I saw 1990's Captain America for my bad-movie quest and was surprised by how much I liked it. Hell, my original notes read, "I honestly enjoy it more than Transformers or Fantastic Four 2". Sure, there was the dogs-playing-pool-painting kitsch appeal but the film was also genuinely engaging in parts and possessed of a scrappy charm throughout. This week, though, I couldn't quite put my finger on exactly why I recalled it so fondly. There was only one thing to do: while the rest of the world held its breath to see whether Chris Evans would accept the shield of destiny, I'd revisit the movie which had Matt Salinger, son of J.D, as its main masked man.
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As cold and calculating as the heart of a Hollywood accountant, The Bounty Hunter is the caper comedy that keeps on taking. I've already given it nearly two irretrievable hours, and here I am again, facing the sucking void of the contemporary mainstream romantic comedy and trying to hold onto my pocket change and what's left of my dignity. If the trailer for this Jennifer Aniston/Gerald Butler PR vehicle didn't crush your spirit, the full feature will certainly take care of that, although there's not much more to know: Aniston has a great body (she's 41 you know!), Butler wants to be a big star, and the two of them probably boned in real life.
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Another entry in Noah Baumbach's rough guide to the modern American narcissist, Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is a kingdom unto himself. Terminally self-conscious and yet brutally un-self-aware, stunted and solipsistic to the point of generating his own toxic atmosphere, he is -- or should be -- the cautionary middle-aged male. At 41 he is recovering from the nervous breakdown that his distant ancestors Holden Caulfield and Hal Incandenza had upon coming of age. Greenberg is of that generation that forgot to officially acknowledge adulthood's arrival -- whether with a child or a career or a drop-in at an asylum -- and the reckoning is humiliating indeed. Recently released from a hospital in New York and minding his brother Phillip's Los Angeles compound while he and his family are off in Vietnam (one in a series of oblique and overt '70s references, the idea of a young man traveling to Saigon to build a hotel is played for one of the film's typically sidelong laughs), Greenberg is tasked with some basics: build a doghouse; see old friends; try not to be such a five-alarm asshole.
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Filmmaking is hard by any measure, but who knew anyone could so easily screw up the lurid, outrageous story of the Runaways, the original girl punks with more drama and depravity per pound than half their male contemporaries? If knowing them truly is to love them, then it only makes sense that Floria Sigismondi's tone-deaf, soulless and vapid biopic The Runaways should feel this spiteful -- to its source as well as the viewer.
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She's Out of My League is a mood piece. Lacking substance, originality, or a coherent treatment of its putative subject matter -- self-image and the defeatist hierarchies we compose from social and superficial assumptions -- it's the kind of goob-fest that relies almost completely on the amenability of its viewers. But the thing is, if you know that, on the right day, you are entirely capable of losing it over a perfectly delivered sexy yoda joke, a "slapshot regatta" sequence, or even the kind of nasty body humor you might sneer at in a more sensible (or harassed) frame of mind, director Jim Field Smith has made a movie just for you. This can be a tough thing to accept, especially if you (and your horrified seatmates) don't see it coming; there were a couple of points where I thought I might accidentally suffocate myself in my attempt to maintain some kind of cool. Which actually just moves me farther into the ranks of the film's classic band of misfits.
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Any review of the maudlin, meandering Robert Pattinson drama Remember Me will always get around to mentioning the Big Twist Ending, so let's just get it out of the way now: There's a Big Twist Ending that anyone paying attention to the film's internal clock and visual cues can see coming a mile away. I won't spoil it, because one of the film's few involving qualities lies in spotting these hints as director Allen Coulter and first-time screenwriter Will Fetters deliver them. Other than that, get ready for a marathon of angst, grief, romance and loving close-ups of gorgeous young people in the middle of it all.
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Late into Green Zone, Paul Greengrass's gratifying if slightly garbled Hollywood treatment of the first months of the Iraq war, George Bush makes his inevitable appearance, in a clip pulled from the "Mission Accomplished" debacle. The only actual player to appear in a film filled with coy doppelgangers, Bush's visage caused a strange response to roll through the audience -- not boos or hisses but a low, mortified, neck-rolling groan. It was the kind of reaction provoked, perhaps, by the far away memory of an ill-advised seafood buffet: major buzz-kill.
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While it's right and just that B-movie aficionados everywhere today celebrate the 70th birthday of Chuck Norris, it'd be tough to argue that any of the conservative chop-socky master's efforts actually belong on any list devoted to the best -- or worst -- cinema has to offer. The exception is 1982's Silent Rage, which even three decades on stands as a strong contender for the most bizarre tagline in Hollywood history. It's not so much a marketing blurb as a short synopsis that also manages to blur actor and character. And like the poster, the trailer leads us to think it's all about Chuck.
