Big Fan Disturbingly Acute

"I can't tell you how sick I am," Paul Aufiero (Patton Oswalt) first says at the beginning of the new dark drama, Big Fan. Though he is doing nothing more than scribing his hatred for the Philadelphia Eagles in this opening scene, he becomes stuck on this sentence, repeating this one phrase. "I can't tell you how sick I am." "I can't tell you how sick I am." These words encapsulate Paul's being, perfectly setting the film's tone and preparing the viewer for an in-depth exploration into this twisted individual.

Paul loves the New York Giants. He attends every home game, tailgating and fraternizing with the Giants community, but can't afford the tickets, so he sits in the parking lot and watches the games on television, pretending he is actually in there with the crowd. His life revolves around the team and he periodically calls into a radio show to praise them. One night, he sees his favorite player, Quantrell Bishop, at a gas station and follows him to a strip club. When he approaches Bishop and reveals that he has been tailing him all night, Bishop beats him to a bloody pulp, hospitalizing him. The controversy surrounding the attack causes Bishop to be suspended from playing, but Paul, being the big fan that he is, refuses to press charges or testify against Bishop because he fears his arrest will put the season on the line.

Big Fan is a dark character study, brilliant at times, haunting at others, but always entertaining. What some movies of a similar style do is chicken out at the end and twist a happy ending out of an overall grim picture (look no further than Wristcutters for proof), but not this one. It follows through with its gloom until the bitter end with a climax that is ingenious and unpredictable, never outstretching its credulity, but walking that fine line exquisitely, with Paul carrying out a final act that seems perfectly realistic of his character.

Paul works at a parking garage, confined in a small box, desolate and alone, which is parallel to his mental state. He is trapped in his own head, living a life that doesn't exist and pretending to be somebody he imagines, not the person he is. He even has homosexual tendencies that he can't seem to properly define.

After his late night calls to the radio show, he becomes instantly aroused upon hanging up the phone and begins to pleasure himself. Later, when Bishop becomes ineligible to play, his arousal weakens. Without the thought of Bishop trounching his opponents, he becomes impotent and unable to masturbate. Earlier at the strip club, a stripper approaches him. Although he humors her with monosyllabic banter, he barely even looks at her, keeping his eyes focused on the sports star.

After he is assaulted and Bishop is forbidden to play, Paul loses sleep, not because he is traumatized from the attack, but because his ineligibility is causing the Giants to lose games. Like a wife beaten by her abusive husband, he believes he is at fault. With his team falling apart and his mental state weakening, he slips on Bishop's jersey, cuddles up on his bed and cries. Paul loves Bishop and finds no fault in what he has done.

Big Fan is poignant, immensely entertaining and extremely well done. Though no element outshines another, with each facet of its design working as just another cog in a well oiled machine, the film would mean nothing without a good lead and Patton Oswalt brings the goods. Not a follower of any sport in real life, Oswalt slips into Paul's shoes comfortably, ably exploring the emotional distraught of the character and mental feebleness that is keeping him confined in his own fictional world. His performance is extraordinary and I can't wait to see him in his next dramatic role.

Paul is a scary guy, an unforgettable enigma who is not easily definable to the average viewer because he can't even define himself. He is a 30-something year old man working at a dead end job who still lives with his mother and has a homoerotic fixation to a star football player. By taking such a common persona, a sports fan, and turning him into a disturbed, neurotic individual, Big Fan effectively explores the inner turmoil of somebody who lives vicariously through others in order to shield himself with a false comfort. It is in its unflinching desire to show the true face behind all of the red and blue paint that Big Fan succeeds.

Big Fan receives 4.5/5

Fame a Good Hearted Flop

If there is one thing I cannot fault a movie for, it is its ambition. Watching a movie attempt to carry out a difficult task is admirable, but more often than not, that ambition leads to failure. Fame is no different. What this film tries to do is take 10 kids and give them each their own stories within the overarching story, but ends up creating links where none exist and emotion that hasn't been established. Though I have not seen the original Academy Award winning 1980 film, it's safe to say that the new Fame does not live up to its namesake.

The problem with detailing the story here like I usually do is that there are so many unexplored mini-stories within it and doing so would take way too long to type. As a brief summary, the movie begins with hopeful students auditioning to get into New York's School of Performing Arts. Among the acceptees are Jenny (Kay Panabaker), Marco (Asher Book), Victor (Walter Perez), Malik (Collins Pennie), Denise (Naturi Naughton) and Alice (Kherington Payne). Upon entering the school, Jenny and Marco meet each other and start a relationship, as do Victor and Alice. Meanwhile, Victor joins up with Malik and Denise to form a hip hop band.

Out of all of the stories in the movie, of which there are many, the two relationships and the band are the three most important for this review. Why? Because they are all major components and they all have fundamental flaws. The kicker is that the flaws are largely the same.

Here is what I mean. Fame sports 10 characters (by my count; perhaps even more) and none of them are given the chance to grow. By attempting to juggle so many different stories and emotions and hardships, it completely misses the boat on everything. Some could have been interesting, namely Jenny and Marco's budding relationship, but they don't get the time that they need to be fully fleshed out.

At one point in the movie, Marco asks Jenny out on a date and she accepts. At the date, they hit it off and the scene ends with the implication that they are now together. This was a great scene, Marco serenading Jenny with a beautiful song on piano, but it ends too abruptly and moves on, skipping forward to their junior year. The film never knew when it had something going for it and flies right by its most interesting aspects. I would have loved more screen time for these two to see the ups and downs of their relationship so I could truly understand their feelings for each other, but the next thing you know, they've broken up. It skipped ahead a year showing little in between the sparking romance and its decline.

Similar to this is Victor and Alice's relationship, which receives even less time than Marco and Jenny, so little that I forgot they were together in the first place. The culmination of their time together onscreen totals about, oh, I don't know, 10 seconds (no joke) before the break up scene. Alice decides to follow her dreams, which leaves Victor alone and heartbroken, or at least you would think so. The next scene shows him playing the piano, smiling and having a grand old time. He doesn't seem to care. If he doesn't, why should I? To care about characters, they need screen time. It's as simple as that and it's a fact. It is a movie after all. It's hard to care about something that isn't seen and never explored.

Then there are the times when you aren't even aware of the status of the characters. In the case of the hip hop band, there is a moment in the movie where they start to get some recognition from a music company. However, they are only interested in Denise, not the entire group. Victor and Malik get angry, storm out and the scene ends. The next time you see all three together is late in the movie backstage before a concert. What is unclear is whether the guys have made peace with being kicked to the curb and are there supporting Denise or if Denise turned down the deal and stuck with them. Until they all get onstage and perform their song, it's ambiguous. Ambiguity can be a helpful tool in films because it allows for different interpretations, but that is usually after the movie is over and you are reflecting back on it. Fame's ambiguity stems from poor writing.

Take for example, Jenny's evolution as an artist. When the movie starts, she can't act, she can't sing, and she can't play an instrument. It's a wonder she made it into the school at all. Near the end, the characters begin to talk about her talent, though we are still yet to see it at this point. It isn't until the final self gratifying final sequence that Jenny shows her chops in any artistic field. Fame simply does a bad job of creating even the most basic of storylines.

What it all boils down to is that the film has no structure. It jumps from character to character and storyline to storyline so much that no real flow is established. It's not so much a narrative as it is a collage of after school specials rolled into one. To be fair, the songs are good and the performance/dance sequences are genuinely impressive, but the whole is lacking. It takes more than a few catchy song and dance numbers to make an engaging movie. Fame has a good heart and means well, but its failure to carry out the simplest of tasks prevents it from flourishing.

