A more accurate title for “Peep World” would be “Famous People Flailing.” Here’s a wholly unpleasant dramedy, generally uneven and reckless, from director Barry Blaustein, who was last seen helming 2005’s “The Ringer.” You remember, the Johnny Knoxville comedy about the Special Olympics? Well, the filmmaker’s sense of humor hasn’t improved much in the intervening years, with his latest effort an unfinished, unlikable take on familial depression and friction.
“Waking Madison” appears as though it emerges from a heartfelt place of concern, yet the execution of this psychological drama is thoroughly unremarkable, consumed with ambiguity and obvious mood while its critical sense of humanity is pushed aside for low-budget dreamscape showboating. Writer/director Katherine Brooks has passion, but her feel for storytelling is seriously tangled.
For “House of the Rising Sun” to work as a thriller, it needed a new cast, a fresh script, and a director with a little more interest in properly establishing characters. Muddled and frequently comatose, the picture yearns to be a turbulent ride of crooks and cops, yet it never rises to the occasion, generating a feeble mystery sold by a cast of brutes trying to pass themselves off as actors.
Movies based on video games always face an impossible challenge of adaptation, especially anything pulled from the 1990s, when gaming was just starting to showing interest in expansive narratives and complex characterizations. “Tekken” is a failure on many levels, but it does make a plucky attempt to replicate the flippy-floppy nature of the fighting elements, creating a limb-snapping effort of escapism surrounded by bland writing and sleepy performances.
Personally, I harbor no romantic feelings for the 1981 Dudley Moore sleeper smash, “Arthur.” Distractingly clunky, the feature is best appreciated as a film of its time, when a mainstream comedy could be built around the antics of monstrous alcoholic and still be regarded as adorable. It’s strange to be confronted with a remake of such beloved material, which still holds to a clownish boozehound mentality to acquire laughs, though much of the overt foam has been shaved away out of respect for the disease. Then again, Moore made “Arthur 2: On the Rocks,” so perhaps the character isn’t as precious as I recall. Remake away, boys.
“Dawning” is an exhaustively disappointing film. Co-writer/director Gregg Holtgrew appears to have his heart in the right place, staging a psychological thriller in the middle of Northern Minnesota woods, where isolation provides a sinister backdrop to vague evildoing. Unfortunately, there’s little terror within the picture, which spends too much time exploring clichéd characters, skipping fingernail-chewing suspense to cover tedious, repetitive domestic matters.
2007’s “Rec” was a marvel of a horror film, portraying piercing POV scares with an unreal strain of screen anxiety, shaping a monumental genre exercise in sheer cinematic terror. Of course, it was quickly dumbed down into an excretal American remake titled “Quarantine,” but directors Paco Plaza and Jaume Balaguero weren’t content to let the story die there. “Rec 2” shouldn’t logically work, but the raw creativity of the filmmakers lights up the screen, reworking the premise of handheld horror into a fierce, raging mix of “Aliens” and “The Exorcist.”
“Miral” is a film of many themes, characters, and stories, though it desires to be a singular vision of history. Chaotically arranged by director Julian Schnabel, the film is an uninvolving mess, though a thoughtfully composed jumble of emotions and time periods ambitiously reaching for a distressing screen poeticism it never achieves.
“13 Assassins” is like watching a protracted chess game with an exquisite final move. It’s a samurai tale of allegiances and vengeance, and while its violent, blood-spattered path is engrossing, the film makes a considerable effort to slow cook the set-up, making the road to death’s door something significant, moving away from empty stylistics to stage a film of icy warrior valor.
It’s difficult to take Nicolas Cage seriously these days. The former madman has been forced into a series of paycheck gigs for reasons obvious to anyone enjoying access to the internet, with “Season of the Witch” a solid representation of Cage’s new career direction. Unchallenged and over-wigged, the actor is merely biding his time with this serving of horror hooey, obviously more interested in hearing the sweet sound of “cut!” than trying to make a tepid screenplay shuffle with restless energy Cage is more than capable of summoning. The material needed his special sauce. Instead, Cage barely raises an eyebrow.
