Category: Film Review

“The Red Baron” hopelessly desires to be accepted as the German equivalent of a Bay/Bruckheimer production, taking a glossy, rudimentary path toward wartime reverence. It’s a “Pearl Harbor” riff that might satisfy some curious WWI aficionados (perhaps Snoopy fans too), but offers nothing in the way of excitement or a compelling psychological shakedown of the feared pilot that ruled European airspace, eventually immortalized in the history books and on frozen pizza boxes.

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“The Princess and the Frog” represents Disney’s big comeback to feature-length, traditionally animated filmmaking. Granted, it’s only been away for five years, but a comeback is a comeback, and I’ll take any renewed interest in 2-D storytelling I can get. Playing it safe to rekindle the animated magic that once defined the Disney name, “Princess and the Frog” is a joyful lap around familiar Mouse House artistic elements, looking to help rebuild the kingdom brand name with a cushy tale of a princess, smooch-happy amphibians, and the grandeur of turn-of-the-century New Orleans.

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Lest I come across like a curmudgeon who despises all things slapstick, I’ll state that “Old Dogs” is poor slapstick. A spastic, noxious comedy, “Old Dogs” is scattershot and out of control, bludgeoning the audience with all sorts of eye-bulging mugging and dire cliché. It’s insufferable and lazily directed, trusting sheer frontal force will be enough to supply laughs. Shot two years ago, the picture has the feel of a movie that’s been reordered and reworked a few dozen times, shaved down to a pure goof-and-sentiment experience that fails both goals. It’s dreadful, but at least Disney’s been kind enough to suggest as much through their disheartening marketing efforts.

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Released during the same week “The Hurt Locker” swept up major Academy Awards for its harsh depiction of life on the Iraq War frontlines, “Green Zone” elects to take the opposite route of dramatization. While coarse and unquestionably whirlwind, “Green Zone” should be viewed in the vein of a graphic novel adaptation, with its sniveling villains and primary colored view of wartime ethics. It’s entertainment first and foremost, with ham-fisted politics popping the mood far too often, sucking away a desired tempo of defiance to play a crude game of Middle East Stratego.

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A charmer from the school of Apatow, “She’s Out of My League” takes a fantasy dating situation and tries to tilt it toward a sense of realism while retaining all the required silly business. Without reinventing the wheel or resisting the lure of lazy gross-out jokes, the picture gets by on a funky, winning cast and the occasional, ever-so-faint, squint-to-see-it moment of emotional truth the genre typically treats like a nasty infection. As goofball as it is, “She’s Out of My League” shows a surprising conscience to go along with its frat-house humor.

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To describe “Our Family Wedding” as an offshoot of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” is undoubtedly an insult to the 1967 Stanley Kramer film. Perhaps my memory isn’t as sharp as it once was, but I fail to recall the original picture containing a scene in which a goat, jacked up on a spilled bottle of Viagra, endeavors to dry-hump an understandably confused leading character. Again, perhaps that’s my mind playing tricks on me.

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Poetic, romantic, and tied together by a crippling event of violence, “Remember Me” aches to be absorbed as a drama of substance and lasting impact. However, it’s dour, hysterical sudser that never lifts off the ground, no matter how hard it flaps its wings with sequences of nicotine-stained rebellion, cycles of abuse, and bootleg turns of fate. Compassionate but never assured, “Remember Me” is perhaps best appreciated for Robert Pattinson, who steps away from the ghostly make-up, dead air bother, and diamond skin (the hair remains) to portray a plausibly disturbed young man on his way to an emotional breakdown.

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In 2006, director Bong Joon-ho brought “The Host” to the world stage. A clever, startling reawakening of the monster movie genre, the film brought the director tremendous, well-deserved success, making him something of a master of the genre after only a single picture. “Mother” returns Bong to familiar cinematic ground, taking on a slightly comic, utterly transfixing murder mystery that pins violence and messy displays of injustice on the most saintly of screen images: dear old mom.

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As witnessed throughout much of his filmography, Tim Burton has the uncanny ability to reach astonishingly dark moods while still maintaining a jovial atmosphere worthy of his riotous imagination. Occasionally, the shadows get the best of him. Much like “Batman Returns” and “Mars Attacks,” “Alice in Wonderland” is a Burton vehicle with four flat tires, attempting to pull off a tricky juggling act of whimsy and violence, using author Lewis Carroll’s legendary novel as a playground for the blandest of fantasy visions. It’s a drab feature film molded with garish CGI and acted as if there wasn’t a director on set at all. It’s far from deplorable, but it does represent the filmmaker at his most persistently ineffective.

