A disjointed exercise in cosplay action theatrics that evidences the worst instincts of cobbled-together Hollywood overindulgence, G.I. Joe: Retaliation by and large ditches the characters of its first big screen iteration, 2009’s G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, in favor of a new story of square-jawed elite military defense against terrorism. It may well make a good chunk of money, but it’s hard to imagine anyone getting particularly, legitimately passionate about this flick, which awkwardly attempts to service both nostalgia and the uninvested interest of newcomers, to generally yawning effect.



The film picks up after events of The Rise of Cobra, though it’s not exactingly rigid in its adherence to canon, given the significant turnover in cast. After Duke (Channing Tatum) leads the elite military Joes in securing a loose nuclear weapon from a destabilized Pakistan, they’re framed by Zartan, who’s still impersonating the President of the United States (Jonathan Pryce), and working on a scheme for terrorist organization Cobra. After Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee) and Firefly (Ray Stevenson) break Cobra Commander out of his state of suspended imprisonment, the latter promptly resumes focus on world enslavement.

Standing in Cobra’s way are Roadblock (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), Flint (D.J. Cotrona) and Lady Jaye (Adrianne Palicki), who try to first unravel the conspiracy surrounding their framing and then extract proper revenge for their fallen comrades. Enlisting the assistance of the “original Joe,” General Colton (Bruce Willis, always looking like he just woke up), these Joes craft a strongly worded treatise appealing to the Cobra Commander’s core human decency. Nah… just kidding. Stuff gets blowed up good!

Screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick labor to awkwardly fold in source material mythology, as it relates to both a mission by Jinx (Elodie Yung) and Snake Eyes (Ray Park) and Storm Shadow’s disillusionment with Cobra, but this chiefly results in a lot of clunky, hilarious scenes in which RZA shows up as Blind Master, and butchers a bunch of already gracelessly expository dialogue.

Forgetting for a moment the movie’s many slick but false moves, and the manner in which it contrives to put Palicki in first workout clothes and then a cocktail dress, what’s most notable about Retaliation is the litany of small indignities it foists upon its big-stakes, wham-bang conceit, like the fact that the American President’s national popularity is said to soar after, in the wake of a nuke going missing, he decides to push for a worldwide nuclear disarmament summit; or that Israel — who’s never officially admitted to possessing nuclear weapons — is part of the gathering, along with global pariah North Korea. Forget the intellectual heavy lifting of any cogent write-around that might serve its story; time and time again, Retaliation opts for whatever’s easy and convenient, sense be damned.

If the movie was proportionately staked (instead of the entirety of London being destroyed) and just more fun, that might work. Director Jon Chu is a gifted visual filmmaker, and in Step Up 2 the Streets and then Step Up 3D he showed a nice handle on action choreography. Here, however, Chu’s gifts are handcuffed, and less evident. He has a lot of fun with a balletic, vertical, mountainside chase-and-swordfight sequence that summons memories of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But while Chu orchestrates action sequences with a certain zest, Retaliation‘s scenes too frequently lack a properly delineated space.

When, in the movie’s final siege, Roadblock tabs himself to handle “the perimeter,” it sets up a discrete, rampaging tank sequence that doesn’t cut together well at all with the rest of the Joes’ attack. (Maybe this was part of the movie’s purported re-shoots.) And when Roadblock takes on Firefly, the confrontation goes from land to sea and then land again, culminating in a silly, combination fistfight-firefight, where each party occasionally elects to throw punches with a loaded weapon.

The Rock provides a suitable steely yet wry charisma as Roadblock, and he and Tatum have a nice rapport while it lasts. But other characters are complete ciphers, and Cotrona and Palicki are wan substitutes for any of a number of cast members from the first film, which offers up more punchy fun than this sequel. Maybe if there were more of a sense of actual nefarious plotting, G.I. Joe: Retaliation might have a more legitimate scope, and a bit of the grand, army-versus-army feeling of something like The Avengers. Instead, it’s just another loud action movie, but not one particularly marked by any memorable catharsis. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Paramount, PG-13, 110 minutes)

Muriel’s Wedding director PJ Hogan and star Toni Collette reunite to considerably less winning effect with Mental, a mad, garrulous little slice of alt-nanny comedy. As imaginative as it is indefatigable, the film nonetheless puts an overall unconvincingly quirky Australian spin on fractured-family mental health movies like Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck‘s It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Dustin Lance Black’s Virginia and Ryan Murphy’s 2006 adaptation of Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors. All three of those tales, among many others, take inspiration from memoirs of coming-of-age amidst mental illness, and touch on parentalized adolescents. Mental tries to mine that same terrain for both laughs and drama, but comes across as just frenzied and bipolar.

Unhappy housewife Shirley Moochmore (Rebecca Gibney) copes with the lack of support and perpetual absence of her small town mayor husband Barry (Anthony LaPaglia) by withdrawing into a fantasy world built around The Sound of Music and the happy Von Trapp family. Her five girls are certain she’s nuts, and that they’re not far behind — one self-diagnoses as schizophrenic, the other as a sociopath. Barry finally commits Shirley to a mental institution for a stint of indeterminate length. But since he hardly knows his daughters’ names much less how to relate to them, he picks up an eccentric hitchhiker, Shaz (Collette), and tasks her with becoming their nanny and controlling them. Much scene-chewing then ensues, as Shaz, like a foul-mouthed, Mad Hatter Mary Poppins, upends both the girls’ lives as well as their views and opinions of themselves.

