In terms of cinema, February is exiting with a whimper. This weekends releases for your consideration.

Semi-Pro

Semi-Pro
The pitch line for almost every Will Ferrell film of the last few years must have gone like this: “Imagine Will Ferrell as a _____________.” Then, fill in the blank with Nascar driver, elf, anchorman, soccer coach, ice skater, and now basketball player. This formula of Will-Ferrell-As-Something is obviously working, to the tune of $580 million in domestic box office alone, and I have to admit that I’m not quite tired of it yet (although I’m getting close). Will better be careful or he’s going to squander America’s notoriously fickle patience threshold.

The Other Boleyn Girl

The Other Boleyn Girl
Medieval romance, betrayal, and aristocratic machinations combined with a sumptuous cast (Scarlett Johansen, Natalie Portman, and Eric Bana) equals a great time at the movies. Or a horrible time, depending. Which one do you think gets her head chopped off? Vote in the comments section to win fabulous prizes!

Penelope

Penelope
I had to watch the trailer for this one online because I hadn’t even heard of it. Imagine my surprise when I discovered it’s a romance about a girl with the nose of a pig. Yes, you read that right, a porker’s snout. Christina Ricci plays the little piggy and James McAvoy (man, he’s popping up everywhere these days) is the, *ahem*, big bad wolf. Actually he’s just the romantic interest, but I couldn’t help myself.

It’s not often that Hollywood takes a risk like making a “tearjerker” for men—especially one that doesn’t primarily center on sports or war. In Joe Johnston’s October Sky, the sports are peripheral and the War is Cold. Given how unusual this one is, it should come as no surprise that it was promoted as “From the producer of Field of Dreams”—some things (like whether or not the men show up) just shouldn’t be left to chance. Johnston’s “man-weepie” actually did fairly well for itself, though, making upwards of $30 million at the box office (not blockbuster-level, but pretty good for a drama), and winning numerous awards (all of which were well-deserved).
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Hana to Arisu [2004 - Japan]
Directed by: Shunji Iwai
Runtime: 135 min
No US Rating (but probably PG)
5/5

“Hana & Alice” is a movie about relationship from writer/director Shunji Iwai, who is probably best known for “Riri Shushu no Subete” (All about Lily Chou-Chou), and it’s a great point of reference as anyone who enjoys one will surely love the other. Hanako and Arisugawa are best friends who both fall for the same boy, but this film is so much more than that.
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As I’m writing this review in 2008, not a whole lot remains to be said about Shrek. The film became something of a cultural phenomenon, spawning two sequels (that each raked in their respective bucks) and every imaginable tie-in and bit of merchandise. With all this commercial garbage assaulting the senses day and night, it’s easy to forget that the original Shrek was actually a pretty good little film.
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Note: This review was originally written for the theatrical release, which was in digital 3D. On DVD you will not have that option, making the film even less appealing.

How interesting would you find the cinematic adaptation of a 1000 year old poem that spans nearly 4000 lines? No? What if the writers took liberal license with the text, tossed in plenty of gore and nudity, used the latest technology to make the film an entirely digital affair, and did it in 3D to boot? If this sounds like a sideshow novelty to you, you’re on the right track. Light on substance but popping at the seams with an obscene amount of style, Beowulf will appeal to 13 year old boys and men who act like 13 year old boys, but not many others.
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Homeless prizefighters, brooding artists, tortured siblings, macabre hi-jinks, and a digitally pudgy Anthony Hopkins…such a wide variety for you to choose from this last week of February.

30 Days of Night

30 Days of Night - MovieZeal Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
Apparently I lied to you last week (or was lied to by the release schedule I trust). 30 Days of Night appears to be hitting DVD today and not 7 days ago. Regardless, die-hard vampire fans are the only ones who need apply. For those of you who like your horror intelligent and, you know, scary, look elsewhere.

Beowulf

Beowulf - MovieZeal Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
King Leonidas eat your heart out, digital Ray Winstone is here to prove he’s better at screaming grammatically simple sentences than you are! Adapted (barely) from the millenia-old English poem, Beowulf involves one very angry dude killing a lot of monsters, including trolls and dragons. Don’t expect much, though, and since you can’t see it in 3D on home video, expect even less.

The Darjeeling Limited

The Darjeeling Limited
Director Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) is an acquired taste. This latest outing, about estranged siblings stuck on a rackety train chugging through the Indian countryside, seems hard to distinguish from his other movies about estranged family members. As always, the location is the biggest character (like the house in Tenenbaums and the submarine in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou) so expect the train to be art-direction on steroids.

