7/23/07:  "I'm not a big fan of musicals.  I get the strengths of the format, music being such a pure expression of human emotion, but most musicals are so banal that they can't take advantage of the potential of using song to convey heartbreak, hope or joy.  But “banal” is the last word you could use to describe Hairspray, Adam Shankman's cinematic explosion of joy that may well be the best musical I've ever seen.  On the basis of this and his work on South Park:  Bigger, Longer and Uncut, composer Marc Shaiman is starting to look like the lowbrow Stephen Sondheim. 

Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonsky) has a dream:  to become one of the teen dancers on a 1960's  Baltimore TV dance series called The Corny Collins Show.  There's only one problem:  the short, overweight Tracy doesn't fit the image of beauty promoted by producer Velma Von Tussle (Michelle Pfeiffer), the one-time “Miss Baltimore Crabs”.  Host Corny Collins (James Marsden) has a dream of his own.  The show is all-white, setting aside a single “Negro Day” each month which is hosted by Motormouth Maybelle (Queen Latifah), and Corny dreams of bringing the two casts together onto a single integrated show.  Destinies begin to collide when Tracy is sent to detention, where most of the kids are black." MORE

9/4/08:  "Dying, they say, is easy, while comedy is very, very hard.  I can barely imagine the self confidence it must take to commit to a really out-there comic performance on a soundstage with no audience feedback.  It's no wonder many comedies shoot movies upon movies worth of footage and then edit it into its' final version only after sampling the bits and pieces before test audiences:  it must be nerve-wracking!  So, it can be easy to look at a comedy that's not working and wonder if the participants had any idea it was going badly on the set.  Hamlet 2, the painfully self-amused new film festival darling from co-writer/director Andrew Fleming, asks the opposite question.  With seemingly every actor giving a different kind of comic performance, most of them bad, how could anyone have thought it was going well?  The movie does have its' moments, but surprisingly few of them are funny.  I look at all those rave reviews from Sundance and keep telling myself “There's nothing more subjective than comedy.”  And it doesn't hurt if one of a movie's few good characters is a critic.

Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan) dreamed of being an actor.  Alas, he was very, very bad at it.  So he went “where dreams go to die”, Tucson, AZ, where he has become a very, very bad drama teacher." MORE

7/5/08:  "You don't expect to see something like this on the 4th of July holiday weekend.  In fact, it's a certain kind of movie one expects to see only in mid-January, late April, late August, or mid-October:  a big-budget spectacular based on a screenplay too dark or challenging for a commercial niche which has been dumbed down, compromised, reshot, re-edited, focus grouped, test screened and generally cut down to within an inch of coherence.  Throughout 90-odd minutes, the screen crackles with spectacle and starpower, but you ask yourself, “Who in their right mind would set out to put all this Hollywood muscle behind THIS story?”  The answer, of course, is no one.  Movies like Hancock don't set out to be what they become, but it's a slippery slope of one tweak here, one compromise there  until what you have doesn't just fail to resemble what you set out to make, but also what anyone would want to see.  And I'm not sure to whom this very peculiar superhero flick will appeal:  very broad comedy, very ambitious fantasy drama, and an almost painfully naïve social consciousness keep canceling each other out as they battle for screen time.  But Peter Berg's movie tries very hard to be whatever it is that it's supposed to be, and I never stopped expecting that it would all start clicking in just a moment or two... at least until the credits rolled." MORE

2/26/07:  "Franchises run their course for all kinds of reasons.  A continuing story concludes (The Lord of the Rings trilogy).  A huge cast becomes too expensive to maintain (the X-Men series).  There's a single movie so awful no one can imagine sequeling it (Batman and Robin).  In the Batman case, Warner Bros. enjoyed a box office windfall by going back in time with a new actor for the origin story prequel Batman Begins.  Frustrated with the creative direction of their James Bond series, Sony hit paydirt with the origin story Casino Royale.  Now, with Lord of the Rings, X-Men, and even Star Trek prequels in the works, MGM hits a speed bump with Hannibal Rising.  Trying to overcome Anthony Hopkins' advancing age and lack of interest in reprising his iconic role by imagining Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter's post-WWII origins, Rising held my interest for a while but can't recapture the magic of Silence of the Lambs or Red Dragon.

