If the career of Christopher Nolan is any indication, we've entered an era in which movies can no longer be great. They can only be awesome, which isn't nearly the same thing.
To be a sorcerer, at least in the terms outlined in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, you've got to engage most of your brain, not the measly 10 percent most of us poor average Joes use. You also have to be able to harness electricity so you can mold fiery snowballs of energy with your hands and fling them at bad people. And pointy-toed leather shoes are not optional: Rubber-soled sneakers block the flow of energy. "Plus," as Nicolas Cage's sorcerer guru Balthazar tells his young student Dave (Jay Baruchel), "it helps to look classy."
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[REC] 2 relies almost entirely on its tunnel-vision, single-player style for its scares. It's a strategy that stalls out halfway through, which means it works for twice as long as it should. Picking up where the 2007 sleeper hit [REC] left off, this Spanish horror trip sets up its premise while efficiently establishing its style: A SWAT team is suiting up and turning on its helmet cams (we're given one soldier's perspective, though other cameras are occasionally patched in) in order to escort a health inspector (Jonathan Mellor) into a quarantined building. No one is quite sure what the disease is or how it manifests itself, but it's killing the people inside. [REC] 2 executes its one big twist almost immediately; the series of aftershock-like twists in its wake occur with descending intensity. The last one wouldn't rattle a teacup.
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We've lost something now that elaborate, sophisticated full-length animated movies have become big business in Hollywood: Technical proficiency is up. But disreputability is way, way down. Pixar has set the bar high for superior quality, perceived classiness, and allegedly deep, soulful thematic undercurrents, and other studios have scrambled to compete. Even Dreamworks' Shrek movies, with their piled-on pop-culture references and ever-so-gentle boogery gross-outs, feel highly mechanized rather than breezy. Nothing in animation feels casual anymore, and worse, so much of it is designed to encourage good behavior and love for our fellow human beings. No anvils falling on heads, no coyotes being blown up by TNT. It's enough to make you make you want to blast your own duckbill off with a shotgun. At last, Universal offers a raygun of hope with Despicable Me, a picture that manages to feel both original and pleasingly nostalgic without straining for either effect.
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Not a sequel and not quite a reboot, Predators sits in that no-man's land of derivation, where a franchise is plundered mainly for its conceptual cachet, and continuity and reinvention are cast aside as hopelessly old-fashioned. Conceiving of their audience as a chronic video-game player, the filmmakers seem to have figured that fans want only minor variations on the same experience, over and over again. Not that such a calculation is below a franchise born as a goof (the original screenwriters were inspired by a joke that followed the release of Rocky IV: If that franchise were to continue, he'd have to fight an alien) and forced into the indignity of the Predator vs. Alien films. Fans of the original, which had Arnold Schwarzenegger wasting a killer extraterrestrial in Guatemala, have likely grown resigned to disappointment with its descendents; Predators will not change that entirely, but it may summon enough fond memories to sneak by.
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The novels of the late Stieg Larsson are the little Saabs that could: These three posthumously published thrillers -- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest -- might have been nothing more than an entertaining genre-fiction exercise, the sort of thing that might, at best, achieve some sort of cult status. Instead, they've become the books that everyone and their grandmothers seem to be reading, and the Swedish movie based on the first book in the series, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, directed by Niels Arden Oplev, became a surprise U.S. hit last year. Hollywood is, of course, preparing its own David Fincher-directed version, but those of us who are allegedly in the know are supposed to automatically prefer the Swedish version, with its dour approach to torture and violence and its efficient "He did it because he's crazy, that's why" wrap-up. Because the movie is long, colorless, uncompromising and, well, Swedish, it's got to be better than any future American version, right?
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Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right is such a low-key feat of filmmaking that the scope of its offhanded generosity -- toward its characters, its story, its actors and its audience -- may not hit you until days after you've seen it. The movie finds its greatness in the margins, in the way one character might fumble through a particularly astute yet painful observation, or the way another muses aloud about how much a sperm bank paid him for the very stuff of human life. This is a comedy about what might be considered an alternative family, if only its members didn't suffer so acutely from the same doubts, temptations, insecurities and longings that people in nearly all families do. The Kids Are All Right is more universal than it is alternative, except in one sense: There's nothing else on the contemporary movie landscape like it.
