March 2010
43 posts
Rod Lott Review: Hot Tub Time Machine
Not since “Snakes on a Plane” has a film’s title told you everything you needed to know. “Hot Tub Time Machine” pays tribute to the slopes-set sex comedies of the mid-’80s to early ’90s. Unless your hormones were brimming with activity at any point within that time frame, you may not realize so many existed: “Hot Dog … The Movie,” “Ski Patrol,” “Ski School,” “Ski School 2.”
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Clif' Warren Review: Green Zone
“Green Zone,” a problematical film pulled from Ravjiv Chandrasekaran’s 2006 non-fiction work “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” fails to be the heavyweight thriller it was meant to be for several central reasons.
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Joshua Blevins Peck Review: The White Ribbon
The White Ribbon is a haunting, austere work by a director not frightened to put his vision on the screen.
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Joe O'Shansky Review: Hot Tub Time Machine
I’ve probably said before in this space that my only major requirement for a comedy is that it is funny. I don’t care how ridiculous the situations or how goofy the characters are. I’ll even let technical proficiency slide if a film serves up consistent laughs. And as stupid as Hot Tub Time Machine sounds on paper, it did a decent job of serving up some raunchy, nostalgic fun.
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Shawn S. Lealos: Pixels 'n Bits - Street Fighter
For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me… it was Tuesday
Wow. I watched Super Mario Bros. last week and talked about how it wasn’t a very good movie, but at least it was a blast to watch. It knew it wanted to be a tongue-in-cheek fun time at the movies and succeeded in that aspect of the film. This week, I watched Street Fighter...
Shawn S. Lealos Review: The Bounty Hunter
When The Bounty Hunter begins, Nicole is locked in the trunk of Milo’s car and lights a flare stick. He opens the trunk and she responds by punching him in the balls and running for freedom. He gives chase and tackles her to the ground, leading to the extended flashback of how they got to this point. I am sure I am not the only person to have flashbacks to the Steven Soderbergh movie Out of...
George Lang Review: Hot Tub Time Machine
There are good bad movies, and there are bad good movies. True to its ridiculous, on-the-nose title, “Hot Tub Time Machine” is a good bad movie: a raunchy, gloriously self-aware mash note to teensploitation flicks of the ’80s.
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Brandy McDonnell Review: How to Train Your Dragon
The creative pairing behind the 2002 Oscar-nominated animated sci-fi feature “Lilo & Stitch” helps the fantastical new animated adventure “How to Train Your Dragon” soar far higher than anticipated.
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Kim Brown Review: The White Ribbon
“I don’t know if the story I want to tell you is entirely true.”
The narrator says that at the beginning of “The White Ribbon,” a film that is ambiguous but sharply focused, a contradiction that makes sense only in director Michael Haneke’s complicated cinematic world.
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Michael Smith Review: How to Train Your Dragon
Filled with rousing adventure and eye-popping animation in 3-D and Imax, while balanced by a sweetness and comedy that translates to all ages, “How to Train Your Dragon” is the first great family film of the year.
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Michael Smith Review: Chloe
Imagine a filmmaker attempting to make a Hitchcockian suspense film, an always tricky proposition, and then dressing it up with “Fatal Attraction” overtones. The result is “Chloe,” a trashy mistake.
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Phil Bacharach Review: Chloe
“Chloe” wants to be an erotic thriller. At least, that’s what I think it aims to be. It’s difficult to know for sure, what with its eroticism mired in fussy pretensions and its suspense mainly stemming from how the moviemakers will possibly resolve the silliness.
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Joe O'Shansky Review: The Bounty Hunter
Ahh, The Bounty Hunter. You sure, I can’t just tell you Jennifer Anniston looks drool-worthy in that indestructible, form-fitting, black mini-dress and that Gerard Butler takes his shirt off, and just get out of here?
I didn’t think so.
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Joshua Blevins Peck Review: The Ghost Writer
It’s hard to mention the name Roman Polanski without getting all the attached baggage associated with him. Currently suffering through “chalet” arrest in Switzerland, the 76-year-old director is fighting extradition to Los Angeles to face charges of sexual assault that have lay in limbo for more than 30 years.
Polanski is a divisive, controversial figure to many, due to this...
Kim Brown Review: Repo Men
The violence and gore wouldn’t be so bad in “Repo Men” if it were consistent.
