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.

Hot Tub Time Machine - 1/2*

Hot Tub Time Machine is an inverted comedy. You know how a lot of throw-away comedies are funny for about 80 minutes and then for the last 15 minutes or so they stop being funny and wrap up the story that you didn't care about? Well Hot Tub is funny for about 15 minutes, and then has about 80 minutes of boring plot, mostly of the annoying late third-act melodrama type, so most of the movie plays out something like this, "But we used to be such good friends, and now we never see each other anymore and sometimes it just makes me feel alone, you know?" Stuff like that might have been good in a movie with actual characters and development, but Hot Tub is admittedly just Back to the Future meets 80s John Cusack movies minus the charm.

Now, I am not above stupid comedy; in fact I laughed pretty hard when Rob Corddry projectile-vomits at a squirrel, which is about 15 minutes into the movie, but I don't think I laughed again until the car ride home. Okay, that's not exactly true; there is a subplot with a one-armed Crispen Glover that is pretty funny, but other than that it's a somber John Cusack lamenting lost love (embarrassing), Craig Robinson singing the Black-Eyed Peas in the 80s (very embarrassing), and Rob Corddry saying things like, "We could combine Twitter with Viagra... Twittagra!" (lacks the minimum amount of effort required to be embarrassing). That leaves Clark Duke with nothing to do, essentially playing Marty McFly without the charismatic personality, walking around making sure the other guys repeat the past so he can be born in the future. It's boring. I never thought I'd have to beg for a couple of dick and fart jokes from a movie called Hot Tub Time Machine, but there it is.

You might think that a half star is a little harsh for this movie, but it was just such an awful experience to watch it. I originally had it lined up for zero, but there are a few moments that are pretty good, too good to be in a zero-star film, like the low-brow scene referenced earlier, or simply the line, "It's called male bonding... have you even seen Wild Hogs?" No matter how much I hated anything else in the movie, that line is still funny. And maybe that's just it: on paper, it's not like this is a tough sell: a silly premise and four actors that are actually funny. And in practice it actually showed potential for a little while, but it just gradually grows worse and worse. It wasn't even entertaining to make fun of it. I noticed that even my posture grew more slumped as I grew more discouraged with what I was watching; by the end, I was somehow sitting on the small of my back and my body was turned away from the screen. If only my eyes and ears could have been.

How to Train Your Dragon - ****

How to Train Your Dragon made me feel something movies so rarely do: elation. It's beautiful, funny, exciting, and has a Hell of a lot of heart. I went into it thinking that it was directed by the guys responsible for the Madagascar (ugh) films, so I already had a bias against it, but it won me over in about twenty minutes, after which I gave in and started loving it. It is actually directed by Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, the team behind Lilo and Stitch, and Sanders was also a writer on Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King, and his talent shows through wonderfully in this film. Though there isn't much of a story, the characters are pretty fantastic, and there is enough wit and intelligence to overcome what could be considered a formulaic narrative arc.

I saw this film in 3-D, a format which I am not very enthusiastic about. I'm one of those guys who, in advance, is already hating on all of the movies lining up to cash in on it (Fuck you Spider-Man 4), but Dragon kind of nails it. Maybe it's the fantastic flying sequences, which cover maybe twenty minutes, and are truly amazing, maybe it's the crisp animation, or maybe it's the fact that the great cinematographer Roger Deakins was a visual consultant that makes it work... I don't know what it is, but the 3-D is spectacular.

I should also mention that the voice-cast is superb, featuring a few guys from the Apatow family, like Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who are always pretty reliable in any shape or form. And then there is also Gerard Butler, who contributed to that negative bias when I walked into this, coming only a week after seeing The Bounty Hunter, but he pulls is it off brilliantly. He helps turn what could have been, and usually is, a boring character, the stubborn father who refuses to accept his son for who he is until the big finale where the son is the hero, into someone who seems real, given that you accept the reality of the film. His gruff, warrior voice in the beginning gradually fades to understanding tenderness by the end.

Though Dreamworks Animation normally produces bottom-of-the-barrel dreck and misery, like Shrek, Shark Tale, and Skrek the Turd, How to Train Your Dragon is nothing short of animation magic and, like some of the best Pixar films, it's enjoyable for viewers of all ages. After Kung Fu Panda and this, maybe I'll even give Shrek Forever Afturd a pass. Okay, probably not, but I couldn't give this film a higher recommendation. See it. Love it. See it again.

