10/6/07:  "First, and most importantly, I should point out that before seeing ads for The Seeker:  The Dark is Rising, I'd never read or even heard of Susan Cooper's acclaimed series of fantasy novels.  Since seeing the movie, I've done a bit of googling about them, and they sound like solid, well-developed fantasy tales.  Alas, the first (and likely last) film adaptation is a disastrous shell that drops names of characters, forces and objects but lacks her (or anyone else's) plot, themes, or logic.  Limping sadly through 95 heavily-edited minutes, it trots out a pair of professional performances and a few competent special effects but mostly keeps checking to see if we understood its' random, silly mythology the first twenty times it was explained.

Will Stanton (Alexander Ludwig) is an American kid living in England with his large, vaguely English family we're assured are all Americans.  He's got a crush on New Girl at School Maggie Barnes (Amelia Warner) and a 14th birthday right around the corner.  That's when things start to get strange.  He begins to see spinning spirals in the air when around certain objects and is detained at the mall by a couple of security guards who give him the Agent Smith treatment and then turn into flocks of crows.  He's approached by a group of four older people who live at the Greythorne mansion outside of town." MORE

12/21/08:  "Things I hate:
-Movies opening with a random moment from near the end that spoils all their secrets in a futile attempt to “start with a bang”
-Stories where a character or characters set out to do something and ultimately do it after encountering few or no obstacles
-Twist Movies where the twist is obvious within 20 minutes
-Movies that expect me to be grateful to have had unearned tragedy heaped upon me because “it's so sad”.

For all of the above, see Seven Pounds, a pointless, depressing love letter to suicide masquerading as an uplifting tale of loss and redemption.  Will Smith is outstanding in an extremely challenging role, leading a first-rate cast that labors futilely under the steady direction of Pursuit of Happyness' Gabriele Muccino to sell a story as obvious as it is wrongheaded.  Seven Pounds looks and feels like a quality Oscar season release, but I honestly can't think of one good reason to tell this story.

Ben Thomas (Will Smith) is an IRS agent “auditing” a series of people who happen to be sick." MORE

9/8/07:  "Americans have a love-hate relationship with guns, and it's reflected in our movies.  They're engines of death and destruction, and we certainly don't want them in the hands of our enemies, or even people we don't like.  But yet, they're just so darn cool!  Pull that trigger and BAM!  Instant Manhood.  Personally I've never had a problem being anti-gun in the real world and liking my movies as bullet-ridden as possible, and there's no question Michael Davis's new movie Shoot 'Em Up is with me.  The demented, ultra-violent and gleefully crass movie does its' damnedest to examine our real and fictional love affair with firearms from every angle, and while I don't think it ever really comes together as a movie, it contains a couple top-shelf characters and does know how to make lethal violence fun.

A lone man we'll later know as Smith (Clive Owen) sits on a bench chewing on a carrot.  A frantic pregnant woman (Ramona Pringle) rushes by, followed by gun-toting goons who clearly want her dead.  What's Smith to do?  He kills one of them with his carrot, picks up the guy's gun and starts shooting.  He delivers the baby himself, cutting the umbilical cord with a bullet, but the woman is later killed, leaving Smith to race off with the baby in hand." MORE

3/29/07:  "There are certain plots a regular moviegoer sees over and over again, and here's one that seems to pop up each Spring:  a loyal military/law enforcement figure is framed for a crime he didn't commit by a vast conspiracy.  Because his expertise makes him smarter, tougher and better than all his pursuers put together, he not only eludes capture, but solves the crime and turns the tables on his pursuers.  Yes, we've all seen it a thousand times, but very few movies are good or bad because of their story:  it's the execution that counts.  Depending upon the cleverness of the writers and the commitment of the cast, such a film can be as lazy and forgettable as last April's The Sentinel or as feisty, exciting, and subversive as the new Mark Wahlberg vehicle Shooter. 

