Category: Film Review

With the rabid success of shows such as “Glee” and “American Idol,” it makes sense that someone with a few bucks in their back pocket would come along to make an “inspirational” film about the lust for musical stardom. However, I wasn’t expecting a weirdo motion picture like this. “Standing Ovation” is a low-budget effort to meld the exhilaration of performance with the squeals of tweendom, throwing an impressive amount of oddity into the picture to make it stick. It’s amateurish, woefully acted by a majority of the cast, and features music even Miley Cyrus would be embarrassed to sing, but it’s certainly kooky. Compellingly so at times.

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Minimalism is wielded masterfully in Lance Daly’s “Kisses,” an unexpectedly tart juvenile drama that trusts in the emotional purity of life. Short (70 minutes) but keenly aware of economic filmmaking decisions, the picture is a mood piece in the vein of a Ken Loach or Shane Meadows experience, though coated with a more musically poetic touch that assists in the picture’s lopsided hold on whimsy.

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“The Kids Are All Right” is a striking film, though not due to any type of emotional hurricanes or drastic turns of fate. It’s frequently mesmerizing in the manner it observes a longstanding domestic commitment, following a married couple through the rigors of parenting teens, the strain of intimacy issues, and the irritation of habits. Writer/director Lisa Cholodenko brilliantly observes a homestead rocked by insecurity and complacency, making a vital, emotionally sound statement on the fragility of feelings and the strength of commitment, regardless of sexual orientation.

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Huffing only the finest Coen Brothers fumes, “The Square” is a cracking Australian thriller that packs a staggering left hook. Dire, frantic, and unfailingly engaging, the picture marks the feature-length directing debut of former stuntman Nash Edgerton, and I hope there are plenty more movies to come from this fellow. He has an incredible knack for the genre and terrific eye for casting, shaping this outwardly mild picture into a rowdy ride of volatility and underhanded happenings.

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Between “Batman” movies and taut thriller exercises such as “Insomnia,” writer/director Christopher Nolan likes to muck around with the minds of his audience. He enjoys the sport of deception, poking around the confines of unreality to fashion complex illusory puzzles that demand the utmost moviegoing attention. You’d be a fool to even blink. “Inception” is Nolan’s Fat Man mind-bomb; it’s a lavishly byzantine thriller, dripping with layers upon layers of subconscious excavation, attempting to wrap viewers up in a heist-like adventure to help swallow the complex dreamscape machinations. It’s a bold, stunning feature of impossible technical virtuosity. It also has the tendency to be about as emotionally stimulating as a college lecture.

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I’m starting to believe there’s a massive steel machine in super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s office, and, when he makes a movie, he feeds the pleasing results into the furious engine, which then takes whatever clicks wonderfully about the film and smashes it to pieces. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” began life as a riff on the iconic Mickey Mouse segment of “Fantasia,” but what’s onscreen isn’t nearly as inviting or whimsical as the animated short. Instead, the feature is a winded stunt show, brought to its knees by overcooked writing and insistently fruitless attempts at comedy. Once again, Bruckheimer’s contraption takes a pure idea for adventure and kills the enjoyment by overthinking matters to a paralyzing degree.

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“Predators” opens with man falling from the sky. We know he’s Adrien Brody, but we don’t know the character yet, introduced to the man as he free falls down to a jungle planet. Frantic, he searches madly for a parachute, baffled by the mechanism strapped to his body, watching as the planet below draws near at an incredible speed. It’s a pitch-perfect moment of disorientation and panic, setting an outstanding tone for this semi-sequel/rebootish/do-over motion picture, which endeavors to smash surprise back into a franchise squeezed dry by a studio that never quite understood what they had over the last two decades.

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Universal Studios adds their great CG-animated hope to the summer moviegoing sweepstakes with the bouncy “Despicable Me.” A full-blooded cartoon in a genre that is typically bombarded with overt sentimentality, the picture is a mixed bag, missing bellylaughs despite rather aggressive attempts at humor, yet highlighting an intriguingly playful voice cast, who eschew their normal, moneymaking tones to match the film’s colorful world of supervillains and henchmen.

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Promising a formidable series of thrillers with “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (released earlier this year), the producers have decided to step up the pace, bringing the next chapter in author Stieg Larsson’s celebrated “Millennium Trilogy” to theaters with alarming speed. “The Girl Who Played with Fire” suffers from the demanding production push, losing the vast talents of director Niels Arden Oplev to settle more directly in the tar of exposition and adaptation with filmmaker Daniel Alfredson. While still engrossing and pleasantly twisted, the second chapter in the Lisbeth Salander saga suffers from a flat storytelling approach, which doesn’t encourage the suspense in the same urgent manner as before.

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When “The Hurt Locker” won the Academy Award this year for Best Picture, it was rewarded for its unflinching view of wartime survival, taking viewers to the core of the Middle East conflict. The film did an extraordinary job manufacturing reality. The documentary “Restrepo” is reality, contributing a harrowing, emotionally pummeling you-are-there examination of Afghanistan combat, as viewed through the lens of embedded directors Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington. There are no politics or blustery commentary, just pure experience, capturing the raw commotion of military conflict.

