Clamzilla's Adventures in the Dark

The Curtain Comes Down

2010-02-01T02:02:00.002-05:00

After four and a half years and nearly 500 movie commentaries, this mollusk is tired. What started out as a fun hobby has turned into a nearly full-time job, with great benefits (free movies and popcorn!), but popcorn doesn’t pay the mortgage and I’m just not well enough these days to continue to make the trip to my favorite theaters, the Essex Cinemas and Cumberland 12, to check out the latest releases in the timely way I used to. So this will be my final Adventure in the Dark, at least of the cinematic variety. It’s been fun. Who knows? Maybe I’ll see you at the movies once in a while.

Legion

2010-01-28T11:49:00.001-05:00

Once again a movie that should never have been made has escaped the studio vault to assault our senses with its ludicrous silliness. I’m talking about Legion, of course. Actually, if you’ve seen The Prophecy, Prophecy II, Prophecy III, or The Prophecy: Uprising (aka Prophecy IV), you’ve already seen Legion, just with a different cast.

Just as in The Prophecy series, the Arch-angel Gabriel (Kevin Durand; X-Men Origins: Wolverine) has his celestial panties in a knot, and he wants to destroy humankind. This is because God Himself has become disenchanted with mankind and has ordered a hit on all of us. Apparently in the realm of the Almighty, He has some form of ADHD and has grown tired of human beings, so His natural inclination is to wipe out everything on the planet. This time though, instead of a flood, He wants to mix things up, so He decides to slaughter us all by sending down a flock of cranky angels to do the deed. And I’ve always thought angels were supposed to be sweet, chubby cherubs; these bastards are more like Gary Coleman on crack after he’s just been called “Webster” for the eighteenth time in one day.

Fortunately for us, that other pin-up Arch-Angel, Michael (Paul Bettany; Inkheart), has a soft spot for the human race, so he shows up in the middle of the vast New Mexico desert at a decrepit diner/gas station called “Paradise Falls” (Get it? Get it? Hey, this is as witty as it gets in Legion) to defend the world against the oncoming horde of winged warriors. As always happens in movies of this ilk, the diner may be two hundred miles from anything except tumbleweeds in all directions, but it’s a cinch the place is going to be packed with an assortment of colorful characters. Paradise Falls is no exception. The place is run by Bob Hansen (Dennis Quaid; Pandorum), grumpy as hell because he is looking more like Randy Quaid every year. His adult son, named Jeep (Lucas Black; Jarhead), is still hanging around the single-wide in the back, along with a pregnant waitress called Charlie (Adrianne Palicki; tv’s “Friday Night Lights”), whose greatest aspiration appears to be squeezing out an urchin in the squalor they call the “Ladies” room in this dustbowl. There’s also the stereotypical bickering married couple, Howard (Jon Tenney; tv’s “The Closer”) and Sandra Anderson (Kate Walsh of tv’s “Private Practice” under several pounds of whorish make-up), stranded when their Beamer breaks down; the source of their discord is their slutty-looking teenage daughter Audrey (Willa Holland; “The O.C.”), who has as cheery an attitude as Lindsey Lohan when she realized she left her stash of cocaine in the pocket of her jeans after they’ve gone through the wash. This trio seems more like they are doing a summer stock production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” rather than acting in a horror movie. Apparently this is what “artistes” do during their hiatus from whatever hit television series they are on.

The cast is rounded out with Charles S. Dutton as Percy, hiding out as Paradise Fall’s one-armed cook to avoid the shame he should feel for being a part of that ghastly remake of Fame last fall, and finally there is mystery man Kyle Williams (Tyrese Gibson; Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen), who is supposed to keep us on edge guessing if he is a good guy or bad since he packs heat and doesn’t answer direct questions. Oh, and there is the fact that he is African American, which plays on the white audience’s inherent fears of black men and satisfies the black audience’s long-held understanding that a brother is only put in these movies to get whacked. Don’t blame me for telling it like it is. That’s the cliché, and it is what it is.

So this potpourri of neurotics spend a couple of hours milling around the diner shooting “zombified” people that are possessed by the spirits of the avenging angels, which makes little sense since angels should (I presume) be able to resist decimation by bullets, but these guys keel over and die along with their host bodies as easily as a Kardashian will spread her legs like butter against a hot knife.

Director and co-writer (along with Peter Schink; Gotham Cafe) Scott Stewart (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love) stumbles around the idea that Charlie’s baby is the new Messiah, especially since there is no mention of who the baby’s daddy is or under what circumstances she got knocked-up, but he never really goes all the way in making the New Testament connection. He also never explains why it is that Michael feels compelled to lop off his wings when he first arrives on Earth in order to fit in with the humans around him yet the rest of the army of angels have no problem hiding theirs within the hosts they inhabit. Odd.

The whole of Legion does have its moments of intensity and suspense, but ultimately it is just dumb. The best part of the entire movie is a brief appearance by octogenarian actress Jeanette Miller (Four Christmases) as kick-ass Gladys Foster, a foul-mouthed visitor to the diner who ups the shock factor by uttering the “F word” and the “C word” while still presenting herself as the sweetest grandmother this side of Betty White. Other than that, Legion doesn’t cover any new ground. If it really wanted to amuse us, they would have had God strike us down by killing off the audiences who go see stinky horror movies. In other words, He’d kill us with Legionnaire disease.

Lovely Bones (The)

2010-01-21T15:34:00.001-05:00

From what I remember I once had some Lovely Bones. That was a few decades ago when I could actually see them under my skin. Then I met my perfect husband, who is also the perfect chef, and despite my protestations that if I ate the way he wanted me to I would end up looking like a refugee from “The Biggest Loser,” I finally cracked and gravy became my new best friend. Until then, I subsisted almost entirely on lettuce leaves and balsamic vinaigrette. I also weighed a good hundred pounds less than I do now. Hence, it was goodbye to The Lovely Bones and hello to the Fashion Bug Plus. I’m very fond of the Fashion Bug, but there are no clothes made for “hefty hideaway” gals that will get someone of my size laid. That’s right. I said it (well, typed it). I may be happily married, but that doesn’t mean I want men other than my husband to ignore me. Hell, I want to be seduced (or at least have someone try) just so I’ll feel better about myself. I want my perfect husband to worry that other men are dragging me behind bushes somewhere to steal a kiss now and again. After all these years I hate to admit it but (and, yes, I know this is so un-PC) I even get a tad jealous of teenage girls like Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan; City of Ember), the main character in the new movie The Lovely Bones.

Okay, so Susie is dead from the very beginning of the movie, but you can’t have everything. At least she had her youth and she was skinny enough to wear low-rider jeans, though The Lovely Bones takes place in 1973, so her clothing choices are kind of tragic, like her life (or at least the end of it). Now I’m not implying that being killed by a pedophile is anything other than heinous, but until then Susie had it made. First off, her Dad looked just like Marky Mark (Mark Walhberg; Max Payne), and he was the type of father that plays catch with his kids and devotes every moment to telling them how much he loves them. He’s kind of like Richard Simmons only in long pants. The unfortunate part is that, like Simmons, he keeps his shirt on all the time and we all know it would nice if he didn’t. After all, he did fill out those Calvin Kleins just fine back in the day.

Susie’s also had a dreamy guy (Reece Ritchie; 10,000 BC) with eyelashes for days and enough moral fiber not to go past first base even though you know he really wanted to. It’s true that Susie’s mom (Rachel Weisz; Definitely, Maybe) seems a lot less engaging from what we see of her, but that’s probably because her entire role in the film is to be traumatized, if not by her daughter’s death then by her own drunky-poo mother, played by Susan Sarandon (Enchanted). Apparently Sarandon was under the impression she was acting in a comedy instead of the grim tragedy that The Lovely Bones is supposed to be as most of her role is spent doing battle with kitchen appliances, smoking like a chimney, and scrounging the cupboards for any alcohol short of gasoline. I guess she is still making those brilliant choices like she did when she agreed to star in Speed Racer. I love Susan Sarandon, but it may be time for an intervention, if you ask me, which you didn’t, but I’m just sayin’.

There is no mystery as to who kills Susie. That’s clear from the beginning. It’s the (obviously) pervy neighbor George Harvey (Stanley Tucci; Julie and Julia). His sketchy wig and ‘70s porn moustache screams out for someone to call Chris Hanson and the crew from “To Catch a Predator.”

It’s already well-known that director Peter Jackson (King Kong) never met a green screen he didn’t like, and it is never more obvious than here. With Susie narrating her tale from “the in-between place” on her way to heaven, Jackson goes overboard concocting a heavenly (and ever-changing) landscape that looks a lot like a Skittles commercial. I kept waiting for rainbows and unicorns to come flying out of Susie’s ass, but those were the only things that didn’t show up. Oh wait; there was a unicorn now that I remember. Hmmm. And a rainbow. I wonder if Jackson had to pay for product infringement.

Personally, I always thought that “the in-between place” was supposed to be Purgatory, which isn’t exactly Heaven, but it beats the hell out of Hell. I imagine it is a lot like living in a trailer park where everybody has the Comcast™ “triple-play” and you still have NetZero™ dial-up and basic cable. Of course, my favorite “in-between place” has always been Limbo, but thanks to Pope John the XXIII, Limbo got shut down like a way too high-profile crack house and all those un-baptized babies who supposedly got stuck in Limbo because their souls were too dirty to make it through the Pearly Gates were given a last-minute reprieve and were adopted by the saints. Frankly, I think you’d have to be a saint to scoop up a cloud full of dead babies’ souls and make them your own, but I digress.

In the genre of “dead girls speak out” movies, The Lovely Bones isn’t bad, but it’s not exactly uplifting fun either. I suppose if you like watching the parents, siblings and friends of a murdered teenager grieve then you’ll have a great time, but for those of us who have lost someone in their own family The Lovely Bones is an exercise in remembered pain.

Daybreakers

2010-01-11T20:11:00.002-05:00

Pardon the pun, but Vampires suck. For one thing, there are way too many of them, especially today. We’ve got those folks from “True Blood”, southern hedonists who are struggling to assimilate into the society of the living. Then there is the brood from Twilight. They’ve spent a hundred years in high school and still haven’t figured out how to make it to the cool kids’ table in the cafeteria. Blood-sucking nerds. The BBC has “Being Human”, a series, which sounds like an old joke… “A vampire, a werewolf and a ghost move into an apartment together…” Even over at the CW, they’ve got 20-something angst coming out their fangs with “The Vampire Diaries”, though it is hard to feel sorry for anyone who is undead and still looks as fabulous as the high cheek-boned Ian Somerhalder.

One thing all of these stories have in common is a protagonist who is unhappy being a vampire and who eschews the drinking of human blood, which is a lot like being a Lohan who doesn’t want to soak up spilled booze with the enthusiasm of an alcoholic Spongebob. It defeats the purpose and makes doing a vampire’s job all the more difficult. This is certainly true for Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke; Staten Island), the tortured neck nibbler at the center of the new (well, not really) movie, Daybreakers. The fact that Edward is a hematologist by trade would seem to make human blood readily available to him, a particularly ironic fact considering that in his world of 2019, over 95% of the world’s population is now of the vampiric persuasion, meaning there’s not nearly enough humans still around to be farmed for their fluids.

That’s a problem Charles Bromley (Sam Neil; In Her Skin) wants to exploit for all it’s worth as he maintains the world’s largest “farm” of human “cattle” in existence. His company keeps the humans naked and barely conscious, hanging like slabs of beef in cold storage, where they survive only to have their blood cyclically drained through tubes inserted permanently in their necks.

As for Edward, he is supposedly working on developing a synthetic blood product to placate the masses (and keep Bromley’s stock through the roof); at least that is what he wants his boss to think. In actuality, he is working on a cure for vampirism, which begs the question “Does the majority of the population need to be ‘cured’ when they are the ones determining what is ‘normal’?” Obviously, Bromley doesn’t think so, and that point is drummed in with visual cues reminiscent of the Holocaust photos that showed the frailest of the death camp inmates being marched off to their slaughter. In Bromley’s world, those who can’t keep it together as vampires are dragged out into the sun to fry.

Daybreakers tries hard to imbue its subject matter with relevance and show the corporate bloodsuckers for what they really are ~ corporate bloodsuckers ~ willing to stop at nothing to satisfy their personal greed. People talk about the war in Iraq “spilling blood for oil.” Here, the Bromley folk are spilling blood for… well, more blood, and they are awfully sloppy in the spillage.

Daybreakers is chock-full of bloodshed, so much so that I couldn’t help but wonder if they were a tad more careful with the blood that is splattered everywhere then maybe there wouldn’t be such a drastic shortage.

And speaking of drastic shortages, the movie suffers from its biggest shortages in the quality of the script and the complexity of the characters, not that this is the kind of movie that demands either. Maybe I’m spoiled by “True Blood”, but Daybreakers is fairly anemic when it comes to making connections amongst its characters. Hawke plays Edward like he truly is dead, not exactly the inspired scientist one might expect. If he can manage any human emotions he must have been doing it during breaks in the filming because none of it is on-screen. Meanwhile, the human woman Edward befriends, Audrey Bennett (Claudia Karvan; Saved), seems just the opposite. She is immediately and passionately willing to trust this stranger who works for her sworn enemy, which makes no sense except as a plot device.

Lionsgate, the studio distributing the film, kept it in the shelf down under, in Australia, where it was shot, for more than two years, not confident enough to give Daybreakers a release date until now. Perhaps because co-directors and writers (and twin brothers) Peter and Michael Spierig (Undead) turn the vampire mythology on its ear, it may explain why the studio didn’t know what to do with the movie. It’s too bad because Daybreakers is a gory bit of fun in spite of its flaws. While it may lack complexity, it does present the vampire story in a new light (albeit it of a non-UV variety) and can be looked at as a biting satire on American consumerism. That alone earns it a rating of AB+.

It's Complicated

2009-12-30T14:23:00.001-05:00

The most complicated thing about It’s Complicated has to be in the miracle that it even got made in the first place. Imagine a sex comedy where the three principle parts are all played by people over the age of forty ~ er, okay, fifty and two of those are actually on the other side of sixty. I barely made it into the lobby at the Essex Cinemas before one of the young’uns who works there asked what I was going to see. “It’s Complicated” I replied, only to be met by a scrunched up face and the comment “Oh, the old people’s movie.” Therein lies the dilemma for filmmaker Nancy Meyers (Something’s Gotta Give) and the talented team of marketers from Universal Pictures. How do you fill the theater when the target demographic for this gem of a film spends more time focusing on ads for Metamucil in their daily newspaper than they do checking out the movie schedule? The answer to that is obvious: you make a really witty movie that pokes fun at the aging process and the simple fact that no matter what the calendar says the truth remains that we all need a little love and an occasional game of ‘Chutes and Ladders’ now and again, if you get my meaning (and I know that you do).

As for the plot, It’s Complicated isn’t nearly as complicated as you might think, at least if you’ve lived a little. After all, who hasn’t gotten drunk and slept with their ex-husband (or wife as the case may be) in a weak moment? That’s the dilemma Jane (Meryl Streep; Julie and Julia) faces after ending up in the same hotel with her former husband Jake (Alec Baldwin of tv’s “30 Rock”) while both are attending their son’s New York University graduation. So, you may ask, what is the big deal? Maybe it’s because Jake is now married to the near-fetus (Lake Bell; Pride and Glory) he cheated with while still wed to Jane, or the fact that the divorced Adlers’ three adult kids are still carrying tons of emotional baggage that came with their parents’ divorce. Maybe, too, it the fact that Jane has spent these last ten years rebuilding her own independent spirit and self-esteem and can’t quite believe she would so easily succumb ~ especially with a married man. That is a problem, but not nearly as much of one as how to handle this slip just as her relationship with a sensitive architect named Adam (Steve Martin; The Pink Panther 2) is heating up. Toss in a bit of high-powered reefer (yes, reefer!) and you’ve got some pretty hilarious stuff because, after all, nobody expects to see America’s premier actress toking up on-screen and losing her inhibitions altogether.

