Film

When will cinema stop being obsessed by sex? Sex scenes these days are so predictably present, and so predictable, they may as well start slotting in audience toilet breaks – just to keep it real. Do filmmakers still collectively think we have no clue what happens when naked people rub up against each other? On-screen relationships were much more interesting when actors had to keep one foot on the bedroom floor.
Humpday is a film obsessed by sex like a toddler is obsessed with presenting what they've done in their potty. To its credit, Humpday came out of the Sundance Film Festival, and hardly any DV-made, Sundance films actually make it to theatres. Film critics tend to believe people will see Transformers despite the reviews, but a small, independent film can be helped greatly by a good quote for the posters. Sad to say no such quote will be provided in these prudish paragraphs.

District 9 is much more than a sci-fi thriller. It's an engaging mockumentary infused with black humor, a scathing satire on 24-hour news, commentary on xenophobia, corporate greed and apartheid, and it's all wrapped up in a full-blown action movie.
So much work went into this movie that it's hard to believe it was made for only $30 million. At least 10 minutes of credits are given to post production special effects teams and yet the beauty of D-9 is that its high-tech soul comes across as low-tech believability.
The plot is a straightforward Stranger in a Strange Land. An alien spacecraft is marooned over Johannesburg, South Africa. After the starving aliens are rescued, a shantytown of corrugated metal shacks is constructed to house them, and over the next 28 years their population expands to 1.8 million. Segregation and cultural differences lead to increasing prejudice and violence between humans and aliens. The Predator-like creatures with spiny torsos and protruding mandibles are derogatorily referred to as “prawns” and treated as an underclass.

Julie & Julia is split in half to tell the true stories of the chef and author of Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, Julia Child, and aspiring writer Julie Powell, who wrote a popular blog about cooking all the recipes in that book over one year. But the problem is – only Child's half proves worthwhile. The portion of the film following Julia Child through her first French food experience and her life in Paris is colorful and energetic, given buoyancy by Meryl Streep's pitch-perfect performance and some beautiful backdrops. The half of the film detailing the period of Julie Powell's life in which she began chronicling her duck boning and sauce-stirring adventures is uninspiring and weighed down by a whiny, obnoxious characterization of the New York blogger that Amy Adams limps through lifelessly.
Meryl Streep does a very loveable, joyous turn as the eccentric chef that many remember most well from her 1970s and 1980s television series Julie Child & Company and Dinner At Julia's. With brilliant comic timing, she makes even her most over-the-top moments endearing. It's so good a performance that some of Streep's best lines are those muttered at the edge of scenes, suggesting when the cameras stopped rolling she just carried on in character. In all honesty, Child had the sort of personality that could have been a disaster when magnified on the big screen – shrill, grating – but Streep brings an undercurrent of genuine emotion to her wild gesticulations. Julia's marriage to Paul Child, played by Stanley Tucci, is convincing, with his adoring love for her helping along our own fondness.

A wise woman once told me that the older she got the more she tried to see the good in things rather than the easier route of criticizing everything. I have thought of that comment virtually every day since she said those words, but never more than while watching GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
The problem for me with this movie is not that it brings to life the Hasbro action figures first introduced in 1964 – that's kind of cool – but it does so with none of the freshness or originality of other similar efforts like Sin City or the humor and self-deprecation of the Superman franchise, or the passion of Iron Man. The creators bumbled a golden opportunity here to laugh at the effort itself, you know, the tongue-in-cheek stuff. There is nothing interesting about this effort and no humor to buoy the comic book dialogue. See the good.

The frequently used term “nail-biting” has never been more appropriate than to describe The Hurt Locker. Focused on a bomb squad assigned to dismantle IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in Baghdad circa 2004, the gritty realism and sheer tension of this movie sucks you in, hooks you and keeps you dangling the entire time.
Based on the true experiences of journalist Mark Boal, who spent time embedded with such a unit (Explosive Ordinance Disposal or EOD), Hurt Locker is not an Iraq war statement but rather an in-depth character study of addiction to risk and danger. It's also a classic study of men in combat and under stress that could have taken place anywhere, detailing strong characters thrown together in the harshest of times, forced to deal with each other's psychotic idiosyncrasies and insecurities.

