9/13/09:  "The minds of writer/directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Tayor must be two very scary places:  kinda like those rubber ball pits kids jump around in, only with sex and violence in place of the rubber balls.  There's no question that if you can stomach their worldview, these guys have tons of talent, and it's interesting to watch them learning to use it, as each of their three features has been a huge improvement over its' predecessor.  First, the dreary Crank couldn't pay off on the potential of its' cool high concept and appealing stars, then sequel Crank:  High Voltage delivered a rush of insane, demented fun, but couldn't always stay on the tracks.  Now, these cinematic psychos (and I mean that in the most flattering way possible) have finally fired on all cylinders and the result is truly awesome.  Gamer doesn't need to stop for interludes of dementia, the patented hard-HARD-R Neveldine/Taylor style is encoded into its' story's twisted DNA.  Funny thing is, it's a cautionary tale about the fact that we can't let technology gain too much control over us, because we never know when somebody like Mark Neveldine or Brian Taylor will be pushing the buttons.  Wonderfully acted, brilliantly satirical and way smarter than a movie like this has any reason to be, Gamer will test your ability to keep your eyes on the screen (I did have to look away a time or two).  But sci-fi fans should give it a shot, because there's a ridiculous amount to like here, and it wouldn't pack nearly the punch it does if two saner people were behind the camera." MORE

6/22/07:  "Adapting a classic TV show for the big screen required filmmakers to navigate a minefield of seemingly conflicting goals.  Be true to what people loved about the original, but update the story for a modern audience.  Fill the movie with references and in-jokes for the fans but tell a story you don't need to know the source material to enjoy.  Cast actors who'll personify the iconic roles, but get full-bodied performances rather than mere imitations.  I'm hard-pressed to think of a movie that satisfies every item on this checklist better than Peter Segal's Get Smart, which updates the greatest of all spy spoofs with the loving attention of a maniacal Smart fanboy but with a limber willingness to go outside of cannon that makes it a grand action comedy all its' own.  Steve Carell extends his recent streak of brilliant comic performances as a Maxwell Smart who both embodies the comic genius of the late Don Adams and stands on his own as another of his patented late bloomer underdogs.  Jam-packed with both laughs and excitement, Get Smart is a summer entertainment machine that will make fans of the classic series (like me) absolutely giddy.

Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) has labored for years as an analyst for the top-secret government intelligence agency CONTROL.  He's always dreamed of becoming a field agent but was held back by his weight." MORE

8/9/09:  "Jerry Bruckheimer has produced untold hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of hours of movies and TV in a three-decade career, the majority of which stand for a certain kind of relentless action-adventure.  It would be difficult for anyone not to develop certain Mad Libs tendencies after all that output, but his new family action flick G-Force plays like a perverse game of trying to take an utterly un-Bruckheimer story and squeeze it into that mold.  Not that I minded, because whenever the events of the moment haven't seemed to have wandered in from The Rock, the movie is an unqualified failure.  But listening to Trevor Rabin's score blare over the adventures of a bunch of talking guinea pigs with identical conviction to Bruce Willis attacking that asteroid, it's pretty clear that G-Force is a resume-padding afterthought for everyone involved.

Using special equipment, government scientist Ben (Zach Galifianakis) has taught a collection of animals to talk, to stand on two legs, and to go on top-secret spy missions.  His team is led by three guinea pigs:  straight-arrow Darwin (voice of Sam Rockwell), spicy Latina Juarez (Penelope Cruz), and hip-hop cliché Blaster (Tracy Morgan) are joined by Mole Speckles (Nicolas Cage) and housefly Mooch (Dee Bradley Baker is credited, although I didn't hear any lines)." MORE

2/17/07:  "It cost a reported one hundred twenty million dollars and didn't screen for critics.  Its' production and release dates have danced around the calendar for years. Editing was still going on just weeks ago.  Despite a super-cool trailer, there were many reasons to fear that Ghost Rider, the latest Marvel Comics  movie adaptation would prove to be a turkey. It does have its' issues, and shows signs of substantial editing and reshooting, but Daredevil writer/director Mark Steven Johnson has set out to make a fun crowd-pleaser about a flaming, leather jacket-clad skeleton who fights evil, and for the most part, he's succeeded.