Baldwin deserves credit for making a fool of himself while abandoning his former leading man status by baring nearly all, thus exposing a middle-age spread most actors would be ashamed to let be seen in public. Instead, Baldwin prances about proudly, like a rooster let into the hen house once he has scored with his former wife. His uncomfortable subservience as the whipped husband to Bell’s Agnes includes some hysterical footage of Jake trying to “do his duty” in a fertility clinic because Agnes demands that they have a child even though Jake is far from convinced that this is a good idea. There’s just something instinctively silly about seeing adult men talking about their sperm. On a more serious note, it is his bonding with Jane after all these years that is, to him, an acknowledgement that he’s finally grown up. Unfortunately, to Jane, her indiscretion appears to be nothing more than a terrible mistake despite Jake’s assumption that it is their first step towards reconciliation. Apparently he has finally come to his senses and realizes that his trophy wife is no Meryl Streep. In doing so, he shows himself to be genuinely remorseful, and his sly charm is endearing, surprisingly so since it was his adultery that destroyed his marriage in the first place.

Streep is also no slouch in pointing out her own flaws. She insists that Jake never see her naked except when she is lying down because “things have shifted” due to gravity, and she reveals her insecurities about not measuring up to his current wife. She frets about her drooping eyelids, the lines around her eyes, and her general appearance, but these self-doubt are balanced by her confidence in her skills in the kitchen where she knows she is a superb chef. It’s her success as the owner of an upscale bakery that creates the reason for her first meeting with Adam, who has been hired to design a new addition for her home so she can have the dream kitchen she has wanted for years. Martin turns in a surprisingly understated performance as the soft-spoken architect whose own divorce has left him emotionally battered and shy. His cautious interest in Jane is perhaps the most subtle part of the film, so much so that you almost wonder if he is the right guy for Jane, whose chemistry with Jake remains explosive.

That is the key piece of It’s Complicated. The actors rise above the simple structure of the script and imbue their characters with many layers. Streep plays Jane with enormous depth while Baldwin excels in showing his vulnerabilities and makes the regret he experiences over his infidelity so palpable that you can’t help but feel sorry for him.

One character you don’t have to feel sorry for isplayed by hunky John Krasinski (tv’s “The Office”), who steals the spotlight from the veteran actors in every scene he is in. As Harley, fiancé to eldest daughter Lauren (Caitlin Fitzgerald; Taking Woodstock), Krasinski is the “inside” outsider who accidentally stumbles upon the sexy shenanigans of his future in-laws and then bumbles his way through the picture trying not to let on that he knows what Jane and Jake are up to.

While It’s Complicated is a fast-paced, clever comedy rooted in some have painful truths. Adultery is still a tough subject to address and Jane hasn’t quite gotten over the rejection and hurt even after all these years. Jake also has to accept that he is not the center of his family’s universe any longer, and both share the ache of growing older and not fitting the image in their heads of who they are versus the reality of being older than they feel. The movie includes some frank discussions about the motives of the characters and it doesn’t shy away from the sexual needs and loneliness of women over a certain age.

The resolution of the story (which you’ll have to see to find out) is refreshingly more realistic than what one has come to expect in romantic comedies these days. It’s Complicated may seem like an “old people’s movie” to the teenagers enraptured by New Moon and such, but for those seeking a more profound (and funny) experience, It’s Complicated is the simple answer.

Avatar

2009-12-22T18:09:00.000-05:00

Once in a blue moon a film comes along to chase away the Blues with such stunning technological advances that it will change the art of movie-making forever. First came sound with The Jazz Singer, then Technicolor™ with The Wizard of Oz, followed by the wide screen format of Cinemascope™ with The Robe and now the next step in 3D and motion capture photography is here with the opening of Avatar.

Avatar is an extraordinary piece of art with something for all ages, from teens in blue jeans to blue-haired old ladies. It is an action flick, a love story, a social allegory about the treatment of Native Americans, and an elaborate science fiction spectacle all wrapped up in one. The story concerns a mining operation and military intervention by humans on a moon called Pandora located in the proverbial galaxy far, far away. Also sharing the premises of the company compound is scientist Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver; The Tale of Despereaux), who is leading a team dedicated to studying and establishing diplomatic relations with the indigenous people of the moon, a race of ten-foot tall blue-skinned people called the Na’vi. To make this a reality, Dr. Augustine has recruited a small cadre of experts whose job is to have their consciousness transferred into the cloned bodies of the Na’vi, grown within the company’s laboratory. By fate, one of Augustine’s team has been killed before the movie begins, and it is his twin brother, Jake (Sam Worthington; Terminator Salvation), who is brought in as a replacement because of the genetic similarity to his brother, which is necessary for the success of the connection between human mind and Na’vi body.

Jake is a marine that has been rendered a paraplegic during a previous mission, so the idea of regaining the use of his legs through an Avatar, i.e., a representative body that will replace his own while he remains in stasis back at the lab, is an exciting possibility. His lack of training or knowledge of biological sciences is of great concern to Augustine, but after a harrowing introduction to native life, Jake proves a natural in adapting to Na’vi culture. His first contact, with Na’vi beauty Neytiri (Zöe Saldana; Star Trek), turns to love despite the tribe’s well-deserved suspicion of the newcomer.

As you can imagine, the story builds to an inevitable climax that will challenge Jake’s loyalties to his human beginnings when he finds himself questioning the validity of the mining project that will end with the decimation of the Na’vi’s home world. The passive, pastoral lifestyle of the Na’vi, who live in concert with nature and with a belief system that all beings on Pandora are connected as one, is shown through a few pivotal scenes where we glimpse the Na’vi at their most spiritual ~ swaying in syncopated rhythms with one another like the Blue Man Group times a thousand.

The real Blue Meanie of the movie is Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang; The Men Who Stare at Goats), a bad-ass, by-the-book marine who looks forward to nothing more than eradicating the Na’vi for the thrill of the fight. He doesn’t care about the blue skies, blue lagoons, or Blue Hawaii (sans Elvis) gorgeousness of the scenery. All he cares about is annihilation. That tends to leave everyone else singing the Blues, Na’vi or not.

The conflict that results makes for striking visuals, shown in Real 3D, but done with subtlety and the restraint necessary to make the battles and the environment feel authentic rather than exaggerated with the usual “gags” jumping off the screen that one associates with tradition 3D from the 1950s and ‘60s. Director James Cameron (Titanic) packs very frame with blue ribbon-caliber effects and details that will guarantee you’ll forget that the world you are watching is all computer generated.

Avatar is an epic adventure that will leave you wondering how its two hours and forty minutes flashed by quickly enough so that you never took a moment to look at your watch. There isn’t a moment that isn’t entertaining, fascinating, and thought-provoking. If you are looking for the movie of 2009, just slip on your blue suede shoes and boogie on down to the Essex Cinemas or Cumberland 12 to check out these Smurfs on steroids. Avatar rocks!

Princess and the Frog (The)

2009-12-14T11:00:00.002-05:00

Any human being on this planet in possession of a uterus can attest to the eons-old adage that “You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince.” What that saying doesn’t tell you is that almost all of those frogs are really only a bunch of horny toads and you’ll be lucky if all you end up with is a bad case of warts once you give ‘em a lit puck. My pucker was blessedly good enough to sift out a true Noble prince on my second time around, but don’t think I didn’t learn the hard way during my first go when I made the mistake of choosing a husband who was worse than a frog or a toad. He was a low-down snake in the grass.

Fortunately, none of this foul reality besieges the fantasy realm of Disney’s latest money-making machine, the lovely-to-look-at The Princess and the Frog. Much will be made (and already has been) concerning the “revolutionary” decision by Disney to add to its bevy of Princesses™ an African American model. Some call it a step forward inclusivity, but anyone who has ever worked for Disney knows it is actually a step forward in marketing. Yes, now every little girl (and middle-aged queen with a Barbie™ collection) can have a “black version” of its Cinderella, Aurora, Belle, Jasmine, and Ariel dolls. Those are the signature Princesses™ that Disney uses to mint a sizeable fortune every year. Incredibly, the company has only now realized that there are Black people in the world outside of those little animatronic folks in “It’s a Small World” and these folk have money Disney hasn’t yet snatched away from them. Apparently Disney doesn’t care so much about Asian or Native American dollars because even though Mulan and Pocahontas were both successful movies long before The Princess and the Frog neither has made the cut as a Princess™, instead taking to the back of the bus to give more room for Ariel’s gigantic scaly-ass fishtail. But I digress.

There’s no need to harbor bad feelings towards The Princess and the Frog’s main maiden, Tiana (voiced by Anika Noni Rose; the least well-remembered of the Dreamgirls). Tiana is a hard-working young woman scraping by in 1920s New Orleans as she strives to save enough money to open the restaurant she and her now-deceased father dreamed of opening together during a brief prologue to the actual story. Daddy is voiced by Terrence Howard of Iron Man fame (or infamy considering he has been replaced by Don Cheadle in the upcoming sequel), and I’m actually relieved he doesn’t make it beyond the opening credits because every time I see (or, apparently, hear) him I am reminded of a totally unnecessary interview he gave to Elle magazine in 2007 in which he told reporter Andrew Goldman he could never “be” with a woman who did not sanitize her va-jay-jay with Baby Wipes® first. Talk about giving out “Too Much Information!”

Of course, this being a Disney movie, the beloved (or hygienic) parent always dies in the first reel so the protagonist can grow and learn from the dead one’s example, and Tiana is no different. In the tradition of Bambi or even Nemo, Tiana grows stronger and more determined to make it, though, ironically, since she wants to open a restaurant she may end up serving both Bambi and Nemo as entrees on in given night. In the meantime though, she toils for tips as a “common waitress” (and the words haven’t sounded so demeaning since Joan Collins uttered them back in her “Dynasty” days), and she wishes upon a star for her ship to come in. Voila! ~ that ship does come in, literally, carrying the enchanting Prince Naveen (Bruno Campos; Wake) from the fictional country of Maldonia on his first trip to the United States. Naturally, their paths cross and they can’t stand one another ~ a sure sign they were meant to be together forever like all married folks.

In little time, Naveen gets into a whole heap of voo doo poo poo and is turned into the frog of the title by the bewitchingly vile Dr. Facilier (Keith David; All About Steve), sort of a male version of Sleeping Beauty’s Maleficent. Facilier is working with Naveen’s valet, Lawrence (Peter Bartlett aka Nigel Bartholomew-Smythe of tv’s “One Life to Live”), to get hold of a fortune by duping the fabulously wealthy man-hunter Charlotte (big screen debuting Jennifer Cody) into marrying a faux Naveen, actually a magically transmorphed Lawrence. This is where it falls upon Tiana to do the requisite good deed by kissing the frog and thus returning him to all his royal glory so he can expose the deception. Except… in a twist on tradition, when Tiana puts her lips on his something unexpected happens and the story really takes off.

Like all great Disney animated features it’s the supporting cast of characters who put the taste in this gumbo and I see visions of plush alligators and fireflies exploding out of souvenir booths and gift shops all over Disney resorts around the globe. Yes, it’s the fun-loving reptile (albeit dimmer than Pumbaa on a good day) Louis (Michael-Leon Wooley; Ghost Town) and sentimental beetle Ray (Jim Cummings; Pete on tv’s "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse") that bring on the funk and the funny in this tale as the action shifts from New Orleans to the Louisiana Bayou. It also provides the show-stopping backdrop for a singing voo doo Priestess, Mama Odie (Jenifer Lewis; Meet the Browns), to belt out the movie’s biggest and best “choreographed” number “Deep a Little Deeper” featuring The Pinnacle Gospel Choir, just one of sixteen snappy tunes written by Toy Story maestro Randy Newman.

This probably won’t mean beans to the kids in the audience, but for viewers of a certain age (*ahem*), The Princess and the Frog heralds back to an earlier era in Disney animation when films were actually drawn and colored by hand. This is Disney’s first foray back into hand-made features since the studio shuttered its Animation Department (supposedly) for good in 2004. Now, thanks to The Princess and the Frog, the clout of co-directors Ron Clements and John Musker (Aladdin, Hercules, and The Little Mermaid among others), and along with the support of Pixar and Disney Creative Chief John Lasseter (also Producer of Bolt), this is the first of several new projects in this medium on the horizon, including a big screen Winnie the Pooh scheduled to bow in 2011. The lushness of the backgrounds, the intricacy of details and shadows and the minutiae within different scenes provide a subtle homage to earlier classic Disney films (Tell me Tiana’s ball gown doesn’t harken back to Cinderella’s), and this tender loving care truly makes The Princess and the Frog the best Disney can offer and yet seemed to have forgotten how to be. Great looking, terrific music, lots of laughs and a touch of genuine sentimentality (yes, even I teared up a bit), this is one to see whether you have kids or not.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (The)

2009-12-07T12:32:00.004-05:00

When I was growing up my Uncle Cletus had a pet fox he called Charmin (so dubbed because, like the toilet tissue of the same name, he truly was “squeezably soft”). As a thirteen year old I was sent to spend a couple of weeks with Uncle Cletus while my parents went off on a cruise without me, a time that would eventually be known by me as “That Unfortunate Era of Uncondomed Lust” which resulted in my younger sister Clamentine’s joining our family. So while my parents were off playing Chutes & Ladders of a Certain Kind, I was foisted onto a shirt-tail relative of last resort to look after my well-being, or at least make sure I didn’t kill accidentally myself during their absence. I’m pretty sure that was the best they could expect from a man like Cletus anyway. I’d never met him before and wasn’t sure how he gained the title “Uncle” because I was fairly certain he wasn’t my father or mother’s brother, but when you are thirteen that hardly matters if the guy has a spirited red fox living in his house.

Uncle Cletus said that he found Charmin as a pup alone in the woods after his mother had been caught in a trap. Cletus never said that it was his trap, but the fact that he wore a bright orange fur hat with a fox-tail dangling down his back always made him suspect in my book. Maybe he did it to help Charmin feel more at home growing up, but I doubt Cletus had any thought that went that deep. More likely he did it to cover his bald head and give that hairless dome a place to hide under since he had a head with enough bumps and ridges across it to make a Klingon proud. You’d think a guy would feel those things under his hair before he would take a razor to his scalp, but Cletus wasn’t quite that self-observant. After all, he lived in a house where the plumbing was as much a promise that could be broken at a moment’s notice as not, and it practically took a hand-held GPS device to navigate the piles of “collectibles” that clogged the paths between my guest room and the kitchen. Not that I cared. I was too distracted by Uncle Cletus and his love-connection to the little red fur-ball. He treated Charmin more like a favorite son than a pet. Charmin followed Cletus everywhere he went and slept at night curled up on the empty pillow across from my uncle’s head. Like a loyal dog, Charmin would wag his bushy tail whenever Cletus came through the door and he could do any number of tricks, from simply rolling over to doing an impressive back flip on command. He was also great at burrowing into the furniture, leaving stuffing from the couches and chairs strewn all across the living room floor, a tiny inconvenience Uncle Cletus didn’t seem to notice since his idea of tidiness lay somewhere between what you’d expect to find in a Pakistani ghetto or in the camp of

“I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here.”

Most of my two weeks with Cletus I felt like all I wanted to do was scream “I might be a celebrity one day. Get Me Out of Here!” not just because of Charmin’s penchant for using the inside of the piano as his personal toilet but mostly because my uncle seemed a bit… off. Well, maybe he was a LOT off. Besides having a fox as a best friend he tended to refer to a stuffed deer’s head over his mantle as “My lovely wife, Martha.” I think it was on my sixth day there that I noticed the head was missing from its spot on the wall and when I asked Cousin Latreen about it he said Cletus and Martha always went out for long walks along the beach at sunset. It was how they kept the romance alive in their relationship. Just about then they returned and for the first time I noticed that the head was sporting both blush and lipstick, which couldn’t have been easy to apply since deer tend not to have lips, at least not Angelina Jolie quality lips. I knew then that it was going to be a very scary eight more days.

