The Cory Snyder Show

"A Separation" and "Kill List"

2012-02-12T08:57:00.011-06:00

I was reluctant to see the Iranian-made drama, "A Separation", because I thought it was going to be the story of a brave Muslim woman, struggling for independence under Sharia Law. Thankfully, though, it was clear from the every first scene, in which a husband and wife are seen filing for divorce in front of a judge, that this was not "The Stoning of Soraya M". Both husband and wife seemed sympathetic and the judge came off as reasonable and unbiased.

So, at this point, I was definitely relieved, but still assumed I was in for "Portrait of an Iranian Marriage": two dreary hours of flashbacks to happier days, juxtaposed with scenes of a now miserable husband and wife arguing about past betrayals and fighting over who is going to get custody of the kid.

Wrong again! When the next series of scenes focused not on the film's central couple, but on a woman hired by the husband to help take care of his ailing father, I was really disoriented. What exactly was this movie about??

Well, I don't want to ruin the experience for you, but suffice to say, the couple's separation ends up being complicated by an interesting, morally ambiguous crime investigation! I did not see that coming!

So, "A Separation" ends up working as a domestic drama, a glimpse at the inner workings of a rarely depicted culture, and, quite surprisingly, as a "murder mystery" of sorts.

The only quibble I have with the film: as I said in my review of "Martha Marcy May Marlene", ending a movie by cutting to black immediately prior to a particular key moment is becoming the ultimate art-house cliche - and it's really beginning to get on my nerves. Too often, I feel it's a cop-out for the filmmakers, as if they realize that they've written themselves into a corner, where there are only two possible endings and neither one is quite satisfying, so they decide to abruptly stop the film before either can occur, hoping that the audience will find the act of imagining what the ending could be more tantalizing than actually witnessing it. (Though, in fairness to writer-director Asgar Farhadi, in this case, he was probably right: another ten minutes of this storyline would have probably been really anti-climatic.)

Grade: B+

Another film that begins as a domestic drama before veering off into more unpredictable terrain is "Kill List", a British horror film that is very much a spiritual descendant of 1973's "The Wicker Man". In fact, one could call it "The Wicker Hitman". "Kill List"'s ending isn't quite as haunting as "The Wicker Man"'s, however, largely because I'm not sure it holds up to close scrutiny. Even after a second viewing, spent closely watching for clues that could shed light on the film's "shocking" conclusion, I was not convinced that it all logically hangs together. There's a very fine line between "doesn't explain everything" and "doesn't make any sense"and this film lives right on that edge. Still, for fans of the offbeat, the movie is a fun, dark ride and worth seeking out. I assume it will have a long shelf-life as a cult favorite.

Grade: B

"The Woman in Black" and "Chronicle"

2012-02-04T10:08:00.019-06:00

"The Woman in Black", starring popular man-boy Daniel Radcliffe , is the weaker of the two haunted house films opening today, but if "The Innkeepers" isn't playing in your town, "Black" might be worth a matinee. This is a movie that works incredibly hard (maybe even too hard) to be spooky, employing almost every ghost-story cliche in the book (old photographs with the eyes scratched out, a rocking chair rocking by itself, clown dolls, eerie children - pretty much everything but a vintage record player playing creepy, old-timey music), but when you have a movie that jumps out and screams "Boo!!" at you as many times as this film does, a few of those attempted scares are bound to land. I found the ending mildly intriguing, too, but I'll bury my thoughts on that at the bottom of this entry.

Grade: B-

I would ordinarily never see a movie called "Chronicle", no matter what it was about, but the reviews were so good that I felt obligated to check it out. The good news (for me, anyway) is that it's not the "Narnia" or "Clash of the Titans" or "Hobbit"-type sword and/or sorcery film that the title suggests and is, instead, yet another "found footage" movie, a notoriously hit-or-miss genre that, unlike fantasy films, tends to work for me a bit more often (the "Paranormal Activity series, "Cloverfield") than not ("Apollo 18", "The Devil Inside"). The bad news, however, is that this isn't a horror film, really - it's more of a superhero origin story about teenagers with telekinesis. Imagine "Hancock" meets "The Fury".

While this might sound like fun (and, apparently, for some critics it is), I wasn't that impressed and here's why: for a "found footage" film to work for me, 1) I have to believe that there is a legitimate reason for characters to be filming everything they do, 2) I have to be able to piece together in my mind, even if the film doesn't explicitly state it, who might have found this footage and edited to together for the world to see, and 3) the footage must feel real, it can't appear professionally filmed or acted out by real actors.

In my opinion, "Chronicle" fails on all three counts:

1. I can sort of get why the film's central character, a picked-on teenager and a battered son (played by the DiCaprio-esque newcomer Dane DeHaan) would want to document his abuse, but explain to me why there is a second character, a hot female, who also films all her daily interactions, other than the need for someone to capture moments in which our lead character is not present! Most of us go our entire lives without meeting one person who films every single moment of their waking lives, but the characters in this movie, know two of them!

2. The first third of this movie is filmed with one camera, but then that camera gets left behind at one point and is subsequently buried underground. So, how are we seeing that footage!?? It's a hard concept to wrap your head around, but it appears that we are not supposed to believe that we are witnessing home-movie footage assembled long after the film's events, but that we are witnessing those events as they happen via character POV shots that just happen to be filtered through a camera lens.

3. The home-movie footage in the film does not resemble any home movie footage I have ever seen. Despite the hand-held camera angles, the images shot have the visual look of every other Hollywood feature film. I know technology has come a long way since the days of VHS, but how expensive would a home video camera have to be to be able to shoot images that are always perfectly in focus and have the rich visuals of something designed by a professional cinematographer? And even if such a camera did exist, how expensive would it have to be? Could an unemployed high school kid, so poor that he has to rob a convenience store just to pay for prescription medication for his dying mother, possibly afford two of them!? (And how convenient that the cute blonde neighborhood girl is apparently using the exact same camera, so that there is no need for "Chronicle"'s film-making team to change film stocks when switching from one character's footage to the other's!)

I'm guessing that the movie is probably getting fairly positive reviews due to 1) low expectations, and 2) critics being in the mood for something lite and summery after having to sit though such heavy and/or dreary winter releases as "W.E.", "Pariah", and "In the Land of Blood and Honey".

Grade: C+

And now, for those that have seen it, my quick thoughts on the ending of "The Woman in Black"... After the lengths Harry Potter went to provide closure to The Woman in Black so that she could let go of her feelings of vengeance and finally leave this world for the next, my first thought when she led his young son onto the railroad tracks in front of the oncoming train was, "That's kind of dickish of her", but then, upon reflection, as I left the theater, it occurred to me that, in leading both Harry Potter and his son to their deaths, she was, in a way, returning a favor. She was reuniting his family, just as he had reunited hers.

Previewing February 2012

2012-02-01T00:33:00.002-06:00

Well, we made it through January! "Haywire" sure helped. Here's what lies ahead...

FEBRUARY 3rd

This week, Drew Barrymore stars in a movie called "Big Miracle". If the title isn't enough to turn you off, note that 1) it's about whales, 2) until recently, it had the even worse title "Everybody Loves Whales", and 3) it's directed by the man who brought us "Dunston Checks In", "The Beautician & The Beast", and "License to Wed".

An aside: whatever happened to Drew Barrymore? She was never the world's greatest actress, but she used to be fun, at least.

Also opening: "The Woman in Black" (starring that British kid who was in a bunch of wizard movies I never saw), "W.E." (directed by 80's pop singer Madonna Louise Ciccone), and something called "Chronicle" (and I have no idea what that is).

FEBRUARY 10th

Speaking of terrible titles, how about this one: "Journey 2: The Mysterious Island"! Okay, it's more or less a sequel to "Journey to the Center of the Earth" - even though it is made by completely different people and only has one of the same cast members (and it's not Brandon Fraser!) - but why not call it "Journey to the Mysterious Island"? I mean, is "Journey to the Center of the Earth" so beloved that we MUST MAKE SURE that everyone knows "Mysterious Island" is loosely related to it in some way by stuffing a number 2 into the middle of title?? Are we now supposed to call the last movie "Journey One" and this one "Journey Two"? Aren't those kind of affectionate nicknames for a series of films no one is really all that crazy about?

Also opening on this surprisingly busy weekend: "Safe House" with Denzel Washington and the suddenly desperate-for-a-hit Ryan Reynolds, "The Vow" with Rachel MacAdams and (yawn) Channing Tatum, and the new 3-D version of "Star Wars: Episode Whatever Who Gives a Fuck" starring some kind of rastafarian lizard muppet and a little blonde kid as Darth Vader.

FEBRUARY 17th

More terrible titles: "Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance", "The Secret World of Arrietty", and "This Means War". The first is your usual Nicholas Cage junk, the second is a Japanese cartoon, and the third is some sort of romantic spy comedy starring Reese Witherspoon, Bane, Teenage Captain Kirk, and Chelsea Handler. Of the three releases, I'm most likely to see "This Means War", if only because Witherspoon is a very attractive woman, but the movie itself looks to pretty disposable to me, like a "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" for the "Gossip Girl" generation.

FEBRUARY 24th

"Tyler Perry's Good Deeds" and Amanda Seyfried's "Gone" both open, but the movie I want to see and, in fact, dare I say it, cannot wait to see is "Wanderlust"! The way the film's release date has been shuffled around is definitely cause for concern, but writer-director David Wain ("The State", "Wet Hot American Summer", "Stella", "The Ten", "Wainy Days", "Role Models", "Children's Hospital") hasn't let me down yet.

WHAT I AM MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING

"Wanderlust"

WHAT I WILL NOT BE SEEING UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES

"Big Miracle", "Tyler Perry's Good Deeds", "Lil' Darth Vader"

(I love Paul Rudd's line reading of "Oh, I got fired.")

"Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie"

2012-01-31T00:36:00.000-06:00

I found about eleven minutes of "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie" funny. Trim out the other 81 minutes and you'd have a pretty great episode of "Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!".

I consider myself a fan of the film's creators, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim - I even had a "Jan and Wayne Skylar, Married News Team" calendar on my cubicle wall for all of 2007, much to the disgust of many of my co-workers - but, like "Awesome Show"'s later seasons, "Billion Dollar Movie" is more weird and gross than funny. I would have much rather seen a feature film devoted to the adventures of Dr. Steve Brule.

Grade: C (or, on the sketch-show-turned-feature-film-scale, not as good as "Brain Candy", but a bit better than "Run, Ronnie, Run")

By the way, though I'm not recommending the Tim & Eric movie, fans of alt comedy and 1970's/early eighties mellow rock a.m. radio (an admittedly small intersection of interests on a very unusual venn diagram) should check out "Starting From Nowhere", the deadpan "yacht rock" parody album Tim Heidecker recorded last year with "Awesome Show" music composer, Davin Wood. It's not for everybody, but I think if you listen to these two songs, you'll know if it's for you:

Live-Blogging the 2012 Screen Actors Guild Awards

2012-01-30T00:01:00.002-06:00

6:45 - OK, I have the E! Red Carpet Show on and Ross the Intern (the poor man's Larry "Bud" Melman) is interviewing Maya Rudolph & he just said something that drives me crazy every time I hear it. You know how there are people who hate it when people say "ATM Machine" because what they are essentially saying is "Automatic Teller Machine Machine"? Well, I can't stand it when people say "I'm LOL-ing" because what they're actually saying is "I'm laughing-out-loud-ing", WHICH MAKES NO SENSE!!

6:50 - It's so weird that Maya Rudolph is married to Paul Thomas Anderson. Fiona Apple still seems like a better match for him, though there's no doubt that Rudolph is a healthier choice.

It would be interesting if Paul Thomas Anderson put Maya Rudolph in a movie... as long as she doesn't do that fake-singing schtick that she's always doing!! I used to like Rudolph, but I really think she's the weak link on "Up All Night": the stuff with Applegate, Arnett, and the baby is gold & the stuff at Applegate's workplace, with Rudolph as sort of a cross between Oprah and Jack Donaghy, doesn't work at all.)

6:58 - I can see why people think Kim Kardashian's marriage was fake. I caught a couple of minutes of "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" recently and I was shocked by how much of it seemed staged. (Yes, I'm probably naive to have been shocked, but I don't watch much reality TV.)

OK, time for the show! I'm switching to TBS...

7:01 - Ooh, Jane Krakowski's dress is kind of ugly. That's a weird breast-plate thing she's got on.

7:03 - Yuck. It's those awkward "I'm (so and so) and I'm an actor" speeches that open the show every year.

Rose Byrne is so beautiful. I don't like that weird Prince Valiant hairdo she's been sporting lately. I don't like her covering up a fourth of her face with bangs, even if it is the least-interesting fourth of her face.

7:04 - Best Supporting Actor. Albert Brooks is not nominated. I'll quit beating this dead horse soon, but how did Jonah Hill get nominated and Albert Brooks didn't? Listen, I can't act at all. I show a very limited range whenever I've acted in skits or home movies because I'm just not comfortable emoting, it's not who I am. That being said, I am pretty sure I could have done almost as well playing Jonah Hill's role in "Moneyball" as he did. I'm not saying he was bad, I'm just saying that the role, in my opinion, didn't require much.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. Christopher Plummer won.

7:09 - You know how they say about some people, "Women want to be with him and men want to be him"? Well, when it comes to George Clooney, I would be okay with either being him or being with him? In fact, I'd be open to being with him, while also being him - just a couple of Clooneys, hanging out, one of them being me.

I apparently have had too much caffeine tonight.

7:10 - Best Supporting Actress.

Jessica Chastain has had a big year, but I wouldn't recognize her on the street.

Octavia Spencer won, of course.

You know, former "MTV Raps" co-host Ed Lover pointed out something interesting recently (a sentence you don't often hear!). He noticed that the only three minority actors nominated for Oscars this year (Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis, and Demian Bichir), were all nominated for playing servants. How far we've come since Hattie McDaniel!

7:20 - It's weird to see Bryan Cranston with hair.

7:21 - Outstanding Actor in a Comedy Series. Alec Baldwin!! A bit of a shocker, but not undeserved.

Boy, did you see how badly "30 Rock" tanked in the ratings last week? That's okay, though. If, in the spring, NBC has to choose between renewing "30 Rock" for a 7th season or "Community" for a 4th, I would hope it's "Community" that avoid cancelation. "30 Rock" has had a good run, but it's been a B or even a B- show for a couple of seasons now.

7:25 - Outstanding Actress in a Comedy Series. Betty White.

Okay, listen, I like Betty White. We all like Betty White. But does she really deserve all these awards for "Hot in Cleveland"? Is there anything she's doing on that show that she wasn't doing for years on "The Golden Girls"? She's not exactly stretching as an actress on "Hot in Cleveland".

7:29 - I quit paying attention for a minute. Now someone who might be Jessica Chastain is onstage.

7:31 - Outstanding Ensemble in a Comedy Series.

Oh, the adorable Melissa Rauch is in the audience. I liked her so much on "Best Week Ever", though not quite enough to watch her on "The Big Bang Theory".

I just saw a twenty-second clip of "Glee". Man, is that show not for me!

"Modern Family" won. (Psst! That show has already jumped the shark and nobody has noticed yet.)

Yuck, the cast is doing scripted schtick during their acceptance speech. These guys are getting too big for their britches. It would be nice if "Parks & Rec" could knock them down a peg at the Emmys this year.

7:42 - I haven't seen "Damages" since it moved to satellite. Is it still any good?

8:00 - Hey, it's Dick Van Dyke! If we all sign a petition, can Dick Van Dyke never die?

Mary Tyler Moore is getting a lifetime achievement award. She is indeed a legend.

I've still never seen "Ordinary People". Should I?

8:22 - John Krasinski's window of opportunity has passed. He wasted it on "Leatherheads", "License to Wed", and "Something Borrowed". No film career for you, John Krasinski!

8:24 - I could happily go the rest of my life without hearing Michael C. Hall as Dexter talking about his "dark passenger". Oh, my God, that show has gotten so bad.

8:27 - The "In Memoriam" montage. Let's see, of all the actors who died last year, which one I will miss the most! Let's see, not Bubba Smith from the "Police Academy" movies....

Hey! William Duell, Johnny the shoeshine guy from "Police Squad!", died??

Is Bob Hope's wife, Delores, really an actor?

Anyway, for who I think I'll miss the most, I think I have to go with Peter Falk. Serpentine!

8:35 - The cast of "Dallas" just came out. A lot of polite clapping.

Larry Hagman looks like a skeleton in a cowboy hat.

8:36 - Outstanding Ensemble in a Drama Series. "Boardwalk Empire". Should have been "Breaking Bad". For one thing, it's absurd that Paz de la Huerta keeps getting SAG awards!

8:41 - Best Actor. Oh, no, the guy from "The Artist" won. I really don't want it to be "The Artist"'s year.

8:51 - Best Actress. Viola Davis. It would probably be more exciting if I saw "The Help". Isn't that the movie where one character defecates in a pie and then feeds it to another character? Sounds great.

8:55 - The final award: Outstanding Cast in a Motion Picture.

Huh. "The Help" won. A bit of a surprise. Keeps Oscar night interesting.

Well, that might be overstating it a bit.

Talk to you later.

On DVD: "The Woman", "Beginners" and "Dirty Girl"

2012-01-29T15:24:00.000-06:00

THE WOMAN

Called by some a radical feminist horror movie (and, by others, misogynistic and exploitative), Lucky McKee's "The Woman" is well-acted, suspenseful, and really gets under a viewer's skin (see the video below). When I didn't start watching the movie until after midnight, I was a bit worried I wouldn't be able to stay awake for the whole thing, but, more than three hours later, I was still up, watching DVD special features and reading various reviews & message board comments on the internet! Before I could go to bed, I had to learn more about this weird movie!

It may not be perfect - there's a twist at the end that I think is both unneeded and strains credibility (plus, I'm not sure I understand the decision made by a couple of surviving characters in the film's closing shot) - but, overall, I respected "The Woman" for being one of those rare sick, "midnight movies" that also has a brain in its head, an ultra-gory horror movie that actually tries to be about something. Call it the thinking man's "Human Centipede".

Grade: B

BEGINNERS

I originally rented "Beginners" to see Christopher Plummer give the acclaimed performance that was going to beat Albert Brooks at the Academy Awards. Once I discovered Brooks wasn't even nominated, I became far less invested in the idea of watching it. Over a week, I probably put in the DVD a half dozen times, sitting through 5 or 10 minutes here and there, only to become distracted by an urge to do some other errand (or just take a nap). It's not that it's a bad movie, it's just that it's such a nicey-nice movie. Perfect for older art-house audiences, but nothing that I could identify with or sink my teeth into.

In the future, when you read my reviews, you may want to remember that I really liked "The Woman" and was bored by "Beginners" and then use that info to calibrate how much my opinions should affect your film-going choices.

Grade: C+

DIRTY GIRL

An achingly sincere and earnest combination of Sundance-friendly gay coming-of-age story, road trip comedy, and John Hughes homage that is super-awkward and doesn't work at all, despite the modest charms of possible next big thing Juno Temple.

A side-note: the movie is set in 1987, but much of the music in "Dirty Girl" (Melissa Manchester, Joan Jett, The Oak Ridge Boys, Bow Wow Wow, Pat Benatar) is more appropriate for 1982. Yes, people under the age of 35, there is a difference!

Grade: D

My Thoughts on the 2012 Oscar Nominations

2012-01-24T07:56:00.031-06:00

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"? Really??? How in the HELL did that get nominated for Best Picture?? According to both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, here are just a few of the 2011 releases that got better reviews than "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close": "A Very Harold and Kumar 3-D Christmas", "Mr. Popper's Penguins", "Final Destination 5". I mean, that new Marky Mark movie that, nine months from now, no one will remember ever existed has gotten better reviews than "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close"! I am shocked! I am dumbfounded.

