Ramona and Beezus - **1/2

The first half of Ramona and Beezus is kind of an annoying experience, especially if you're over the age of six. During this forty-five minute period everyone in Ramona's life treats her like a nuisance and condescends to her whenever she opens her mouth. The hyper-polished look and obnoxiously over-cute tone led me to the early conclusion that this would be yet another children's film with no joy and an obvious message. I was wrong, or half wrong anyway, because that description certainly does suit the first half of the film well. But then it eases up somewhat, and with the help of a nice supporting performance from Transformers' Josh Duhamel of all people, Ramona and Beezus gently glides into the territory of genuine sincerity. Though the obvious message remains, the film is made for kids, not a twenty-three year-olds. And when the message is to be yourself, and let your imagination run wild, I'm not going to bitch too loudly.

Charlie St. Cloud - *1/2

I enjoyed about half of Charlie St. Cloud. The first half, that is. But the second half pretty much negates the first half, or renders it irrelevant, or makes you question the movie to the point where even the enjoyable first half doesn't make any sense. That's a bad place to be. There's a plot twist that drives that second half that has been done a little too often in recent years, and done far better than it is here, and it's completely unnecessary in this case, which makes it all the more awful to sit through. The story follows Charlie after he gets into a car wreck that kills his little brother. Before he died, Charlie promised to meet him in the woods every day, a promise that is kept for five years after his death, until Charlie reunites with a girl he used to have a crush on. There is plenty of interesting drama that could have been explored here, but this potential goes unfulfilled, and what began as an intriguing and heartfelt premise gets buried in tired supernatural twists and by the end it goes fate-and-religion out of nowhere on you. What a shame.

Life During Wartime - *

Life During Wartime may have many of the ingredients of a Todd Solondz film: loneliness, pedophilia, social misfits, confused children, but it's missing the most important part, which is the spark that makes it all hilarious and poignant at the same time. A brilliant opening scene aside, Life During Wartime is missing the awkward tension that is too painful not to laugh at. Instead it plays out a little more straight, feeling more like a misguided drama than anything else. And finding out that this was a pseudo-sequel to Solondz' Happiness doesn't really help. I'm not sure why we needed to revisit these characters, or why the choice was made to cast different actors in the roles. It doesn't work. Life During Wartime feels less like a continuation of that film than a tired rehash of it. It just came off as a series of boring scenes with vulgarity for the sake of vulgarity, and by the end I was left feeling not like I didn't get it, but like there was just nothing there to get.

The Last Airbender - *

The Last Airbender is terrible on just about every level a film can be. It fails to achieve everything that it sets out to do. It's an eye-sore in every visual respect, from the drab cinematography to the ubiquitously atrocious special effects. The story is as silly as it can be, and what little narrative you can draw from its mess of pseudo Eastern religious cliches and unexplained mystical power structure, to the "Avatar" itself, begs to be laughed at. What's worse is these things are presented as if the audience should know how to put them in a logical order (something Mr. Shyamalan used to know how to do himself), let alone find them entertaining.

Airbender also acts as yet another example of a truly failed adaptation. Not every medium translates well to another. The film is adapted from an Americanized anime cartoon on Nickelodeon, where you can get away with a lot of the things Shyamalan tries to pull off in a live-action film. Crazy animals work just fine in a cartoon, where they fit in to the visual landscape and animation style, but when you have a CGI turtle-seal in a real-world Arctic setting, it just looks like garbage. Even something as simple as a haircut is made to look embarrassing for anyone involved in its creation. Or when an Element Bender is about to use his powers, he goes through a strange, way overlong ritualistic kung-fu dance before some of the horrid CGI effects escape his hands. It's pretty astonishing. The question that most often comes to mind while watching the film is, "Am I really supposed to be taking this seriously?" Unfortunately I'm not sure what the answer is. One thing is clear: Shyamalan thinks it's a masterpiece... It's not.

I really should hate The Last Airbender. I should. But I don't. I appreciate it in the same way I do films like The Neverending Story. There's something endearing about misfired children's fantasy films. Pure imagination stifled by the inability to capture it on film is a beautiful thing. Or a hideous thing. Whichever it is, it's kind of fun to watch. And trust me, that's not giving any credit to M. Night Shyamalan.

