reno 911!, for I am otherwise loath to explain his unlikely presence in this unabashed nonsense — plays the eccentric crime boss, absurdly decked out in wig and wardrobe refurbished from the Bram Stoker's Dracula lot sale. An actor whose distinctive deadpan-staccato line delivery seems borne of impromptu farce, he's a boon to the comic la-la-landscape of Thomas Lennon — who co-stars as a burly German pro-Ponger — and Garant's script. (As two of Reno's aloof police officers, both Lennon and Garant are aces of improvised lunacy themselves.) A droll, what-the-hell mischievousness follows Walken around, but the rest of the movie relies too heavily on blind-Asians-are-hilarious gags, as our schlubby hero (Tony-winner Dan Fogler, gamely aping the entire oeuvre of Jack Black), a former table-tennis wunderkind, hops back on the paddle under the Zen tutelage of a sight-impaired master-trainer (James Hong) in hopes of vanquishing Walken for good. There are a few inspired Naked Gun-style visual gags, and a lots of doofy fortune-cookie dialogue ("Better to die like a tiger than live like a pussy"), but it's mostly lowest-common-denominator business as usual: When in doubt, farts, pratfalls and blows to the scrotum are always grand. Well, actually, they're not. Which is kinda the problem. C+

popScorn | I suffer so you don't have to

2007-08-30T00:19:00.000-04:00

I'm always up for a bad-movie night, as my Netflix friends who shake their heads at my overstuffed-with-surefire-crud queue can attest. I've willingly endured some incredibly painful, er, "movies" — Killer Drag Queens on Dope, Rock & Roll Frankenstein, Entrails of a Virgin, Revenge of the Living Dead Girls, and Tales from the Crapper immediately come to mind — thanks to Netflix's intoxicating selection of dreck, and yet I sometimes can't help myself. Today, for example, I read Netflix user Flashbulb's review of a 1989 Japanese horror flick called Tetsuo: The Iron Man:

Boy is turning into a central air conditioning unit. Girl is turning into a Toyota transaxle. Boy meeets girl. Girl grows 8 foot long phallus made of 1 inch corrogated steel conduit. Boy feels masculinity is threatened and grows 3 foot diamond tip rotorooter out of his groin. It is shorter but much thicker, and girth is what counts. Every filmaker in Japan is influenced for the next 2 generations. AMEN.

Wow. Obviously, I couldn't add it to the queue quickly enough.

film | Surf bored

2007-08-29T13:21:00.002-04:00

You've seen those knock-off superhero action figures dangling on the pegs at the Dollar Tree: Arachnid City Defender instead of Spider-Man, Swarthy Green Behemoth as the Incredible Hulk, Guy-Dude in place of He-Man. (Sidenote: I would totally buy a Guy-Dude action figure. Seriously.) Well, FANTASTIC FOUR: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER is a knock-off superhero action movie: At a glance from a distance, it might resemble the real deal, but when you get close enough to examine the packaging and the paint detail and the overall craftsmanship, you'll probably realize that nearly everything about it is nine kinds of shoddy. It's right around here where the dutiful reader would remind me that 2005's original Fantastic Four smacked of Dollar Tree-ness itself, though I'd argue that, at the very least, it was comparable to the high-roller shelves at Five Below, where items cost a non-budget-threatening $5.

FF 1's silly pandering to 10-year-old boys ran neck-and-neck with a pleasant, undemanding, junky-fun (or funny-junk?) appeal, kind of the same reaction this child of the '80s has to reruns of the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. In Rise of the Silver Surfer, though, the race is over, and the brazen juvenility not only leaves the entertainment value eating its dust, but it doubles back to soak any straggling charm in a mighty torrent of urine — and it had asparagus and Bac-Os for dinner, folks. So soon after the crummy Spider-Man 3, do we really need to see another superhero busting a move on the dance floor? Hell no, but here's the elastic Mr. Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd) winding his ropy limbs around a mob of delighted female admirers at a disco club regardless. It's his bachelor party on the eve of his nuptials to the Invisible Woman (Jessica Alba) — her powers: self-explanatory — but the celebration is cut short after what appears to be a chrome-plated Kelly Slater from outer space zips into our atmosphere and incites some alarming apocalyptic phenomena in Egypt, Japan and, of course, the U.S.

Okay, here's the thing: This Silver Surfer dude, as I've been told by too many friends who dig the old FF comics, is a pretty badass character, but Rise portrays him as a liquid-metal mannequin who speaks in soporific end-of-the-world portents (Laurence Fishburne provides his ominous timbre) and is brought to life via CGI effects that were more exciting in Terminator 2, oh, 16 years ago. He's the subservient summoner of a planet-devouring cosmic force known as Galactus, who's realized here as a cosmic funnel cloud, and not the über-imposing interstellar deity of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's 1960s source material. This botches the climactic showdown — cardboard X-Men rejects (Chris Evans' piping-hot Human Torch and Michael Chiklis' Thing, a brick house with limbs and a temper, complete the bickering quartet) vs. a giant tornado — but hey, it's not like the movie, with its witless jabs at celebrity culture (Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Woman's wedding is a major media event) and anemic action sequences (the good guys save endangered patrons on the crumbling London Eye: swell!), suddenly took a turn for the worse. No, the whole show's a clunky sham, right down to the overblown title: The Silver Surfer doesn't rise as much as he crashes a chintzy toy convention you were already jonesing to leave anyway. D

popScorn | And don't forget the robots!

2007-05-19T13:49:00.001-04:00

Far be it from me to publicize a film i haven't even seen yet, but ... come on. This new trailer for Michael Bay's Transformers — opens nationwide on July 4! — totally kicks ass. True, i can't think of a single Bay flick i've ever liked, and okay, it doesn't inspire much promise that the thing's scripted by two guys who wrote The Mask of Zorro and Bay's The Island, and sure, it's a live-action, big-budget summer blockbuster based on an '80s toy fad — not exactly the benchmark of quality cinema. But hey, if it makes zillions of dollars, we can probably expect to see some pretty awe-inspiring shit in the near future. Just think: Reese Witherspoon in Strawberry Shortcake! G.I. Joe, starring Seann William Scott as Duke, Johnny Knoxville as Flint, and Lindsay Lohan in a dual role as Scarlett and the voice of Cobra Commander! Al Pacino, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey, and the rest of the Glengarry Glen Ross cast reuniting for Food Fighters, featuring a very special appearance by Robert De Niro as Chip the Ripper!

Anyway, just watch the clip. If the ch-ch-chuh noise when Optimus Prime morphs from truck cab to automaton doesn't make you feel like you're 10 again, then maybe nothing will.

film | Motel icks

2007-05-09T18:05:00.001-04:00

Just about every other coming attraction you see these days seems to be heralding the arrival of another sequel or remake, and maybe it's a further testament to the lack of fresh ideas floating around Hollywood that, even on the rare occasion a film's not blatantly based on a prior work, it usually still feels like you've seen it 11 times before. For example, take VACANCY, an "original" screenplay written by Mark L. Smith that essentially amounts to a greatest-hits compilation of scenes and concepts from sundry better thrillers. In other words, a bickering married couple (Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale) have nowhere to go but the ooky motel a couple miles down the winding country backroad on which their car died, and what ensues is an overtly familiar mish-mash of Psycho, Breakdown, Duel, 8mm, Joy Ride, Identity, The Hitcher, and U-Turn, and I'm sure there's more, but those are the only titles that came to mind in the 96 seconds it took me to write this sentence.

Actually, the early passages of Vacancy are staged with enough verve and juicy conviction that their redundant uselessness is, at first, quite easy to disregard. The performances by Wilson and Beckinsale emit a chokehold intensity, and director Nimród Antal reinvigorates wheezy horror clichés — the deceptively helpful auto mechanic (Ethan Embry), the off-puttingly kooky desk clerk (Frank Whaley), the apallingly seedy room décor — with visceral pizzazz. As our stranded heroes' anxious unease begins to bleed into reasonable terror, Vacancy offers a gripping — if not notably novel — what's-going-to-happen-next scenario. Unfortunately, what happens next is a big reveal — Wilson and Beckinsale have walked into a grotesque trap set by a snuff-filmmaking crew — that turns the remainder of the film into silly cat-and-mouse stuff, wherein the mice suffer from delayed-reaction syndrome, and the cats come across as too bumbling and disorganized to have successfully carried out this nasty business, as a wall of videotapes suggests, countless times before. Initially, you might appreciate Vacancy for how it manages to effectively unnerve without resorting to the gristle and ick of its shocker contemporaries (Hostel, the Saw series), but you'll eventually realize that it's lacking both blood spatter and brain matter. C

film | I like to watch

2007-04-26T17:59:00.001-04:00

If Hollywood's lazy obsession with modernizing classic lit into high-gloss larks for the mallrat set — i.e., Austen's Emma as Clueless, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as She's the Man — has finally run its course, it only makes sense that they'd next turn their attention to classic cinema. But shock of shocks: DISTURBIA, a contemporary revamping of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, that still-gripping 1954 landmark of suspense and suspicion, is more creepy-crawly fun than it has any right to be, and most of the credit goes to Shia Labeouf's crackerjack performance in the Jimmy Stewart role. As a troubled teen on summer house arrest for decking his teacher — and the teacher kinda had it coming, honestly — he's a smartass hero worth rooting for. Oh, and he's bright and resourceful, too, never stepping out of the realm of high-school-senior believability, yet (mercifully) sidestepping the dumbass decisions that end up getting many of his slasher-flick peers hacked to bits. You like this kid, and his angsty amateur sleuthing keeps you glued to the screen with a big old dollop of up-your-spine tingle even when Disturbia stumbles into a subpar house-of-horrors endgame.

Co-writers Christopher B. Landon and Carl Ellsworth alter the handicap — Stewart's broken leg for Labeouf's ankle monitor — and if you think that sounds like a downgrade in the dire-incapacitation department, well, OK, you'd be right. But the canniest thing Landon and Ellsworth do is to not confine Labeouf to a wheelchair, which makes him more of a proactive detainee than a helpless victim-in-waiting, which, in turn, gives Disturbia a youthful-malcontent-who-cried-wolf identity of its own. And what a wolf — as the neighbor who's a serial killer in regular-joe clothing (come on, like you expect him to turn out to be a nice guy), The Green Mile's David Morse oozes tightly-wound hostility, and he's so brilliant at keeping the psycho in check that he makes Labeouf's vulnerable, widowed mom (The Matrix's Carrie-Ann Moss) suspect that her son has transitioned from stir-crazy to just plain crazy. True, there's no real surprise to how this all plays out, but the predictable story arc is goosed with the techno-voyeuristic slickness to suck in the Livejournalists and the YouTubers, and, at its heart, it's also got enough old-fashioned spunk to appeal to those folks who don't know what the hell Livejournal or YouTube are. Disturbia's pretty easy to nitpick apart (wouldn't Morse's home emit one ungodly odor?), but it's extremely easier to enjoy. B+

film | Holy crap

2007-04-24T14:47:00.001-04:00

The poster for the occult mystery THE REAPING sports the tagline What hath God wrought?, but the question first and foremost on my mind while navigating its convoluted tale of biblical nuttiness was Did Hilary Swank owe somebody a favor? Because, um, hello, she's young-ish, she has two Oscars, she's got clout and prestige and whatnot. I know people complain about how few quality roles there are for women in Hollywood, but is the situation so dire that Swank voluntarily signed up for the cringe-worthiest career about-face since Halle Berry won the Academy Award for Monster's Ball, then opted to star in the immensely idiotic shocker Gothika, which, by the way, is from the same production studio as The Reaping? Uh-oh. Let us now pray for Reese Witherspoon, 2006's Best Actress, who, if the trend holds and the timing is right, should be starring in some abysmal horror flick sometime this autumn.

Swank plays a former pastor who — say it with me — lost her faith when her husband and child were killed on a missionary trip to Africa. What's a devoutly religious gal who's royally ticked off at God to do? Why, become an atheist professor of miracle-debunkery at Louisiana State University, of course, which makes her the go-to authority when a nearby backwoods community claims that the water in their creeks has ominously turned to blood overnight. the Bible-beatin' locals fear this is the first in a revisited series of the 10 plagues of Egypt from the book of Exodus, so Swank sets out to explain it all with science — only she can't, natch, cuz The Reaping is a supernatural thriller with at least nine more special-effects sequences to realize. It gives very little away to note that Swank's made a re-believer upon being assailed by a swarm of locusts, but that's plague no. 8, and it follows the boils, the lice and the death of the livestock. Me, I'd probably get a mean case of the wiggins when hundreds of flies — and that's no. 3, one of the early plagues — instantaneously envelope the grilled fish I was gonna eat for dinner, which is a roundabout suggestion that Swank takes too long to grasp that she's in way over her skeptical head.

Yawn, here's a twist: This freaky business is connected to a barefoot devil child (Bridge to Terabithia's Annasophia Robb) who doesn't do much but habitually dart in front of the camera whenever director Stephen Hopkins (Lost in Space) needs to trick viewers into thinking The Reaping is actually scary. Nope, just loud, obnoxious and redundant with the requisite, dumb faux-jolts — phew, it was only a bird! or a tea kettle! or a dream ... within a dream! — that typically come two or three in a row. As for the story, it's the stuff of a lame X-Files two-parter: satanic cults, secret villains, sacred daggers, southern discomfort, and climactic plot revelations involving a character who could resolve everything with an expository line or two if he or she didn't opt to inexplicably remain silent throughout most of the film. Swank invokes scientific techno-jargon like "phenophaline" with a brisk confidence, but she's trapped in a third-rate riff on The Omen — and since a mere nine months ago saw a second-rate remake of The Omen, The Reaping feels like a really burnt offering to the movie gods. D+

film | Army fatigue

2007-04-19T13:02:00.000-04:00

Exactly how homosexual is 300, a fantastical — but hardly fantastic — bit of revisionist history focusing on the small Spartan army that managed to temporarily stave off an impossibly mighty battalion of Persian invaders in what any enthusiastic ancient studies teacher would probably gush was the awesomest last stand, like, ever? It's so homosexual that the nonstop sequences of half-naked musclemen grunting as they jab each other with phallic implements are nearly stud-on-stud porn with a more bombastic soundtrack. It's so homosexual that, when Spartan soldiers run a Persian flank off the edge of a steep cliff, I expected the Weathergirls' "it's raining men" to suddenly kick in on the Dolby. It's so homosexual that it could be subtitled A Gay Romp with Leonidas and Xerxes at Thermopylae.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.

But 300 must think that there is something wrong with that, because its homoerotic subtext is matched only by its homophobic one. The movie is essentially an all-you-can-eye buffet of swarthy Spartan soldiers flaunting and flexing their chisled hardbodies, but for all its read-between-the-lines beefcake posturing, 300 seems decidedly skittish about being viewed as anything other than an ode to hetero manliness, a ¿quién es más macho? stomp around the battlefield. When the Spartan king Leonidas (his royal ripped-ness Gerard Butler of The Phantom of the Opera) slams his Persian foes as "boy-lovers" — right, because same-sex pederasty was never the thing to do in 480 BC Sparta — it's a queasy moment, but when 300 finally shows this evil Persian threat, the hoo-rah bigotry segues into laughable camp. It turns out Persia boasts less of a military than a marching circuit party; in between skirmishes, they enjoy elaborate orgies — don't worry, dudes, cuz the camera only lingers over the lesbo stuff — and their ruler, the self-professed god Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro, newly of television's Lost), is realized as a towering drag-queen priss in gold body jewelry and about seven layers of Max Factor. Yeah, Sparta! we're meant to cheer. Kick their boy-lovin', accessorizin', alternative-lifestyle-havin' asses! Hurry, before they kidnap you at spearpoint and drag you to a Cher concert!

Seekers of the thrill-ride viewing experience might not mind the garishly confused overtones, because 300 contains a proper smattering of visceral excesses, chiefly the striking monochromatic compositions that director Zack Snyder (2004's Dawn of the Dead redux) and cinematographer Larry Fong (also from Lost) lift straight from Frank Miller's graphic-novel source. As in 2005's adaptation of Miller's Sin City, however, razzle-dazzle can only carry an empty stylistic exercise so far, and less than a half-hour in, the visual punch becomes more of a nagging flick on the earlobe. You'd think the story of Sparta's David fending off Persia's Goliath would loan itself to a rousing combat epic, but Snyder is so obsessed with parlaying the cool factor that he shoots the bloody bits up close and personal — great for a clear view of the graphic slow-motion carnage, but it hampers the bigger picture. I dunno how the real Spartans managed to really defeat the real Persians without the assist from today's finest green-screen craftsmen.

Yeah, yeah, I get it: The Spartans didn't actually overpower martial-artist acrobats and a marauding menagerie of elephants and rhinos. These parts offer a tenuous link to historical accuracy; it's more a depiction of their triumph as word-of-mouth mythos probably spun it. (And 300 is narrated, in fact, in tall-tale pronouncements that obnoxiously states the obvious: "The wolf begins to circle the boy.") But even as a visionary history-class goregasm, 300 flounders, too redundant in its spurting ultra-violence, its bellowed declarations ("THIS! IS! SPARTA!"), its heavily digitized comic-book artifice to be much in the way of escapist entertainment. Strip the film of rampant sexual insinuation, initial ooohs and ahhhs, and quite possibly the finest parade of male abdominal ripples ever to grace the screen, and Edwin Starr was right: War is good for absolutely nothing. C-

film | Over troubled water

2007-04-10T13:41:00.001-04:00

BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA faithfully adapts Katherine Paterson's beloved 1977 young-adult book, but in this case, faithfully may not mean that the film sticks to its source material. No, it's more of a bewildered allusion to Walden Media, the production company led by conservative moneybags Philip Anschutz that aspires to swaddle its kiddie-oriented properties — including Terabithia and the Chronicles of Narnia film series that recently launched — in evangelical values and themes. Hey, if that's your bag, I at least hope it matches your shoes, but watching Bridge to Terabithia, I kept wondering why a guy who's funded research institutes that support only intelligent-design studies and ballot initiatives to legalize discrimination against gays and lesbians would back a movie that invites its audience to, as one character succinctly puts it, "Close your eyes and keep your mind wide open"?

Oh well. My personal issues with the producers' wonky politicking aside, Terabithia is a film best described as nice: well-intentioned, intermittently engaging and hardly a chore to endure, and as the end credits roll, you sit there thinking, "Gosh, I wish I liked that movie more than I actually did." I blame the fantasy genre's oversaturation — you've got your Narnias, your Harry Potters, your Lord of the Ringses. In Terabithia, when two fifth-grade classmates (RV's Josh Hutcherson and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's Annasophia Robb) dodge mean bullies and stern parents by escaping into a make-believe world of trolls, sorcerers and other sundry critters, you don't really get the feeling that anything especially magical is happening; it's just a couple kids surrounding themselves with special-effects imagery they've cobbled together from sugar-buzzed marathon viewings of Narnia, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings on DVD. Also, that both Hutcherson and Robb look too old to be sparring with pretend monsters from a tree-fort in the woods — he was 14 at the time of filming, she was 13 — doesn't help to sell the copious flights of fantasy. On the page, their characters are 10, an age that seems more in line with their horsing around.

The non-imaginary scenes go down easier. They employ the usual clichés found in your garden-variety coming-of-age family flick — the soft-rock musical montage (let's dance while we paint the living room, everybody!), the crushed-on inspirational teacher (Elf's Zooey Deschanel, deflecting a borderline-creepy role with innocuous oomph), the dour dad (The X-Files' Robert Patrick) whose love is unyieldingly tough, the little sister (cutie-pie Bailee Madison, a natural at 7) who boo-hoos after being denied entry to the big kids' club — but they're performed with heart and enthusiasm by a cast that shines through what eventually amounts to a CGI-enhanced After-School Special. Hutcherson especially reigns in the story's jarringly dire finale with soulful conviction, emerging as a young actor to watch — preferably in better movies. Next up for him: the queasily-titled Firehouse Dog, which I'm gonna go ahead and bet isn't one of them. C+

film | Bad to the bone

2007-03-29T14:13:00.001-04:00

Nicolas Cage, the otherworldly hero of the garishly awful GHOST RIDER, is such a fan of the film's Marvel-Comics source that he has a tattoo of the main character on his arm. Which raises an extremely important question: Why would he attach himself to a movie that crams his beloved idol into ... well, i won't call it a bad joke. 2002's Daredevil, as directed and written by Ghost Rider director/writer Mark Steven Johnson — now, that was a bad joke. Ghost Rider, on the other hand, wishes it was noodle-headed enough to be deemed a joke. It's just plain old bad.

Remember the playground dance-fighting between Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner in Daredevil? Well, imagine the same awkwardness stripped of the holy-crap-this-can't-be-real amusement factor, and you've got a solid idea of how Johnson shoehorns ill-advised bursts of self-conscious "comedy" into material that demands a consistently dark treatment. True, i've never read the comic, but something tells me it's not so absurd that the human alter-ego of its titular badass skeleton biker grooves along with the music of the Carpenters and swills jelly beans from a martini glass when he's not commanding the flames of hades to fight an array of nasty foes by night. Watching Ghost Rider's smug stabs at crowd-pleasery, you can almost hear Johnson laud his movie as a subversive mash-up of humor and action, but calling it an unpalatable porridge of silliness and hokey computer effects would be more honest. Ghost Rider recalls Spawn (1999), another botched attempt to parlay a popular comic in which a good guy inadvertently gets recruited as a demonic emissary for Beelzebub into a film franchise. And the similarities don't stop there, mostly because I hated Spawn, too.

Cage stars as Johnny Blaze, a stunt cyclist whose backfired pact with the devil (Peter Fonda, confusing bored with evil) to save his dying papa cost him his soul, which means that Johnny morphs into a bony bounty hunter with a burning skull whenever Mephistopheles requires the aid of hired, er, muscle. Thus, after Satan Jr. (American Beauty's fantastic Wes Bentley, AWOL since 2002 and climbing aboard an extraordinarily lame comeback vehicle) riles his dad by crossing over to the mortal plane in order to nab a supernatural artifact that could trigger the apocalypse — is there any other kind? — Johnny decides to use his powers against the entire hellish patriarchy, incorporating only the occasional lull to woo his teen sweetie, now a va-va-va-voom-ish television reporter played Hitch's uncomfortably miscast Eva Mendes. in a sight-gag blunder that echoes the cringe-worthy camp moment from Batman & Robin where the Caped Crusader whips out his Bat-Mastercard, she consults a magic eight-ball (she keeps one in her purse, of course) to see if Johnny will make the fancy-restaurant date he's running late to. Uh-huh. In Ghost Rider, all signs point to groan. D

film | Bored of the rings

2007-03-23T16:57:00.001-04:00

"There was a time when the fierce and beautiful land of Alagaësia was ruled by men astride mighty dragons ..."

So goes the opening narration of the swords-and-sorcery yarn ERAGON, voiced by none other than Jeremy Irons in a bored sigh that says, "Yeah, yeah. I know: I have an Oscar, I'm too good for this shit, yadda yadda. But hey, they all can't be Reversal of Fortune. I gotta eat, and ... and Malkovich is in this, too!" It's a portent of the not-quite-inspired goofiness to come in director Stephen Fangmeier's clunky adaptation of Christopher Paolini's kid-lit tome, from the bizarro casting — Blood Diamond's Djimon Hounsou as an elfin ruler in a brunette pageboy, Trainspotting's Robert Carlyle as an evil warlock who's styled to resemble a gene-pool orgy between Meat Loaf, Gloria Stuart and Evil Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (gah! my eyes!) — to the wonky dialogue that'd feel at home in comic-book-blurb form but sounds pretty damn nutty emitted by actors trying to be serious: "Into the sky to win or die!", "Durza will send his Urgals after us!", and, my personal favorite, "Before you can cast a spell, you must learn the magic language of the elves."

Newcomer Edward Speelers plays a young farmhand who stumbles across a mysterious oversized egg while hunting and becomes the guardian of the female dragon pup it hatches. She grows at an alarming rate and begins to telepathically communicate with Speelers (Rachel Weisz of The Constant Gardener provides her vocal purr), which leads to endless scenes where the dragon and the boy mentally chit-chat while quietly blinking at each other. I dunno. When a character speaks, I enjoy seeing its face and mouth move accordingly, but that's a minor distraction alongside how blatantly Star-Wars-with-fire-breathing-behemoths-instead-of-X-Wing-Starfighters the story is. There's the murdered uncle, the kidnapped princess, the wizened mentor — there's even a moment for our blonde, callow hero to stare off into the sunset as the orchestral score swells. And there's John Malkovich as the dark lord Galbatorix, whose wonky moniker might be a cryptogram that decodes to spell D-A-R-T-H V-A-D-E-R. Toss in some J.R. Tolkien (nasty monster-soldiers) here and a bit of J.K. Rowling (mystical scars) there, and you've got an effects-laden medieval mélange that's as blandly inoffensive as it is overtly familiar. When I learned that Paolini was only in his teens at the time he put this tale on paper, I thought, Yep, that sounds about right. C-

film | Silence is moldin'

2007-03-19T11:53:00.000-04:00

Maybe director Jamie Babbit has never actually interacted with someone who's hearing impaired, or maybe the characters in THE QUIET are all a bunch of stupid idiots. Either way, her ridiculous potboiler proffers a plot twist that crashes an orgy of sensationalist camp topicality masquerading as a "serious" psychological thriller. The Quiet is equal parts after-school special, American Beauty-esque suburban-scandal drama, and Mean Girls rewritten as a lurid V.C. Andrews page-turner, and if I made it sound goofy and amusing, please accept my apologies. It's neither, especially once you factor in that there's no winking chink in the film's solemn facade, which is odd considering that Babbit's prior work — the sexuality-conversion farce But I'm a Cheerleader, episodes of the plastic-surgery soap Nip/Tuck — flaunts her flair for the outrageous-aware.