And worst of all, Albert Brooks was shut out of Best Supporting Actor for "Drive"! And who took his spot? Max Von Sydow for "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"!!! Why?? How?? I am so upset. Of my two favorite performances of 2011, I knew Kristen Wiig wasn't going to get nominated for "Bridesmaids", but I totally assumed Albert Brooks getting recognized for Best Supporting Actor was a done deal!

I am outraged!

Okay, I will now pull myself together and go through the full list of nominees. There must be something to be happy about somewhere in this list...

BEST PICTURE

"The Artist", "The Descendants", "Extremely Bad and Annoyingly Nominated", "The Help", "Hugo", "Midnight in Paris", "Moneyball", "The Tree of Life", and "War Horse".

I've seen six of the nine and have no intention of seeing the other three ("The Help", "War Horse", and "Extremely/Incredibly"). My favorite of the bunch is actually "Hugo", but I'm rooting for either "The Descendants", which has the best chance of taking out "The Artist" (this year's front-runner), or for a "Midnight in Paris" upset, just because it would be a nice finale to Woody Allen's big comeback year.

BEST ACTOR

Clooney, Brad Pitt, Gary Oldman (good for him!), the guy from "The Artist" (this year's Benigni/Cotillard?), and the guy from "A Better Life", a movie nobody's seen (total box office gross: less than 1.8 million).

Demian Bichir's nomination for "A Better Life" unfortunately means that Michael Fassbender got shut out. It is clear that Oscar voters are all 70 years old and favor movies that have no edge whatsoever. Of the five nominated, I'm rooting for Clooney, could live with Pitt, and would be thoroughly bored if the guy from "The Artist" wins.

At least DiCaprio wasn't nominated for "J. Edgar".

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

The nominees are Not Albert Brooks, Not Albert Brooks, Not Albert Brooks, Not Albert Brooks, and Not Albert Brooks.

I mean, it really doesn't matter. Even if Albert Brooks had been nominated, he was just going to lose to Christopher Plummer anyway, but come on! Of those who were nominated, I haven't seen three of the performances (Plummer, Nolte, von Sydow) and thought the other two (Kenneth Branaugh and, somehow, Jonah Hill) weren't anything special. I'm choosing not to root for anyone in this category. Take THAT, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences!!

BEST ACTRESS

Meryl Streep for "The Iron Lady", Viola Davis from "The Help", the great Michelle Williams for the boring "My Week With Marilyn", Glenn Close for "Albert Nobbs", and (a bit of a pleasant surprise) Rooney Mara for "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo".

Considering what a strong year this was for women, this is a fairly uninteresting group of nominees. I would have much rather seen those 5 slots taken up by the five runners-up: Kirsten Dunst, Kristen Wiig, Tilda Swinton, Elizabeth Olsen, and Charlize Theron.

Of those that were nominated, it's a two man race between Streep and Davis, though I'm probably rooting for Michelle Williams. She didn't blow me away as Marilyn Monroe, but she's a good person and an actress with real integrity. Plus, if she were to win, maybe Magnolia Pictures would hurry up and finally release "Take This Waltz" in order to capitalize on her success.

The least deserving nominee of the five: Glenn Close for "Albert Nobbs". I hate how easy it is to get nominated by dressing up as someone from the opposite sex (think of the 1983 Oscars when Dustin Hoffman, Julie Andrews, and John Lithgow were all nominated for performances done in drag).

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Another boring, boring category: the girl from "The Artist", two women from "The Help", another woman from "Albert Nobbs", and Melissa McCarthy from "Bridesmaids", whom America has apparently fallen in love with.

I'm rooting for McCarthy, though I think her work in "Bridesmaids" is a little bit overrated. I don't think she brought any more to that movie than Rose Byrne, Wendi McLendon-Covey, or even Jon Hamm.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

Ha Ha, Pixar! No nomination for your dumb, money-grab "Cars" sequel!

The real surprise, though, is no nomination for Steven Spielberg's "Adventures of Tintin". Looks like this is "Rango"'s race to lose.

BEST ART DIRECTION

It's nice to see "Hugo" nominated in this category!

BEST DIRECTOR

Three legends (Scorsese, Malick, Woody), one legend in the making (Alexander Payne), and the guy who did "The Artist".

I think this might be one of those year's where there is a split between Best Picture and Best Director. I'm going to predict that "The Artist" wins Best Picture, but Scorcese wins Best Director.

BEST DOCUMENTARY

Exciting to see "Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory" on this list. I just saw this a couple of nights ago. Pretty amazing stuff. (The most surprising element: the redemption of John Mark Byers, someone portrayed as a nut-job - and even a suspect - in the earlier "Paradise Lost" installments.)

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

Looks like an easy win for "A Separation".

BEST MAKE-UP

A team of three people have been nominated for almost, not quite, not really making Glenn Close look like a man in "Albert Nobbs".

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

Now here's something to be excited about! For some reason, only two songs have been nominated and one of them is "Man or Muppet" from "The Muppets"! So, no nominations for Madonna or Elton John, but Bret McKenzie from Flight of the Conchords is nominated for a mother-flippin' Oscar!

(I am a bit surprised that his seemingly more Oscar-friendly "Life is a Happy Song" wasn't also nominated.)

BEST SOUND EDITING

"Drive" gets its only nomination!

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

"Descendants", "Hugo", "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy", "Ides of March", and "Moneyball".

First of all, nice to see "Community"'s Dean Pelton (Jim Rash) nominated for an Oscar (he co-wrote "The Descendants") - and it's interesting that Clooney is nominated twice this year, once for acting and once for screenwriting. My vote would go for "Moneyball", though, for making a dry subject matter so engaging. (By the way, notice no nomination here for "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"!)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

"The Artist", "Bridesmaids", "Margin Call", "Midnight in Paris", "A Separation".

A couple of surprise nominees: "Margin Call" and "A Separation" (sorry, "50/50"!).

I'm thrilled to see Kristen Wiig nominated in this category, if only as a consolation prize for not being nominated for Best Actress.

My prediction is that, just as Scorcese will steal Best Director out from under "The Artist"'s Michael Hazanavicius, Woody Allen will win beat Hazanavicius for Best Original Screenplay. And I will be happy about that, even if Woody himself couldn't care less.

Who I'm Most Rooting For

Bret McKenzie, Clooney, Woody, Scorcese, Wiig

Who I'm Most Rooting Against

Because I hate boring Oscar telecasts, I'm rooting against all the front-runners: Streep, Christopher Plummer, Octavia Spencer, and "The Artist".

"A Dangerous Method"

2012-01-23T20:58:00.003-06:00

I'll keep this one brief. I'm rapidly becoming a fan of Michael Fassbender (he was pretty damn cool in "Haywire") and it's nice to see Keira Knightley give an uncharacteristically fierce, and almost feral, performance (in a weaker film year she'd be a strong candidate for a Best Acress nomination), but "A Dangerous Method" is a lot like most late-period David Cronenberg films that don't involve Viggo Mortenson beating people up: it's cold, detached, and kind of boring.

Grade: C

"Haywire" and "Carnage"

2012-01-22T14:49:00.000-06:00

Steven Soderbergh has emerged as one of my favorite directors. He's got impeccable taste (his list of producing credits is possibly even more impressive than his directing filmography) and a admirably experimental nature. My favorite Soderbergh films ("Schizopolis", "Bubble", "Solaris") may be among his least accessible, but even when he's doing something commercial ("Ocean's Eleven", "Contagion"), you never sense that he's just phoning it in. In fact, when he's working within a commercial framework, he often seems to delight in subverting expectations, whether it's casting a dozen comic actors in completely straight supporting parts in "The Informant!" or making "Ocean's 12" an homage to French New Wave. It should be no surprise, then, that Soderbergh's first foray into action filmmaking, "Haywire", is leaving many multiplex patrons feeling a bit nonplussed this weekend. The movie may have earned a D+ from the usually quite generous graders who participate in opening weekend Cinemascore polling, but I for one loved it.

"Haywire" is a jazzy, fizzy art house action film that often plays a lot like "The Girlfriend Experiment" with kickboxing. I wasn't exactly sure what was happening a lot of the time, but I didn't really care that much, I just enjoyed the ride. The movie is beautifully shot, creatively edited, nicely acted (even Channing Tatum is pretty good!), wonderfully scored, and the action scenes are really, really fun! I know Soderbergh probably has better things to do than focus on a sequel (and at this point, at least, there doesn't seem to be a mass audience clamoring for one), but I would definitely love to see a "Haywire Supremacy" and a "Haywire Ultimatum".

Grade: B+

Roman Polanski's "Carnage" is an adaptation of a stage play and feels like one. Not just because it consists of four actors stuck in one location for 80 minutes, but because it feels so written and acted. I was always aware that I was watching Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz, and John C. Reilly reciting dialogue, each one giving an uncharacteristically uneven performance (with Foster coming off worst, playing the film's shrillest character). I enjoyed a few moments here and there, but overall the movie's not really worth seeking out.

Side-note inspired by watching Christof Waltz eat an apple-pear cobbler: Have you ever noticed how aggressively actors eat when in character? Not only are they constantly talking while shoveling food into their mouths (understandable, I suppose, given how much dialogue that's required), but they are always scraping their forks against their teeth! Even weirder, they never use forks to scoop, only to stab - and then they'll hold the fork upside down, so that its tines are pointed towards the tongue and not to the roof of the mouth. I have never used a fork that way! Look for this the next time you watch people eat in movies, especially business people and villains.

Grade: C+

Live-Blogging the 2012 Golden Globe Awards

2012-01-16T05:40:00.004-06:00

5:40 - I'm starting to "live-blog" a little later than normal. I've just recently (finally) gotten sucked into "Mad Men" and have managed to plow through seven episodes today (I've just started Season Two). I like the show, though it took me more than half of the first season to get past the fact that most of the characters are douchebags (man, I hate that Pete Campbell kid!).

So, anyway, I've finally turned to E! and have the red carpet coverage on.

I'm kind of nervous about tonight. I think it was a mistake for Ricky Gervais to come back. He's bound to try too hard to top himself. Plus, he's been kind of insufferable lately. New York magazine's Vulture site had it right when they recently published an article called "Ricky Gervais is Losing His Edge by Not Shutting Up About His Edge".

5:49 - Julie Bowen is not the same person that she was when she was Carol Vessey.

5:54 - It's Our Girl Zooey! Black hair and a green dress! I'm swooning.

Zooey's actually been around for a long time now. I remember her being on an episode of "Frasier"! It's been a little frustrating seeing her breakthrough to the masses with that show on FOX where she lives with the three annoying guys. It's kind of like when your favorite indie band crosses over.

5:57 - I alluded to this in my "Sitter" review, but there is probably no celebrity I am less attracted to than Jonah Hill. Thin, fat, doesn't matter - he is just so physically unappealing. He's the anti-Zooey.

6:02 - Jane Lynch is getting boring.

6:03 - What did Kelly Osbourne do to her hair? I don't get it. The front of it, but not all of it, has been dyed a slightly purpley silver.

6:06 - Oh, man, Laura Dern! She deserves all sorts of awards for "Enlightened", a show you should really rent when it comes out on DVD.

I met Laura Dern once. Because I'm an idiot, this is what I said to her: "For the longest time, 'Wild at Heart' was my favorite movie!" Sort of a backwards compliment in that it implies that "Wild at Heart" is no longer my favorite movie. Hey, just keepin' it real!

6:09 - Whenever Kristen Wiig glams up for one of these events, there's always sort of a 70's vibe about her (works for me!). I hope she wins 'Best Actress in a Comedy' tonight. I think it's the performance of the year.

6:15 - Ryan Seacrest just called Kevin James "one of the funniest men on the planet" - and he wasn't even interviewing Kevin James at the time! He was talking to Salma Hayek!

6:25 - Okay, I'm switching over to NBC.

Oh, it's the poor man's Ryan Seacrest, Carson Daly! And dreamy "Today Show" news girl Natalie Morales.

6:30 - Hey, I'm going to be a trendspotter here and remember you heard it here first: green earrings are in!

6:35 - Michelle Williams is having the career Jennifer Jason Leigh should have had.

6:36 - Boy, that "Are You There, Chelsea" just looks like hell, as does Chelsea herself in that brown fright-wig she has to wear to play her own sister.

6:38 - Why is time being devoted on network television to a red carpet interview with Nicole Richie? I don't know who this woman is that they've got interviewing her, but she just introduced Richie as "your dream woman, Nicole Richie: designer, mom, hot star!" What is Nicole Richie even doing at the Golden Globes? Is this 2003?? Why don't celebrities go away anymore? It's like once you're famous, you're famous forever. No one ever says, "Whatever happened to (so and so)?" anymore.

6:45 - Huh, Rob Lowe's wife looks age-appropriate. That's cool.

6:46 - I think I say this in almost every award show live-blog, but I still haven't made up my mind on Evan Rachel Wood.

6:49 - It's funny that all women who have had work done look exactly the same. If you look just at their faces, there's almost no difference between Dolly Parton, Joan Rivers, and Madonna.

6:50 - Claire Danes is back again this year. I wonder if she's still carting Temple Grandin around everywhere she goes.

6:52 - I will be a little sad if Amy Poehler & Will Arnett ever split up.

6:53 - I'm ready to be done with Mila Kunis.

6:54 - Leonardo DiCaprio can grow all the facial hair we wants, but he will always look like a 15 year old.

6:55 - Oh, Tina Fey. She is so perfect. I just want to marry the shit out of her.

6:57 - Oh, good lord! Adam Levine and Jimmy Fallon will be presenting the awards for Best Song and Best Score?? That's probably when I'll have to flip over to Showtime and see if Emmy Rossum is doing a nude scene on "Shameless" this week.

6:59 - Reese Witherspoon looks lovely.

Ok, it's 7:00. Time for the show!

7:01 - I like Gervais' suit. It makes him look a bit like The Devil, which I'm guessing is intentional.

"For any of you who don't know, the Golden Globes are just like the Oscars, but without all that esteem. The Golden Globes are to the Oscars what Kim Kardashian is to Kate Middleton." Even more than when he makes fun of celebrities, I like when he makes fun of the Globes themselves.

7:06 - Pretty good monologue. I think the only time he maybe crossed the line was when he joked that not many men have seen Jodie Foster's "Beaver".

Ha! I liked both Gervais' introduction of Johnny Depp ("a man who will wear literally anything Tim Burton tells him to") and him asking Depp, "Be honest... have you seen 'The Tourist' yet?"

7:07 - Does anyone else think Johnny Depp has sort of an odd speaking voice? Like it's lower than it should be? Like he's doing an impression of William Hurt?

7:09 - Oh, what a shame. Albert Brooks lost Best Supporting Actor to Christopher Plummer. Not only did Brooks deserve it, but the acceptance speech would have been awesome! 'Hollywood legend' trumps 'comedian playing it straight', I guess. I'm sure the fact that Plummer is playing gay in "Beginners" and also dies in the film, didn't hurt his chances either. (For the record, I haven't yet seen "Beginners", so I don't know for sure that he dies in it, but I have to assume he does, right?)

Hey, this is a bit off topic, but I just saw him stand up in the audience... You know who is suddenly weirdly sanctimonious? Judd Apatow!

7:13 - Three of my Top Six celebrity crushes were nominated for Best Actress in a Comedy Series, but the winner, deservedly, is Laura Dern. The next time I see her, I'll have to tell her that I was very happy for her when she won a Golden Globe even though I was more attracted to all of her competitors!

7:21 - I just noticed it's called "Downton Abbey" and not "Downtown Abbey". What's a "downton"?

7:23 - Ah, it's good to see Diane Lane and Josh Brolin sitting together. I think they make a nice couple.

7:25 - Kate Winslet should just have her own award show. "The Kate Winslet Awards"!

7:36 - Wow! Kelsey Grammer won Best Actor in a Drama Series for "Boss". The Golden Globes are giving some love to little-seen cable series tonight! If only "Community" was on cable!

7:44 - Oh, it's Excitable Boy Jimmy Fallon. And "Shameless" hasn't even started yet. Crap!

Can't you just imagine Jimmy Fallon waking up every morning, bouncing out of bed, chomping at the bit to begin each day and experience all the wonderful things that lay ahead of him? How does he even sleep at night when he always seem to be in six-year-old-on-Christmas-Eve mode? I so hope to find out one day that he has a dark side. Wouldn't it be so wonderful to hear that all his life Jimmy Fallon has secretly been a cutter!

7:49 - How did Bret McKenzie not get nominated for Best Original Song for his work on the Muppet movie? Probably because they'd rather have Madonna up onstage than one of Flight of the Conchords.

7:57 - "Shark Night 3D" star Katherine McPhee is presenting Best Actor in a TV Movie or Miniseries.

7:59 - Wouldn't it be pleasantly surprising if "Brangelina" never split up? What if they become like the new Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy (or, as they're more commonly known, "Crondy")?

8:00 - Oh no, Jodie Foster brought her kids! I'm glad her two young sons got to hear all those "Beaver" jokes!

8:01 - I love Michelle Williams, but she absolutely did not deserve to beat Kristen Wiig and Charlize Theron for 'Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy' because "My Week With Marilyn" is neither a musical nor a comedy! I love presenter Seth Rogen for pointing that out, while reading the list of nominees, by saying that Williams was nominated for "the hysterical comedy 'My Week With Marilyn'."

8:08 - Sarah Michelle Gellar. Is "Ringer" still on? That was the name of it, right?

8:11 - Ricky Gervais just called George Clooney "the Cloonmeister General". That's awesome.

8:13 - Jessica Alba and Channing Tatum. I fear the two of them presenting an award together will create some sort of black hole at the center of our universe. Arguably the two most boring people in show business.

8:21 - Clive Owen belongs in the category I've long called "Simmered, Never Boiled". He seemed on the verge of being the next big thing & then it never happened. I assume he lays awake at night, cursing Daniel Craig.

8:22 - Yay! Woody Allen won for Best Screenplay. I'm not sure it's deserved, but I'm happy for his success.

8:31 - Madonna. Still not funny.

8:44 - Matt LeBlanc just won for another little-seen cable series. "Episodes" is actually a pretty good little show. It improved as it went along.

8:47 - Is that Chris Tucker in the audience??

8:56 - Sidney Poitier. 84 years old! It's apparently true: black don't crack. He could easily pass for 70.

9:13 - Huh. Scorcese won Best Director for "Hugo". A bit of a surprise.

9:18 - It's only Season Two, but I think it's safe to say "Modern Family"'s best days are already behind it. Not that it will prevent the show from being nominated for Best Comedy Series every year for as many years as it's on the air.

9:31 - It was funny when Ricky Gervais said what you don't know about Colin Firth is "he's extremely racist", but it was really awkward when the show's director chose to cut to a shot of the cast from "The Help" immediately after he said it! Seriously, what could they have been thinking in the control room!? We're they afraid to show white people laughing at that? Was this a better alternative? I think I'd vote for no audience reaction shot whatsoever!

9:35 - I suspect that Tilda Swinton is an extraterrestrial. She's "The Man Who Fell to Earth".

9:36 - Streepy won Best Actress for that historical biopic no one is really all that crazy about ("The Iron Lady" apparently being the female counterpart this year to "J. Edgar"). She's definitely feigning surprise, because she had to have known from the moment she signed the contract that she was a shoo-in for every Best Actress prize imaginable.

9:40 - "The Artist" won Best Comedy. I was hoping for a "Bridesmaids" upset or even a "Midnight in Paris" surprise win.

Hey, I just noticed that "The Descendants" is nominated for Best Drama instead of Best Comedy. How is "My Week With Marilyn" a comedy and "The Descendants" isn't?

9:48 - Best Actor in a Drama: The Cloonmeister General!

9:50 - Ouch, his joke about Michael Fassbender having a big penis joke didn't really work for me. And, worse, it stepped on my own 'Michael Fassbender has a large penis' joke! I'll have to save it for the SAG awards.