Fortunately, nothing remotely as awkward befalls the title character in The Fantastic Mr. Fox, which is not to say that Mr. Fox doesn’t have problems of his own. This foxy gentleman, voiced by the perpetually suave George Clooney (The Men Who Stare at Goats), wears stylish business suits and ties even if he does forgo shoes, which somehow makes sense if you are a wild animal. That’s another bit of Mr. Fox’s unique charm. He may be a classy “Vulpes vulpes” as he likes to point out, but he is also a wild animal and can channel those beastly traits on a moment’s notice. Let’s just say that dinner time resembles something akin to my dreams of Pizza Night with the San Francisco 49s. It’s every man for himself, and fingers are considered fair game if they get between a player and his pie.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox is based on a short story by Roald Dahl, author of James and the Giant Peach as well as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and a multitude of other well-known children’s books, so you know this sly critter has quite the good pedigree. And he knows it too. Mr. Fox is definitely not lacking in the self-esteem department. He exudes confidence as the best chicken-stealer in the valley until he promises his (then future) wife, Felicity (Meryl Streep; Julie and Julia) to go straight and get a reputable job. Sure enough, Mr. Fox becomes a columnist for the local newspaper, although I used to have a similar job and I’m not sure I’d call that a “reputable” career. It’s like calling a whore a “social marketing technician.” Anyway, Mr. Fox manages to stay on the straight and narrow for a long time, but eventually he and his pal, an opossum named Kylie (Wallace Wolodarsky; The Darjeeling Limited) can’t help themselves, and they are once again rustling chickens, alcoholic cider and frozen foods on the down-low from the three meanest human farmers in the area. As you might expect, trouble ensues.

Naturally, Mrs. Fox is oblivious ~ at first ~ to her husband’s misdeeds, and her concerns about his past are simply a matter of keeping him alive to be a good husband and a father to their son Ash (voiced by Jason Schwartzman; Funny People). Ash could use some of his father’s assurance and a lot of his Dad’s love since he suffers from very low self-worth. He is neither an athlete nor a charmer like his old man, and if things weren’t bad enough, his cousin Kristofferson (Eric Chase Anderson; The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) comes for an extended visit, and he is adept at everything from martial arts to Olympic diving. Kris is also the foxy guy all the girls at their school prowl the halls to date, leaving Ash always feeling (and being) second-rate. If I was a psychiatrist I might want to ponder the fact that director Wes Anderson (The Darjeeling Limited) hired his own brother to voice this role. I’m sure I could keep the Andersons on the couch for years sorting all this out, but that’s a whole other column.

The star-packed cast, including Bill Murray (Zombieland) as a badgering badger named Badger, Willem Dafoe (Daybreakers) as a dirty rat also called Rat, and a ferret dubbed Skip, the boys’ Wakbat coach (Owen Wilson; Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian), help make the film a virtual “Guess Who?” for fans trying to figure out the celeb’s identity by voice alone. For those not so interested in that aspect of the movie, The Fantastic Mr. Fox presents a colorful and exciting enough tale about family, honesty, loyalty, larceny and redemption to keep most anyone entertained throughout its 87 minutes. While the lessons in the film may be a tad obscure (Is it still okay to steal as long as it is from ugly or mean people?), kids are less inclined to dig that deep and leave the philosophizing to the adults, who will be more likely enjoying the retro look of the movie, done entirely with stop-action photography in the style of Art Clokey’s 1950’s tv series “Gumby” or Will Vinton’s claymation features such as 1986’s The Adventures of Mark Twain.

I’m sure my Uncle Cletus would have loved The Fantastic Mr. Fox if he was still with us today. Unfortunately, he was bit in the throat by a wild animal while he slept one night and bled out by morning. My parents grieved a long time about that because they figured that whatever creature snuck into the house and killed Cletus must have gobbled up poor Charmin at the same time because he has never been seen again. For the next three years Cousin Latreen wore his lucky pork chops around his neck and wandered the woods behind Cletus’ house hoping to coax his “Little Brother” to come home. Apparently it became too much for Latreen because one day he simply walked out of the house and into the woods with a fresh necklace of pork chops around his neck and never was seen again. At least he had something to eat on his trip to who-knows-where. Too bad he forgot the applesauce to go along with the chops... but what can you expect? He’s Cletus’ son.

Old Dogs

2009-11-30T14:59:00.001-05:00

For Old Dogs like me, the movie Old Dogs is just one more reminder that I’m falling apart and everything I held dear is an allusion. I treasured my memories of Vinnie Barbarino and Mork as they were in the ‘70s, captivating my generation with catchphrases like “Wh--?” and “Nanu Nanu.” Now, the new film opens with credits that show stars Robin Williams and John Travolta in photographs from that era and we watch as they move from their “Welcome Back, Kotter” and “Mork and Mindy” days through the Mrs. Doubtfire and Hairspray era to how they look today. Personally, I think Travolta looked better in a fat suit and a dress than he does au natural if for no other reason than as a woman he wears a credible wig and not that distracting dead raccoon he will never admit is a toupee. Watching him on-screen I couldn’t help but think that the Old Dogs of the title might well be referring to the plethora of hairpieces he keeps under lock and key.

I suppose we are expected to speak reverentially about Travolta since he is still recovering from the death of his son, Jett, but I don’t think it excuses his lazy performance in Old Dogs, especially since this was filmed long before Jett’s demise. As a matter of fact, this tragedy of a comedy has sat on the shelf for well over a year, perhaps a sign that someone at the studio which released it believed it might be kindest to put these Old Dogs out of their misery (and ours), but we aren’t that lucky. As long as there is a penny to be made Disney will release it ~ or in this case let it escape on an unsuspecting public.

In Old Dogs, Travolta plays Charlie, an investment guru, who has been business partners with Williams’ Dan for over thirty years. Obviously, this is Williams’ movie as the plot hinges on his relationship with the twin son and daughter he discovers he fathered after a memorable one-night stand in Miami seven years ago. That shouldn’t mean that Travolta can just take a backseat in the acting department, but he is so low key here that the sets outshine him. That might be the mistake of director Walt Becker (Wild Hogs), who seems to have put his focus on Williams and the kids, played by Connor Rayburn (tv’s “According to Jim”) and debuting Ella Bleu Travolta (yep, John and Kelly Preston’s kid). Ironically, it is the younger Travolta who radiates a screen presence as she comes to accept and then love her newfound Dad. Ella is a natural as Emily, the shy half of the twins, whose biggest dream is to play “princess” with her father. Indeed, the film’s most heartwarming scene involves just that, though it suffers that scripters David Diamond and David Weissman (Minutemen) felt it necessary to inject an insipid (and totally unrealistic) plot device about Dan’s need for robotic assistance before he can grant such a simple request from the girl. Once this silly bit is past both Williams and the wee Travolta shine. Somehow seeing Robin Williams dressed in a king costume and enjoying a tea party with a seven year old seems a natural setting for his brand of comedy.

What doesn’t seem natural is a whole contrived situation in which Charlie and Dan are involved in courting a Japanese company for a high-powered business venture. The constant bowing and scraping to find the humor in Japanese culture is just not funny. The film would have been better just sticking to the family foolishness and let Dan and Charlie act idiotic as they do in some (too) brief scenes with Camp Director Matt Dillon (Armored) when the kids go on a scouting excursion with the tightly wound Dillon and his unhinged henchman an uncredited Justin Long; Taking Chances). Why this section of the movie seems truncated is beyond me, but it is also peculiar that bits featuring the marvelous Amy Sedaris (Jennifer's Body) and Rita Wilson (My Life in Ruins) go nowhere. Wilson arrives early in the film as the cross-eyed best friend of the twins’ mother, Vicki (aka Mrs. Travolta in real-life, Kelly Preston; Struck). Why she is cross-eyed is never explained. Neither is why she was introduced as a character since she has nothing do except smile and look cock-eyed in a single scene. Ditto Sedaris, who has only two or three lines, shrieking from a balcony. Meanwhile, the long-dead Bernie Mac (in his last role) leaves behind a limp legacy as a friend of Dan’s named Lunchbox Jimmy. He has a handful of more lines than the ladies but his presence seems trivial. So does an odd appearance by Ann Margaret (All's Faire in Love) in a throwaway role that could be played by an extra. At least she has the opportunity to show off the fact that she’s still a good looking dame at 68.

Old Dogs relies mostly on repetitive poop jokes, golf ball to the crotch scenes, and even an uncomfortable bit with Williams in a public restroom watching little Zach (Rayburn) take a dump. Listening to a seven year old fart is about the high (-class) point of the movie.

Basically, this whole project seems like a vanity affair slapped together by the Travoltas to showcase their daughter. Besides Ella Bleu, John’s sister Margaret and his brother Sam also have bit parts, though neither is given anything to do, so they are in good company with the other stars making cameo appearances. As for Seth Green (tv’s “Robot Chicken”), the pint-sized comic plays well off the older duo as their third-in-command at the agency. He steals all of his scenes without needing to try, though his best scenes aren’t with Williams or Travolta but with a 600-pound gorilla, a part of the (supposed) Burlington, Vermont, zoo. I’d love to know where this (non-existent) zoo has been hiding for the past two decades or so I’ve lived here because I’d like to go sometime. It has to be a lot more entertaining than another two hours of Old Dogs.

New Moon

2009-11-23T14:53:00.001-05:00

My Aunt Gerta was a werewolf, so I think when it comes to New Moon I think I have a little prejudice in favor of “Camp Jacob” as the Twilight fans call the folks who choose lycanthrope Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner; tv’s "My Own Worst Enemy") over vampire protagonist Edward Cullen as they vie for the love of seemingly brain-dead Bella Swan. Okay, let me back up and be honest. My Aunt Gerta wasn’t really a werewolf. She just looked like one once menopause hit. Every month or so she’d sprout more facial hair than a sixteen year old Italian boy and gets as cranky as any wild beast in the woods. She’d growl and threaten to kill anyone who left a dish in her sink or snickered at her Frida Kahlo unibrow. Who knew all it would take to vanquish a werewolf is a simple estrogen patch?

So my perfect husband and I went to see The Twilight Saga: New Moon last weekend at the Essex Cinemas with a theater full of teenage girls, all of whom must have been under the impression that this was an audience participation film because they never stopped giggling, gasping and groaning from beginning to end. The fact that they reacted with such verve to every turn of the glacially s-l-o-w moving plot seemed odd since one might expect that they would have read the Twilight books and already knew that it is a fait accompli as to who Bella was going to end up bumping nasties with for the long haul.

And speaking of which, I found my mind wandering during The Twilight Saga: New Moon to extrapolate a tad bit further than what author Stephanie Meyer and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg (tv’s “Dexter”) probably wanted me to. For instance, in one pivotal scene, boring Bella (Kristen Stewart; Adventureland) fantasizes seeing herself in the future as an old woman with Edward (Robert Pattinson; Little Ashes), who has not aged at all. Her concern, as a human, is that Edward will lose interest in her since she will continue to age and eventually die. As if saggy boobs and wrinkles are the worst she has to worry about. After all, she’s having sex with a DEAD guy. Hello?!, and he’s 109 years old, so basically this is a love triangle between a teenage girl and an animated corpse and an animal that will leave fur all over the furniture. All of the violins in the world and sparkly special effects can’t cover up the fact that New Moon is a love story chalk full of pedophilia, necrophilia, and bestiality. Not to mention the possibility that Bella could get a bad case of fleas depending on whom she lies down with.

Oh sure, the “grand design” of New Moon is to fulfill every teenage girl’s need for romance, and on that level it is a great success. Considering the panting sounds coming from two rows behind us it was apparently also satisfying on a deeper level, hitting more than an occasional (G) spot that was sending the girls in the audience into a stupor. It’s understandable when you realize that for at least half the movie hunky werewolves Jacob, Embry (debuting Kiowa Gordon), Jared (Bronson Pelletier; tv’s "Renegadepress.com"), Paul (Alex Meraz; Two Spirits, One Journey), and Sam (Chaske Spencer; Red Dead Revolver) are shirtless and deliciously pumped up with more muscles than you’d find at a steroid rehab clinic. Much has been made in the press about Taylor Lautner’s transformation from 16-year-old kid actor to 17-year-old super-hunk in an effort to ensure that he wouldn’t be replaced in the role he originated in Twilight, and he has indeed undergone a remarkable change, though not as spectacular as the conversion he makes from Native American to Lycanthrope American thanks to some very slick effects. The sporadic move from species to species is fast and beautiful, not at all the grinding pain one has come to expect from other werewolf spectacles such as An American Werewolf in London and Wolf.

New Moon is like the flip side of its predecessor as Edward takes a long absence from the screen so that Jacob and his pack of hirsute relatives can step front and center. Unfortunately, the story still hangs entirely on Bella and her relationship with Edward. She pines for him throughout, treating Jacob more like a puppy than a big bad wolf, and, worse yet, he lets her. Granted, it might be more tolerable if someone other than Kristen Stewart was providing us with her usual one-note performance, a cross between a kind of vegetative state and death. Hopefully director Chris Weitz (The Golden Compass) will poke her with a cattle prod to elicit a conscious response on-screen by the third film. Either that or just let Jacob bite her head off and find us a new female lead.

The gaggle of gigglers behind my perfect husband and me gasped in shock at the cliffhanger ending of the movie, which would come as no surprise to anyone who could actually read, but apparently the majority of these hormonal hussies was interested only in the movie version of these tales because reading is something they only do when required to by law. The concept of a film actually following the plot of its source material is usually rare in Hollywood, but Meyer has her hands all over these movies, much like J.K. Rowling has with her Harry Potter series. It shows, and for genuine fans of the written page this is a plus. For those of us in the audience who are forced to sit amongst the mouth-breathing gum-chewers without a clue it’s a curse. Maybe by the time The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is released they’ll have checked out the Wikipedia if nothing else so the rest of the theater can hear the dialogue on-screen. Let’s hope because I’m already whittling myself a couple of wooden stakes just in case I need to shut a few folks up.

2012

2009-11-17T17:25:00.010-05:00

There are a lot of great things to be said about going to prison. Oh, I know nobody wants to go to prison, but if you end up there you can learn some handy survival tips that will make life all the easier when the world comes to an end in2012. My cousin Henry has spent most of his worthless life incarcerated for one sleazy scheme or another, not the least of which involved attempting to rob a liquor store after just purchasing a bottle of Limocello from the clerk using his personal American Express card. Nobody said he was smart, okay? Despite this and his multitude of other failings, he has at least been able to impart his knowledge about some things that may actually prove useful in the new world order. For instance, how many of you know how to make stereo speakers out of empty soda cans or who can make a toilet bowl full of wine out of rancid oranges and a handful of ketchup packets? These may not seem like important life skills today, but wait until you’ve survived the Apocalypse and you may change your mind. Most of you may just think of prison as a good place to give up smoking or get a hepatitis-encrusted amateur tattoo, but Henry insists that when the rest of us are tits-up in a world covered in mud, it’s the inmates who will flourish. They know a lot of important survival skills that John Cusack (who stars in the film 2012) has ever heard of before.