The Crazies - **

About forty minutes into The Crazies, the source of all the craziness is revealed to be a military cover-up gone wrong involving a secret chemical virus that was being transported to a secret government facility for destruction when the plane carrying the substance lost control and crashed into a small-town river. The river is the town's water supply and so folks that drink the water get infected and, well, they go crazy. It's a shitty explanation that was completely unnecessary, and I knew it at the time, but I was totally willing to go along with it... for a while. Why? Because the first forty minutes of the film are kind of great, especially for a genre film like this. There are two or three sequences that were really intense, making creepy use of small-town fixtures, like farm tools and little league baseball. But when the top-secret military guys come in with high-tech equipment, the craziness turns to banality, and the film rolls out the cliches. That's when characters start to do extraordinary things, like breaking into the heavily-guarded hazmat containment area just in time to save the sheriff's wife, who is tied to a bed waiting to die by the hand of the guy who is dragging the pitchfork across the floor, or when the sheriff's wife, who is pregnant, is able to beat up a guy twice her size, or when the gunshot killing the sacrificial trusty sidekick is able to be heard by the main characters a mile away for maximum dramatic effect.

Why does every film with a premise like this have to have an explanation? And sorry, but "Because it was in the original" is not an acceptable answer. Is anybody going to see The Crazies for a plot? It's a rhetorical question, but I'll answer it for you: Nope. And if there really has to be an explanation for some reason, why always the half-assed government cover-up? It's boring, and it drags a film like this down, way down.

Overall it's actually a competently made genre film, but maybe that's why I don't like it. Because, for a while, it's a great genre film, but at a certain point suspension of disbelief stopped being rewarding, and I just started questioning every little thing and picking it apart, which isn't good for any film, least of all an apocalyptic horror film.

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.

North Face - ***1/2

When it comes to films that are based on true stories, people often have a hard time distinguishing between a great story and a great film. This is why bullshit movies like The Blind Side become big hits. The 2008 German film North Face, which was just recently released in America, certainly tells an amazing story, but it took me a while to realize that it was also an incredible film. Many things are done right; director Philipp Stozl knows when to drag out tension, like when a near-frozen man is dangling from a rope twenty feet above a team of rescuers and is trying to summon the strength to untie it while his girlfriend, who has climbed up the side of the mountain so she is parallel to him, and is reaching out to him, desperately begs for him to lift his arms. The scene lasts forever and he dies at the end of it... it's awful. It's about two steps away from being a horror film, and walking out of it I felt that it unfairly manipulated viewers' expectations of what kind of film they were in for, but now I'm not so sure that it does.

The film tells the horrific story of two competing teams of mountain climbers who hope to be the first to ascend the north face of the Eiger Mountain. Louise, a newspaper reporter hoping to get her first by-line, convinces her lover Toni and his partner Andi to make an attempt. About a day's climb from the top, one of their competitors breaks a leg and they decide to help him back down, instead of leaving him to die. In the process all of the men die, while Louise looks on from below, hoping to see Toni again.

Not knowing the story going in, I wrestled with how I felt about this radical turn of events. I think that people, myself included, get caught up in rooting for characters in films and are easily swept up in heroism and incredible acts of strength and will power. In North Face, this caused me to lose sight of who the film is really about, which is Louise, who anxiously awaits Toni's return from a four-star hotel, while listening to her reporting partner expound on how a rescue wouldn't make for a good story, but men dying in the attempt would be front-page news. I should have known earlier that this wasn't going to end well, because with any other outcome cutting between brutal mountain blizzards and cozy hotel fires wouldn't work, but here it's effective. As you lose more and more hope for the cause, Louise's patience only heightens the suspense of the descent in a way that even the amazing score, which beautifully blends in what sounds like a hammer hitting rock, cannot. The film has some faults, sure, but the sheer unrelentingly brutal experience of watching it is enough to overwhelm just about anything.

Creation - 1/2*

I'm not sure if it is intentional or not, but Creation succeeds in doing what most biopics, or film adaptations in general, cannot: it makes you forget the source material and focus on what is actually on the screen. In this case, you forget that this is a movie about Charles Darwin and focus on the fucking idiot portrayed on-screen. I guess it's probably unintentional.

The makers of the film seem to think that viewers need a background on who Charles Darwin is, so the opening text reads something like, "The arguments put forth in Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species are among the most important ideas in the history of thought." I believe that anyone who wasn't aware of Charles Darwin before the film would think that statement is a lie, because Darwin the character never says or does anything intelligent in the film, or anything very interesting either.

