Film

No, this isn’t a re-issue of the excellent documentary about The Who. This Kids Are All Right is a cinematic attempt to showcase how married lesbian parents go through life's same hardships while trying make sure that the happiness of their children comes first – in other words that they're normal people. Kids starts off cool with a Larry Clark’ Wassup Rockers feel as a hand-held camera covers Laser and a pal skateboarding and knocking down garbage cans. We then get the family dynamics setting up the gay relationship and how it's really no different than any other couple with maybe a tad too much info.
The film opens with lesbian couple Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) who have been together for almost 20 years and their two teenage children named Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), show their devotion to themselves during a witty-banter-laden dinner. Through some New Age-y and mostly superficial emoting, it becomes apparent how hip the filmmakers want their audience to be. Unbeknownst to their mothers, Joni and Laser seek out their biological father, a restaurant owner and entrepreneur named Paul (Mark Ruffalo). Complications arise when the teens bond with Paul and invite him into their lives on the eve of Joni's heading out to college. Things get tricky when the sperm donor turns out to be a cool guy eventually liked by all and as his relationship with the family intensifies, more dysfunction follows.

An article in the British Guardian newspaper recently claimed “U.S. celebrities use reality cinema to fight power of gossip bloggers,” noting that the release of the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work will be closely followed by films focused on Carrie Fisher and Billy Joel. In the world of journalism three is, they say, a trend, but this new genre of moviemaking would be better evidenced if Lindsey Lohan or Mel Gibson were to open their doors to a camera crew.
The reality format is fascinating, and feeds human curiosity in a far healthier way than the grocery store tabloid route. In A Piece of Work, Rivers sets a high standard, doling out thought-provoking insights and self-analysis with such plain honesty that it is, at times, grueling to watch. She displays her relationship with her daughter, the enduring impact of the suicide of her husband over twenty years ago and her daily round of neuroses. Yet this whole person is much more interesting than anything we can create, more intriguing than her media persona. It’s easy to see how frustrating it would be dealing with decades of over-simplified and lazy public opinion that berates you for being angry, outspoken, female and old.

Angelina Jolie kicks ass! Angelina Jolie chucks hand grenades! Angelina Jolie doesn't adopt any kids or grimace with Brad Pitt! There you go; that's essentially what happens in Salt.
Apparently Tom Cruise dropped out of the project and the filmmakers rewrote this Salt thing for Jolie. Too bad, when a movie is this awful you sort of expect someone like Cruise to be in it. It used to be that when a plot was so luridly far-fetched it was a bad thing, but now we've been subjected to so much pedestrian crap that expectations have shifted. Opening up the potential floodgates with a PG-13 rating, mainstream filmmakers churn this stuff out and people unquestioningly accept it.

One of my personal problems with Facebook is that I have a lot of other reviewers as friends, meaning that when they see a movie long before its release, they often can't help but make their opinion known. One such friend, Ali Catterall, wrote of Inception: “It. Is. Awful. (I will, of course, be one of perhaps three critics offering this verdict. The rest of the lazy sheep can bleat all they like about its perceived triumphs.” And as I normally find myself agreeing with him – most recently about the rubbish-ness of Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland for example – I was readied to not like Christopher Nolan's follow-up to 2008's smash hit, The Dark Knight.
Sometimes when everyone says a movie is good, it's because it actually is, but experience tells us that blockbusters are rarely as exciting as their trailers suggest. The cause-effect graph states the more money spent, the more rubbish the story will be. Summer blockbusters also set a particular challenge for the reviewer, as essentially no one cares whether you like them or not, most will go regardless – unlike with a small independent film that you can potentially introduce to vast numbers, it would otherwise pass by.

