Great Opening for the Emmys

Jimmy Fallon and Neil Patrick Harris should switch off hosting every year for the next ten years.

My One and Only - DVD Review

**
Starring Renee Zellweger, Logan Lerman, Kevin Bacon, Mark Rendall, Chris Noth, Nick Stahl, Eric McCormack, David Koechner, Steven Weber, Troy Garity and Robin Weigart.
Directed by Richard Loncraine.

I remembered this was based on the childhood of someone famous, but I didn't look up who so I could watch it unbiased. And I was surprised when the reveal came who he is.

My problem with this was the tone and the borrowing. One scene comes straight out of Monty Python's Life of Brian. Another scene comes right out of GoodFellas. And I don't mean tone-wise, I mean they literally felt like someone took those scenes and changed the dialogue a little,a nd then plugged them into this movie.

So is this a comedy or a drama? Zellweger's socialite mother seems like a comic character but with bad things that happen to her. Logan Lerman (Percy Jackson) has the intensity of a dramatic character but when we find out who he is, I don't know, seems like he would've been a little more light-hearted in his youth.

She's a rich woman who learns her husband's cheating on her so she puts her two teenage boys in the car and drives across the country looking for a new husband/sugar-daddy to take care of them. Each guy seems to get 5-10 minutes and then she moves on, and after the third failure, I found myself growing impatient with what's going on. So... she's going to go through the rest of the actors I've heard of in the opening credits before she has her epiphany? A big meh from me.

Brooklyn's Finest - DVD Review

**1/2

Starring Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke, Wesley Snipes, Will Patton, Ellen Barkin, Lili Taylor, Brian F. O'Byrne, Michael K. Williams, Jesse Williams and Vincent D'Onofrio.
Directed by Antoine Fuqua.

If you've seen Training Day, Dark Blue, Deep Cover, or any corrupt-cop movie in the past 40 years, you've seen Brooklyn's Finest. The appeal then is just watching a different set of actors go through familiar motions.

It's an ensemble piece that focusses on three different, very loosely connected cops. So loose that I don't think any gets more than ten seconds of screen-time shared with another. Richard Gere is the beat cop who has one week until retirement. Don Cheadle is the undercover cop who's been under so long he's starting to lose his grip on his own humanity. Ethan Hawke is the detective struggling with the temptation to pocket drug money from their busts with his bills stacking up.

There are so many cliches in the movie that it has fun with it. It sets up about twelve cliched plot turns but only follows eight of them, while the other four just evaporate. It gets pretty violent, and director Antoine Fuqua has a fetish for blood splattering on the wall. In fact, it got to where any time a character was standing near a wall, I figured he wasn't long for this world.

The performances are all fine, especially Hawke as the cop at the end of his rope. It's also nice to see Snipes in a movie that didn't go straight to DVD. It all builds to an allegedly powerful climax but th impact isn't there, maybe because it feels so inevitable.

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.