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Sex and the City 2 
Sex and the City the movie was a huge hit, so with the sequel just two years later, the girls kind of feel like they can do whatever they want.  They give the fans what they want in an over-the-top self-indulgent fashion (while wearing a lot of over-the-top self-indulgent fashions) ...has all the elements in place for a good, extended episode of Sex and the City.  Then after about 45 minutes, the girls leave the city. Then the movie becomes just plain stupid... They are living out a fantasy just because they can.
Didn’t they learn from their first hiatus that we want them to be themselves?
Full review at moviejungle.com

Just Wright 
This movie isn’t too hard.  It isn’t too soft.  But something about Just Wright isn’t right either.  The drama is never intense enough to have you concerned about the characters.  It’s never funny enough to be considered a romantic comedy... Queen Latifah is a beautiful woman, but because of her size, she isn’t always thought of as a sex symbol like some of her glamorous colleagues..  But does the movie have to be afraid to say that’s why McKnight falls for her gorgeous friend first?.. if Leslie isn’t going to show us her insecurities, how can the audience ever doubt things will turn out just right?...  Just Wright is really just… there.
Full review at moviejungle.com

Clash of the Titans   
"Just release the Kraken already. “Release The Kraken” is a catchphrase that’s endured among fans of the 1981 original.  The studio behind the new one has made sure we hear the phrase in all the promos.  And as I sat there watching the new one, I wanted them to release the Kraken so I could see the cool special effects and then be released from sitting through this underwhelming remake... Liam Neeson is Zeus.  Ralph Fiennes is Hades.  I couldn’t help but wonder if two of them looked at each other, rolled their eyes and said:  “Dude, what happened here?  We were in Schindler's List”."
Full review at moviejungle.com

Our Family Wedding 
"Two cultures come together – but not with a bit of wit or originality.  Seriously, the best they could come up with was a grandma fainting at the site of her future black grandson-in-law.  Perhaps there’s no pleasing me, because if the bulk of the movie had played to stereotypes I would have blasted it for pandering... If we don’t see them embrace their own cultures, why should we believe the two fathers are so proud of their own?  The filmmakers would probably point to the overly long wedding itself – which is an explosion of poorly done slapstick, offensive stereotypes and loud reminders of everyone’s ethnicity.  It’s as if they forgot the racial comedy had no racial themes, so they crammed them all into the end.
Full review at moviejungle.com

Dear John   
Dear Young Women of America:  If you were into The Notebook, you’ll probably want to see Dear John.  And the film’s creators will do everything they can to manipulate you into liking it...  John is on leave from the U.S. Army Special Forces visiting his father in South Carolina.  He’s a big heroic lunk – a good boy now but there are hints that he used to be a bad boy.  He also spends a lot of time shirtless.  Savannah is an unbelievably good girl.  She’s a wide-eyed blonde all the boys like.  She thinks she has a bad girl streak because she swears – in her head!  Her ambition:  to someday open a ranch where autistic kids can play with horses (Wow, that’s unbelievably word-in-Savannah’s-head-ing wholesome)!...  pretty much everything we see coming in the most cornball presentation possible.
(For the record -- I actually don't mind The Notebook)
Full review at moviejungle.com

Did You Hear About The Morgans?  
"It has an intriguing and somewhat unique enough premise, or at least one that should have made it stand out from other romantic comedies.  But once the creators had the initial idea, they let laziness set in...  Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant do just enough to remind you they’re Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant and aren’t other actors in disguise.  She’s a quirky yet sophisticated gal who loves New York City and wants to talk about her relationships.  He’s a droll Englishman with a witty charm who hides his true feelings.  They’ve each done these parts so many times before that they’re just phoning it in here.  Their delivery is so slow and so familiar; they both seem bored the entire time."
Full review at moviejungle.com 

2012  
Indiana Jones fans will know about the moment that separated the fourth movie from the classics: it’s been nicknamed the “nuke the fridge” moment.  Without giving away too much, Indy escapes certain death thanks to a refrigerator, and the audience who’s been with Indy through snakes, rolling boulders and temples of doom finally rolls its eyes and says “oh, come on.”  2012 is a two and a half hour “nuke the fridge” moment.  John Cusack’s character is either the greatest driver who ever lived or the luckiest SOB on the planet...  Let’s hope the Mayans’ prediction that something terrible would happen in 2012 has been mistranslated into “something terrible will happen that’s called 2012.”  Full review at moviejungle.com

