6/19/10:  "Like most things in life, acting careers tend to follow a bell curve.  One starts as a supporting player, hopes to graduate to leading roles, and eventually puts their skills to work in those most challenging supporting roles reserved for the veteran Character Actor.  The Karate Kid, a remake of the 1984 sports classic that briefly made Ralph Macchio a star and got veteran comedian Pat Morita an Oscar nomination, is most interesting as a snapshot of two actors trying to transition from one stage to another.  Jaden Smith, the son of one of our biggest movie stars, tries to build on solid supporting work in The Day the Earth Stood Still and especially The Pursuit of Happyness in his first lead role, while legendary martial arts star Jackie Chan tries to show previously untapped dramatic chops in the Character Actor role of his mentor.  Both men are works in progress, and will hopefully improve in future films, but their performances do nothing to buoy an already slipshod production that retrofits a great story for mediocrity at every turn.  The Karate Kid is long, dull, and filled with below-par acting.  It has its moments near the end, but there's really nothing here you won't see better if you Netflix the original.

Sherry Parker (Taraji P. Henson) uproots her son from their Detroit home to take a great new job in China."  MORE

5/30/10:  "I am deeply conflicted about this movie.  Kick-Ass arrives at the crest of a tidal wave of hype, some of which was clearly ridiculous before it even got here (it would force future superhero movies into a mode of R-rated “realism” because it's so much better than the piddling likes of Iron Man and The Dark Knight), while others had me genuinely excited (general raves from the SXSW film festival, where it screened).  Today, it stands at #146 on the IMDB list of the top-rated movies of all time, and it does seem to have struck a chord with a certain kind of fan.  Problem is, I've seen it now, and while a key subplot indeed represents a challenging deconstruction of the superhero mythos, the main throughline is more like an 80's “kid puts on a superhero costume to get the girl” comedy with 2010 levels of profanity and violence.  At its' best, Kick-Ass is very good, but more often it's merely adequate, and sometimes it's so amazingly self-satisfied with its' own alleged transgressiveness I wanted to smack it upside the head.  This isn't a bad movie, but man, oh man is it ever over-hyped, even by itself."  MORE

8/23/10:  "We've had this discussion before, but since I'm sure just about no one (well, maybe my sister Tammy) reads every review on this site, it bears repeating.  The problem with the whole film festival/platform release system that's now just about the only way to interest adult audiences in movies with mature subject matter is that it makes it virtually impossible to see the movies in question except through the prism of the buzz they ride into your town.  It puts the opening weekend reviews on steroids, because they're often all you know about movies whose trailers you usually have to seek out online, and they remain all you know (other than whatever the box office returns look like in those cities lucky enough to get the movie before yours) for weeks and months on end.  So, when a movie like The Kids are All Right shows up, it feels like half the screen is blocked out as ad space for the brilliantly funny celebration of the universality of family we're expected to fall in line and experience.  But after watching Kids chug along at a steady level of “not bad” for a hair under two hours, I was left with a one-two punch to the gut:  not only is that not really the movie I was promised, but upon reflection, I don't really buy any of what it's selling."  MORE

12/29/11:  "I root for Jason Statham:  the former Olympic diver turned kickboxing male model turned actor clearly has that special something that makes a movie star, but he has only occasionally been able to escape the ghetto of third-rate action movies into films more elaborate (The Expendables), commercial (The Italian Job) or dramatic (The Bank Job).  So, when you hear he’s going to make a movie with Clive Owen and Robert De Niro, fans can’t help but have high hopes.  And, indeed, the three stars are the primary reason Killer Elite is worth watching.  But make no mistake, this sluggishly diverting thriller is more of a step down for Owen and De Niro than a step up for the Transporter.

In 1980, hitman Danny Bryce (Jason Statham) kills a man in front of his own son and almost dies trying to get away, inspiring him to retire.  But one year later, he’s summoned by a mysterious Agent (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) to Oman, where his mentor Hunter (Robert De Niro) is being held hostage.  It appears that Hunter took a 6 million dollar job to assassinate the former SAS agents who killed a terminally ill tribal leader’s three sons during a military operation but failed to finish the job.  If vengeance is taken, the family honor will be restored and the leader’s son (Firass Dirani) will regain control of his region."  MORE

10/5/07:  "The gloves are off.  While Hollywood was quick to start using the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a reason heartbroken love interests had lost their wives, the actual War on Terror had been conspicuously absent from the movies during its' first six years.  Oh, Hollywood had its' reasons:  a fear of encouraging hate crimes being the most noble, a fear of encouraging people to vote Republican a bit less noble, and a fear of alienating pro-war ticket buyers that was downright cowardly.  But now that the War in Iraq is as unpopular as it is entrenched, filmmakers will finally begin to emerge from their bunkers and weigh in, with a staggering number of war and terrorism-themed projects due just in time for the awards season.  First to emerge is Peter Berg's The Kingdom, a deliberately-paced, but ultimately fulfilling FBI-vs.-terrorists thriller with the novelty of being set in the country that produced more 9/11 hijackers than any other:  our good friend Saudi Arabia.

