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If a critic screams in a middle of a Michael Bay film and the film is too loud for anyone to hear, did it ever actually occur?-My thoughts, after leaving the Transformers screening.

Okay, so I didn’t actually scream in the middle of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. But I sure wanted to.
Part of my dismay was not just the film’s bone-crushing noise, stupefying action, gung-ho conservatism, thinly-veiled racism, predictable sexism, bloated running time (two and a half freaking hours!), and crass commercialism (actually, compared to the film’s other sins, the crass commercialism is kind of quaint)—it was knowing that no matter what I say, it won’t amount to squat. Transformers II is going to make its buckets of money, paving the way for a third and possibly even a fourth iteration of this soulless franchise...
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The thorny ethical issue at the core of My Sister’s Keeper is the stuff of juicy late-night debates: What if a family had a sick child and essentially engineered another child to give that sick child bone marrow and blood? And what if that younger, healthy child got tired of being stuck with needles and hospitalized and decided to sue her parents for emancipation of her own body? Whose side would you be on?
In both Jodi Picoult’s novel and Nick Cassavetes’ film adaptation, you find yourself mostly sympathizing with young Anna (Abigail Breslin), partly because her mother (Cameron Diaz, unglammed and completely believable) has such crazy tunnel vision when it comes to her eldest daughter.
At the same time, the mother’s fierce protectiveness is touching...
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I’m trying to figure out if I liked The Proposal more when it was called What Happens in Vegas or when it was called The Wedding Date or when it was called Green Card.
Come to think of it, I’m trying to decide if I like this story better when Sandra Bullock plays the demanding boss, as she does here, or when she plays the put upon assistant, as she did in Two Weeks Notice.
You get the point. Been there, done that with this rom-com formula...
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Jack Black, all gleeful id, and Michael Cera, all fussy misery, seem like a match made in buddy film heaven. Throw in writer/director Harold Ramis, a zany, pre-historic plot, and plenty of chances to bring hipster humor to the events of the Bible, and it seems like you can’t lose.
That may very well be the problem.  When everyone is sitting around a Hollywood boardroom thinking, “We can’t lose!” a kind of torpor sets in. The result of that torpor? The flat out lazy Year One...
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John Krasinski’s character Burt Farlander is afflicted with something I’ve decided to call the indie stupor.
We’ve all seen this before, in films as varied as Garden State, American Beauty, Broken Flowers, and Elizabethtown. Our hero is a sheepish and sometimes benumbed observer of the wacky world around him. The wackier the supporting characters, the more our wounded hero looks blankly at the camera, as if to say, “Everyone is crazy except for me. In contrast, I am a deeply sensitive and intuitive human being.”
But it begs the question: Why would I care about such a passive hero? I prefer someone who is actively engaged in the world around him, not just standing around in an “I’m With Stupid” shirt...
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As I was settling into my seat for the screening of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, a young man came up to me and asked, “Are you excited?”
“I guess,” I said (unconvincingly). “I really loved the original, so I’m not exactly sure why we needed a remake.”
“This is a remake?” the kid asked.
And there you go.
To be honest, I actually feel sorry for people whose sole experience with this film—about the hijacking of a New York subway car—comes courtesy of Tony Scott’s slickly efficient but soulless version. The original was gritty, funky, funny, and humane—positively redolent with a sense of New York City and its people.
The new flick has its moments—mostly the scenes between Denzel Washington as Walter Garber, the mild-mannered NYC transit worker, and John Travolta as Ryder, the pissed off philosopher-hijacker he must negotiate with—but Scott is clearly much more interested in keeping the action swift and the body count high than giving us a sense of place...
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He’s baaaaack. Sam Raimi, the talented director who started his career with the cult comic-horror classic The Evil Dead and then gravitated to more mainstream work like A Simple Plan and The Spider Man series, has returned to the genre that made him famous. I’m happy to report that he has not gone soft.
Nope, from its straight-to-the-point title, to its pussy, oozy, “I just threw up a little in my mouth” special effects, Drag Me to Hell will make you scream with both fear and laughter. It’s a fast-paced, deliriously nasty joy ride to hell...
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For a film that is supposed to be concerned with the state of humanity, Terminator Salvation lacks a beating heart. Things 'splode real good, and giant robot Terminators the size of Transformers (coming soon to a theater near you!) stomp around with authority (before 'sploding). But if you’re looking for character development, dialogue that does anything but advance the plot, or relationships of any consequence, you’ve come to the wrong place...
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You think they would’ve learned their lesson. For all of the book’s massive success, The Da Vinci Code movie managed to be both over-wrought and boring. So what made Ron Howard, Tom Hanks and co. think they could do any better with Dan Brown’s less beloved "Angels & Demons?"