The Ugly Truth  
"I kid you not:  at my screening of The Ugly Truth, the film broke right at the film’s climax.  Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler were acting out the pivotal scene that you knew was coming, and the film broke.  I could have waited for the film to be fixed just so I could see the last minute in between the unimaginative climax and the credits, but at that point, I had already correctly predicted every other single thing that was going to happen.  Why wait when I’m sure I know?...  If you think you know everything about Abby and Mike…  you’re right, you do.  These two characters are stereotypes, written with no imagination and acted with no originality by Heigl and Butler. 
Full review at moviejungle.com

Transformers:  Revenge of the Fallen  
"It didn’t make a bit of sense to me, and with all the noise of machines fighting each other, I didn’t have time to figure it out.  Looking back, that’s hard to believe since the movie runs to overkill length of nearly 2 ½ hours.  The basic idea is that an evil robot called “The Fallen” has decided now is the time for his fellow evil Transformers – called “Decepticons” – to rise up and take over the planet.  Why now?  I don’t know.  If they were living among us all along, what took ‘em so long?...  When the mechanical arms start flying and the roar of machines blare through the speakers, I’ll be damned if I can figure out which one is the Autobot and which one is the Decepticon."
Full review at moviejungle.com

Battle For Terra 
"Conservative groups or anyone with an ax to grind against the environmental movement should stay away from—and not talk about -- the animated 3-D adventure Battle for Terra.  Bringing attention to this movie could generate publicity and encourage people to see it, and that will hurt your cause.  I won’t reveal where I stand on environmental issues, but I will reveal where I stand on bad movies:  I’m against them."
Full review at moviejungle.com


Observe and Report 
"If I may, I’ll quote myself from my Paul Blart: Mall Cop review referencing one of the few things I liked:  “It’s kind of funny that Paul took an oath as a security guard to ‘observe and report’ and he works a Segway very well – we needed more of that kind of law enforcement parody earlier on.” ... Boy, not only did writer/director Jody Hill and the usually likeable Seth Rogen give us a movie that sucks just as bad as Paul Blart, but one that’s kind of unsettling... if you feel like you’ve seen this before – you have and you haven’t.  But do yourself a favor and pretend you have.
Full review at moviejungle.com

Adventureland  
"Had Adventureland come out when I was still a teenager in the 80s, I would have thought this was a classic.  It has sex, loud music, parties and a story about young adults trying to make it in the real world.  But with my adult perspective, I can’t help but think Adventureland is bland and a little sad...    When all is said and done, Adventureland is probably pretty accurate portraying coming of age in the 80s, but it can’t hold up to a coming-of-age movie from the 80s. 
(Oh -- and Rochester readers -- look not just for Kristen Wiig but for a Foreigner tribute band!)
Full review at moviejungle.com


The Pink Panther 2
"If I told you there’d be a movie starring a comedy dream team of Steve Martin, John Cleese and Lily Tomlin – and that it would be based on a concept by Blake Edwards and performed by Peter Sellers – you would have a right to be excited...  It’s amazing that the movie makers had the audacity to remake the classic to begin with and the arrogance to start the counter back at one."   
Full review at moviejungle.com

Underworld:  Rise of the Lycans 
"Maybe the worst part of Underworld: Rise of the Lycans is that it’s very, very dark.  You can’t see much onscreen, and worse:  there isn’t a moment of daylight to let you glance at your watch... With the corny overacting and the flowery speeches of main Lycan Lucian , it just comes off as goofy.  It’s a war between an army of vampires and an army of werewolves – I kept wondering if an army of Frankenstein monsters would jump in and take sides."
Full review at moviejungle.com

Paul Blart:  Mall Cop 
"The title makes you hopeful you’ll get a movie with some big, dumb laughs. You want to see a guy who’s over-confident and takes his job way too seriously..  I can’t laugh at this guy. I’d be as big a jerk as the sales clerks who make fun of him.. I can’t laugh with him either because the movie isn’t very funny... This could have been the first movie about Black Friday to open on Black Friday.  Why not take advantage of the symmetry and the marketing opportunities and open then?  Oh yeah: because it stinks. And the good movies released at the same time would have Paul Blart: Mall Cop escorted from the building."
Full review at moviejungle.com

Yes Man
Jim, Jim, Jim… why, after saying “yes” to The Majestic, Fun With Dick and Jane, and The Number 23 would you say “yes” to starring in a bad movie about a guy who has to say “yes” to everything?  You kind of asked for this, no?  So allll-righty then…
Full review at moviejungle.com