Hogan, whose Stateside studio filmography includes My Best Friend’s Wedding and Confessions of a Shopaholic, has a colorful pop sensibility which trends decidedly toward the manic, and that’s part of his undoing here. Mental has a wild, live-wire energy, and comes out of the gate like a freight train; it’s the sort of movie that uses the foleyed sound of a cuckoo clock to underscore a point. The problem is that this full-frontal assault is a bit wearying, and it creates an emotional disconnect that widens to a chasm when, 45 minutes in, the film tries to pivot into more baldly melodramatic territory. There’s no honest attachment to the characters, so Mental‘s plays at sympathy ring hollow — if always loudly.

There is some funny material here, including the forced familial freak-out of an uptight neighbor and a scene where Shaz holds forth on Australia’s history as a penal colony and how, while there are certain “control mice” (Kylie Minogue, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett and Russell Crowe) sent abroad to play nice, most of the entire country is actually insane. But Hogan, in trying to cram in as many autobiographical details and strands as possible, overloads Mental, including a needlessly complicated subplot involving the avuncular shark adventurer boss, Trevor Blundell (Liev Schreiber), of skittish oldest daughter Coral (Lily Sullivan). Putting a bow on Shaz’s personal history isn’t a necessity, but down that rabbit hole Hogan ill-advisedly goes.

As Shaz, Collette is a total, gum-smacking force of nature. If there was an Aussie Erin Brockovich giving an audition for a Down Under production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I’d like to see her top this. But Mental so prizes sound and fury over rigorous and clear plotting that even Collette can’t off the dramatic lift for which Hogan aims with his third act. Still, if one wants to see the actress light a fart on fire, this may be the only chance they get. Plan accordingly. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Dada Films/Arclight Films, R, 116 minutes)

In addition to his evocative showcasings of oddballs and outcasts, writer-director Harmony Korine’s work has always exuded a strong sense of place, and in his latest film, the audacious, neon-veined Spring Breakers, the often confrontational auteur transforms St. Petersburg, Florida into a decidedly modern synth-pop mélange of ecstatic heaven and drugged-out hell. In knee-jerk fashion, detractors will take aim at Korine’s proudly prurient work as an empty glorification of brainless adolescent posturing, but it’s actually a rich, smartly tied together provocation — an allegory for the corruption of innocence and the fear of blossoming female sexuality, powered by a hallucinatory musical score from Drive composer Cliff Martinez and the throbbing electronic dance music of Skrillex.



Good girl Faith (Selena Gomez) has been friends with Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Cotty (Rachel Korine, Harmony’s wife) and Brit (Ashley Benson) since grade school. Bored at college, they anxiously await their spring break vacation, but are short on cash. So with Cotty driving getaway, Candy and Brit rob a restaurant. From there, loot in hand, the girls head off to Florida, where pastel scooters and all manner of bikini-clad debauchery awaits. After a police bust lands the girls in jail, they’re bailed out by a local drug peddler/rapper/arms dealer, Alien (a delightfully skeevy James Franco, sporting cornrows along with an assortment of tattoos and garish jewelry), looking for some angels. Faith is unnerved by his scuzziness, but the other girls gravitate toward Alien’s wealth and outlandish displays of machismo, as well as the danger he represents, unwittingly getting sucked into a turf battle between Alien and his former friend and mentor, Big Arch (Gucci Mane).

From its poppy, peppy opening — with heaving bosoms, the shotgunning of much beer and the fellating of popsicles — on through much darker terrain, Spring Breakers exudes a stylistic adventurousness of a certain piece with something like Oliver Stone‘s Natural Born Killers (a film that, thematically, feels like something of a cousin), even though it’s shot, by Belgian cinematographer Benoît Debie, entirely on celluloid. Korine is intent on making viewers never forget that they’re watching a movie — and having to process that, along with the actual narrative and the sheer, careening joy and swagger of its overall packaging. In darkly satiric sum, the film then forces viewers to consider the folly of slick, guns-and-tits entertainment.

Korine doesn’t really take a traditional approach to character development; he trades here largely in snapshot moments, and embraced attitudes and wild gestures. The movie also commingles fantasy sequences with its plot proper, returning again and again to the bacchanalia that serves as its opening — the teens’ idealized vision of the new horizons that spring break affords. It’s not for nothing that Faith is seen getting “jacked up on Jesus” at a church youth group meeting, while another character repeats over and over, “Just pretend you’re in a videogame; act like you’re in a movie or something.” In taking aim at the impact of entertainment and pop culture, as well as its general hypocrisy and some of its more soul-deadening qualities, Korine offers up his most compelling and fully rounded big screen vision yet, along with a collection of characters every bit as fascinating as those Kids from his screenwriting debut. In Spring Breakers, he threads the needle between character specificity and stand-in attributes.

In one of the film’s more memorably quotable passages, Alien — an avatar of celebratory materialistic ignorance — holds forth as a backwater, Rap Age Scarface, ranting in sing-song fashion about his various possessions. It’s a call-back of sorts to a moment earlier in the movie, when Candy, literally rolling in stolen cash, opines that “money makes [her] pussy wet, and tits look bigger.” In offering up this portrait of girls gone really wild — with unicorn ski masks and semi-automatic weapons — Korine is reflecting in exaggerated fashion the abundant, free-flowing energy of youth culture, and specifically toying with the overwhelming feelings of panic and uncomfortableness that assertive young women coming into their own sexual ripeness engender. It’s an exercise in gonzo metaphor that triggers tripwires of both titillation and alarm. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (A24 Films, R, 92 minutes)

A good number of actresses, including Penelope Cruz, have worked for years in multiple languages. And while it seems a bit less common with actors, recent James Bond villain Javier Bardem scored a Best Actor Oscar nomination for 2010’s Biutiful while speaking in his native tongue. But apart from Kristin Scott Thomas — and recently Will Ferrell, who took up Spanish for the comedy Casa de Mi Padre — few native English speakers aim to flex their bilingual skills on the big screen. And that’s a big part of the reason writer-director Ana Piterbarg’s Everybody Has a Plan, starring Viggo Mortensen in what is actually his third Spanish language film, is interesting, given the otherwise slow, dangling drama of its assumed-identity conceit.

