Why so serious? Faster, starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is his return to seemingly watchable movies, is an unpleasant, cliché-ridden revenge-fantasy that goes about itself completely wrong. If you’re going to make a movie with absolutely zero redeemable characters, at least inject some life through black comedy or just take… Continue reading
Life As We Know It contains what has to be the most unappetizing setup in romantic comedy history. Usually people bump carts at the grocery store or trip over each other on a New York City street. It’s what Ebert calls the “Meet Cute.” We have the two young and… Continue reading
Disclaimer: I don’t know the first thing about the source material. Not that it matters. I can imagine any fan of the series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, sitting in the theater, slack-jawed, at this dreary, joyless, and boring effort from M. Night Shyamalan. Where’s the fun? We’re talking about characters… Continue reading
It’s hard to escape the feeling that the script for Grown Ups was left in someone’s desk drawer for about the past fifteen years. We’re talking about a script that contains not one, but multiple O.J. Simpson jokes. Given the cast, made up mostly of 90’s SNL veterans, one would… Continue reading
Looking back at the archives from my review of 2008’s Sex and the City film, I came across this sentence: “the fact of the matter is that this review doesn’t matter.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement for my writing, but it’s still how I feel about this series. I bent… Continue reading
Well, at least I know what setting $70 million ablaze looks like in 3D. That’s about all that’s to be gained from this 2010 version of Clash of the Titans, an ugly, joyless clunker that could only have been made better if it were an April Fool’s joke. No such… Continue reading
When in Rome is an aggressively bad movie; perhaps one of the most pathetically manic rom-coms ever made. We’re not talking Because I Said So bad, but at least Couples Retreat bad. That this is the current state of the romantic comedy is pretty sad, as Hollywood continues to expel… Continue reading
Couples Retreat is the latest comedic debacle for the once-funny Vince Vaughn, and at this point we’re a bit beyond worried. By my count, Vaughn hasn’t made a funny, or even particularly good (with the exception of his brief appearance in 2007’s Into the Wild), movie since 2005’s Wedding Crashers.… Continue reading
Purposefully shrouded in mystery over the past few months, few people going in to Seven Pounds will have any idea of what it’s really about. Mission: accomplished for the studio. This is one of the dourest, boring, and insulting films I have seen in years. We got our first taste… Continue reading
The horrors of living in a surveillance society have been predicted and estimated for decades, and now that we’re actually in one I suppose we can take a step back and look at things objectively. Eagle Eye attempts to exploit the fact that the technology exists to track any human… Continue reading