The Alphabet Killer 
I've sold the full review to my friends at moviejungle.com, so let me get Rochester-specific here.  The Rochester-based movie is fun to watch just to look for things you recognize --  be it a Churchville sign, Richmond's bar or High Falls (but could someone in Webster tell me where your underground parking garage is?).  Unfortunately, the movie is dull most of the way through and ludicrous at the end.
Full review at moviejungle.com

The Duchess
"I sense through history there must have been thousands of stories of noble women held back by their royal spouses – beloved by the masses but loathed by the men they married because they couldn’t give them a male heir. And I feel like Hollywood is determined to tell every one of them...  For all her suffering, we don’t see acted out why Georgiana is a great figure. You do learn that all of this becomes important – when you read the “whatever happened to” subtitles at the end. Director Saul Dibb has made a movie about an asterisk to history and not about history itself."
Full review at moviejungle.com

Disaster Movie
"... Reality TV star Kim Kardashian and Nick Lachey’s girlfriend Vanessa Minnillo are two of the stars of the new parody film Disaster Movie. If that’s a selling point for you and you go, then you deserve that you get. "
Full review at moviejungle.com

The Rocker
"The Rocker is the new movie where the guy who plays Dwight on The Office is a former member of an ‘80s hair band trying to recapture his glory days... They could have called it Dwightsnake...  Or Great Dwight...  But they went with the generic The Rocker, which fits this hopelessly generic rock and roll comedy."
Full review at moviejungle.com

Star Wars:  The Clone Wars
"I swear I love Star Wars, and I really do consider myself a Star Wars fan, but there are moments when I feel a great disturbance in The Force."
Please read my review at moviejungle.com

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
I can only guess that to truly enjoy Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 you need to a) be a teenaged or pre-teen girl   b) been a teenaged or pre-teen girl when Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 1 came out  or  c) seen Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 1... Actually, all four have had considerable success in TV either during or after Sisterhood 1.  It’s ironic that they didn’t move on to a bigger or better movie this time.  A dull project like this would seem to defeat the purpose of teaching that when you get older, you have to stop relying on your BFFs and strike out on your own.
Please read my review at moviejungle.com

Step Brothers
"...if you know any of these slackers yourself, you know what makes them funny and why you laugh behind their back. They think they’ve got it going on.  They somehow think living at home makes them independent thinkers who don’t conform.  They think they’re just biding their time until the time is right.  They think they’re smarter than you... The problem with Step Brothers is that they’re played not as if they’re ignorant but so dumb they come off as mentally-challenged.  These guys don’t act like teenagers who never let go of their glory days – they act like toddlers.. .  And if a mentally-challenged guy still lives at home – well, you cut him some slack, don’t you?"
Full review at moviejungle.com

Forbidden Kingdom
I’m not an aficionado of kung fu movies, so watching Forbidden Kingdom, I couldn’t say for sure if I was watching a parody or a tongue-in-cheek tribute.  Distilling the above comment to the real point:  I have no idea what I was watching.
Full review at moviejungle.com


Smart People
" Does it make me stupid to say I wish they’d taken the raw material they had here and turned it into a more accessible romantic comedy?  On paper, it’s got what it takes.  Dennis Quaid though is a college professor, and Thomas Haden Church and Ellen Page made their name in Oscar-nominated quirky comedies, so (director) Noam Murro decides Smart People has to be more erudite.  What it comes off as is a movie that’s fairly dull, and not as smart as it thinks it is."
Full review at moviejungle.com

10,000 BC
There’s a great old Jerry Seinfeld routine where he claims when you watch a nature show, you root for whichever animal is the subject.  (If it’s about lions, you root for them to kill that stupid gazelle.  If it’s about the gazelle, you exclaim:  Get out of there!  Use your speed!).  When the tribe of main characters attacks the herd of woolly mammoths, I just can’t root for them.  Not to sound like an animal rights activist or too shallow, but the mammoths come off as these majestic beasts and the tribe just looks ridiculous.  They speak about very metaphysical concepts, yet one of them I think is named “Tick Tick”. 
Full review at moviejungle.com

