“Zathura” has a “Last Starfighter” kind of charm to it; it’s hopelessly behind the times in terms of what kids – and adults – want and expect from a sci-fi fantasy, and yet there is something oddly appealing about it. Maybe it’s the fact that the filmmakers know they’re making something terribly uncool. The source material for “Zathura” may only be four years old, but it, like its predecessor “Jumanji” (both the work of children’s author Chris Van Allsburg), feel like they were written in the ‘50s. If you buy the premise as an idea from a bygone era, with…
Author: David Medsker
If there was a spectrum of animated films, where the witty, high brow Pixar movies were on one end and the broad, stunt-casted DreamWorks Animation films were on the other, “Chicken Little” would fall dead in the center. It has a fresh visual style and keeps the bodily function jokes to a minimum (like Pixar), but they also stuffed the movie to the gills with pop song after pop song (ala “Shrek”), as well as recruiting voice talent from “The Simpsons,” “Family Guy,” Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries, and even a couple of Pixar veterans. It’s not a masterpiece, but it is…
The biggest problem with “Stay” is that going in, you know that there’s a hook, that you can’t believe everything you see yet must pay attention to every little detail. Do these movies ever live up to the payoff? Every once in a while, like in “The Sixth Sense.” But what helped that movie was how grounded it was; at its core was a story that wasn’t about ghosts but people and their inability to communicate. “Stay” has no such foundation, and as a result it flails a lot. As for the hook, well, at the risk of giving away…
The photography is luscious, even though it’s black and white. The subject matter is compelling, to say the least. The cast, while not A-listers, are actors’ actors, across the board. “Good Night, and Good Luck,” George Clooney’s directorial follow-up to 2002’s “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” boasts a laundry list of superlative qualities, and they’re almost completely undone by its bone dry approach to the source material, which Clooney wrote with Grant Heslov. For all the things they get right, the movie has far less emotional impact because of the one thing they got wrong. The movie begins and ends…
Things have clearly gotten a bit randy at Aardman Animation since we last checked in with Nick Park & Co. The kings of claymation, who have won two Oscars for their efforts (“The Wrong Trousers” and “A Close Shave”), were the last bastion of clean, smart storytelling, making films both long and short (they made 2000’s “Chicken Run” as well) that the entire family, all clichés aside, can enjoy. From cyberdogs and thieving penguins, to sheep that can operate power tools, Wallace & Gromit represented a kind of moviemaking that was innocent but clever, which was a breath of fresh…
It takes a tough broad to hang with the boys in the world of comedy, and Lisa Lampanelli is so tough that the boys are actually afraid of her. Her routine (you’ve no doubt seen her on a number of Comedy Central roasts), which focuses mainly on ripping the paying audience to ribbons, is the kind of stuff you’d get out of Don Rickles after messing with his medication. It’s venomous, yes, but playful; her secret weapon is that she’s equal opportunity, and in doing so makes everyone part of the joke and lets them in on it as well.…
Disney’s had a good thing going for the last few years with these sports movies based on true stories. They are tales where the ending can be seen down Broadway and around the corner, but the notion that David can beat Goliath, that the sum is far, far greater than the parts, has massive appeal. Dennis Quaid striking out Royce Clayton (“The Rookie”), the US Olympic hockey team of scrubs beating the mighty Russians (“Miracle”), Denzel Washington uniting a school and town for a good far greater than football (“Remember the Titans”); who can resist this stuff? Up to this…
David St. Hubbins was more right than he knew when discussing the fine line between stupid and clever. “Flightplan” is a pitch perfect example of it, in fact. It’s a simple premise with a convoluted payoff, and it depends on a series of staggering coincidences in order to stay afloat. To the filmmakers’ credit, they do a good job of deflecting any and all suspicion, but only for so long. In the end, they can’t escape their own contrivances, and while the movie is well executed, it’s fatally flawed. Jodie Foster stars as Kyle Pratt, an engineer for an airplane…
If the animators behind Tim Burton’s love letters to Ray Harryhausen put as much effort into the story they’re telling as they put into the ten-inch stick figures that tell it, they would truly be dangerous. His first stop-motion foray, 1993’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” was charming but flawed, too impressed with its technical achievement for its own good. The same affliction mars “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride” as well; it’s visually stunning, leaps and bounds beyond both “Nightmare” and 1995’s “James and the Giant Peach.” The story, however, is seriously lacking, and the tunes aren’t that good, either. Johnny Depp…
“Just Like Heaven” had the makings of a classic. You have the Queen of Hollywood (sorry, Julia) teamed up with the most unlikely yet most capable male romantic lead there is today, starring in a smart, otherworldly love story. So what went wrong? They tried too hard to make a movie that literally everyone would enjoy. Had they gone the “Four Weddings and a Funeral” route, where the writers understood that their sense of humor was not everyone’s cup of tea and said ‘sod off’ to anyone who didn’t get their jokes, they would have easily made the best romantic…