Mixing to pleasingly irreverent effect the same sort of light
social satire, dysfunctional family comedy and base physical gags that have
been part of its well-honed formula for almost 20 years, The Simpsons Movie smoothly jumps the yawning chasm from small
screen to large, delivering consistent laughs from the start-to-finish fallback position of a
wide, nearly uninterrupted smile.

The Simpsons Movie forward is Homer’s habitual indifference and
inattention, which drives Lisa and Marge up the wall and sends Bart, searching for a father figure, into the
open arms of do-gooder neighbor Ned Flanders.

There has to be a fleshed-out plot, of course, and The Simpsons Movie takes as its
launching-off point a premise of environmental destruction. With Springfield
teetering on the brink of ecological ruin thanks to its rampant pollution,
littering and illegal dumping, Homer unloads a silo full of his new pet pig’s
waste into the local lake. The effect is toxic, and draws the attention of
hard-charging Environmental Protection Agency chief Russ Cargill (voiced by
Albert Brooks), who advises President Arnold
Schwarzenegger (voiced by Harry Shearer) to seal off the entire rotten city with
a giant biodome.

With Homer scape-goated for their situation, the town turns
on the Simpson clan, who manage to accidentally escape the bubble, and briefly
set up a new family life in Alaska.
Old fractures quickly give way, however, and Homer — aided by an Inuit-assisted epiphany — is forced to embark on a
personal odyssey of redemption, seeking the forgiveness of Marge and his
family, as well as the salvation of his hometown.

It’s somewhat surprising how immediately suited for long-form narrative
the characters feel, and this is without even giving much more than lip
service throwaway jokes to many of the supporting players that have
come to flesh out the citizenry of Springfield. The only surprising thing might be that the movie doesn’t feature any
satirical musical numbers, something for which the television show has
become known. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. For more random thoughts and a few good joke bits (like how a book club reading of Tuesdays with Morrie sets off a riot), check back over the next several days.

The first audience member stood up when battery acid was about to be
poured on a young girl’s face, but, interestingly, walked down the
stairs to the edge of the theater, watched the scene and then returned
to their seat. Apparently, it wasn’t actually too graphic. Said person did
leave, however, along with two others, during a sequence in which the
same character is forced to drink a bloody milkshake made out of
eyeballs, ears and other bits of flesh. Ahh yes, another month, another
slice of offensive cinematic torture porn to raise the hackles of cultural critics and parents everywhere.

This time it’s Captivity, a serviceably rendered but entirely predictable piece of mental rot
directed by Roland Joffé. Opening in just over 1,060 screens, the movie pulled in a dismal $1.4 million in its debut frame last weekend, good enough to come in behind the fifth weekend go-round of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

The film’s plot, to the extent that its set-up is even really accounted for, finds young fashion icon and actress Jennifer Tree (Elisha Cuthbert, making House of Wax look like high art) drugged and kidnapped from a corporate-sponsored party. She awakens to find herself sealed in a subterranean metallic
tomb, where her shrouded captor tortures with barrages of light and
sound, and by means more nasty.
Jennifer eventually makes contact with a fellow captive, Gary (Daniel
Gillies), and the pair seeks solace in one another’s company, trying to
escape their hellish situation.

The first 15 to 20 minutes of the movie feature very little dialogue,
and we don’t see Jennifer interact in person with another human being; Captivity, then, is a filmic exercise in mind’s-eye stalking, with the movie’s
cinematography fetishistically mimicking the early surveillance footage
that provides the killer’s point-of-view. One would think that since Jennifer is a young and sexy celebrity, the
film might have some sort of (nominal) commentary about fame or the
obsession that public images can trigger in diseased minds, but it
really doesn’t. <Spoiler alert> There’s never any doubt as to Gary’s complicity in the
plot (if I’ve shocked you with that revelation, you deserve a punch to
the head), so the film becomes nothing more than a bunch of rather
arbitrary and artificially flavored torture and thrill sequences, the
nasty playing out of a string. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

I have a dirty confession to make. I’m a professional film critic and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth film in a franchise whose five efforts thus far have raked in a combined $3.5 billion domestically, is the first film in the series that I’ve seen.
This is irresponsible to some and baffling to most, but I find it rather amusing.