9:54 - Why does Harrison Ford always seem so grumpy? Is it just his schtick?

9:55 - Best Drama: "The Descendants". Solid choice. I suspect it'll lose the Oscar to "The Artist", though.

Well, that wasn't so bad. I think Gervais, for the most part, found the right balance: mean enough to amuse me, but not so mean that it's all anyone will talk about for the next week.

"The Artist"

2012-01-14T15:23:00.007-06:00

"The Artist" is a gimmick film - the gimmick being that it's a silent film made in the present day - and it works on that level. I wasn't terribly invested in it, though. How seriously can you take a movie so slight that it actually includes a scene where a dog, through a series of barks and head gestures, convinces a uniformed policeman to follow him to a burning apartment building? Worse, I found the film's climax, intended to induce tears, overwrought and redundant. We already had one climax and happy ending, do really we need another one? Especially one that distractingly borrows Bernard Hermann's classic score from "Vertigo" and makes the female love interest seem more like a stalker than a guardian angel.

That said, I did really enjoy the movie's creative and sparing use of sound (a mid-film dream sequence might have been my favorite part of the movie) and I liked the last couple of minutes enough that I kind of wish that the entire thing had been a musical (though I guess "Singing in the Rain" pretty much already told this story as a musical).

I was also pleasantly surprised to see onetime ingenue Penelope Ann Miller pop up in a supporting role, even if she is now old enough to play the hero's frumpy, uptight spouse instead of the sweet young thing that steals his heart. I'm guessing she's just grateful to be appearing in a Best Picture nominated film at this stage in her career, almost twenty years after things began to cool off for her (does anyone, other than someone like me who worked at a video store in the early 90's, remember "The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag"? "Other People's Money"? "Year of the Comet" co-starring Tim Daly from "Wings"!?).

Bottom-line: I'm recommending "The Artist" because it works as a novelty, but I also think it's probably the least deserving Best Picture front-runner since, well, "The King's Speech" just one year ago.

Grade: B

Random Thoughts While Paging Through the Rolling Stone "2011 in Review" Issue

2012-01-08T10:27:00.022-06:00

Just as Playboy magazine needs to get rid of Hugh Hefner if it's ever going to reinvent/save itself (enough with the photos of sad, sad parties at the Playboy mansion; enough with the Marilyn Monroe fixation; enough with the embarrassing cartoons and "party jokes"; enough with the repetitive pictorials of Hefner's reality show "girlfriends"; enough with the fawning references to "Hef", as if he is the ideal that all men should be striving to be), Rolling Stone has to cut its ties to its publisher/creator Jann Wenner!

As long as he's in charge, the magazine will always have one foot stuck in his hopelessly dated baby-boomer aesthetics, making it one of the more schizophrenic magazines out there: one week, it's Bob Dylan or George Harrison on the cover and then, the next week, it's Katy Perry or Britney Spears. Wenner will happily put whatever teen idol is currently popular on the cover, no matter how synthetic their product is, as long as it will sell magazines, but inside will always be profiles of artists like Jackson Browne or John Fogerty, alongside a five-star review of whatever Mick Jagger might be up to lately!

(And, yes, I'm extremely bitter because Wenner will not allow The Monkees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame entirely because of their manufactured origins, something nobody born after 1960 really cares about, but I'll save that argument for another blog entry.)

So, anyway, let's page through the latest issue (of a magazine I've been subscribed to since 1985!) and see what Jann Wenner's got for us this month...

* Hmm, a two-page ad for Smirnoff Fluffed Marshmallow and Whipped Cream flavored vodkas. Being a girl-drink drunk, I have tried the Marshmallow vodka and it is actually quite delicious, though there's, sadly, not that much you can mix with it: hot chocolate, Godiva liqueur... that's about it.

* Page Five: the first non-ad page in the magazine! Oh, and who is this pictured? Jackson Browne at an Occupy Wall rally. When was the last time Jackson Browne sold one record?? Seriously, who under the age of 60 gives a f**k about Jackson Browne? My generation (and my generation is pretty old!) knows him principally as a guy with a song on the "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" soundtrack who (allegedly) used to beat up Darryl Hannah.

* Page 13 kicks off the "Rock & Roll" news section. In this issue, you get to find out what Bruce Springsteen, The Beach Boys, Aerosmith, ZZ Top, and Bob Seger are up to. No, I'm not kidding: Bob Seger! Way to change with the times, Rolling Stone! Can you imagine any college kid today, sitting in his dorm-room, flipping through Rolling Stone magazine?? It's a shame Blender went under. I thought that was a magazine that was appropriately reverent towards rock music's long history, but didn't feel like it was being written by journalists who actually attended Woodstock.

* Page 16: Not to keep harping on the same point, but this article called "Digital Music's Cloud Revolution" perfectly illustrates how hopelessly stuck between two worlds Rolling Stone magazine is: it wants to be young and current and on top of all the trends, but it lists Spotify's cons as "Catalog doesn't include the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, or key Bob Dylan tracks." It's missing key Bob Dylan tracks?? Oh, dear me, I think I'm coming down with a case of the vapors!

* Fifth question asked in the Bob Seger Q & A: "Do you remember where you were when you wrote 'Night Moves'?" That's funny, right?

* Page 38: a profile of Questlove from The Roots. I'll use this as another opportunity to bash Jimmy Fallon. Who wants a talk show host who is "honored" to have Michelle Bachmann as a guest and giggles at every single joke she makes as if she is just absolutely delightful? Concerning the whole "Lyin' Ass Bitch" controversy, I am Team Questlove; Fallon is Team Bachmann. Lame!

* After years as a respected comedy writer and stand-up, Louis C.K. ascended to legend status so rapidly this year that his ears had to have popped. I am happy for him. He is a good man and totally deserves it.

* Here's my stance on Obama as of this writing: I will be voting for him and I may even give him some money, but he doesn't deserve re-election. In retrospect, I wish I had supported Hillary in 2008. I thought she was a total dick during that campaign, but we need a dick right now. Dicks get stuff done.

* Want to know Sammy Hagar's favorite movie of 2011? "The Help"! "That movie was pretty damn special," he says. (Just in case you needed another reason to prefer David Lee Roth.)

* Chris Rock's 'Best Concert' of 2011 was Jay Z and Kanye West and his 'Worst Moment' was the death of Heavy D, but his choice of 'Best Director': "I just saw 'The Descendants'. Alexander Payne is my favorite guy not named Woody Allen. Alexander Payne is the fucking truth. We are lucky to be living in the time of Alexander Payne." I kind of love Chris Rock.

* Ke$ha is to new millennium party girls what Fred Durst was to dumb males in the 1990's: a lowest common denominator musical id.

* Conan O'Brien's choice for 'Worst Plot Device': "The line in 'Hangover 2' where Bradley Cooper says 'It's happening again.' It was this incredibly cynical thing of 'We've got to make another one. How are we going to get away with this? Oh, screw it. Just turn to the camera and say 'It's happening again' and have the same stuff happen." Hear, hear!!

* You think people complain a lot about Michael Cera always giving the same performance? Wait until Aubrey Plaza starts making movies!

* As a liberal, I think it's kind of embarrassing having Al Sharpton on MSNBC.

* I prefer "Chasing Pavements" to "Rolling in the Deep".

* I'm worried about MCA's health. It's scary to me that The Beastie Boys didn't make any "Hot Sauce Committee" promotional appearances and barely appeared in their videos this year because of how sickly he looked. I worry that any day now there will be an announcement.

* I received the book "I Want My MTV: The Uncensored History of the Music Video Revolution" for Christmas and read all of its 600 pages over three days. For those, like me, who came of age in the 1980's, I highly recommend it.

* Page 89: A four-star review of Bob Seger's "Ultimate Hits" compilation. It lists the key tracks as "Night Moves" and "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man". That's funny, right?

* The magazine's classified ad section, next to advertisements for Beatles t-shirts and Viagra, is an ad for something called "Fresh Balls". Believe it or not, it's exactly what you think it is: "Finally, the solution to a problem men have suffered with for generations. Fresh Balls is designed specifically to relieve the moisture and uncomfortable feeling of sweaty balls." Thank god our years of suffering are finally coming to an end!

Turn the page.

"The Innkeepers" and "The Devil Inside"

2012-01-07T16:44:00.000-06:00

"The Innkeepers" doesn't reinvent the wheel. There is literally nothing in this hotel ghost story that you haven't seen many times before. The movie works, however, because of two very likable lead characters that you really get to know and worry about. One of them is played by Sara Paxton, an actress that I have been somewhat familiar with for a while now through her usually vanilla (and often bikini-clad) work in such genre films like "Shark Night 3D" and the "Last House on the Left" remake, but has never made much of an impact on me until now. De-glammed into a believable (and very cute) girl-next-door, her work here is something of a revelation: she is utterly charming and funny ("winning " is another adjective that comes to mind) and I'm pretty sure, 14 months from now, when I'm compiling my 'Best of 2012' blog entry, her name will appear on my list of the year's favorite performances.

As a horror film, "The Innkeepers" may not be nearly as satisfying as director Ti West's previous film, the early-80's-influenced cult-favorite, "The House of the Devil" (for one thing, I am convinced that West botched the film's final shot), but it is absolutely "The Shining" compared this weekend's #1 film, the found-footage "Exorcist" knock-off "The Devil Inside".

I think the continued popularity of exorcism movies suggests that we really are a Christian nation and we take the concept of a devil quite seriously. I recall someone once telling me, "I'm not afraid of a guy killing teenagers in a hockey mask, but being possessed by the Devil could actually happen!"

Um, yeah...

Well, I'm guessing that person might find a scene or two in "The Devil Inside" legitimately frightening, because the movie does have several set-pieces that are well-staged and mildly creepy (it makes effective use of menstrual blood, for example), but those scenes are stand-alone vignettes and their impact is dulled considerably by being surrounded by scenes of endless exposition and a slack, shapeless narrative that is void of any sort of dramatic urgency. You never sense a story moving relentlessly forward while watching "The Devil Inside"; instead, you get a series of loosely-related scenes - most of them flat and many of them contrived - punctuated by the occasional loud noise, quick cut to black, or grotesquely contorted body.

I would much rather watch teenagers being stabbed by a guy in a hockey mask.

"The Inkeepers": B-

"The Devil Inside": D

Greatest Hits: 2011

2012-01-02T10:10:00.003-06:00

Over 365 days, this site has been viewed by almost 17,000 visitors more than 22,000 times. That's 70% more hits than I had in 2010!

Here are the most visited pages of 2011.....

1. Cory Snyder Ruins the Ending of "Meek's Cutoff" (May 20th, 2011)

People were clearly baffled by the ending of the Michelle Williams movie, "Meek's Cutoff". According to Google Analytics, the two keyword searches that most frequently led people to my site were "meek's cutoff ending" and "meeks cutoff ending" ("the cory snyder show" was a distant third).

2. "The Fighter" (December 23rd, 2010)

According to Google Analytics, the reason this entry was so popular was because it contains a picture of Conan O'Brien's sister, Kate.

3. The 50 Greatest "SNL" Cast-Members of All-Time (July 4th, 2011)

I'm not proud of a lot of my blog entries, but I am proud of this one. There are a number of similar lists out there on the internet and I think mine's the best. There are very few things that I know almost everything about and "Saturday Night Live" is one of them.

4. Random Thoughts: What's On TV Tonight (November 18th, 2009)

Thoughts on Keith Olbermann, "Deal or No Deal", and "The Fly 2", but still popular due to a photo of Olivia Munn. (Ranking on the 2010 'Greatest Hits' List: #1)

5. Christmas Eve Random Thoughts (December 24th, 2010)

Thoughts on Corey Haim, the Alvin & the Chipmunks "squeakquel", and Taylor Swift. Although it, too, features a photo of Olivia Munn, Google Analytics suggests this entry is so popular mostly due to people looking for info on Snooki's pistachio commercial!

6. My Thoughts on the 2009 Emmy Nominations (July 17th, 2009)

Two and a half years later, a picture of Sarah Silverman in her underwear is still drawin' 'em in! (2010 ranking: #2)

7. Live-Blogging the 2011 Grammy Awards (February 14th, 2011)

A pretty epic blog entry, but a good one. I think the various "live-blogs" are probably the best entries on the site; I'm certainly better at short, snarky one-liners than discussing the major themes in a given film.

8. Rating Late Night: "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson" (December 11th, 2010)

According to Google Analytics, there are apparently a lot of fans of the robot Geoffrey Peterson out there! I actually like my "Rating Late Night" series. My takedowns of Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon are worth seeking out, I think.

9. My 50 Favorite Film Actors of All Time: 50-41 (October 17th, 2009)

I kind of hate that this list is so popular. It really needs to be updated, if for no other than reason than I have Jack Black somewhere in my Top 20 and I've grown extremely tired of him over the last couple of years. (2010 ranking: #8)

10. April Random Thoughts (April 27th, 2010)

Thoughts on Ann Jillian, Adam Lambert, and Gary Sandy.

11. My 50 Favorite Film Actors of All Time: 40-31 (October 18th, 2009)

(2010 ranking: #10)

12. Live-Blogging the 2011 Golden Globe Awards (January 17th, 2011)

Ricky Gervais burns the place down.

13. Random Thoughts: 1988 (December 1st, 2009)

Inspired by a 1988 journal entry. (2010 ranking: #3)

14. Live-Blogging the 2010 Emmy Awards (August 30th, 2010)

(2010 ranking: #11)

15. "A Nightmare on Elm Street" and "The Human Centipede" (May 1st, 2010)

Well, people weren't looking up this entry throughout 2011 for my thoughts on the "Nightmare on Elm Street" remake, that's for sure!

16. 30 Minutes of Random Thoughts After 4 Glasses of Wine (November 11th, 2009)

Thoughts on "Saved By The Bell", "Laverne & Shirley", and They Might Be Giants. (2010 ranking: #5)

17. February 2011 Random Thoughts (February 20th, 2011)

This is actually quite an entry! Thoughts on Shelley Long, Shepard Smith, Abraham Lincoln, and Patricia Heaton - plus 'David Brent meeting Michael Scott' and 'Frank Sinatra vs Sammy Davis Jr'.

18. The AV Club Q & A's: Volume One (February 12th, 2011)

Thoughts on "Coneheads", "The Shadow", Harry Nilsson, "Twin Peaks", "I Heart Huckabees", and Steely Dan. I should make time to do another one of these AV Club-inspired entries.

19. Best Worst Movies (August 1st, 2010)

My favorite bad movies.

20. "The Perfect Host", "The Ledge", and "The Hangover Part Two" (May 28th, 2011)

Interestingly, according to Google Analytics, this entry was so popular not because of the $254-million-grossing "Hangover 2", but the $49-thousand-grossing David Hyde Pierce vehicle, "The Perfect Host"!

21. "Jackass 3-D" (October 16th, 2010)

A two-sentence review that, for some reason, soared in popularity when Ryan Dunn died!

22. My Favorite Film Actors of All Time: 20-11 (October 20th, 2009)

(2010 ranking: #4)

23. "RED" (October 15th, 2010)

I have no idea why this old entry is so popular. A mildly sexy picture of Helen Mirren, perhaps?

24. "Midnight in Paris" and the Films of Woody Allen (May 27th, 2011)

Every Woody Allen movie, ranked favorite to least-favorite.

25. Greatest Hits: 2010 (January 1st, 2011)

Again, the power of an Olivia Munn photo.

26. My Thoughts on the 2010 Emmy Nominations (July 8th, 2010)

Thoughts on "True Blood", "Parks & Recreation", "Lost", NBC's "The Office", etc.

27. "Blue Valentine" and "The Green Hornet" (January 15th, 2011)

Google Analytics data suggests a lot of people were interested in Ryan Gosling's hair.

28. "Super 8" (June 12th, 2011)

It's nice to know I wasn't the only one who had problems with this film.

29. My 30 Favorite TV Shows of the Last Decade (January 10th, 2010)

(2010 ranking: #25)

30. "Last Train" to Clarkson (February 14th, 2010)

My argument that Kelly Clarkson is the Monkees of the New Millennium. (2010 ranking: #16)

"The Adventures of Tintin"

2011-12-31T11:35:00.001-06:00

Pirates and treasure maps and dog sidekicks and teenage detectives... "The Adventures of Tintin" is probably a lot like the books Steven Spielberg enjoyed as a boy.

I hated those books.

Adventure stories didn't do much for me at age 12 and they do even less for me 30 years later. However, "The Adventures of Tintin" might have worked for me, at least a little bit, if there had been a character at the center of it that I found at all amusing or interesting, an Indiana Jones or a Captain Jack Sparrow. Instead, I defy any of you to name a more boring film character this year than the one-dimensional, goody-goody man-boy that is Tintin. He's not funny, he has no weaknesses or demons, he seems to have zero interest in girls, he doesn't appear to have parents or friends or school or a job, he sees a man murdered in front of him and displays no signs of trauma or grief... I couldn't even tell you what age he is! Is he 13 or 16 or 22??

As for the colorful supporting characters, put in place to offset Tintin's blandness (a ship captain who responds to booze the way Popeye responds to spinach, a Mutt-and-Jeff pair of clueless police detectives), I just found them annoying. Despite the film's life-like animation and 3-D effects, I never cared for a minute about what was happening on-screen. For me, the whole movie went in one 3-D lens and out the other.

Grade: C

Previewing January 2012

2011-12-28T11:29:00.007-06:00

January is traditionally a pretty dead month for new releases. This January looks to be no exception.

JANUARY 6th

The only movie opening wide is "The Devil Inside", which has a pretty effective trailer, though it looks awfully similar to "The Last Exorcism".

JANUARY 13th

Marky Mark makes two kinds of movies: good ones and generic action vehicles like "Shooter", "Max Payne", and "Contraband".

Also opening: "Beauty & the Beast" in 3-D and "Joyful Noise" with Dolly Parton (sadly, not in 3-D).

JANUARY 20th

The big release this weekend is "Underworld: Awakening", the fourth film in a series I've never had any interest in. (I may be wrong, but doesn't Kate Beckinsale deserve better than being the thinking man's Milla Jovovich?)

Also opening: Steven Soderbergh's spy thriller, "Haywire" (what is a Steven Soderbergh movie doing opening in January??) and Cuba Gooding Jr. (yup, still around!) flying a World War Two fighter plane in "Red Tails".

JANUARY 27th

"The Grey" is our annual late-winter Liam Neeson box office bait for older audiences. (You have to give him credit, with "Taken" and "Unknown", Neeson's managed to carve out a nice little niche for himself.)

Also opening: "Man on a Ledge", which should not be confused with - and could not possibly be worse than - 2011's man-on-a-ledge thriller, "The Ledge". Oh, and Katherine Heigl's film career continues it's long, slow descent with something called "One For The Money" (expect the bulk of the press tour questions for this one to be focused on Heigl's hair being dyed brown).

And that's it! Like I said, a slow month.

WHAT I AM MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING

"Wanderlust", in February.

WHAT I WILL NOT BE SEEING UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES

"Red Tails"

"The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo"

2011-12-27T16:48:00.008-06:00

What cool opening credits, huh? It's a shame that what followed was just another 'girl with a dragon tattoo' movie. I mean, the film was well-done and all, beautiful to look at and moderately engaging, but I felt a lot of "been here, seen that" while watching it. (Though, not all of the movie's problems can be based on over-familiarity with its source material: I suspect that even if I hadn't seen this story told on-screen just 20 months earlier, I still would've been able to correctly guess the film's villain the moment he appeared on-screen.)

In the title role, Rooney Mara was better than expected, though a little too pretty, in my opinion. The sex scenes may have been a little bit sexier because she was playing Lisbeth Salander, but Rooney always struck me as more of a poseur than a true goth-punk, an ingenue playing dress-up. (And what was the deal with her eyebrows? I know Salander is supposed to be a natural blonde who dyes her hair black, but do blondes even have eyebrows like that? She looks like a natural brunette who dyes her eyebrows white for some odd reason.) For me, Noomi Rapace remains the definitive Lisbeth Salander.