Fame receives 1.5/5

Pandorum a Mediocre Homage

Looking at the myriad of posters that were released for the new film Pandorum, one might think that it actually has some merit. They promised ingenuity. They promised scares. They promised intrigue. But it delivered nothing. Pandorum is all missed opportunities. The filmmakers landed Dennis Quaid, a terrific actor (sans G.I. Joe and the straight to DVD thriller, Horsemen), and keeps him locked in a room by himself for the majority of the movie. They create a huge ship with plenty of areas to explore, but make each corridor more generic and boring than the last. They create monsters that are so derivative of other, better movies that I'm almost positive they were stolen directly from the excellent 2005 horror flick, The Descent. There is potential in Pandorum, though little is realized.

The film takes place a couple hundred years in the future and things are looking bleak. As time went by, Earth's population continued to grow as its resources continued to dwindle. Tanis, the only other known planet similar to Earth that can sustain life, seems to be mankind's only hope. With no plans to journey back to Earth, a ship called the Elysium takes thousands of people and species and embarks on this journey. Onboard, Bower (Ben Foster) has just woken up in a cryostasis chamber and has amnesia, an unfortunate side effect from his extended period of hyper sleep. His superior, Payton (Dennis Quaid) awakens shortly after and they realize something is wrong with the ship. The problem is that they can barely remember their names, much less their purpose on the vessel. As Bower makes his way through the halls to fix what he hopes is only a technical complication, he encounters other survivors as well as a strange group of creatures who have taken over the ship.

Pandorum, like many movies these days, is a mediocre effort that produces mediocre results. It borrows heavily from other films like Event Horizon and Alien, even going so far as to downright steal one of its most tense scenes, but leaves no shred of originality. It doesn't so much feel like its own movie as it does an homage to other ones. Paying respect to other genre films is fine, but you've got to create a quality product around it and Pandorum doesn't. It holds the conventions of sci-fi horror in such high fidelity that you would barely be able to tell the difference between this one and others had it not been so bland and predictable.

Part of its banality stems from its laziness to create a convincing and ambient environment for the characters to probe. As evidenced by the first shots in Alien that wander through the corridors of the Nostromo, building an atmospheric ship is essential to any sci-fi horror film set in space. That ship had enough original, distinguishable features to make what would eventually become a terrifying deathtrap. By showing the initial calmness in its features, it made the impact of the alien presence unbearably scary. Pandorum doesn't have that realistic feeling that made Alien such a visceral experience.

Like the hit Fox show, 24 (and the hilarious South Park episode that spoofed it), much of Pandorum's dialogue consists of intense whispering that stresses urgency, or as Cartman put it, "Whispering really loudly for dramatic effect." Most of this loud whispering comes in the form of generic sci-fi banter like, "We're the only ones here," later followed by a "We're not alone," when they realize their previous statement was wrong.

As you would expect from a film as commonplace as this one, it has a ridiculous amount of jump scares that quickly become annoying. It's the type of movie where a character approaches a body in the darkness, but inexplicably points his flashlight towards the ground so the music can jump in and hopefully get you with its "Boo!" moment, which almost never works, partly because you simply can't see what is happening.

Along with the frantic camera movements, the cuts came fast and furious, not to the same extent as the recent Gamer, but crazy nonetheless. But unlike Gamer, Pandorum is very dark and if you combine that with the shaky camera technique and quick cuts, it becomes nearly impossible to see what is going on during some of its pivotal horror scenes.

Pandorum refers to the insanity one can experience by being in deep-space for long periods of time. Its symptoms include paranoia and hallucinations which eventually lead the sick person to murder the people around him. The disappointment in that narrative tool comes from how interesting it could have been. As Bower ventured throughout the ship, it would have been great to see him battle the symptoms, delving into his weakening mental state and providing some creepy imagery, but its only significance comes from the final twist, a twist that really isn't all that impressive because the events leading up to it are so dull.

Though credit must be given to Ben Foster, who has given superb performances in everything from the underrated Hostage to 3:10 to Yuma, the overall outcome of Pandorum pales in comparison to its genre brethren it holds in such high regards.

Pandorum receives 2/5

Surrogates a Mindless Drone

Being a movie lover and having a fervent passion for writing about them means that I have to sit through a lot of crap, but rarely is one so utterly terrible that I feel like I've just been slapped in the face by the metaphorical hand of fate, mocking my affection for a medium as uneven as the movies. Few this year have built up a hatred so strong that I give them one of my two lowest scores, but here we are in late September and I'm being forced to dole out another one to the truly awful Surrogates. Having seen it, I can now safely say that I wish I could have sent a surrogate to watch it for me.

Over a decade ago, a powerful company created a line of robots called surrogates that could be controlled through thoughts. It was a breakthrough in technology and as the years went by, people saw the benefits of owning a surrogate. Racism was practically stopped overnight and crime went down to less than 1%. The world seemed a better place with the arrival of these machines and the public quickly latched onto them. Now, the world is overrun by surrogates. Outside of one group of rebellious humans who refuse to own one, everybody lives their lives through these machines. They go to work, do their errands and have their fun all by lying in a chair in their rooms and controlling them with their minds. Part of the appeal of using a surrogate is that the person is always safe. If their surrogate is hurt, they remain unharmed. But a mysterious weapon has emerged that fries the surrogate while also, somehow, killing the host who is back home. FBI agent Greer (Bruce Willis) is put on the case to stop this weapon from taking more innocent lives.

From what I could tell based on the information in the movie, people have become so accustomed to using surrogates that they barely leave their rooms anymore, much less their homes. Even spouses only spend time with each other through the use of their surrogates, which begs the question, how do they reproduce? Are they not worried about extinction? Naturally, not a single child is seen throughout the movie other than in an area with humans who do not use surrogates. And what about obesity? Does the exercise the surrogate gets translate back to the human sitting idly in his or her chair? If not, why is everybody so thin?

The film never answers these questions, or even cares to. It barely even plays by its own set of rules. Though the movie clearly states that the surrogate has all the senses a normal human would have, including touch, how it works is unclear. If the surrogate is walking, it feels to the host like they actually are. If they are in physical contact with something, it's as if the host was physically there touching it. They are supposed to feel what their surrogates feel. But if they get punched in the face, they just laugh. If they get hit by a car, they merely look confused. They don't feel the pain despite feeling everything else, which makes no sense because believe me, if you got hit by a car, you would feel it.

Then there's the case of the surrogates randomly and inexplicably gaining superhuman abilites, jumping absurd distances and effortlessly hurdling over cars, which again is contradictory to the film's own mythology. The surrogates act at the will of the human controlling it and are supposed to act normally, but those moves are certainly not normal. When did everyone become an Olympic athlete? Don't even get me started on the use of surrogates as objects of war, which makes about as much sense as a Kamikaze pilot wearing a helmet.

Keep in mind that there are more problems with the movie than just its ridiculous story and failure to make any sense of its own rules. The characters, at least in surrogate mode, are emotionless and boring; a decision assumedly made on purpose by the filmmakers to show that there is no life in the machines. What I want to know is how this company has the technology to build robots that walk the world controlled by the thoughts of their owners, but doesn't have the technology to support a smile. I would say that watching the surrogate characters "act" is about as fun as watching paint dry, but that would be doing a disservice to drywall.

Surrogates is a terrible movie that ranks among Bruce Willis' worst. Does it make a statement about humanity and how we are increasingly letting technology control our lives? It sure tries. Although admittedly a good message to hear, the movie surrounding it is a complete mess, causing the message to get lost in the shuffle of its endless stupidity.

Surrogates receives 0.5/5

Tucker Max Feature Story

(I had the chance to sit down about a month ago to conduct an in-person interview with Tucker Max, writer of the hit book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell and its film counterpart, which you can read my review of by clicking here. Instead of doing a simple question and answer story, I decided to write a feature story on him using the best quotes I received. This story was originally published in the August 31, 2009 issue of Broadside.)

