10/8/08:  "There are two kinds of great movies.  Some illuminate the human condition, captivate us with their ingenious, labyrinthine plots, or delight us with unforgettable characters.  Others are just wicked awesome.  Eagle Eye falls into the later category, telling an improbable sci-fi action story with such commitment and relentless gusto that it's easy to ignore how patently ridiculous many of its' events are.  Disturbia director D.J. Caruso reunites with his star Shia LaBeouf while doing his best Michael Bay impression under the eye of producer Steven Spielberg, who did the same job on Disturbia and the Bay-directed LaBeouf bone-cruncher Transformers.  A pure popcorn thrill ride with sensational stunt sequences and a plot so overheated it pops like Orville Redenbacher for two solid hours, Eagle Eye is not a movie for the discriminating cineaste.  But for fans of joyful mayhem, it's not to be missed.

Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) is a loser:  working at the Copy Cabana after dropping out of Stanford, he's so distanced from his family that he hasn't spoken to twin brother Ethan in over two years.  Then comes a fateful call:  Ethan has died.  " MORE

9/27/07:  "With the passing of the Toronto Film Festival, the nature of moviegoing hype changes for the six month Oscar Season.  After a summer of letting marketers and trailer editors tell us what movies we MUST see, now it's time to let buzzmeisters (both critics and reporters who tell us how much some movies look like critics should love them) take over.  The funny thing is, I've never found one group to be more reliable than the other when it comes to heralding what's actually going to amaze me beyond all measure.  Case in point:  Toronto Audience Award Winner Eastern Promises, the recipient of some of the year's ravest reviews.  It's a good movie, a competently diverting crime thriller directed with consummate skill and sporting one really good performance, but any resemblance to the groundbreaking slicing of bread is purely coincidental.

A teenage girl enters a London pharmacy with blood running down her legs and collapses.  She's rushed to a nearby hospital where she gives birth... and dies.  Identifying her and finding a family for her newborn daughter becomes an obsession for midwife Anna (Naomi Watts), who recently suffered a miscarriage.  She finds the girl's diary among her things, but it's in Russian." MORE

4/23/08:  "I couldn't help thinking of the man who picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue repeatedly while watching 88 Minutes, a luridly overcranked and utterly ridiculous thriller that plays like an entire season of 24 compressed into a hair under two hours.  Unsavory serial murders and random assassination attempts alternate with the bizarre, endless spectacle of Al Pacino on his cell phone multitasking his way through enough suspects, evidence and red herrings to fill a dozen thrillers, all en route to a solution easily guessable without one single clue.  For all its' overheated frenzy, 88 Minutes includes not a single minute of genuine entertainment, except that sometimes it made me a little giggly.

We open with a sequence that really wishes the Hostel sequel had done better:  twin sisters (their status as twins the first of many things that screams “CLUE!” but is never followed up on) are drugged in their apartment, hung upside down and subjected to assorted nastiness I no more want to describe than watch.  One is able to scream for help that arrives too late to save her sister, but does scare off the assailant.  She thinks she can pick him out of a lineup and ends up IDing Jon Forster (Neal McDonough), who's convicted in large part because of the expert testimony of forensic psychiatrist Dr. Jack Graham (Al Pacino)." MORE

11/25/07:  "As I understand it, the history of the Disney Princess goes something like this:  for about 50 years between the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the era of Beauty and the Beast, little girls everywhere dreampt of themselves wearing awesome gowns, having woodland critters as their friends and, most importantly, being swept off their feet by a Prince Charming with whom they would live Happily Ever After.  Then, right around the time the ever-profitable Disney corporation caught on to how promotable the notion of the “Disney Princess” as a kind of asexual Bond Girl was, the country was catching up to the idea that singing to woodland critters and waiting for Prince Charming were not skills that were going to get a woman into the White House anytime soon.  So began a tug of war each subsequent Traditional Disney flick has tried to stay on the right side of:  fantasy vs. empowerment.  While the largely human-free Pixar revolution has called Time Out on this eternal struggle for the last few years, it's back with a vengeance in Enchanted, which sends a Disney Princess through a magical portal into The Real World.  There, the movie has a lot of fun with the contradictions between the two universes, and utterly fails to say any of the many meaningful things it so desperately wants to." MORE

1/27/07:  "Airplane! is one of my all-time favorite comedies, and I've seen it dozens of times.  One of the things I always marvel about it and the other movies created by the comic geniuses David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker is how they know that things which make absolutely no sense are going to be funny for that precise reason.  Humor is so subjective, and never more so than in their films and the whole “spoof” genre they inspired.  I try to keep that thought in mind as I ponder how exactly Epic Movie, the new blockbuster spoof from writer/directors (and in this case I use both terms loosely) Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, got made.  Mistaking references for referential humor, acted with an amazingly tin ear for comedy, and maddeningly padded out with dance numbers and musical montages, it is amateurish almost beyond belief.

