Movie Review : Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009)

Genre: Animation, Family
Running Time: 81 min.
MPAA Rating: PG
Director: Christopher Miller, Phil Lord
Writer: Chris Miller, Phil Lord, Judi Barrett, Ron Barrett
Cast: Anna Faris, Bill Hader, Andy Samberg, Bruce Campbell, James Caan, Tracy Morgan, Mr. T

Synopsis

Columbia Pictures' and Sony Pictures Animation's "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" will be the most delicious event since macaroni met cheese. Inspired by the beloved children's book, the film focuses on a town where food falls from the sky like rain.

Movie Review : Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009)

A Sony Pictures Entertainment release of a Columbia Pictures presentation of a Sony Pictures Animation production. Produced by Pam Marsden. Executive producer, Yair Landau. Co-producers, Lydia Bottegoni, Chris Juen. Directed, written by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, based on the book written by Judi Barrett and illustrated by Ron Barrett.

Voices:

Flint Lockwood - Bill Hader

Sam Sparks - Anna Faris

Tim Lockwood - James Caan

"Baby" Brent - Andy Samberg

Mayor Shelbourne - Bruce Campbell

Earl Devereaux - Mr. T

Cal Devereaux - Bobb'e J. Thompson

Manny - Benjamin Bratt

Tut tut, it looks like a hit for Sony Pictures Animation. Eye-popping and mouth-watering in one, "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" spins a 30-page children's book into a 90-minute all-you-can-laugh buffet, expanding the premise of a town where it rains ketchup and hot dogs to disaster-movie proportions. With drooling tongues in cheek, tyro helmers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (whose only previous directing credit was cult MTV toon "Clone High") bring a fresh, irreverent sensibility to bigscreen computer animation, using 3D projection to maximize their sky-is-falling scenario. This box office and concession-stand draw should make exhibitors very happy.

Considering Judi and Ron Barrett's high-concept picture book offers no characters beyond its narrator, Lord and Miller are to be commended for balancing their own originality with respect for the source (nearly all the book's key images, from a macaroni-headed bystander to the pancake-flattened school, survive the leap to screen). The story opens in Swallow Falls -- "a tiny island hidden under the A in Atlantic" on the map -- with Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader), a junior inventor whose gadgets have a way of going awry. Flint wants nothing more than to earn his father's approval, but Dad (James Caan, speaking almost entirely in fishing metaphors) wishes his son would just settle for running the family bait shop.

For years, Swallow Falls thrived on its booming sardine industry; then the world moved on to tastier options, leaving the mayor (Bruce Campbell) with no clue as to how to save the town. Fed up with fish, Flint invents a device that transforms water into any kind of food, and for once, the gizmo actually works (sort of). Launched into the sky above Swallow Falls, the machine sucks in clouds and spits out burgers, bacon and eggs -- whatever he wants -- showering chow upon the town, which becomes a major tourist destination overnight, changing its name to Chew and Swallow. On hand to document the meteorological anomaly is wannabe weather girl Sam Sparks (Anna Faris).

To deliver the initial meteorological spectacle, "Cloudy" appropriately steals Spielberg's signature eyes-wide, mouth-ajar reaction shot to build anticipation for a big reveal and repeats it for every major character on the island before finally showing the truly stunning burger-shaped cloud formation. Lord and Miller are savvy pop-culture sponges, synthesizing decades of film and TV viewing into a sensibility thirtysomething parents and their kids will embrace immediately (the casting of Mr. T as the town cop is particularly inspired, as is Mark Mothersbaugh's geek-chic score, positioned at the intersection of Bruckheimer fare and science fair).

Aesthetically, the plain character designs may not seem much to look at, but their elastic faces move like Muppets, while their Gumby-like bodies support a wide range of hilarious poses. Initially drab and gray, the environment erupts with color as soon as the weather turns tasty, featuring a palette that pops even more than "Up's" South American balloon ride (the photoreal food, meanwhile, dramatically expands on "Ratatouille's" menu).

The takeaway here is that it's OK to be a nerd, which applies not only to the young lovebirds (Sam is constantly apologizing for her brainy outbursts) but also the directors themselves, who tackle "Cloudy" like a thought experiment, taking a crazy idea and seeing it through to its philosophical conclusion. In this case, that means staging a giant aerial battle against the army of mutant food that has risen up to defend Flint's device -- a finale that evokes such sci-fi staples as "Independence Day" and "Star Wars," if the Death Star were a giant meatball.

Teetering just this side of haywire, the climax works (in 3D, at least) perhaps only by virtue of its visceral roller-coaster appeal. Both the father-son relationship and romantic subplot satisfy, but Lord and Miller are remiss to ignore a proper villain. (Flint's insubordinate invention echoes a red-eyed HAL, though the power-hungry mayor seems equally responsible for letting things get out of control.) The directors clearly privilege comedy over drama, and as the epic food fight winds down, they cleverly use various recurring gags to deliver a final emotional payoff.

Pic's visual design is staggering, featuring crowd sequences and a giant "foodalanche" that would have crashed the servers a few years back. The stereoscopic design is easy on the eyes yet playful with its use of space, yielding some of the most satisfying 3D viewing to date.

Trailer : Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009)

Credit : MRQE.com

Movie Review : Jennifer's Body (2009)

Genre: Comedy, Horror, SciFi/Fantasy
Running Time: 102 min.
MPAA Rating: R
Director: Karyn Kusama
Writer: Diablo Cody
Cast: Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Johnny Simmons, Adam Brody, J.K. Simmons, Amy Sedaris, Chris Pratt, Juno Ruddell, Kyle Gallner, Allison Janney

Synopsis

When small town high-school student Jennifer is possessed by a hungry demon, she transitions from being "high-school evil" -- gorgeous (and doesn't she know it), stuck up and ultra-attitudinal -- to the real deal: evil/evil. The glittering beauty becomes a pale and sickly creature jonesing for a meaty snack, and guys who never stood a chance with the heartless babe, take on new luster in the light of Jennifer's insatiable appetite. Meanwhile, Jennifer's lifelong best friend Needy, long relegated to living in Jennifer's shadow, must step-up to protect the town's young men, including her nerdy boyfriend.

Movie Review : Jennifer's Body (2009)

Hell Is Other People, Especially the Popular Girl

“Jennifer’s Body,” a bloody high school demonic-possession serial-killer comedy written by Diablo Cody, directed by Karyn Kusama and starring Megan Fox in the title role, is an unholy mess.

I mean that as a compliment. Yes, the movie’s gory set pieces are executed with more carnivorous glee than formal discipline, and its story is as full of holes as some of its disemboweled victims. But coherence has never been a significant criterion for horror movies. If it were, we could forget about Dario Argento and Brian De Palma, half of Hitchcock and most of the entries in the “Friday the 13th” series. And though it is too soon to install “Jennifer’s Body” in that blood-soaked pantheon, the movie deserves — and is likely to win — a devoted cult following, despite its flaws.

These are mitigated by a sensibility that mixes playful pop-culture ingenuity with a healthy shot of feminist anger. Ms. Cody and Ms. Kusama take up a theme shared by slasher films and teenage comedies — that queasy, panicky fascination with female sexuality that we all know and sublimate — and turn it inside out. This is not a simple reversal of perspective; the girl’s point of view has frequently been explored in both maniac-on-the-loose thrillers and homeroom-to-prom-night romantic comedies. “Jennifer’s Body” goes further, taking the complication and confusion of being a young woman as its central problem and operating principle, the soil from which it harvests a tangle of unruly metaphors, mixed emotions, crazy jokes and ambivalent insights.

Jennifer, chilly, dark-haired and beautiful, is both the victim of male violence and a monster of indiscriminate vengeance, a ravening demon and an object of lust and longing. But always an object. The title of the movie is not “Jennifer’s Soul,” and from every angle she is a fantasy, a cipher, a figure in someone else’s fevered imagination. The inevitable critical sneering at Ms. Fox’s acting abilities will miss exactly this point. Her blunt, blank affect belongs to the character, not the performer, and is part of the film’s calculated tease. Ms. Kusama puts Ms. Fox’s lithe physique right in your face and then demands to know what you think you’re looking at.

Before a fateful run-in with an evil indie-rock band (led by Adam Brody) turns her into a bloodthirsty, bile-spewing succubus, Jennifer is the embodiment of a series of high school clichés that almost entirely obscure her inner life. She’s a mean girl, a bad girl, a popular girl, a dream girl — the one every other girl envies and every boy wants. But she is not the heroine of the movie, and it is not her predicament that makes it so interesting and original.

