Review

reviews

Review score: 4

In Theaters: The Bounty Hunter

Written by Michelle Orange | 18 Mar 2010, 4:00 PM | 4 comments

As cold and calculating as the heart of a Hollywood accountant, The Bounty Hunter is the caper comedy that keeps on taking. I’ve already given it nearly two irretrievable hours, and here I am again, facing the sucking void of the contemporary mainstream romantic comedy and trying to hold onto my pocket change and what’s left of my dignity. If the trailer for this Jennifer Aniston/Gerald Butler PR vehicle didn’t crush your spirit, the full feature will certainly take care of that, although there’s not much more to know: Aniston has a great body (she’s 41 you know!), Butler wants to be a big star, and the two of them probably boned in real life.

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reviews

Review score: 7.5

In Theaters: Greenberg

Written by Michelle Orange | 18 Mar 2010, 12:50 PM | 1 comment

Another entry in Noah Baumbach’s rough guide to the modern American narcissist, Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is a kingdom unto himself. Terminally self-conscious and yet brutally un-self-aware, stunted and solipsistic to the point of generating his own toxic atmosphere, he is — or should be — the cautionary middle-aged male. At 41 he is recovering from the nervous breakdown that his distant ancestors Holden Caulfield and Hal Incandenza had upon coming of age. Greenberg is of that generation that forgot to officially acknowledge adulthood’s arrival — whether with a child or a career or a drop-in at an asylum — and the reckoning is humiliating indeed. Recently released from a hospital in New York and minding his brother Phillip’s Los Angeles compound while he and his family are off in Vietnam (one in a series of oblique and overt ’70s references, the idea of a young man traveling to Saigon to build a hotel is played for one of the film’s typically sidelong laughs), Greenberg is tasked with some basics: build a doghouse; see old friends; try not to be such a five-alarm asshole.

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Reviews

Review score: 3.5

In Theaters: The Runaways

Written by S.T. VanAirsdale | 17 Mar 2010, 12:45 PM | 3 comments

Filmmaking is hard by any measure, but who knew anyone could so easily screw up the lurid, outrageous story of the Runaways, the original girl punks with more drama and depravity per pound than half their male contemporaries? If knowing them truly is to love them, then it only makes sense that Floria Sigismondi’s tone-deaf, soulless and vapid biopic The Runaways should feel this spiteful — to its source as well as the viewer.

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reviews

Review score: 7

In Theaters: She's Out of My League

Written by Michelle Orange | 12 Mar 2010, 1:50 PM | Comment

She’s Out of My League is a mood piece. Lacking substance, originality, or a coherent treatment of its putative subject matter — self-image and the defeatist hierarchies we compose from social and superficial assumptions — it’s the kind of goob-fest that relies almost completely on the amenability of its viewers. But the thing is, if you know that, on the right day, you are entirely capable of losing it over a perfectly delivered sexy yoda joke, a “slapshot regatta” sequence, or even the kind of nasty body humor you might sneer at in a more sensible (or harassed) frame of mind, director Jim Field Smith has made a movie just for you. This can be a tough thing to accept, especially if you (and your horrified seatmates) don’t see it coming; there were a couple of points where I thought I might accidentally suffocate myself in my attempt to maintain some kind of cool. Which actually just moves me farther into the ranks of the film’s classic band of misfits.

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Reviews

Review score: 5.5

In Theaters: Remember Me

Written by S.T. VanAirsdale | 12 Mar 2010, 9:40 AM | Comment

Any review of the maudlin, meandering Robert Pattinson drama Remember Me will always get around to mentioning the Big Twist Ending, so let’s just get it out of the way now: There’s a Big Twist Ending that anyone paying attention to the film’s internal clock and visual cues can see coming a mile away. I won’t spoil it, because one of the film’s few involving qualities lies in spotting these hints as director Allen Coulter and first-time screenwriter Will Fetters deliver them. Other than that, get ready for a marathon of angst, grief, romance and loving close-ups of gorgeous young people in the middle of it all.