We first meet Bobby Lee Swagger (Wahlberg) as a sniper behind enemy lines “in a county we're not supposed to be in”.  He and his partner Donnie (Lane Garrison) are hung out to dry by their superiors and only Bobby makes it out alive.  After the “mysterious” death of the commanding officer who failed to back him, Bobby goes into exile in a mountain cabin with his dog.  One day, Colonel Isaac Johnson (Danny Glover) uses his Metal of Honor and a silver tongue to talk Bobby into using his sniper expertise to help him catch an unknown marksman about to make an attempt on the President's life." MORE

7/16/07:  "**POLITICAL OPINION WARNING:  if you're one of those people inclined to write letters to editors demanding that their critic “Just review the movie” rather than offer political opinions, read no further.  Michael Moore's documentaries are political Rorschach Tests, and barely even exist outside the personal biases of those viewing them.**

I haven't written a word yet, but since this review already includes the words “Michael Moore” twice, you've probably got a pretty good idea of where you stand on Sicko.  I've never met anyone who says “Michael Moore?  Ah, I can take him or leave him.”  Granted, I know some (even myself to a certain degree) who love his films but would never want to be seated next to America's #1 Self-Promoter on a bus.  Either way, just about everybody who knows his work falls into one of two camps.  Michael Moore is either:  1)A fat-assed traitor, or 2)A modern day Thomas Payne with the guts to say what nobody else in the media will.  Count me in the later camp.  I know his methods are pure Propaganda 101, but in a time when our media has boiled almost everything down to tossing out an issue and letting two bought-and-paid-for talking heads call each other names over it, it's excited to see someone really advocate their position on an issue.  " MORE

7/28/07:  "I'm a pretty big fan of The Simpsons, FOX's generation-spanning animated sitcom which recently aired its' 400th episode.  Maybe not “I can name every episode” big, or even “I've SEEN every episode” big (I did mention that there are 400 of them, right?), but big enough to own all the DVDs, still be watching the new episodes on Sundays and to catch the syndicated reruns from time to time.  No matter how many times it happens, I'm always kinda surprised by the Simpsons Whiplash that occurs when the syndicated run reaches the end and goes back to the beginning, because it's easy to forget that while the characters are unaging and their situation never changes, what kind of show The Simpsons is has actually changed a few times during its' run.  The original Simpsons was, in many ways, a more artful and humanist animated version of the original FOX sitcom hit, Married... With Children.  The Simpsons were fairly grounded in reality as yellow animated people go, as were their emotions and problems as a wacky dysfunctional family.  Then, around the 3rd season, things started to change:  the characters became a little broader and their adventures became a LOT broader, with loads of referential humor, political satire and celebrity cameos becoming the norm.  The next 5 seasons or so were the Simpsons Renaissance, when the humor was delightfully crazy, the writing razor-sharp and the characters still maintained a certain humanity." MORE

8/16/07:  "It's funny what makes it into theaters:  relentlessly cheap-looking, directed with questionable professionalism and filled with actors I know I know from someplace, Skinwalkers resembles a major motion picture in exactly one way:  Stan Winston Studios creature effects that are clever and unique.  Other than that, we're looking at a 2nd-tier Sci-Fi Channel movie, the kind you watch one Saturday night, admit that it does in fact have a plot and struggle to remember the title of on Sunday morning.  I wasn't bored, but I wasn't exactly interested either.

An awkward opening narration informs us of the existence of Skinwalkers, humans transformed by an Indian curse into bloodthirsty werewolves when the moon is full.  Some fight the thirst and seek salvation from an ancient prophecy that a boy who is half-human and half-Skinwalker will bring an end to the curse on midnight of his 13th birthday.  And that moment is just days away.  Young Timothy (Matthew Knight, who played the lead character in flashbacks to his childhood on The Dresden Files) has grown up in a small town surrounded by the friends and family of his late father and his oblivious mom Rachel (Rhona Mitra, whose character Tara was unfairly dropped after the first season of Boston Legal)." MORE

