Knight & Day - Movie Review

**1/2

Starring Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Peter Sarsgaard, Viola Davis, Jordi Molla, Paul Dano, Maggie Grace, Marc Blucas, Celia Weston and Dale Dye.
Directed by James Mangold.

This was the first movie I've seen where I felt like the director was thinking about how it would look on an iPod. There are numerous close-ups of Cruise & Diaz, and it reminded me of the Shatner & Nimoy close-ups on the Star Trek series, filmed for 13-inch screens so their heads fill up the entire screen. I always found it funny how I could see the varying shades of Mr. Nimoy's make-up.

But that's just one piece. I want to go to another. There's a scene late in the movie where Diaz's character is given "experimental truth serum." Comic opportunities are exploited to positive effect from that, and it made me wish more of the movie had been in that spirit.

Cruise plays Roy Miller, a CIA agent gone rogue. Diaz plays June, a car-restorer who bumps into him at the airport. After Roy kills everyone on their plane, he needs to keep June with him for a while to keep her safe. Is he crazy? Is he actually the bad guy? The movie plays with those questions for a while.

Good stunt-work. Cruise and Diaz are likeable performers, though Diaz is better at comedy. We saw this at the $1.50 theater, and it was perfect for that price. Fun, amusing, utterly forgettable.

Big Lake - TV Review

Chris Gethard seems like a nice guy, but he has a breathy delivery like he's recording animated voices while trying not to wake up his baby. He's not really the problem. Comedy Central's new show Big Lake has some of the flattest laughs of any sitcom pilot ever. Worse than Hank. Decent cast, weak writing. I can see why Jon Heder backed out of starring in it. I'd DVR'd two episodes, but I deleted the second one.

A Single Man - DVD Review

***1/2

Starring Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Nicholas Hoult, Matthew Goode, Lee Pace and Ginnifer Goodwin.
Directed by Tom Ford.

Finally got a chance to see this little film from late last year that created a buzz for it being the performance of Colin Firth's career. Maybe so. I'm glad he got this chance. I can't say he buried himself in the role, but that we got to see what Firth can really do when he's the center of attention and he can take the time here and there to just pause and absorb what's going on.

I've noticed I'm a sucker for the dramatic pause. When I watched Wall Street again, as fun as it was to lap up the ooze from Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko, my favorite moment was the five-second pause Martin Sheen takes when he realizes how corrupted his son has become. There's the look on Jeff Bridges's face that washes over him in Crazy Heart when he realizes that due to his drinking, he has lost his girlfriend's son. Any movie worth its salt that casts Robert Duvall makes sure to give him one or two.

Firth gets a few of those here. He's a starched shirt of a professor in 1962, and he's just lost his long-time lover in a car crash. Being a closeted homosexual, he has to keep hidden the grief he's suffering. There are several agonizing moments Firth is allowed.

My vote still would have been for Bridges, but Firth was definitely worthy of the consideration.

Michael Douglas has Throat Cancer

I wish him a full recovery, for the sake of himself, his wife and family.

And I'm looking forward to Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World - Movie Review

***1/2

Starring Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans, Anna Kendrick, Brandon Routh, Jason Schwartzman, Ellen Wong, Alison Pill, Mark Webber, Mae Whitman and Aubrey Plaza.
Directed by Edgar Wright.

Once I saw the 80% RottenTomato ranking I figured I'd like it, but it was even better than I expected. Michael Cera, who's been getting annoying lately, is still playing the same variant of his normal persona, but it all works here as Scott Pilgrim, a young man in love who must battle evil to get it.

The movie is very plugged in. It's like watching The Fly remade as The iPhone, with music, TV, video games references constantly, with characters defined in stat-mode, and it never slows down. If a joke fizzles, meh, the next one's on its way.

That's Chris Evans, taking between his gags as The Human Torch and Captain America, as an evil movie star. That's Brandon "Superman" Routh, as an evil bass player. Scott's sister is Oscar-nominee Anna Kendrick. My favorite though was Kieran Culkin as Scott's sarcastic gay roommate Wallace. Reminded me of a younger Robert Downey Jr.

We had a blast.

