Film

Oren Peli has ruined my movie-going experience one time too many. The dude responsible for the Paranormal Activity atrocities has had me running screaming down the aisles in disgust rather than fright. But now Peli has nearly redeemed himself by producing and co-writing the screenplay for Chernobyl Diaries. This flick is nowhere near as bad as I had anticipated; in fact it’s downright fun.
Looking like we’re in found footage territory from the get-go, this is merely a trick to help set up the characters on a European vacation, though found footage is wisely incorporated again later. We begin with the formulaic technique of spending time with couples vacationing before they’re detoured from Moscow and treated to mutated cannibalistic humanistic underground dwellers. (C.H.U.D. Remember?)

It’s been 10 years since Men in Black 2 came out, which is long enough for me to have completely forgotten every single detail of it (other than remembering Biz Markie played an alien in it). I don’t think anyone was really asking for another Men in Black movie, but as one of the world’s most bankable stars, Will Smith can get a project rolling despite the logical reasons against it. So, he got it made and now here it is, a sequel to a sequel with a 39 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes that occupies zero consciousness on the cultural radar. In other words, my expectations were pretty low and the film met those expectations exactly.

With The Dictator, Sacha Baron Cohen finds himself addressing a situation no entertainer wants to confront: What do you do when the shtick that was your bread-and-butter just can’t work any more?
Borat was, after all, a minor masterpiece of comedic filmmaking, combining Cohen’s sensibility as anarchic, gleefully offensive social satirist with faux-documentary style in something that emerged as Candid Camera by way of South Park. But by the time he was ready for his follow-up, Brüno, it was already clear that Cohen wasn’t going to be able to sneak up on people any more. Sure, he could find plenty of work for hire as a gifted comic actor in stuff like Hugo, or more Madagascar voiceovers. But for his own original creations, he was going to have to find a new, Punk’d-free delivery system—and based on 2002’s Ali G Indahouse, that was far from a sure thing.

To enjoy Battleship you first really have to think about what you’re sitting down to watch. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour summer blockbuster based on a board game that you can play while waiting for your Oolong tea at Townshend’s. There’s no back story there, no mythology that the game teases out—it’s just blindly firing missiles at your opponent and winning through either luck or educated guessing. Which is fine. Pirates of the Caribbean was based on a damn Disneyland ride and still managed to be pretty great, but you can’t have expectations set at that level. Think of Battleship more like it’s Transformers 2 in the Pacific Ocean. But with Rihanna shooting at things.

Director Joseph Cedar offers a dazzlingly fresh take on filmmaking with Footnote, a whirlwind of dynamics surrounding mind games, intellectual suffering and guilt.
This flick is a mind-bending chess game between two rival scholars who just happen to be father (Shlomo Bar-Abba) and son (Lior Ashkenazi). But don’t let that fool you. These two are scholars who read about reading, write about writing and live and breathe investigation into both. The scholars are focused on the Talmud transcripts, the central texts of mainstream Judaism that document discussions pertaining to Jewish law, ethics, philosophy, customs and history.

Dark Shadows marks the eighth collaboration between director Tim Burton and Johnny Depp over a span of more than 20 years, and in some ways you could certainly say the partnership has been a fruitful one. They made a couple of wonderfully original films like Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood; they both have made rolling-around-in-it-like-Scrooge-McDuck money. And the cosmetics industry has likely put more than a few kids through college on the face-powder and guy-liner budget of their films.
But the Burton/Depp creative marriage has grown less and less creative with every passing reunion. Two singularly quirky cinema personalities have found themselves stuck in a cycle of revisiting whatever familiar pop-culture character manages to cross their radar in a given year: Ichabod Crane, Willy Wonka, Sweeney Todd, the Mad Hatter.

After the over-praised flicks Metropolitan and Last Days of Disco, writer and director Whit Stillman has returned – 14 years later – with Damsels in Distress. And his comeback speaks volumes as to why Stillman should stay away for good.
Using a recipe steeped in superficial self awareness, Stillman turns Damsels into a low-budget fiasco that feels as if Jared Hess took time out from Napoleon Dynamite and teamed up with a Jennifer's Body-era Diablo Cody. In the hands of, say ,John Waters or Wes Anderson, this self aware flick might've played out better, but really no amount of genius could have kept this misguided crap out of the toilet tank.

One thing I will never understand is why a director casts a very capable martial artist, then has him shoot at people for 90 minutes. If an actor looks great kicking someone in the throat, then let him throat kick. Don’t put them in long stagnant gunfights. That, in a nutshell, is my biggest issue with Safe, the new Jason Statham vehicle.
There’s some intense and exhilarating hand-to-hand combat for the first half, followed by poorly staged shootouts in the second, which makes the entire finale anti-climactic and boring. Add the ludicrous plot and Safe plays like it should have been a direct-to-DVD release instead of a heavily marketed theatrical outing.

From Harry Potter to Twilight, from The Hunger Games to the new Marvel's The Avengers and every comic-book movie that has preceded it, adaptations of beloved pop-culture properties face a question that is rarely asked, but pretty much always should be: Do the fans love them because they're great, or simply because they exist?
Fan-thusiasms being what they are, you'd almost never get adherents to cop to the latter, obvious though it may be to those peering, in befuddlement, from the outside. Stories and characters that we encounter at particular times in our lives begin to resonate in ways that are indefensible through conventional means. Yeah, yeah, the editing was jittery, and sure, the narrative bends under the strain of its need to please the true believers. But that's Katniss up there on a screen in three dimensions! Bella and Edward! Professor Snape! The X-Men! What part of that do you not understand?

The makers of The Raven would like you to believe that Edgar Allen Poe spent his final days helping police capture a killer who was using Poe's works as inspiration and, in doing so, saved the love of his life Emily, for whom he wrote the poem Annabel Lee.
The plot uses some of the real-life mysteries from Poe’s final days to form the backdrop of a fictional tale. Filmed in Serbia and Hungary, Raven looks cool, but that's about it.
Let's face it; John Cusack is not really an actor. He is just John Cusack. There's no discernable difference between his former roles and Poe with the exception of more hair and a goatee. Cusack's Poe could have cranked up the turmoil and debauchery; he was an alcoholic and opium addict for chrissakes!