11/23/08:  "Since I first saw Universal Soldier back in 1992, I have held yet another of my extreme minority opinions:  Jean-Claude Van Damme, the kickboxing action star nicknamed “The Muscles from Brussels” has real acting chops.  His heyday was brief, but in a period between the summers of '92 through '96, the former karate champion gave great performances in Soldier, Nowhere to Run, Timecop and Sudden Death, along with solid star turns in The Quest, Hard Target and the underrated camp gem Street Fighter.  What made him special was an emotional accessibility you'd never get from his contemporaries like Steven Segal or Dolph Lundgren.  From there, bad career choices like co-starring with Dennis Rodman in Double Team and a real-life cocaine habit conspired to drop him into the direct-to-video dustbin with shocking speed.  But now, over a decade later, the inspired French thriller JCVD hands the 48 year-old the role of the lifetime:  himself. 

Jean-Claude Van Damme is at the end of his rope.  Stumbling off the set of another direct-to-video turkey, he's fighting a losing battle for custody of his daughter (Saskia Flanders) complicated by the fact that his check to his attorney (Alan Rossett) just bounced." MORE

11/13/11:  "Nobody sets out to be a monster.  It’s not generally anyone’s initial goal in life to crush all who dare oppose them, to cut themselves off from all normal human companionship or to accumulate power at the expense of all else.  These are the things that sometimes happen along the way, particularly to those who end up accomplishing “great” things, like J. Edgar Hoover, the founder of the modern FBI.  There’s no question that his drive to modernize American law enforcement was the cornerstone of all we now believe about the way crimes should be investigated, and he build the small potatoes, deeply political Bureau of Investigations into a law enforcement behemoth that has helped to keep people safe for generations.  There’s also no question that he abused power in the way almost everyone who ever gains too much of it does, picking and choosing America’s “enemies” and using the tools at his disposal against them.  Rumors have swirled for years that he was also a world-class hypocrite, using rumors (and sometimes truths) of homosexuality against his opponents when he may in fact have been gay himself.  All of the above are components of Clint Eastwood’s new film J. Edgar, but it’s the last one that is its driving force:  Hoover (as brilliantly played by Leonardo DiCaprio), it contends, was driven by an appalling childhood and a need to deny what he really was even to himself that led him to strive both for greatness and adulation at the expense of everyone in his path." MORE

10/11/09:  "Friends are forever telling me that I overthink movies or that I'm “too much of a critic”.  It is true that when you've put in the hours I have studying story structure and film theory, it gets a lot harder to come out of a movie shrugging your shoulders and saying “it was OK for what it was supposed to be,” which seems to be the reaction many films are designed to elicit.  But there are compensations, not just in terms of the deeper appreciation of good movies all that criticiness gives me, but the ability to enjoy a movie like Jennifer's Body.  As a commercial enterprise, it's most noteworthy for what it follows, being Diablo Cody's first screenplay since her Oscar win for Juno and Megan Fox's first starring role after another hit Transformers movie.  As a movie, it's ambitious as can be, and I think just about every scene works in some way while it's unspooling.  But as a whole, the scary, heartfelt and cynically satirical elements work against each other, resulting in a movie that will leave most viewers shrugging and saying “It sucked.”  But I was fascinated by those messy, ill-fitting pieces, some of which affected me more strongly than the elements of many better movies.  Jennifer's Body is a movie you'll need to overthink to enjoy.

Needy Lesnicky (Amanda Seyfried) narrates from a mental hospital." MORE

6/19/10:  "Frequent moviegoers tend to have an opinion when it comes to knowing a movie's running time in advance.  Some violently oppose the idea since they'll have a sense of where in the story they stand based on how long they've been sitting in their seats.  Others (including me) really want to know how long it's going to be, both to fit the movie into their day and also because they DO want to know where in the three-act structure they might stand at any given time.  But with pre-screening your movie's running time comes occasional shocks like Jonah Hex.  This Warner Bros. adaptation of a cult classic DC comic book clocks in at an almost unthinkably brief 80 minutes, causing me to scan my brain for a live-action feature that brief that didn't feel like the skeletal remains of a disastrous production (I did think of one:  Wes Craven's excellent thriller Red Eye).  Now, having seen it, I can't speak for whether its production was a disaster of not, but Jonah Hex is clearly the skeletal remains of something.  Flashbacks, dream sequences and alternate universes swirl in a haze of “get some use out of all this footage we shot!” editing, while the “and” acting credit is reserved for a guy (Michael Shannon) who has at most two lines.  But if you can do the mental persistence of vision trick heavily edited movies require, there's an undeniable cool to Jonah Hex." MORE

7/16/08:  "Here is a movie that is headed in two totally different historical directions, both of them pretty delightful.  Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D (not to be confused with the plain old Journey to the Center of the Earth those of you in 2D theaters are seeing) represents the cutting edge of digital 3D technology (it's the first scripted live-action movie shot in RealD) at the same time as its' story hearkens back to a simpler time when movie characters were mostly unencumbered by vast conspiracies, dark character arcs and Shaymalanesque plot twists, and knew that solving their interpersonal problems was as simple as outrunning the nearest rampaging dinosaur.  The kid in you will have a ball.  Those without much kid in them might want to bring a book.