“The Warrior’s Way” is an odd one. Wedged somewhere between the furious imaginations of Tsui Hark and Sergio Leone, the feature is an idiosyncratic ode to pure screen heroism thwarted by the junky instincts of its untested writer/director, Sngmoo Lee. I was never outright bored by the picture, but there’s much to jeer in this overwrought action film, which spends so much time reminding the audience of its artificiality, it forgets to have some spaghetti western fun with the limitless potential of CGI.
Our friendly turtle guide returns to the deep blue sea with “Sharks,” a semi-sequel to the 2003 production, “Ocean Wonderland.” Once again detailing the activity of the ocean, the focus is on the titular creature here, though director Jean-Jacques Mantello doesn’t always have the patience to stay glued to shark incidents. Often swimming around to observe the rest of the neighborhood, the film creates more of a community feel here than anticipated.
“You Got Served: Beat the World” is a terrible motion picture, but you probably already knew that. The original “You Got Served,” released in 2004, was also a terrible motion picture, but at least it made the attempt to tell something of a story between blasts of street dance and hip-hop humiliation. “Beat the World” is a lazy movie, with only a faint hint of conflict dusted over repetitive and illogical dance sequences. It’s a bore from start to finish. Again, you probably already knew that.
Imagine a tepid Marx Brothers comedy starring Gabe Kaplan, Alex Karras, and Robert Klein, and there’s “Nobody’s Perfekt,” a pronounced attempt to bring jolly vaudevillian timing to the cynical year of 1981. Rarely funny but endearingly determined, the picture’s success could only be gauged by personal taste. Those interested in the unconventional cast should have a blast, while others would be wise to steer clear of this funky Floridian farce.
A domestic drama from 1984, “Blame It on the Night” is a perfectly functional tearjerker that rarely satisfies. Perhaps more interested in selling soundtracks than emotions, the picture is a vague offering of thoughtful human interaction, though supported by satisfying performances and a snapshot of MTV-fueled rock stardom in the mid-1980s. A magical time when a 37-year-old man with a mild perm could make an arena of teenage girls swoon.
For the first hour, the southern drama “Bloodworth” captures a perfectly compelling tone of discovery, approaching solemn incidents of domestic disturbance with a countrified stillness. Criminally, the final 30 minutes erase most positive feelings about the feature, with concentration lost to the demands of a complicated literary translation. It’s an interesting picture, teeming with inspired performances and intriguing developments, but it’s a viewing experience best left unfinished.
The producers blew a major opportunity when they decided to turn “Immigration Tango” into a feature film. A concept more suited for a sitcom translation, the movie rushes through unrelenting mediocrity, hoping to captivate with its tepid comedy and chilly romance, making an inert farce without the benefit of a laugh track. It would’ve been right at home on network television.
When Martin Scorsese’s filmography is explored, there are typically two efforts that define his oeuvre: 1976’s “Taxi Driver” and 1980’s “Raging Bull.” However, during this fertile creative period there was another picture, sandwiched in-between, a 1977 feature that effectively stalled and oddly reenergized Scorsese’s career. “New York, New York” isn’t a forgotten or lost picture, but one that’s rarely brought up when a discussion of the maestro is introduced. A shame, really. While it’s flawed and fattened, it’s one of Scorsese’s more appealing experiments, looking to resuscitate the traditional Hollywood musical within the raw mood of the 1970s, creating an unusually frosty, but pleasingly unpredictable candy-coated psychodrama.
I’ll freely admit that I have a sensitivity to movies set in the Midwest, a place I called home for the majority of my life. To most Hollywood productions, the Midwest is an alien landscape for hopelessly naïve folk going about their naïve business while the coasts take care of the culture and style for America. That’s not the Midwest I know. I shouldn’t take “Cedar Rapids” seriously as an incisive take on “flyover” country ethics, but the least this tepid comedy could do is provide a vibrant sense of humor. Instead, it’s a riff-heavy, wildly formulaic modern comedy that uses stereotypes and improvisations in a gentle, but tedious manner to bring the laughs.
Never one to leave a Hollywood trend alone, producer Roger Corman decided to assemble his own “Star Wars” space opera cash machine with “Battle Beyond the Stars,” a low-budget (of course) take on Lucasian matinee mayhem. The results are predictably formulaic, but never cynical, with Corman and his team of filmmakers creating a sincere, engaging sci-fi spectacle that makes a lovely ruckus, though it lacks a cracking pace that helped shape “Star Wars” into a legend.
BRIAN ORNDORF 
