Taken offers little in the way of originality (ok, let’s be frank, it offers nothing original); it requires you to suspend an obscene amount of disbelief; and it’s borderline exploitative – 3 nasty strikes that would handily damn any other film. Director Pierre Morel (District B13), however, disregards such concerns in lieu of one thing: delivering on the promise that his chosen genre (revenge fantasy) requires of him (vengeance, preferably of the extremely prejudicial variety). And ohmygosh, Taken delivers on said promise so magnificently that it reduces the intellect to a collection of giddy valley girl-isms: “Do you, like, TOTALLY BELIEVE THAT JUST HAPPENED????” The film is a slice of pure, guilt-riddled pleasure that satisfies some primal need you didn’t realize needed satisfying until you’re watching Liam Neeson exact sinfully sweet revenge upon horde after horde of scumbags and you’re cheering – audibly cheering. Taken’s faults, both egregious and painful, thoroughly drown in the pure fist-pumping pleasure of watching its bad guys bleed out in oh-so gratifying ways.
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An hour or so into Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, one character refers to a record producer as “A former hippie, current yuppie, spoon-feeding the masses the same old garbage,” and I’m sorry to say that that’s not a bad description of the people behind the film. Nick and Norah sports a title that would seem to suggest a quirky, indie-esque comedy, and the cast (which features Michael Cera of Juno and Superbad, as well as Kat Dennings of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Charlie Bartlett) seems to have been assembled to back that up. Unfortunately, it’s nothing more than a formulaic teen-oriented romantic comedy that happens to have latched onto a trend that might have been cool and edgy about five years ago.
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I take a lot of things for granted, although perhaps less than some. I spent my teenage years in a borderline third world country where I shared a small room with both my siblings. It’s the small things you tend to miss. At the store there were two choices of soda: coke or sprite; our electric water heater limited hot showers to 2 minutes; and English reading material was at a premium—I devoured my books in mere days. Living in the states within that context, I appreciate the things I’ve had to live without: the sheer number of choices the grocery store has to offer, the 15 minutes I spend on average in the shower now, and the library and local bookstores, which I can lose myself in for hours. However, watching The Singing Revolution last night, I realized I had taken one Big Thing for granted, in large part because I’ve never had to live without it: my freedom.
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This review was originally published August 15th, 2008.

Full disclosure: my film vocabulary is conspicuously lacking in Woody Allen. I can count the number of his films I’ve seen on one hand, although he’s made nearly 1 a year since he debuted in 1966 with What’s Up, Tiger Lily? That leaves me either 1) woefully inadequate to discuss his latest film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, or 2) perfectly suited since I’m not weighed down with Allen baggage, desperately hoping for another Annie Hall. I’ll go with the latter. If nothing else, we film critics love our egos.
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This review was originally published November 14th, 2008.

Subtlety is overrated. Now hear me out. I’m not saying that we should burn every Bergman or obliterate every Ozu. I do believe, however, that oftentimes something worth doing is worth overdoing. What better time do overdo something than when it’s going to be projected on a thirty foot high screen?
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A friend and colleague of mine (guess which one!) never misses an opportunity to point out how much he hates the film genre “musical biopic.” They’re all the same, he says, and they rarely (if ever) bother to make any point, other than deification of the subject. What’s the point if every musician’s life was the same, and their shared rise-and-fall trajectory means nothing, except that they were awesome?

I’m always the first to jump up and defend the genre, but after seeing Notorious — a retelling of the life of hip-hop emcee Chris Wallace/Biggie Smalls/Notorious B.I.G./whatever else — I’m seriously thinking about defecting to his camp. The movie was a blow-by-blow revue of every complaint he has. We see Biggie grow up, rise to fame, and fall victim to a world he never made. We see what a darn nice guy he was, and we see his many romantic and sexual exploits, none of which actually go anywhere. And of course, it’s all filled with lots of boobs, just to give it a hip-hop edge.
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A few moments before I sat down to watch Darren Aronofsky’s new film The Wrestler, I was overcome with prejudice and apprehension culminating in a simple question: “Could someone actually make a worthwhile film about wrestling?”  Call me shallow (you may be right), label me a snob (point taken), but despite all the buzz I’d heard, I wasn’t ready to be impressed.
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This review was originally published August 4th, 2008.