The problems are roughly the same: Hanks’ character, symbologist Robert Langdon, is a dud. He is defined by three things: Improbable bravery (for a symbologist), expert knowledge of religious iconography, and a skepticism about religion in general. He’s not really a character, he’s a cipher: But lead characters in movies need distinguishing personalities: Brown (and now Ron Howard) can’t even be bothered to give Langdon a nervous tic, a bad habit, hell, a fondness for show tunes...
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I know what you’re thinking: Another Star Trek movie? Is this truly necessary after the cult TV show, the four spin-offs, the several (mostly bad) movies, and even the Trekkie subculture beginning to die-off? (The new generation of out and proud geeks now gravitate to the ComicCon festival—same crowd, different handshake.)
But guess what? The ol’ Enterprise still has lift-off, especially when in the hands of director J.J. Abrams (TV's "Lost"), who brings an obvious reverence for the source material (read: he seems seriously geeked over the show), coupled with a TV guy’s understanding of character development, and a proven ability to steer a somewhat rusty franchise in the right direction (he also directed Mission Impossible III).
This one is a prequel (they could’ve called it Star Trek: Origins, but X-Men got there first), so, obviously, casting was essential...
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You have to be good—Tarantino good—to pull off a hyper violent movie where none of the characters are likeable and the humor derives from the depths of their incompetence and stupidity.
Benny Boom, the director of Next Day Air, is not that good...
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Lately, it seems that every comic book movie down the pike can be subtitled: Or How Our Hero Got His Angst On. At this point, they should really rename the whole genre bummer books.
So, as X-Men Origins: Wolverine begins, we watch as the child version of our mutant hero...
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Reimagining A Christmas Carol as a rom-com about a caddish lothario (Matthew McConaughey) who, after visitations from the ghosts of girlfriends past, present, and future, sees the error of his womanizing ways and commits to his one true love (Jennifer Garner), may've seemed like an ingenious concept. After all, Dickens’ classic has seen countless incarnations—as a comedy, as a musical—but as far as I know, this is its first stint as a chick flick.
But there's an inherent flaw in the concept (and execution) of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and it reveals itself pretty quickly...
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In a way, Zac Efron is the perfect actor to play a 37-year-old man magically transplanted back into his 17-year-old body. He is a heartthrob to be sure, but he’s not at all hip. You can imagine him driving a minivan. When his character gives a passionate speech about abstinence or stares with paternal pride at his son (who has no idea it’s his dad), it feels believable. This is partly good acting on Efron’s part and partly because, in interviews, on red carpet, in life, Efron has a square earnestness about him. He’s as nice and sensible a boy as the Disney starmaking machine could hope to manufacture. (Efron has graduated, by the way. 17 Again is released by Warner Bros.)
17 Again proves that the body-swapping genre still has legs. Big, of course, remains the class of the field—but Freaky Friday (both versions), 13 Going on 30, and Peggy Sue Got Married were all entertaining diversions, and so is this...
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As State of Play began, I had an unexpected surge of wistfulness. After all, this film is about an intrepid newspaper reporter (Russell Crowe) investigating the suspicious death of a pretty young Capitol Hill staffer. But in this world of blogs and Twitter, aren’t movies where the hero is a reporter about to go the way of the dodo bird?
Happily, State of Play rather ingeniously sidesteps this reality by making sure that Crowe’s Cal McAffrey is constantly being reminded that he’s an endangered species. He’s forced to work with a rising star young blogger (Rachel McAdams), his tough publisher (Helen Mirren) is bemoaning a gimmicky corporate-fueled redesign, and he has to fend off accusations of irrelevance from his subjects.
“When it’s real news, it breaks through the gossip,” Cal insists (or something to that effect)—and I was surprised my colleagues at the screening didn’t give him a standing ovation.
Of course, State of Play isn’t really about the state of newspapers today, but it’s a nice little addition to the script (based on the acclaimed British mini series of the same name) which is essentially a good, old fashioned conspiracy thriller...
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Hannah Montana (Miley Cyrus) is the tween girl’s answer to Batman. For those who don’t know, during the day she is normal high school kid Miley Stewart (also Cyrus), then at night she dons a blonde wig, changes into micro minis and Lycra, and becomes international pop sensation Hannah Montana! No one ever seems to notice the resemblance...
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Apparently, the shopping mall is this generation’s version of hell on earth. (I love the smell of Bath and Bodyworks in the morning?) How else to explain the fact that there have been two movies about mall cops within the span of two months? I mean, even if you believe that some sort of studio espionage was involved, that still means that somewhere out there were two mall cop scripts, and the second one just got greenlit a little bit faster to keep up with the competition...
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Paris 36 is a handsomely made French musical that never really soars.

