Results tagged “cinephillyistreviews”

Normally when we go out in the world to review films, we end up in one of the smaller theaters at the Ritz 5 with a mere handful of other journalists and/or bloggers. For Twilight: New Moon, not so much.

Maybe it's because I love war movies. Maybe it's because I love George Clooney. But The Men Who Stare at Goats, based on a book by Jon Ronson and directed by Grant Heslov (a distant relative-of-a-relative by marriage, but that's not really pertinent), was definitely on my list of most-anticipated movies of 2009. The film, which is based on more truth than you'd like to believe (a paraphrase of the opening title card), follows a reporter's quest to learn more about an elite group of psychic soldiers, nicknamed "Jedi warriors," also features (as Allison so eloquently put it in today's CinePhillyist) "Obi-Won, Kaiser Soze, and The Dude"—a cast list that at once made me giddy with anticipation and totally nervous that the movie wouldn't do its cast justice.

"That very night, in Max's room, a forest grew and grew and grew, until his ceiling hung with vines and walls became the world all around."

You probably know someone like Big Fan's Paul Aufiero. Diehard sports fan, lives and breathes football for the season, refers to the team as "we?"

We think we've just seen the next movie that people will be quoting at parties.

So, um, I don't get it. The Time Traveler's Wife is a highly-praised reality-bending romance, beloved both by critics and many of my friends. I've seen people push the book earnestly into somebody else's hands, saying, "Trust me, you'll love it." Sure enough, they would love it, and tell their friends, and so on. Now that said beloved novel has spawned a mopey, over-literal film adaptation, I can ask what I didn't ask then: why should I care?

It's generally true that each film in the Harry Potter series has been better than the last—and also darker than the last. And as the series has gone on, we've not only gotten a chance to see Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley grow up before our eyes, we've also gotten a chance to see Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint grow up before our eyes—not to mention the rest of the young cast. With each film, these actors get a bit older and a bit more talented. It's especially astonishing to see how much improved Radcliffe is. Take a look back at his awkward, wooden, wince-inducing performance in The Sorcerer's Stone, and then watch how comfortable and funny and real he is in this film.

I think I can say with some confidence that however you felt about Michael Bay's first Transformers film, you will feel the same way about his second one. It's more of the same. More giant robots getting into epic slow motion fights while things explode all around them. More Megan Fox in sexy outfits running in slow motion. More ponderous narration. More of John Turturro thoroughly embarrassing himself for what I hope is a very large paycheck. More lowbrow "comedy." More, more, more.

The Terminator franchise has always been a heady and delicious mixture of horror, sci-fi, and action; time travel, robots, and apocalypse. Every installment in the franchise has spoken of a coming Judgment Day: the apocalyptic moment when machines would rise up and nearly destroy humanity. Afterwards, one man—John Connor—would organize a resistance and fight back, saving the human race. Each film (and TV show) has been about a killer machine coming back through time to try to eliminate John before he can become this savior. Luckily, the resistance has always been able to send back a protector, as well, to keep him safe. We've never really seen the world after Judgment Day, and never really seen John as the savior, except in brief glimpses.

Just to get this out of the way up front: I'm a long-time, dyed-in-the-wool Star Trek fan. I watched the entire original series, every episode of the animated series and Next Generation, put in some time with Voyager and Enterprise, and I stuck with Deep Space Nine far past the point when it was any good. And of course I've seen all the movies. But even I have to admit the last couple films were pretty poor. The plots were nonsensical, the writing lazy and repetitive. How many times would they blow up the Enterprise and how many characters would nobly sacrifice themselves for the greater good and how many non-humans would yearn to be human? The series was getting tired. So when they brought in J.J. Abrams to rejuvenate the whole thing, I was excited and apprehensive at the same time. The guy said in interviews he didn't even like Star Trek. I was all right with him shaking things up a bit, but I didn't want him to turn it into a big dumb action movie and lose the soul of the thing.

Full disclosure: I kind of want to punch Matthew McConaughey in the neck. Nothing personal, I’m sure he’s a lovely human being, and he’s nice enough to look at if you don’t mind your men freakishly tan with an appalling lack of body hair. There’s just something about him that grates on me.

Let's just get one thing out of the way before launching into the proper review: I am in love with Robert Downey, Jr. Not since seeing Michael J. Fox whip through time in that DeLorean have I been so smitten with an actor. I typically don't get into the whole swooning over celebrities thing, but I can't help myself with this one. My love is unavoidable, uncontrollable, and unrelenting. Okay, I feel better now having disclosed that. On with the review.