It is a warm spring night. A young man, no more than 30 years old, goes out on the town looking only for a good time. At a local bar, he meets a young woman, a fan of his now infamous website, tuckermax.com. After many rounds of alcohol, he winds back at her place for a night of sexual debauchery. As his lady friend makes it to the bathroom, the bar events prior do not bode well with his stomach, so he does what any normal person would do. He pulls her bed back and vomits under it, coyly hiding it from her, only to have her dog eat it up. Apparently, something doesn’t bode well in the dog either, though the contents of its stomach pour out in a decidedly different manner, producing an unlikely string of events that allow him to pass all the blame for the merciless smell onto the poor little yuppie.

It’s just another day in the life of Tucker Max, author of the New York Times bestseller, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. What began as a simple detailing of the crazy events in his life has now become a nationwide phenomenon and has, perhaps inevitably, spawned a movie.

The book is an anthology of short stories written like blog posts to mirror his online writing style, but is a structure that is not easy to translate well into a feature length narrative. “The movie is a fully fleshed out, realized story. It was hard at first,” Max admits, though he is quick to point out the benefits. “Making movies is probably harder to do, but ultimately, it’s more rewarding.”

To promote his new film, he is traveling the country on a Premiere Tour, showing it off to enthusiastic audiences who come with book in hand, hoping for an autograph and a picture. However, not everybody who attends is pleased with the movie.

At a recent stop in North Carolina, Max and crew were met with protestors who were quoted on FoxNews.com as saying that the film intended to “dehumanize and perpetuate a rape culture.”

Max argues back, “The movie has not been met with criticism. People have criticized what they perceive it to be about. None of those people had seen the movie.”

True to his word, it seems the protestors had jumped the gun, as the Fox article clearly states that no one had attended a viewing and that only one “had read Max’s book that inspired the movie.”

What does Max have to say about all this? “No one believes the media anymore because the media lies to them all the time. It’s preposterous to me that I should be expected to answer an accusation that is based on conjecture.”

But they always say that any publicity is good publicity, right? And this should get the train moving along quite nicely. “The way I see it is there’s no stronger or better marketing than word of mouth,” and he hopes that that word of mouth will reflect back on how others will see the film. “At the end of the day, I feel like we made the movie we wanted to make.”

Throughout the years, Tucker Max has shared with the world some of his strangest, craziest, and most embarrassing stories and he has done it with pride. When asked what we could expect next, he responded with what must be his motto. “On any given night, anything can happen.” And we look forward to reading about it.

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell Review

(This review was originally published in the August 31, 2009 issue of Broadside. The score at the end is new.)

Based on the New York Times bestseller, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell revolves around Tucker, played by Matt Czuchry, and his two buddies, Drew, played by Jesse Bradford, and Dan, played by Geoff Stults. Drew has just gotten out of a rough relationship and harbors hostility for every woman he meets because his ex cheated on him, unfairly concluding that she must represent the entire female population. Dan, on the other hand, is only days away from marriage, so Tucker coaxes the two into traveling with him to a strip club for his bachelor party. After arriving, Dan learns that Tucker has alternate reasons for being there, which potentially jeopardizes Dan’s relationship with his soon to be wife.

Tucker Max is a guy most self respecting men love to hate. He treats women poorly and talks down to them, crudely pointing out every flaw he possibly can to make them feel insecure, objectifying them only as a means to get laid, and they still unrelentingly flock to him. He is the type of guy who spouts off lines like, “You may be able to vote and drive, but you will never be equal,” and then attempts to defend himself, twisting logic to make it sound like what he just said had no sexist implications. He has become a shining example of whom college aged men look up to, which is a sad statement on society if there ever was one. The fact that this putrid character is molded after an actual person and the events surrounding him are supposedly based on absolute truth is even more depressing.

Though Dan and Drew both grow as people, Tucker does not and unfortunately, he is the star of the movie. Tucker nearly ruins Dan’s relationship due to his own egotistical selfishness and shows no remorse. Does he learn a lesson? I suppose you could argue so, though crashing your friend’s wedding that you were no longer invited to and ranting a string of profanities in front of his family hardly qualifies as reaching a revelatory experience.

Much like the book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is unfocused, uneven and poorly written, but also like the book, there is something about it that keeps it moving along. You become curious as to what outlandish situations the guys will get themselves into next and tirelessly watch, fascinated by the absurd circumstances unfolding in front of you.

Nonetheless, what worked on the page does not necessarily hold up onscreen. The funniest lines in the film do not come from the book because many of the otherwise humorous stories get lost in translation. Each of the dozens of stories presented in the book usually built for pages leading up to one final paragraph or sentence, marking the comedic pay off of the chapter, which was easily accomplished due to its short story structure. The movie, however, follows a traditional narrative and instead comes off as one giant one-liner. There isn’t so much a set up and a pay off rather than a continuous string of zingers that, despite working within the context of the dialogue, feel too forced to be authentic.

While some jokes hit, many do not. Whether or not one will enjoy the movie depends largely on their affinity with the book because it unashamedly caters directly to that demographic, limiting its audience in the process. Had it not been for a thoroughly reprehensible protagonist, this minor entry into the world of cinema could have been a nice diversion from the typical mainstream Hollywood fare, but I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell fails on too many levels to reach even that status.

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell receives 2.5/5

Bright Star a Romantic Gem

Bright Star is the rarest of the rare. It's a period piece romantic drama set in the early 1800's that is absolutely magnificent. I'm kind of a cynic when it comes to those types of movies. I am a film lover and I try to give every movie I see a fair chance, but let's face it. I'm a guy. These flicks do not appeal to me, but there's something about Bright Star and the way it portrays love that grabs a hold of the heart and doesn't let go.

Based on the last few years of poet John Keats' life, the film focuses on the relationship between Keats (Ben Whishaw) and his object of affection, Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). Similar to many other romantic tragedies, the two are unable to be together despite their growing desires for one another. The difference in this movie is that it isn't quarreling families or evil parents attempting to subdue their love. This time, it is Keats who restrains himself, or at least tries to, because he doesn't know how he will provide for her. He is a struggling poet, releasing many books, but selling none. He can't afford to put a bonnet on her head, much less provide a habitable home for her and any possible children.

The irony is that his poetry is what is keeping him from truly being with her because he is unable to produce money from it, but it is her that gives him the inspiration to keep writing. His thoughts don't begin to truly spill out with beautiful fervor until he finds himself happily in the arms of Fanny, thoughts that include a number of letters he writes her while he is away that are arguably filled with more heart, soul and passion than his actual poems.

An issue I have with many British films, especially ones set deep in the past such as this one, is that I don't always understand what everybody is saying. Some lines of dialogue go over my head and I will sometimes find myself lost, but love is universal and needs no words. That is where this movie succeeds the most, knowing when to tone it down and let the visuals do the talking. In fact, the most touching moments in the entire film were the silent ones where you could see and feel the love that existed between the two without having to hear it.

The direction, helmed by Jane Campion, is understated, yet elegant and delivers a few gorgeous shots that are of the utmost importance to the success of the movie, including a wonderful side profile of Fanny as the wind slowly and gracefully blows her window curtains towards her. But the real bright star (yuk yuk) of the movie is Abbie Cornish. She has garnered a lot of buzz for her portrayal of Fanny and is being called on by the film community to be nominated for an Oscar. She deserves it. She is captivating, especially in a late scene where she spills her guts out in an emotional breakdown, falling to her knees and crying to the heavens, forced to deal with an unimaginable pain that most of us will never experience. Her spellbinding performance, along with the great Ben Whishaw, cements the film as a terrific romantic tale.

Knowing when it has something good going, Bright Star ends with Keats reading one of his poems over the credits, giving the viewer something to ponder over as they walk out of the theater. It may be the only time in history where a film has kept my attention until the final name had come and gone, leaving me staring at a blank screen, mesmerized by the beautiful words I had just heard. Bright Star is delightful and a true testament to the power of love.

