I sat through all 81 minutes of Space Chimps, but all I could think about the whole time was WALL-E. It had never occurred to me before that hour and a half (which I’ll never get back, by the way), but Pixar managed to make an entire movie set in space, without ever once resorting to extraterrestrials as a plot point. This may not seem remarkable, until you consider how infrequently that sort of storyline actually makes it into production. It’s not hard to imagine the studio board meeting that birthed this film…
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Along Came a Spider is a film that draws you in immediately, but spends the next two hours throwing your interest away. Die-hard whodunit fans may enjoy the fact that the movie keeps them guessing, but those looking for a great film will ultimately be put off by bland characterizations, poor acting, and a plot that only occasionally makes sense.
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This review was originally published March 21, 2008.

Since the success of 2002’s The Ring, Hollywood has been unstoppable in its determination to remake every Asian horror film of the last ten years or so. From a business standpoint, I suppose this makes sense—Asia’s been extremely prolific in churning out decent thrillers as of late, and remaking them is sure a lot easier than coming up with your own ideas (something Hollywood’s been notoriously bad at from the very start—that Maltese Falcon movie starring Humphrey Bogart? it was the second remake of the original, which was, of course, based on the book by Dashiell Hammett to begin with). But there’s something disturbingly xenophobic about most of the resulting films. On the one hand, they give Americans yet another excuse to pretend that Hollywood cinema is the only cinema that matters; on the other, they usually end up transporting the heroes to Asia, anyway—making the heroes Americans and the ghouls Asians (and also making the remake seem even more unnecessary). I’m not sure what to read into this—economic anxiety, maybe? (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, ask anyone from Detroit.)
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This review was originally published March 8th, 2008.

A heist film starring Jason Statham with the words ‘The’ and ‘Job’ in the title? The British actor certainly has a type, and while this film shares a lot of superficial similarities with 2003’s The Italian Job, it differs in nearly every other respect. Where Italian was a remake and a light popcorn diversion (essentially serving as a $60 million Mini Cooper commercial), Bank is based on a true story and has a surprisingly dark undercurrent to it.
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It may be because I just haven’t seen a good refugee movie in a long time, but I couldn’t resist the charms of The Children of Huang Shi. It’s not a film that breaks any new ground by any means, but it is well-made, entertaining, and moving. I’m breaking with other critics a bit by giving it four stars, but what can I say? In a summer clogged with nothing but superheroes, it’s nice to see a real hero grace the screen.
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Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth has been used and abused by filmmakers for years. Who could forget the phony Scottish accent of standard crooner Pat Boone in the 1959 adaptation? Or last year’s 188-minute Hallmark Channel event? Even Wishbone got his paws on Jules Verne once or twice. Walden Media’s new take on on the story is less a conventional movie than a chance to show off what Real-D 3D projection can do. In fact, it functions best when computer graphics are exploded onto the screen and little firefly-birds are flapping their luminous blue wings in your face. There’s novelty to it for sure, but in the end it smells a bit like second-rate amusement park sideshow.
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I’m getting tired of the marketing hook adorning trailers and television spots that reads “From Visionary Filmmaker [insert latest flavor of the week here].” While Wanted was a giddy testosterone fest that proudly flipped Physics the bird, director Timur Bekmambetov did not warrant the ‘Visionary’ label that Universal seemed determined to bestow him with.

Enter Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, Universal’s 3rd foray into comic book adaptations this summer (following Wanted and The Incredible Hulk), and once again the big wigs with the purse strings are slapping ‘Visionary Filmmaker’ over every piece of marketing fluff they can generate – posters, trailers, websites, everything. They all conspicuously display that moniker which is essentially PC speak for ‘Cinematic God.’ The only difference this time is that director Guillermo del Toro utterly deserves it.
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“You live in a dream. Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you ripped the fronts off houses you’d find swine? The world’s a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?”

—Charlie Oakley, Shadow of a Doubt

Shadow of a Doubt has occasionally been described as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most nihilistic films, and this is a point I won’t argue with. In a sense, its lead antagonist, Charlie Oakley, embodies the very essence of film noir: hatred of self, a total lack of faith in societal establishments, hopelessly repressed sexuality. At the same time, however, the most interesting aspect of the film is speculating how different it would have been, were it made at a different time or in another place. One can’t help but shake the feeling that Hitchcock would have different things to show you—and different things to say—were his hands not tied by the Hays Production Code.
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This review was originally published April 8th, 2008.

If the cynics in Hollywood can market Shutter using its executive producers (“From the executive producers of The Ring and The Grudge!” as the poster so eagerly tells us), then it only seems fair that I should be allowed to tell you that The Ruins was executive produced by Ben Stiller. Yes, that Ben Stiller. I’m kind of spoiling the ending here, since you don’t find this out until the final credits roll, but don’t worry—this isn’t quite the funniest part of the film. Thanks to pedestrian script writing, inept directing and some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen, it’s actually quite a challenge to pick the funniest part of The Ruins. But I should at least try.
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This review was originally posted April 26th, 2008.

