The Last Exorcism - ***1/2

The Last Exorcism has all the makings of a worst-of-the-year candidate: it's approached in the increasingly-tiresome found-footage faux-documentary style with a derivative set-up involving the Devil as the villain and is a horror film distributed by Lionsgate, the folks responsible for almost every shitball torture-porn gore-fest you find at the bottom of the cinematic barrel. But The Last Exorcism features none of the things you expect, delivering very little of the obligatory crowd-pleasing moments that modern horror films seem to require. Instead, it's a very slow build-up, starting as more of an interview-style documentation of a charismatic preacher who doesn't believe in God. The first half of the film is more funny than it is anything else, with the preacher revealing some tricks of the trade, and agreeing to perform the exorcism merely to prove that it's all an empty ritual involving cheap parlor tricks. The central performance by Patrick Fabian as Reverend Cotton Marshall might actually be one of the best of the year. His performance took me from pure dread to loving the film in less than twenty minutes. And what's really amazing is that when it turns from light and funny to dark and scary, the filmmakers actually pull off the transition marvelously, turning a joke into something deeply unsettling. Don't miss it.

Piranha - ***

Boobs, blood, and more boobs. Not usually the best combination, but somehow Alexandre Aja fits it all together for some outstanding entertainment in the new Piranha film. It's easily one of the thinnest plots ever conceived: seismic activity ruptures the floor of a lake near the shore of a small town during Spring Break, and thousands of highly evolved piranha come out to feed. Finally a film that knows not only to be dumb, but also how to be dumb. It has no pretensions about being great, or even having any kind of plot resolution, but instead it's eight minutes of set-up, probably two of which feature a fantastically whacked-out Christopher Lloyd, and then eighty minutes of climax. And it's refreshing to see a retro drive-in style horror movie made with sincerity, without any purposefully silly Grindhouse-like winks at the audience. It's exactly what it needs to be. The boobs are big, the CGI is terrible, the blood flows by the gallon, and it's all genuinely fun. Apparently that's not an easy task, because I don't think I've seen anyone actually pull it off since Aja did it with The Hills Have Eyes a few years ago.

Nanny McPhee Returns - 1/2*

The only thing in Nanny McPhee Returns that is more of an eye-sore than Emma Thompson's make-up is the rest of the movie. The whole thing. The color palette; the scenery; the props; the action going on inside the frame, like the scene in which Nanny McPhee is trying to teach five little shits to stop fighting by tapping her magic stick on the floor, causing the kids to start hitting themselves, pulling their own hair, and banging their heads against the walls. All of it. It's all bad, painful even. Like the magical child abuse scene, almost every other comedic attempt fails two-fold, not only missing completely on the humor, but also on the tone. The weirdest example of this is when Maggie Smith's character mistakes a pile of cow shit for a cushion at a picnic, is corrected, but sits in it anyway because it looks comfortable, which is followed immediately by the arrival of a telegram from the War Office saying that the kids' father has been killed, which it turns out was forged by their uncle, who has a gambling problem and is trying to convince their mother to sell the farm so that silly-serious hit-women do not remove his kidneys, which they almost do later on, but are stopped when they are literally blown away by an enormous bird-fart that also harvests a field of barley. Wholesome family entertainment, written by Academy-Award winning screenwriter, Emma Thompson.

Takers - Zero Stars

I could simply make a bunch of puns about how Takers just takes your money, or how it takes your time; how it takes up a screen at your movie theater; how it takes away your interest in watching it after about eleven minutes; how it takes about forty minutes for someone in the film to say the title: "We're Takers... that's what we do," and so on. I could do that, but that would be too easy. It wouldn't be very thoughtful or insightful, or worth the time it would take to read it; it would be boring and predictable, like every other comment anyone else has spoken or written about it; it would demonstrate no effort by me, nor would it give anyone reason to believe that I took any time to think about what I am writing and publishing; it would have absolutely no value or significance, and would be boring and obnoxious to read. It might not even make any sense. It would probably be taken to be the worst comment about a film so far this year... which is why cliche puns are a perfectly suitable comment about Takers.

Vampires Suck - Zero Stars

Exhausting.

Step Up 3D - 1/2*

Step Up 3D banks just about everything on the assumption that team-choreographed-street-break-dancing is, like, pretty much the coolest thing ever. It's not. Not really. Not even in 3D. In fact, 3D might even make it worse, especially considering the rest of the movie gives absolutely no reason to utilize the technology; it opens with, and features throughout, a montage of footage that a guy is shooting on a handheld camera and any of the non-dancing is shot in close-ups.

