3/22/09:  "If you're like me and have extended your love of the movies to doing a little screenwriting on the side, you're probably familiar with this feeling.  You've got an idea, an awesome, AWESOME idea, with only one flaw:  no one would ever do the things your idea requires them to do.  But the idea's awesome, so you swallow hard and invent a Ridiculous Contrivance that inspires them to do that awesome stuff.  Alas, as you're writing, you find that the Ridiculous Contrivance is tied to your Awesome Idea like cans to the back of a Newlyweds' car, and you keep having to feed and water it on Every Stinkin' Page, dragging down the awesomeness.  The long-delayed comedy Fanboys has such a screenplay, a wacky lark about five friends who try to break into George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch in 1998 to steal a copy of the yet-unreleased Star Wars, Episode 1:  The Phantom Menace and see it before anyone else.  Cool idea, only no one would ever do that.  So writers Ernest Cline, Adam F. Goldberg and Dan Pulick have swallowed hard and given one of the friends terminal cancer that will ensure he doesn't live to see the movie's Memorial Day 1999 release.  And you know, nothing says wacky road trip comedy like terminal cancer!  Despite this, and a general raggedness inspired by years of re-editing and reshooting, Fanboys' heart is in the right place.  Geeks in general and Star Wars geeks in particular will enjoy a lot of the silly in-jokes and army of cameos.  But probably not the cancer." MORE

6/15/07:  "I can't say I read a lot of Fantastic Four comics as a kid (The Avengers were my Marvel Super-Team of choice), making it a lot easier for me to accept some of the sillier, more sitcomish decisions director Tim Story made when bringing The World's Greatest Comic Magazine to film in 2005.  I liked that cheerful, unpretentious superhero flick quite a bit, but I have to say I was expecting to see less of Mr. Fantastic using his stretching powers upon running out of toilet paper and more scope and gravity in a sequel.  And yes, that sequel, Fantastic Four:  Rise of the Silver Surfer, does pit the title heroes against galactic forces seeking to destroy the Earth.  But it struggles to put away childish things, and gets off to a brutally slow start before kicking into gear.  Like so many sequels, it relies on residual goodwill and game performances by the returning cast to sell material I wouldn't otherwise view so charitably.

The Fantastic Four are a media sensation, and the wedding of Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd, aka the shape-shifting Mr. Fantastic) and Sue Storm (Jessica Alba, the Invisible Woman) is swarmed by media." MORE

12/7/09:  "Love him or hate him, no one can dispute that director Wes Anderson has created a filmmaking style all his own.  Oh, sure, others can try to infuse the American Independent style with the same level of comic manic depression he does, but good lucky trying to catch up, or to walk the tightrope that allows him to almost always stay on the fun side of despair (don't get me started on The Darjeeling Limited, the exception to this rule).  I'm also partial to the occasions when he mixes in other genres, like the action adventure bent of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and you'd be hard-pressed to see any director take a more outside-the-box genre leap than the one Anderson takes with Fantastic Mr. Fox, a stop-motion animated family film in the style of the old Rankin/Bass TV specials.  As far as it is from the likes of The Royal Tenenbaums, Mr. Fox is unmistakably Anderson's, and in fact its' mixture of childlike whimsy and philosophical profundity makes it a strong contender for the best movie he's ever done.  Delightfully quirky, it's got enough critter hijinks to entertain the kids, but it's really designed for the adults who grew up on old school stop motion.  No doubt, as with the entire Wes Anderson catalog, the more adventurous the viewer, the better." MORE

4/18/09:  "I'm mostly an outsider to the Fast/Furious franchise that began with, well, 2001's The Fast and the Furious.  I passed on that junky-looking hit (probably would have gone today, I didn't live five minutes from a theater then like I do now) but caught the sequels 2 Fast 2 Furious (adequate, if for no other reason because it includes the line “This is some serious Dukes of Hazzard shit!”) and Fast and the Furious:  Tokyo Drift (inadequate, if for no other reason because of the relentlessly clunky way star Lucas Black pronounced the word “gaijin”) at the Drive-In, mostly because I'd go to see just about anything there.  Now, at last, I paid good money without the benefit of starlight and hamburgers to catch a new installment, and just in time:  with a bigger scale, better story and more swagger than the previous chapters, Fast & Furious is good old-fashioned junky fun.

Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel, star of FF1 who cameoed in FF3) and his girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez, from FF1) are living high as gas truck thieves in the Dominican Republic, but the heat is closing in and he feels the need to go it alone.  Letty heads for the US, while right-hand Han (Sung Kang, from FF3) heads back to Tokyo.  Meanwhile, in Los Angeles Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker, from FFs 1 & 2) has been reinstated by the FBI and is pursuing the drug ring of the mysterious Arturo Braga." MORE

9/21/09:  "The world is trying to kill us.  Forget all the different ways our bodies can turn against us and just look around at all the flammable, sharp-edged, poisonous, electrified things you see, not counting those heavy or fast-moving enough to crush us.  I'm new to the Final Destination series, which uses a fairly contrived device involving those who cheated death getting cheated right back to deliver ghoulish lessons about just how easy it is for five or six of those dangerous items to gang up in a chain reaction and cut your head off.  Also new to the franchise is 3D, which seems like a natural for this kind of enterprise, and indeed proves to be the highlight of the cheerfully idiotic thrill machine The Final Destination.  If you (like me) enjoy yelling “Ohhhhhh!” when a movie character gets sliced in half by a flying projectile, this is the movie for you.  If you're a fan of characters, plot, and dialog, you should probably look elsewhere (make it someplace with no loose screws, spilled water, or other implements of death).

Four friends attend a NASCAR (never mentioned by name, of course) race:  Nick (Bobby Campo) and his girlfriend Lori (Shantel VanSanten) are the nice ones, Hunt (Nick Zano) is a flamboyant jerk, and Janet (Haley Webb) wanted to go to the movies instead." MORE

8/18/09:  "There's a good reason why movie characters spend so much time running, shooting, falling in love and generally doing stuff:  sadness, despair, and all things introverted are hard things to put on screen.  It's hard to get an actor who can seem like more than an unlikable mope while doing them, and when the characters onscreen are doing nothing but standing still, the full burden of generating the movie's energy shifts behind the camera.  No worries:  (500) Days of Summer relishes the challenge, turning in the most complete and heartfelt cinematic portrait of heartbreak I've ever seen.  Credit a tremendous performance by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the lead role and the invention of Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber on the page and Marc Webb behind the camera.  Funny, bittersweet, and instantly relatable to anyone who's ever watched a dream of happiness fade before their eyes, (500) Days of Summer is that rare movie that really seems to know what's going on inside our heads when we think no one's paying attention.

In more-or-less random order, we visit some of the 500 days during the relationship of greeting card writer Tom Hanson (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and his boss's assistant Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel)." MORE

10/8/08:  "I often worry that in our society's eternal struggle between ethics and expediency, expedience has dug a deep hole, dumped ethics in and buried it under a mountain of cash.  It's easy to see why:  we've witnessed the last few weeks just how much Wall Street holds our economic well-being by the throat.  All Wall Street wants is to make money by any means necessary, so why wouldn't we all just fall in line and say “Just shut up, take what you can get and keep the economy running?”  In fact, someone whose rights were violated would almost have to be crazy to challenge Corporate America on principal:  the best you could possibly hope for if you've been wronged is to be written a check to go home, but don't ever expect an admission of guilt or to be “made whole” in any way you can't pay for with that check.  Flash of Genius tells the story of Bob Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, and his long, costly battle with the Ford Motor Company to prove they'd stolen his invention.  Not to get paid for his invention, mind you, to PROVE it had been stolen.  To PROVE he had invented it.  To regain ALL the rights that might come with that invention had it never fallen into Ford's hands.  And yes, Bob Kearns was crazy, but an excellent performance by Greg Kinnear made me feel for that crazy guy and his need to do what was right in a world that sees no right or wrong that doesn't start with a dollar sign." MORE

2/9/08:  "All movies are products:  the best we as moviegoers can hope for is that what we are being sold is a rich storytelling experience filled with entertainment.  Sadly, many filmmakers lack the nerve to sell us “a vision”, “a story”, or even “a movie” and are content to fire action, comedy, romance and wacky gay sidekicks into the audience like T-shirts out of a cannon at a sporting event.  And when it works, I'm dutifully entertained and keep my mouth shut.  When it doesn't, you get something like the aptly titled Fool's Gold, a reunion of the stars of the hatefully cynical romantic comedy blockbuster How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days that glistens with high production values and good intentions but just can't deliver the goods.  In their absence, we get a parade of demographically diverse characters and desperately pandering moments trying to give every single audience member something to hold onto.

