Reviews

This movie has no message, no deep meaning, no pretensions at all. It is simple entertainment, with a few wry plot twists to keep you guessing and a really wonderful cast of characters.

To start with, Anna Kendrick's character Martha is just eccentric enough when she first appears that you can easily imagine her zaniness turning cheerfully violent in the end. And indeed it does. Martha is the sort of person who, bound and gagged, can't stifle her giggles at the absurdly macho kidnappers she's about to kill.

Sam Rockwell, as a practically invincible hit man, somehow senses that Martha shares his superpower (for lack of a better word) and opens the door to it for her just enough to enable her to join him. He is in fact her Mr Right, and she is his perfect match.

You find out your girlfriend has been cheating on you. You start quizzing her about it. You want not only number of times but when, where, what specific acts did they perform, everything. Your obsession with it is so intense that you start to sound a little bit not right in the head. You just won't let it go.

Now, imagine this conversation takes place while you and your girlfriend are both bound and bloody, and waiting for a couple of maniacs to grind you up into human fertilizer in a giant meat-grinder. That's how crazy this movie is. I especially loved the Aussie country music, which is every bit as goofy as you'd expect.

I have no proof of this, but I suspect the movie was inspired by an Ambrose Bierce story called "Oil of Dog."

Imagine, if you will, Catherine Keener bending over a sink for whatever reason. Imagine a mournful solo cello noodling away on the soundtrack. Now imagine Catherine Keener snapping photos of Sicily (which, it turns out, is a sh*thole) or of various fashionably grungy Middle Eastern types. Minimalist synthesizer noise on the soundtrack. Now she's back at the sink. Now taking snapshots. Ear-splitting vocal on the track. Now the sink.

Regarding the spoiler alert: there is no plot. That's the spoiler.

Regarding the music: we all love music, right? I love music, too. But the music on the soundtrack made me want to run twin power drills into my ears.

If you've read much H.P. Lovecraft you will understand this movie. There is a race of Ancient Gods, or Great Old Ones, or whatever, lurking just underneath our perception. They are "dead but dreaming" down there, waiting for the moment when they will be released to rule, or kill, the human race. There is a cult of humans trying to keep the Ancient Gods down, or perhaps trying to release them. Some poor soul says the wrong words and releases one of the Great Old Ones. Use your bloodiest imagination to fill in the rest. It's all rather nonsensical, but if you suspend your disbelief for a few pages you will lose sleep over it. If you are young and impressionable it might scare the crap out of you.

What this movie does is to techify Lovecraft's idea and then take it further than Lovecraft himself ever took it. It's not pretty.

If your idea of a good time is watching people sitting at a table talking, with the sound so bad it sounds like it was filtered though a garbage can, and the talk is nonsensical and pretentious at the same time, then this one is for you. We found if you turn the sound off, it's boring beyond belief. If you leave the sound on, it's also boring beyond belief. Fast-forward it, it's boring. Leave the room altogether, it's still boring.

Okay seriously, if you died and found that in the afterlife you had control over physical phenomena and could make lights flicker and loud noises happen, could you even be bothered with such things? Well, actually, yes you could, if you were an asshole. In fact, that's the message of this movie: asshole in this life, asshole in the next. For you, the hereafter is an eternal state of excruciating insanity, to quote a famous writer.

Good! But if you're gonna make a movie about it, at least try and have a few good scenes, nice special effects, something. Don't, I beg you, for the zillionth time think you can get away with depicting a ghost as an attractive but obviously demented young woman (you know she's crazy because her hair is a mess) who crawls toward you across the floor. Or the ceiling, in this case.

Buncha dottie oldsters troop out to the woods naked or in masks and bed sheets and perform silly rituals that sometimes involve suicide or bloodshed. They need to crown a new murder-king, so they recruit a couple of semiretired hit men to prove their prowess. The hit men don't know what's happening to them and, being good hit men, don't ask. Same goes for the audience (except, apparently, for the know-it-alls who write IMDb reviews) who sit there in the dark, trusting that something interesting will eventually happen.

