Before Ryan Gosling sent blue valentines to the Academy, he sent regular old valentines to the romcom community with The Notebook, this week's addition to the Bad Movies We Love vault. God, this movie. So gooey. So maudlin. And best of all, so medically improbable. If you think this story of memory loss and romance is feasible, then your favorite docudrama of the past 10 years might be 50 First Dates. Erase your common sense and join us for a lovely, super-mocking trip into The Notebook.
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The nod to structure in Another Year, Mike Leigh's latest rumpled, rambling character study, frames it with a gentle irony. A social portraitist known for his regional specialties and organic development process -- his scripts are gleaned from improvisational sessions with actors, in this case a central trio comprising a long-married couple and their wobbly third wheel -- narrative organization is notoriously low on Leigh's list of priorities. And so while the film is divided into the four seasons of another passing -- wonderful, wasted -- year, the time-keeping device serves mainly to highlight how nature shames those of us who remain little changed with its constant, show-offy segues.
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The latest entry from the "If it makes you feel terrible, it must be great!" school of filmmaking, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Biutiful has it all: Charming, intelligent, wholly innocent children who suffer at the hands of their wackadoodle manic-depressive mother. Desperate immigrants who toil away under exploitive working conditions for greedy employers who care more about profits than about human lives. Dead babies. Cancer. Nothing says "Awards Season" like feel-bad cinema, and with Biutiful, Iñárritu hauls out the big guns.
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Lilliputian light and unconcerned about it, Gulliver's Travels clears enough antic elbow room for its liberal adaptation of Jonathan Swift's classic novel to do its thing without too much offense and then pretty much disappears. Directed by Rob Letterman (Shark Tale and Monsters vs. Aliens), the film turns Swift's hero into the male comedic mainstay of the day -- a schlubby, pop culture-obsessed man-child with no prospects and tics and references where a personality should be. Which is to say: Jack Black. The joke is obvious, and Black has used his maniacal, delusional grin to make it for years: I think I'm way bigger than I am. And yet Gulliver's journey yields a little more than the basic, bland yuk of a mail-room jockey who can barely look his comely co-worker (Amanda Peet) in the eye becoming a terrifying and potent giant in cargo shorts and Chucks.
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People who love Charles Portis' 1967 novel True Grit -- and you will know them when you meet them, even if they do not wear an eyepatch and do not forego the modern convenience known as the contraction -- love it with a fierceness that shouldn't be crossed. Joel and Ethan Coen must have known what they were getting themselves into when they set out to adapt it. If they'd failed to capture the tone and flavor of the book, or messed with too many of its roughhewn details, the mark of shame upon them would be too great to bear.
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Merry Christmas, medium-sized fockers! I'll avoid yuletide cinema this week (since Alonso Duralde is assuaging your Kris Kringle needs with his "12 Days of Christmas" film series) and commemorate Little Fockers thespian Barbra Streisand's other worst film for today's edition of Bad Movies We Love: A Star is Born. Just like Christ, see. A Star is Born co-stars Kris (Kringle) Kristofferson, Gary (OMG) Busey, and our nervous laughter. Recline in your love-soft easy chairs and enjoy this fresh bearded hell!
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Some of those who have already written about Sofia Coppola's Somewhere have categorized it, in a kind of lazy shorthand, as a movie about the "emptiness of celebrity." But Somewhere is really a Western -- a Western without cactuses or rocks or horses, but one that, even so, takes place under a special kind of sunlight found only in L.A., in an environment that's wild and ruthless under its veneer of civilization. The character of the land means everything in Somewhere: Wide boulevards lined with palm trees make for an illusory endless frontier; giant billboards advertise nothing in particular -- they're big because they can be. This is a place where you can lose your way without even taking a wrong turn, and sure enough, the hero of this particular story is a man who has temporarily lost himself. Still, the city's beauty -- either sitting in plain sight under the sizzling noon sun or semi-hidden in the dusk -- is peculiar and specific and alluring. L.A. -- and the idea of Hollywood, if not the actual neighborhood -- is heartless and fabulous. It's a place to really be a man -- or not.
