The Skin I Live In (2011)

October 21, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Horror, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

La piel que habito
**½/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, Jan Cornet
screenplay by Pedro Almodóvar, based on the novel Tarantula by Thierry Jonquet
directed by Pedro Almodóvar

by Angelo Muredda “Don’t pay attention to the surfaces,” Antonio Banderas’s mad scientist cautions maid and unofficial secret-keeper Marisa Paredes as she approaches a cluttered countertop late–or is it early?–in Pedro Almodóvar’s latest genre- and gender-hopping melodrama, The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito). It’s a joke, of course: the film, whose literalized English title mangles the Spanish pun on habito as both living and occupying, say, an outfit, is obsessed with surfaces and the ambiguous plumbing that supposedly runs deep below the tissue. Trouble is, The Skin I Live In is almost all surface–a beautifully carved wooden doll without any innards. That the doll should proudly display its hollow centre, which the movie does in numerous winks at its own clever vapidity, is admirable enough. But Almodóvar, never one to shy away from an operatic climax or three, overdoes it even by his standards, turning the last act into a morality play about protecting your integrity–your true, unseen self–against the skin-deep scars inflicted by other people. It’s a nice conceit that might have rung true, or at least wrung tears, if the true self in question wasn’t a total blank.

The Thing (2011)

October 13, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Ulrich Thomsen
screenplay by Eric Heisserer
directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.

Thingquelby Walter Chaw Just talking time, I've been waiting for this prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing almost twice as long as I waited for Episode I, and if the disappointment seems inversely proportional to the duration of the anticipation, chalk it up to me probably being too old to be duped like that again. (There's also the thought that Episode I killed anticipation for my entire generation.) To be fair, this Thing prequel (hereafter The Thing-quel), which imagines the happenings at the Norwegian camp prior to the titular alien finding Wilford Brimley and Kurt Russell's beard, isn't nearly as boring and/or offensive as a senate debate, a naval blockade enacted by space-Japs, and a hike in the desert surrounded by evil Jews and Arabs in the company of a Jamaican Stepin Fetchit. No, the only thing Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.'s (son of Matthijs van Heijningen, the IMDb helpfully informs) The Thing-quel does is mill around tepidly while demonstrating that Rob Bottin's seriously fucked-up creature effects from the original lose their soul when squeezed through the mainframe of a giant computer. What truly depressed me, though, were the sheer number of people at the public screening I attended with no awareness of the 1982 film, who were thus breathless with anticipation that the closing credits–which set up the opening of the Carpenter flick–were setting up some kind of remake-cum-sequel. As experiences go, it's somewhere south of getting kicked square in the sack.

Real Steel (2011)

October 7, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, India, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Sports, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Dakota Goyo, Evangeline Lilly, Anthony Mackie
screenplay by John Gatins
directed by Shawn Levy

Realsteelby Walter Chaw There’s really no excuse for Real Steel, a Frankenstein contraption made up of spare parts from middle-American fairytales like Field of Dreams and underdog sports intrigues starting with Rocky, I guess, and building all the way through to junk like The Rookie and any number of films just like it that appear with what seems like annual reliability. Set a few years from now, in a world where for some reason people have decided they love to watch giant robots fight each other in place of good ol’ primate bloodsport, it has going for it the most bucolic vision of the future since “The Jetsons”. Indeed, there are so many gorgeous shots of waving wheat and bilious white clouds that it’s fair to wonder if Ridley Scott directed it. Alas, Shawn Levy, the genius behind Night at the Museum, The Pink Panther, and Cheaper by the Dozen directed this cynical piece of bathetic crap and his sticky, syrup-coated paws are all over it, from the movie’s flat, unimaginative staging to its absolute inability to be non-didactic in its presentation. (The biggest surprise? That there isn’t a flatulent dog around for cheap reaction shots.) Already legendary for how quickly its trailers revealed it to be possibly the worst idea since Buck Henry pitched “The Graduate, Part 2” at the beginning of The Player, Real Steel–the condescension starts with the quasi-inspirational dual-meaning of its title–swiftly becomes legendary in its own right for somehow being exactly as bad as you thought it was going to be.