Chop Shop is such a beautiful, understated film that it almost feels like I’m insulting it by even attempting to review it. The film is more than capable of standing on its own—it says exactly what needs to be said, and nothing more. To add anything to it would destroy its delicate beauty—and far too often, this is exactly what film reviews do. To attempt “judge” a film—especially one as self-interpreting as this one—is a presumptuous task indeed.
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Jeff Nichols’ gritty revenge story Shotgun Stories had its debut at The Berlin Film Festival — a prestigious honor for a film shot with almost no budget in the director’s hometown. But there’s a reason why it has captured the minds of critics and audiences worldwide. It’s a film about envy, greed, brotherhood, and sin, but it’s also an elevated piece of gritty Southern poetry tackling themes as old as the Bible and ones that run just as deep in the roots of the human condition.
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Ghengis Khan is a figure whose political accomplishments—uniting nearly all of the warring factions of Asia—are unlikely to ever be paralleled. With this in mind, it seems appropriate that the first serious attempt to chronicle his life on film has united so many countries. Mongol, the first film in a planned trilogy by Russian filmmaker Sergei Bodrov, is a co-production of Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Germany, and Russia, and features actors from nearly all parts of Europe and Asia (the credits list “translators” for quite a bit of screen time). That such a sweeping epic can be made by so many different people, speaking so many different languages, for so little money (less than $20 million, or roughly what Hollywood spends on catering for a 90-minute drama with four characters) is a testament to the skills of those involved. It’s worth seeing for its sweeping ambition alone.
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This review was originally published May 30th, 2008.

My Blueberry Nights approaches the viewer like an awkward lover, desperate to please but unsure of what to do. At times it is sensual and alluring, a delicious cinematic confection for the senses, but suddenly it becomes clumsy and inexperienced, placing its hands in all the wrong places and whispering words that induce giggling rather than titillation. You will either be enraptured with it in spite of its faults or you will be turned off completely by its graceless advances. I could only entertain the films fleeting charms for so long, however, before becoming irrevocably irritated with it.
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This review was originally published February 22, 2008.

The suspension of disbelief in Vantage Point may be difficult to maintain at times, but it nonetheless provides decent action thrills guaranteed to satisfy your adrenaline, if not your grey matter. As guilty pleasures go, this is one of the better ones.
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I love Peter Berg, much much more than I reasonably should. He’s directed some entertaining (if slightly forgettable) movies like Friday Night Lights and The Kingdom, but he holds a special place in my heart for putting one of the greatest action epics of all time onto film. That’s right, you guessed it, The Rundown, starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Seann William Scott (you know, Stifler from American Pie).

You probably think I’m being sarcastic. I’m not. For inexplicable reasons, The Rundown is one of my all-time favorites, sharing a spot in my Top 10 along with Vertigo, Lawrence of Arabia, and Requiem for a Dream (I am nothing if not eclectic). I love this film with a passion that borders on the unhealthy, and my wife becomes intensely irritated with me whenever I want to watch it for the 37th time. It’s a mania that rises to teenage-girl-meets-Titanic levels of obsession, and whenever I meet one of the uninitiated, a rabid glee enters my eyes as I preach on its Looney Tunes-esque action sequences, its Arnold Schwarzenegger cameo, and Christopher Walken uttering my favorite line of dialogue ever, “Wow, that’s a lot of cows.” Professional propriety can shove it–I love this film.

So you can imagine the lightheaded anticipation I’ve felt ever since witnessing that first Hancock trailer back in January. Not only was it riotously funny, Peter “The Rundown” Berg (!) was at the helm, and maybe, just maybe, another guilty pleasure masterpiece would muscle its way into my Top 10.
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NOTE: Two of the screencaps within this review contain depictions of violence and strong language.

As a child, when Mark Millar was first introduced to comic books and superheroes, the question he immediately had was, “Where do they all live?” His older brother, never one to pass up a golden opportunity, told the little tot that all of the superheroes were dead because the super-villains had teamed up and wiped them out. While briefly traumatizing him, the prank would also become the basis for his hit 2003 comics mini-series, Wanted.

I picked up a copy of Wanted a few months ago in anticipation of the film. It was unequivocally one of the most sadistically violent, amoral, and thought provoking things I had ever read. The film, sadly, retains the first, waters down the second, and jettisons the third completely.
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In 1983, a former monk named Godfrey Reggio made a film called Koyaanisqatsi. The title comes from a word in the Hopi language meaning “crazy life” or even better, “life out of balance.” Considered a classic in some circles, the film isn’t a traditional narrative but a tone poem about how modern man has become extremely distanced from the very thing that gives him life and breath. Some would interpret this as the transcendental idea of nature, others would say God. The film was a not-so-subtle call to replace our current state with another way of living; to focus on the simple and the natural instead of complicated consumerism and life-absorbing technological advances. I was reminded of Koyaanisqatsi more than once during WALL•E and did a double-take: was this really coming out of Disney studios — purveyor of all things luxurious and commercial?
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There’s one aspect of Marc Forster’s Stranger than Fiction that I can’t help but love: the fact that if you criticize it, it criticizes you back. It’s not “critic proof” in the traditional sense—arthouse-type fare like this stands or falls on the reactions of critics (though Will Ferrell’s presence may have helped)—but it’s impossible to question any of it without becoming one of the cynical, life-hating schlubs that it rakes over the coals. And, to make things better, it comes off as completely harmless and innocent even as it does this.
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This review was originally posted March 1st, 2008.

Martin McDonagh’s previous film, Six Shooter, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short in 2007, was shown to me by a friend without any caveats attached, and McDonagh is a director that requires…no, necessitates caveats. His blend of black humor, violence, and human despair was not only off-putting, it was borderline offensive. Caught unawares, I was mortified.

I was more prepared for In Bruges (pronounced ‘broozsh’ – you know you’ve picked a bad title for your film when the critic has to tell people how to pronounce it).
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It seems every time you turn around, another graphic novel has been made into a movie. Which is great, because I love graphic novels, and I love movies, and I love the thought of bringing them together like some beautiful cosmic sandwich. It hasn’t been all peanut butter and jelly, though - too often, these attempts are marred with inconsistent vision, shallow storytelling, and the sheer inability to capture the tone and experience of the source material.
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