Several of the characters in Observe and Report haunted the mall when I had a part-time job there 13 years ago: the morning walkers, the lost souls, the horny make-up counter attendant, the dirty old men who sized up teenagers in the food court. I even felt a little nostalgic during the opening sequence, when head security guard Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen) watches customers, salespeople, and loiterers cruise the corridors. But then, the camera cuts to the parking lot, where an ugly little man wearing nothing but a trench coat runs around pointing to his penis. Yes, we see the penis. More than a few times.

At the end of last year, I told you about a presentation I saw on the DreamWorks computer-animated film Monsters vs. Aliens, and the new 3D technology in employs. I wasn't totally blown away by the technology, but I enjoyed what I saw of the movie and looked forward to seeing it in its entirety and reviewing it for Phillyist. Now that I've had a chance to see the whole movie, I'm very pleased with it, and a bit more impressed with the technology than I was originally.

"Bromance" is one of the new terms that I don't despise (I'm looking at you, whoever coined "Recessionista"). Judd Apatow has consistently been bringing the funny with stories of man-boys refusing to exist in the grown-up world of real jobs, sex, girlfriends, and non-pot smoking. This foray into the Peter Pan world is not actually associated with Apatow, but it is the logical extension of his formula. I Love You, Man takes the charming and slightly girlish Paul Rudd and pairs him with man's man Jason Segal while following all the rules of Romantic Comedy.

After much hype and controversy, director Zack Snyder's film adaptation of author Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons' critically acclaimed graphic novel Watchmen is finally here. Many people, including the book's author, said it was unfilmable, and I definitely understand why. The book is a postmodern examination, not only of the content and the stories of comic books—what it would really mean to be a costumed crime fighter, and what kind of person would really do that; what it would really mean to have super powers; what it would really mean to "save" the world—but also of the form of comic books—how the images flow across the page; how they relate to each other from panel to panel; how time and space are expressed on the page. The story is so much, at its very root, a comic book story, that moving it into another medium in some way destroys it.

I was sold on seeing Push as soon as I realized it featured telekinetic gunmen. I'm a simple man with simple tastes. However, some might need more information before making their determination, and so I present a synopsis and review.

Ciao, a well-intentioned movie about grief, loneliness, and tentative human connections, is not inherently bad, but it’s an ill-fated compromise between two types of filmmaking that turn out to be mutually incompatible. Much of the movie employs lengthy static shots that employ intentionally blank characters in a service of a deliberate composition, a style that director Yen Tan apparently lifted from many international art-house favorites. A master like Tsai Ming-liang can create a single static shot so unexpectedly vertiginous that you can’t stop studying it. Yen Tan, on the other hand, doesn’t have the precise eye needed to pull off a similar trick--his color scheme is particularly sloppy--and his attempts are constantly undercut by the movie’s cheap, muddy digital video and poor production values.

Theoretically, Hotel for Dogs should have been the perfect movie for me. After all, it combined two of my greatest loves: dogs and Rube Goldberg machines.

The man born Christopher George Latore Wallace was known by many names: Biggie Smalls, Notorious B.I.G., Big Poppa, Biggie and had just as many facets to his personality. A ground-breaking rapper, he was also a lover, a son, a drug-dealer, a father, a convict, and just a little boy from Bed-Stuy. Going into the film, I wondered if the film would just be a glorified "Behind the Music" episode, but was blown away by the performance of unknown Jamal Woolard as Christopher Wallace. People who knew Big in real life are most likely haunted by the spot-on portrayal of the rapper in the film. Those of us who only knew him as a performer will also be moved by the tale of his life. Particularly touching was Biggie's real-life son C.J. playing him as a young child—seeing him out on the stoop, writing rhymes in his dime store notebook, we get a glimpse into where Biggie's talent was born.

At one point in Frank Miller's film adaptation of the Will Eisner comic The Spirit, Samuel L. Jackson (who plays the villain of the piece, a crime lord/mad scientist named The Octopus) looks down at the bullet-riddled body of his enemy (the title character, an undead crime fighter played by Gabriel Macht) and says, "There's shot to hell and there's shot to hell, and then there's just plain ridiculous." This film is the latter. There is no part of it that is not silly, overdone, and just plain ridiculous, from the stark, surreal, computer-generated, mostly black-and-white visuals to the horrific dialogue. I really don't know what Miller was going for with this weird combination of earnest, noble speeches; corny melodrama; painfully unfunny, low-brow humor; and utter pointlessness, but if he was trying to make one of the most embarrassing movies of all time, he may just have succeeded.

