Culture

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.