Bright Star receives 4/5

Love Happens...Again

I have seen Love Happens before. Not literally, but it's one of those films where the story and characters are so familiar that you'll swear somebody pulled the old bait and switch on you and swapped the reel with one of the hundreds of other romantic comedies similar to it. It's nothing more than a routine stock picture that attempts nothing new and falls back on every rom-com tradition you can possibly think of. Much like Kanye West's behavior at an awards show, the movie is predictable, down to the letter, but unlike Kanye West, you still end up liking Love Happens. It's charm is inescapable.

Aaron Eckhart plays Burke, a self help guru and author of the book, "A-Okay," a tool to help those who have lost a loved one reclaim their life and move on. When we meet him, he is on a tour promoting the book, stopping in various cities throughout the nation and his latest stop has placed him in Seattle for a few days, hosting seminars and working as a life coach to a number of people who have come to employ his methods of letting go. What they don't know is that he leads a double life, pretending to be happy and teaching others to be happy while dealing with his crushing depression left over by the loss of his wife who died in a car accident three years ago. Though he has a number of steps that teach his readers to move on, he can't follow them himself, hiding his own demons away and putting on a fake façade for his adoring crowds. Meanwhile, Eloise, played by Jennifer Aniston, has found out that her wanna-be rock star boyfriend has once again cheated on her and she is leaving him for good. The two meet and although Eloise blows Burke off initially, they eventually come to like each other, but the issue of Burke's depression hinders their relationship.

The problem with Love Happens is that it is incredibly derivative of other romance movies. The story of a spouse dying and the widower having to get over it while finding love in other places is conventional. The many twists and turns it takes are cliché. It even sports some horrible lines of dialogue that are supposed to be touching, but come off as just plain stupid. No, this is not a particularly well written movie. But Eckhart and Aniston are very likable and work well together, not entirely negating the film's sameness, but elevating it above the drudgery we've become accustomed to in the genre.

Personally, I found Burke to be an interesting character, however common he may be. Though he does put on a guise to hide his emotional pain, you do feel like he really does care about these people. He knows what it feels like to lose someone you love and doesn't want anyone else to have to share that pain. Some may find his ways contradictory ("Hypocrite!" his father-in-law yells at him at one of his speeches), but he doesn't do it purposely. In fact, he does it with good intentions, but just can't follow his own rules, telling his followers that alcohol is not a means to an end and will not help you get rid of your sorrows, yet he drinks constantly, usually in secret, for the very purpose he pretends to oppose.

His character, spearheaded by the terrific Eckhart is the heart and soul of this movie, but the script ignores him far too often and goes on needless tangents, like an uninteresting side plot involving one of Burke's conference attendees who has lost his child. Yes, the loss of a child is sad and any human being with a soul will feel bad for this man, but his story is more schmaltzy than the already overly dramatic love story, which you've really got to try hard to do.

The most heartfelt moment in all of Love Happens is offset by an unintentionally funny slow clap which, at least for me, has forever been ruined by Not Another Teen Movie, which hilariously spoofed this tired emotional ploy. This is only one example of the many tried and true formulas the film uses that come off as strikingly dull. Actually, most moments meant to be serious are noticeably scripted and work only on the most basic levels. I understood the hardships the characters had gone through, but I didn't really care. That was its main problem, but once again, the talents of the two stars shine through and their charming personalities push this one to its conclusion. Love Happens is nothing special (and with such a generic title, it's not much of a surprise), but I think there's enough here for a look-see.

Love Happens receives 2.5/5

The Informant! Oddly Interesting

From the time of this writing, it has been over a week, 10 days to be exact, since I attended the early press screening for The Informant!, and I'm just now getting around to writing about it. Why? A number of factors, not the least of which is that I'm simply confused and uncertain of how I feel about the movie. It's not that the story is overly convoluted, but rather that the whole of the film is just so different from the typical mainstream Hollywood fare. It tries new things, which is wonderful in this day and age of rehashed remakes and sequels, but at the same time, I'm not quite sure if those new things really work. Though it may be all for naught, I'll try my best to explain.

Matt Damon plays Mark Whitacre, a worker at a corn lysine plant in Decatur, Illinois. The year is 1992 and his company has been accused of price fixing by the FBI. The allegations are true, the investigations are ongoing and Mark is the man who was tasked with the illegal assignment. He has been conducting the dirty business at his home and although the FBI only has Mark's office phone tapped, his paranoia (only one of his many, many personality traits) makes him come clean to an agent who employs him as a mole to bring down the company, wiring him and tasking him with getting the dirt on any guilty party.

There you have it, and like I said, the story really isn't too out there, at least from a traditional perspective. But peel back the surface layers and you have one weird, quirky, sometimes funny, but oftentimes boring film that is bound to be seen as brilliant by some and senseless by others. What one must decide in the opening minutes of The Informant! is whether or not they are on board with the character of Mark. Many will find him off-putting and those folks I'm afraid will get nothing from this movie. Others will find him delightfully dopey as a socially ignorant dimwit unaware that his cooperation with the FBI will effectively kill his career. I personally found myself in the middle.

"Paranoid is what people call you when they're trying to get you to let down your guard," Mark narrates at one point in the movie, inadvertently explaining that he is the type of guy who thinks the world is out to get him. He thinks the World Series is rigged. He thinks government conspiracies are commonplace. He is a confused and mentally lost man who goes off on narrative tangents, his inner monologue deviating from the events at hand and discussing irrelevant matters. In one scene, after a particularly heated conflict where he and a co-worker are abusively yelling back and forth, his mind wanders off at the sight of a sweater as he explains to the audience how he doesn't like them.

In another scene, Mark tells us that there is a specific butterfly with poison in its wings. Somehow, he says, their predators are aware of this and leave them be. As he continues on, he discusses another breed of butterfly that looks exactly the same, but doesn't have poison in their wings and is free to fly around looking dangerous, though there is no real threat. In a way, this echoes his own being.

Mark has a problem, which type is not revealed until the end (though his symptoms make it quite apparent), but he's a calm guy who doesn't want to hurt anyone else. He's a gentle giant who isn't involved with things many would deem unforgivable, like murder or rape. He just takes in some extra cash on the side and has somehow illuded the FBI the entire time, at least until his paranoia gets the best of him and he confesses. Much like that butterfly, he flaps his wings optimistically with the illusion that he is dangerous, but is nothing more than a small, insignificant blip that can easily be disposed of. In this regard, The Informant! is very smart.

However, the film simply doesn't succeed as a comedy. The humor is supposed to flow from the fact that Mark is a weird guy and his thoughts never quite run parallel to the situations he faces. His random outbursts of pointless knowledge are supposed to be funny, but aren't. It takes more than random narration to produce laughs and that was all this movie had going for it.

With that said, Damon's performance is magnificent. He takes on a role we've never seen him play before and he does it well. He is the cornerstone of the film and he helps it through its many rough patches, making his character simultaneously uncomfortable to be around and endlessly fascinating. Without him, The Informant! doesn't work.

Like many other aspects, the direction was off-the-wall as well. Steven Soderbergh, who is probably most famous nowadays for his work on the Ocean's movies, utilizes a reddish/yellowish tint that works on a number of levels, one of which is that it effectively echoes the early 90's time period, making everything look a bit retro and another is that it shows an otherwise ordinary world through a different perspective, Mark's. However, it's also ugly and gives the movie a slightly grimy aesthetic that is unpleasing on the eyes, to the point of giving off headaches.

Soderbergh is a brilliant exploratory director and although The Informant! is different on a character level, it hardly breaks new ground in other areas of filmmaking. Despite his undeniable talents, he hasn't had a truly remarkable mainstream film since 2000's Traffic. His more experimental movies like Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience have proven to be his most memorable in recent years and The Informant! doesn't reach that level.

The frustration some will feel from Mark's idiosyncratic personality could kill this movie for select audiences, but if nothing else, it will pique curiosities enough to make it enjoyably baffling. But much like Mark, my mind began to wander away from the events at hand, long before the film's drawn out conclusion, and although it may not always work from a traditional standpoint, the gumption it shows from its refusal to play by the rules warrants a look.

