Quick Thoughts - Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)

12/13/13: Though it features some outstanding production value, Rare Exports is a B-movie at heart. Re-imagining Santa Claus as a piece of folklore in which he is an evil, demon-like beast who eats naughty children, it follows an archeological dig to uncover him, as seen through the eyes of a few rural villagers. It probably would have worked a lot better as a short, expediting some of its lengthier stretches which become a little stale now and then. But even so, it's an original premise, at least to those of us who don't surf Netflix for low-budget Christmas-themed horror films, and it has some solid suspense filtered through a lens of curiosity which I found refreshing. Not a Christmas classic by any means, but certainly has an oddity that is worth a look. ***

Quick Thoughts - EdTV (1999)

12/5/13: EdTV is the poor man's Truman Show, a film that employed the same themes and a similar premise. Both films sniffed out the onslaught of reality television when it was still in its infancy. And while both successfully send up the idea, EdTV actually feels more relevant now, fifteen years later, as it's premise is exactly what TV has turned into (though Truman is still a better film). EdTV also got right America's obsession with celebrity as the film follows Matthew McConaughey's rise from an aloof everyman to conversational fodder for tabloid junkies everywhere. Aside from eerily accurate social commentary, EdTV actually manages to be a solid romantic comedy, pulling laughs from its cast of (mostly) colorful characters and what at the time may have been considered an absurd idea. Probably benefiting from a little bit of distance from its release and the accuracy of its predictions, EdTV is nevertheless a solid entry to the rom-com canon. ***

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty - ***

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is exactly the film that Ben Stiller set out to make, for better or worse. It’s incredibly uneven, takes forever to take off, and is unexpectedly bogged down by an excess of seemingly unnecessary plot exposition, but there’s passion infused in every frame, and there’s something wonderful about that which makes most of the film’s flaws forgivable, if not lovable.

Stiller plays the title character, a tenured, unappreciated photo lab grunt at Life Magazine, who loses an important photograph by the famed recluse photographer, Sean O’Connell (played by Sean Penn in a cameo so good I almost wish the whole film had centered around him), expected to be the cover shot of the final issue of the magazine. Lost, lonely, and lovelorn, Stiller’s Walter Mitty sets out on an adventure to find O’Connell and infuse his life with meaning. He also hopes to win the affections of a new payroll clerk in his office with whom he’s been trying to connect via an online dating website; however, the site restricts his access due to an incomplete profile left blank because he’s never been anywhere or done anything noteworthy.

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Quick Thoughts - The 40-Year Old Virgin (2005)

11/23/13: Judd Apatow has never been one for brevity, and I stand by Shakespeare's adage that brevity is the soul of wit. Nobody ever asked for a longer comedy, or to expand on a punchline, but unfortunately that's exactly what Apatow loves to do. However, the premise of The 40 Year-Old Virgin is sound, and Apatow also excels at deeply character-based comedy, so even when he hammers the nail a little too hard, it's always in service of building something bigger than the obvious, gimme jokes that the concept would be chock-full of had somebody else been in charge. It's not perfect, and its long run-time invites Apatow's signature get-on-with-it-already third-act issues, but its plenty funny on the way there, and surprisingly original, too. ***

Quick Thoughts - Cop and 1/2 (1993)

11/21/13: On the surface, Cop and 1/2 is just another formulaic buddy cop movie. It has all of the cliches and routine plot twists that are expected. But when you get into sub-genres, the pleasure is in the variation, and somehow director Henry Winkler is able to make the same old tricks fresh again. Aging, cocky Burt Reynolds gets paired up with Norman D. Golden II, an eight-year old who obsessively watches cop dramas on TV and mimics the tough-guy act. It's unlikely that such a plot could work, but Golden actually has some acting intuition that elevates him from simply being a cute kid, and Reynolds fully commits to the role, playing the part with the right amount of sincerity, so what would have been a silly premise that gets old after the first act is transformed into a genuinely funny family film, and a legitimate entry in the buddy cop canon. ***

Quick Thoughts - Another Year (2010)

11/12/13: Mike Leigh is a master of writing brilliantly nuanced characters and pulling out truly raw performances from his actors. In this sense, Another Year is another notch in is belt, and Lesley Manville's broken, needy, alcoholic narcissist might be Leigh's greatest triumph as a writer/director. However, it's just about all the film has going for it as Leigh chronicles four dinners, separated by changing seasons, which Manville's character attends, invited or not. Seeing her through the eyes of her more mentally stable friends, a likable Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen, is interesting, and perhaps vital to her presentation, but the pair provide no real drama in the moments Manville is not around to stir things up and make the audience cringe, a chunk of time which is unfortunately too much to sit through waiting for something to happen. But still, a film by the great Mike Leigh, even half-cocked, is better than most. ***