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Joshua Blevins Peck Review: She's Out of My League
The phrase “only in the movies” can apply itself to many things when it comes to cinema.
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Coming Soon to a TV Near You, March 22 - 28, 2010
Ordinary People (TCM, Thursday, March 25, 9pm)
In the 30 years since Robert Redford’s directorial debut, it is tempting to dismiss Ordinary People as a ham-handed tearjerker. To be sure, its story of an upper-middle-class family devastated by the death of a child was the stuff of soap operas and Oscar bait. Indeed, it won Academy Awards for best director, supporting actor, adapted screenplay...
George Lang DVD Review: 2012
After 4.5 billion years of mostly noble history, Earth deserves a far better ending than the hopelessly stupid “2012.”
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George Lang Review: The Bounty Hunter
Hiding inside “The Bounty Hunter” is a much better movie — it can be seen struggling to get out from under the silliness. In fact, with its hard-boiled supporting characters and the promise of romantic spark between charismatic stars Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler, the film can occasionally even feel like something Elmore Leonard dashed off in his spare time. (Leonard’s first novel was...
Kim Brown Review: She's Out of My League
In a movie world full of sex-comedy sharks, “She’s Out of My League” is surprisingly gentle.
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Michael Smith Review: Green Zone
Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller has a job to do. As part of the Army in Iraq in March 2003, he follows orders. When he’s told to go find weapons of mass destruction, he goes on the hunt with the intelligence reports he’s given.
But when his unit’s searches come up empty again and again, he starts questioning the intelligence. He asks the question that the world was asking at...
Kathryn Jenson White Review: The Maid
“The Maid,” which screens Friday and Saturday at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, is the story of a housemaid in the home of a wealthy Chilean family, giving us a Latin-American take on the world of upstairs/downstairs. While Raquel (Saavedra) has served the family for 23 years, she isn’t really part of it. If there’s one thing this film makes clear, it’s that as much as the employer wants the...
Mike Robertson Review: She's Out of My League
As we’ve also pointed out many times before, rom-com plot elements have become so predictable and well-defined that their success lies almost solely in the charm provided by said leading couple and their wacky friends/neighbors/townspeople.
Based on these criteria, “She’s Out of My League” does OK.
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Joe O'Shansky Review: Green Zone
Even with The Hurt Locker taking Best Picture recently, it’s actual box office gross suggested most of the people who saw it win that Oscar probably hadn’t seen the film yet. I have to confess to being a little baffled by The Hurt Locker’s sweep with the Academy voters. While Jeremy Renner’s performance was superb, I found the film to be a very well crafted action/suspense...
Shawn S. Lealos: Pixels 'n Bits - Super Mario...
“You know what I love about mud. It’s clean and dirty at the same time.”
This is the kind of dialogue you can expect from this movie and shows how low the bar you need to set for yourself is, if you have never watched it before now. The movie is considered a prime example of how bad video game adaptations can be, but I don’t think it is really as bad as everyone, including...
Coming Soon to a TV Near You, March 15 - 21, 2010
Heavy Metal in Baghdad (IFC, Wednesday, March 17, 9:30pm)
Heavy Metal in Baghdad purports to be about the only heavy metal band in Iraq, but it is much more. By concentrating on a ragtag group of average Joes (or average Fulans, to be culturally correct) and their day-to-day struggles in a war-torn country, this riveting 2007 documentary opens a rarely seen window on the life of Iraqis.
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Jeffrey Huston Review: Our Family Wedding
Urban comedy-dramas (popularized by Tyler Perry)—many of which revolve around extended families—have become a niche staple of the spring and fall movie seasons. Our Family Wedding is another addition to this growing sub-genre, and it most certainly has to rank among the worst.
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Brandy McDonnell Review: Our Family Wedding
Just before the titular nuptials of the comedy “Our Family Wedding” march down the aisle, a destined-for-the-barbecue goat runs amok, gobbling down Viagra, tipping over tables and trampling decorations.
But lame slapstick, predictable drama and easy stereotypes wreak havoc on director/co-writer Rick Famuyiwa’s (“Brown Sugar”) culture-clash tale long before the goat does its damage.
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Gene Triplett Review: She's Out of My League
Can a blond bombshell really fall for a bumbling geek? Maybe in a terminally awkward and frustrated schoolboy’s fondest fantasy. Definitely in the puerile imaginations of screenwriters Sean Anders and John Morris, who took audiences for a ridiculously raunchy ride in “Sex Drive.”