Agustin (Mortensen), a married pediatrician in Buenos Aires, is on the precipice of adopting a child with his wife (Soledad Villamil), but still gripped by a suffocating malaise. When his terminally ill twin brother Pedro (Mortensen again), from whom he is estranged, shows up, Agustin decides to slip into his identity, returning to the bayou-like Tigre Delta where they grew up as boys. Pedro worked there nominally as a beekeeper, but also as the muscle for a local thug (Daniel Fanego) operating kidnappings and other schemes. Agustin, as Pedro, then feels his way through a flirtation with a girl (Sofia Gala Castaglione) helping with his honeycombs, while also trying to carve out a safe haven for his new life.

While from Dead Ringers on through dozens of other examples on the big screen identical twins have been used to juicy effect, here they’re in large part a catalyst for… brooding. Everybody Has a Plan — rather ironically titled, since neither Agustin nor any other character really seems to have one — is a work of mist-shrouded atmosphere. So inscrutable are Piterbarg’s interests, in fact, that even calling it a mood piece is to elevate the movie to a plateau of psychological certitude it doesn’t really achieve.

Mortensen grew up in Venezuela and Argentina, so he has a great grasp of not only the language but seemingly some of the in-the-marrow cultural ambiance the movie seems to want to channel or explore. Piterbarg, though, in her feature film debut, doesn’t have a keen sense of how to exploit the danger with which she lines her narrative. The wan, incomplete result is a story stretched too thin, across a running time of nearly two hours. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Fox International, R, 118 minutes)

In 2003, legendary music producer Phil Spector — the man responsible for the pioneering “wall of sound” technique, and hit songs and albums from everyone from the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers to the Beatles — was arrested and charged with the murder of Lana Clarkson, a would-be actress found dead at his home. Writer-director David Mamet’s new film, which takes the name of the man and bows this weekend on HBO, is a snapshot of part of Spector’s first murder trial, which would result in a hung jury, followed by a conviction in 2009.



Mamet’s film has already drawn some flak, and probably deservedly so, for a pre-title card posturing that Phil Spector is a work of fiction, and “not based on a true story.” This is a rather audacious claim (not the least given the title of the work), and if anyone other than the Pulitzer Prize-winning Mamet was front-and-center attempting to peddle this particular line of bullshit, it would certainly be more roundly debated and likely more widely derided. So almost from the get-go, one has their head cocked and brow arched watching Phil Spector, the willful obstinance of its purposefully hypothetical and blinkered construction evident from early frames.

I can’t speak to the claim that a few critics who covered the real-life trial(s) have had — that the movie soft-peddles some of the evidence in order to paint Spector in a more favorable light — but Phil Spector is a movie that certainly goes to considerable lengths to very much avoid being about the time period during which it is set. As such, it’s a strange thing — a film that at times feels like it’s trying to cancel out the very reason for its existence. It’s most definitely not a biography, but neither is Phil Spector a courtroom drama, or even a compressed character study.

When original lead defense attorney Bruce Cutler (Jeffrey Tambor) seemingly can’t fully devote his time and energy to the Spector case, he brings in Linda Kenney Baden (Helen Mirren). She’s at first hesitant to commit, both because she’s physically sick and has an overseas vacation already on the schedule. But Linda eventually relents and mounts a passionate defense, grappling with notions of reasonable doubt and juror prejudice — the latter by way of some interesting scenes of legal focus group research.

At the core of the movie is Linda’s relationship with Spector (Al Pacino), who’s potentially an egomaniac and certainly an autodidact given to pretentious, wheel-spinning pontification (“First time you got felt up — guess what?! You were listening to one of my songs”). Much of Phil Spector unfolds out of the courtroom, but it has the feeling of a series of lectures and monologues, unconnected to much of unifying substance. Mamet’s vision of events is tightly focused — almost too much so at certain times, putting Linda in a hermetically sealed bubble every bit as much as her client, absent the input of other characters.

What makes Phil Spector work at least a little bit is the magnetic watchability of its two leads — even if their dances often seem to amount to two solos rather than a duet. Pacino captures Spector’s mercurial brilliance, and Mirren — who replaced Bette Midler after the latter had to withdraw two weeks into shooting due to back problems — a steadfast commitment to the principles of the law. The final act also catches fire, as the film works its way toward Linda’s begrudging acceptance of the fact that she might have to put her eccentric client on the stand if she wishes to argue a particular theory regarding his innocence. A contentious mock cross-examination (with Chiwetel Ejiofor) registers powerfully, and if the idea of the dramatic revelation of Spector’s frizzy afro — a homage to Jimi Hendrix, he insists — seems silly as a payoff, well, Mamet makes it work. And that was based on a true event, actually. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (HBO Films, unrated, 92 minutes)

A delightfully deadpan relationship comedy that plays like a cross between something from Quentin Dupieux and Jared and Jerusha Hess, Somebody Up There Likes Me is an imaginative paean to world-weary nonchalance. Directed by Bob Byington, this subversive little treat flirts with absurdism but never tips over into hipster posturing in chronicling a bunch of domestic ennui and professional unhappiness that its characters pretty much seem to all shruggingly accept.



After listless waiter Max Youngman (Keith Poulson, looking like a cousin of Jack White) catches his first wife (Kate Lyn Sheil) in bed with another guy, Max tries to get back in the dating game. In his breadstick-loving co-worker Lylah (Jess Weixler), Max promptly finds weirdo love. They promptly marry (“All right, well, let’s give this thing a try and see who gives out first,” he says on their wedding night), and Max and Lylah eventually even have a son, before temptation in the form of their babysitter-turned-nanny Clarissa (Stephanie Hunt) helps scuttle things and send Lylah into the arms of Max’s best friend, Sal (Nick Offerman, above right).