While Cusack’s character proves to be quite resourceful as the world is literally falling into pieces around him, there’s no indication that the writer/limo driver would know that if he needs something to eat AND to clean up with after a tsunami has just ravaged all of the Midwest he can always eat the bar soap they provide in prisons. It’s true. Since inmates were constantly eating soap to make themselves ill in order to be sent to the infirmary, the Department of Corrections now uses an edible soap that can’t make a person sick. Okay, so it’s not caviar, but come2012 every Taco Bell between here and Bratislava are bound to be

That’s one of my biggest gripes with 2012, the movie. While the special effects truly are spectacular, the entire hullabaloo about THE BIG DAY coming is simply followed by the end credits once the CGI budget has been shot, and the aftermath of the tragedy is left to our feeble imaginations. I’m not lobbying for 2012 to be any longer by any means (Dear God, no! It already clocks in at 2 hours and 40 minutes), but it would have been nice to see some practical realities addressed, like how the survivors are going to recover and rebuild their lives (and civilization) in this strange new environment. I mean, it’s not like anyone can run to the nearest Cumby’s for a Diet Coke and a microwaved burrito when the urge strikes.

Nevertheless, 2012 really is a mammoth accomplishment for director Roland Emmerich. He blew up the White House in Independence Day, then froze the east coast in The Day After Tomorrow, so now he finally gets the opportunity to ruin the entire world as we know it. His mama must be so proud.

The film is based on the ancient Mayan calendar’s coming to an end on December 21, 2012, at which time all of the planets in our solar system will be aligned in a configuration that happens only once every gazillion years. Somehow, by this happening, any number of people have extrapolated that this means the world is ending since, without a Mayan calendar, we’ll all be too stupid to figure out that the next day will be December 22^nd. It’s based on the same principle I use with my bank account. If I still have checks then I must still have money, so I’ll just shop ‘til I drop.

Alright, so if you suspend your disbelief, you’ll enjoy the concept of 2012. Thanks to unprecedented solar flares in 2009, government scientists alert the President (Danny Glover; The Harimaya Bridge) of the oncoming disaster, and so a secret multinational effort is put into effect to build ginormous arks to save at least a fraction of mankind once the planet is savaged by all types of natural disasters. Totally by coincidence, of course, the President just happens to have a gorgeous brainchild of a daughter, Laura (Thandie Newton; W.), who is verycompatible with the senior geophysicist on the case, Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor; Endgame). So ~ yadda, yadda ~ we get a whole little soap opera romance going with them, which seems a tad bit of a distraction from the beaucoup fires, tidal waves, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions bearing down on the earth.

Meanwhile, Cusack’s (1408) Jackson Curtis is a divorced father or two precocious movie-cute children, Noah (Liam James; tv’s “Psych”) and Lily (Morgan Lily; Pornstar). Of course Jackson still has feelings for his ex-wife (Amanda Peet; The X Files: I Want to Believe), who is now married to a nice-guy plastic surgeon named Gordon (Tom McCarthy; Duplicity). Do you smell more soap opera coming? You know it. This movie has more suds in it than a month of “The Bold and the Beautiful.” This is the problem with 2012. It’s got way more plot than is necessary for this type of film. While it wants to humanize the effects of the worldwide calamity, it aims too much on humor (Woody Harrelson of Zombielandshows up as a nut-case doomsday-spouting radio host) and schmaltz rather than focusing on the actual devastation to the spirit of humanity that would be inevitable in such a situation. 2012 is far closer to an Indiana Jones adventure than aSchindler's List, not that’s there’s anything wrong with that. It just doesn’t feel “real”, and so don’t expect to see 2012 and leave petrified of the possibility that these events could ever actually happen, unlike the proceedings portrayed inParanormal Activity which seem to have rattled some folks to the core.

The effects in 2012 are as special as they can be, and that’s the main reason to see the film. The performers are all secondary to the destruction of Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Rome, but that’s okay. The CGI will have you puckering with the same excitement as a full body cavity search but without those unpleasant long-term effects, at least that’s what Henry told me to say, and he ought to know.

Box (The)

2009-11-10T12:14:00.001-05:00

I’m surprised there aren’t more people interested in seeing Cameron Diaz’s box. The national weekend grosses for her latest movie, The Box, shows that it earned only sixth place in the Top Ten movies at the box office and brought in an anemic $7.5 million dollars in its debut. Granted, at 37, Diaz is practically a dinosaur by Hollywood’s measure, her “best years” a decade behind her in an industry that treats actresses over the age of 28 as if they ought to be tossed in a wood chipper, but it amazes me that the star of both Charlie’s Angels and the Shrek franchise isn’t a bigger draw to a movie with her name over the title. Just the title alone ought to lure a few red-blooded men into the theater.

It’s a shame the film isn’t doing better financially because The Box has to be the best of the current crop of cerebral scarefests out right now. A hundred times scarier than Paranormal Activity and a thousand times smarter than The Fourth Kind, The Box is one of the creepiest movies I’ve seen in years. Sadly, there’s not much I can tell you about it because The Box is one of those sneaky little tales that starts like a simple enough story about one thing and turns out being something very much different by the ending credits.

I can give you an idea about the basic premise of The Box, or, more specifically, what unexpected visitor Arlington Steward (Frank Langella; Frost/Nixon) offers to 70’s suburbanites Norma (Diaz) and Arthur Lewis (James Marsden; 27 Dresses) at the beginning of the story.

When Mr. Steward appears he makes the couple a deal: he gives them a wooden box with a button on it and offers them $1 million dollars tax-free if they will push it. The catch? If they do, someone that they don’t know, somewhere in the world, will be killed. The moral dilemma is theirs to consider for the next 24 hours. It would take me about a millisecond to make up my mind, and my most important question to Mr. Steward would be “Can I only hit it once?” because I’d be tapping that button like a horny dog attached to a mail carrier’s leg. I’m sorry, but it’s true. I had a conscience once, but I lost it about the same time as I misplaced my virginity. I’m sure they are happy together, but I doubt I’ll ever see either again.

Of course there is much more to the tale than just these two sitting around in bad period fashions in front of eyeball-burning wallpaper while they wax poetic about whether to take the money and off somebody in the process. That would make for as big a bomb as watching Waiting for Godot starring Tom Arnold and Tori Spelling. Oh no, this is merely the tip of the iceberg of what goes on in The Box. The secrets involved are jaw-dropping in their intensity and source. What the Lewises don’t know (and the audience is made aware of just one step ahead of them) is that what is behind The Box has potentially earth-shattering consequences in ways that are barely imaginable.

Obviously, since this is a movie, you don’t have to imagine (too much) because director and screenwriter Richard Kelley (Southland Tales, Donnie Darko) is going to give you a peek ~ for at least as much as he wants you to see. Like with his previous films, Kelley does leave some things purposely ambiguous, but that makes The Box all the more fascinating and thought-provoking.

Look for any number of religious symbols as Kelley’s adaptation of Richard Matheson’s original story tries hard to incorporate several Old Testament themes into the mix, starting most undoubtedly with the Adam and Eve story, with Arthur representing Adam, Norma playing Eve, and Mr. Seward there in lieu of an actual serpent. Perhaps it is more than just a coincidence that The Box’s enticing button is big, round and apple red?

It’s a rare film these days that can generate actual discussion after it is over, but I guarantee that you’ll want to talk to your friends about this one. More than cheap effects and jump-out-of-the-shadows scares, The Box will stay with you long after you’ve left the theater. It’s just that good.

Fourth Kind (The)

2009-11-05T06:03:00.001-05:00

There’s a movie out about alien abductions called The Fourth Kind, as in one more than those Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I know a lot about this subject, having been abducted myself back when I was about nineteen. Okay, so the aliens who kidnapped me were a couple of cabin boys from a Lithuanian freighter that had docked along the East River, and it was a *tad* bit voluntary on my part, but I understand the pain of these folks from The Fourth Kind. Whether they’re from Eastern Europe or Alpha Centari, grabby hands poking at your no-no hole are all the same.

For those who are clamoring to actually see any of this type of personal space invasion The Fourth Kind is going to be a terrible disappointment. It has to be the first alien abduction movie to not feature any aliens and only one small abduction, and that takes place off-camera. I know what you are thinking, and, seriously, this sucks eggs. Even the schlockiest of crapola on the SyFy Channel will spring for a rubber mask with big eyes to give us a few (very, very few) chills. Instead, director and writer Olatunde Osunsanmi (WIthIN) has decided to turn The Fourth Kind into a faux quasi-documentary. This wouldn’t seem like such a big “bend-over” deal except that all the ads for the film make it look like this is going to be one huge scary-ass thriller. The previews show requisite creaky doors opening, a couple of close-ups of people screaming in horror, and quick cutaways of folks running through the darkness while the music shrieks like it was torn straight from the soundtrack of Psycho. If only. The only thing that made me want to run away was the snoozy script that left me biting the insides of my cheeks to stay awake through the whole thing.


The story of The Fourth Kind is fairly simple: Psychologist Abbey Tyler (Milla Jovovich;Resident Evil: Extinction) has moved her family to Nome, Alaska after her husband’s recent death and quickly finds out that several of her patients are suffering from intense anxiety and paranoia as well as sharing a common memory of being stalked by a big white owl coming for them in the night. So she tapes these patients while hypnotized and what happens next is supposedly Blair Witch Project scary. The only problem with this is that people went into The Blair Witch Project without expecting to see an actual witch. People coming into The Fourth Kind want to see some honest-to-God fake aliens, and there are none to be seen. Complicating things even further isThe Fourth Kind’s allegation that the unseen entities terrorizing people are more than just aliens from outer space. It seems these critters speak ancient Sumerian, and in the small translatable bit of dialogue uttered by one of the “possessed” victims being taped the visitor identifies itself as God. Hmmm. So suddenly we jump from Close Encounters territory to shades of The Exorcist.


One unusual element to The Fourth Kind is Osunsanmi’s decision to use a split-screen in various parts of the film and have his actors recreate the hypnotic sessions “real” patients, i.e., “characters” had with therapist Abbey Tyler while grainy footage of the (alleged) “actual” taped meetings run simultaneously. Ironically, it is the “actor” actors’ mouthing the identical dialogue as the so-called “real victims” that is more convincing than those in the film who purport to have been abducted. Obviously the “real” footage is as fake as the recreations, but it does help generate a sense of legitimate dread for those viewers who can’t help but be drawn in to the drama.


It’s doubtful skeptics are the ones who will be filling theater seats for The Fourth Kind, so the movie relies on that already built-in audience willing to suspend its disbelief and go with the flow as presented by Osunsanmi and company. Unfortunately, the key role of the “real” Dr. Tyler is played by an unnamed actress who looks like she just stepped out of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”. The perpetually vacant stare, her pasty-white face, stringy hair and never-ending flat affect are way over the top, making it hard to believe she could ever be a competent psychologist no matter how many times she’s been on the receiving end of an alien probe. Jovovich is more believable, and actually does a reasonable job convincing us that Dr. Tyler has the balls tom stand up to the local sheriff (Will Patton; The Canyon), whose basic job in the movie is to bully her and imply that he is a heartbeat away from arresting her for the murder of her late husband.


Dr. Tyler’s involvement in the death of her husband Will (Julian Vergov; Fake Identity) is crucial to the bigger story. Was he killed by aliens who have invaded the Tyler home? Did Abbey kill him while under the influence of some otherworldly source? And what, if anything, do her kids know about the events of that night? Son Ronnie (Raphaël Coleman; It’s Alive) is a constant source of hostility and bitchiness which Abbey tends to ignore even if the audience can’t. While fifteen year old Coleman is effective playing a ten year old, “Ronnie” comes across as a punk in need of a swift kick (or anal probe) in the ass. Okay, so maybe he’s mad that his Dad is dead and he has an idea that Mom is responsible, but does he have to be such a shmendrik about it?
Elias Koteas (The Haunting in Connecticut) is also on hand, lurking through most of the picture as Abel Campos, a skeptical colleague of the late other Dr. Tyler. What he adds to the mix is a tip of the hat to those who might think that these proceeding are a load of crap. He reminds me of Ohio Representative John Boenner. He’s kind of an a-hole, but is still worth enduring just so you can have someone to kvetch about later. He’s as close to a villain as the movie gets, especially since we never get to actually see the invaders.

The Fourth Kind is the only movie I’ve seen that opens with its star addressing the audience with "I'm actress Milla Jovovich and I will be portraying Dr. Abigail Tyler in the movie… What you are about to see is extremely disturbing." This alone is disconcerting, but what follows with the mixture of “real” (actually real fake) and cinematic is a clever conceit even if it ultimately falls apart by the end. The Fourth Kind tries very hard to make a case for alien abductions but it ends up being more about the smoke and mirrors of filmmaking. If you are planning to go to see The Fourth Kind for chills and thrills I’d recommend you try The Box instead. Now there is a real freak-out, and it’s playing right next door to The Fourth Kind at both the Essex Cinemas and the Cumberland 12.

Michael Jackson ~ This is It

2009-10-30T17:55:00.000-04:00

These days it isn’t that hard to grab yourself a fan base. Heck, even Spencer Pratt and his Will o’ the Wisp flesh-colored beard have people who worship him, and that is not so far from adoring a hemorrhoid with a transparent merkin on his chin. My cousin Winona, whose only discernable talent seems to be the ability to breathe with her mouth closed, has a Facebook page with 874 “friends.” Okay, so “friends” may not be exactly the same as “fans”, but considering she lives in a single-wide near an ice-flow along the James Ross Strait in Nunavut, EBF, Canada and spends her days knitting custom yarmulkes for people’s pets, it proves that almost anybody with an Internet connection can find someone to like them. Granted, I’m assuming that at least half of those 874 “friends” are actually human and at least 10% of those have truly met her, so apparently there really is a sucker born every minute. We don’t even invite Winona to family reunions, but that is mostly because everyone in her immediate gene pool knows that it is impossible to tell which of her eyes to look into when trying to carry on a conversation with her. Unfortunately, Winona was born with two lazy eyes, and neither one of them has wandered onto the same path since. My Uncle Dominick, her father, always said the biggest blessing in Winona’s life was that she was born a girl because with those eyes she’d never be able to write her name in the snow, if you know what I mean. Rumor has it she may have drowned the family cat trying to take aim, but that’s a visual I try not to think about.

Speaking of trying to avoid something, I waited until a week after it premiered to see Michael Jackson: This is It because I had about as much enthusiasm for hearing or seeing anything more even remotely associated with Michael Jackson as I do for giving Larry King a Brazilian wax with my teeth. I’m sorry, but I was never a fan of the self-proclaimed “King of Pop.” Maybe that title was part of the problem. I don’t really like people who crown themselves as royalty. It’s not much different than what George Bush managed to pull off in 2004 or Idi Amin did in 1971. I will give him credit though. Calling himself the “King of Pop” may have proved to be a self-fulfilling prophesy; perhaps I should begin referring to myself as the “Queen of the Internet” and wait for the riches to roll in.

You know, liking Michael Jackson has not been an easy task. With everything from his bizarre fetish for cosmetic surgery, the peculiar way he dressed his children in masks whenever they went out in public, his odd penchant for obtaining The Elephant Man’s remains, and, of course, that whole child-diddling issue all act as heavy barriers to my even wanting to bother with acknowledging the talents the man had. He went out of the way to separate himself from the masses with his weird tastes, whether it was by bleaching his skin, wearing those odd militaristic (yet fabulously sequined) costumes in his private life off-stage, or by turning his home into an amusement park where his best friend and companion was a cranky chimpanzee named Bubbles, Michael practically begged to be mocked. It almost seems like he wanted us to think he was crazy. Maybe he was; Jackson’s personal life was a mess and apparently always had been thanks to his hideously abusive father. The days of his “Thriller” fame were only a painful memory of when Michael was a young, sexy, black man long before he morphed into a middle-aged, androgynous-looking white woman. It’s only now, after his death, that the truth about his rampant drug use has been revealed and has clouded his reputation even further.

