Category: Film Review

When Adrienne Shelly was murdered in 2006, it was a heinous, heartbreaking event that struck down a talented actress finally getting a firm grip on motion picture direction, with her final effort, “Waitress,” a tender valentine to the various varieties of love. It’s hard to say where her screenplay for “Serious Moonlight” would’ve fit in during this glowing career ascension, but I hope, for the sake of her memory, that the material was still multiple drafts away from completion. “Serious Moonlight” is not how I want to remember Adrienne Shelly.

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The image of the typical cat lady is a portrait of severe mental disturbance, often used comedically like in “The Simpsons,” where Springfield’s unshowered feline connoisseur leaps into action, using kittens as throwing stars as she clears the room with her garbled ranting. Of course, there’s a dark side to this lifestyle, a portrayal offered a brief but harrowing spotlight in the spellbinding documentary “Cat Ladies.”

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Having loathed 1999’s “The Boondock Saints,” I was hoping a decade-long absence from filmmaking would somehow magically inject writer/director Troy Duffy with the needed wisdom of hindsight. A hulking shot of perspective to build a better “Boondock.” Taking an eternity to follow-up his cult curiosity and dorm room staple, whatever was meant to pass for Duffy’s filmmaking intuition appears to have calcified long ago, resulting in a turgid, cut-rate sequel that’s surprisingly unable to best the insufferable original. The Saints have finally returned, but their fearless leader is as confused as ever.

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When most directors repeat themselves, it’s typically a sign of artistic exhaustion or perhaps unshakable fixation. In Wes Anderson’s case, his visual repetition has become an irresistible thumbprint, and one of the great moviegoing joys I’ve encountered in recent years is the opportunity to watch this supremely gifted filmmaker use his leather-bound imagination to impart varying stories of eccentric outsiders and their enduring emotional wounds, with each film connected by exotic aesthetic degrees of detail-oriented splendor. Now Anderson takes his cinematic language to the hand-woven field of stop-motion animation for “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” and, yet again, the filmmaker shapes a breathtaking cinematic marvel; he finds a magnificent home nestled firmly in the luxurious textures of the animation, the dancing vocal performances, and delicious wry tone that makes for stunningly fanciful cinema.

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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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“Ninja Assassin” quickly trips over itself trying to establish something substantial out of a frivolous concept. One of the biggest heartbreakers of 2009, the picture is a confused, tedious merging of absurdly overcooked violence and a drab screenplay, sold unconvincingly by director James McTeigue (“V for Vendetta”). It’s a ninja story for goodness sake, but McTeigue and his writers are on the prowl for something epic, puncturing the potential of the film by taking it all so very seriously.

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“The Road” is a bleak and wholeheartedly downbeat motion picture. As a film critic, it’s a challenge to stay away from those gloomy descriptions, for fear of chasing away moviegoers who only desire optimism from their cinema, but the reality of the picture cannot be sugarcoated. It’s the end of the world. There are no heroes, prospects, or tickles. “The Road” is a crushing dose of negative energy, communicated through the laudable guise of a parental protection story. It’s a searing, sporadically beautiful film, but something to tap your toes to? This feature is perhaps the very opposite of a good time.

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Robin Wright Penn (though now she’s capped the Penn) has enjoyed a career of weepy, meditative roles that have made fine use of her expressive face and special way with sorrow. Wright’s always been an excellent actress, but she’s seldom offered characters that make the most out of her range. “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee” shakes Wright out of her sullen coma, bestowed a juicy role that magnifies her personality and ability to communicate the slow, dreadful burn of remorse. Wright is the miracle this picture needs, helping the material achieve an emotional tempo it wouldn’t otherwise reach without her stellar contribution.

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“Mammoth” marks director Lukas Moodysson’s return to secure dramatic ground. Riding off into a black hole of surrealism and shock value with 2004’s “A Hole in My Heart,” “Mammoth” encourages Moodysson’s human curiosity to come out and play once again, this time exploring the unity of life on Earth. Perhaps too esoteric for its own good, “Mammoth” features sensational moments of reaction and deliberation communicated by a gifted cast, building a few symbolic global bridges, more appreciable for their design than their destination.

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It was only a year ago when “Twilight” entered my life. I had no history with the book, held immense reservations with the cast and crew, and found the hysteria surrounding the release obnoxiously manufactured by a desperate studio. And then I watched the film, finding every last one of my fears confirmed. “Twilight” was a dreadful picture on multiple levels, but most pointedly it was a shoddily produced affair entirely dependent on forgiving teen enthusiasm to provide colossal box office returns. Here we are again one year later with “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” and there have been a few changes to the franchise. Changes for the better.