When the first movie came out, in November of 2001, I was the editor-in-chief and principal film critic of a now-defunct weekly entertainment paper here in Los Angeles, so I had my pick of the litter with regards to assignments. The thing was, I wasn’t necessarily as excited about Harry Potter
as the general populace. I’d heard good things about the books (even a
thumbs up from my mom), but hadn’t read any of them; given that my
regular job indulged such high amounts of escapist fiction, any time I
had left for reading invariably was devoted to biographies or something
of the sort, so I could feel like I wasn’t completely rotting my brain

The paper where I worked wasn’t invited to the film’s out-of-town
junket (in London), and I believe I had another, admittedly nominal
conflict the evening of the announced screening I first heard about
from a Warner Bros. publicist. So I passed the movie along to one of my fine and more than grateful freelancers; I think I reviewed Steve Martin’s Novocaine, Snoop Dogg’s The Wash, and the indies Maze and The Fluffer that week, four films which collectively opened on less than a quarter of the screens that Harry Potter did.

I followed with interest the intriguing choices of director for the
series, and some of the other gossip, but never really felt like I was
missing out. If anything, I thought fondly of a day 20 years hence,
just settling down one weekend with a stack of DVDs (or whatever form
of newfangled home exhibition was all the rage at that time) and
plowing through them all, my own little discovered pop cultural time
capsule. But now I’ve gone and ruined that a bit. And all in all, I have to say, I enjoyed the movie just fine.

It’s not as
bewildering of an experience as you might think, actually, wandering
into a series completely cold. You’re probably able to appreciate
certain things a bit more — certainly there’s no irrational attachment
to the novels’ exposition or detail in setting. I had no strong previous connection to the material, but was carried
along by the film’s rather savvy balance of wonderment with a sense of
impending doom and mystery. Coming out of The Order of the Phoenix, I can understand and more fully appreciate the series’ appeal, even without the same sum-total hourly commitment of shared darkness. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga) are well-to-do Manhattan parents whose idyllic lives begin to unravel after the birth of their second child. Baby Lily’s arrival is celebrated by Abby’s effete brother and Brad’s born-again mother, but the exceptionally precocious and well-coiffed nine-year-old Joshua (Jacob Kogan, above center) seems to harbor a swallowed resentment of his new sister — or at least that’s what the movie’s tremulous, piano-inflected score tells us. As Abby starts showing signs of wild-eyed strain that may or may not be an acute case of postpartum psychosis, Brad comes to suspect that the unnervingly mature and angelic Joshua may be the manipulative mastermind behind a series of increasingly unfortunate events.

This is another fashionably miniaturized sociopath’s tale, in the mold of last year’s remake of The Omen, but filtered tonally through the more cloistered disquiet of 2004’s Birth. To the nominal credit of director George Ratliff (the documentary Hell House, ha) and his co-writer David Gilbert, the film doesn’t load up on jump-scares and obvious music cues; its makers are reaching for a sense of accumulated domestic unease. Their methods, though, come across as indulgent of a whole other set of art-house clichés. Joshua may be unsatisfying in very precious, upscale ways, but it’s unsatisfying nonetheless. For the full capsule review, from CityBeat, click here and scroll down.

It’s not particularly surprising that Michael Bay personally introduced a recent screening of Transformers
by enthusiastically announcing that he was there “to make sure it’s
fucking loud.” This is a director, after all, who has built his entire
career around action brawn, pumped-up soundtracks, slow-mo visuals,
canted close-ups and a penchant for somewhat tacky
exclamation. Nuance is not really part of his vocabulary. Luckily for
him, it’s not the public’s most coveted quality in entertainment either. Having pulled in $8.8 million during its nationwide Monday
night sneak previews, and a record $27 million-plus from its opening
day haul (biggest Tuesday opening ever… blah, blah, blah), Transformers
is a big, old-fashioned blockbuster, that much is certain. Nothing that
I or any other critic might say about the movie will derail its
downhill momentum. Sequels will be spawned, a hearty line of spin-off
products launched, and a somewhat struggling studio (the newly
betrothed Paramount/DreamWorks) rejuvenated with a new franchise.

So what to make of Transformers’ success, especially coming on the heels of the all-out domestic implosion of Bay’s last film, 2005’s The Island?
The most immediate lessons are two-fold: 1) That special effects and a
suitably rousing trailer can really still rally the youth dollar; and,
2) As depressingly close-minded as such backwards-gazing nostalgia is,
Hollywood studios will continue to value name-brand properties — really
any franchise, almost — over original ideas, if only for their
perceived ability to deliver a built-in audience. Transformers, of course, is based on a toy line of convertible kids’ action figures from the 1980’s; with G.I. Joe I believe already in development, can a live-action Centipede, Pac-Man or Donkey Kong movie be far behind? For another full review of the movie, from FilmStew, click here.