The movie begins Years Ago, when young Johnny Blaze (Matt Long) joins his father (Brett Cullen) in a motorcycle daredevil act.  He plans to run away with his girlfriend Roxanne (Raquel Alessi) until he learns that his father suffers from terminal cancer.  A mysterious visitor (Peter Fonda) offers a chance for his father to be healthy again in exchange for Johnny's soul.  Mephistopheles keeps that deal, only to ensure that an accident kills Mr. Blaze shortly thereafter.  He promises to call in his marker someday and leaves an adult Johnny (Nicolas Cage) to a life of ever-increasing risk taking.  He runs into Roxanne (Eva Mendes) again just around the time that Old Scratch comes calling.  It seems that his son, Blackheart (Wes Bentley) is out to retrieve a legendary scroll that will permit him to Rule the World, and he needs the Ghost Rider to stop him.  " MORE

5/3/09:  "It's not a question people are often asked, but if you ask me “What's the greatest fictional story ever written?” I'm gonna tell you hands down, it's Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.  I know, you're rolling your eyes, muttering something about corniness and 70's sitcoms, but I'll stand my ground.  What else can you ask of great fiction for but to illuminate the human condition and provide us with inspiration and hope?  And there's no story that speaks to me more on the subjects of how past events make us the people we are today, but don't give us an excuse not to recognize and improve our shortcomings.  There is nothing more important than our capacity for change, and I've never seen a feature adaptation of A Christmas Carol (OK, I'll admit most of those sitcom episodes do suck) that didn't at least make me feel energized.  Which brings us to Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, one of the more outside-the-box takes on Dickens' tale.  Transplanting the Ebeneser Scrooge saga to a modern romantic comedy, it finds more insight into the genre than one might expect, and despite occasional detours into piffle, maintains the heart and soul of our greatest fictional story." MORE

5/1/10:  "What the name Roman Polanski means to you tends to vary depending upon your age and cinematic disposition.  Those old enough to have lived through his late 60's-early 70's heyday tend to break down into lovers and haters depending upon their tolerance for his dark (sometime downright Satanic) themes.  But having been five at the time of his 1977 arrest on charges of statutory rape, I'm among the generations who tend to regard the Chinatown auteur as a fugitive first and a filmmaker second.  Perhaps it's fitting, then, that his most artistically successful film in quite some time should be an homage to a time when he was just plain old Roman Polanski. The Ghost Writer (released, ironically, after his arrest following years on the lamb) is set in 2009 but very much a film of the early 70's, with its overwrought score, politically paranoid subject matter and, most of all, sense that a world-shaking conspiracy can be as simple as it is shocking. The Ghost Writer is gripping in large part because it's so loose.  Not a lot happens during its running time, but it's consistently engaging and even funny.  Ewan McGregor is perfectly cast at the center of a great ensemble inviting us to guess not just what the movie's secret is, but who among them knows it.

We never learn our hero's name, the credits call him The Ghost (Ewan McGregor)." MORE

8/9/09:  "One tends to get a little nervous when seeing that Hasbro now has an animated production company logo, even more so when reading that a deal was recently struck for a movie “based” on the old Viewmaster toy.  But the great toy franchises can be rich subject matter for movies, inspiring as they did no end of comic books, novels and animated series designed to sell even more toys.  In fact, in the case of well-chosen properties, the opposite problem can emerge:  there are so damn MANY Transformers that their film adventures get stuffed-to-bursting with characters.  Upon conceding the viability of toy-based movie franchises there are two obvious ones, the aforementioned Autobots and Decepticons and the Real American Heroes of G.I. Joe.  The original 1964 Joe figure was just some guy with a gun, but the line was reimagined in 1982 with a complex backstory about the eternal struggle between the heroic G.I. JOE organization and the evil COBRA.  And it's this Joe world that Mummy director Stephen Sommers brings to life in G.I. Joe:  The Rise of Cobra.  The necessity of introducing so much so fast leads to a rocky start, but once it settles in, this is the kind of fun, empty calorie action spectacular this dreary summer movie season has been missing.  Go, Joe!" MORE