Eight years ago, Tess (Kate Hudson) went to Florida on Spring Break and ended up married to and invested in the treasure hunting life of Benjamin “Finn” Finnegan (Matthew McConaughey).  Together they became obsessed with an 18th-Century shipwreck that scuttled a huge Spanish treasure called The Queen's Dowry." MORE

4/25/08:  "I've said it before:  stars are cool.  They bring iconic weight to characters, allow us to measure their range from role to role, and generally distract us in material that needs the goose.  Something else that's great about them is that you can put two stars together, then stand back and watch the sparks struck by their combined starpower.  Action stars rarely team up:  it's a solitary genre, telling stories of lone wolves taking on impossible odds and even sidekicks are usually little more than cannon fodder.  So I guess it's not all that surprising that it's taken this long for the two biggest Asian martial arts stars of our era, Jackie Chan and Jet Li, to finally make a movie together.  If they were waiting for the right vehicle, their patience has been rewarded by The Forbidden Kingdom.  It's a nifty kung fu fantasy pitched at teens but enjoyable by anyone whose pulse quickens when I mention that yes, the two titans take time out to fight before joining forces.

Teen Jason Tripitikas (Michael Angarano) loves kung fu movies, so much that he makes frequent trips to Chinatown to buy bootleg videos from Old Hop (Jackie Chan), whose shop includes an ancient staff that's been waiting for years to be picked up “by its' rightful owner”." MORE

6/27/07:  "There's a great Haunted Mansion ride at the Knoebel's Grove amusement park in Elysburg, PA.  You take a seat in a little roller coaster-style car and then ride along a track through the mostly dark “mansion” while the lights rise and fall and “spooks” of all kinds are either suddenly in front of you or come popping out of various holes in the walls.  For extra disorientation, there's a tunnel of strobing lights, an oncoming train whose lights come on about two feet in front of you and a little shower of water at the very end.  I love that ride (I've been on it a couple dozen times over the years), and I thought about it repeatedly during Mikael Hafstrom's new Stephen King adaptation 1408.  Just like the ride, it excels at springing jumping spooks upon you.  And just like the ride, its' plot never really goes anywhere. 

Mike Enslin (John Cusack) is a once-promising writer who's been reduced, after a personal tragedy, to touring the country and visiting “haunted places” for a series of third-rate Spooky Travel Guides.  An unsigned postcard in his Post Office Box inspires him to visit New York's Dolphin Hotel, where the mysterious Room 1408 has seen the death or dismemberment of pretty much everyone who's ever stayed in, or in some cases even cleaned, it." MORE

4/21/07:  "I love a good thriller.  The prospect of seeing a clever mystery solved by clever people with danger around every corner hits so many visceral and intellectual hotspots that it's easy to forget how rarely these movies really work.  There are lots of reasons thrillers go wrong:  crafting a convincing mystery is hard, populating it with likable characters isn't as easy as it seems (after all, many of them have to be lawyers), and the need for twists and turns makes it easy to break faith with the viewer.  Director Gregory Hoblit is best known for Primal Fear (although he also directed the sensational Frequency), a movie that I felt was fatally tripped up by its' own cleverness.  But his new film Fracture is a model thriller:  a battle of wits between two great characters, one of whom is trying to get away with an exceedingly clever “perfect murder”.

Ted Crawford (Anthony Hopkins) is a brilliant engineer whose wife (Embeth Davidtz) is having an affair with police hostage negotiator Rob Nunally (Billy Burke).  One night, Ted confronts her with the truth, then calmly shoots her in the face.  Staging a “hostage situation”, he draws Rob to his home, where he turns over the murder weapon and confesses." MORE

11/11/07:  "I'm a sucker for Christmas movies.  There's something about the holiday and the Hollywood imagery about giving, magic, redemption and flying reindeer that totally hits me in a personal soft spot that wants to believe in some sort of transcendent human goodness.  And that's probably why I enjoyed Fred Claus, an initially awkward holiday reunion of Wedding Crashers star Vince Vaughn and his director David Dobkin.  It gets off to a slow, painfully unfunny start, but once it settles into its' tale of a troubled North Pole family reunion that, yes, might just Save Christmas, I was surprisingly moved.  Of course, in the interests of full disclosure, I also cried at the end of It Nearly Wasn't Christmas.