The Golden Compass
          Conservative Christians and atheists are both complaining about The Golden Compass.  The Christians say it promotes atheism; some atheists are saying it doesn’t do enough to do so.
          I came out with a prayer of my own:  “Dear God, they aren’t really going to make another one of these, are they?”
          The long and senseless movie goes on forever and leads to no real conclusion, but then throughout, I never really knew what the characters were trying to do.  Still, it’s clearly set up for a sequel.  Golden Compass:  you are no Harry Potter. 
          And Harry’s success is the reason they’re making movies like this nowadays.  It has nothing to do with God, atheists, wizards or what have you.  It’s about marketing, and by the end of The Golden Compass, I’d had my fill.  Actually, I realized I’d had my fill when I saw all the Potter-inspired films in the previews.  I think every one of them featured talking animals, gold lettering in its titles, an announcer using the words “magical” and “adventure,” and one special little kid who is “the chosen one.”
         The Golden Compass had all the above too.  It’s the story of a special little girl who will somehow lead us to the truth about “dust.”  Dust are particles that let people see the truth about other worlds—but the priests in power don’t want her to uncover that truth because they’ll lose their power.  All people in her world have demons (spelled “daemons” for fanciful effect) that are actually living, morphing animals walking beside them.  The priests capture her friends, and she goes off on a quest to free them, aided by a group of Egyptians (I think they said Egyptians.  It was probably some variation of the word to make it more “subtle” that the anti-Christians were being helped by Muslims). 
         There’s a weird sidebar involving polar bears that makes no sense at all.  It looks very cool (most of the movie does), but all I could think is it looks like a Christmas Coca Cola commercial gone wrong.
         I didn’t get it, so Christians don’t worry:  I don’t think kids will either.  Maybe they got the messages in Philip Pullman’s books, maybe they didn’t.  But among the special effects and medieval babbling in the film, I would think they’ll be as lost as I was.  I’m all for subversive stories, but as an adult, it’s cooler to look back and discover something you didn’t realize was subversive… like when you realize Alice In Wonderland is a big long drug trip.  The lack of subtlety here just made me roll my eyes.

Good Luck Chuck
          Decision time:  do I want this site to be R-rated?  Because there are words that rhyme with Luck and Chuck that would fit nicely into this review.
          If you saw the commercials, you’ll think Good Luck Chuck is about Dane Cook falling in love with Jessica Alba and struggling to get through day-to-day life with her since she’s such a klutz.  She is, but perhaps the creators realized Jessica Alba isn’t that great a physical actress and abandoned that.  The real premise of the movie is that Cook’s Chuck is a good luck charm for women seeking their true love.  If they sleep with him, the next person they date is their soul mate and eventual husband. 
          So before Chuck hooks up with Alba, he sleeps with a lot of women to make the most of this “gift.”  He’s egged on by a best friend, who is the epitome of the “guy best friend” in a romantic comedy – an immature lout who thinks about nothing but partying and sex even though he has no game himself.  He’s played by a guy with no charisma whose name I’d mention, but I don’t feel like looking him up, and since he’s so bad, it’s just not worth it.
          The ludicrous premise reaches its ridiculous peak when Chuck does get involved with Alba… and is fearful he’ll lose her to the next guy she meets.  Since the idea is so vague, it’s hard to know the rules of this curse.  I’ll travel back in time now and address Chuck:  “Dude, just break up with her.  Then get back together with her, and you’re all set.”
          There are a couple of funny moments when Chuck becomes something of a Jessica Alba stalker, but they’re negated by the unfunny moments.  Looking back, the curse left a bad taste in my mouth, particularly when Chuck hooks up with one woman to “do her a favor” so she will meet her true love.  It’s supposed to be nice, but it comes off as exploitive and cruel.


Perfect Stranger
          The writers of Perfect Stranger had some good ideas there, but no idea how to make them happen.  Halle Berry plays a crusading journalist who takes on a very personal assignment:  find the man who killed an old friend.  In their last conversation, she tells Berry that she’s been having an affair with a powerful ad executive (Bruce Willis) who she met online.
          This actually would have been better about ten years ago when AOL and chatting were newer.  I imagine the screenwriters were up chatting one night and came up with the idea of Halle Berry (who I’m sure many a computer geek has stared at online) seducing Willis online to get in close to him.  But while they wrote “lol” and “brb” back and forth to each other, they didn’t think about how to write a long form story.
          When they needed to fill in some gaps, they cut and pasted from other sources.  I sensed trouble early on, when Berry needed to pontificate on corporate greed, censorship in the media and for some odd reason—the war in Iraq.  Her speech had to be copied and pasted from the “comments” section on somebody’s blog.  It was nothing we hadn’t heard before.
          In between, there are a few twists and turns, mostly spelled out for us in the badly written dialogue.  Berry and Willis are just here for the paychecks, but they’ve done that before.  I was really disappointed to see Giovanni Ribisi in this as Berry’s creepy sidekick Miles.  He’s been fun as a creep before (Phoebe’s brother on Friends for instance), but here he just makes you squirm.  There’s no reason for this supposedly intrepid reporter to have such a guy in her life.  I like creeps in movies, but this movie didn’t know what tone to take.  It would have been better off as an all-out sleaze movie that revels in it instead of giving our lead her moral high ground.
          The ending by the way isn’t fair.  I’ve complained about some twist endings before and I’ll do so again.  There’s a difference between ending a movie with an exciting twist you never saw coming and wrapping up a mystery with some unfair background that the viewer couldn’t possibly have known about.
          Final note to the creators:  I know you couldn’t use the letters “AOL” for obvious reasons, but it didn’t show that much creativity to call the online service “IOL.”  Besides that, “IOL” looks too much like “LOL.”