The Informant! receives 3/5

Interview with Michelle Beavan

(I recently had the chance to have a one on one interview with Michelle Beaven from the new documentary, No Impact Man, which you can read my review of clicking here, and this is the result of that interview. This interview was originally published in the September 14, 2009 issue of Broadside.)

What was the idea behind this year long project?

My husband, Colin Beavan, he writes books for a living and in 2006, he really wanted to write about global warming. He wanted to change his focus and so he came up with this idea about trying to live in New York City for a year without making any environmental impact, any negative environmental impact. He asked me if I would join him because he wanted to write a book about it and so that was the genesis of the whole thing. It began with the book basically.

Considering how much impact each human being does have on the environment, what was the breaking point for you? What was it that made you and Colin decide that doing this was a good idea?

Colin came up with the idea in late 2006 and I had recently seen An Inconvenient Truth. It was sort of the era for that movie. I remember very vividly, I saw it in this movie theater and the theater was blasting air conditioning and I was the only person in the movie theater. I had this moment where I was just like, you know, my God, my lifestyle was very wasteful. So that kind of laid the groundwork and it was right after that that Colin had this idea and I was, just like everybody, worried about global warming. I was also a new mother so that made me worried on another level. When he asked me to do it, it just seemed like the right thing to do. It just seemed like a good idea, just to see what would happen if we dropped out of the culture and dropped off the grid, just to see what would emerge and see if there was a way that we could live in a more sustainable way.

You had to give up a lot of things for this experiment. What was the toughest thing to adjust to?

The coffee was the hardest for me. The withdrawal was ugly and brutal.

I know in the movie there wasn’t a lot of footage of the holidays. Was one of those tough things not being able to go visit your family and friends during those times?

We definitely had to give that up, but after the project ended, I did go see my family. I got a plane and went and saw them. Yeah, that was one of the difficult things. I think that we’ve resolved that it’s better to take trips that are longer and fly less. Now, for example, as opposed to jumping on a plane for tiny little trips, we try to go for longer chunks of time so that we fly less frequently.

How dramatically has your lifestyle changed since the experiment’s end? Are you more aware of how you are affecting the environment or is it more or less back to the way it was?

It had a very dramatic and profound effect on our life and it continues to. We still have our community garden that we love where we grow vegetables and we still eat local food as much as possible. We still bike everywhere. We still don’t have a TV. We still don’t have air conditioning. We just try to do our best and we do what makes sense for us.

Do you think the movie effectively condensed a year’s worth of material into a potent 90 minute film?

I think that the movie and the book are very complimentary and I think that when you take the two together, the movie and the book, it gives you a rounded perspective of what we were trying to do. They are good together.

So you think that both of those will work as effective catalysts for your message that you can live happily while still protecting the environment?

You know, I hope so. That was our hope and that was why we did it. Our hope is that it can encourage people to think more about living sustainably and also becoming more engaged citizens to promote that in the country and all over the world.

The film was just as much a documentary about your relationship with your family as it was about the environment. How did the experiment affect your family?

I think it made me a better mother because by removing all the distractions, TV and all that, our family got really close and we just entertained one another. There was something just totally lovely about the intimacy and closeness that we had and I think it put me more in the moment with my daughter so I think that it made me a better mom. I hope that it did and I think that it did.

What advice would you give people who similarly want to cut back on their negative impact on the environment?

The number one piece of advice I would give would be to do something in their community, to join some environmental organization, whether it be to fight smog in their community or promote recycling or what have you, to just join a community environmental group and that will start anybody on the way towards getting more and more engaged in this issue.

No Impact Man Review

(This review was originally published in the September 14, 2009 issue of Broadside. However, this is the original draft of my review, which I think is a tad better due to less constraints. Though not verbatim, this is essentially the same review. The score at the end is new.)

“Is it possible to have a good life without wasting too much?” That is the question Colin Beavan poses in the new documentary, No Impact Man, a film that probes the neglectfulness of America and our ignorance to the harm we are causing our planet through the millions of carbon footprints we produce each day.

Beavan, along with his wife Michelle and daughter Isabella, set out on an environmental experiment to see if it is possible to live a sustainable life in New York City without making any negative impact on the environment. Though few of us could survive without television, computers or video games, they lived for one year without toilet paper, incandescent light bulbs, magazines, newspapers, elevators, plastic bags or any form of motorized transportation.

Is that a tad extreme? Absolutely. Is it a little naïve to think that their actions could influence an entire city, or even the world into significantly cutting back on their carbon emissions? Perhaps. But it is also brave and noble, shunning the things they have become accustomed to and trying to lessen their impact on the environment while also providing a habitable home for themselves.

What No Impact Man does so successfully is condense a year’s long worth of character growth into a short 90 minutes, showing the evolution of Colin and Michelle’s personal thoughts and beliefs through that time. Initially (and understandably), Michelle is reluctant to undertake this venture, quickly feeling the jolts from her coffee and fast food withdrawal, while Colin finds the whole affair easy, but as time goes on, their roles begin to flip. After getting numerous letters from other environmentalists, heartlessly explaining how “crazy” people like him give them a bad name, Colin begins to doubt his actions, questioning if what he is doing is relevant, and it is Michelle who puts life back into perspective for him.

Though it never shows the end result of what positive effects, if any, this experiment had on the environment, it successfully shows the more conventional benefits of living this way. After a scathing New York Times article titled, “The Year Without Toilet Paper” is published, undermining the point of the project, Colin confides in the camera, defending his position, saying, “Why not call it ‘The Year We Didn’t Watch TV and We Became Much Better Parents as a Result’ or ‘The Year We Ate Locally and Seasonally and It Ended Up Reversing My Wife’s Pre-Diabetic Condition?’”

Colin admits about his experiment, “It’s not meant to be scientific,” because it is far from it, but the end results say more than any scientific data. Over the course of the year, Colin and Michelle do indeed become better parents to young Isabella, spending more time with her and partaking in activities outside, not confined to the four walls of their living room and refusing to let the television baby-sit their child. They all become healthier, quitting their bad dietary habits and getting plenty of exercise through their use of bicycles as their means for transportation. They even save more money by buying only food and necessary equipment. The impact on the environment may be strangely absent, but the impact in the home is ever present.

In the end, Colin realizes that being a good environmentalist is not about reducing your carbon footprints to zero, but rather managing them in sustainable ways. This revelation is a test for the viewer, challenging us to look at the negative effects we are having on the environment through things that are not vital to our well being. Is No Impact Man really going to change how we live? No, of course not. But it will make you think twice the next time you step on that elevator.

No Impact Man receives 4/5

Jennifer's Body Above Average Horror

Two years ago, way back in 2007, a little movie took the world by storm, first earning standing ovations on the festival circuits before getting a wide release and earning milions upon millions of dollars at the box office and becoming the highest grossing film in Fox Searchlight Pictures' history. That movie was Juno, a delightful little film that was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars and written by a talented newcomer named Diablo Cody who would go on to win Best Original Screenplay, and deservedly so. Juno was a brilliant film. Her follow-up, Jennifer's Body, doesn't fare quite as well. It's certainly not a flop, but given the illustrious debut of Cody, one expects more than what this competent, but forgettable horror movie delivers.

Jennifer's Body begins with Needy (Amanda Seyfried) in prison for unknown reasons. All we know from her narration is that she is there and it has something to do with Jennifer (Megan Fox). Flashback to before this time and we learn that the two best friends went to a bar to see a band play, one that Jennifer was dying to meet. After the band finishes and Jennifer is thoroughly inebriated, the band takes her away in their van and Needy is left alone. She goes home worried about her friend, but soon finds her in her house, cut up, bloody and acting oddly, making strange noises and vomiting a weird substance all over her floor. After this night, the guys in the town begin to mysteriously die and their bodies are only partly found because the other parts have been eaten. Needy quickly realizes that Jennifer is the culprit and plans on doing something about it, but knows that these are no ordinary murders.