I have to confess, I love pagans and wiccans and throwback cultists in general, New Age and Old Age both. Adding them to a seemingly routine gangster movie can only make for a better gangster movie, at least for me. In this case, the "reveal" at the end, where the psychotically nasty gangster is crowned as the new prince of the pagans/wiccans/Druids/whatever, thus showing that he'd been their unwitting recruit all along, might've been more interesting to me than it will be to you, judging from the unhappy tone of some of the reviews here. And even I, closet pagan that I am, lost interest in the gangster part of this movie, with its low-budget mayhem and its incomprehensible accents. By the time the bed-sheeted and straw-masked crazies made their appearance, my first thought was how invitingly combustible their outfits looked. Plus all those torches! If I'd been that hit man I don't think I could've resisted.

Movies that start with stylized cartoons and breezy music over the opening credits already have two strikes against them. I mean, haven't we outgrown Doris Day and Rock Hudson? And this is not even Doris Day and Rock Hudson, it's Jennifer Lopez and some guy selected to be less famous than Jennifer Lopez. When they're on-screen together you look at Lopez - impeccably coiffed, dressed and made up, obviously rolling in money in real life and no longer able to play it down - and then you look at the poor guy - boring, shabby, boring, awkward, boring - and you just roll your eyes.

The Back-up Plan is about a plucky middle-aged woman (and how sad is that?) who wants a baby but can't find a guy. So she gets pregnant and THEN finds a guy, through the tritest series of stock misadventures you ever saw. It's as if somebody dropped one of those instant screenplay kits on the floor and just went with it.

This is one of those if-anything-can-go-wrong-it-will romantic comedies. If there's a plane, it won't take off; if there's a car, it'll break down in the middle of nowhere; if there's a train, the heroine will miss it. This simple-minded fun wears very thin very quickly.

What I found even more offensive was the long list of stereotypes the movie presents as truth - the Irish are not terribly bright, they drink too much and they love to fight. They are also terminally colorful, with boatloads of goofy mannerisms and mumbled Gaelic weirdness. They are impossibly rude to lost Americans, at whom the men point and laugh like mean girls. Even their dogs are mean.

One thing this movie gets completely wrong is the Boston Irish girl played by Amy Adams. Apparently, the writers think Boston Irish are a stuffy, humorless race of gingers who never joke about anything and never realize they're being teased. Also, she sounds like she grew up in Colorado. (I'm told Matthew Goode's Irish accent is all wrong, too.)

There is some lovely authentic-looking scenery, which earn 5 stars for this movie.

If the young-hottie-inexplicably-f*cks-ugly-old-guy theme of this movie reminds you of "The Human Stain," that would be because they are both based on novels by Philip Roth, who evidently either has been chronicling *someone's* use of literary celebrity (Library of America editions already!) to get awestruck girls into bed, or else enjoys writing out his harmless fantasies about same. In either case, who can blame him?

It does make for some "Oh, please" moments, but this movie is somewhat better than "The Human Stain" because it is a real love story. The ugly old guy actually falls in love with the young hottie; he breaks off the relationship because the problems presented by the 30-year difference in their ages seem insurmountable to him, only to find out two years later that the young hottie was in love with him all along, not merely an infatuated young lit-groupie.

Sadly, the movie solves the age-difference problem by giving the young hottie breast cancer, which, as she puts it, now makes her feel like the older one. This shamefully simple-minded plot twist supposedly makes the two of them a little bit closer in the looks department (but not really - I mean, it's Penelope Cruz vs Ben Kingsley), deprives the ugly old guy of one of the young hottie's breasts that he loved so much by way of punishment for being such a lecher, and, in the worst case, might put them on their death beds at about the same time. Problem solved, if you're a senile writer or a heartless filmmaker, but it leaves a very, very bad taste in the viewer's mouth.

Ben Kingsley is quite good in this, as is the always-likable Dennis Hopper in an uncharacteristic role as a dispenser of sane advice (which turns out to be wrong). And, of course, Penelope Cruz spends a lot of time topless. Our final glimpse of her breasts comes when she asks Ben Kingsley to photograph them before her mastectomy. It is meant to be the elegiac scene that gives the movie its title, but there is something embarrassing and almost laughable about it, as if the writer's fantasies finally run away with him. (In fairness to Roth, I am told the novel ends differently.) If I had written it, it probably would have been about getting a last glimpse of a woman's double-D's before she has breast reduction surgery to relieve her backaches, so it's all relative, isn't it?