With his one-two noir punch of 1994, consisting of the fantastic Red Rock West and equally serpentine and deliciously entertaining The Last Seduction,
director John Dahl made a convincing play for genre all-star honors. He
showed deftness with labyrinthine plot, a great touch with actors and
an ability to milk both menace and dark comedy out of the same scene.
Dahl’s career since those days, though, has been one of a seemingly
stalled engine. A quick studio gig re-teaming with Linda Fiorentino, Unforgettable, proved anything but so. The extremely underrated Rounders starred Edward Norton and Matt Damon, but released in 1998, just a couple years ahead of the full-fledged
poker renaissance; it grossed $22 million, which is probably about what
it would cost to get those two actors back together today. The modestly
budgeted and effectively taut Joyride, putting a slightly modern spin on Steven Spielberg’s classic Duel, rung up $36 million worldwide, Dahl’s biggest hit, but still didn’t break out commercially like many thought it could.
Then there’s the matter of 2005’s The Great Raid,
Dahl’s World War II rescue flick, based on a true story. Budgeted at a
reported $80 million, it was a total commercial washout, grossing only
$10.5 million worldwide.

The somewhat liltingly melancholic hit man character piece You Kill Me, then, represents a return-to-roots of sorts for Dahl — a characteristically small story
with mixed tonalities, about the sparks flying between headstrong
and/or wounded characters. It’s also the director’s first real foray
into comedy. Unfortunately, despite the slight novelty of some of its
performances, the movie never rises above anything more than the sum of
its fractured parts, and it lacks a strong enough narrative spine to
break out much further beyond arthouse devotees.

As an alcoholic Polish mob family killer, Ben Kingsley rolls together traits and trace character elements of several of his previous gangster incarnations (Lucky Number Slevin, Sexy Beast, Bugsy) and puts a sad-sack spin on them.
It’s a strange mixture — sometimes compelling, but also a little vague. For someone experiencing a supposed awakening of the mind or spirit, Kingsley remains surprisingly sedate and down-tempo. Téa Leoni, meanwhile, plays a tart-tongued saleswoman, with her own damaged past, who becomes the object of Kingsley’s character’s affection. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Bruce is back, baby. And he’s so comfortably besieged. While
a movie not without its faults, Live
Free or Die Hard is like hooking
up with an old girlfriend late one slurry night and realizing all the things
that were right about the relationship. Too rangy by half, the movie
doesn’t quite work in lockstep with the rest of the Die Hard series as a piece of ticking-clock containment, but it’s action-packed,
personality-driven, and at least achieves a certain nimbleness. While Len
Wiseman, of the Underworld series, is
a relatively anonymous director of action, he has a superlative team of
technicians with which to work here. The problem is that in scenes requiring
lots of talking, he typically shoots things too jittery and canted;
furthermore, a good handful of these scenes are quite simply awful in terms of
their coverage and editing, and the ADR overdubs covering up R-rated curse
words are derisible.

Where the film really
succeeds is as a piece of burly, cathartic, uncertain-world entertainment. “Did
you see that?” sputters Justin Long’s computer hacker at one point, to which
Willis’ battered, cynical super-cop replies reflexively, “See it? I did it!” In
the current geopolitical landscape of apathetic delegation, fuzzy-minded
operational objective and botched prosecution, there’s an escapist’s solace to be found in Live Free or Die Hard. Unlike our current leaders, John
McClane always seems to actually have the right answer at just the right
moment, with quip-laden assurance to boot. For
the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Transformers, an orgiastic action
extravaganza based on Hasbro’s line of convertible kids’ action toys. Some
likeable characters and early, intriguingly seeded plot strands of clandestine
overlap are sacrificed at the altar of expediency and clash, and in its third
act the movie suffers a tonal blowout, devolving into little more than a furious assault on the
senses. Powered by superlative special effects from Industrial Light & Magic, though, Transformers splays its budget and production value across the screen during almost
every scene, and the high hoo-rah factor should turn out young males in
droves.