Camilla Belle of that awful When a Stranger Calls redux plays a deaf-mute orphaned teen who's taken in by her wealthy godparents, but since their little-miss-bitch daughter (24's Elisha Cuthbert) relentlessly antagonizes Belle at school and home — and especially because dad (The Opposite of Sex's Martin Donovan) has a sicko predilection that mom (The Sopranos' Edie Falco) swills pills to avoid dealing with — their philanthropy doesn't make much sense. But the aforementioned revelation here has to do with Belle's true nature, which: A) when discovered and used against Belle by Cuthbert, still doesn't provide a good-enough reason for Belle to not blow the whistle on her new family's creepy secret; and B) is concealed pretty sloppily, given that anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to Belle might wonder how she appears to understand what people say to her without concentrating on their lips. Well, read mine: With its room-temp stabs at shock value, The Quiet comes off as a Lifetime-network movie featuring flashes of pay-cable kink. D

film | Sarah, plain and dull

2007-03-06T22:56:00.001-05:00

Dear Sarah Michelle Gellar,

Hi. How are you? How's married life with Freddie? How are Faith and Giles doing? Please tell me Willow and Kennedy broke up. Did Xander ever call that nice Sandy Duncan to find out where she got her glass eye? I guess you heard about how that whole Shansu deal went down in — wait. Shit, I'm sorry. I was so engrossed in those seven amazing seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I keep forgetting they weren't, you know, like ... real.

Oh, hey. Speaking of the show, I wanted to tell you that I caught your new flick THE RETURN the other day, and it sorta Dawn-ed (haha, get it?) on me that you need to step it up, girl. Your post-Buffy projects have been few and far between, and when you do act in a movie, it's a poor vehicle for your tremendous charisma and tasty way with a one-liner. OK. Allow me to recap: I actually didn't mind Scooby-Doo 2, if only because it was a decent improvement over Scooby-Doo Uno, and because Linda Cardinelli and Matthew Lillard are truly the perfect Velma and Shaggy, but you were definitely miscast as Daphne, who was scripted as an ornamental Buffy clone in red hair dye. The Grudge might've been a box-office hit, I'll give you that, but it contained a scene in which a vengeful spirit had to be buzzed into an apartment complex in order to haunt somebody. In other words, ew. You literally jumped out of The Grudge 2 after maybe eight minutes of screen time, and I'd like to think that when you heard they were making it, you rolled your eyes and were all like, "Fine, I'll do it for continuity's sake, but I am totally zooming through it like Jamie Lee in that 26th Halloween sequel: Boo! Aaah! Splat! Cha-ching!", and that is so proof that you're one smart cookie. (And pretty, too! I dig the brunette deal you've got going on!) And I know Simply Irresistible came out in the middle of Buffy's third season, so I shouldn't bring it up here, but Sarah. Sarah. It was so freakin' terrible, I couldn't not include it. Two words: enchanted crustacean.

So, um, The Return. Yawn. I mean, it's not as awful as that episode where Buffy and that fraternity are transformed into neanderthals by the tainted beer, but it's also not good, like ... oh, every other episode of Buffy. You play a sadsack sales rep for a trucking company, for God's sake. I know you actor people need to stretch by taking different roles and stuff — and, yeah, this is about as un-Buffy as you can get — but this Shyamalan-ian supernatural drama ain't doin' either of us a favor.

So this Joanna (you), she's a morose self-mutilator due to a hazy childhood trauma, and she's cruising through the south on business with a stalker ex (Adam Scott) — a subplot that disappears so quickly, it's less a red herring than a pink anchovy — and her demons — not, unfortunately, the literal kind you used to wallop on Buffy — in hot pursuit. She experiences these vivid flashbacks to a violent ordeal that doesn't seem to have anything to do with her, only it actually does, see, because ... well, you already know. You're in the movie ... which reminds me: I've got a couple questions that maybe you can answer. Like, OK. If the you-know-what wanted to find you-know-who, why on earth would it make you cut yourself? Let's say you bled to death; it'd be screwed. And how did the bad guy manage to get his truck ahead of you for that pivotal climactic jolt? And why did he hide the knife in the gas tank? And aren't you incredibly fortunate that the vehicle was collecting rust right there on his lot, and that the undercarriage had corroded just enough for you to reach in and find it?

Sarah, poppet. I adore you, and I want to give The Return a few scraps of credit for its terrifically moody production values, and for at least trying to unnerve without resorting to the endless gristle of one of those Hostel Saw Massacre torture shows that are so popular with the kids these days. And while the obligatory big-twist finale is mildly interesting, getting there — a murky slog through familiar territory — is hardly worth it. If I was the kind of guy who graded movies on some stupid blog in order to make myself seem more important than I actually am, I'd probably give The Return a C-, and I might end my review by asking you to quit this dreary-thriller crap and do some returning yourself — to your roots. I miss you dusting vamps, sure, but most of all, I miss looking like you were having a ball doing it.

Love always, your best friend forever,

Jamie.

p.s. Seriously, Willow and Kennedy?

film | Snooze alarmed

2007-03-05T17:22:00.001-05:00

Let it be known: I heart Michel Gondry. I heart his Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I heart the DVD collection of his commercials and short films, and I especially heart his music videos for the Chemical Brothers, Kylie Minogue and Cibo Matto. I do not, however, heart THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP, Gondry's quirky, fluttering juxtaposition of slumberland fantasia and covers-yanked-off reality — actually, his vision of covers-yanked-off reality is pretty fantasied, too — that cracks under the weight of its own incessant whimsy. What happened? My guess is that Gondry, for the first time, is working from his own screenplay, not a script from the brilliant imagination of Charlie Kaufman (who authored Gondry's Eternal Sunshine and Human Nature), and not a catchy dance-pop song that compliments Gondry's dependably trippy visual aesthetic terrifically. Yeah, Gondry's an insanely inventive director. As a writer, well ... he's an insanely inventive director.

The über-charming Gael García Bernal (Y Tu Mamá También) plays Sleep's drowsy hero, but the movie stretches his innate likeability so far that it snaps. As Stepháne, an aspiring inventor who awkwardly flits between the brash spunk of his dream self and the social insecurities of his waking life, Bernal is such an irritatingly infantilized man-child that he makes the pop persona of, say, Adam Sandler seem posh enough to join Dame Judi Dench for afternoon tea. Stepháne wobbles into a crush on his new apartment neighbor (Charlotte Gainsbourg) — her name: why, Stephánie, of course — but since their kooky pseudo-courtship develops both in actuality and in his unconscious mind, and because Gondry insists on blurring the lines between the two, you're never quite sure how to interpret the logic of the characters' actions: Somnambulating, Stepháne slides nonsensical letters under Stephánie's door, and he breaks into her place in order to kidnap a beloved stuffed horse to rig to it a mechanism that enables it to gallop on its own; she responds with anger (understandable) at his invasion of her privacy, then expresses adoration for the gift; he's momentarily humble and penitent before bouncing back to his bratty collegiate-kindergarten jocularity ("I like your boobs. They're very friendly and unpretentious"). At best, he's merely insane; at worst, he's an off-puttingly petulant baby who reins in his obvious desire for Stephánie by treating her pretty much like crap. Either way, The Science of Sleep's coddling, twee portrayal of him as an endearingly introspective stargazer is a bit of a stretch.

Gondry's flights of fancy and reliance on unusually dazzling (but low-tech) effects — a television studio made from egg cartons, a faucet that runs a stream of crinkled blue cellophane — struggle to liberate the film from its obnoxious personality and inane cutesy-poo dialogue (Stepháne: "Each structure has its own resonant frequency!"; Stephánie: "Destruction is an obstruction for the construction!"), but it's in vain. As a pure example of Gondry's mind-bending sensory ingenuity, The Science of Sleep is nothing less than a doozy. As a winking portrait of the creative mind gone astray, however, it is what it eats. C-

film | Gore for precedent

2007-02-21T14:17:00.000-05:00

Attention, you nutty gore-lovers who thought the previous entries of the Saw and Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchises somehow left a few gaping eviscerations unstaged: Between the sticky death games of SAW III and the tool-shed amputations of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE BEGINNING, you'll see the human body mauled, maimed and mutilated beyond your grodiest dreams. We movie-reviewin' snobs, we'll bitch and moan like we always do about the wooden gratuitousness of these scare tactics, but the Fangoria faithful seem to dig them because they deliver exactly that — just enough gallons o' gristle and inventive kills to out-ick whatever last month's blood-spattered horror bonanza was — and little else. That said, with its drowning-by-liquified-pig-guts and a machine that makes its occupant do the twist in a way Chubby Checker probably never imagined, Saw III wins in the depraved-showmanship department, cuz ... well, there's only so much you can do with a chainsaw.

Anyway, let's start with The Beginning, an unnecessary prequel to 2003's better-than-it-had-any-right-to-be Texas Chainsaw redux, sorta superfluous itself, I guess, but also a truly unnerving carnival sideshow. The Beginning initially appears to be a glib analytical breakdown of Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski) — the series' mute, stab-happy, other-folks'-epidermis-wearin' boogeyman — and his sick afflictions, but pop-psychology is more or less shrugged off after the opening credits, which means that we're spared a campy moment in which a cute li'l Leatherface brings meat tenderizer and a mallet to his kindergarten show-and-tell. But hey, that would've been preferable to the mostly scene-for-scene restaging of TCM '03, this time with a quartet of 1970s youths (Jordana Brewster, Matthew Bomer, Diora Baird and Taylor Handley) running afoul of Leatherface's cannibalistic clan while road-tripping through the Lone Star state before the boys enlist for a tour of duty in Vietnam. Leatherface's maniacal adoptive pa (R. Lee Ermey, always a batshit-crazy drill sergeant, never a bride) tries to slice and dice the kids into a four-course meal, and, uh, since none of these characters stick around to warn Jessica Biel and co. in TCM '03, it's obvious from the get-go that this bloodbath ends with a full freezer.

While the inevitable cast casualties of The Beginning render it a pointless wallow in cinematic violence, they're precisely the reason the Saw flicks are so damn popular: It's less about who dies than how they die, and the rusty booby traps and torture devices fashioned by Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), the anti-hero monster of Saw, to reform society's miscreants and sinners — y'know, they'll repent if they survive — are equal parts Rube Goldberg and the Marquis de Sade in their devious brilliance. Jigsaw and his Saw II lackey (Shawnee Smith) are still prone to windbag pontifications ("Death is a surprise party ... unless you're already dead on the inside"; insert evil laughter here) as they target two new marks: a grieving dad (Braveheart's Angus Macfayden), given the opportunity to avenge his son's death, and a sullen ER physician (Bahar Soomekh), locked in a bomb collar while she operates on Jigsaw's terminal brain tumor. Believe it or not, this stuff is a cut above Saw and Saw II in terms of performance and writing, but that's not exactly a ringing endorsement considering how barrel-bottom both films were. Hell, maybe I'm only giving Saw III a little extra credit because, amidst the non-stop unpleasantness of its entrail-soaked money shots, it addresses the shoddiness of its predecessors by working back through the entire narrative to tie up their loose ends and fill in their plot holes. Flesh wounds aren't the only gaping things in the Saw movies.

As Saw III reaches its ballsy (for this kind of film), definitively final finale, you've gotta wonder what big twist the writers could possibly cook up for Saw IV — which is, of course, scheduled for release later this year. Please, franchise gods, deliver us from yet another Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but if the Saws keep improving at this rate, holy cow, Saw VIII might actually be good. Saw III: C The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning: D+

film | Diary of a mad white woman

2007-02-16T15:20:00.000-05:00

If the American Film Institute compiles a list of the 100 creepiest movie characters, it's a safe bet that Dame Judi Dench's aggressively busybody history teacher from NOTES ON A SCANDAL will rank somewhere on there. Clinical shrinks might find a disturbing case study on pathological loneliness in this lady ... provided she ever opened up to anything other than her journal, where she cuts loose with pages and pages of scrawled self-pity and snobby, usually vitriolic observations about everybody else. Her latest fixation: Cate Blanchett as the new art teacher at her London comprehensive school. After Blanchett succumbs to the moony advances of a 15-year-old student (Andrew Simpson), Dench spies them in a sexual clinch, then essentially — and very delicately — coerces blanchett into an eerie companionship that recalls Matt Damon's psychosexual fancying of Jude Law in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Booned by the master-class talents of Dench and Blanchett, Scandal packs a dramatic punch with one of those deliciously diabolical thriller scenarios where there are no saints, sinners prey on the weaknesses of other sinners, and it's less a question of if it'll end badly for those involved than exactly how badly it's going to end.

Notes on a Scandal doesn't take the time to tap into Blanchett's head the way it does with Dench, and the reactions of Blanchett's jilted husband (the excellent Bill Nighy) — hateful towards Dench during a particularly tense moment, friendly to her in their next scene — occasionally feel like key bits of the movie were left on the floor of the editing suite, but these are sacrifices the movie might've made in order to whittle its source — Zoë Heller's 2003 novel, aptly titled What Was She Thinking? — down to a lean, mean 90 minutes. Alas, you forgive the missteps because it's riveting fun to watch Dench's maniacally parasitic repression and Blanchett's dewy boho vulnerability stir a tasty little bite of tabloid sensationalism into an engaging, high-class potboiler. Together, they make Notes on a Scandal scandalously good. B+

film | No sale

2007-01-31T16:42:00.000-05:00

The few honest-to-God funny moments in the alleged comedy EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH come from the casting of pop tart Jessica Simpson as a new cashier at a Costco-ish bulk store, who, rumor has it, will totally sleep with any co-worker who wins the titular honor. Sure, her big-screen debut in last year's Dukes of Hazzard merely required her to jiggle, look sexy in cut-offs, and pronounce the word "undercarriage" with a Georgian accent, but Employee needs her to be convincing as an engaging romantic lead. She's not, of course, which might be why the movie doesn't seem to give her a lot of dialogue (her big line: "Now, that is some of the best chicken parmesan i've ever had!") or much to do beyond reacting to comedian du jour Dane Cook — who plays the shelf-stocker pining for her sweet, sweet ass — with precisely three different expressions: A) "You're silly!"; B) "I'm pretty!"; and C) "You think i'm pretty, too!" It's almost amusing to watch the film go out of its way to avoid making Simpson do anything but flash her obnoxiously bright smile. Almost.

But let's be honest: Employee of the Month would've sucked even with a legit actress in the role, and that's because its life-on-the-clock farce can't hold a price-scanner to the wickedly sharp and hilariously real portrayals of workplace malaise and management politicking in The Good Girl, Office Space and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. No, Employee is quite content to stay on frat-boy turf: blows to the crotch, homophobic jibes, and fart humor (first gas-passing: seven minutes in) — the type of predictable slacker hijinks that polluted Grandma's Boy, You, Me and Dupree and, oh, about seven or eight other stinkers released in the past year. give Cook a little credit: He's not bad, and he's wisely playing to his 15-to-25-year-old male fan base, but i couldn't shake the feeling that this is exactly the kind of flick he'd rag on in one of his exhaustingly loud stand-up routines. He's quieter here. trying to woo Simpson with charm, compliments and a date cribbed from John Hughes' Career Opportunities — cuz, gee, who wouldn't want to bang a chick who'll do you only if you nab a meaningless superlative? His chief rival: a jerky clerk (Dax Shepard) who's adored by customers because he turns his checkout lane into a floor show. Yeah, right. I don't know anyone who'd subject themselves to a longer wait in line just to see some guy flip their economy-sized bottle of Wesson behind his back like he's Tom Cruise in Cocktail. Pass the jumbo Tylenol. D

film | Crimebotchers

2007-01-26T16:41:00.000-05:00

Just to clear up any confusion, Brian De Palma's THE BLACK DAHLIA is not culled completely from factual events, but rather the James Ellroy novel that fictionally cracked the titular 1947 unsolved murder case. The acclaimed author has said that his book's speculative pulp functions as a pseudo-dedication to his mother, whose own unsolved murder 11 years later has held his imagination hostage since. That's a haunting story, and one that's far more compelling than the retro generics of De Palma's film, a visually sumptuous but dramatically ridiculous riff on hard-boiled noir classics and, of course, De Palma's favorite sequences from other movies he directed (Scarface, The Untouchables, Carlito's Way). In other words, The Black Dahlia is quintessential De Palma, only bad. Really bad. We're talkin' worse-than-Mission-to-Mars bad here.

The facts: The body of starlet-wannabe Elizabeth Short (Not Another Teen Movie's Mia Kirshner), 22, is discovered in a field in Los Angeles, bisected at the waist and mutilated further. The make-believe: As buddy cops Aaron Eckhart (Thank You for Smoking) and Josh Hartnett (Pearl Harbor) hunt for the killer, Eckhart downward-spirals into obsession, and Hartnett does a smoldering-look exchange with his pal's girlfriend (Scarlet Johansson in a self-consciously vampy performance that relies far too heavily on a prop cigarette holder). The investigation, which takes a backseat to the tepid romantic triangle — Eckhart's a rakish fit for Dahlia's rat-a-tat theatrics, but Hartnett and Johansson give the impression they're horsing around in gangster-flick dress-up — and boilerplate civic corruption, later ensnares a bisexual socialite played with a Bugs-Bunny-goes-to-the-ginjoint moxie by Hilary Swank; maybe this character wandered into the film by taking a right at The Hudsucker Proxy and a left at Bullets Over Broadway, because she definitely belongs to a different movie universe than the rest of the cast. Swank figures into one of Dahlia's bungled plot points: that she's the spitting image of the deceased, who's glimpsed alive but thoroughly sad in a series of seedy black-and-white audition clips. Yeah, um ...

Maybe nobody on the crew noted that Kirshner's period-perfect glamour doesn't nearly match Swank's vogue iciness because they were too busy tending to the hundred different directions the story goes in, forgetting about short — hello, the movie's called The Black Dahlia! — for chunks at a time. De Palma attempts to tie it all together with a final act that delves into high camp, replete with unlikely coincidences, silly deductions, and the screechiest villain confession ever, and why not? He's hit every other note. He even stages one of those sex scenes where Hartnett passionately clears the table of dinner, dishes, linens and centerpieces to make room for him and Johansson to get it on. If the next shot was of Johansson on her knees and picking bits of roasted quail and morteau sausage out of the designer carpet, I might give The Black Dahlia a little more credit. But it wasn't, so i don't have to. D

film | Blunder woman

2007-01-24T10:07:00.000-05:00

In MY SUPER EX-GIRLFRIEND, Uma Thurman plays the most annoying superhero since the Wonder Twins and Gleek. She's G-Girl, a nondescript superwoman with a checklist of Supermannish superpowers — incredible strength, heat vision, the ability to fly, et. al. — that she uses to thwart superdisasters (runaway military missiles), combat supervillains (Eddie Izzard's Professor Bedlam), and wreak superhavoc on the average-joe ex (Luke Wilson) who superdumped her superass the moment he realized the superlovemaking wasn't worth putting up with her superneurosis. Yeah, I'm gonna wear out super in the story description cuz i sure as hell ain't gonna be usin' the word to describe the film.

You've heard of phoned-in performances? Well, My Super Ex-Girlfriend is a phoned-in movie: limp and listless with squandered potential all around, as if its writer — The Simpsons vet Don Payne — couldn't be bothered to explore the sly action-figures-have-feelings-too possibilities generated by its juicy screwball premise. In the two funny scenes, Thurman vandalizes Wilson's car (with a twist) and tosses a live shark through his bedroom window, and these bits flicker with a loopy imagination that momentarily encourages you to overlook that G-Girl is a vindictive, unlikeable shrew. And it doesn't help that the harmless, hangdog Wilson is the object of her seemingly non-stop rancor — or that he totally made the right decision in ending their relationship to return the affections of his cute co-worker (Scary Movie's Anna Faris), a nice gal who's decidedly not a psycho bitch. In a spectacularly uncomfortable pre-break-up sequence, Thurman hoists Wilson into the air and essentially forces him to join the mile-high club as they zoom through the city skyline, and his reaction to having sex at the speed of sound encapsulates the whole show: It should be crazy fun, but oh God, it isn't. D+

film | Man behaving badly

2007-01-18T17:07:00.000-05:00

Imagine Speed with the bus replaced by, oh, a human body, and you've got CRANK, a relentlessly busy action-thriller in which a bad guy zig-zags through Los Angeles to find — and kill, natch — the even-badder guys who jabbed him with a hypodermic needle full of some mystery drug that'll seize his heart if he doesn't keep his adrenaline thumping at 101 percent throttle. Of course, I briefly wondered: If the even-badder guys want him dead and got within pricking distance, why didn't they just shoot him in the face and get it over with already? And I'm sorry, but the mere knowledge that there's an arrhythmic timebomb inside your ribcage should be enough to stress you into the kind of physical buzz you'd have to ingest a week's worth of caffiene drips to otherwise achieve, right? So why does Chev Chelios (Jason Statham), Crank's anti-hero hit man, need to engage in all sorts of reckless behavior — inciting racial tension, snorting coke off the floor of a strip club bathroom, screwing his girlfriend (Amy Smart of Road Trip) on a bustling city sidewalk — to keep the beat from slowing to the lulled tempo of a Sunday siesta? Cuz, um, I know I'd be buggin' out, like, the whole damn time. Chev, apparently, has a more blasé attitude regarding his impending demise.

If you think Crank sounds extreme, well, co-writers/directors Brian Taylor and Mark Neveldine would probably respond with a high-five and a "hell yeah!"; their movie is hungrily, proudly gratuitous, which really doesn't excuse its rampant stupidity — or its questionable portrayal of women as rap-video hoochies and daft exhibitionist cheerleaders — as much as it enables farcical broad strokes all around. (It's not as though the men, the lot of them skeezy hoodlums, fare better.) This rampant, turbo-charged ridiculousness is a cracked-out boon for Crank's first 40 minutes — it's wildly funny when Statham eludes a police chase by turning the mall into a giant drive-thru — and then ... well, perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that too much of too much is an exhausting thing, and the movie morphs into a glib cartoon headache that won't let up until the inevitable final moments. You might need a nap and a couple Advil as the end credits roll, but hey, it could be worse: You could be Chev Chelios. C

film | Magic: The blathering

2007-01-17T15:29:00.000-05:00

THE COVENANT is what happens when you toss the Book of Shadows, an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue, and a paint-by-numbers activity page into a paper shredder, then tape the resulting odds and ends into a script that must've been greenlit in a top-secret joint venture between the Sci-Fi Channel and the Logo network: See hot male witches. See hot male witches strut around in speedos and as little else as the PG-13 rating allows. See hot male witches interact homoerotically. See — well, hear — hot male witches employ nonsensical occult jargon like "ascension," "darkling" and "book of damnation." See hot male witches shoot magic blasts from their fingers. See good hot male witch defeat bad hot male witch and save hot female non-witch girlfriend in the process. Run, audience, run!

There's not a single original idea floating around this leaden supernatural clunker. Its anti(?)-heroes — the "Sons of ipswich," four preppy warlocks (Sky High's Steven Strait plays the personality-lite leader of the pack) who descended from a secret coven that managed to survive 1690s Salem — are kinda-sorta a himbo spin on the Wiccan clique from 1996's The Craft, and the simplistic parallels drawn between the abuse of their magic and drug addiction isn't anything that the sixth season of Buffy didn't stage with more imagination and resonance. The film alleges that when a witch uses his powers, it prematurely ages him, which might be a detail tacked onto the screenplay to explain why most of its alleged high school students look 25. But come on, they're doing sorcery in practically every scene — on themselves, on SUVs, on the skirts of hottie classmates (all levitation spells, of course). Shouldn't they resemble Strom Thurmond?

Director Renny Harlin has a knack for parlaying even the most ridiculous scenarios into entertaining funhouse thrillers (The Long Kiss Goodnight, Deep Blue Sea), but here he's tethered to a story treatment that veers between botched camp and sleepy teen-soap melodrama, with oodles of ho-hum jolts — creepy-crawlies, scary faces, it-was-just-a-nightmare-isms — dimming the derivative way. Also, the dialogue is quite stiff when it's not striving for a place in the awkward-pop-reference hall of fame; "How 'bout i make you my wee-yotch?" taunts one young wizard, and another effuses that "Harry Potter can kiss my ass!" after an especially nifty trick. Witch, please. Your wand ain't got nothin' on his. D

popScorn | Hitting the books

2007-01-16T13:25:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure if anybody's been checking this blog since mom flaked ages ago, but on the off chance she returns to see what I thought of the orgasm comedy The Oh in Ohio, I'd like to direct her — and whoever else might be peeping this — to head on over to Meech Eat Books, a brand-spankin'-new book review blog run by my lovely pal Michelle that I've decided is totally the official sister site to reMedia! If we can only convince another friend to launch a music review blog, we'd be a big old media-critiquing triumvirate (look it up)!

Thanks, Michelle. With all the movie-watching lately, I have time to crack open a book maybe, mmm, two hours a month, so I've been reading the first chapter of Scott Smith's The Ruins over and over since August. Now, when I'm chatting up strangers at hifalutin' cocktail parties, I can just verbally plagiarize whatever you've written most recently and seem like I've got a well-read head on my shoulders, and then people won't have the slightest clue that I'm the kind of guy who willingly subjects himself to crap like Little Man and John Tucker Must Die.

You know, so you don't have to. I'm into philanthropy like that.

film | Fake, fake, fake, fake!

2007-01-16T11:36:00.000-05:00

It's full-disclosure time, and this one's a kinda-sorta embarrassment for a pop-cultural sponge like myself: I've never seen a single episode of Sex and the City. Phew. Now, let me tell you why: because, in my head, it's the pay-cable equivalent of a movie like THE OH IN OHIO, a lame parade of "outrageous" sexual hijinks in the guise of you-go-girl sauciness. In other words, it's got Parker Posey, as a repressed 30-something ad executive, blissfully twitching her way through an important business presentation as a pager vibrates in her underwear. It's hard to laugh when you feel bad for the character and even worse for the actress playing her, as Posey's too sharp of a comedienne to be trapped in the kind of see-through gags on display here. When, one scene earlier, she slips the device into her panties to give herself a little good-morning buzz on the drive to work, you know exactly where the movie's headed, and also that you'll be grimacing for the duration.

