Repo Men - ***

The future is always a tricky matter when portrayed in movies, especially when they take a negative view toward it. Repo Men has an intriguing premise, visual flare, some great budget effects, and a dark sense of humor that makes its dystopian future seem fresh rather than redundant. It plays a little bit like a low-rent Blade Runner, sans the philosophical inclinations, though it's not entirely devoid of intelligence. Following men who forcefully repossess expensive organs, the film has some unique action sequences, especially when one of these men gets one of these organs against his will and goes on the run. But what sets it apart from other action films is its ability to slow down and show a more contemplative side, like when Jude Law's character gets a call to repossess an organ from a recording artist, and let's the guy demo a new song for him before he gets to business. They sit and listen for a few minutes, Law tells him he's been a fan for years, and then asks him to lie down so he can remove his heart.

It's exciting, it's thrilling, and it's even kind of funny, but for some reason Repo Men slipped through the cracks. It's one of those movies that you missed and will forget about for a few years, until you stumble upon it at three in the morning cruising through Netflix instant plays. That's going to be a great night for you.

Mid-August Lunch - **

Mid-August Lunch, an Italian film about an obscure holiday, begins charmingly enough: Gianni is living with his overbearing mother, struggling to pay the bills, when he agrees to babysit his friend's mother for the weekend in exchange for a little debt forgiveness. The scene in which this is negotiated hits a nice subtly comic rhythm, as both push impositions on each other while still trying to keep up the pretense of a harmless conversation between old pals, and when this friend shows up with his mother and an aunt who was never part of the deal, it gives their whole exchange a nice punchline. From there the film slowly devolves into a wash of boring conversations between undeveloped characters. More women are added to the house before the night is out, and they nag at each other and at Gianni while he plays host. This could have been fun, but none of these characters has any distinct personality to form any kind of witty exchange. It's kind of depressing when you reach a point in a film when you realize that it's not going anywhere... and the only thing worse than that realization is sitting through the rest of the film after that, especially when it consists solely of a group of people celebrating a holiday you've never heard of.

Toy Story 3 - ****

A great film doesn't concern itself with what happens, so much as how it happens. You probably know the broad strokes of how Toy Story 3 will play out before you're too far into it, but the way it actually comes together is really a thing of beauty... and Pixar isn't about broad strokes at all. They have always been great at finding a way of telling a unique story using elements of its natural environment, unlike, say, Shark Tale, the story of fish who inhabit an underwater Times Square and have an Italian mafia. They have not yet put this skill to better use than they do in Toy Story 3, in which they actually come up with a story worth telling, and a way worth telling it. You could focus a viewing of this film alone on looking at all of the old toys they've included, or seeing how they've integrated the functions of these toys into the narrative, like using a bookworm as a librarian who keeps the instruction manuals for different toys.

It seems crazy that a handful of animated plastic toys act in ways more human than most of the characters in any film so far this year, but there you have it. Crazier still is that, amid these incredibly genuine moments, the film also delivers consistent laughs and some of the best executed sight gags I've seen in a long time, a few stand-outs being Spanish Buzz, Mr. Tortilla Head, and Ken riding the rickety elevator of Barbie's Dream House. To pull all of this off in a G-rated story about friendship and loss, and the need to have a purpose in life is really pretty phenomenal.

If you have eyes, ears, and a heart, you'll certainly shed a tear or two in the final sequences of the film as you watch two of the most iconic characters in all of cinema walk off into the sunset for the last time... Its bittersweet ending (though far more sweet than bitter) actually conveys a sense of loss that other animated films lack the ambition and imagination to even strive for, and you, and your kids, need to experience it. That isn't to say that this is one of those sequels that banks on your pre-established feelings for its characters, though growing up watching Buzz and Woody does land them a special place in my cinema-going heart. No, Toy Story 3 more than succeeds on its own merits.

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.

Vincere - *

It's a true story, so that means I'm supposed to care, and it's in a foreign language, so that means I'm supposed to think it's great. Unfortunately it's boringly pretentious and doesn't make any sense. Vincere tells the story of Mussolini's Mistress, mother to his first son. Why that story matters at all I'm not sure; I didn't have a guess before seeing the film, and after seeing it I'm not even sure there's enough here to call it a story in the first place. It's as if someone took a really complex film and removed every other scene. Needless to say, what's left makes no sense whatsoever, and isn't interesting or entertaining in the slightest, which makes it something of a chore to watch. It consists of a bunch of scenes of Mussolini's Mistress crying in different places until the midpoint, when all of her crying is done in an insane-asylum. I'm not sure if it was supposed to be a portrait of dick-headed men who deny the truth or irrational women who can't take a hint, but what's on screen is a woman condemning herself to an awful life trying to get one of the most powerful men in the world to own up to an illegitimate son, as if that wold ever work out. Unfortunately the audience gets the hint a lot earlier than she does, so Vincere ends up feeling like a week in solitary confinement.

