Stay Away From:
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
Please read my review at moviejungle.com
"... 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. "
The Rocker
Please read my review at moviejungle.com
"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."
Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Please read my review at moviejungle.com
"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."
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
Please read my review at moviejungle.com
Step Brothers
Please read my review at moviejungle.com
The Forbidden Kingdom
Please read my review at moviejungle.com.
Smart People
Please read my review at moviejungle.com.
10,000 BC
Please read my review at moviejungle.com. Please scroll down to find it under staff reviews.
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.
Rendition
One sequence wedged in the middle of Rendition sums it up pretty well.
Reese Witherspoon is determined to find out what has happened to her husband, who has mysteriously vanished after boarding an international flight. She suspects the CIA has taken him, and after weeks of trying to get at the head of the CIA through a well-connected friend, she may get her chance. The friend’s secretary whispers something like “She’ll be here tomorrow.”
So Witherspoon waits at the office for Meryl Streep (who’s looking more and more like Glenn Close) for the confrontation. She screams at her: “Where’s my husband?” Security has her removed. And that’s it. Sure, it gave the editors making the film’s trailers a shot of Reese Witherspoon getting all dramatic, but the moment didn’t live up to the buildup.
There’s a lot of that. Rendition is full of moments of tension that go nowhere. Witherspoon hints that she might be a force to be reckoned with who the CIA shouldn’t have crossed—but c’mon, I could get in Meryl Streep’s face and shout.
There are also a lot of torture scenes, which I complain about not because of graphic content but because of repetition. Witherspoon’s husband is tortured by his captors who demand information from him he doesn’t have, and they work long and hard to get it out of him. There’s nothing particularly inventive about any of these scenes, and frankly, you only need a couple of them to get the point. I can only listen to: “Tell us what you know” – “I don’t know anything” so many times before I feel tortured myself.
Oscar winners Streep and Witherspoon are joined by Oscar nominee Jake Gyllenhaal, who is present to watch all the torture. He has perhaps never been blander. His CIA operative just kind of observes before taking a little bit of action himself, but in the scheme of things, he’s as effective as Reese Witherspoon’s character.
It might all have been worth it, but the little moments of disappointment through the whole movie work their way to a horribly disappointing ending. As international dramas go, this is a horrible rendition.
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 so fearful he’ll lose her to the next guy she meets that he practically goes nuts. 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.
Mr. Woodcock
For reasons I may never figure out, Billy Bob Thornton looked at this script and the similarly-themed School For Scoundrels and decided both needed to be made.
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 told 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 fresher. 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 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 had to have 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.”
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.
Because I Said So
Imagine you've been invited to a dinner party and the hosts are an overbearing woman and her three daughters. To entertain their guests after dinner, the four of them get up and sing some oldies. Only one of them can sing.
That unbearably annoying scenario is part of Because I Said So. I sat there and asked: "Why the hell would anyone want to go to a party where this is the entertainment?" And I realized I was sitting through a movie where that scene was supposed to be the entertainment.
Diane Keaton is the overbearing mother. She lives through her three daughters, and as a long-time single woman, she desperately wants to keep them from making the mistakes she's made. For the timing of this movie, it's youngest daughter Millie, played by Mandy Moore, who finds herself needing a man. So Keaton takes out a personal ad for her and screens the potential candidates. The two most promising are a live-for-the-moment musician and a shallow yuppie.
Guess which one we're supposed to root for and which one we're supposed to root against? Of course the yuppie will come off as soulless. He's one of the chick flick elements we've seen before, along with Mandy Moore's snorting laugh, the above-mentioned sing-along, and a precocious kid who tells women "You have a vagina." I feel like I've seen that kid a lot.
The chick flick clichés can work well with good acting or a good story (they worked last week in Catch And Release), but this movie just isn't funny and no one in it is very good. The makers may have been in awe of Diane Keaton and decided to let her do whatever she wanted. They should have pulled her back a bit to make her likeable. Mandy Moore's character-- doomed to repeat her mother's mistakes-- takes after her mother in the annoying department. The other two sisters, played by the talented Lauren Graham and Piper Perabo, have nothing to do.
This movie sucks. Because I said so.
Code Name: The Cleaner
Cedric The Entertainer wakes up with no memory, a briefcase full of money and a dead body next to him. Where did the body come from? He might be a secret agent, or he might be a janitor. He might be married to Nicolette Sheridan, or he might be involved with Lucy Liu. He’s found himself in the middle of quite a mystery.
Unfortunately, he’s found himself in the middle of a dull, dull comedy.
I’ve liked Cedric before, but he does nothing here really worth talking about. The attempts at funny material are nothing more imaginative than a fat guy attempting martial arts or a black guy questioning “I’m married to a white woman?”
Liu, Sheridan and everybody else are phoning it in here. About the only guy I liked was standup comic DeRay Davis as a janitor/wannabe rapper. He gets in a couple of good raps but isn’t used enough.
The spy stuff isn’t good, the comedy isn’t good… heck, the cleaning stuff isn’t all that good. If you go, you’ll forget you ever saw this.
THE WORST OF 2006:
I saw them for you.