In the final days of World War II, young Hannibal (Aaron Thomas) and Mischa Lecter (Helena Lia Tachovska) witness the deaths of their parents at the hands of Nazi goons.  A storm sets in and the two children are left trapped in their home with a group of wannabe SS officers who find food hard to come by." MORE

6/14/08:  "For your consideration:  a career at a crossroads.  After his brilliant and hugely successful three picture run of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs, horror/sci-fi auteur M. Night Shayamalan stood atop the world.  Then came The Village, an intriguing and thought-provoking tale that suffered from a mid-movie reversal that made everything less interesting than it had previously seemed.  It represented a forgivable one-movie slump at least until his follow-up, Lady in the Water,  was a disastrously muddled screenplay rendered tolerable by Shayamalan's formidable directorial skills and a few strong performances.  Now, the “genius” bloom is off the rose.  With fans no longer able to take his name as a guaranty of quality, what's a man who'd become a genre onto himself to do?  Stage a comeback, that's what.  The Happening shows the director playing in a bigger, scarier sandbox than before, balancing R-rated shocks with an amazingly deft hand for tension-releasing humor.  During its' 91-minute running time, the movie piles on unspeakable, apocalyptic horrors, but it is first and foremost a roller coaster ride of spooky thrills.  It's not Shayamalan's best work, but it's close enough to re-establish him as one of our premiere genre filmmakers.

One Tuesday morning in New York City, strange things begin to happen." MORE

1/15/07:  "There's penguins.  They sing and dance.  I'm there.  But wait!  Days before I saw Happy Feet, I caught a TV ad in which I finally noticed the name of the director:  Mad Max's George Miller!  Not that I was totally shocked, as Miller established his kids' movie credentials with the Babe series.  But the fact that this adorable looking flick is the first modern animated kid's movie directed by someone famous for quality live-action fare piqued my interest in a whole new way.  And I was not disappointed.

As fans of March of the Penguins know, all Emperor Penguins attract and know each other through the singing of unique songs.  In Happy Feet, they happen to be well-known pop songs.  Memphis (Hugh Jackman doing Elvis) and Norma Jean (Nicole Kidman doing Marilyn Monroe) meet in just this way:  she lays an egg and heads back to the shore to get food while he holds onto the egg through the long, cold winter.  Alas, he drops the egg for a moment, and when the baby hatches, rather than singing like all the other penguins, Mumble Happy Feet (Elijah Wood)... tap dances.  This is viewed as an abomination by penguin elders like Noah (Hugo Weaving), who're calling for renewed adherence to the ancient penguin traditions to bring back the vast supplies of fish that used to live in the ocean." MORE

6/5/08:  "Political satire can be a dicey business because there's nothing more irritating than having somebody lecture you about what you already believe for two hours.  As such, sometimes it helps to be really dumb if you want to be really smart, and believe me, the new sequel Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is REALLY dumb.  It's also the movie Borat so desperately wished it was.  Using outrageously tasteless and raunchy humor, writer-directors Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg deliver a cinematic State of the Union about a country divided by racial stereotypes in which all of us, even a couple of stoner dudes and the President of the United States, have a lot more in common than we think.  Despite the episodic format built into any road trip movie, it's unusually structurally sound for any comedy, but unbelievably so for one built on gross-outs and pot jokes.

Picking up where Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle left off, pals Harold Lee (John Cho) and Kumar Patel (Kal Penn) are taking a flight to Amsterdam in pursuit of Harold's dream girl Maria (Paula Garces).  At the airport, they bump into Kumar's One That Got Away, Vanessa (Danneel Harris), who's engaged to Colton Graham (Eric Winter), a wealthy Texan whose father works for the President. " MORE

7/16/07:  "The Harry Potter movie series is a fascinating structural experiment, allowing the kind of epic saga we've grown used to seeing doled out in a trilogy of increasingly unfocused films to play out over no fewer than seven.  It helps, obviously, to have the most beloved novels of their time as a blueprint, but unlike the standard movie trilogy, which marches to a fairly predictable three-act pattern of setup (Star Wars), darkest hour (The Empire Strikes Back) and payoff (Return of the Jedi), the Potter saga has the ongoing drift of a serialized TV show, kinda like a big-screen Lost that only airs once every 18 months.  Now, after four movies of setup, the franchise has finally produced its' Empire Strikes Back:  Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix sees the sunny, childlike world of magic and wonder we entered six years ago so upended and infested with evil of every variety that it's barely recognizable.  Some will despair the coming darkness, but I say “Let it come”:  the Harry Potter franchise remains the most exciting and vital of our ongoing holiday thrill machines.

