Furry Vengeance

Release Date: April 30, 2010

Genre: Comedy, Family

MPAA Rating: PG

Studio: Summit Entertainment

Director: Roger Kumble

Screenwriter: Michael Carnes, Josh Gilbert

Movie Website: FurryVengeance-movie.com

Actors/Actresses: Brendan Fraser, Brooke Shields, Dick Van Dyke, Ken Jeong, Samantha Bee

Plot Summary: “Furry Vengeance” is a live action family comedy in which an ambitious young real estate developer, Dan Sanders, faces off with a band of angry animals when his new housing subdivision pushes too far into a pristine part of the wilderness. Led by an incredibly clever raccoon, the animals stymie the development and teach our hero about the environmental consequences of man’s encroachment on nature.

She’s Out of My League, directed by Jim Field Smith, is not an original concept in young adult, comedy, or romantic comedy film genres. It is the quintessential story of the geek who gets the girl. Often in these types of films, the geek gets the soulless hottie or is used by the heartless femme fatale and realizes that the girl he is meant to be with was right beside him all along.

And that’s just boring. In She’s Out of My League, the rare real-world event of a perfect 10 female digging the skinny dweeb with a dead-end job is the film’s central theme. It makes for some warm squishiness for the hopeless romantics out there; some awkward, mindless, and adolescent (in a good way) comedy for the macho boyfriends hen-pecked into watching the dreaded “chick flick”; and some real bromance for the bros in touch with their Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants-watching sides (if any guy has actually seen that movie).

In short, if a boyfriend, husband, unfortunate dater, or anyone like Paul Rudd’s character in I Love You, Man is dragged (perhaps kicking and screaming) into a romantic comedy this year, it ought to be She’s Out of My League. It’s got a twinge more sickening romance than Forgetting Sarah Marshall (an awesome movie), but enough testicle shaving and finger pegging to actually make it guy-friendly.

For those looking for anything thought-provoking, they’ll not likely find it watching She’s Out of My League. Instead, viewers can expect a blend of witty and witless comedy and somewhat touching lovey-dovey stuff.

Genre: Comedy, Romance

MPAA Rating: R

Studio: DreamWorks Pictures (Paramount)

Director: Jim Field Smith

Screenwriter: Sean Anders, John Morris

Trailer

Movie Website: GetYourRating.com

Actors/Actresses: Jay Baruchel, Alice Eve, T.J. Miller, Nate Torrence, Krysten Ritter, Geoff Stults, Lindsay Sloane

Our Verdict:

The movie is not a comedy classic, but I did laugh out loud a handful of times and chuckled on a regular basis. In the end, isn’t that all we really want from those sweet, mindless comedies Hollywood continues to offer?

As a shameless contraption of ridiculously sad things befalling attractive people, the engorged romantic tragedy Remember Me stands tall between those towering monuments to teen-oriented cinematic misery, Love Story and Twilight: Beginning with a shock of urban violence set on a subway platform in 1991, then moving forward to a balmy New York City summer a decade later, the movie is one part ”Love means never having to say you’re sorry” and one part 
 Edward’s warning to Bella: ”If you’re smart, you’ll stay away from me.” As in Love Story, an angry, fancy-class young man named Tyler (Robert Pattinson) falls in love with a fine, plain-class young woman named Ally (Lost’s Emilie de Ravin) on the campus of a renowned American university, and the couple’s devotion survives an avalanche of crises that would bury lesser soul mates. As in Twilight, Pattinson evokes the fancy-class man using the combined resources of dark glowers, milky gazes, and fabulously mussed-up hair.

Impressively, the star stuck with Remember Me even after his post-Twilight celebrity soared. Unfortunately, the film’s alienated rich kid is perilously close, in intense disgruntlement and plasma-deficient pallor, to that of alienated vampire Edward Cullen. And the overheated woes dreamed up by first-time screenwriter Will Fetters, directed by HBO veteran Allen Coulter, don’t allow the actor room to demonstrate much range as Tyler slouches around on a diet of cigarettes and beer. (He shares a ratty hipster apartment with Tate Ellington as a clownish roommate better suited to cohabitation with the dudes from Knocked Up.)