1. Larry The Cable Guy: Health Inspector
2. Big Momma's House 2
3. RV
4. Marie Antoinette
5. Failure To Launch
6. Basic Instinct 2
7. When A Stranger Calls
8. Take The Lead
9. Fast Food Nation
10. Miami Vice
Night At The Museum
It could have been a passing of the torch, but instead it becomes an ironic and unfortunate moment.
Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney-- two movie icons who have appeared in some of the most memorable childrens films ever-- play night watchmen at the Museum of Natural History. They're leaving, and they interview Ben Stiller for the job (never mind that people leaving a job don't interview their replacements). Stiller gets the job, and it's his chance to headline a live action kids movie.
With nothing to work with, the star of There's Something About Mary and Along Came Polly is going to have to wait a little longer before he has a classic he can show off to his kids. The two legends onscreen retirement becomes a symbol that kids movies aren't what they used to be. I wonder if Mary Poppins or Pete's Dragon are showing at the Museum of Natural History.
It's too bad, because the idea should be a good one, especially for any kid with an active imagination. When the sun goes down, the exhibits at the Museum come to life, making Stiller not just a security guard but a peacekeeper and babysitter to the diaramas, statues, stuffed animals and wax figures that become animated. Sadly, they don't turn interesting. They do rather unoriginal things (the monkey steals keys, the diarama figures fight over space, a tiki head wants gum). They and the special effects are the stars, forcing Stiller to do nothing but react. And since he's reacting to uninteresting things, he returns in kind. I'd like to think a kid that would fantasize about the museum coming to life would be smart one: one who would appreciate good jokes and an interesting plot. The central mystery is both obvious in its conclusion and is not even logical when you think about it.
One of Stiller's trademarks is losing his temper and going off the deep end, which he does to some degree here. But this is a kid's movie, so he can't go too deep into that end or he'll scare the audience.
Stiller's all-star list of co-stars (Carla Gugino, Robin Williams, Ricky Gervais, Paul Rudd and a for-some-reason-uncredited Owen Wilson) won't be able to show off to their kids either with this one. The movie may keep them busy, but the entertainment value won't stay with them for long.
Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny
I guess I don’t know what I want from Jack Black.
In the last year or so, I’ve complained to directors when I’ve seen Black in their movies: “Let Jack be Jack,” I pleaded. He was too restrained in the very disappointing Nacho Libre and terribly miscast in King Kong.
So Black has reunited with partner Kyle Gass for Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny, the story of how their cult-comedy-band Tenacious D was “founded.” Jack gets to go all out and be in full rock opera mode… and it’s all too much.
I’ll give Jack Black credit for his devotion to the rock music he loves, and he does understand something I’ve come across when trying to explain my similar devotion. In a metalhead’s mind, Iron Maiden and Dio are the coolest things that ever existed. But you can’t possibly explain why. As soon as you verbalize why you love The Number Of The Beast or Holy Diver, you sound stupid.
In School of Rock, Black let his geek side show, and it worked. He was something of an outsider and had someone to play off. In The Pick of Destiny, it’s too much Tenacious D, and it doesn’t translate. I appreciate that Black knows who Dio is and is a fan, but just pointing out what you know about the man and his band isn’t funny. (Hey, I prefer Ronnie James Dio in Black Sabbath, I know he’s from Cortland and I even own the Lock Up The Wolves album… see? It sounds stupid and it’s not all that funny).
The Pick of Destiny is a buddy-road movie featuring two rock star wannabes trying to find “The Pick of Destiny,” a guitar pick played by the devil himself that as it turns out, all the great rock stars used (no explanation as to how Eddie Van Halen and Angus Young had this pick at the same time).
It relies very heavily on Jack Black’s personality, without giving him the material to let his personality shine. It’s part Beavis and Butthead, part Wayne’s World, part Blues Brothers, but it didn’t take any of the best parts.
One entertaining part of Tenacious D is the celebrity cameos, which I won’t give away. They’re a fun surprise, if not all that funny, and it’s interesting to see who is kind of included in Black’s “slack pack.”
Fast Food Nation
I never read the book ahead of time, so I didn’t know a lot about what to expect from Fast Food Nation, based on Eric Schlosser’s best-seller. I knew it would be something of an expose of the fast food industry, but thought it might have a funny, satirical take. You throw the words “fast food” into a title and you might expect quick, cheap entertainment. What you get instead from Fast Food Nation is a dull movie served to us painfully slow.
Greg Kinnear plays a marketing executive for fictional fast food giant “Mickey’s” (boy, that’s subtle) who is sent to a Colorado packing plant to figure out how cow excrement is getting into the burgers. And he finds—well, a lot of bull.
We see what Kinnear doesn’t. According to Nation, the problem with meat in the fast food industry is illegal immigration. Seriously. Our flawed immigration policy means thousands of illegals are getting across the border and finding jobs in meat packing plants. Apparently the supervisor jobs are given to sex-starved bullies who give drugs to all the women there and that causes them not to focus and to let contaminated meat slip by. That’s what I got out of it.
