“Penelope” made its debut at the Toronto Film Festival. The 2006 Toronto Film Festival. Not a good sign that the movie has languished this long without being released. The story gets better, though: the movie is coming out smack dab in between the most recent projects from its lead actors, one of which was a Best Picture nominee (James McAvoy, “Atonement”) and the other is one of the summer’s most anticipated movies (Christina Ricci, “Speed Racer”). Mighty convenient, that timing. The movie surely is a train wreck, right? Surprisingly, it’s not. While it paints with far too broad a brush…
Author: David Medsker
Deep in the bowels of the Columbus Schottenstein Center, hours before the latest stop of the Funny or Die tour, Will Ferrell has willingly subjected himself to assorted local and online press in order to promote his latest movie, “Semi-Pro.” After doing about two dozen on-camera interviews for local TV affiliates (give or take a dozen), Ferrell did a brief roundtable discussion that covered the complexities of improvising in a sports movie. But first, he offered the press some cubed cheese he found on his way into the conference room. Will Ferrell is a giver; don’t let anyone tell you…
There was one movie that my movie critic peers and I were looking forward to seeing in these dog days of winter, and it was “Be Kind Rewind,” Michel Gondry’s wacko tale of a video clerk and his oddball friend who shoot their own versions of hit movies. Then, without a word, the movie disappeared from our screening schedule. Further research revealed that New Line was yanking all screenings from certain markets, and we lived in one of them. Considering that they had just shown us “Over Her Dead Body,” a movie that they should have set on fire, flattened…
You have to give the makers of “Vantage Point” credit for one thing: what the movie lacks in plausibility, it makes up for with raw enthusiasm. They think their movie is awesome – well, actually, they probably know it’s not awesome, since they’ve put off releasing it for over a year – but they sure do pull out all the stops to deliver a bullet-riddled, car chase-happy whodunit, “Rashomon”-style. How much you enjoy it depends on how much you like watching the same scene five times in a row. Much like last year’s flashback extravaganza, “Before the Devil Knows You’re…
It’s a miracle that “Jumper” works as well as it does. Thanks to its 88-minute running time, no aspect of the story is given the chance to breathe, resulting in a movie that is as flighty as its lead character. To make matters worse, that lead character is played by one of the most wooden actors of his or any other generation, and he’s being chased by Samuel L. Jackson in white hair. It’s as if they’re trying to torpedo their own movie before it leaves the ground, and yet “Jumper” still finds a way to overcome its many obstacles.…
Moviegoers have spent the last two years trudging through many a mediocre tweener fantasy movie fast-tracked in the wake of Pottermania – have you forgotten “Eragon” and “The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising” so quickly? – but “The Spiderwick Chronicles” is the first one that feels like a genuinely worthy heir to the throne. It’s obviously not playing the same sport as J.K. Rowling’s books in terms of scope, but that turns out to be a virtue, resulting in a straight-forward plot with none of the tangents that bogged down “The Golden Compass” and even the more recent “Harry Potter”…
With a movie like “Rambo,” it’s best to just throw the scale out the window. How do you measure it against anything but itself, and possibly the three previous Rambo movies? (If we’re being fair, though, we leave “First Blood” out of the conversation altogether, since it was a completely different kind of movie.) “Rambo” movies exist in their own universe, where no critical barb, be it sincere or snarky, can touch them. That notion appears to be lost on Lionsgate, who did not screen “Rambo” for critics, but fortunately it was not lost on writer/director/star Sylvester Stallone. He knows…
While “Cloverfield’s” approach to monster movies is indeed unique – it’s “Godzilla” from the point of view of the guy on the street who points and yells, “Oh nooooooooo!” – the truth is that there isn’t a single technique employed here that you haven’t seen before. That, however, does not stop “Cloverfield” from delivering some legitimate thrills and downright creepy moments. The “Blair Witch Project”-style camerawork is effective in terms of revealing as little or as much as the movie wants you to see, but it’s also nauseating, like Paul Greengrass hopped up on Red Bull and NoDoz. The movie…
By all rights, “Mad Money” should be an unholy mess. For starters, look no further than the casting. Diane Keaton, Katie Holmes and Queen Latifah in a movie? And not just any movie, but a comedy about three women who rob the Federal Reserve? No, no, and hell to the no. But “Mad Money,” in spite of itself, manages to be occasionally bearable. That may not sound like an endorsement, but that is as flattering a comment they’re gonna get, and it is arguably more flattering than the movie deserves. Diane Keaton is Bridget, a kept woman who’s forced to…
Even if it didn’t bear such frightening similarity to porno slang (anyone who has the “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” CD’s, and has heard the ad involving the amusement park “where strangers become friends,” knows what I mean), the people who decided to saddle the thoroughly enjoyable “Glory Road” with that awful title should get a thousand lashes. For all of the remarkable things that Don Haskins and his Texas Western Miners did in 1966, the movie of their lives deserved a better title than “Glory Road,” which says nothing about anything. The movie begins with Haskins (Josh Lucas, who…