It's quite obvious from the get go that Jennifer's Body is indeed a Diablo Cody movie. Her trademark hipster style lingo that dominated Juno dominates much of this film too, but whereas it worked in Juno, it comes off as pretentious and uninspired here, like she couldn't make the transition between genres and took what worked in that film and twisted it to fit into this one, but to no avail.

The character of Juno was an unconventional, eccentric teenager living in a realized world and dealing with real problems. Her sarcastic vernacular worked as a way for her to hide her fear and insecurities of bringing a baby into the world at such a young age. The characters in this movie are archetype, Jennifer being the hot one and Needy being the nerdy, smart one and neither stand out among the dozens of other kids at their school. Juno was an abnormal teenager living in a normal world, but these characters are just as normal as their surroundings and let's face it, people do not talk like this, especially considering that Needy is a bible toting Christian with crucifixes adorning the walls of her home. I doubt she would be using phrases like "freak-tarded" to describe the crazy events happening around town. The hip dialogue was unnecessary and, despite a few inspired moments, detracted severely from the overall product.

Still, it shows promise. Regardless of the sometimes annoying dialogue, it is written pretty well and actually manages to build a decent amount of suspense. The first time Jennifer shows up in Needy's house early in the film, it is truly creepy and Fox pulls this scene off devilishly cool, slowly revealing a smile while blood drips from her mouth. It builds tension and has a pay off that is reminiscent of older horror movies, not relying on jump scares, but rather haunting imagery. To say that this scene is frightening is putting it mildly.

Perhaps it was inevitable in this day and age, but it didn't stay this way, resorting back to the same old tired clichés most horror movies fall back on, like birds loudly appearing out of nowhere, causing the audience to jump, but providing zero substance in the process. It's not particularly clever, it's not particularly new, it's not particularly scary and it drags near the end with a final confrontation between Jennifer and Needy that is laughably stupid, utilizing a BFF necklace as a means to more or less seal Jennifer's fate. How quaint.

The occasional narrative hiccup can't detract from its surprisingly stylistic aesthetics, however. Jennifer's Body boasts great direction and beautiful cinematography that highlights a good amount of filmmaking ingenuity (including a scene where blood spews from the silhouettes on the wall). This isn't your typical minimal effort harebrained horror film. Talent was put into this one.

Interestingly, part of that talent comes from Megan Fox, who has done little to show me she has a gift for acting in her previous roles, which include two awful Transformers movies and a part in How to Lose Friends & Alienate People where she played a stupid, spoiled young starlet, which I doubt is much of a stretch, but she is very good here. She proves herself quite capable of handling a leading role, portraying an evil, demonized girl who must feed on her victims to stay strong, but simultaneously making her character likable, which is an impressive feat indeed.

Jennifer's Body is a relatively strong horror movie that could have been so much better had Cody been able to subdue herself when it came to that aforementioned hipster lingo, overusing idiotic made up words like "lesbi-gay" to an irredeemable extent. However, it does feature a full blown make out scene between Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried which is narratively unnecessary, but damned appreciated, which is kind of how I felt about the movie as a whole. Was it necessary? Nope. But it was fun while it lasted and it's worth seeing.

Jennifer's Body receives 3/5

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs Falls Off in the End

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is like watching a relative die from a slow, incurable disease. You've loved it as long as you've known it and it pains your heart to see it steadily decline with so much potential that will never be discovered. That is to say that the film is rock solid for the first hour and 10 minutes or so, delivering constant laughs and a smart script, only to crash land in the end with stupid plot turns and missed opportunities.

The film takes place on a little island called Swallow Falls, which has been able to thrive economically thanks to its famous sardine factory, but times are tough and the factory is closing. Due to lack of resources, the residents of the town are forced to eat what is leftover from the now shut down plant. Meanwhile, Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader), an always curious scientist, has created a machine that turns water into food which will soon become his greatest masterpiece. In the hopes of bringing tourists to the island, Mayor Shelbourne (voiced by Bruce Campbell) is about to open a new sardine themed amusement park, but during the ceremonies, Flint's machine blows up, wrecking everything and shooting up into the atmosphere. Though the town is infuriated with Flint at first, it quickly begins to rain cheeseburgers and the town realizes that his invention could be the end of their worries.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is like a well written cartoon, one that is aimed mainly at children, but is positively delightful for adults as well. Much like the way Nickelodeon's Fairly Oddparents works, the film is written intelligently, with a strong sense of imagination and humor that is appropriate, and more importantly funny, for all ages. Also like that excellent television program, the movie features quick-witted dialogue and dozens of visual gags that can easily be missed by blinking at the wrong time.

Part of its appeal comes from its smart play on words that sound half-witted on paper, but work in the film due to the excellent delivery and contextually clever script. "You've seen a meteor shower, but you've never seen one meatier than this," Sam Sparks (voiced by Anna Faris) says during her weather forecast at one point in the movie, defying the rules of how script to screen translations generally work. What is usually the case is that something will work on paper and not work well on film, but the dialogue here sounds idiotic in print (as you can probably tell by reading the above quote), but do wonders in the final product. The dexterous abilities of the talented cast and the astutely written script take what could be another throwaway animated movie and turn it into something special, though it isn't without its blemishes.

There is a fine line between silliness and stupidity. Silliness is defined in my book as over the top, but nonetheless charming. Stupidity is over the top that goes much too far and drifts away from what made the film so charming to begin with. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs tip toes perfectly in the middle for the first two-thirds, getting as zany as it can get without getting dopey, but then plummets hard on the side of stupidity thanks to a strange and unnecessary narrative decision to bring the food to life, with kung fu fighting poultry (already cooked) and figher pilot pizza slices that fly through the air and chase after Flint and his gang. As absurd as the whole premise of the film is, one would expect something this nutty to occur, but that doesn't mean it works.

It felt like the filmmakers couldn't come up with a conflict or a viable solution and resorted to sentient food, which comes off as an abrubt departure from the controlled goofiness of previous scenes. It becomes a movie in desperate search of an ending and it looks in all the wrong places. The problem is that the film couldn't see the human conflict right in front of it that could have served this purpose.

By fleshing out the relationship conflict between Flint and his father, making it a vital component to the overall picture, all film disputes could have been solved without a reliance on a ridiculous food vs. people conflict, but that relationship is rarely explored and thus seems irrelevant. But it also misses on another level. This family tension was inserted in an attempt to make drama out of a supremely wacky idea, but the drama doesn't gel well with that idea. The film could have gone either way, dropping the drama or exploring it enough to give it some substance, which would have made up for its downfalls, but instead doesn't go far enough on any level to work and ends up sitting smack dab in the middle of the two extremes.

That being said, the film is still an enchanting fantasy that stumbles only from some odd plot decisions, but never from its vivid imagination. The animation is wonderful, not attempting to blend real life imagery with outlandish scenarios, much like the way Up did so successfully earlier this year, but trying to echo the feeling of a Saturday morning cartoon and it largely succeeds. The characters are visually exaggerated and they move with a frantic urgency not because something of importance needs to be cared for, but because that's just how they move in their realized world, zipping to and fro in the blink of an eye.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs works aesthetically, but it also works comically and produces as many laughs as it possibly can, in large part thanks to its lively cast and likable characters. Flint is an inventive person with a wily imagination. Even as an adult, his childlike sensibilities and natural wonderment hasn't changed, which will appeal to kids who will enjoy his childish follies, but it will also appeal to adults who will see themselves in him, a person always in search for answers to life's biggest questions, though it seems like none are to be found. But all of that still can't save the idiocy that bookends the movie. It's still a good ride, but with a few key changes, it could have been great.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs receives 3.5/5

Sorority Row Surprisingly Satisfactory

There's a saying when it comes to slasher movies. "Boobs and blood bring big bags of bucks." Okay, so that's not an actual saying, but it's more or less true (and is a good example of my creative wordplay, I might add). What the majority of slasher fans want to see when sitting down for a genre movie is gratuitous amounts of female nudity and enough blood to satiate them until the next kill-fest rolls around. It may not be an award winner, but this film does exactly what is expected of it.