All that said, the movie is still worth seeing for director David Fincher's visual flair. In fact, I'd probably give this remake the same grade I gave the original (a B+), if it weren't for its long, incredibly anti-climatic epilogue. (I don't remember, did the ending of the first "Dragon Tattoo" seem to drag on forever like that? And did it also conclude with a final shot that seemed to reduce the tough, self-sufficient Salander character to just a girl with a crush on a boy?)

Grade: B

"Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol"

2011-12-26T09:51:00.014-06:00

That Tom Cruise is a resilient bastard. First Oprah's couch, the Matt Lauer interview, and the "South Park" Trapped in the Closet episode severely damaged his reputation; then "Lions For Lambs", "Valkyrie", and "Knight & Day" all either bombed or underperformed at the box office; then, in what seemed like a desperate move, he signed up for a fourth movie in a series that no one was really ever all that passionate about in the first place - a movie with the ridiculous title, "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol"!

He had to be done, right? I'm pretty sure many people thought so, when Hot New Thing, Jeremy Renner, was brought in to co-star in the movie, the rationale likely being that Tom Cruise was getting a bit too old and a more youthful actor was needed to bring in the kids and, possibly, take over the franchise one day (the Shia LaBeouf strategy). Paramount's unconventional release strategy of opening the film on only 425 screens in order to build up some positive word-of-mouth before going wide against the likes of "Sherlock Holmes" and "Alvin & the Chipmunks", also suggested that Cruise's days as a top box office draw were winding down: no other big-budget action sequel has ever needed a platform release to overcome public skepticism about its leading man.

But - surprise, surprise - the movie is actually a lot of fun and, apparently, the big hit of the holiday season! It's the best "Mission: Impossible" movie yet and Tom Cruise is actually really good in it. Listen, as a person, I hate the guy - I think he's crazy, his religion is a cult, and his marriage is a sham - but, he's evolved into a pretty good actor over the last twenty years (he should've won the Oscar for "Magnolia") and his project choices are interesting more often than not ("Eyes Wide Shut", "Vanilla Sky", "Collateral", "Tropic Thunder") . And if it was his decision to hire renowned Pixar animator Brad Bird to helm "Ghost Protocol", he is also a genius.

Right from the first scene, Bird brings a liteness to the movie, there's a spring in its step. It's not overly complicated like Brian DePalma's "Mission: Impossible 1" nor is it pompous and heavy like John Woo's "Mission: Impossible 2". "Ghost Protocol", instead, has a nice, clean narrative, with the tasks at hand being clearly spelled out for the audience (so we are not constantly struggling to keep up with the characters, as was the case with "Sherlock Holmes 2"), and it also has a tongue-in-cheek self-awareness about action film conventions and the movie's TV show origins. When the prison-escape pre-credits sequence ended with Tom Cruise saying, "Light the fuse", I smiled and said to myself , "That's brilliant."

I also really enjoyed the supporting cast: Simon Pegg is funny, as always, and Renner, who seems to be relishing a break from serious drama, is well-used as an audience surrogate, asking important questions like "Why are you doing this?" and "How did you know that would work?" The real star in the cast, however, is Paula Patton. Holy Crap! She was beautiful even when de-glammed enough to play an inner-city school teacher in "Precious", but she is melt-the-screen sexy here!

So, I had a good time with "Ghost Protocol". Welcome back, Tom Cruise! I look forward to "Rock of Ages".

Grade: B+

"Sherlock Holmes 2"

2011-12-22T20:28:00.000-06:00

Most of the time, while I was watching "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows", I had almost no idea what was going on. Thankfully, I was still able to enjoy the film's surface pleasures: the always fun-to-watch Robert Downey Jr, his chemistry with Jude Law, and the film's many stylish action scenes (lots of slo-mo!). I also enjoyed the interplay (the game of shadows, if you will) between Holmes & his nemesis, Moriarty, and I had a minute or two of fun, as I walked out of the theater, piecing together how Holmes managed to (implausibly) survive their climatic battle to the death.

And I liked how Sherlock Holmes' older brother (played by Stephen Fry) always calls him "Sherley".

So a mixed review for me. I'm not recommending it, but you could do worse.

Grade: C+

"Young Adult", "Shame", and "The Sitter"

2011-12-18T17:36:00.000-06:00

I'm sorry I've been away for a bit. I've still been seeing movies, but I haven't had much time to write about them. Here's some quick thoughts about what I've seen lately:

"Young Adult" is an intriguing movie, a character study of an extremely unsympathetic character, whom, over the course of the movie, either grows nor changes. It's a bit like "Bad Teacher" or "Bad Santa", but grounded in reality like one of those anti-hero HBO comedies that critics tend to like, but make most viewers a bit uncomfortable ("Enlightened", "The Comeback", "Summer Heights High").

I was initially excited to see the movie because I read comedian/co-star Patton Oswalt describe it somewhere as being about Generation X hitting the age of 40 and not taking it so well. While there is definitely that element to the movie - and, as a proud Gen-X-er, I appreciated it, what I think the movie is about is how difficult it is to significantly change who we are. For better or worse, our identities are defined at a fairly young age. Every now and then, we may get a glimpse of who we really are, warts and all, as the Charlize Theron character does late in the film, but we will usually repress that knowledge in order to live with ourselves.

Theron is pretty great in the movie (I love the way she chugs a 2 liter bottle of Diet Coke when she gets up each morning). Oswalt is good, too, though I find the Oscar buzz arund his performance just a bit much (despite his character's tragic back story, he's basically playing Patton Oswalt with a limp). Best of all, the dialogue by Diablo Cody, does not sound like Diablo Cody dialogue: aside from a reference to a "Ken-taco Hut" (a restaurant containing a Kentucky Fried Chicken, a Taco Bell, and a Pizza Hut all in one building), the cutesy, too-clever-by-half, word-play that she's known for has been largely abandoned. Despite having an acerbic female protagonist and a Minnesota setting, this feels much more like a follow up to director Jason Reitman's Cody-less "Up in the Air", than a follow-up to his previous Cody collaboration, "Juno".

My favorite thing about "Young Adult", though, is the opening credit sequence, in which Theron wallows in nostalgia by playing, over and over, a Teenage Fanclub song on a twenty year-old mix-tape. It's absolutely perfect! I especially love that the cassette looks like this:

What Gen-X-er doesn't remember that design!?

Grade: B+

The sex addition drama, "Shame", is this year's "Blue Valentine". Like "Valentine", it's a critically-acclaimed, solidly-made, well-acted drama - likely to get only one Academy Award nomination, despite having two deserving leads - with enough sexual content to get the MPAA all hot & bothered and severely limit it's already slight box office potential. And, as with "Blue Valentine", I liked "Shame" but could not love it. Though I don't have any real qualms or concerns about the film, no moments that rang false or plot points that I'd quibble with, I just didn't find myself terribly engaged with it. Maybe I couldn't identify with - or wasn't that sympathetic to - a wealthy, incredibly handsome man who is having sex all of the time. (I suspect if I looked like Michael Fassbender, I'd be a sex addict, too.)

Fans of full frontal nudity, however, will not leave disappointed.

Grade: B

If you insist on seeing "The Sitter", you may want to linger a bit at the concession stand and skip the first couple of minutes. I know I wish I had. Just as I did not need to see Jonah Hill's naked butt in "Get Him to the Greek", I really did not need to see him performing oral sex on his girlfriend during "The Sitter"'s opening moments. It's an image I honestly had trouble shaking for the first ten minutes or so of the movie!

I know we routinely have to stretch our willing suspension of disbelief these days as more and more movies and TV shows feature incredibly attractive women like Rosario Dawson falling for rotund men like Kevin James, but it completely strains credibility to see Johan Hill get propositioned and hit on by extremely pretty actresses like Ari Graynor and Kylie Bunbury. Hill just doesn't have the sexual charisma of a John Belushi or a Seth Rogan that is required to pull off being a viable heavy-set romantic leading man. Jonah Hill is morbidly obese and he looks like an owl.

And he also cannot carry a movie. He's a sidekick, a supporting player. Jonah Hill without Michael Cera or Russell Brand (or Brad Pitt, even) is like Oliver Hardy without Stan Laurel.

With a different actor in the leading role, this "Adventures in Babysitting"/"After Hours"/"Superbad" hybrid might have worked, but with Jonah Hill at the center of it, the movie never stood a chance.

Grade: C-

"Margin Call" and a Return to "Melancholia"

2011-12-04T19:28:00.007-06:00

I resisted seeing "Margin Call" for as long as I could, because I knew the subject matter wasn't for me. Ultimately, though, the good reviews and some low-level Oscar buzz won out & I ended up ordering the film on pay-per-view.

(By the way, is "pay-per-view" now an out-dated, old-timey term? I know you're supposed to say that a movie is available "on demand", but it feels wrong to write, "I watched the movie on 'on demand'." Any advice you can provide on this matter would be greatly appreciated.)

So, anyway, "Margin Call" is about the Wall Street collapse, so my big fear was that, having failed Economics in High School and never having revisited the subject in the almost 25 years since, much of the movie would go sailing right over my head. And, unfortunately, it did. I mean, I had more than a vague sense of what was going on, but it wasn't like "Moneyball", which you could fully enjoy even if you knew nothing about sports.

I'm still recommending the film to other dummies like myself, though, because I liked the film's 'over-the-course-of-24-hours' narrative structure and, more crucially, I enjoyed watching one of the best acting ensembles in recent memory at work. Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, Paul Bettany, and 'Teenage Spock' were all great. In fact, watching them bounce off of each other reminded me a bit at times of "Glengarry Glen Ross".

Grade: only a B, though those with an MBA degree or a stock portfolio may enjoy it more.

Also available on 'On Demand', though I opted on my second viewing to see it in 'In a Theater', is Lars von Trier's "Melancholia", a movie I liked a lot the first time I saw it, but hoped to love upon seeing it on a big screen. I figured that I might have missed something, seeing the world end on a relatively tiny 15 x 27-inch TV screen, but it turns out that, like most of the films I've seen twice this year ("Drive", "Midnight in Paris", "Bridesmaids"), I liked "Melancholia" the exact same amount the second time as I did the first time. I guess I need to trust my initial reactions a bit more! It's pretty rare that my opinion on a film changes dramatically with a second look (the last time I can remember it happening is 2004's "I Heart Huckabees").

There was one benefit, however, to seeing it in a theater: I don't know who does the tongue-in-cheek marquees at the Uptown Theater in Minneapolis, but this one made me laugh:

Grade: still a B+

"Hugo" and "My Week With Marilyn"

2011-12-03T16:46:00.001-06:00

I'm going to be really struggling when it comes time to officially rank my 10 favorite films of 2011. I feel like I'd have to watch them all again to get the order exactly right.

Immediately after seeing Martin Scorcese's "Hugo", I ranked it as my second favorite film of 2011, mostly because it is an absolutely gorgeous film to look at. It should definitely, in my opinion, win Oscars for art direction, cinematography, and costume design - and the 3-D effects are absolutely the best I've ever seen! The movie single-handedly disproves my theory that 3D should solely be used for gimmick films like "A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas" and "Piranha 3D".

Then, a day or so after seeing - and loving - the film, I began to feel my enthusiasm start to lag just a bit. I had enjoyed the film in much the same way one would enjoy a fireworks display - mouth agape for a couple of hours, ooh-ing and aah-ing - but, as with a fireworks display, once it was over, it was hard to remember why I liked it so much. Nothing about the experience of watching it stuck with me afterwards.

The movie was perfectly cast, but despite how fond I am of Sasha Baron Cohen and Chloe "Hit Girl" Moretz, I didn't find myself still marveling over their performances days later, like I did with Kristen Wiig in "Bridesmaids" or Albert Brooks in "Drive". Nor did the film's story intrigue me the way "Source Code" or "Melancholia" did or resonate with me emotionally the way "Uncle Kent", "The Future", or even "The Descendants" did. The movie also lacked a single stand-out scene that I felt like I just had to see again, like the Brooks/Cranston face-off in "Drive"or the end-of-the-world montage that opens "Melancholia".

Bottom line: at this exact moment, I am giving the 3D version an A-. However, if I had seen it in 2D, I'm sure it would only get a B+. For the time being, I'm keeping it ranked at #2 on my "Best of 2011", but don't be surprised if, upon reflection, it settles into spot somewhere in the middle of my Top 10 by the time the list is published in February.

Ranking nowhere near my Top 10 is "My Week With Marilyn". I love Michelle Wiliams, I really do. I think she is easily one of our five greatest actresses, and she does about as well as can be expected in "My Week With Marilyn", but having Michelle Williams play Marilyn Monroe is like having John Hawkes play Warren Beatty. She might be able to bear a passable resemblance to Monroe with the right make-up and a padded bra, but she sorely lacks the star power - the charisma, the va-va-voom, the life - that made Marilyn a star. I know Marilyn Monroe was troubled, but she could have never reached the heights she did if she was as flat and mopey as Williams plays her.

Not that Michelle Williams is the biggest problem with the movie; she's not. The biggest problem is that the movie isn't really about Marilyn Monroe, it's about this dopey production assistant on one of her movie sets. I really don't care that much about Marilyn Monroe, the drugged-up, insecure diva, but I really don't care about some lucky-bastard apple-cheeked kid who she once chose to go skinny-dipping with! In fact, I found two hours of him swooning over her, giggling like a schoolgirl, and telling her how much he loves her, really kind of annoying.

Take away the true-story elements and "My Week With Marilyn" is really just another boring coming-of-age story: "Summer of '42" but with a movie star doing the deflowering. Yet, the movie desperately wants to convince us that this was a great, tragic love story. I never bought it. I was never convinced that the lead character's feelings went any deeper than, "Holy Cow! Marilyn Monroe naked!" and I'm pretty certain that the real life Marilyn Monroe probably forgot he existed within days of having last seen him, just another guy in a blurry drug-filled haze of flings and would-be paramours.

Grade: C+

Previewing December 2011

2011-11-28T00:04:00.000-06:00

Another year winds down, as it always does, with Academy Award contenders and singing chipmunks...

DECEMBER 2nd

The film "Shame" raises a number of questions: Can an NC-17 film have a financially successful theatrical release? Will buzz from the Toronto Film Festival translate into a Best Actor nomination for Michael Fassbender? Will the media ever grow up and stop talking about how you totally get to see Michael Fassbender's dick, you guys! ?

DECEMBER 9th

The only way I could enjoy "New Year's Eve", Garry Marshall's all-star follow-up to "Valentine's Day", would be if it were a remake of "The Towering Inferno" and the characters played by Ashton Kutcher, Katherine Heigl, Sarah Jessica Parker, Zac Efron, Jessica Biel, Lea Michele, Alyssa Milano, Halle Berry, John Stamos, Ryan Seacrest, and Bon Jovi were all burned alive at the end. (Too harsh?)

Better choices this weekend include three Oscar-buzzy indies ("We Need To Talk About Kevin", "Young Adult", and "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy") and, possibly, Jonah Hill's swan song as a fat guy, the R-rated "Adventures in Babysitting" homage, "The Sitter".

DECEMBER 16th

Opening this weekend (in order of most interesting to least interesting): "Carnage" with Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster, and John C. Reilly; "Sherlock Holmes 2" with Robert Downey Jr, Jude Law, and the original girl with the dragon tattoo; and "Alvin & the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked" with Alvin, Simon, and David Cross.

DECEMBER 21st - DECEMBER 25th

Steven Spielberg has two movies opening ("The Adventures of Tintin" and "War Horse") and while Edgar Wright co-wrote one of them and the other is a likely Best Picture nominee, I have zero interest in either of them. I'm also going to pass on Cameron Crowe's "We Bought a Zoo", partly because it's about a family that buys a zoo and partly because I still haven't forgiven Crowe for "Elizabethtown". Slightly more intriguing is "Mission Colon Impossible Hyphen Ghost Protocol", or, as the (marketing) kids call it, "MI4", if only because it's directed by animation legend Brad Bird ("Ratatouille", "The Incredibles").

Also opening is some sort of sci-fi disaster movie called "The Darkest Hour" (starring Emile Hirsh, who once had a promising career not all that long ago), "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" (starring Daniel Craig, who desperately needs to be a hit after the back-to-back flops "Cowboys & Aliens" and "Dream House"), and "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" (starring Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, and 9/11).

DECEMBER 30th

And, finally, we close out the year with Meryl Streep kicking some ass as Margaret Thatcher in "The Iron Lady: Ghost Protocol".

WHAT I AM MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING

"Shame", "We Need to Talk About Kevin", "Carnage"

WHAT I WILL NOT BE SEEING UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES

"Alvin & The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked", "New Year's Eve", "War Horse"

"The Descendants" and My 10 Favorite George Clooney Movies

2011-11-27T00:03:00.001-06:00

Even more so than "Michael Clayton" and "Up In The Air", "The Descendants" is the ultimate George Clooney movie. For two hours, he is in every scene and is asked to play a wide variety of notes. I will be surprised (and disappointed) if he doesn't win Best Actor for it.

On the Alexander Payne scale, it ranks below "Election" and "Sideways", but above "About Schmidt" and "Citizen Ruth". For where it ranks among George Clooney's best work, or at least among my favorite Clooney films, read on....

MY TEN FAVORITE GEORGE CLOONEY FILMS

1. THREE KINGS (1999)

I cannot believe I've only seen his once (I've been meaning to get it on DVD for years), but the one time I did see it, I was convinced it was a masterpiece. I heart me some "I Heart Huckabees", but this is still David O. Russell's best film.

2. UP IN THE AIR (2009)

I considered placing this one at the top of the list because it's the Clooney film that resonates the most for me emotionally. (Another film I should really get on DVD.)

3. CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND (2002)

It speaks well of Clooney that he chose a Charlie Kaufman script for his directorial debut.

4. FANTASTIC MR. FOX (2009)

Alexander Payne, David O. Russell, Steven Soderbergh, The Coen Brothers, Wes Anderson - over the last dozen years, Clooney has worked with some of the best directors working today. I hope that one day he turns up in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie - or is recruited again by his old "From Dusk 'Til Dawn" brother, Quentin Tarantino.

5. MICHAEL CLAYTON (2007)

Possibly Clooney at his coolest (which is saying something). The closing credits of "The Descendants" actually reminded me a bit "Michael Clayton"'s closing credits (which I loved).

6. BURN AFTER READING (1998)

We've seen him do broad comedy in other films that, in my opinion, weren't as successful ("O Brother Where Art Thou", "The Men Who Stare at Goats"), but this is my favorite example of 'Silly Clooney'.

7. THE DESCENDANTS (2011)

Grade: B+

8. SOLARIS (2002)

One of Clooney's most underrated films (as is the comparably slow-moving and equally unloved - at least by mainstream audiences - "The American").

9. THE IDES OF MARCH (2011)

I would totally vote for President George Clooney.

10. OCEAN'S ELEVEN

The best of the three "Ocean" films, though "Ocean's 13" is enjoyable enough.

As for the rest of his post-"Batman & Robin" filmography: "The Perfect Storm" was a solid box office comeback; "Out of Sight", like "O Brother Where Art Thou", was liked much more by others than by me; "Syriana" and, to a lesser extent, "The Thin Red Line" went right over my head; "The Good German"and "Leatherheads" were noble failures; "Intolerable Cruelty" was seen, enjoyed, and immediately forgotten; and I still haven't gotten around to seeing "Welcome to Collinwood" (though I've heard good things).

(And, just as I didn't include "The Muppet Movie" in my list of Top 5 Steve Martin movies, because it wasn't really a 'Steve Martin movie', I didn't include "South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut" on my list of favorite George Clooney movies - though, if I had, it would have probably been #1.)

