Culture

Miguel Arteta (Chuck and Buck, Youth in Revolt) deserves credit for being the only director to yank a decent performance out of Jennifer Aniston in the past decade with The Good Girl. In Cedar Rapids, he provides a straightforward story about a fictional Wisconsin town, Brown Valley, and the heroic turn of its dweeb insurance man, Tim Lippe (Ed Helms), who is sent to Cedar Rapids to represent his company at a convention. Lippe soon finds himself mixed up with three veterans of the convention circuit.
Simplistic to the hilt with real-life scenarios, Rapids is not a wacky comedy, but a heartfelt look at a man doing right no matter how messed up things get. Like Fargo, we find corruption amidst the small-time wheeling and dealing – only sans the wood chipper.

The Adjustment Bureau is a sci-fi action thriller, love story and parable all rolled into one and writer/director George Nolfi combines all the elements to tell a somewhat balanced story.
Based on Phillip K. Dick's 1954 short story, “Adjustment Team,” about an insurance salesman who learns that he's a puppet on a string controlled by a clandestine organization. Writer/director George Nolfi, who also penned The Bourne Ultimatum screenplay, has made considerable, ahem, adjustments to the story, though it looks like the business suits (especially the hats) are holdovers from Dick's era.

Here's the irony of motion-capture animation, one that Mars Needs Moms only serves to reinforce: For a technology that's intended to make animated humans look more real, it sure hasn't been used to tell stories that are more human.
When Robert Zemeckis pioneered the idea for a feature-length film in The Polar Express in 2004, plenty of critics picked on the creepy-looking characters with their hollowed-out mouths. But even as Zemeckis fine-tuned the technology for Beowulf and A Christmas Carol, the narratives themselves remained remote and uninvolving. Always a filmmaker fond of his state-of-the-art toys, Zemeckis focused almost entirely on what he could do with this particular approach to visual storytelling, forgetting that somewhere along the line, he needed to have us care about what was happening to these strange-looking people.