Give Luc Besson credit for filling his animated/live action fantasy “Arthur and the Invisibles” with more imagination than you’ll find in most alleged children’s fare these days (ahem, “Happily N’Ever After”), which makes it such a pity that the movie gets completely lost in translation from French to English. (“Arthur et les Minimoys” is the original title) The American voice actors, even the good ones, never get a feel for the style or pacing of the source material, and the movie turns into a big race from one scene to the next. Freddie Highmore (the clear heir to Haley Joel…
Author: David Medsker
I can’t say that I particularly care one way or the other for Renée Zellweger in the real world, but I fall head over heels in love with her every time I see her on the big screen. Say what you will about female leading ladies, box office draw, bankability, Jennifer Aniston, blah blah bling bling blah. It doesn’t mean a hill of beans to me. Renée Zellweger is the most reliable young actress in Hollywood because she has It, that mysterious but unmistakable quality that transcends all of the things that are calculated into today’s moviemaking. The woman, quite…
Little-known fact: Alfonso Cuarón is The Man. And chances are, no matter what kinds of movies you prefer, you’ve seen The Man’s work. When he’s not making a Mexican road movie (“Y Tu Mama Tambien”) or reinterpreting Dickens (1998’s “Great Expectations”), you might find him making a movie about some British boy wizard (“Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” this writer’s personal favorite in the series to date). Amazingly, Cuarón walked away from the “Potter” series after making just one movie, though you’ll forgive him for doing so once you’ve seen the dazzling “Children of Men,” a brutal futuristic…
Forgive me if this sounds redundant, but I feel I should advise you right up front that “Dreamgirls” is a musical. The reason I say this is because when the movie ended, I heard several people comment negatively about how there was too much singing. They clearly did not know what they were getting themselves into, and in their defense, the first I had heard of the musical – which, for the record debuted in 1981, ran for over 1,500 performances and won six Tony Awards – was about a month ago. So there it is. It’s a musical. Let’s…
Ben Stiller knows funny. So does Dick Van Dyke, Robin Williams, Ricky Gervais and Owen Wilson. Carla Gugino, meanwhile, was Karen Cisco and the mother of the Spy Kids, so she knows funny, too. Why, then, is “Night at the Museum” so incredibly unfunny? Blame must squarely be placed on the shoulders of screenwriters Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, who also know funny (“The State”) but happen to write really, really bad screenplays (“Taxi,” “The Pacifier,” “Let’s Go to Prison”). You can’t help but think that if everyone worked together, they could have made the best wax-figures-come-to-life-at-night movie in history.…
It’s not surprising that a rival studio to New Line thought that the market would support another “Lord of the Rings”-style medieval adventure, but surely someone, somewhere along the way, took a look at the structure of “Eragon,” the best-selling novel by then–teenager Christopher Paolini, and thought, “Isn’t this just ‘Lord of the Rings’ crossed with ‘Star Wars’?” And, of course, that’s exactly what “Eragon” is. Even the name is only a few letters removed from Aragorn, son of Arathorn, a.k.a. Strider, a.k.a. Viggo freaking Mortenson. And if this movie is missing anything – and it isn’t just missing anything,…
Say this for the kiddie Christmas comedy “Unaccompanied Minors”: the movie is positively overflowing with good taste, from the Christmas songs that open and close the movie (the Kinks and Everything but the Girl, respectively) to the comic royalty that appears in even the smallest roles. The movie’s director, Paul Feig, helmed episodes of “Arrested Development,” “The Office,” and “Freaks and Geeks,” and dipped into the talent pools of all three, among others, to put this movie together. Last but not least, the kids that play the six lead roles are funny, funny, funny. Pity, then, that the movie is…
You have to hand it to Mel Gibson. Sure, the man is the Grand Poohbah of crazy, along with every other euphemism for ‘nuts’ that they use in the chorus to Pink Floyd’s “The Trial,” but while his convictions have led him to make some profane declarations of late, you cannot deny that the man has onions. Is he really following his Jesus snuff film “The Passion of the Christ” with a tale about the fall of the Mayan empire, spoken entirely in Mayan? And he’s paying for it himself? Do you need a wheelbarrow for those stones you’re carrying…
“Blood Diamond” is 110 minutes of intense, heart-wrenching, political and emotional turmoil about the blood shed by all concerned in the diamond-rich Sierra Leone region of western Africa. The only problem is that the movie is 140 minutes long, which means that for all of its good qualities, the movie will challenge your attention span, early and often. It’s as if the movie wants to be “Hey Jude,” when “Yesterday” would have been just fine. The movie begins with Solomon (Djimon Hounsou), a fisherman in a small African village that is ransacked by rebel forces. Solomon is able to save…
As my boy Bill Clark of FromTheBalcony.com said when the lights went up, “Tropical Hostel.” That’s “Turistas” in a nutshell, though to its credit “Turistas” is not nearly as vapid or morally bankrupt as “Hostel” was. The bad guys in “Turistas” may be performing heinous acts on their prey, but the movie is not solely about the act itself. In other words, it’s not torture for the sake of torture. But either way, it still isn’t any good: it’s just not as bad as what I consider to be the worst movie ever made. The story begins with a group…