Jared Rasic

I'm probably breaking every rule in the critic handbook here, but I have to recommend Immortals, even though it misses the boat on some things “good” movies should contain. I could moan about subtext and character motivations until the cows come home, but if you've seen the trailer for Immortals, then you know exactly what you're getting into: It's Clash of the Titans (the original) for the 300 crowd. If you're looking for something deeper than that, then I'm sure J. Edgar will top off your “grown-up” movie tank, but if you shell out the dollars for this, then expect to feel like a little kid again.
I think the reason for the lack of subtext and motivation is due to the fact that the story itself is boilerplate hero's journey stuff. Boy leads simple life, Boy's simple life is destroyed by all powerful evil, Boy goes on journey to find mystical artifact to destroy said evil, Boy meets girl who will probably be held hostage by evil, Boy finds artifact and faces his destiny against evil and might possibly win if his heart is pure, his aim is true and his muscles are all greased up and flexed. When the remake of Clash of the Titans tried to pull off the hero's journey it failed because of three main flaws: 1) The hero was Sam Worthington, who is a black hole of charisma, 2) The script was written by people who should have their pencils taken away and 3) It was directed with such a lack of vision and style that it felt like a sad facsimile of something that could be awesome.

Finally, we have an IMAX screen here in Bend! No more heading over to Portland for IMAX midnight screenings now that we can get our faces melted from the comfort of our little mountain town. For my first IMAX-ing (in 3-D), I watched the Shrek spin-off Puss In Boots, starring the sounds of Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek and Zach Galifianakis. I wasn't expecting too much since I thought the last two Shrek movies were so pop culture laden that they were dated about eight minutes after release, but Puss In Boots keeps the references to a minimum and comes out feeling timeless and, at times, almost classic.
The sound system in the Old Mill 16's IMAX auditorium is 12,000 watts of pure auditory adrenalin and, combined with the giant screen and tastefully done 3-D, Puss In Boots was an incredibly immersive experience for me. The story is a mash-up of a few different fairy tales with Puss (the flawless Banderas) on the hunt for magic beans that will allow him to get to the castle in the sky so he can steal the goose that lays golden eggs. He partners with Kitty Softpaws (a seductively smoky Hayek) and his old friend Humpty Dumpty (the indispensable Galifianakis) to do one last heist and then he's done stealing. All the story beats are predictable from a mile off, but the kids will be eating up every word and the world of Puss in Boots is so bizarre and surreal that cooler parents will also be swept along with them.

We live in a time of constant remakes and reboots, prequels, sequels and re-imaginings, sometimes even rebootquels and prequakes. Sure, thanks, I'd love another version of The Thing that takes place 15 minutes before the last one and why not do another Footloose, since I'm pretty sure people still like to cut loose and pick up their Sunday shoes.
But The Three Musketeers? Really? There have been 22 live-action versions of the film since 1903 (including a martial arts take from 2001 and a 1993 Disney production starring Kiefer “DAMMIT” Sutherland and Charlie “winning” Sheen) and seven animated versions since 1953 (including Barbie and the Three Musketeers from 2009, which is either a kids’ movie or porn). If you're going to do another Musketeer movie then it needs to add something new to the formula, but all the new Musketeer film adds is laughable acting, incompetent direction and a script so filled with clichés that it starts swallowing itself like an Ouroboros.

It's been a weird summer for blockbusters. I should know. I've watched most of them, 95 percent of which were superhero movies. After being bombarded with Green Lantern, Thor, Captain America, Conan and Cowboys and Aliens, I was starting to get this nagging suspicion that I was a stupid grownup and couldn't get sucked into these worlds like I once did. What I didn't realize is that the reason I wasn't enjoying these movies was because they didn't have any characters I felt invested in. After watching Drive, not only did I feel like I'd seen a true superhero movie, but I felt like I'd seen the best one made in my lifetime with a hero I truly cared about… even though he's sort of a sociopath. A super anti-hero, if you will.
Drive is a throwback to every mid-to-late '80s character-based action film like William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. or Michael Mann's Thief. It makes the city of Los Angeles just as much of a character as anyone while exploring the hidden nooks and crannies of a city that never gets shot like this anymore. Director Nicolas Winding Refn shoots L.A. like it's a crumbling empire, still at the height of its power, yet rotting underneath its façade. Anyone who is interested in the language of film should study Drive as well as the earlier works of Refn like his Pusher trilogy, Bronson and Valhalla Rising. This guy is our next Kubrick, Cronenberg and Peckinpah rolled into a hyper stylized ball of genius.