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After the venomous reaction to his 2008 horror picture, “The Happening,” writer/director M. Night Shyamalan retreated to the comfort of a big-budget special effects extravaganza, picking an adaptation of the cult animated series “Avatar: The Last Airbender” as a way to increase his box office chances while fostering his idiosyncratic filmmaking vision. Instead of blockbuster glory, “The Last Airbender” (it seems the “Avatar” part of the title was already spoken for) manages to cripple the filmmaker further; it’s a joyless, stilted adventure picture, petrified by Shyamalan’s glacial touch and his odd refusal to simply kick back and enjoy the inherent spectacle of the source material.

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After the nausea brought on by 2008’s “Twilight,” I was stunned to find myself moderately intrigued with the next chapter of the saga, 2009’s “New Moon.” Director Chris Weitz found something resembling a pulse to the vampire vs. werewolf proceedings, pushing the paralytic material to contentedly mediocre, but encouraging results, ending the event with a cliffhanger — a question of lifelong commitment that promised the “Twilight” series would soon lead to more challenging demands of drama. Instead of a film with fertile conflict and legitimate swoon, “Eclipse” returns the franchise to square one, booking a bullet train to dullsville as director David Slade replaces Weitz’s careful, mournful movement with clunky battle cry theatrics that appear more in line with a shoddy SyFy Channel movie.

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“Don’t Look Back” pairs two titans of the European film market: Monica Bellucci and Sophie Marceau. So, turn down the lights, kick back with a bottle of wine, wear something comfortable, and spread around a few candles. It’s time for some lovin’. Oh, wait, this is a horror film? Really? Well, it seems for their introductory co-starring effort, the actresses have selected a dark psychological chiller for themselves, which spends most of its running time keeping the talent in a state of quivering distress, even going as far as to distort their faces. It’s most certainly not time for some lovin’.

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Ever wanted a film to work so badly, it involved the crossing of both fingers and toes? Ever wanted to have as much fun as the cast onscreen, watching helplessly as the talent kicks up a giggle storm, clearly enjoying the heck out of one another? The experience of watching “Grown Ups” is a sustained squeeze of agony, observing an easygoing, star-studded, summertime comedy stumble through a series of ridiculous, stillborn scenes that barely add up to a movie. Here, the audience is made to watch Adam Sandler’s summer vacation video, which displays how much fun he had, and how little of that merriment and camaraderie translated to the screen.

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It’s fantastic to see Tom Cruise back to being enthusiastic and jittery in “Knight and Day,” though it’s a shame the film doesn’t support that soaring effort. A strangely strained spy caper, “Knight and Day” has its share of derring-do, explosions, and flirtation, but director James Mangold doesn’t shape a scintillating feature out of the ingredients. Instead, there are a few key stunt sequences that are smoothly rendered, but the film as a whole lacks a pulse-pounding, swoony mood of adventure and romance. Still, it does have Cruise, and he’s almost worth a recommendation alone for his spirited efforts.

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“Dogtooth” recalls the wondrous heyday of the Dogme 95 film movement, once spearheaded by Lars von Trier. Though enjoying some degree of polish, “Dogtooth” nevertheless approaches the concept of dehumanization with a gritty, free-flowing tone, permitting the film a genuine sense of surprise. It’s a grotesque illustration of inhumanity and feral instinct, but “Dogtooth” is an absolutely hypnotic motion picture, attaining a nauseating sense of self-destruction in a thrillingly art-house manner that’s been absent from the screen for far too long.

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I’ll give “Wild Grass” this much: it successfully summons a disturbed, frazzled state of mind. The mental blur carries this French import from legendary director Alain Resnais an incredible distance, assisting a special Euro discombobulation that makes it easier to swallow the often surreal nature of this unrequited love story. Meaningful? Romantic? Full-throated? Perhaps not. Yet, “Wild Grass” evokes the mania of a spinning brain wonderfully, presenting a polite jolt of anxiety to an otherwise impenetrable motion picture.

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What happens when you cross a film containing carnivorous trees, angry moths, and a lead actress billed as “Beverly Hills” with a group of ace comedians doing their best to make light of a dire moviegoing experience? Well, it means Cinematic Titanic has returned. Roughly four months after their last effort, “The Alien Factor,” the troupe has surfaced again to deliver 90 minutes of consistent laughs with “Danger on Tiki Island,” a wildly incoherent, bizarre horror film that provides the flood of awful the riffing gang needs to successfully land some satisfying bellylaughs.

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The comic relief is provided by Dax Shepard, Jon Heder, and Will Arnett; there’s a punchline where a needle is literally scratched off a record; a character exclaims “My bad!” after a piece of destructive slapstick; the screenplay makes absolutely no sense; and Danny DeVito plays a horny sausage salesman. See, this is what happens when Hollywood gives a romantic comedy to the director of “Daredevil,” “Ghost Rider,” and “Simon Birch.”

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Pixar cautiously entered the sequel game 11 years ago with “Toy Story 2,” a development that was somewhat forced upon the company, but proved to be an artistic and financial success. Now the beloved animation house is beginning to make sequels a full-time business, with follow-ups to “Cars” and “Monsters, Inc.” in the production pipeline. However, priming the franchise machine is “Toy Story 3,” a long-awaited second sequel that reunites beloved characters with a frazzled plot that exploits every ounce of plastic neuroses it possibly can. The third time isn’t exactly the charm for this friendly series of films, but this next step in the evolution of Buzz and Woody is dutifully manic and frequently engaging.

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