Still, despite all of his peculiarities, there was an amazingly talented person behind the tabloid headlines and Michael Jackson: This is It is a grand opportunity to see the legend devoid of his peculiarities and revealed to be the great musician he actually was. While Michael Jackson: This is It is not what one could call a great concert film, it is a very personal event. Made up of footage from Jackson’s rehearsals for his planned London comeback concert series, Michael Jackson: This is It strips away a lot of the “exotic” hoopla that always followed Jackson and concentrates on the artist at work. Michael is shown working with his dance troupe, his band, and choreographer and director Kenny Ortega (who assembled the footage and brought Michael Jackson: This is It to life) as he works to develop the precision moves and cues he has always been known for in his act. Whatever questions people may have held about him being too frail or drug dependent to perform this comeback should be doused by the picture of the man on-screen. Michael was on fire creatively and physically, able to manage moves no ordinary 50 year old guy could do.

Michael Jackson: This is It is Michael Jackson at his best. There are updated versions of several of his past hits, including a peek at was to be a new 3-D “Thriller” and a salute to his years as the front-man for the Jackson Five. The most fascinating thing though has to be seeing ~ even in small glimpses ~ the kindness of the man that is usually lost in the hype and mythology that surrounded him in life and now continues since his death. How rare to see an artist of his stature granting those in his circle time on-stage during his show to shine as individual talents beyond being his “background” performers. Truly, Michael had a generous spirit.

I’m sure Michael Jackson: This is It won’t be the absolute last we hear from the deceased singer considering the huge archives of his work that must exist, but this is definitely a fitting tribute to Michael and a gift to his fans worth cherishing. I’ll admit I may not have been one before, but after Michael Jackson: This is It I have a newfound respect for the man even if it does mean I have to admit I was wrong about the man. Better late than never I suppose.

Paranormal Activity

2009-10-29T14:12:00.002-04:00

Last weekend my perfect husband and I went to the Essex Cinemas to see Paranormal Activity. Dale Chapman, the always genial manager of the theater, told us that people were coming out of the movie completely freaked out, scared senseless by this supposedly terrifying saga of a young couple haunted by an unseen entity in their oh-so-chic San Diego McMansion. He remembered a gaggle of teenage girls who were so frightened after the 8:00 pm show on Friday that they were afraid to go home for fear of what might be lurking in the dark. Uh huh.

I haven’t seen so much hoopla over a “scary movie” since The Exorcist was first released back in 1973. Now this was a national trauma. People passed out, threw up, broke down and checked in to mental institutions over that religious potboiler. I couldn’t imagine Paranormal Activity was going to be that creepy. Many people have also compared Paranormal Activity to 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, but I think that is mostly because both films were shot on the cheap and done in a documentary style. There is one other parallel which is more Blair Witch than Exorcist and that is that it’s what you don’t see which creates the spooky atmosphere. For those looking for out-and-out gore, there’s Saw VI, also currently playing, but Paranormal Activity aims for a more intellectual scare. It’s what isn’t obvious in the night that first time writer/director Oren Peli wants to have you fretting about.

In Paranormal Activity, happily unmarried Katie (Katie Featherston; Mutant) and Micah (Micah Sloat, in an impressive debut) are living a dream lifestyle for a 20-something couple. Micah is an apparently very successful day trader while Katie is a graduate student, living a (seemingly) cushy life without a worry in the world. At least they were until Katie admits to a wee problem she has endured since she was a kid. It seems a malevolent spirit has been reaching out to her ever since her family home mysteriously burned to the ground when she was only eight. Oh my, just a little thing to have kept secret until after she and Micah had shacked up together. So, for the next fifteen years or so she has done her best to ignore the poltergeist on her tail and has managed to do fairly well at it until now. How fortunate for her that Micah lists his two favorite hobbies as videotaping everything he can and pissing off evil ghosties as often as possible. How unfortunate for us that this pretty much constitutes the gist of the rest of the movie.

The tiny sounds that terrify these un-newlyweds just show how young and impressionable they really are. It also shows how much things have changed in the last thirty years. With a weekly dose of guts and grossness splayed out across the screen (and by this I mean movies like the Saw series and not the latest Lindsay Lohan release), Generations X, Y and Me have become completely desensitized to gore and the shock value of a single head turning around and spewing pea soup at the camera. It’s what they don’t see that scares them. Maybe this explains why today’s group seems to lack the same enthusiasm for sex that mine did in our 20s. You know the saying: “How you going to keep them from upchucking the farm after they’ve seen Paris?” A steady stream of snatching a glimpse (or glimpsing a snatch) of every starlet from Ms. Hilton (who has had more men spend the night in her than every stayed at one of the hotels bearing her family name) to Britney Spears (and who hasn’t speared that thing?), the prospect of what could happen between the attractive Featherston and Sloat when they hit the sheets seems to have been replaced by the notion that watching them cower on the corner of the bed is more entertaining than the obvious.

One thing is clear: this Paranormal Activity is definitely for younger people. Anyone who has been married for more than ten years will attest that waking up at the tiniest noise just doesn’t happen. At my house things creak, go bump in the night, and mysterious rumblings occur regularly, and I’ve become so used to all the racket escaping from my perfect husband while he blissfully snores and farts himself into oblivion that it would take a jetliner crashing into our bedroom to disturb my slumber. And anybody with children will tell you that if they hear weird noises in the dark they aren’t going to get out of bed until one of the kids screams that someone has lost an eye. In real life, only the young and childless are going to believe in the spirits Paranormal Activity has to offer. Perhaps, for them, the movie should have been called Paranoid Activity instead.

Law Abiding Citizen

2009-10-22T21:03:00.007-04:00

I have a friend we’ll call “Gale” to protect her anonymity because her story is one of raw lust, not meant for mixed company or to be shared at dinner parties. “Gale” is a fifty year old woman with a teenager’s crush on Scottish actor Gerard Butler. Say his name and she squeals like she’s been goosed hard. Say it twice and she’ll have to change her panties she’ll get so excited. So you can imagine when Butler’s latest release, Law Abiding Citizen, opened this week it would be inevitable that I would take my BFF to see the movie, but not before I grabbed a few towels, a bottle of disinfectant, and a roll of Saran Wrap® to ensure the quality maintenance of her theater seat in case seeing Butler’s presence on the big screen proved too overwhelming and “Gale” lost all her bodily functions at his first appearance. If only I could get her to put me in her will I’d put some energy into arranging a face-to-face meeting between the two. That way we’d both win. She’d die happy and I’d be rich. The only loser in that scenario would be Gerry because I’m sure “Gayle’s head would explode upon laying eyes on him and he’d be stuck with brain goo all over his snappy designer duds (not to mention her eyes, really laying upon him somewhere).

Okay. So maybe I exaggerate slightly, but “Gale’s” unfettered fluttering of the heart for the Great Scott is a wonder to behold. I will admit I do find Butler mildly attractive, especially as he was playing the caring and oh-so-sensitive dead husband to Hilary Swank in P.S. I Love You. Of course, in that he was a corpse and so his compassion comes mostly off-screen and after a terminal cancer diagnosis, so it makes sense in a way that belies his macho image in other movies like 300, Gamer and The Ugly Truth. Those films seem more in line with what I imagine the “real” Gerard Butler to be like. He probably has a good sense of humor (he’d have to since he spent the entirety of 300 in a leather mini-skirt), an intensity to his concentration (hey, killing hundreds of guys out to get him as he did in Gamer takes focus), and he’s had a string of other women he’s left in his wake (as was implied in The Ugly Truth). That’s an important point: I don’t see Gerard as the marrying kind, at least not in this decade. Just in 2009 so far, he’s been alleged to have dipped his pen in the inkwells of a legion of Hollywood hotties, including Jessica Simpson, Shanna Moakler, Jennifer Aniston, Cheryl Burke, Cameron Diaz, Priyanka Chopra, Josie D`arby, Rosario Dawson, Kola Boof, Naomi Campbell, Cassandra Hepburn, Chiara Conti and a handful of other models and pass-around-honeys that regularly make Page Six for no other reason than that. Dear God, if a woman was as promiscuous as Gerry, she’d either be called the town slut or at the very least she’d be a Kardashian. Meanwhile, man-whore Butler gets a pat on the back from Hollywood and a wink of approval for all his efforts by the tabloids. I just hope he has stock in Church & Dwight Inc., Co. (the makers of Trojan™ condoms).

I guess it is because of Gerry’s public persona that I found Law Abiding Citizen a bit of a stretch from its first frame forward. In it, Butler plays Clyde Shelton, a happily married husband and father to a six year old girl. I mean, really? My first thought was “I didn’t know this was going to be a science fiction flick” but before I could even whisper this incredulity to “Gale” intruders broke in and killed the mother and kid and left Clyde for dead without us ever getting to know exactly why the murderers chose the Shelton family to slay. A motive would have been nice, but then again, this picture is all about Clyde’s motives, so the mother and daughter are quickly dispensed with and the action flashes forward to three years later and the execution of one of the two killers. The other, thanks to a plea bargain deal made with Assistant District Attorney Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx; The Soloist), gets only ten years in prison even though Clyde begged to testify against the guy. Einnie meenie chilly beanie and we flash forward again ~ this time ten years (and the movie is only 15 minutes old). Amazingly, none of the principals seems to have aged a day in that quick decade despite all the stress, though I think my Sour Patch Kids® tasted like they had just passed puberty about now.

Now Nick’s been promoted to DA and he and wife Kelly (Regina Hall; Superhero Movie) are no longer kissy-huggy newlyweds. Now they are parents to nine-year old daughter Denise (Emerald-Angel Young; tv’s “Life on Mars”) and sniping at one another like old pros. As for Clyde, apparently he’s been watching all the Saw movies over and over because he is cooking with gas when it comes to having made plans for the newly paroled child-killer. Violence ensues and when the police show up to arrest Clyde he, naturally, strips naked so Butler won’t break his streak of exposing his ass-crack in all of his movies. I think he and Ewan McGregor are practicing the old Scottish game of ‘Butt Bingo’ to see who can show the most anal roughage throughout their career. But I digress.

From this point Law Abiding Citizen takes a whole other turn and becomes some sort of high-minded vengeance flick in the tradition of Death Wish. Clyde rails on about the nightmarish mistakes the justice system continues to make and how he blames the District Attorney and judges involved in his case and that of his family’s killers as perfect examples of how easily manipulated people can be. When a female judge sympathizes with him and offers him bail, he lets loose a diatribe of profanity against her for not throwing the book at him. Later, she learns just how serious he was when he told her he’d prove to everybody just what an “empty-headed c**t” she really is. You’ll understand exactly what I mean by that when you see the movie, but you can pretty much take that literally, if you get my drift, and I know that you do.

The tension and excitement that keeps Law Abiding Citizen at the top of its game comes from the well-edited (Sarah Farrand; Grace) and superbly directed (F. Gary Gray; Be Cool) behind-the-scenes team as well as the chemistry between the principals, Foxx and Butler. An effective score by Brian Tyler (The Final Destination) also ratchets up the suspense and hits all the right notes to keep viewers on the edge of their seats. The mystery of how an incarcerated wing-nut in a maximum security prison is managing to commit a series of remarkably designed and executed murders without ever having a single visitor or phone call from someone acting as his accomplice will keep you wondering right up to the last reel just how he is pulling this off.

I’m surprised Law Abiding Citizen hasn’t gotten a lot more buzz than it has. It certainly deserves an audience. Granted, the plot does ask that you suspend your belief more than once ~ coincidences are too...well, coincidental, to be believed anywhere but in the movies ~ but Law Abiding Citizen is still bloody good fun and definitely worth a look-see.

Where the Wild Things Are

2009-10-18T18:35:00.004-04:00

Contrary to what you may think, Where the Wild Things Are is not a documentary about the goings-on in my boudoir. Nor is it an expose of what you are going to find in Khloe Kardasian’s lingerie hamper, though there are critters in the movie Where the Wild Things Are that probably resemble what you’d find in her underpants if you looked at them under a microscope.

Believe it or not, Where the Wild Things Are is a(n alleged) children’s movie, although with a well-deserved PG rating I would hardly encourage anyone to grab their six year old and rush out to see it. This thing is downright creepy ~ Blair Witch Project creepy ~ without the swearing, but still managing the low-budget feel and wilderness motif that makes a big city gal like me long for room service and fluffy towels.

First, let me give you the gist of what Where the Wild Things Are is about. It is essentially a simple tale spun off from a ten sentence (!!!) 1963 bestselling book written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak about a boy named Max (debuting Max Record) who has a fight with his mother and is sent to his room where he spends the evening envisioning himself as the king of an island of monsters. Eventually he gets homesick (and hungry) and wants to come home, wrapping up his punishment and imaginary adventure just in time for dinner. The End. Okay, so it’s ten lines. You can’t expect Shakespeare, but apparently you can expect generations of kids to grow up on this book like it is the pre-adolescent equivalent of the Talmud or something.

So when the movie opened last week, a flock of the young’uns who work at the Essex Cinemas were all in a froth wanting to see it. They were practically devastated when I arrived on Friday afternoon and I told a quartet of concession cuties on duty that I was there to see Law Abiding Citizen instead of Where the Wild Things Are. They were hoping I’d be their envoy to witness the first showing so I could report back immediately afterward on just how wonderful it absolutely had to be. It’s just as well I missed that premiere because I also missed the Jim Jones’ special Sendak Kool Aid® recipe apparently the rest of the world was drinking back in the day. Not only had I never read the book I had never even seen it except in passing while strolling through various bookstores over the years. Now, my penance for living a hedonistic lifestyle and using birth control had caught up to me and I was being forced to face my ignorance of all things popular amongst the elementary school set. Granted, director Spike Jonze (creator of tv and film’s Jackass series) does make some changes to Sendak’s original story (there’d have to be in order to stretch his ten lines into a 95-minute film), but the tone and the monsters are transferred from page to cinema without losing any of their original charm, if you want to call it that.

Personally, I didn’t find these critters all that charismatic, but it’s probably because I am a pragmatist. When Max meets his new pals late at night, illuminated only by firelight, they are grunting and growling and the biggest of the lot is on a rampage of destruction ~ not exactly an introduction I’d find enticing for making friends. Worse yet, as soon as Max is sized up by the group, the female monster, Judith (voiced by Catherine O'Hara; Away We Go), not only suggests eating him, but also chastises him for probably having “crunchy, little bird bones” that will be a problem to swallow. What the hell kind of a ‘good time’ image is that for an impressionable four or five year old to think about? Their parents might as well take the kids to see Saw VI for that kind of educational experience. Oh sure, by morning, things lighten up in more ways than just having the sun come up, and everyone is having a “rumpus” of a good time demolishing trees throughout the forest Where the Wild Things Are, but I found myself more concerned about whether Max was going to get covered in ticks from riding on the backs of these hairy beasties or if the creatures would all die once their woods were clear-cut in another week or so of this senseless deforestation. It’s never clear how long the monsters have lived on this (imaginary) island, but I imagined the desert that head monster Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini; tv’s “The Sopranos” of course) and Max travel through was probably last week’s State Park.

Nothing much happens in Where the Wild Things Are that doesn’t happen in any human home populated with a pre-teen herd. The monsters bicker, they play, they collaborate on projects, and then they turn on one another. Okay, so Carol does rip his best friend’s arm off, but doesn’t that happen all the time with kids? At least he sticks a tree branch in the open wound as a replacement limb. Limb? Ha, I kill myself.