Somebody Up There Likes Me, though, isn’t a movie of emotional realism, much less hand-wringing. Behavior and plot twists that would be played for drama in your average indie film are here things to be talked about from a sort of befuddled remove. Characters have trouble remembering the names of people they’ve known for years, instead referring to them by description. Byington’s film also flashes forward several times in segments of five years, but he makes no great effort to mark the time in anything but the most cursory of fashion.

Part of the movie eventually tries to address this pause of measurement, but to call it a pay-off is to overstate matters, since it’s chiefly a shrug-inducing cutesy quirk almost irrelevant to the film’s charms and beguiling hold. Somebody Up There Likes Me isn’t a movie of much outwardly apparent depth, but it does have a philosophically playful streak that warmly embraces the futility of so much human endeavor. There’s some conventional repartee, but Byington’s film is marked mostly by a motley assortment of inappropriate, oblivious and off-the-wall soliloquies and exchanges, the common thread being a tone of detached puzzlement.

With an original score from Vampire Weekend’s Chris Baio that nicely encompasses a wry leitmotif, and a series of animated vignettes by Bob Sabistan (of A Scanner Darkly) that blend together the jumps in time, Somebody Up There Likes Me is a brisk, fun and funny little bauble that doesn’t overstay its welcome. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Denver and Austin, Somebody Up There Likes Me is also currently available nationwide on VOD platforms. (Tribeca Film, R, 75 minutes)

There’s a unique, chilly vibe that hangs over Come Out and Play, an unnerving, humid slice of elemental horror that definitely has nothing to do with the old song of the same name by the Offspring. Summoning up disparate recollections of George Romero, Children of the Corn and even, fleetingly, Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, this artful genre entry works the mind like a punching bag before finally playing a hand that, narratively, isn’t as much of a winner. The odd story behind this film (dedicated to the martyrs of Stalingrad!) and its singularly named anonymous director, Makinov, may sound (and ultimately be) worthy of a movie itself, but shouldn’t totally overshadow the things about Come Out and Play that work.



During a romantic getaway to Mexico, Francis (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) insists on taking his pregnant wife Beth (Vinessa Shaw) to a more serene locale. So they rent a boat and head toward what they believe to be a charming little island. Once there, however, an atmosphere of unease sets in — the restaurant and hotel they find are abandoned, and the duo feel they’re being watched. Smiling and giggling kids pop up here and there, but no adults. And those kids aren’t innocent, it turns out — they’re murderous. A fight for survival ensues, as Francis tries to get Beth safely off the island.

The Russian-born Makinov, who wore a variety of masks during filming in order to protect his anonymity, updates Juan José Plan’s 1976 Spanish film El Juego De Niños with an eye and mind toward austere travelogue realism. (And Soon the Darkness and Melissa George’s overlooked 2010 film Triangle are other vaguely similar mood pieces, though the latter less for its doom-loop plot than simply its equally spare setting.) The location settings ooze authenticity, and yet even in this openness he manages to locate some claustrophobia, with over-the-shoulder hallway tracking shots and a panicked auto escape. With a score that drifts into Moog and theremin, and conjures up the distorted low hum of a bi-plane, Makinov succeeds in creating a mood of looming dread.

A little of this goes a long way, though, and Come Out and Play kind of plateaus once Francis and Beth figure out the depths of danger these spooky, silent kids represent. The narrative is almost by definition painted into a corner that requires the introduction of awkward exposition, but the manner in which this is handled — once the pair meet another adult who’s survived a night of brutal attacks — is rather deflating. Even in streamlined form, this tale loses its grip. Still, the ominous effectiveness of its set-up and middle portion beckons, heralding the possible arrival of a bizarre new international talent in the thriller-suspense genre — one whose skill with the language of fear supersedes the need to speak English. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Cinedigm, R, 75 minutes)

Man want to feel wanted, useful. Mostly by woman, in the loincloth, but also, later, by family. This feeling at center of The Croods, new animated movie. Croods not too complicated. Kind of like cross between Ice Age and Year One, in some ways. Characters move in funny quadruped/biped hybrid gait, and seem to have invented parkour. But Croods tell pleasant story about family, utility of man, and letting go.



Movie open several millions of years ago, which definitely throw Sarah Palin and others for loop. Earth is crazy and inhospitable place, like South to liberals. Croods are cave family. Like, literally. Dad Grug (Nicolas Cage) have unibrow that would impress Anthony Davis. Grug take care of family, which consist of feral baby, stupid son Thunk (Clark Duke) and headstrong daughter Eep (Emma Stone). There is wife, too, Ugga (Catherine Keener), though she do nothing. Almost forgot about her. Oh, and mother-in-law Gran (Cloris Leachman), who is kind of like meth addict version of that witch from Brave. Grug secretly always hopes she die, which is funny.

Grug have many mottos like, “Darkness brings death, we know this!” And, “Never not be afraid!” Fear is not the little death for Grug. It keep him alive, he feel. Grug only let family out of cave to help him hunt. Eep, though, seek broader social horizon and meaning in life, which is very confusing to Grug. Eep sneak out, meet Guy (Ryan Reynolds), who have much better hair, less sloping forehead. Guy have baby sun! (This turn out to be called fire.) Guy also have animal belt that talk, which very confusing.

Guy no live in cave, which also confuse Grug. Guy then talk of strange place, “tomorrow,” and foretells of end-of-world prophesy, which he maybe picked up from Roland Emmerich movie? Anyway, group separated from cave, so then road trip happen, and crazy things. Grug maybe realize some rules primitive, so he tries to find some change he can believe in.