With Posey cast as a woman who's never experienced what Kirstie Alley referred to as "the big one" in an old Emmy acceptance speech, The Oh in Ohio aspires to be a pseudo-riff on The 40-Year-Old Virgin, but the skillfully crude humor in Virgin emerged from the deliciously real (and raucous) personalities created by its crack ensemble of improv actors. Posey and frustrated hubby Paul Rudd (a Virgin alum) make an adorable couple, yes, but when she starts attending self-gratification classes (taught, of course, by Liza Minnelli) and shopping for pleasure aids, he jogs off his suburban paunch and canoodles with a flirtatious high school student (The OC's Mischa Barton), and you might wonder if the favorite films of Oh scribe Adam Wierzbianski have titles that begin with American and end in either Pie or Beauty. In its final act, Posey attains unlikely sexual nirvana with a wealthy widower (Danny DeVito), and the movie finds its own rhythm and briefly flirts with a heretofore absent sweetness, but even this part is less funny than blandly cute. Hey, you know what's a sad irony? A sex farce centered around orgasms in which the laughs don't come. D+

film | Yo ho-hum

2007-01-15T10:09:00.000-05:00

That sinking feeling threatens to turn into out-and-out submergence in PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST, a poky sequel to the 2003 Disney shock-blockbuster that caught pretty much everybody off guard, probably because it was adapted from the studio's own theme-park attraction, and hello, did anyone enjoy (or even see) Country Bears or The Haunted Mansion? Actually, Pirates 1 was a bit of a slog itself — expensive but empty, your garden-variety Jerry Bruckheimer production — but it boasted an unexpected secret weapon in the kooky delights of Johnny Depp's wholly unique interpretation of a rascally buccaneer captain as the lovechild of an intoxicated glam-rock star and one of those wind-up toy monkeys with the clapping cymbals.

In Dead Man's Chest, Depp's Jack Sparrow is still a scene-stealing force to be reckoned with, but the audience now expects this, which mops the surprise whimsy of Pirates 1 right off the poop deck. What remains? More of the bloated same: stern-to-bow sea battles, swordfights, supernatural intrigue, shifting loyalties, and — least interestingly — tepid romantic entanglements between sweethearts Will (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth (Kiera Knightley), Jack's sporadic allies, occasional adversaries, and the action figures most likely to be collecting dust in the Toys R Us clearance bin long after all the Johnny Depps are nabbed. The first movie essentially exhausted these characters and their (admittedly nifty) universe, but Dead Man's Chest chugs along with a cheery self-indulgence, taking time — 150 minutes of it — to continue old plot points as though you care about Will and Elizabeth's cardboard relationship or recall how the hell a fellow by the name of Norrington (Jack Davenport) fits into the picture. Actually, you might. Me, the only bits of Pirates 1 I remember in the three years since i saw it are: A) the terrific Depp; B) the terrific production design; and C) that i was delighted to find the terrific Mackenzie Crook — Gareth on BBC's The Office — popping up as a bumbling pirate lackey with a rogue glass eyeball.

And oh yes, the special effects also impress, particularly the pixels that bring to life the tentacled mug and squirming mannerisms of Davy Jones (with a vocal/motion-capture assist from the incomparable Bill Nighy of Love Actually), the cephalopod villain who commands a crew of fearsome oceanic mutants to capture Jack and collect an old debt: his soul. Too bad Davy must've also grabbed the one that belongs to the movie. For all its big action, sensory bombast and intermittent distraction, Dead Man's Chest tries to compensate for a hollow center with pointless excess (the half-hour allotted to an interlude with a savage island tribe, which has nothing to do with anything; the double- and triple-crosses that emerge less from logic than whimsy). It's kinda like finding a box of Cracker Jack filled with only toy prizes: At first, you're all oooh ahhh, but when hunger sets in, there's not much to chew on. C

film | Sacrificial ham

2007-01-09T20:58:00.000-05:00

Since Nicolas Cage certainly won't be winning the Oscar for his panicked perspiring in the howlingly ridiculous THE WICKER MAN, let's all chip in to buy him a shirt that reads: I Went to a Scary Feminist Habitat Off the Coast of Washington State, and All I Got Was Burned Alive in a Giant Totem to Please the Harvest Gods. Oh yeah, Neil Labute's remake of the 1973 British shocker is one of those movies: totally botched from beginning to end, yet somehow oblivious to its awesome badness, and very nearly modest entertainment as a result.

Cage plays a California cop summoned by an ex-girlfriend (Kate Beahan) to investigate the perplexing disappearance of her daughter on a spooky island commune in the pacific northwest, but its residents — a hive-like matriarchy of beekeepers who refer to each other as Sister So-and-So and keep their scanty male population in check as emasculated, mute drones — fail to welcome him or his sleuthing with open arms. Right off the bat, you'll note that these ladies are sinister, bonkers and smugly involved in some sort of secret plot, but it takes Cage — a freakin' policeman — far too long to figure this much out and ask the one question of Beahan that should've been on his mind the second he heard from her. Don't carp, though, because the frequent lapses in logic and the somber seriousness of their staging actually turn The Wicker Man into high camp.

Enjoy, then, a few of my favorite Wicker snickers: A) how the womenfolk speak in ridiculously ominous declarations that make them sound like extras at the Renaissance Festival ("Enjoy the night, only make sure you're ready for the day of tomorrow — the time of death and rebirth"); B) when a frenzied Cage pulls a gun on a cycling schoolmarm (Deadwood's Molly Parker) with a stone-faced "Step away from the bike!", then beats the shit outta all 115 lbs. of Leelee Sobieski (The Glass House) as an aggressive harpy; C) how the village's earth-mother queen (i can't believe it's Ellen Burstyn!) leads a ritualistic celebration by traipsing through a sun-dappled meadow in Braveheart face paint like she's in the world's wonkiest Zoloft commercial; and D) when Cage evades his adversaries in the jaw-dropping climax by slipping into a bear costume, and later, when apprehended, pleads for his life by roaring, "Killing me won't bring back your goddamn honey!" (See, the gals believe ... oh, nevermind.)

So how do I rate a movie that's a complete failure at being the enigmatic occult thriller it thinks it is, yet finds deliriously enjoyable footing as an accidental comedy? Beats me, but this might be the first truly terrible film that I can't wait to re-watch with friends. I think I'll just find the alphabetical mean of the the best and worst letter grades. Hey, it's a formula that's at least slightly more rational than The Wicker Man. C

film | High school debacle

2007-01-08T15:28:00.000-05:00

JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE is a great title for a teen comedy that's certainly not great, and nor is it good, average, barely tolerable, or in possession of even a single moment of genuine mirth, amusement or likeability. You leave the movie wishing less ill will on the eponymous John Tucker than the screenwriter — Jeff Lowell, for the record — who alleges that John needs to be terminated.

And see, there's the movie's central problem: It can't decide if John (Jesse Metcalf, the hunky gardener on Desperate Housewives) is a philandering jerk or an affable jock whose only crime is simply lovin' too many ladies. When three female classmates from different social strata — the A/V brain (Arielle Kebbel), the head cheerleader (Ashanti), the vegan whore (Sophia Bush) — figure out they're being three-timed by John, they plot to bring him down with the help of the new girl at school (Brittany Snow), a loner wallflower who reads Dave Eggars and digs "old school" Elvis Costello, so, like, you know she's totally got a beautiful soul. They give her a CW-style makeover to lure him in, and then, once her innate depth and smokin' hot bod guide him to the realization that monogamy is way more emotionally fulfilling than serial skeezing, she'll dump him like leftover chinese food, and vengeance will be theirs. Gee, do you think she end up falling for him after he drops the BMOC facade? Oh, the banality!

For the revenge stuff to satisfy, John needs to be portrayed as a proper asshat, but Metcalfe's soft-serve romance with Snow takes the character — and the film — in a confusingly mushy direction. And though Kebbel, Ashanti and Bush are portrayed as mere spank-fantasy cartoon shrews, John Tucker Must Die gets even more female-disempowered by ultimately turing into a smarmy castigation of their behavior — you know, as if they were way out of line to demand their mutual boyfriend treat them with honesty and respect. Alas, their methods are lame, of course, and involve spiking his protien powder with estrogen so that he'll burst into hissy fit during the big basketball game; for a sharper, more creative take on teen backstabbery, please add Mean Girls to your Netflix queue.

In the end, the ladies' catty animus ain't nothing a big old food fight can't solve, and John Tucker learns that it's perfectly fine to treat women like penis repositories as long as he's open about it. (Natch, the women don't seem to mind much cuz, hello, did you see his abs?!) If these people were ever guests on an episode of Jerry Springer, one of them would probably fall back on that hate-the-game-not-the-player business at some point. Me, I hate 'em both equally. F

film | There's not enough Bactine in the world

2007-01-03T15:06:00.000-05:00

I can speak no good about SEE NO EVIL, another one of those boilerplate horror endeavors where teen blood spatter is everywhere, imagination or novelty value are not, and the ill-lit, sepia-toned über-grime — as well as the quick-buck genre familiarity — that permeates every frame may lead you to wonder if the movie was written, cast and shot on the mucky Saw sets while that crew was on an extended lunch break at T.G.I. Friday's. Sure, See No Evil is terrifying ... if you're Martha Stewart. Everybody else will probably be less concerned with whether their favorite characters survive than if the actors playing them got tetanus shots and checked for mange when filming wrapped.

Wait. Favorite characters? Characters? Bahaha.

Anyway, you might find more tension and excitement on any given WWE Friday Night Smackdown, an apt comparison since See No Evil is the debut release from the new movie division of World Wrestling Entertainment, which explains the presence of professional bodyslammer Kane (née Glen Jacobs) as the mad slasher, which, in turn, epitomizes how see no evil has little appeal beyond indiscriminate gorehounds who double as the niche that knows their tombstone piledrivers from their falling powerbombs. His victims: a crew of horny, mouthy and/or dumbass delinquent youths who must refurbish an abandoned hotel — his rust-encrusted lair — to shave time off their juvie sentences. In the lone morbidly creative fatality, Kane (think: Uncle Fester on anabolic steroids) crams a cell phone down the throat of the obligatory blonde bimbo, but director Gregory Dark stops the scene before it reaches the sicko zenith he promises. Sheesh. You'd think an auteur who's worked mostly in porn — New Wave Hookers, Hootermania and, my personal fave, Between the Cheeks 2 — would at least come through with the money shot. D

film | Hey blah!

2006-12-28T15:15:00.000-05:00

A visually lavish four-minute MTV clip that overstays its welcome by an increasingly leaden two hours, the hip-hopera IDLEWILD transplants the anachronistic pop huzzahs of Moulin Rouge to the gangland racketeering of prohibition-era Georgia, where Outkast's André "André 3000" Benjamin and Antwan "Big Boi" Patton don dapper period fashion as, respectively, a mopey pianist and a boisterous emcee at a bawdy dancehall known as "The Church." Listen, rag on Rouge all you want, but even its most bilious detractors would probably agree it was turbo-charged and rarely boring. Comparatively, Idlewild exudes the livelihood of one of the embalmed stiffs Benjamin tends to during his mortician day job, which is a damning shame for a pseudo-musical starring the rowdiest act on the rap charts.

Actually, Benjamin — who sounds pretty dead himself in Idlewild's on-off narration — and Patton don't fare terribly well next to the rest of the cast, particularly two actors from Hustle & Flow: the Oscar-nominated Terrence Howard, oozing cool menace as a nasty hoodlum, and Paula Jai Parker, a scene-stealing firecracker as a floozy showgirl. Otherwise, it's a lethargic retro-urban Rouge redux, with Hitch's Paula Patton (no relation to Antwan) in Nicole Kidman's doomed-chanteuse role, slow-motion Gap-commercial swing steps replacing the can-can, and a scatting flask in lieu of a singing absinthe bottle. Even worse, Idlewild seems leery of embracing its genre: The big production numbers are underwhelming and infrequent, and none of the songs — partially culled from Outkast's smash 2003 double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, which should tell you how long this project has been growing mold in the studio vault — are instantaneously catchy enough to grab your attention. This is especially weird coming from a duo whose "Ms. Jackson," "Hey Ya!", "The Way You Move" and "Roses" are still memorable as hell years after their original release. D+

film | Bohemian, don't like you

2006-12-07T16:44:00.000-05:00

YOU, ME AND DUPREE? I hate all three of them, and here's why:

A) Dupree: He's one of those pathologically reckless screw-ups you only find in really forced comedies, and with Owen Wilson lending the role his usual hangdog obliviousness, the film sputters and wheezes in its attempt to portray him as an adorably free-spirit kook who means well but leaves an inadvertent trail of chaos and irritation in his wake. Yeah, no dice. He bugged the shit outta me, but so did ...

B) You and me: Not sure exactly who's who, but together they're Carl (Matt Dillon) and Molly (Kate Hudson), nice, calm yuppie newlyweds who open their cute little home to Dupree — Carl's best friend — after he loses his job and apartment. Destructive shenanigans ensue, of course, over and over and over, enabled by Carl and Molly's insane refusal to show Dupree the door after he orders cable without their permission, intrudes upon their foreplay without knocking, and incinerates their living room during a candlelit tryst with a Mormon librarian. (Wait, a Mormon librarian?! OMG! LOL!) Actually, following that last folly, they do kick him out, but he's back in less than 10 minutes; when they come across him mopishly sitting on a park bench in a torrential downpour with nowhere to go, Molly inexplicably melts into a puddle of Dupree-coddling goop — that whole house-torching deal? nothing a fun-fun Clash musical montage can't fix! — while a jealous Carl morphs from understandably annoyed into an enraged psychotic.

And what about how Carl's dictatorial boss (Michael Douglas) — also Molly's father — incites unnecessary bickering when Carl pisses off Molly by working late on a Very Important Project? Hello, why doesn't Carl just be honest and tell her that her dad is an overbearing jerk, who, by the way, insists Carl get a vasectomy for no reason that I can discern. That's typical of You, Me and Dupree: With the exception of the great Seth Rogen (The 40-Year-Old Virgin), who provides all five of the movie's chuckles as Dillon's whipped buddy, all of the characters are puppets of a story that jerks them into outlandish behavior that's not even funny on an extreme level, and while the actors appear to be having a ball, the mirth stays on the screen. Wilson's last star vehicle was the infectiously good-time Wedding Crashers. Comparatively, this film could be called Buzz Killers. D+

film | Baby vomit

2006-12-05T16:14:00.000-05:00

Let me be perfectly clear: I do not accept the premise of LITTLE MAN. Not today, not yesterday, not tomorrow. Not now, not ever. Not with a fox, not in a box. Not if director Keenen Ivory Wayans aimed a potato gun at my face and told me to dig this flick or he'd pull the trigger. Look, I don't even know if a potato gun shoots bullets or tater tots, but because I won't risk giving even a teeniest scrap of endorsement to an alleged comedy in which a diminutive jewel thief poses as an abandoned infant to swipe a priceless diamond from a suburban couple, I'm willing to sustain cranial harm or — far scarier — stray from my low-carb diet.

What pushed me into full-tilt hateration? Was it the creepy digital effects that superimpose the mugging head of Marlon Wayans (6'2") onto the bodies of either child actor Linden Porco or dwarf actor Gabriel Pimental? The way the newlyweds (Shawn Wayans and Ray's Kerry Washington, too good for this shit) who "unknowingly" take him in are portrayed as utter idiots beyond even the realm of stupid-humor conceivability? The wheezy gags centered around rectal thermometers and breast milk that you'll see coming from whatever distance you decide to appropriate between you and this film? The story's nonsensical logistics (i.e., how Marlon can't seem to just fucking slip out of sight and fucking abscond with the fucking rock already despite apparently making time to shave his entire body in secret at least twice a day, or that nobody questions his full set of adult teeth, his air force tattoo, or his developed genitals)? The bizarro tone shift from crotch-smashin' jamboree to daddy-never-loved-me schmaltz? No, it was probably the bit in which Marlon feigns fear of the dark so he can sleep between his doltish foster parents in their bed, where he — somehow — rapes Washington while she thinks she's having sex with Shawn. Charming with a capital H, A, R and M.

So who the hell is Little Man's target audience? Tough call. The crudity ain't for children, but the juvenile writing — by Keenan, Marlon and Shawn, of course — and sloppy staging aren't exactly going to sell the clunky poop-and-boobies jokes to anyone who made it through puberty with half a brain cell. No, it's undoubtedly a movie only for the entire family — the entire Wayans family. F

film | Rocky horror picture shows

2006-12-01T11:39:00.000-05:00

Ah, the midnight movie: a genre that, to be truly successful, must navigate the fine line between being legitimately amusing and self-consciously — or, if you prefer, inadvertently — godawful. FEAST and SLITHER, a pair of goop-drenched additions to the intentional-B-flick canon, aren't shooting for much more than a cult following in a few years' time, and while they do a convincing job of walking the walk and talking the talk, they don't quite, uh, breathe the breath. In other words, they're not quite amusing or terrible enough to be midnight movies. They'd probably play at 9:45 p.m.

Feast is the more curious title simply because it's the final product of the third season of the HBO filmmaking reality show Project Greenlight, and it's decidedly not a coming-of-age drama à la rounds one (Stolen Summer) and two (The Ballad of Shaker Heights). No, Feast is lean, mean and entirely nostalgia-free, unless it's nostalgia on your part for a meatier monster mash. True, there's nothing wrong with a wispy story — bar patrons fend off hungry mutant creatures in the desolate Texas desert — that sets up a fast and furious ride, and Feast initially looks to be headed in that direction. Its first 20 minutes are rollicking fun, playfully winking at horror conventions by introducing each cast member via on-screen statistics that tout his or her stock-character archetype (the woebegone single mom [Krista Allen], the antagonistic prick [Balthazar Getty], the grizzled veteran [Clu Gulager], the vulnerable teen [Josh Zuckerman]) and assorted trivial information. The moment Feast's obligatory fearless hero (Eric Dane) — "Job: kicking ass; Life Expectancy: pretty fucking good" — bursts onto the scene and begins to take charge, the movie hilariously knees viewer expectation in the groin, and all bets are off.

Or so you'll think. After this and another great jolt are out of the way, Feast settles into an increasingly humdrum riff on From Dusk Till Dawn, with ravenous beasties from Stan Winston's yard sale standing in for Dusk's mob of rowdy Mexican vampires. With its clever novelty gags mostly expired, Feast becomes an overextended episode of Tales from the Crypt, and episodes of Tales from the Crypt run a scanty half-hour for a reason. Director John Gulager (Clu's son) frequently amplifies the sensory commotion and packs in the jokey details — Jason Mewes, the Jay half of Kevin Smith's Jay & Silent Bob, apparently playing himself — in an attempt to mask either his movie's throwaway-junk silliness ("The monsters are doin' it doggy-style!") or an effects budget best described as deficient, but that only means you can easily sit through most of Feast without being particularly engaged by it.

Where Feast doesn't particularly give a shit — most of its characters don't even have names, let alone backstories — Slither sorta-kinda wants you to care if its cast winds up falling victim to some slobbering behemoth, which makes it closer in spirit to the 1950s drive-in attractions they used to razz on Mystery Science Theater 3000. If Slither was one of them, it'd be called Earth Vs. Tentacles or Hubby from Beyond the Known Galaxy, though I guess Slither does succinctly describe most of the action in the movie: An alien parasite lands in the kind of sleepy little burg Norman Rockwell used to paint and infects the local Mr. Moneybags (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer's Michael Rooker), who morphs into a grotesquely slimy entity worthy of his own Fangoria cover, then fathers a squirming mass of slugs that burrow into the townspeople and turn them into sentient zombies. His beautiful trophy wife (Elizabeth Banks of The 40-Year-Old Virgin) is understandably distraught.

The problem is, Slither's a horror-comedy that ain't especially frightening or funny. The performers sure are game — particularly Banks and Nathan Fillion, the droll captain of TV's wonderful Firefly, as a swaggering cop — but the movie funnels their pitch-perfect pluck into endless scenes that build nicely, then jump to the next distraction in lieu of delivering any kind of payoff, a frustration that occasionally bungled director James Gunn's Dawn of the Dead remake in 2004. Consider Slither's finale, which feels cobbled together — perhaps intentionally? — from the climaxes of countless other sub-inspired sci-fi thrillers, then lazily doesn't go out of its way to mock its own familiarity or do something quirky or different. A joke in search of a decent punchline, Slither, like Feast, is ultimately not bad enough to be good, not good enough to be memorable, and never stable enough on the bad-good tightrope to be midnight-movie bliss. Feast: C+ Slither: C

film | Read the dictionary, then see the movie

2006-11-20T23:33:00.000-05:00

I fancy myself a decent wordsmith, but I sure can't hold an Aim-N-Flame to the puzzle junkies of WORDPLAY, a breezy little documentary in which solving the trickiest Sunday New York Times crossword in less than two minutes takes on the importance of ending world hunger. Unabashed in their word-nerdery, these men and women are excitedly readying for the 28th Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament — referred to as "an orgy of puzzling" by one left-brainiac — and director Patrick Creadon follows the enthusiastic hopefuls as they hone their skills, remember the close calls and upsets of years past, and expound on their delightfully geeky affinity. "I've always been intrigued by the letter Q," says Trip Payne, the defending champ. The best bets to nab his title include: Al Sanders, a genial project manager at Hewlitt-Packard who perpetually places third; Tyler Hinman, a college-kid whiz whose victory could set an age record; and Ellen Ripstein, known as "the Susan Lucci of crosswords" because her 2001 victory came after 17 consecutive losses. They're all characters, as in 10-letter word for amusing or interesting people, usually with many quirks.

Into the tourney business, Creadon mixes interviews with famous folks — Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, Jon Stewart, the Indigo Girls, Mike Mussina — who relate their own love of the craft. But aside from an anecdote relating to a genius series of two-way Times crossword clues published the day of the 1996 presidential election — here's where you realize how deliciously crafty the guys who create these puzzles can be — these cute but unnecessary bits aren't as tasty as the competition storyline, which contains more humor (the laugh-with-them variety), suspense (a gasp-for-air shock in the finals), and baton-twirling (courtesy of a downtime talent show) than you might expect. This event is the brainchild of Times puzzle editor Will Shortz, the only person in the nation with a degree (from Indiana University) in "enigmatology." He'd appear to have the coolest job in the world were it not for Merl Reagle, a career puzzle constructor who looks to be having oodles of fun as he finesses scribal stymies around a black-and-white grid. "Words like urine and enema are terrific because they pack a lot of vowels in five letters," he says. When (and if) I grow up, I want to be him. B+

film | Postal disservice

2006-11-19T22:21:00.001-05:00

I'll say this for THE LAKE HOUSE: It's pure schmaltz, but at least it doesn't even pretend to be anything imbued with grit, substance or verisimilitude. A mopey parallel-reality romance between an architect (Keanu Reeves) from 2004 and an ER doc (Sandra Bullock) who lives in 2006 — a magic mailbox (how Blue's Clues-ian!) enables them to soothe each other's loneliness by sending letters across the space-time continuum or whatever — how much you dig the film'll hinge on your ability to stomach a cornball premise that features dialogue like: "The truth is, man from the past, not much has changed in 2006." And later, after Reeves scopes out Bullock in '04 and starts getting fresh with her '06 self via correspondence, prep your chunder bucket.

Him: "You never told me how beautiful you are."
Her: "Well, maybe you saw somebody else."
Him: "Long brown hair. Gentle, unguarded eyes ..."

Barf. But then, what do you really expect from a narrative that's centered around a magic mailbox?

And yet ... you know, it's not awful or unwatchable, which is more of a nod to the simpatico appeal of Reeves and Bullock than the maudlin lure of the Hallmark-movie-of-the-week story. They clicked in Speed 12 years ago, and they're a nice couple here, especially in the one scene director Alejandro Agresti and writer David Auburn — reworking the Korean film Il Mare — let them interact in person. Comfortable within his mellow range, Reeves makes an effective puppy-dog suitor (though he should never fake-sneeze again), while Bullock is surprisingly convincing at shaking off her chick-flick perk and immersing herself in an ocean of glum. They sure are cute at sad-sackery, but the mechanics of their relationship are too clumsy and wooden — after Reeves '04 sets up a dinner date in '06, then inexplicably doesn't show, Bullock angrily rebuffs him instead of, y'know, logically using hospital resources to see if he's dead in '06 or something — to raise The Lake House to the level of saccharine wonderment it aims for. (Also, I think there's a huge plot hole involving Reeves' location in a key beginning moment, but pondering it gives me a migraine.) The bottom line, I suppose, is that The Lake House is probably as good as a magic-mailbox movie can be, which is, unfortunately, not very. C

film | What a poseur

2006-11-19T19:28:00.000-05:00

The story of '50s pin-up icon Bettie Page should constitute a nifty bio-pic, but THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE ain't it. Despite realistic period ambiance — think: a (mostly) black-and-white Far from Heaven — and a confident performance from Gretchen Mol, American Psycho director Mary Harron's dramatization of Page's rise to fame as an inadvertent sex symbol and her subsequent born-again religious awakening feels overall like a Cliffs Notes encapsulation of a supremely intriguing subject: You get a connect-the-dots picture of the big events in Page's life without any psychological depth or motivation, which means that Notorious depicts Page (played as an adult by Mol) as an abused child, a battered wife, and a gang-rape victim, all in a zippy 15 minutes of screen time, and then focuses on her career as a model in the early days of the fetish-titillation trade and her role (or lack thereof, as it turns out) in Estes Kefauver's 1955 senate indecency hearings. Did the sexual trauma affect her? Benumb her to posing with riding crops and ball gags? Beats me. The movie is less about who Page was in her heyday than what happened when she stripped down to her underwear and less.

Briefly a sensation herself before dual 1999 flops (The Thirteenth Floor and Rounders) put the kibosh on her burgeoning it-girl buzz, Moll certainly looks great in the part, and she deftly captures the if-you-say-so nonchalance that permeated Page's vintage Tease-O-Rama clips. If the script by Guinevere Turner (Bloodrayne: ack!) was as convincing or nuanced, Notorious might've clicked. But Turner ultimately doesn't give Mol's Bettie enough to say — she speaks maybe 100 words in the film's first 45 minutes — or do, aside from innocuously smiling as she nakedly cavorts through a procession of Page's cheesecake-iest moments. Ironically and unfortunately, this Bettie Page is as dimensional as a centerfold. D+

film | The Amityville snorer

2006-11-07T16:27:00.001-05:00

Alright, AN AMERICAN HAUNTING. Let me see if I understand this "true story" you're selling me.

Okay. So the Bell family of 1810s Tennessee was spooked by some sort of nasty supernatural presence that violently fixated on innocent preteen daughter Betsy. It'd hoist her into the air by her hair, grab her extremities and drag her around the house, and pummel her with the kind of bitchslaps you'd expect to find in a steel-cage showdown between Whitney Houston and Moe from the Three Stooges, attacks which presaged the mysterious poisoning of dear old Daddy Bell in 1820, which, according to the movie's marketing campaign, is the only official case in U.S. history where a spirit caused the death of a human being. Sure, that's all fine and good and sounds like the start of a decent campfire tale, and if director/co-writer Courtney Solomon (Dungeons & Dragons: eek!) knew how to make the narrative emotionally gripping or exciting or relevant for people who watch movies in which spirits cause the death of human beings all the damn time, An American Haunting might've been a passable creepfest. But he doesn't, and it isn't. Sweet merciful crap, it isn't.