To an extent, that earthbound quality is intentional. The subject is the Chansonia, a second-rate music hall that hosts woefully bad acts to sparse audiences. The Paris of 1936 seethes with political and economic turmoil. Liberal, Jewish politician Leon Blum has just been elected prime minister, radicals are calling for nationwide strikes and gangsters are trying to close the Chansonia. After his actress wife runs off with another man, theater manager Pigoil (Grard Jugnot) looks for work and raises his accordion-playing son, Jojo (Maxence Perrin). A half-dozen or so other characters are caught up in similar professional and familiar conflicts, though those are revealed slowly.

Eventually, as Pigoil tries to reopen the music hall with acts that are even worse than the ones that flopped earlier, a young woman named Douce (Nora Arnezeder) shows up. She is the ray of light they've all been waiting for...
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More than 10 years ago, Greg Mottola made a near-perfect indie gem, The Daytrippers, about a woman who suspects her husband of cheating and embarks on a car ride from hell to Manhattan in a wood-paneled station wagon with her squabbling parents, her kid sister, and her kid sister’s pretentious boyfriend. It was funny, it was wise, it was drolly hip. Then Mottola kind of disappeared for several years, mostly directing TV shows. Finally, he resurfaced in 2007 with the hilarious blockbuster Superbad—a film I actually loved, but that didn’t share the intimate indie sensibility of his first feature.
It’s no surprise that the ads for Adventureland trumpet: “From the Director of Superbad!” (I mean, what are they supposed to say: “From the guy who directed a few really good episodes of Arrested Development?). But that’s slightly misleading. In fact, if you split the difference between The Daytrippers and Superbad, you pretty much have Adventureland...
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Oh, how the trendy have fallen. Eight years ago, two rising star actors—the beef-cakey Vin Diesel and the surfer dudeish Paul Walker—made a hit film about fast cars and fast women called The Fast and the Furious. A sequel followed—2 Fast 2 Furious—but this time only Walker appeared; Diesel, apparently, had bigger fish to fry (like, uh, The Chronicles of Riddick?). Then came a third iteration—The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift—but neither Diesel nor Walker condescended to appear in it.
Well, it’s 2009 and Walker (a pretty, but wooden actor who seems more suited to The CW then the big screen) and the brooding, sculpted Diesel (who has been passed over by The Rock and Jason Statham as the action hunks du jour) have seen their careers flat-line. So they’ve pretty much crawled back to their reliable franchise.
Hate to say it guys, but. . .you should've stayed under those rocks...
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In the 3-D animated sci-fi flick Monster vs. Aliens, blushing bride Susan Murphy (Reese Witherspoon) gets zapped by an alien meteorite and becomes 50-feet tall, much to the chagrin of her smarmy TV weatherman husband (Paul Rudd). She then gets absconded by the government and placed in a secret laboratory with other “monsters.”
“But I’m not a monster!” Susan protests. Eventually, she bonds with her fellow charges: Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie), a brilliant scientist who, a la Vincent Price in The Fly, accidentally turned himself into a roach; The Missing Link (Will Arnett), who just wants to party; B.O.B. (Seth Rogen) a brainless but loveable blob; and the Mothra-like Incectosaurus.
Monsters vs. Aliens is about rejecting convention and embracing your inner freak. It also has lots of fun sending up those 1950s sci-fi films...
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Viva (R) reviewed by Mike Mayo [Now Available on DVD]

“Viva” is a tasty little time machine that zips back to 1972 and recreates the world of exploitation movies with an emphasis on style over plot, though there’s plenty of that.