The real girl in the middle of this bloodbath — which overtakes a small town in Minnesota called Devil’s Kettle — is Needy, short for Anita. Played by Amanda Seyfried, she is Jennifer’s best friend, and if Ms. Fox brazenly incarnates teenage girl clichés, Ms. Seyfried slyly subverts them. Needy is sensible, studious and bespectacled, but hardly a nerd. She has a good-natured boyfriend named Chip (Johnny Simmons), and she seems generally well adjusted: curious about sex but not obsessed with it, adventurous but not reckless, prudent but not timid. She is also tough, kind and funny.

Needy is also driven past bewilderment to the brink of madness by what happens to Jennifer, who lures one young man after another to his doom. The jock, the goth and others are so bedazzled by her attention that they are blind to her murderous intentions. She has been similarly fooled and abused, but “Jennifer’s Body” is not only a fantasy of revenge against the predatory male sex, though the ultimate enactment of that revenge is awfully satisfying. The antagonism and attraction between boys and girls is a relatively straightforward (if, in this case, grisly) matter; the real terror, the stuff of Needy’s nightmares, lies in the snares and shadows of female friendship.

The relationship between Needy and Jennifer is rivalrous, sisterly, undermining, sadomasochistic, treacherous and tender. “Hell,” Needy asserts early on, “is a teenage girl.” If Jean-Paul Sartre were in the databank of allusions Ms. Cody has supplied her with, she might have specified that hell is other teenage girls. The inferno consumes everything around it, very nearly including the movie itself.

The palette is dark and sanguinary. The dialogue is an unstable mélange of screeches and howls and the compulsively savvy, provincial-hipster babble that is for Ms. Cody what terse Chicago indirection is for David Mamet and long-winded analysis of cultural trivia is for Quentin Tarantino.

“Cheese and fries!” Needy exclaims, though at other times she is happy to utter all manner of blasphemy. “Move on dot org,” Jennifer says, perhaps attempting to top an already legendary nonsensical non sequitur from Ms. Cody’s “Juno” screenplay: “Honest to blog.”

Honestly, though, “Juno,” mannered and self-conscious as it was, gave us, in the person of Ellen Page, a young heroine with a sharp tongue, a good heart and questionable judgment — a character who was smart, surprising and, in the end, hard to resist. Ms. Kusama’s first film, “Girlfight,” did something similar with its bruising, bruised protagonist, played by Michelle Rodriguez. And Needy, our Virgil in Ms. Cody and Ms. Kusama’s tour of teenage hell, so nimbly personified by Ms. Seyfried, belongs in this company. She’s the main reason to see “Jennifer’s Body.”

Trailer : Jennifer's Body (2009)




Credit : MRQE.com

Movie Review & Trailer : Bright Star (2009)

Genre: Drama, Romance
Running Time: 119 min.
MPAA Rating: PG
Director: Jane Campion
Writer: Jane Campion
Cast: Paul Schneider, Abbie Cornish, Thomas Sangster, Ben Whishaw, Kerry Fox, Samuel Barnett, Samuel Roukin, Roger Ashton-Griffiths, Sebastian Armesto, Antonia Campbell-Hughes

Synopsis

London 1818: a secret love affair begins between 23 year old English poet, John Keats, and the girl next door, Fanny Brawne, an outspoken student of fashion. This unlikely pair started at odds; he thinking her a stylish minx, she unimpressed by literature in general. It was the illness of Keats's younger brother that drew them together. Keats was touched by Fanny's efforts to help and agreed to teach her poetry. By the time Fanny's alarmed mother and Keats's best friend Brown realized their attachment, the relationship had an unstoppable momentum. Intensely and helplessly absorbed in each other, the young lovers were swept into powerful new sensations, "I have the feeling as if I were dissolving", Keats wrote to her. Together they rode a wave of romantic obsession that deepened as their troubles mounted. Only Keats's illness proved insurmountable.

Movie Review

Bright Star (2009)

Keats and His Beloved in an Ode to Hot English Chastity


John Keats was a Romantic poet. “Bright Star,” which tells the tale of Keats and Fanny Brawne, the love of his short life, is a romantic movie. The vernacular of popular culture and the somewhat specialized language of literary history assign different meanings to that word, but the achievement of Jane Campion’s learned and ravishing new film is to fuse them, to trace the comminglings and collisions of poetic creation and amatory passion.

Skip to next paragraphThis is a risky project, not least because a bog of cliché and fallacy lies between the filmmaker and her goal. In the first decades of the 19th century, some poets may have been like movie stars, but the lives of the poets have been, in general, badly served on film, either neglected altogether or puffed up with sentiment and solemnity. The Regency period, moreover, serves too many lazy, prestige-minded directors as a convenient vintage clothing store. And there are times in “Bright Star” when Keats, played by the pale and skinny British actor Ben Whishaw (“Perfume,” “I’m Not There”), trembles on the edge of caricature. He broods; he coughs (signaling the tuberculosis that will soon kill him); he looks dreamily at flowers and trees and rocks.

But these moments, rather than feeling studied or obvious, arrive with startling keenness and disarming beauty, much in the way that Keats’s own lyrics do. His verses can at first seem ornate and sentimental, but on repeated readings, they have a way of gaining in force and freshness. The music is so intricate and artificial, even as the emotions it carries seem natural and spontaneous. And while no film can hope to take you inside the process by which these poems were made, Ms. Campion allows you to hear them spoken aloud as if for the first time. You will want to stay until the very last bit of the end credits, not necessarily to read the name of each gaffer and grip, but rather to savor every syllable of Mr. Whishaw’s recitation of “Ode to a Nightingale.”

Keats’s genius — underestimated by many of the critics of his time, championed by a loyal coterie of literary friends — is the fixed point around which “Bright Star” orbits. Its animating force, however, is the infatuation that envelops Keats and Brawne in their early meetings and grows, over the subsequent months, into a sustaining and tormenting love. Mr. Keats, as his lover decorously calls him, is diffident and uneasy at times, but also witty, sly and steadfast. The movie really belongs to Brawne, played with mesmerizing vitality and heart-stopping grace by Abbie Cornish.

Ms. Cornish, an Australian actress whose previous films include “Stop-Loss,” “Candy” and “Somersault,” has, at 27, achieved a mixture of unguardedness and self-control matched by few actresses of any age or nationality. She’s as good as Kate Winslet, which is about as good as it’s possible to be.

Fanny, the eldest daughter of a distracted widow (Kerry Fox), has some of the spirited cleverness of a Jane Austen heroine. A gifted seamstress, she prides herself on her forward-looking fashion sense and her independence. She is also vain, insecure and capable of throwing herself headlong into the apparent folly of adoring a dying and penniless poet, something no sensible Austen character would ever do.

If it were just the poet and his beloved, “Bright Star” might collapse in swooning and sighing, or into the static rhythms of a love poem. And while there are passages of extraordinary lyricism — butterflies, fields of flowers, fluttering hands and beseeching glances — these are balanced by a rough, energetic worldliness. Lovers, like poets, may create their own realms of feeling and significance, but they do so in contention with the same reality that the rest of us inhabit.

The film’s designated reality principle is Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), Keats’s friend, patron and collaborator and his main rival for Fanny’s attention. For Brown, Fanny is an irritant and a distraction, though the sarcastic intensity of their banter carries an interesting sexual charge of its own. In an Austen novel this friction would be resolved in matrimony, but “Bright Star,” following the crooked, shadowed path of biographical fact, has a different story to tell.

Brown and Keats are neighbors to the Brawne brood in Hampstead in 1818, when the story begins. In April of the following year the poets are occupying one-half of a house, with Fanny and her mother and siblings on the other side of the wall. After nine months Keats, in declining health, is dispatched to Italy by a committee of concerned friends, but until then he and Fanny consummate their love in every possible way except physically.

Ms. Campion is one of modern cinema’s great explorers of female sexuality, illuminating Sigmund Freud’s “dark continent” with skepticism, sympathy and occasional indignation. “Bright Star” could easily have become a dark, simple fable of repression, since modern audiences like nothing better than to be assured that our social order is freer and more enlightened than any that came before. But Fanny and Keats are modern too, and though the mores of their time constrain them, they nonetheless regard themselves as free.