12/30/08:  "It's a odd experience around this time each year to be informed that a coming pack of movies are the best of the year and then to wait around for a month or two until getting a chance to actually check them out for ourselves.  Certainly this tidal wave of hype helps to sell tickets; in fact, it makes hits of films that could not otherwise hope to draw audiences in our hype-centered film culture.  But inevitably it also leads to some head-scratching when we've been sold a movie that has no audience friendly attributes.  On the other hand, I'm left scratching my head over the critical response to Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire for the opposite reason:  at its' best (particularly in its' pitch-perfect last 20 minutes) it's sublime.  At its' worst, it's as dull as it is perfunctory.  But it's never anything less than melodramatic, the kind of placing of audience manipulation over dramatic integrity I'm always told is unworthy of acclaim.  Who knows, perhaps relocating these Dickensian cliches to an unfamiliar part of the world made them feel fresh for some.  Most of Slumdog Millionaire didn't work for me, but it's hard to argue with the proven crowd-pleasing formula of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and you've pretty much got to be made of stone not to be moved by that rousing finish.

Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) is being tortured by police, the Inspector (Irrfan Khan) and Sergeant Srinivas (Saurabh Shukla), accused of fraud. " MORE

4/19/08:  "I start every review by pulling the credits off the Internet Movie Database.  I try not to read any other reviews including user reviews on websites before putting my own thoughts down, but I usually catch the headline of the most recent IMDB user comment.  In this case, I had to chuckle because it's hard to imagine the indie-fried Dennis Quaid comedy Smart People described in two words any better than “Foofalow” has:  “It's OK”.  Seemingly infected by the same malaise that hangs over its' characters, Smart People is never less than watchable, but ultimately comes off as the cinematic equivalent of clinical depression.  It's hard enough for this movie to even get out of bed in the morning:  don't expect it to do much once it has.

Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid) knows as much about literature as anybody:  just don't expect the pompous Professor to bother passing that knowledge along to his students.  In a tailspin over the death of his wife that's gone on so long it's become a lifestyle choice, he's raised two utterly miserable children.  Son James (Ashton Holmes) bitterly rebels against everything he stands for while daughter Vanessa (Ellen Page) embraces his hard-working elitist misery and eats lunch by herself every day. " MORE

7/22/08:  "Fault writer/director Garth Jennings (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) for a lot of things, but don't fault him for not trying to make the Greatest Movie of All Time.  Son of Rambow is about a lot of things, a LOT of things:  the fantasy world of childhood, the conflict between orthodox religion and popular culture, the unjust social order of high school, the purity of friendship, and most of all, the way the movies reflect, inspire, and re-enforce the world in which we live.  Whew!  At some of those goals, Jennings' film is a brilliant success.  At others, it is a disastrous failure.  But Son of Rambow is never dull, and at its' best (and, more importantly, last) it's a lot of fun and quite touching.

It's the summer of 1982.  British schoolmates Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) and Lee Carter (Will Poulter) couldn't be more different.  Will's family is part of a religious order that forbids all modern media, even lame-o educational films in school.  So, he sits out in the hall while they're shown, and there he meets perpetual truant Lee, being raised by his brother (Ed Westwick) into a life of petty crime.  Lee cons the gullible Will into doing him assorted favors, and in the process of one, the kid who's never seen a movie ends up watching a bootleg copy of First Blood." MORE

5/24/08:  "Yes, as Uncle Ben told us, with great power comes great responsibility.  But in Hollywood, great  power (earned through great success) also brings great opportunity.  While the notion of a film version of the popular 60's anime series Speed Racer has been kicking around for years, it's hard to imagine that anyone but the most respected and powerful filmmakers could get this version made.  Luckily for Larry and Andy Wachowki, they redefined the modern action movie with the uberblockbuster The Matrix, allowing them a virtually blank creative check for their directorial follow-up to its' disappointing but still highly profitable sequels. Speed Racer is out there on a ledge, set in an almost entirely digital world created with all manner of new effects technology, and at 135 minutes, this unreal world kinda wears out its' welcome.  But Racer gets right what a movie really needs:  it's got a big, humanist heart, and a first-rate cast puts just enough meat on the bones of the Racer family to make me care about them.  The middle hour is a black hole, but there are lots of small pleasures here, most of them shockingly human.

Young Speed Racer (Nicholas Elia) dreams of being a race car driver like his older brother Rex (Scott Porter), who races under the sponsorship of his father, Pops (John Goodman)." MORE

5/5/07:  "I love the Summer Movie Season, and one big reason for that is that I love hype.  The process, sometimes years long, of hearing the announcement, getting updates as the cast assemble, reading rumors about the plot, seeing photos, watching better and better trailers, chatting with friends about how unbelievably super AWESOME it's gonna be, and finally...