Croods co-directed by Chris Sanders — who make Lilo & Stitch and How To Train Your Dragon, both with big heart — and Kirk DeMicco, who make Space Chimps. Space Chimps piece of crap, but hey, everyone gotta eat. As on Dragon, Sanders use Roger Deakins as “visual consultant” on Croods. Good decision. This guy Deakins smart. Helps give film nice look. Croods have fantastic array of colorful creatures. Croods kind of like a Flintstones-era cousin of The Lorax or something. Its 3-D also not just rip-off — good in scenes of scope, and inventive with dust particles tracking toward camera.

One problem with Croods is no real fear of death, or looming consequence. Lots of slapstick-y bits in battles with creatures. (Could use more nut shots, though.) Some slip-ups in wording, too. Grug at one time tell Eep she “grounded,” but how that different than her normal life? Croods could be smarter, or have stronger inner logic. It could explore more confused reaction of Croods to entire new world. But it find fun mostly in family dynamic, so viewer not mad.

Some of words characters say funny (“Stay inside the family kill circle!”), and voice acting good. Funny to think about Cage going apeshit with grunts and such in booth. Or maybe he was recorded leaving Romanian nightclub? Anyway, Croods tell simple story but do it well. Smaller people like it most. Just no get them talking animal belt for birthday — world not need that. For full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (20th Century Fox/DreamWorks, PG, 96 minutes)

Filmmaker Michel Gondry has always been a visionary of visual style, dating back to his groundbreaking work in the music video format. Less noted is his soft spot for underclass underdogs and those existing on the margins of society, as found in his features like Be Kind Rewind and The Science of Sleep. That predilection gets a more direct exercising in what may be Gondry’s most narratively straightforward and direct movie yet, which charts a city bus ride home for a group of New York high schoolers on the last day of class before summer break.



The result, The We and the I, is the product of a two-year collaboration between Gondry and actual students at a Bronx after-school arts program, and it’s sort of like Laurent Cantent’s 2008 Palme d’Or winner The Class by way of Steven Soderbergh’s minor canon social-portrait riffs, like Full Frontal and The Girlfriend Experience. Marked by a flurry of adolescent energy, where kids can’t not talk for five seconds, the film works more as a caffeinated conveyance of feeling than an actual plotted story.

When the spring semester school bell rings for the last time, a motley crew of teenagers pile aboard and basically take over a city bus. The driver (Mia Lobo) occasionally attempts to enforce some discipline, but is also co-opted by free pizza, leaving other passengers to fend for themselves as the voluble kids gossip, gloat, brag and bully. What ensues is a litany of lover’s quarrels, clowning of old people, text messaging drama, “Sweet 16” party planning, games of truth-or-dare and general bickering, shining a light on rivalries, anxieties and friendships both true and perhaps significantly less so.

The We and the I has the potential to be like an emotionally combustible cross between Kids and the self-contained parts of Speed, but there’s a counterbalancing innocence to Gondry’s film — Young MC’s “Bust a Move” opens the movie, and other old-school hip hop flavors interstitial bits and editorial pivot points — and the violence that crops up never escalates past a certain point. There’s no charged threat of doom here, in other words, for both better and worse.

Instead, Gondry aims for an artful, scrambled blend of youthful connection and hormonally charged carousing. Cinematographer Alex Disenhof’s inventive camerawork and framing — sometimes incorporating telltale Gondry in-camera cross-cuts of stories being told — matches the inquisitive and boisterous nature of his subjects. The dialogue is sometimes funny (“The Dalai Lama says you gotta be fearless in matters of food as well as love — I have an email from my sister saying he said that”) and occasionally piercing and sad (“You three are the only ones that talk to me, and it’s never anything I wanna hear”), but mostly it’s less deeply insightful than just loud, jocular and unending — just like much real teenage conversation, in essence.

What the non-professional cast lacks in experience they for the most part make up for with raw, unfiltered charisma. But, in its third billed chapter, or act, when the movie pivots into a bit of moralizing payoff, the lack of formal training undercuts some of The We and the I‘s putative lessons learned. Still, an off-speed curveball with less inherent narrative appeal from Gondry is interesting in ways that dozens of more rigorously plotted films aren’t. Plot your route and purchase your fare accordingly. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Paladin/108 Media, unrated, 100 minutes)

A tender, impressionistic coming-of-age tale set against the backdrop of the Cold War in Great Britain, Ginger & Rosa is a colored pencil sketch of a movie distinguished by its acting — in particular young Elle Fanning, the actress at its core. Giving off the feeling of a short story, it’s not necessarily wildly revelatory, but instead small and intimately observed.

Writer-director Sally Potter (Orlando) has a great gift with mood and melancholy, which gives her story strong roots. In capturing early on the stolen private moments of her titular pair, Potter taps into the same sort of uniquely mad, combustible energy of female adolescents as on display in movies like My Summer of Love and Heavenly Creatures. This mooring helps the movie mostly — though not entirely — cut and shove its way through the melodrama of its late second and third acts, which shares some trace similarities with An Education. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (A24 Films, PG-13, 90 minutes)

Saddled with a terrible, clunky title and a programmatic narrative that represents a fairly unpersuasive blend of the familiar and contrived, Los Angeles-set indie romantic comedy Dorfman in Love connects most fitfully as a vehicle for the charms of star Sara Rue. Penned by Wendy Kout and directed by Bradley Leong, the big-hearted movie is a sort of Bridget Jones’s Diary by way of (500) Days of Summer, though without the apexes of cleverness and flair found in those films. It’s charming enough in spots, but doesn’t overwhelm in execution or insight.