I Know What You Did...I mean, Sorority Row, begins at the most outlandish sorority party I've ever seen, a Theta Pi hazing party for new recruits that features a trampoline in the middle of the sorority house with half naked women bouncing up and down and playfully fighting while alcohol infused men stand around and indulge themselves in reckless misogyny, blurting out sexual connotations that they can later blame on the beer, cleansing themselves of any wrongdoing. A particular group of girls, all seniors, have forged strong relationships with one another, condemning their lying, cheating boyfriends by saying, "You cheat on one Theta, you cheat on every Theta!" Oh snap girlfriend!

To top off the already crazy night, the girls decide that playing a prank on an unsuspecting guy would be loads of fun, so they give him fake roofies to slip in Megan's (Audrina Partridge) drink. She pretends that these roofies have done more than just knock her out, making him believe that she is dead. The other girls, in on the joke, agree to take her out to a field and help him rid of the body so he won't have to go to jail. While their backs are turned, he decides to start chopping her up and, still unaware of the prank, ends up killing her. In deciding what to do with the body, the girls idiotically base their judgment on the "tenants of sisterhood," quoting their sorority credo to justify their decision to dump her down an abandoned mineshaft. Eight months later, on the day of their graduation, somebody appears, seemingly aware of what the girls did and begins to kill each of them off one by one.

One thing that must be said about Sorority Row is that there is almost no originality in the entire thing, falling back on old horror clichés like it has some kind of addiction, even resorting to the tried and true obligatory shower kill. Though it pays homage to many classic horror films like Jaws and The Shining, it never creates a style of its own. Even the kills are taken directly from other movies, everywhere from Friday the 13th Part 5 to Thomas Jane's The Punisher. Sorority Row didn't feel so much like a new movie as it did the best parts of other, better movies cobbled together.

As is common with the slasher genre, there is plenty of gratuitous nudity in Sorority Row that exists as a tongue in cheek way of saying, "We know exactly what we are doing," which includes a scene where an underclassmen is showering in the seniors' showers and her punishment from the president of the sorority is to run back to her apartment naked, so the poor girl drops her towel while the camera lingers on her nude body. Yep, this is quality filmmaking here, though to be absolutely fair, the cinematography was actually quite good, appropriately dark for a film like this and the direction was competent, to the point where I was actually admiring certain shots. Shocking indeed.

There's even a good amount of humor in the movie that lightens up the mood a bit and surprisingly, it works. In an early scene, a couple of the sorority sisters are missing and the rest start to discuss whether or not they could be dead, to which the president remarks, "Nobody's dead!" She then shrugs and says, "Well...Megan." Hilarious.

The bottom line is that I had fun watching Sorority Row and at times I was, dare I say, impressed by certain aspects of it. However, I was also watching it with three good friends, guys who knew what they were getting themselves into and they too had a good time, boosting my enjoyment. Will it be as fun by yourself or with someone who doesn't have the ability to relax and simply enjoy a good stupid movie? I suspect not. Even as I sit here and write, winding down to the end of this review, I'm not entirely certain if I should even recommend it. In the end though, taking into account the able direction, funny jokes and good performances (at least as good as a bunch of irritating, ditzy sorority bimbo performances can get), I think this one might have just enough to earn my approval. But remember this: go with friends, or don't go at all.

Sorority Row receives 2.5/5

9 a Haunting, Adult Fairy Tale

Relying largely on audience patience, the lack of narrative structure could be what makes or breaks the newest computer animated movie, 9. Though all is explained by the end, the first hour brings little context to the story of a little sack-like figure who wakes up in a post-apocalyptic world. Some will argue the frustration this causes, but they would be missing the underlying themes and multi-layered characterizations that 9 possesses, undermining its intelligence.

The film begins with a small doll, known only by the number stitched into his back, 9 (Elijah Wood), waking up in a ruined world and finding out he is alone. After some time, 9 runs into another sack-like doll, 2 (Martin Landau), who befriends him, though the friendship is short lived due to an evil mechanized beast who snatches 2 away. Eventually, 9 meets up with others like him who explain that a war was waged between man and machine after the machines turned on them, thus wiping out the human race. Regardless of the danger posed by these machines, 9 is determined to get 2 back and travels to a forbidden area where he accidentally awakens the most evil machine of all, one that is determined to get every last one of them.

Part 28 Days Later and part Terminator, 9 works on a level not seen in contemporary adult animation. It shoots for more than just gorgeous visuals and a hauntingly dark tone (though it does have those as well). It explores themes. It has messages. It has a smart ending that questions the whole of humanity and what it takes to survive in a world run mad by technology. This is a deep film that will work best for the more astute viewers who can see below the surface aesthetics and find its many meanings.

9 is a beautifully macabre fantasy that deals with the creation of unnatural life, serving biblical implications that aren't simply brought up and thrown away, but work as an overarching motif throughout. The machine that 9 awakens is said to build other machines "in its own image," echoing the Genesis verse saying that God made man in his own image. It's a cautionary tale about playing God, showing that life is a natural occurrence and attempting to manufacture new forms of it disrupts the flow of nature and ends in tragedy.

At the same time, it's an altruistic tale about redemption and correcting one's mistakes. It's easy to understand that these little numbered people are in a life and death struggle, but we never understand why until the final revelation. Though it doesn't quite make up for the lack of substance prior, it is an interesting turn that impresses not only on its level of ingenuity, but also in its intelligence, which gives the film multiple perspectives on humanity, not just of 9 making right what he has done wrong, but also of another character important to the equation that I dare not give away so as not to take away from the impact of the story.

Many will feel, as I did, that the characters are one-dimensional, with each owning only one defining personality trait. Unlike Carl Fredricksen from Up or Coraline from that titularly titled film, there's really no one character to care about here. They hardly even have names, much less distinguished personalities. However, once the last block of the movie rolls around and you find out how and why these sack dolls came into existence, it all makes sense and you realize that they were purposely made that way, throwing you for a loop and forcing you to reevalute everything you've seen up to that point.

The biggest disappointment in 9 stems from a beautiful post-apocalyptic world that is shamefully left unexplored. When 9 awakens at the outset of the film, he cannot talk, which could have allowed the filmmakers to have him travel the wasteland, allowing us to witness the destruction that has occurred from the war. After all, film is a visual medium. But it doesn't do that. He quickly runs into 2 and gains a voice, limiting its scope and ambition. At a brisk runtime of an hour and 15 minutes, there's not much time for discovery or wonderment. There's so much potential here, but so little is realized.

Although that is a significant detractor in the overall product, 9 is still a wonderful experience that actually conveys a bit of meaning on top of its flashy design. As if it needed clarity, this is not a film for children, as seen early on when it shows a dead mother clutching her dead baby in her arms, a shot that effectively sets its dark tone. It's an adult fairy tale that asks us to question our own morals and it does it well. It isn't perfect due to a few narrative blunders, but 9 is about something, which is more than I can say for most recent Hollywood endeavors.

9 receives 4/5

Whiteout a Forgettable Void

I planned on starting this review off with a zinger, comparing the new Kate Beckinsale movie, Whiteout, to BIC's Wite-Out, saying that the purpose of Wite-Out is to erase errors on written documents and that Whiteout's script should have been covered in it. I was going to bash this movie to high heavens because I didn't like it, but as I sit here and think about what I just saw, I realize that I didn't really not like it either. Whiteout is one of those movies where there isn't much to object to, but neither is there much to praise.

It begins high in the sky in a plane flying over Antarctica in 1957. On board is a mysterious box that the two pilots for some reason want all to themselves. While one steers the plane, the other is tasked with killing everybody else in the back. However, his would-be victims fight back, killing both pilots, causing the plane to crash. Flash forward to the present day and a government team stationed at a base in Antarctica is preparing to finally head home. On a routine mission, Carrie (Kate Beckinsale) discovers a dead body and brings it back to the base. There, she deduces that he didn't die of natural causes, but was instead murdered. Carrie, being the resident law enforcer, is tasked with hunting down the killer and discovering the motive behind his heinous acts, though visions of her past come back to haunt her, making her job emotionally tormenting.