The film is hardly blind to the sexual hypocrisy that surrounds them. Fanny can’t marry Keats because of his poverty, but Brown blithely crosses class lines to have some fun with (and impregnate) a naïve and illiterate young household servant (Antonia Campbell-Hughes). That Fanny and Keats must sublimate their longings in letters, poems and conversations seems cruel, but they make the best of it. As does Ms. Campion: a sequence in which, fully clothed, the couple trades stanzas of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” in a half-darkened bedroom must surely count as one of the hottest sex scenes in recent cinema.

The heat of that moment and others like it deliver “Bright Star” from the tidy prison of period costume drama. Ms. Campion, with her restless camera movements and off-center close-ups, films history in the present tense, and her wild vitality makes this movie romantic in every possible sense of the word.

•Genre: Action/Adventure, Drama
•Running Time: 105 min.
•MPAA Rating: PG-13
•Director: Dito Montiel
•Writer: Dito Montiel
•Cast: Channing Tatum, Terrence Howard, Brian J. White, Luis Guzmán, Zulay Henao, Roger Guenveur Smith, Angelic Zambrana, Anthony DeSando, Aaron Behr, Cung Le


Synopsis

Small-town boy Shawn MacArthur has come to New York City with nothing. Barely earning a living selling counterfeit goods on the streets, his luck changes when scam artist Harvey Boarden sees that he has a natural talent for street fighting. When Harvey offers Shawn help at making the real cash, the two form an uneasy partnership. As Shawn's manager, Harvey introduces him to the corrupt bare-knuckle circuit, where rich men bet on disposable pawns. Almost overnight, he becomes a star brawler, taking down professional boxers, mixed martial arts champs and ultimate fighters in a series of staggeringly intense bouts. But, if Shawn ever hopes to escape the dark world in which he's found himself, he must now face the toughest fight of his life.

Movie Review

Fighting (2009)

Softer (around the edges) than expected

Get ready for lots of mumbling and a little light rumbling. Dito Montiel's follow-up to A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is a muted, almost neutered homage to Midnight Cowboy that has Channing Tatum poised to conquer New York with his fists. There’s nothing exploitative about Fighting, and you can respect Montiel’s attempt to infuse a genre flick with artiness without finding it absorbing or entirely successful. Business may suffer when audiences lured by the promise of visceral entertainment realize the movie relies so heavily on indirection while also staying safely within conventional boundaries.

Regarding the Midnight Cowboy parallels, Tatum’s character Shawn MacArthur is Joe Buck and Terrence Howard’s Harvey Boarden is Ratso Rizzo. A petty hustler, promoter and ticket scalper, Harvey discovers the Great White Brawler from Alabama on Manhattan's (unconvincingly) mean streets trying to sell phony books and DVDs. Later, we learn that Shawn came north after an altercation with his hard-ass father who coached his college wrestling team. Shawn is a rube but a confident one with a lug’s charm; he makes Mickey Rourke’s Randy “The Ram” Robinson seem like a MENSA chapter head. Thankfully, he’s much younger and still lithe and powerful, though Montiel refrains from fetishizing Tatum’s body. When Harvey asks Shawn at one juncture, “What are you thinking about?” I found it difficult to stifle a “Nada!”

Harvey believes Shawn can make it in the underground fight world and reels him in with the promise of $5,000 for his first bout in a Brooklyn church basement versus a Russian bantamweight. Afterward, they retire to a nightclub where Shawn pursues cocktail waitress and single mom Zulay Valez (Zulay Heao), whom he met the day Harvey spotted him. He also runs into the grappler, Evan Hailey (Brian White), who supplanted him on his college squad. Shawn’s second fight, against a Latin behemoth, takes place behind a bodega in the Bronx where leather-clad lesbians are perched near the top of the food chain. Then it’s on to a glitzy Asian whorehouse for a taste of kung-fu. To keep the ethnic theme in tact, the story builds to a high-priced showdown with his African-American rival Hailey on the balcony of a Wall Street hotshot’s penthouse.

As he did in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Montiel alternates between jagged, frenetic scenes and quiet, reflective interludes. The latter is more prominent here, which is too bad because he has much less to say. He and co-writer Robert Munic neither reveal enough about their characters nor dive headlong into the bare-knuckle milieu. The tension between Shawn and Harvey doesn’t coalesce. Howard makes a reedy effort to garner sympathy for scuffed-up Harvey—a man trying to hold on to his dignity despite the scorn of his former associates (including one played by a low-key Luis Guzman.) It’s an unnerving, failed performance because Howard isn’t given sufficient raw material to work with or a substantial enough personality in Shawn to play off. The romantic triangulation hinted at in the third reel is more odd than poignant. Zulay’s suspicious mother (Altagarcia Guzman) earns laughs during a few scenes that, while comparatively broad, are more realistic than what passes for grit in Fighting.

The brassy hip-hop music echoes Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” and Blacksploitation soundtracks in equal measure. It practically functions as dialogue, since not only do the characters have little to say, but it’s often difficult to hear what they’re saying, especially Tatum’s borderline mumblecore pugilist. As for menace and blood, they don’t really materialize. Ditto sexuality. The bobbing camerawork and quick edits are more likely to make you queasy than anything that transpires during Shawn’s handful of short bouts. Working against the most recognizable urban backdrop, director of photography Stefan Czapsky’s doesn’t provide any fresh perspective on New York City either.

Fighting has a nervous, jittery vibe mostly attributable to Howard’s stab at embodying dissolution and disillusionment. But Howard isn’t backed up in this goal, so his tremulousness points toward a lack of commitment to the material on the part of the filmmakers and certainly fails to approximate the pathos of Midnight Cowboy. What Montiel found on the streets of his native Queens in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, which he adapted from his own memoir, eludes him in his sophomore go-round. He’s still a legitimate contender in my book, but in Fighting he’s shadow boxing.

CREDIT : MRQE SITE

•Genre: Drama, Suspense/Thriller
•Running Time: 105 min.
•MPAA Rating: PG-13
•Director: Steve Shill
•Writer: David Loughery
•Cast: Idris Elba, Ali Larter, Beyoncé Knowles, Bruce McGill, Jerry O'Connell, Christine Lahti

Synopsis

Derek Charles, a successful asset manager who has just received a huge promotion, is blissfully happy in his career and in his marriage to the beautiful Beth. But, when Lisa, a temp worker, starts stalking Derek, everything he's worked so hard for is placed in jeopardy.

Movie Review

Obsessed (2009)

Happily Married, but Still a Stalker’s Perfect Target

There are no boiled bunnies in “Obsessed,” a clanking, low-rent imitation of “Fatal Attraction” that lacks the imagination to come up with such a novelty. But because Ali Larter plays Lisa, the movie’s psychotic lady-who-refuses-to-take-no-for-an-answer like a carbon copy of Glenn Close’s demonic temptress in the original, she succeeds in pushing buttons that make you root for her destruction and feel ashamed for doing so.

As Lisa, a sultry office temp, puts the moves on Derek Charles (Idris Elba), a happily married investment banker, she wears an insinuating smirk that turns into a crazy rictus smile. Sidling up to Derek at a fancy bar and ordering two dirty martinis, she announces that she likes hers “filthy.”

Watching her flash Derek the look of lust, a colleague offers the questionable observation that young women nowadays view the workplace as a sexual hunting ground, and that Lisa obviously has him “in her cross hairs.”

There is no moral ambiguity in this dumbed-down rehash of the earlier movie, directed by Steve Shill from a screenplay by David Loughery. Unlike Michael Douglas’s cheating husband in “Fatal Attraction,” Derek never succumbs to Lisa’s advances, even when she follows him into a bathroom stall and throws herself on him like a wildcat.

Derek has just moved into a beautiful house with his wife, Sharon (Beyoncé Knowles), and their young son. Until Lisa appears, their only immediate problem is whether to remove the mirror from the bedroom ceiling.

At work, Derek is riding high, having just reeled in a $150 million account. For a while he succeeds in fending off Lisa. But just when he thinks she has abandoned her campaign, she trails him to a corporate retreat, where she poses as his wife to enter his hotel room and tries to kill herself with sleeping pills. After Lisa’s attempted suicide, Derek, who neglected to tell Sharon about the harassment, endures a domestic fall from grace. But this perfect husband and father isn’t down and out for long.