The Interrupters (2011)

October 7, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Documentary, Theatrical

***/****
directed by Steve James

by Angelo Muredda There’s a bracing moment late in Steve James’s new documentary The Interrupters when a host of Chicago neighbourhood teens pay their respects to Derrion Albert, a 16-year-old beaten to death in a gang skirmish outside his school. Fidgeting in their pews and adjusting their hats (for the camera?) at his memorial service, they take in their surroundings as if, as one commentator opines, they’re at a dress rehearsal for their own funerals. The Interrupters is full of such alarming insights. A fly-on-the-wall chronicle of a year in the life of three so-called violence interrupters, it puts us on the frontlines of a number of intense encounters on Chicago streets without losing sight of the generational crisis that undergirds each of these potentially shattering exchanges between kids who don’t expect to live past 30. Both James and producer Alex Kotlowitz, whose NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE article on the violence-prevention efforts of an organization called CeaseFire inspired the film, ensure that the stakes are high; the camera frequently catches ephemeral stuffed-animal memorials, charting a haunted path through marked playgrounds and bus stops. If the filmmakers’ subdued reverence for their protagonists sometimes keeps them from fully exploring their complex subject, the result is nevertheless a devastating polemic about retraining fatalistic teens to think of themselves as having a future.

Moneyball (2011)

September 23, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Sports, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright
screenplay by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, based on the book by Michael Lewis
directed by Bennett Miller

Moneyballby Angelo Muredda Moneyball arrives after years in development hell with nearly as much baggage as the Oakland A's. A Steven Soderbergh project scrapped at the eleventh hour of pre-production and inherited by a high-pedigree team composed of Capote director Bennett Miller and scribes Steven Zaillian (the lone holdover) and Aaron Sorkin, it's as much a reinvention of the discarded film–apparently pitched as a data-saturated docudrama–as it is an adaptation of Michael Lewis's best-selling non-fiction book of the same name. No matter: Soderbergh successfully redirected his energy into Contagion, a snappy procedural lobbed to the same stats fetishists who might've warmed to his Moneyball, while Miller has delivered an affecting and deceptively conventional baseball movie that works on its own terms. Oscar-bait it might be, but Moneyball is surprisingly fresh, especially in how it shifts focus from the unexpected winners that most sports stories fawn over to a few perpetual losers who live off the wistful fumes of second-place finishes.

Drive (2011)

September 16, 2011Posted in****/****, 2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks
screenplay by Hossein Amini, based on the novel by James Sallis
directed by Nicolas Winding Refn 

Driveby Walter Chaw The pink, cursive font of the opening credits immediately calls to mind '80s classics like Smooth Talk while the obsessive interest in functionality and work (and Cliff Martinez's awesome Tangerine Dream soundtrack) recalls Michael Mann's Thief, but it's that certain quality of masculine stillness that marks Drive as another Nicolas Winding Refn masterpiece. Its story is boilerplate noir: loner (Ryan Gosling) falls for young mother (Carey Mulligan) and is forced by circumstance to protect her and her son (Kaden Leos) against all the bad men. Drive is, in other words, Taxi Driver if Mann had made it in the eighties, a meticulous character study done in long, drawn-out takes and extended silences punctuated now and again by extreme violence. It's a smart movie–a quintessentially L.A. one, too, in its self-awareness (the nameless hero is a stuntman, Richard Rush fans take note), and it has an extraordinary quality of stillness that paints in confident strokes what it feels like to be completely alone by luck you call choice. A late scene with "Driver" holding himself around the middle, then getting in his car as Refn splashes neon on him and The Chromatics play on the soundtrack is something like a perfect moment in a film indicated by them.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (d. Lynne Ramsay)

September 8, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Theatrical, TIFF, TIFF 11
Elliptical, sprawling, transfixed by the natural or at least the pseudonatural (chiefly, food), We Need to Talk About Kevin confirms that Lynne Ramsay is the heir apparent to Terrence Malick in more ways than just her lack of prolificacy. But she shows that his method can be used to more sobering, less transcendental effect. Where billowing curtains are a hopeful, ethereal symbol in The Tree of Life, here they signify death; where Malick has locusts wreak biblical havoc on the farm in Days of Heaven, Ramsay has ants devour a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich left angrily smeared on a glass coffee table.…