Tyler and Ally each carry scars from family tragedies in their past. But the script offers no tolerable explanation as to why, for instance, Tyler’s business-mogul father (Pierce Brosnan, sharp in a business suit) is such a cold SOB. Why Tyler’s kid sister (nicely serious young Ruby Jerins) is bullied by the mean girls at her school. Why Ally’s policeman dad (the great Chris Cooper, outwitted) behaves so inconsistently. Or why Remember Me goes where it goes with such staggeringly misplaced self-seriousness — a movie with all the hyperventilating hysteria of a 1960s teen-tragedy pop song and all the disposability, too.

Genre: Drama, Romance

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Studio: Summit Entertainment

Director: Allen Coulter

Screenwriter: Will Fetters

Trailer

Movie Website: RememberMe-movie.com

Actors/Actresses: Robert Pattinson, Emilie de Ravin, Chris Cooper, Lena Olin, Tate Ellington, Ruby Jerins, Pierce Brosnan

Our Verdict:

Remember Me is too overripe in the melodrama department for modern audiences; a movie with all the hyperventilating hysteria of a 1960s teen-tragedy pop song and all the disposability, too.

In Green Zone, Matt Damon plays a hero who’s one part 24’s Jack Bauer and two parts good soldier. Wearing standard combat gear accessorized with an Arab kaffiyeh knotted around his neck, Damon is U.S. Army chief warrant officer Roy Miller, who’s stationed in Baghdad at the start of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq in 2003. Miller’s squadron is on a mission to find weapons of mass destruction, since the highly reliable intelligence confirming Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s deadly stash of WMD is what persuaded Congress to authorize George W. Bush to invade the country in the first place. But there are no WMD to be found. And Miller, a serious man, has begun to wonder: Why is the intel so bad?

Not that he gets much time to sit around thinking. Green Zone is a strangely dated, foolishly grandiose, simplistically angry fictional war-zone thriller about how one patriot blows the lid off America’s missteps in Iraq. It’s the work of Paul Greengrass, the same adrenaline-generating filmmaker who put Damon through his action-hero paces in The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). In his Bourne projects, as well as in his more documentary-style re-creations such as Bloody Sunday (2002) and United 93 (2006), Greengrass specializes in a high-wire visual vocabulary that not only enhances action sequences but turns even sit-down meetings into nerve-racking affairs. From the moment we meet Miller and his men as they secure a reputed WMD storage facility (”Clear!”) and risk their lives for zilch, the movie never walks when it can run, never runs when it can race with bullets flying overhead, and never leaves room for a sentient audience to draw its own conclusions when the filmmakers can poke a finger in our collective chest and growl, ”Look how Bush and company screwed up here and here and HERE.” Green Zone’s didactic script, by Mystic River screenwriter Brian Helgeland, is based on Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, by former Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran, but it converts that indispensable nonfiction book into a wild, whistle-blowing fable.

The more sober 2007 documentary No End in Sight produced powerful evidence of fatally poor decision-making in Iraq. But in Green Zone’s 2003 Baghdad alleys, Miller operates like a one-man truth squad, piecing together all the ways that his men — and, by extension, the American public — were duped into invasion. A disillusioned CIA operative (Brendan Gleeson, with an American accent subject to power failures) steers Miller in one direction; a dangerous, gung ho doofus of a State Department operative (Greg Kinnear) spins him in another. A credulous Wall Street Journal journalist (Amy Ryan), unsubtly modeled on New York Times journalist Judith Miller, buys into the disinformation she’s been fed. There’s also a helpful, patriotic Everyman Iraqi citizen (Khalid Abdalla) who calls himself Freddy. Initially, he’s roughed up by suspicious U.S. soldiers when he volunteers useful information; then he’s hustled into service as Miller’s translator and driver. Eventually, Freddy comes to regret that he thought his new American ”friends” could ever help keep his family safe.

