The Losers ***

The Losers is nothing brilliant, and the good thing is that it's not trying to be. It's refreshing to see a film that knows it's place, especially when it delivers everything it promises. In this case it's gunfights, cleavage, and one-liners, and it works. Splendidly. It's a fairly low-budget affair, but it does a lot with a little, putting together some stylishly ridiculous action sequences, and rounding up a great cast of actors who work well together. For my money you can't do much better than Chris Evans in a witty side-kick role, and Jason Patrick nails the part of the comically sinister villain. Entertainment for the sake of entertainment seems to be a difficult thing to pull off these days, but The Losers wins does just that.

Oceans - ***1/2

Oceans may not be too much more than a Discovery Channel documentary, but the difference is that you get to see this film on a giant screen, and due to some ridiculously beautiful imagery, that is a pretty big difference. Though there isn't much in the way of a narrative, Oceans does have a few great sequences that play with your emotions, or at least tug on the part of you that hates to see adorable creatures preyed on by vicious predators. Take the scene in which a nest of sea turtles hatch on a beach and head for the water. We watch for a few minutes as hundreds of them struggle to cover about thirty yards and can't help but marvel with a big smile, until a flock of seagulls swoop down and pick them off one by one, until only a handful make it to the water. It's as fascinating as it is heartbreaking, and it might actually be a better action sequence than many actions films have featured this year. Absolutely dynamite.

Date Night - ***

The premise of Date Night is weak at best: a married couple with a boring life go out on the town and unknowingly pose as criminals and get in over their heads, running from both the bad guys and the cops to prove their innocence, all the while injecting some much-needed excitement into their lives and learning that their marriage is still fresh. Yup, it could have been a miserable ninety minutes, but the perfect casting of Steve Carell and Tina Fey saves it from turning into the drollery that it really could have. With great timing and delivery they're able to turn mediocre jokes into good ones, and they're way too good together for even some of the lesser obligatory marriage-and-kids jokes to come off as more than harmless. Great cameos help too, whether it's Mark Wahlberg's ridiculous surveillance system, or Mila Kunis and James Franco as naive scumbags in love... Hell, William Fichtner's horny, drugged-out utterance of "Sexy robots!" alone might make the film worthwhile. It's not all gold, but enough of it is.

Why Did I Get Married Too? - Zero Stars

There's almost no way to talk about Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married Too? without sounding racist. It's as if before writing the screenplay Mr. Perry passed around a hat to everyone he knew and asked them to throw in a folded piece of paper with a black stereotype written on it for him to include in the film. In addition to being put off by a cast of token black characters, I was never able to tell whether the film was supposed to take the film seriously or if I was supposed to be laughing at it; it's difficult to classify exchanges like, "I thought you quit drinkin'..." "Girl, with that negro you're lucky I'm not on crrrrrrack!" as bad drama or failed humor.

The plot seems to revolve around which couple can argue the loudest, or who can destroy the most expensive items in their beautiful houses when they return from an island getaway. Or maybe it was who can argue over the most ridiculous nonsense... (SPOILER ALERT) The couple that argues over the guy revealing the password to his cell phone to prove he isn't cheating wins. It goes on for the entire movie, despite the fact that there isn't enough there to sustain a single scene. There isn't even enough there for a verse in Janet Jackson's original song recorded for the film, though that doesn't stop her from singing about it anyway.

Why Did I Get Married Too? is poorly written, and Perry's direction of the material is even worse. It looks as if it were written for the stage, as most of the scenes consist simply of one shot of four people sitting in a row on the beach or in a house. Bland visuals would be acceptable if the actors could carry a scene, but in this case they can't, and the dialogue they are given is putrid at best. I never understood why Tyler Perry was such a phenomenon and, after actually seeing one of his films, I'm even more baffled than before. He's a terrible writer, an even worse director, with no comprehension of visual storytelling, scene structure, pacing, or the relevance of a single scene to the film as a whole... and he might even be a racist. The only credit I can give him is that I don't remember seeing a single basketball in the entire film.

