What we commonly call genre films -- westerns, romantic comedies, horror and action films -- may have been born in Hollywood, but the great proof of their durability is that no one can claim ownership of them: They belong to everyone, to interpret and revitalize as they wish. That explains how a Korean filmmaker would be inspired to make his own version of an Italian western, which itself was inspired by Hollywood movies that mined America's "Westward, ho!" mythology, a case of the American experience being reflected back at us through double mirrors. But Kim Jee-Woon's The Good, the Bad, The Weird is no The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and it doesn't so much build upon its namesake as climb over its back on its way to somewhere else. There's no modesty in Kim's movie, not even the false kind. It's faux-Leone baloney.
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An art-world goof with credibility and characters to burn, Boogie Woogie is that curious indie animal that combines a can't-miss cast and roaring, Altman-esque ambitions, only to barely squeak into theaters.
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Juan José Campanella's The Secret in Their Eyes, the Argentinian picture that won this year's Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, is well-acted, nicely constructed and beautiful to look at. Its story -- about a criminal court investigator who begins pursuing a horrific rape and murder case in 1974 that, thanks to a mingling of factors including procedural glitches, judicial mishandling and government corruption, continues to haunt him 25 years later -- is worked out with care. The ending is satisfying and somewhat surprising. In short, there's almost nothing wrong with it. Almost.
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A fantastic concept that frays under the rigors of narrative convention, the premise of The Joneses -- a pre-fab family unit is hired to infiltrate and market to an affluent suburban neighborhood -- sold half of Hollywood, attracting bucks and talent to the table. Yet as pointed out by David Foster Wallace, the man who envisioned entire calendar years being branded ("The Year of the Perdue Wonder Chicken" will never stop making me laugh), the obviousness of the target requires a more expansive execution: "We already 'know' U.S. culture is materialistic," he said. "This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. [The] engaging and artistically real how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn't have a price?" First-time writer/director Derrick Borte does make a bleakly viable case for an extreme strain of our materialism, but the film's attempt at a humanistic antidote diffuses its intriguing chemistry for the worse.
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There's a theory suggesting that people who don't like scatological humor harbor a fear of death, and it makes sense: Death is the ultimate example of our bodies turning against us, and in life, anything that reminds us how messily human we are -- and how little control we have over our bodies -- brings us one step closer to the ultimate flush. So in the movies, shouldn't poo jokes and death go together like chocolate and peanut butter?
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Based on a 2008 Marvel comic, Kick-Ass appears to be making a preemptive bid for franchise status (the final issue of the series came out earlier this year), and its gleefully jacked-up intentions are as dubious as those of the filmmakers racing it to the screen. Knowing, impatient, and prone to shuddering violence as both a substitute for plot and shorthand for exhilaration, Kick-Ass oozes a supreme confidence in the knowledge of its audience. The film speaks fluent fanboy, which for the rest of us is a disorienting but occasionally -- almost accidentally -- diverting proposition.
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Exit Through the Gift Shop is the first and perhaps the last movie to be made by the mysterious English street artist Banksy, and although it's partly about himself and his fellow night marauders -- among them Shepard Fairey, now most famous for that ubiquitous red, blue and cream Obama poster, but also the creator of the Andre the Giant sticker campaign of the late 1980s -- there's nothing self-aggrandizing about it. Or perhaps everything about it is self-aggrandizing. The picture strives to capture the spirit and style of street art, and to make a bold statement about its commodification: Banksy's work, in particular, is prized by collectors and fetches high prices in the art market. But if Banksy is getting rich, he doesn't seem to be too happy about it. And so he has framed his film as a rags-to-raggedy riches story in which an enthusiastic street-art fan -- a nutball Frenchman transplanted to Los Angeles named Thierry Guetta -- first becomes a Banksy disciple and then surpasses his teacher, launching a mega-million-dollar art career of his own.
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We're exactly a month away from opening night of the Cannes Film Festival, and aside from that evening's screening of Robin Hood, speculation and conjecture regarding the fest's competition selections remain heading into this week. So when Movieline's "Cannes" alarm filled the office this morning with its customary accordion jig, I raced to see what putative masterpiece of world cinema had triggered it. My only reaction was two words -- and they weren't "false alarm."
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Date Night succeeds chiefly in making the work that its two stars do on the same major television network seem anything but mainstream. NBC's primetime wonder twins Tina Fey and Steve Carell face a strange, almost quaint crossroads in their career: Having conquered the small screen, the received show biz wisdom would demand they dominate the big one. It may be time to call that model of stardom outmoded, especially if these are the paces they must be put through. I'm not sure what other explanation would account for their agreeing to headline such a straight shot up the middle; it's a little discomfiting to watch, even as their presence adds a sizable compensation to this broad, hectic and occasionally endearing take on the screwball set-up.