"The Muppets" and "Being Elmo"

2011-11-26T14:25:00.002-06:00

There are plenty of reasons for longtime fans to feel optimistic about the new Muppet movie: it's been written by two "Muppet Show" super-fans (Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller), it's had an absolutely perfect marketing campaign, and the reviews over at RottenTomatoes.com are currently 97% positive. There are, however, also reasons to be worried: above-the-title roles for established Hollywood actors (something the original trilogy of Muppet films never had), a central role for a bland new Muppet (be it Rizzo the Rat, Pepe the King Prawn, Bobo the Bear, or Clifford the dread-locked catfish, has a new member of the original ensemble ever been fully embraced by the general public?), and, most ominously, the refusal of Muppet legend Frank Oz to participate on the grounds that Segel & Stoller's script "didn't respect the original characters".

Having seen the film on opening night, I can say that, if you are a Muppet fan like I am, you will probably enjoy the movie much more if you go into the film with lowered expectations. "The Muppets" is wildly uneven and ultimately disappointing. It's an alright Muppet movie, but it's no "Muppet Movie". It's not even as good as "The Great Muppet Caper", "The Muppets Take Manhattan", or "A Muppet Christmas Carol".

There are a lot of things to like about it, tough: I found much of the opening third of the film very cute and charming; the film's romantic leads (Jason Segel & an admirably spunky Amy Adams), thankfully, managed to stay out of the way, for the most part; and the songs by Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords, while not nearly as great as the brilliant ones Paul Williams wrote for "The Muppet Movie", are amusingly Conchord-esque.

However, after a promising first act, I found my enthusiasm starting to sag a bit as the film went on. Here are some of the problems I had with the movie:

* What was with the agonizing montage set to Starship's "We Built This City", a song that I'm pretty confident not a single person on the planet enjoys?

* And, speaking of musical numbers, a choir of chickens performing Cee-Lo's "Fuck You"? What is this, "Alvin & the Chipmunks"? Such an of-the-moment (or, technically, about a full year past the moment) pop culture reference instantly dates the film. (And I could have also done without the Muppet version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit". It was sacrilege when old people sang it for comic effect in "Moulin Rouge" and it's sacrilege here, too.)

* The celebrity cameos are lame! "The Muppet Movie" had legends like Steve Martin, Bob Hope, Mel Brooks, and Richard Pryor. "The Muppets" has Whoopi Goldberg, Selena Gomez, James Carville, and the fat kid from "Modern Family"! It says something sad that the cameo that got the biggest reaction from the audience I saw the movie with was Jim Parsons!

The biggest problem I had with the film, though, is the casting of two central characters: Chris Cooper as the oil tycoon who intends to tear down the Muppet theater and Jack Black as the big celebrity that the Muppets kidnap so that they'll have a guest star for their comeback special. I strongly feel that a comic actor should have been hired to play the film's villain and a straight actor should have been hired for the role of the big celebrity.

As the villain, Chris Cooper is flat and boring - and the scene where he raps is absolutely painful to sit through. Now, if someone like Jack Black were in the villain role, chewing up the scenery and mugging for the camera, he could have really made something of the part (think of a performance similar to Steve Martin's in "Little Shop of Horrors"). Instead, Black is stuck playing a curiously neutered version of himself in the straight-man part of a star tied up and forced to participate in a Muppet telethon against his will. First of all, is Jack Black really a big enough star to play the A-lister a television networks needs to give a greenlight to a two-hour prime-time special? Shouldn't it be a Tom Cruise or a Brad Pitt or a George Clooney? Secondly, if all the part requires is struggling to get untied and reacting with dismay to assorted Muppet shenanigans, why hire Jack Black, an actor with a well-established devilish, fun-loving, free-spirit persona for the role? You know Jack Black would see the Muppets as kindred spirits, not pests, and would certainly not need to be kidnapped in order to appear on a Muppets telecast.

All that said, it's still good to have the Muppets back in a big way and I am happy for the film's success. I would have been very concerned about our future if a new Muppets movie couldn't do as well as "The Smurfs". Now that the franchise has been successfully revived, let's bring Frank Oz back into the fold and do it right next time!

Grade: B-

A better Muppet movie is "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey", a documentary about Kevin Clash, the Jim Henson disciple who went from making homemade puppets in his bedroom, as a teenager, to getting hired by Henson and eventually voicing the popular Elmo character. There's not a lot of drama to the film - Clash is not a particularly tortured character and the film's attempt to create drama out of his struggle to balance stardom with fatherhood doesn't really stick - but there is a lot of fascinating footage of life behind-the-scenes at Jim Henson Studios and there's something really inspiring in the story of a man with a very specific dream seeing it through to fruition.

Grade: B

Thanksgiving Break

2011-11-20T08:26:00.001-06:00

I'm taking a bit of a break, largely because I don't have any interest in either of this weekend's new releases ("Happy Feet Two" and "The Twilight Saga: Vampire Baby Part One"). I should be back to reviewing movies again by late next week, though. Over the next seven days or so, I'm hoping to make time for "The Muppets", "The Descendants", "My Week with Marilyn", and "Hugo". I'm also going to see "Melancholia" a second time - this time in a theater - so I may have some additional thoughts on that (it's currently sitting in 9th place on the list of my ten favorite films of 2011, but I'm hoping it'll move up that list after a second viewing).

I had considered putting something up on this site in the meantime by "live-blogging" tonight's American Music Awards, but it just seemed like too big of a chore. For one thing, I have zero interest in hearing "Moves Like Jagger" ever again. Instead, I'll be spending my Sunday night watching the PBS "American Masters" documentary on Woody Allen.

Have a good Thanksgiving!

"Martha Marcy May Marlene" and "The Skin I Live In"

2011-11-12T08:47:00.000-06:00

"Martha Marcy May Marlene" is a tense, intriguing film - cleverly constructed by first-time writer/director Sean Durkin - and its leading lady, Elizabeth Olsen, a beguiling blend of ScarJo and Maggie Gyllenhaal, is completely worthy of all the hype she's been getting for the last ten months or so. My only problem with the movie is its rather abrupt ending. There have been so many movies lately that end immediately before some key moment, that it's very quickly becoming an indie cliche (this year alone, I've seen it happen in at least three films: "Last Night", "Meek's Cutoff", and "Take Shelter"). "Martha Marcy" does the cut-to-black as well as any of them, but sometimes you just want to know what happens next, not spend the rest of your life wondering!

Grade: B+

Pedro Almodovar's "The Skin I Live In" is a crazy ass film. About half-way in, you'll probably find yourself wondering, "Is the movie going where I think it's going?" and the answer is, "Yes, yes it is." I will say no more because, like "The Crying Game", how much you'll enjoy the film depends entirely on how little you know about the plot going in; in fact, if you've already read a plot synopsis that gives away the twist, I wouldn't even bother with it.

Grade: B

On DVD: "Attack the Block", "Beautiful Boy", and "A Little Help"

2011-11-07T00:04:00.002-06:00

ATTACK THE BLOCK

A well-reviewed British crowd-pleaser that was barely released here in the states (maybe because of the thick accents?), "Attack the Block" is every bit the "Goonies vs Space Aliens" movie that "Super 8" wanted to be.

Grade: B

BEAUTIFUL BOY

The first of two indie releases this year to center on the parents of a school shooter, "Beautiful Boy", starring Maria Bello and Michael Sheen, is a well-acted and interesting film, though I don't know how much of the film's success is due to the skill of its creators and how much can be credited to how inherently dramatic/intriguing its premise is. I should have a better idea once i am able to compare it, favorably or unfavorably, to "We Need to Talk About Kevin" later this year.

Grade: B

A LITTLE HELP

This extremely annoying comedy-drama features the adorable Jenna Fischer surrounded by a calvacade of genuinely awful supporting characters. Ninety minutes of the film's 105 minute running time consists of Fischer's character repeatedly getting bullied into doing the exactly wrong thing by a series of total dicks. Irritating and, ultimately, pointless.

Grade: D

"The Catechism Cataclysm" and "Sleeping Beauty"

2011-11-06T08:56:00.002-06:00

A pair of very odd movies for more adventurous viewers. I have no idea what either film is about.

THE CATECHISM CATACLYSM

A strange, strange, strange movie. What begins as an odd couple buddy comedy (the story of two old high school acquaintances -a young priest and an Ice Capades spotlight operator - taking an afternoon canoe trip down a river) takes a sudden turn for the dark and surreal in its last twenty minutes. Is it for you? If you, based upon my recommendations, saw "Rubber" and "Super" and you did not think I was crazy for liking them, this might be another one to check out. However, if you are less of a fan of the avant-garde, you should probably pass.

Grade: B

SLEEPING BEAUTY

An intriguing film, but I kept waiting for its pieces to snap into place and they never did. (The last few minutes are especially puzzling.) Someday, I might stumble upon a detailed analysis of the film and be convinced that it's a masterpiece, but for now, my grade is: B-

"Harold & Kumar 3-D" and "Tower Heist"

2011-11-05T15:22:00.006-05:00

"A Very Harold & Kumar 3-D Christmas" is easily the best of the three "Harold & Kumar" films. It's not particularly funny, but it's good-natured enough and not aggressively unfunny in the way that the disappointing "Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay" was. Plus, its got some amusing 3-D effects, a substantial role for The State's Tom Lennon, and a return appearance by the MVP of the series, Neil Patrick Harris (though he is again underutilized in an extended cameo appearance).

Also opening this weekend is "Tower Heist", a movie that I had to sneak into because, despite my fondness for Eddie Murphy, Ben Stiller, Matthew Broderick, Alan Alda, Tea Leoni, and Judd Hirsch, I could not in good conscience support anything directed by that enormous douchebag, Brett Ratner. The movie was okay and I enjoyed the performances, but it wasn't nearly as entertaining as any of the recent talk show appearances that Eddie Murphy has made to promote the film. Murphy has proven that he is still naturally funny and charismatic - and "Tower Heist" is a definite step in the right direction towards career rehabilitation (no children, no fat suits - unless that's somehow him playing Gabourey Sidibe) - but he's really got to work with stronger directors than Brett Ratner if he's ever going to have a full-fledged comedy comeback.

My grade for both films: C+ (though my fondness for "Harold & Kumar" might end up increasing with time)

Previewing November 2011

2011-10-29T09:07:00.011-05:00

Coming Soon...

NOVEMBER 4th

I didn't like "Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle" and I liked "Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay" even less, so it's probably naive for me to be so looking forward to "A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas", but I am.

It's probably also more than a bit optimistic for me to hope that "Tower Heist" will kick off a big comeback year for Eddie Murphy, being that he hasn't made a good, non-animated, comedy in twelve years. His recent talk show appearances, though, have really reminded me why I liked him so much as a kid. I'd love it if he really followed through on his threats to give up family films and hit the road as a stand-up. (And while you're at it, Eddie, go back and host "Saturday Night Live", for god's sake! Bring Piscopo with you!)

NOVEMBER 11th

Something called "The Immortals" is opening up and I don't know what that is (I'm guessing Greek mythology meets "300"?), but it's probably not for me. Also opening is Adam Sandler's "Jack & Jill", which looks exactly like one of those awful movies George Simmons was famous for in "Funny People". (Honestly, does the movie advertised above look any more real than "MerMan" or "My Best Friend is a Robot"?)

Also opening: Leonardo DiCaprio in Clint Eastwood's "J. Edgar" (a.k.a. "Homework: The Movie"), and "Melancholia", a movie I've already seen on 'On Demand', but am anxious to experience a second time on the big screen.

NOVEMBER 18th

The big releases this week are "Happy Feet 2" (yuck) and "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part One" (which actually looks a bit intriguing, though it's way too late for me to get involved in this franchise now). The movie I will be seeing is George Clooney in Alexander Payne's "The Descendants". It's almost impossible to lose with Clooney (or with Payne, for that matter) and this one has got some really good buzz behind it (Best Actor?).

NOVEMBER 23rd

It's a shame that "Piranha 3DD"'s release date got pushed back from November 23rd to sometime in 2012, because it would have made for some much-needed counter-programming: just five days after the launch of "Happy Feet 2", three additional family films are getting a wide release: "The Muppets", Martin Scorcese's "Hugo", and "Arthur Christmas", which is not a sequel to Russell Brand's "Arthur", but is instead some Wallace & Gromit-type thing from the U.K.

Meanwhile, opening in limited release are two Oscar contenders: the silent film, "The Artist", which threatens to be this year's "Slumdog Millionaire" (or, at least, its "Life is Beautiful") and "My Week With Marilyn", which may star the great Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe, but aren't we all Marilyn-ed out by this point? I need another Marilyn Monroe biopic about as much as need another Robin Hood or Incredible Hulk movie. (Yeah, I know.... small-town girl, Norma Jean, sex symbol, Kennedys, overdose... I get it!)

WHAT I AM MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING

"The Muppets", "Harold & Kumar 3D", "The Descendants"

WHAT I WILL NOT BE SEEING UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES

"The Immortals", "Happy Feet 2", "Jack & Jill"

"The Rum Diary"

2011-10-28T19:59:00.008-05:00

It's nice to see Johnny Depp in a franchise not set on a pirate ship, but "The Rum Diary" - a "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" sort-0f-prequel, as well as something of a Hunter S. Thompson origin story - lacks the visual flair that Terry Gilliam brought to "Fear and Loathing" and features a Thompson character that is disappointingly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed compared to the detached, anarchic Thompson that Depp (and Bill Murray) has played in the past. This film's Hunter S. Thompson doesn't even do drugs for the first time until the film's final 30 minutes and is matinee-idol handsome enough to not just bed, but marry Amber Heard! Neither "The Rum Diary" nor its central character is nearly gonzo enough. It's a really flat, limp, boring movie.

Grade: C-

"Paranormal Activity 3"

2011-10-21T18:51:00.007-05:00

The third film in a horror series. A prequel set in the 80's. The first narrative feature directed by two non-fiction film-makers. There is no reason for "Paranormal Activity 3" to be good at all, let alone as good as it is.

I thought the first "Paranormal Activity" was fine, if a bit underwhelming compared to the hype. I liked the second a bit more, mostly because of how it played with it's narrative structure (the events in "Part Two" essentially happening concurrently with the events of "Part One"). The third film, though, is easily the best of the three. Unlike the first two, which were pretty much 85 minutes of set-up followed by a too-short five minute pay-off, this chapter is really suspenseful for at least half of its running time, often almost unbearably so. (The scene in the bathroom with the lights off, for example, is perfectly timed to instill maximum dread!)

I now find myself really looking forward to another sequel, believe it or not. I don't even care if it takes place in the present day, after the events of the first two films, or if it's another prequel, maybe set in the 90's during Katie and Kristi's teenage years. I'm just curious where the story goes from here. That's how successfully the people behind this series have somehow stitched an intriguing backstory to the matchbook-length plot of the first film.

One of the year's pleasant surprises.

Grade: B

"Take Shelter" and "Trespass"

2011-10-18T19:30:00.002-05:00

TAKE SHELTER

Watching "Take Shelter", a portrait of one man's descent into mental illness, is a depressing experience. It's also a bit frustrating, with plot points you can see coming from a mile away and a tacked-on twist ending that is equal parts intriguing and gimmicky.

Michael Shannon is great, though, and deserves an Oscar nomination.

Grade: B-

TRESPASS

First of all, this is not the mostly forgotten (though, if I remember, not that bad) "Trespass" with Ices T & Cube. This one instead stars the stunningly mismatched duo of Nicholas Cage and Nicole Kidman. They may both be Oscar winners, but there is no way this fire and ice combo should be in the same movie, let alone cast as husband and wife!

A lack of romantic chemistry, however, is the least of the movie's problems. On paper, this home invasion thriller has pretty much the same plot as the spanish thriller, "Kidnapped", which I reviewed earlier this year, but instead of cat-and-mouse intrigue and pitch black comedy, "Trespass" consists entirely of a half-dozen or so stunningly dumb characters making a series of poor choices while screaming endlessly at each other. It's repetitive, ridiculous, and fingers-on-a-chalkboard irritating. Director Joel Schumacher has made a lot of terrible films ("Batman & Robin", "Phone Booth", "The Number 23"), but this just might be the worst. There are flashback scenes in this movie that are so cheesy, they look like they were shot for a Mexican soap opera.

Grade: F

"The Big Year" and My 5 Favorite Steve Martin Movies

2011-10-16T13:10:00.018-05:00

I would have not predicted a month ago that one of the biggest flops of 2011 would be a comedy teaming Steve Martin with Jack Black and Owen Wilson. A box office disappointment, perhaps, but not a total disaster - which is exactly what "The Big Year" has turned out to be. Reportedly made for $40 million, this comedy (about the world of competitive bird watching!) could only manage an opening weekend gross of $3.3 million, good enough for just 9th place at the box office. To put that into context, here's some 2011 release that you probably have no memory of that had considerably better opening weekends: "The Rite" (14.7 million), "The Mechanic" (11.4 million), "Sanctum" (9.4 million) "The Eagle" (8.7 million), "African Cats" (6 million), and "Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs Evil!" (4.1 million).

Of the movie's three stars, Owen Wilson is the most likely to emerge from this disaster unscathed, thanks largely to his surprising success with Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris". As for Jack Black, after "Year One", "Gulliver's Travels" and this, he might find himself headlining a sitcom in the very near future.

And then there's Steve. At age 66, I fear this will mark the end of Steve Martin's run as a leading man. I can easily imagine him spending his remaining years as a semi-retired living legend - pursuing such passions as writing, playing the banjo, and art collecting - while making only the occasional media appearance, usually on a talk show or "SNL", to promote some new book or bluegrass album.

That would be the end of an era, but given his film choices over the last dozen years, maybe it's for the best. During the 80's, almost every movie he made worked (even the extremely flawed "Lonely Guy" has enough nice moments to make it worth a rental). The next decade, however, beginning with the unfortunate "My Blue Heaven" in 1990, was very hit-and-miss, with good films like "L.A. Story" and "Bowfinger" mixed in amongst the mediocre ("Leap of Faith", "A Simple Twist of Fate") and the genuinely awful ("Mixed Nuts","Sgt Bilko"). Things then got even worse in the '00's: after kicking off the decade with a failed attempt at doing something edgy ("Novocaine"), Martin retreated into the middle of the road, where he has languished in a string of unfunny family comedies usually helmed by bland, interchangeable studio directors such as Adam Shankman ("Bringing Down the House", "Cheaper By the Dozen 2"), Shawn Levy ("Cheaper By The Dozen", "The Pink Panther"), and Harald Zwart ("The Pink Panther 2").

Which brings us to "The Big Year", a movie that fits a bit too snugly into Steve's already too-large canon of soft-hearted, feel-good dramedies, alongside "Parenthood" and the "Father of the Bride"/"Cheaper By the Dozen" films. Thankfully, there are no cute kids around in this one (with the brief exception of one baby, limited to two scenes) and the slapstick of "Cheaper" 1 and 2 is missing as well (despite the presence of many trees and hillsides, neither Martin nor Black fall down any of them), so what we're essentially left with is the "City Slickers" of bird-watching.

"City Slickers" was a lot funnier, though. I was moved a bit by the "The Big Year"'s male-bonding and carpe-annum message, but I didn't laugh. In fact, I was kind of bored.

Let's hope that, with my generation - the generation that looked up to Steve Martin as a hero in the 70's and 80's - now in charge of Hollywood, someone out there - a Judd Apatow, a David Wain, or an Adam McKay - will give Steve an opportunity to make one last great flat-out comedy. "The Big Year" would be a disappointing film to go out on.

Grade: C+

MY FIVE FAVORITE STEVE MARTIN MOVIES

1. LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1986)

A perfect musical comedy, with a mid-80's dream cast (and also Jim Belushi).