The Last Song -1/2*

Greg Kinnear stars along Miley Cyrus in The Last Song, the latest too-sappy-for-its-own-or-anyone-else's-good Nicolas Sparks adaptation, playing the guilt-ridden estranged Dad, keeping cancer a secret from the kids. While watching the film one thing is clear, and that is that Kinnear must have a daughter between the ages of maybe seven and fourteen, and she is surely a Hannah Montana fan. Why the Hell else would he be involved with this awful schlock? There is almost nothing else good about the film other than Mr. Kinnear, who makes about a quarter of the film almost bearable, but it's all muddled by the intolerable little asshole who plays his son and Miley's approach to acting, which is speaking with perpetually clenched teeth and casting dirty looks at the pretty boy she will later fall in love with as Dad withers away. I guess it's a coming-of-age story, only it depicts a rebellious seventeen year-old girl mature into a calm fifteen year-old.

City Island - ***

It would seem that a movie like City Island shouldn't work. The plot is on par with a CBS sitcom, following a dysfunctional Italian family who take in a paroled inmate who is Dad's illegitimate son, and the screenplay provides plenty of chances for the film to go sour, but somehow it is all reigned in and ends up being pretty charming. It may be an easy premise, but it's full of interesting characters with bizarre secrets, such as Dad taking an acting class in his spare time, working on a cringe-worthy Marlon Brando impression, or Son enjoying internet fetish videos featuring men feeding food to round women, or Mom's crush on Dad's Illegitimate Son. All of these secrets are of course revealed in the final scene of total madness and shouting, and a touch of physical violence (they are, after all, Cinematic City Italians), but no worries... it's resolved with a surprising amount of grace and humor, and quite a bit of heart.

Furry Vengeance - Zero Stars

The opening scene of the brain-numbing Furry Vengeance pretty much says it all. A businessman driving through the woods is talking to his boss about the mall that they are going to build there, and an intrepid little shit of a raccoon and his friends run his car off the road and over a cliff. You see, the animals don't want the forest torn down, so they hassle, embarrass, maim, and even kill anyone that gets in their way. It's a pretty good PG message to dispense to children or, wait... on second thought it might be everything that is annoying and wrong about today's children. So save your ten bucks and just take a trip to the Wal-Mart toy aisle. Not only does this car-wreck teach children to take what they want, however they have to go about doing so, but it also teaches them that shit like this is supposed to be funny, or maybe I'm just not sophisticated enough to understand the subtleties of tipping over a porta-potty with a surely ashamed Brendan Fraser in it. Seriously though, who told Brendan Fraser this was a good idea? In addition to that, he gets naked in a tomato-juice bath after being skunked, he runs around in the tightest women's track suit imaginable with "yum-yum" printed on the ass, and he also receives a golden shower while wrestling with a raccoon. What was he thinking? What were the raccoon and the skunk thinking? What was anyone involved with this thinking?

A Nightmare on Elm Street - Zero Stars

About a half hour into A Nightmare on Elm Street, I was bored into considering the logic behind the premise. Things like if you're merely slashed by Fred in your dream, but not killed, should you get a tetanus shot when you wake up? Or why is the solution in this scenario always to just try to stay awake? What will that do besides delay death by an unenjoyable two or three days? And can these characters actually hear that cliche shrill horror suspense music that was added in post-production to every scene? They must, because why else would they be terrified to go into their backyards to bring the dog inside? I suppose in a film like this you should just take it wherever you can get it, because Nightmare is about as scary as an untied shoe or riding a bike without a helmet. Fred looks like a drowsy scarecrow whose head is a stretched-out ball-sack with a mouth, and he is shown in the very first scene, a rookie mistake which, though I'm not an expert on the horror genre, I'm pretty sure breaks an unwritten rule, even if it's only a slasher film. Even worse is the scene that comes about twenty minutes later when one of the characters describes him to her friend, who also sees Fred in his dreams. Why go through an "eerie" two-minute description of a character, who has already been shown onscreen, to another character who already knows what he looks like? But that's the kind of thing this movie does best: dragging out scenes with obvious results.

Of all the perplexingly nonsensical plot twists or poor character decisions, the most confusing thing about the film is why someone picked this film to remake. As cultish or kitschy as the original film is, I think even some of its biggest fans would admit that it really isn't very good. But what it lacks in actual quality it makes up for with cheap thrills and genre conventions, and I mean that in an endearing way. This new update leaves those things out, opting instead to attempt to take the story and character seriously, without doing anything to make anyone care. It's a movie in which the characters are obnoxiously stupid and one-dimensional, with parents who are ignorant to the point of insanity who spew out boringly outrageous dialogue, a movie in which you don't revel in the fact that characters make poor decisions which prompt you to say things like "Don't go in there!" with pleasure, but instead you literally wonder why the Hell they would actually consider going in there in the first place, because once they're in there, it's not nearly as exciting, by means of kitsch or genuine thrill, as it should be.