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To the average cynic, “The Blind Side” might appear to be infested with cooties. Following an impressive string of feel-good racial divide entertainment offerings, “Blind Side” carries the burden of immediate derision. It turns out the film isn’t the total embarrassment the Warner Brothers marketing folks would have you believe. Instead, the picture is a friendly, tender audience pleaser working broadly to reach out to a wide audience that wouldn’t dare reject a compassionate tale of the affluent and sassy helping out the underprivileged and borderline mute.

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For his 17th film, Pedro Almodovar doesn’t exactly break new ground with “Broken Embraces,” instead fine tuning his gifts and decadent cinematic appetites to a satisfying routine. A spiraling, sensual story of noirish obsession and paranoia, “Embraces” is a riveting sit, due to the filmmaker’s incredible storytelling gifts, and the cast, who articulate a dreamy series of toxic encounters with sniper-like precision, tightening Almodovar’s noose with exceptional skill.

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After making his mark on the Hollywood action movie scene in 1993, famed director John Woo returns to his Asian cinema roots with the Chinese war epic, “Red Cliff.” Massive in scale, ridiculous with blood-soaked action, and submitting a user-friendly spectacle of warriors and weapons, “Red Cliff” is a majestic motion picture that returns Woo to the sort of whirlwind screen restlessness he built his legendary name upon.

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I suppose after the sugar rush of wonderful family films such as “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” the high was bound to crash at some point. “Planet 51” is the party pooper, looking to pass itself off as a spirited sci-fi romp crammed with slapstick and four-quadrant-friendly pop culture references to best wow the crowds. The picture is actually a poorly conceived comedy spotlighting a collection of anal-centric humor that’s about as appealing as baseball bat to the face. After watching a few creative minds take the animation genre to soaring heights, the dreadful routine and vulgar imagination of “Planet 51” is all the more dispiritingly amplified.

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In the high stakes Hollywood blockbuster poker game, Roland Emmerich is going all in with “2012.” A disaster movie to end all disaster movies, “2012” is an enormous moviegoing event guaranteed to make eyes bleed and ears burst with its sheer scale and thundering execution. To bend the dictionary a little, it’s positively ginormous. “2012” is also disturbingly repetitive, obnoxiously noisy, and almost pornographic in length. Instead of providing a comforting bowl of melted apocalyptic cheese, Emmerich wants to beat the living hell out of his audience instead, staging doom after doom, death after death, until it reaches a nauseating spin of sensorial overload. It’s cinematic waterboarding and there was more than one occasion during the film when I was convinced it was never going to end.

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I like Richard Curtis. I really do. The man directed “Love Actually” for heaven’s sake, crafting one of the most charming and stark romantic comedies of the last 30 years. But his “Pirate Radio” is a flawed piece of work, at times utterly paralyzed by muddled whimsy. It’ll take some effort from the viewer to sort through this cluttered feature film, but the reward is an opportunity to witness profound respect for the power of music, articulated by a throng of gifted, uninhibited actors Curtis spends most of the feature trying to corral more than simply direct.

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The karaoke scene. It’s become an epidemic. I’ve seen an inordinate amount of comedies over the last few years employ a karaoke bar as a comedic device, typically involving a fuddy-duddy character finding screechy vocal salvation at the hand of a memorable ‘80’s hit. If there’s anything that immediately signals lazy screenwriting, it’s staging slapstick at a karaoke bar. “Love Hurts” features such a scene. Actually, a few of them. However, it’s the least of the offenses contained within this dreadful comedy, which runs through a checklist of clichés to make it to a contractually obligated 90-minute running time. It’s a long 90 minutes.

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Magnified with the type of divine emotional majesty few animation spectacles could ever hope to reach, Disney/Pixar’s “Up” is a triumphant masterstroke for the studio and their Teflon reputation. Declining the red-carpet invitation to manufacture mawkish, feebly scripted pathos, “Up” instead aims for and achieves a splendid merger of heartache and soaring spirituality. For their 10th motion picture, the Pixar squad has hit pay dirt yet again, only with “Up,” the production team manages to weave together whimsy and poignancy in a visually dazzling, high-flying marvel of an adventure. Conceptually, it’s not a trailblazer, but the execution is perhaps Pixar’s most confident and irresistibly moving since their 1995 masterpiece, “Toy Story.”

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