Movie Review: The Smurfs
July 29, 2011
The Smurfs may be blue, but their movie is decidedly green, recycling discarded bits from other celluloid Happy Meals like Alvin and the Chipmunks, Garfield, and Hop into something half animated, half live action, and all careful studio calculation. Read more
Movie Review: Cowboys & Aliens
July 29, 2011
When you go into a high-powered summer sci-fi action thriller called Cowboys & Aliens, it’s a fairly safe bet that you’re going to spend two hours watching cowboys and aliens. But what you hope to see is a film that fuses those two familiar pop-movie elements into something with a tasty, original flavor — a genre mash-up that’s greater than the sum of its clichés. Read more
Movie Review: Zookeeper
July 8, 2011
Kevin James was fine as an affable sitcom schlub and Adam Sandler sidekick, but when Paul Blart: Mall Cop came out just after the 2008 economic meltdown and became a sleeper smash, he no longer seemed an innocuous loser. Suddenly, he was America’s loser. His puffed-up myopic bravado stood in for a nation whose dreams outstripped its reality. I was hoping James would go on to develop his charismatic fecklessness, but Zookeeper (I can’t believe I’m even writing this) is a dumbed-down Paul Blart. Read more
Movie Review: Horrible Bosses
July 8, 2011
There are few comedy pleasures better suited to the medium of movies than that of watching supposedly normal people behaving terribly. And if those transgressing characters are played by popular movie stars, so much the better. Everything naughty is a little bit nicer with, for instance, Billy Bob Thornton in the title role in Bad Santa. To this sweet list of sourball comedies we can now add Horrible Bosses, a bouncy, well-built, delightfully nasty tale of resentment, desperation, and amoral revenge that does for employer-employee relations what Danny DeVito and Bette Midler did for the bonds of matrimony in the great 1986 Zucker brothers comedy Ruthless People. Read more
Movie Review: Super 8
June 10, 2011
Loving, Playful, and spectacularly well made, Super 8 is easily the best summer movie of the year — of many years. And I make that declaration with full knowledge that the season has just begun. It’s been eons since a movie has conjured up such intense, specific feelings, images, memories, and nostalgic fantasies about American summertime youth — everyone’s American summertime youth, regardless of current age, nationality, sex, or climate. It’s been ages since adolescent innocence, fatherly authority, and everyday awe were in movie vogue. Read more
Movie Review: Bridesmaids
May 12, 2011
With a bit of training, a starlet can radiate strength, flair, poise, and well-being on screen. But to project skittish insecurity and self-loathing, and to make those qualities funny and sympathetic, and to do it all with an inner glow — that takes a special kind of performer, one who can stake out an almost confessional connection to the audience. That’s what Kristen Wiig
Movie Review: Thor
May 10, 2011
Can a blockbuster be momentous and lighthearted at the same time? Thor, Kenneth Branagh‘s rousing popcorn adventure about the Norse-blond, hammer-wielding god of thunder who made his Marvel Comics debut in 1962, pulls off something I wouldn’t have thought possible: It restores the innocence to big-budget superhero mythmaking. Thor, played by the Australian newcomer Chris Hemsworth with a bulked-up swagger, absurdly noble eyes, and a killer grin, is a stud-muffin Viking Hercules who is born to royalty in the realm of Asgard. After crossing his father, Odin (Anthony Hopkins), in a fit of youthful pique, he gets stripped of his powers and is sent through a wormhole, which crash-lands him in the New Mexico desert. Read more
Movie Review: Something Borrowed
May 10, 2011
Don’t be fooled by Rachel (Ginnifer Goodwin), one third of the inane Gen-Y love triangle in Something Borrowed. She may dress like the accomplished attorney she is, but she’s fundamentally and forever a girlish doormat, born to submit to the demands of her narcissistic, sexually provocative best friend, Darcy (Kate Hudson, always game for playing a party girl). Darcy (note to Jane Austen: Sue!) is engaged to Dex (the Tom Cruise-faced Colin Egglesfield), a hot rich guy as passive as he is handsome. When he and Rachel met in law school, neither would make a romantic move, although the two simperers were obviously meant to be together. So Darcy snapped up Dex and is now planning her wedding. Life would be peachy if Dex and Rachel hadn’t confessed their feelings on the night of her 30th birthday and ended up in bed. To quote Austen, ”Oh no they dit-un’t!” Read more
Movie Review: Rio
April 15, 2011
Rio is an animated film intended primarily for kids, it also passes the grown-up test, with enough good-natured comedy and general intelligence to keep it from driving you crazy. It was conceived and directed by Carlos Saldanha, who directed or co-directed all three “Ice Age” movies and “Robots” before returning to his native land for inspiration. Fittingly, it’s a story about someone coming home to Brazil: a blue macaw taken from the jungle as a hatchling who has lived all of his 15 years as a pet in Minnesota. Read more
Movie Review: Your Highness
April 8, 2011
The intended audience for Your Highness requires no professional guidance to spot the high in the title. Marketed as an oeuvre de wack from director David Gordon Green of the magnum stoner comedy Pineapple Express and starring Pineapple stalwarts Danny McBride and James Franco, with medieval garb on loan, perhaps, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Your Highness is just what the TV ads imply: a rude, raunchy, violent mess of a fake olde fairy tale, available for the toking, er, taking. So far, so good, right? Read more
