Film

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.

Whaddaya call this sport again? Cribbage?British comedian Stewart Lee has a skit in response to the Harry Potter franchise. To quote: "People come up to me and ask, 'Oh, did you read the new Harry Potter?' And I say, 'No I haven't read it, because I'm forty f***ing years-old, no, I did not read Harry Potter And The Tree Of NOTHING.'"

But point being, there is very little point to actually reviewing the latest Harry Potter movie. The franchise is a multi-billion dollar juggernaut, and the Hogwarts tales are so beloved across the world that the creators could probably turn out a shaky cell phone-made film of the cast drunkenly slurring through a script reading around a table at the Dog In The Pond pub in rural Sussex, with Daniel Radcliffe leaving for the bathroom half-way through not coming back, and it would still be a smash.
So, considering, it's fair that this multi-billion dollar juggernaut assumes that everyone has read the books, everyone has seen the movies and so proceeds to produce material based on this assumption. It sells. Well, this reviewer has not read the series, and has completely avoided anything more than a TV preview of the movies. Hell, this reviewer thought Harry Potter and Hermione Granger were a couple.

This is ground control to Major Bowie…your son directed this movie.The previews for Moon are misleading and for once that's a good thing. This is not a space-age horror/time-warp/psychological thriller, but rather a socio-politico commentary on the present, taking place in the not so distant future.

The film focuses on the psychological ramifications of cabin fever and the bleak outlook of the onset of cloning. Sam Rockwell plays two roles-a lone astronaut about to go home in two weeks, and his clone. Revealing the clone is no spoiler; It's all set up fairly early.
Beginning with a TV commercial touting Lunar Industries, a company that makes safer, cleaner air by harvesting moon rocks, Moon veers into strange territory almost immediately. Sam Bell (Rockwell) is the sole worker on a moon outpost, in charge of maintaining all the equipment, vehicles and the moon station itself. His only companionship is a beat-up, helper robot computer (reminiscent of 2001's HAL) named Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey). Gerty shuffles and glides around to assist Sam at every step. Resembling a dilapidated X-ray machine, with a "kick me" sticker on his back and a yellow smiley face on a video screen to exhibit his "emotions," Gerty provides comic relief-or does he? Deception and perhaps hallucinations come into play as Sam receives mail from his wife in the form of delayed video feeds thanks to a busted communications satellite. Sam has little interest in anything but going home. But soon, one thing after another goes wrong and Sam is face to face with a cloned version of himself. Their confusion (and consequently ours) becomes the main focus as to what's next on this planetary agenda.

Animal cruelty?At the opening night screening of Brüno at the Old Mill cinema no one walked out. Not the giggling groups of teenage boys, not those engaged in middle-aged man-dates, not the hand-holding couples, not even the lady who gasped, "Oh my god" at five-minute intervals. No, the entire audience sat stalwartly through the sexual equivalent of Saw V. The mechanical dildos, the swinging penis, the champagne bottle butt plug, the anal bleaching, it was all very well received.

I don't think we can discern whether the Bend community is inured to onscreen iniquity, jaded, or actually more liberal than previously thought. Yet, there were a handful of moments when the laughter disappeared, and the audience quieted to a nervous-coughing hush-and from these moments we can learn. There are some things that can still shock, that cannot be tolerated, and so instead of the article that we had in mind (Bend's Ten Biggest Walk-Out-of-Brüno Moments) here instead is… Bend's Six Biggest Though-We-Understand-We're-Watching-Brüno-We're-Not-OK-With-That Moments.
1. The souvenir severed foot of an African elephant retrieved from an airport luggage conveyor. The illegal procurement of animal limbs for novel umbrella stands is NOT okay with the people of Bend and will be met with a dire silence. An African baby arriving subsequently in a box marked "fragile," is, however, very funny. And, with "awws" everywhere, also quite cute. From this we presume Bend to be extremely environmentally friendly.

dances with the devil in the pale moonlight. Public Enemies is bound to score some real fans, but I am sure it will make its share of enemies as well. Director Michael Mann takes a true Depression-era crime story and interprets it with ultra-heavy handedness beyond any sense of realism. As an art/crime film, this is an impressive flick, but its brooding quality breathes hollow.

Rising from Indiana crime sprees to Public Enemy number one, John Dillinger was regarded as a latter-day Robin Hood. Robbing banks that had gotten fat while foreclosing on famiy farms. But Dillinger embraced his rock-star status, exuding bravado and charisma. Yet the film plays out in one somber moment after another, as if everyone was still reeling from The Depression and acting all…depressed.
Johnny Depp (playing Dillinger) brilliantly festers in a uniquely restrained performance. Depp has the ability to slide into whatever role he takes and it was nice to see him in one that didn't require an English accent. A sorely miscast Christian Bale, gives us a one-note performance as FBI agent Melvin Purvis, pensively staring into space. We see him slip in and out of accents covering maybe five different Southern regions. Captivating actress Marion Cotillard, as Dillinger's love Billie Frechette, does a good job with a poorly written part. Billy Cruddup is convincing and entertaining as J. Edgar Hoover. There's a veritable avalanche of cameos and appearances by recognizable actors and some really well picked unknowns. Still, most characters come off empty. I don't care how many cool handheld shots you surround them with, it's hard to care for any character at all.

Or we could shoot hoops?Woody Allen's filmmaking career has been like one long, good conversation. He knows that sometimes he's been talking to himself, with the audience acting as psychiatrist, nodding and saying, "I see" in the right places. But Whatever Works is Woody's second wind-after losing track of the conversation to stumble about woozily, searching for the right bases; he's returned to form with a very funny, very smart farce-like comedy that beats out Annie Hall for quotable witticisms.

His last film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is brilliant but our enthusiasm was wary, as we'd waited patiently asking of each six-monthly release, "Is this the one to get excited about?" The assumption was that he'd lost it, and so even though his most mediocre effort can be ten times better than most of what makes it onto the big screen, fun films like Anything Else got ignored. After seeing Whatever Works, you'll want to rent Vicky Cristina Barcelona, to watch it through without holding your breath.
Filmmaking is Woody Allen's way of life, and the day he wraps one film he begins to pull together the next and as he travels from country to country. Whatever Works is as much about his place in Hollywood as it is about our place in the universe. While critics complain scripts restrict his actors, to merely impersonating Allen. This time around he cast Larry David for the central character, Boris Yellnikoff – a natural fit given that David's HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm is the illegitimate child of Allen's comedy stand-up.