The Bounty Hunter - DVD Review

**

Starring Jennifer Aniston, Gerard Butler, Jason Sudeikis, Christine Baranski, Cathy Moriarty, Peter Greene, Jeff Garlin and Dorian Missick.
Directed by Andy Tennant.

Saw this a while ago but haven't found much energy to review it. It's not terrible but it's not good. It's very formula, and the "they-hate-each-other-til-they-love-each-other" arc wasn't believable to me. The scene that sums it up for me is when Gerard Butler, as a bounty hunter, is chasing a guy across a gold course. He runs into the driving range. Do the people stop? No, each one hits their balls as he gets it front of them, as not one golfer notices there's a guy out there running. Several actors show up to get their Supporting Player paydays before going back to their more fulfilling work on TV, like Christine Baranski (The Good Wife) and Jeff Garlin (Curb Your Enthusiasm).

Repo Men - DVD Review

*

Starring Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Liev Schreiber, Alice Braga and Carice van Houten.
Directed by Miguel Sapochnik.

Sometime in the future - a murky, shapeless future - strictly privatized health-care will result in expensive organ transplants with outrageous interest rates where it's been made legal for repo men to cut your organs out if you can't pay. This was the premise for the junky Repo: The Genetic Opera not long ago, and even with the same basic premise, this movie is about as bad, just for different reasons. Where R:TGO seemed to be aspiring to be terrible, trying to be the next Rocky Horror cult film, Repo Men thinks it's saying something.

The first third isn't too bad, setting up the world, the psychopaths who have fun cutting people up legally. Jude Law (Remy) and Forest Whitaker (Jake) have a decent buddy chemistry, and Liev Schreiber becomes a master at offering that fake reassuring smile when we know his evil will eventually manifest itself.

When Remy goes out to do "one last job", as his wife has threatened to leave him if he doesn't quit, he gets zapped by faulty equipment. He wakes up to find he has his own new heart, one that he has to pay for. This is where I got yanked out.

I was giving the movie the ugly, brutal, inhumane society it'd created, but if you're on the job, and it's your own company's faulty equipment that nukes your heart, doesn't the company have to pay for it? Wouldn't they give him a special deal? Wouldn't this world be full of lawyers salivating at the chance of slapping this artificial-organ company with a lawsuit? This movie doesn't want you to think about things. Ever.

It's also when Remy now has an artificial heart that the movie decides to start taking itself seriously, at its own peril. The soundtrack gets all somber, and he meets an underground society of people with defaulted loans on their artificial organs, hiding, unable to pay. Now wifeless, he even gets a new love interest.

Toward the end, there's one reveal that demonstrates how jaw-droppingly stupid one character is, and that gets topped off by one of the worst twist endings in movie history. Just because I didn't see it coming doesn't make it good.

After.Life - DVD Review

*1/2

Starring Christina Ricci, Liam Neeson, Justin Long, Josh Charles, Chandler Canterbury and Celia Weston.
Directed by Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo.

Half-hour premise stretched out to 90 minutes. We're waiting the whole time for the surely Twilight Zone ending, but it ends on a fairly ambiguous note.

Christina Ricci plays a young woman who gets into a car crash. She's awake, alive on the slab at the mortuary, where funeral director Liam Neeson is preparing her body. Or is she really dead? He seems to be the only one who can hear her.

It's largely a two-character a movie, but we get the occassional distraction from her histrionic fiance (Justin Long, who's better at comedy) and an unconvincingly mustachioed Josh Charles (The Good Wife). I go back to my original assertion. 30 minute premise, 90 minute movie. And the "twist" ending doesn't answer the one question that is the premise for the entire film.

NBC's Last Comic Standing concludes

I watched the two-hour finale, and weirdly, the least funny comic of the final five, Felipe Esparza, won the $250,000. I meet the news with a shurg because previous winners haven't really gone on to anything.

The thing that stuck out most to me was when Kathy Griffin performed. She had pumped-in laughs. Everyone else who performed had to earn the laughs of the crowd, but every punchline of hers got the same amount of laughs at the same volume. It was weird.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid - DVD Review

***

Starring Zachary Gordon, Robert Capron, Rachael Harris, Steve Zahn, Chloe Moretz, Devon Bostwick and Grayson Russell.
Directed by Thor Freudenthal.