The Karate Kid - ***

The 1980s are cool... again. Or at least that's what Hollywood thinks. 80s throwbacks, homages, updates, re-makes, reboots, and spoofs are all the rage these days, and the new Karate Kid had all the potential, and expectation, to simply be lumped in as another generic rip-off of a popular 80s classic. Surprisingly that's not what it actually is. Instead it's not only a worthy re-make, but also a really good film in its own right. The best thing that I can say about the The Karate Kid is that it feels new. Though it tells the same story as the original film, but in a different way, which is always nice, despite what fans might think. Why bother watching a re-make if it's exactly the same as the film on which it's based? Maybe it's just that the story is transplanted to China and follows a twelve year-old Jaden Smith, but it has a freshness to it that will make you forget to look for similarities with the original. At 140 minutes, the film runs a little too long and, to be honest, the first half hour could easily have been trimmed, though it does contain a few nice character moments. But once you get past that, and Jackie Chan enters, it's a really enjoyable film. I never thought I'd say it, but Jackie Chan gives an amazing performance, one of the best of the year, even. And Jaden Smith isn't so bad, either. It's not a perfect movie, but it's a lot better than it needed to be.

Knight and Day - ***

Though it was ignored by most people and shit on by the rest, Knight and Day succeeds more than enough of the time to make its reception seem unfair. Though you may think the title is awkward and the cast is questionable, Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz will make you remember why they became stars in the first place. While I am a big fan of Cruise, I haven't been able to say that I enjoyed Diaz in a movie in more than five years, but here they are fantastic together, alternating roles as straight man and funny man to great effect. Cruise is as charming as ever, constantly on the verge of being over-the-top in the best way, especially considering the plot and tone call for exactly that. Though it may devolve into silly nonsense in the third act, it's nothing that these two stars can't keep afloat.

The Losers ***

The Losers is nothing brilliant, and the good thing is that it's not trying to be. It's refreshing to see a film that knows it's place, especially when it delivers everything it promises. In this case it's gunfights, cleavage, and one-liners, and it works. Splendidly. It's a fairly low-budget affair, but it does a lot with a little, putting together some stylishly ridiculous action sequences, and rounding up a great cast of actors who work well together. For my money you can't do much better than Chris Evans in a witty side-kick role, and Jason Patrick nails the part of the comically sinister villain. Entertainment for the sake of entertainment seems to be a difficult thing to pull off these days, but The Losers wins does just that.

Piranha - ***

Boobs, blood, and more boobs. Not usually the best combination, but somehow Alexandre Aja fits it all together for some outstanding entertainment in the new Piranha film. It's easily one of the thinnest plots ever conceived: seismic activity ruptures the floor of a lake near the shore of a small town during Spring Break, and thousands of highly evolved piranha come out to feed. Finally a film that knows not only to be dumb, but also how to be dumb. It has no pretensions about being great, or even having any kind of plot resolution, but instead it's eight minutes of set-up, probably two of which feature a fantastically whacked-out Christopher Lloyd, and then eighty minutes of climax. And it's refreshing to see a retro drive-in style horror movie made with sincerity, without any purposefully silly Grindhouse-like winks at the audience. It's exactly what it needs to be. The boobs are big, the CGI is terrible, the blood flows by the gallon, and it's all genuinely fun. Apparently that's not an easy task, because I don't think I've seen anyone actually pull it off since Aja did it with The Hills Have Eyes a few years ago.

Date Night - ***

The premise of Date Night is weak at best: a married couple with a boring life go out on the town and unknowingly pose as criminals and get in over their heads, running from both the bad guys and the cops to prove their innocence, all the while injecting some much-needed excitement into their lives and learning that their marriage is still fresh. Yup, it could have been a miserable ninety minutes, but the perfect casting of Steve Carell and Tina Fey saves it from turning into the drollery that it really could have. With great timing and delivery they're able to turn mediocre jokes into good ones, and they're way too good together for even some of the lesser obligatory marriage-and-kids jokes to come off as more than harmless. Great cameos help too, whether it's Mark Wahlberg's ridiculous surveillance system, or Mila Kunis and James Franco as naive scumbags in love... Hell, William Fichtner's horny, drugged-out utterance of "Sexy robots!" alone might make the film worthwhile. It's not all gold, but enough of it is.

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.

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.

City Island - ***

It would seem that a movie like City Island shouldn't work. The plot is on par with a CBS sitcom, following a dysfunctional Italian family who take in a paroled inmate who is Dad's illegitimate son, and the screenplay provides plenty of chances for the film to go sour, but somehow it is all reigned in and ends up being pretty charming. It may be an easy premise, but it's full of interesting characters with bizarre secrets, such as Dad taking an acting class in his spare time, working on a cringe-worthy Marlon Brando impression, or Son enjoying internet fetish videos featuring men feeding food to round women, or Mom's crush on Dad's Illegitimate Son. All of these secrets are of course revealed in the final scene of total madness and shouting, and a touch of physical violence (they are, after all, Cinematic City Italians), but no worries... it's resolved with a surprising amount of grace and humor, and quite a bit of heart.