I know you're not going to see this movie, but I'm going to review it anyway. Just to spite you. So, Shark Night (not to be mistaken for Shark Knight, the aquatic adventure film starring Martin Lawrence and Mo'Nique that follows the exploits of a chivalrous mako shark and his… I've just been told that movie doesn't exist and I made it up. Back to reviews of real movies).

Over the last week, I've been hearing that the new Conan the Barbarian is not just a bad movie or crappy end-of-the-summer blockbuster, but an actual stain on the name of Robert E. Howard (author of the original Conan stories) and an offense to filmgoers everywhere. Now, I've been known to drop hyperbole bombs to and sometimes fro, but I've got to say, while Conan the Barbarian is not a freckle on the original Conan the Barbarian's undercarriage, it's streets ahead of Conan the Destroyer (sorry, Grace Jones and a PG rating make The Destroyer dead to me). Conan is a badass for the first two-thirds of its running time, but then turns into yawns.
Easily the best thing about the new Conan is Jason Momoa (who owned in Game of Thrones) since he's much closer to Howard's vision of Conan than Arnold was. I was raised on Howard's books and I never forgot how Conan was described as moving like a panther, whereas Arnie moved like a bull crossbred with an Austrian bodybuilder. Momoa not only moves like a Panther, he moves like the whole jungle is in his bones. There is no other modern actor who could have pulled off this role and, if you don't believe me, I'll whip out some more nerd knowledge bombs (after I put away my hyperbole bombs) and take you all out with me.

If there's one thing I hate about the current state of film criticism, it's that so many critics (mostly online) view movies through a cracked lens of jaded cynicism and detached boredom that it makes me wonder whether they even enjoy the world of film to begin with. Specifically, there's a word that drives me insane and since it's birth it has become the nadir of intelligent discourse and critical thinking. A word that says to the world that you're too indifferent to actually put words together to form sentences and create an intelligent critique of something you observed.
What could this word be you probably aren't asking? The word is “meh” and it hates us all. Urban Dictionary defines “meh” as “when one simply does not care,” and I fail to understand how any art (whether it's van Gogh or Vin Diesel) cannot extract something more from us than the absence of opinion. The word wants us to become detached from thinking deeply about topics like art, politics and religion. It soothes us into a state of apathetic snobbery we may never escape from. But if you were to ask me what I thought about 30 Minutes or Less, all I can think to say is meh.

Dear Movie Gods,
Now that's how it's done. All I had to do was complain in four straight reviews about the death of the Hollywood blockbuster and you, the movie gods, answered my prayers. With the excellent Rise of the Planet of the Apes, I'm sure I must owe you a blood sacrifice or at least a back rub at some point.
You know my biggest complaint about this summer at the movies has been the uniformly strong first acts (Transformers notwithstanding) and a fizzle when it comes to the final third of the films. In the cases of Cowboys and Aliens, Captain America and Green Lantern, they all have this really fascinating origin story, only to let us down when it comes to the final battle and the denouement (fancy nerd talk for conclusion, but you knew that). They all seem to just be doing their best to set up a franchise instead of telling a complete story and that's where Apes succeeds grandly: it has a beginning, middle and an actual end that it earns instead of just stopping until they can start shooting the next one.

I like a lot of really bad movies. Movies that are so bad they actually force me to examine my life choices and rationale behind why I think a movie called Mega Python vs Gatoroid is going to be worth my time (answer: it has Debbie Gibson and Tiffany in it.). It's easy to watch bad movies because it's fun to tear into them with friends afterward and dissect them like the hidden meaning of Pink Floyd lyrics (answer: drugs). What's much more difficult to discuss are movies that are just… good. Middle of the road, perfectly satisfactory movies that don't stick out, one way or the other. Cowboys & Aliens fits this model perfectly. It made me smile and has several exhilarating action sequences that wrap you up in the spirit of the picture, but it feels like it could have been so much more and I know it will be completely forgotten in outside of a week.

I don't think I'm ready for this yet. Superheroes have been such an integral part of my life for so long that I don't even know who I'd be without my love for Captain America, The Punisher, X-Men, both Green's (Arrow and Lantern, screw Hornet), Batman, Spidey and The Avengers. I know these people better than I know my friends and family. Now that I've seen Captain America right on the heels of Thor and Green Lantern, I'm afraid I might be growing out of superhero movies or, more accurately, I'm growing out of the formula that they all have in common, which I call the Batman Begins syndrome.