It’s tempting for movie critics to unfurl the claws on a movie like “The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising” – indeed, I’m betting a good percentage of my colleagues will do just that – but there really are times when the people who rate a movie’s artistic worth have to take into account that certain movies are simply not made with them in mind. This is not to say that people who make movies targeted at children or teenagers have carte blanche to dumb things down to a level that would insult, say, my six-month-old son. Rather, what it means…
Author: David Medsker
According to Wikipedia, it took almost two years to edit “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” and it’s still two hours and 40 minutes long. This is 20 minutes shorter than writer/director Andrew Dominik’s original cut, but 40 minutes longer than it needs to be. Were it not anchored by two agreeable performances from Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck in the title roles, the movie would have been completely lost in a wash of chilly rural country sides and fish-eye lens shots. The movie begins before the James Gang’s last train robbery. The members of the…
In the interest of full disclosure, you should know that I hated “Crash,” Paul Haggis’ Oscar-winning 2005 drama about racism in modern society, with the white-hot fire of a thousand suns. (Which, for the record, is actually less than L.A. gossip blog Defamer hated it.) I understand what Haggis was trying to say – that everyone’s a little bit racist, to quote the “Avenue Q” song – and to be honest, I don’t disagree with him. What I take issue with, however, is his delivery. Would you like an anvil to the head, or a baseball bat to the kneecaps?…
There is nothing about “Mr. Woodcock” that the title alone doesn’t tell you. The movie is obsessed with sex, though in a manner similar to someone who’s never actually had sex. Quick, name someone you know who is obsessed with sex but hasn’t had it yet. Let me guess, you just thought of an adolescent. How fitting, because nearly everything about “Mr. Woodcock,” particularly its humor, is adolescent. Billy Bob Thornton is the title character, a sadistic gym teacher who made life hell for anyone he perceived as weak, most notably a chubby young boy named John Farley. Thirteen years…
Revolution is arguably the worst movie studio in history. Their catalog stuffed to the gills with movies so bad that it would make Ed Wood blush. Two “xXx” movies, “Daddy Day Care,” “White Chicks,” “Little Man,” “Christmas with the Kranks,” “America’s Sweethearts,” “Zoom,” “The Master of Disguise,” “Next” and “The Animal” are but a handful of the movies they’ve inflicted on an undeserving public. They’re also responsible for three of this year’s worst movies: “Daddy Day Camp,” “The Brothers Solomon” and “Perfect Stranger,” the last of which has the most preposterous ending you will see in a movie from this…
Last week I chided “Death Sentence” for trying to take the high road in a gory revenge thriller, as if any of the movie’s characters actually deserved that kind of respect. “Shoot ‘Em Up,” thankfully, does not make the same mistake. The movie is 16 different flavors of bad, from the dialogue to the special effects to the acting, and yet the end result is one of the most wildly entertaining bad movies to come down the pipe in years. What did “Shoot ‘Em Up” do that “Death Sentence” didn’t? It embraced its badness, pure and simple. Clive Owen stars…
Embrace the badness. It’s a lesson that a lot of movies would benefit greatly from learning. Look at “Ghost Rider,” for example. That’s a bad, bad movie, right there, but hot damn, is it bad in a really fun way. James Wan, director of “Saw” and this year’s underwhelming “Dead Silence,” must have known that he was setting himself up for trouble when he signed on to make “Death Sentence,” author Brian Garfield’s first sequel to his 1972 novel “Death Wish.” And yet, Wan approaches the subject matter with a wide-eyed innocence that only occasionally taps into its potential for…
As spy thrillers go, “The Bourne Ultimatum” is shockingly plot-free. The majority of the movie is Run, Jason, Run! as he plays cat-and-mouse with the CIA in an attempt to uncover The Awful Truth about his identity and history. But just try and keep your eyes off of it, even when Paul Greengrass’ trademark nausea-cam trickery gives you vertigo. I am not kidding when I say that one of the attendees of the screening for this movie confessed to popping a couple Dramamines before the lights went down. Superspy Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is thisclose to finding out to who…
“Balls of Fury” is one of those monkeys-with-typewriters kind of movies, the inevitable result of someone watching “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story” and “Beerfest” enough times for a synapse to finally fire in the back of his oxygen-deprived brain that says, “Literal sudden death ping pong.” Does the world need another ‘non-athletic sport becomes high-stakes battle’ movie? Probably not, though the world would have made room for “Balls of Fury” had the filmmakers given us enough reason to. Dan Fogler stars as Randy Daytona, a onetime Olympic table tennis prodigy who’s now reduced to performing his ping pong skills for…
Much ado was made when Matthew Vaughn, who spent ten years making a living as a friend of Guy Ritchie before striking out on his own to direct “Layer Cake,” was offered the director’s chair for “X-Men: The Last Stand” after Bryan Singer bowed out to direct “Superman Returns.” Even more ado was made when Vaughn turned the gig down to direct an adaptation of the Neil Gaiman four-issue comic book series “Stardust,” citing a desire to stay in his native England rather than shoot a movie in Canada. Whatever his reasons, his instincts did not steer him wrong. “Stardust”…