The biggest difference between “Fatal Attraction” and “Obsessed” is the characterization of the threatened wife. Unlike the mousy, demure spouse played by Anne Archer in the original, Sharon is a pro-active woman warrior, to put it mildly. Largely in the background for the first two-thirds of the movie, Ms. Knowles strides to the center at the end when Sharon and Lisa have their inevitable knockdown, drag-out confrontation.

The movie’s most disturbing aspect, of which the filmmakers could not have been unaware, is the physical resemblance between Mr. Elba and Ms. Larter to O. J. and Nicole Brown Simpson. It lends “Obsessed” a distasteful taint of exploitation.“Obsessed” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has strong language, violence and sexual situations.

CREDIT : MRQE SITE

•Genre: Drama, Suspense/Thriller
•Running Time: 98 min.
•MPAA Rating: R
•Director: Gregor Jordan
•Writer: Bret Easton Ellis, Nicholas Jarecki
•Cast: Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger, Winona Ryder, Mickey Rourke, Jon Foster, Amber Heard, Rhys Ifans, Chris Isaak, Lou Taylor Pucci, Mel Raido

Synopsis

Focusing on the Los Angeles of the early 1980s, "The Informers" balances a vast array of characters that represent both the top of the heap (a Hollywood dream merchant, a dissolute rock star, an aging newscaster) and the bottom (a voyeuristic doorman, an amoral ex-con). Connecting all these intertwining strands are the quintessential Brett Easton Ellis protagonists--a group of beautiful, blonde young men and women who sleep all day and party all night, doing drugs--and one another--with abandon, never realizing that they are dancing on the edge of a volcano.

Movie Review

The Informers (2009)

Back to the ’80s, for Assorted Hookups in a Wasteland of Privilege

Graham (Jon Foster) and Martin (Austin Nichols) are sitting in a Porsche parked in the hills overlooking Los Angeles. Graham is doing a lot of coke. Martin has been doing Graham’s mom, and also Graham’s girlfriend, Christie (Amber Heard), and also — as he points out just in case we were having trouble identifying the naked blond bodies piling up in various beds — Graham. But such doings are not on Graham’s mind. He is in a moral crisis: “I want someone to tell me what’s good. And I want someone to tell me what’s bad.” He goes on to ask what happens if there’s no one around to tell you what’s good and what’s bad.

One thing that happens is a movie like “The Informers,” of which Graham and Martin are but two of a dozen or so principal inhabitants. They are neither the most messed up nor the least interesting characters to surface in Gregor Jordan’s puzzling and tedious adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s book of short stories. But these two golden boys, like everyone else in this wasteland of privilege and hedonism — “Los Angeles, 1983,” we’re told, in case we were having trouble placing the palm trees, the asymmetrical top-heavy haircuts and the post-punk soundtrack — are not so much characters as symbols of, well, of some pretty bad stuff.

The corruption of innocence? The death of feeling? The bad vibes of a decade whose emblems (other than the haircuts and the music) are Ronald Reagan and AIDS? Yes, all of that. And some other stuff I probably forgot about. But so did they.

The entitled young in this world favor cocaine, cigarettes and group sex. Their parents prefer alcohol, prescription medicines and adultery. The children regard the parents with icy contempt. Occasionally a flicker of guilt passes over a parental face, but it just may be that the parents are being played by seasoned actors, many with careers going back to the ’80s, and so can sometimes inject a grain or two of nuance into the glazed, dazed, dull surface of the film.

Kim Basinger is in it, playing Graham’s mom. Also Billy Bob Thornton (as her husband, a movie-studio bigwig), Winona Ryder (as his mistress, a television newscaster), Chris Isaak and, alarmingly if also amusingly, Mickey Rourke. Mr. Rourke plays one of the few nonwealthy people in “The Informers.” He drives a van, sports some strange facial hair and kidnaps a child.

Why? For the same reason that a hyperbolically drugged-out rock star (Mel Raido) punches a sweet-faced groupie from Nebraska. To shock us with our inability to feel especially shocked by anything. In Mr. Ellis’s book — not one of his best, but not without interest — the numb plainness of the prose at times achieves a morose clarity, and the deadpan, brain-dead dialogue is tweaked with satire. Nearly every time Mr. Jordan, working from a script by Mr. Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki, tries for similar effects, he goes badly awry, so that you snicker when the movie is trying to be poignant and groan when it aims to make a joke.

From an opening scene that looks, intriguingly enough, like a Billy Idol video shot by Antonioni, “The Informers” moves through a few rounds of passionless coupling and passive-aggressive conversation, never provoking a reaction more intense than mild irritation or moderate boredom. The performances run the gamut from twitchy to catatonic, and the stoned stiffness of the actors seems to have less to do with the affectlessness of the characters than with their own confusion. “The Informers” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has nudity, sex, drug use and violence. And it’s still boring.

CREDIT : MRQE SITE

•Genre: Action/Adventure
•Running Time: 85 min.
•MPAA Rating: R
•Director: Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor
•Writer: Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor
•Cast: Jason Statham, Amy Smart, Efren Ramirez, Bai Ling, David Carradine, Reno Wilson, Joseph Julian Soria, Dwight Yoakam

Synopsis

Picking up immediately where the first movie left off, "Crank High Voltage" finds Chev Chelios surviving the climactic plunge to his most certain death on the streets of Los Angeles, only to be kidnapped by a mysterious Chinese mobster. Three months later, Chev wakes up to discover his nearly indestructible heart has been surgically removed and replaced with a battery-operated ticker that requires regular jolts of electricity in order to work. After a dangerous escape from his captors, Chev is on the run again, this time from the charismatic Mexican gang boss El Huron, and the Chinese Triads, headed by the dangerous 100 year-old elder Poon Dong. Once again turning to Doc Miles for medical advice, receiving help from his friend Kaylo's twin brother Venus, and re-connecting with his girlfriend Eve, who is no longer in the dark about what he does for a living, Chev is determined to get his real heart back and wreak vengeance on whoever stole it, embarking on an electrifying chase through Los Angeles where anything goes to stay alive.

Movie Review

Crank 2: High Voltage

He Might Lack a Ticker, but He’s Still a Time Bomb

“Morally bankrupt” doesn’t come close. This is a film that replaces plot with gratuitous violence, character with gratuitous sex / nudity, and theme with a stripper getting her implants punctured in a gunfight. There’s wince-inducing self-harm, and it may contain scenes of mild peril. Thank god it’s also endlessly entertaining and one of the funniest films of the year.

The action – a term we use advisedly – picks up exactly where the first film left off, with our hero Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) smashing to earth in an apparently lifeless heap. We see him scraped off the pavement with a snow shovel and bundled into a van, thence to have his heart removed and replaced with an electrical model not designed for heavy use. So for him to, say, race through LA, have public sex on a racetrack, slam bad guys through walls or stick oiled shotguns in places they really shouldn’t be stuck, he’s going to need regular electric shocks to keep him going. Cue Statham juicing himself up with jump leads, grabbing power cables with both hands and in extremis rubbing himself up against polyester-sporting little old ladies.

In short, it’s hard to see where the action genre goes from this franchise, with demented writer-directors Neveldine and Taylor cranking volume, pace and the power lines up to 11. For all Michael Bay’s rust-coloured sunsets and giant robots, even he has always stopped short of having a character slice his own nipples off, or reanimating a severed head. It’s testament to the absurdity of this franchise that a dreamlike sequence where a papier-mache headed, Godzilla-sized Statham beats up a bad guy in a model city seems like one of the film’s more realistic moments.

But Crank knows its own limitations, using John de Lancie’s newsreader for a couple of wry asides and keeping tongue firmly in cheek. Statham’s relentless deadpannery and Cockerney rhyming slang (“Where the fuck is my strawberry tart?”) provide a solid focus, with Amy Smart’s dim-bulb girlfriend once again offering supporting laughs. Neveldine and Taylor slip up with some supporting characters – Bai Ling’s Ria is this film’s JarJar, Corey Haim is largely pointless and a Chelios childhood flashback suffers from appalling accent work – and rely too heavily on casual racism and the entertainment power of boobies, but when they focus on mayhem they’re unbeatable.

It has taken only three years for Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) to end his long fall from a helicopter at the end of “Crank.” Waiting for him at a busy Los Angeles intersection are a bunch of Chinese mobsters, who shovel the hit man off the street, remove his heart and substitute a machine. Without constant recharging, Chev — and the “Crank” franchise — will die.