The plot makes detours to reference a few recent films but mostly follows that of The Chronicles of Narnia:  The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.  Four orphans find Magic Tickets inspired by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to visit a cannibalistic candymaker Willy (Crispin Glover, at least entertaining himself)."  MORE

1/4/07:  "I love cheesy dragon movies, particularly the ones the Sci-Fi Channel runs on Saturday nights, like Dragon Storm, Dragon Dynasty and Dragon Sword (aka George & the Dragon).  I even kinda liked Joel Silver's goofily awful theatrical take on Dungeons & Dragons, if for no other reason than to hear Jeremy Irons bellow perhaps the greatest bad line of all time, “I'll have to craft a new destiny for you, a destiny of pain!”  So, it is with great disappointment that I must announce that the latest big-screen dragon epic, Eragon, is a misbegotten mess, albeit one with some eye-popping special effects.

All together now... “It is a time of darkness.”  The evil King Galbatorix (John Malkovich, so overcranked he seems ready to attack any extra who might wander into the frame) rules his medieval kingdom with an iron hand, his soldiers forceably recruiting every able-bodied man for his (off-screen) wars.  Young Eragon (Edward Speleers), whose brother fled the country to dodge old man Galabatorix's draft, goes hunting one night and stumbles upon a remarkable stone.  It is in fact a dragon's egg, which hatches the adorable Saphira (voice of Rachel Weisz)." MORE

6/23/07:  "I've often said that the best sequels are to movies that don't entirely work.  Not “bad” movies per se, but the ones that leave you frustrated that their potential went unrealized.  Sequel a great movie, and you've got a high bar you're expected to meet or even exceed.  Sequel a mess, and you've not only got a lower bar to get over, but a clear guide to all the things you shouldn't do.  2003's Bruce Almighty got a few laughs from the clever idea of an ordinary man (Jim Carrey) given the power of God to teach him a thing or two about faith, but mostly failed at the story level.  Carrey wasn't interested in returning for a sequel, but writer Steve Oedekerk and director Tom Shadyac found a new leading man within their own cast:  Bruce was the first major movie role for rising comic Steve Carell, who played TV anchorman Evan Baxter.  Morgan Freeman returns as God, and Oedekerk worked his rewriting magic on a Bruce-free spec script called The Passion of the Ark about a modern-day politician called upon by God to build an ark, just like Noah.  The result, Evan Almighty, is not just a movie far better than its' predecessor, but a funny and inspirational extravaganza that delivers just about everything you could ask for from a Summer movie.

Tiring of his TV news gig, Evan ran for Congress, promising to “Change the World”, and won." MORE

2/14/08:  "You hear it all the time, but there really aren't many good leading role for actresses, especially in mainstream movies.  Since making a splash as the ass-kicking transgenic hero of James Cameron's TV series Dark Angel, Jessica Alba has taken a lot of critical abuse as a pretty face with no acting chops.  But after seeing her in The Eye, it's worth reflecting on exactly what she's had to work with up to now.  Other than suiting up as The Invisible Woman in the Fantastic Four movies (and even that wasn't much of a role in last summer's sequel), she's been mostly asked to look good in a swimsuit and smile a lot (two things, granted, that she does exceptionally well).  But The Eye confirms that she's more than just a hottie:  tasked with commanding every scene as a blind woman who finds a cornea transplant to be a mixed blessing at best, Alba delivers the goods.  And she has to, because The Eye is creepy at times and engaging at others but it is first and foremost a star vehicle, one which overcomes some conceptual flaws to deliver 90 minutes of quality B-movie entertainment.

We know Sydney Wells (Alba) is as smart and refined as she is beautiful because she's got the movies' go-to career for the smart and refined:  concert violinist." MORE