Culture

Expectations are understandably high for The Informant! since Warner Brothers has spent a fortune placing pop-up ads and television spots virtually everywhere. It has been extraordinarily difficult over the last month to avoid the nerdy image of Matt Damon in the title role of Mark Whitacre.
But the finished product stands up to the scrutiny. I'd read it's like A Beautiful Mind meets The Insider. And that's not bad, of course. Director Steven Soderbergh's prodigious and excellent body of work cuts him plenty of slack. Michael Clayton, Syriana, and Oceans 11 and 13 alone would command our respect, but he's also responsible for Traffic, Erin Brockovich, and Sex, Lies, and Videotape.

The first line of Jennifer's Body is, “Hell is a teenage girl.” Let me rephrase: “Hell is enduring a teenage girl/demonic possession movie written by Diablo Cody.”
The film features the same producers as Juno, but brings into the fold director Karyn Kusama (Girlfight) and it seems this group is slapping themselves on the back for how clever they think they are. Suffocating from Cody's overly wordy and relentlessly self-conscious narrative, this flick is an exercise in extreme futility. It's OK if one character talks like a wiseacre (as in Juno) but when every character has essentially the same smart-aleck voice, it rings untrue and loses its punch. Real people do not talk this way… ever.

With a slew of horror movies saturating the market lately the genre is getting overworked. Initially, Sorority Row follows almost all the '70s drive-in rules but then morphs into cheesy wisecrack one liners, a trait started in the late '80s when horror flicks took a turn for the worse with tongue-in-cheek horror clichés.
With an opening zoom into a house party replete with naughty dancers wearing butt-exposing jammies bouncing on a trampoline, you know you're in for a treat of some sort. This re-make of the House on Sorority Row more resembles I Know What You Did Last Summer even though it claims to be based on a screenplay called Seven Sisters.

Charlyne Yi is the kind of girl you'd like to be friends with, meet for dinner on the weekend and hear her observations on LA life. She is not, however, the kind of girl to follow around with a camera. Nor, despite my affection, would this reviewer turn up on her doorstep one day and stalk her for several months with said camera in the hope that such a tactic might secure that regular weekend meet-up and a lifelong friendship. But Paper Heart does just that; it's a tireless stalker of a movie.

The recent cloudy, windy afternoons and crisp cold evenings have awakened the sleeping bear of desire. The ski and board shops on Century Drive are restocked with the year's new gear and dumping their old inventory in Labor Day sales.