12/13/11:  "What’s that sound?  Oh, that’s just the International Bestseller Hype Machine arriving on the scene with yet another screen adaptation of a novel obsessed over by millions who’ve already got their knives drawn should it fail to be anything less than exactly what they saw in their heads when they read it.  Personally, I’ve never read Stieg Larsson’s Internationally beloved Millennium Trilogy nor seen any of the Swedish film versions produced a few years back, so I come into David Fincher’s adaptation/remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo without preconceptions or a checklist of stuff I demand to see.  You can certainly tell this is a film version of a beloved book because it lingers over irrelevant details and goes on way too long.  It’s also a pretty good mystery, highlighted by some great performances, but I don’t need to be a devoted reader to know that what makes these books a phenomenon is the character of Lisbeth Salander, embodied here in an astonishingly fearless performance by Rooney Mara.  Lisbeth is like nothing we’ve seen before, a punk genius with the thought process of a criminal mastermind and the collective fury of every woman who’s ever been the victim of sexual assault.  She’s cleverly paired with Daniel Craig’s endearingly frumpy journalist hero to investigate a solid mystery full of lurid details.  Lurid is Dragon’s middle name, and Fincher’s trademark observational chilliness serves the material well.." MORE

12/2/07:  "We live in an entertainment age of anticipation, when spoilers are as important as the TV shows whose progress they predict, speculation about what films might be made makes headlines over those currently in theaters and you're more likely to see a teaser trailer for one of next summer's movies than the ones coming out next week.  So it should come as no surprise that our entertainment itself is increasingly serialized, forever laying out breadcrumbs of information to debate and promises of future closure which (as X-Files and Sopranos fans can tell you) are rarely realized.  But when they are, it can be magic, as in the Lord of the Rings trilogy or that sensational TV/movie hybrid that was Firefly/Serenity.  So we keep coming back to TV Losts and would-be movie trilogies hoping they ultimately deliver the goods.  But like trying to review a movie after its' first 40 minutes, how is one to accurately judge the likes of The Golden Compass, the new Chris Weitz film version of the first book from Phillip Pullman's beloved His Dark Materials trilogy (unread by me; memo to self:  make New Year's Resolution to read more)?  Sit back and enjoy the ride, I suppose, a ride which at this point is a bit overcrowded and a tad mechanical, but at its' heart, intriguing as all get-out.

There are, we're told, an endless series of parallel universes, separated yet linked by something called “Dust”.."  MORE

10/29/07:  "I'd rather not go to Boston right now.  It's got nothing to do with the Red Sox World Championship or the coming winter, but the fact that Gone Baby Gone, the directorial debut of Local Kid Made Good Ben Affleck, makes Beantown look like one of Dante's Circles of Hell.  Gut-wrenching almost beyond emotional endurance, this adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel proves that even as a Really Big Celebrity, Affleck's Oscar-winning screenwriting chops remain intact.  It also demonstrates that he's a gifted director with a great eye for gritty local color, and that his little brother Casey is one hell of an actor.

Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) have a nice life, both as a couple and as partners in a modest Missing Persons Detective Agency.  The “Missing Persons” in question tend to be the kind who're only missing from their creditors, but one day something bigger turns up on their doorstep.  Little Amanda McCready (Madeline O'Brien) has vanished from her home, and while her drug addicted mother Helene (Amy Ryan) doesn't seem to care and grandfather Lionel (Titus Welliver) wants to tread lightly, grandmother Beatrice (Amy Madigan) has left no stone unturned."  MORE

9/8/09:  "You're either wired for sales or you're not.  For me, for instance, the thought of walking up to perfect strangers and trying to talk them into buying something is kinda like asking me to walk into a hospital and perform open heart surgery.  It's always seemed to me that the sales personality is kinda like the stand-up comedian personality, just a little too extroverted to not be covering for something, and that goes double for car salesmen.  As such, they're perfect fodder for the latest Adam McKay/Will Ferrell-produced comedy.  The Goods:  Live Hard, Sell Hard has great fun with the dark underbelly of car sales, spun with the Tall Tale format popularized by the duo's Anchorman and Talladega Nights.  Ferrell settles for a supporting role, turning the lead over to Jeremy Piven, whose dishonest edge makes him born to play mercenary liquidator Don “The Goods” Ready.  It's a surly, drunken, no-holds-barred kinda movie that happens to be pretty delightful in its' own bitter way.

These are tough times at Selleck Motors.  With a sales staff that hovers between incompetent and bizarre and the bank looking for foreclose, Ben Selleck (James Brolin) has only one choice:  call in a mercenary.  And not just any mercenary, but Don “The Goods” Ready (Jeremy Piven), who leads an eclectic crew of salesmen who can move anything to anybody."  MORE

1/10/09:  "What an amazing career Clint Eastwood has had, from 50's TV star to 60's Western icon to 70's and 80's action hero and 90's and 00's auteur, taking a little time out in between for mayoring and co-owning the Pebble Beach country club.  10 Oscar nominations, all since the age of 62, and as an actor, the 78-year-old icon is only just hitting his stride.  As such, it would be both unfortunate and appropriate if, as he's threatened, Gran Torino should prove to be his swan song in front of the camera.  Unfortunate because his work here and in Million Dollar Baby is his best ever, but appropriate since Torino would be an amazing capper on a legendary career.  Just as Unforgiven offered a final word on the violent legacy of the Western Myth, Gran Torino ponders the place of the macho old school man of action in a changing world, the things he has to teach it, and the things it has to teach him.

Walt Kowalski (Eastwood) mourns the passing of his wife at a funeral that only serves to underscore how estranged he is from his two grown sons (Brian Haley and Brian Howe) and the Priest (Christopher Carley) who promised the late Mrs. Kowalski he'd look after him."  MORE

4/6/09:  "If celebrity is a virus, our society is thoroughly infected.  We wanna be famous.  Failing that, to know somebody famous.  Failing that, to feel like we do.  And if we have any of those things, we're hanging onto them for dear life.  Cable networks are filled with reality shows following fallen celebrities around as they struggle to fan the dying embers of their past glory.  These days the primary path to fame for those who don't act, sing, write or play a sport is infamy.  But back in the day, it was the vaudeville talents:  ventriloquism, celebrity impersonation, magic.  Or, as the title character in The Great Buck Howard would call it, “mentalism”.  Writer/director Sean McGinly knows what of he speaks, as the former road manager for The Amazing Kreskin, and he's crafted a really memorable character study of the decline and resurgence of a man who's built his entire life around having been famous.  Despite fine performances across the board, the rest of his tale doesn't quite hold water, but as embodied by the splendid John Malkovich, The Great Buck Howard makes The Great Buck Howard well worth seeing.

Troy Gable (Colin Hanks) was pushed into law school by his father (real-life Dad Tom Hanks), but he just can't stand it.  So one day he up and quits, and decides to reinvent himself as a writer."  MORE

12/30/07:  "It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that because our society hasn't overcome any of its' problems or injustices since, say, August, that “Nothing Ever Changes”.  But things do change:  look at the slow but steady progress we've made on race relations over the last century.  I can remember a time (when I was but a wee lad) when there were basically no African Americans in leadership roles in the Government or Business, and you could count the grand total of black movie stars, Oscar winners, baseball managers and head coaches on just one hand.  Rewind another 45 years, to the 1930's setting of The Great Debaters, and you'd find a South filled with relentless segregation, Jim Crow laws, and regular lynchings.  Denzel Washington (who also directed) and Forest Whitaker star in this solid, inspirational drama about how hard it was to live in those times, and the amazing ways people like Melvin Tolson broke down barriers just by getting black and white students on the same stage to prove just how equal they were.