It’s the story of Barbie (producer/writer/director/set designer, etc. Anna Biller), “the perfect little woman” who’s married to Rick (Chad England). When Barbie feels neglected by her hubby, she and her friend Shiela (Bridget Brno) decide to throw off the traces and strike out on their own. Barbie reinvents herself as the free-spirited Viva and enters a world of hippies, nudists, the occasional musical number and even moments of animation.

But what happens in the film is not nearly as important as its look and sound. (See interview.)

Each scene is carefully staged with color coordinated sets, props, costumes and makeup—all decked out in the wildest shades and patterns imaginable. Think hot pink and vibrant emerald green. Think leisure suits and caftans. Think paisley and Pop Art.

The sexual aspects of the story are mostly tongue-in-cheek, though they are historically accurate, at least in part. At one point, the unrepentantly sexist Mark (co-producer Jared Sanford) delivers a speech about how wonderful it is to be a guy in “this time,” and his smugness is illuminating. It’s obvious that Ms. Biller is tipping her hat to Radley Metzger, Russ Meyer and even a bit to John Waters.

In the end, the film is so “naughty” (for want of a better term), that I can’t recommend it to viewers who don’t remember and appreciate those wonderful pictures from the 1970s, but those who do will find a lot to love in “Viva.”

The key to watching Knowing is to simply enjoy the ride. Because if you start to connect the dots—and they’re all there, laid out pretty obviously—you begin to realize that something truly silly and self-important is about to transpire. Anticipating a horrible ending—and Knowing’s is a real doozy—is a surefire way to ruin a film.
But at least for a while, Knowing is a decent, if overly noisy, sci-fi/action/horror film...
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I Love You, Man follows many of the conventions of the romantic comedy:
We have two people, hopelessly mismatched, yet destined to be together.
They meet cute, fall in love, and break up.
In the end, there’s a wedding where they realize they can not be apart.
Of course, the difference here is that I Love You, Man is about a platonic love affair between two straight guys...
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Sunshine Cleaning—about a couple of down-on-their-luck sisters (Amy Adams and Emily Blunt) who start a crime scene clean-up business—suffers from a bit of whimsy overload. It’s one of those self-consciously quirky indie films—one sister communicates with God through a CB radio; their father (Alan Arkin) engages a series of improbable get-rich-quick schemes—that tend to do well at local art houses. Little Miss Sunshine, which Sunshine Cleaning rather slavishly takes cues from (I mean, could they be more obvious?) would be the gold standard...
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I suppose when you film a nihilistic and profane graphic novel about morally ambiguous superheroes in a dystopian alternate universe, you have an obligation to the novel’s hardcore fans. After all, they’re your guaranteed audience, the only ones invested enough in the material to show up no matter what. But here’s the problem with that logic: The readership for The Watchmen may be sizeable, but they would amount to a mere gnat on Spiderman’s spinneret, relatively speaking. Those cult fans alone ain’t going to move the box office needle.
So you could attempt to make the adaptation more tame, less dense with mythology, less pornographically violent, and more user-friendly. Whoa, boy—then you’re really in trouble. Pissed off fans and a watered down product. Not exactly a recipe for success.
So director Zack Snyder, the blockbuster wunderkind behind the hyper-stylized (and soul-dead) 300, chose the only route he could—talmudic faithfulness to the novels—with predictably shaky results...
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American movies spend a lot of time in classrooms, but they usually don’t stick around for long. Most films about teachers—Dead Poet’s Society, Dangerous Minds, even a tough-minded indie gem like Half Nelson—only have the patience to spend a few minutes at a time with the class. There’s some revelatory speech or life-changing confrontation and then—oh, look at that!—the bell conveniently rings and the students file out.