I was a little wary stepping into a screening of Brideshead Revisited. These British-movies-based-on-British-novels (Pride and Prejudice et. al.) tend to be, in my experience, mere “fan service”—little more than visual imaginings of the novel, intended primarily (or even exclusively) for fans of the novel (sort of like a more-literate take on our recent spate of comic book films stateside)—and I had barely even heard of Evelyn Waugh’s classic tome Brideshead Revisited. (I’m really not sure how that happened, as I possess a bachelor’s degree in English—perhaps because my literature professors always tended toward either extremely old British fiction, or extremely recent American fiction written by “diverse” authors, neither of which describes Brideshead at all. Regardless, it appears that I’m a Philistine. Consider this my formal apology to the literacy police.) Walking out, I felt roughly the same way.
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This review was originally published August 2nd, 2008.

Swing Vote is the cinematic equivalent of a servile politician. He has nothing new to bring to the table, nothing to say that really inspires the American people, and hardly any real platform to speak of—but he just really wants your vote, will do anything to get it, and heck, he’s just a darn nice guy. What more could you want? Well, substance, maybe, but if so, you’re clearly looking in the wrong country. Swing Vote is undeniably a fun piece of fluff, but those looking for real, meaningful discussion should remain cloistered at the local arthouse.
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Clint Eastwood.

Everyone knows his name. He’s an American staple – as common a household name as Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson. Generations have grown up with his films, whether they be the many he has starred in or the ones he has directed in the last 30 years. He’s not only a staple of American cinema, but American culture in general. There’s a funny thing about Eastwood, though: he never quite stays the same. He was introduced to many through the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone and from there he created the violent persona of Insp. “Dirty” Harry Callahan. No rules for Dirty Harry; just results. Years later, Eastwood would direct a western himself in which he would reinvent himself.
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Ron Howard’s films ache for Oscars. Sometimes they win (Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind) and sometimes they don’t (Cinderella Man, The Missing), but it’s hard to shake the impression that his recent pictures have each been on their knees, begging for shiny statuettes. Frost/Nixon, detailing David Frost’s infamous ‘77 interviews with the impeached President, is rivaled only by W. in its need to be this season’s Politically Relevant Film (Nixon is like Bush! Get it?), and you can practically see Howard popping into the frame, pointing to his favorite bits, and whispering, “For your consideration!” Such baggage threatens to choke Frost/Nixon to death; the first act does an admirable job of tightening the noose.

All the more surprising, then, when Howard clears the golden cobwebs out of his head and switches on the light. The transformation is subtle and unexpected, but around the 40 minute mark the pretty-please pandering dissipates and you’re (suddenly) watching riveting cinema.
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This review was originally published on August 6th, 2008.

“Well, it wasn’t as bad as Step Brothers.”

Pineapple Express is the worst kind of film a critic must write about. It succeeds admirably at its implied goals, entertains well enough, and doesn’t fail in miserable ways. You enjoy yourself while watching it, but when you leave the theater it flits out of your mind like toilet paper in the wind. As you sit down to pound out a review, you realize you can’t remember anything about it, so you pull your little notepad out that you scribble random thoughts on during screenings, looking for inspiration, only to discover you wrote nothing. The film engendered no thoughts of significant worth, either negative or positive, at least no thoughts that compelled you to record them for later use. You are, in a word, ambivalent. And now you have to write about your ambivalence in an entertaining and fair manner, when all you want to do is go into the other room and watch the latest episode of The Wire.

Sigh.
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This review was originally published August 12th, 2008.