Greengrass has a compulsively watchable style and a sharp understanding of Damon’s unlikely strengths as an action hero; the director plays off the actor’s understated efficiency and physical stolidity in scenes of mad danger. The standoffs, showdowns, and cat-and-mouse chases are bracing, sometimes even Bourne cool. What Green Zone lacks, however, is gravitas, perspective, and (since it was shot two years ago) timeliness: Why wasn’t this out before the 2008 elections? Until now, I’ve been immune to ”Iraq fatigue,” the diagnosis invented for why audiences stay away from good movies about U.S. military involvement in the Middle East. (Even the apolitical Oscar winner The Hurt Locker earned peanuts at the box office.) With Green Zone, though, the malaise has finally hit me. So while Damon’s Miller uncovers the (inconvenient) truth of why the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, all I want to know is: How does he suggest we get out?

Genre: Thriller

MPAA Rating: R

Studio: Universal Pictures

Director: Paul Greengrass

Screenwriter: Brian Helgeland

Trailer

Movie Website: GreenZonemovie.com

Actors/Actresses: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Amy Ryan, Brendan Gleeson, Jason Isaacs, Khalid Abdalla

Our Verdict:

This Matt Damon/Paul Greengrass WMD-themed political thriller feels so familiar, it might as well be called ‘The Bourne Zone.’ Green Zone is a story we’ve already heard, shot in a manner we’ve already seen, and starring Matt Damon in a role he’s already played.

Green Zone

Genre: Thriller

MPAA Rating: R

Studio: Universal Pictures

Director: Paul Greengrass

Screenwriter: Brian Helgeland

Trailer

Movie Website: GreenZonemovie.com

Actors/Actresses: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Amy Ryan, Brendan Gleeson, Jason Isaacs, Khalid Abdalla

Plot Summary: Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass (“The Bourne Supremacy,” “The Bourne Ultimatum,” “United 93″) re-team for their latest electrifying thriller
in “Green Zone,” a film set in the chaotic early days of the Iraqi War when no one could be trusted and every decision could detonate unforeseen consequences.

During the U.S.-led occupation of Baghdad in 2003, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Damon) and his team of Army inspectors were dispatched to find weapons of mass destruction believed to be stockpiled in the Iraqi desert. Rocketing from one booby-trapped and treacherous site to the next, the men search for deadly chemical agents but stumble instead upon an elaborate cover-up that inverts the purpose of their mission.

Spun by operatives with intersecting agendas, Miller must hunt through covert and faulty intelligence hidden on foreign soil for answers that will either clear a rogue regime or escalate a war in an unstable region. And at this blistering time and in this combustible place, he will find the most elusive weapon of all is the truth.

Remember Me

Genre: Drama, Romance

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Studio: Summit Entertainment

Director: Allen Coulter

Screenwriter: Will Fetters

Trailer

Movie Website: RememberMe-movie.com

Actors/Actresses: Robert Pattinson, Emilie de Ravin, Chris Cooper, Lena Olin, Tate Ellington, Ruby Jerins, Pierce Brosnan

Plot Summary: In the romantic drama “Remember Me,” Robert Pattinson plays Tyler, a rebellious young man in New York City who has a strained relationship with his father (Pierce Brosnan) ever since tragedy separated their family. Tyler didn’t think anyone could possibly understand what he was going through until the day he met Ally (Emilie de Ravin) through an unusual twist of fate. Love was the last thing on his mind, but as her spirit unexpectedly heals and inspires him, he begins to fall for her. Through their love, he begins to find happiness and meaning in his life. But soon, hidden secrets are revealed, and the circumstances that brought them together slowly threaten to tear them apart. “Remember Me” is an unforgettable story about the power of love, the strength of family, and the importance of living passionately and treasuring every day of one’s life.

