Film

The first time I saw the trailer for The Watch (then called Neighborhood Watch) was two days after George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin. All you could really do is wince at the timing and feel sorry for everyone involved in the project. As the months progressed, the trailers focused more on the alien invasion plot line as opposed to the neighborhood watch aspects. It looked like maybe the film could avoid the negative comparisons it was receiving at the beginning of its marketing run.
As of press time, The Watch had flopped pretty horribly, making only $13 million in its opening weekend on a $68 million dollar budget. Some speculate that the movie bombed because of the neighborhood watch subject matter, which I don’t buy since the Aurora massacre had absolutely no negative effects on The Dark Knight Rises record breaking box office totals. I think The Watch is tanking because critical reviews are poor, word of mouth is nonexistent and everyone is still spending their movie budget on Batman. But it’s unfair to judge films on what they aren’t, so let’s look at what it is.

Hatfields & McCoys
Kevin Costner and Bill Paxton as dueling rednecks over five hours? Sounds like an acceptable way to spend a weekend to me. I’m sure the History Channel rushed this out to stores so they could make room for 12 more hours of American Pickers on their programming block—not that I’m complaining. Seriously though, this mini-series has Powers Boothe (Rapid Fire), Tom Berenger (Platoon) and a script by Ted Mann (Deadwood), so the pedigree is more than stellar enough to warrant a gigantic chunk of your life.

To Rome With Love is set in the Eternal City and has distinctive, eternally Woody Allen qualities. From the neurotic leading characters to the cinematography, which captures the beauty of the city, it’s plain to see this film has Allen engrained throughout. To Rome With Love comprises various vignettes that never intersect, but rather dance around each other with the shared themes of love, infidelity and celebrity. While at first it seems as if no reoccurring, singular theme unites the vignettes, as Allen did with anthology films such as New York, I Love You and Paris, je t’aime, as the movie progresses the cohesion becomes more apparent.
Again Allen is interested in the theme of love and sub-themes of longing and infidelity. In this case, we meet Jack (Jesse Eisenberg), a budding architect living in Rome with his girlfriend Sally (Greta Gerwig). When Sally’s friend Monica (Ellen Page), an out-of-work actress, comes to visit after having broken up with her most recent victim, er… boyfriend, Sally fears Jack will fall hopelessly in love with Monica as every other man has.

Many factors make a Woody Allen movie uniquely Woody Allen. While his style incorporates distinctive dialogue, neurotic characters and beautiful city landscapes—casting has always been his strong suit. In both To Rome With Love and last year’s Midnight in Paris, several of young Hollywood’s brightest stars have joined Allen’s ensemble.
Since Allen most frequently played the anxious leading men he also wrote about, finding the right young men in Hollywood to replace him is a sensitive and daunting task. After his roles in Zombieland, Adventureland and in some respects The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg may be the most competent choice to someday fill Allen’s shoes.

This may be the darkest, the grimmest, the most depressing summer popcorn movie ever. It is not summery. It is not popcorny. There is no adventure here. There is no escapism. There is only grinding reality to be endured in the harsh mirror it holds up to us in the audience. For there can be no mistake that the people of Gotham are us, we 99 percent huddled in the dark and frantic for a hero we will not find.
In Christopher Nolan’s first Dark Knight film, Batman Begins, Gotham was a clearly fictional place: oh, inspired by New York City, no question, but the Gotham skyline was emphatically a fantasy. Here, there is no longer any pretense: The iconic buildings and bridges of the Manhattanscape are not disguised or altered. That is Fifth Avenue, symbol of luxury and wealth. That is Wall Street, symbol of excess and greed.

Just because Oliver Stone makes movies look cool doesn’t mean he always makes cool movies. Savages falls somewhere in between cool and ludicrous. O.K., let’s just say it has its moments. Weaving between overtly dark secrecy and over-the-top camp, Savages delivers a cartoonish version of deadly violent subject matter.
When Stone isn’t making some valiant statement in a lavish production (think JFK and Wall Street) he tears his style down to its bare essentials. With Savages, he dishes out a pretty standard story about drug dealing and a kidnap/hostage situation, but he isn’t trying to sell the viewer on much of anything with the use of black-and-white-to-color storytelling, non-linear editing and multiple film stocks.

I’m sure there will be people who argue that The Amazing Spider-man should be evaluated on its own merits, as a work separate from the legacy of Sam Raimi’s Spider-man films over the last decade. And I respectfully ask—after I catch my breath from the hysterical laughter—“You’re joking, right?”
Leave aside for a moment the cynical reality that Sony had to make this movie sooner rather than later, in order to preserve its rights to the character after Disney’s deal to buy Marvel Comics. The fact remains that we are not even a generation removed from one of the great pop-culture one-two punches in blockbuster history (I’m pretending that Spider-man 3 never happened, as should we all). We saw what a pretty-close-to-perfect Spider-man movie looks like. We know that it’s possible. And because we know these things, how is it possible to look at The Amazing Spider-man and not recognize how much it lacks?

As the Spiderman franchise reboots and comes wall-crawling back into our lives, it seems like a good time to look back at some of the highlights and lowlights of comic over the last 35 years. I’m specifically focusing on the super hero movies based on comic books, or else this would just be 500 words on Unbreakable…the greatest of all super hero movies.

Wes Anderson doesn’t care if anyone likes his films. I think if the world stopped paying to see them, he would continue to make them, with his own money and show them to friends when they came over for dinner. He’s an auteur and one of the handful alive today like Paul Thomas Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Michael Haneke and a few others. As with those filmmakers, it’s usually easy to tell within the first minute when you’re watching a Wes Anderson film. Yet for some reason, critics single out Anderson for his distinctive style.

The craziest thing about this movie is the film doesn’t live up to the campiness conveyed by the title. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is so deadly serious that it should be ashamed of itself.
It’s as if The History Channel morphed into a bad action movie with the now standard Matrix-like effects. Sure there’s blood spraying and wild wire-work fight choreography. But this kung fu kickery attributed to an influential historical figure is a trend that has got to stop. How far will Hollywood take this trend of putting real people in completely farfetched scenarios á la the recent Raven where Edgar Allan Poe helped fight crime?