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.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work - ***1/2

When I first heard about this Joan Rivers documentary, I instantly wrote a one-line review of it in my head... It went something like this: Why would someone ever choose Joan Rivers as the subject of a feature-length film. Who would ever want to look at her face for ninety minutes, let alone listen to that obnoxious, scratchy voice?

My first impression walking out of that Joan Rivers documentary: Holy shit! A movie that actually made me care about Joan Rivers!

My image of Rivers has always been that annoying superficial red carpet commentator that she was sucked into being for so long, but what I never realized about her, and one of the first things made clear in Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work is that maybe she doesn't actually like being that person... "You think I like going out there and talking to those assholes!" Apparently not. The film portrays the vulnerable side of a comedian and, to an even greater extent, the way show business warps good intentions and promising beginnings into annoying, superficial red carpet commentators, desperate for a gig, shown most effectively in a sequence in which Joan goes up against daughter, Melissa, on Celebrity Apprentice, and acknowledging the sadness of actually having to place importance on such a triviality. Though if that doesn't interest you, it's worth seeing if only to discover, or to remind yourself, that Joan Rivers is actually really funny.

The A-Team - Zero Stars

In the new front-runner for The Most Unnecessary Film of the Year, The A-Team, we see the team assemble and plan some of the most outrageously complicated missions imaginable, sequences that are so impossible that director Joe Carnahan is unable to trust the audience to accept them playing out on their own. The film pretty much consists of about four of these missions, which are edited down to dullness, not being allowed to play out coherently. Instead each action sequence is inter cut with the planning of each step of the mission, and burdened with some hokey voice-over narration to further convince you that these long series of perfectly timed coincidences involving their enemies' reactions or the bending of the laws of physics could ever be planned at all... which would be fine... if they were the slightest bit entertaining. Besides being cut down to nothing, whenever any of these sequences is allowed to breathe a little and play unbroken, they are shot so close to the action and edited so rapidly that you can't even decipher what is happening. It's all very tiresome.

The A-Team also suffers from its simultaneously strict and loose adherence to its source material. Why would you ever have someone act like Mr. T? The charm of a guy like Mr. T is his sincerity, so when you have an actor reprise a role originated by Mr. T, the worst thing you can do is make it ironic, which is pretty much what's on display in this incarnation of The A-Team. The film tries to replicate the kitsch of an 80's hit while at the same time making it a modern big-budget action film, which only ends up dissolving any of the charm that was there to begin with, and lands the film somewhere in between taking itself way too seriously and not seriously enough.

And that's not even mentioning the abysmal CGI that blankets the film. At best it looks like a Saturday morning cartoon, which would be good if I were watching Wile E. Coyote trying to catch the Roadrunner, but bad when it's live-action and I'm watching the A-Team try to fly a free-falling Army tank by rotating its barrel the right number of degrees and shooting a shell to propel it a certain distance in a certain direction at the perfect time, so that they can land safely(?(!)) in a small lake in Germany. That cartoonish scene might sound too ludicrous to not be fun and enjoyable, but it's really not. Or perhaps, in the words of a real action film, I'm too old for this shit.

Marmaduke - *1/2

Chalk this one up to that rare group of films that are bad enough not to be good, but weird and absurd enough not to be awful. Marmaduke is a talking animal film in which the main character is a pet dog who frequently breaks the fourth wall in a way that wouldn't be at all charming if it weren't Owen Wilson voicing the most awkward-looking animal in recent memory. We see him run, jump, and surf his way into the hearts of the California dog park pedigree circle while bumbling the romance between the prissy girlfriend of the Top Dog (voiced by Kiefer Sutherland), and his real love, the humble, homely-looking friend, while overstaying his welcome with his owner and family, throwing dog-parties while they're away and pretending to rough up the cat to gain face with the pedigrees. Yup, it doesn't make a lick of sense, and that's pretty much everything it has going for it... well, that and the awkward mouth movements when the animals speak. But somehow it invites you to laugh at it often enough to make the experience a lot less painful than it should be.

Splice - **

Splice is one of those horror movies that is much more interesting when you don't look at it as a horror movie. It's got a pretty neat premise about a nature vs. nurture experiment gone too far, which is handled well for about forty-five minutes, at which point someone told the filmmakers that because the film shares similarities with other horror films, it should conform to all of the pitfalls of the genre. And so what starts out as an emotionally-grounded film with a strange premise turns into a dreadful exercise in gross-out CGI-driven mayhem featuring a strong candidate for worst line of the year... "What do you want?!" screams the female scientist creator of the Winged, Knife-Tailed, Gender-Switching Demon Who Can Breathe Under Water, to which WK-TG-SDWCBUW chokes out, "Inside... You!" But at that point, you don't really care if the Female Scientist gets raped by a demon knife-tail, or anything else on screen... you just want to be Outside... The Theater.