This movie is going to be up for a lot of awards, and rightfully so. It was wonderfully written (aside from the goofily absurd amount of racial slurs—more on that in a moment), brilliantly directed, and excellently acted. Except for one minor problem. Clint should hang up his acting hat and stick to directing. You gotta love the man playing a bad ass character at his age. And it actually worked, his age wasn't a problem. It's just that he's been doing "Clint" for so long that his acting comes out as over-baked. When he's growling his lines it's hard not to laugh when a laugh isn't intended because he's more like a cartoon character bully than an actual racist Michigan retiree.

So, other than the whole aging backward thing, David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has very little in common with F. Scott Fitzgerald's original story of the same name. That usually bothers me a lot in adaptations, because as a writer, I wouldn't want somebody to do that to my words. But Fitzgerald is dead and his story is a bit dated, so what we're left with is a film very true to the spirit of the original tale, if not to many of the details.

I often catch heat for disliking the whole inbred cluster of Apatow-related films, but I assure you that my dislike has nothing to do with snobbishness against broad, no-brainer comedies. I do own a copy of Joe Dirt. Sometimes, ridiculous comedy can be good, as in Four Christmases. At times, this holiday comedy is rude and cringe-inducing, but for this film, it works. Being over-blitzed by promos for the movie before viewing it, I was afraid that all the funny bits were wasted in the trailer. (How many times can seeing Vince Vaughn gagging at baby puke remain humorous?) But the comedy was fresh and plentiful, with the audience laughing audibly at many of the scenes. The film clearly had an overabundance of comedic scenes—a funny scene that had been in the trailer was removed from the theatrical cut. In it, Vince Vaughn's trashy sister-in-law is slapping together a spam and mayo salad because they are "trying to eat healthy." Even without that brief laugh, the movie still had plenty to offer.

The movie has been been getting lukewarm to downright bad reviews, which it probably rightfully deserves given its over-the-top, plodding story and unimaginative plot points. What saves the movie, though, is the strong and solid acting by all involved: not only by the four men listed above (especially Noah Emmerich—love him!), but also by the women who play their significant others, and by the supporting cast of police officers. Every actor in this thing gives a top performance. So even though this might not be a movie for you to run right out and see tonight, it definitely deserves a viewing at some point, if only to see Jon Voight's boozy speech at the family Christmas dinner table.

Once upon a time, Oliver Stone enjoyed a reputation as the most paranoid man in Hollywood, seeing conspiracy theories under every rock and questioning the official explanations. So when Stone decided, earlier this year, to tackle the subject of our current president, who is responsible for any number of actual conspiracies to take away civil liberties and then cover up his own responsibility for same, I got a little giddy. This is, after all, the president that’s held people for years without any sort of review, with secret evidence and occasionally secret legal arguments, on a prison that the American government runs but claimed not to control. I didn’t want to hear my opinions parroted back to me, but I figured that the dramatic expansion of torture and electronic surveillance might have sparked his interest.

is equally ill-served by the time-lag involved in movie production.

Ed Harris is well known as an actor, but he's also branched out into directing a couple of times. The first was 2000's powerful artist biopic Pollock. The second is the western Appaloosa, which opens today. Besides directing the film, Harris also stars and contributed to the screenplay, which is an adaptation of Robert Parker's novel. Harris plays Virgil Cole, one part of a two-man peace-keeping operation. The other part is Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), a man who always carries an eight gauge shotgun with him. The two of them travel the Wild West, taking over towns and bringing order to them by enacting their own brand of martial law. This consists of them putting up a series of by-laws; if anyone breaks a by-law, that person is arrested. If he won't come quietly, he's shot. It's as simple as that.

This movie is not high art by any means, but it succeeds at the most basic of movie goals: providing captivating entertainment that keeps the viewer's mind far from real life for two hours. If you are looking for a sweet first date movie, this probably isn't your thing. But if you are looking to be highly entertained and repeatedly shocked by action, this is certainly your pick for the weekend. Just remember to take your heart medicine before you go.

, provides a vehicle for Gervais to take the audience on a ride from general distaste for his character to an understanding (if not liking) of the man.