Like its predecessor, “Crank: High Voltage,” the latest abomination from Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, is boorish, bigoted and borderline pornographic. As Chev charges around town searching for his stolen organ — juicing himself with jumper cables, a Taser and a bout of old-lady frottage — the plot vigorously abuses Mexicans, Asians, women and the disabled with equal-opportunity glee.

Bearing the brunt of the punishment is Chev’s pole-dancing girlfriend (Amy Smart) and a besotted Asian hooker (Bai Ling); apparently Chev’s resemblance to a rutting bull is not limited to his neck and personality.

Fans of the original (and you are out there) will be thrilled to discover that the director of photography, Brandon Trost, seems confused about the meaning of the term “private parts” and that the filmmakers are still resisting maturity. “Isn’t everybody looking for their heart?” Mr. Neveldine asks in the press notes. On this evidence, it seems unlikely.“Crank: High Voltage” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Nipples are sliced, breast implants pierced and horses frightened.

CREDIT : MRQE SITE

•Genre: Drama
•Running Time: 118 min.
•MPAA Rating: PG-13
•Director: Kevin MacDonald
•Writer: Matthew Michael Carnahan, Paul Abbott
•Cast: Rachel McAdams, Ben Affleck, Russell Crowe, Robin Wright Penn, Jason Bateman, Helen Mirren, Wendy Makkena, Rob Benedict, Katy Mixon, Bonita Friedericy


Synopsis

Handsome, unflappable U.S. Congressman Stephen Collins is the future of his political party--an honorable appointee who serves as the chairman of a committee overseeing defense spending. All eyes are upon the rising star to be his party's contender for the upcoming presidential race. Until his research assistant/mistress is brutally murdered and buried secrets come tumbling out. D.C. reporter Cal McCaffrey has the dubious fortune of both an old friendship with Collins and a ruthless editor, Cameron, who has assigned him to investigate the murder. As he and partner Della try to uncover the killer's identity, McCaffrey steps into a cover-up that threatens to shake the nation's power structures. And, in a town of spin-doctors and wealthy politicos, he will discover one truth: when billions are at stake, no one's integrity, love or life is ever safe.

Movie Review

State of Play (2009)

The News on Paper, and Other Artifacts

I will admit that I choked up a little at the end of “State of Play.” Not because the story was especially moving — or even, ultimately, all that interesting — but because the iconography of the closing credits tugged at my ink-stained heartstrings. The images are stirring and familiar, though in a few years’ time they may look as quaint as engravings of stagecoaches and steam engines. A breaking, earthshaking story makes its way from computer screen to newsprint. The plates are set, the presses whir, sheaves of freshly printed broadsheet are collated, stacked on pallets and sent out to meet the eyes of the hungry public. Truth has been told, corruption revealed and new oxygen pumped into the civic bloodstream. All that’s missing is a paperboy yelling “extra!” to crowds of commuters in raincoats and fedoras.

Those of us who work in the newspaper business are highly susceptible to the kind of sentimental view of our trade this movie offers, especially when the sentiment masquerades as tough-minded cynicism, which makes us go all dewy and reach for the bottle of rye we keep stashed in the bottom drawer of our battered metal desk. And anyone, in whatever field, who cherishes memories of “All the President’s Men” or “His Girl Friday” will smile when “State of Play,” directed by Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland”), now and again hits the sweet spot of the genre.

On the other hand, those who recall the British television mini-series on which this is based, with its unsparing dissection of compromised and arrogant news media, are likely to be a bit dismayed. The narrative has been updated and condensed by a trio of talented screenwriters (Tony Gilroy, Matthew Michael Carnahan and Billy Ray), but what has been lost is less length or context than depth. This “State of Play” is both shallower and muddier than its clear-eyed source.

Russell Crowe, as Cal McAffrey, a scruffy, dogged metro reporter for The Washington Globe, engages in fine snappy banter with Rachel McAdams, whose character has the ultramodern job of political gossip blogger and the ripely old-fashioned name of Della Frye. The two of them are not remotely Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell — nor yet Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman — but there is some fun to be had in watching them lock horns and ultimately join forces in pursuit of the big story.

The near-total absence of sexual tension between them is perhaps a concession to the mores of the modern workplace, but it also allows Cal to be ensnared in a dubious subplot involving Anne Collins (Robin Wright Penn), an old flame who happens to be married to a powerful young congressman who happens to be Cal’s college roommate and best pal. We will get to him in due course — his alleged doings and potential undoing are the motor that drives the movie’s frantic plot, and he is played by Ben Affleck — but let’s linger for another moment in the newsroom, while it lasts.

The battered old Globe has just been taken over by a media conglomerate (a development that only adds to the atmosphere of nostalgia), and the flinty editor (Helen Mirren) harangues her troops to bring in the hot copy that will sell some papers. A series of apparently unconnected events — a double murder in a dark alley; the apparently accidental death of a young congressional staffer; important hearings up on Capitol Hill — bring together Cal and Della, who present an amusing clash of journalistic sensibilities and generational styles.

Cal drives a filthy Saab, works at a desk strewn with papers and books, lives in a cluttered rat hole and takes notes with a pen. Initially he has nothing but contempt for Della, whose insouciant, opinionated approach seems to him to violate every tenet of his noble, ragged craft. She doesn’t even seem to own a pen! Della, naturally, regards Cal as a slow-moving, antediluvian creature marked for extinction. Each has so much to learn from the other. What Della learns, charmingly if none too plausibly, is that some stories lie too deep for blogs and can only truly live on the smudgy, crumply page.

The chance to explore the swiftly changing culture of Web-age journalism is one of several intriguing possibilities that “State of Play” squanders as it makes its jumpy, lumpy way toward a disastrous final plot twist. Della and Cal spar over journalistic ethics and habits, but their arguments carry no real dramatic force. And as their investigation proceeds, the movie uncovers some tantalizing themes that are either trampled or kicked aside. What promises to be a smart, sharp inquiry into the complicated intersection of private vice and political corruption — a vivid essay on the nature of power and the ambiguous pursuit of truth — turns into a superficially clever, self-important and finally incoherent thriller.

Congressman Stephen Collins (Mr. Affleck, wielding a Philadelphia accent as thick and inauthentic as low-fat cream cheese) is digging into the sinister dealings of a mysterious security contractor. When his lead researcher is run over by a train, all kinds of questions begin to pop up on cable television and the blogosphere. Was she sleeping with the congressman? Was her death really an accident? Cal tries to juggle professional duty and the obligations of friendship, and the screenwriters try to manage a blizzard of semitopical allusions while Mr. Crowe and Mr. Affleck allow themselves to be upstaged by top-notch supporting players like Jeff Daniels (as a partisan poobah) and Jason Bateman (as a sleazy D.C. fixer).

Mr. Bateman arrives too late to save “State of Play” from the train wreck of its third act but just in time to interrupt the speechifying with some louche and tasty line readings. And the best parts of the movie are details and atmospherics, which add up to a sense that in small ways, filmmakers come close to getting the story right even if the story itself turns out to be nonsensical. “State of Play” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some violence, sexual references and swearing — just like a real-life newsroom.

CREDIT : MRQE SITE

•Genre: Comedy, Family
•Running Time: 102 min.
•Director: Peter Chelsom
•Writer: Daniel Berendsen
•Cast: Miley Cyrus, Emily Osment, Jason Earles, Mitchel Musso, Heather Locklear, Billy Ray Cyrus, Moises Arias, Cody Linley, Vanessa Williams, Anna Maria Perez de Tagle

Synopsis

Miley Stewart struggles to juggle school, friends and her secret pop-star persona; when Hannah Montana's soaring popularity threatens to take over her life--she just might let it. So her father takes the teen home to Crowley Corners, Tenn., for a dose of reality, kicking off an adventure filled with the kind of fun, laughter and romance even Hannah Montana couldn't imagine.

Movie Review

Hannah Montana: The Movie (2009)

OMG! Hannah on the Big Screen

omg ashley, i’ve just seen “hannah montana the movie”!! and it’s just as awesome as the tv show only bigger and prettier and she doesn’t fall down so much.

basically hannah the pop star is getting way too cocky for a secret identity so her dad (i wish billy ray cyrus would shave his chin) takes her home to tennessee to remind her her real name is miley stewart (well it’s really miley cyrus but you know what i mean). and she falls in love with this cooool cowboy (i wish we had cowboys in new york!) who wears super tight jeans and has zac efron hair but zac doesn’t play him :( and he likes miley way better than hannah even though hannah’s outfits are really cute (but not trashy like britney or lindsay).

then she paints a henhouse and totally saves her home town from getting a shopping mall (not sure why) by giving a SUPER AWESOME concert with all these new songs about how great it is to climb mountains and then a million people dance. oh, and her dad finds a girlfriend (i know, super gross).i love hannah sooo much. she’s so CLEAN, you know?