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A trip to grimmest copland with a fine pedigree and long tradition on both the big and small screen standing behind it, in a way Brooklyn's Finest falls prey to the paradox it sets up in its first and most riveting scene. A known criminal named Carlo (Vincent D'Onofrio) is explaining to his NYPD connection Sal (Ethan Hawke) the lesson in the difference between ethics and morals that a judge recently gave him. "It's not a question of right and wrong," Carlo recalls the judge saying, citing a defendant who had to break the law to do the right thing, "but of righter and wronger." The three cops whom director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) follows through his two-plus hour urban melodrama traverse a similarly tricky x/y axis of good and bad vs. right and wrong, each one plotting a different course across the matrix of what it means to serve and protect. It's a classic set-up, if one whose tropes are ultimately pumped up beyond recognition with pomp and portent.
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There are just two sleeps to go to the big night! The odds have been calculated and the prognostications made! The votes are in and now can't even be changed by Harvey's semitic signage, Nicolas's nincompoop e-natterings or James revealing that the Na'vi aren't actually CG but real genetic freaks he cooked up in his garage. Yet we can't keep having the same conversations for the next 48 hours. What we need is something to feed the appetite and stoke the fever -- something that's of the Academy Awards but not about their 82nd iteration. And The Oscar is that filmic fondue, a cauldron of cheese cooked up by director Russell Rouse, writer Harlan Ellison, stars Stephen Boyd and Tony Bennett, and a who's who of Hollywood donating cameos.
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Sorority Row targets that narrow cross section of the population who are both slasher film fans and people willing to watch Rumer Willis act. The film also is best seen by anyone not familiar with Scream, since the ruling principles of both films are the same: cozy, anonymous town terrorized by a killer, cameo by a celebrity (okay, in this case it's a reality show "celebrity") who gets offed in the first ten minutes, a series of creative slashings and gashings, and a heroine with a conscience trying to save her friends. Carrie Fisher's presence as the boozy house mother is also an unexplained phenomenon that is neither funny nor campy; I guess that just makes it just sort of sad. Help her, Obi Wan, she's accepting terrible roles.
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Two children's classics whose hallucinatory mixture of exhilaration and dread has perhaps been most compellingly evinced by a Jefferson Airplane song and a Tom Petty video, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are tricky cinematic source material. The 1951 Disney animated feature never quite reached the canonical status of a Cinderella or Snow White; Lewis Carroll's iconoclastic heroine seemed to resist the plangent, embalming tones of such fare, despite having her own coterie of talking animals and fatalistic queens. What she didn't have was a prince, which curiously enough is the first thing Tim Burton, in his hybridic update, gives her. It's a conventional tweak that doesn't bode well for an adaptation of a tale as idiosyncratic as Alice, which requires descendants to inhabit its spirit of invention in an organic and yet equally singular way.
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Parenthood is strange and familiar thanks to its utterly traditional format. Based on the disarming 1989 film comedy with Steve Martin and Rick Moranis (and exec-produced by the film's director Ron Howard), Parenthood takes the family melodrama of Brothers & Sisters and ratchets up the funny moments, allowing actors who've pleased us in similar roles to gently overstep their archetypes with warm, self-effacing sympathy. If we can catch up with all the pilot's proposed story lines, we may have a Pottery Barn-scented Modern Family on our hands.
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Director Jacques Audiard has said that the character of Malik, the turbulent moral center of A Prophet, is not, as the title implies, the voice of God, but a simple messenger, "a prototype of a new kind of human being." A juvenile offender transferred to an adult prison on his 19th birthday to serve out the remaining six years of his sentence, Malik (Tahar Rahim) bears both good and bad news, and it breaks over Audiard's two-and-a-half hour chronicle of his coming of age within the French penal system. The central question of the prison drama -- What does it mean to survive? -- is transposed onto the experiences of a young Arab who arrives formless and frightened but increasingly determined to get by. Audiard's new kind of human being is not a mutation or a psychopath but a ruthless adaptor, and the process is one of dubious and paradoxical rewards.
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Straining to give limp quotation the luster of homage, Kevin Smith's Cop Out pays tribute mostly to the director's rich heritage of self-amusement. His chosen genre -- the '80s buddy cop comedy -- gets a brief run-down in the opening scene, when NYPD detectives Jimmy (Bruce Willis) and Paul (Tracy Morgan) bicker over the interrogation of a suspect. Lobbying for the part of "bad cop," Paul insists that his years of watching cop movies have prepared him for this moment, and launches a performative assault on the detainee that begins with bits from Heat and Training Day, but quickly devolves into a channeling of Harpo from The Color Purple. It's a long and indulgent sequence in Smith's singularly brutish style: strong-arming you with stupidity until you crack. It may also be the last laugh you'll concede.
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