Hit the jump for this week’s other releases.

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The trouble with irony is that it’s never really possible to know who’s kidding whom. This is true in the world of the fine arts—Andy Warhol, anyone?—but can be even more frustrating in the mass media, especially media that tends to glorify its villains and undeniably has an active role in shaping the surrounding culture. Take, for example, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers—a film that was obviously intended as a parody of American culture’s obsession with violence, but has had no noticeable effect on said culture other than to desensitize it further, and encourage the very violence it satirizes. Of course, there are two possible ways to react to that: I could call the film a failure, or I could rave that it’s Now More Important Than Ever!
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Let’s get formality out of the way: this is not a good movie. Never mistake this for a good movie. This is an action movie, through and through, and while there are action movies that are also good movies, this simply isn’t one of them.

No, this movie is just a bag full of awesome.
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U2 3D

Directed By: Catherine Owens, Mark Pellington
Starring: Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen Jr.
Runtime: 85 minutes
Rated G
4 out of 5 stars

Simply put, if you love U2 you will love this movie. Filmed at the beginning of 2006 in 7 different locations in South America, U2 3D is pure energy, bursting at the seams both musically and visually. Apart from actually being front row at a U2 concert, this is as good as it gets.
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It’s aliiiiive. Yay.

Director: James Whale
Starring: Boris Karloff, Colin Clive
Running Time: 71 minutes
Not Rated
4 out of 5 stars

You gotta feel for Mary Shelley. Poor girl wrote a brilliant work of art—a gothic horror novel—that was widely celebrated in her lifetime. Then in the twentieth century, the film industry chewed it up, spit it out, chewed it up some more, and spit it out again numerous times—turning it into so much over-over-overused drive-in fodder. Now Frankenstein and his monster are two of the biggest clichés on the silver screen (rent Van Helsing for proof of this—although any film post-1960 with the word “Frankenstein” in the title will do). Shelley would probably be rolling over in her grave if, you know, she had been reanimated with the power of lightning. Or something.
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I am, I believe, optimistic to a fault sometimes. My experience in the past with short films has been less then joyous. Go to a local short film festival and you will be treated to what I mean. Shorts seem to be, for the most part, an excuse for directors with sub-par talent to get their ‘films’ seen by people other than their immediate family. But these are the Oscar nominees for short films, right? They have to be better than the usual experimental art-house dreck that gets labeled ’short film’, right? Right?

Well, here are my thoughts on who should win/who will win, although to be honest, most people make their Oscar predictions based on buzz and marketing, and since neither of those things exist for the short film nominees, I’m shooting in the dark.

At Night (Christian E. Christiansen & Louise Vesth, Denmark)
I’m not going to even slightly suggest that cancer, suicide, comas, and death aren’t subjects worth dealing with in film, but to have all of them crammed into a 40 minute span with no break is a bit much, even for my masochistic self. You need moments of humor in order to grapple with such heavy topics, and this story of 3 women in a cancer ward at Christmas has none.
Will it win? I hope not, but it is depressing enough to be a front runner.
Should it win? No. It shouldn’t.
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Tasty treats this week in the trailer park: little girls with creepy dolls in 3D, mystical rapture-like disappearances, and mashed-up apocalyptic mind benders. Enjoy.

Coraline

Coraline
Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors and I instantly fell in love with Coraline when I read it years ago. It’s a children’s fairy tale with bite: not too scary for a child of 10, but not tame enough to remove all fears. The director of The Nightmare Before Christmas tackles this one, with Teri Hatcher and Dakota Fanning doing the voices. And its in 3D! (not the trailer, but the film) Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy….

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Silly Michel Gondry.

Director: Michel Gondry
Starring: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Tom Wilkinson
Running Time: 108 min.
Rated R for language, some drug and sexual content
4.5 out of 5 stars

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is, in many ways, a film that defies classification. It could be described as a romantic comedy, but the comedy is subtle and serious—and besides that, it’s far too honest about human relationships to appeal to the usual thirteen-year-old-girl crowd. It’s got a pretty good dose of science fiction in it, but it’s too mundane in its science to attract a lot of Trekkies. I guess you could maybe call it an “art film”—you know, the kind of movie your Birkentsock-wearing friends go to to prove they’re smarter than you. (I’m not sure that’s really a genre in the traditional sense, but you could say it functions as a de facto genre of sorts.) The good news is that while Eternal Sunshine does have a hefty dose of pretension, it more than earns it—through well-developed characters, a weird sense of humor, and an uncompromisingly honest view of reality. If you’re able to accept its fragmented storytelling and visual flourish (which may be a little too idiosyncratic for some), you won’t be disappointed.
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As we slowly move away from the January/February sludge pit of theater releases, things begin to look up for filmgoers, but does the multiplex demand your worship this weekend?

