The documentary Certifiably Jonathan has engrossing moments in it. How can it not? It's got a great subject -- the extraordinarily voluble comedian Jonathan Winters, whose constant rush of words can be like a blizzard: beautiful, maddening, exhausting and finally beautiful again. But it's not a great film.
In period films, it always helps to have someone built to carry a sword, and Channing Tatum clearly hasn't missed a workout for the past two years so he fits the bill in that regard. What he's missing in The Eagle is that spark of the insane -- the slightly lunatic fever that makes us unable to keep our eyes off him. Instead, he's so distant, he looks slightly baked. It's supposed to be a combination of the thousand-yard-stare and lost in a state of continual flashback that director Kevin Macdonald cuts to reveal Tatum's "Inner Pain." Instead, the star seems irritated that his buzz will burn off before a new batch of edibles arrives.
We've slaughtered the likes of James Franco, Annette Bening, Natalie Portman, Nicole Kidman, and Christian Bale with the "Bad Movies We Love" treatment, and this week's Oscar contender up for tickle torture is Mark Ruffalo -- who had a slight part in a very slight movie called 54. Hooray for Mark! Un-hooray for this movie: It takes place at the famous Studio 54 in 1978, but you'll swear it's about dressing up for a glowstick party in 1998 (inside a future IKEA). So get your Andy Warhol wig, your Ryan Phillippe nipples, and your Neve Campbell cry-kisses out of storage. It's time for the Hustle!
Underage youth defy their feuding families by falling madly in love, sleep together before marriage and end up dying tragically because of crossed signals. What a dud of a story! You know what it needs to dress it up? Garden gnomes.
Where would indie cinema be without the hopes and dreams and peccadilloes of the little people? In their ordinary fleece pullovers and loud ties? Miguel Arteta's alleged comedy Cedar Rapids was apparently made by, and largely for, people who would never go to a place like Cedar Rapids without saying to their friends with a sneer, "Yeah, Cedar Rapids! Can you believe it?" It's a movie that needs to look down its nose for its laughs, which generally isn't the best place to find them.
After all of the trailers for movies featuring werewolves, a priest battling evil unleashed from the Stygian depths of some CGI master hard drive and Seth Rogen as an alien, the poor, mild-mannered scare picture The Roommate didn't stand a chance. Sensation exhaustion had set. Even the flirty-eyed Aly Michalka, laboring mightily to conceal the curly haired flair she displays on Hellcats, can't save the meekness that is Roommate. It's the kind of live-action sub-mediocrity that usually comes with 3-D glasses. And the only fear this movie will inspire is when you realize the goggles being passed out at the ticket counter are for the far luckier patrons of Sanctum.
No filmmaker wants to be lumped in with the Mumblecore movement anymore, and for good reason: The problem with the pictures made by the likes of Joe Swanberg, Andrew Bujalski and the Duplass brothers in the early to mid-2000s wasn't that they were made on tiny budgets; it was that they were aimless and peopled with characters who were supposedly like "real people," even though they weren't anyone you'd particularly care to watch in a movie. (Typical plot: So a guy goes here, and then he walks down the street, and then he meets this girl, and they talk about stuff, and then maybe they go to bed or maybe not.) What's more, they were punishment to look at. This was low-budget filmmaking made by people who seemed to think innovation and cleverness on a shoestring were bourgeois.
In the interest of scientific exploration, I offer a few random dialogue samples from the 3-D cavediveapalooza survival adventure Sanctum: "Life's not a dress rehearsal -- you gotta seize the day!" "The exit! Shit!" "Where's my mask? Goddammit!" "I am not wearing the wetsuit of a dead person!" "You spend your lives wrapped in cotton wool! You want to play at being adventurous? Yeah, this is it!" And last but not least, the ever-popular "We've got to get out of here -- now!"
Natalie Portman's approach to acting demands that she wears her heart on her sleeve so explicitly, the heart becomes the whole garment -- a crimson chemise with streaks of blue veins running across it. So writer-director Don Roos casting her in his new film, The Other Woman, sounds subversive, given that his career includes The Opposite of Sex and other mocking takes on melodrama; he's Pedro Almodovar with low blood pressure. You might suppose Roos would find a way to comment on her moist-eyed vivacity. (You'd be hard-pressed to find another actress with such natural camera rapport who still commits so fervently; she makes the contestants on American Idol seem like Dick Cheney.)
Long before Natalie Portman and Annette Bening battled for Best Actress, they clamored for the title of Most Irrelevant Supporting Character in Tim Burton's schlock-'n-awe alien invasion epic Mars Attacks!. This movie is bad. It knows it's bad. It's $100 million worth of bad. But Burton gets one thing right in this ensemble B-movie throwback: Every time we meet a disposable character (which is often), the movie finds a way to -- get this -- dispose of him. Clever and kind of fun! Let's meet these great dolts.
I generally feel there's no need to beat up on a modestly budgeted, small-release movie that's never going to pack 'em in at the multiplex. But I'm making an exception for Waiting for Forever, not because its intentions aren't good (I'm sure they are), but for the way it introduces complicated emotional situations only to drop them, for its bizarre efforts to make stalking "cute," for its clueless underuse of good actors (Richard Jenkins, Blythe Danner) and for its overall simpering, "He's not crazy, he's special!" tone. If your idea of a great Valentine's Day is to ring up your secret beloved and breathe heavily into the phone, this is the movie for you.
Gregg Araki's Kaboom may be the most cheerful movie ever made about the impending apocalypse, a picture in which bed-hopping young people live each day as if it were its last -- because it very well may be. The picture is stylized, joyful, cartoonishly ominous and more than a little silly. But Araki -- whose last movie was the 2007 pothead comedy Smiley Face, with the great Anna Faris -- holds the reins firmly but lightly. For all its randy rambunctiousness, the picture is surprisingly well-controlled, rather than just a messy sprawl.
I was a wee girl in Catholic school when The Exorcist was released, and the nuns stood before us with a stern admonishment: The Vatican -- or just someone in a dress and a pointy hat -- had decreed that watching this movie might actually cause viewers to become possessed by the devil. While this caused some of my classmates to rush out and see it, I, obedient tyke that I was, just said NO to demons.
What if, as if in a dream, Donald Sutherland appeared before you -- the Donald Sutherland of today, silver-fox handsome and turning a throwaway role into something rich and refined -- only to be whisked away and replaced with...Ben Foster? To quote Johnny Rotten: Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?
Happy Oscar nominations, babies. You got what you wanted, though you have to throw those gold-plated, NSFW Andrew Garfield valentines in the trash. It could be worse. You could be living in 1994, when the Academy honored not Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, or my darling Quiz Show with a Best Picture victory, but a staggering sh*t fortress of offensive "whimsicality" called Forrest Gump. You saw it. It's dumb. Loony. It's got a lot of nerve. But here's a secret you and I share: We're both attracted to bastards, and Forrest Gump's the slimiest john I know. Let's love it.
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