Solomon favors rote horror-flick clichés (creaky doors, sinister whispers, sudden loud noises) in the lethargic early scenes, then goes flashy for An American Haunting's remainder, with a swooping point-of-view ghostcam that inexplicably flits between color and black-and-white, and a couple of hallucination segments that confusingly bleed into the characters' waking lives — which ring false, by the way. We're apparently supposed to buy that, though young Betsy (Peter Pan's Rachel Hurd-Wood) is repeatedly victimized and molested by a malicious entity, Pa and Ma Bell (Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek) insist on leaving her alone at night in the attic bedroom. And then there's the "twist" ending that explains the paranormal crud with a ludicrous faux-shock revelation that: A) is decidedly not fact-based, and it's really kind of deplorable for Solomon to pretend otherwise; B) completely negates the preceding 80 minutes if you don't buy it; C) creates gaping plot holes if you do (even if you accept that [blank] can cause [blank], why the hell does [blank] assault [blank], and what's with the wolf and the pilgrim girl?); and D) ultimately sucks harder than the old it-was-all-a-dream standby. Solomon stages a single nifty jolt when a horse-drawn carriage suddenly flips over as it, uh, races away from looming evil, but 10 seconds of greatness aren't enough to keep the other 5,390 from resembling the worst Little House on the Prairie Halloween episode ever.

Oh, I almost forgot: An American Haunting is framed by a pair of awkward present-day sequences that seem to exist solely for a bit of product pimpage on behalf of Absolut Vodka. If the folks at the distillery ever wanna return the favor by featuring the film in one of their clever magazine ads, may i suggest Absolut Idiocy as the theme? D-

film | Lost in Japanese-to-English translation

2006-10-25T15:58:00.000-04:00

At least Takashi Shimizu believes in what he does. To date, the director has helmed four Grudge horror movies — two theatrical releases (a third is on the way, of course) and two straight-to-video titles — in his native Japan, the 2004 American version of his original Grudge, and now THE GRUDGE 2, its follow-up, which nobody really asked for, save for maybe Takashi Shimizu. Had it not already been nabbed by another scary Japanese export, you might think The Ring would be a better name for this brand ... until you remember that the Ring property lays claim to a series of novels and comic books, a TV-movie, and a film trilogy in Japan alone, plus two Hollywood remakes, which, I think, certainly earns it the right to be called The Ring. Well, either that or The Neverending Story, which is a title ironically taken by a stalled 1984-1994 kiddie-fantasy franchise, but I digress, mostly because I'm trying very hard to avoid writing my review of The Grudge 2.

And here's why: there's only so many ways one can expound upon its stilted blandness. It's not unwatchable, not embarrassingly incompetent, not even full-tilt terrible — just bursting at the seams with the same clichéd genre formality U.S. audiences have seen over and over since that evil little girl with the swampy 'do crawled through the television set and into our hearts at the nifty twist conclusion of The Ring: demonic child phantoms, spooky occurrences in/around the bathtub, herky-jerky body contortions worthy of a macabre Cirque du Soleil performance, some sort of curse stemming from a tormented past, ominous noises that sound like a malfunctioning Speak N Spell, and locks of long black hair creeping out of places where no locks of long black hair should be found (i.e., your throat, the attic dumbwaiter). Let's compare The Grudge 2 to the post-Ring J-horror adaptations that contain those tired ingredients: It's not as lame as The Ring Two or Pulse, it's on par with the negligible Dark Water, and it's actually a bit of an improvement from the first Grudge, which was a ghost tale so silly that the poor ghost had to get buzzed into an apartment building in order to kill a tenant who pissed it off. Oh sure. You're powerful enough to make your victims disappear by pulling them inside a mirror or their own sweatshirt, but passing through a wall? That's clearly pushing it.

Sarah Michelle Gellar, the ineffectual heroine from Grudge 1, returns, but she only sticks around for a 10-minute appearance that carbon copies Jamie Lee Curtis' I'm-outta-here-before-they-write-more-sequels rooftop plunge from the dreadful Halloween: Resurrection. Saddled with leading-lady duties in this new Grudge is Joan of Arcadia's Amber Tamblyn as Gellar's estranged (for no apparent reason) sis, and fans of the sidetrack in opening paragraph of this critique will note that Tamblyn's big-screen debut was as the dead chick who resembled a moldy eggplant in The Ring. If i dug corny puns, I'd observe that her career has come semi-circle.

Anyway, Tamblyn arrives in japan to assist gellar, who's medicated and strapped to a hospital bed after the events of Grudge 1, and traces her sibling's troubles to the haunted house where she worked as a personal nurse. Bad stuff ensues as The Grudge 2 weaves this storyline with a few others: Nasty spirits from the home's violent history also terrorize a lonely teen (Arielle Kebbel) at Tokyo International School and — oh, why not? — a family of four in downtown Chicago. (Jennifer Beals plays the stepmom.) Though Stephen Susco's script falls back on lazy plotting ("I have a friend who's really into folklore — I think he can help us") and nonsensical jolts (what's with the milk-regurgitating next-door neighbor, or the nice guidance counselor who suddenly becomes a sinister harbinger of doom before vanishing from the film altogether?), he connects the dots with a slick mind- and time-bending twist that I sure didn't anticipate. Briefly, you'll get a solid glimpse of how tricky-fun the Grudge flicks could've been with a sneakier, more ambitious overhaul. Instead, The Grudge 2 merely winds up the umpteenth nail in the coffin of yankee-ized J-horror. C

film | Not even remotely good

2006-10-19T21:16:00.000-04:00

In CLICK, two worlds collide: the one where Adam Sandler's a giddy doofus with an inexplicable penchant for parlaying lowbrow humor into box-office gold (Billy Madison, The Waterboy), and the other in which he shirks the expected silly voices and manic antics, gives the legit-actor thing a whirl, and stuns the critics with how terrific he can be when he's alienating his fratboy fan base (Punch-Drunk Love, Spanglish). Ergo, Click finds Sandler immersed in the usual glut of jokes centered around farting and humping and titty-jiggling, and then, after it zips decades into the future, he's in sexagenarian make-up for an overblown death sequence, collapsed on a rainy street and gasping in his final throes that "Family [dramatic pause] always comes first." This moment is not punctuated by any belching or flatulence, though I'm not sure if that's good or bad.

Click, however, is pretty bad. A peculiar mix of It's a Wonderful Life, Bruce Almighty, A Christmas Carol, Being There, and — depending on how you interpret the dopey "twist" ending — the complete ninth season of Dallas, the movie casts Sandler as a workaholic husband and father of two who stumbles into the Way Beyond section of Bed Bath & Beyond, where a lab coat-clad nutjob (Christopher Walken, doing a Saturday Night Live-ish impression of himself) gives him a universal remote control that allows him to (yep, say it with me) control his universe. Suddenly, he can fast forward through lengthy dinners with his kvetching folks (Henry Winkler and Julie Kavner), freeze-frame his asshat boss (David Hasselhoff) long enough to pass gas in his face, and watch the screen-in-screen football game while he's arguing with his wife (Kate Beckinsale). Alas, the remote starts to function on auto-pilot, and soon he's missing his kids growing up, his marriage hitting the skids, his father passing away — all because he wasn't there. But then, he wasn't really ever there, was he? Oooooh.

Click's heavy-handed stabs at pathos don't tug on the heartstrings as much as they yank them across the fingerboard of the world's most out-of-tune violin and proceed to play the Full House theme song for a couple hours. And save for a cute bit that finds Sandler activating his life's own voice-over commentary (by James Earl Jones!), the comedy shtick doesn't stray far from what you expect: rudimentary body-function gags, kicks to the crotch, the family dog repeatedly trying to procreate with a stuffed animal, and Sandler mugging like Jim Carrey Lite as he sets his skin hue to green and growls like the Incredible Hulk. Never explored: what happens when he changes channels, which is mentally what you'll be doing for the duration of Click. D

film | Choking hazard

2006-10-17T13:40:00.001-04:00

Inject the Brothers Grimm with plain ol' grim, and you've got the queasy fable HARD CANDY, in which Little Red Riding Hood bypasses grandma's house, skips straight to the lair of the Big Bad Wolf, and ends up gasping, "My, what a gargantuan perv you are!"

The nasty tweak to Hard Candy is that its incarnation of demure little Red — a 14-year-old named Hayley (intense newcomer Ellen Page) — ain't takin' no shit off nobody, especially the wolfen Jeff (Patrick Wilson of Angels in America), a mid-30s professional photographer with whom she flirts in an online chatroom. She's initially all timid sweetness when they hook up at a coffee shop and decide to go back to his swank bachelor pad in the Hollywood Hills, where drinks are mixed and coy smiles are exchanged. And then Jeff starts to feel woozy, keels over and awakens tied to a chair, at which point the squeamish predator/prey dynamic developed during the movie's first act begins to do cartwheels, and Hard Candy's true nature suddenly becomes much harder to peg.

Because the film's success hangs mostly on your reaction to its parade of gruesome shocks and twists, it's not too fair telling what happens next. But it's safe to reveal that Hard Candy tips a morbid hat to such melancholy psychological thrillers as Death and the Maiden, 8mm, Audition and Misery, the last one in a scene that involves a debilitating procedure waaay ickier than Kathy Bates whacking James Caan's ankles with a sledgehammer. It'll send 92 percent of the men in attendance racing to the exits while the remaining eight squeeze their legs together like they're working the world's rustiest thighmaster.

In the moment, Hard Candy is certainly harrowing material, and the taut performances of Page and Wilson glue your eyes to the screen. But as this disquieting revenge fantasy plays out, you might wonder why, well after the Jeff character is established as a disgusting creep, the movie turns into a deliberation of whether he's a really disgusting creep. The answer is glaringly obvious (thanks, telltale pan to a missing-child poster at the 10-minute mark!), and getting there hinges on an ill-conceived backstory that grows less interesting the more uncertainties it's swaddled in. But then the whole narrative remains ambiguous: The film frustratingly dances around the hows and whys of Hayley's histrionic search-and-destroy methodology, which, despite Page's fist-clenching fireworks, saps any emotional investment you might've built up during its understatedly unnerving early sequences. Such a pity to find Hard Candy done in by its own chewy center. C

film | Engine trouble

2006-10-12T12:51:00.000-04:00

The only characters bustling through Pixar's Colorform-bright digi-toon comedy CARS are cars, of course, and they zip and zoom, wisecrack and emote, bat their windshield eyelids and grin with front-bumper smiles, slurp and burp and nap and fart, and also develop romantic feelings for other cars, which, I think, is where the movie honestly started to weird me out a bit. Because i began to wonder about the roles exhaust pipes and mufflers and headlights might play in vehicular intercourse, as well as the larger question of why the heck all these cars with their doors and their trunks and their (presumably) roomy interiors are bustling through an automotive metropolis that's completely uninhabited by mankind. OK, fine, maybe my imagination sucks, but sentient cars just aren't as lovable or endearing creations as the workaday creatures from Monsters, Inc., the crafty ant colony in A Bug's Life, or the bickering figurines of Toy Story. Beyond little boys with Tonka bedsheets and older folks who live in homes slathered in NASCAR décor and Dale Earnhardt commemorative plates, I can't think of many people getting really revved up about Cars.

Anyway, the narrative is bits and pieces of Doc Hollywood, The Majestic and every other film scenario in which a shallow schmuck from the big city — in this case, a hotshot racecar voiced by Owen Wilson — gets stranded in a cozy middle-American fantasyland where a population of saintly bumpkins teach him What's Really Important in Life™: There's Paul Newman as an old-timer Hudson Hornet, Bonnie Hunt as the Porsche next door, and a surprisingly not-totally-obnoxious Larry the Cable Guy as a redneck tow truck. Peppering the lethargic ride are some of the clever asides and funny details you expect from Pixar — gnat-sized Volkswagen bugs dart through the air like insects, a Hummer with an austrian accent stands in for the governor of California, and bonus footage during the end credits are crammed with a ticklish hilarity that recalls the fantastic faux blooper reel from A Bug's Life. But despite Pixar's most superlative animation yet, Cars ultimately isn't interesting or lively enough to warrant a padded two-hour running time, which is especially strange considering that Monsters, Inc., A Bug's Life and both Toy Storys were rowdy fun and emotionally satisfying in the space of 90 minutes. Cars ain't bad, but it runs out of gas long before it decides to pull over. C

film | He's neither a bird nor a plane; discuss

2006-10-04T22:57:00.000-04:00

Faster than a speeding bullet? No. And not even close, really.

Clocking in at a massive 154 minutes, SUPERMAN RETURNS is as big, broad and latitudinous as its titular hero's shoulders, which, let's be honest, end up carrying a helluva lotta weight. I mean, to finally zoom back home after a five-year identity crisis beyond the known galaxy — that's distressing enough. But to also get smacked in the face with the revelation that your ex has shacked up with the father of the kid she popped out while you were gone, oh, and the world needs saving again? Well, to handle all this without a bottle of Jim Beam, the complete recordings of Joy Division, and the telephone numbers of all your old girlfriends requires a rather patrician handle on your emotions. But I guess they don't call him the Man of Steel for nothin'.

Rather than reboot the franchise like last year's triumphant Batman Begins, Superman Returns fills in the half-decade story gap since 1980's Superman II — wisely ignoring tacky sequels III (1983) and IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) — with ol' Supey (Brandon Routh) searching outer space for remnants of Krypton, über-villain Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) hatching a vengeful new ploy for world domination, and Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth), maybe a little bitter, scoring a Pulitzer for a story tellingly titled "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman." Also, she has a young son (Tristan Lake Leabu) with her newspaper-guy beau (James Marsden), so when Superman does return, and alter-ego Clark Kent correspondingly dusts off his reporter's post at The Daily Planet — OK, did even a single co-worker ever think, "Hmm. Superman's missing, we haven't heard from Kent since, and they do kinda favor each other"? — the mood isn't quite as light or capricious as 1979's Superman. Hey, it's not unexpected; Director Bryan Singer pumped substance and subtext into the wild rides of his X-Men 1 and 2, and with a tighter focus and fewer opportunities for crazy action, the gravitas is even more dominant here. While it adds dimension to the comic-book characters and fits the narrative snugly, it can cause this Superman to be kind of a drag; especially in the pokey finale, the movie's grounded when it should be all about the up, up and away.

And yet ... despite the sporadic sluggishness, it's clever, polished, pretty damn involving, allegorical without slathering it on too thick, and genuinely thrilling in individual moments, which is probably a testament to Singer's skills in concocting big-budget escapism for thinking folk. (Look at the third X-Men flick — an overproduced mess without him. And hell, imagine how disastrously rah-rah this revered icon of "truth, justice and the American way" — in the '50s film serials starring George Reeves, at least — could've been in the hands of, say, a Mark Steven Johnson [Daredevil] or a Roland Emmerich [Independence Day].) As for the cast, only Bosworth (Blue Crush) struggles; as scripted, her Lois mopes when she should've channeled the same moxie the snappy Margot Kidder brought to the original films. But Spacey's Luthor oozes a psychotic menace Gene Hackman never seemed to touch on, and Parker Posey has fun in a supporting roll as Lex's moll. Routh (One Life to Live), meanwhile, makes a a winsome Clark and a commanding Superman, and he plays the former with both an engaging charm and a romantic longing that frequently bleed into the selfless feats of the latter. Somewhere, you gotta figure, Christopher Reeve is smiling in acknowledgment. B

popScorn | Bringing up the rear

2006-10-02T12:49:00.000-04:00

Welcome to popScorn, a maybe-semi-regular nook and/or cranny on reMedia! where I'll probably be bitching considerably about whatever bothersome pop topic du jour I can't figure out a not-awkward way to assign a letter grade to. And what grander way to kick off the debut column than with a bit of exciting-ish news? Drumroll, please: reMedia! is (somehow) currently no. 90 on Blogshares: The Fantasy Blog Stock Market's ranking of the top 100 blogs in entertainment news. They have it listed at:

100 / 5,000 shares available @ B$13.06 ea. — 25.35 p/e

This means ... um, I'm actually clueless as to what this means. I honestly never paid much attention during senior-year economics — sorry, Mr. Norris! — and a decade later, it looks like it's finally caught up with me. Oh well. Let's just pretend it's a good thing, and it might actually be, too, as it's alongside such fun folks from the fluff-blogosphere as Gawker, Egotastic!, Defamer and I Don't Like You in That Way.

Then again, a Harry Potter fansite sits in the top slot, and no. 18 is Hilary Duff News, so, you know, grain of salt.

film | What's the opposite of joystick?

2006-09-29T14:55:00.000-04:00

Watching STAY ALIVE, a witless chunk of horror-flick nonsense about a malevolent video game that literally kills its players at the moment a grisly death befalls their pixelated counterparts, you'll kinda picture director/co-writer William Brent Bell blabbing to Fangoria something like how his movie is really a comment on the Playstation dependency of today's zombified youth culture. Uh-huh. Sure. If his next film is called Bloody List, and it's a thriller in which a sentient IM program knocks off a troupe of photogenic chat-roomers, and he claims it's truly a parable about the dangers of anonymous online communication, my eyes are gonna roll right outta my head and down the multiplex aisle.

But I digress. Stay Alive is bad — really really really bad. How really really really bad? Well, in no particular order, it features: A) characters named Hutch, Swink, Abigail, Phineas and October, yet it's not adapted from a Dickens novel; B) Malcolm in the Middle's Frankie Muniz as a geeky techno-whiz who wears a backwards poker cap and swears in excitable South Park-ian dudespeak ("Goddamn sweet!"), which means he can't get turned into an Agent-Cody-Banks-kabob soon enough; C) a campy cameo by Alice Krige, Star Trek's borg queen, as an occult expert with an Elmer-Fudd-goes-to-the-bayou accent that turns a solemn expository monologue into a phonetical howler (according to her, the mystowee behind the carnage is linked to the evil spirit of a wesewected murderess); and D) what might be the worst scary-movie demise ever — a hit-and-run by a phantom horse-drawn carriage.

And then there's the ridiculous finale, in which the convoluted rules for survival Stay Alive previously established are shoved out the window as our intrepid heroes (A Door in the Floor's Jon Foster and The OC's Samaire Armstrong) defeat a mob of herky-jerky girl ghosts from The Ring or The Grudge or whatever other spooky Japanese import is hot right now — it's getting old, Hollywood — by pelting them with magical roses. Yep, magical roses. Insert your own game-over pun here. D-

film | Cobra commander

2006-09-14T18:22:00.001-04:00

Pssst. Hey. Did you hear the one about the motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking plane?

Yeah, so don't even try to pretend that you weren't a little amused by the deafening internet buzz for SNAKES ON A PLANE, a film that's been hyped, parodied and toasted in endless geek-entertainment-blog postings since its sublimely goofy title — which also functions as a pat four-word encapsulation of its sublimely goofy premise — popped up on the 2006 release schedule. And please, take this however you will — and however you decide to take it ultimately depends on your taste for tongue-in-cheek cinema — but Snakes on a Plane actually lives up to its junk-schlock buzz. Lo and behold, it's the Godfather of snakes-on-a-plane movies. And that, I think, is a better-than-alright thing.

See, Snakes on a Plane is all about the ride, both literally and figuratively. The film — in which a bevy of cobras and boas and asps (oh my!) slither through (and in some cases, I mean right through) a group of stock disaster-flick personalities trapped aboard an airborne red eye, of course — heartily embraces its below-sub-lofty ambitions to merely crank out the trashy thrills, and that's where it becomes ridiculously fun in ways that most of its summer-blockbuster ilk (Cars, X-Men III, The Da Vinci Code), for all of their higher pedigrees and glossy posturing, never quite pulled off. Sure, it ain't Kubrick or Kieslowski — the director here is David R. Ellis of Final Destination 2, of which the only nice thing you might say is that it's not Final Destination 3 — but hey, if every movie should be judged on how successful it is at what it attempts to do, Snakes on a Plane: A) contains a lot of snakes; B) takes place on a plane; and C) administers a steady flow of slimy jolts played with a wily smirk. It's as good as a movie called Snakes on a Plane could be, and it sets the bar pretty damn high for future entries in the burgeoning reptiles-in-transportation genre.

Oh, I almost forgot: As a nervous passenger wonders after a particularly grisly attack, "Why are there snakes on the plane?" Well, snakes are on the plane — and I love love love how the script is peppered with various uses of the "snakes on a plane" phraseology — because they were hidden in the cargo hold by an Asian gangster (Byron Lawson) in a wacky attempt to crash the flight and kill the government witness (Wolf Creek's Nathan Phillips) who's going to testify against him. As the badass FBI escort who proves to be considerably less ophidiophobic than Indiana Jones, Samuel L. Jackson sells the shit outta his silly dialogue, whether he's barking orders in the authoritative tone that made him famous ("Everybody listen! We need to put a barrier between us and the snakes!") or calming down for a brief character moment (when the snakes cut the plane's A/C: "I'm from Tennessee, I hadn't noticed. Anyway, heat's the least of our worries right now"). I hate to admit it in a public forum, but Fangsgiving: Snakes from the Plane Bite Back doesn't seem like such a bad idea. B+

film | You've got male

2006-09-13T09:29:00.000-04:00

So you adore Brokeback Mountain, but you secretly wish it contained a scene in which Heath Ledger snorted bad cocaine and crapped all over the floor in front of a stunned Jake Gyllenhaal. Well, ADAM & STEVE, a gay relationship farce from actor/director/writer Craig Chester, is here to at last realize the scenario — if not with Ledger or Gyllenhaal — in a There's Something About Mary-ish opening sequence that showcases perhaps the worst one-night stand in cinematic history. Chester's timid goth takes home a hardbodied go-go boy (Caroline in the City's Malcolm Gets) while clubbing in 1987 New York City, but a diarrhetic bump spurs a highly unpleasant surprise that causes gets to bolt in embarrassment. Nearly two decades later, they reconnect but don't recognize each other, and ... uh, if you can't figure out where this is headed, you probably think the romantic-comedy oeuvres of Kate Hudson, Reese Witherspoon and Meg Ryan are home to some of the most brilliantly original plotting since The Crying Game. Also, I'm the brains behind this pyramid scheme that'd totally make you tons of money. Call me.

Anyway, discounting the same-sex angle and its ensuing shtick (i.e., the queasy running gag in which beer bottles are hurled at Chester whenever he shares a public clinch with Gets), Adam & Steve's narrative is par for the genre's course: Two people meet, date, confide in wisecracking friends (here, Saturday Night Live's Chris Kattan is Gets' typical-straight-guy roommate, and the incomparable Parker Posey plays Chester's gal pal, a formerly-chubby comic whose deadpan stand-up act consists of wildly inapplicable I'm-so-fat jokes), fall in love, face complications, break up, reconcile, and presumably live Happily Ever After. Yawn. While Chester unleashes some choice bon mots ("Oprah has made it impossible for me to have a close relationship with anyone ... besides Oprah"), his stabs at whimsy — oh no, not a cutesy line-dancing showdown! — are too awkward to shake the movie free from its rom-com doldrums. Adam & Steve has a heart, and it's usually in the right place, but its funny bone needs to be checked for osteoporosis. C-

film | French twits

2006-08-31T23:56:00.000-04:00

The big mystery in THE PINK PANTHER doesn't involve who killed the french soccer coach and made off with his honkin' diamond ring. No, it's whether the limited screen time of Beyoncé Knowles — billed third on the poster but eighth in the closing credits — was scanty to begin with, or if her vacant acting as a sexy pop diva (a stretch, I know) led to some unexpected overtime in the editing room. Or, hell, maybe she was hastily shoehorned into an already-completed script in order to attract an audience beyond the remaining 27 fans of the now-moldy Pink Panther film franchise Blake Edwards debuted in 1963, and that's why our girl B is only required to look fantastic, politely giggle at the madcap shenanigans around her, perform a musical number, smile, bat her eyelashes, provide a hit soundtrack single for MTV play, and split.

These questions'll be on your mind for the duration of this family-friendly caper from director Shawn Levy (Cheaper by the Dozen) because very little of the bumbling physical comedy of clueless Inspector Jacques Clouseau (Steve Martin, who co-wrote the screenplay, in the quintessential Peter Sellers role) engages beyond a sporadic chuckle. Unless, that is, you're at the age where you eat your own boogers, and then desperate shtick in which Martin breaks wind over the intercom of a sound-proof recording studio or demolishes a posh hotel bathroom in an attempt to retrieve his "miracle pill for the middle-aged man" from a drain pipe will make you lose your shit. Sellers enthusiasts, meanwhile, are probably going to hang their heads in shame. If so, they'll miss a scene-stealing Emily Mortimer (Match Point) as Clouseau's adoring secretary and a terrific sight gag involving an airborne police badge, and, um, that's about it. D+

film | I'm retching over a four-leaf clover

2006-08-29T23:25:00.000-04:00

In the grating comedy JUST MY LUCK, tabloid mainstay Lindsay Lohan plays the luckiest girl in new york, a PR assistant with a serious case of midas-itis: She lives in an impossibly gorgeous apartment, designer dry cleaning is accidentally delivered to her door the evening of a big date, she's never met a scratch-off lotto ticket she couldn't turn into a $20 score, and passing taxis screech to a halt whenever she steps onto the city curb. And then she smooches a handsome stranger (The Princess Diaries 2's Chris Pine) at a music-industry masquerade ball, and blammo: She snaps a stiletto in half, loses her posh job, gets electrocuted, and later winds up gangbanged by the San Diego Chargers after eating a burrito laced with mescaline. OK, that last bit never actually happens, but it sure would've enlivened the movie considerably if it did.

So yeah. Lohan's mystery man turns out to be a maintenance lackey at the local bowling alley who moonlights as the oafish manager to an unsigned british rock band (true-life recording artists McFly, very much enjoying the 103-minute commercial for their songs). He's also a walking broken mirror — crapped on by birds, splashed by street puddles, mistaken for a rapist when he collides with a female jogger and inadvertently drops his britches — and it looks as though he and Lohan swapped kismets as they canoodled, a farcical twist of fate that's not at all reminiscent of her hit Freaky Friday remake three years ago. Thus, while she combs the town in search of him, he goes from graceless nerd to suave jet setter, and she stumbles through mishaps with hairdryers and faulty shelving units that seem a mere mutilation away from one of those chain-reaction deathtraps of the Final Destination series.