Here we have proof that no matter how cool a movie looks, how dazzling the photography, how mesmerizing the score, how nail biting the suspense, there is no masking a stupid story. The Collector is one of those movies, and here's why…
Arkin (Josh Stewart) has problems. His wife owes a vague yet sufficiently large amount of cash to loan sharks, and his handyman job doesn't pay enough to help. It does get him into homes, however, and being an ex-con in cahoots with a robbery ring, he decides to steal a huge gem from the house he's been casing. All looks well and good, but as soon as he breaks into the home he finds that someone has beaten him to it. A masked creep has been torturing the family, and has booby trapped the house to the hilt. The burglar is faced with the moral dilemma of stealing, fleeing or saving the family. Escape is not going to be fun.

In Funny People we may have the delicious beginnings of a great collaborative team, Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow. The two, who were once roommates early in their respective careers, join forces here for the first time on the big screen (if you discount You Don't Mess With The Zohan, which Apatow evidently had some hand in writing) and the results are excellent.
This is the movie many fans of Sandler and costar Seth Rogan have been waiting for. Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Knocked Up were fun, uneven, and promising. And Zohan, of course, made Billy Madison look like high art. But both may be coming into a period of very good work. Funny People has higher goals than groin humor, though there's plenty of that if you're a south-of-the-border type. It seeks not only to tell a story, but the movie attempts to navigate some of life's more difficult regions like aging, facing death, and the issues surrounding the limits of friendship. And the movie dares to ask the question “What would you do if you got a second chance at life?”

The force is strong with this one. The 3D version of G Force may rightly be criticized
as mere eye candy, but if that's the case, then-somewhat surprisingly-it's
among the most opulent and luxurious eye candy we're likely to see this summer.
From the first technology-rich sequences, the 3D experience reminds us of what
it feels like to be a kid taking that first ride on Space Mountain: mouth
slightly agape, head tilted skyward and eyes fixed blissfully wide. And one
certainly gets the feeling this 3D pipeline is just getting started. But even
with our eyeballs having been dazzled, by the end of G Force, the magic
of this gimmick has worn off.

To get an idea of the landscape of G Force, think of
a Jason Bourne movie with guinea pigs as major characters. An affable human,
Ben, played with restraint by Zach (Hangover)
Galifianakis, heads an under-the-radar project employing guinea pigs and a
mole. I suspect that the opening sequence is riveting even without the 3D, but
with the effects it's positively mesmerizing.

She paints beautifully, Honey. And silly you thought she was trying to kill us!Opening with an over-the-top bloody delivery room dream sequence, Orphan shows some
promise. But soon, it quickly dissolves into the opening class session for
Formulaic Horror Moviemaking 101 with an insulting script destined to make you
roll your eyes about 50 times.

This insidious stab at the genre takes everything beyond
believability, losing any credibility almost immediately. A troubled wife (Vera
Farmiga) has demons to exorcise from her past revolving around the loss of her
daughter. With two kids already and the blessing of a worthless psychiatrist
(inadequately played by Margo Martindale), she and husband John (Peter
Sarsgaard) are off to an orphanage to pick smiling and lonely Esther (Isabelle
Fuhrman). Artistic, intelligent and world-savvy, Esther is no regular small
fry. Unconvincingly enamored, the couple takes the child home to ruin their
lives with one despicable act after another.  

Ten bucks says they fall in love, but with hilarious consequences.Twenty years ago-almost to the day-American moviegoers were introduced to Sally Albright in Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron's When Harry Met Sally. As played by Meg Ryan, she was a sunny but tightly-wound city girl who found a perfect foil in loosey-goosey misanthrope Harry Burns (Billy Crystal). Sally owed more than a little to Holly Hunter's Type-A, scheduled-crying-jag TV news producer Jane Craig in Broadcast News, but she became the standard bearer for a certain kind of romantic-comedy heroine, one we've already seen this summer in The Proposal: the sympathetic control freak.

The Ugly Truth arrives on this auspicious anniversary for the "rom-com" genre to remind us that it takes more than a list-maker with a pretty face to earn the "sympathetic" part of that character description. Katherine Heigl may be trying desperately to channel some Sally-and some Jane-into her performance, but that's not the same as giving an audience a reason to like her.
Heigl plays Abby Richter, whose occupation happens to be-watch out, Jane Craig!-a TV news producer. Overseeing a Sacramento morning show that's floundering in the ratings, she's also trying to find the perfect guy who will fit all the criteria on her checklist.