Well, it doesn't always work out.  And now I sit before my laptop with a hype hangover, trying to figure out how, despite all my hopes, Spider-Man 3 went so wrong.

On paper, it's gangbusters:  finally give the fans their look at Venom, perhaps Spidy's most popular nemesis.  Add the Sandman, boosted by amazing new special effects.  And as the cherry on top, allow poor, troubled Harry Osborn to inherit his father's evil mantle as The Green Goblin (OK, New Goblin if you must...).  Who knows, after the touching finale of SM2, maybe a chance to watch Peter Parker and Mary Jane finally be a couple for more than a minute and a half." MORE

2/17/08:  "Talk about swimming against the tide!  At a time when most major studio productions exist only to kick off franchises, when “save it for the sequel” seems to be Hollywood's official motto, The Spiderwick Chronicles compresses the events of no fewer than five bestselling young adult novels into a single 97-minute film.  The results are glorious:  an action-packed throwback to the family films of the 80's that's designed to take kids on a thrill ride of scary adventure.  Adults, too, if you're into that sort of thing, which I most definitely am.

Helen Grace (Mary-Louise Parker) has separated from her husband Richard (Andrew McCarthy) and is moving her family to the only place she can afford:  the house of her great-Aunt Lucinda (Joan Plowright), who's been committed to a sanitarium.  She brings along twin sons Simon and Jared (Freddie Highmore in a dual role) and older daughter Mallory (Sarah Bolger).  Simon and Mallory are supportive of their Mom, but Jared is resentful and blames her for the breakup.  The house is both old and strange, with salt around the windows and large stashes of honey and spaghetti sauce.  There's also something living in the walls, and when Jared investigates he finds an old book with a note declaring that it must never be read." MORE

12/30/08:  "I've got a weakness for campy genre fare.  Even now I can rattle off the titles of great movies I saw on USA Up All Night.  I loved Hudson Hawk.  And you're free to check out my 4-star review of DOA:  Dead or Alive.  As such, I'm the ideal audience for Frank Miller's first solo directorial effort, The Spirit.  Based upon Will Eisner's groundbreaking WWII-era comic series, the movie covers ground familiar to fans of previous retro superhero flicks The Shadow and The Phantom, and has some of the same problems creating a world that is Pulpishly arch and yet also dramatically viable.  As such, The Spirit is at its' best when it's just going for laughs (or, perhaps I should say when it's GETTING laughs).  What really makes the movie worth seeing is the odd couple of the year:  Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlet Johansson as the villainous Octopus and his right-hand woman Silken Floss.  These two could entertain themselves all day either by ruling the world or just melting cats, and I was delighted every moment they were on screen.  The rest of the time, it was touch and go.

The Spirit (Gabriel Macht) isn't quite sure what he is.  He used to be a man named Denny Colt, then he died and rose from the grave unable to “stay hurt”." MORE

8/16/07:  "Comic fantasy may be the hardest genre to judge on the basis of loglines, ads and trailers because it is absolutely, 100% about tone.  Sure, other genres may ask you to take leaps of space and time and completely disregard everything you know about the laws of physics, and all comedies require you to share their sense of humor on some level.  But a meat and potatoes comic fantasy flick asks you not only to believe in dragons, witches, and unicorns and not only to think they're pretty darn cool, but also to think that the very fabric of its' universe is inherently fun.  The gold standard for this sort of thing is Rob Reiner's classic The Princess Bride, with one of the definitive William Goldman scrips and the star-making performances of Robin Wright, Cary Elwes and Mandy Patankin.  Even when it goes a little over the top, every frame of that movie is joyous, and the lead characters are as virtuous as they are hilarious.  Exactly 20 years later, Layer Cake director Matthew Vaughn has worked similar magic on Neil Gaiman's novel Stardust, creating a remarkable fantasy work awash in pure, romantic fun.