Just My Luck fancies itself a younger, hipper Serendipity or Sleepless in Seattle, but the main problems with its romantic fantasy are that: A) the romantic part hinges on the movie's dollar-store interpretation of whimsy; and B) the fantasy elements are so over-the-top silly that they undermine any interest you might have in accepting the characters as real people. (I'm sorry, but if you drop your contact lens into a dirty litterbox and immediately stick it right over your cornea without washing it off, it's not misfortune. No, it's that you're a gigantic idiot who deserves to wear an ugly eyepatch.) The film wastes little time morphing into a mechanical parade of predictable set pieces that saps the buoyant charms Lohan showcased in 2004's brilliant Mean Girls. If she's hoping to mature into grown-up roles now that she's officially no longer a teenager, well, fine, I understand. But did she have to pick a vehicle for this transition that's more awkward than puberty? D

film | The spoof hurts

2006-08-28T23:28:00.000-04:00

Length of SCARY MOVIE 4 in minutes, not counting the end credits: 83.
Number of gags where a character gets conked on the noggin: 27.
Approximate occurrence of noggin-conking gags: once per 3.07 minutes.

Here's the thing about comedic trauma to the head: It can be amusing if it leads to the punchline of a joke — see Naked Gun 2½, where some poor schmo's cranium is besieged by horseshoes, a bowling ball, tar, a bag of feathers and an anvil, only to inspire one of the best lines in the movie — but as the punchline of a joke, well, it's beyond lame. In scary movie 4, the slapstick abuse is both the tired set-up and the unfortunate payoff. But hey, on the plus side, there are only three bits involving fart humor, although one of them does go on for what feels like an eternity.

Because Scary Movies 1-3 left at least a few scatological stones unturned, Scary Movie 4 plops intrepid series heroine Anna Faris into yet another hodgepodge of spooky-flick spoofs, this time tossing the most mockery at The Grudge, The Village, Saw, War of the Worlds and Brokeback Mountain, which probably only qualifies as a "scary movie" if you read a lot of Ann Coulter. In a particularly long sequence, it also clumsily lampoons Tom Cruise's infamous Oprah freakout, which reveals that this kind of film is less preoccupied with cooking up any genuine amusement than making its audience feel savvy by half-assedly referencing as many identifiable noteable pop topics from the years since the last Scary Movie's release as possible — Dr. Phil! Lil John! Million Dollar Baby! The iPod! Russell Crowe's telephone tantrum! R. Kelly's pee fetish! MySpace! "My Humps"! — and, usually, dousing them in excreta. In his parody of War of the Worlds' alien invasion, director David Zucker goes to great lengths to reproduce certain Spielbergian camera angles and special effects, and even Dakota Fanning's Candyland-colored wardrobe, but he forgets the hilarity.

Zucker's previous cinematic caricatures — the classic Airplane! and the first two Naked Guns — were clever, dimensional and so crammed with funny stuff you risked missing something good just by blinking. in Scary Movie 4, you can rest your eyes for entire scenes, and you'll hopefully skip the saggy butt-double for Leslie Nielsen (as the bumbling U.S. prez) and the wheezy testicle entendres of the Brokeback montage, but not the the cute riff on the Americanization of Japan's horror genre ("Buddha! Shitake kimono!") and the swift jab at the pompous colonial-speak of The Village ("This is some shit up with which we will not put!"), which are among the film's scanty legitimate guffaws. Faris, a supremely talented comedienne, deserves bigger and better material than this franchise offers, but then again, after you wash Cloris Leachman's face with a sponge soaked in a used bedpan, I suppose there's nowhere to go but up. D+

film | Glub glub glub

2006-08-23T16:04:00.001-04:00

If you locked Björk in an armoire for a couple weeks, fed her just Hershey bars and Red Bull, and then forced her at gunpoint to adapt the 1984 mermaid comedy Splash as a postmodern fairy tale under the guise of a drunk party guest who insists on slurring through the kind of inanely anecdotal prattle that's too galling to be funny, well, you might end up with something along the lines of LADY IN THE WATER, a nightmare of outlandish self-enchantment from director/writer M. Night Shyamalan, a guy who's made three movies that were varying degrees of good — for the record: Signs, Unbreakable, and The Sixth Sense — and, now, one that's painted in at least eight shades of awful.

Inspired by a bedtime fable Shyamalan verbally improvised for his young daughters, Lady in the Water contains enough maddening ridiculousness, crowded whimsy and lethargic storytelling to position the auteur as the front-runner for 2006's you-shoulda-kept-it-to-yourself award. (Last year's victor: Tom "Pimp my bride! And my beliefs! Oh, and my new movie, too!" Cruise, but I digress.) In his best work — the keen arthouse-superhero yarn Unbreakable and the invasion thriller Signs, taut and unnerving despite a faulty final act — Shyamalan marries the imaginative and the routine in uniquely enigmatic fantasias that are simultaneously epic and intimate. Lady in the Water aims for the same brew, as a schlubby apartment manager (the terrific Paul Giamatti, unfortunately saddled with hammy st-st-stutter) stumbles into a mess of supernatural intrigue upon encountering a sea nymph (Bryce Dallas Howard of Shyamalan's The Village) who lives in the building's swimming pool. OK, yeah, fine. Sounds like the beginnings of a charming little kiddie book. But in adult-skewed cinematic form, Lady in the Water is made of so many unappetizing mystery scraps that it winds up the celluloid equivalent of a Chicken McNugget.

Howard's ethereal "narf" (think: aquatic humanoid) has a mission: to locate and enlighten the struggling writer among Giamatti's tenants whose future works will lead generations of mankind to greatness, and Shyamalan casting himself in the role is an ego trip that recalls the memorably hokey "You give out hope like it was candy in your pocket!" moment from Kevin Costner's 1997 vanity project The Postman. Anyway, Howard speaks in kooky new-age pronouncements ("Do you feel an awakening?") until the script requires her to inexplicably fall mute, thus padding the running time with endless scenes in which Giamatti and his crew of quirky residents — including Shaft's Jeffrey Wright as a single-dad wordsmith, Cindy Cheung as a brassy Asian tart, and Six Feet Under's Freddy Rodríguez as a weightlifter who (grotesquely) works only the right side of his body — guess at what she wants them to do, get it wrong, and then repeat the process.

The rest of Lady in the Water veers between imitation Spielbergian wonder, interminable everyone-has-a-purpose moralizing, and ineffective scare scenes involving creature effects that the film apparently picked up at the Jumanji yard sale. (Let's see. there's a sod-covered wolf called a "scrunt" that stalks the narf, a triad of mohawked monkeys known as the "tartutic" that, in turn, stalk the scrunt, and a very special appearance by the cousin of the giant eagle from Lord of the Rings.) As if Shyamalan needs anything else on his plate, he plops a priggish movie reviewer (Bob Balaban) into the narrative to: A) self-reflexively comment on genre conventions (Shyamalan to his audience: "You probably think this is ridiculous ... but see, I know this is ridiculous!"); and B) ultimately get devoured by a scrunt, maybe as payback for the terrible notices Shyamalan received for The Village — with its asinine, look-how-clever-I-am! twist ending — two years ago. ("Who would have the arrogance to judge the intentions of another human being?" a character gasps.) Hey, bub. when it comes to bad films, everybody's a critic, so you'll need an entire army of scrunts to counter the negative word of mouth that's likely here. But totally eat me first. F

film | OMG! LOL! WTF!

2006-08-17T19:00:00.000-04:00

After a merciless dosido around this year's release schedule, the stagnant Japanese-horror remake PULSE finally wheezes into multiplexes just in time for the cinematic trash days that usually comprise the late-summer box office, and I'm really quite sad to report that this is a fate the movie totally deserves. The reason for my depression in two words: Kristen Bell, an engaging, intelligent, compulsively delightful firecracker in the title role of the über-smart and highly addictive teen-detective soap Veronica Mars. (Tuesdays at 9 p.m. this fall on the CW!) throughout Pulse, Mars nuts will probably visualize their dear Veronica — as keen, levelheaded and sharp as ever — rolling her eyes at most everything about it, from the ridiculous premise (evil spirits enter reality via computer wormholes) to the kooky dialogue ("There's no system to shut down. THEY ARE THE SYSTEM!").

Bell's plucky undergrad teams up with a townie mainframe whiz (Ian Somerhalder of Lost, far too pretty to accept spouting incredible revelations regarding Wifi, viruses and portable memory drives) to investigate her boyfriend's suicide, which, they learn, had less to do with depression than the plague of creepy ghouls he inadvertently unleashed on the world from the comfort of his own PC desktop. Or something. There's a germ of a nifty idea in how kids today are doomed by relying on convenience technology that allows them to pull so far back from honest-to-god human interaction that they simply disappear altogether, and director Jim Sonzero, working from a hackneyed screenplay by Wes Craven, loads the early scenes with enough text messages and chat-room conversations to underline, italicize and boldface the point. But Pulse, with its woefully bungled scares and nonsensical slasher-flick "logic," is ultimately such an unwieldy mess that you wouldn't notice if it suddenly segued into a commentary on Great Britain's naval eminence following the Battle of Trafalgar.

Despite a few genuinely creepy moments and a more existentialist story that sidestepped the silly cyber-babble, Japan's original Pulse [Kairo] never overcame its funeral-dirge pacing. If the Hollywood honchos who greenlit this version thought they could take it to the next level, well, they were right. Their Pulse is dull and stupid. D

film | Ate below

2006-08-14T17:23:00.000-04:00

In THE DESCENT, six female buddies rent a cabin in the Appalachians to gab, bond and spelunk a year after their previous sporting-adventure getaway ended in a car wreck that killed one gal's accompanying husband and young daughter. It sounds positively chick-flick-ian, alright, and for a while, The Descent looks to be on the verge of bursting with enough estrogen for a Lifetime TV-movie marathon. and then director/writer Neil Marshall (the U.K. werewolf tale Dog Soldiers) dumps his nasty little bag of tricks onto the table, at which point the film rapidly segues into full-tilt nightmare fuel — lean, mean and obscenely creepy-crawly.

These athletic ladypals — including the spooked widow (MI-5's Shauna Macdonald) and a cocky daredevil (Moulin Rouge's Natalie Mendoza) with questionable motives — rappel deep into an uncharted cavern, where, once the movie exhausts its obligatory parade of fake boo! moments (phew, it was only a bad dream! a perturbed bird! a horde of bats! my sneaky girlfriend!), incredibly real scares await them. In concept, The Descent ain't nothing terribly novel or groundbreaking, but what keeps it from being another inept subterranean twist on Alien (remember last summer's The Cave?) is the canny way Marshall depicts his protagonists as resourceful, scrappy, intelligent personalities, provides hints of friction bubbling beneath their cheery camaraderie, and then throws an increasingly volatile cavalcade of horrors into the mix to bring the characters' dissension to a frenzied boil: claustrophobia! hallucinations! mutiny! abandonment! Ravenous monsters that look like the creature prosthetics of Bram Stoker's Dracula mated with the ashy beings from Aphex Twin's "Come to Daddy" music video!

Oh, and speaking of Alien, and at the risk of cinematic sacrilege, The Decent rates a bit higher on the eek-o-meter than ridley scott's seminal 1979 sci-fi thriller. At least Sigourney Weaver and crew had flamethrowers and overhead lighting on their side as they combed their spaceship for the intergalactic beastie that unwelcomely hitched a ride. Comparatively, the heroines of The Decent careen through pitch-black underground tunnels armed with just signal flares and mountain-climbing equipment, and you've gotta get pretty close to something to swipe at it with a pickaxe. Not afraid of the dark? Heh. You will be. A-

Note: For whatever reason, the current American theatrical release of The Decent — a British production that opened overseas in 2005 — lops off the last 60 seconds of Marshall's original cut. The U.S. version is good for a fast jolt, but it's the sweet/sad imagery of the U.K. finale that ties everything together and truly sticks with you. It can be viewed here.

film | Kind of a drag

2006-08-09T21:09:00.000-04:00

SHE'S THE MAN tweaks William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night for the Abercrombie crowd, and the net result is even more unmemorable than 10 Things I Hate About You's blah twist on The Taming of the Shrew back in 1998. It's quite depressing to report, but the mallrat-lit genre has crumbled considerably since the brilliant Clueless plopped Jane Austen's Emma into the Coolio-era Beverly Hills of 11 years ago. You'll cringe at the thought of what's next — Howards End redone as an emo MTV musical with all-new songs by Dashboard Confessional? Chad Michael Murray, Talan Torriero, Adam Brody and Nick Cannon in Little Men? Hilary Duff as Tess of the d'Urbervilles?

Teenybopper starlet Amanda Bynes (What a Girl Wants) nabs the role of Twelfth Night heroine Viola, updated here as a varsity athlete who's peeved when her school yanks the ladies' soccer team. Presumably because a Norma Rae-ish rally against institutional sexism would be lost on Bynes' target audience, she decides to enroll at a neighboring prep academy under the identity of her twin brother, only her affected faux-butch baritone and frat-boy mannerisms — seriously, she hoots and hollers like she's in the boisterous family-dinner scenes from Eddie Murphy's Nutty Professor movies — are so transparent and irritatingly forced that they're hardly convincing or funny. And her disguise. Oy. In her mop-top wig and glue-on sideburns, Bynes looks ... well, macho's a huge stretch, and even boyish is verging on a pulled muscle. Mmm, let's say creepy. I've seen sock puppets that aspired to higher levels of masculine anatomical correctness.

With the comedic/romantic entanglements stemming from Bynes' dumb drag show rendered completely idiotic, you take your diversions where you can find them: in the occasional clever line ("Is it just me, or does this soccer game have more nudity than most?") and a few supporting performances that are really quite sharp for this type of film. There's Channing Tatum (Coach Carter) as the jock roommate bynes secretly admires, and Laura Ramsey (Venom) as the misled cutie who, for some weird reason, becomes smitten with Bynes' male alter-ego. She's the Man isn't concerned with the psychological ramifications that ordinarily might trouble young people caught in this web of complex infatuations and gender confusion — as the great Shakes himself once wrote, "All's well that ends well." Yeah, and not a moment too soon. C-

film | Death, be not dumb

2006-08-08T19:15:00.000-04:00

Death, take a holiday — please. Because you must be absolutely knackered after masterminding the elaborately wicked booby traps that kill, oh, the entire cast of FINAL DESTINATION 3. And that ain't no spoiler — nuh-uh, not even close, since the target audience of this escalatingly goofy franchise actually pays good money to watch the Grim Reaper spring a bounty of inescapable domino-effect perils on a group of hapless young victims. Or, if you prefer, a Final Destination flick with definite survivors is like a Dateline interview in which Tom Cruise comes off as a rational, sane and lucid person.

As far as characters dying, then, it's less a matter of if they will than how they're going to. 2000's original Final Destination was schlocky trash, but it managed to wring a few supremely effective shocks out of its nifty premise, while its 2003 sequel turned most remaining jolts into bad jokes. Blame further diminishing returns, déjà vu or a teen-horror genre that's grown increasingly desperate, but Final Destination 3 feels mechanical, lethargic and uninspired. It promises a series of particularly sicko mad-lib collaborations between Rube Goldberg and Stephen King —

1) Scary noise: ____________
2) Action verb: ____________
3) Profane exclamation: ____________
4) Sigh of relief: ____________
5) Benign household item: ____________
6) Action verb: ____________
7) Benign household item: ____________
8) Action verb: ____________
9) Benign household item: ____________
10) Action verb: ____________
11) Sharp household item: ____________
12) Violent action verb: ____________
13) Tender part of body: ____________
14) Squishy sound: ____________

— but hands you a dollar-store puzzle book with all the dots connected and the numbers already painted-by instead. The film fails to continually surprise; once you spy the nail gun, the tanning bed or the especially wobbly piece of gym equipment, you're counting the seconds until some poor soul is spiked, fried or has their noggin popped whitehead-style. Give Final Destination 3 a couple points, however, for employing an automobile engine fan as a cranial Ginsu in its lone genuinely nasty whammy.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Sky High) plays a yearbook photographer who has a bloodcurdling vision of her and her classmates' demises in a freak rollercoaster accident at a school carnival. Her histrionics at the ride's gate manage to spook several friends and acquaintances into detraining — and it's a good thing, too, as the carts do, in fact, jump the tracks mid-loop (leading to a huge plot hole involving a video camera, but I digress). In the days following, of course, the voracious specter of doom begins to catch up with each of them in the precise order they'd have been splattered against the tilt-a-whirl, blah blah blah. The obvious message behind director James Wong (The X-Files) and co-writer Glen Morgan's screenplay — aside from "ca-ching!" — is that nobody can cheat death. Cheating movie-goers, on the other hand ... D

film | Evil employer

2006-07-31T18:34:00.000-04:00

Decently sporty if not a full-tilt trendsetter, THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA never quite adapts Lauren Weisberger's rudimentary beach-read into the fantabulously snarky clotheshorse exposé you might expect from its high-glam trappings. That's probably because this Devil, more cuddly than catty, wields a semi-dull pitchfork whenever Meryl Streep — as the über-cranky editor of a swank couture magazine called Runway — and Anne Hathaway — as the hopelessly mousy aspiring journalist who lands a job as her personal gofer — aren't engaged in a series of wickedly funny boss-from-hell scenarios. For example, your job woes might not seem so bad after Streep, playing a character allegedly inspired by Vogue empress Anna Wintour, demands that Hathaway nab her a copy of the new Harry Potter — as in, the one that has yet to be published.

For a good while, The Devil Wears Prada chugs along merrily, transplanting the fairy-tale outline of Hathaway's own The Princess Diaries — and, to be fair, countless chick-flick makeovers before it — into Lifestyles of the Jetset and Anorexic, with the superlative Streep (prediction: at least a nomination for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy at next year's Golden Globes) a perfect evil queen for Project Runway addicts, and Hathaway gently glowing as a size-six (oh my god!) Cinderella who you long to see finally cut loose with a verbal bitchslap aimed squarely at her domineering taskmaster. (Sadly, the most apropos retort clashes with the PG-13 rating.) My Summer of Love's Emily Blunt, as Streep's first assistant, does a terrific riff on wicked-stepsister animus, while the obligatory role of the fairy godmother is, of course, filled by a flamboyant art coordinator (Stanley Tucci, quipping fast and furious) who favors expensive Jimmy Choos over that whole tired glass-slipper thing.

The direction of small-screen vet David Frankel begins to grow naggingly made-for-television as Aline Brosh McKenna's script shoehorns Hathaway into a dull romantic triangle with her nice-guy chef boyfriend (Entourage's perpetually stubbled Adrien Grenier) and a ladies'-man novelist (slimy Simon Baker, dressed like a bad Queer Eye experiment), and the movie's misfired climax hinges on dramatic personnel shake-ups (absent from the novel) that threaten to morph the narrative into Disclosure Lite. Did I care? Honey, no. I merely hoped the fierce mental walk-off between Hathaway's bookish beauty and Streep's bellicose beast would build and build and build to a beau-monde jihad. Regrettably, it doesn't, but these two ladies' valiant efforts keep Prada in fashion. B-

film | Who's your daddy?

2006-07-26T11:26:00.000-04:00

Dear Hollywood,
Stop. It. With. The. Damn. Horror. Flicks. That. Feature. Creepy. Children. Thanks in advance.
Love and kisses,
Jamie.

OK, so director John Moore (Flight of the Phoenix) clearly ignored the memo. But you've gotta give him a teensy-weensy bit of credit for opting to revisit THE OMEN — that 1976 zenith of creepy-child endeavors — in lieu of simply polluting multiplexes with a brand new piece of stink starring a kid who talks to dead people or is a dead person or has some strange connection to the the dead populace (i.e., The Grudge and Hide and Seek and The Ring Two and Silent Hill). And yet Moore's Omen utilizes the same David Seltzer screenplay as Richard Donner's original, meaning it's less a proper remake than a scene-for-scene homage, so you're often left wondering: A) what the point is; and B) if this incarnation exists simply because studio honchos thought it'd be too cute to capitalize on a devlish June 6, 2006 — 6/6/06, get it? — release date.

Liev Schreiber (the Scream series) and Julia Stiles (Save the Last Dance) nab the Gregory Peck and Lee Remick roles of an American diplomat and his preggers wife, awaiting the birth of their first baby in Great Britain. Long story short, members of a covert demonic sect instigate a hospital switcheroo that leaves Schreiber and Stiles the parents of little Damien, the most cherubic harbinger of the apocalypse since Sean Preston Spears — or, in the immortal words of Sidney Blackmer in the classic occult chiller Rosemary's Baby, "He has his father's eyes. Hail Satan!" In the film's craftiest moments, actually, Mia Farrow — yep, Rosemary herself — oozes deliciously diabolical glee as the kind of sinister nanny who'd totally ram that spoonful of sugar up Mary Poppins' ass before ripping her to shreds with her bare hands.

Schreiber and David Thewlis (Professor Lupin from Harry Potter), as a sleuthing paparazzo, share an amiable rapport when late-in-the-game globe-trotting takes them from misty monasteries to gothic graveyards, uncovering hokey plot revelations — those devious Satan-worshipers leave quite the unholy paper trail — as they hurdle through Moore's occasionally effective shock sequences. But Stiles is sourly miscast as the distressed young mother, and while little Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick, as Damien at six years old, glowers like he's auditioning for The Kenneth Starr Story, his pint-sized Antichrist never becomes much of a character. His sullen stare elicits a nice chuckle, though, in the movie's final scene, which is either meant as a (funny) jab at the Bush administration or a set-up for the inevitable Omen 2: Satanic Boogaloo. Omen '76 spawned three sequels and a made-for-TV documentary, so consider yourself warned. C

film | Ford, focus!

2006-07-21T20:16:00.001-04:00

Replace Harrison Ford with, say, the non-Alec Baldwin brother of your choice, and the underwhelming techno-thriller FIREWALL would've completely bypassed the cineplex and gone straight to Blockbuster Video, eventually collecting dust in the "action" section alongside such shelf-warmers as the Steven Seagal environmentalism epic Fire Down Below and Howie Long's I'm-an-athlete-and-an-actor vehicle Firestorm. In Ford's filmography, Firewall is a lot like the stuff he's been in so far this millennium — a weak and unessential footnote, another K-19: The Widowmaker or Hollywood Homicide. And if you don't quite remember K-19: The Widowmaker or Hollywood Homicide, well, that's the idea.

Ford stars as a bank security VIP whose home is invaded by a group of master computer hackers who threaten to kill his wife (Sideways' lovely Virginia Madsen) and two kids (Carly Schroeder and Jimmy Bennett) unless he helps them steal $100 million from his clients, and oh my goodness, I nearly just fell asleep writing that synopsis. You've seen this story before, probably on the USA network, and you'll see it again, probably on the USA network. But what makes Firewall almost watchable is the brazenly goofy script of Joe Forte, a first-time screenwriter with a woefully ironic last name. Wow, the plot's a big old doozy, featuring: A) a remote-control toy car and a peanut allergy that amateurishly telegraph upcoming suspense; B) a smarmy british villain (A Beautiful Mind's Paul Bettany, actually quite good) who shows his hostages that he means business by shooting one of his own men (!?); C) an answering machine that plays back messages in the reverse order from which they were received; and D) a ridiculous climax that hinges on: 1) the bad guys inexplicably going on the lam with Ford's brood in tow long after they should've murdered them already; and 2) the family pooch wearing a GPS device on its collar. Phew. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll reminisce about Ford's Indiana Jones/Han Solo glory days. But you'll mostly laugh. Inappropriately. C-

film | Kismet, you fool!

2006-07-21T00:01:00.000-04:00

Piper Perabo hasn't exactly lived up to the it-girl buzz that surrounded her pert performance in Coyote Ugly six years ago, but she's perfectly fine as a nonplussed newlywed — and even affects a cute English accent — in IMAGINE ME & YOU, a frothy confection from Britain that almost manages to coast on the charms of its appealing cast. It's a shame that the pesky script by director/writer Ol Parker keeps getting in the way.

Perabo's blushing bride Rachel exchanges a serendipitous glance with spunky wedding florist Luce (Gossip's gorgeous Lena Headey) on her walk down the aisle. In the weeks following, Rachel initiates a friendship with Luce, then begins to fancy her new gal pal — who's a full-tilt lesbian, by the way — more than her new hubby (Matthew Goode of Match Point). And therein lies the major roadblock to truly digging Imagine Me & You: The movie insists that these two women are meant for each other, but it doesn't provide any real evidence of the alleged pyrotechnics beyond some tepid flirting at a baseball game and 30 seconds of impromptu smooching in the back of Luce's flower shop. Oh, it wants to tell a story of love at first sight and fated cosmic fireworks and all that stuff that Coldplay sings about, but Rachel comes off flighty and premature as she makes huge decisions with the same consideration she'd give the dollar menu at McDonald's. Meanwhile, her sexual awakening is so absent — yeah, she curiously peeks at chick-on-chick porn, but the scene is used for a comic close-call rather than a moment of legitimate self-discovery — that it practically enforces the misguided notion that you can suddenly decide you're gay because, well, it's kinda trendy these days. Not that that doesn't happen occasionally on MTV's spring-break programming and the Girls Gone Wild video series, but still ...

Oddly, Imagine Me & You turns the jilted husband into its most engaging, sympathetic and complete personality, and Goode delivers his adorably quirky asides ("I like this jam. It's really good jam ... I should make jam") with a sharp, Hugh Grant-ish levity. Also winning: Boo Jackson and Buffy's Anthony Head in the stock supporting roles of, respectively, the cute little sister who's wise beyond her age and the soused dad who smartens up right on schedule for the Big Important Speech. Too bad that the movie seems to merely demonstrate that homosexual romantic comedies can be just as flat and unmemorable as the straight ones. C

film | Who's for dinner?

2006-07-18T22:51:00.000-04:00

In THE HILLS HAVE EYES, as Barbra Streisand might say, people who eat people are the ugliest people in the world. Of course, you don't really watch a movie in which a clan of cannibalistic mutants nosh on unassuming vacationers stuck in the New Mexico desert and expect them to flaunt the immaculate facial structure of Jude Law, eh?