Seven Days in Utopia (2011)

September 7, 2011Posted in2011, Drama, Family, Sports, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Robert Duvall, Lucas Black, Melissa Leo, Kathy Baker
screenplay by David L. Cook & Rob Levine & Matthew Dean Russell & Sandra Thrift, based on Cook's novel Golf's Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia
directed by Matthew Dean Russell

Sevendaysinutopiaby Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Bursting at the seams with God/daddy issues but evincing no desire to confront (or even acknowledge) them, Matthew Dean Russell's Seven Days in Utopia is something like a hyper-wholesome, hyper-mainstream response to The Tree of Life. And what do you know? It's awful. After suffering a major breakdown during an important game, disgraced young golfer Luke Chisholm (Lucas Black) retreats to the small town of Utopia, Texas, where he meets an old landowner named Johnnie (Robert Duvall), who just happens to be a former golf champion. Johnnie is willing to teach Luke the ropes and maybe remind him of what's important, i.e., living for yourself and all of that good sports-movie stuff. Putting your faith in the Almighty figures in there somewhere, too, but while the film was made with an unavoidable Christian slant, the problem with Seven Days in Utopia is hardly a matter of ideology. Look past the squeaky-clean landscape promised by its G rating and you'll find it has no ideology at all.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2011)

August 26, 2011Posted in2011, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mexico, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Katie Holmes, Guy Pearce, Bailee Madison, Jack Thompson
screenplay by Guillermo Del Toro & Matthew Robbins, based on the teleplay by Nigel McKeand
directed by Troy Nixey

Dontbeafraidofdarkby Walter Chaw There are so many opportunities squandered, so many set-ups dishonoured, so many promising moments clearly assembled into incoherence in the editing bay, that it's kind of amazing how Troy Nixey's Don't Be Afraid of the Dark still manages to coast along on its monsters and its lovely, gothic atmosphere. It's not a good movie, but it's a good time, for the most part–the part where you're not thinking about how irritating it is that in movies like this parents are constantly leaving their children in peril. Produced by Guillermo Del Toro, the picture feels an awful lot like another Del Toro production, 2008's The Orphanage, which also provides solid atmosphere, a couple of gross-outs, and an overall feeling of pleasant well-being. The major difference is that Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is so disjointed and spotty that the predominant aftertaste is frustration. What a shame.

Conan the Barbarian (2011)

August 19, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Bulgaria, Fantasy, Germany, India, Theatrical

*/****
starring Jason Momoa, Stephen Lang, Rachel Nichols, Ron Perlman
screenplay by Thomas Dean Donnelly & Joshua Oppenheimer and Sean Hood
directed by Marcus Nispel

Conan2011by Walter Chaw It's hard for me to hate on Marcus Nispel's unwell Conan the Barbarian too much, mainly because its failings are more a matter of incompetence than of real malice. There are few pleasures as gratifying as Robert E. Howard's testosterone-rich raving, and for a while there, the movie looks to have found the mad amplification that typified the Texan author's best work. But when the wheels come off–and they come off right around the time that Conan's dad, played by Ron Perlman (naturally), checks out–the whole mess goes careening off the proverbial cliff. If only the rest of the film were as mad as its opening, with a young Conan (Leo Howard) demonstrating his innate birthright to slay every single thing within arm's reach by presenting two handfuls of severed-head to his thunderstruck village after a brutal scuffle in the forest. The level of lawlessness in its first half-hour is as legendary as the brilliant prologue to John Milius's original, from Conan's birth-by-unplanned-Caesarean on a raging battlefield to the presence of none other than Morgan Freeman, lured into a payday to provide solemn narration.

