Self-important, pretentious, deeply-flawed.
It’s a trifle too “on the nose” casting, yes? Putting the fellow who dazzles playing the troubled Brit TV Sherlock Holmes in the role of Wikileaks Emperor Julian Assange in “The Fifth Estate.”
But man, he’s on the money.
Yes, kids, there used to be things called “newspapers.” With what we called, back then “Funny pages.”
And the best thing ever to hit those funny pages was the sublimely silly, serenely insightful “Calvin & Hobbes,” a dizzy take on childhood as seen through the eyes of a precious boy and his stuffed tiger, Hobbes.
It’s a shame a generation has grown up without knowing the glories of “C & H,” but for those who remember it, this trailer to a new documentary will take you back.
Dreamworks, like Pixar, wasn’t able to put its best foot forward with a big summer movie this year. The idea cupboards at both dream factories seem pretty bare.
“Monsters University” was hyped and promoted to beat the band, but thin on laughs and weak on execution. At least to adults.
And “Turbo” panders to the racing/street tuning car crowd’s kids with a movie that also suffers a lack of laughs. It’s pretty, it’s animated, it has a diverse voice cast. But it’s a bit flat. The reviews reflect that.
Passable, but far from top drawer.
I wonder if there’s a talent drain owing to all the many animation outfits out there. “Epic” was weak, but Blue Sky, Sony and Universal have plucked much of their talent from Dreamworks and Pixar. Disney’s “Planes” is on its way and it doesn’t inspire any confidence.
The only summer cartoon movie to deliver laughs was “Despicable Me,” and it didn’t have the pathos of the first film.
The Weinstein Co. may roll this indie drama into many more markets, simply due to its topicality.
It’s a true story about a young black man with a checkered past who gets into a dust-up with BART (Bay Area) transit rent-a-cops, one of whom shoots him in the back in front of a platform full of witnesses.
Pretty infamous incident when it happened.
“Girl Most Likely” is a comedy from Kristen Wiig’s alternate universe career — the career she might have had without “Bridesmaids.”
A daft, thin and instantly forgettable farce about a woman of once-great promise who fakes a suicide attempt to hang on to a beau who is bailing on her, it’s the sort of movie that has its Manhattan heroine turn out to be from New Jersey — as if that’s all it takes for hilarity to ensue. It relies on Wiig’s charms, Matt Dillon’s wackiness and lot of examples of that favorite crutch of underwhelming romantic comedy directors — cute time-lapse montages set to pop music.
Imogene (Wiig) is a blurb writer for the arts section of a New York magazine. It’s not exactly where she saw herself ten years ago, when her student play was winning acclaim and her future seemed bright.
And then she’s fired from that blurb gig. Good thing she has her beau (Brian Petsos) to lean on. Only she doesn’t. He’s dumping her, no matter how much she pleads “I don’t really trust myself to be alone right now.” Getting dolled up, writing a note and taking sleeping pills on the hope that he will be the one to discover her and save her doesn’t work out, either.
The hospital promptly “sentences” her to be taken home by her estranged mother — the one who lives in New Jersey.
Annette Bening is the blowsy, brassy Ocean City mom Imogone so wanted to escape. When Mother Zelda leaves the heavily medicated Imogene sleeping in the car so Zelda can hit the casino on the way home, we understand why. Her advice that “Some men are ‘stayers’ and some are ‘leavers’ — you’re better off finding it out now,” may be sound. But Imogne isnt’ hearing it.
Zelda’s living with a blowhard (Matt Dillon) who whispers to one and all that he’s a C.I.A. hitman. And they’re all sharing the rattletrap Jersey Shore house with Imogene’s special needs brother (Christopher Fitzgerald). Imogone’s old room? Zelda rented it out to hunky young club entertainer Lee (Darren Criss of “Glee”).
“Girl Most Likely” tracks Imogene’s flailing attempts to hang onto her wealthier, shallower New York mean-girl friends, her tentative attraction to the supportive Lee and her efforts to make sense of a life that had so much promise and went so wrong. Maybe the father she barely knew is the key.
Wiig does this ugly-duckling-who-doesn’t-think-she-deserves-the-guy thing well. But usually, she dresses down so much we believe her ordinariness. In this film, she’s wearing Bullock-level makeup in every shot, even when she’s trapped wearing her “old” ’90s clothes, because that’s all Imogene can find in the house she grew up in. Her Imogene never lets us believe she’s as unhinged as she claims to be.
There’s an engaging connection between her brother, who sells crabs in a booth and who believes a shell or “exoskeleton” is the perfect defense against modern life. And Dillon is an old hand at this sort of clueless, comical creep — pontificating about “the samurai tradition” and the like as if he has some sort of killer’s connection to that.
