Let me be frank: Kirby Dick’s documentary Outrage is completely unwatchable. Agonizingly, tortorously unwatchable. It’s an hour and half of cheap, ugly, digital photography and some of the least interesting interviews and most ear-gratingly awful music ever conducted. It’s a boring, self-congratulating, almost-never-ending mess. I have never been less entertained in my life, and I have never been so amused by playing with my wedding ring. (Eventually I lost control of it and it went flying across the theater; when it did, I found that looking for it on my hands and knees was much more entertaining than the film.) I can’t think of a single reason to see it, and I can’t think of a single person — friend or foe — that I would recommend it to.
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Let’s start at the beginning. There are only a handful of possible sports movies. To simplify even further, a sports movie can only end one of two ways: either they win the Big Game (Rocky II) or they lose it (Rocky). Add to that that no one will want to root for the reigning champion, and you’ll find that all sports movies have to be underdog stories. Add to that that the characters have to progress, and you’ll see that all sports movies have to be coming-of-age stories. So we’re narrowing down the possibilities pretty fast here, right? Yes, all sports movies are basically the same. So the question is: is that really such a bad thing?
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Every time I watch a new Michael Moore film, I inevitably ask myself – just who the hell is this guy making movies for? He acts as if he is a voice of change – showing us the moral and political indignities perpetrated against the American people by the despotic, elected (and sometimes not elected) leaders of our country. Yet, for anyone who is even the most modestly informed, not much the director spouts into his booming megaphone is any real revelation. Anyone and everyone who reads even the occasional newspaper or catches the occasional passing TV tuned to CNN or MSNBC (something other than the maniacally manipulative Fox News, that is) should know at least the basic ins and outs of what is going on in and around Washington and Wall Street. Nope, Moore does not make his films for these people.
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There’s the usual seasonal calling for gore, off-colored humor, a cynical yet appreciative point of view, and as well, the ubiquitous cameo by a well-known, well-liked actor.
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So, like, there are these Satanists, right? And they think this girl is, like, a virgin and stuff — but she’s like, totally not, okay? But then they sacrifice her anyway, so then she has, like, a demon dwelling in her reanimated body, which totally blows, and then she has to eat people to stay alive, which blows even more, am I right? Like, duh.
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Rupert and Kristin Isaacson had an idyllic romance.  According to Rupert, when he first saw Kristin he knew she would one day be his wife.  He took special measures to ensure this would happen when he asked her to marry him on their first meeting.  They married and settled in Texas, Rupert working in journalism and human rights, Kristin teaching psychology.  When their son Rowan was born 2002, everything had seemingly fallen into place for them as a family.

It all fell shockingly apart when Rowan was diagnosed with autism in 2004 and The Horse Boy is their story; a beautiful picture of a family’s love for their ailing son, a love that manifests itself in an unconventional journey across the world to heal the little boy’s raging autism.
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If you look closely at The Informant!, Steven Soderbergh’s new based-on-a-true-story comedy, you just might find a scene that doesn’t have a bust of Abraham Lincoln in it.

Might.
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Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs began in 1982 as a children’s picture book that told a simple tale about a town where it rained food. It was a dreamy bedtime story — whimsical and childlike at its core, but its realistic, minimally-colored drawing style showed that it had been filtered through the mind of a somewhat world-weary adult. The new film from Sony Animation Studios is almost the exact opposite: its visuals are cartoonish, slapstick-filled, and candy-colored, but at its heart lie some very sobering, adult themes. What began as a misty fairytale has been re-imagined into a disarmingly dark parody of science fiction and disaster movies — albeit one with wall-to-wall laughs and some of the most imaginative visuals this side of WALL-E. It borrows a few scenes and plot points from the book, but otherwise makes no attempt to remain entirely true to its themes — and is all the more stunning for it.
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Mike Judge can’t seem to get any respect. Office Space eventually found its audience on DVD (after flopping hard in theaters), but his follow-up, Idiocracy (which, by the way, was brilliant – go see it now) barely even received a theatrical release before being shoveled into Blockbusters everywhere. He’s had a bit more luck on TV, with the long-running Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill series, but — seriously — do you know anyone who will admit to watching either one of them? (His latest, The Goode Family, aired on ABC this summer, and was both his most “mainstream”-oriented and also his best; not surprisingly, ABC cancelled it as soon as it was out of the gate.) With an all-star cast and no serious competition at the box-office, his latest film — Extract – is in an ideal position to change this; unfortunately, it’s just not very good.
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“I make movies for the planet Earth”
-Quentin Tarantino

We’ve all heard of writer/director Quentin Tarantino, from his early days working as a video store clerk to his successful independent feature, Reservoir Dogs. Highly controversial in his presentation of violence, language, and race, he has developed a rare fanbase over the years that draws from everyday moviegoers to hardened cineastes. Tarantino’s blend of pulp, dialogue, and homage to other films are his defining characteristics.