At Wiley College, Melvin Tolson (Denzel Washington) is assembling his Debate Team for another season."  MORE

7/14/11:  "One of the most underrated comedies of all time is... wait for it... 1988's Return of the Killer Tomatoes, which starred a young George Clooney and contains a subplot where the filmmakers run out of money and had to fill the remaining running time with increasingly outrageous acts of what was then called Product Placement to allow our heroes to save the world from man-eating vegetables.  That, of course, was the time when it felt shamelessly odd for movie and TV characters to be seen drinking actual Coke or eating real Fruit Loops rather than the generic versions that had filled the screen since the early days of filmmaking, in part because we knew that the products had paid for what amounted to an extra commercial on our time.  Fast-forward to 2011, when what advertisers now like to call brand integration has taken over not only filmed entertainment, but just about everything else, and now it's weird to see characters eating, drinking or using anything generic.  Still, surprisingly few viewers really understand how hand-in-glove products and storytellers have become, and who better than documentarian/performance artist Morgan Spurlock to explain it to them?  The man who erased the words “super size” from fast-food menus across the country gives us The Greatest Movie Ever Sold or, pardon me, POM Wonderful presents 'The Greatest Movie Ever Sold', a film about brand integration financed completely with the money paid to him by a movie full of corporate sponsors."  MORE

6/20/11:  "Marvel and DC comics have been at war in one way or another since they became the top two producers of superhero comics in the early 60's.  For two decades from the 1978 release of Superman:  The Movie through the fizzling out of the Batman franchise in 1997, DC utterly ruled the cinematic landscape while Marvel's characters were relegated to direct-to-video nonsense.  That all changed with the 2000 release of X-Men, which began a relentless march of Marvel heroes onto the big screen while DC successfully rebooted Batman and produced a single Superman sequel that failed to restart a franchise whose rights are slipping away from the company.  Trying to turn things around, DC and its Time Warner corporate ally Warner Bros have lavished a couple stray hundred million dollars on the first major DC superhero movie to star neither of the company's leading icons.  Instead, Green Lantern seeks to do what Marvel's Iron Man did a few years back:  take a character beloved by the comic-reading faithful, make an inspired casting choice to play him and wrap it up in an endlessly expensive uber-blockbuster that makes said character an international marketing phenomenon.  Easy, right?  Well, a funny thing happened on the way to turning Hal Jordan into the next Tony Stark.  For all Ryan Reynolds' hard work in a role that fits him like his glowing CGI super suit, Green Lantern is really nothing more than an OK time-killer of a superhero movie."  MORE

3/14/10:  "The old saying tells us that we have two choices where history is concerned:  learn from it or repeat it.  That presupposes, of course, that history isn't something you'd care to repeat and I'm pretty sure most of us agree that the 2nd Iraq War from which we are now winding down is the kind of thing we're in no hurry to do again.  To that end, Paul Greengrass' political action thriller Green Zone serves as a second act of sorts to an Iraq War Mistakes trilogy, following United 93's litany of errors that allowed 9/11 to happen.  Set in the early days after the whole Shock and Awe and pulling down Saddam's statue things had us thinking we'd routed all Iraqi resistance, it tracks one soldier's self-appointed mission to figure out what the heck happened to the WMDs while all around him, as they say, mistakes are made.  Filled with strong performances, it's a great story, although Greengrass' action sequences tend to go on and on.  Just like the war.

Roy Miller (Matt Damon) leads his squad into an unsecured area desperate to reach a warehouse that's been identified as a repository of Weapons of Mass Destruction before looters can empty it out.  After taking out a sniper, his men enter the building and find... nothing."  MORE