Bruce Willis, in an extended cameo as a restaurant owner and executive, asks what the problem is. He knows a percentage of fecal matter is going to stay on the meat and says the dangerous stuff will be cooked away. I hate to say it, but that sounds logical. Now, I’m sure it’s not a good thing to have meat with fecal matter on it, but I would have liked this movie to explain to me why. Because honestly, Bruce Willis kind of made sense. I need to know why I'm supposed to be outraged.
Amber Johnson (who I swear is Willis and Demi Moore’s daughter) is the focus of a subplot that takes up too much main time as a Mickey’s employee caught up in the animal rights movement. She’s also your typical teen who feels like she’s trapped in a dead-end job and dreams of bigger things beyond her small town. The implication might be that places like Mickey’s keep these kids down. Again, it might be. Otherwise, I’m not sure what this plot was doing here. There are just too many plots that at times, are only tangential to the fast food industry and at all times, move way too slow.
The use of a fictional fast food chain does make one wonder: how much of this is true? What’s it all based on? And the most important thing: what’s the deal with the fecal matter in the meat?
Running With Scissors
If anyone at Oscar time is still talking about Running With Scissors, they'll be talking about Annette Bening and what had to be an exhausting performance as Augusten Burroughs' mentally unstable mother Deirdre.
The movie is based on Burroughs' best-selling memoir about his childhood, so we see Deirdre entirely through his eyes. As a child, he adores her, so she manages to be both an idol to him and a delusional narcissist to us. Later, she has a full mental breakdown, which Oscar voters are sure to love.
Nearly as good is Alec Baldwin as her alcoholic husband, who no longer recognizes his wife and doesn't understand the boy whose life she's taken over. Lately, I don't think Alec Baldwin can do any wrong: he's outstanding in The Departed and is the only funny thing about TV's 30 Rock.
Unfortunately for young Augusten-- and for the movie-- his parents send him away to live with their therapist. It's unfortunate for him for the obvious reasons, and unfortunate for the movie because it means the two best characters aren't on camera for large chunks of time.
We do get more good performances though, including Brian Cox as therapist Dr. Finch, Jill Clayburgh as his wife, Gwyneth Paltrow as his daughter, Evan Rachel Wood as his other daughter and Joseph Fiennes as his son. They all do a fine job of playing the additional mentally instable influences on poor Augusten. Everyone in this movie, in fact, is a nutjob, and eventually, I just couldn't take it anymore. It's as if they're in competition to be the best wacko in the film.
I needed someone in this movie to be the voice of sanity-- to look at these people from the outside and say, "You're all crazy." Not having read Running With Scissors, I don't know if Augusten Burroughs himself is that voice of reason. In the movie, there's some narration from actor Joseph Cross as Augusten, but not enough to separate him from the others. He's overwhelmed by the insanity, as was I. It was all too much, and after three or four false endings, the whole movie was hard to take after awhile.
Running With Scissors is a true story, which means there was an outside world connected to the insanity of these people. It would have helped to see it.
Marie Antoinette
The promos feature music by Siouxsie & The Banshees and The Strokes, the opening title and logo looks like the Sex Pistols' "Never Mind The Bollocks," the star is a popular young starlet, the director is one of the most-talked about young filmmakers-- all of which would make you think the new film Marie Antoinette is a raucous, hip retelling of the life of France's infamous queen. You're hoping this is more lively than your typical period piece.
Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette is deadly dull, even moreso than your typical period piece (and even moreso than her incredibly overrated Lost In Translation).
Kirsten Dunst is Antoinette, the Archduchess of Austria, sent to France to marry the future king and unify the two countries. She's way out of her element, not used to the ways of royalty. She can't relate to these people she's forced to live among, and to make her life even harder, she's under extreme pressure to produce an heir even though her new husband appears to be impotent.
His "problem" may be a metaphor for how audiences will feel about this movie. It's hard to get excited about a movie featuring a bored woman wandering around a palace. If Marie Antoinette had a single emotion, it's hard to tell. Kirsten Dunst manages to play one of the more colorful and controversial women in history with a complete lack of passion. It's hard to tell when Marie is happy, sad, wistful, angry, or turned on. You have no idea if she has any feeling for her husband (an equally listless Jason Schwartzman, who can normally steal a movie), be it resentment, lust or even affection. I know boredom is supposed to be a theme, but you can only show so much boredom before you kill your audience. By the time she has an affair (it's in the promos I'm not giving anything away), you have no idea why.
You also have no idea why she was reviled by the people of France. For one thing, you never see the people of France to know how they'd react to her. I hate her because she's boring, but I got to see her. If you know anything about Marie Antoinette, you know she was beheaded by her people. It would have been nice to know why. Marie Antoinette didn't need to be a documentary, but if it was going to be a character study, it should at least have given us an interesting character.
The oddest addition to the movie would be the punk rock and new wave music from the '80s through today, meant to show Marie may have been "edgy." It is of course out of place, but it's used too sparingly for me to even get the point. Musically, this should have been a rock and roll Moulin Rouge-esque movie or a straight out period piece-- but the intermittent use of the music is just distracting.
About the only thing getting me through was knowing somebody was going to find her and cut her off her head before long.