The books are better, but it conveyed just enough charm that I'm glad I rented it.

Zachary Gordon (National Treasure 2) plays Greg Heffley, a middle-school kid obsessed with "being cool" and therefore sabotages his image every attempt he makes to enhance it. Watching it in live-action, it's not as obvious in the books, but man, Greg can be a selfish jerk sometimes. I think that actually plays to the movie's advantage. We don't mind all these bad things happening to him since he has some actual growing up to do.

It covers a lot of familiar ground when the general horrors of puberty and surviving middle school. It does so with wit and insight. In fact, this might serve to frighten 10-year-olds into never wanting to go to middle school. For every movie like this, there are twenty dreadful tweenage sitcoms on Disney or Nick.

They've already greenlit the sequel, and I'm sure I'll rent that too.

News Tidbits

- Jennifer Aniston, who stars with Jason Bateman in The Switch opening later this month, said she'd love to be a part of the planned Arrested Development movie, which'd reunite Bateman, Michael Cera, Portia de Rossi, and the rest from the cancelled Fox TV show.

- Polygamous family getting their own reality show on TLC.

- Constatin Films developing an animated 3D Tarzan movie.

Despicable Me - Movie Review

***

Starring the voices of Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Russell Brand, Kristen Wiig, Will Arnett, Miranda Cosgrove and Julie Andrews.
Directed by Pierre Coffin & Chris Renaud.

For Best Animated Film of 2010, we have our third nominee. It's not as good as Toy Story 3 or How to Train Your Dragon, but it easily beats out Shrek Forever After.

Carell voices Gru, a modern-day supervillain who's conspiring to pull off the biggest heist in history. He wants to steal the moon. To do so, he needs a shrink ray. He steals one, only to have it stolen from a younger, nerdier supervillain named Vector. How to get it back? Well, fortune has it he's a sucker for girl-scout cookies. So Gru adopts three girls to deliver the cookies, one box of which will contain robot cookies. Work with me here.

So you have the worst possible parental figure in the world now serving as dad to three girls. Hijinks ensue.

The story arc is predictable from there, but I still enjoyed the throw-away gags, sight gags, and the extra stuff with the little yellow minions. (It never does explain where they came from. Did he make them in a lab?) If I had to choose between a Despicable Me 2 or a Shrek 5, I'd pick DM2 in a heartbeat.

Chloe - DVD Review

**

Starring Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, Amanda Seyfried, Max Theiriot and Nina Dobrev.
Directed by Atom Egoyan.

A good cast can disguise a bad movie for only so long.

Moore and Neeson are a married couple hitting a bit of a rough patch. Moore is sure her husband is cheating on her, and to prove it, she hires a prostitute (Seyfried) to come on to him and see if he takes the bait and tries to sleep with her. But eventually it becomes clear this is a Fatal Attraction rip-off.

The main three players bring gravitas to roles that might have benefitted from a more campy approach, but nothing could redeem those final fifteen minutes no matter what tone they opted for. If the climax concluded with one of them having magic powers, it would not have been less ridiculous.

Friday's Box Office

1. The Other Guys - $13.2 million - 1 day
2. Step Up 3-D - $6.6 - 1 day
3. Inception - $5.53 ($214.66) - 22 days
4. Dinner for Schmucks - $3.38 ($39.63) - 8 days
5. Salt - $3 ($83.88) - 15 days
6. Despicable Me - $2.92 ($202.92) - 29 days
7. Cats & Dogs 2 - $2.15 ($21.68) - 8 days
8. Charlie St. Cloud - $1.72 ($20.52) - 8 days
9. Toy Story 3 - $.86 ($394.13) - 50 days
10. Grown Ups - $.75 ($154.01) - 43 days
11. Twilight: Eclipse - $.74 ($291.55) - 38 days

So does this mean Will Ferrell is still a bigger movie-star than Steve Carell? Or maybe The Other Guys benefitted from a clearer marketing campaign and big supporting players like Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Samuel L. Jackson, Eva Mendes, Michael Keaton, Steve Coogan, etc. Either way it should get $38 million for the weekend and be another $100 million hit for Ferrell.

"One move can change a generation." That line from the Step Up 3-D trailer always makes me giggle. Unless you're already Chuck Berry or Michael Jackson, I'm not really sure how much truth there is to that sentiment. It should get $18 million and therefore be considered successful.

