“The Lovely Bones” is one of those rare movies where the plot gets in the way of the story. It looks magnificent, and is anchored by three unforgettable performances, but when director Peter Jackson has to leave Fantasyland and get back to advancing the story, his sadness is palpable. “But look at all the cool stuff I made here! Don’t make me leave! Waaaaaaah!” The end result is similar to his remake of “King Kong”: Occasionally beautiful and heart-stopping, but ultimately uneven. The year is 1973, and a lovestruck teen named Susie (Saoirse Ronan) has just been asked out on…
Author: David Medsker
“Nine” might have been something special if we hadn’t seen it already. Director Rob Marshall reuses pretty much every staging technique he used in “Chicago,” with naturally less exciting results since he’s lost the element of surprise. It’s perfectly competent, well sung and performed, but it’s also rather passionless. And who would have thought that Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench, Marion Cotillard and Penelope Cruz, Oscar winners all, would be upstaged by Kate Hudson? The year is 1965, and Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis), a beloved Italian film director whose last two movies were flops, cannot come up with an idea for…
Watching “Old Dogs” is a lot like watching Ohio State football. There are clearly some smart people behind its creation, but when it comes to execution, they’re all about playing it safe. Here’s the gay joke, here’s the groin shot (and shortly after that, the other groin shot), here’s the ‘funny face’ scene. Then there is this other, completely gonzo movie happening at the same time, filled with crazy campers, hand models with lazy eyes, and Amy Sedaris. Good for them for trying to stretch the field, but the two extremes work against each other more than they work together,…
It is usually the ultimate compliment for a movie to be considered better than the written work that inspired it. In the case of the movies made from Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series, however, it would be considered a profound disappointment if they weren’t. Legions of Twi-hards be damned, the books are ponderous reads, clumsy and thick-headed like their heroine Bella Swan. Fortunately, the people that have been hired to bring the “Twilight” books to life have a better grasp of narrative and structure than Meyer does, and ultimately save “New Moon” from itself. Well, save it to a point, at…
When it comes to Roland Emmerich movies, we hold these truths to be self-evident: they will be overlong, not terribly well acted, and loaded with melodrama that has the emotional weight of a Hallmark card. In the plus column, the man can stage one hell of a disaster sequence, and his latest movie “2012,” for better and for worse, is all of these things. It sports a ridiculous run time – two hours and 38 minutes, yikes – and the so-called teary moments fall flat, but the annihilation sequences he assembles are like nothing you’ve ever seen. That leaves the…
After taking his groundbreaking motion capture technology to insane extremes in 2007’s “Beowulf,” it made sense that Robert Zemeckis would up the ante in his retelling of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” However, to say that he upped the ante here would be a grand understatement. The effects work here is far beyond a tech wizard showing off; it’s more like watching Zemeckis lose his mind. He seems so obsessed with what he can do with the FX that he doesn’t stop to consider whether he should. Jim Carrey, in one of several roles, is Ebenezer Scrooge, a penny-pinching miser…
The sixth installment in what has up to now been a wildly successful franchise – while this one still turned a healthy profit, it made half as much as the other “Saw” movies, due in large part to the ass kicking it received from “Paranormal Activity” – “Saw VI” has a ripped-from-the-headlines timeliness to it that you would expect to see from one of the “Law & Order” series. They purport that this was Jigsaw’s endgame when the story began in 2004, doing their usual shoehorn retrofitting to make it work. And while the story technically works, there is absolutely…
Being a celebrity does not automatically make someone interesting. Even with the creative license that comes with your typical Hollywood biopic, “Amelia” portrays 1930s aviation pioneer and role model Amelia Earhart as a pleasant but frankly dull person. Even the parts that dealt with Earhart compromising her integrity in order to achieve her dreams – which she did a lot – were boring. Hilary Swank plays the title character, a Kansas girl with a dream to fly. She meets with George Putnam (Richard Gere), a Colonel Tom Parker type who agrees to let Earhart “fly” across the Atlantic – though…
“Law Abiding Citizen” is a Frankenstein’s monster of ‘90s thrillers, mashing up the self-centered, morally compromised lawyer from a Grisham book with an “In the Line of Fire”-esque killer that more or less hides in plain sight. As cliché as that may sound – and man oh man, is this movie chock full of cliché – the movie actually works at times, and even has the decency to look away when decorum calls for it to do so. Gerard Butler is Clyde Shelton, a government employee whose wife and daughter are murdered during a robbery. Clyde is not at all…
While armchair critics wondered exactly what steps Spike Jonze would take to flesh out “Where the Wild Things Are,” Maurice Sendak’s 37-page, largely wordless tale of an ornery child who creates a world where his wild antics are not only encouraged but celebrated, it’s a safe bet that no one was expecting a sobering meditation on the effects of divorce on children. But that is exactly what Jonze has done, and gorgeous though it may be, it is woefully lacking in terms of emotional weight. Max (Max Records) is a lonely boy. His older sister Claire (Pepita Emmerichs) is too…