The Joneses - *

The Joneses has an intriguing premise: a group of salesmen move into a neighborhood and pose as a perfect family in order to sell the American Dream, which in this case is a bunch of unnecessary and expensive products that companies pay them to endorse. Unfortunately the film is exactly what it is against: a glamorization of consumerism. Like the McDonald's documentary Super Size Me, this film only serves to make its target that much more alluring (I got a Big Mac immediately after seeing Super Size Me). Who wouldn't want a nicer car, or flat-screen televisions in every room, or microwavable pizza rolls that won't make you fat?

Not making the statement it was trying to make would have been okay with me, but in addition to that it is also not exciting or even entertaining in any way, despite the fact that it stars David Duchovny and Gary Cole. For a while Duchovny's presence fooled me into thinking that I liked it, because there are a couple of times when it almost turns into an episode of Californication, but when a half hour went by and he hadn't gotten drunk and slept with a hooker, I realized I was just watching a boring film. Not only does the film not achieve the lofty goal of its premise, but the premise itself detaches the viewer from the reality of anything that is happening on the screen. It's hard to care about characters that have everything, and I'm not even sure if we're supposed to care about them. And when the time comes late in the film for them to make tough decisions, it's hard to distinguish between their emotions and their greed; I wasn't sure if they actually felt affection for anyone, or if they were just trying to make a sale.

In the beginning the film is exactly what it hates: a glorification of American insatiability and in the end it is exactly what I hate: an exercise in unearned heavy-handedness. In the third act Gary Cole, who plays the neighbor, commits suicide by tying himself to one of the many expensive toys that he had been buying throughout the film, a lawnmower with a television fixed above the steering wheel that he couldn't afford, and driving it into a pool. You see, he was drowning in debt, and so he literally drown himself... using the very cause of his debt! Brilliant. This device of making the audience get on-board with something in the beginning, in this case cool products, and then using that something to indict the audience in the end has worked before (watch Lord of War), but after this film instead of feeling guilty, I just pulled out my phone and looked at the BestBuy ad to see if they had any flat-screens on sale.

The Back-Up Plan - ***

Who would have thought that, four months into the year, one of the most enjoyable movies to date would be a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Lopez? Not me, but there you have it. The Back-Up Plan isn't great, not even close, but it does do enough of the little things to get you on its side so that you're willing to overlook the obvious transgressions... They don't like each other at first, but then they get to know each other and hit it off, until he does something that is taken out of context and they break up for a while until her friend tells her to wise up, and so on. Sure, it has all of the cliches and narrative potholes of every rom-com I can't stand, but it also has several moments I would call hilarious, like when Lopez's water breaks at a geriatric wedding and you can see everyone in the background feeling their pants, or when Robert Klein shows up for one scene as the gynecologist, half of which consists of him repeating the word "vagina" ten times in a row to ward off the boyfriend's squeamishness. Maybe I liked it because it has the right amount of vulgarity, or the right kind of bathroom humor, or maybe it's just that, while it's not realistic in any sense, it's my kind of fantasy, the kind where an average guy can win over a beautiful girl with a candle-lit dinner where he serves pizza.

Kick-Ass - ***

I think I like the new comic-book adaptation Kick-Ass a lot more when I'm not watching it. It's a movie that grows on you. I walked out of it feeling a little disappointed, and wrote down a list of complaints like, "I didn't like the kid in the lead role," "Feels low-rent," "Disjointed." But after a second viewing and a few weeks to ponder over the experience, I don't really feel too strongly about any one of those comments, and my list of praiseworthy details has maybe doubled since opening night.