With the help of terrorists in Saudi police uniforms, a US housing complex in Riyadh is bombed, and follow-up attacks claim the life of one of the first agents (Kyle Chandler) on the scene.  Among his friends at the FBI is Special Agent Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx), who quickly assembles a team to travel there and investigate."  MORE

10/7/07:  "As a child of the 80's, “classic” arcade video games meant a lot to me growing up, and I still play them on my PS2 from time to time.  As we learn from the new documentary The King of Kong:  A Fistful of Quarters, they mean quite a bit more than that to some people.  There's something inside us all that burns to be The Best, to be Special, and years of study, skill and hard work have allowed the subjects of the film to record higher scores on the Donkey Kong video game (the one that introduced Mario to the world) than anyone else alive.  It doesn't matter that their scores “don't mean anything”:  they mean everything to them, and the movie focuses its' unblinking camera upon what these people and those around them are willing to do, and not do, to claim that record.  The King of Kong is superficially about Donkey Kong, but at its' heart it's an ethics lesson of the highest order.

In 1982, LIFE Magazine brought a group of the country's top video game players together for a photo shoot.  One clearly stood out:  with his unflinching self confidence and self-aggrandizing persona, Billy Mitchell was the closest thing the gaming community would ever have to a Star.  Years passed and new generations of games consigned Billy's scores on the likes of Donkey Kong and Missile Command to obscure trivia, but for a small group the passion for these games continued to burn."  MORE

1/15/11:  "When people tell you that history bores them, odds are they haven't been exposed to it much since the days when we were all victims of whatever imbecile decided the way to teach it in school was to drill students in a timeline of names, places and dates.  Ironically, the only thing that really does make history sing is the fact that it pulses with human stories, people who were just as real as you and I making real choices and facing real problems both epic and intimate.  Case in point:  Prince Albert, the Duke of York who, between the mid-20's and late 30's faced two major issues.  One was a chain of events that would thrust him into an unexpected position of King of England on the eve of World War II.  The other, a speech impediment that made him terrified to speak in public.  The King's Speech tells both stories with a heavy emphasis on the humanity of all involved and is the latest in a tremendous string of late-2010 prestige releases to sport a cast full of remarkable performances.  Chief among them is Colin Firth, a longtime reliable character actor who's now hitting his leading man stride on the other side of 50.  Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter, who long ago earned the right to play to the back row and use it quite often, are at their most subtle, and Guy Pearce and Michael Gambon their most casually odious."  MORE

7/4/10:  "You know how you know a movie star?  The person in question doesn't just have talent:  they have an appeal that is totally unique, and that rubs people the wrong way in almost (but not quite) equal numbers to the ones it entertains.  Yes, folks, Tom Cruise is an honest-to-goodness movie star, with his live wire intensity and million-watt charisma that seem to come from a place both dark and untrustworthy.  It's said that Christian Bale based his American Psycho performance on Cruise's icy likability, and many a director has found the contradiction between his brilliant smile and underlying emptiness to be just the spark their story needed.  While he's most famous for the empty calorie Mission:  Impossible movies and a run of truly terrible 80's Simpson/Bruckheimer flicks, Cruise has earned his 3 Oscar nominations and remains one of our most interesting actors.  But, of course, that sinister undercurrent to his appeal made him especially vulnerable to an ever-stranger series of revelations about his personal life, and a romance with Katie Holmes that seemed like the plot of a conspiracy thriller helped to put his career on the defensive.  It's remained there for several years, despite the popular WWII thriller Valkyrie and a winning supporting turn in Tropic Thunder, and the new action comedy Knight and Day is a studied, deliberate attempt to thread the needle between Leading Man Cruise and Crazy Man Cruise to crowd-pleasing effect."  MORE

3/22/09:  "I've said it before and I'll say it again, the two movies most responsible for modern Hollywood filmmaking are Pulp Fiction and The Sixth Sense.  While the later popularized twist endings to a previously unprecedented degree, it also opened the door for a subgenre I call The Question Movie, a story that presents a bizarre or inexplicable phenomenon and asks you to sit patiently for 90-140 minutes waiting for The Answer:  what exactly is going on here?  Question movies are fun to think about before you see them, and fun to play along with while they're unfolding but, truth be told, it's really hard to come up with an Answer that's actually gonna satisfy.  Give Knowing, the long, long-gestating screenplay (check out that writing credit, I might have done some uncredited work on this one and since forgotten about it!) that's finally been filmed by Dark City director Alex Proyas, this much:  the way it ends is certainly no cop-out.  But it also makes this a movie whose final 10 minutes are substantially different in tone, style and scope from the 110 that proceeded them, leaving me feeling a bit empty about the entire enterprise.  I admired the craft and conviction of Knowing, and can't say I had a bad time, but will probably disappoint all but a select few moviegoers who'll really admire its' audacity."  MORE

6/12/08:  "As moviegoers, we have a love/hate relationship with trailers.  They tease, they spoil, they lie through their teeth in the attempt to get us to buy a ticket.  Once in a while, you'll see a trailer, like the one for August Rush, that perfectly encapsulates the emotional experience of the movie you'll see without giving away every last one of its' beats.  On the other hand, the animated comedy Kung Fu Panda surprised me by being so free of surprises:  it's nothing short of a 90-minute remake of its' own trailer.  Anchored by some appealing vocal performances and lovely, colorful animation, Panda is never less than an agreeable movie experience.  It's just also never much more, a mild, predictable fable best enjoyed by kids and animation die-hards.

In the Valley of Peace, a panda named Po (voice of Jack Black) works at a drudgerous job in the noodle restaurant of his father, a goose named Mr. Ping (James Hong).  But Po dreams of martial arts glory like that known by the Furious Five:  Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Monkey (Jackie Chan), Mantis (Seth Rogan), Viper (Lucy Liu) and Crane (David Cross).  Those warriors are students of Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), himself a student of Master Oogway.  There is a prophecy that in a time of great danger, Oogway will select The Dragon Warrior, who will receive a special scroll with the key to ultimate power."  MORE