Premonition
          I know what’s going to happen.  Audiences leaving Premonition are going to be either disappointed or kind of confused.
          Like in Sandra Bullock’s underrated The Lake House, our heroine finds herself in a fantasy world, where she’s not quite sure what’s real and what’s not.  Unlike The Lake House, this is not a romance.  She wakes up one day to find her husband has been killed in a car crash and that her family life is in disarray.  Then she wakes up the next day to find him alive and everyone happy.  She wakes up the day after that and finds he is dead after all.   And so it goes, like it’s Groundhog Every Other Day.
          So what is going on here?  I think I get it, and I think I figured it out early.  The mystery is enough to sustain interest, although the action moves a little slowly.  You know there’s going to be a car crash (or is there?), but it’d be nice to have more things happen in the meantime.
          One reason it drags a little bit:  Sandra Bullock is pretty much the only person in this movie.  Her husband—supposedly someone with great influence on the course of her life—has nothing to do but his best impression of Patrick Duffy in Dallas (fans will get it. Think of the infamous season that wasn’t).  He’s played by Julian McMahon, who we know can carry a drama from his work on Nip/Tuck.  He’s wasted, as is character actor Peter Stormare, who is good in everything from Prison Break to Volkswagen commercials.  He’s underutilized as a psychiatrist, which is really weird for a movie about whether or not some poor girl’s gone crazy.
 
 Hannibal Rising
          I know Thomas Harris wrote a series of Hannibal Lecter books, but doesn’t he know how perfect a movie Silence Of The Lambs is?  It had this guy Hannibal Lecter locked up in a cage with a grisly past we could only imagine.  And at the end, he was off to do more horrible deeds that again, we could only imagine.
          But Harris wanted more of his books to make it to the big screen, so he gave us sequels that well… didn’t live up to that final shot in Silence of the Lambs (but I’ll admit—seeing Ray Liotta’s brain exposed was more horrible than I could imagine).  Now he’s written the screenplay based on his novel Hannibal Rising, a look at the cannibal’s formative years—a look at what in his childhood turned him into the movie’s most famous cannibal.
          Why would I want to know that?  Why would I want to have the grisly past I could only imagine spelled out for me?  And why would I ever want to feel sorry for Hannibal Lecter?
          The story begins in Lithuania during World War II, when Nazis invade the childhood home of Hannibal and his family.  The group is snowed in, and the horrors Hannibal witnesses make a big impression on him.  For the heck of it, I won’t give it all away, but my advice to Harris:  repressed memories are only interesting as plot devices if the audience isn’t in on them from the beginning.  It kind of ruins “the big reveal.”
          In the years that follow his ordeal, Hannibal the young man journeys through Europe, attending medical school, moving in with his uncle’s exotic wife (Gong Li of Memoirs of a Geisha) and becoming the man he does.  In one ludicrous part, he even goes through some samurai training.  Then—what a happy coincidence—the very Nazis who scarred him pretty much land right in his jaws for him to take revenge and whet his appetite.  It’s like a sadistic Batman Begins. 
          Gaspard Ulleil as the young Hannibal does an adequate Sir Anthony Hopkins impression, but he looks too much like Crispin Glover to imagine he’ll become that guy Jodie Foster eventually comes to for advice.
          Note to Thomas Harris:  the lambs stopped screaming.  Please no more.

These would be the movies in current release or from the recent past that sucked and left a bruise.  Consider these your Phantom Menaces... your Meet The Spartans... your Pearl Harbors...  if these were bands, they'd be Nelson or the Yoko Ono half of a John Lennon album...