The problem I have with Where the Wild Things Are has to do with the subliminal messages it sends to kids that today’s parents seem to be missing. Maybe parents are so cowed by their children they don’t even realize bad behavior when they see it anymore. I don’t know what world they ~ or Max’s mom (Catherine Keener; The Soloist) live in, but if I was Max’s mother and he got up on a kitchen counter in his dirty shoes and screamed “FEED ME, WOMAN!” at me he’d get himself locked in the nearest broom closet without dinner or consciousness before he had a chance to run away. Instead, she squirms and begs him to be quiet for fear that her date (Mark Ruffalo; What Doesn't Kill You, in a throw-away three or four line role) in the living room might hear. Please, Louise! I’m sure her date would be just as happy to see her sell the kid to a circus freak show than get saddled with this little candidate for a Ritalin Ranch somewhere in Idaho, so if she knocked him off that counter he’d just ask for a little more wine and a lot more coochie by evening’s end.

Max is 100% a juvenile delinquent in the making. In the first ten minutes of the movie the kid is off the hook with his rage and destroys his sister’s personal property when he trashes her room, he mouths off at mama, runs away from home, commits grand theft when he steals a sailboat, then vandalizes the vehicle by carving his name into its beautiful teak wood hull. He barely meets the monster squad before he lies through his teeth and even commits identity fraud. Hmm. I’m not sure he’s the one we should be worried for so much as about. He has the potential to become another Jeffrey Dahmer by the time he turns 16. I mean, think about it, after all, this is his funky fantasy, and he’s the one dreaming about how tasty the meat of human flesh will taste coming off the bone. Where the Wild Things Are, indeed.

Couples Retreat

2009-10-12T13:29:00.004-04:00

Starring:

Vince Vaughn (Four Christmases)

Jason Bateman (State of Play)

Jon Favreau (I Love You Man)

Malin Ackerman (The Proposal)

Kristin Davis (Sex and the City)

Kristen Bell ("Gossip Girl")

Faizon Love (A Day in the Life)

Kali Hawk (Pushing Thirty)

Peter Serafinowicz ("The Peter Serafinowicz Show")

Jean Reno (The Pink Panther 2)

Directed by:

Peter Billingsley (as Producer; Iron Man)

Written by:

Jon Favreau (The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest)

Vince Vaughn (The Break-Up), and Dana Fox (What Happens in Vegas)

Anyone married for more than a few years will appreciate the laughs to be found in Universal’s Couples Retreat. The comedy stars Vince Vaughn, Jason Bateman, and a slew of other fine actors as thirty-something couples circling towards forty and treating it like a death sentence. For Bateman, cleverly dubbed “Jason”, the problem he and his wife Cynthi (Bell) have been facing is their inability to conceive a child after years of trying. It’s reached a point now that they are considering divorce and their decision to participate in a couple’s therapy program is a last-ditch effort that is the impetus for them to invite all of their closest friends to join them on a trip to a tropical resort called Eden even though the other three couples agree to tag along simply to enjoy the spa, surf, and sun at this exclusive spot (actually Bora Bora). Naturally, it turns out that despite that plan, everybody discovers new ways to relate to one another and even the one couple that doesn’t go together ends up finding the real meaning of their bond before the end credits roll. Awww.

Peter (“You’ll shoot your eye out, Kid!”) Billingsley, who started life as a child actor and became a national icon thanks to TNT’s annual 24-hour marathon of his 1983 A Christmas Story, does a fine job in his directorial debut. Even though the film doesn’t focus much on the couples’ children, Billingsley does great with the little nippers who play Dave (Vaughn) and Ronnie’s (Akerman) sons. They actually get some of the biggest laughs of the movie even though they have the least airtime. I couldn’t help but think how odd it must be for him, now 38, to be on the other side of the camera and steering the careers of children who are starting out in the business at an age when he first started.

The film is fairly scatter-shot in its approach to story-telling as it jumps from couple to couple and addresses the problems each face. One thing that becomes more apparent with time is that it never really does make sense that these people would be friends in the first place. Besides social, educational, and class differences, the couples seem to have very little in common. While the movie lingers almost tediously over the hemming-and-hawing done by Jason and Cynthia’s friends about whether to join them of this expedition, it does nothing to establish how and why they became pals. Since we already know they are going to go on the trip the movie wastes lot of lost time listening to folks gab about their financial woes and the burden of having kids. No offense, but I think people came to see this movie to get away from thinking about these real life issues and to get to the island, not spend time being reminded about how crappy things are outside of the Cineplex. Too bad, scripters Favreau, Vaughn and Fox didn’t put half as much effort into working to convince us that these folks actually had friendships strong enough to make them want to vacation together. Personally, I can’t think of many people I’d be willing to plunk down thousands of dollars to go on holiday with, and that includes my own perfect husband. Separate vacations are heavenly. There, my (dead) Ann Landers words of wisdom for the week.

The real standout in this otherwise obvious sitcom bloated to big-screen size is the appearance of British actor and comedian Peter Serafinowicz as “Sctanley…with a ‘c’”, Eden’s fey version of Fantasy Island’s Mr. Roarke. Sctanley is the sort of character one rarely sees these days, the prissy descendent of Edward Everett Horton or even Charles Nelson Reilly. Wound so tight he could produce a diamond in thirty minutes if you shoved a lump of coal up his rear end (but getting it there would be a whole other movie), Sctanley is both the island’s angelic host and its tempting demon, depending on who the guest happens to be, and that is where the challenge lies for at least one in our tour group while for the rest the real work lies in their therapy sessions, delightfully played for laughs with a series of peculiar therapists taking the lead, all building up to the grand entrance of the main guru himself, Marcel (Reno), who is as full of himself as Octomom is full of fertile eggs ready to go.

Couples Retreat is not a particularly great movie. It’s a tad too reminiscent of last year’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall and the year before that’s The Heartbreak Kid to feel altogether fresh. And, seriously, it’s not on a par with the last Vaughn/Bateman/Favreau/Billingsley boy’s night out together in The Break-Up, but it is still pretty funny, and it has plenty of eye candy to keep you distracted during the slower moments. That’s one of the benefits of filming in paradise ~ lots of skin. Overall, it is what it is. You pay a few shekels, you get some laughs, and by the next day you’ll barely remember what it was you saw, but ~ what the heck? ~ It is a fun couple of hours and you will come out feeling better than when you came in. Is that so wrong?

Zombieland

2009-10-07T21:32:00.001-04:00

Starring:

Woody Harrelson (Seven Pounds)

Jesse Eisenberg (Adventureland)

Emma Stone (Ghosts of Girlfriends Past)

Abigail Breslin (My Sister’s Keeper)

Bill Murray (City of Ember)

Directed by:

Ruben Fleischer (Gumball 3000: 6 Days in May)

Written by:
Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick ("El show de Cándido")

Zombieland is gutbusting fun. Don’t let the blood and gore scare you away because this is a hoot-and-a-half of a comedy and you’ll be missing a great road film if you let a few irritable bowel movements (as in those exploding from folks’ internal places to the external world) gross you out. Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg make one terrific mismatched couple left to fend off the victims of a worldwide plague which has turned most all of humanity into raging flesh-eating zombies. Known only by the names of their hometowns (since getting too familiar isn’t advisable in a world full of mindless killers), Tallahassee (Harrelson) and Columbus (Eisenberg) roam the interstate looking for other survivors, or, in Tallahassee’s case, at least a fresh case of Hostess Twinkies®. Hey, when the world’s gone to crap, you set your sights low.

Sometimes finding what you want though can lead to its own complications, and those come in the form of sister act Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). Can the nervous nerdy virgin from Columbus woo the tough-talking, ass-kicking Goth gal from Kansas in this new world order? Naturally, but it’s the getting there that’s all the fun, especially when the quartet decides to move into the Beverly Hills home of Tallahassee’s personal idol, actor Bill Murray. Look for an extended cameo by Murray himself in what has to be one of his funniest bits ever, trapped at the mercy of Harrelson’s fanatic fan, a guy who just can’t get over meeting his real-life hero in person, thus proving that there are way scarier things in the world today than brain-eating corpses. But we’ll have a much better example of this in theaters in another few weeks when the Michael Jackson documentary, This is It, opens.

Fame

2009-10-07T21:19:00.002-04:00

Starring:

Kay Panabaker (Happy Campers)

Naturi Naughton (Notorious)

Kherington Payne ("So You Think You Can Dance")

Megan Mullally ("In the Motherhood")

Bebe Neuwirth ("Law & Order: Trial by Jury")

Debbie Allen (Next Day Air)

Asher Book (Eight One Eight)

Cody Longo (Bring It On: Fight to the Finish)

Walter Perez (Coup de Grace)

Charles S. Dutton (The Express)

Kelsey Grammer ("Hank")

Collins Pennie (Fired Up!)

Anna Maria Perez de Tagle ("Hannah Montana")

Paul McGill (Man on Wire)

Paul Iacono (Return to Sleepaway Camp)

Directed by:

Kevin Tancharoen ("The Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll")

Written by:

Allison Burnett (Untraceable)

If you are old enough to remember Alan Parker’s 1980 version of Fame then seeing what director Kevin Tancharoen calls his “re-imagined tribute” to the original will probably feel less like an homage than a grave-robbing because this Fame is one lame shame. I’m sorry, Kiddos, but it is just the plain cold truth, and it hurts me to say so. You have no idea how much I wanted to love this movie. I was actually looking forward to this version of Fame coming out because I had high hopes that it would recapture the magic of that fragile coming-of-age film set within the walls of the prestigious School of the Performing Arts in New York City. Unfortunately, inspired by the blandness of the High School Musical series, any semblance of reality has been sanitized into oblivion. None of these kids swear, do drugs, smoke, drink, carry guns, or live in abject poverty. Unlike in the original, nobody frets about an unwanted pregnancy or (God forbid!) actually gets an abortion. The sexual orientation question is also taboo even though coming out was a big deal for one of the kids in 1980’s Fame. Apparently these days no gay people dance, sing or act. The arts have butched up considerably in the past 29 years.

Unlike the Parker film, this Fame is packed with well-known stars as faculty members, but the students are all unknowns, and with one notable exception will probably remain that way. Naturi Naughton rocks as the classical pianist who longs to sing hip hop despite her daddy’s stern objections. I know, it’s not much of a plotline, but Naughton proves she can act, sing, and look pretty all at the same time. In other words, she is the female Zac Efron in this movie. Well, Zac Efron is really the female Zac Efron, but you get the idea. The rest of the kids looking to “live forever” probably will have to settle on doing so in SyFy or Lifetime channel movies, and the way the networks rerun those stinkers over and over again they really will live forever or at least it will seem that way. I guess it’s something.

Whiteout

2009-09-15T22:59:00.003-04:00

I’m not going to snow you with a flurry of half-felt praise for the recently released thriller Whiteout. The truth is that this who-done-it based at a scientific research camp at the South Pole is chilling enough; it’s just that once the pieces start to fall into place the mystery of who the masked killer is becomes a slippery slide to obvious resolution long before the plot’s predicted blizzard hits the fan.

It really doesn’t matter much to me this week. When I began writing this column four years ago this next week the idea was to write about what I learned from the movies I watched each week or comment on how seeing a particular movie reminded me of something from my own life. Instead, I’ve written primarily about the films themselves (okay, with some notable exceptions), but this week it turns out that going to Whiteout was only the beginning of a week of some remarkable reflections for me about life, death and true friendship, none of which are the landmark themes of Whiteout.

Let me explain: Every Friday for the past few years I have had a standing date for breakfast with my two best friends, Dale and Nancy. Whether we care to admit it or not, I think we as human beings tend to take our friends for granted, and our weekly get-togethers had become so routine I barely thought about them as anything more than a regular part of my “schedule” as I do my daily shower, feeding the cats, or getting the dry heaves any time somebody mentions Rush Limbaugh. Still as routine as our gatherings can be, each is always wonderful in its own way. There is something so *right* about life when you are lucky enough to find a single friend who “gets” you, but to have two who are so perfectly balanced as my Nancy and Dale are to one another is an utter blessing. Besides being my BFFs, they work together on the graveyard shift in a very high-stress environment (which shall remain nameless) , so when I see them they always have a lot of steam to blow off and stories to share about the scandals, stupidity, and utter strangeness that permeates their plant.

So last Friday, after breakfast and catching up, we all went to see Whiteout, this flaky murder mystery starring Kate Beckinsale (Underworld: Rise of the Lycans) as troubled (as in ‘haunted by her past mistakes’) U.S. Marshall, Carrie Stetko, who volunteered to be stationed in Antarctica for the last three years in some kind of self-made penance. Now, in the last day or so before the South Pole will be plunged into darkness for months and her time on the ice finally up, and as the rest of the crew is preparing to fly out until Spring, Stetko is faced with Antarctica’s first murder. This, not surprisingly, leads to a second and third before the day is out, and with each death comes more complicated dramatic situations for the Marshall and the kindly old doctor at the research site, John Fury (Tom Skerritt; tv’s “Brothers & Sisters”) while they also inch closer to being frozen out of the limited window of opportunity to evacuate. A perfect storm, a Whiteout, a blizzard with the power of a hurricane, is headed towards the camp and soon no planes will be able to fly out at all.

The sudden and inexplicable arrival of U.N. operative Robert Pryce (Gabriel Macht; The Spirit) prompts lots of icy stares of suspicion between Beckinsale’s Steyko and the presumably guilty Pryce, while loony-tunes Aussie pilot Russell Haden (Alex O'Loughlin; tv’s “3 Rivers”) lurks menacingly in darkened alcoves now and again, always with his shirt off as to best display his collection of unappealing tattoos of snakes and such ~ the sure sign of a serial killer or a clever red herring tossed in by screenwriters Jon and Erich Hoeber (Montana) and Chad Hayes (The Reaping) to throw viewers off!

The underlying motive for the killings at the base isn’t revealed until late in the movie, but I guessed the obvious reason a half-hour into the story even though the subject was never broached in the film’s dialogue. I’m not sure why, but I thought after the prologue involving the downing of a Soviet plane during the Cold War back in the 1950s, the probable connection would be crystal clear to everybody not only what was going on but who was involved. Heck, I never made it through high school algebra, but I can do enough basic arithmetic to figure out these obvious clues, and that’s all I’m saying about that. Do the math.

The part of Antarctica is played by Manitoba, Canada, and it does, indeed, look colder than a witch’s, well, you know. In other words, it looked like Vermont most of the year, so it almost came as a surprise to exit the theater and be startled back into the reality that this is actually still Summer (sort of, barely).

Dale and Nancy both gave a big yawns up to Whiteout. It wasn’t a complete washout but it wasn’t anything memorable. I felt pretty much the same. I did think it had some great moments of suspense that will have you jumping out of your seat, but the overarching mystery is disappointing. For the guys hoping to see Beckinsale naked, that bit (and her bits) is included even before the opening credits and it doesn’t happen again, so if you are coming hoping for a peep show you’d best not be tardy and skip the popcorn until after Marshall Steyko scrubs up.

As I said, this week I learned that even after four full years of writing about the movies every week, sometimes there are things that are more important. Later on Friday night, on the west coast, my friend Dale’s youngest sister Ellen died after a long, tough battle with cancer. The last months, in particular, had been very grim as the cancer enveloped her brain and caused her to have seizures, memory problems, and all kinds of severe debilitating symptoms. Even still, knowing the end was coming and coming to grips with such a huge loss are such different things. Dale has been remarkable in the last week while coping with her grief and struggling with the fact that all of the final events marking Ellen’s life and death have taken place across the country by others so she hasn’t been able to participate in that process and the closure it brings. While I never met Ellen Stewart my heart breaks for Dale and I know from everything I’ve heard about her that the world is a lesser place without Ellen in it. So I mourn too for this lost light who is gone at only 42.

Nancy and I have tried to be more than “breakfast buddies” this week, not because we have felt we had to but because it was the natural place to be. On Wednesday morning, I brought a dozen bagels and a half-pound of cream cheese over to Dale’s. Nancy arrived with two pounds of bacon and an entire box of bakery items she purchased from a local restaurant, including muffins, strudels, and brownies. Dale scrambled up a dozen eggs. Do you think this was enough for three middle-aged women to eat? I sat there looking at a table big enough to seat six and realized there wasn’t an inch of free space to be found with this bounty spread everywhere. Then I looked across the table at my two ‘best friends forever’ and understood that we had finally taken that giant step beyond menopause and become “The Golden Girls.” Now if only one of us had remembered the cheesecake.