While I can't say I loved the movie, the things that I loved about it are those which I recall most easily. Aaron Johnson, the kid in the lead role, really isn't that bad. I think it's just that he is upstaged by just about everyone else in the cast, most notably by Chloe Grace-Moretz as Hit-Girl, the eleven year-old sword-wielding assassin, and Mark Strong as the mob boss and ultimate target of the film's "real-life" superheroes. Strong gives what is probably my favorite performance of the year, with the perfect blend of menace and nonchalance, like when he leaves a brutal interrogation scene and tells his henchmen to kill the guy however they wish because he wants to catch a movie with his kid. In lesser hands it would come off as grim, but Strong somehow makes it laughable. And that's really when the film is at its best, when it can transform something that should be offensive into something entertaining. Hit-Girl and her father, Big Daddy (played superbly by Nicolas Cage), share a number of these scenes, making wholesome family fun out of asking for and receiving a butterfly knife for a birthday gift.

I think the problem I have while watching the film is that not all of it is handled with the grace that these scenes are, and so sometimes it felt like it was going from one extreme to another without giving me time to adjust. At times it goes from real danger to a happy-go-lucky action sequence in the blink of an eye, and that's where it feels disjointed; it shifts its momentum too quickly for everything to register. And that's where the difficulty in adaptation lies. It's easy to pull off a change in tone in a comic series, when there are natural breaks in the narrative and each issue can have its own feel, but a film is meant to be experienced as a whole, and so a story like this can maybe seem like a little too much. But I have to say that for all of it's flaws Kick-Ass still manages to be pretty awesome.

The Runaways - **

About 20 minutes into The Runaways I noted that all it consisted of was haircuts and a great soundtrack. Though it goes through a short period of being mildly interesting, my initial assessment was not far off. The "biopic" of The Runaways, which is really only about two of the members of the band, features that polished rebellion that Catherine Hardwicke perfected to absolute mediocrity in Lords of Dogtown a few years back, where characters wear rebellion well, but never actually do anything rebellious. Kristen Stewart's Joan Jett utters "fuck" and "cunt" a few times, and even ruins a perfectly good t-shirt by ripping it up and spray-painting "Sex Pistols" on it, but you walk away with the assumption that she probably doesn't even hate her parents.

Dakota Fanning, however, comes off a little more bad-ass, playing Cherie Currie, the bi-sexual jail-bait possible-girlfriend-of-Joan-Jett-(they-sleep-together-one-night)-but-it's-never-really-made-clear-what-the-Hell-is-going-on-between-the-two-of-them lead-singer of The Runaways. She gets all of the fun scenes, all two of them, where she gets to win a junior high talent show by lip-syncing to glam-rock era David Bowie and giving her classmates the finger. Watching I Am Sam ten years ago, I never thought I'd see adorable little Dakota Fanning dressing up as an androgynous rock-star and dry-humping a school auditorium stage, but she steals the show. Well, her and Michael Shannon as the band's flamboyant manager and mentor. He only gets a few scenes, but the movie's almost worth watching for them alone.

But aside from two great performances, the film is a mess. I have no idea what time-span it covers, but I was left with the impression that Joan Jett went to a guitar lesson one day, paired up with an important music producer the next day, and went on tour before the end of the week. It all happens so fast you don't even learn the names of the other girls in the band. It's even missing the enjoyably obligatory scene where they come up with the name for the band. It's more than a little bit annoying that things like this are unclear, because it's not as though the film shows us the lives of the characters when they're not practicing or touring; that's pretty much all you get, which make the scenes in which Joan writes songs about heartbreak that much more aggravating because who has she ever loved? Somewhere in the third act, The Runaways runs away from coherence completely when the band breaks up for reasons that don't make sense and the film tries to manufacture some drama out of the whole thing, but I wasn't buying any of it, and neither should you. If you want to watch a movie about punk-rock, go rent 24 Hour Party People.

The Perfect Game - ***

The Perfect Game depicts the trials of the first Mexican team to win the Little League World Series. The movie is kind of like the team itself: scrappy, a little rough around the edges, and in the end it comes out of nowhere to be pretty good. It has it's share of faults, but aside from being a little preachy in the beginning and featuring the inspirational film's stock character of the stubborn father who seems to not want to see his son succeed, and who berates and belittles at every turn until the end, when he risks something to witness the final victory, there's nothing too offensive about the film. Stubborn Dad is handled best when he has a little charm, like Paul Dooley in Breaking Away or even Ned Beatty in Rudy, but here he's a little too serious, which I guess is okay; it is his son who pitches the perfect game in the championship (the only time that has ever been done), so a little crowd-pleasing drama is excusable, I suppose.

