“Taken” is a guy movie, a guilty pleasure in which the velocity of the action propels this wildly improbable tale over the yawning gaps in the plot’s logic.
The most important two words about the film: Luc Besson. The French action-auteur and fantabulist cowrote and produced the film, whose high-test martial-arts moments move at superhuman speed. And he’s teamed up with director Pierre Morel, whose cult action gem, “District B13,” was spiced with parkour and other martial-arts gymnastics. (More…)
If Frank Capra were to make a movie today, it would probably look a lot like “New in Town.”
Of course, Frank Capra is dead. Then again, so is this movie.
Certainly, you can feel the creative team behind this film trying to channel Capra, in a desperate, voodoo sort of way. They’ve even got the economy on their side, with its brutalizing effect on the working class – to parallel Capra’s Depression-era classics.
On the surface, the elements are there: It’s a comedy set during an economic downturn, about a corporate shark who discovers she has a heart just when she’s assigned to downsize a factory in a rural Minnesota town.
But the script by Kenneth Rance and C. Jay Cox feels as though it was written by computer software programmed with joke algorithms. There’s no actual sense of humor at work. Jonas Elmer directs as though English is his second language – oh, wait, it is. (More…)
“Donkey Punch,” a creepy little thriller named after a joke about a sex act, is a single-set thriller, in which the location in question is a lavish yacht, where a pleasure cruise goes suddenly, drastically wrong.
It starts with seven characters – three women, four men – so there’s going to be one odd person out when these young pleasure-seekers turn amorous. By the end, the question is which one will end up alive.
Written and directed by Olly Blackburn, “Donkey Punch” has a simple set-up: Three British birds on vacation in Mallorca meet a trio of British lads at a party. The boys tell them that they’re crewing a yacht that’s moored in the local marina – and they could easily move the party there. (More…)
As a writer who, in his darker moments, sees the death of books and reading as being eminently imminent, it’s hard for me to slag a movie like “Inkheart,” which celebrates books as magical objects.
Unfortunately, those “Reading is Fun(damental)” commercials have more entertainment value than “Inkheart,” a slog of a movie built around an intriguing notion and a zero of a star.
That actor is Brendan Fraser, who sucks up energy and gives almost nothing off in return. He’s done the Indiana Jones thing before – in mediocre fare like “The Mummy” and its unnecessary sequels – and has been found wanting. With his limpid eyes and full mouth, he looks like a matinee idol and has all the dynamic energy of a Polaroid picture. (More…)
At the rate of 1,000 films a year – double the output of the American film industry – India’s Bollywood has established itself as the world’s richest cinema culture, if not its most quality-driven.
So it’s only a matter of time before Bollywood catches up with Hollywood, in terms of the quality of the films it’s releasing. Hey, if you can’t make a movie better than “Bride Wars,” you’re not trying
“Chandni Chowk to China,” a lavish Bollywood kung-fu musical, is getting the largest American release of any Bollywood film ever. It’s a bold commercial move – but “Chandni Chowk” just might be the movie to break the barrier. (More…)
“Hotel for Dogs” is one of those high-concept movie ideas that flood the theaters this time of year. Is it surprising that it’s unsatisfying?
The only surprise, really, is how little canine comedy they’ve inserted in a movie with a title like “Hotel for Dogs.” I mean, it’s right in the title: “Dogs.” But the dog sight-gags are mostly kept to a minimum. A few poop-and-pee gags – but for the most part, this movie spends far too much time on its distinctly less interesting human cast. (More…)
I don’t profess to be knowledgeable about the politics of the East Coast/West Coast rap war in the mid-90s that wound up costing the lives of friends-turned-enemies Tupac Shakur and Biggie (Notorious B.I.G.) Smalls.
Offhand, I’d have to guess they were more nuanced than what we get in “Notorious,” a surprisingly involving biopic of Biggie that lists his mother, his manager and Sean Combs – the Diddy formerly known as Puff Daddy – as producers.
The film would have you believe that Biggie and Puffy were just innocent bystanders to Tupac’s shooting in the lobby of a Seventh Avenue recording studio where Biggie was working; it’s played here as a violent robbery, instead of the set-up that Tupac later claimed. The film also hypothesizes that the combination of a hyperactive media and Tupac’s overactive imagination (with Suge Knight fanning the flames of Shakur’s paranoia) lit the fuse on the violence that eventually claimed both rappers’ lives.
While I don’t have a dog in this fight, I assume that fans of the opposing factions will have different reactions (though, officially, both murders remain unsolved, conspiracy theories abound). The Biggie crowd will love it, the Tupac constituency will call it a travesty. Or so I’m guessing.
It doesn’t spoil the film. This is an engrossing, if conventional, biopic, built around the outsized legend of Biggie as a rap innovator. And it’s helped immeasurably by a strong performance by acting newcomer Jamal Woolard, who capably steps into Biggie’s size-14 kicks. (More…)
Last year, it was “27 Dresses.” This year, “Bride Wars.” Why is January suddenly the month of lame chick-flick romantic comedies about weddings?
You’ve got to wonder. You’ve also got to wonder about the kind of post-feminist message these movies send: that a woman ain’t nothin’ ’less she can snag herself a man. Shades of Sadie Hawkins Day. That’s not to mention the casual glorification of conspicuous consumption at a level of excess that seems appropriate only for a big-budget network game show.
Perhaps my complaints about the retrograde sexual politics of these films would be less pointed if the movies were actually entertaining. In that regard, “Bride Wars” is particularly dismal: They should put up signs at the multiplexes whose screens this movie will be clogging, saying, “CAUTION: NOW ENTERING A LAUGH-FREE ZONE.”(More…)
Robert Celestino’s “Yonkers Joe” is a schizoid piece of entertainment that’s half a tense con-man tale. The other half, however, is family drama that too often slides into melodrama.
Chazz Palminteri plays the title role, a veteran scam artist who’s always looking for an edge to take the element of surprise out of games of chance. He lives in Yonkers (which, after all, is New York State’s fourth-largest city). But he dreams of being a player in the big time.
He’s first glimpsed in an Atlantic City casino, swept up in a bust of another player at a craps table just because he looks suspicious. Appearances, of course, aren’t deceiving: The other person who gets pulled into a back room, Janice (Christine Lahti), is Joe’s girlfriend/partner-in-crime. She’s been switching the regular dice for weighted copies – and though the casino security guys don’t find the evidence, they know this pair is up to something.
Where January used to be a moment to catch one’s breath after the movie avalanche of December, it’s now turned into a dumping ground for movies that will be available on video-store shelves and Netflix by March. There seem to be more movies released in January than in June (when everyone is keeping their releases out of the path of summer blockbusters). Worse, most of the January releases offer late-as-possible press screenings to keep the negative pre-release reviews to a minimum.
So Ole Bornedal’s “Just Another Love Story” comes as a genuine delight, an unintentional bit of counter-programming that engages the imagination while being sexy, nasty, intelligent, shivery fun. (More…)