The Future is Now: FFC Interviews Miranda July|The Future (2011)

August 7, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Ian Pugh, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Interviews, Romance, Theatrical, UK

MjulyinterviewtitleMiranda July reflects on The Future

THE FUTURE
***/****
starring Hamish Linklater, Miranda July, David Warshofsky, Isabella Acres
written and directed by Miranda July

In The Future, writer/director/star Miranda July indulges in the same wayward malaise of her previous film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, but, somewhat ironically, the focus on the uncertainty of "what comes next" makes this one seem a lot less scattershot. Dance teacher Sophie (July) and tech-support guy Jason (Hamish Linklater) have rescued a sickly cat from the wild and sent him to an animal shelter, and they've got a month until they can reclaim him. However, the cat will require 'round-the-clock care from them to stay alive, so they conclude that this is their last "free" month before years-long responsibilities squander their potential, and they quit their jobs in a bid to become more "spontaneous." Jason goes door-to-door selling trees for an environmental program and Sophie decides to film "thirty dances over thirty days" for a short-track to YouTube stardom. But neither one is prepared for the apathy and self-loathing that greets their cutesy little endeavours, and as they spin their wheels, they gravitate towards people who appear to "really have their shit together": Sophie becomes attracted to a single father with a small business (David Warshofsky), while Jason regularly visits an old man (Joe Putterlik) who once sold him a used hairdryer. What's important is that July quickly establishes that these behaviours are not a matter of self-improvement or jealousy–it's just a hell of a lot easier to stare at the lives of others and marvel at how organized they look from the outside. In other words, Sophie and Jason take no real "action" of their own accord; everything they do is just another bit of slacktivism to avoid the responsibilities for which they're supposedly preparing. Her self-esteem takes a hit as she views other women's "dancing" videos, so she cancels her Internet and calls it a great opportunity to focus. July makes this sheltered worldview all the more fascinating by introducing an element of surrealism–soon, her characters' paradoxical desires to move forward and stand still give them to power to bend the universe to their will, as an imminent break-up is stalled by the literal stoppage of time. (And yet, time still manages to march on.) The self-conscious obviousness of its metaphors give The Future a strong grounding in reality, rendering even July's silliest notions–such as a series of helium-inflected monologues from the cat himself (the only neglected "victim" in this scenario), waiting for his loving masters to return–deeply affecting.–IP

August 7, 2011|Miranda July is very much like the characters she plays, and they are very much like her: she stares at you with wide, intense eyes, and her responses trail off once she realizes that she's revealed all she wants to about a given subject. She's in town to promote her second feature film, The Future, for the Boston Independent Film Festival, and we both seem a little eager to discover if indeed this sophomore effort can be discussed at length. Over the course of our conversation, we shared a couple of awkward laughs–in mutual recognition, I think, of the inherent absurdity of this meeting; we had been tasked to interpret and explain an intentionally abstract piece dealing with moving on and growing older, about which the creator must refuse a "full" explanation. Still, though July insists on keeping some things secret, she comes across as utterly sincere–so much so that I felt a pang of remorse when I realized that I had unintentionally lied to her by not attending the festival's screening of The Future like I said I would. Several days later, given another interview opportunity for a different film, I made it a point to ask her husband Mike Mills to apologize on my behalf.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

August 5, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring James Franco, Freida Pinto, John Lithgow, Andy Serkis
screenplay by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver
directed by Rupert Wyatt

Riseoftheapesby Walter Chaw Perverse, terrifying, hilarious in exactly the right way; smart enough, emotional enough, and at the end uniquely satisfying in any number of hard-to-quantify ways, Rupert Wyatt's Rise of the Planet of the Apes (hereafter Rise) overcomes even James Franco–here miscast as a human–to produce something of a minor masterpiece. A prequel to the classic series' prequels-as-sequels, it follows the ascendancy of chimp Caesar (Andy Serkis, typecast in motion capture) as he's genetically engineered to be intelligent through an accident of birth, only to grow progressively more so in time with the devolution of adoptive human grandfather Charles (John Lithgow), who's ravaged by the Alzheimer's disease that the drug that makes Caesar smart was meant to cure. So while there's a decided "Flowers for Algernon" effect of the stuff on humans, in ape-kind it just sort of escalates geometrically, thus presenting Rise as kindred in spirit to J.J. Abrams's Star Trek reboot: problem-solving at the same pace it's delivering exceptional character moments and well-timed action sequences. Like Star Trek, too, incidentally, it's a wonderful surprise.