The potential hors d'oueurves in this stylized but sluggish updating of Wes Craven's 1977 shocker are a family of seven — dad (Silence of the Lambs' Ted Levine), mom (Apollo 13's Kathleen Quinlan), two teen children (Dan Byrd and Lost's Emilie de Ravin), and a grown daughter (Eyes Wide Shut's Vinessa Shaw) with a husband (Aaron Stanford) and baby of her own — on a benignly bickersome getaway to California. Director Alexandre Aja (last year's brain-eroding High Tension) wants to inspire dread and suspense when, after their Airstream mysteriously goes kaput in the middle of nowhere, the group encounters the savagely ravenous locals, only our protagonists excel at the kind of dumbass horror-movie logic (take the off-road shortcut the creepy gas-station attendant suggested? Sure! Oh no, now we're stranded ... we'd better split up!) that promises at least a couple of them to the fixin's bar of a human buffet. For genre afficionados, The Hills Have Eyes contains more than its share of sicko moments, but — save for one terrifically stomach-churning mega-jolt that results in a death you'll think the film lacks the balls to actually stage — the bloodletting feels mechanical, rote and icky-silly, especially on the heels of 2003's better-than-it-had-any-right-to-be Texas Chainsaw Massacre restaging.

Hills' villains are descendants of a mining settlement nuked 50 years ago during government testing, and by the time a pole tethered to an American flag is jammed into a mutant's jugular in a violent act of self-defense, you begin to wonder about the tacit socio-political messages of Aja and co-scribe Grégory Levasseur. aside from its wonky thematic implications, the movie flounders even on a visceral level, turning the wimpy salesman son-in-law played by Stanford (terrific in Tadpole) into a vengeful 130-lb. rambo. OK, sure, it's a portrait of a mild-mannered young father forced to unleash his inner Schwarzenegger, but, as written, the transformation just doesn't convince, particularly when Stanford overcomes a bad guy we've already seen toss grown men around like plastic horseshoes. As for those mutants, well, they're gross and nasty and threatening and all ... until this Hills Have Eyes visits their gore-splattered homebase — a detour not present in the original — to find the television tuned into Divorce Court. Presumably, Judge Judy was a repeat. D+

film | The dating shame

2006-07-13T16:06:00.000-04:00

Houston, we have a problem, and it's called FAILURE TO LAUNCH. This alleged comedy operates under the delusion that it's a bouncy screwball romance between a 35-year-old slacker (Matthew McConaughey) who still lives at home and the "professional interventionist" (Sarah Jessica Parker) his folks hire to seduce him into emptying their nest. Of course, mom (Kathy Bates) needs to stop cleaning his room and cooking his meals, and then dad (ex-footballer Terry Bradshaw) should just sit him down and explain to him that it's high time to move out, but then the film wouldn't exist, and millions of women might be deprived of the sight of the tawny McConaughey's physical-specimen-ness in a series of fitted shirts that apparently are all missing the top four buttons. I'd, however, get my 96 minutes back, and that, I think, is a pretty fair trade.

OK, so, let's see if this sounds kosher to you. As soon as McConaughey's commitment-phobic duder — "Gnarly crash!" he enthuses following a mountain-bike wipeout — tires of a girlfriend, he invites her back to his place for the night as he knows she'll bail upon the next morning's realization that his parents sleep across the hall. Parker, meanwhile, is a working girl you pay to fake-date your freeloading-bachelor son, goad him into swapping his childhood bedroom for a place of his own, and then dump him as soon as the U-Haul's unloading at his new digs. Mmmhm. We're supposed to root for these two to fall in love, but Failure to Launch fails to make either of them endearing or likable, and instead wastes time with misguided America's Funniest Home Videos-level shtick in which McConaughey is bitten by — in no particular order — a chipmunk, a dolphin, and a smirking vegetarian lizard. Later in the movie, Parker's roommate and a buddy of McConaughey's (Elf's Zooey Deschanel and National Treasure's Justin Bartha, welcome scene-stealers) encounter a pissed-off mockingbird, presumably because a dolphin, a chipmunk, a smirking vegetarian lizard, and a pissed-off mockingbird attacking the same person would be overkill.

Failure to Launch sort of realizes the questionable actions of its main characters, and it attempts to compensate by: A) cooking up a half-assed backstory to rationalize McConaughey's relationship wavering; and B) insisting that Parker never ever sleeps with her marks, but no amount of backtracking or explanation can change that he's a royal schmuck and she's an emotional prostitute. The ridiculous happy ending — what, you were expecting something grounded in reality? — acknowledges at least a kernel of truth: that these people totally deserve each other. D+

film | Not funny!

2006-07-10T16:29:00.000-04:00

Yeah, yeah, I get it. DATE MOVIE mocks date movies. You know, date movies, feel-good flicks for the hand-holding set like My Best Friend's Wedding and The Wedding Planner and My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Wedding Crashers — the 1990 Alan Alda/Molly Ringwald comedy Betsy's Wedding was, presumably, too obscure — and Hitch and Notting Hill and Meet the Fockers and What Women Want and ... um ... Napoleon Dynamite and King Kong and Kill Bill and Lord of the Rings and ... er ... MTV's vehicular-rehab series Pimp My Ride and the no-one-cares-anymore reality show The Bachelor and the commercial in which Paris Hilton has sexual intercourse with a hamburger.

That half those titles aren't date movies isn't even the real problem. Most of the rest of them were so utterly forgettable to begin with — hello, does anybody remember anything about The Wedding Planner other than that it's one of those romantic-farce dustballs Jennifer Lopez does when she's taking a break from getting married? — that the parodies seem limp and clueless by default. It's akin to "Weird Al" Yankovic releasing an album of wacky covers based on any record Alanis Morissette made following Jagged Little Pill.

Chuckles? I counted three. Erstwhile Buffy sidekick Alyson Hannigan, cute as several buttons despite the Stay-Puft fat suit she wears for the first 20 minutes of the film, plays a lovelorn plus-plus-sizer who jiggles down the street to Kelis' inescapable dance hit "Milkshake," lustily thrusting towards a construction worker who nail-guns his own head in disgust. (Check!) In a borderline-clever twist on My Big Fat ethnic humor, she waits tables in a Greek restaurant owned by her African-American dad and Indian mom (check!), and later — after Hannigan's liposuctioned her way into the heart of a winsome British customer (Adam Campbell) — Best in Show scene-stealers Fred Willard and Jennifer Coolidge stop by for an amusing riff on Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand's cheese-and-matzo-cracker performances as the frisky Jewish in-laws of Meet the Fockers (check!).

And that's about it, really. Aside from the 45 seconds or so of mild titters those moments provide, Date Movie is just plain old unfunny — a comedy you don't watch as much as you wait out. D-

film | From Russia with blood

2006-07-07T18:41:00.000-04:00

The main lesson gleaned from NIGHT WATCH [NOCHNOY DOZOR]: Don't judge a foreign-language cinematic fantasia by its groaningly silly prologue. This 2004 Russian blockbuster, the first installment in a planned film trilogy culled from a cult novel by sci-fi author Sergei Lukyanenko, begins seven centuries ago in a supernatural earth realm known as "the Gloom," where warriors on the opposing sides of Light and Darkness — whatever that means — meet on a bridge for the kind of apocalyptic showdown you used to see on Buffy every Tuesday evening, then call a truce in the midst of their bloody skirmish. The conditions: The Warriors of Light will maintain a Night Watch to keep tabs on the Warriors of Darkness, who, in turn, institute a Day Watch to eyeball the Warriors of Light. Ominous narration informs us that:

... So it will be, until a man emerges who is meant to become the great one. And if he chooses the Side of Light, then Light will win. But those to whom the truth has been revealed say that he will choose Darkness, for it is easier to kill the Light within oneself than to scatter the Darkness around.

Uh-huh.

And then, just as Night Watch starts to seem like Keanu Reeves' stinky Constantine doused in a six-pack of Red Bull and a few quarts of Rikaloff, the weirdest thing happens: The movie begins to crackle in spite of its byzantine mythology — an episodic hodgepodge of elements from Ghostbusters, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix and Men in Black — thanks to the gorgeously neon-grunge visual juice of director/co-writer Timur Bekmambetov and cinematographer Sergei Trofimov. Seriously. As the story cuts to a contemporary setting, and a brooding seer (Konstantin Khabensky) on the Night Watch payroll investigates a non-stop glut of end-of-the-world phenomena, even the English subtitles get in on the razzle-dazzle, occasionally taking the form of dimensional lit-mag tone poetry as they pass behind the actors, dissolve in water, or enlarge and scatter when the dialogue grows frenetic. And right there's the rub: Night Watch is such a kinetic triumph of mood and style that you never quite mind it's also a load of muddled good-vs.-evil mumbo-jumbo. B-

film | Fangs for nothing

2006-06-23T17:24:00.000-04:00

"Why would Domastir bring her here?"
"Perhaps she needs to feed, or the sun."

Everything you need to know about the barrel-bottom medieval thriller BLOODRAYNE can be summed up in that goofy exchange, partially delivered by a more-detached-than-he-was-in-Sin-City Michael Madsen as a slovenly warrior who groggily stumbles around 1700s-ish romania in search of evil creatures and/or the mother of all hangover cures. He and his badass allies (Legally Blonde's Matt Davis and Michelle Rodriguez of TV's Lost) encounter a ferocious human/vampire hybrid (Kristanna Loken, Terminator 3's Terminatrix) on the lam from captivity as a carnival sideshow freak, and together they occupy the kind of half-assed mystical adventure yarn you expect to see sandwiched in between airings of Cobra vs. Komodo and Mansquito at 3 a.m. on the Sci-Fi Channel.

Director Uwe Boll previously helmed Alone in the Dark, a braindead monster mash with Tara Reid as an archaeologist who always seemed moments away from tearing off her lab coat and horn-rimmed glasses to arch her back and flip her hair Van Halen-style. Collectively, Bloodrayne's cast is even weirder, featuring Meat Loaf Aday (!), Geraldine Chaplin (!!), Ben Kingsley (!!!), and what the opening credits bill as "a special appearance" by Billy Zane. (Oh, come on. Billy Zane could materialize hovering over the Statue of Liberty in Liberace's gaudiest frock with rainbows shooting from his fingertips, and it wouldn't be "a special appearance.") Also quite oddly, the script is credited to The L Word's Guinivere Turner, and she's a rather uncanny choice to massage the main character of a popular video game set mostly in Nazi-era Germany into a castles-and-crossbows movie mythology where everybody gives the rumpled impression they just clocked out from an unenthusiastic day shift at the Renaissance Festival hawking mead and fried pickles.

Even indiscriminate genre fans aren't apt to find much bite in Bloodrayne. The action sequences are so ineffectual that they make Lucy Lawless' hammy acrobatics in Xena look like the artfully balletic brawls of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a hilariously gratuitous sex scene exists solely to flaunt Loken's D-list C-cups, and Boll curiously caps his epic with a flashback montage of Bloodrayne's goriest moments — as if viewers would be sitting there to nod, "Yeah, you know, I sure was hoping they'd show that splattered cranium from 23 minutes ago one more time." But hey, throw in a a bit of cross-dressing and some grave-robbers from outer space, and Bloodrayne's exactly the kind of flick notorious schlock auteur Ed Wood would return from the dead for. F

film | Gravy boat

2006-06-08T19:04:00.002-04:00

Throwing caution to the old "bigger is better" adage, POSEIDON whittles down both the name — by two words — and the length — by nearly a half-hour! — of 1972's The Poseidon Adventure, the Irwin Allen all-star spectacular that's as noteworthy for ushering in its decade's glut of disaster flicks as it is for Shelley Winters' sublimely hammy glub-glub-glubbing in an Oscar-nominated supporting performance. Fittingly, the less-than-epic but diverting Poseidon redux probably won't be remembered as much beyond a footnote on the original's Wikipedia listing this time next year, but as summer movies go, it's lean and mean and exciting enough to redeem its harried made-for-TV exposition.

Maybe director Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot and The Perfect Storm) and screenwriter Mark Protosevich (The Cell) were a little screwed no matter how you slice it. Either they: A) drag out the set-up to the extent that it becomes apparent why the Adventure has been dropped from the title; or B) condense their character introductions and development into a perfunctory 15 minutes of forefront pablum, then cut to the big-budget chaos as quickly as possible. they've opted for the latter, doing few favors for the movie's ensuing who-lives-and-who-dies dramatic urgency in the process, so it's a very good thing that Petersen's ensemble cast blends together established actors with built-in likability — Josh Lucas, Kurt Russell and Richard Dreyfuss — and semi-unknowns who're easily likable — Ladder 49's Jacinda Barrett and Alias' Mía Maestro.

Let's see. There's the brainy badass (Lucas), the single mom (Barrett, a Real World alum), the little boy (Jimmy Bennett), the sexist prick (Kevin Dillon, channeling older brother Matt from There's Something About Mary), the skittish stowaway (Maestro), the Latino cook (Freddie Rodríguez of Six Feet Under), the gay architect (Dreyfuss), the young engaged couple (The Phantom of the Opera's Emmy Rossum and Mike Vogel), and the ex-firefighter former mayor of New York City (Russell, in the most blatantly heroic role, like, ever). They're aboard a luxury New Year's cruise on the titular ocean liner when — in the first in a series of terrific and bracing action sequences — a "rogue wave" strikes, overturning the vessel and forcing this ragtag band of dwindling survivors to climb to an opening in the hull before it completely submerges. Not the best news for those billed last on the credits, if you know what i mean.

While The Poseidon Adventure peppered its story with religious allegory — Gene Hackman's recreant reverend led his flock of persevering passengers through dangerous tests of faith — Poseidon eludes highfalutin' symbolic content to concentrate on continuously supplying thrills. And they're actually thrilling, particularly an underwater race through a series of ballast tanks that'll unnerve anybody with breath-holding issues. Really, that's the moderate brilliance of the film's simple premise, and the reason why the scene in Steven Spielberg's Jaws where the shark bears into the boat and devours Robert Shaw will remain one of the niftiest movie scares for eternity: You can't escape the dark side of nature — be it in the form of an unstoppable great white or a tsunami that floods your safe haven — if you're floating helplessly in the middle of the sea. Now add a ton of turbulence by flipping the floor and the ceiling, and you've got a fine idea of Poseidon's effectively freaky capsized hell. B

film | Trapped inside a wacky Broadway nightmare

2006-06-03T01:44:00.000-04:00

A Mel Brooks movie musical adapted from a Mel Brooks Broadway musical based on a Mel Brooks movie farce about a Broadway musical (phew), THE PRODUCERS honors the Tony-winning pedigree of the crowd-pleasing 2001 play — and the Oscar-winning 1968 comedy that inspired it — for five deliciously promising minutes, and then becomes a glitzy migraine with song-and-dance diarrhea. Seriously. this first-to-second-scene turnaround leads to some of the most exasperatingly forced yuks since Christmas with the Kranks, which puts The Producers on par with Tim Allen wearing nothing but a fake tan and a Speedo: unpleasant at best.

Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick reprise their famed Broadway gigs as indiscriminate financier Max Bialystock and nebbish accountant Leo Bloom, a pair of 1950s cads who team up to put on a show that flops fast and hard, enabling them to pocket the residuals and hightail it to the tropics. Their craptastic find: a little gem called Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden, penned by a brash Nazi (Will Ferrell) as a gushing ode to Großdeutschland, complete with a goosestepping chorus line formed into a climactic Busby Berkeley-style swastika. On paper, this premise is bad-taste bliss, and the bizarre Springtime for Hitler sequences are orchestrated with a roguish wink that's missing from the rest of the film, but maybe that's because the talents of director Susan Stroman — a holdover from the original Broadway crew — seem better suited to the theater. Unfortunately, she helms nearly every moment of The Producers with a live performance in mind, from the static camera work and anti-cinematic staging of the big set pieces to the awkward hold-for-laughter-and-applause pauses every time there's a joke or a production number.

Lane and Ferrell coast through their comfortably kooky element, and Gary Beach and Roger Bart (Desperate Housewives' psycho pharmacist) are blazingly boisterous as a flamboyant auteur and his "common-law assistant." But Uma Thurman, as a slinky swedish secretary who deftly shimmies her way between Max and Leo, is too conscious of her character's inherent wackiness to make her the sly sexpot the script requires, while the unusually manic Broderick twitches and tics like he's channeling Roger Rabbit through Jerry Lewis. Perhaps never before has so much energy resulted in so much lethargy. D+

film | Hawkin' the suburbs

2006-05-31T16:31:00.000-04:00

It's more than a little bit hypocritical of OVER THE HEDGE — this month's computer-animated endeavor featuring a menagerie of wisecracking critters voiced by recognizable Hollywood talent — to offer a snarky commentary on fatass middle-American consumption while promotionally shackled to Trix, Crunch 'n Munch, Wal-Mart and Wendy's Kid's Meals. And it'd be distracting to the point of irritation, too, were Over the Hedge not first and foremost a gleefully winsome romp beyond the backyard, buoyed by lively characterizations and moments of manic invention that recall the antics of Roadrunner and Pepé le Pew from classic Looney Tunes shorts. Besides, Shrek, you'll remember, peppered its looks-don't-matter social message with a plethora of height jokes aimed at its diminutive villain, so moralistic glibness ain't no stranger to this new breed of family film.

Bruce Willis' smart-aleck machismo is a nifty fit to his cartoon counterpart, a crafty raccoon who's caught red-pawed looting the Alpine larder of an ill-tempered grizzly bear (Nick Nolte). He pledges to restock all the food within a week or be torn to shreds, so he dupes an unwitting flock of genial forest-dwellers — including a nervous turtle (Garry Shandling), a sassy skunk (Wanda Sykes), a hyperactive squirrel (the incomparable Steve Carell), and yokel ma and pa hedgehogs (Catherine O'Hara and Eugene Levy) — into looting nearby suburbia of its throwaway pizza crusts, caffeinated beverages and high-calorie snacks.

This lightweight scenario lacks the surprising poignance and stirring emotional kick of, say, Finding Nemo or Toy Story, but it's fast-paced and funny, and it deftly provides William Shatner, as a possum whose play-dead defense mechanism lapses into Shakespearean overkill, with a clever outlet to parody his own hammy screen persona. Even better, the movie doesn't rely on the same tired cinematic spoofs and pop-culture references you've come to expect from its ilk. Over the Hedge's best gags actually stem from its mischievously pointed lampooning of unhealthy bourgeoisie eating habits. In one scene, a bag of chips is torn open, resulting in a gargantuan mushroom cloud of real nacho cheese flavoring, and it's kinda sad — and somewhat fitting — that it makes you hungry for Doritos, eh? B

film | Reefer badness

2006-05-29T13:15:00.000-04:00

At long last, the cinematic equivalent of getting a colonoscopy from a skittish med student during a funeral for someone you never liked!

In other words, the Adam Sandler-produced stoner spectacle GRANDMA'S BOY inspires the kind of excruciating discomfort that only a comedy with nary a truly funny moment can. Sure, the cast here appears to be having a swell time as they goof their way through crude shtick involving flatulent african tribesmen, masturbatus interruptus, and old ladies swilling tea spiked with marijuana, but any genuine mirth emanating from this film must've squealed to a halt following the wrap party — aside from the two or three chuckles provided by Shirley "Mrs. Partridge" Jones as a horny septuagenarian with a list of sexual conquests dating back to Charlie Chaplin, of course.

In an assembly-line premise that was probably pitched as Karold & Kumar meet the Golden Girls, frequent Sandler cohort Allen Covert (Big Daddy) plays a mid-30s pothead video-game tester who's forced to move in with his doting granny (Everybody Loves Raymond's Doris Roberts, shock of shocks) and her kooky gal pals (Jones and Shirley Knight, far too wonderful to be reduced to pill-popping buffoonery) after his roommate blows their rent money on hookers. Ashamed, he tells his hopeless-nerd buddies at work he's shacking with a trio of slutty babes, which leads to a number of situational complications when he falls for a hottie project supervisor (Brokeback Mountain's Linda Cardellini), and ... wait, do you honestly care about the story? The writers — Covert, co-star Nick Swardson and Barry Wernick — don't really seem to, which makes one wonder if they were aiming for The 40-Year-Old Virgin's sublime mix of the sweet and the salty, but then got distracted upon the prop truck accidentally delivering authentic weed to the set.

Anyway, Grandma's Boy contains a couple of naked boobs, obligatory cameos by Rob Schneider and David Spade (or, if you prefer, a couple of clothed boobs), miscalculated warm-'n'-fuzzies, more ganja humor than you can shake a spliff at, drunk karaoke performances, a chimp driving a car, the inventive use of a Lara Croft action figure as a sexual aid, and a Matrix-worshiping techie villain (Joel David Moore) who makes hydraulic robot noises whenever he moves his arms, legs and neck. With that, you should know if this movie'll be up your alley. For everyone else, the queue forms behind me. D-

film | Dial B for blunder

2006-05-23T16:13:00.000-04:00

Another unnecessary notch in the Hollywood bedpost of pointless remakes, WHEN A STRANGER CALLS reworks the 1979 stalker thriller that's remembered somewhat fondly, less for actually being good — it really wasn't — than for its bravura first 15 minutes, in which the shocks of the old babysitter-in-peril campfire tale are staged with harrowing gusto. How ineffectual is this new Stranger? Well, the original got down to nasty business incredibly quick while parlaying a couple key lines of dialogue into the lexicon of all-time great scary-flick quotes. Version 2.0 completely jettisons the rest of the story, then stretches the first film's initial scene to fill an hour and a half. By the time Stranger's anonymous psycho phones his nubile young female victim with the immortal threat of "Have you checked the children?" — more than halfway into the freakin' movie — you'll heckle, "Screw the damn children, I'm checking the hell outta my watch!"

After a clunky opening-credits montage of ominous imagery — never good signs: solitary red balloons floating into the night sky and carnival carousels shot from low angles — When a Stranger Calls dutifully and dully introduces Jill (The Ballad of Jack and Rose's Camilla Belle), our teen heroine, who's about to keep an eye on the brood of a wealthy doctor at his swanky upstate mansion for the evening. Director Simon West (Con Air) utilizes the perfunctory early scenes to telegraph the continual frights that pop up straight through the film's delayed climax: Here's the family cat, she might unexpectedly leap at you from the darkness soon, and the ice machine, it totally sounds like an intruder's trying to break in! Oh, and the motion-sensor room lights, they're going to come in handy when we need to generate suspense from an unseen but menacing presence moving through the house, and the live-in maid, you'll find her floating in the fish pond later on. (And speaking of the live-in maid, why isn't she minding the kids? Sheesh.)

In the underwhelming finale — which follows the insanely overdue "the call is coming from inside the house!" moment — Jill finally faces her harasser (Tommy Flanagan, with a gritty vocal boost from Aliens' Lance Henriksen), but it's only exciting because you know the end of this unscary dreck is near. Until then, Jake Wade Wall's script doesn't provide Belle with much to do beyond intently ogling the caller ID and nervously peering in the direction of sudden clatter. She does what she can mostly acting opposite an LCD panel, but the real star of the show is Jon Gary Steele's lavish set design, which might make you wish you were perusing a Mikasa catalogue in lieu of enduring When a Stranger Calls. That way, you'd get all of the visual splendor with none of the restless twitching. D

film | Mother goosed

2006-05-16T22:29:00.000-04:00

First things first: HOODWINKED, a rowdy computer-generated assault on fairy-tale familiarity, is not from the people who made Shrek, though, with both movies sharing a similarly snarky rewrite of childhood fables, you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise. It's actually the debut effort from a new animation studio called Kanbar, and if their plasticized digital imagery has an intermittent Kewpie-Doll stiffness and lacks the fully-realized textural polish of their Pixar counterparts, well, you kinda forgive them, because: A) it's serviceable and decent enough to work while slightly lowering the bar; and B) raising the bar, at this point, would hinge on besting the technically superlative but unsettlingly hyperrealistic imagery of The Polar Express, which probably means you just nix the cartoon approach entirely and film a damn movie on legitimate sets with live actors, for god's sake. but I digress.

So yeah. In kind of a purée of the screen classic Rashomon, Gregory Maguire's Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister and a rucksack of speed, Hoodwinked (adorable title, by the way) purports that there's more to the altercation between Little Red Riding Hood (pertly voiced by The Princess Diaries' Anne Hathaway) and the big bad wolf (Seinfeld's Patrick Warburton, drolly amusing as usual) — who, in a botched attempt at procuring dinner, impersonated her dear old grandma (Glenn Close) — than you ever heard in kindergarten. For starters, the wolf's really an ace reporter hot on the trail of a dessert thief known as "the goody bandit," and granny, secretly an extreme-sports junkie, can handle trouble herself. Further sly surprises and clever overlaps occur as each of the characters involved in the imbroglio gives a statement to an amphibious police inspector (David Ogden Stiers) whose British accent and stalwart sleuthing suggest a Wind in the Willows excerpt penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

It's all quite cute — and, in moments, even inspired — but a feeling of restlessness eventually emerges from stretching a story that takes the length of a commercial break to tell into an 81-minute parade of in-jokes and sight gags, and a handful of half-assed musical numbers are extra padding on a movie that essentially is extra padding. But then, just as Hoodwinked begins to seriously burn off the last ounces in its reserve tank of viewer goodwill, a brilliant vocal performance by Newsradio's Andy Dick as a nefarious forrest critter enlivens a finale that's more manic fun than it has any right to be. Suddenly, Fleeced — the true account of Mary and her little lamb versus the Massachusetts Board of Education — doesn't seem like such a bad idea. B-

film | The clone bores

2006-05-08T16:03:00.000-04:00

March 7, 2004. A phone rings somewhere in Hollywood.

CHARLIZE THERON: Hello.

HALLE BERRY: Charlize? Hey, it's Halle! And I have Angelina here on three-way!

CHARLIZE: Wow, hi! How are you ladies?

ANGELINA JOLIE: Char, we wanted to congratulate you on your Oscar victory a week ago. You were absolutely terrific in Monster.

CHARLIZE: Thanks, Angie. It's so nice of you to say that.

HALLE: Listen, Char. We also hoped you'd take a bit of unsolicited advice from ... you know, a couple gals who've been there and done that.

CHARLIZE: Sure.

HALLE: Well, the first thing I thought when i won the 2002 Best Actress Academy Award for Monster's Ball was, how soon can I slide into a sexy superheroic costume and kick some bad-guy ass? And this July, Catwoman's gonna turn all the other big-budget blockbusters into kitty litter!