But for the most part, The Perfect Game is full of charm and wit. Even the preachiness in the beginning dissolves into harmless fun, with Cheech Marin of all people playing the team's own personal traveling baseball encyclopedia/priest. And a corny cliched romance sub-plot between the coach, played by the underrated Clifton Collins, and a girl back home is handled well enough to actually add to the film rather than detract from it, with Coach being love-coached by a little dirt-ball Romeo who can't throw a ball but can whip up an excuse for why Coach missed dinner with the girl's family and produce a make-shift bouquet of flowers in a moment's notice. The rest of the team is fun to watch too and while this is no Bad News Bears, it's no Hardball (the one with Keanu Reeves) either, and there's enough heart in it to win just about anyone over.

The Black Waters of Echo's Pond - 1/2*

I'm not really sure what to say about The Black Waters of Echo's Pond. It's a low-budget horror film with Robert Patrick, the dad from Kindergarten Cop, and the guy that played Frank in Donnie Darko, so of course it was absolute trash. But is it fair to beat up on a campy horror film? It probably is, but is it worthwhile? I don't know about that. You already know it sucks. You already know that there is no story, or what story there is amounts to rubbish. You already know that it is cheesy as Hell. You know that Robert Patrick was ashamed to be in it and probably stipulated in his contract that he only wanted to be on the set for one day, so his part consists of a bunch of shots of him walking around in the woods with a shotgun that are peppered throughout the entire film to make it seem like he actually serves a purpose. Sure, you know all of that, but what you don't know? It has the best line of the year so far: "I wasn't going to punch you, I was just raising my fist!" Okay, it's probably the worst, but the worst in the best way. And the crowd that it was made for sit alone in their seats, mumble to themselves and then chant, "Show me your boobs! Show me your boobs!" whenever a girl is shown wearing a bra. Pathetic? Sure. Hilarious? Absolutely. So thank you, Black Something of Edmond's Porch for assuring me that no matter how bad my life gets, it will always be better than the lives of your fans, and of your cast.

Clash of the Titans - *1/2

Nothing is as it should be in the new Clash of the Titans remake. It could have been campy and fun, but instead it has an inflated sense of self-importance, not a good quality for a film with lousy effects and no plot. The cast that has been assembled for the task of acting out this hokey trash is full of actors that are either too good for these roles, or just not fit to play them. A few, like Liam Neeson and Casino Royale villain Mads Mikkelsen manage to save some face, pulling off a few acceptable scenes, but others, like Nicolas Hoult, the chubby loser from About a Boy, is just way off, playing an army grunt who has absolutely no effect whatsoever because all I see is the gay kid in the glowing sweater and the too-white teeth from last year's A Single Man. Seriously, Narcissus could see his reflection in those teeth. It's distracting.

There are a few good things in the film; Olympus looks great, and I really dug Zeus' shiny armor and, well, I guess that's about it for the good stuff. These scenes with the gods aren't too bad, but there aren't enough of them, and Ralph Fiennes shows up in most of them as Hades, who creepily floats around, ruining what's left of them. But creepy is good, right? Umm, not really. It's not the kind of creepy that is a nuance of the performance, but the creepiness of bad make-up and poor shot-selection, like when you catch the pan-and-scan version of Mission Impossible III on TNT and there are shots where Phil Hoffman's face takes up literally the entire screen, so it just looks like an amorphous blob that can speak. Clash has a few shots with Fiennes that rival Amorphous Hoffman.

While Clash never really reaches the point where it is painful to watch, it just never wows you in any way. Like 300, the action is poorly directed, and it features a boring political sub-plot that takes place back home. The score is never epic enough to arouse any excitement whatsoever, and is pretty much a cross between generic adventure music and shit-metal. And like so many other action films that feature a giant creature, it incorporates the obligatory close-up of that creature roaring loudly into the camera. Why is this in every movie? It will never come anywhere near to being as incredible as it was in Jurassic Park, so it needs to be put-down, especially when it takes up roughly ten percent of the creature's screen-time in the film. That's right, the Kraken of "Release the Kraken!" trailer fame has about three minutes of screen-time in the actual film, most of it spent as a mess of flailing tentacles rising from the ocean. The sequence is over before it starts, and might go down as the least-impressive set-piece since the bandits' raid on the house in Home Alone 3. But I suppose an impressive ending would have upset the balance of mediocrity the film worked so hard to attain in the first 100 minutes, so maybe it works after all.