She’s Out Of My League

Genre: Comedy, Romance

MPAA Rating: R

Studio: DreamWorks Pictures (Paramount)

Director: Jim Field Smith

Screenwriter: Sean Anders, John Morris

Trailer

Movie Website: GetYourRating.com

Actors/Actresses: Jay Baruchel, Alice Eve, T.J. Miller, Nate Torrence, Krysten Ritter, Geoff Stults, Lindsay Sloane

Plot Summary: Kirk (Jay Baruchel, “Knocked Up,” “Tropic Thunder”), an average Joe, can’t believe his luck. Though he’s stuck in a seemingly dead-end job as an airport security agent, against all odds Molly (Alice Eve), a successful and outrageously gorgeous babe falls for him. Kirk is stunned. So are his friends, his family and even his ex-girlfriend. Now he has to figure out how to make the relationship work, even though he’s the first to admit “She’s Out of My League.”

Iron Man 2

Release Date: May 7, 2010 (conventional theaters and IMAX)

Genre: Action, Adventure

MPAA Rating: Not Yet Rated

Studio: Paramount Pictures, Marvel Studios

Director: Jon Favreau

Screenwriter: Justin Theroux

Movie Website: IronManmovie.com

Actors/Actresses: Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Jon Favreau, Mickey Rourke, Sam Rockwell, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Garry Shandling, John Slattery, Kate Mara, Clark Gregg, Olivia Munn

Plot Summary: In the sequel, Mickey Rourke will play Whiplash, a character that includes elements from that comic book villain and Crimson Dynamo, another Russian baddie. Sam Rockwell will play Justin Hammer, a multibillionaire businessman and a rival of industrialist Tony Stark, AKA Iron Man, being played by a returning Robert Downey Jr.

Despicable Me

Release Date: July 9, 2010

Genre: Animation, Comedy

MPAA Rating: Not Yet Rated

Studio: Universal Pictures

Director: Chris Renaud, Pierre Coffin

Screenwriter: Cinco Paul, Ken Daurio

Movie Website: Despicable.me

Actors/Actresses: Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Russell Brand, Will Arnett, Kristen Wiig, Danny McBride, Miranda Cosgrove, Jack McBrayer, Mindy Kaling, Jemaine Clement, Julie Andrews

Plot Summary: In a happy suburban neighborhood surrounded by white picket fences with flowering rose bushes, sits a black house with a dead lawn. Unbeknownst to the neighbors, hidden beneath this home is a vast secret hideout. Surrounded by a small army of minions, we discover Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), planning the biggest heist in the history of the world. He is going to steal the moon (Yes, the moon!) in Universal’s new 3-D CGI feature, “Despicable Me.”

Gru delights in all things wicked. Armed with his arsenal of shrink rays, freeze rays, and battle-ready vehicles for land and air, he vanquishes all who stand in his way. Until the day he encounters the immense will of three little orphaned girls who look at him and see something that no one else has ever seen: a potential Dad.

The world’s greatest villain has just met his greatest challenge: three little girls named Margo, Edith and Agnes.

Comedienne Mo’Nique continued her impressive streak of cleaning up Best Supporting Actress awards for her turn as an abusive mother in ‘Precious” as she collected the golden statue at the Academy Awards on Sunday night. Other big winners were war drama, The Hurt Locker for Best Picture, and Best Director. Veteran actor Jeff Bridges won his first Best Actor award.

The major winners were:

Best Actor- Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart)
Best Actress- Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side)
Best Picture- The Hurt Locker
Best Director- Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker)
Best Supporting Actor- Christoph Waltz (Inglorious Basterds)
Best Supporting Actress- Mo’Nique (Precious)
Best Animated Picture- Up