Rue stars as Deborah Dorfman, an accountant and single, Jewish, San Fernando Valley girl who works with her brother Daniel (Jonathan Chase), constantly picking up his slack. She also takes care of her widowed dad Burt (Elliott Gould), who’s still in a funk over the death of his wife over a year ago. Deborah’s long-time crush, her Daniel Cleaver, is Jay (Johann Urb), a dashing and adventurous reporter. When he gets summoned away on assignment, Deborah offers to cat-sit at Jay’s new, as-of-yet undecorated downtown loft for a week-plus, figuring she’ll fix it up to wow him and win him over.

Downtown Los Angeles in like another world to Deborah, who’s both frazzled and exhilarated by the change. While trying to juggle and manage the needs and wants of the other men in her life, her brother and dad, she opts for a makeover and also meets painter Winston “Cookie” Cooke (Haaz Sleiman), which causes Deborah to have to reevaluate the nature of her obsession with Jay.

Dorfman in Love is essentially a generous, slightly fizzy character study of a woman on the verge — though on the verge of what exactly even she isn’t sure. What gives the movie its pop, though, is its grey linings, and the fact that Rue’s winning performance is rimmed with a relatable sadness and vulnerability. Deborah is a one-time big girl who’s extraordinarily professionally competent, but still carries around feelings of unworthiness, and still misses her mom. Some of the rest of the acting is uneven, but Rue is simply great — engaging, and really tuned into the tiny, faultline behavioral consequences that years of a father’s sex-based favoritism can breed.

Yet Kout and Leong don’t allow Deborah (or anyone else) to truly fall apart. Most of the movie charts Deborah’s blossoming self-confidence, so sunniness is the order of the day. But even in darker moments, when Daniel cheats on his wife Leann (Keri Lynn Pratt), the infidelity is treated as but a hiccup — the impetus for a couple dramatic scenes, but nothing to leave a mark. It’s hard knocks, perhaps, to ding a putative comedy for not being more of a drama, but that’s where most of Dorfman in Love‘s best moments lay — far less in any would-be romance, which unfolds with a yawn, but instead in its subject’s sometimes bumbling and sometimes self-effacing attempts to fully embrace the realization that she has a right to pursue her own happiness. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Brainstorm Media, PG-13, 91 minutes)

A moving chronicle of some of the traits that should be more widely venerated in a media and pop cultural landscape too driven by the elevation of the trivial, director Scott Mactavish’s documentary Murph: The Protector honors and celebrates the life of ex-Navy SEAL Lieutenant Michael Murphy, paying tribute to his personality, selflessness and service without succumbing to a less interesting, more knee-jerk wholesale lionization of the military. This is a tightly focused, deeply personal account of one man and soldier that, in rooting down into what made him so special to his friends and family, illuminates the best of American character.

Born in 1976, Michael was the type of guy in high school who would lash out at bullies trying to stuff another kid into a school locker. When his uncle passed away and his female cousins came to live with his family, Michael gladly gave up his room to them. Later, at Penn State, he made fast friends with a wide variety of folks. As his time at college wrapped up, Michael ditched plans for a legal career, deciding he wanted to try to join the Navy SEALS. He succeeded, and would serve honorably for several years before his life was claimed in a firefight in Afghanistan on June 28, 2005, the result of a tip to Taliban forces on the supposedly secret insertion of a four-man reconnaissance squadron of which Michael was the leader. In 2007, he would be posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, for his efforts to protect and save his men.

Murph: The Protector is built mostly around interviews with Murphy’s parents, Maureen and Dan, other family members and assorted friends, but also includes some parallel biographical stands from Hector Velez, the first recipient of a scholarship fund set up by Michael’s parents in his honor. Despite its somber ending, there are actually plenty of light moments along the way, like Michael’s friends recalling their shared childhoods and Maureen recounting Michael’s story to her about having to punch a hyena in the face during a late night run while on assignment in Africa.

Most moving, though, are the portions of the movie which detail the military’s outreach to Michael’s family, as well as the return of his body to Dover Air Force Base and Michael’s eventual funeral, which highlights the special fellowship of different types of first responders. Murph: The Protector isn’t a particularly sexy or dazzling movie; it eschews macro politics and the moves and ambition of statement filmmaking. It’s a simple portrait of true heartbreak, however, and sometimes that’s enough. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more general information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Mactavish Pictures, unrated, 77 minutes)

The action movie equivalent of the guy who, a couple years on from university, is still concerned with the sort of empty, cock-of-the-walk masculine posturing typically associated with teenagers, Olympus Has Fallen, or “Die Hard in the White House” as the pitch meeting surely went, attempts to graft geopolitical seriousness onto a swaggering siege tale, to ridiculous effect. A slick technical packaging by director Antoine Fuqua can’t offset the lumbering plotting and patchwork quality of producer-star Gerard Butler‘s vehicle — the first of two movies this year in which a Secret Service agent has to rescue the American president from a paramilitary takeover of his highly fortified residence. (The other, Sony’s White House Down, starring Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum, arrives this June). The thrill of the original Die Hard, the filmmakers seem to have forgotten, lay truly more in its brains than brawn. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (FilmDistrict, R, 117 minutes)

Inspired by Philip Shabecoff’s book of the same name, the ambitious documentary A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet takes as its subject the very history of American environmentalism. From the foundings of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club as well as the inaugural Earth Day through the Love Canal disaster, fights for global rain forests and the counter-revolution pushback of industry during the Reagan Administration on to climate change and more, director Mark Kitchell’s wide-ranging yet compelling film — essential viewing for those with a social conscience, and an interest in where we’ve been and where we’re going in the struggle for a better, sustainable planet Earth — showcases a rare and cogent macro-portrait skill unmatched in the arena of this topic since the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (First Run Features, unrated, 101 minutes)

Over the past three-and-a-half decades, the paranormal events at a house at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, a suburban tract along the south shore of Long Island, New York, have inspired all kinds of books — most notably Jay Anson’s 1977 bestseller — and 10 different movies. Make that 11, now. Director Eric Walter’s new film, however, is a bit different. My Amityville Horror is a documentary look at the events that terrified young Daniel Lutz and his family in late 1975, as told from the perspective and recollection of Lutz himself.

