Film

Taylor Lautner's abs put on an excellent performance in Abduction. Seriously, his abs have never looked better.

Baseball is known as America's pastime for a reason. Despite its long games, lack of instant excitement and outrageously lengthy season, baseball has captured our attention for nearly a century and a half, gaining the interest of generation after generation. And there's no better baseball than playoff baseball. With the postseason quickly approaching, Moneyball is a great film for fans of our nation's oldest major sport to begin their autumn ritual. Based on Michael Lewis' best-selling book of the same name, Moneyball tells the true story of how one general manager broke the mold of traditional player scouting in order to field a team with the best players that his small-market organization could afford. The action takes place in 2002 when computers began displacing professional baseball scouts and in doing so challenged the conventional wisdom that had guided scouting and player evaluation for more than a century. As such, it's a story that's bigger than baseball. It's a tale of how an industry wrestles with the forces of change.

Without the genius of director Sam Peckinpah, there would be no John Woo or Walter Hill movies. There would never have been The Wild Bunch, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia or Straw Dogs without Peckinpah. Now we have Straw Dogs without Peckinpah. Some may say “homage,” I say “blasphemy.”
Peckinpah's 1971 Straw Dogs was his most enigmatic, open wound of a movie, complete with commentary on bigotry, racism, social and religious dysfunction, (and if you look deep enough, health care). Peckinpah's hard drinking and hard life influenced his filmmaking style and perpetual “last man standing” theme, be it against the changing time, the protection of one's home or the preservation of self-respect. It wasn't just the stories; it was Sam's vision through cinematic styling that made his films shine with a kind of dignity. He has every right to be spinning in his grave.

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.

New horror movies give me hope and, from the looks of it, Creature had guilty pleasure, drive-in homage stamped into its very existence. At first, it seemed like my prayers had been answered, but to my dismay, this flick proved to be a lame, excruciatingly cheap slasher with no soul and one ridiculous, disjointed scene after another.

If I had it my way, I would go my entire life without seeing Gwyneth Paltrow's skull sawed open and the skin on her head peeled back. But this is what happens as doctors performed an autopsy on her Contagion character, Beth Emhoff. It's the kind of moment where you put your hand up in front of your face to block the disgusting sight, but still kind of peek around your fingers so you don't miss what's going on in the movie. Contagion, which has been marketed as an action/thriller about a global disease pandemic, kind of misses its target audience, aside from revealing the inside of Paltrow's forehead.
Here's how Beth ends up getting her skull chopped in half: she returns home to Chicago after spending time in Hong Kong for business and what she thinks is jet lag ends up sending her into seizures and taking her life within merely a few days, along with that of her young son. The unknown disease spreads fast, as these things tend to do in the movies, and soon reaches epidemic proportions. Meanwhile, at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) contracts a team of highly skilled doctors to identify the disease, identify the first patient and develop a vaccination.

We all have to make choices. Like if someone tells you a story and says it really happened, you choose to believe it. And if it's an especially good story, well even better. If it's embellished, all over the map and totally unbelievable, but ultimately makes you laugh, well, then all the better.
If you want to believe, go ahead, but Apollo 18 quickly sheds its “found footage” concept and just digs deep into delivering some excellent horror movie goods. Please note that there are credits to Apollo 18. In other words: this shit ain't for real.

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).

My love for Paul Rudd started at a young age when I saw him in Clueless. He's got a certain kind of every-man charisma that makes him relatable in just about any role he takes on. If you take a look back at his career, you'll notice he doesn't really do fantasy or sci-fi. Rudd has made a career out of finding comedy in reality, which for me personally is the best kind of humor. Yes, of course, he's swayed into the gross-out comedy genre at times, but Rudd hits his stride when he's honest and relatable – just as he is as Ned Rochlin in Our Idiot Brother.
The film begins with Ned, the so-called idiot brother in reference, selling pot to a uniformed police officer. After returning from jail, Ned has been kicked to the curb by his former girlfriend Janet (played by Kathryn Hahn, who I've been mistaking for Saturday Night Live alumna Ana Gastyer for years). Ned decides to couch hop between his sisters' homes in New York while trying to get back on his feet.

It's safe to say that visionary filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy) makes a pretty good living off things that go bump in the night. The director of the upcoming Hobbit films produced and co-wrote one of this summer's only notable horror films Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. His decision, or whomever's decision it was, to let new-comer Troy Nixey lead this 1973, made-for-TV revival was the only noticeable flaw to this well-made remake.
The story follows a little, raven-haired girl named Sally who goes from her unloving mother's care in Los Angeles to Rhode Island where her father (Guy Pearce) and his lady-friend (Katie Holmes) are renovating a deceased painter's home that holds a demonic little secret. As if depressing family issues weren't enough, poor Sally can't even turn the lights off once her curiosity gets the best of her.