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It’s been some time since Roman Polanski made something as cagey and good-naturedly twisted as “The Ghost Writer.” He’s been off vacationing inside of his youthful trauma during the last decade (“The Pianist,” “Oliver Twist”), which makes his new film a cunning achievement, steered by one of the filmdom’s sharpest minds. Verbose but lovingly toxic, “The Ghost Writer” nails a perfect pitch of paranoia with a distinctly retro flair, restoring some needed maturity to the bustling business of thriller cinema.

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Director Antoine Fuqua has built a career on mediocrity, hitting a few cinematic highlights (“Training Day”), but mostly sticking to the comfort of generic thrillers devoid of sensational feats of filmmaking. As imperfect as it is, “Brooklyn’s Finest” is perhaps the closest Fuqua will ever come to true greatness, revealing a deft command of nerve-racking criminal moods and multi-character tragedy, showing something approaching range while working out a screenplay soaked in oily despair. Missteps abound, but “Brooklyn’s Finest,” when firing on all brooding cityscape cylinders, is a convincing, commanding motion picture.

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“Possession” is the type of movie where miraculous events occur in the plot, but none of the characters bother to accurately reflect the wondrous gravity of the situation. It’s a stillborn chiller (a remake of the South Korean film “Addicted”) and an awfully silly picture, boasting screamingly inept performances and preoccupied direction that spends more time seeking out the perfect camera angle than tightening the story to appropriate nail-biting levels of suspense.

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“Ajami” is an Israeli picture that closely mirrors the work of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu during his emotionally turbulent years with “Amores Perros,” “21 Grams,” and “Babel.” Observing the ominous nature of violence and its crushing aftermath, “Ajami” is a striking raw nerve of a feature film, holding to a steady path of dread, but keeping the story on its toes by jolting back and forth through locations and time. It builds patiently, but fascinatingly, providing a portrait of humanity struggling in one of the more volatile areas of the Middle East.

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Director Kevin Smith has set out to pay homage to the buddy cop action festivals of his formative years, and that’s precisely the film one receives with “Cop Out.” The picture is mindless escapism, spreading around as many laughs as it does bullet casings, harmlessly going about the business of slapstick and shoot-em-up. At its worse, it’s disjointed, crafted by a filmmaker with zero experience in the action genre. At its best, it’s a delightfully silly, carefree bit of profane nonsense, effectively scraping away the stale taste left behind by Smith’s lifeless 2008 feature, “Zack and Miri Make a Porno.”

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“The Crazies” is a sporadically splendid thriller saddled with seriously banal horror embellishment. It should come as little surprise to learn the film is a remake, extracted from the thin skin of George Romero’s 1973 chiller. The paranoia and general Vietnam-era dread has been chiseled off the material by director Breck Eisner, who shapes a more direct shot of scares, gussied up with overtly slick filmmaking that spends more time on technical challenges than it does lacing together a consistently nail-biting motion picture.

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Part of me wanted to appreciate “Toe to Toe” for the way it aches to portray teenage life as more than just sassmouth and cartoon cliques. The rest of me wanted to take can of gas and a book of matches to the negative, preventing the film from ever being exhibited again. A demented, amateurish after school special, “Toe to Toe” is only useful as a means to observe a first-rate actress in the making. The rest is pure rubbish, delivered with all the subtlety of an air horn.

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Coming off arguably their finest effort to date with the kung-fu/blaxploitation adventure “East Meets Watts,” Cinematic Titanic returns with a second helping of their burgeoning live act in “The Alien Factor.” Another lackadaisical statement of unfiltered goofballery from the 1970s, the newest target of riff rage proves to be a worthy contender to the franchise crown, with the gang shaping 80 minutes of uninterrupted hilarity, feeding off the frisky stage energy to give this sorry routine of rubber suits, cruddy acting, and endless strolls a needed kick in the behind.

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The last time David DeFalco stepped behind a camera, it was for the 2005 shocker, “Chaos.” A morally bankrupt, technically abysmal reworking of “Last House on the Left, “Chaos” strived to be the final word on screen inhumanity; instead, it was insufferable, highlighting DeFalco’s diseased world view and inability to coherently piece together a feature film. Dialing back the gruesomeness to fiddle around with the DTV action market, DeFalco returns with “Wrong Side of Town,” a burly, brainless exercise in tough guy cinema, with a slew of D-list celebrities and professional wrestling buddies to help fill out his limited vision for weightlifter heroism.

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It’s refreshing to see Robert De Niro shove aside his tough guy screen persona now and then, to remind viewers used to his antics that beyond his icy glare and powder keg temper lies a uniquely sensitive actor. “Everybody’s Fine” is a thorough tear-jerker, but the feature earns most of its sentiment, due in great part to De Niro and his gentle, worrywart lead performance. I’m not suggesting this is De Niro at his most invested and commanding, but his communication of concern adds a needed push of authenticity to a film forever on the precipice of pure schmaltz.

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