Be Kind, Rewind

Be Kind, Rewind
Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) is one of the most talented and unique directors working today. Pairing him with Jack Black and Mos Def is quite the coup d’etat (I realize there are supposed to be little squiggles in there somewhere, but I’m lazy). The plot - video store clerks who accidentally magnetize all of their tapes and are forced to re-film the classics on their own - sounds like comedy gold.

Vantage Point

Vantage Point
Doesn’t look like much more than an action packed mystery thriller trip, but I like action packed mystery thriller trips. The president has been assassinated - or has he? (thats the mystery part) Stuff will blow up, cars will wreck, and guns will be fired. Matthew Fox flexes his post-Lost acting chops and the cast is rounded out with the likes of Forrest Whitaker, Dennis Quaid, and William Hurt. This is the kind of film thats hard for me to resist.

Charlie Bartlett

Charlie Bartlett
The ads are billing this as the next Juno. I don’t buy it. Charlie is a high school student adrift who discovers popularity when he starts handing out both psychiatric advice and drug prescriptions from the school bathroom. Robert Downey Jr. stars as an alcoholic principal (really Robert, an alcoholic?) who is out to stop the would-be-Freud. Could be a sleeper hit, could be an indie failure, your mileage may vary.

Witless Protection

Witless Protection
I hesitate to even waste the time or bandwidth discussing this one. Anyone who’s name is an entire phrase hardly deserves 15 minutes, much less top billing in a theatrical motion picture (and I’m looking at you, too, Cedric the Entertainer). The fact that Jenny McCarthy co-stars is another strike against it, although Larry the Cable Guy in and of himself is enough of a reason to run screaming from this one like a…well, just run screaming, thats the important part.

Indulge me in an educational moment, if you will. In a film’s credits, when you see writers’ names joined by an ampersand (’&’) it means they collaborated as a team. When you see them joined by an ‘and’ it means they wrote separately (didn’t you always want to know that?). The writer credit for 30 Days of Night says a lot about it: “Written by Steve Niles and Stuart Beattie and Brian Nelson.” Steve Niles is the man who conceived of and wrote the original graphic novel this film is based on. He did the first version of the script, which someone didn’t like: strike 1, tack on an ‘and.’ Then Stuart Beattie (Collateral) took a stab. Nuh-uh, add ‘and’ number two. Finally, Brian Nelson was (probably) brought on to ‘fix’ the script. As hard as it might be to believe, this is not the ideal way to write a movie.
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Well, here we are again—Oscar time, when everyone will tune in for a long, long four hours to watch Hollywood explain to the world, for the 80th time, why Hollywood is just so gosh-darn awesome. Excited? I know I am. As always, however, some of the awards handed out may prove a bit mystifying to the general public. Best Animated Short, for instance. Who watches shorts anymore? That’s right—bohemian film buffs living in New York, and pretty much no one else. But the award is still there, reminding us of a simpler time when the clips before the movie were entertainment, instead of ads for Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart. So for those of you who need to mark your Oscar ballots, I now present a rundown of the five pictures up for the award…

Even Pigeons Go to Heaven (Samuel Tourneaux, France)
In this stop-motion missive, a priest tries to sell a man a machine that he claims will take him to heaven. The animation is excellent, but the morality play is a little facile and a bit overdone.
Will it win? Possibly. Oscar does love iconoclasm.
But should it? Any film that features Death as a central character is okay by me.
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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II

Director: MichaelPressman
Starring: Paige Turco, David Warner
Running Time: 88 min.
Rated PG for violence
3.5 out of 5 stars

Growing up in the late 80’s and early 90’s, I was somewhat aware that the popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise was ironic—but perhaps I didn’t realize just how much so. Created in 1984 by out-of-work comic book artists Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, the series was originally intended to parody comic book conventions (especially several by Stan Lee and Frank Miller). The duo used what little cash they could scrape together to self-publish a black-and-white comic book for distribution at a convention. It was discovered by licensing agent Mark Freedman, who knew a marketing opportunity when he saw one, and the merchandising bonanza began—including a television series, numerous snack foods, every possible toy (literally—Universal Studios Classic Monsters-themed Turtle figures, anyone?), and three motion pictures. In other words, a series designed to parody the establishment rapidly became the establishment. (It wasn’t the first time this had happened, and it wouldn’t be the last.)
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And what delectable discs will be trickling down the Hollywood pipeline and onto the shelves of Blockbuster (actually, does anyone even rent there anymore? in fact, does Blockbuster still exist?) this week? Some very solid choices this time around, which more than anything else indicates that Oscar is just around the corner.

