In all the ways that movies are mis-marketed… errr, slyly peddled, one of the more curious disconnects in recent memory between elicited expectation and finished product has to be found in the new ping pong comedy Balls of Fury. Its title is vaguely juvenile (“Huh huh, he said balls…”), with an evocation of theatrical rage that stands as none-too-coincidental counterpoint to the recent hit Blades of Glory. If grandeur and achievement are part of sports, after all, so too are the flipside emotions — such as disappointment and anger — of presumed defeat.

So the movie looks, on the surface, to be another down-market tale of alpha male behavior on the fringe, with wildly colorful characters and plenty of slapstick situations. Yet overall Balls of Fury plays things surprisingly straight; it’s a rather shockingly low-energy treatment of such a colorful, willfully silly concept. Despite its advertising campaign (with shots of a weeping little girl punching a guy in the groin in heavy rotation), it really isn’t a comedy of rote physical debasement. But neither is the movie wholeheartedly about the competition at the core of its story, in a manner that would (potentially) allow it to blossom as a satire of muscle-bound sports flicks. No, instead, it’s not feelings of outrage that the movie most summons forth… just deep sighs of puzzled indifference. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Also, while this holiday weekend looks to be a box office battle between Rob Zombie’s Halloween, Saw director James Wan’s Death Sentence and Balls of Fury, as well as an extra serving for big-budget holdovers, there are plenty of other, smaller, better films still at cineplexes that would love the vote of confidence that your dollars confer upon them. Narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, The 11th Hour is an important movie, definitively showing how the Earth is giving off symptoms of an infected organism, and how just unnatural many of our natural disasters and current weather patterns really are. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Meanwhile, Justin Theroux’s pleasantly barbed Dedication is still in limited release, I know, but Jeffrey Blitz’s Rocket Science is a great, skewed coming-of-age tale, and the documentary The King of Kong is deliciously fun — a reminder that high school’s shadow never completely disappears, it just stretches longer. Oh, and 3:10 to Yuma sneaks on Saturday night, I believe, in advance of its September 7 bow. All are definitely worth checking out.