But co-directors Shari Singer Berman and Robert Pulcini (“American Splendor,” “The Extra Man”) never find the right balance between pathos and farce. And they compound their frustration at this by hurling pop music montages to try and put a head on this flatter-than-flat beer.
Whatever their other gifts, they cannot find the fizz here and can never get Wiig to commit to the sort of film that she, even when she was making it, must have realized was beneath her in her post-“Bridesmaids” glory.
(Roger Moore talks with Kristen Wiig here).
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content and language.
Cast: Kristen Wiig, Annette Bening, Matt Dillon, Darren Criss
Credits: Directed by written by Michelle Morgan. A Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions release.
Running time: 1:43
Sadie knows. The dog always knows not to go into the haunted house.
But since this was 1971, and the world, much less Rhode Island’s Perron family, had not seen “The Exorcist” and the generations of ultra-realistic horror movies and “Ghost Hunters” TV shows that followed, they didn’t see heed the dog’s warnings. The Perrons were in for it.
“The Conjuring” is like a prequel to 40 years of demonic possession thrillers, a movie about the original ghost hunters, Ed and Lorraine Warren, and an early case this “Amityville Horror” couple found so terrifying they never talked about it — “until now!”
James Wan, who made his horror bones with “Saw” and outgrew torture porn with the superbly spooky “Insidious” reunites with his “Insidious” star, Patrick Wilson, for this solid and sometimes hair-raising thriller about a haunted house, the family of seven (five daughters) haunted by it and the can-do couple summoned by the Perrons.
The Warrens lecture at colleges, show film of inexplicable supernatural events and collect the possessed artifacts that they weed out among all the false alarms that are usually creaking pipes and settling floorboards. Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) is clairvoyant, which means she sees what those truly spooked see and feels what they feel. Ed (Wilson) may be credulous, but he’s the pragmatist — applying 1960s and 70s pre-digital technology to his search for “proof” of what they’re dealing with.
These cases have three phases, he lectures — “infestation, oppression and possesion.” He’s got a ready answer for dealing with them when Caroline and Roger Perron (Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston) invite them over. Are their kids baptized?
“We’re not really a church-going family.”
“You might want to rethink that.”
The humor in “The Conjuring” comes from the naivete of the victims — Caroline doesn’t recognize her bruise marks as demonic injuries, their five daughters don’t know their invisible friends, their sleepwalking and the mysterious bumps and claps that ruin their games of “Hide and Clap” are ghosts — and the gee whiz let’s-invent-this-trade, ghost hunting — of the Warrens.
Wan and his screenwriters serve up some classic scary situations and provide a decent jolt or three in the “sealed off basement,” the ghostly shadow in the mirror of an antique jack-in-the-box. There’s something particularly insidious about a monstrous menace to children. Farmiga and Wilson play the Warrens as slow to take on urgency, with a seen-it-all world weariness that robs some scenes of their true terror.
And horror audiences are more sophisticated than this story. A movie that plays like horror’s greatest hits — a little “Exorcist” here, a dose of “Chucky” or “Paranormal Activity” there — is going to feel tired, even with the odd surprise.
It conjures up a few frights, but “The Conjuring” is more solid than sensational and spine tingling. Think of it as a horror history lesson, yet another “based on a true story” to explain those things that go bump in the night.
MPAA Rating:R for sequences of disturbing violence and terror .
Cast: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Lili Taylor, Ron Livingston
Credits: Directed by James Wan, written by Chad and Carey Hayes. A New Line/Warner Brothers release
Running time: 1:52
When you’ve got a name like Steve McQueen, you have our attention. Even if you’re British and black. And when your previous film “Shame” was as critically acclaimed as it was, and “Hunger” stirred things up as well, and you’ve already got a reputation as collaborative, unflinching and ready to show ugly things at their ugliest, actors will flock to you.
McQueen’s bio-pic “Twelve Years a Slave,” a true story of a free black man kidnapped in the North and sold in the South, drew Chewitel Ejiofor as its star, McQueen’s muse Michael Fassbender as a slave owner, Brad Pitt, Paul Giamatti, Alfre Woodard and Paul Dano. A very good trailer for what looks like a much more conventional McQueen movie. “Twelve Years a Slave” opens in October.
In animation shorthand, “Turbo” is “‘Cars’ with Snails.” It’s light on the jokes, but cute, with animation so vivid it looks photo-real.
It’s another “impossible dream” tale, this time of a motorhead mollusk who has a need for “Terrifying, blinding speed.” Theo (Ryan Gosling) is an auto-racing obsessed garden snail who longs to escape his colony of tomato-munchers. The occasional terror by the Big Wheel riding tyke nicknamed “Shell Crusher” and the odd assault by crows is the only excitement in this over-organized, limited world.
He watches races on TV and works hard to improve his time over the measured yard — 17 minutes is a personal best.