Terror’s Advocate

Terror’s Advocate
You’ll notice a trend with these posts: I like docs, and I think you should like them too. And they don’t get much more fascinating than this. Meet Jacques Vergès, an international lawyer who defended Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy. The crucial question comes when the director asks him whether he would have even defended Hitler. Riveting stuff, even if it is in French.

American Gangster

American Gangster - MovieZeal Rating:  4 out of 5 stars
Denzel and Russell do what they do best: glower, seethe, and get crazy mad at stuff. A Godfather for the modern age, this is a solid motion picture and a good rent, even if it doesn’t rise to the promise of its pedigree. Just don’t expect too much violence, as its parceled out in small doses.

Michael Clayton

Michael Clayton - MovieZeal Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Another solid choice, and has the distinction of being up for 7 Oscars including Best Picture. Clooney really only plays ‘George Clooney’ in this, but he does it well and is not unpleasant to watch. The supporting cast is top notch, the writing is as sharp as razor wire, and the legal bits are compelling. Even if it is a slow burn, there’s much to like here.

30 Days of Night

30 Days of Night - MovieZeal Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
It doesn’t get much more high concept than this. In the northen reaches of Alaska, the town of Barrow goes through an entire month without sun each year. This naturally attracts a herd of vampires (or gaggle, or pride, or flock, or whatever they get labeled when there’s more than one) who go on a blood binge at the expense of the inhabitants. It has a few scares and a lot of gore, but you can find more effective elsewhere (The Descent, 28 Weeks Later, and Dawn of the Dead are all better choices).

Hit the jump for more choices.
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Ok, so I should have done this yesterday. Actually, my dog ate my post, which is not an impossibility, though it may seem that way on the surface.

Definitely, Maybe

Definitely, Maybe
Abigal Breslin, ever since her Oscar nominated turn in Little Miss Sunshine, has become Hollywood’s goto girl for the cute-precocious-daughter-with-razor-sharp-wit character. She does it again in this film opposite Ryan Renolds, who is trying his hand at leading man status. This is Sleepless in Seattle for fans of How I Met Your Mother, as the film revolves around which beautiful woman is really Abigal’s mother (cue mystery theme music).

The Spiderwick Chronicles

The Spiderwick Chronicles
So far, only Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia have been able to do it successfully, to the tune of a billion plus dollars, but that isn’t stopping a horde of wannabes from trying to achieve the title of “Next Big Kiddie Franchise.” Will Spiderwick take the throne, or will it be the next Eragorn, The Dark is Rising, or The Golden Compass? My money is on the latter.

Jumper

Jumper
Doug Liman is a very flashy director, and I’m becoming more convinced that The Bourne Identity (he only directed the first one) was a fluke. Jumper certainly seems to be more like his previous outing, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which was good fun but pretty hollow on the inside. However, if you’re game for Anakin Skywalker jumping around the world with Mace Windu trying to kill him, then this should be right up your alley.

Step Up 2 the Streets

Step Up 2 the Streets
Nothing screams high drama like replacing key words in your title with numerals (as previous critical darlings 2 Fast 2 Furious and Cradle 2 the Grave proved). Actually, I’m just going to let the title speak for itself. And the poster. I think that sums it up.

Oh, God!

Director: Carl Reiner
Starring: John Denver, George Burns
Running Time: 97 min.
Rated PG for adult humor
3 out of 5 stars

Movies about God are necessarily products of their time. The 1950’s brought us Cecil B. Demille’s The Ten Commandments, which assumed all its viewers were Christian, or at least of an Abrahamic religion, but didn’t really care what the movie had to say as long as it entertained; the early 2000’s brought us Tom Shadyac’s Bruce Almighty, which featured God as a prominent character, but thanks to political correctness and bottom-line concerns, couldn’t actually say anything about him. Carl Reiner’s Oh, God! is just as much a child of the 70’s: God is sick of religion and war (in that order) and just wants us all to get along.
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