CREDIT : MRQE SITE

•Genre: Comedy
•Running Time: 106 min.
•MPAA Rating: R
•Director: Jody Hill
•Writer: Jody Hill
•Cast: Seth Rogen, Anna Faris, Michael Peña, Ray Liotta, Collette Wolfe, Jesse Plemons, Aziz Ansari, Dan Bakkedahl, Z. Ray Wakeman, David House

Synopsis

At the Forest Ridge Mall, head of security Ronnie Barnhardt patrols his jurisdiction with an iron fist, combating skateboarders, shoplifters and the occasional unruly customer while dreaming of the day when he can swap his flashlight for a badge and a gun. His delusions of grandeur are put to the test when the mall is struck by a flasher. Driven to protect and serve the mall and its patrons, Ronnie seizes the opportunity to showcase his underappreciated law enforcement talents on a grand scale, hoping his solution of this crime will earn a coveted spot at the police academy and the heart of his elusive dream girl Brandi, the hot make-up counter clerk who won't give him the time of day. But his single-minded pursuit of glory launches a turf war with the equally competitive Detective Harrison of the Conway Police, and Ronnie is confronted with the challenge of not only catching the flasher, but getting him before the real cops do.

Movie Review

Observe and Report (2009)

Mall Crisis? Call Security. Then Again, Maybe Not.

If you thought Abu Ghraib was a laugh riot then you might love “Observe and Report,” a potentially brilliant conceptual comedy that fizzles because its writer and director, Jody Hill, doesn’t have the guts to go with his spleen. The story, in short, turns on a psycho shopping mall security chief, Ronnie (Seth Rogen, putting the lump into lumpen proletariat), who rules his retail roost with a Taser, a trigger-hair temper and some smiley-faced sycophants. Like the pettiest of dictators, Ronnie preys on the weak in the service of power (in this case the mall itself). He’s the Lynndie England of this dumber-and-dumbest yukfest.

That’s admittedly overstated, but sadism is this movie’s currency. The standard line about Mr. Hill, whose other credits include the movie “The Foot Fist Way” and the new HBO series “East Bound and Down,” is that he has carved out a place in the pop-cultural firmament by exploiting his characters’ perceived awkwardness. But while Ronnie is socially clumsy, his ineptitude is a contrivance, a mask that initially entertains (we laugh at him), only to be more or less discarded when he turns hero — at which point, we’re meant to laugh less at him and more at everyone else. The comedies of the Farrelly brothers and Judd Apatow hinge on a similar misfit-turned-hero dynamic, but Mr. Hill adds a nasty twist to the formula.

The twist here is Ronnie, a veritable catalog of dysfunction whose drop-dead drunk of a mother (Celia Weston) describes him as having been a special-needs child. Ronnie pops prescription pills day and night, presumably for his self-confessed bipolar disorder. At work, where he is soon preoccupied with capturing a serial flasher (Randy Gambill), he swaggers around the mall like a Wild West sheriff — though because he’s more Deputy Dawg than Dirty Harry, the joke is definitely on him. He bosses around his rent-a-cop underlings, including his deputy, Dennis (a heavily lisping Michael Peña), and John and Matt (John and Matt Yuan), a support team that seems to have been assembled specifically to neutralize any complaints about how Ronnie treats nonwhites.

Not that Ronnie is a race hater. However technically inept a director, Mr. Hill is too professionally shrewd to barrel down that particular road and, more important, there are too many studio dollars at stake here to risk outraging ethnic and racial groups that could be buying movie tickets. Instead Mr. Hill thumbs his nose at politically correct sensibilities, notably through Ronnie’s mutually hostile encounters with a mall worker he calls Saddamn (Aziz Ansari), who has taken a restraining order out against him. Mr. Hill defuses this potentially explosive relationship by making sure that Saddamn is as verbally hostile as his foe, which I guess is supposed to make it O.K. to laugh when Ronnie punches him in the face.

By far the most outrageous instance of Mr. Hill’s disarming his own bombs occurs when Ronnie beds Brandi (Anna Faris, rising above the muck), a cosmetics clerk who’s impervious to his attentions until the flasher brings them together. During an ensuing date, Brandi gobbles pills, guzzles tequila and even sputters puke, prompting Ronnie to kiss her square on the messy mouth. What follows next should have been the shock of the movie: a cut to Ronnie having vigorous sex with Brandi who, from her closed eyes, slack body and the vomit trailing from her mouth to her pillow, appears to have passed out. But before the words “date rape” can form in your head, she rouses herself long enough to command Ronnie to keep going.

Comedy is often cruel, of course, but before 1968, the year the movie rating system was instituted, directors couldn’t squeeze laughs from the suggestion of date rape, as Mr. Hill tries to do here. Like action and horror filmmakers, comedy directors now push hard against social norms with characters who deploy expletives, bodily fluids and increasing brutality. Mr. Hill has upped the ante in this extreme comedy scene not only by creating a working-class, bipolar bully who lives with his alcoholic mother, but also by asking us to laugh at this pathetic soul — and his miserably constrained life — as well as at the violence he wreaks. The dolts in “Dumb and Dumber” had hearts of gold. Ronnie has a gun.

Mr. Hill says his movie was inspired by “Taxi Driver,” a self-flattering comparison. Like those of Travis Bickle, Ronnie’s delusions of grandeur do end in a paroxysm of blood. Yet while Martin Scorsese might be overly fond of screen violence, part of what makes that film profound and memorable is how the thrill of violence, its seduction, is always in play with a palpable moral revulsion. No such dialectic informs “Observe and Report,” which exploits Ronnie and his brutality for laughs. This lack of critique might make the movie seem daring. But it’s hard to see what is so bold about a film that, much like the world outside the theater, turns the pain and humiliation of other people into a consumable spectacle.

You could argue, I suppose, that there is no real difference between Ronnie shooting an unarmed man and a comic who throws a custard pie in another person’s kisser: they both make (some) audiences laugh. To insist on that difference is, among other things, to introduce politics and morality into the conversation, and, really, who wants that when you’re watching a Seth Rogen flick? It’s far better and certainly easier, as the old movie theater slogan put it, to sit back and relax and enjoy the show. That, after all, is precisely what Hollywood banks on each time it manufactures a new entertainment for a public that — as the stupid, violent characters who hold up a mirror to that public indicate — it views with contempt. “Observe and Report” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The film contains bloody gun and fisticuff violence, vomit-adorned sexual congress and full-frontal male nudity.

CREDIT : MRQE SITE

•Genre: Animation
•Running Time: 100 min.
•Director: Daisuke Nishio
•Writer: Akira Toriyama
•Cast: Justin Chatwin, James Marsters, Emmy Rossum, Jamie Chung, Yun-Fat Chow, Joon Park, Randall Duk Kim, Eriko Tamura, Ernie Hudson, Texas Battle

Synopsis

Goku and a handful of friends battle for the Earth against the deadly forces of the Saiyans, who are sweeping across the universe, leaving a path of destruction. Goku and his friends' best chance for survival rests with the Namekian DragonBalls, which provide them the power to summon a mighty dragon.

Movie Review

Dragonball Evolution (2009)

A popular Japanese manga series gets a pleasing if paint-by-numbers live-action makeover in "Dragonball Evolution," which half-heartedly tries to keep the faith for its pubescent male fanbase. The original "Dragonball" graphic novel series appeared in Japan in 1984, and went on to become a worldwide phenomenon with more than 150 million volumes sold and successfully spinning off into countless anime features, TV versions and videogames. Aiming to tap into a ready-made market, this passable Fox release should do solid biz with established fans of all ages and nationalities. Potential appeal to the unacquainted, however, is minimal.

A pre-titles prologue rapidly outlines details of an ancient battle for the soul of planet Earth by Lord Piccolo (James Marsters) and his beastly cohort, Oozaru (Ian Whyte) -- a clash the world has blissfully forgotten.

Yarn proper begins 2,000 years later on the 18th birthday of Goku (Justin Chatwin) as he undergoes a daily ritual of martial-arts training with his feisty grandfather, Gohan (Randall Duk Kim). In honor of Goku's coming of age, Gohan presents the youth with a shining dragonball orb, revealing the heirloom's history and wish-granting power if united with the six other existing dragonballs.