The story beings with a man (Jean-Michael Pare) being chased through volcanic underground tunnels by a Tyrannosaurus Rex.  He slips and falls into a magma-filled crevice.  Fast forward ten years and we learn that man was Max Anderson, the brother of scientist Trevor Anderson (Brendan Frasier), who's about to lose all funding for his ongoing monitoring of his brother's fading system of seismic sensors.  He's also got an unwanted guest on his doorstep, Max's surly young son Sean (John Hutcherson), whose mother leaves him with Trevor while she scouts out a new family home in Canada." MORE

8/15/09:  "I once heard Julie Powell's story on a network news show, and for obvious reasons, it really struck a chord with me.  Pretty much all of us who've carved out a little corner of the Internet to write about our favorite topics do so for the love of expressing ourselves and sharing our voice with the world at large.  But anybody who'd tell you they haven't once dreamed of being “discovered” online and <gasp> paid to do what we love (unlike the bulk of us who must settle for being paid to do what we hate) is lying.  And thanks to her popular blog The Julie/Julia Project, Julie Powell did just that.  In an even bigger break, she's now been immortalized in her very own movie, Julie & Julia, the first major studio film to be based on a blog.  But writer/director Nora Ephron hit on a true stroke of genius:  Powell's tale of cooking her way from one end of Julia Child's iconic Mastering the Art of French Cooking to the other isn't really the stuff of a full movie, and as such she's combined it with a filming of Child's posthumously-published autobiography My Life in France.  And by telling the stories of two women's journey to their first published book that just happens to pass through the same set of French recipes, she's created a bouyant, joyous ode to finding one's way in the world.  And make no mistake, while the Powell segments are solid, Child's story absolutely glows thanks to yet another of Meryl Streep's seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of career highlights." MORE

2/16/08:  "What horrifying tales of production terror this movie must have to tell!  I may be alone in this, but I've often daydreamed about being able to teleport myself around the world (and even just to work), so when I saw Jumper's spiffy trailer, my hopes were high.  Little did I suspect that the movie's 87 minute running time would be filled out with what are presumably (shudder) the best scenes shot during a long and torturous production that included the replacement of both original stars, name actors reduced to minutes or even seconds of screen time, and a plot that merely hints at coherence.  None of this might have been necessary had any of its' stars or three credited writers been able to lick the hard truth at the film's center:  no matter how many gee-wiz effects and globe-trotting locations we see, not one of Jumper's characters is worth giving the slightest damn about.

Life was tough for young David Rice (Max Thieriot):  abandoned at the age of 5 by his mother Mary (Diane Lane) and left with alcoholic father William (Michael Rooker), he was an outcast at school, tolerated only by girl of his dreams Millie (AnnaSophia Robb).  After slipping through the ice on a pond, he's presumed dead, but in fact has discovered the remarkable ability to teleport himself to safety with his mind." MORE

1/12/08:  "OK, let me be the first to declare the Sundance Revolution over.  The generation of filmmakers first cultivated, then inspired by the products of Robert Redford's institute and its' companion film festival turned Hollywood upside down and created a fully functioning and highly profitable set of shadow studios that specialize in “independent” films.  What the whole Indie thing is supposed to mean to us is that we're getting the individualized visions of people with diverse and exciting backgrounds who have things to say that the average Hollywood movie can't get its' head out of its' Spago's menu long enough to imagine, let alone film.  But after seeing Juno, the much-hyped and quite entertaining teen pregnancy comedy with its' wonderful performances and first-rate screenplay by former exotic dancer Diablo Cody, I can't shake the thought that it would have been better, amazing even, if only it could have shaken the indie cliché manner in which it was filmed.  Alert the media:  those Miramax kids are now The Man.

Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) is a smart, witty 16-year-old with a problem:  she's pregnant thanks to that one time she had sex with her friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera)." MORE

2/14/11:  "Adam Sandler has become one of Hollywood's leading stars by following a simple formula:  give the people what they want.  A very hands-on producer and sometimes co-writer of his films, he knows that the key to box office success is sending every possible viewer out of the theater feeling like they got something, if not everything, that they wanted, and that if a couple sees one of his movies on a date and one loves what they just saw while the other tolerates it, that's good enough to keep selling both customers tickets in perpetuity.  Sometimes he'll venture outside his lowbrow comfort zone with something like the excellent Click or by adding a little more thematic flavoring to an otherwise scattershot comedy like I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry or You Don't Mess with the Zohan.  But mostly he stays in his wheelhouse, and that means movies like Just Go With It.  Go, a Sandlerized remake of the 1968 Oscar-winner Cactus Flower, delivers romance, PG-13-level gross-out comedy, wacky kids, beautiful babes, a hula contest, CPR on a rubber sheep and just about anything else the star, writers Allan Loeb and Timothy Dowling or director Dennis Dugan can think to throw into the pot.  The result is, indeed, entertaining more often than not, even if an air of check-cashing laziness hangs over the proceedings." MORE