Penned by screenwriting tandem Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (The Island, Mission: Impossible III), the film’s story is certainly no more preposterous than
the basic concept mandates. Trading especially on Sam’s home life,
the script locates a few smart points of entry for early pockets of humor, though
a sequence in which the Autobots impatiently hide outside Sam’s house
while he searches his room for a key piece of evidence drags on for far
too long. In fact, after a lengthy first act spent setting up
all the military intrigue, it’s somehow less than thrilling when
Autobot leader Optimus Prime and the other Transformers show up and
actually start talking. The wonderment of the conceit is punctured, and
a few of the robot exchanges come across as hammy, at odds with the established tone.

That said, Bay makes certain that the audience isn’t left wanting
for action, erring on the side of distended, explosive set pieces, as
he did most recently in both Bad Boys II and The Island. Trading in the sort of emphatic, canted close-ups and adrenalized style
that have been his hallmark throughout his career, Bay delivers quick-cut action made up of individually effective, sometimes even iconic shots. The
problem, for those sensitive to matters of rationality, is that Bay, for
all his arguable skill as a conjurer of sugar-rush catharsis,
frequently creates escape through reverse shots rather than any sort of
sensible internal story logic. There is little sense of spatial
coherence, and even less artful massaging of tension. The action, then, becomes the
cinematic equivalent of a false show-and-tell exercise — bravura
demonstration lacking any rooted truth, emotional weight or
involvement. For the full review, from Screen International, click here.

A Mighty Heart — a labyrinthine procedural and doomed investigative piece of glancing emotional blows, centering around the wife of kidnapped and ultimately beheaded Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl — comes to see the light of day just after the
official dawn of summer.

A very autumnal, let’s say, film releasing in
the midst of a lot of splashy, effects-laden fare, A Mighty Heart is a project built for the long-run, certainly. Still, even though it
stars tabloid favorite Angelina Jolie, its commercial prospects hinge
on how willing American audiences are to relive a story as complex as
it is unsavory in nature, particularly as news of more violence from
Iraq and abroad filters in over the next several months. As directed by Michael Winterbottom, the movie has the same sort of clutchy immediacy that Paul Greengrass brought to United 93 and The Bourne Supremacy; it’s a slowly building collage of dread and tension, this time infused with the slipperier elements of an inherently ungraspable foreign landscape. Though not conventionally cathartic, A Mighty Heart is powered throughout by the superlative lead performance of Angelina Jolie, and her portrayal is one of mesmerizingly tightened effect and distress — her very soul seems clenched. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Evan Almighty has as its lead certainly one of the hottest comedy stars working today in the form of Steve Carell, of  television’s The Office. Still, even filtered through the more forgiving lens of PG-dom, and giving its mash-up narrative conceit (part Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, part Noah’s arc bible story) a hall pass, Evan Almighty is a dispiritingly timid comedy of laid-track laffs.

I say “laffs” instead of laughs because there’s so little that’s either surprising or even genuine about this movie — it feels phony, in a rib-nudging sort of way, almost bizarrely, purposefully false. From every pore Evan Almighty exudes the feel of a meticulously corporate-vetted tale, and one so nakedly designed to radiate broad appeal that it ends up being a bore — and a rather predictable bore, at that.

From almost the get-go, Evan Almighty feels like the wrong choice for a spin-off to Bruce Almighty, just in terms of the story and where it’s taken. The smug, pompous Evan Baxter of the first film — a cameo bit player who finds himself the unknowing recipient of frustrated colleague Jim Carrey’s passive-aggressiveness — is completely gone, replaced with a generic-type sitcom dad, struggling to please the wife and kids with family time. Robbed of the comedic tension and opportunities that an erosion of this self-importance would provide, the movie becomes an exercise in visually tricked-out tedium. When Evan Almighty dips into its obligatory music montage of arc-building mishaps, Carell hits his thumb with a hammer not once, not twice… but three times, because, you know, comedy comes in triplicate. For the full, original review, from FilmStew, click here. (Universal, PG, 90 minutes)

Just as Jaws remade the modern blockbuster and kick-started
an era of imitators who frequently tried to cop its moves via a
misapplication of its lessons, so too has the overwhelming commercial
success and (only recently mitigated) critical embrace of the Spider-Man and X-Men films changed both the way that cinematic comic book adaptations are shepherded to the big screen and taken in by audiences.
In the summer of 2005, Fantastic Four
debuted to $56 million, en route to a $154 million tally domestically.
It was mostly reamed by critics, however, rightly derided as simple-minded,
bland and lacking in its execution. Fan-boys, meanwhile, as is their wont, nit-picked the movie
to death, carping over everything from the casting and costumes to its
storyline and effects work. When everyone finally pushed away from the
table, the result was a theatrical haul of more than $330 worldwide.
Still, there didn’t seem to be much happiness about the final product,
either amongst cast or audiences. Fantastic Four was an almost anonymous, flavorless hit, like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider or Van Helsing, each of which pulled comparable box office numbers.