A lot of hyperbole gets jacked up and spun around in the opening scenes of Racing Dreams, Marshall Curry's wonderful and wonderfully surprising documentary about the junior NASCAR set. Three youngsters, we are informed in the titles that accompany a rock-and-roll montage of candy-colored cars streaking around a track, are about to embark on the year that will determine whether they've "got what it takes" to "make it" as race-car drivers. To "go the distance," if you will. Vrrrrrrooooozzzzzzzz.
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At 76, Jack Rebney speaks in rich, Orson Wellesian tones and has a gift for cursing that even the old master might have admired. Trained as a broadcaster but reduced, late in his career, to starring in in-house corporate videos, he's developed a peculiar persona: That of a quintessential disappointment artist. Rebney's extensive outtakes from a 1988 Winnebago marketing video suggest a man whose explosive reactions to the indignity of his predicament have taken on a performative zeal. Those outtakes, which became a hot commodity in the VHS underground before going viral on YouTube in 2005, inspired Winnebago Man, an earnest and occasionally poignant attempt to penetrate Rebney's potent man-on-fire image and explore the impact of becoming an Internet sideshow.
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In the latest installment of Movieline's video reviews, chief film critic Stephanie Zacharek drops by to deliver her take on the less-than-beloved fantasy effort The Last Airbender. Will Stephanie go a little easier on Manoj's Folly than her peers, or is it just as irredeemable as you've heard? There's only one way to find out -- the video's after the jump.
I don't know if Angela Ismailos's Great Directors is a great documentary, but for the most part it's a treat to watch. On second thought, I do know: This not a great or even a particularly good documentary. It lacks structure, posits fandom as perspective and persists in drifting into unforgivable non sequitur shots of Ismailos looking moody and glamorous. And yet it's packed with raw material that even lesser directors than Ismailos couldn't ruin: She gained access to 10 of the world's more interesting directors and recorded their conversations at length. Though the movie is largely vanilla in its pleasures, film lovers will eat it up.
Folks, let's face it: There's only one movie that really matters this summer. Nevertheless, while Inception doesn't open for another two weeks, we'll all just just have to make do with The Twilight Saga: Eclipse for now. And you'd better believe a lot of moviegoers are totally fine doing exactly that. But what exactly are they seeing, anyway? In her latest video review, Movieline's chief film critic Stephanie Zacharek breaks down the new Twilight blockbuster. Click through and join the party.
The Last Airbender is, as M. Night Shyamalan movies go, pretty straightforward. It's also, refreshingly, not as completely idiotic as most of his movies are. No aliens in stretchy unitards who can be vanquished by -- surprise! -- plain old tap water; no meek, modest 19th-century communities who are -- surprise! -- really just weirdo cults being kept away from 21st-century life. The Last Airbender, based on a popular Nickelodeon cartoon series, is a fantasy-adventure aimed primarily at kids, set in a world where four tribal nations -- Air, Water, Earth and Fire -- just can't get along, because a revered being known as the Avatar has skipped out on them some 100 years ago. Taking advantage of this international instability, the people of the Fire Nation have decided to bully the other guys into submission and thus take over the world. Oh where, oh where, could the Avatar be?
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It's all too tempting to look down on the Twilight movie series -- based on Stephenie Meyer's explosively popular series of novels -- as quickie pictures designed to herd in large audiences of indiscriminate, ticket-buying, Robert Pattinson-and/or-Taylor Lautner-loving teen- and tweenage girls. And with the exception of the first movie in the series, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, that's exactly what they are. The real horror isn't simply that these movies are bad -- plenty of us were raised on, and loved, junk movies and crap TV. It's that the folks at the top don't think teen and tween audiences deserve better. The latest installment, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, directed by David Slade (30 Days of Night, Hard Candy), while admittedly an improvement over last year's barely coherent New Moon, only adds insult to injury. Nothing so grand as a real eclipse, it's more just a massive blind spot.
Playing the madam at the center of Love Ranch, Helen Mirren seems acutely aware of the novelty of a freshly minted grande dame picking up her skirts and heading straight for the sex worker's equivalent of Disneyland. As Grace Bontempo (a pan-lingual take on Mrs. Goodtime) she runs the Love Ranch, one of Reno's legal prostitution outposts, with a self-consciousness unbecoming of one who could convincingly pull off royal blood. The spectacle of Mirren tricked out in mid-70's pimp wear -- ahead of her time, she even brandishes a cane -- has a certain charm, but novelty alone can't keep Love Ranch's tiresome tropes and plodding storyline from dragging the film down through the Nevada dust.
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