At some point in the distant past, Mother (Kathy Bates) and Papa Claus (Trevor Peacock) had two children:  the older, Fred (played at different ages by Jordon Hull and Liam James) lives in the shadow of saintly young Nick (Theo Stevenson).  In fact, Nick grows more and more saintly until in some mysterious fashion, he ends up as Santa Claus and celebrates the (unmentioned) birth of the Baby Jesus by handing out toys to Good Girls and Boys each December 25." MORE

1/11/07:  "Storytelling serves many different purposes:  it cautions, amuses, thrills and inspires.  Any story can do these things, but there's a special thrill that comes with depositing the word “true” in front of it:  the feeling of possibility that comes from knowing the one person really did overcome the odds, and maybe they're not the only one who can.  I think that's why most teacher movies these days are at least “inspired” by real-life tales:  sometimes the news can really wear us down about our educational system and, by extension, our society's future.  It's good to be reminded that the right teacher in the right place at the right time can still make magic happen, just as Erin Gruwell did.

After the LA Riots, Erin (Hilary Swank) decided to abandon her goal to become a lawyer and become a teacher instead, to try and save people before they wound up in court.  She arrives at Wilson High in Long Beach with no experience but boundless optimism.  Cynical administrator Margaret Campbell (Imelda Staunton) assigns her an English class of freshmen with the school's worst behavioral and academic problems, and Erin's early classes are disastrous.  The students know nothing but the violence and racial division of their day-to-day lives and believe they have no use for an education." MORE

2/15/09:  "First, a confession:  since I was 8 when the original came out and didn't really develop a taste for horror until my 20's, I've never seen any of the original Paramount Friday the 13th movies.  And as such, I'm not the best judge of what fans might be looking for in a remake.  But viewed without much experience with what Jason's all about when he's not battling Freddy (now THAT was cool!), the new Marcus Nispel-directed, Michael Bay-produced Friday is a slick, fun slasher movie that at times is even better than that.  The acting is far better than the genre average, and Nispel really knows how to film the investigation of a spooky room.  Could we have spent a little less time in the company of debaucherous young adult losers?  Sure, but somebody's gotta take that ax in the back.

1980:  Pamela Vorhees (Nana Visitor, sadly getting less screen time here than she did in the movie's teaser trailer, perhaps the victim of rumored reshoots?) has gone mad and murdered all the counselors but one at Camp Crystal Lake for not keeping an eye on her drowned son Jason." MORE

2/15/10:  "Director Pierre Morel made his English-language debut on last year's retro delight Taken, which took us back to a time when high-body-count familial vengeance was the bread and butter of the action genre.  A year later, he revisits another bygone movie era, the time after Lethal Weapon when any two actors found walking down the street at roughly the same time would be grabbed and paired in a crass, violent and pointless plot that had something to do with drugs.  Add that layer of Western cultural obliviousness that second-tier English-language products from Luc Besson's Europa Pictures factory often sport, and you get From Paris With Love, a crass, violent and pointless check-casher that pairs an abysmally chemistry-free John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers in a script that seems to have been spat out by a Random Buddy Movie Generator that really, really doesn't care for Arabs.

James Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) works at the American Embassy in Paris, but also performs low-level espionage work for a shadowy intelligence organization.  He yearns to be a “real” agent, and so he pounces on the chance to “partner” with legendary agent Charlie Wax (John Travolta) who's in town on unspecified business." MORE

2/13/09:  "Anybody sufficiently interested in politics to be reading this review no doubt shares a common fantasy.  That stinkin’ crook who disgraced the nation while serving as our Commander in Chief finally gets what he has coming to him, dragged onto National TV to face a fearless grilling.  With no advisors or spinmeisters to hide behind, asked all the questions the press was either too fearful or too complicitous in his corruption to pose, he breaks down and confesses:  yes, it’s all true.  He was a power-hungry maniac who warped the US Constitution for his own evil goals.  Decent Americans then celebrate in the streets.  Of course, you and I might argue about who “He” is (Clinton?  Bush?  A couple decades ago, Reagan?), but British playwright Peter Morgan was happy to supply this fantasy masquerading as historical fact with his popular stage play Frost/Nixon.  After successful runs on both sides of the Atlantic, stars Frank Langella and Michael Sheen reprise their roles in a new film version directed by Ron Howard.  They’re awesome, and the fantasy the movie’s selling is a formidable one.  A certain cinematic inertia and the nagging sense that this couldn’t possibly be the true story (hint:  it’s not) hold it back, but Frost/Nixon is a solid character study.  Just not necessarily a study of real characters." MORE