Goku has other maturing experiences on his mind (though the details are muted for younger auds). Carrying his dragonball for luck, Goku brushes off a birthday dinner with his grandfather to attend a party thrown by comely coed Chi Chi (Jamie Chung), and woos her after dispatching some high school bullies from central casting.

Meanwhile, Gohan is attacked by Lord Piccolo and his sexpot companion, Mai ("Heroes" thesp Eriko), who are on their own mission to collect the seven dragonballs. With his dying breath, Gohan directs his grandson to enlist Master Roshi (Chow Yun-fat) to help him gather the seven balls himself before an impending solar eclipse occurs.

Pic turns into a "Wizard of Oz"-like pilgrimage, with Goku enlisting fellow travelers along the way. But unlike the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion, Goku's companions don't seek what they need; rather, they learn the superficiality of what they want (fame for Emmy Rossum's forceful Bulma, wealth for Joon Park's cocky Yamcha). With Chow providing both Yoda-like wisdom and lusty comic relief, the pic moves toward its climax with an impressive character twist for Goku that will warm the cockles of every young Jungian's heart.

As helmed by James Wong (the "Final Destination" franchise) "Dragonball Evolution" doesn't take itself too seriously, but avoids campiness. Efforts to maintain a sexual subtext will feel inappropriate to some, but is consistent with the story's fairy-tale symbols and structure.

Production seems to have been hastily thrown together, and some scenes appear to have been shot using outmoded rear projection techniques. More care has been taken with the battle scenes; the climactic clash between Piccolo and Goku offers a faithful CGI representation of the ethereal powers as drawn in the original manga. Pic's ending sets up the inevitable sequel.

Despite his boyish looks, 28-year-old Chatwin feels too old to be a convincing adolescent. Chung also seems a bit too mature for her age, but since her come-on lines about how she likes guys who are "different" are every otaku's wet dream, target auds are less likely to complain. Though Chow's Hollywood roles have been disappointing, especially for fans who remember his days as a trenchcoat-wearing John Woo icon, his English-speaking performances continue to improve. The unshaven, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing martial-arts sage with a fetish for bikini magazines depicted here may rankle with many, but Chow has a hammy good time and encourages auds to do the same.

CREDIT : Variety SITE

•Genre: Action/Adventure, Suspense/Thriller
•Running Time: 106 min.
•Director: Justin Lin
•Writer: Chris Morgan
•Cast: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster, John Ortiz, Laz Alonso

Synopsis

When a crime brings them back to L.A., fugitive ex-con Dom Toretto reignites his feud with agent Brian O'Conner. But, as they are forced to confront a shared enemy, Dom and Brian must give in to an uncertain new trust if they hope to outmaneuver him. And, from convoy heists to precision tunnel crawls across international lines, two men will find the best way to get revenge: Push the limits of what's possible behind the wheel.

Moview Review

Fast & Furious (2009)

Burning Rubber One More Time

Fast & Furious brings back the cast of the original The Fast and the Furious in a blatant attempt to reconnect with viewers who have drifted away over the course of two weak sequels. This represents the only time Vin Diesel and Paul Walker have been teamed since the first movie. (Walker was the star of 2 Fast 2 Furious and Diesel had a cameo in Tokyo Drift.) In addition to Diesel and Walker, female co-stars Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez are also on board. To tie this movie with the third installment, the character of Han also makes an appearance, and Fast & Furious is directed by Tokyo Drift's Justin Lin.

Fast & Furious is an improvement over its two immediate predecessors. It's not on par with the first installment, although the first 20 minutes offer some of the best material in any of the films. The movie opens with some kick-ass James Bond-type car action, followed by an unexpected plot twist. Unfortunately, after getting off to this promising start, Fast & Furious begins a slow downhill slide. There are plenty of car chases during the course of the movie, most of which are well choreographed and photographed, but the plot is leaden and the movie isn't very interesting when the characters aren't racing.

Dominic Toretto (Diesel) and Brian O'Conner (Walker) haven't seen each other in five years when their pursuit of a common quarry brings them together in Los Angeles. Brian is after the guy because he's a key witness in a case the FBI is working. Dominic's reasons are less lofty: he wants revenge. This guy's capture results in (however improbably) Dominic and Brian competing in a race for the right to become a driver for a drug kingpin. One wins but the other finds out a way to work his way into the gang anyway. Once under cover, Dominic and Brian agree to an uneasy truce as they pursue goals that are not mutually exclusive.

Diesel seems a little off his game in this movie. In the past, the actor (who was at one time projected as the heir apparent to Schwarzenegger - something that didn't happen) has shown range and ability, but in Fast & Furious, his performance is curiously one-note. This is especially disappointing since events in the film should demand a fair degree of emotion from the character. Paul Walker isn't any better - but then, one wouldn't expect more from Walker, whose overall resume fails to impress. Michelle Rodriquez and Jordana Brewster fill less important roles than they did in the first film. With the exception of her participation in the opening sequence, Rodriquez has little to do, and Brewster's part is even less effectively developed. The primary villains, played by John Ortiz and Laz Alonso, are standard-order bad guys. They are unexceptional in every way, and this makes it difficult to get worked up about hoping they get their deserved comeuppance.

The centerpiece of Fast & Furious isn't plotting, character interaction, or acting. It's cars, races, and action scenes. These things are handled with a fair degree of aplomb, and the camera isn't so spastic that it's impossible to figure out what's going on (a key problem with installment #2). Still, there's only so much any movie can do with car chases, and Fast & Furious pretty much fulfills the quota with the initial scene and the Dominic/Brian race. After that, there's a repetitive quality to the chases. In fact, one underground "track" is used twice. Apparently, the filmmakers ran out of interesting courses.

Fans of all three previous Fast and the Furious features will undoubtedly like this one, but those who believe the first one told all the story that needs to be told and showed all the car action that needs to be shown will find this one redundant. Lin is a talented director, but this material is beneath him. He does what he can to make things engaging, but there's only so much that can be accomplished with something this basic. The end result, while it provides moments of kinetic entertainment, is too repetitive and uneven to be satisfying. Fast & Furious has the brainless/action-oriented quality one normally associates with summer movies. In this case, however, it's only April. Apparently, the filmmakers didn't have enough faith in this production to believe it could stand its own against the year's big guns. That's a fair assessment.

CREDIT : ReelViews SITE

•Genre: Comedy
•Running Time: 106 min.
•Director: Greg Mottola
•Writer: Greg Mottola
•Cast: Kristen Stewart, Ryan Reynolds, Bill Hader, Martin Starr, Kristen Wiig, Margarita Levieva, Jesse Eisenberg, Josh Pais, Mary Birdsong, Kevin Breznahan

Synopsis

It's the summer of 1987, and James Brennan, an uptight, recent college grad, can't wait to embark on his dream tour of Europe. But when his parents announce they can no longer subsidize his trip, James has little choice but to take a lowly job at a local amusement park. Forget about German beer, world-famous museums, and cute French girls-James's summer will now be populated by belligerent dads, stuffed pandas, and screaming kids high on cotton candy. Lucky for James, what should be his worst summer ever turns into quite an adventure when he discovers love in the most unlikely place.

Movie Review

Adventureland (2009)

Coming of Age on the Midway

It’s the summer of 1987. The stock market crash is a few months off, but for James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) things have already taken a recessionary turn. His father (Jack Gilpin), a wilted, weak-chinned alcoholic, has been demoted, and the resulting financial pinch puts the kibosh on James’s rather modest postcollegiate dream of a summer in Europe followed by graduate school at Columbia. (His sights were set on journalism school, and given what his midcareer, 40-something self would be facing two decades later, it’s probably just as well he didn’t go.)

Anyway, like so many other members of a generation unfairly stigmatized at the time as slackers, James moves back in with Dad and Mom (Wendie Malick), who live in standard suburban discomfort in western Pennsylvania. Finding that a B.A. in comparative literature qualifies him for fairly little in the way of paid work, James takes a position manning the midway games at Adventureland, a sad little amusement park that serves as the employer of last resort for the area’s misfit young.

Apart from a certain gangly, nerdy charm — Mr. Eisenberg’s stock in trade, already evident in “Roger Dodger” and “The Squid and the Whale” — James doesn’t have much in the way of assets: his virginity, a bag of joints (courtesy of a preppy college pal) and a bookish naïveté, all of which you can be sure he will be rid of by the time “Adventureland” is over.