A lot is riding on Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer,
then. And so it’s no coincidence that the sequel sort of circles the
narrative wagon, plays up some of the same thematic elements that the
character of Spider-Man has grappled with (a superhero’s place in the
world, trying to find some sense of normalcy in one’s private life),
and goes to painstaking lengths to plumb a tale that not just sets up
another installment but in fact actively flows to a third film.

Leaner than its predecessor, almost too much so, and also, to much derisive gossip, rated PG to the original’s
PG-13, Rise of the Silver Surfer will suffer the slings and
arrows of not being perceived as hip enough to qualify as a truly
“good” or substantial comic book film. And is there some truth to that?
Possibly, though I read precisely two Fantastic Four comics as
a kid, remember very little about them, and therefore feel no
duty-bound sense of outraged betrayal over any alleged pillaging or
besmirching of the source material.

It is true that Rise of the Silver Surfer is a relatively
streamlined movie of primary colors and emotions, and unmuddled motivations. It’s flip, and light of foot. But
every adolescent generation needs those sorts of pictures, right? And whereas the
first Fantastic Four didn’t really succeed in establishing a
compelling backdrop of heightened (or, on the other hand, hyper-)
reality, this iteration feels a lot more comfortable in its skin. Even
if that skin is of a children’s size. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here. For an interview with co-screenwriter Don Payne, meanwhile, click here.

As long as there have been horror movies, there’s been chatter about their undue influence on corruptible minors.
When we see images of Virginia Tech campus shooter Cho Seung-Hui posed
menacingly with a hammer, a la Chan-wook Park’s Oldboy, it
makes one wonder about the connections between the violent images and
content we as a society so readily accept and rapaciously consume in
our entertainment, and their place in and relationship to our real lives.

When it bowed in January of 2006, Eli Roth‘s low-budget Hostel
reignited the low-lying embers of that debate, exemplifying the
“torture-porn” trend in robust fashion on its way to an
overall worldwide haul of more than $80 million. Its sequel, costarring Bijou Phillips (above), is at once a fancifully heightened reflection of a very
tangible, real-world evil that’s always existed and also a movie of
such unapologetically grim, realistic strokes that you could envision
it serving as a  sort of trigger in maybe that one lonely, desperate, sick kid
out there with an inclination for violence.

So on the one hand, Hostel: Part II is offensive, yes, insomuch as it’s completely cognizant of the buttons that it so merrily pushes. One extended sequence finds a gun menacingly pushed directly into the
faces of seven or eight children, one by one. Another finds a naked
woman bathing in the arterial spray of a bound and gagged torture
victim, slowly slit open with a scythe. There isn’t — or shouldn’t be,
at least — any cathartic pleasure derived from watching these scenes,
which is why both this film and its predecessor can’t reasonably be
described as “good,” but rather instead bleakly accomplished.

Still, there have been and always will be works of music, literature and entertainment that demand context. This isn’t to say that Hostel: Part II is terribly complex, or a work of great or significant art, but to
acknowledge that both its commercial success — and the opposite reactions of
disgust that it produces — says something important about the cultural
crossroads at which we find ourselves. Roth has a sense of playful macabre humor, but is also chiefly a savvy fence-straddler
who, for the purpose of his career, came along at a particularly
fortuitous moment. It’s no surprise,
really, that he worked for David Lynch on material for the celebrated
filmmaker’s web site, because Roth’s own movies, dating back to Rotten Fruit and Cabin Fever, are an even more graphic extension of the queasy premise found in Lynch’s perhaps still most well-known masterwork, Blue Velvet: namely, that darkness and unspeakable depravity lurks just beneath the surface of tranquil normalcy.

For the full review of Hostel: Part II, from FilmStew, click here. Meanwhile, for more of Roth’s thoughts on the movie, and its NC-17 first-cut pass, click here.

A world-on-a-string kind of movie that restores a goodwill shine to the all-star series, Ocean’s Thirteen is a slick, pleasurable romp — a populist slice of entertainment that serves as a reminder of just how much fun summer movies can be. It plays like a stone skipping across water, like an old standard belted out effortlessly by a nouveau-style crooner, and it should absolutely slay at the box office, driven by mainstream, cross-demographic appeal and positive word-of-mouth.