In December of ’75, young Daniel, part of a newly blended family, moved into the aforementioned Dutch Colonial-style house with his mother Kathy, younger brother and sister, and new stepfather George, a burly, bearded ex-Marine. Thirteen months earlier, Ronald DeFeo had shot and killed all six members of his nuclear family in the home while they slept. The Lutzes knew of this before purchasing the home and moving in, and didn’t have a problem with it. Over the next month-and-a-half, though, they would report all sorts of strange disturbances and chilling incidents, from swarms of flies and pockets of cold and overwhelming odors to apparitions, green slime and demonic possessions. In mid-January they would leave, sending a mover for their possessions and never returning again.

Rather understandably guarded by nature, Daniel, now a divorced UPS driver and father of two teens, is a frequently sympathetic figure (“All I walk around doing is protecting that 10-year-old kid,” he says of his memories, and interactions with others). He relates some of his recollections of events with detail, confidence and emotion, all of which certainly underscore his belief in them. And yet Daniel also confesses to a tremendous antipathy toward his stepfather, who would later delight in introducing himself as “that Amityville guy,” only one of many things that disgusted him about George. Daniel also doesn’t seem to connect any of this — the weird and/or supernatural events he describes the entire family witnessing, or his relative state of mind at the time in question — to what he calls George’s obsession with the occult, and skill with telekinesis.

Director Walter flirts around all these bizarre incongruities and coincidences, constructing his film in an unusual tapestral manner. Sometimes he is the off-camera interviewer, asking questions of Daniel; other times it’s a psychologist with whom Daniel isn’t in regular therapy. Still other times it’s a paranormal investigator who investigated the case years ago with the Lutzes. Also interwoven are a couple awkwardly structured roundtable-type chats with various academics and talking heads.

The net result is a movie that tantalizes, but always feels just off its mark. Walter does a poor job in establishing a basic chronological timeline of events, and, time after time, doesn’t follow up on what should be obvious questions — Daniel’s offhand mention, for instance, that he tried to kill his stepfather “many times.” Perhaps needing to kowtow a bit to keep his sensitive and potentially volatile subject in the fold, Walter doesn’t want to put to him hard questions regarding the potential suggestibility of a disaffected and lonely child reeling from “losing” the special relationship with his mother. So many years later, there is probably no easy or pat explanation of all the events in Amityville, but the aforementioned and other details (along with the fact that Daniel’s siblings declined to be interviewed for this project) help contribute to a skeptic’s point-of-view. My Amityville Horror opens this weekend at the Arena Cinema in Hollywood. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information in general, click here to visit the movie’s website. (IFC Films, unrated, 85 minutes)

What begins as a grand concept full of unusual possibilities — twinned, touching planets with opposing gravitational fields — quickly succumbs to a frustrating mixture of pretentiousness and torpor in Upside Down, Argentinean-born writer-director Juan Solanas’ dystopian romance, starring Kirsten Dunst and Jim Sturgess. A gussied-up, threadbare fairytale narrative that unfolds in perpetual pursuit of memorable images over narrative sensibility, this misfire illustrates the axiom that even if not all good ideas are original, all original ideas are certainly not good.



Unfolding against a backdrop of inter-world tension, the basic split on display in Upside Down tracks loosely along the same line as the recent Total Recall remake, except with contrasting gravities — the planet “up there” is a wealthy, business-oriented and exploitative one, while the one below it exists in poverty-stricken servitude. Despite this, Adam Kirk (Sturgess) and Eden Moore (Dunst) strike up an adolescent friendship when they meet at the mountain peaks that almost touch. As teens, it bends toward romance when Adam pulls her down into his world with a rope (visiting the other planet doesn’t release a person from the gravitational pull of their native planet). They canoodle, but when interplanetary border patrol agents attack them, Eden tumbles back into her world.

Flash forward a decade. Adam believes Eden to be dead, but it turns out that she was merely concussed, and has amnesia. In his desperate attempts to gain some face time with Eden, Adam gets a job at TransWorld working on an innovative face-lift cream based on a secret, gravity-neutralizing ingredient that’s been passed down for generations in his family. So begins Adam’s quest — with the assistance of disaffected co-worker Bob Boruchowicz (Timothy Spall) — to both devise a weighted suit to mask his innate gravitational pull and woo Eden all over again, all while maintaining a separate identity.

It all sounds outrageous, I realize, and it is, on a certain level. Yet for the uniqueness of its conceit, there’s a simplicity to the actual story at the movie’s core. The setting may be distinctive, but the narrative is anything but fanciful or unmoored. In fact, it’s kind of a yawn. (Various benchmarks include Another Earth, The Vow, Cloud Atlas, The Adjustment Bureau as well as pretty much the entire filmography of Andrew Niccol.) Solanas is clearly aiming for a sort of less-is-more lyricism. The problem is that Upside Down is loaded down by misstep after misstep.

First, and most crucially, is a lack of honest investment in the putative civil unrest between the worlds. Solanas’ simple little love story has a certain ceiling of intrigue, but what initially comes across as just piddling eventually comes to feel overwhelmingly insipid when the plot begins to revolve around Adam’s universe-revolutionizing formula. Upside Down then asks viewers to believe things beyond the pale — that an almighty and evil corporation like TransWorld can’t conduct a simple chemical analysis, or that they’d eventually be foiled by… having someone beat them to file a patent application (yes, seriously). Later, Solanas shoehorns in a ridiculous stepping-stone-type chase and shoot-out (you know, for “thrills”) that feels grafted on per some weird studio note.

