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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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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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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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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'Rocky and Bullwinkle': Unmitigated failure, or misunderstood epic?

Does anyone else remember 2000’s The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle? It was a colossal flop, and I think I might have been the only one that went to see it—certainly, I was the only one who enjoyed it—but it’s the best metaphor I can think of for the new Get Smart adaptation. As the latest in a string of (mediocre or worse) Jay Ward adaptations, Rocky and Bullwinkle showed up thoroughly uninvited. It didn’t suck, but nobody cared—it was just sort of…there, and it left theaters as quickly as it came. And nobody noticed. (Meanwhile, the colossal stinkbomb George of the Jungle received a direct-to-video sequel—is there no justice?)

Get Smart, while likely to be a bigger commercial success, feels uncomfortable in many of the same ways. Like Bullwinkle, Get Smart is the latest in a series of mostly-unnecessary adaptations of the work of its venerable creator, Mel Brooks. The public (somewhat inexplicably) went nuts over The Producers: The Musical, but after The Producers: The Musical: The Movie, and a somewhat less-appreciated musical version of Young Frankenstein (with a TV cartoon based on Spaceballs on its way), it’s hard to imagine that people aren’t starting to lose interest. Like all satire, Brooks’ work was funny because it was timely. Now it’s just…sort of…not.
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I have a love-hate relationship with romantic comedies that resembles more of a hate-hate relationship most of the time. As genres go, it isn’t sitting at the bottom of my barrel (musical bio-pic, I’m looking at you), but it’s close. Tack on the word ‘French’ to the beginning and things become even more problematic. From the heights of absolute adoration (Amelie) to the depths pure hatred (Love Me If You Dare, perhaps one of the worst films I have ever seen), the French take on the romantic comedy consistently elicits extreme reactions from me. They are experimental with their rom-coms as often as we are generic with ours, but the results are not always palatable, or even coherent for that matter. So it was with trepidation that I popped my screener of Priceless into the DVD player, hoping for the best but bracing myself to be emotionally assaulted with the worst. Surprisingly, the latest Audrey Tatou (Amelie, The Da Vinci Code) vehicle doesn’t register at either extreme, but sits comfortably somewhere in the middle.
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Dear Mike Myers,

I just got back from your new movie The Love Guru and can’t say I’ve ever felt this way after walking out of a theater. I’ll give you credit for giving the movie a story, even if it was small and one we’ve all heard before. But my main problem was this: I didn’t laugh once. In fact, I did the very opposite of laugh … something I don’t particularly know how to define. Its as if every time your character of Guru Pitka was on the screen, a part of my brain died and unknowingly got sucked into the screen.
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Strange events are occurring all over the United States. Out of nowhere, large populations of people have started blathering nonsense. Soon after, they become still … as if someone has pressed a pause button. The final step of this strange and unpredictable happening is death: the “frozen” people use any means necessary to quickly kill themselves and people close by. In case you haven’t already heard, this is M. Night Shyamalan’s first R-rated film: The Happening.

And oh yeah: the deaths are violent.
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“It’s a monster! Run for your lives!”

Apart from being a quote from Frankenstein, those are also the words uttered by Marvel and company following the 2003 release of Ang Lee’s Hulk. Perhaps an obvious pairing on paper, the Asian auteur of angst took significant liberties with the property and rendered a film that was well written, superbly acted, ambitious, and…absolutely no fun. And in the comic book genre, ‘no fun’ is just another way of saying ‘franchise killer’. “Hulk Poodles!” became the bitter rallying cry of spurned fanboys the globe over.

So Avi Arad and the boys at Marvel (not content to let one of their most recognizable properties be remembered primarily for Nick Nolte shooting lightning bolts out of his eyes) turned to a director guaranteed never to make anything in his career that even remotely resembles Brokeback Mountain – Louis Letterier, the French action junkie responsible for the Transporter franchise and Unleashed. With a lot more SMASH and a lot less pathos, The Incredible Hulk is as obvious an apology for Hulk as The Last Crusade was for The Temple of Doom, which both helps and hurts it.
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What words come to mind when I say “movie starring several Saturday Night Live veterans”? That’s right: “unbelievable, indescribable awfulness.” I’m sure several of you will jump to mention exceptions (Wayne’s World and Anchorman come to mind, of course), but these are the exceptions that prove the rule. If you lined up every SNL-star-starring movie side-by-side, I guarantee that a good 90% of them would suck.