In Victorian England, young Dunstan Thorn (Ben Barnes) lives in the town of Wall, which is near... The Wall.  It is guarded by an ancient man (David Kelly) who is to let no one pass for reasons that are not entirely clear to those on the outside." MORE

8/17/08:  "Star Wars is a different animal than other sci-fi/fantasy franchises:  while they may not have all been great, every movie ever released under that brand name has been a uber-blockbuster, made on a gigantic scale at the cutting edge of Hollywood knowhow.  Creator George Lucas has built his franchise into a commercial empire unlike any other, but there's never been a Star Wars movie that wasn't trying to be something really special.  Until now.  For reasons that elude me, a 98-minute pilot for an upcoming Cartoon Network animated series has been released theatrically as Star Wars:  The Clone Wars.  I'll be skipping the series (as I probably would have anyway, not being all that interested in the further adventures of barely adequate Jedi hero Anakin Skywalker) in no small part because Clone Wars is unspeakably awful, an amateurish animated travesty of the Prequel universe not unlike those old 80's Saturday morning shows that sent Laverne and Shirley into the Army with a talking pig for a Drill Sergeant and the Happy Days gang (with Fonz's dog Mr. Cool) traveling through time.  We're not talking dry, stately Phantom Menace awful here:  with its' utterly painful sense of humor, bizarre extended Hutt family and multiple characters who'd seem more at home in South Park than The Old Republic, The Clone Wars is Star Wars Holiday Special awful.  And it doesn't even have Bea Arthur." MORE

8/4/08:  "Society is a machine designed to take little boys who love dinosaurs, have never heard anything funnier than a fart and want to be either an Astronaut, a NASCAR driver or a Park Ranger and grind them down into adults grateful for a chance to sit at a desk 8 to 15 hours a day and make money for somebody else.  So it's no wonder that a movie like Step Brothers strikes such a cord without actually being about likable characters, situations you'd want to find yourself involved with or a story you'd believe for a second.  It's a comic primal scream about two 40 year-old men who, other than the fact that they've added nudie magazines to the repertoire, have refused to change one bit since they were 10.  That may not be such a good thing in practice, but by reuniting reigning master of idiocy Will Ferrell with his Anchorman director Adam McKay and Talladega Nights co-star John C. Reilly, it sure is fun to watch.

Brennan Huff (Will Ferrell) lives with his Mom Nancy (Mary Steenburgen).  Traumatized by a high school humiliation engineered by his brother Derek (Adam Scott), he's utterly unemployed and afraid to sing in public despite having “The voice of my generation”.  Dale Doback (John C. Reilly) lives with his Dad Robert (Richard Jenkins)." MORE

4/17/08:  "I try my best to post reviews of new movies within a few days of seeing them:  with luck, even the same day.  But there's been a logjam lately:  yes, I've been busy on some other projects, but there's also been this review I've been a bit hesitant to write.  Like roughly 70% of Americans (depending upon the poll), I know someone who's been to Iraq, and in a few weeks, he'll be headed back.  We're not close, he's the boyfriend of a friend, but the connection still changes the face of a war I've never supported to start with.  IEDs, Suicide Bombers, Post-Traumatic Stress: all fixtures of the news, but also distant in that way the media has of making everything seem like fiction.  But as I consider the reality of these threats and dozens more like them, I am confronted with Stop-Loss, Kimberly Peirce's in-your-face attack on The War and its' effects on the people who fight it and those close to them.  The movie disturbed me, shook me up, and left me pretty thoroughly depressed.  But in its' own muckraking way, it's quite brilliant, and in a country discovering that those handy Support the Troops magnets come off your car just as easy as they went on, it should be required viewing." MORE