Speed? “It’s IN me,” declares Theo, who prefers the nickname “Turbo.” “It’s NOT,” says his brother Chet (Paul Giamatti), who knows what he’s talking about. “Not every dream is meant to come true.”
Turbo is constantly taking risks that are sure to shorten his life, and sometimes, even he can see that. Dejected, he slimes his way to the dry bed of the Los Angeles River, where he’s caught up in some drag racing and is sucked into the turbocharger of a Nitrous Oxide-boosted Camero.
Darned if he isn’t transformed into the World’s Fastest Snail, sliming a literal blue streak down L.A. streets and up L.A. walls.
Darned if a Latino taco maker (Michael Pena) doesn’t enter Turbo in his rundown strip mall’s nightly snail races. Darned if Turbo doesn’t chew up the souped-up local snails, led by Whiplash (Samuel L. Jackson) but including Smoove Move (Snoop Dogg).
And darned if that doesn’t have the taco maker and his fellow failing small business owners (Ken Jeong voices a nail parlor operator, Richard Jenkins a hobbyshop owner and Michelle Rodriguez an auto body shop operator) thinking “Indianapolis 500.”
The first big laughs arrive when Jackson’s character purrs that Turbo has “clearly got the skills to pay the bills…If snails had bills.” Bill Hader vamps up the French Indy car champ who inspires Turbo but who could not bear to lose to a snail in The Brickyard.
The situations are more amusing than the dialogue and shrieking Ken “Hangover” Jeong one-liners. And as vivid as the race scenes are — zooming over, through and under Indy cars — if we want to watch photo-real auto-racing we can turn on the TV.
So while small children may be enchanted by this little gastropod that could, adults will be more sorely tested. For all the horsepower the “Turbo” boasts about, the movie tends toward the sluggish — as in slow as a slug.
MPAA Rating: PG for some mild action and thematic elements.
Cast: The voices of Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Paul Giamatti, Luis Guzman, Michael Pena, Michelle Rodriguez, Bill Hader
Credits: Directed by David Soren, written by David Soren, Darren Lemke and Robert D. Siegel. A Dreamworks/Fox release
Running time: 1:35
Her life hasn’t been the same since “Bridesmaids.” And this weekend, the SNL alumna turned movie star Kristen Wiig has a star vehicle — “Girl Most Likely” — opening in cinemas.
Questions for Kristen? I figure to ask her about her fondness for playing low-self-esteem 30things who find love in unlikely places and the movie. If you have a suggestion, post it as a comment. And thanks.
Here’s an old fashioned “creature feature” in the mold of “The Thing”, “Critters” and “Gremlins.” What sets “Grabbers” apart is a touch of the “diddly aye.” Yes, this time the beast comes ashore in an island town off Ireland. And the locals — Irish “types” one and all — have a grand time holding off the thing that sucks their faces off in the night.
Ruth Bradley is the fetching state cop (Garda) named Lisa Nolan who has taken temporary duty on Erin Island. The locals can’t help but flirt. Even the only other cop on duty during this corner of the summer. But Ciaran O’Shea (Richard Coyle) is a lush and a barely functioning one as it is.
Nothing ever happens here, he tells the new Garda girl. Ahh, she says, but “It’s always the quiet places where the mad (stuff) happens.”
And so it does. A meteor struck the sea before Nolan showed up, and what was in it quickly relieved a fishing boat of its crew. Next, half-devoured whales wash ashore, a lush of a fisherman, naturally named Paddy (Lalor Roddy) finds something alien in his lobster traps.
“Caught meself a sea monster today, I did.”
The local British ecologist-biologist (Russell Tovey) is puzzled, and nonplussed by Paddy’s need to keep the critter in his tub.
“You are so NOT putting this on eBay!”
As the Garda and a select clique of locals start to figure out what’s going on just as a storm rolls in, isolating Erin Island from rescue, director Jon Wright (“Tormented”, starring Alex Pettyfer, was his) ratchets up the energy and suspense — hand-held camera chases mixed with hilarious subjective shots of the boozy locals trying to stomp the life out of this alien life.
Screenwriter Kevin Lehane keeps his spirited — and often imbibing — characters fun by stuffing them to the gills with funny lines. Asking the aged tippler Paddy “How are you still alive?” earns a droll, “Diet…and exercise” as he lifts a pint to his lips.
There is absolutely nothing new in this variation on the time-honored creature-feature tropes. But the fun just builds and builds as our heroes and our Irish island come to a solution that seems — on the surface — awfully Irish in its logic.
That lets “Grabbers” take us in its comic clutches and never let go until the foe is vanquished or the pubs close — whichever comes last.
MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, alcohol abuse and profanity.
Cast: Richard Coyle, Ruth Bradley, Lalor Roddy, Bronagh Gallagher, Russell Tovey
Credits: Directed by Jon Wright, written by Kevin Lehane. An IFC release
Running time: 1:34