Gamer

2009-09-08T13:28:00.000-04:00

Gamer is a movie that makes me appreciate my digestive system. It does, because while sitting in the theater watching this ghastly mess I realized I have had more satisfaction from a bowel movement than from wasting 95 minutes trying to figure out why anyone allowed co-directors and writers Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor ( Crank: High Voltage) to make this disaster in the first place.

Ironically, the movie itself seems like a cloudy knock-off of their former leading man Jason Straham’s Death Race from last year. Okay, so Death Race didn’t have the whole holographic angle that Gamer does, but Death Race pretty much does the same thing Gamer tries to do, only it does it with a more coherent script and a cast that does not appear to be expressing themselves in a huge self-congratulatory exercise in Improvisation. Dear God, what is this movie supposed to be about anyway? I recognize a slim plot amidst the clutter of machine gun fire, exploding heads, flying body parts, bombs blowing up, bullets flying, and deafening discharges everywhere, but mostly it appears to be a collection of big-name actors performing their personal favorite characterizations (or caricatures) regardless of whether they look foolish in the process. I found myself wondering just what kind of blackmail pictures Neveldine and Taylor must have on Kyra Sedgwick (tv’s “The Closer”), for example, that would explain her decision to trampy play television host Gina Parker Smith, whose main goal at the beginning of the picture seems to be nothing more than to bed billionaire video game creator Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall; tv’s “Dexter”). Her over-the-top glitter eye make-up and lip smacking peculiarities notwithstanding, she is only overshadowed by Hall’s completely twisted and ham-handed performance as a Southern eccentric with a dark agenda of his own hidden beneath his veneer of genteel, if somewhat odd, behavior. The inclusion of one scene in particular, which features an elaborately-choreographed and lighted Bob Fosse-inspired musical number highlighting our villain dancing and lip-syncing to a medley of Sammy Davis, Jr. singing “I've Got You Under My Skin,” “Big Bad John,” and “Night And Day” with a dozen death row goons as his back-up dancers is just… well, entertaining, sure, but how it fits into the action film about these same death row inmates seeking their freedom by fighting each other to the death through thirty rounds of bloody mayhem as a way to be set free isn’t any clearer than how or why other big names like John Leguizamo (Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs), Milo Ventimiglia (tv’s “Heroes”), John de Lancie (Pathology), Alison Lohman (Drag Me to Hell), Amber Valletta (Premonition), Terry Crews (Terminator Salvation), Aaron Yoo (Friday the 13^th), and Ludacris (Max Payne) all show up in cameo or small but significant roles. Did none of these people read the script? I mean, it couldn’t have taken more than five minutes at best.

I’m sure it sounded good. On one level Gamer could be said to look at how our society has become enslaved by its own love of technology and that in allowing ourselves to be isolated by this we then become less connected to one another and more easily led by what is “fed” to us by those who control that technology to a point where we become addicted to this very technology and then those who control it can alter our reality as they please. That sounds deep, doesn’t it? If I was Gerard Butler (The Ugly Truth) I might buy into it too. Bwwwwaaaahhhhhh! I’m sorry. I can’t even write that with a straight face. Maybe some of the others bought that stuff, but you know Butler was probably tanked and signed the contract between shots of Cutty Sark and thought it was his bar tab. I love Gerard Butler. I really do, but he has never impressed me as the brightest bulb in the marquee. I think if he read the script he just saw this as another chance to make a movie where he got to kick a lot of ass, and he does do that in Gamer.

Oh yeah, I hadn’t even mentioned Butler. He stars as Kable, the death row inmate turned into a star by Castle, who has manipulated the game so the inmate would get far in the game and thus guarantee a worldwide audience of hundreds-of-millions on pay per view. Of course, Castle has no intention of letting his star win his freedom, so he plans to ensure that Kable doesn’t make it to the 30^th level. Why it means a rat’s ass to him one way or the other is beyond me, but it does. The one complication is a seventeen year old kid named Simon (Logan Lerman; 3:10 to Yuma), the Gamer who is in control Kable’s movements via the nano-technology implanted in his brain and linked to Simon’s home computer. Now guess who’s going to be hunted down by Kable, Castle, and the rebel Humanz, who are determined to warn the world against the dangers of Castle’s nefarious schemes? Yawn!

So, truthfully, for adults, Gamer couldn’t be lamer. I’m sure for teenagers who don’t care about anything more than watching things and people explode it will be a (very) wet (as in bloody) dream come true. For the rest of us, it will be something to forget a day after you’ve seen it. I chalk it all up to the Bernie Madoff scandal. We know Kyra got stung, but I’ll bet if you check the list of the embezzler’s victims you’ll find everyone who worked on this movie lost money to that bastard. Let’s just hope that old fart never gets his chance to play this game. He’s already played enough people.

All About Steve

2009-09-07T19:39:00.005-04:00

I may be breaking up with Sandra Bullock soon. I’m not sure yet. I’ve never had an unrequited girl-crush before. Well, maybe there was a brief swoon for Yvonne Craig in her Batgirl suit back in the prehistoric 1960s, but that was so long ago it doesn’t really count. I was barely pubescent and the truth is I didn’t love her I just wanted the suit. It had built in boobs that were perfectly formed torpedoes with an equally perfect sunshine yellow bat symbol placed strategically between them. What eleven year old girl didn’t want to wear that sparkly purple skin-tight spandex leotard, cape, and boots along with the mask and red wig to complete the disguise? The only thing wrong with the whole idea was that “Bat-GIRL” was played by a 30 year old actress and even in those not-so-consciousness-raised times I knew ‘something in the milk wasn’t clean’ to refer to a thirty year old woman a “girl”, “Bat” or otherwise. This just gave me even more legitimate reason (I thought) as to why she should send her costume to me as I was closer to the right age to be fighting crime in the garish get-up than she was. At thirty, she was practically ready for a nursing home, or so I figured from the comfort of what seemed an eternal twenty-one years away. So I wrote to her directly and told her so, and six weeks later she sent me back a 4 x 6 color postcard with her picture in full Bat-drag on one side and on the other she scrawled “Thanks for all your support, Yvonne Craig”. My support? Is that what she called it? That cow hadn’t even read my letter. And to think I worshipped her. She was leading me down the flannel path to the Isle of Lesbos and a life of pool tables, cheap beer, bowling shirts, and buzz cuts. I swore it would never happen again, and it hasn’t yet, though if anyone has come close to making me consider changing teams it would be my beloved Sandra Bullock.

I don’t lust after Sandra in a sexual frenzy the way a certified Sappho would be expected to do. I just find myself always drawn to her movies because her performances always ring true for me. She almost always makes terrific emotional choices in scenes, whether comedic or dramatic, and so I enter a Bullock movie with confidence that whatever it might be it will be enjoyable. Or so I thought.

This last week I saw All About Steve, Bullock’s second film of the season (after the gloriously funny The Proposal), and by the time it was over I didn’t really know all that much more about Steve (Bradley Cooper; The Hangover) than I did at the beginning of the picture, but I also didn’t really care to. Worse yet, I knew more than enough about Bullock’s Mary Horowitz, which is to say that she has to be the most annoying character I’ve seen on-screen this year as a protagonist. She reminded me of a wretched melding of Arnold Horschack from tv’s “Welcome Back Kotter”, Janice Litman of “Friends”, and with a smattering of Jan from “The Brady Bunch” thrown in just to add to the crazy. What Mary doesn’t have is a smidge of the warm cuddlies to make her even remotely endearing as Sandra has been in her other films. Mary is just grating. Bullock’s shtick as someone who is an outsider and struggling with social ineptness has been endearing in other films (Miss Congeniality; While You Were Sleeping) but here it's just plain disturbing. Her character is extremely intelligent but totally clueless when it comes to developing or maintaining personal relationships, and her obsession with her job as a cruciverbalist (crossword puzzle creator) has turned her into a non-stop motor-mouth who prattles on about useless facts and information without provocation or the ability to stop.

Mary lives at home with her equally odd parents, played by Howard Hesseman (Halloween II) and Beth Grant (Extract), who seem to have quit decorating in the 1970s and apparently are still living there as well. It’s because of their fixing up their daughter on a blind date with the son of friends of theirs that Mary first meets with Steve, and their five minute date turns into something more akin to date rape during which time Mary practically devours the tv news cameraman before they’ve even left the curb in front of her parents’ home. There’s definitely something about this Mary alright!

After that, Steve thinks Mary is just a bad memory he can share with the guys on his news crew, but for Mary he has already become an obsession, and the next hour and a half is taken up with Mary’s adventures while stalking Steve as he crosses back and forth across the country on his job covering the national news. Of course, since Mary has no money, her trips are convoluted and put her in touch with a colorful and eccentric group of people along the way, many of whom totally understand and support her cause without questioning the fact she and Steve have barely met.

An absolutely absurd crisis occurs that makes the hurricane, tornado, and birth defect stories Steve has previously been covering seem tame by comparison, and when the “dramatic” reveal happened I laughed so hard my friends had to forcefully try to quiet me as other audience members turned to see why I was struck with such a bad case of the giggles. Longtime readers who see the movie (and you should just for this part) will totally understand immediately what I am talking about. It is as precious as watching the Von Trapp family struck down by lightening (but that’s not it). This time Mary accidently gets involved in the news drama herself and before it is over Steve goes from covering the story to being a part of it as the other reporters on the scene recognize him as “the boyfriend.”

So the comedy takes a sneaky turn and suddenly becomes a full-on message movie. We get bombarded with a clear admonition not to believe everything we hear in the media or read in the tabloids. The discrepancies and outright lies told by the reporters as they cover the story grow more outrageous as time ticks by, while at the same time the growing crowd of supporters for Mary provide a tableau of those the media usually tries not to cover ~ the unattractive, the overweight, the old, the eccentric, the “everyday” people, in other words, people who are less than perfect… people like Mary. Perennial movie outcast DJ Qualls (Road Trip: Beer Pong) plays Howard, a guy who makes a living carving celebrity faces out of apples and then traverses the country selling them out of the back of his 1976 Ford Geo. Who better to then step up as the skinny-mini spokesman and point out just how wonderful Mary is just the way she is with the subtlety of a guy whacking everybody in the audience on the head with a frozen salmon or something equally as distracting because ~dammit! ~ Mary is okay, even if she is the kind of gal you’d be happy to put a kink in her respirator’s air hose any other day of the week if this was real life and you have had to put up with her incessant chatter and insipid insertion of factoids into every sentence you attempt to speak for years and you can’t stand it anymore! Grrr.

Other than Mary and Steve, though, the supporting cast is actually fairly interesting in what little we get to enjoy of them. Network news correspondent Hartman Hughes (Thomas Haden Church; Spiderman 3) deserves more time than he gets as we watch him evolve from self-aggrandizing idiot to actual, three dimensional (but still self-aggrandizing) human being. His producer, Angus (Ken Jeong; also from The Hangover) provides spots of inspired comic relief without much dialogue, mostly in great reaction shots he makes to the lines of Cooper and Church in their never-ending bickering along the road.

The fact that All About Steve was finished more than two years ago and sat in the studio’s vault without a release date until now pretty much says everything you need to know about the movie. It is awkward to watch because you can’t decide who you are supposed to root for. Steve is a misogynistic jerk who won’t give Mary a minute of his time while Mary could easily be diagnosed with an array of disorders, from Ausberger’s Syndrome to obsessive compulsive disorder to who-knows-what. And that is being kind. It’s better than just saying a minute with her is like listening to someone drag their fingernails down a chalkboard for an hour or two. Yes, she’s just that much fun.

I’m sorry, Sandra, but I’m not deserting you yet. Everybody deserves another chance. Mike Myers had The Love Guru, and I’m giving you All About Steve. I’m willing to forgive all indiscretions of the former millennium, so I’ll never throw Speed 2: Cruise Control in your face ever again if you promise never to mention that misfire of a weekend I spent with “the Coreys” back in the day. So, I’m going to look forward to November’s The Blind Side and we’ll see where we go from there. But in the meantime, I’m not getting a U-Haul, and I’m not buying any flannel shirts yet. I’m sure you and Jesse are both relieved. I know my perfect husband is. M’kay.

The Final Destination

2009-09-03T20:33:00.001-04:00

No offense to director David R. Ellis (Snakes on a Plane), but he must be a complete idiot if he thinks he has made The Final Destination. First off, how presumptuous of New Line Cinema to think by slapping on a simple article ‘The’ at the front of this low budget horror flick it can end a franchise just · like · that. After all, these are the same chowderheads that created Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare in 1991 before they realized they had killed their only golden child molesting serial killer and brought him back to life three years later with the brilliantly titled New Nightmare, to be followed shortly thereafter by a slapdown with another popular and oft-killed but quickly brought back favorite from the Friday the 13^th series in 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason. Do people even remember that Jason was supposedly dispatched to the Great Beyond for good by Paramount Pictures in 1984 with Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter? Yeah, they tried that ‘THE’ bit too and it has since led to another eight films (so far) and counting. Tell us again this is The Final Destination. Until the next one.

The big difference between this Final Destination and its predecessors is that this one is in 3-D, which traditionally has been a horrible omen for a horror franchise, sort of the cinematic equivalent of serving Velveeta and Triscuits on paper plates as hors d'oeuvres at a formal affair (anywhere south of the Northeast Kingdom that is). Fortunately, thanks to leaps and bounds in technology made during the past couple of years (kudos to Pixar for that) 3-D is no longer a red-headed step-child in the cinema but can actually can offer real depth and more than just crappy “boo!” moments in a movie. Not that The Final Destination doesn’t celebrate these as well; after all, when you are making a horror movie and have the opportunity to throw a few body parts or gallons of blood directly at your audience how can you possibly resist? It would be a disappointment not to find some of these stunts included. The trick is to do it judiciously, and Ellis does better than you might expect considering he was also the director of a gore-drenched gross-out called Asylum.

The story here is basically the same as the first three Final Destination movies. This time, instead of a plane crash, a major freeway pile-up, or a roller-coaster gone off its tracks, the source of the opening mayhem that kills dozens is an out-of-control series of accidents at an aging speedway, which leads to explosive fires, racecars crashing and engine parts spinning (and cutting, crushing, or disemboweling) everywhere, eventually also causing the audience stands to collapse. As usual, a young man has a premonition of all this just minutes before it happens for real and panics, getting himself and his friends (and a few other annoying types you kind of wish he’d have let stay behind) out of the path of destruction just before everything goes to crap. Or so he thinks.

Then the real crap begins. And by crap I mean the stuff you wouldn’t want to have happen to your worst enemy kind of stuff, except I would because I’m a vindictive bitch and I have a list of people I’d LOVE to sign up for their own Final Destination, but I’m not naming names because I already know that if anything were to happen to any of these dirtbags the boys in blue would be at my front door in a heartbeat fitting me for a pair of matching bracelets and promising me a long vacation away from home.

So things are only about knee-deep or worse for Nick (Bobby Campo; Legally Blondes) and the rest of his pals when he, as the protagonists in the other three movies, proves he is not only psychic but smart enough to realize after a few of the less desirable survivors from the NASCAR holocaust wind up dead in some pretty weird and spectacular ways that what we have here is a situation where our cast has escaped death when they were meant to die and so are now marked for gruesome (and elaborately staged ~ in 3-D ~ no less!) individual death scenes. These are each as complex as that old kids’ game Mousetrap, where one action leads to another to another and to another, etc. and after a dozen or so seemingly sure “gotcha!” moments the deed finally happens totally out of nowhere. But that’s why people come to see these movies, so you already knew that, right?