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reviews

Review score: 7

In Theaters: Green Zone

Written by Michelle Orange | 11 Mar 2010, 11:50 AM | 1 comment

Late into Green Zone, Paul Greengrass’s gratifying if slightly garbled Hollywood treatment of the first months of the Iraq war, George Bush makes his inevitable appearance, in a clip pulled from the “Mission Accomplished” debacle. The only actual player to appear in a film filled with coy doppelgangers, Bush’s visage caused a strange response to roll through the audience — not boos or hisses but a low, mortified, neck-rolling groan. It was the kind of reaction provoked, perhaps, by the far away memory of an ill-advised seafood buffet: major buzz-kill.

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Bad Movies We Love

silent_rage_bmwl_top.jpgWhile it’s right and just that B-movie aficionados everywhere today celebrate the 70th birthday of Chuck Norris, it’d be tough to argue that any of the conservative chop-socky master’s efforts actually belong on any list devoted to the best — or worst — cinema has to offer. The exception is 1982’s Silent Rage, which even three decades on stands as a strong contender for the most bizarre tagline in Hollywood history. It’s not so much a marketing blurb as a short synopsis that also manages to blur actor and character. And like the poster, the trailer leads us to think it’s all about Chuck.

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reviews

Review score: 6.5

In Theaters: Brooklyn's Finest

Written by Michelle Orange | 05 Mar 2010, 4:00 PM | 2 comments

A trip to grimmest copland with a fine pedigree and long tradition on both the big and small screen standing behind it, in a way Brooklyn’s Finest falls prey to the paradox it sets up in its first and most riveting scene. A known criminal named Carlo (Vincent D’Onofrio) is explaining to his NYPD connection Sal (Ethan Hawke) the lesson in the difference between ethics and morals that a judge recently gave him. “It’s not a question of right and wrong,” Carlo recalls the judge saying, citing a defendant who had to break the law to do the right thing, “but of righter and wronger.” The three cops whom director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) follows through his two-plus hour urban melodrama traverse a similarly tricky x/y axis of good and bad vs. right and wrong, each one plotting a different course across the matrix of what it means to serve and protect. It’s a classic set-up, if one whose tropes are ultimately pumped up beyond recognition with pomp and portent.

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Bad Movies We Love

bmwl_the_oscar_top.jpgThere are just two sleeps to go to the big night! The odds have been calculated and the prognostications made! The votes are in and now can’t even be changed by Harvey’s semitic signage, Nicolas’s nincompoop e-natterings or James revealing that the Na’vi aren’t actually CG but real genetic freaks he cooked up in his garage. Yet we can’t keep having the same conversations for the next 48 hours. What we need is something to feed the appetite and stoke the fever — something that’s of the Academy Awards but not about their 82nd iteration. And The Oscar is that filmic fondue, a cauldron of cheese cooked up by director Russell Rouse, writer Harlan Ellison, stars Stephen Boyd and Tony Bennett, and a who’s who of Hollywood donating cameos.

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Buyer, Renter, Coaster

On DVD and Blu-ray: Sorority Row

Written by Liz Black | 04 Mar 2010, 5:40 PM | 1 comment

sororityrowdvd.jpgSorority Row targets that narrow cross section of the population who are both slasher film fans and people willing to watch Rumer Willis act. The film also is best seen by anyone not familiar with Scream, since the ruling principles of both films are the same: cozy, anonymous town terrorized by a killer, cameo by a celebrity (okay, in this case it’s a reality show “celebrity”) who gets offed in the first ten minutes, a series of creative slashings and gashings, and a heroine with a conscience trying to save her friends. Carrie Fisher’s presence as the boozy house mother is also an unexplained phenomenon that is neither funny nor campy; I guess that just makes it just sort of sad. Help her, Obi Wan, she’s accepting terrible roles.

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