Big budget extravaganza Avatar won gongs for Cinematography, Visual Effects and Art Direction while cult favourite Star Trek won Best Make-Up. The big showdown had been expected to come for the Best Picture and Director awards with former husband and wife team James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow going up against each other in a battle of cinema art versus mass appeal. Bigelow seemingly won this one hands down.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, first published in 1865, is the sort of fractured-reality fairy tale that’s designed to strike adults much differently than it does children. For anyone old enough to know, the Queen of Hearts is a savage parody of a certain autocratic breed of political high haughtiness; for kids, she’s just a witchy lady with a frighteningly big and ugly head. Carroll’s classic, of course, is far from the only kiddie fantasia that operates on levels children can’t see. What’s unique about it is that an adult’s raised-eyebrow smirk is built into the very tone and structure of the story. Once Alice tumbles into Wonderland, everyone she meets is, if not certifiable, then a blithely self-absorbed, nattering crackpot-narcissist. The book is a visionary satire of the newly emerging modern world, in which everyone is really babbling to no one but themselves.

The challenge of adapting Alice in Wonderland is this: How do you create relationships, a story, a purpose out of a tale whose prime purpose is not to have one? Tim Burton, with his crazy love for rabbit-hole alternative worlds (Beetlejuice), baroque oddballs (Batman, Edward Scissorhands), and kiddie fables told with a cynical wink (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), would seem to be the perfect director to adapt Carroll’s legendary tale and make a memorable, zany-dark movie out of it. But Burton’s Disneyfied 3-D Alice in Wonderland, written by the girl-power specialist Linda Woolverton (Beauty and the Beast), is a strange brew indeed: murky, diffuse, and meandering, set not in a Wonderland that pops with demented life but in a world called Underland that’s like a joyless, bombed-out version of Wonderland. It looks like a CGI head trip gone postapocalyptic.

Alice, instead of the spunky girl we remember, is now a rather stern 19-year-old Victorian ingenue who is visiting the place for the second time, even though she can hardly remember the first. (No, it doesn’t make any more sense when you’re watching it.) She seems actively annoyed to be there. The young actress Mia Wasikowska, with her Pre-Raphaelite look, gives Alice a beaming sensual intelligence (she frowns beautifully), but wherever Alice goes, she never displays the slightest hint of curiosity. The characters she meets are certainly eye-catching. The White Rabbit (voiced by Michael Sheen) percolates with antic charm, and Tweedledum and Tweedledee (Matt Lucas) are fleshy twins that make it look as if Glenn Beck had just given birth to Cabbage Patch Kids. The Cheshire Cat, with electric blue stripes, is voiced by Stephen Fry in drolly amused dry-sherry tones.

Then there’s Johnny Depp, who plays the Mad Hatter with radioactive emerald eyes, an exploding Bozo carrot top, and a gaze of luminous dementia. He’s a fantastic image, but once Depp opens his mouth, what comes out is a noisome Scottish brogue that makes everything he says sound more or less the same. The character offers no captivatingly skewed bat-house psychology. There isn’t much to him, really — he’s just a smiling Johnny one-note with a secret hip-hop dance move — and so we start to react to him the way that Alice does to everything else: by wondering when he’s going to stop making nonsense. Depp’s counterpart in shrill sameness is Helena Bonham Carter, who plays the Red Queen (a composite of the Queen of Hearts and a character from the 1872 Alice sequel, Through the Looking-Glass) in striking Klaus Nomi makeup, but without much to say besides ”Off with his head!” Boy, does that get old.

The movie cobbles together both of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and his fantastical-beastie poem ”Jabberwocky.” But it also fluffs out the tale with a bland mash of Disney heroics. The Red Queen has a saintly sister (Anne Hathaway), Alice has to fight a dragon — the Jabberwocky! — and the film builds to a CGI battle that might have come out of a lesser Narnia sequel.

Release Date: March 5, 2010 (Conventional Theaters and IMAX 3D)

Genre: Family, Fantasy

MPAA Rating: PG

Studio: Walt Disney Pictures

Director: Tim Burton

Screenwriter: Linda Woolverton

Trailer

Movie Website: Disney.com

Actors/Actresses: Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Crispin Glover, Matt Lucas, Marton Csokas, Tim Pigott-Smith, Lindsay Duncan, Geraldine James, Leo Bill, Jemma Powell, Mairi Ella Challen, Mia Wasikowska, Stephen Fry, Alan Rickman, Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall, Christopher Lee, Paul Whitehouse, Barbara Windsor

Our Verdict:

Helena Bonham Carter as The Red Queen was the most interesting character to watch in this film, and it wasn’t just because she’s the villain. Carter manages to show a lot vulnerability regardless of her tough exterior that makes the audience relate to her. Even though she does heinous things, you feel compassion because you know deep down she’s acting out of the hurt and rejection she’s felt most of her life.