I could go on (and on — don’t get me started on its stupid ending), but even the idea of further dissection wearies me, honestly. Terrible isn’t the right word to use to describe Upside Down, which suffers from a myopia that comes only with the indulgence of a Big Idea; it is a real, top-shelf mess, however. Dunst and Sturgess are fine, and have an OK chemistry together, but the film suffers from having so few supporting characters of note. While Spall brings a wry personality to Bob, he can’t breathe a convincing multi-dimensionality into his character. And, lacking characters, Solanas’ movie is just this strange, enervated mash-up of poorly sketched ideas tossed across an expensive canvas. It’s a tone poem of wobbly, inconsistent pitch. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Millennium Entertainment, PG-13, 103 minutes)

An odd little duck of a film, writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin’s If I Were You kicks around enjoyably for quite a while in the same sandbox as some of Woody Allen‘s mid-career farces, before eventually pivoting and skipping off into less rewarding territory. The story of a woman who accidentally learns of her husband’s infidelity and then enters into a strange friendship and pact with his unwitting mistress, this bouncy but meandering comedy would benefit from an editorial haircut that trims down some of its less inspired subplots.

It’s a shock for New York City focus group and marketing manager Madelyn Reid (Marcia Gay Harden) when she stumbles across her husband Paul (Joseph Kell) one afternoon in a restaurant, in a lover’s clinch with his mistress. When he gets nervous and scampers off after an exploratory phone call from her, the young woman, a would-be actress named Lucy (Leonor Watling), is despondent and hysterical. Madelyn follows her back to her apartment, where she foils a bungled suicide attempt.

When her unsuspecting rival opens up to her, Madelyn at first sees an opportunity to seize the upper hand. But Lucy, stressing their shared unhappiness, suggests that they start making choices for one another (“The way to fix our lives is to stop making our own decisions!”). Madelyn slowly accedes, and trips into a contemporized production of King Lear when she accompanies Lucy to an audition. Hijinks ensue, wouldn’t you know — with Madeyln lying to Paul about an affair she’s not having, Paul getting jealous about a co-worker of Madelyn’s whom he believes to be the offending cuckolder, and a handsome and affable stranger, Derek (Aidan Quinn, quite good), popping up at a moment of crisis.

It’s not merely the introduction of the King Lear gambit that makes If I Were You easy to imagine as a stageplay; it’s a fairly hermetic story, with lots of talky one-on-one or small couples scenes. This tack works for a while, but a sense of claustrophobia eventually sets in, aided by the movie’s lack of compelling visual vocabulary. It’s a low-budget offering, understandably, but Carr-Wiggin and cinematographer Bruce Worrall deliver a flat telling, and Aidan Leroux and Sean Breaugh’s spare production design offers little by way of distinguishing features.

If I Were You‘s abundant early charms are built largely around the amusing interplay of the distraught, distracted Harden and the deliciously flighty, simple-minded Watling. But several subplots — including one with married co-worker Keith (Gary Piquer), who’s enthusiastic about Paul’s infidelity, figuring it opens up the door for he and Madelyn to have a fling — aren’t as amusing as Carr-Wiggin imagines them to be. A far tighter focus, and re-imagination of the piece as basically a three-hander, would have given it greater punch and pay-off. As is, If I Were You is only worth a look for hardcore fans of the talent involved, or indie comedies of existential crisis more broadly. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. If I Were You opens in select theaters nationwide, and in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall 3. (Kino Lorber, R, 115 minutes)

Horror has always been a popular format for anthologizing, both because of its DIY roots and the fact that certain kernels of elemental discomfort often don’t quite rise to the merits of a full-length story or movie. A massive anthology film rooted in those children’s educational books from days of yore, producers Tim League and Ant Timpson’s The ABCs of Death corrals 26 short movies from 26 different directors — assigning each a letter of the alphabet and then giving them free reign in choosing a word (or phrase) to encapsulate a story involving death. It’s an interesting idea, certainly, but one that never fully congeals or takes flight, owing to the vast qualitative spread of the offerings.

A natural (and popular) selection at both last year’s Fantastic Fest and the Toronto Film Festival, The ABCs of Death features a number of known or critically anointed young genre directors, but also as much as anything serves as a hand-up showcase for young talent. That experiential diversity is reflected in the breadth of the work. Some entries are under-sketched while others, like Jon Schnepp’s aptly named WTF!, are stylistic orgies of pointlessness. Many, like Noburo Iguchi’s giggly-gross Fart, actually have a comedic bent.

Of the spread, though, seven were by my count passably entertaining, and only around five others truly superlative. The cream of the crop share a penchant for experimentation — the lifeblood of short-form film and video. Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet’s heady, gorgeously shot, investigational Orgasm leaves a mark upon one’s memory, as does Simon Rumley‘s grim Pressure, a slice of kitten snuff porn. Srdjan Spasojevic’s Removed tantalizingly hints at something deeper, while Xavier Gens’ deeply unsettling XXL presents a fat girl’s self-immolation. The best effort, though, may just be Marcel Sarmiento’s slow-motion Dogfight — a twisted, how’d-they-do-that rendering of an underground death match between man and dog.

It sounds perhaps racist to say, but The ABCs of Death could have perhaps benefited from a few more Western voices. A number of entries dote in yawning fashion on weighted topics that are familiar psycho-sexual stand-ins (Japanese schoolgirls, female body taboos), while others — with Nazis, and a girl with a tattoo of the exploding Twin Towers on her breasts — seem designed for empty shock. This compilation lacks some great genre minds, and overall pales in comparison to other recent anthologies. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Magnet Releasing, R, 129 minutes)