Keep that in mind as you watch Baby Mama, and you’ll be in awe of the movie’s quality.
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Truly great comedies don’t play like stories that have jokes stuck to them. The really memorable ones play like single jokes that are two hours long—letting their plots develop naturally, but building towards a comedic climax. This was true of Arsenic and Old Lace, and It Happened One Night, and Annie Hall, and Young Frankenstein, and yes, even What about Bob? If Adam Sandler’s films have proven anything, it’s that he doesn’t understand this. Ignoring his brief forays into “art house” pictures (Punch Drunk Love et. al.), he’s essentially made the same movie ten times since becoming a big star. One imagines it gets pitched to producers something like this: “An outcast overcomes rejection and failure, saves the day, and gets the girl. And there are a lot of penis jokes.” (Producer: “Sold! Can we give you ten million dollars right now? Please?”)
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A few months ago, there was some controversy surrounding Michael Haneke’s remake of his own film Funny Games. In addition to the obvious disagreement over the film’s inherent value, many questioned why Haneke felt the need to remake himself. Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers answers this question definitively: Because, if you don’t (and often even if you do), Hollywood will. And they’ll royally screw it up.
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Oh, to be a decade or two older. Having been born in 1985, I take far, far too many things for granted. Home videogames have always been a popular pastime. Compact discs have always been the preferred medium for recorded music (until recently, of course). The original formulation of Coke has always had the bizarrely cumbersome moniker “Coca-Cola Classic.”

Summer has always been the time for bloated, effects-filled blockbusters.
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Those who are of the opinion that C.S. Lewis wrote The Chronicles of Narnia as an allegory designed to convert children to Christianity (I’m looking at you, Phillip Pullman) would be well advised to check out Prince Caspian, the latest entry in the eponymous film series (by the way, they should also look up the word “allegory”—but I digress). Make no mistake about it—Lewis, as a former atheist, wrote just as much out of doubt as he did out of faith, and his books were no mere morality plays. Caspian in particular is a dark meditation on the coming of age—the story of children realizing that fairytales simply aren’t true. At the center of it all is the question of what humanity can do when its God has left it alone on the earth. In other words, this ain’t kid stuff; nor is it particularly “religious.”

But it is truth.
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This isn’t going to be a review so much as it’s going to be a sermon.

I have never experienced a film like Speed Racer before in my life. It is an exuberant, giddy, unabashed celebration of the wide-eyed wonder that shines in the eyes of little boys who believe with every ounce of their being that a 2 inch Hot Wheels car can accelerate at 500mph through a loop-de-loop, flip majestically into the air over the competition, and soar into the stratosphere with a jet-propelled rocket (which is obviously strapped to the back). Physics? Gravity? What are those things? I left the theater with a shockingly goofy grin plastered all over my face, fully believing that nothing was impossible and that no one—no one!—could tell me what I could or couldn’t do. That is the raw power of this film: to transport you to a place where the world is an epic adventure waiting to be seized, where dreams and possibilities are as big as you can imagine them, and where the crushing mundanity of adulthood is left eating the dust of the sleek, physics-defying Mach 5 driven by a boy named Speed. This is the stuff little boys’ dreams are made of, and heaven help me, I loved every thrilling second of it.
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One imagines that What Happens in Vegas is the sort of film Michael Medved would love—after all, it reinforces traditional values without challenging your previous assumptions, asking you to think, or even questioning your vices. This is the sort of film that—despite the titular metropolis—is designed to “play in Peoria,” as the saying goes. It’s the quintessential bread-and-circuses film, reaffirming the paper-thin presumptions of the middle American masses while entertaining them for an hour and a half. The only surprise? It’s a thoroughly watchable film.
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