Now they’ve brought to life the answer to every love-starved pencil-neck’s dream with “She’s Out of My...
Michael Smith Review: Our Family Wedding
Sweet, goofy and funnier than I expected it to be, “Our Family Wedding” is a simple, broad comedy. Its modern depiction of a Hispanic woman marrying a black man is filled with cultures clashing in cliched ways.
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Shawn S. Lealos Review: Our Family Wedding
I have to admit, I went into Our Family Wedding with very low expectations. The movie had a lot going against it in my mind. It looked like a basic chick flick with no original qualities. There is a couple who wants to get married. They decide to introduce their families on the day they announce their engagement. One family is Latino and the other is African American. Racial tensions arise,...
Mike Robertson Review: Alice in Wonderland
Tim Burton is one of those directors who brings such a distinctive visual style to his projects that it’s difficult to ignore his presence — even if you would like to — when discussing his work. Burton stopped pushing his own boundaries with 1994’s “Ed Wood.” Since then, he’s become increasingly predictable — the directorial equivalent of Al Pacino or Jack Nicholson in delivering the caricatured...
Joshua Blevins Peck Review: Brooklyn's Finest
Does the sensation of déjà vu ever come over you as a movie unfolds? It’s a creeping-up-on-you sort of feeling that makes a film seem like a copy of something already seen.
The story and cops in Brooklyn’s Finest fit firmly into that déjà vu category.
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Joe O'Shansky Review: Alice in Wonderland
it might be films like Alice in Wonderland that push this 3D craze a little closer to burn out.
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Coming Soon to a TV Near You, March 8 - 14, 2010
Paranoid Park (IFC, Sunday, March 14, 4:15am, 9:30am, 3:30pm)
Disaffected youth is the métier of Gus Van Sant. Beginning with his 1989 feature-length debut, Drugstore Cowboy, and continuing through 2003’s Elephant, the Portland, Oregon-based filmmaker has poked and prodded teen dispirit. Paranoid Park, a Van Sant ode to callow young people, is a sort of Crime and Punishment for skaters....
Joshua Blevins Peck talks Oscar 2010
I have a confession to make: Every year in March, I partake in something that makes me hate myself. When it is over, I feel ashamed and dirty.
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Rod Lott DVD Review: We Live in Public
Josh Harris is “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of.” That’s true, despite the sheer amount of press he received in all his ventures, both online and off. That says a lot about how fleeting fame can be when tied to the Web, and the 2009 documentary “We Live in Public” explores the degrees and dangers of that visibility.
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George Lang Review: Alice in Wonderland
To quote Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, buying into Tim Burton’s vision of “Alice in Wonderland” “depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” Burton might seem like the perfect guide down the rabbit hole, but in the end, there’s not an atom of meaning in it.
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George Lang Review: Brooklyn's Finest
In the context of its sad, slightly interlocking stories, the title of Antoine Fuqua’s “Brooklyn’s Finest” registers with dark irony and even a world-weary sneer. These are cop stories in which redemption is not a reasonable expectation, and if it does come, it will be the paltry, take-what-you-can-get variety. And there is not much point to it all, unless “Brooklyn’s Finest” is...
Michael Smith Review: Alice in Wonderland
Let’s be clear, no speaking in riddles: Tim Burton’s new film is a head trip into blunderland.
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Michael Smith Review: The Crazies
The most surprising quality about “The Crazies” is its sanity. This virus-run-amok chiller works in almost every way.
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Shawn S. Lealos Review: Alice in Wonderland
Leaving the screening of Alice in Wonderland, one of my only thoughts was that no one but Tim Burton could have made this movie. I am not a huge fan of the 1951 Disney animated classic, it is a bit too strange although I understand that was the entire point of the story to begin with. I often thought that the animators and writers had to be on some serious drugs to make that movie. Well, that...
Shawn S. Lealos Review: Brooklyn's Finest
When I reviewed Street Kings last year, I complained about the lack of the script’s originality. With the release of Brooklyn’s Finest, my complaints are even harsher. This is not only an unoriginal idea but a rehash of a number of better films and situations, thrown together in one giant anthology of a movie reeking strongly of an overreliance on coincidence. Never once in this movie did I feel a...