The film, written and directed by Greg Mottola (“The Daytrippers,” “Superbad”), plants its flag in thoroughly explored territory, but that familiarity turns out to be integral to its loose and scruffy appeal. Somehow the story of a young man’s coming of age never gets old, at least when it is told with the kind of sweetness and intelligence “Adventureland” displays.

The engine that drives most film comedy these days is the male flight from maturity. John Updike famously observed that an American man is “a failed boy.” The endless parade of movies that bear the name or show the influence of Judd Apatow (a producer of “Superbad”) blunts the tragic implication of that claim by insisting that a man is a successful boy, who gets to keep his toys and his pals even as he acquires the benefits and obligations of heterosexual monogamy. The humor in these comedies is based on various forms of sexual unease, in particular a jokey, half-panicky homoeroticism complemented by a semiterrified fascination with those oddly shaped, emotionally inscrutable creatures known as women.

The cast of “Adventureland” includes a few members of the Apatow stock company (notably Bill Hader as one of the park’s owners and Martin Starr as a nebbishy colleague of James’s with a fondness for Gogol). But in spite of this family resemblance, Mr. Mottola’s film is a relatively sober and cerebral affair, more akin to Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused” than to “Knocked Up” or “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.”

It’s not just that James is an intellectual with a literary bent that suggests a latter-day Woody Allen or Philip Roth hero. It’s more that his innocence expresses itself less as an anxious mystification of women and sex than as a romantic idealization of (gulp) love.

No sooner has James started at Adventureland than he is smitten — as what literature major worth his Rilke would not be? — with Em, a moody, leggy N.Y.U. student played by Kristen Stewart. Em is secretly involved with Connell (Ryan Reynolds), an older, married maintenance man who impresses his younger co-workers, male and female alike, with transparently bogus tales of hobnobbing with famous musicians. “Did you know he jammed with Lou Reed?” Back in the ’80s, wherever you went, there was always some guy hanging around who had jammed with Lou Reed, even if Lou Reed never was much for jamming.

But the drop of Mr. Reed’s name allows “Adventureland” to make heartfelt use of “Satellite of Love,” one of his loveliest songs and part of a soundtrack that runs the gamut of more or less period-appropriate sounds, from the sublimity of Hüsker Dü to the ridiculousness of a bar band covering Foreigner. Otherwise Mr. Mottola is careful not to fetishize or lampoon the 1980s with silly hairdos or too-obvious topical references.

Nor does he lean too heavily on the central romantic plot, allowing the film, true to its season of idleness and drift, to meander from one thing to another. There is some exemplary silliness from Mr. Hader and the peerless Kristen Wiig, who plays his character’s wife and business partner, but the jokes tend to be sly rather than broad, and Mr. Mottola never sacrifices tenderness of feeling for a cheap laugh. Minor characters who might have been mean, tossed-off caricatures — like the theme-park bombshell known as Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva) — are endowed with the capacity to change and surprise, almost as if they were the protagonists of their own movies.

“Adventureland” sometimes seems to lose track of just which movie it is, and its sprawling narrative encompasses some soft spots and patches of inconsistency. The worst of these comes near the end, with a failure of compassion on James’s part that seems to owe more to the demands of the plot than the logic of the character. And at times Mr. Mottola lays on the suburban adolescent malaise with too heavy a hand.

Over all, though, the smart, slightly depressive vibe feels just right — for James’s era and for our own as well. The path to adulthood is lined with disappointment, but for a young man with an open heart and a measure of self-confidence, to say nothing of a degree in comp lit, things will most likely be O.K.“Adventureland” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). A little sex and a lot of pot smoking. Ah yes, the ’80s.

CREDIT : MRQE SITE

•Genre: Comedy, Drama
•Running Time: 90 min.
•Director: R.W. Goodwin
•Writer: James Swift, Steven P. Fisher
•Cast: Eric McCormack, Jenni Baird, Robert Patrick, Jody Thompson, Dan Lauria, Aaron Brooks, Sarah Smyth, Andrew Dunbar, Sage Brocklebank, Jonathan Young

Synopsis

Set in 1957, "Alien Trespass" chronicles a fiery object from outer space that crashes into a mountaintop in the California desert, bringing the threat of disaster to Earth. Out of the flying saucer escapes a murderous creature--the Ghota--which is bent on destroying all life forms on the planet. A benevolent alien from the spaceship, Urp, inhabits the body of Ted Lewis--a local astronomer--and with the help of Tammy, a waitress from the local diner, sets out to save mankind.

Movie Review

Alien Trespass (2009)

Monsters, Aliens and Nostalgia

A charmingly sentimental but ultimately pointless hommage to the sci-fi classics of yesteryear, “Alien Trespass” proves only that while styles and technology have moved on, the affection for corn is everlasting.

Spearheading this retro revival is Eric McCormack as a prissy astronomer whose cardigan-sweatered body is co-opted in the first act by a foil-wrapped alien. “My name is Urp,” he announces to a perky diner waitress (a scene-stealing Jenni Baird).

“Would you like some Rolaids?” she inquires brightly, demonstrating the script’s notion of humor and her own deadpan skills. But as Urp tracks a tentacled beastie by means of the sticky remains of its human dinners, we wait in vain for the director, R. W. Goodwin, to display more than just fan-boy obsession. Substituting period accuracy — a keening theremin, a rubbery monster and a cast of 10s — for ideas, he and his writers (James Swift and Steven Fisher) stay well clear of the mushroom-clouded corners of the American psyche.

As a result the cast is compelled to play along without wink or subtext, a skill at which the women excel. Fortified with Cross-Your-Heart technology and gorgeous makeup, Ms. Baird and Jody Thompson (as the scientist’s silky, hot-to-trot wife) act their male colleagues into the margins. Compared with wrangling foundation garments and seamed stockings, besting monsters is a breeze.

“Alien Trespass” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). A phallus-shaped monster and a human-shaped alien.

CREDIT : MRQE SITE

•Genre: Horror, Suspense/Thriller
•Running Time: 92 min.
•Director: Peter Cornwell
•Writer: Adam Simon, Tim Metcalfe
•Cast: Virginia Madsen, Kyle Gallner, Martin Donovan, Elias Koteas, Amanda Crew, D.W. Brown, Sarah Constible, Matt Kippen, John B. Lowe

Synopsis

Based on a chilling true story, Lionsgate's "The Haunting in Connecticut" charts one family's terrifying, real-life encounter with the dark forces of the supernatural. When the Campbell family moves to upstate Connecticut, they soon learn that their charming Victorian home has a disturbing history: not only was the house a transformed funeral parlor where inconceivable acts occurred, but the owner's clairvoyant son Jonah served as a demonic messenger, providing a gateway for spiritual entities to crossover. Now, unspeakable terror awaits, when Jonah, the boy who communicated with the powerful dark forces of the supernatural, returns to unleash a new kind of horror on the innocent and unsuspecting family.

Movie Review

The Haunting in Connecticut (2009)

A Family Plot

Spinning another based-on-actual-events tale of a family ejected from its home by angry spirits, “The Haunting in Connecticut” gives you the creeps, the giggles and the groans in almost equal measure.

When the Campbells (headed by Virginia Madsen and Martin Donovan) discover that their rickety Connecticut rental is a former funeral parlor, it’s left to the family’s terminally ill son (Kyle Gallner, earnestly moping) to handle the disgruntled former clients. Apparently their mortician liked to do more than just embalm.

Aside from the presence of the usual corny cleric (here played on the level by Elias Koteas), the movie refers to “Psycho,” “The Shining” and “The Exorcist” by way of Amityville. But these mnemonics are far less distracting than the endlessly prompting, screeching score. Stories like this need hush to work: the rustle of a shroud and the dry whisper of ghostly conversation can’t compete with shrieking violins.

Directing his first feature, Peter Cornwell delivers some genuinely grisly imagery: a rusty tin filled with eyelid trimmings — their lashes still attached — and a spew of brocadelike ectoplasm. Most unsettling of all are the peaceful photographs of dead people that link the movie’s parallel worlds; as the Icelandic filmmaker Hrabba Gunnarsdottir proved in her mesmerizing documentary “Corpus Camera,” images of the deceased can provide a great deal more than closure.

Credit by : MRQE SITE