It's another lonely and hard summer away from Hogwarts for Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe)." MORE

7/16/08:  "Film scholars generally believe that there are two kinds of directors.  The Artist uses his command of cinematic language and general genius to make Important Movies about Important Things.  The Hack uses his ability to delight the ticket-buying rubes with shiny objects while making lowbrow crap that will <gasp> entertain people.  What makes Guillermo Del Toro fascinating is that he's in many ways a Hack Artist, using his command of cinematic language and general genius to make lowbrow crap to entertain the masses.  Pan's Labyrinth gave us a glimpse at just how brilliantly he can summon a world of magical fantasy, and I'm delightedly amused to see him cash in the credibility boost that Oscar-winning art house smash gave him to make a sequel about a superhero team made up of a cigar-smoking demon, a fish-man, a female version of the Human Torch and a German ghost in a diving suit.  In fact, Hellboy II:  The Golden Army sits on the exact divide between those two supposed schools of filmmaking, putting delightfully silly characters in the service of a fairy tale story that is at times quite beautiful.  It's a bit draggy in the middle, but at its' best, Hellboy II is a delight." MORE

1/23/07:  "Without meaning to, The Hitcher asks a fairly intriguing question:  just how much plot, characterization, and logic does it take to make 80 exciting minutes into a “good” movie?  Your reaction to this remake of an 80's horror standard I've never seen should tell you everything you need to know about your own feelings on the subject.  It contains virtually no plot, no characterization and no logic but is nonetheless well-made and relentlessly exciting.

College students Jim Halsey (Zachary Knighton) and Grace Andrews (Sophia Bush) hop into his car to spend spring break with some of her friends.  Along the way, on the obligatory dark, rainy night in the middle of nowhere, they come upon a lone man standing in the middle of the road.  They wisely keep driving, but he catches up to them at a mini-mart where Jim feels pressured into giving him a ride to a nearby motel.  Of course, the man, calling himself John Ryder (Sean Bean) quickly proves to be a homicidal psycho, and while they're able to get him out of their car, they can't get him out of their lives.  He leaves a bloody trail of bodies everywhere he goes, all the while systematically framing them for the crimes.  Police Lieutenant Esteridge (Neal McDonough) is hot on their trail, but will he realize the truth before it's too late?" MORE

11/23/07:  "I'm young enough to have a Playstation 2, but old enough that my game collection consists primarily of classic games and spinoffs from my favorite TV shows.  Thus, I'm a stranger to the immorally amoral universe of Agent 47, the genetically created Hitman who kills for the cleverly named The Organization.  If his movie adventure is any indication, I'm a lucky guy.  As boring as it is loud, Hitman bypasses pesky things like character, motivation and ethics in favor of 100 minutes of Strip Strip, Bang Bang.  The first on-screen words are “London, England,” and it's all downhill from there.

Interpol Agent Mike Whittier (Dougray Scott) comes home one night to find Agent 47 (Timothy Olyphant; it actually takes over an hour to learn his name/number, but I don't know if it's supposed to be a mystery or the movie just forgets that it hasn't gotten around to mentioning it) in his study.  47, a bald guy with a bar code tattooed on the back of his head, has a question:  How does a good man know when it's all right to kill someone?  To elaborate (well, honestly to kill time), he tells a story, much of which he could not possibly know because it was Whittier and not he who was there for it.  The Interpol Agent has been chasing a mystery assassin around the globe at great expense for three years." MORE

4/29/07:  "Billionaire Howard Hughes occupies a unique place in the mythology of the 20th Century:  aviation pioneer, Hollywood power broker, mysterious recluse.  One reason his legend resonates so well through the decades is that no one ever learned the true story of his wild, eventful, insane life.  In 1971, a writer named Clifford Irving and his friend Dick Susskind decided there was a fortune to be made by changing that, by authoring The Autobiography of Howard Hughes.  So what if Hughes himself was unavailable to participate in the writing of his own Autobiography?  In telling the tale of how Irving refused to let reality get in the way of a good story, The Hoax is a fun, fascinating examination of how lies lubricate our society, all the way from our most intimate relationships to the highest halls of power.

