We're stocked up on Hemsworth family hype, no? Between Liam Hemsworth's casting as Gale Hawthorne in The Hunger Games and brother Chris Hemsworth's premiere this week as Angry Barry Gibb in the Bee Gees documentary Thor, I'd say all bases are covered. Since Chris's filmography is largely devoid of guilty pleasures (aside from, perhaps, A Perfect Getaway), Bad Movies We Love is proud to gurgle up bile all over Liam's sappiest film to date, The Last Song. It's Miley Cyrus' cry-party in the U.S.A! And I'm weeping! And I love this movie. So shut up.
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Fast Five is not the movie it could be. But maybe it's the movie it ought to be. Action movies in which the cutting is so frenetic and choppy that you can barely discern who's coming from where are a nickel a dozen, and Fast Five is one of them. But the picture has other charms. Cars that drive off cliffs, trains that blow up real good, actors who are in on the joke of their own ridiculously buff silhouettes, shapely girls who wear short-shorts with a single star slapped on each buttock: It isn't quite summer-movie season yet, but Fast Five is already peeling down to its proverbial, sweat-sodden muscle shirt in preparation. It's ready for anything.
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Takashi Miike's samurai adventure 13 Assassins is so beautifully made, it could serve as a model for contemporary American action films. If only. Once you get past the initial intricacies of the plot setup, the story is rather basic: It's mid-19th-century Japan, and a group of underemployed samurai band together to vanquish the shogun's half brother, a power-mad sicko who's been roaming the country inflicting horrific cruelties on its citizens. But the filmmaking is so crisp and precise, and so gorgeous to look at, that the movie shines as a piece of visual storytelling. 13 Assassins, which is being released in select American theaters this week and is available via video on demand as well, is satisfying in an elemental way. And though it's gorgeous on the big screen, thanks to Miike's decisive sense of composition and characterization, it works just as well at home on the smaller one.
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Not so long ago, 3-D technology was being trumpeted as the future of movies. Now that that future has become business as usual, with a new 3-D picture (or a retrofitted one) opening nearly every other week -- and with the radioactive glow of Avatar growing dimmer with the passage of time -- what's left to look forward to? The answer may lie in 3-D films made by genius weirdos like Werner Herzog.
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On a recent Saturday, Disney held a special screening of Prom, an off-the-rack omnibus story centered on the sacred, American, adolescent rite of passage. I realized quickly that I was a little underdressed and way over-aged for the occasion. "Have any of you guys been to prom yet?" a publicist asked the audience, which had been carefully stocked with high schoolers. An unfamiliar pop star and the son of Sean Combs ("heir to the 'Diddy' empire" was his terrifying billing) were on hand to declaim the event's sponsor (a teen site) and urge the audience to blow up Prom on Twitter and Facebook. Some of the kids were sizing me up. I knew the least cool among them could still ice me with a look. You might leave the jungle, but you never forget its rules.
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I'm thrilled that Fast Five cuts the wobbly title The Fast and the Furious 5: Rio Heist down to the franchise's purest essence. TFATF:RH is so cumbersome. So baroque. But Fast Five? That sounds like a bad-ass Chili's appetizer platter or a failed Robin Antin burlesque troupe. Excellence! In a tube top! With a side of southwestern eggrolls! Perfection. Before you and your nitrous-huffing buddies head out to watch Vin Diesel steer more Popsicle-colored cars, revisit the movie that started it all: the definitively bad, the delicious trashy The Fast and the Furious.
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Writing about certain of Tyler Perry's movies feels more like filing a witness report. Behind the veil of tears and near-pornographic melodrama, For Colored Girls offered a glimpse of where the mogul's creative future might lead. There was much to be said. To watch Madea's Big Happy Family is to be disarmed on several fronts. I was there, I saw what happened, and I am aware of the career-founding success of the franchise, but beyond that everything goes kind of blank.
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It's a special disappointment when a movie takes a great subject and lets us down. It's even more heartbreaking when a movie's release coincides with a horrific real-life event. Steven Silver's The Bang Bang Club, based on the true story of four photographers who met and formed a gang of sorts while covering the conflicts in South Africa during the last days of Apartheid, is making its way into American theaters the same week two photojournalists, Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington (the latter of whom codirected the fine war documentary Restrepo), were killed covering the conflict in Libya.
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Water for Elephants is one of those big, extravagant-looking romances that you might automatically deem "conventional" -- except for the fact that almost nobody makes big, extravagant-looking romances anymore. That's the elephant in the room that the movie's director, Francis Lawrence, faces head on. Whatever his movie's flaws may be, he's alive to the wonder of spectacle, and he still believes in the old-fashioned idea of movie stars: Those with two legs, and especially those with four.
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Cats! You know you love 'em! Or maybe you don't. In that case, watching Disneynature's African Cats may give you a new appreciation for these fascinating creatures. Or maybe it won't. That's the problem -- mixed in with a few blessings -- with handsome-looking documentaries like this one: They present the wonder of nature smoothed over and shellacked for our enjoyment and possible edification. But in the end, does African Cats really bring us that much closer to understanding the essential mysteries of catness? Or does it just cop a cattitude?
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There's nothing less controversial than a documentary filmmaker pretending to be controversial. To make POM Wonderful Presents the Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Morgan Spurlock pounded the pavement, took to the phones and beat the bushes to find a number of corporate sponsors to help finance his documentary about -- what else? -- product placement in the movies. By being completely transparent about his motives, he'd expose the inner workings of the system and, possibly, reach some grand conclusion about the extent to which all moviegoers are constantly being sold to.
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According to movies, teenagers enjoy one activity: scheming. Who could disagree? I schemed as a high-schooler. Certainly. If by "schemed" you mean "ate Wheat Thins for dinner, wore Kohl's cargo shorts, and cried at Natalie Imbruglia lyrics," which you do. Cruel Intentions perpetuates the myth that teenagers inhabit more exotic, scheme-filled lives than Danny Ocean, and its melodrama predates the emo generation by an impressive half-decade. Great! Star Reese Witherspoon may tame pachyderms in Water for Elephants this coming weekend, but in Cruel Intentions she conquered the more formidable "trunk" of Ryan Phillippe, which should be its own Big Top spectacle.
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There are moments of glory, or at least glorious color, in Rio, an animated 3D adventure about a domesticated macaw living in Minnesota who suddenly finds himself on the loose in Rio de Janeiro. The opening, set in a Brazilian rainforest, is a floor-show extravaganza: All manner of winged creatures in unreal colors -- the flaming orange of Mercurochrome, the outer-space blue of artificially colored popsicles -- dip and sweep among the trees. A troupe of flying parrots execute a kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley routine. It's from this polychrome paradise that our macaw friend is snatched while still just a chick, eventually ending up as the happy pet of a protective little girl.
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The Danish war documentary Armadillo may be mostly business as usual as war documentaries go, but it does feature a landmark of sorts: This may be the first time a platoon gets in trouble for its actions because somebody went and told his mom.
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In his recent appreciation of Sidney Lumet, New York Times critic A.O. Scott gently rebuked some of the late, humanist filmmaker's contemporary detractors. "We are supposed to be too sophisticated to require stories that place their themes in the foreground," Scott wrote. "And also, perhaps, too jaded to be stirred by a dramatic universe built around increasingly battered beliefs in progress, solidarity and fair play." The implication is that acceptable movies today must embrace smugness and cynicism in equal measure, lest haters choke on their own humanity. If Scott is right -- and I do think he's on to something -- then modern audiences might find something like Scream 4 to be the most relevant film of the year, maybe even a generation.
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