Salt - *

Who is Salt? I won't tell you because I don't want to ruin the surprise you'll feel when the film ruins the surprise itself after about a half hour. It's one of those films where you can guess the trajectory of its twists because you've seen any other political thriller released in the last eighty-seven years. Yup, Salt peaks at about the twenty-five minute mark, and steadily goes downhill from there, all the way to the incoherent multi-predictable-twist ending. It starts out fine enough, even if it's a little bit slow. There is some decent set-up, and a fairly impressive chase sequence that ends with Salt jumping between tractor-trailers on the freeway. But after that it settles into a series of uninteresting flashbacks and half-assed political double agent subplots which feel like the cinematic equivalent of somebody mumbling through the seven day forecast. Snooze.

The Kids Are All Right - ***

I hate it when films reuse existing titles, a somewhat recent example of this would be the Will Ferrell soccer vehicle, Kicking & Screaming, which was not a remake of Noah Baumbach's brilliant comedy, Kicking and Screaming. This movie, The Kids Are All Right has nothing to do with the song by The Who, or the excellent rockumentary The Kids Are Alright.
I think that in this case, the offense is far more egregious because the filmmakers have simply reused a title that people are somewhat familiar with, for no reason other than that it will seem somewhat familiar to people. Boring.

The movie is about a gay couple and their children. One day, the kids decide to find their genetic father, so they contact the sperm bank who puts them in touch with dad. Mom and mom are unsure about it until they meet him, and guess what? One of them likes him and the other one doesn't.

It's funny, too, that a movie about such an unconventional family could be told in such a conventional way. From the beginning, one could predict exactly what would happen in the movie. Who sleeps with who and who ends up being a jerk and who makes up in the end and where everyone winds up. It's all predictable and blah, blah, blah.

However, the actors, especially Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo make the movie not just bearable, but incredibly entertaining. Their time together on-screen is especially great, though a dinner scene late in the film with Ruffalo and Annette Bening singing Joni Mitchell is probably the film's shining moment. All in all, it's quite good.

Cats & Dogs 2: The Revenge of Kitty Galore - **

I'm not really sure why Cats & Dogs needed a sequel nine years after it came out, but here it is. It's completely unnecessary, but honestly not unfunny. Granted, a lot of the humor stems from how bizarre the execution of such a silly concept is... cats and dogs speak with awkward mouth movements, wear suits and eye-glasses, fly around with jet-packs... in 3D! It's not brilliant, not for a minute, but it has its moments. In addition to some pleasantly unexpected film references refitted for pets, there are actually a few clever moments and genuinely funny lines throughout this ridiculous film, like when the heroes walk into a house full of cats that are high on catnip, or when a spy dog rises from under the floor of a jail kennel to bust a police dog loose, and the police dog asks the spy dog how he knows his name, to which the spy dog (voiced by Nick Nolte) replies dryly, "I just came up from under the floor; I think we can assume I'm a little smarter than you are." Cats & Dogs 2 is actually kind of a pleasure to watch for about a half hour, after which the novelty wears off and the jokes are more inconsistent, but I think I have to give at least some credit to the kids' film that gave me the feline Hannibal Lector.

Predators - 1/2*

The most interesting part of the Predators trailer was the shot of Adrian Brody stopping in his tracks to look down at his torso as a dozen or so predators have their laser targets on him. Unfortunately this isn't the way it plays in the film; instead it is just one predator targeting him, much less thrilling than a dozen. That's pretty much the way the rest of the film is: a lot less thrilling than it should be, failing to deliver the action and excitement that it promises, giving the audience no evidence that it even needs to exist at all.

The original Predator got down to business pretty quickly... there was a little expository sequence, and then a bunch of guys get thrown into the jungle and start shooting up the place. Predators begins more like an episode of the Twilight Zone, where six or seven random people wake up while parachuting down to a strange planet and have to figure out how and why they got there. Of course, we know why they're there, but for some reason director Nimrod Antal decided to amp up the suspense aspect of the story rather than the action, of which there is very little. I bring up the original film not to argue that a re-make has to be exactly like the original, but because it seems odd that what made the original great is left out, and because we know exactly where the film is going before it even starts, the pleasure of discovery is removed, making the attempted suspense irrelevant. So we're left waiting and waiting for something that never comes.

Though there are more predators this time around, as the title suggests, Antal for some reason decided to focus more on his boring human characters, a group of the world's greatest mercenaries and killers. They're given a unique assortment of weapons, which they barely use, to very little effect, both on the predators and on the audience. The writing is awful, the direction is flat, and the acting is pretty dry, which makes for a very, very boring film. But something tells me that's not going to stop someone from making the inevitable spin-off, Aliens vs. Predators.