ANGELINA: And after my Oscar for Girl, Interrupted in 2000, Tomb Raider was a huge hit for me just the next year!

HALLE: That Oscar was for Best Supporting Actress, right?

CHARLIZE: But wait, Angie. Didn't the second Tomb Raider flop?

ANGELINA: You never let a sequel eclipse the original, my dear.

CHARLIZE: Oh. Hmmm ...

HALLE: Anyway, Char, I read in variety that you were thinking of jumping on board that Æon Flux movie over at Paramount, and all I can say is, go for it. Such a good career move. You've proved that you're a serious actress, and now it's time for serious action!

CHARLIZE: Gee, that sounds ... pretty neat, Hal. I'll do it!

HALLE: Fabulous! It's gonna be terrific. We'll see you at the premiere.

ANGELINA: Bye, Char!

CHARLIZE: Thanks! I'm excited! Talk to you both soon!

Charlize disconnects. Beat.

ANGELINA: Do you think she bought it?

HALLE: Oh yeah. And now I'll only have to wait about 18 months until the inevitable sting of Catwoman is forgotten by critics and audiences everywhere, as a new acclaimed actress follows up a mantlepiece of year-end honors with a totally miscalculated and costly star vehicle in which her boobs should rightfully receive top billing!

Thunder and lightening.

ANGELINA: Dumb question, Hal. If you're so confident Catwoman will bomb, why'd you sign up for it?

HALLE: Are you kidding? The pay was great. Plus, during the fight sequences, I got to beat the living shit outta Sharon Stone.

ANGELINA: Lucky!

Curtain.

In short, hell yeah, ÆON FLUX outbads Catwoman. At least stretches of Catwoman were unknowingly goofy camp. But someone sure forgot to flick on Æon's mirth switch, as it appears that everybody in this adaptation of the 1995 anime shorts from MTV's Liquid Television is utterly bored to death with the material. And understandably so: As Theron's leather-clad rebel operative kicks, slugs, vaults, somersaults and handsprings her way through the totalitarian enemy forces that rule the movie's plague-ravaged future-world metropolis, this lifeless sci-fi migraine merely recycles the dullest ideas and moments from The Island, The Matrix and Logan's Run. Director Karyn Kusama (Girlfight) even bungles the numerous action scenes, shooting them in maddening close-ups that further the kind of cluelessly clunky aura you'd find in the cinematic turkeys Mystery Science Theater 3000 used to roast. And oh, MST3K would have a field day with the unfortunate wardrobe choices for supporting performers Frances McDormand — yes, that Frances McDormand — and Pete Postlethwaite (In the Name of the Father), who looks like he's wearing something from the Taco Bell value menu. Meanwhile, Hotel Rwanda's Sophie Okenedo plays an acrobatic ally of Theron's with a second set of hands where her feet should be. This bit of quirkiness never really pays off, but it did make me think that if i had four middle fingers, I'd point most of them at Æon Flux. D

film | A town without pretty

2006-05-05T16:31:00.000-04:00

Rose (Pitch Black's Radha Mitchell), the intrepid heroine of SILENT HILL, probably won't be winning many mother-of-the-year awards anytime soon. Not only do she and her husband (Lord of the Rings' Sean Bean) opt to live in a house atop a jeopardous cliff while caring for a nightmare-afflicted daughter (Jodelle Ferland) who's prone to outdoors sleepwalking, but when the wee somnambulist starts murmuring about the titular (and fictional) West Virginian haunted hamlet — where, Rose learns, toxic coal fires have blazed underground for decades — Rose's curious reaction is to: A) shun psychological help (Tom Cruise would be proud!); B) hightail it there with the kid in the middle of the night; C) ignore her hubby's sensible phone pleas to return home; and D) knowingly endanger her young by literally crashing into the town while speeding away from a motorcycle cop (Laurie Holden) who's merely trying to warn her that THIS ROUTE MIGHT NOT BE THE BEST IDEA.

Great, folks. Just great. We're maybe 15 minutes into this Playstation-based crud, and the main character's already lost me.

Long story short: The girl goes missing, and Rose spends the rest of the film frantically searching for her amidst the ashy haze of Silent Hill, which ain't too easy given that the place is abandoned save for a cult of burn-the-witch religious zealots who shuffle around making ominously kooky pronouncements ("Into the fire she swallowed their hate") when they're not excitedly roasting godless interlopers on a spit. Oh, and there are also vaguely humanoid creatures leftover from Aphex Twin music videos and/or the cinematic oeuvre of Clive Barker that appear every time strange air-raid sirens trigger the quietly uneasy locale's sudden supernatural transformation into an unsettlingly hellish netherworld. This happens roughly once every half-hour, as if to remind audiences who've grown lethargic from Rose's sluggish sleuthing that they are, in fact, watching something that purports to be a horror flick.

Eventually, Silent Hill stumbles through the backstory of its twisted demonology via a chunk of oh-come-on exposition dispensed by an eerily adult-mannered child (see The Sixth Sense or The Others or The Ring or Hide and Seek — it's getting old), and it's capped off by an overdue climax that's a little bit Carrie, a little bit The Crucible, and a whole lot "Is That All There Is?" originally performed by Miss Peggy Lee. French director Christophe Gans previously helmed the baroque action extravaganza Brotherhood of the Wolf, a visually striking movie that earned him more than a few admirers, but it's hard to imagine anybody other than lifetime Fangoria subscribers screaming the praises of Silent Hill aloud. D

film | American idle

2006-05-03T23:38:00.000-04:00

It doesn't get much riper for the mocking than the current presidential administration or elimination-style reality television, and here comes AMERICAN DREAMZ with a deliciously timely premise that aims to skewer both the bumbling George Bush regime and the cornball talent scouting of American Idol, and with a nifty cast that includes Hugh Grant, Dennis Quaid, Jennifer Coolidge and Mandy Moore (in wickedly self-spoofing Saved! mode) to boot. It certainly sounds like it can't miss. So what the hell happened?

The huge problem: American Dreamz is considerably less amusing than either the brazenly aloof posturing that accompanies your typical Bush address or any given American Idol episode in which judge Paula Abdul verbally flails her way through a performance critique. It's a wobbly build-up to a punchline that never quite arrives, mostly due to a screenplay — by director Paul Weitz (About a Boy) — that abandons an array of decidedly farcical characters in situations and subplots that don't pack much punch. The movie wants to be a snarky satire of water-cooler topicalities, but it feels obvious and underdeveloped, and a single segment of The Daily Show dispenses wittier views of pop and political cultures than American Dreamz does in its entire 102-minute running time.

Oh, but this is one terrific collection of sly comedic turns. Grant, an actor who's capable of injecting bizarre glimmers of winsomeness in even his shrewdest roles, has more than a few lip-smacking moments as the narcissistic host of an American Idol-esque TV hit on which the languid U.S. prez (Quaid, doing a game but sympathetic riff on Dubya) is pressured into appearing in order to boost his droopy approval ratings. (Scary how it almost seems ... plausible.) It's a fantastic opportunity for an Arab terrorist cell to strap a bomb to a reluctant new recruit (the good-humored Sam Golzari) who's entered the contest as showtune-belting underdog. Chief scene-stealers: pop singer Moore, pitch-perfect as a midwestern karaoke champ too willing to jump into fame-whore training pants when she's selected for the competition, and Tony Yalda, howlingly dead-on as Golzari's pompously preening Persian-American cousin and eager stylist.

Moore's becoming the go-to girl for lampooning the faux-wholesome image all her bubblegum-teen-diva contemporaries embraced early on in their careers before tarting it up the closer they got to 20. It's a shame the film isn't as adventuresome. American Dreamz needs to really bite the hand of the culture that provided its targets. Instead, it happily laps at a few fingers, then pees on the floor. C+

film | The best little slaughterhouse in Europe

2006-05-01T23:25:00.000-04:00

Gross: vomiting.

Grosser than gross: vomiting with a ball gag in your mouth as several of your fingers are shredded from your bound hands with a chainsaw.

Gee, I'm not entirely sure why there wasn't a McDonald's tie-in promotion for HOSTEL, an unpleasant trough of splattered gore and gristle that begins as a raunchy sex comedy, then goes full-tilt horror-show after locking in the interest of its target audience — that'd be hetero fratboys for $400, Alex! — with a bounty of exposed female flesh. In other words, you get naked chicks frolicking in a co-ed sauna during the movie's first half, followed by a second act in which some poor young lady is strapped to a chair and scalded with a blowtorch while her right eyeball precariously dangles from its socket like a loose pom-pon on a winter hat knitted by dear old grandma.

Dude, I don't think I'm gonna finish these twizzlers ...

Initially, the film chronicles the horny misadventures of two U.S. college-grad backpackers (Crazy/Beautiful's Jay Hernandez and Dumb and Dumberer's Derek Richardson) as they stagger around Amsterdam with a new Icelandic acquaintance (Eythor Gudjonsson) in search of booze, hash and promiscuous foreign women. They decide to travel to Bratislava — huge mistake, which they'd know if they ever rented Eurotrip — to visit a hostel they heard is a living Girls Gone Wild video, but the copious debauchery turns out to be merely an inviting front to lure victims into a Slovakian torture ring where the rich and deranged from around the globe pay big bucks to maim the young and unsuspecting.

The one genuinely clever idea in Hostel: that kids from the states are sold for the most money, presumably because the rest of the world hates us so much that there's a high demand to watch us twitch, bleed, beg for mercy and (eventually) die. That, sadly, is believable, and director/writer Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, about six shades of silly) portrays the Hernandez and Richardson characters as such unlikably ugly Americans that you can't wait until they start to suffer. Whether this was a conscious decision or not, I dunno, but it renders all the libidinous-hijink stuff flat and insipid, and by the time the surviving protagonists turn the tables on their evil captors during the woefully extended — and gratuitously contrived — climax, you're nowhere near the edge of your seat. Beyond a few visceral jolts, it's hard to imagine many viewers really becoming involved in Hostel, which is maybe why the movie eagerly strains to provide blood, sweat and tears of its own. D+

film | Bungle in the jungle

2006-05-01T23:20:00.000-04:00

The legal department over at Disney's computer animation studios probably wants you to know that THE WILD was in production before DreamWorks' strangely identical Madagascar, a family flick that, unfortunately for the Magic Kingdom, beat The Wild to theaters by almost a year. Adding insult to injury, the extra time Disney had didn't appear to help. A dutiful reviewer should now point out that Madagascar is technically the superior film, but between these two titles, it's more a question of which endeavor is slightly less unremarkable while being equally inoffensive.

In both movies, a manic menagerie from a New York City zoo — including a neurotic giraffe and a lion with a crowd-pleasing roar — escape their metropolitan captivity, stumble onto a freighter, wind up shipwrecked in the african jungle, and run across a bullied troop of indigenous creatures — that'd be wildebeests in The Wild, lemurs (infinitely more adorable than wildebeests) in Madagascar — prone to outlandish musical numbers. The Wild's one big plot dissimilarity comes when leading lion Samson (voiced by Kiefer Sutherland) loses his only cub (Greg Cipes) in the labyrinthine bush and must race to rescue him, which, come to think of it, isn't all that original either. In fact, it's the narrative framework of Disney's own Finding Nemo, beached on dry land and gasping for fresh air.

For such a redundant and listless story, the film is remarkably busy and stuffed with wisecracking animal sidekicks: Assisting Samson on his quest are Benny the Squirrel (James Belushi), Bridget the Giraffe (Janeane Garofalo [!]), Nigel the Koala bear (Eddie Izzard [!!]), and Larry the ~~Cable Guy~~ Anaconda (Richard Kind). They're certainly cute and cuddly and lovable — and terrifically detailed, where their Madagascar counterparts were colorful but cartoony — but they're better suited to a collection of beanie babies than a batch of movie characters. There's an extremely forced zaniness to most of their interplay, and too many of the comedy bits and throwaway lines rely on clunky madcap sound effects to underscore their frivolity. By the time the end credits attribute the direction to one Steve "Spaz" Williams, you might not wonder how he got the nickname. C

film | Mug, rob, repeat

2006-04-20T14:48:00.000-04:00

Exactly how much fun you'll have with FUN WITH DICK AND JANE depends largely on your tolerance for Manic-Shtick Jim Carrey, who is not to be confused with Serious-Actor Jim Carrey, who was all shades of terrific in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Man on the Moon and The Truman Show. No, Manic-Shtick Jim Carrey is a Jim Carrey I can occasionally take (Batman Forever, most of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events) but usually leave (Liar Liar, Bruce friggin' Almighty), and as soon as he began to mug his way through a spastic rendition of R. Kelly's insufferably anthemic "I Believe I Can Fly" during the opening moments of Dick and Jane, a big neon warning magically appeared between my face and the screen that flashed: DANGER! MANIC-SHTICK JIM CARREY ACTIVATED! THIS MOVIE WILL SELF-DESTRUCT IN FIVE ... FOUR ... THREE ...

Carrey's family-man executive — KABOOM! — is joyously reaching for the stars because he's about to be promoted to a coveted VP slot at his media mega-corp, but no sooner does he land his big-bucks dream job than an Enron-ish scandal erupts that tanks the company and shoves him to the back of the very scary unemployment line. The previews for Dick and Jane focus on Carrey and wife Tea Leoni (Deep Impact) resorting to a madcap amateur robbery spree to make ends meet, but that's shoehorned into a 10-minute montage halfway through the film. Until then, it's all overlong set-up — the plasma television is repossessed first, then the BMW, then the sod on the front lawn, har har! — and forced Christmas with the Kranks-ian humor involving Carrey and Leoni's botched attempts to find new careers. And the remaining half-hour, with its utterly disinteresting mock-Ocean's Eleven bank con, assumes that any viewer still watching actually cares about the characters and is engaged by their farcically dire financial situation. Probably not. It's just that lethargy totally counteracts the mental acuity required in forming an escape plan.

The liveliest bit of Fun with Dick and Jane is the running gag in which Carrey and Leoni's pint-sized son (Aaron Michael Drozin) speaks with a Spanish accent, the joke being that his true adult role model is the Latina maid before either of his workaholic parents. ("Don't take away my Telemundo!" he cries as the TV gets removed from the house.) And when the funniest parts of a Jim Carrey comedy come courtesy of a kid with only a handful of scenes, well, there's a problem. D+

film | Maybe the dingo ate those ladies

2006-04-18T16:23:00.000-04:00

That never-ending stream of PG-13 quote-unquote horror pap — The Fog, Boogeyman and Darkness Falls, I'm lookin' at you! — is probably to blame for WOLF CREEK, a decidedly R-rated response to the genre's typically ineffectual fare. Purportedly based on true events, it's so grim and gruesome that even those who appreciate the movie'll be hard-pressed to recommend it without attaching a disclaimer to their praise. On one hand, Wolf Creek is crisply fashioned, performed to the hilt, and pretty damn successful in developing an uneasy atmosphere of mounting dread. on the other, I'm not actively hoping to see anything like it ever again.

Blair Witch Project-style, this Sundance Film Festival competitor from down under follows three road-tripping friends — native nice-guy ben (Nathan Phillips), a surplus duder from Lords of Dogtown, and pretty British backpackers Liz (Cassandra Magrath), the sensible brunette, and Kristy (Kestie Morassi), the spunky blond — on a joyride through the starkly desolate Australian outback. When engine trouble — the most dependable scary-flick ingredient since Vincent Price — strands them quite literally in the middle of nowhere, help comes along in the form of a trucker named Mick (John Jarratt), whose amiably rough-and-tumble demeanor is straight outta Crocodile Dundee. His spare-time pursuits, however, are more remniscent of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which our protagonists learn the hard way after crashing at his garage for the night and waking up hog-tied and worse.

In this moment, Wolf Creek morphs from an eerily disquieting travelogue into an extended chase scene punctuated by frequent acts of harrowing violence, and your opinion of the film will depend entirely on how much of this transition you can stomach. It'd be much easier to dismiss the movie as repulsive trash if debut writer/director Greg McLean hadn't staged such an effective first 50 minutes that — thanks to the hand-held jitters of Will Gibson's you-are-there photography and the unaffected naturalness of Phillips, Magrath and Morassi's almost improvisational rapport — make you feel as though you're watching real people unwittingly coast down the highway to hell.

Then, as an appreciative thanks for caring, McLean repeatedly punches you in the balls for the duration of Wolf Creek's second half, when the narrative takes the form of a particularly sadistic pep-squad cheer (with Jarratt, convincingly scary, at the megaphone), and where he resorts to slasher-film clichés and logic holes (the killer lurking in the backseat of the car he couldn't possibly know the screaming victim would try to hide in; the incapacitated villain who, inexplicably, nobody offs) that all the bloodletting in the world won't fill. It's admittedly not hard to get sucked into Wolf Creek, but as the character-to-victim ratio evens out and the curious final images flicker on the screen, you might begin to wonder if the only point at work here belongs to the bowie knife that Mick uses to ... ugh. You know what? Never mind. C

film | A few ingredients short of Turkish delight

2006-04-12T00:18:00.000-04:00

The bottom line on THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE: The lion's a regal drag, the witch deserves more screen time, and the wardrobe stops being fun in less than an hour. Oh well. Total, that's like one-and-a-half out of three, and one-and-a-half out of three ain't a total bust.

Disney's adaptation of C.S. Lewis' beloved kiddie-lit-cum-biblical-allegory casts a beguiling spell in its early scenes, as four plucky school-age siblings — wide-eyed Lucy (Georgie Henley), devious Edmund (Skandar Keynes), stubborn Susan (Anna Popplewell) and headstrong Peter (William Moseley) — evacuate bomb-ravaged London in the thick of World War II for an expansive country estate in rural England. You probably recall from childhood reading endeavors how little Lucy, during a game of hide and seek, discovers an ominous wardrobe (check!) that houses a portal to Narnia, an otherworldly realm of perpetual winter full of mythical creatures, sweeping vistas and, thus, the best computer-generated special effects money can buy. What you may not expect are the quaint storybook enchantments in which director Andrew Adamson (Shrek) swaddles these moments — the book's most iconic and memorable — as Lucy, played with winning pluck by the adorable Henley, enters Narnia and befriends a nervously chatty faun called Mr. Tumnus (James McAvoy, utterly affable). Her older brothers and sister eventually follow, of course, for a family vacation at a magic kingdom that doesn't cost thousands of dollars.

And then, right as Narnia the movie seems ready to take off, Narnia the landscape grows a bit cluttered. In increasingly charmless developments, the awestruck brood learn that their snowy surroundings are actually the work of the wicked white witch (check!!) Jadis (the amazing Tilda Swinton), whose self-imposed hundred years of coldhearted rule subjugated narnia's legit lion (check!!!) king, the noble Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson), and that a big-ass Narnian prophecy foresees a quartet of human youngsters defeating Jadis and ascending to the throne in victory. The kids accept this alarming news without much hesitancy, though I suppose that when you've emerged from an ensorcelled armoire to hear a talking menagerie claim that you and your preteen kin are imperative in destroying the forces of darkness in a theme-park jihad, you kinda just go with the flow.

Lewis' text has always read like the New Testament rewritten as a metaphorical adventure tale for Sunday-schoolers whose eyelids flutter with disinterest at the first sign of ecclesiastical solemnity. (Instead of Jesus, there's a mighty warrior lion fighting a mean sorceress and her army of beast-men! And heroic half-pints help save the day, with a special appearance by Santa Claus as an arms dealer!) But Disney's Narnia partnership with Walden Media, a production company closely linked to the conservative Christian Right, retains religious allusions both diminutive (references to Genesis and a direct quote from the gospel of John) and blindingly obvious (a character's pseudo-crucifixion and resurrection due to "deep magic") that, while faithful to the source, suck the delight from the movie's second half. Aslan might be a wondrous and expressive digital creation, but as a stand-in for Christ, he's a righteously invincible bore. This leaves Narnia's epic-combat climax — Braveheart for the booger-eating set — for all of its impressive technical wizardry, relentlessly hokey sound and fury without even a hint of surprise or feeling.

Ultimately, this Lion's main attraction is the enigmatic Swinton (The Deep End), whose indelibly striking presence and icy-glam looks perfectly compliment the frostbitten villainess of Lewis' prose. Not every actress can simultaneously sell a menacing scowl and a knowingly campy wink while riding a chariot pulled by polar bears across a battlefield populated by muppets in chain mail. Swinton sure does, and that alone is enough to make you wish that evil triumphed over good — just this once. C

film | Breast stroke

2006-04-08T00:09:00.000-04:00

Apparently bankrolled because some benevolent Hollywood honcho decided that 2006 needed a Showgirls to call its own, BASIC INSTINCT 2 stumbles into theaters with a troubled production history — and the grace of a plastered frat boy — a long 14 years after the 1992 original courted mega-controversy for its lurid content and turned Sharon Stone, now 48, into America's bisexual-icepick-murderess sweetheart. Stone, tellingly, is the only holdover from Instinct 1; gone from the first film are its leading man (Michael Douglas), its director (Paul Verhoeven), its scribe (Joe Eszterhas), its kinky menace, its trashy allure and, generally, its pulse.

Stone reprises her household-name-making role as Catherine Tramell, a brilliant and seductive mystery writer whose violent, racy fiction has the peculiar habit of predicting true-life bloodshed. In Basic Instinct 2, she's relocated to London — after screwing and stabbing her way through the entire straight-guy population of San Francisco, presumably — to bring her carnal mindgames to the Y-chromos (OK, and the occasional lady) of an entirely new country. She's fingered — no, literally — in the fishy death of a British football star, then court-ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation by the repressed, stodgy Dr. Michael Glass (Hilary & Jackie's David Morrissey), a shrink with an office on one of the top floors of the über-phallic Swiss Re skyscraper that's slangily referred to as "the gherkin." Freud would have a field day with this movie.

As Catherine starts to suggestively slink around Michael's personal and professional circles, his friends and associates begin to drop dead, of course, and Basic Instinct 2 shifts its focus to interactions among a web of nondescript and expendable stock secondary parts that includes David Thewlis (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) as "the sputtering detective," Charlotte Rampling (Swimming Pool) as "the concerned colleague," and Indira Varma (HBO's Rome) as "the vulnerable ex-wife." Suddenly shuffled off to the sidelines, Stone becomes more of an overhead presence than an integral ingredient of the story. You kinda wonder if Leora Barish and Henry Bean's screenplay existed as a paint-by-numbers psychological thriller that sat unproduced and collecting dust on a cluttered studio shelf before the Catherine Tramell character was shoehorned into it, as Stone pops up like a syphilis-encrusted whack-a-mole whenever Basic Instinct 2 needs a lame double entendre, a boob shot or some dirty talk.

Stone's performance contains a lot of faux smoldering and sneery posturing, the fakest orgasms the entertainment industry's heard since Liza Minelli and Peter Allen's honeymoon, and too many line deliveries that scream: CAN YOU FREAKIN' BELIEVE HOW DAMN SEXY I AM?! She's either: A) voraciously trying to prove that aging actresses can still be sensual; or B) aware there's no way in hell this Basic-Instinct-sequel conceit's gonna work and, therefore, playing it as campy spoofery. I fear it's A), but if B)'s true, well, yay, but director Michael Caton-Jones (Rob Roy) really should've advised the rest of the team to follow suit, especially Morrissey, who looks so sour and uncomfortable in every scene that you suspect somebody's holding a carton of expired milk just out of frame.

The previous Instinct essentially exhausted the premise: The final image revealed Catherine did it, case closed, which leaves the follow-up all dressed skanky with nowhere suspenseful to go. And despite its endlessly put-on naughtiness, it's shockingly tame. Basic Instinct actually pushed boundaries, while Basic Instinct 2 merely has Stone pull a leather belt around Morrissey's neck while they're gettin' busy, and wasn't that on an episode of Red Shoe Diaries, like, a decade ago? Ultimately, Basic Instinct 2's biggest sin isn't that it's not as sleazy as its predecessor. It's that it never even tries to be. D

film | Cafeteria food for thought

2006-04-03T22:37:00.000-04:00

Wait, what's this: a teen flick actually concerned with important real-world issues affecting today's youth? With a climax set at a venue other than the big dance? That's not a vehicle for Amanda Duff or Hilary Bynes or some other interchangeable Nickelodeon starlet? Earth to director/co-writer Josh Stolberg — are you even trying to get your movie seen?

Earnestly ambitious but woefully unsure of itself, KIDS IN AMERICA deserves at least a little pat on the back for thinking outside the lunchbox. Inspired by real stories of adolescent activism (some of which are told in maddening first-person documentary accounts during the closing credits), the story involves a diverse batch of John Hughes-ian stereotypes updated for the new millennium — the stalwart rebel (Everwood's Gregory Smith), the asian tech-nerd (Emy Coligado), the flamboyant male dramatist (Alex Anfanger), the progressive newspaper editor (Stephanie Sherrin), the sassy black girl (Crystal Celeste Grant), etc. — collectively rallying against the discrimination and narrow-mindedness their high school passes off as administrative policy: suspending the president of the chastity club for suggesting that her classmates who do choose to have sex use protection, or penalizing a gay student for kissing his boyfriend in the hallway when every straight couple that makes out between periods goes unscolded.

It's a potent idea for a film, loaded with timely social application and scads of satirical promise. But Kids feels like its makers were afraid their concept was entirely too subversive and challenging for the mallrat target demographic, so they watered it down with broad comedy bits and one-note caricatures that inadvertently (and ironically) trivialize their whole freedom-of-expression point. A bland puppy-love connection between Smith and Sherrin inspires an overtly cutesy montage of the young actors recreating famous movie liplocks from Say Anything ..., Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Disney's Lady and the Tramp (arf!), while the rest of the cast is merely relegated to lively interpretations of familiar clichés. Worse, the priggish principal (Boston Legal's lovely Julie Bowen) this Breakfast Club version 2.0 combats is scripted as such a screechy cartoon character — most of the adult authority figures are, really — you wonder why she doesn't just drop an ACME safe on her pupils to put an end to their incessant protesting for good. Yeah, Kids in America's heart is in the right place, but all its other vital organs are out smoking behind the cafeteria dumpsters. C-

film | The scribe, the creep, his wife and her cover

2006-04-02T14:37:00.000-04:00

For a textbook example of how wrong wrong wrong a movie can go just when you think it can't get no righter, check out THE DYING GAUL. The gleefully nasty first 30 minutes of this complex drama from playwright Craig Lucas (Prelude to a Kiss) practically crumble under the weight of their own deliciousness: A schmucky studio executive (Campbell Scott, elevating Hollywood smarm to an art form) woos a sadsack writer (the amazing Peter Sarsgaard of Shattered Glass) whose autobiographical screenplay concerns a man who loses his boyfriend to AIDS. Scott wants to buy it and change the doomed lover's gender, citing that "America hates gay people," and he suggests Sarsgaard stick around and make the switch himself, since, of course, he wants to get in Sarsgaard's pants. In a year when approval numbers regarding same-sex marriage are rising because, the media offers, TV news isn't reporting on it as much — not to mention the cowboy-on-cowboy tearjerker Brokeback Mountain grossing a stunning $80 million, winning countless critical accolades and nearly every top cinema honor around, and then losing (for whatever reason) the best-picture award at the Oscars — this is one lip-smackingly topical premise.

