Absurdly plotted, ineptly scripted and haplessly acted, “Creature” is a new variation on the “Creature from the Black Lagoon” theme.
Take half a dozen good-looking but under-credited actors, surround them with horror hacks and turn them loose in the bayou to be hunted by “Lockjaw,” a half-gator/half-man beast who feeds on skinny dippers and those stupid enough to camp next to haunted houses, and you’ve got yourself a movie.
The last time we took any note of Roland Joffe, the director of “The Mission” and “The Killing Fields,” it was through his take on the ugly genre “torture porn” titled “Captivity” back in 2007. To be fair, he followed that up with the lesbian murder mystery “You and I,” which even fewer people people saw.
He’s back in theaters and back in the world of period pieces with “There Be Dragons,” a Spanish Civil War tale that tells the story of the controversial founder of the Catholic Opus Dei organization. It’s an odd but ambitious choice and a muddled and unsatisfying film — “Doctor Zhivago” without the majesty, “Reds” without the passion or romance.
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A sickly boy milks his illness to try and convince his school to break a world record in this lighthearted wintry kids’ comedy.
“Scream,” that cutlery, cleavage and quips franchise returns to life — sort of — with “Scream 4″ or “Scre4m,” another sashay down self-aware “meta-movie” lane with director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson. It’s a fitfully amusing, not remotely scary slasher picture that refuses to take its own advice, one drilled into our heads (not literally, praise be) by the movie itself.
“Don’t (bleep) with the original!”
As a “Don’t open that door!” thriller which involves us, connects us with characters and frightens us, it fails.
As a satire of the Media Generation, drunken, horror-obsessed cell-phone and viral video addicted teenagers, it stumbles. Somebody explain “twitter” and “texting” and “live streaming” to those geezers Williamson and Craven.
Toward the end of “Fast Five,” the latest installment in the long-running action film franchise, characters, and by extension the characters in the film, gaze longingly at a new jet-black Dodge Challenger SRT. This at the end of a movie when those characters have raced Dodge Charger police cruisers.
Nothing too untoward there. It is, after all, a movie in which the cars are co-stars. And as product placement goes, that’s so obvious as to induce giggles. Then maybe you’ll recall the prominent role Dodges had in the February film “I Am Number 4,” from Chargers and a Challenger to even a beat-up late model Dodge pick-up.
Product placement in movies is nothing new. But filmmaker Morgan “Super Size Me” Spurlock decided to turn such brand-name pay for play into a financing scheme for his latest documentary, “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.” The film follows him as he learns about that side of the film business, polishes his pitches and eventually lands the pomegranate juice company POM Wonderful as the major underwriter for his film.
Aaron Paul Alison Poots and Dominic Cooper are the leads in Dreamworks’ big screen adaptation of the video game “Need for Speed.”
Scott Waugh is directing, and Oscar nominee (“Flight”) John Gatins is co-writing with George Gatins.
The EA games have been around since the early 1990s. Apparently. Could be a “Fast and Furious” competitor, being all about cars and going fast in them.
The Wrap says that Abi Morgan, the screenwriter whose “Iron Lady” and “Shame” won attention a couple of winters ago, is set to adapt Shakespeare’s complicated knockabout comedy “The Taming of the Shrew” for the screen, with Anne Hathaway as the nasty/testy/put upon Kate in this version.
No word on who her Petruccio might be.
It’s a malleable play, if nothing else. Loved the Heath Ledger/Julia Stiles high school take on it, “Ten Things I Hate About You.”
There was a funny, understated and more passive aggressive John Cleese version that PBS aired back in the last century. And of course, Richard Burton tossing about Elizabeth Taylor in the ’60s.
Hathaway, who shares the name of Shakespeare’s wife, could play this any number of ways — British and period, American and modern.
“Submarine” is an eccentric coming-of-age comedy from Britain, that rare teen comedy where the kids aren’t gorgeous, the hero isn’t heroic and the object of desire has a lot of reasons why she isn’t necessarily desirable.
And no, it has little or nothing to do with submarines.
Actor (“The IT Crowd”) turned writer-director Richard Ayoade’s film of Joe Dunthorne’s novel leans heavily — a bit too heavily — on “quirky” as we explore the self-important autobiography of young wordsmith Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), a teenager who informs we “Americans,” in an opening credit, that “Submarine; is an important film” which we should treat “with respect.”
Take away much of the myth, most of the sorcery and all of the humor of the 1982 John Milius-Arnold Schwarzenegger version of the sword and sorcery epic “Conan the Barbarian” and you’ve got an idea what the new “Conan” is like.
“Winnie the Pooh,” Disney’s latest film revival of A.A. Milne’s “willy, nilly, silly old bear,” is longer on charm than it is on laughs. Or length. But it’s a treat for children making their first trek to the multiplex and for parents and grandparents with fond memories of the Hundred Acre Wood.