The Back-Up Plan - ***

Who would have thought that, four months into the year, one of the most enjoyable movies to date would be a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Lopez? Not me, but there you have it. The Back-Up Plan isn't great, not even close, but it does do enough of the little things to get you on its side so that you're willing to overlook the obvious transgressions... They don't like each other at first, but then they get to know each other and hit it off, until he does something that is taken out of context and they break up for a while until her friend tells her to wise up, and so on. Sure, it has all of the cliches and narrative potholes of every rom-com I can't stand, but it also has several moments I would call hilarious, like when Lopez's water breaks at a geriatric wedding and you can see everyone in the background feeling their pants, or when Robert Klein shows up for one scene as the gynecologist, half of which consists of him repeating the word "vagina" ten times in a row to ward off the boyfriend's squeamishness. Maybe I liked it because it has the right amount of vulgarity, or the right kind of bathroom humor, or maybe it's just that, while it's not realistic in any sense, it's my kind of fantasy, the kind where an average guy can win over a beautiful girl with a candle-lit dinner where he serves pizza.

Kick-Ass - ***

I think I like the new comic-book adaptation Kick-Ass a lot more when I'm not watching it. It's a movie that grows on you. I walked out of it feeling a little disappointed, and wrote down a list of complaints like, "I didn't like the kid in the lead role," "Feels low-rent," "Disjointed." But after a second viewing and a few weeks to ponder over the experience, I don't really feel too strongly about any one of those comments, and my list of praiseworthy details has maybe doubled since opening night.

While I can't say I loved the movie, the things that I loved about it are those which I recall most easily. Aaron Johnson, the kid in the lead role, really isn't that bad. I think it's just that he is upstaged by just about everyone else in the cast, most notably by Chloe Grace-Moretz as Hit-Girl, the eleven year-old sword-wielding assassin, and Mark Strong as the mob boss and ultimate target of the film's "real-life" superheroes. Strong gives what is probably my favorite performance of the year, with the perfect blend of menace and nonchalance, like when he leaves a brutal interrogation scene and tells his henchmen to kill the guy however they wish because he wants to catch a movie with his kid. In lesser hands it would come off as grim, but Strong somehow makes it laughable. And that's really when the film is at its best, when it can transform something that should be offensive into something entertaining. Hit-Girl and her father, Big Daddy (played superbly by Nicolas Cage), share a number of these scenes, making wholesome family fun out of asking for and receiving a butterfly knife for a birthday gift.

I think the problem I have while watching the film is that not all of it is handled with the grace that these scenes are, and so sometimes it felt like it was going from one extreme to another without giving me time to adjust. At times it goes from real danger to a happy-go-lucky action sequence in the blink of an eye, and that's where it feels disjointed; it shifts its momentum too quickly for everything to register. And that's where the difficulty in adaptation lies. It's easy to pull off a change in tone in a comic series, when there are natural breaks in the narrative and each issue can have its own feel, but a film is meant to be experienced as a whole, and so a story like this can maybe seem like a little too much. But I have to say that for all of it's flaws Kick-Ass still manages to be pretty awesome.

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.

Green Zone - ***

There's something about Green Zone that just doesn't feel right. It follows fake characters who influence a real war, with an outcome that clearly didn't happen, which would normally be fine. But because the outcome is Matt Damon discovering the corrupt and fallacious beginning of the war and exposing it to the world, an ending with so much hope it seems that it is signaling an end to a war that clearly did not end three months after it started, it feels wrong. What you get is essentially a fantasy film told in the hyper-real Paul Greengrass "shaky-cam" style that worked so well for United 93 and the Bourne series. In Green Zone, Greengrass proves to anyone that didn't already believe that he has mastered the technique of shooting an entire film handheld; there are some outstanding chase sequences through darkened streets that rival the Bourne films. Matt Damon and a supporting cast that includes Amy Ryan and Greg Kinnear are great, but the film suffers from the clash between style and substance. Had it been a straight-forward action film, or had it been released six years ago, Green Zone probably would have been great, but today it just feels... off.

She's Out of My League - ***

I thought about writing a one-line review for this movie. I think it would have looked something like this: "Surprisingly not terrible". And let's face it, folks. That's exactly what this movie is. It has everything going against it, but in the end, it somehow works.

In a world filled with unfunny movies, this one made me laugh. I can't say anything else about it. The story is crap, it isn't particularly well-shot, it is filled with those perfunctory scenes of bros just hanging around and talking about stuff, the women exist for the sole purpose of being lust after by unattractive men, it is based on a premise that is so full of shit that only some of the characters have to abide by it (this being the points system for relationships), at least two-thirds of the punchlines are dick-related, there is more than one scene involving hockey, and there is a Pepsi can in every shot.

It shouldn't work, but it does. Bravo.