2. L.A. STORY (1991)

Possibly the quintessential Steve Martin movie - though, I suppose, "The Jerk" could also be considered a contender for that title. The two films taken together neatly capture his evolution as a comic artist over a prolific twelve-year period.

3. THE MAN WITH TWO BRAINS (1983)

My favorite of the films made with Carl Reiner ("The Jerk", "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid", "All of Me"). It's an extremely silly movie.

4. PENNIES FROM HEAVEN (1981)

Steve's first attempt at drama - a dark, somber faux-musical set during the Great Depression - is now pretty well-respected, but was a notorious, almost career-killing, flop in its day (though, when adjusted for inflation, its total gross was still more than twice what "The Big Year" will ultimately earn).

5. DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS (1988)

A lot of movies could have gone in this slot, but I find "Scoundrels" to be a solid, underrated pleasure.

"Footloose" and "The Thing"

2011-10-15T09:28:00.002-05:00

Hey, remember the 80's? The remakes nobody needed just keep coming....

Unless you're a twelve year-old girl who has never seen the original "Footloose", it would probably be wise to skip the surprisingly reverential remake. If you have seen the original and loved it (in which case, I'm presuming you were a twelve year-old girl back in 1984), you should probably just keep on watching the original, which must have developed a pretty thick protective coating of kitsch and nostalgia over the years for anyone to still be caring about it in 2011. If, on the other hand, you're like me and never cared that much about "Footloose" to begin with, there's nothing much new in this extremely boring remake to win you over.

It's the same hokey story (outsider shakes up a town that bans dancing while he romances the preacher's daughter) and the same ultra-corny songs ("Let's Hear It For The Boy", "Holding Out For a Hero", "Almost Paradise"). The cast is different, of course, but both of the lead actors are pretty vanilla: Julianne Hough is a blandly beautiful hybrid of Amber Heard and Miley Cyrus, while newcomer Kenny Wormald looks like Johnny Depp's "Crybaby" character watered down with a heaping helping of Maxwell Caufield. Also inferior to his 80's counterpart: a totally slumming Dennis Quaid, whose pretty boring work as the film's villain makes one sorely miss the always entertaining hamminess of John Lithgow. (The only cast-member who improves on the work of his predecessor is Miles Teller, from "Rabbit Hole", who very affably takes over the Christopher Penn best friend part and reminded me a lot of a young John Cusack.)

Perhaps the film's biggest problem, though, is that it's really more of a teen drama than a musical. Because of the inherent structural problems in building a dance film around the story of a town that bans dancing, there is much more talk about dancing than actual dancing. And when characters do start dancing, it never feels natural: for a town that has made dancing illegal for the last three years, all of its residents are awfully good at it! Were kids doing backflips at your high school dances??

Grade: D

No less faithful to its source material, but marginally more entertaining is the new remake/prequel to John Carpenter's "The Thing". Unfortunately, it's modest pleasures (a couple of really big scares, some really creative monster effects) are undercut by an extremely muddled ending. As with "Footloose" (and "Arthur" and "Fright Night"), 'tis better to stick with the original.

Grade: a weak B-

"The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence"

2011-10-14T18:34:00.007-05:00

Listen, I liked the first "Human Centipede". I gave it a B. I ranked it as my 45th favorite film of 2010 (out of 113 films) - that's two places higher than "The King's Speech"! So, despite the extremely negative reviews, I thought there was still a pretty good chance that "Human Centipede 2" could work for me.

It didn't.

I think writer/director/insane-person Tom Six has talent - or at least I did until two hours ago - but he probably should have tried something completely different for his sophomore effort. Attempting to top the outrageousness of the first "Centipede" was probably always a bad idea, but trying to do so with such grim, unrelenting ugliness was a total miscalculation. Yes, part two is somehow a sicker film than the original and if your only standard for judging a horror film is based on how sick it is, then "Human Centipede 2" is a total success, but the movie completely lacks the dark humor, the colorful villain, and the suspense that made the gross-out stuff in the first film palatable (for lack of a better word).

The first "Human Centipede" made you want to run out and tell your friends about this crazy thing you saw. Sitting through the second one is something you'll probably want to keep to yourself.

Grade: F

"Melancholia" and "The Ides of March"

2011-10-09T12:43:00.007-05:00

MELANCHOLIA

It's good to see Kirsten Dunst back in the game. This beautiful, anxiety-inducing, end-of-the-world drama feels right at home on Dunsty's filmography alongside such moody cult classics as "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "The Virgin Suicides". There is, apparently, life after "Elizabethtown"! (Okay, maybe not for you, Orlando Bloom, but still..)

Grade: B+

THE IDES OF MARCH

George Clooney playing a Clinton-Edwards-Obama hybrid in a political thriller he co-wrote and directed, co-starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, and Marisa Tomei. What's not to like?

Grade: B+

Odds and Ends: "Weekend", "Submarine", "Little Man", and "Monica Velour"

2011-10-08T16:28:00.003-05:00

A bit of house cleaning before moving on to the much-anticipated "Ides of March" and "Melancholia"......

WEEKEND

A smartly-observed, well-acted, mumblecore-inspired romantic drama from England. Imagine "Before Sunset", only with two gay men as protagonists. B

SUBMARINE

A quirky coming-of-age comedy kneecapped by having the film's central character totally botch his perfect relationship with a super-cute girl for no other reason than the film's plot required him to. (Keep your eyes open for a wordless five-second cameo from one of the film's producers, Ben Stiller.) B-

SHUT UP, LITTLE MAN

This documentary about an audio vérité craze from the late eighties/early nineties brought back some feelings of nostalgia for my pre-internet, Gen-X youth, but it probably goes on a bit too long and tries to do a bit too much. B-

MEET MONICA VELOUR

Kim Cattrall is surprisingly good in this low-budget indie, giving a performance that successfully buries any trace of Samantha Jones. The movie feels written, though, with an especially clunky, uneven third act. And a word of warning: Cattrall may play a porn star, but it's 73 year-old Brian Dennehy that has the nude scene. An extra word of warning: the scene is shot from behind and he's bending over. C

Previewing October 2011

2011-10-01T16:09:00.014-05:00

Here's what to look forward to in the coming month...

October 7th

I will be seeing the George Clooney does "Primary Colors" political drama, "The Ides of March", though the early reviews suggest it's a good movie, not a great one. I also have a feeling that "Dirty Girl" will launch Juno Temple as the next big indie It Girl (someone has to fill the void now that Zooey is doing a sitcom on Fox).

The movie I am most looking forward to is "The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence". I'm sure it'll be terrible, but advance word suggests that the clearly insane director, Tom Six, has set out to make the most offensive, appalling movie ever and I just have to see what exactly that looks like.

What I will not be seeing is Hugh Jackman in "Real Steel", which looks to me like "Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots: The Movie".

October 14th

Of the three big releases, I am much more interested in seeing the Steve Martin/Owen Wilson/Jack Black comedy "The Big Year" and the horror remake/prequel/reboot "The Thing" than I am seeing a new version of "Footloose", but I have to say, judging from the preview, I think the people behind it may know what they're doing. First of all, it makes sense that the remake has been countryfied, with artists like Blake Shelton covering songs from the original "Footloose", because only in a small redneck red state town would the plot of a town banning dancing make any sense whatsoever. Secondly, I am amused to see that the remake has its characters wearing costumes awfully similar to those worn by characters in the original film (the green shirt with the skinny black tie, the maroon tux coat with the black bow tie). I am skeptical that the world needed another "Footloose" (or even needed the first one, for that matter), but it looks like the remake was put together with at lease some degree of thought and care.

October 21st

I am most excited about the buzzed-about indie drama, "Martha Marcy May Marlene" (good luck saying that one right at the ticket counter!), but will also be checking out "Paranormal Activity 3", despite my disappointment that it is yet another prequel, instead of a real sequel. Also opening is the Milla Jovovich 3-D swashbuckler "The Three Musketeers" (which should have really been called "The 3-D Musketeers", don't you think?) and I have no idea what the Carla Gugino sports drama, "The Mighty Macs" is all about, but unless the title is somehow a reference to Gugino's breasts, I'll probably pass.

October 28th

A lot of middling releases this week:

* Justin Timberlake stars with Amanda Seyfried in "In Time" a sci-fi thriller that looks a lot like a feature-length version of the "Sexy Back" video.

* Johnny Depp does Hunter S. Thompson without Terry Gilliam in "The Rum Diary".

* Roland Emmerich - the man who gave us "2012", "10,000 B.C.", "The Day After Tomorrow", "Godzilla", and "Independence Day" - takes what I'm sure will be a laughable stab at credibility with the period drama, "Anonymous".

* Antonio Banderas again voices his apparently beloved "Shrek" chararcter in "Puss in Boots", while Rowan Atkinson' has a sequel to 2003's "Johnny English" called "Johnny English Reborn", which somebody somewhere must have at least some interest in seeing. Someone? Anyone?

WHAT I AM MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING THIS MONTH

"Martha Marcy May Marlene", "The Ides of March", "Human Centipede 2"

WHAT I WILL NOT BE SEEING UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES

"The Three Musketeers", "The Mighty Macs", "Real Steel"

"Moneyball", "50/50", and "What's Your Number?"

2011-09-30T18:52:00.015-05:00

I'm not at all surprised that of the three movies I saw today, the one I was looking forward to the most was the one I liked the least, but it is still disappointing that a movie in which Anna Faris plays strip basketball ended up being harder to sit through than the ones involving Jonah Hill processing baseball statistics and Joseph Gordon-Levitt getting chemo.

MONEYBALL

As of this writing, two of my ten favorite movies of 2011 are true-life baseball stories: the ESPN documentary "Catching Hell" and, now, the acclaimed Brad Pitt film, "Moneyball" - this, despite the fact that I have zero interest in baseball and probably haven't sat though a game in five years. In the case of "Moneyball", my general disinterest in the subject matter may have actually helped me enjoy the movie more: I'm sure that not having a clue whether the Oakland A's would win 2o games in a row and/or make it to the World Series made the movie much more suspenseful for me than for the average viewer (hell, I was actually nervous at one point that the movie might end with Brad Pitt's character, Billy Beane, dying in a car accident, something that I'm sure those familiar with the real-life Billy Beane would not have been at all worried about).

Grade: B+

50/50

"50/50" is undeniably moving, with a very good central performance from Joseph Gordon-Levitt and some welcome supporting work from Phillip Baker Hall and onetime Max Headroom, Matt Frewer, but I would have liked the movie more had it cut back a bit on Seth Rogen's fratboy humor, which I'm really starting to get tired of, and concluded with a less tidy happy ending.

Grade: B

WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER?

Despite the occasional use of a body double, there are definitely Maxim-level displays of actual Anna Faris flesh on display in "What's Your Number?" and those images, I'm ashamed to admit, will most likely stay with me long after I've forgotten most of "Moneyball" and "50/50". That's not nearly enough to recommend the film, though. The movie is pretty much your standard Katherine Heigl-level rom-com only with Faris being completely wasted in the central role. It's not funny when it tries to be and is deadly dull whenever it attempts to be serious (pretty much the entire third act). Faris' familiar off-kilter line-readings (much parodied by Abby Elliott on "SNL") help somewhat, but do we really need yet another female-led comedy centered around a wedding (name the last one that wasn't) and promoting the idea that you can look the world over for your heart's desire, but sometimes you need look no further than the total douchebag in your own backyard (in this case, Captain America, Chris Evans, filling the Matthew McConaughey/Gerard Butler role).

It's, unfortunately, beginning to look more and more like Anna Faris, as a leading lady, may never top "Smiley Face".

Grade: C-

"Higher Ground"

2011-09-22T19:59:00.002-05:00

Extremely well-acted, but I found it kind of boring. I probably should have just seen "Drive" again.

Grade: C+

My Aborted Attempt to Live-Blog the 2011 Emmy Awards

2011-09-19T00:01:00.001-05:00

5:57 - Oh, man. I am an hour behind on the Ryan Seacrest "Red Carpet" show because I was busy putting the finishing touches on my blog entry about "The Ward" and "A Horrible Way to Die". If you only knew how much time I waste on reviews that nobody reads of movies that nobody watches! Anyway, let's go to the DVR...

6:05 - After pausing to see what Lea Michele was wearing, I fast-forwarded to Sarah Hyland from "Modern Family". She looks so much like a little kid that part of me wonders if she has some sort of Gary Coleman disease.

6:09 - Everytime I see Christina Hendricks I think someone really needs to cast her as Ginger from "Gilligan's Island". I think it says something about how she's seen in Hollywood that before director Nicolas Winding Rehn cast her in "Drive", he was auditioning porn actresses for the role.

By the way, if I was Nicolas Winding Rehn, I would try to hook up with actor Justin Long and start a production company called "Long and Winding Rehn Productions".

6:10 - Juliana Margulies has kind of a weird dress on. It looks like she is inside a cone.

6:17 - I'm fast-forwarding through Jimmy Fallon.

6:18 - Joel McHale's tux looks one size to small.

6:20 - I still haven't formed an opinion about Evan Rachel Wood.

6:21 - Zooey. I have seen the "New Girl" pilot. I like her enough, but who are these guys in the cast?? The guys on "The New Girl" and the guys on "Happy Endings" are completely interchangeable to me. They all look like Zoolander's roommates.

I hope Abby Elliott is working on a Zooey Deschanel impersonation. Someone needs to.

6:31 - Ooh, I don't like Gwyneth Paltrow's dress. The bare midriff is weird.

6:39 - Kit Kat bars are girl candy.

6:44 - My vote for "best dressed" might be Kate Winslet. She's such a class act.

6:57 - What's Andie MacDowell been up to?

Okay, it's showtime.

7:03 - This opening skit is not funny.

7:08 - Wow, that was long. Eight minutes and no laughs.

7:10 - Oh, so sad to see Joel McHale pulled into this trainwreck, singing alongside Wilmer Valderrama as one of the "Emmytones". This is all painful.

7:15 - Finally, the first award. It's Jimmy Kimmel presenting with Jimmy Fallon. One of the many things that annoy me about Jimmy Fallon: how he calls everyone "buddy".

7:17 - Supporting Actress in a Comedy. I was rooting for Kristen Wiig, but Carol Vessey won, which I can live with.

7:20 - Supporting Actor in a Comedy. Ty Burrell for "Modern Family". Well-deserved.

7:28 - The usually reliable Ricky Gervais just did a deadly pre-taped bit. Man, nothing is working tonight.

7:30 - For some reason they've got someone with a not at all comic voice reading not at all funny jokes as the winners approach the stage. Where's John Hodgman??

7:32 - Will Arnett and Zooey Deschanel are presenting an award and are totally bombing. I'm starting to fear that Zooey is beginning to believe her own press.

This show really is a disaster. I mean really terrible. Listen to these "jokes" read by that announcer guy I just mentioned a minute ago as "Modern Family" writers Steve Levitan and Jeffrey Richman took the stage:

"This is Jeffrey's second and Steve's third Emmy. I wonder if they prefer the chicken nuggets that are shaped like dinosaurs? Co-executive producer Christopher Lloyd has never been back to the future."

Seriously, are those even jokes???

7:40 - So, Charlie Sheen just came out and, for some reason, Jimmy Fallon - and only Jimmy Fallon - stood up to give him a standing ovation.

Sheen's opening line: "Thank you. Good evening." The camera then cut to a shot of Jimmy Fallon, still cheering wildly. This makes no sense.

Sheen is clearly on a campaign to rehabilitate his image. Is anyone buying that he is all of a sudden sane again?

7:43 - Jim Parsons just won Best Actor in a Comedy Series. Here's what the announcer guy - again, in a completely straight, non-comic voice - read as Parsons approached the stage: "This is Jim's second Emmy and third nomination. Jim eats a lot of peanut butter. Jim has several online fans which range from enthusiastic to quite frightening." Again, how are these jokes??? I seriously don't know if I can keep watching this.

7:47 - Best Actress in a Comedy. Melissa McCarthy won for "Bridesmaids". Well, technically, for something called "Mike & Molly", but we all know she really won for "Bridesmaids".

7:57 - A taped bit on the set of "The Office" was kind of funny (the best part: Jesse Pinkman from "Breaking Bad" delivering crystal meth to Creed), but now The Emmytones are on again. I am so embarrassed for Joel McHale.

I really can't take any more of this. Maybe I'll read a book or something until "Breaking Bad" starts in an hour.

On DVD: "The Ward" and "A Horrible Way to Die"

2011-09-18T11:19:00.020-05:00

After prisons, a mental institution might be my least favorite settings for a movie. Every movie that takes place in one, no matter the genre, has so many common elements (the stern Nurse Ratched figure, the sane patient who is only pretending to take her meds, the electroshock therapy, the failed escape attempts, the head psychiatrist in the big office, the under-lit hallways, the scenes of patients watching TV in the rec room) that when I watch one, I inevitably feel like I've seen it all before. John Carpenter's "The Ward", for example, is pretty much "Girl, Interrupted" with Winona Ryder, Angeline Jolie, and Brittany Murphy replaced with a bunch of CW actresses and being chased around by an evil spirit. Call it "Ghost, Interrupted". That said, the movie still stands head and shoulders above, say, "Gothika", and its twist ending, though very much a cliche, holds up to scrutiny surprisingly well.

I can't recommend it, but you could do worse.

Grade: C+

It makes sense that there would be overlap between the horror and mumblecore genres. Both thrive on low-budgets and aim to be as raw and naturalistic as possible (at least the best horror films do - it's why Tobe Hooper's "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" works and Jessica Biel's "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" does not). Starring mumblecore kingpin Joe Swanberg (the director behind "Nights and Weekends" and "Uncle Kent") and frequent mumblecore actress Amy Seimetz ("The Myth of the American Sleepover", "Tiny Furniture", and Swanberg's "Alexandra the Last"), "A Horrible Way to Die" is the third mumblechorror* film that I can think of (following the meta-slasher film "Baghead" and retro-occult classic "The House of the Devil"), and it's the first one to explore the by now thoroughly exhausted subject of serial killers (though, now that I think of it, 1990's "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" had a pretty mumblecore feel about it).

The film's low-key approach works for a while - or at least it doesn't not work - but, there is an absolutely ludicrous gear shift that occurs with about 10 minutes left that is only marginally redeemed by serial killer AJ Bowen's delightful line-reading of "Thanks for having me" - a very mumblecore moment that makes this underwhelming horror movie almost worth renting.

Grade: C-

* I hope that, in the future, I will get proper credit for being the person who coined the phrase "mumblechorror". I just did a Google search and, as of this writing, the phrase does not match any documents.

Post-script (written two weeks later): I feel like such an idiot! Out of the blue, a much better nickname for mumblecore horror films just hit me..... MUMBLEGORE!! It's perfect, isn't it??

"Drive"

2011-09-16T18:18:00.003-05:00

I wasn't crazy about the Tangerine Dream-like soundtrack (I guess I'll have to get used to films with an 80's influence now that the children of that crummy decade are emerging as the next generation of filmmakers) and I would have trimmed the ending by 30 or 40 seconds (the movie strains a bit for a needlessly ambiguous conclusion), but, overall, "Drive" is a solid piece of work. I've even found myself somewhat haunted by it in the hours since it ended.

And Albert Brooks as a mobster was everything I hoped it would be. His work alone makes the film worth a second viewing.

Grade: B+

"Contagion"

2011-09-11T15:03:00.005-05:00

Steven Soderbergh's "Contagion" is an effectively unnerving movie in which eight Academy Award nominees (and, for some reason, comedian Demetri Martin) do battle against the dreaded Gwyneth Paltrow Virus (also known as the "Goop Flu"). Portraying an entirely plausible apocalypse, a movie like this would fill me with anxiety under even the best of circumstances, but the fact that much of it is set here in Minneapolis, where I live and work, added an extra layer of dread, as one my biggest fears about the end of the world is that it will occur during a Minnesota winter.

