I am not the audience for this movie.
I did not see the original Twilight. I read the novel and was horrified; how many teenage girls truly believe that men like Edward Cullen exist? (Fewer, probably, than the number of boys men who expect to meet a gorgeous independent woman who caters to their every whim and is miraculously attracted to slovenly underachievers, but that’s a rant for another film.) In real life a man who stalks protects a woman the way Edward does will continue to do so whether her life’s in danger or not. Perhaps the majority of Twilight fans recognize this, and treat the stories as wish fulfillment, much as this reviewer does with good romantic comedies (though not, it must be said, The Ugly Truth, which peddled a similar adolescent fantasy).
On that level, New Moon delivers. It reproduces the central appeal of the books: a man who’s faster, stronger, more romantic, better at playing baseball and musical instruments alike and more beautiful than anyone you could possibly imagine falls for Bella Swan, an ordinary, unremarkable-looking girl, and continually professes not only that he loves her, but that he cannot live without her. So protective is he that when his otherworldly urges place her in danger he actually abandons her to protect her.
This is the basest sort of adolescent fantasy, the kind any writer who’s attended university could dream up, and yet it would be undone by a sense of manufactured cynicism if author Stephenie Meyer didn’t wholeheartedly believe in it. She does, and it would appear a wide cross-section of the western world does too.
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Dunno if you heard, but a concert documentary, starring a little-known performer who died recently, opened across the country at 12:01 this morning.
This performer, Michael Jackson, would likely have been plagued by scandal through much of his adult life had anyone actually heard of him, so perhaps it’s just as well.
To Sony’s credit, This Is It does not feel like a quickie cash-in on Jackson’s death. A bit over-adulatory perhaps, but that’s to be expected. It must be said, however, that Jackson’s death casts a pall over the movie’s early proceedings; to me, his fake cleft chin and overly manufactured nose make his face look like melted wax, his voice occasionally lilts – not in a good way – and some of his dance moves look robotic.
But as time passes, the rehearsals have an obvious effect on him; his dancing becomes smoother, his singing becomes stronger, and he appears to become younger. Performing came as naturally to Jackson as breathing, and while his voice occasionally disappears, he’s never off-key (and explains more than once that he’s trying to save his vocal cords), and every number yields enthusiastic applause from the gathered technicians and back-up dancers.
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Here’s an old-fashioned crowd-pleaser; albeit, a crowd-pleaser with lots of blood spewing, limb-chewing, and bone breaking – but really, why would you see a movie called Zombieland if you didn’t want to see that?
Here’s a horror film that acknowledges how ridiculous it is by depicting a group of eight-year-old zombie girls before the opening credits; and a comedy that, by casting Jesse Eisenberg in the lead role, quickly establishes an enjoyably quirky tone, and maintains it by adding Abigail Breslin as a shotgun-toting 12-year-old and Woody Harrelson (in a terrific performance) as the movie’s resident badass.
Here’s a genre movie with a coherent plot – Breslin and Emma Stone, playing nervy sisters, push the thin but logical story along – and which pays attention to its characters, giving each of them solid backstories and respectable screentime. (My biggest complaint with Zombieland is that while the sisters are much stronger than typical damsels in distress, they nonetheless wind up being damsels in distress).
Here’s an action movie with an extended, glorious climax at an amusement park, with all the standbys (roller coaster, tilt-a-whirl, drop mechanism) used in exactly the way you’d expect; plus characters using really big guns, and firing them with a generous helping of one-liners.
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Note: If you’re already interested in seeing District 9 - you know the setup, you’ve seen the posters – go see it. Like all good stories, the best way to experience it is to know nothing about it going in. A word to the squeamish, however – this is a Peter Jackson production by the man who directed The Frighteners and the icky spider-pit sequence in King Kong, not the man who directed Heavenly Creatures or Lord of the Rings.
When we first meet Wikus Van der Merwe, we don’t really notice him; he’s one of many talking heads in the faux documentary that opens District 9, and he isn’t important. Others explain that in the 1980s an alien mothership appeared suddenly over Johannesburg, and that, after nothing happened (by all appearances, there was nothing to keep this ship from torching South Africa like the aliens in Independence Day) humans broke in and discovered a sickly race of alien refugees whose ship had literally run out of gas. Wikus (newcomer Sharlto Copley) is a cubicle drone tasked by MNU, the corporation that has kept the refugees under (debatable) control, to lead a team that will hand the aliens eviction notices, lending a sense of legitimacy to their forced extraction from District 9, the slums in which they currently reside, to District 10, which is more of a concentration camp. In his opening scenes, Wikus comes across as an officious bureaucrat who in any other movie would be the first to go, in a spectacular and probably funny manner. That appearance is crucial, because it means his ultimate role in the story is as much a surprise to the audience as it is to him. I can’t say that if Hitchcock made an alien invasion film Wikus would have been his protagonist, but I do think he would have been proud.