The opening text continues with, "This is the story of how he wrote it," which is misleading, to say the least. One would think that that statement means that the film will be about how Darwin the man came up with his ideas-- what he observed or what experiments he used to test his theories. But what you get is Darwin the character brooding over his dead daughter and his cold, distant wife. When it opens he has already formulated his theories, but refuses to write them down, because he doesn't want to offend his wife by publishing ideas that oppose the church's teachings. The whole time I was watching it, the only thing I could think was, "Why is this a film about Charles Darwin?

The opening text should read, "This is the story of how he decided to publish it." That story involves a series of dreams or delusions or fantasies, hallucinations, whatever, who cares involving the dead daughter mixed with a series of scenes in which Darwin the character has a spiritual crisis, thinking that he would be a bad person for publishing his theories. I hope that this was a fabrication created with the hope that it would imbue a boring, nonsensical, confusing film with some drama, because why would a brilliant scientist worry that he would go to Hell for exposing belief in a lie? I don't know, and I don't think the film has the answer. The tagline for the film is "Faith evolves," but I'm not really sure what that means. I don't have any idea what the film's stance on faith is at all, but if Darwin the man is as foolish and illogical as Darwin the character, then maybe we should reconsider the theory of evolution.

Remember Me - **

Remember Me is a strange movie.

In it, we have a great coming-of-age story about a tormented college-age guy with no direction, filled with interesting characters, excellent camerawork, and, unlike last year's (500) Days of Summer, a romantic fling that doesn't feel so contrived and pedestrian. The worst part about it is that I can't really say anything more without ruining the experience for you because there is an event that takes place, a real-life event, that is so jarring when it happens because it just doesn't fit. You'd know exactly what I'm talking about if you saw it, and I don't want you to go into the movie expecting it. To solve this problem, I will simply skate around it and finish this review without ever having mentioned the actual event that I am making reference to. However, I will make several hints at it.

The film opens on a subway platform. In the background, we can see the twin towers of the World Trade Center. In the end, the main character is in an office on the 86th floor of a building in the middle of Manhattan. This all takes place on a Tuesday in the middle of September of 2001. This is where the event that I mentioned earlier occurs.

The sad fact remains that there are thousands of true stories that could have been made, some of which we've already seen (twice in 2006!), and they're probably all better than this one. We've also seen this device before, and it always leaves an awful taste in a viewer's mouth. Who wants to be tricked into seeing a movie about this? And why? Why did it have to be this event? It could have been anything else and would still have been just as "memorable", at least in his family's case.

Remember Me isn't a terrible movie, though. The first 90 minutes are engaging and showcase a very talented young actor in Pattinson. I didn't ever think I'd say that, after everything I'd heard about the Twilight series. At the very least, this movie makes me not dread seeing Eclipse so much. So, thanks for that.

But that fucking ending.

Oddsac - Zero Stars

Oddsac is perhaps the only film that I have liked even less after witnessing a Q&A with the filmmakers, which is a Hell of a statement considering how awful an experience the film is on its own. What is Oddsac? It's the "visual album" by Danny Perez and experimental indie band, Animal Collective. I travelled five hours to New York City to see it, and it was, um, a bit of a let-down.

Watching Oddsac is like being trapped in a stoner's dorm room listening to him recount a dream that only means anything to him, except it goes on for about fifty minutes. Listening to a Q&A with Danny Perez about Oddsac is like listening to a first-year film student expound on the meaning of his "art." At one point he describes a scene in which a family is camping in the woods throwing roasted marshmallows around as representing "the breakdown of the 'nucular' family"... fuck off.

What music there actually is in the "visual album," which is maybe about three songs, is pretty amazing, which makes the remaining forty-two minutes that much worse, because you could be at least hearing something beautiful, but instead it is just a mess of ambient noise and static. And yeah, literally static. What a shame for a "visual album" that starts out so well, with the first sequence featuring one of the songs, and some really interesting images, including the one pictured above. But it only devolves from there, with a few intermittently interesting images. Most of all, it is non-sense, maybe unfair criticism for an extended music video, but how could I say otherwise of a visual experience that includes a seven-minute sequence of television static? And yeah, literally television static. Okay, maybe the whole seven minutes weren't television static; to be fair, about four of those minutes looked more like what you see when you listen to music with Windows Media Player, and there is no video component... you know, those color swirls and such. Not very interesting. Perez points out that there is a computer program that creates images like these, but he didn't use it; he created each one individually by hand, and it took months. Months... he's a real artist. Well, I hate to sound like my father, but Danny, maybe you should get a real job.