Let’s be frank right from the start: Couples Retreat is the kind of movie you can appreciate and enjoy when you’re sitting in the drive-thru at McDonald’s wondering what one dollar Redbox rental will go nicely with your Double Quarter Pounder, pound of fries and cattle trough-sized soda. It’s not a terrible show and has a few funny bits, but its best digested with no expectations, and also while inebriated with sugar and cholesterol. The tragedy of Couples Retreat is …
Category: Reviews
The Coen brothers can be obtuse filmmakers: operating as if to apply their master’s touch on mainstream films solely for building the studio goodwill needed to produce the films they’re really interested in making. Such is the case with A Serious Man. It’s not mainstream. It’s not even midstream. Critics will love it, but the general audience won’t see it and those who do will find it totally, inaccessibly boring. Which doesn’t mean it’s bad- it just means A Serious …
Bright Star is what used to be surefire Masterpiece Theater bait. A serious, deliberate and restrained piece of lushly designed period romance and tragedy. A film where moments and vistas swirl around its centerpiece stars, all managed with a steady and deliberate directorial hand. All said in today’s bombastic, spoon-fed world of cinema… that’s some boring crap. And yet, it’s like comparing Bach to Beatles. Where most mainstream films feel like they’ve got a bouncy hook and melody to bring …
First, a confession: Open a film with a vast expanse of stars and you’ve instantly grabbed my inner geek by vice grip right where it counts. Put a knobby starship plowing through that expanse of stars to regions unknown and you’ve won my goodwill. Hello, Pandorum. As the most recent big screen addition to the grime-crusted house deep space sci-fi morphed into circa 1979, German director Christian Alvart’s Pandorum manages to kick off in disorienting fashion, nicely setting up unanswered …
Somewhere between the Oscar-winning geneses of 1980’s Fame and its 2009 remake, technology changed fame’s definition. Once the reward for hard work and craft refinement, fame has become the reward for cheaply hawking the three B’s (belly, breasts and butt). Where fame and the title of “celebrity” (IE- an individual worthy of celebration) were once purchased in the currency of dedicated sweat, it’s now easily traded via the narcissistically shallow efforts to amass a legion of social network followers with …
The winds of change sweep into every avenue of our lives without regard to time or place. It can be the passing of a dear friend, a change in ideology religiously or politically, marriage, a new baby, a new job, or something seemingly inconsequential, such as hairstyles, fashion and music. But one thing will never change as long as Father Time keeps tick-tocking away: High school sucks. Some will disagree. They’ll say their four years of high school were nothing …
Unexpectedly pleasant movies are always a nice surprise. After Cloudy With a Chance of Meatball‘s lackluster marketing efforts and a string of mediocre trailers, I’d all but written it off. Oops. Totally unfamiliar with the children’s book of the same name, I went in to Sony Animation’s Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs with an unattached blank slate– a slate quickly loaded with a congenial array of off-center comedy and LOL zing. Who knew? Cloudy barrels forward with a technicolor …
Jennifer’s Body arrives not as simply a tongue-through-cheek horror film aimed at enticing the teen crowd, but also loaded with a hat-trick of questions: 1) Is Diablo Cody (writer of Juno and Showtime’s United States of Tara) a 2-hit wonder? 2) Does Megan Fox have an acting career beyond Transformers? and 3) Is the movie any good? The answer: probably not, kind of and not really. In move-geek circles, a lot’s been made of the fact Oscar Winning screenwriter Diablo …