It's not all gloom and doom, though. I suspect the legion of Paltrow-haters out there will get a kick out of her spastic death scene and a brief, but gruesome autopsy shot (I'll admit I chuckled a bit at the latter).

Grade: B

On DVD: "Small Town Murder Songs" and "Uncle Boonmee"

2011-09-10T23:50:00.000-05:00

"Small Town Murder Songs" is quiet little indie crime drama, light on mystery but heavy on mood, with a somber soundtrack (note the word "songs" in the title) that acts as almost a greek chorus for its tortured central character (well-played by Peter Stormare). It's a sleeper worth adding to your Netflix queue.

Grade: B

The Thai film "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" won the Cannes Film Festival's top prize in 2010 and opened in the U.S. this past March to near universal acclaim, but, boy, did it go over my head. I mean way over my head! This is a film where the ghost of a dead wife suddenly appears at the family dinner table, along with a long-missing son who has somehow, through sexual contact, turned into a fur-covered, self-described, "monkey ghost" (with glowing red eyes), and no one even bats an eye. It's all accepted as just the most normal thing on Earth! It also features an interlude in the middle of the film, having nothing to do with anything, as far as I can tell, where a deformed princess has sex with a talking catfish (!) and ends with what was, for me, the most compelling part of the movie: an extended, David Lynch-ian epilogue, set after Uncle Boonmee's funeral, in which characters sit in a hotel room and watch TV.

I had assumed "Uncle Boonmee"was going to be, more or less, a feature-length death-bed hallucination, where the title character flashes back to his many previous lives, but, oddly, aside from a quote placed on-screen at the beginning of the film, I didn't spot a single reference to reincarnation in the entire movie. Unless, in a previous life, Uncle Boonmee was either a princess or a catfish.

Grade: C+ (but you may get more out of it than I did)

"Bellflower"

2011-09-07T19:54:00.004-05:00

The low budget indie drama, "Bellflower", keeps teasing us with the possibility of an on-camera apocalypse, but unfortunately, it never comes. It's a shame because the movie has the most deplorable set of characters this side of "The Rules of Attraction" (one of which is played by the film's writer/director, confirming my suspicion that we are actually supposed to think of these characters not as total douchebags, but as charming antiheroes!). In addition to giving the film's alcoholic, self-centered, slacker leads some much needed direction in life (or at least a karmically well-deserved bout of radiation sickness), a big old mushroom cloud might have also spared us a ridiculous "is-it-real-or-is-it-all-in-his-mind?" third act that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

The mostly positive reviews suggest to me that critics are cutting this movie a lot of slack due to its D.I.Y origins, but, trust me, it is absolutely not worth your time.

Grade: D+

"Tucker & Dale Vs Evil" and "Apollo 18"

2011-09-04T11:07:00.004-05:00

The story of a bunch of snotty, obnoxious college kids who mistake two good-natured country folk for murderous hillbillies and proceed to accidentally kill themselves off, one by one, while trying to defend themselves against absolutely nothing, the black comedy "Tucker & Dale Vs Evil" is a one-joke movie, but it's a pretty funny joke. It's also, surprisingly, one of the sweetest movies you'll see with a death count so high.

Count on a cult following developing around this one.

Grade: B

"Apollo 18" is a moderately creepy, but muddled "found footage" sci-fi/horror film. Some footage is probably better off remaining lost.

Grade: C-

"A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"

2011-09-03T14:18:00.020-05:00

"A Good Old Fashioned Orgy" takes an intriguing premise (a group of lifelong friends decide to throw an orgy) and does nothing with it. There is not a single laugh in the movie. In fact, there are barely jokes in it. The writers apparently thought that the premise was so outrageous, that jokes weren't even necessary; instead, they seem to have banked on people finding the repeated use of the word "orgy" in and of itself inherently funny.

It's frustrating because with a little bit of effort, "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy" could have been a pretty interesting movie. Here are six things that I think could have made it work:

1. They should have hired an older cast. There are a lot of talented people in the movie (Jason Sudeikis, Nick Kroll, Will Forte, Lindsay Sloane, Lake Bell, Martin Starr), but it would have been funnier and more poignant had the characters been maybe a decade older. The eight orgy participants use arguments about misspent and faded youth to justify their decision to have an orgy, but all the whining rings hollow when the average age of the actors playing them was 29 at the time of filming.

2. The movie is featherweight when its plot could have been the basis of a movie that is really about something! For example, it could have been about people who feel that their lives are in a rut and, so they decide to make a desperate move in order to shake things up. Or, it could have been about a group of friends who are beginning to drift apart with time and are making a valiant effort to return to the glory days of their youth. Or, it could have been about any number of things involving friendship or sex or aging, but, instead, the movie is largely about the old gang losing their beach house and wanting to throw one last kick-ass party (woo-hoo!).

3. The filmmakers should have upped the dramatic stakes. What if a couple of the participants were married? Or had children? Or if one secretly was in love with another one? What if one of the participants was less desirable than the rest and felt left out of the proceedings? Or what if one of the characters was gay? Think of all the interpersonal dynamics that go one between a group of any eight people under normal circumstances and then throw group sex into the mix. I mean, where's the love and the jealousy and the anxiety and the awkwardness and the bitterness and the rivalry and the dark humor that would all be a part of an experience like that? There is some seriously intimate behavior going on at an orgy and it is naive to think that there there would not be some emotionally raw feelings going on just below, and occasionally above, the surface. Yet, the closest we get to any conflict is having Jason Sudeikis start to date a nice girl a few weeks before the orgy, leaving him briefly torn over whether to cheat on her with all of his friends or not, but then the movie immediately lets him off the hook with one of those cliched scenes where the guy goes to a girl's house, she answers the door, he begins to pour out his feelings, and then another guy suddenly appears in the doorway, behind the girl, asking "Who is it, honey?"

4. The entire movie should have taken place on the night of the orgy. It should have been one of those movies that take place all in one night & then no one is the same the morning after. Instead of 90 minutes fully exploring the dynamics of a sex party (and the resulting aftermath), a full hour of "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy" is devoted to planning the orgy! We get discussions of possible themes for the orgy, we get debate about who should and should not be able to attend, and we get montages of the characters watching porn, getting blood tests, and purchasing sex toys. Meanwhile, reminders at the bottom of the screen frequently appear to keep us abreast of how much time we have left until the party ("Six Weeks Until Labor Day", "Four Weeks Until Labor Day", "Two Days Until Labor Day", etc.) and they only make the set up all the more tedious. Every time one of these title cards would come up, I'd think, "Hurry up and get to the orgy already!!!"

5. They should have made it sexy. Given the subject matter, you'd think that really wouldn't have been too difficult, but for all its ribald talk, the movie is curiously timid when it comes to the sex scenes. Most of the action takes place off camera; the characters are always paired up in separate areas of a room, instead of engaging in intercourse in groups of three or more, as one would at an actual orgy; and everyone's body parts are always carefully shielded from the camera. Not counting a long shot, presumably of body-doubles, the only male cast-member we see naked is, of course, the fat guy (because fat people naked is funny) and, of the four female leads, the only one to show any flesh (for about two seconds) is, predictably, the least famous one of the bunch, the one we've never seen in any other movie before. Even "Tell Me You Love Me" star Michelle Borth (do a Google image search) remains discretely covered!

6. I would have loved an ambiguous or even an all-out sad ending. I love morning-after, harsh-light-of-day endings, but in this movie, there is no emotional fall-out from the orgy whatsoever. Everyone essentially reconvenes over breakfast and says, "Well, that was fun, let's go to the beach!" The End.

Grade: D+

"Red State" and "Shark Night 3-D"

2011-09-02T17:30:00.002-05:00

I'd rather not say a lot about "Red State" because part of the fun (if not most of the fun) of watching it comes from having no idea where its going. In my opinion, it's easily Kevin Smith's best movie - perhaps because I'm not a Kevin Smith fan and, aside from a couple very long talky stretches, there's nothing all that Kevin Smith-y about it. Instead of existing in a world where Jay and Silent Bob could wander by any minute, "Red State" is this sort of horror/drama/action/heavy-handed-satire thing. The direction is amateurish in spots (what's with the title card announcing what time the John Goodman character is having breakfast?) and the story definitely has its flaws (I had a problem or two with the ending and I'm guessing you might, too), but it is inarguably one weird, weird, weird movie and, for that reason, I'm recommending it.

Grade: B

Pretty much everything you need to know about "Shark Night 3-D" you can get from its title. Doesn't "Shark Night 3-D" sounds like a fictional movie that characters in a TV show might go see? Can't you imagine Screech from "Saved by the Bell" or Malcolm of "Malcolm in the Middle" heading off to see a movie called "Shark Night 3-D"??

Predictably, perhaps, the movie itself is about as imaginative as its title. While watching it, I actually screamed once and jumped a couple of times, but, overall, "Shark Night" is pretty thin soup, with a plot that's too ridiculous for even the most forgiving horror fans to take seriously. And, with it's PG-13 rating, it greatly pales in comparison to last year's absolutely gonzo genre piece, "Piranha 3-D". While "Piranha 3-D" was classic grindhouse, "Shark Night 3-D" is total SyFy channel.

One of the film's big eye-rolling moments comes at the film's conclusion, when a beloved pet dog suddenly reappears, alive and well, hours after being thrown into shark-infested waters by the movie's main villain (yes, the movie actually has human villains!). It's one of those annoying "Don't worry, folks, the dog's okay!" codas that occur way too routinely in horror films, disaster movies, and TV commercials. In "Piranha 3-D", the dog would not be okay.

Grade: C

A note about the film's 3-D: There is nothing about "Shark Night 3-D" that demands that it be seen in the 3-D format, but if you're going to see a movie called "Shark Night 3-D", why go half way?

Previewing September 2011

2011-08-31T00:20:00.001-05:00

Hey, Freaks, here comes September!

SEPTEMBER 2nd

In addition to "The NASA Blair Witch Project" ("Apollo 18") and the PG-13 "Piranha 3-D" ("Shark Night 3-D"), the R-rated comedy not good enough for summer (yes, it's presumably worse than "The Change Up"), "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy" opens in limited release. I had a feeling that, despite its talented cast (Jason Sudeikis, Will Forte, Lindsay Sloane, Lake Bell), it would pretty much go straight to video. Whoever put together the poster was certainly phoning it in!

SEPTEMBER 9th

From Adam Sandler's Happy Madison production company - the people who brought you "Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo", "Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star", and "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" - comes "Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star", the latest "(Funny Name): (Funny Descriptive Term)" comedy to star a member of Adam Sandler's entourage. One of the safest bets in life is that any movie bearing the "Happy Madison" logo will be total crap, especially if it does not star Adam Sandler! Check out this sad list of the previous Sandler-free Happy Madison films:

"Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo", "The Animal", "Joe Dirt", "The Master of Disguise", "The Hot Chick", "Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star", "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo", "Grandma's Boys", "The Benchwarmers", "Strange Wilderness", "The House Bunny", "Paul Blart: Mall Cop", and "Zookeeper". Together, these films have any average "fresh" rating at RottenTomatoes.com of only 18%!

You're probably better off this weekend seeing the world wiped out by The Gwyeth Paltrow Virus in Steven Soderbergh's "Contagion".

SEPTEMBER 16th

I'm most excited about seeing Albert Brooks play a mobster in "Drive", but if you're in the mood for something dumber, you could see "Mars Attacks!" stars Sarah Jessica Parker and Pierce Brosnan reunite in the female-pandering "I Don't Know How She Does It" or James Marsden in the remake of Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs". (By the way, whenever I am asked "Who do you think is this generation's Dustin Hoffman?", I always answer, without hesitation, "Why, James Marsden, of course!" Now how about a remake of "The Graduate" starring Channing Tatum?)

Oh, and "The Lion King in 3D" is opening. I never saw "The Lion King" in 2-D. It's too orange.

SEPTEMBER 23rd

Oh, please let's all hope "Abduction" bombs. I can't deal with Taylor Lautner. I love how catty people on the internet say he looks like a llama:

Instead, if you need an action fix, why not try "Killer Elite" starring two actors who have probably seen better days (Clive Owen and Robert DeNiro) and one who probably hasn't (Jason Statham, who I'm starting to think is the modern equivalent of Charles Bronson, playing the same part over and over again in a long string of indistinguishable B-grade action movies).

Also opening on September 23rd is Brad Pitt, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Chris Pratt in the drama "Moneyball", which I wish wasn't about baseball, and Ashley Judd in the PG-rated 3D family film about dolphins called "Dolphin Tale", which I wish wasn't a PG-rated 3D family film about dolphins called "Dolphin Tale".

SEPTEMBER 30th

The month ends strong...

In wide release, we've got Anna Faris in "What's Your Number?", Naomi Watts and Daniel Craig in "Dream House", and Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon Levitt in "50/50", all of which I have at least some interest in. Opening in limited release are four more movies I'm curious about: the horror-comedy "Tucker & Dale Vs Evil" (co-starring Katrina Bowden of "30 Rock"); Michael Shannon in "Take Shelter"; Anna Paquin, Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo, and Matthew Broderick in the long-delayed Kenneth Lonergan film, "Margaret"; and "Sarah Palin: You Betcha", from the amusing British documentarian, Nick Broomfield.

Of the seven, though, I've got to go with "What's Your Number?", or as it's more bluntly titled in France....

WHAT I'M MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING IN SEPTEMBER

"Shark Night 3-D", "Take Shelter", and "Sex List"

WHAT I WILL NOT BE SEEING UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES

"Abduction", "Dolphin Tale", and "Lion King 3-D" (it's just too orange!)

106 Days of Summer: A Look Back at Summer 2011

2011-08-30T00:03:00.004-05:00

This was not a good summer. Things rallied a bit in August, thanks to a few pleasant surprises and a couple solid arthouse releases, but, for the most part, it felt like a long drought between "Bridesmaids" on May 6th and "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" on August 5th. I ended up seeing 18 of the twenty films on my 2011 Summer Preview list, where, together, they had an average "predicted grade" of only a B-. After seeing them, they ended up with a actual average grade of C. In other words, as bad as the summer looked going in, it was actually considerably worse.

FIVE FAVORITE MOVIES OF THE SUMMER

1. BRIDESMAIDS

2. THE FUTURE

3. OUR IDIOT BROTHER

4. RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

5. CONAN O'BRIEN CAN'T STOP

(Technically, the documentary "Catching Hell" should be on the list, as I saw it during the summer months, but I'm leaving it off because it still hasn't managed much of a theatrical release.)

FIVE LEAST FAVORITE FILMS OF THE SUMMER

1. PASSION PLAY

2. CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE

3. THE HANGOVER PART 2

4. THE LEDGE

5. THE CHANGE UP

MOST PLEASANT SURPRISE

RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

Not only was "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" not on the list of the movies I was most looking forward to seeing, but had I compiled a list back in April of the summer releases I had absolutely no interest in seeing, I'm sure "Apes" would have been on it! Until I saw the trailers, I assumed the movie would be James Franco running around in the woods, being chased by talking, fully-dressed, standing-upright ape warriors, like Marky Mark did in the Tim Burton "Apes" movie that I chose not to see. Then, when I saw the trailers and learned it was an origin story, I was a little bit interested, but still doubted it could possibly be any good. But then came the reviews: 83% Fresh at RottenTomatoes.com! Amazing! Along with approximately 7.8 million other people, I went on opening weekend and thoroughly enjoyed myself. It's a clever movie; as good as a "Planet of the Apes" movie could be.

BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT

THE TREE OF LIFE

This film has divided audiences. I am ashamed to be part of half who didn't get it.

THE FIVE BIGGEST HITS THAT I CHOSE NOT TO SEE

1. HARRY POTTER 8

2. TRANSFORMERS 3

3. CARS 2

4. KUNG-FU PANDA 2

5. THE SMURFS 1

THREE MOVIES THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN BIGGER HITS

30 MINUTES OR LESS (Jesse Eisenberg is still not, and likely will never be, a box-office draw)

FINAL DESTINATION 5 (not a great movie, but it should have done better than the previous "FD" installment, which was really quite bad)

GLEE: THE 3-D CONCERT MOVIE (though I'm kinda relieved it flopped; while I liked the movie, I still hate "Glee")

(By the way, although I am very fond of the box office dud, "Our Idiot Brother", it probably made about as much money as it should have made. It was an indie comedy cynically dumped onto 2,555 multiplex screens in hopes of making a quick cash-grab from low-brow audiences expecting "Dinner For Schmucks 2". Had the Weinstein Brothers done a traditional platform release in only art-house theaters, as they should have, it would have been warmly received by a niche audience, made nearly the same amount of money, and then would have moved to the secondary markets (DVD, pay-per-view) without having the stink of having been a box office flop all over it.)

HAPPIEST BOX OFFICE NEWS

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS

How amazing was it to see a Woody Allen movie stay in the box office Top 20 for fifteen straight weeks and earn more than 50 million dollars!? While I'm not one of the people who loved it, as a life-long Woody fan, I'm thrilled with its success.

MOST FRUSTRATING BOX OFFICE NEWS

THE HANGOVER PART TWO

Because it earned more than $250 million domestically (and another $327 million internationally), I'm sure the people who made "The Hangover 2" think they made something quite good. They didn't.

But that's not what's frustrating - bad movies makes lots of money all of the time (did you know that, when adjusted for inflation, "Porky's" made the equivalent of $248 million back in 1982?). What's frustrating is that, after the film's enormous opening weekend ($86 million), the box office take didn't immediately drop like a stone in Week Two. Being that no one particularly loved it and everyone seemed to agree that it was a complete rip-off/remake off of the first "Hangover", bad word of mouth should have kept the total domestic gross somewhere below $200 million, but the fact that it earned the industry-standard total gross of three times its opening weekend, suggests that people ignored the bad word-of-mouth and felt they just had to see it for themselves.

I guarantee you though, audiences won't be as nearly as eager to rush out to "Hangover 3". The filmmakers don't realize it yet because they're still rolling in money, but the brand has been tainted.

MOVIES I LIKED BUT NOT AS MUCH AS EVERYONE ELSE DID

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS

TABLOID

THE TRIP

MOVIES I DIDN'T LIKE AND EVERYONE ELSE SEEMED TO LOVE

TREE OF LIFE

CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE.

(I may be wrong about "Tree of Life", but I am definitely not wrong about "Crazy, Stupid, Love"! Anyone who likes that movie is welcome to come sit with me in my living room, where we will watch it on DVD and I will point out everything that is phony and corny and terrible about it.)

MY FAVORITE PERFORMANCE OF THE SUMMER

Kristen Wiig in "Bridesmaids"

MY LEAST FAVORITE PERFORMANCE OF THE SUMMER

Charlie Hunnam in "The Ledge"

Alright, let's put this lousy summer behind us. I'm ready for the fall! Bring on Lars von Trier and the Muppets!!

Bridesmaids Outtakes - watch more funny videos

Live-Blogging the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards

2011-08-29T00:04:00.006-05:00

Should I even be doing this? I know that Britney Spears is going to be getting some lifetime achievement award, presumably for becoming an international icon despite an inability to sing live, write songs, play an instrument, act, dance, or chew gum and walk at the same time. I know I will get really mad, so should I really put myself through witnessing it?

Ugh, and what if I have to see Chris Brown or Will.i.am or Puff Daddy? Or The Situation? Or Jimmy Fallon?? Oh, man, it could be a rough night. I can easily imagine Steven Tyler leering at some co-presenter a third of his age, like Selena Gomez or someone. The MTV Music Awards always seem like an occasion for nice, normal celebrities to become douchebags and for douchebag celebrities to become ENORMOUS douchebags.

Oh, well, I'll give it a shot. It can't be worse than the show I have in my head, can it? And maybe Katy Perry will be there wearing some provocative candy-colored outfit? That's worth a couple hours of my life, right?