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A sun-burnt addition to the growing line of distant noir descendants, The Square is more of a red-faced hustle through the genre's tropes than a cool-cheeked embodiment of the thing itself. The strain is certainly palpable in the script, a collaboration between actor Joel Edgerton and Matthew Dabner, and direction that veers in its examination of infidelity gone nastily awry between over-excited and overly deliberate. Director and former Australian stuntman Nash Edgerton (Joel's brother) makes a tense and yet drearily unsuspenseful mash of this domestic horror story, piling bad decisions and bad luck onto a body count and pressing out something he hopes will be accepted as a modern or meta- or maybe just mega-take on the old Postman Always Rings Twice paradigm.
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"I did not come here for some stupid summer romance," Miley Cyrus croaks at the midway point of The Last Song, "with some stupid local boy who's done this a thousand times before." Sister, I've got at least three kinds of bad news for you. In the second Nicholas Sparks adaptation in as many months (Dear John has the sole distinction of knocking Avatar from its first-place perch), another young lady finds herself on Georgia's powdery beaches for the summer, balancing a shirtless suitor with hackneyed class conflicts and a passage to adulthood via untimely death. Luckily both the audiences for Sparks's corn pone weepers and Cyrus's Liquid Drano rasp don't share her character's distaste for cliché: whether they can overlook The Last Song's sucking charm and chemistry voids is another story.
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Yesterday's birthday boy Christopher Walken makes no secret of the fact: he loves to work. And that's one of the reasons he makes as many bad movies as good ones. For every Deer Hunter, Dead Zone, King Of New York, Pulp Fiction or Hairspray, there's a Kangaroo Jack, Man On Fire, Click or Domino. But where does The Mighty Haired One's first lead role in a movie fall fit in the spectrum? In 1972 -- coming off a supporting part in Sidney Lumet's The Anderson Tapes -- the 29-year-old scored this adaptation of Dennis Reardon's Off-Broadway play The Happiness Cage. Given the snazzier title of The Mind Snatchers when it hit cinemas, Bernard Girard's film was praised as "a frightening contemporary thriller" by Judith Crist. Walken, however, was more succinct when he reappraised it as "piece of garbage" and said "it seemed my career in film was finished." Who's right?
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In its attempt to upgrade a classic with kick-ass effects, Louis Leterrier's noisy, manic and not much fun at all Clash of the Titans saps much of the spirit of the 1981 cult epic. Leterrier countered fanboy skepticism with the prospect of a 3-D and CGI-enhanced version of the fantastical Greek myth that powered the original. A few scenes in an even better defense suggests itself: the sight of Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes plotting to make the plebes worship them again, to restore proper order between gods and mere mortals. Now you're talking, I thought; a modern critique of the socialization of fame could only have been stronger if they'd populated Argos exclusively with reality stars. Alas, the effects can't quite cut through the hazy narrative and wretched dialogue, and when it comes to subtext my imagination seemed to have outpaced that of the filmmakers by the 15-minute mark.
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Chloe, Atom Egoyan's ripe, psychosexual minuet, poses the infidelity thriller's founding question -- Who am I married to? -- only to leave it to molder, a red herring at last. Even its opening monologue, in which the title character, an upscale call girl played by Amanda Seyfried, makes a compelling case for her market value, is a bit of a feint: this is not a film about what men want, or why they cheat, although the gauzy boudoir shots of Seyfried snapping into her La Perla may suggest otherwise. Able to intuit and attend to the every fantasy and exquisite pressure point of her clients, what Chloe gets out of the bargain, when the sex worker stars align, is to disappear. It's a trick and a trap that powers much of Chloe's rich but blaringly unsubtle treatment of both its central relationship and the larger prism of female sexual identity.
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To paraphrase Jason London's character in Dazed and Confused, "All I'm saying is, if I ever start referring to these as the best movies of my life -- remind me to kill myself." With Hot Tub Time Machine, director Steve Pink manages to connect self-conscious cinematic nostalgia to the middle-aged anomie London warns against with rowdy affection, avoiding the trap of earnest emulation that Cop Out, its recent comrade in homage, fell into. A fully committed spoof of the high concept, factory-farmed comedies of the 80s, Hot Tub goes under some pretty deep cover, glossing over big plot and pacing bumps with its proudly cruddy, in-joke attitude. Produced by a high priest of 80s effluvia (and a couple of genuine classics), John Cusack confirms his imprimatur by starring in the film. One of its genuine pleasures is watching him once again balance seriously generic, frankly sophomoric material with his sober wit and goofy, shaggy grace.
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