Author: Bob Westal

There’s a good chance that, growing up, you’ve fantasized about being a private investigator. Fed by a lifetime of TV, movie, and literary P.I.s, I know I have – and still do. The mind of Andy Barker (Andy Richter), however, has been elsewhere. Andy’s an accountant, and a very good one, but he’s so unaware of the noir mythos that when someone mentions the movie “Chinatown,” he asks, “Is that with Jackie Chan?” Blissfully married to the adoring Jenny Barker (the quirkily deadpan Clea Lewis), he’s more than happy taking all his walks on the mild side. Still, when he…

Although “Moonrise Kingdom” is the first to make a point of being set in the past, all of Wes Anderson’s films are, in a way, period pieces. Some writers may call him playfully post-modern, but it’s equally true to think of him as defiantly old fashioned. He delights in overtly literary dialogue, his characters are as courtly and eccentric as those in any 1930s screwball farce, and there is little trace of the 21st century in any Anderson production. No wonder I’m a fan. An ensemble film to its very bones, “Moonrise Kingdom” nevertheless focuses mainly on two remarkable, and…

Some years ago, we are told, producer David Gross set out to rectify what must seem a grave imbalance to north-of-the-border sports fans: the fact that the ultimate movie about Canada’s national sport, 1977’s “Slapshot,” was made in the non-poutine eating United States. Mission accomplished: “Goon” is a Canadian hockey comedy with a capital CANUCK. It oozes Great White North out of its every pore, which I’m glad to say is a lot less disgusting than it sounds. Inspired by the career of real-life minor league hockey player Doug Smith, “Goon” starts out awkwardly with an unfunny teaser featuring Liev…

If the events of the 19th century had gone differently, the area we now call Hollywood would have been on Mexican land. It seems unlikely that that would have somehow led to an alternate historical timeline in which Will Ferrell would have emerged as a stalwart Spanish-speaking leading man and action star. That, nevertheless, is something like the universe imagined in “Casa de mi Padre,” an often very funny but terribly haphazard spoof of low-budget south of the border pop culture. Presented in fabulous Mexicoscope, “House of My Father” (para los gringos) stars Ferrell as heroic, virtuous and completely non-self-aware…

Between exacting justified revenge on Osama bin Laden and the rescue of two aid workers during this year’s State of the Union speech, Navy SEALs have been generating plenty of good press lately. Now, they’ve provided what is almost certainly an unprecedented level of cooperation for an action film, but I’m betting the PR bonanza won’t likely extend to many positive reviews. Easily one of the glossiest productions to ever feature a largely non-professional cast, “Act of Valor” stars, we are told, actual active duty SEALs – identified by rank and first name only – mixed in with professional actors…

“Rampart” is in no way a docudrama about the real-life police corruption scandal that rocked Los Angeles in the late 1990s. Nor is it a biting and complex cop drama along the lines of “The Shield,” which itself was originally entitled “Rampart.” From director/co-writer Oren Moverman (“The Messenger”) and novelist turned first-time screenwriter James Ellroy (“L.A. Confidential,” “The Black Dahlia”), and set in 1999, this “Rampart” is mostly a 1970s-style character study focusing on the disintegration of a bad apple cop. Woody Harrelson stars in a pretty unquestionable tour de force performance as Officer Dave Brown, aka “Date Rape Dave.”…

It’s easy to see why Roman Polanski was attracted to French playwright Yasmina Reza’s international black comedy hit, “God of Carnage.” It deals with the classic post-World War II issue of man’s inability to defeat primeval urges within a supposedly civilized society. Polanski, a survivor of monstrous crimes and the perpatrator of another one I need not describe, is a man who clearly has had an issue or two with being a human animal. It’s title shortened for the presumably more word-averse, deity-fearing movie market, “Carnage” starts at what should have been the end of things. Two boys have had…

Newbie action director and all-around busy guy Steven Soderbergh argues that this hard-edged spy thriller is “more of a drama with action than it is a wall-to-wall action movie.” True enough, but isn’t every decent action film primarily a drama with action? Hollywood seems to think it can make films where stories and characters are an afterthought, but that’s like trying to make cupcakes that are 99% sugar; and Hollywood usually screws up the sugar. “Haywire” most definitely does not screw up the violent sugar, however, and is an entirely honorable throwback. Re-teaming Soderbergh with writer Lem Dobbs of the…

It’s a story as old as time itself. No, I don’t mean the tale of an avenging hero who destroys evil, wins the favor of the gods, and liberates his people. I’m talking about what happens when a potentially decent big budget genre film is derailed by an unfocused, uninteresting screenplay that seems to have been everyone’s lowest priority. In traditional Greek mythology Theseus was the heroic demigod who founded the city-state of Athens. In “Immortals,” however, Theseus (Henry Cavill) is a lowly craftsman who receives advice from an initially unnamed but theoretically wise old man (John Hurt, who also…

Forty-two years after his death, B-horror legend William Castle remains synonymous with cinematic gimmicks with names like “Emergo,” (a glow-in-the-dark skeleton that flew over the audience), “Percepto” (a small vibrator under some theaters seats) and “Illusion-O” (a “ghost viewer”). Though his modestly budgeted productions delighted the young, they were impossible to take seriously and never earned him the kind of respect given to less avidly commercial auteurs. Still, he was a solid movie craftsman of the old school with a buoyant attitude who worked with Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, and possibly influenced Alfred Hitchcock’s move into sensational horror with “Psycho”…