Among the great mysteries of the spy-movie world -- along with the question of how Blofeld keeps his suits from being covered with cat hair -- is this: Why aren't the Johnny English movies better?
My complicated muddle of feelings toward the Paranormal Activity franchise are directly related to my acute personal susceptibility to jump scares. They work on me embarrassingly well. A film that's as reliant on them on Paranormal Activity 3, the series' latest episode, can have me as twitchy as an meth addict out of agonized anticipation of the inevitable "boo."
The opening scene of Sean Durkin's debut feature Martha Marcy May Marlene suggests we're in for a big rusty bread pan's worth of rural miserablism, and even though we're not, the yeasty grayness of those early moments is clearly intentional: A group of women in drab dresses and droopy T-shirts go about preparing dinner in a house whose unfinished interior looks either new and hastily erected or ancient and about to fall apart -- it's hard to tell which. A young boy stomps about in a dusty, scrubby yard; a woman sits on the porch working on a crocheted afghan. When dinner's ready, a bunch of men sit down to eat; then they leave the table -- the man who appears to be the leader murmurs something appreciative about the meal -- and the women take their places. Then there's one lone shot of a ton of dirty dishes jumbled into and around the kitchen sink -- there's no question who's going to be scouring them clean. It's as if Amishtown had been taken over by a nicer version of the Manson family.
Every time Sam Worthington shows up in a movie, I squint and ask myself, "Who's that again?" That might happen two or three times with a new actor. But I feel as if I've seen a dozen Worthington performances by now, and I still squinted at him in Texas Killing Fields.
There's so much shouting in Joel Schumacher's hostage thriller Trespass that you start to imagine the cast must have had to take every third day off to sit around in wool scarves with lemon tea focusing on regaining the ability to speak. If you were to down a shot every time someone screams "Go!" or "Run!" you'd expire of alcohol poisoning before the credits ran. Taking place over the course of one shrieky evening, the film presents a home invasion scenario to fit up with our new era of class warfare accusations -- a group of desperate thugs posing as policemen force their way into the high-end lakeside home of a diamond dealer and his family, who turn out to be struggling through their own financial dire straits.
The idea of building a person to spec -- especially when that person is some form of ideal woman -- is one that's haunted the movies in variations from My Fair Lady to Vertigo to Bride of Frankenstein to Weird Science. It's an echo of the constructing of a character that results in what you see on screen -- a figure who's the joint creation of an actor, director, writer, makeup artist, dialect coach, costume designer, ad infinitum. But it's also a concept that provides a counter to the typical romance saga in which two people who are perfect for one other come together. Why search for your match when you can make one?
Where does appreciation end and exploitation begin? Gorgeous and disquieting, the documentary Bombay Beach wobbles between the two like a beginner gymnast on her first attempt on the balance beam. On one side, it's a poetic, freeform examination of the lives of a few of the residents of the area of the title, located by the Salton Sea in the Southern California desert. On the other, it's an uncomfortable fetishization of the community's outsider status, dictated by poverty, by location and by an inability or unwillingness to exist elsewhere. Israeli-born director Alma Har'el, who comes from a background of music videos and commercials, doesn't just bask in this abundance of scenic, decaying Americana, she shapes it into choreographed dance interludes with the subjects, who twirl outside their mobile homes and don carnival masks to cavort in an outdoor gazebo. It's a bit of whimsy as pretty and problematic as the film as a whole.
God save Craig Brewer's Footloose, which is less a movie for today's audiences than for yesterday's -- and I mean that in the good way. This is a pop entertainment made with an eye for detail: When our teen hero and the young woman he's been wooing move in for their first kiss, the setting sun peeps out from behind their conjoined silhouettes. Corny, right? Get this: The rays beam out through a star filter. You can roll your eyes at the obviousness of it all, or you can marvel that a filmmaker cared to make a choice so traditional, so clichéd, that it becomes a kind of pop-culture mission statement. It's as if Brewer is taking a stand for movies that look like movies instead of audience hipness barometers.