The story dumps Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and his crew — including Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) and Linus Caldwell (Matt Damon) — back in Las Vegas, where they take a run at amoral hotelier and mogul Willie Bank (Al Pacino), who’s cheated Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould) out of his share of a new development, and induced in him a heart attack that’s left Reuben virtually catatonic. In a Robin Hood-esque plan, the gang conspires — in advance of Banks’ gala opening launch — to rig all the dice games, slots, blackjack tables, etcetera, at his casino, busting Banks’ bank and returning $500 million in winnings to patrons before inducing a cash-out by simulating an earthquake.

Utilizing “up-river” devices and trickery both low-fi and technologically advanced, this scheme requires that they trump an almost laughably advanced artificial intelligence security system and — eventually, when in a pinch — solicit the financial backing of former nemesis Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), a ploy that comes with its own set of dangers and conditions. It’s not just financial revenge that the guys are concerned with, however. They also set out to undermine Banks’ coveted and highly prestigious “Five Diamond” rating by making sure that the writer (David Paymer) assigned to cover the hotel opening has a miserable experience.

Distended, smug and stricken with a steep rate of depreciation, Ocean’s Twelve was faux-sly, its winking half-assedness substituting for subversiveness. In short, it was the sort of movie you walk out of with an uneasy smile, trying to convince yourself it was enjoyable. Penned by Brian Koppelman and David Levien — who with 1998’s underrated Rounders showed that they know their way around the jargon-filled world of gaming and gambling — this re-up is a return to roots, of sorts. Thankfully jettisoning Julia Roberts and any major angles of romantic intrigue, Ocean’s Thirteen is blithely unconcerned with lasting relationships, except to the degree that its plot is driven by fraternal devotion.

In focusing solely and clearly on the here and now, the film recaptures and in fact fortifies a big part of what made the first movie such a blast of fresh fun — namely, Clooney and Pitt looking dapper, a well-heeled ensemble expressing guy’s-guy exasperation with one another, and a rakish, revenge-fed heist/criminal story set on a 45-degree, downhill slope. Pleasingly paced and powered by a great soundtrack — David Holmes’ original score pulses along courtesy of a nice drum-and-bass line, with chiming chords scattered around it like tiny diamonds on bejeweled wristwear — this snappy, perfectly fizzy summer concoction delivers in smashing fashion on every plane on which it competes. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 122 minutes)

Surf’s Up attempts to extend the recent
public surge in affection for penguins, telling the buoyant, reciprocal story
of a mentor and pupil who ultimately each show one another sides of life they’ve
both been missing out on. Making substantial use of ascendant young star Shia
LaBeouf’s
personality, the likeable production puts a loose-limbed, mostly agreeable spin
on a story with a familiar for-love-of-the-sport moral.

Unfolding, in somewhat unlikely fashion, as a
character-focused documentary, the film chronicles headstrong teenage penguin
Cody Maverick (LaBeouf),
who leaves his Antarctic hometown of Shiverpool to follow his dream of becoming
a successful surfer. Befriended along the way by the distractible Chicken Joe (Jon
Heder), Cody arrives at Pen Gu Island just in advance of the Big Z Memorial
Surf Off, an annual competition named for Cody’s idol.

After meeting cute with lifeguard Lani Aliikai (Zooey Deschanel),
Cody immediately faces a setback in his efforts to dethrone the preening, jerky
reigning champion, Tank Evans (Diedrich Bader). Cast into exile for a few days,
Cody is taken under the wing of a laid-back, hermetic surfer (Jeff Bridges) who
becomes his mentor. With this help, Cody learns to balance his desire to win
with the pure pleasure of surfing, and the friendships and enjoyment that this
affords.

While generally shunning the over-reliance on big sound effects that
marks many kids’ flicks, Surf’s Up does make certain to include a number of
bodily function jokes. It also features a peppy modern soundtrack, driven by
toe-tapping alt-rock tunes from acts like Green Day, the Romantics, Incubus and
the New Radicals. Still, the movie’s mode
of expression — a lurking-narrator-style nipped from any number of popular
reality TV shows, peppered with canted angles, ironic framing and camera pans,
off-screen questions and the occasional broken-glass and wet lens effects — may
prove less easily graspable to the PG-rated picture’s chief demographic age
range. For the full review, from Screen International, click here.