Irving (Richard Gere) is a working writer whose latest manuscript fails to excite his publisher, McGraw-Hill.  He's been reduced to taking meetings with the underlings of underlings and to turn around his fortunes, he hatches a brilliant idea.  Howard Hughes hasn't been seen in public in 14 years; surely he would never come out of hiding now to refute a fake autobiography.  In fact, who's to say he'd even know it existed?" MORE

3/23/08:  "Sometimes you see a movie you just want to hug.  The clever wordplay, imagination and sophisticated innocence in the children's books of Dr. Seuss (aka the late Theodor Geisel) are a natural for animation, as Chuck Jones proved with his classic adaptation of How The Grinch Stole Christmas.  But both previous features based on his work, Ron Howard's ill-advised reworking of The Grinch as a Jim Carrey vehicle and the Mike Meyers Cat in the Hat, have been live-action, where Seuss's fluid, magical and bizarre creatures are reduced to simple guys in creepy suits.  At last, the latex is gone, as is any pretense to irony or playing to the adults in the audience and with Horton Hears a Who!, the true spirit of Seuss shines through.  Carrey returns to the scene of the crime, leading a first-rate vocal cast to tell a story so sweet and good-hearted that it bucks all current movie trends, both animated and otherwise.  Alert the media:  Horton is a family movie as close to free of objectionable content as any story worth telling could possibly be.

The faithful elephant Horton (Carrey) lives in the jungle of Nool, where he “teaches” a daily class of baby animals the wonders of their world." MORE

3/29/07:  "It's a big ol' globalized world out there, and that's reflected in a movie marketplace that hasn't been this friendly to actors and films from all over the world since at least the 60's.  As a result, American audiences now see all manner of International Co-Productions and the crème de la crème of movies made by top directors all over the world.  As a result of this climate, it's hard to believe that many movies of budget and scale are being made anymore that don't give at least some thought to global distribution while they're being written, making sure that their stories aren't too regional to click with an international audience.  But I enjoy occasionally catching filmmakers from other countries, and thus their audiences, when they think I'm not looking.  After all, which do you think will teach you more about what the people of Great Britain are like:  listening to Tony Blair talk for an hour or watching an episode of Doctor Who?  This ads an extra layer of fascination to the shaggy dog Korean sci-fi/horror/political satire/family comedy The Host (or Gwoemul, as it was known by its' intended audience).  It's messy and odd, but also funny, exciting, and seemingly very Korean." MORE

4/21/07:  "There's something about action movies... the relentless gunfire and explosions, carnage, snappy one-liners:  all in the name of seeing justice done, no matter how many bodies or how much property damage it takes.  When it's done right, the whole thing is cool on some totally primal level.  Just ask Writer/Director Edgar Wright and Writer/Star Simon Pegg (of Shaun of the Dead fame):  their new movie Hot Fuzz doesn't just love movies like Point Break and Bad Boys II to death, it's also a really smart commentary on why the world we live in makes the fantasy of a righteous man with a whole lotta firepower so appealing.

Police Sergeant Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is a one-man wrecking crew who's fought, shot, and raced his way through half of London's crime.  He's even bounced back from that unfortunate incident where the evil department store Santa stabbed him in the hand.  But there's a problem:  he's making his fellow cops look bad, and they exile him to the small town of Sanford.  There, he finds a soft police force led by Inspector Frank Butterman (Jim Broadbent).  He's partnered with Frank's son Danny (Nick Frost) for big investigations like underage drinkers and a missing swan." MORE

10/19/08:  "When I was a kid, I used to think The Golden Raspberry Awards (aka The Razzies) were a hoot.  I'm not above doing a Ten Worst List here on the site, and we all get a little cathartic buzz out of smacking back when the movies take our money and don't give us entertainment in return.  But as I've gotten older and watched the Internet give a bloggy pulpit to everyone with an ax to grind against “bad movies”, I've noticed a trend.  Who're the Worst Actors of every year?  The highest paid, the biggest stars.  Who're the Worst Actresses?  Covergirls, sex symbols and tabloid targets.  It seems to me like everybody who actually hates bad movies simply stops buying tickets to them (I'm sure longtime readers have noticed there are some genres that are rarely covered on this site; why go to see a movie I'm 95% sure I won't like?).  If you ask me, the culture of “Hating Hollywood” these days has a lot more to do with an unhealthy obsession with striking back at the guys who'd never party with you and the girls who'd never sleep with you.  That's why the Razzie crowd is gonna LOVE How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, the new film version of Toby Young's memoir of his unhappy run as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair (with names changed, of course)." MORE