As we all know by now, Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.'s The Thing is not a remake of John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing, which in turn wasn't really a remake of Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby's 1951 The Thing from Another World. So now we have two Things that are only tangentially related to the first Thing, although the thing about the third Thing is that it explains how the Thing of the second Thing demolished the Norwegian explorers who were dead by the time that Thing was even a thing. The Thing of the third Thing basically does the same thing we saw it do in the second Thing, so the third Thing probably isn't for you if the second Thing wasn't your thing.
Miss Bala is a fairly straightforward story, told in a reasonably straightforward way: A young woman in Mexico longs to win a beauty pageant as a way of making life better for herself, her father and her younger brother. But before she can make it to the first round, she runs afoul of a group of gangsters who use her -- and her alluring but unassuming beauty -- as a means to their own devious ends.
The Big Year has such an overstuffed comedic cast that it's a shock to realize how modest and unconcerned with generating broad laughs it is. Directed by David Frankel (of The Devil Wears Prada and Marley & Me), produced by Ben Stiller and adapted from a book by former Denver Post reporter Mark Obmascik, The Big Year is only really a comedy in that it's tonally light and doesn't ever firmly commit in another direction. Mostly, it's an earnest showcase for the subculture and annual circuit of competitive bird watching -- the preferred term for the true devotees, apparently, is "birding" -- in which the hardcore travel around the country hoping for sightings of as many species as possible, some keeping track (honor system only!) and submitting their final count to the North American Big Year contest.
George Clooney's The Ides of March is an actors' movie, a picture that gives performers some provocative things to do without necessarily providing a great story for them to hang onto. It's also a movie made for grown-ups, and Lord knows there are few enough of those around today. But this story of an idealistic young press secretary who finds his principles eroded at the hands of a corrupt Democratic presidential candidate keeps getting in the way of its own chin-stroking: It's carefully designed to make us think it's making us think, but in the end, what's it really telling us? That politics -- and politicians -- can be dishonest and ugly? Please don't stop the presses for that one.
Once casts a long shadow over the The Swell Season, a black-and-white tour documentary co-directed by Nick August-Perna, Chris Dapkins and Carlo Mirabella-Davis. For one thing the film, which follows musicians-turned-movie stars Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová as they perform under the band name of the title, wouldn't exist if it weren't for Once -- the incredible, unexpected success of the Irish indie romance made celebrities of its leads and netted them an Academy Award for their song "Falling Slowly," one of many we hear them play in the doc. Early on, we're shown Hansard's mother hefting her son's Oscar and speaking of him with pride, musing that if the two musicians were to get married, their children would be able to say "ma and dad have an Oscar each!" Once has allowed the long-struggling Hansard and considerably younger Irglová to become a coveted live act, and it's on tour that The Swell Season catches them, as the first flush of celebration has faded and weariness has begun to set in.
1911 may be filled with lavish battle sequences and scenes involving masses of extras in picture perfect period garb, but the most breathtaking thing about Jackie Chan's 100th film is how indifferent it is to international audiences. The Chinese blockbuster hasn't needed or necessarily even sought out multinational success of late -- if homegrown hits from the last few years like earthquake disaster drama Aftershock and romantic comedy If You Are The One and its sequel (all three of which happen to share the same director, Feng Xiaogang) don't sound familiar, that's because they've gotten nominal American releases or none at all. For U.S. markets, foreign still equals arthouse, and films that fall outside of that equation often confound studios and audiences who aren't sure which niche subtitled mainstream fare should fall into.
In Real Steel Hugh Jackman plays a boxing promoter who's forced to reconnect with his estranged son. But the boxers on which Jackman hangs his hopes aren't human: Real Steel, which is based on a Richard Matheson short story, is set in the near future, when "robot boxing" is all the rage. Controlled by their handlers, these overgrown Rock' Em Sock 'Em Robots are sent into the ring to do the work real human athletes used to do, but not even these guys are always built to take a punch. Just like their primitive plastic forebears, their blocks get knocked off routinely.
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