Mark and Jay Duplass, the directing/writing team of the Puffy Chair (winner of Bend Film's Jury Prize in '05) and the offbeat horror comedy Baghead, venture out of super indie mumble-core mode to semi-mainstream mumble-core mode in their newest flick Cyrus. The signature style of the Duplass bros somewhat mesmerizing in Cyrus, mainly because it hasn't progressed, it just employs more recognizable actors.
John (John C. Reilly) is a big, goofy, disheveled, middle-aged loser who meets Molly (Marisa Tomei) at a party. Breaking all the dating rules, things move too fast and hit a wall when John encounters Cyrus (Jonah Hill), Molly's 21-year-old son still living at home who exudes heartfelt yet bogus politeness, undermining his hostility and resulting in an escalating war of wills with John.

Let's say – just hypothetically – that you're launching a production studio for computer-animated features. Your inaugural effort is going to lay the groundwork for the way audiences will think about your brand name. And you have at least a couple of models out there for how you could do things. Do you: a) focus intently on nailing a story with real emotional honesty and resonance, or b) find a familiar, time-worn premise that you don't have to think too much about, and then pack it full of gags?
It's not incredibly surprising to see Illumination Entertainment choosing option “b” for its debut feature, Despicable Me. DreamWorks Animation hasn't exactly gone broke looking to that paradigm, nor have other late-comers like Blue Sky who followed in those footsteps. But with the way Pixar has raised the bar on animated storytelling by preferring option “a,” you really need to nail the execution if you're going to trot out a concept that's been done and done and done again. And Despicable Me appears content to deliver something that's merely diverting.

The combo of Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Planet Terror) producing and Nimrod Antal (Kontroll, Vacancy) helming Predators, the latest installment in the dreadlocked-lizard-mantis-space-beasts franchise, sounded promising. With subject matter that's clocked in two features, two Alien crossovers, countless novels, video games and comic-book spin-offs, a spicy version seemed called for. What we get is a watered-down redux of the 1987 Schwarzenegger version with just a few twists.

Director M. Night Shyamalan became a Hollywood success with the hauntingly supernatural Sixth Sense in 1999 before stumbling badly with critical disappointments like The Village and The Happening, and now The Last Airbender, which again veers far from his earlier success. It doesn't help that he's hamstrung himself with the subject matter; this family-friendly adventure flick is based on a successful Nickelodeon animated TV series.
The story kicks into gear when the Fire Nation launches a brutal war, leaving Aang (Noah Ringer) caught between combat and courage. He soon discovers that he's the lone Avatar (not the blue, James Cameron kind of Avatar, though) with the power to manipulate all four elements. He teams up with brother and sister (Jackson Rathbone and Nicola Peltz) and a flying behemoth that looks like a big sheep to restore balance to their war-torn world.

Hundreds of pre-teen and teenage girls, moms, a few boyfriends (who were dragged kicking and screaming, no doubt) and a plethora of twenty-something's who know better than to love Twilight, but do anyway, stood in line outside of Old Mill 16 on Tuesday night for the midnight premier of The Twilight Sage: Eclipse. The weather gods decided to give us a taste of what Bella goes through while camping in the film with a chill. Not to that extreme, of course, but it is officially summer and I'm pretty sure it was warmer during the November 2009 debut of New Moon. But whatever, it was worth the wait and besides, as the Source Weekly's senior Twilight correspondent, it was my duty to be there.

Here is one of those movies that will make you want to go straight out and rent the rest of the writer-director's work. It will make you excited at the prospect of mining Nicole Holofcener's whole back catalogue, and wonder why you never took notice of her name before.
The thing is, she makes the kind of films that might have passed you by, as they did me, mostly because they sound like earnest, pseudo-intelligent weepies for women who want to bond and cry over the luxurious yet miserable lives of beautiful, sad accountants and lawyers. They have titles that suggest as much, like Friends with Money and Lovely and Amazing. These sound like movies that dupe people into thinking they are good, but really, they're not. They seem shifty and suspicious. Plus Holofcener's last film, Friends with Money, starred Jennifer Aniston, which in itself might be enough to put off some discerning moviegoers, even if it did also star Catherine Keener and Frances McDormand, it was Aniston's name that stood out and marked the movie with bad mojo.