Inception's finally been knocked from the top perch, but mission accomplished money-wise for all involved. If it's not nominated for Best Picture this year it's a crime, especially when there are ten nominees now.

Everything else is petering out. Schmucks won't match what Date Night did. Salt might still squeak across the $100 million mark. Cats & Dogs 2 and Charlie St. Cloud are going to quickly disappear.

Quentin Tarantino rebooting the Shadow?

Dark Horizons has the scoop on the possibility of QT working on a Shadow script.

The 1994 film with Alec Baldwin, Penelope Ann Miller and Ian McKellen was one of those mid-1990's embarrassments for superhero movies. There were a lot of bad ones after Tim Burton's Batman and before Sam Raimi's Superman. I remember the purple-suited Billy Zane in The Phantom around the same time, and I wanted to see it just because it was giving Braveheart's Patrick McGoohan work.

St. John of Las Vegas - DVD Review

*1/2

Starring Steve Buscemi, Romany Malco, Peter Dinklage, Sarah Silverman and Tim Blake Nelson.

Very game cast, but my goodness, they have nothing to do. This feels like two episodes of a cable series that hasn't found its voice yet.

Buscemi plays a former gambler who's moved to New Mexico, but his new job in fraud investigation sends him right back to Las Vegas, where he does not want to be. It has the air of being a comedy, and with Sarah Silverman and Romany Malco (Weeds) hanging around, I expected laughs to happen. I think I smiled once.

Inception - Movie Review

****

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Michael Caine, Tom Berenger, Lukas Haas, Dileep Rao and Pete Postlethwaite.
Directed by Christopher Nolan.

Finally, a movie that deserves as much analysis and dissection as any season of Lost. There is a purpose behind the actions of characters, even their names, and everything happens for a reason.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, an expert at infiltrating people's dreams and stealing valuable information that rests in there. After unsuccessfully trying to extract information from a CEO named Seito (Ken Watanabe) he gets a reverse offer. Seito would like him not to steal, but plant an idea into the mind of his main competitor. If he does so, he'll pull the right strings to get Cobb's arrest warrant dropped. (Why Cobb is on the run is revealed later in the film). Cobb pulls a team together and the long con is on.

It's hard to imagine another filmmaker that could be given this budget ($160 million) and be given the liberty to make an intelligent thriller like this, but when you make the highest-grossing non-James Cameron movie of all time, liberty must be granted. It's a movie I'd be glad to see again, if just to analyze my theories about what was really going on.

I'd like to do a spoiler-filled write-up later, but suffice to say, I'm sure it'll be one of the ten nominees for Best Picture in about six months.

Inception still #1 at box-office

For the weekend of July 30-August 1.

1. Inception - $27.52 million ($193.35) - 3 wks (WB) -35.6%
3545 screens / $7763 per screen
2. Dinner for Schmucks - $23.3 - 1 wk (DW)
2911 / $8004
3. Salt - $19.25 ($70.8) - 2 wks (Sony) -46.5%
3612 / $5329
4. Despicable Me - $15.54 ($190.35) - 4 wks (U) -34.4%
3602 / $4315
5. Cats & Dogs 2 - $12.53 - 1 wk (WB)
3705 / $3381
6. Charlie St. Cloud - $12.14 - 1 wk (U)
2718 / $4465
7. Toy Story 3 - $5.04 ($389.67) - 7 wks (BV) -43.5%
2105 / $2392
8. Grown Ups - $4.5 ($150.71) - 6 wks (Sony) -39.4%
2269 / $1983
9. The Sorcerer's Apprentice - $4.32 ($51.88) - 3 wks (BV) -55.2%
2524 / $1712
10. Twilight: Eclipse - $3.97 ($288.2) - 5 wks (Sum) -44.8%
2334 / $1699
11. Ramona & Beezus - $3.65 ($16.31) - 2 wks (Fox) -53.3%
2719 / $1342
12. The Kids Are All Right - $3.46 ($9.57) - 4 wks (Foc) +33.5%
847 / $4089
13. The Last Airbender - $1.76 ($127.24) - 5 wks (Par) -58.3%
1238 / $1421