Bellflower (2011) + The Change-Up (2011)|Bellflower – Blu-ray Disc + DVD

August 4, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical

BELLFLOWER
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Evan Glodell, Jessie Wiseman, Taylor Dawson, Rebekah Brandes
written and directed by Evan Glodell

THE CHANGE-UP
½*/****
starring Jason Bateman, Ryan Reynolds, Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde
screenplay by Jon Lucas & Scott Moore
directed by David Dobkin

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Bellflower earns the right to its melodrama by asking what you have to live for and, more importantly, what you're willing to do to keep your life uncomplicated. Woodrow (writer-director Evan Glodell) and Aiden (Taylor Dawson) don't seem to have much of a life beyond hanging out with their friends and drinking too much–but their minds were suitably "warped" by a second-generation VHS tape of Mad Max. Now they spend their days constructing flamethrowers and muscle cars destined to fit right in with that film's end-of-the-world milieu. Woodrow hooks up with a young woman named Milly (Jessie Wiseman), and as the relationship blossoms (and breaks down), Glodell takes the opportunity to explore the unfathomable guilt and anger that drove George Miller's original road warrior–as well as what Glodell's own heroes have failed to understand about his journey. When we first meet him, Woodrow doesn't know too much about guilt or anger, so his coping mechanisms are extremely fractured. Confrontations with others are typically brief, sometimes without logical end, and the director intentionally tones down most of the violence so that his characters can wallow in passive-aggressive detachment. Sometimes the violent images are chopped out entirely, only to be saved for later in the movie, where they may or may not have been mentally re-edited by Woodrow to conform to a more favorable outcome. That's the thing about the apocalypse: it never goes quite the way you want.

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

July 29, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, India, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

½*/****
starring Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell
screenplay by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman & Damon Lindelof and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby
directed by Jon Favreau

Cowboysaliensby Walter Chaw Let’s be clear: if there were a Hippocratic oath for movies, and there should be, it would be “first, do not suck.” It’s not about any desire for depth in something called Cowboys & Aliens, but rather the hope that the movie achieves some kind of baseline competence without, along the way, tripping off issues it doesn’t have the muscle to address and therefore shouldn’t also try to ride to an illusion of depth. It’s the difference between Brett Ratner using the Holocaust as a plot point in X-Men: The Last Stand and Matthew Vaughn doing the same in X-Men: First Class; I mean, talk about it or not, but if you bring it up, have something to say. So when Cowboys & Aliens director Jon Favreau casts Adam Beach as the adopted–and hated–black-headed stepchild of racist cattle baron Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford, gruffing it up in a role named after the serial killer in Red Dragon), he needs to do better than offer up a noble Redskin who, with his last martyred breath, all but invites his would-be dad to go be white with his real boy, Dolarhyde’s psychotic son Percy (Paul Dano). It’s the message of the film, sort of, where no message was necessary or even welcome–this transformation of Dolarhyde from a rawhide-chewing bastard into a dewy-eyed, dyed-in-the-wool liberal who lowers himself to rescue the chief savage (Raoul Trujillo) after taking a second to complain about the disconnectedness of Yankee leadership in the Union army. It’s enough to root for the South to rise again.

The Smurfs (2011)

July 29, 2011Posted in2011, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Canada, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Neil Patrick Harris, Jayma Mays, Sofia Vergara, Hank Azaria
screenplay by J. David Stem & David N. Weiss and Jat Scherick & David Ronn
directed by Raja Gosnell