Big screen comedy is of course a fickle thing. What constitutes a laugh
today can seem tired and played out only a few short years later, and
there are all sorts of barriers, both cultural and generational, that combine
to produce distinctively flavored subsets of humor. When it comes to
more willfully vulgar comedies, the slope is even slipperier. Life is
naturally a bawdy thing, but in the past 25 years there have only been
eight R-rated laffers to gross more than $80 million domestically, and
three of those were slices of the American Pie franchise.

Writer-director Judd Apatow’s feature debut, The 40-Year-Old Virgin,
joined that rare club in 2005, ringing up just under $110 domestically
and another $67 million overseas on the strength of his heady blend of
effusive personality, light raunchiness, heart, sexually frank dialogue
and quasi-improvisational hilarity. After years of still-birthing
critics’ darlings like Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared for the small screen, Apatow’s first film punched through with audiences in no small part due to its distinctive relatability, and it’s largely for this reason that Knocked Up — the story of a
one-night stand between a very mismatched couple (Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen), and a resultant
pregnancy that throws each of their worlds out of orbit — will almost
certainly join the aforementioned R-rated smashes in the box office
winners’ circle.

Refreshingly, Apatow allows for real arguments between his characters, and in Knocked Up he thankfully doesn’t feel obliged, by mandate of some test audience
scorecards, to tone
down a sequence in which his two leads say some really nasty things to
one another… and yet also never stop trying to see if they can work things between the two of them and reach some plane of accord. Despite all the masturbatory, vaginal and bodily function jokes, and
despite his high fidelity to topical one-liners, Apatow remains
seriously dedicated to assaying the
mysterious distance between men and women that alternately maddens,
entices, bemuses and confounds us all. Knocked Up is in its heart a film with a searcher’s soul. It just happens to also be a very funny, R-rated comedy. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

A lurching, zigzag tale of serial murder, killer
apprenticeship, malevolent reverence and cat-and-mouse investigation, Kevin
Costner’s Mr. Brooks puts a
deliciously warped spin on what are by now many prim and proper thriller
conventions. A throwback to a certain breed of wildly plot-driven thrillers
from the 1980s, the film surfs along on its own crest of rising ridiculousness
before slowly — and somewhat surprisingly — becoming something a bit more
interesting than it’s able to convincingly sell in its single-hook television
ads and marketing campaign.

Costner stars as Earl Brooks, an extremely successful and
highly regarded Portland businessman
whose family life masks a habit for serial murder urged on by his gum-chewing,
murderous id, “Marshall” (William Hurt). Glimpsed by a peeping Tom photographer
(Dane Cook) who plies him with a bizarre blackmail demand, Brooks accedes to the
request, perhaps taking up a protégé or perhaps biding his time before erasing
all of the incriminating evidence, and then the interloper himself. Against
this backdrop of uneasy partnership, Brooks’ daughter returns home from college
with a secret, and Brooks also takes an interest in the detective (Demi Moore)
attempting to catch him, working to erase an escaped killer convict who is stalking
her.

If elements of the movie’s execution are very occasionally
derisible, Mr. Brooks makes up for it
with sheer narrative audaciousness, spinning to its benefit the advantage of
genuine surprise (both good and bad) and arriving, comfortably in its own skin,
at a final resting point more wildly entertaining than good. It may be hooey, in other words, but it’s inventive and sugary sweet.

Scripted by director Bruce A Evans (Kuffs) with writing partner Raynold Gideon (Stand By Me), Mr. Brooks
is full of feints, but also, and more notably, bold choices. In a market full
of more slickly crafted movies that make safe selections, that has to count for
something. For the full review, from Screen International, click here.

Writer-director Judd Apatow scored a knockout success in 2005 with his
feature debut, The 40-Year-Old Virgin. With Knocked Up, he’s again come up with an
enjoyable movie of distinct personality — a heady cocktail of hilarity,
heart and light raunchiness. In telling the tale of two virtual strangers carrying a pregnancy to term, Apatow never over-polishes his story’s
premise; he establishes a few key parameters and instead relies on
smartly placed supporting players in bit parts (Harold Ramis, Joanna
Kerns, Alan Tudyk and large chunks of the casts of Saturday Night Live and The
Office) to bring individual scenes to a full boil. For a little capsule review on the film, from CityBeat, click here and scroll down. More to follow in the coming days…

The eye-popping excesses of the third installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean
franchise are, well, vast, but perhaps most easily summarized by a
watery tumble that puts Venezuela’s legendary Angel Falls and certainly
the United States’ Niagara Falls to shame. No simple metaphor, this
title: At World’s End literally takes its players to and over
the edge of the Earth (presumably, Sam Brownback is a fan), all in only
the first act of a blowout extravaganza that provides thousands of
special effects artisans a solid (if hardly exclusive) résumé credit.

