Paranormal Activity 2 - Zero Stars

For about the first half hour of Paranormal Activity 2, nothing happens. But then in the next half hour, nothing happens. Fortunately, though, it does close with something happening. Unfortunately though, that something is more nothing. Let me lay out the next ten theater-going Halloweens for you: people move into a house, have cute, innocuous dialogue exchanges, for some reason install cameras all over the house, an inanimate object falls over, the new tenants immediately assume that it's a ghost, they read up on demons, and then one of them gets possessed and throws somebody at the camera to end the film.

Paranormal Activity had its charms, and worked in certain areas because it felt genuine. 2 has cash-grab written all over it, and I hated it right from the opening message to the families of the deceased... lame. This one follows the sister of the girl from the first film, and the filmmakers try clumsily to invent a mythology for the demon in the films, which at times requires the people on screen to try their best at actually acting. The whole thing fails miserably, especially the part where nothing happens. Fuck this movie. Fuck this series.

Jackass 3D - Yes

There's really no way to rate Jackass 3D. It's not for everyone, but it happens to be for me, and I was glad to see that not only has it not lost its edge in the four years since Number Two, or the decade or so since it began, but it is maybe the third film that I have seen that actually takes advantage of 3D rather than simply making me pay an extra $4 to wear glasses and be distracted. That may sound like an overstatement, but that's because you haven't seen Bam Margera surprise people by pissing on them, with the camera at the base of his penis... the depth of frame is stunning, especially when he does it off of a trailer! Or when the dildo gets shot out of a potato gun and jiggles and writhes in super slow motion past miniature models of the Pyramids and the Eiffel Tower, through a glass of milk and into a guy's face! Is it art? Mmmmmmmmmmm... Sure. Or maybe not. But it's certainly all the glory of big budget immaturity you could ever hope to see in one sitting. That's got to count for something.

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.

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.

Shrek Forever After - Zero Stars

It's kind of ironic that the two stars of the Shrek series are notoriously known as comedians who "used to be funny." Could there be a better parallel for the series itself? Though I'm not a fan, I'll admit that the first film had it's merits, but these sequels, of which I've seen two and four, are absolute brutality for audiences. A few years ago, Jeffrey Katzenberg stated that the series was always imagined to be four films... Let's hope that there's some truth in that lie and cross our fingers that the shamelessness of these cash-grab sequels stops here. The only evidence I see that this was all planned is that each of the titles of the sequels can easily be modified into a reference to shit. Or maybe that's just more irony.

Shrek Forever Afturd has direct-to-video written all over it, not even concerning itself with any kind of timeline that coincides with the other films in the series. Instead we see him unhappy and despairing in married life, hoping he could have a day to himself, which some unfunny character grants him. But blah blah blah it all goes wrong and Shrek ends up in a parallel universe where he didn't save the world and everything is bleak, and nobody knows who he is, and he has to reclaim his wife's love. So it's basically just a rip-off of It's a Wonderful Life, or to be more qualitatively accurate, a rip-off of Mr. Destiny with James Belushi. The jokes are flat, focusing mainly on pointing out boring, nonsensical incongruities between the real world and the fictitious Far Far Away where the film takes place, interspersed with some poorly executed bathroom humor and some bad music cues that are supposed to be funny.

Anyone who finds anything in this film entertaining is too young to understand the poignance of the message, and anyone who does understand the poignance of the message is too old to find anything in the film to be entertaining. I'd highly recommend this film, but only if you like ugly animation, shameless sequels, boring characters, awkward music cues, or The Love Guru.