Smurfsby Walter Chaw Between preaching its preach about not being pigeonholed and the importance of living life in the moment, Raja Gosnell’s The Smurfs misses no opportunity to talk about the superficiality of Smurfette (voice of Katy Perry) discovering her secret shopping bug; Gargamel (Hank Azaria) turning an “old lady” into a balloon-chested hottie; and human hero Patrick (Neil Patrick Harris) helping his harridan cosmetics boss Odile (Sofia Vergara) sell gallons of snake oil to the Vanity Smurfs (voice of John Oliver) of the world. There’s also a lot of pissing, puking, shitting, and farting; a disturbing running joke about putting heads on a pike; highly-imitable and often-disturbing cat violence; and a wave of overwhelming weariness that rolls off these Alvin and the Chipmunks/The Sorcerer’s Apprentice pieces of shit that tend to flop but never hard enough to prevent the clockwork arrival of another something just like it. Fact is, the kid-movie market is too lucrative to not take homerun swings at it with ’80s-nostalgic, high-concept falderal such as this; fact is, too, that The Smurfs, et al, come coated in critic-repellent asbestos, because no matter how deadening and odious something is, as long as your pliant and uncritical children enjoy it, it’s fine. What were you expecting, Citizen Kane? Were that the same rationale applied to food made for children: what were you expecting, free of salmonella and rat turds?

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II (2011)

July 15, 2011Posted in2011, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Mystery, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by David Yates

Harrypotter7bby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Not having read the final book in the Harry Potter series, I fear I spent the last hour-and-a-half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 2 (hereafter Harry Potter 7.2) thinking that Professor Snape (Alan Rickman) was Harry's father. And there's the problem, really–not that it's so insular that only people who've read the books can understand it, but that it's so myopic in its insularity that it doesn't realize that what it's saying on the screen is pretty contrary to what's explained on the page. It's not that there wasn't time, either, over the course of these five hours, to address obvious misunderstandings and obscurities (why, for instance, doesn't everyone always cast the "kill" spell, since it seems pretty effective), as there was certainly enough time to pack in a horse-cart full of characters pointing to their chests and weepily declaring that their dead pals will "always be right here." Mostly, it reveals an author in J.K. Rowling–who was setting up a genuinely extraordinary ending to her dip in the archetype pool–engaged in a lot of self-pitying sobbing over grandiloquent gestures, group hugs, and an epilogue set 19 years hence that brazenly sucks, simply because she didn't have the muscle to pull the proverbial trigger. More egregiously, by failing to honour her own story with the proper ending, Rowling betrays real post-feminist icon Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), the "most gifted wizard of her generation" (and low-born to boot), squandered to tertiary status in this instalment before being dismissed into domesticity. An author who by the end was driven perhaps too much by her fans (she admits in an interview that she "didn't have the heart" to kill Arthur Weasley–one wonders if she ever considered killing Harry as she ought) is behind a handsome, crisp film that is, alas, ultimately for her fans only.

Horrible Bosses (2011)

July 7, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, Jamie Foxx
screenplay by Michael Markowitz and John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein
directed by Seth Gordon

Horriblebossesby Ian Pugh A straight-white-male fantasy of the most ridiculous order, Horrible Bosses begins with a trio of working shmoes who are, ironically, comfortable enough to go drinking every night and bemoan how their bosses are making their lives a living hell. Office jockey Nick (Jason Bateman, in his best performance in ages) has been passed up for a promotion by the sadistic Harken (Kevin Spacey); dental assistant Dale (Charlie Day) works under constant sexual harassment from Julia Harris, DDS (Jennifer Aniston, hilarious for a change); and chemical-plant employee Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) is suddenly thrust into the dominion of middle-aged frat boy Bobby Pellit (Colin Farrell, perfection). They can't just quit their jobs because the economy's in the toilet, so the only sane solution is for them to band together and kill their employers. The joke that propels the film is that their poorly-conceived plans amount to little more than one of those online "kill your boss" simulators, and Horrible Bosses occasionally seems to acknowledge its plot as a grossly oversimplified game. A recon mission yields no intel that would be useful to these would-be hitmen, while Kurt puts Pellit's toothbrush up his ass and Dale plays "Angry Birds" on his iPhone to work off an accidental coke binge.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)

June 29, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Michael Bay, Spielberg, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Frances McDormand
screenplay by Ehren Kruger
directed by Sir Michael Bay