You probably also know that there is scarcely anyone you’ve ever heard of or ever will hear of in the cast (I’m sorry, but it’s true) except maybe Mykelti Williamson (tv’s “24”), who has had a long career and must have been looking for college tuition for one of his daughters when this script crossed his desk. Not that The Final Destination is horribly written. It’s just that it is basically the same movie as Final Destination 2, which may be because it was written by F2’s screenwriter Eric Bress and directed by F2’s David R. Ellis. I’d love to know why they were cut out of Final Destination 3 but brought back for this one. Curious move. Hmmm.

Whatever that drama was about can hardly be as interesting as seeing how the folks at New Line are going to explain away their earlier decision when they green-light the next chapter in this series. Considering it was the biggest earner of the week domestically (beating out the also premiering sure-fire hit Halloween II), The Final Destination is bound to be little more than a pit stop on the way to hell for these filmmakers. In the meantime, there are worse places to hang, but more about Gamer some other time.

Halloween II

2009-09-02T15:23:00.021-04:00

People who like horror movies are like people who like cats. You either do or you don’t. It’s not a “take it or leave it” situation. If you ask anybody their opinion about scary movies you are bound to elicit an animated reply, which can range from a disgusted sense of superiority to a sudden bond of surreptitious brotherhood, as the person on the other end of your question will no doubt respond with passion and an unsolicited recollection of their favorite scene from their own personal favorite film. There’s just something different about horror that distinguishes it from any other type of movie except maybe porn, which brings us full circle again back to the subject of pussies.

I happen to like pussies and scary movies (porn, not so much). I also happen to believe that felines and films share something else in common ~ you can never have too many of them, even if not all of them are your favorites. Still, you’ll cherish each and every one, even those that mostly just turn out to snore in a corner all day. Some of the Halloween series has been like that, though it’s better to be repetitive or a tad dull than outright stupid or just plain awful like most of the other notorious horror franchises, like Leprechaun, Friday the 13^th and Nightmare on Elm Street, all of which became embarrassments after a while. Including this week’s reimagining of John Carpenter’s 1981 version of Halloween II, there have been ten movies in the franchise, and I can’t say any have been outright terrible (well, except maybe Halloween III, but that’s because it had nothing to do with the Myers’ saga and illegitimately bore the ‘Halloween’ label only because the studio allowed it). This chapter is probably among my favorite three since the original in 1978. Now that’s saying something.

Gads! When the original Halloween debuted I was barely older than perpetual victim Laurie Strode herself (then played by newcomer Jamie Lee Curtis). Thirty-one years later (and one rebirth later as well having been killed in 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection), poor Laurie (now Scout Taylor-Compton; Obsessed) returned in 2007’s reimagining of the original Halloween, under the direction of horror-meister Rob Zombie (The Devil's Rejects), who breathed a whole new life into the aging series. Now he is back with Halloween II, a continuation of his version of the Michael Myers legend, which deviates quite a bit at this point from the original story.

Zombie’s Halloween expanded on the mythos of Michael Myers, the serial killer behind the William Shatner mask in the first movie, but he stayed close the John Carpenter’s plotline from 1978. In Halloween II, he uses the Carpenter story as astepping-off point rather than a blueprint to create his own slaughterhouse full of teen angst and blood-letting that is tense, clever, thoughtful and funny. For those expecting the same characters to act as they did in the movies thirty years ago there is going to be nothing but disappointment. For everyone else, there will be surprises and insights into how the world has changed in the past three decades, especially when it comes to the glamorization of murder by the media.

This Halloween II pays homage to the perfect films of horror fans’ past with tips of the hat (even the gold, glitter-covered formal variety) to movies as diverse as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Wizard of Oz, Cat Ballou, A Clockwork Orange, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, and Psycho. What it doesn’t do is follow the John Carpenter story which dealt exclusively with Laurie’s hospitalization the same Halloween night as her attack by Michael in the original 1978 Halloween . In this Halloween II, Laurie and Annie Brackett (Danielle Harris; Super Capers),who survived in Zombie’s world whereas she didn’t in Carpenter’s story, make it to another year and have grown closer as they have both had to deal with their shared post-traumatic stress from their encounter with Michael Myers. Because Laurie is an orphan she lives with Annie and her father, Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif; Born of Earth), unaware of her familial connection to the serial killer who tried to take her life the year before. That’s until Michael’s psychiatrist, Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell; Bolt) releases his new book, A Devil Walks Among Us, about Michael’s rampage on Halloween of the previous year, which includes the shocking personal revelation that Laurie is actually Michael Myers’ youngest sister Angel, the only survivor of his family from the night of his first murders fifteen years ago. That’s not the sort of thing you want to hear about from a friend on the phone or from browsing through the Best Sellers’ rack at your local Borders.

Well, as you might imagine, this causes a lot of unpleasantness and it only gets worse when Laurie and the rest of the town slowly realize that Michael isn’t nearly as dead as they seem to have thought. Of course, for a lot of those people that realization comes too late to do much about it, but that’s what makes Halloween II all the more fun! Michael is still up for the challenge of offing just about anybody and everybody who crosses his path, and he does so with panache as always. Believe me, if I ever need someone to get rid of a cockroach, I know exactly who to call after seeing how well Mikey can stomp on a pest! Oy!

Zombie brings back his real-life wife Sheri Moon Zombie as Michael’s mother Deborah, this time as a spectral vision of her former (aka Halloween) self who, along with young Michael (Chase Wright Vanek also of Halloween), appear before the hulking giant (played by Tyler Mane, the original Sabretooth in X-Men for those who wonder what he actually looks like behind the mask) to direct him in his quest to “reunite” Angel with the rest if the family. In this respect the character of Michael changes significantly than in previous incarnations as he seems to have fallen into a familiar niche for sadistic cinematic serial killers ~ that bond with mom. Can we say Jason Voorhees or Norman Bates anyone? Before now, the one thing that set Michael apart from the pack was the mystery of his motives and Zombie has somewhat demystified that by pulling the veil back on the Myers’ white-trash family dysfunction. By showing us just how human Michael really is Zombie makes it difficult not to acknowledge how possible it just might be for us as audience members to cross that line and pick up a knife and follow Michael down his dark path, and, after all, isn’t that the real goal of a successful horror movie? If we can feel ourselves siding with the killer, then surely the writer and director (in this case both Zombie himself) must feel great satisfaction.

The ending of the movie (don’t worry, I’m not spoiling!) is bound to be controversial, and it is probably the only bit I wasn’t all that thrilled with because it seemed a bit trite to me. I understand where Zombie is going with it (Halloween III obviously), but it just seems like an obvious conclusion after an otherwise brilliant event. But I’m still going to love this one, even if it has a couple of fleas on it.

Inglourious Basterds

2009-08-24T10:31:00.004-04:00

I was so annoyed when I went to Inglourious Basterds and found out it wasn’t about my family. That always was the pet name I used to describe uncles and my father, although being an English major I was smart enough to spell “Inglorious Bastards” correctly even if I was only thinking of my uncles in that light. Okay, so technically they weren’t bastards bastards. Their parents were married, but in the colloquial sense, they were all a bunch of Inglourious Basterds, kind of like the illiterate goons referred to as the title characters in Quentin Tarantino’s latest blood-drenched fantasy now at the Essex Cinemas.

These Inglourious Basterds are a ragtag group of Jewish soldiers brought together to hunt Nazis in occupied France during World War II (probably the best time to find them if you think about it), led by a lug-nut American Lieutenant named Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). Aldo is a good ol’ boy from dumbfu--, um, he’s from rural Tennessee, and hardly seems an observant member of the Red Sea Pedestrian Genealogy Pedigree Society, but, then again, neither do any of the rest of the cast, not that it matters since this is a Quentin Tarantino movie after all. Bradley walks around with his lower lip wrapped under his teeth, apparently meant to give him a “country” look, i.e., simple-minded. It works because he accomplishes the feat so well he quickly becomes the least interesting person on screen despite his being the only one with a “name” to draw in crowds. I felt like he was using ‘Barney’ from “The Simpsons” as his inspiration. See what happens when you have six kids under eight at home.

The real stars of the film are its two female leads and Austrian actor Christoph Waltz (German tv’s "Tatort"). Waltz nails the role of multi-dimensional and very sociopathic SS Colonel Hans Landa, the type of soldier that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would positively swoon about on those late night sleepovers while they painted one another’s toenails and did each other’s hair (what there is left of it anyway). Landa is a relentless Jew hunter without a seeming ounce of compassion or conscience in him. As he explains early on, he equates the Jews to rats and the Germans to squirrels. While they may both be rodents, if both were to run into your home only one would elicit a visceral reaction of total disgust or nausea. And that’s the nicest thing he says in the whole movie. He has the same warm personality of my mother-in-law but without her masterful sneer. Still, despite that deficiency, Waltz makes for a great Nazi and he dances through the five “chapters” of this saga, and makes his presence in the overarching story felt even when he is not present.

The other major forces in the movie are played by Mélanie Laurent (Paris) and Diane Kruger (National Treasure: Book of Secrets) plays Shosanna Dreyfus, a Jewish teenager who escapes her own murder when Colonel Landa orders the slaughter of her family in Chapter One of this epic. She reappears a few years later in Chapter Three as a movie theater owner in Paris who by several twists of fate finds herself host to the gala premiere of a Nazi-sponsored film directed by Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth; Hilde) himself, Hitler’s Chief of Propaganda. Oy! Wait until you see what they do to the cinema for this event! I haven’t seen this many swastikas and machine guns on display since a “Shirtless Saturday” BBQ and Gun Show in a Wal·Mart parking lot in Mississippi. I’ll bet you can already guess whose favorite Colonel is going to be front and center row for this event and is bound to take a personal interest in the beautiful young theater owner, unaware of their previous connection... or is he? Also on hand is Germany’s favorite (fictional) actress of the period Bridget von Hammersmark (Kruger), an undercover agent for British Intelligence who is pegged in Chapter Four to be the contact for the Basterds when they parachute into Nazi-occupied France to set in motion the big finale Chapter Five story, which, of course, turns into something completely unlike what the viewer is led to expect.

The obvious collision of all these stories into a combustible explosion from which the Inglorious Basterds shall rise triumphant is far too simplistic an end-game for a director like Tarantino, and he does not disappoint here. While I do usually cut artsy fartsy types like Quentin slack because they are (for lack of a more modest word) geniuses, I do wish he wouldn’t alter real history’s timeline or the outcome of real people’s fates as has a knack for doing. I won’t go into details for fear of spoilage, but with the general laziness of the American public today I’m just afraid that a lot of people will go see movies like this, where history is rewritten, and take what they see as fact because, God forbid, they would read something deeper than TV Guide or US Weekly. Books? If they don’t contain Sudoku puzzles in them and come in paperback then they are something called “paperweights” or “school work.” But I digress.

Inglourious Basterds is a terrific albeit flawed film. As Tarantino is known to do, he chooses music to score his movies that is terribly out of place most of the time and can be distracting. In thiscase, the opening theme sounds like it belongs in a 1970s spaghetti western scored by Ennio Morricone, not remotely Bavarian, French or even war-like. Otherwise, he is a stickler for detail and the costumes and sets will propel you back in time and you won’t just feel you are watching a movie but that you are a part of the story, especially because he does take those dreaded liberties with historical fact. Anyone who knows their history will either be baffled or furious at Tarantino’s ‘alternative universe’ because it provides an unknown “future past” where anything is possible. Most will consider that exciting though, but much more exciting is the presence of Mélanie Laurent, who owns the screen in every scene in which she appears. She is incendiary as the revenge-fueled young woman under Landa’s thumb. The 26-year-old actress has already gained much fame in her native France, but I’d make bank that this may be the beginning of a cross-over career into American films and her entrée into the Hollywood elite.

There are very few directors out there today making movies that will surprise you, and Tarantino is one who does. When you think you know how ~ and when ~ the tale is ending things will careen wildly and shockingly, sometimes comically, onto new ground. Inglourious Basterds is not just another war movie. I’m not quite sure I’d even categorize it as a war movie even though it obviously concerns matters happening during World War II, but it is much more a story of human emotions and deep, dark feelings. Do yourself a favor and see this delicious and daring drama. It beats another dry old documentary on the Hitler Channel, um, I mean the History Channel any day.

Shorts

2009-08-22T15:46:00.003-04:00

Before anyone gets their bloomers in a bunch let me give you a brief glimpse of Shorts, the latest low-budget children’s craptacular from Spy Kids writer and director Robert Rodriguez. Rodriguez never ceases to amaze as he jockeys from very adult blood and guts projects such as the “Planet Terror” segment in Grindhouse to kiddie fare like this or The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D. And yes, that one starred future New Moon panties-dampener Taylor Lautner, but that’s a whole other story we can reminisce about when the Twilight sequel bows on November 20th.

As for Shorts, despite Rodriguez’ involvement, parents won’t have to worry about any unmentionables being aired unless you consider the repeated use of the word “booger” an unmentionable. Yes, I said “booger.” That should give you an idea of how tacky this brain-dead twaddle really is. One of the main “Shorts” of the title, a tale told in five inexplicably out of order ‘chapters’, is about a renegade giant booger which chases after the boy from whose nose he first came, apparently wanting him to produce another booger for the monster to have as a friend or to eat the kid as revenge for his having eaten other boogers in the past. I think I threw up in my mouth a little just writing that sentence. And this epic bit stars none other than Oscar nominee and Emmy winning actor William H. Macy (The Tale of Despereaux) as Dr. Noseworthy, the scientist responsible for bringing his son Nose’s (Jack Short; The Anna Nicole Smith Story) nasal excrement to life.

Actually, it’s not the Doctor who manages the miracle of life even if he thinks so, it is the magic of an alien rock that passes from owner to owner and kid to kid in this sandbox (alleged) comedy. What tiny plot threads its way through the mismatched Shorts concerns a megalomaniac Bill Gates type by the singular name of Black (James Spader; late of tv’s “Boston Legal”), determined to rule the world with his ever-adapting invention, The Black Box, which can morph from a toaster to a cell phone to a gun in seconds. He is determined that every human on the planet buy one and it is up to those sitting on his executive staff to make that happen. To encourage their aggressive competition to make this happen Black even goes so far as to pit staff members against one another, a particular problem for Mr. and Mrs. Thompson (Jon Cryer; tv’s “Two and a Half Men” and Leslie Mann; 17 Again), since they are forced to head up opposite teams and are told that the losing team will be fired and lose their company-owned homes. As you can see, with adult characters that have no first names their general usefulness is limited to moving the plot along as lackeys for the kids and not much else. The real “stars” are the children who handle the alien rock and make wishes on it, like it is a genie’s lamp. After all, the barely par special effects are what the children in the audience are really expected to come to see anyway. So the gist of the story is taken up with Toby “Toe” Thompson (Jimmy Bennett; Orphan) and his juvenile battles with Black’s bully daughter Helvetica Black, Jolie Vanier (Strange Little Girl), and her henchman, her brother Cole Black Devon Gearheart (Changeling) as they snatch the rock back and forth and wish an assortment of ridiculous things to appear and disappear or events to transpire then not.

To up the preciousness factor Trevor Gagnon (Richie of tv’s "The New Adventures of Old Christine") is also cast as Toe’s sidekick to help explain any and everything to Toe since the audience is not expected to have any clue what the heck is going on, though it is hardly necessary because by the second ‘chapter’ I was so uninterested in the whole mess that I was praying I could grab hold of the rock and wish this movie was never made. You will feel the same if you make the mistake of wasting your money on this sad little brain-drain. It should have been called Shortchanged because that’s how you’ll feel if you pay to see this stinker. There’s a whole lot better stuff you could to do for your kids than dump them in front of this for two hours. Try that instead. They’ll love you for it.