Into the tawdry situation slinks Scott's ex-scribe wife (Pieces of April's compulsively watchable Patricia Clarkson) — yep, he's married — who reads Sarsgaard's unedited script and develops her own fascination with him. At this point, The Dying Gaul could spin into about a thousand different intriguing directions, but the film unfortunately sidesteps them all and suddenly becomes a weird amalgamation of a cracked-out Touched by an Angel episode and a cautionary After School Special on the dangers of internet anonymity. A lot of the big dramatic moments in the concluding hour involve Clarkson and Sarsgaard conducting a series of chat-room rendezvous that rely on: A) Clarkson knowing information you're never entirely clear how she got; and B) Sarsgaard reacting in an unconvincingly metaphysical and rather idiotic way. The movie essentially dooms itself to interminably hokey passages in which the actors look into the camera and voice the back-and-forth chatter they're typing, a stilted device that clashes with the whole cinematic thing but probably feels less garish on stage (where Gaul originated in 1998). The same goes for the tacky mock-Shakespearean conclusion, with its split-second timing and poison botany. Despite three master-class performances, most of The Dying Gaul ends up frustratingly lost in translation. C-

film | Anarchy in the U.K.

2006-03-29T12:56:00.000-05:00

If V FOR VENDETTA was a geographical landmark, it'd be all over the map. This resolutely visceral adaptation of the futuristic nightmare dystopia from Alan Moore's graphic novel is unapologetically theatrical, frequently rousing, quirky to a fault, bizarrely affecting, occasionally heavy-handed, vividly challenging and never less than rambunctiously entertaining. And yet behind the surface flash and mega-budget action and comic-book goodies you expect from writers/producers Andy and Larry Wachowski — the siblings behind the Matrix franchise — are honest-to-goodness ideas. Hell, the film is basically about the impervious power of honest-to-goodness ideas. But it also features a dude in a cool costume blowing up stuff. You know, if that's what you're looking for.

His name is simply V (Hugo Weaving, Lord of the Rings' elf king), and he anonymously swoops into the brutally totalitarian landscape of 2020s London in his Guy Fawkes mask, That Girl wig and Ninja-Turtle artillery concealed by a flowing black cloak (he's historical, he's pop-cultural, and he's fabulous!) to combat the conspiracies and machinations of the ultra-conservative government's Big-Brother figureheads while settling a few personal scores of his own. In an anarchist twist on The Phantom of the Opera, Natalie Portman plays his grateful/reluctant/sympathetic captive/ally/student, a gofer assistant for Britain's sole television network — federally owned and operated, of course — who V rescues from sexually aggressive patrol officers on a night she's out past the mandated curfew. (That Portman works in state-controlled TV news allows for audaciously funny jabs at extreme media spin.)

V is a hybrid of Zorro, Edmond Dantès, Errol Flynn's Robin Hood and those cunning Euro-trash bad guys from every Die Hard knock-off ever made — not quite a full-tilt hero in the traditional sense. So is V also for villain? Nah, he's more of an equal-opportunity antagonist; the movie portrays him with empathy and unmistakably takes his side, but usually (without giving anything away) in intriguing shades of gray, ash and heather. By definition, sure, he's a terrorist, but then, in theory, his omnipotent politician adversaries — led by Alien's John Hurt as Great Britain's sputteringly nasty dictator — are also. Essentially, if V's a monster, he was created by much scarier ones.

With Weaving hidden behind an immobile harlequin faceplate and speaking in an exaggerated vaudevillian lilt, Vendetta attempts to give V a flesh-and-blood accessibility in the odd whimsical moment that pushes the film's admittedly loose tone a step too far. (V seems less ... badass vigilante after you watch him mundanely poach eggs on toast while "The Girl from Ipanema" softly hums on a nearby jukebox.) No matter. Portman supplies the human element sublimely, and she positively nails her character's emotional vivification during a harrowing prison sequence that packs an unexpected wallop — that carries through to the haunting finale — as it keenly intertwines with the flashback narrative of a persecuted lesbian actress. Once you let prejudice restrict specific personal liberties, Vendetta topically asks, where do you stop?

Moore (From Hell) published his source material in the early 1980s as a response to Margaret Thatcher-era England, but the subtexts of V for Vendetta are pretty darn applicable and timely decades later. Whether debut director James McTeigue (second-unit crew on the Matrix flicks) intended the movie as a subversive statement on the current political climate, a boldly hypothetical harbinger of strifes yet to come, or absorbing escapism with daggers and disguises and explosions (oh my!) is for him to know and audiences to debate — but it is subversive, boldy hypothetical and absorbing, often in the same scene, with an increasingly ardent resonance that's hard to shake off. In other words, like, whoa. A-

film | Lover from another generation

2006-03-27T21:16:00.000-05:00

She's 37, divorced and a bombshell photography coordinator! He's a 23-year-old aspiring-artist hardbody who lives with his grandparents! They have a great spark and even better sex, but what neither of them has is the slightest clue that his doting Jewish mother is the therapist to whom she relates the steamy details of their relationship — this fall on ABC!

So goes PRIME, a thoroughly unremarkable romantic dramedy with the aura of a clunky TV sitcom, albeit one that partially counters its ho-hum narrative and bland characterizations with pleasant chemistry of Uma Thurman and Bryan Greenberg (from HBO's Unscripted) as the unlikely couple. They meet in a cineplex lobby after simultaneously getting locked out of the theater showing their Michelangelo Antonioni double-feature, a scene that might've been cute if it didn't make you wonder: A) why nobody thinks to look for an usher; and B) what kind of screening room needs doors that deadbolt shut. But those are tiny contrivances compared to Greenberg's shrink mom (Meryl Streep) continuing to advise Thurman after she deduces that her favorite patient is also her son's shiksa girlfriend. You say "oy gevalt," I say "huge conflict of interest."

This leads to stagy sequences in which Streep turbo-kvetches while Thurman graphically fawns over her inexperienced but virile new beau's sexual prowess ("His penis was so beautiful i wanted to knit it a little hat!"), and it's kinda sad to see the endlessly acclaimed screen legend stuck in a role that's mostly a matzo-thin parade of twitchy tics. The film actually doesn't need the religious angle at all — hello, it's called Prime, not Gentile — but at least Streep's brassy caricature provides something resembling a pulse. Despite Thurman and Greenberg's best efforts, the age-difference interplay (How Uma Got Her Groove Back?) unspools in such pedestrian, connect-the-dots lethargy that you're grateful for the distraction.

Director/writer Ben Younger previously helmed the macho stock-scam thriller Boiler Room in 2000. That movie was testosterrific. Prime, comparatively, is estrogeneric. C-

film | Identity crisis

2006-03-23T21:57:00.000-05:00

Director David Cronenberg is no stranger to sicko cinema. His icky '80s remake of The Fly found a decomposing Jeff Goldblum storing his rotting penis in the medicine cabinet, and he helmed the über-bizarre car-wreck-fetish drama Crash a decade ago. So when he spends most of the first reel of A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE establishing the quietly idyllic existence of a serene restaurant owner (Viggo Mortensen), his loving wife (Maria Bello) and their two adorable children in picturesque small-town Indiana, you're counting the moments until the enticingly protective Norman Rockwell tarp gets yanked away and some serious shit goes down. And some serious shit definitely goes down the night two homicidal hoodlums stroll into the family diner with an appetite for things that aren't on the menu. In a jarringly bloody flash, Mortensen fights back, and his split-second vigilante heroics grab the attention of both the local media and, consequently, a few shady types from Philly — Ed Harris oozes understated menace as their head-goon mouthpiece — who roll into the neighborhood and suggest through stolid intimidation that Mortensen is an ex-killer hiding from the mob in all-American anonymity.

And then, as the movie begins to play an is-he-or-isn't-he? game with Mortensen's true identity, the edgy tension that Cronenberg has carefully built in precarious jenga-tower fashion just kinda tumbles into nothingness. The rest of the script morphs into a parade of tired suspense devices — would Bello really allow her young daughter to wander out of sight at the mall after foreboding brutes with striking facial disfigurements have tacitly threatened her husband? — and though a subplot involving their bullied teen son (Ashton Holmes) seems necessary to address whether human brutality is inherent or imitated, it ultimately feels like a half-baked contrivance to shoehorn the boy into peril at exactly the right time. The performances are thankfully more genuine than the writing, particularly the terrific Bello (The Cooler), turning what could've been a throwaway role into the most vital piece of the film, and an atypically lively William Hurt as a memorably kooky crime boss. Even Mortensen's vacantly gallant screen persona is a good fit to his character's ambiguities, but an unconvincing finale reduces him to Batman-style action manuvers that might've worked in the graphic-novel source material but look totally ridiculous acted out. Sure, Mortensen has minimal trouble zipping past bullets fired at close range, but A History of Violence ends up riddled with holes. C

film | Not worth the weight

2006-03-21T14:55:00.000-05:00

Ryan Reynolds spends the opening scenes of the thoroughly charmless farce JUST FRIENDS kvetching in a latex fat suit and perm wig that make him resemble the offspring of a butternut squash and The Greatest American Hero. It's a relief, really, since just when you thought he'd get typecast as a snarky jackass yet again — Van Wilder, Blade: Trinity, Waiting ..., take your pick — he does something totally different: He plays an insecure, overweight teen who grows up to be a snarky jackass. This requires a few awkward flashbacks worth of him shoving cookies in his mouth and singing along to Boyz II Men's "I Swear" as he unrequitedly pines for his platonic gal pal (The Butterfly Effect's Amy Smart) on the night of their high school graduation. She politely rebuffs his advances, because, well, would you date the genetic hybrid of farm-fresh produce and William Katt? And then the movie jumps forward 10 years, at which point it's snarky-jackass business as usual.

Now a slimmed-down, jet-set, ladies'-man record executive in Los Angeles, Reynolds reluctantly revisits his roots after a party-monster pop diva (Scary Movie's Anna Faris, a genius at manic physical schtick) sets fire to their tour plane and forces an emergency layover near his suburban hometown. You know the rest: He bumps into his old crush, misunderstandings and contrivances abound, there's a false crisis followed by a downbeat musical montage, and then she realizes she loves him right on time for the end credits. but Reynolds' role is written to be such a self-enchanted dolt — always doing and saying exactly the wrong thing simply to prolong the inevitable happily-ever-after with a series of cheap, unfunny gags — that the film clangs, sputters and utterly fails in its attempts to develop a convincing romantic angle. (No, seriously — never before has a comedy labored so hard at creating so little mirth.) Director Roger Kumble (Cruel Intentions) strains for the balance of sweetly engaging and purposefully crude that turned The 40-Year-Old Virgin into gold, but he's made The 90-Minute Migraine instead. D-

film | Bohemian crapsody

2006-03-16T22:19:00.000-05:00

However much of a subversive-issue-embracing, critical-rave-garnering, Pulitzer-and-Tony-winning smash it was at the time of its 1996 stage debut, the cinematic adaptation of Jonathan Larson's RENT is a big old self-important nightmare, so overwhelmingly garish and boisterous it makes Moulin Rouge look like a Lars Von Trier film. For a production that's supposed to epitomize creative passion and youthful exhuberance — the story: early-20s bohemians in New York's East Village with no discernable income back(jazz)hand the archaic, the conservative and the sell-outs by displaying their artistic individuality in song-and-dance numbers that name-drop Pablo Neruda and Getrude Stein, for God's sake — the movie smacks of lethargic desperation. It's as if the "rock opera" label often applied to Rent is merely a polite way to say "painfully awkward musical."

Famous for blockbuster franchises that sold themselves (Home Alone and Harry Potter), director Chris Columbus isn't incompetent, but his typically anonymous, point-and-shoot approach to filmmaking doesn't provide Rent with an identity (or even a pulse) of its own. In an admittedly audacious decision, Columbus retains six of the show's original players in lieu of hiring big stars with marquee clout. But it backfires, as these mid-30s actors — Anthony Rapp (as a jilted documentarian), Adam Pascal (a mopey rocker), Idina Menzel (a flirtatious protest artist) and Wilson Jermaine Heredia (a saintly drag queen) among them — now look at least a decade too old to be prancing around in The Gap's urban hipster collection and warbling about their ambitions, fears and dreams in flat vocals that'd probably get them canned by the American Idol judge's panel only a verse or two into their auditions. These folks don't need to be on par with Pavarotti, true, but in a movie as wall-to-wall grating as Rent, it's another nit to pick.

As for the whole Broadway component, maybe Larson's compositions — unarguably well-intentioned and obviously deepy personal — have a totally different effect in a live-theater venue where the performance is immediately encompassing and doesn't feel as forced or phony. Here, the late playwright's lyrics ("Sodomy / It's between God and me") are absorbed into the movie's clunky-sham aura, the power ballads sound eye-rollingly maudlin, and the sprawling odes to non-conforminty resemble Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" rewritten by pretentious liberal-arts students. During all the indie posturing and fist-in-the-air anthem-belting, the characters face gritty obstacles — traumatic pasts, drug addiction, economic uncertainty, illness and death (or, as the Rent spoof in Team America: World Police succinctly put it, "AIDS! AIDS! AIDS! Everybody has AIDS!") — but don't bother actually caring about any of this pap. Rent is extra enamored with itself so you don't have to be. F

film | Dull service

2006-03-16T19:03:00.001-05:00

A bad-taste marathon about the thankless grind of the young men and women in the tip-dependent food-service industry, WAITING ... does for restaurants with a bunch of tacky crap plastered on the walls what Office Space did for the white-collar workplace — just with a bunch of lowbrow dick jokes in place of razor-sharp observational wit that's honest to the point of discomfort. It's a lousy trade, and one that seals Waiting's inevitable fate of midnight airings on Comedy Central, which, given the high turnaround and dwindling popularity of the bathroom-humor genre, should be within six months or so.

Ryan Reynolds, an actor who's never met a line of dialogue he couldn't transform into a verbal smirk, plays a smartass waiter — not to be confused with his smartass action hero in Blade: Trinity, or his smartass B.M.O.C. in Van Wilder, or his three-year stint as a garden-variety smartass on TV's Two Guys and a Girl — at Shenaniganz, an Applebee's-ish chain where the customers are irritating jerks and the management ain't far behind. Reynolds and crew's respite of choice: the penis game, a sophomoric sort of show-and-tell in which you try to catch your coworker's attention by flashing your contorted genitals at them. Since a majority of the (unfunny) gags involve men displaying their privates for other men, then, of course, calling them fags when they inadvertently look, Waiting winds up with a subtext that's distractingly ... how to put this? Um, homophoberotic?

The film threatens to actually go somewhere or say something on the rare occasion it strays from its tiresome preoccupation with the male anatomy, especially during scenes in which Reynolds' endearingly mopey coworker/buddy (Jeepers Creepers' Justin Long) considers less dead-end career opportunities. Mostly, though, it just drowns an admittedly eclectic ensemble cast — Anna Faris (Scary Movie), Chi McBride (Boston Public), indie-flick mainstays Luis Guzmán and Alanna Ubach, and comedian du jour Dane Cook — in desperate, paint-by-number gross-outs that ask viewers to believe dining patrons would mistake pubic hair for alfalfa sprouts. Mauvais appétit. C-

film | A bloody mess

2006-03-16T16:41:00.000-05:00

Occupying space in the filofax of lame horror sequels alongside Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, The Ring Two and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, SAW II arrives bloody fast on the heels of 2004's Saw, which was a low-budget bit of unscary schlock that inexplicably grossed 45 times its estimated $1.2 million price tag. Weak acting and clunky staging ultimately botched Saw's admittedly intriguing set-up, but at least it felt like a finished movie. Comparatively, Saw II unfolds in the amateurish haze of a rushed community-theater rehearsal that just happened to occur in front of a film crew.

Former New Kid on the Block Donnie Wahlberg plays a hard-boiled detective (yawn) on the trail of Saw's still-at-large villain (Tobin Bell), a crafty headcase called Jigsaw whose modus operandi involves sticking societal miscreants in elaborate deathtrap mechanisms in order to teach them a lesson or whatever. (Think Dr. Phil, only more evil and pretentious.) Too bad his victims don't survive often enough to learn much, which is disheartening news for his latest batch of bad-egg "experiments" — including Wahlberg's klepto son (Erik Knudsen) and a spunky junkie (Shawnee Smith) from Saw uno — who find themselves locked in a Jigsaw-designed funhouse that includes such outrageous attractions as the Easy-Bake Crematorium Oven, the Bottomless Pit o' Drug Needles, and Mr. Toad's Wild Wrist-Lacerating Apparatus.

Director Darren Lynn Bousman douses the action in an acid-trippy visual commotion that clashes with the understated atmosphere of Seven-esque clinical terror he's shooting for, and his screenplay (with original Saw writer/co-star Leigh Whannell) also subscribes to empty chaos. Sure, indiscriminate fans of gore won't mind the tenuous characters, puzzling plot twists or roughhewn story threads, and they'll probably lick their lips with anticipation when the finale (weakly) establishes a premise for a third installment. But for the rest of us, the score for now is Saw II, audience zero. D+

film | Arrested development

2006-03-16T16:40:00.000-05:00

There's been a feeling of diminishing returns to the whole medicated suburban-youth malaise genre since Donnie Darko set the bar admittedly high in 2001, and the ho-hum THUMBSUCKER does nothing to buck the trend. In other words, if any combination of the past year's Garden State, Imaginary Heroes and The Chumscrubber already tested your patience, prepare for yet another drowsy indie-film portrait of generational angst to induce fits of endless fidgeting. That one of Chumscrubber's supporting actors plays the lead role here underlines the movie's broken-record aura.

Actually, Lou Pucci is quite good as Thumbsucker's protagonist, an apathetic high school senior named Justin who engages in the titular digit-fixation as a infantile rebuttal to growing up. Bothered by his detachment and lack of scholarly application, mom and dad (pitch-perfect Tilda Swinton and Vincent D'Onofrio) find a temporary fix in the ritalin prescription that transforms Justin into a bright, attentive debate-team superstar, but fame wanes when his focus shifts to drug and sexual experimentation with his on-again/off-again burnout girlfriend (Kelli Garner). Thumbsucker thankfully never turns into a preachy public service announcement, but it usually feels as generic.

Ultimately, Justin's subtle, substance-addled parable takes a backseat to the more engaging secondary characters, especially Swinton's serenely kooky parent and a pleasantly low-key Vince Vaughn as a teacher with atypical mentoring methods. (Keanu Reeves, meanwhile, gives a jarringly uninspired, what-the-hell? performance as a zen-dippy dentist who advises Justin to call on his "power animal" for spiritual guidance.) Director/screenwriter Mike Mills selects some savvy songs by Elliott Smith and Polyphonic Spree to score his tale of adolescent unease, so pray his next project is a mix tape in lieu of another movie like Thumbsucker. C

film | Hitchcrockian

2006-03-16T16:37:00.000-05:00

Jodie Foster takes paranoia to heights usually reserved for liberal arts majors on a weekend toke-a-thon in FLIGHTPLAN, a visually slick thriller that's essentially Foster's own (better) Panic Room at 37,000 feet. In a taut, no-nonsense performance, she plays a widowed aeronautics engineer whose young daughter seemingly disappears from the massive double-decker plane they're aboard somewhere in the airspace between Europe and the states. It's an arresting premise Hitchcock would've loved, and German director Robert Schwentke stages a exceptionally eerie middle act in which Foster becomes so maniacally unglued that her fellow passengers suspect that maybe the child was never actually on the airliner to begin with. It's too bad, then, that Flightplan's final half-hour navigates a bumpy landing and never recovers, largely due to a series of preposterous plot twists that should provoke an "OK, wait" or seven from anybody paying attention. (In other words — SPOILER ALERT — forget how they pulled it off; once revealed, the villains' convoluted scheme hinges on so many variables and such happenstance, I wondered why on earth they bothered.) Yeah, Foster's teetering-on-the-cusp-of-sanity breathlessness engrosses right through to the tacky, we-are-the-world coda, and Schwentke helms his big Hollywood debut with pizazz and pow to spare, but the holes in the story release an unfortunate amount of cabin pressure. C+

film | Inclement weather

2006-03-16T16:20:00.000-05:00

A tedious retread of John Carpenter's unsatisfactory-to-begin-with 1980 horror flick, THE FOG clumsily plops a couple of successful TV actors in a maritime ghost tale that'll only make their prospects for big-screen stardom soggier than a wet kleenex. Smallville's Tom Welling plays a boat-tour entrepreneur and Lost's Maggie Grace (killed off during November sweeps) his estranged girlfriend, residents of a quaint Oregonian island village that'd look sooooo cute on a box of oyster crackers. As Welling and Grace reunite just in time for a silly shower sex scene, a malevolent mist brings to the town a phantom ship chock full o' vengeful, leprous banshees. Faster than you can shiver your timbers — um, not to imply the film is briskly paced or anything — there are hackneyed story revelations, as many eye-gougings and live cremations as the PG-13 rating allows, and a woefully miscast Selma Blair as the most saturnine radio disc jockey in cinematic history. With the exception of Welling's ill-fitting pacific-northwest sweater ensembles, not a single bit of this dreck is scary, unless watching nondescript characters run from computer-generated water vapor quickens your pulse. Shockingly, Carpenter produced, but pin most of the blame on Cooper Layne's totally clearance-rack script and the clunky direction of Rupert Wainwright (Stigmata: woof!), who you shouldn't confuse with singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright, largely because Rufus Wainwright is an artist who's actually good at what he does. D-

vault | popScorn

2006-03-15T17:00:00.000-05:00

Total number of popScorn items in the vault: 4

Bringing up the rear (October 2, 2006):
• The one where reMedia! garners its first notice.

Hitting the books (January 16, 2007):
• The one where reMedia! finds a partner in crime.

And don't forget the robots! (May 19, 2007):
• The one where reMedia! feels young again.

I suffer so you don't have to (August 30, 2007):
• The one where reMedia! confesses a shameful habit.

vault | Film reviews

2006-03-15T16:58:00.000-05:00

Total number of reviewed movies in the vault: 93.

300 | 2007 | C-

Adam & Steve | 2006 | C-
Æon Flux | 2005 | D
American Dreamz | 2006 | C+
An American Haunting | 2006 | D-
Art School Confidential | 2006 | D+

Balls of Fury | 2007 | C+
Basic Instinct 2 | 2006 | D
The Black Dahlia | 2006 | D
Bloodrayne | 2006 | F
Bridge to Terabithia | 2007 | C+

Cars | 2006 | C
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe | 2005 | C
Click | 2006 | D
The Condemned | 2007 | D
The Covenant | 2006 | D
Crank | 2006 | C

Date Movie | 2006 | D-
The Descent | 2006 | A-
The Devil Wears Prada | 2006 | B-
Disturbia | 2007 | B+
DOA: Dead or Alive | 2007 | C-
The Dying Gaul | 2005 | C-

Employee of the Month | 2006 | D
Eragon | 2006 | C-

Failure to Launch | 2006 | D+
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer | 2007 | D
Feast [with Slither] | 2006 | C+
Final Destination 3 | 2006 | D
Firewall | 2006 | C-
Flightplan | 2005 | C+
The Fog | 2005 | D-
Fun with Dick and Jane | 2005 | D+

Ghost Rider | 2007 | D
Grandma's Boy | 2006 | D-
The Grudge 2 | 2006 | C

Hard Candy | 2006 | C
The Hills Have Eyes | 2006 | D+
A History of Violence | 2005 | C
Hoodwinked | 2006 | B-
Hostel | 2006 | D+

Idlewild | 2006 | D+
Imagine Me & You | 2006 | C

John Tucker Must Die | 2006 | F
Just Friends | 2005 | D-
Just My Luck | 2006 | D

Kids in America | 2006 | C-

Lady in the Water | 2006 | F
The Lake House | 2006 | C
Little Man | 2006 | F

My Super Ex-Girlfriend | 2006 | D+

Next | 2007 | D
Night Watch [Nochnoy Dozor] | 2006 | B-
Notes on a Scandal | 2006 | B+
The Notorious Bettie Page | 2006 | D+
The Number 23 | 2007 | C-

The Oh in Ohio | 2006 | D+
The Omen | 2006 | C
Over the Hedge | 2006 | B

The Pink Panther | 2006 | D+
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest | 2006 | C
Poseidon | 2006 | B
Prime | 2006 | C-
The Producers | 2005 | D+
Pulse | 2006 | D

The Quiet | 2006 | D

The Reaping | 2007 | D+
Rent | 2005 | F
Resident Evil: Extinction | 2007 | C-
The Return | 2006 | C-

Saw II | 2005 | D+
Saw III [with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning] | 2006 | C
Scary Movie 4 | 2006 | D+
The Science of Sleep | 2006 | C-
See No Evil | 2006 | D
She's the Man | 2006 | C-
Silent Hill | 2006 | D
Slither [with Feast] | 2006 | C
Snakes on a Plane | 2006 | B+
Stay Alive | 2006 | D-
Superman Returns | 2006 | B

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning [with Saw III] | 2006 | D+
Thumbsucker | 2005 | C

V for Vendetta | 2006 | A-
Vacancy | 2007 | C

Waiting ... | 2005 | C-
When a Stranger Calls | 2006 | D
The Wicker Man | 2006 | C
The Wild | 2006 | C
Wind Chill | 2007 | C-
Wolf Creek | 2005 | C
Wordplay | 2006 | B+

You, Me and Dupree | 2006 | D+

Films are listed alongside their year of U.S. wide/limited release.