Inglorious Basterds, easily one of his most accessible films to date, is set during World War II in “Nazi-occupied France”. The titular heroes are a group of Jewish-American soliders led by Aldo “The Apache Raine (Brad Pitt). Raine gets his nick-name from his habit of scalping Nazis. The Basterds are charged with the duty of reaking havoc among  the German ranks, which they do with glee.

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Ponyo, the latest anime feature film from academy award winning writer/director Hayao Miyazaki, is a heart-warming tale of childhood and love set in a peculiar tragic landscape.

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Alexis Bledel seems determined to become the female Michael Cera. If you don’t know what I mean, consider the similarities: both are young actors that play the same character over and over again; both established their character on television comedies that were vaguely ahead of their time; and most importantly, there’s no real difference between their respective personas. You know the persona I’m talking about: the overly earnest smart kid who’s far too much of a doormat for his/her good. Cera played the character fist in Arrested Development, and has kept doing it in Juno, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Year One; Bledel did it with Gilmore Girls, then The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, and — yes — even Sin City; now she does the same thing in Post Grad.

The problem with the character in question is that he/she is simply a straight man (or straight woman, I guess) — the lone sane character whose job it is to react to a crazy world — and a straight man is only as funny as the action around him (or her). Imagine if Zeppo Marx had tried to embark on a solo career, and you’ll see the potential for problems here.
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It’s a cliché, and it’s obvious, and any hack film professor could tell you this, but I guess it has to be said: the alien movies we create are always products of their time. Or, at least, the good ones are. The space aliens on the screen are always stand-ins for terrestrial aliens — whatever sort might haunt our dreams at the moment.
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The last of the big summer movies has arrived. The Joes are here and waiting to blow stuff up and I’m all for it. G.I. Joe is one of those movies that doesn’t ask much of you. It presents you with over-the-top mad scientist villains, butt-kicking babes in skin-tight outfits, ninjas, enough cool hardware to make Inspector Gadget blush, explosions…and Marlon Wayans.
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A personal note about myself: I spent a year and a half of my life as a full vegetarian. I don’t like talking about it, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that every time I mentioned it, someone would immediately demand to know “Why!?” Everyone had different reasons for asking: sometimes they were genuinely curious and wanted to get to know me better; sometimes they were eighth-generation beef-farming Republicans who felt the need to refute every opinion I had; sometimes they were crazy hippies eagerly hoping that I would join whatever flavor-of-the-month protest they were planning. But regardless, it was a question I quickly tired of answering. I shouldn’t have to justify my personal choices to everyone I meet on the street.
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Sacha Baron Cohen. The Man, the myth, the legend. I seriously hold this man in very high and low regard for the things he’s done and has yet to do to cinema. In his new movie Bruno, he’s a homosexual German fashion designer trying to get a new start…let’s see how that goes…
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It’s not difficult to imagine that if Moon had been a Hollywood production, it would have been a very, very different film. It’s “science fiction” in the traditional sense — i.e., it’s fiction about science. You won’t see any giant robots, any cities getting leveled, or even any CGI to speak of. What you will see is a haunting meditation on identity, technology, overpopulation, mankind, and the economic engine that drives all of us — and its devastating consequences to the individual.
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An earlier form of this review was originally posted at Wonders in the Dark.

The first five minutes of director Mark Webb’s (500) Days of Summer, a concise and entertaining treatise on young love, are immediately transporting.  There is a narrator, there are attractive (but not fake looking) leading characters, the music is zippy, and Webb introduces his leading players as if they were walking in a narrative music video.  It’s a beautiful amalgamation that can’t help but prompt an ear-to-ear smile.   (500) Days’ narrator has booming voice with commanding presence.  The story gets even more interesting directly following this masterful introduction when he makes the audience a promise: “This is not a love story.”

So, in the spirit of the film, I’ll put an embargo on the word “love” from here on out. It’s just one of the ways this story is atypical – a boy-meets-girl story the likes of which we haven’t seen before and one that is completely necessary in order to publicly state the romantic inclinations of millions of postmodern 20-somethings.
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You can’t kill the metal. Metal will live on.

– Tenacious D

Anvil!: The Story of Anvil opens with a bit of on-screen text that’s every bit as subtle as the first few bars of Sabbath’s “Iron Man”: “In the summer of 1984, Anvil toured the world with the biggest bands in rock: Scorpions, Bon Jovi, Whitesnake. All of them went on to sell millions of records around the world. All of them, except one.”
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Put crassly, Rachel Getting Married is like a 2 hour episode of The Office without any of the humor. Unpleasant, uncomfortable, and even seat-squirmingly painful to watch, it is neither funny, adorable, nor particularly heartwarming. (despite what the blatantly misleading marketing campaign would have you believe) But it is the best work director Jonathan Demme has done since Silence of the Lambs as well as being, hands down, one of the best films of 2008.
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