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It’s a funny thing about life; even though we’re all (obstensibly) unique, certain experiences fall into distinct patterns. Most middle-class children in the western world, for instance, go through a period in their childhood where the world revolves around them, followed by a period in their teenage years where they’re convinced it should and are surprised when it doesn’t. This leads to a period of intense self-reflection, during which they discover their place in the world and are shocked again some years later when that place doesn’t welcome them with open arms either.
In Julie & Julia, Amy Adams’ character, Julie Powell, is in that directionless place between shock and reaction when she decides to give herself one year to cook all 524 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and if you’re in the same place, or recently past it, you’ll probably identify with her.
Another stage many adults find themselves in, and which people of Julie’s age hope to avoid, is that of the middle-aged, middle-class (or upper-middle-class) person who suddenly realizes they haven’t accomplished anything. Sure they’ve survived, but they still don’t recognize their place in the world, nor have they experienced anything they could call a “dream.”
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I was shocked to discover that three women wrote this screenplay. (Or that, more accurately, two women wrote and a third re-wrote it.) I do not harbour any illusions of women being the “fairer” sex. I recognize that women are just as likely (or unlikely) to enjoy dick, fart and sex jokes as men. However, some idealistic part of me still believed a woman was above writing something like The Ugly Truth.
I more or less saw this movie three months ago, under the title Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Like that Matthew McConaughey vehicle, The Ugly Truth revels in juvenile stereotypes about men and women, with Gerard Butler’s Howard Stern-like cretin more or less encouraging control freak Katherine Heigl to pick up a man the same way McConaughey’s cad kept picking up women: by playing to their baser instincts.
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I hadn’t seen the trailers for Year One. I wasn’t expecting a “Jack Black” movie; for me the most important name in the credits was director/co-writer Harold Ramis (Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day).
Year One begins with a boar hunt; not as convincing as the one in Apocalypto perhaps, but credible nonetheless. For two brief, shining minutes I thought here was a movie that understood that most important and least followed rule of comedy: the more seriously the participants take it, the funnier it is.
Then a hunter played by Horatio Sanz is hit with a spear, the type that if thrown properly would have gored him. It barely scratches his shoulder, and after discovering Sanz isn’t a boar, Black apologizes for throwing it. He sounds exactly like the Jack Black we’ve seen in countless other films (King Kong excepted), and if the movie began here I would have found myself wondering what he was doing dressed as a caveman.
Michael Cera sounds exactly like the character we’ve seen in countless other films too – which, as a coworker pointed out, is odd, because he played a completely different character in his breakthrough, Arrested Development. READ MORE »
“There are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new.”
- Anton Ego, Ratatouille
Here is the pitch for Away We Go that arrived in my inbox, and which put me to sleep before the second paragraph:
Longtime (and now thirtysomething) couple Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) are going to have a baby. The pregnancy progresses smoothly, but six months in, the pair is put off and put out by the news from Burt’s parents Jerry and Gloria (Jeff Daniels and Catherine O’Hara), that the eccentric elder Farlanders are moving away from Colorado – thereby eliminating the expectant couple’s main reason for living there.
So, where, and among whom of those closest to them, might Burt and Verona best put down roots to raise their impending bundle of joy? The couple embarks on an ambitious itinerary to visit friends and family, and to evaluate cities, eventually realizing that they must define home on their own terms.
If that sounds riveting, skip my review and see the movie – the less you know walking in, the better.
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A few months ago I caught a 20-minute non-screening of J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek, where the most memorable thing that happened was me falling down a third of a long flight of stairs, injuring my shoulders in a way that still hasn’t fully healed.
The scenes were disconnected, 12-year-old Kirk announcing himself as “James Tiberious Kirk!” was still stupid, and the time travel device driving the plot looked sketchy. The film was written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orchi, who typically favour setpieces over plot and quirks over character development. But the actors were effective and during the rapid-fire action sequences I could actually tell what was going on. I’m glad I saw it; when the lights came down on the full-length movie, I knew what to expect.
Make no mistake: this is not science fiction. It does not utilize a technology-driven society to explore an issue in the present. It is not Star Trek as defined by The Next Generation onward; there are no Big Ideas, no debates over man’s place in the universe. It is, in short, no Battlestar Galactica. But I underestimated Abrams and company; this is an exhilirating, slam-bang space opera, one of the best I’ve seen, that happens to star the characters from the original Star Trek. That also means it has one of the most memorable casts ever to grace a screen, and while most of them are drawn in broad strokes, that’s long been the fate of supporting characters: Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) do have actual character arcs.
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Is there any formula more credible than A Christmas Carol? Done correctly, the story plays on two primal aspects of human nature: that when it comes to remembering how we hurt others, our memories are fuzzy; and that we hate feeling guilt. Forced to confront every nasty thing committed against someone else over the course of three hours, even the most unrepetant jerk would undergo some kind of change (unless they’re a clinical psychopath – which would make for an entertaining, though less marketable, movie).
And yet it results in trash like Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, a pandering, obvious slice of counterprogramming shuffled into theatres against the likely blockbuster Wolverine, starring an especially off-putting Matthew McConaughey.
This is a terrible movie. You don’t need me to tell you that. Just watch the trailer.
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