Alice In Wonderland

Genre: Family, Fantasy

MPAA Rating: PG

Studio: Walt Disney Pictures

Director: Tim Burton

Screenwriter: Linda Woolverton

Trailer

Movie Website: Disney.com

Actors/Actresses: Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Crispin Glover, Matt Lucas, Marton Csokas, Tim Pigott-Smith, Lindsay Duncan, Geraldine James, Leo Bill, Jemma Powell, Mairi Ella Challen, Mia Wasikowska, Stephen Fry, Alan Rickman, Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall, Christopher Lee, Paul Whitehouse, Barbara Windsor

Plot Summary: From Walt Disney Pictures and visionary director Tim Burton comes an epic 3D fantasy adventure “Alice in Wonderland,” a magical and imaginative twist on some of the most beloved stories of all time. Johnny Depp stars as the Mad Hatter and Mia Wasikowska as 19-year-old Alice, who returns to the whimsical world she first encountered as a young girl, reuniting with her childhood friends: the White Rabbit, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the Dormouse, the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, and of course, the Mad Hatter. Alice embarks on a fantastical journey to find her true destiny and end the Red Queen’s reign of terror. The all-star cast also includes Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter and Crispin Glover; Linda Woolverton wrote the screenplay. Capturing the wonder of Lewis Carroll’s beloved “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865) and “Through the Looking-Glass” (1871) with stunning, avant-garde visuals and the most charismatic characters in literary history, “Alice in Wonderland” comes to the big screen in Disney Digital 3D™ on March 5, 2010.

Brooklyn’s Finest

Genre: Crime, Drama

MPAA Rating: R

Studio: Overture Films

Director: Antoine Fuqua

Screenwriter: Michael C. Martin, Brad Caleb Kane

Trailer

Movie Website: BrooklynsFinestthemovie.com

Actors/Actresses: Richard Gere, Ethan Hawke, Don Cheadle, Jesse Williams, Ellen Barkin, Wesley Snipes, Lili Taylor, Brian F. O’Byrne, Shannon Kane, Will Patton, Vincent D’Onofrio

Plot Summary: In the course of one chaotic week, the lives of three conflicted New York City police officers are dramatically transformed by their involvement in a massive drug operation in “Brooklyn’s Finest,” a searing new crime drama from acclaimed director Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day”).

Burned out veteran Eddie Dugan (Golden Globe®-winner Richard Gere) is just one week away from his pension and a fishing cabin in Connecticut. Narcotics officer Sal Procida (Oscar® nominee Ethan Hawke) has discovered there’s no line he won’t cross to provide a better life for his long-suffering wife and seven children. And Clarence “Tango” Butler (Oscar® nominee Don Cheadle) has been undercover so long his loyalties have started to shift from his fellow police officers to his prison buddy Caz (Wesley Snipes), one of Brooklyn’s most infamous drug dealers. With personal and work pressures bearing down on them, each man faces daily tests of judgment and honor in one of the world’s most difficult jobs.

When NYPD’s Operation Clean Up targets the notoriously drug-ridden BK housing project, all three officers find themselves swept away by the violence and corruption of Brooklyn’s gritty 65th Precinct and its most treacherous criminals. During seven fateful days, Eddie, Sal and Tango find themselves hurtling inextricably toward the same fatal crime scene and a shattering collision with destiny.

The film captures the volatile and deadly world of one of New York’s most dangerous precincts through the eyes of the men and women pledged to protect and serve, as they face the wrenching choices that make them “Brooklyn’s Finest.”