4/17/08:  "A lot of people, particularly filmmakers, have a thing against Stars.  “How,” they ask “can I believe I'm watching real people in a real story if I associate the actors with other roles?”  Myself, I can only summon one movie (The Blair Witch Project) whose power in any way came from a sustained illusion that I wasn't watching actors because, um, that's what a movie is.  And furthermore, 75% of what comes out of Hollywood NEEDS stars, because if we were simply pointing a camera at real life people and letting the events of their screenplays play out, we'd be inclined to think “Man, I recognize a lot of this real life from movies I've seen...”  Most films are rituals of genre, and it helps when they're also rituals of Star Power:  not only do we benefit from the emotional memory of connecting actors to other times when we enjoyed their work, but it's fun to see what kind of new angles (even if they're only slightly new) they can find on their established personas.  All of which is my way of saying that Street Kings, the new Keanu Reeves vehicle co-written by novelist James Ellroy, is an awfully familiar, leisurely paced tale of LAPD corruption rendered at first watchable and finally engaging by the presence of a boatload of familiar faces, including some of my favorites.  I mean, come on, who doesn't want to watch Dr. House as an Internal Affairs hotshot?  Anybody?" MORE

4/3/08:  "While it has plenty of antecedents, from the Hope/Crosby Road pictures to early Mel Brooks, the 'Spoof' genre began in earnest with the 1980 classic Airplane! directed by Jim Abrahms and brothers Jerry and David Zucker.  It inspired dozens and dozens of movies filled with non-sequitur humor and references to hit movies, but truth be told there's almost never been a good one that wasn't directed by either a member of the ZAZ crew or one of their protégées, a list that includes people like Pat Proft and now Craig Mazin, who co-wrote Scary Movies 3 & 4 for director David Zucker.  Mazin's take on the genre is more similar to the original Airplane! or The Naked Gun than the “20 movies in a blender” approach that's grown popular in recent years (the films of Meet the Spartans/Epic Movie directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer consist of virtually nothing but mentioning the names of other characters and movies). Superhero Movie doesn't just use the plot of Spider-Man as a clothesline to hang gags on:  it's a straight-up feature-length Mad Magazine satire of Sam Raimi's blockbuster hit.  Oh, there's a scene thrown in from Batman Begins and a side-trip to Professor X's School for Non-Asian Gifted Children to name-drop a few of the X-Men, but Superhero Movie ultimately plays like a direct-to-video knockoff of Spider-Man that's completely lost its' mind." MORE

12/23/07:  "Few filmmakers are more of a brand name than Tim Burton:  his name is as inextricably tied to a signature style as those of Hitchcock, Ford or Lucas.  His films' Gothic wackiness and sympathy for society's freaks and outcasts come coated in a gooey layer of playfully Grand Guignol, but in a career spent making big-budget blockbusters, his style is often at war with his subject matter.  Are Batman Returns' Bruce Wayne and The Penguin even in the same movie?  And how about the way Mars Attacks! divides its' characters into two groups and showers unconditional love on one while pummeling the other with candy colored sadism?  I've long regarded Ed Wood as the one truly perfect Burton movie, so totally immersed in the Bizarro world of the 50's schlock filmmaker and his peculiar friends that it has no struggle at all between Hollywood characters and Burton characters.  Now he's found a second property for which his signature style is absolutely attuned.  In 1973, British playwright Christopher Bond updated the 19th century legend of murderous barber Sweeney Todd to include a sympathetic backstory.  Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics) and Hugh Wheeler (book) adapted this adaptation for the Broadway stage in 1979.  And now Burton's brought it to the big screen as a sensationally demented swirl of murder, madness, music, and, of course, Johnny Depp." MORE

8/10/08:  "I've increasingly come to believe that the US public is made up of two kinds of people:  those who shouldn't be allowed to vote because they're more concerned with the eternal struggle between Democrat & Republican than the country and those who shouldn't be allowed to vote because they have no idea who's running.  Playing to these two constituencies, candidates need only take enough of a break from fattening their coffers with corporate cash to assure the partisans that they'll fight to their last breath to settle decades-old feuds with the other party and the clueless masses that they're “just folks” who love shooting guns, downing brews and rooting for The Local Sports Team.  Good luck waiting for partisan Hollywood to make a real satire about partisanship, but you couldn't ask for a better one about pandering politicians and clueless voters than Swing Vote.  Telling an impossible but allegorically sharp fairy tale about a lone man who must choose the next US President, it's got surprising teeth and wit to go with its' chewy nuget center.

Bud Johnson (Kevin Costner) loves his 11 year-old daughter Molly (Madeline Carroll), but he's a bad father, so much so that he's really the child in their relationship." MORE