A woman who is not your wife - a slightly unhinged temp at your company - follows you into the men's room at the Christmas party and tries to go down on you. You are happily married. Even though you are slightly drunk, you are in control of yourself enough to leave her there and go home to your wife and son, whom you love very much. Question: What do you do first thing the next business day? Unless you're a complete moron, you go straight to Human Resources, relate the incident as best you can, and let them deal with it, right? Well, in this simple-minded piece of junk, the characters are all - ALL, without exception - morons.

"Obsessed" is basically an adolescent guy's fantasy of how awesome it would be to be married to Beyonce Knowles and to be stalked by Ali Larter at the same time - and, to be noble enough to Do The Right Thing. It is "Fatal Attraction" for the new millennium, when Hollywood no longer knows how to write, produce, direct, act or anything else that makes a movie watchable. I mean, the stalker actually slips the stalkee a mickey at one point! Seriously!

This is an unwatchable movie, and everyone who had anything to do with it should be ashamed.

We were chatting the other day about the movie "Married Life" and how much we love Rachel McAdams in it, and gradually we realized that we love Rachel McAdams in everything we've ever seen her in. My daughter even went so far as to call McAdams her favorite actress ever. And then we saw her in this embarrassing clunker and it all came back -- she is literally the only good thing in it. And she is very good indeed.

The movie, alas, is not so good. It's filled with clichés, farcical, pseudo-emotional. It's a chick-flick-wannabe and it fails even at that. All of which makes McAdams' performance the more amazing, being set, as it has to be, against a cast of hopelessly bad actors trapped in a terrible script. I mean, you know when the pater- and materfamilias are Craig T. Nelson and Diane Keaton (who, naturally, is diagnosed with terminal cancer halfway through) and when one of their children is both deaf and gay (haven't those two minorities suffered enough?), and one of the characters - it doesn't really matter which one - is played by the unwatchable Sarah Jessica Parker - well, then you know you have serious problems.

But Rachel McAdams, who is forced to transform from acid-tongued meanie to repentant goodgirl, somehow manages to shrug off the unpleasantness and deliver a performance so convincing, so professional, that it brings tears to your eyes at precisely the moment when the less critical members of the audience are reaching for their third hankies.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

These scuzzball horror flicks share the same handful of shopworn techniques and stock characters. In this case, there are the dimly lit interiors and nocturnal exteriors, the cartoonish "urban" black guy, the cute but ditzy starlet-wannabe, the noble Native American, the don't-mess-with-me hardass, the alarmed scientist nobody listens to until it's too late, the "Alien" ripoff monster, the interminable and absolutely pointless conversations and creeping around cluttered sets -- and, last but not least, one character who's gone all guilty and depressed and alcoholic over some mistake he or she once made, and who, we have to admit, would probably be better off dead. In this movie, it's ***************SPOILER ALERT*************** the lady sheriff, whose flashbacks about the little girl she accidentally killed make it very clear that she will sacrifice herself in the end to kill the monster and save her friends. Which she does. The scientist and the ditzy blond survive, everyone else is killed. And most of the time when there's a sudden noise and everyone spins around and points their guns at it, it's just one of the other characters tripping over something. Also, I think it has something to do with nuclear testing (it takes place in New Mexico), so it's kind of a Godzilla movie underneath it all. There, now you don't have to see it.

In professional wrestling matches, at least in the good old days, there would come a moment when the "good" wrestler, the "clean" guy who would never engage in "illegal" moves, after having been put through 10 minutes of excruciating pain by his "bad" wrestler opponent who has no such scruples, far from being permanently disabled as you would expect, finally gets fed up and decides not to take it anymore. With one swift but satisfying drop-kick, he turns the tables and proceeds to deliver a humiliating trouncing to the bad guy as the fans scream approval.

That, in a nutshell is the plot of this movie. Only instead of 10 minutes it lasts for -- I don't know, it felt like 3 or 4 hours but I guess it was only about 90 minutes. The acting is nonexistent, the plot is stupid, the special effects are laughable, and the whole thing is so badly lit you get a headache squinting at it. The only use I can think of for this movie is as a safe and effective alternative to sleeping pills. Some of the talkier sections are that boring.