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.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time - *

There is a scene early on in Prince of Persia in which Jake Gyllenhaal's character, Dastan, pushes the button on the magical dagger and we see the previous minute reverse and the scene play back until the inevitable moment when Jake Gyllenhaal's character, Dastan, pushes the button on the magical dagger and we see the previous minute reverse and the scene play back again, the only difference being that the magical sand that fuels the magical dagger has run out and so instead of pushing the button, Jake Gyllenhaal's character, Dastan, explains that when he pushes the button on the magical dagger, he goes back in time one minute and nobody else notices. For a movie that takes such pains to explain exactly what we're watching, it is surprising how idiotic these explanations end up sounding and mind-boggling that they could make absolutely no sense whatsoever.

No amount of bad CGI can cover up awful dialogue, a nonsensical plot, and poor direction, but that certainly doesn't stop Prince of Persia from trying to do just that. The film is caked in bad effects that can never make me believe that they had more than one set to use. Instead it looks as if all of the action was filmed using the same room, but edited quickly and close up to try to hide it. And when there is a focus on dialogue, it hints at a confused political message, with the whole thing being triggered by the search for non-existent WMD's and more than one reference to the tax burden falling on the small business owner mixed in with an ancient-NASCAR race and political corruption. What does all of this mean? Nothing. What's entertaining about it? Nothing.

Kites - Zero Stars

(Note: I don't actually remember this moment in the film, but I think it's safe to assume it was there somewhere. Even if it wasn't in the film, Kites is full of stupid shit like this that isn't meant to be ironic.)

All of the buzz on Kites focuses on how it's a nice piece of pulp. I think that people are confusing pulp with shit. Pulp is a fun exercise in genre conventions; shit is just poorly executed cliche. Kites is essentially Bollywood's approximation of a Hollywood film: everyone is rich, even the poor people, everyone is attractive (or at least Bollywood's approximation of attractive), it takes place in Las Vegas, and it's filled to the brim with flashbacks, mob bosses, slow-motion montages featuring characters having a really good time even when their lives are in danger, a slow-motion shot of a guy throwing dice at a craps table, fast retro cars, cops who can't drive, and various other cars that tumble and explode at the slightest touch. It even comes complete with an utterance of "Show me the money!" and a duplicate of the breadstick dance scene from Benny & Joon. Well, these Bollywood folks need to watch more of our movies, or at least pay closer attention to the ones they do watch, because what it's missing is anything interesting, like that Tom Sizemore-y scumbag wild-card character who makes the hero look good. Without a scumbag, this hero just looks like a guy who just got out of bed and couldn't locate a looser pair of pants. And if Ashton Kutcher has taught us anything, it's that tight jeans do not make a convincing hero.

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.