Film

I was introduced to Shrek in two ways. First was the commercial hype and McDonald's toys. The next time was when I was painting a kid's room. I heard a lot of muffled cartoony chatter coming from another room along with laughter from kids. I also heard some cool music from the likes of The Eels, Joan Jett and, shockingly, John Cale. I thought that someone must've had some alternative radio show going at the same time, but there it was: really cool music attached to the childlike phenomenon called Shrek. I checked out the first one, it was sharp and witty with enough humor for adults and fun for kids. I checked out Shrek 2 for about five minutes, lost interest and by-passed Shrek the Third entirely. This time I was curious as to what they've come up with for the grand finale.

How many times and in how many mediums must we watch the saga of Robin Hood be botched? Among all the songs, movies, cartoons and TV shows, add one more with this boring one-note treatment of the band of not-so-merry men. Ridley Scott's Robin Hood is so hell-bent on remaining serious that it squishes the life out of itself. I guess the fact that no one wears tights at any point during this film is the first red flag.
This film is quite simply the longest intro in cinematic history – one long drawn-out prologue to set up how Robin Hood came to be. The plot drags on like a slow moving history lesson instead of an exciting, action-filled adventure. The mediocre opening battle sequence sets the tone for the remainder of this uninspired movie.

The Taylor Swift song “Love Story” plays over the trailer for this movie, and as Letters To Juliet reaches its climax, the lyrics “You'll be the prince and I'll be the princess/It's a love story, baby, just say yes” thunder out over scenes of rolling Italian fields. If you don't like that song, you won't like the film. It is packed with hackneyed one-liners about believing in true love, destiny and happy endings that sound much like the country singer's choruses.
Just as Swift finds it hard to imbue her songs with passion, sounding instead as though she were reciting the contents of her to-do list, this film plays out with little conviction. The actor's voices trail off at the end of their lines, fill spaces up with “hmmms” and “yeahs” and otherwise lack focus. Their eyes are always settled just off screen, like how trained animals concentrate on the treat-waving trainer. One imagines the stars' agents holding up plates of pasta and glasses of wine, willing their clients to make it through to the next scene. In a way we can't blame them, surrounded by beautiful scenery, making this movie must have seemed like a terrible way to ruin a perfectly good vacation.

What's the big deal about babies? I'm not especially fond of other people's babies and there's nothing more torturous than baby home movies. Seriously, what's so special about babies? Who gives a rat's ass unless they're your own? I don't get it.
The new documentary Babies cashes in on the cute and, hopefully, shared fact that we are all enchanted by life's beginning and how awesome it is to be born while surrounded by a bunch of shit we can't comprehend. Clearly I was assigned this movie as a cruel joke, but nothing prepared me for how truly bad this flick would be.

Looking back, the summer of 2008 seems like a very different time to that we're living in today. The first Iron Man movie was released pre-recession, before Obama, at the tale end of eight long years of George W Bush. It came out just before The Dark Knight, a film that in comparison looks so serious, pretentious even in its politically aware themes and grave discussion of our decaying morality. Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man makes Christian Bale as Batman look like a real bore. The Iron Man movies are rambunctious, playful fun. Even the sequel's very title, plainly Iron Man 2 with no posturing extrapolation, suggests the frivolity of the franchise.

When a wildly popular novel is adapted for the big screen, there are a few questions guaranteed to come up. For fans of the novel, they first want to know if the movie stays true to the story. Secondly, they are eager to know if the characters are as they imagined while reading the book. Unfortunately, I have not read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, so I cannot answer those questions.
The basis of the film is that 40 years ago, Henrik Vanger's (Sven-Bertil Taube) niece, Harriet, went missing. Henrik believes she was murdered, and by someone in their unpleasant-yet-tight-for-business-purposes family. Investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) comes onto the case per Henrik's request before he fulfills a three-month jail sentence after losing a libel case. Throughout his trial and investigation, Mikael had been tracked by a computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander.

Producer Michael Bay is on a murder spree. He is systematically slaughtering remakes of classic horror/slasher movies from the '70s and '80s, churning them out in slash-bang fashion. He has destroyed what was good about Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Last House on the Left, and Friday the Thirteenth and now, true to form, has lowered A Nightmare on Elm Street to new slice and dice depths of schlock and mediocrity.
Elm Street was created by Wes Craven (Hills Have Eyes, Scream) in 1984, franchised into nine slasher films and also spawned a television show, novels and comic books. In case you're from Mars, here's the plot: a group of teens suddenly share the same nightmare involving a scary guy in a tattered red-and-green-striped sweater and fedora. This serial killer/monster, Freddy Kruger, wielding a glove with knives as fingers is stalking and killing people in their dreams, resulting in their actual deaths. The wisecracking Freddy has a special motivation. His victims are the teenage children of a group of vigilante parents who hunted him down and burned him alive because he was a child molester.

The Joneses is Derrick Borte's first feature; he's otherwise an advertising man. The idea for this film originated in the contemporary trend in marketing which sees companies paying young, cool, attractive individuals to take their new product and go out into the world to sell it by “stealth” without admitting to being a salesman while bandying about the latest cell phone at a party. Here, Borte imagines what might happen if an advertising company hired a group of individuals to act as a family and sell clients' products to their wealthy friends and neighbors.

The Losers starts off with a laugh-inducing, somewhat jaw-dropping beginning that is guaranteed to take some steam out of the upcoming A-Team movie. Based on a DC comic book from the '70s written by Andy Diggle, and illustrated by Jock, I thought I might hate this cartoonish, nonstop action movie, but I have to admit that it's actually pretty darn amusing.

Kick-Ass is a goofy, mixed-up movie that examines what would happen if regular people became super heroes. I don't think this movie is sure what it is: teenage angst flick, revenge crime-stopper thriller or sensitive slice-of-life indie slacker comedy. But one thing is sure: Kick-Ass has tons of spurting blood combined with more than enough curse words to garnish an R-rating, plus an 11-year-old heroine using the “c” word and chopping off limbs like a ninja assassin. Basically this movie has its moments, but it's a mess.