The bell rarely rings in The Class, and the inspirational moments are few and far between. Instead, we see what it’s like inside a real class in a rough Parisian neighborhood—the insolent kids, the fights breaking out, the maddening distractions, and, yes, the small triumphs...
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So let me get this straight: He’s Just Not That Into You is a movie based on a self-help book based on an episode of a TV show ("Sex and the City").
And yet, with all that seemingly against it, it actually manages to be something of a (qualified) success. The movie cleverly weaves the basic message of the book—that men aren’t that complicated and usually make their feelings and desires pretty explicitly known—into a series of interrelated stories about dating, love, and miscommunication...
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Paul Blart: Mall Cop (PG) reviewed by Max Weiss [Now Available on DVD]

Paul Blart: Mall Cop would’ve made a nice digital short. The story of an out-of-shape, over zealous mall cop (Kevin James) who takes down a band of criminals, Die-Hard-style has a few laughs. It’s funny when Blart runs after the bad guys and falls over for no apparent reason. It’s funny when he acts like he’s been badly hurt, but it’s just a tiny scratch (which he promptly covers with a Hello Kitty band-aid). It’s really funny when he charges into the bank where the hostages are being held, but first dutifully weaves his way through the bank line barrier posts. And . . . that’s about it.
Instead, they tried to make a whole movie about this guy, figuring that the more pathetic Blart was, the funnier his heroism would be. Bad call....
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The Unborn (PG-13) reviewed by Mike Mayo [Now Available on DVD]

This visually polished slice of hokum borrows well from The Exorcist, The Ring, The Mephisto Waltz, The X-Files and even Poltergeist. If the big finish of The Unborn is a bit of a damp firecracker, most of the scary moments work well enough, and some have not been revealed in the trailers.

Young Casey (Odette Yustman) is troubled by visions of a creepy little kid with a really bad haircut. He seems to have something to do with Casey's dead mother, though her dad (B-movie veteran James Remar) pooh-poohs the idea. At first. Then one of Casey's babysitting charges, another creepy kid with an equally unfortunate haircut, gets into the act. Before long, Casey has persuaded her best friend and boyfriend to help her find the truth about her past...
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Seven Pounds is a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, cloaked in a really crappy movie.
How best to describe this clunker? Let’s put it this way: Seven Pounds isn’t just bad—it’s historically bad; deserves to be mocked on Mystery Science Theater 3000 bad; “I can’t believe what I just saw” bad. I’ll give my man Will Smith this: He does nothing halfway...
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What will Jim Carrey be forced to do next? In Liar, Liar, he played a lawyer who, after being put under a spell, couldn’t tell a lie. In Yes Man, he plays an anti-social loan officer who makes a covenant with a self-help guru to embrace the power of yes. So what will it be? Switch places with his dog? Embrace his inner child? Do everything his Rice Krispies tell him to do? (I shouldn’t give Hollywood any ideas.)
The premise actually works—to a point. Everything that’s good about Yes Man, you’ve already seen in the trailer: It’s funny when Carrey’s Carl says yes to flying lessons, yes to Korean lessons, and even yes to a mail order Iranian bride. And the film’s philosophy of affirmation actually resonates, especially when Carl grudgingly gives a ride to a homeless guy and ends up meeting the girl of his dreams (Zooey Deschanel).
But Yes Man simply isn’t funny enough...
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What possessed Keanu Reeves to accept the role of Klaatu, the alien who arrives with his giant robot buddy on the planet Earth with big plans to save our planet by annihilating its inhabitants? Hasn’t Keanu heard enough times in his career that his acting is flat and robotic? Does he really want to give his critics ammunition by playing a part only a few syllables removed from “Take me to your leaders”? (In this case, he’s referring to the U.N.)
I guess I sort of see why 20th Century Fox decided to remake this classic sci-fi. Back in 1951, Klaatu was intent on saving the earth from the Cold War. Today, he wants to save it from global warming. He’s Al Gore From Another Planet.
But the film’s sensibility still seems rooted in the ’50s...
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I’m beginning to buy into this whole rotating James Bond concept. Two years ago, when they introduced Daniel Craig as the new Bond in Casino Royale, I absolutely loved him. I thought the idea of Bond as a working class tough who secretly held a contempt for the elite was a great new wrinkle on the Bond mythos. And Craig, an excellent actor, with a believable physicality (that torso—yowsa!) and a kind of toughness that could easily melt into a wounded vulnerability, played the part to perfection.
Two films into the Craig-as-Bond era and I’m already kind of over it.
Here’s the deal....
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Believe the hype: Danny Boyle’s rags-to-riches fable about an Indian slumdog (street urchin) who makes a fortune on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire is one of the most captivating, ingenious and heartwarming films you’ll ever see...
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