Transformers3by Walter Chaw It starts, maybe, with the moment Frances McDormand, as an NSA bigwig, declares that evil alien robot Decepticons should pass through customs. No–earlier, when noble alien robot Autobots infiltrate some nameless Arab state to murder Arabs. It might begin when fucking asshole Michael Bay does a long tracking shot following–in 3-D!–the toned, tanned ass of impossible-looking Carly (Victoria's Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) as she climbs a flight of stairs to straddle her ugly mutt boyfriend Sam (Shia LaBeouf)–a pairing that at least in part explains the decades-long appeal of Ron Jeremy as a porn icon. Or maybe it's the extended profanity ("dick, asshole, clusterfuck, bitch, shit" in a long-playing loop), the wholesale and semi-graphic murder of innocents by both sides, the way the robots bleed in crimson arterial sprays in this PG-13 movie, that instigates the realization that Transformers: Dark of the Moon (hereafter Transformers: Asshole) is a new low watermark for Bay and this naughty-little-boy franchise that highlights Bay's misogyny, puerility, and imbecility for all the world to see. Better, it works as a fine illustration of how this industry of ours that I spend a lot of time defending is in bed completely with the Michael Bays of the world, who represent, I think, the money-making potential of any industry that consents to peddle vice and venality to children. Think of the cash a live-action hardcore porno based on the Barbie license would bring in. Let's get on that, Bay and Zack Snyder, and give out heroin with the purchase of a ticket while we're at it. The first one's free, little girl.

Cars 2 (2011)

June 24, 2011Posted in2011, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Sports, Theatrical

*½/****
screenplay by Ben Queen
directed by John Lasseter

Cars2by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Trading the ’50s Americana of the original for ’60s British adventure, Cars 2 seems, for a moment there, like it might actually work. The inhumanity that Walter Chaw correctly attributed to Cars scores a few subversive points in this sequel, filled as it is with complicated stunts that are, amusingly, impossible for automobiles to perform. (Even sillier: all of the anthropomorphic spy cars are retrofitted with Gatling guns and assault rifles.) But all is lost as tow-truck hick Mater (voice of Larry the Cable Guy) takes centre-stage in a convoluted espionage scheme, meaning that Cars 2 stoops to the same mistaken-identity spy parody that children’s movies have beaten into the ground since 1966’s The Man Called Flintstone. The subversion runs completely dry after the pre-title sequence, as our resident Connery (?) Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) jumps and shoots his way across oil derricks, only to hand over the reins to the blander heroes of the previous film. So the same old car jokes prevail as Pixar keeps shovelling coal onto a dead fire. Find one more extraneous character in Finn’s liaison Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer), whose primary function is to prove that Bondian double-entendres don’t have much impact when everyone’s name is a double-entendre.

Green Lantern (2011)

June 16, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Tim Robbins
screenplay by Greg Berlanti & Michael Green & Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg
directed by Martin Campbell

Greenlanternby Walter Chaw Martin Campbell's Green Lantern is just awful. It's a mess, a boring mess, featuring boring Ryan Reynolds in a skin-tight green super suit (and not-boring Blake Lively, not) trying to "grow up" and accept the responsibility of becoming an intergalactic Dudley Do-Right–a titular "Green Lantern," which in the DC UNIVERSE parlance apparently means that you say crap about will being stronger than fear and manifest a giant Matchbox race set as the best way to save a crashing helicopter. Cool? Cool if your concept of cool is The Last Starfighter as written by Tony Robbins. There's just so much empowerment going on in this thing, and unresolved daddy issues that are raised without any clue as to how to parallel the dysfunction in the characters or honour what is fast turning out to be this year's driving thematic force. It's no wonder, really, that the bad guy in this one is a giant mess of cosmic goo called "Parallax": the picture jumps around from one point-of-view to another with no sense to bridge the turbid gulfs between them. Worse, Green Lantern's threat to go the ambiguous, Dark Knight, fight-fear-with-fear route fails to materialize in the loudest possible way with an unintentionally-hilarious nonsense soliloquy delivered before a council of detached Kuato. I didn't think I'd see a movie this bad before Transformers: Euphemism for Asshole docks next month.