7:31 - Okay, the VMA Red Carpet Pre-Show is on, but I can't bring myself to watch it, so let's see what else is on:

"A Hard Day's Night" is on a network abbreviated as PLDHD. I don't know what that stands for. Something HD. Anyway, I saw "A Hard Day's Night" in college and I was really bored by it. I guess I'm not really a fan of early Beatles (my collection begins with "Rubber Soul" and ends with "Abbey Road"). It only occurred to me recently that "A Hard Day's Night" is a really weird title - for both a song and a movie.

I guess PLD stands for Palladia. I'm sure that network will last long. Sounds like another TRIO to me.

7:36 - Let's see what else is on...

"The Shawshank Redemption". So many people love that movie, which is odd to me. I just can't get behind prison movies, especially ones involving characters who have been wrongfully imprisoned. I can't imagine having a favorite film with so much anal rape in it. Or any anal rape, for that matter.

7:39 - "Big Brother" is on CBS. Man, I was so hooked on that show for its first two seasons, then I forced myself to walk away. It just took over my life those two summers I watched it. I would just lie in bed, thinking "Those people are in that house right now!"

7:40 - I still have "A Hard Day's Night" on. Do you want to know what my favorite Beatles song is? "You Never Give Me Your Money".

7:43 - Think quick! Which movie came first: "Before Sunrise" or "Before Sunset"??

I don't know the answer and I'm too lazy to check. I know I didn't like the first one, but enjoyed the second one.

7:45 - This has nothing to do with anything on TV, but I couldn't find a natural place in my "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" review this afternoon to make reference to Katie Holmes having a weird, elongated body.

7:47 - Ah, "Dumb and Dumber". An easy movie to watch.

Remember Karen Duffy?

7:51 - OK, Woody Allen's "Love and Death". This is where I'm staying for the next nine minutes.

8:00 - Here we go. It's Lady Gaga, or, as I call her, just "Gaga". PAWS UP!

Oh, she's dressed as a man. That's no fun. She's doing some sort of comedy routine. I wish she'd sing something.

8:03 - Three minutes in and I am really bored. This is going on forever.

8:04 - Gaga is finally singing. I'm still bored (it's some kind of power ballad), but, Britney, please note that she's actually singing. And that cross-dressing bit didn't work, but there is no doubt that it's Gaga's vision, whereas Britney just does what's she's told to do by her people (and barely that).

Okay, I'll try to stop harping on Britney Spears for a while.

8:10 - Someone named Kevin Hart is on stage. I have no idea who that is.

I'm really tempted to flip over to "True Blood" and see if anyone is naked.

Or maybe I should just live-blog the rest of "Love & Death".

8:13 - Jonah Hill looks weird thin. Weird and ugly.

She's not rapping at the moment, but I like Nicki Minaj's rapping style. My favorite part of her song "Super Bass" is when she raps in that weird accent of hers, "I can tell that you're in touch with your feminine side." I just think it's a funny lyric.

8:15 - Ugh, Britney Spears just won Best Pop Video. Oh, I hate her so much. People treat her so delicately, like they're afraid to hurt her feelings. It's like if everyone's afraid that if we stop giving her these meaningless awards, she'll shave her head and have to be institutionalized again.

8:23 - Kanye and Jay Z are rapping to an Otis Redding track.

Oh, my god, they just cut to a shot of Justin Bieber in the audience and he's wearing earrings, eye glasses, and gold chains. He looks so ridiculous. When his ride is over in a year or two, it's going to end hard. He will not be prepared for a life on the C list. Davy Jones, the Bieber of his day, described the sensation once as, "It was like, 'But I am the king!' There was nowhere to go, there was nothing to do."

8:26 - Presenter Miley Cyrus just claimed that she has always loved rock music: "I grew up listening to Nirvana, Joan Jett, and Aerosmith". Kurt Cobain is in his grave having no regrets.

8:38 - You know, I have another thought about "Super Bass" (which just won Best Hip Hop video): I think "Super Bass" is one of those songs like "50 Ways To leave Your Lover" and "Three Times a Lady" where the verses are much better than the chorus.

8:40 - I like the ice cream cone necklace that Nicki Minaj is wearing.

8:45 - Katy Perry just won an award for that "E.T." song, which is a really, really dumb song.

So, is her hair actually dyed that color? It doesn't look like a wig.

8:48 - Pitbull. Any enemy of Lindsay Lohan is a friend of mine.

Kim Kardashian is in the audience. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but didn't she get married just like a week ago? I guess her job is going to these things.

8:55 - Taco John's is five times better than Taco Bell.

8:59 - Adele is singing. Not a single person has lip-synched tonight. When Britney Spears sits there in the audience, watching these performers is there any part of her that knows she's a fraud? Any part of her that thinks, "I wish I could do that!" I guess, because she is not allowed to talk to the press, we'll never know.

9:05 - I really should be watching "Breaking Bad" right now.

9:13 - Seriously, Justin Bieber looks like Rachel Maddow.

Anyone can thank God in an acceptance speech, but Bieber just thanked God and Jesus! I'm sure Jesus appreciated it.

9:14 - Oh, Good Lord. Chris Brown. Is there anything we won't forgive? He's a total ass. And he's lip-synching.

I think I'll watch "Breaking Bad" for awhile.

9:34 - Okay, I'm back. "Breaking Bad" has been something of a slow-burner this season, but things are getting good with tonight's episode.

9:36 - Gaga is giving the lifetime achievement award to Britney Spears and she's still dressed like a man for some reason.

She says Britney taught us all how to be fearless. I'd like some elaboration on that point.

This is so beneath Gaga. Lady Gaga is the new Madonna, not the new Britney Spears. Britney was the pretender to Madonna's throne; Gaga is the real deal.

I don't know if I can watch this. I'm going to fast-forward for a bit.

Britney is reading her acceptance speech from a teleprompter. Fearless!!

9:42 - Beyonce once again showing us all how it's done. A cute, old-school pop song.

9:47 - Beyonce just non-verbally announced she was pregnant. It's the end of an era (sad-faced emoticon).

9:49 - It's Young the Giant. More like Yawn the Giant!! (Good one.)

9:54 - Cloris Leachman with the cast of "Jersey Shore"? Was Betty White unavailable?

9:55 - At the exact moment every one is getting sick of "Born This Way", it's just starting to grow on me. (I don't listen to the radio much.)

10:03 - Ah, the Amy Winehouse tribute. I hope this will be good. I liked Winehouse and rooted for her. I think "Tears Dry On Their Own" is one of the all time great songs and I think her first album, "Frank", is really underrated. Of course, I'm a sucker for bad girls in cocktail dresses.

"Arthur" star Russell Brand just gave a really long speech about her and then introduced the overrated Tony Bennett, who is now giving a really long speech. Please, for God's sake, somebody sing!!

10:10 - Finally, Bruno Mars is doing "Valerie". It's good, though I wish he was doing it with Winehouse's long-suffering back-up band. I'm glad he didn't go with "Rehab".

10:19 - Katie Holmes is giving out the Video of the Year award. That really shows how much power Tom Cruise still has, at least with Viacom (owner of both MTV and Paramount Pictures, the studio behind "Mission Impossible 4"). Ooh, this is the spot where I should have mentioned Katie Holmes' strangely elongated body! Dang it!

Okay. I'm calling it a night. Time for the rest of "Breaking Bad"!

"Don't Be Afraid of the Dark"

2011-08-28T15:34:00.003-05:00

(Warning: there is a spoiler, contained in parenthesis, in this review's second-to-last paragraph.)

Here's a little bit of trivia for you: did you know that the majority of filmgoers who see horror films are women? Isn't that weird? You'd expect it to be teenage boys, but no, studies show women are the big horror fans. Now do you understand why the lone survivor is so often female and why the name above the title so often belongs to a leading lady (Jamie Lee Curtis, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Neve Campbell, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Naomi Watts, etc.)?

With "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark", the name above the title belongs to the current Mrs. Tom Cruise, but, just as Katie Holmes is no Nicole Kidman, "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" is no "The Others". In fact, with movies like this, "Mad Money", "The Romantics", "The Extra Man", and "The Kennedys" making up her post-marriage resume, it's clear that Katie is getting the raw end of whatever her Faustian bargain is with Mr. Cruise.

The movie has its share of creepy moments, but it's also loaded with cliches (the gothic mansion, the skeptical father, the ominous groundkeeper who obviously knows more than he lets on, the children's drawings of sinister creatures, the psychologist who dismisses legitimate fears as being all in one's head, the treasure trove of information to be found at the local library) and the ending makes less and less sense the more you think about it. (Ask your self two questions: 1. What exactly happened to that final victim?, and 2. How did the survivors explain the loss of that victim to the authorities and/or the victim's friends and relatives ?)

I could say a lot about this, but it's probably not worth your time or mine, as the film will soon be all but forgotten by everyone but the occasional elementary school student, who will run into the movie on cable and will, no doubt, delight in describing the plot (tiny monsters in a heating vent, armed with razors!) and its silly twist ending (now she's one of them!) to his or her friends on the schoolyard playground.

I will mention one thing that bothered me, though: if a Polaroid camera is crucial to your movie's plot, have the common sense to set the movie in the 1970's! When one character is taking a photo at the airport using a giant old-school Polaroid camera (complete with detachable flashbulbs) and the character next to her is talking on a cell phone, it sticks out like a sore thumb!

Grade: C-

The 2011 Fall Movie Preview

2011-08-27T10:59:00.005-05:00

Here comes the good stuff! You might recall that when I put together my 2011 Summer Movie Preview, I struggled to come up with even 20 movies I was looking forward to seeing, but I could have easily put together a Top 30 or 35 list for my Fall Movie Preview - and that's without Sarah Polley's "Take This Waltz", still sadly without a release date (though I'm hoping it does well enough at the Toronto Film Festival in September to earn an Oscar-qualifying theatrical run this winter) and David Wain's "Wanderlust", which just recently had it's release date pushed back from October to January (uh-oh!).

Here's my Top 25 for the remainder of 2011...

1. MELANCHOLIA

Release Date: November 11th (though available On Demand on October 7th!!)

The Reason I Want To See It: Dunsty does von Trier.

Why It Might Not Work: The reviews out of Cannes were pretty good, but it's hard to predict which Lars von Trier movies will work for you and which ones won't. I liked "Dogville", but a lot of people didn't; there are those that love "Breaking the Waves", but I was bored... you just never know!

Predicted Grade: A-

2. THE MUPPETS

Release Date: November 23rd

The Reasons I Want to See It: It's made by people who know and love The Muppets and know that the three great Muppet movies are the original trilogy: "The Muppet Movie", "The Great Muppet Caper", and "The Muppets Take Manhattan"; it's directed by James Bobin, the co-creator of "Flight of the Conchords" and "Ali G"; it reportedly has cameos by Alan Arkin, Zach Galifianakis, Ricky Gervais, George Clooney, Donald Glover, Judd Hirsch, Jack Black, and Ben Stiller; the music was supervised (and songs were co-written by) Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords.

Why It Might Not Work: There is always the danger that, instead of being a Muppet Movie with Jason Segel, it will be a Jason Segel movie with Muppets.

Predicted Grade: B+

3. DRIVE

Release Date: September 16th

The Reason I Want To See It: Albert Brooks cast against type as the film's villain (and getting rave reviews for it)!

Why It Might Not Work: Though I am starting to get just a little bit of Ryan Gosling fatigue, I have no reason to believe that this is not going to be a future cult classic.

Predicted Grade: B+

4. PIRANHA 3DD

Release Date: November 23rd

The Reason I Want To See It: Blood, gore, T & A, in 3-D, at a water park.

Why It Might Not Work: A new writer-director team; original cast-members Adam Scott and Elizabeth Shue have been replaced by the far, far inferior likes of David Hasselhoff and Gary Busey.

Predicted Grade: B-

5. MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE

Release Date: October 21st

The Reasons I Want To See It: Head-trippy subject matter; great reviews out of Sundance.

Why It Might Not Work: As with "Drive", I just don't see it not working - the festival reviews are that strong. I fully expect an Oscar nomination for lost Olsen twin Elizabeth Olsen, which would be nice for her after living a life in the shadow of sisters Mary-Kate and Ashley.

Predicted Grade: B+

6. THE DESCENDANTS

Release Date: November 23rd

The Reasons I Want To See It: Clooney; "Sideways"/"Election" director Alexander Payne.

Why It Might Not Work: Payne is due for a miss, isn't he? Also, for some reason it co-stars Matthew Lillard, the long-forgotten Jerry Lewis to Freddie Prinze Jr's Dean Martin.

Predicted Grade: B+

7. A VERY HAROLD AND KUMAR 3-D CHRISTMAS

Release Date: November 4th

The Reasons I Want To See It: The trailer looks as loopy as hell, with lots of goofy 3D jokes and some fine, silly work from Neil Patrick Harris.

Why It Might Not Work: I thought "Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay" was a great idea, too, but it ended up being one of my ten least favorite movies of 2008.

Predicted Grade: Tough one. I could love it or hate it. History suggests a C-, but I'm going to be optimistic and predict that it'll work for me the way "Jackass 3D" did: B-

8. SLEEPING BEAUTY

Release Date: October 28th

The Reasons I Want To See It: Creepy, artsy sex stuff starring Emily Browning from "Sucker Punch".

Why It Might Not Work: Weak reviews on the film festival circuit; word is that director Julia Leigh is the poor man's Jane Campion.

Predicted Grade: C+

9. WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER?

Release Date: September 30th

The Reasons I Want To See It: The main one is Anna Faris, though a supporting cast that includes Joel McHale, Andy Samberg, Thomas Lennon, Martin Freeman, and Chris Pratt certainly helps.

Why It Might Not Work: The plot makes the movie sound like a "Broken Flowers" for the Katy Perry set. Also, is Chris "Captain America" Evans funny? (Another reason for a demerit: Anna Faris used a body double for her nude scenes. Booo!!)

Predicted Grade: C+

10. TAKE SHELTER

Release Date: September 30th

The Reasons I Want To See It: Like "Martha Marcy May Marlene", this is another head-trip film with strong reviews out of Sundance; it also stars the very good Michael Shannon, who appears to be working from his nut-job sweet-spot in this one.

Why It Might Not Work: It could be one of those festival favorites that are virtually ignored in the art-houses. It looks "Donnie Darko"-esque, which may or may not be a good thing.

Predicted Grade: B+

11. THE BIG YEAR

Release Date: October 14th

The Reasons I Want To Se It: Steve Martin working with Owen Wilson and Jack Black.

Why It Might Not Work: The movie is based on a non-fiction book about bird-watching; it's directed by the guy who did "Marley & Me"; it's written by a guy who's only had three screenplays produced in the last 20 years ("Antitrust", "The Public Eye", and "The Man Who Knew Too Little") and none of them were funny; it co-stars Jack Black, who has totally lost me over the last couple of years with junk like "Gulliver's Travels", and frequent Larry the Cable Guy collaborator Owen Wilson, who has only recently begun to win me back with his work in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris".

Predicted Grade: B-

12. THE IDES OF MARCH

Release Date: October 7th

The Reason I Want To See It: It's a political film starring and directed by George Clooney.

Why It Might Not Work: How is this different from "Primary Colors" exactly?

Predicted Grade: B+

13. WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

Release Date: December 2nd

The Reason I Want To See It: A fascinating premise: What do parents feel when their child goes on a high school shooting spree?

Why It Might Not Work: "Beautiful Boy", which came out earlier this year and currently sits in my NetFlix queue awaiting its October 11th DVD release date, has the exact same premise.

Predicted Grade: B

14. TOWER HEIST

Release Date: November 4th

The Reasons I Want To See It: A crazy ensemble cast that includes Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Matthew Broderick, Alan Alda, and Judd Hirsch!

Why It Might Not Work: It's directed by total Hollywood douchebag Brett Ratner.

Predicted Grade: B

15. CARNAGE

Release Date: December 16th

The Reasons I Want To See It: A four-person black comedy starring Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, and Christoph Waltz, directed by Roman Polanski

Why It Might Not Work: Are any of the actors aside from Reilly any good at comedy? How will it not feel like exactly what it is, a stage play on film?

Predicted Grade: B

16. SHARK NIGHT 3-D

Release Date: September 2nd

The Reason I Want To See It: It's called "Shark Night 3-D"

Why It Might Not Work: Its PG-13 rating suggests "Piranha 3D Lite". (Yeah, I know "Jaws" was rated PG, but this obviously ain't no "Jaws".)

Predicted Grade: C+

17. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

Release Date: December 21st

The Reasons I Want To See It: I'm curious to see what David Fincher does with the material.

Why It Might Not Work: Too soon after - and to similar to - the original "Girl With/Who" trilogy? Didn't I just see them all last year??

Predicted Grade: B

18. CONTAGION

Release Date: September 9th

The Reasons I Want to See It: Director Steven Soderbergh; stars Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard.

Why It Might Not Work: The September release date isn't all that promising; could be too scary, being that the film presents a more likely apocalypse scenario than, say, "Battle: Los Angeles" (though Paltrow haters may find it to be the biggest feel-good hit since "Seven"!).

Predicted Grade: B+

19. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3

Release Date: October 21st

The Reason I Want To See It: I liked the previous two installments, as least a little bit.

Why It Likely Won't Work: One of the things I liked about the second "Paranormal Activity" movie was the way it was both a prequel and a sequel, with its events happening simultaneously with the events of the first film, until, at the end, when the two plotlines merged. My hope for the third installment was that it would show us what exactly happened to the Katie character after her spirit-possessed killing spree at the end of the previous two films, but instead, I hear Part Three is another prequel, looking at Katie's childhood!! I DON'T NEED ANY MORE BACKSTORY!! I still think my concept of having the third film focus on a Katie exorcism administered by the Reverend Marcus character from "The Last Exorcism" is a far better idea: it would be the "Freddy Vs Jason" of "found footage" horror films!

Predicted Grade: D+

20. RED STATE

Release Date: September 23rd

The Reason I Want To See It: Kevin Smith makes a horror film!

Why It Might Not Work: Kevin Smith is not a very good director (reviews have been weak so far, though comedian Marc Maron liked it, which, for some reason, means something to me).

Predicted Grade: C

21. HUGO

Release Date: November 23rd

The Reasons I Want To See It: A 3D Release from Martin Scorcese, starring Sacha Baron Cohen and Chloe "Hit Girl" Moretz.

Why It Might Not Work: Fantasy isn't really my genre, nor is it Scorcese's.

Predicted Grade: B

22. APOLLO 18

Release Date: September 2nd

The Reason I Want To See It: Space is creepy.

Why It Might Not Work: The way its release date keeps getting bumped around the calendar suggests its studio has little faith in it, plus, hasn't the "found footage" conceit been thoroughly exhausted? Do we really need "Blair Witch in Space"?

Predicted Grade: C

23. THE DREAM HOUSE

Release Date: September 30th

The Reasons I Want To See It: Naomi Watts; a plot that reportedly features two major twists.

Why It Might Not Work: One of those twists is given away in the trailer. Shield your eyes and plug your ears, people!

Predicted Grade: B-

24. THE THING

Release Date: October 14th

The Reasons I Want To See It: It looks like a pretty faithful remake of John Carpenter's 1982 original (and it has a role for Lyle the Intern!).

Why It Might Not Work: Mary Elizabeth Winstead is pretty, but she's no Kurt Russell.

Predicted Grade: C+

25. SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS

Release Date: December 16th

The Reason I Want To See It: I love Downey being Downey.

Why It Might Not Work: Well, it is a sequel. Which reminds me, why isn't it called "Sherlock Holmes and The Case of the (Something, Something)" or, at the very least, "Sherlock Holmes and the Game of Shadows"? Does there have to be a colon in every sequel title these days? If the second Indiana Jones movie came out today, you know it'd be called "Indiana Jones: The Temple of Doom"!

Predicted Grade: B-

It should be a busy fall!