There is one good scene, a Singin' in the Rain-like dance sequence set to a remixed ice-cream truck jingle that took me by surprise, but it's probably the only part of Step Up 3D that even approaches any real style or quality. The rest is indescribably abysmal, revolving around a dance-feud between the good guys, who inhabit a house for awesome break-dancers that is about to be repossessed by the bank, and the bad guys, who are led by a former good guy bent on revenge against them after getting kicked out of the house due to gambling problems which motivated him to throw a major dance competition. It all plays out like a series of last-minute revisions and improvisations, with no attention paid to how moment impacts a scene, or how that scene impacts the movie as a whole. Characters say exactly what they're feeling, and seem to only be able to think in cliche: "What are you doing up on the roof this late?" "I like to come up here, and just listen to the sounds of the city, you know..." Though I will give someone credit because I would have sworn he was going to say that he goes up there sometimes... to think. Bravo, though it's probably safe to assume that the actor just botched the line. Another thing I would almost describe as impressively obnoxious is the tendency for characters to react to anything they see. There is a subplot that is started after the Camera Guy shows his footage to his Future Girlfriend... they're walking down the street the next day and she sees a poster on a telephone pole for California Film School and says he should apply: "You need to take risks! That film school sounds amazing!" Apparently that's all it takes to make a decision... "I saw a poster so it must be good!" I call this impressive because it actually makes me want to see more of these characters' daily lives and how they go about being influenced by every goddamn sign they see as they walk down the street in fucking New York City. But that's what the movie's all about: creating nonsensical feel-good moments in between epic dance battles. Oh, and later on, after the good guys win the world championship, Future Girlfriend leaves Camera Guy a package which turns out to be an acceptance letter from that film school. She applied for him and they sent the letter to her, apparently. Not to spoil it or anything.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World - ****

It seems funny to think that Scott Pilgrim could be the role that Michael Cera was born to play, considering it's essentially the only role he's ever played, but I think that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the film in which he was meant to play it. His awkward/irresponsible late-teen/early twenty-something has never been more enjoyable, nor has it been better blended with the narrative, and cinematic, style as it is here in this love letter to/send up of hipster culture. Covering everything from being in a shitty grunge band to vegan superiority to going through a bi-sexual phase, Scott Pilgrim weaves together an impressive collection of hipster cliches without succumbing to their obnoxiousness, and skillfully turns small problems into amusing epics, ranging from finding reasons to put on a hat in order to cover up imperfectly messy hair to having to defeat seven evil exes to win the right to date a girl.

It's an action film disguised as a comedy, or maybe a comedy disguised as an action film, following more the structure of an action film, while taking on more of a comedic style and pace. But it's also part romance, part drama, part fantasy, kung-fu musical, live-action anime and about a dozen other different genres, mixing them all together into one of the funnest, sweetest, smartest film of the year, edited together at warp speed using a dozen different aspect ratios and never missing a beat. I defy you to find another film even remotely similar. It's incredibly unique. It's pure style and kinetic energy. It's simultaneously nostalgic and ahead of its time. Scott Pilgrim is, without a doubt, one of the most fully realized films I've seen in a long, long time. I can't recommend it enough.

The Expendables - Zero Stars

The Expendables opens with a shot of the crew riding motorcycles through the street and into a building, then cuts to the title card, then jumps into a poorly staged action sequence. The motorcycles are not seen again until an end credit montage in which they ride them out of the building from the opening. That's pretty much what the movie is like: a hodge-podge of random shit that is meant to be badass, but that have absolutely nothing to do with anything else in the movie. "Motorcycles and leather jackets are real masculine and macho, so we have to get them in there somewhere," Sylvester Stallone surely said out of the side of his mouth to his writing partner at some point.

I guess this is what the movie was meant to be: everything that action movies have, including every random action icon from '87 to '98, but somewhere something went wrong, or everywhere everything went wrong, because what it's missing is entertainment. I'm not sure if Stallone is worse at writing, directing, or acting, because The Expendables hits none of the notes that it should, and wants to hit. It takes itself ultra seriously, shooting all of the dialogue, and quite a bit of the action too, in ultra close-ups. I guess ultra-badasses require an ultra amount of screen-space to speak lines like, "If I could have just saved that girl... I don't know... maybe I could have saved what's left of my soul." That comes out of the mouth of the Mercenary Gone Straight, who's still a tough guy who does the skull and rose-petal tattoos for the guys. And yes, just about all of the dialogue is that bad. Just about all of it is spoken in shorthand... "The general went rogue after skipping town with the goods, it was a real cash-plus operation..." Even their more civilian conversations are like this, but maybe that's because their civilian lives are still hardcore and action-packed; what little we see of them outside of their missions involves a subplot with Jason Statham beating up the no-good boyfriend's basketball team of the woman he loves: "You shouldn't have bruised the girl... next time I'll deflate you!" (after stabbing their basketball). I think that the only time I could condone punching a woman is in this movie, when Stone Cold Steve Austin does just that, because it just means that I don't have to hear whatever poorly-conceived Stallone afterthought was going to escape her mouth. And yes, the scene's a real stunner.

What should have been light and fun is just cold and dark, straining to be philosophical at times. The plot makes no sense, and the action makes even less sense, with the end being basically an eruption of chain-reaction explosions. There is about a three minute montage of the guys setting a bunch of charges on the walls of a big Spanish mansion. I don't know where all of these explosives came from or how they could carry them all, but when they push the button the terrible CGI explosions just keep coming, even from building where no charges were set. And there isn't even a solid one-liner to top it off. It's bad. It's pathetic. It's most definitely expendable.