Two days after seeing The Wackness, I’m still trying to figure out what I disliked so much about it. Some suggestions…
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Every year, December rolls around, and every year, we get the usual glut of movies that really, really, really, want to win Oscars. It’s simply a foregone conclusion, and that little statuette has been around long enough that people know by now what the Academy likes. And one of the things that it likes is, of course, World War II.
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“We should have total freedom to do as we like, just so long as it’s not dull. A critic who talks to me about plausibility is a dull fellow.” – Alfred Hitchcock, on the artistic freedom of filmmakers.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve never worried much about the plausibility, or rather implausibility, of a given movie. Enforcing an outside reality on a piece of insular entertainment seems to be on par with showing up at an all-you-can-eat buffet with a calorie counter in hand. Watching your waistline certainly is an admirable goal, you’ve just come to the wrong place to do it. Director D. J. Caruso seemingly shares this viewpoint. Thus far in his career he has gravitated towards stories that allow him to throw the physics and expectations of the real world out the door, in the service of making an entertaining flick.
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Ghost Town is a film that’s somewhat obviously inspired by M. Night Shyamalan’s hit 90’s horror film The Sixth Sense, and it makes no bones about that — going so far as to use the tagline “He sees dead people…and they annoy him.” As the second half of the line suggests, however, Ghost Town is about as far from a horror film as this sort of story gets. The ghosts here bear no gruesome marks to indicate how they died (although they do wear whatever they died in — making things a bit awkward for those that died in the shower or while engaged in coitus), and you won’t hear a single bloodcurdling scream. No, Ghost Town is a simple romantic comedy — and a very good one, at that.
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Adapted from the play of the same name, Doubt commits the cardinal sin of stage-to-screen films: it fails to add anything of value. The cinematic trappings distract rather than enhance, and one is impressed that the picture pales in comparison to its in-the-flesh predecessor; breathing human beings, a stone’s throw from your seat, would grant the story an intimacy it desperately needs, an intimacy sorely lacking here.
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Three years ago, I made the acquaintance of a little horror picture called The Exorcism of Emily Rose. I didn’t walk in with anything resembling high expectations – history told me that horror films about demon possession were, as a rule, terrible (thanks to the fact that genre-definer The Exorcist couldn’t possibly be improved upon, of course), and director Scott Derrickson’s only previous credit was that direct-to-video classic Hellraiser V: Inferno – but I walked out pleasantly surprised. The film was a funky little exercise in eclecticism – combining courtroom drama with spooky atmosphere and jump scares – plus, it spoke somewhat directly to the times, and while it might not have reached Bergman levels of profundity, it surprised me with its depth of emotion and it even made me reexamine bits of my worldview. It wasn’t a particularly well-reviewed film (though it did make the Chicago Film Critics Association’s list of the “Hundred Scariest Movies of All Time”), but it did manage to change the way I thought about horror movies, and – most importantly – it got me interested in Derrickson.

Well, perhaps that interest was a bit misguided. Or perhaps he’s hit a sophomore slump (this being his second theatrical release). Or maybe he’s simply not at his most comfortable working with a script he didn’t write. Or (most likely) he simply can’t make a great film when he’s not working with great talent. But for whatever reason, his latest – a remake of the 1951 science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still – just doesn’t make it over the bar he’s set for himself.
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What does up-and-coming African-American director Darnell Martin have in common with veteran white guy Clint Eastwood? It sounds like a lame Hollywood insider joke, but it’s not: They both recently directed bland, by-the-numbers biopics. And unfortunately for Martin, hers isn’t about white people screaming and crying (well — most of it isn’t, anyway), so it hasn’t garnered much Oscar buzz.
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This review was originally published August 4th, 2008.

Thank you for your patience. Many factors contributed to the time it took me to write this, not least of all its length, but I hope it was worth the wait, and I hope that you are still interested in reading it.

There is a clear distinction between the film reviewer and the film critic, although at first glance it appears to simply be semantics. The film reviewer writes for the person who has not yet seen the film in question and may not know anything about it. They avoid significant spoilers, spend a great deal of time synopsizing, keep things relatively brief, and cultivate a tone of recommendation: thumbs up or thumbs down, praise or pan, see it now, wait for the DVD, or avoid like the plague. The film critic, on the other hand, writes for the person who has already seen the film. They discuss the internal workings of the movie, wrestle with why it succeeds or fails, and attempt to bring about a deeper understanding of the film’s sociological implications and its place within the culture at large.

I attempt, with varying degrees of success, to combine both of these paradigms in my writing, but The Dark Knight necessitates a more critical approach. In my professional career as a critic so far, it has been the only film that I have required myself to see twice before writing about. Although I am somewhat late to the party, you would have all seen the film whether I told you to or not, so I’m not concerned with the tardiness of this piece. I am also eschewing the guidelines for reviewing, embracing the role of critic instead, so if you’re in the 5% who have yet to see the box office record breaker (rectify that immediately), consider yourself forewarned.
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