That this film is essentially review-proof is a foregone conclusion, of
course, and not merely because of the $17 million it generated in
Thursday night previews, on its way perhaps to a record weekend take of
close to $200 million. So one needn’t dote much on the plot. Still, At World’s End might provide some interesting lessons
yet, as it could serve as the summer’s biggest and most lasting
reanimation of the age-old, oft-quarreled-over divide between critics
and the film-going public. The third installment of Spider-Man,
it’s true, split critics and fans (it’s currently teetering at 61%
positive on Rotten Tomatoes), but did so in interesting fashion. It was
precisely the emo-Peter Parker subplot and fanciful musical sequences
that beguiled many, if not all, writers, but proved toxic to every
avowed franchise fan boy. Because of its ambition and reach, as well as
some admittedly accrued goodwill, a lot of critics were willing to give
director Sam Raimi and the film a pass, essentially, while most comic book fans lashed out
at the movie’s atypicality and creativity, crying out for a simpler,
streamlined narrative. The battle lines here are of a different sort.
The first Pirates of the Caribbean
was a great and exceedingly well-colored, self-contained romp that had
just enough clever plot gambits and deftly interwoven supporting
characters. The sequels have then spun these off into empty theater.

What rings so inherently false about the putative conclusion of the Pirates
franchise is that there is no true or satisfying conclusion to speak of. Sure, things
“end,” much in the same fashion that one’s day does with sleep… only to
begin again. Leaving open (and openly encouraging the notion of)
separate franchise avenues for all major characters is, to be blunt, a
rather righteous and cynical cop-out. It smacks of weakness and not
knowing what to do save pad a running time with more visual hellfire, this
sort of desperate angling to be all things to all people. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Bug stars Ashley Judd as a haggard small town waitress caught up in a spin cycle of poor choices and revisited consequences. She hooks up with a quiet and nervous but kindly drifter (Michael Shannon, above right) who turns out to be an Army deserter, and it’s not long before his paranoid rantings about parasitic bugs in his blood stream have rubbed off on her, and they’re feeding off of one another’s wide-eyed, rampantly increasing obsession.

Bug tangentially recalls certain thrillers of containment like Cube,
movies which are constructed, at least to some degree, around a plot
device or setting that explains their limited production means. Another
movie Bug recalls in fits and starts, actually, is director Richard Linklater’s Tape, another stage-born, three-character piece, unfolding in a single dingy hotel room, in which old transgressions and recrimination are dragged out into the ugly, fluorescent light. Like Tape, Bug courses with a similar airborne tension born
of unreliable characters and shifting rationales. Unlike Linklater’s
film, though, Bug‘s act breaks are hard and
discrete, and if many of its set pieces individually contain a queasy, goosing
energy, in aggregate there’s not a smooth plane of ascension to all the
dizzied-up paranoia. Things become panicky, but remain willfully ambiguous. For director Friedkin, these buggy characters are enough of a reason to submit to the film. Those who enjoy arthouse character studies will likely agree, but mainstream audiences looking for the next big psychological disturbance
will have to wait a few weeks until Hostel II. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

“If you want to know the truth about someone, find a dream
and work backwards,” says the opening line of voice-over narration from Even Money, a
sprawling drama that tries to take a panoramic, bird’s-eye view of
gambling and addiction. If true in movies as in life, the roots of this ensemble film (whose cast includes Kim Basinger and Danny DeVito, above, as well as Forest Whitaker, Ray Liotta, Tim Roth, Jay Mohr and Nick Cannon) most
likely lie in a gassy fever dream induced by a bad Mexican meal.

Directed by Mark Rydell (On Golden Pond), the movie tries to
inject just a pinch of The Usual Suspects-type mystery into the proceedings, through
the frequent invocation of an offscreen mob kingpin named Ivan. As scripted by Robert
Tannen, though, Even Money is formless — there’s no hold to its overcooked drama,
and certainly no building momentum. Characters are either functionary, vague, shriekingly
contrived or some combination thereof. Coming on the heels of Lucky You just two weeks ago, this movie represents yet another losing Hollywood hand. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.