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The big drag about modern animation is the perception -- which seems to be growing more prevalent rather than less -- that it's somehow better when it's "good for you." In the old days, anvils were dropped remorselessly on coyote heads and Popeye, under his breath, swore like a sailor (natch). Now we have Wall-E blinking out sad, cautionary tales about the horrors of environmental waste (or of simply getting too fat to leave your armchair), or wildly scripted tales, like those of Hayao Miyazaki, that follow the kind of noodly dream logic you might see in experimental film -- this is serious stuff, with heavy-duty art-gallery weight. Much of modern animation is technically very beautiful. But what if the story being told leaves you wanting? To say you don't like these so-called serious, not-just-for-kids animated movies has become something of a cutural offense, apparent proof of your coldness as a human being.
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I'm not saying the legacy of Meet the Parents deserved the protection of cinematic landmark status. But it does seem like a shame that what was there to protect has been ground into an unrecognizable pulp and reshaped into a grotesque of its former self. Who knows what kind of reputation the 2000 hit might have developed had well enough been left alone: A clever, well-cast execution of an old setup, it might have stood as a charming keeper, an example of that rare comedy that records a couple of memorable notes on the social anxieties of its time.
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Until he was convicted in 2008, Jack Abramoff was a wearer of many hats: Washington lobbyist supreme, bedfellow of right-wing creeps like Tom DeLay and Ralph Reed, bilker of Indian nations, sometime film producer, restaurateur, observant Jew. Within the past year, he also became the star subject of two movies: First the sharp, complex Alex Gibney documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money, and now the more straightforwardly titled Casino Jack, directed by the late George Hickenlooper and starring Kevin Spacey in the title role. If Abramoff fancies himself a charming scamp, he'll be a lot happier with how he's portrayed in the latter movie -- and that's the problem with it.
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There are good reasons for people to feel nostalgic about the 1982 live action-computer animation hybrid Tron. If you were a little kid when it came out, the spectacle of it might have dazzled you; if you were an older kid, of any age, the novelty of it might have mesmerized you. And from what I've seen, the imagery does look original for the movie's time. That's all the more reason for fans of Tron to feel cheated by the bloated, nonsensical, exhausting sequel that is Tron: Legacy. Even the name seems crass, as if some Disney marketing exec figured that all the studio had to do was slap "Legacy" at the end of the old title and the thing would be good to go.
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The larger portion of what brain power was allotted to the making of Yogi Bear went into its CGI and 3-D effects. Like, 99.89 percent. Which is to say it's a great-looking kiddie film with a storyline that might not have passed muster for a half-hour of Hanna-Barbera programming in the after-school block. In 1962. When I say great-looking I don't mean that it offers much that's new or even that the question of how to render its lead characters, Yogi and Boo Boo, in a live-action picture has been resolved particularly well. But the picture was shot in 3-D (and directed by effects maverick Eric Brevig) in the wilds of New Zealand, using up-to-the-moment technology, and the clarity of the images and integration of the effects with the scenery is fun to look at, in fits and starts. And yet on the whole the film is not much fun to watch. A job is a job, though; Yogi Bear did little to make it more than that.
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Perhaps the only thing harder than making a movie about young parents riven by grief after losing a child is sitting through one. And for that reason alone, Rabbit Hole won't make for a particularly cheery night out. But director John Cameron Mitchell -- adapting David Lindsay-Abaire's play -- has a surprisingly deft touch with this admittedly downbeat material; he builds dramatic intensity in subtle layers, rather than slapping it on with a trowel. Rabbit Hole is so unassuming, in fact -- it's filled with delicately calibrated performances and nuanced moments of connection and disaffection -- that the cumulative effect is a bit underwhelming. But you can't fault Mitchell's instincts; he's adamant about understating this material rather than sending it over the top, and that makes all the difference.
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Fine vulpine Stephen Dorff is perfect in Sofia Coppola's new film Somewhere, so it's only right that we revisit his most shameful work for this week's Bad Movie We Love: 1994's S.F.W. No, it doesn't stand for "Safe for Work." Yes, it stands for something just as annoying.
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A hanging statement rather than a question, the unpunctuated title of James L. Brooks's How Do You Know is an apt reflection of the film's amble toward a theory, in lieu of an answer. The subject, needless to say, is love: What's the secret? Is there an algorithm yet? How, when one meets a new person, is it possible to separate emotional temperatures -- where circumstance, experience, and need have led each of you to be in that exact moment -- and access what true baseline there might be between you? And if it is possible, is it useful? Abandoning analysis for instinct hardly seems like the thing: The rhetoric of instant connections -- clicking, chemistry, sparks -- feels random and unreliable; the more acquisitive approach -- involving checklists, potential, dealbreakers -- is bloodless and overdetermined. To be a vampire, and at least have a few clear guidelines about letting the right one in!
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