Jared Rasic

Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back while simultaneously learning a profound life lesson. Rinse, repeat. That's the timeworn formula employed by every romantic comedy. Some films rest comfortably within the format and fail. (Good Luck Chuck, All About Steve) Others can work within those parameters and create art (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, When Harry Met Sally). Friends with Kids falls disappointingly between those two extremes. The screenplay has a fascinating central conceit that creates dramatic tension, but then falls back on all of the typical genre conventions for the final act.
WriterDirectorStar Jennifer Westfeldt has built a career writing films that playfully deconstruct traditional relationships in favor of something more experimental. In Kissing Jessica Stein, she told the story of a heterosexual woman burned by too many horrible blind dates who turns to lesbianism. With Ira & Abby, she focused on what would happen if two people got engaged after just one conversation.

It's difficult to be too hard on Gone because everyone seems to be trying really hard. The problem is that every aspect of the film is at war with itself.
The PG-13 rating neuters it and keeps it from being as twisted as it should have been; the script loses so much focus in the final ten minutes that the entire premise of the film is lost.
There are characters that exist only as red herrings. When their purpose is fulfilled, they are discarded and never seen again.

The further I get away from my high school years, the more those days seem like a rose-tinted ball of nostalgia, even though at the time I was pretty miserable. I was a senior when the Columbine shootings happened and, until graduation, that event seemed to bring everyone in school closer. As school shootings have become either less frequent or less publicized, films set in high school have once again become focused on the us-vs.-them mentality.
Characters are drawn as black and white, leaving no room for shades of grey. Chronicle addresses this by having three complex main characters that don't fit into any of the boxes in which Hollywood normally places teenage characters. They are heroic, selfish, hopeless, moral and morally bankrupt. In other words, they're human, which makes them fascinating to watch. Oh, and they have superpowers.

Liam Neeson, the actor best known for playing thoughtful, sometimes heroic men, has somehow managed (in his late 50s, no less) to reinvent himself as a steely-eyed action star in the vein of Clint Eastwood or the late Charles Bronson. Watching him beat the living hell out of absolutely everyone in his path in movies like Taken and Unknown proved more fun than anyone imagined. Because of that, the marketing campaign for The Grey has almost exclusively been focusing on the novelty of Liam Neeson fist-fighting giant grey wolves. However, if the film trailer's shot of him taping broken glass to his hands and charging a wolf is the only thing that has you excited about this movie, then you will likely walk out of the theater disappointed. Director Joe Carnahan had more on his mind than wolf punching.

Everybody likes a good scare and, judging from the $35 million that The Devil Inside made this weekend, they like a bad one, too. I realize it's very early to say this, but if The Devil Inside doesn't turn out to be one of the worst movies of 2012, then I fear for the year ahead. I had high hopes for this one since it had a pretty effective advertising campaign and it combines two of my favorite horror subgenre's: faux documentary and exorcism. Even with the immediate realism of the documentary genre and the unknowable horror of an exorcism movie, The Devil Inside manages to not only feel miniscule in scope, but is also free and clear of any and all scares and comes fully packaged with one of the worst endings in cinematic history.
Don't let the awesome trailer fool you into thinking this is more than just your average beginning-of-the-year crap. January is typically the dumping ground for films the studios are too afraid to release around awards season and normally won't even screen them for critics. Most of the time, if you're sitting down to a movie in January, it's probably going to be terrible, but there are exceptions to every rule. The Devil Inside is not one of them. If anything, it solidifies the rule in poopy-flavored shame.

How often do you find yourself sitting down to enjoy a film that you're genuinely excited for? Not just the excitement of it being a movie you've been looking forward to, but one that the critics are calling “The best film of the year” or “a stunning masterpiece that will open up your soul” or some such hyperbole. It makes you feel like you're about to partake in something important: a piece of art that is so critically lauded that it becomes a socially shared experience like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or Jersey Shore. Now, after getting bombarded with all the hype and accolades, how many times does that piece of art actually live up to the standards you've already set? Not very often, right? I think that might have been my problem with The Descendants, a very good movie that I'm sure will do well come awards season, but that never quite crosses the line into “great.”

I don't want to see Miracle on 34th Street. Ever. Same goes for It's a Wonderful Life, Home Alone, A Christmas Carol and A Christmas Story. I can still handle the Charlie Brown Christmas movies, A Nightmare Before Christmas, Bad Santa, Love Actually, Die Hard, Scrooged and Gremlins, but even those are starting to wear a little thin (except for Die Hard which is eternal like fruit cake). I'm 31 years old and I've been watching these movies every year since I was old enough to form memories and I need to start mixing it up a little before I go insane. This year, I decided to try to dig up some Holiday classics that are a little more under-the-radar, so we can start making new traditions to fit alongside the old. With that in mind, here are seven modern holiday classics to add to your Christmas tradition.