Like I said, Whiteout is a film I sat through equivocally torn, wanting to tear it apart due to its own mediocrity, but understanding that it was that mediocrity that placed it firmly in the middle of the good-bad spectrum. The dialogue is rarely laughable, but it's also rarely interesting. There aren't any characters to hate, but none to embrace either. The story isn't good, but it manages to hold at least some level of intrigue.

Though the film never grabbed hold of me, it never bored me, that is until the last act rolled around and the tiny bit of momentum it had up to that point went crashing to the ground. Besides becoming simply another routine chase picture with minimal suspense, it also reveals why Carrie has become so emotionally distraught (which should come as no surprise, but to be fair, stop reading here if you want to avoid spoilers). Her visions show that her partner back in the states turned against her and let an arrested criminal free, which forced her to shoot him. The absurdity of the situation is that she wasn't upset because she had killed her partner, but rather that she was unable to tell that he had switched sides. She was worried that her detective skills were waning. Three cheers for stupidity.

Though the movie could have (and should have) ended with the death of the killer (or killers), Whiteout decides to take it one step further and go on for another 15 minutes, with a "surprise" twist you'll easily see coming based on the events up to that point. The real problem isn't from its overall predictability, but from the fact that it is one of the stupidest, most anti-climactic endings I've seen all year. Though I won't give it away, I will say this. It is wholly unnecessary and should have been left out to shorten the movie and make it slightly more bearable.

Whiteout is one of those movies that doesn't understand that film is a visual medium and not everything needs to be spoken through dialogue. The characters usually speak in small sentences that repeat what the audience has already established for themselves based on the onscreen cues. When there is a dead body, we don't need to hear them say it, as if the fact that the frozen, bloody corpse lying there wasn't enough to tip us off. Or take for instance, the opening text that sets the scene, saying, "Antarctica: The coldest, most isolated land mass on the planet." Whoa, there partner. Slow down. Antarctica is cold and isolated? You don't say.

Whiteout is dumb. It's insulting in its simplicity, though it pretends to be a deep journey into the heart of evil. Instead, it's just a spruced up slasher film, complete with a guy in a mask appearing out of nowhere and hacking people up. But it never really veers too far off and somehow manages to keep chugging along even when things seem to be going irredeemably astray. It's not a good movie by any means, but it takes no more than a minute after Kate Beckinsale's character is introduced for the filmmakers to get her clothes off, so that's saying something.

Whiteout receives 2/5

Gamer Stupidly Fun or Just Stupid?

There's a line of dialogue in Gamer that pinpoints exactly what its fundamental problem is. A character played by Ludacris, known only as Humanz Brother, suddenly appears partway through the movie, his mug taking up the entire screen, and says, "This is not something you can control." Exactly. What Gamer does effectively is echo the gritty look and feel of a multiplayer free-for-all video game, dropping the characters in a random battlefield armed with guns and ammo with survival as their only mission. But playing a video game is a vastly different experience than watching a movie. If you take the controller away from the player, the video game becomes worthless and that is essentially what this movie does, hence rendering it irrelevant.

The film is about death row inmates who volunteer to play in a reality game called "Slayers" where they are physically controlled by gamers thanks to a chip placed in their bodies. The object of the game is to kill everybody and make it to the goal. If the inmate can survive for 30 rounds, he or she is free to return to civilization. Kable (Gerard Butler) is late in the game when we meet him, only a few rounds away from being released, but he quickly learns that there are no plans for him to be set free, so he defies the rules and breaks through the restricted zone into the real world.

I would say Gamer is all style and no substance, but there's not much style here either. Like a video game, it's nothing more than mindless violence wrapped around a vapid, incongruous story. But video games don't necessarily need a story to be entertaining because they are all about the gameplay. Movies, on the other hand, need competent acting, some type of emotion, a well structured narrative, and so on. This movie lacks many of those defining traits.

In what seems to be a growing fad in Hollywood, Gamer tries to preach a certain message while simultaneously contradicting itself by showing us exactly what it's preaching against. A couple of years ago, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry taught us to value everybody and not make fun of homosexuals, though the hour and a half preceding this lesson devalued everybody and interminably bashed homosexuality. Gamer tries to make a statement about how low we'll stoop for entertainment, but then offers us exactly what it's criticizing. It condemns us for wanting to see relentless bloodshed, but offers nothing more than that.

Or maybe I'm looking too much into it. Besides, Gamer is brought to us from the same guys who directed the awful Crank: High Voltage and much like that film, this one employs the frenzied, non-stop shaky cam technique, but ramps it up to 11. The absurdly frantic camera moves more than Beyonce's hips during a dance number and it gets pretty nauseating. It should come with a warning beforehand: "Those prone to seizures due to copious amounts of movement in an attempt to make the events at hand overly exciting, including one ferociously intense game of air hockey, should consult a physician before viewing."

Now, Gamer isn't as bad as Crank: High Voltage, but then again, Crank didn't take itself as seriously. When something stupid occurred, it was usually knowingly stupid. When something like that happens in Gamer, it's just poor filmmaking. Still, the action scenes are exciting and the performances, namely Butler and Michael C. Hall, who plays the main villain, are good. Sure, it's basically frenetic, asinine drivel, but you could do a whole lot worse than Gamer.

Gamer receives 2/5

All About Steve an Embarrassing Failure

Here is a film being released at the perfect time. Bradley Cooper blew up huge this summer in the mega hit, The Hangover, and Sandra Bullock hit box office gold with her surprise smash, The Proposal. So what do you get when you combine the talents of these two actors into one romantic comedy? You get All About Steve, a vapid, mind numbing, rom-com disaster that's about as fun as being beaten up by your sister.

Bullock plays Mary Horowitz, a bizarre, irritating crossword puzzle constructor (she makes one a week for her local paper) who still lives with her parents. She has only one friend, her hamster, and has spent more time in front of books than out on dates. Her parents, desperate to find the right man for her, hook her up on a blind date with Steve, played by Cooper. Upon meeting, she's instantly smitten by him and throws herself at him as soon as they get in his truck. Though initially down for a rumble in the back seat, Steve quickly realizes that going through with this sexual encounter might not be such a good idea after Mary starts detailing their long term compatibility with each other. So he makes up an excuse to get her out of his truck, hopefully avoiding any emotional attachment from Mary, but Mary, being the annoyingly optimistic person she is, doesn't realize it's a brush off and makes her next crossword puzzle all about Steve (natch), including his eye color, his favorite food, even what his lips taste like. The readers don't like this because it's practically unsolvable, so the paper fires her.

And thus starts a catastrophic road trip romance movie that killed enough brain cells to drop me at least a couple of IQ points. After the contrivance that results in her removal from the paper, she decides to take a trip to Tucson, Arizona because that's where Steve is working for the day. She thinks this is a good idea because, in an attempt to not hurt her feelings, Steve made up a lie telling her that he wishes she could come with him, but alas, "You have a job." You see, Steve is a likable guy who isn't shallowly misogynistic and won't sleep with a girl even if he finds her attractive. He sees how unpleasant Mary's persona is and does his best to avoid getting mixed up with her, but Mary stays persistent and follows him across many states, basically stalking him. Oh, and we're supposed to like her.

The problem is that Mary is a creepy, obsessive woman whose understanding of life stems from an inexperienced existence sitting in seclusion in her room. She has no real grasp on humanity or what it takes to fit into a functional society. She's the type of woman who could snap any day because her repressed emotions have finally caused her to reach the breaking point. She's not a pleasant person to be around, which is contradictory to the film's being. When you can't even get right the one driving force behind your movie, you have produced an epic failure.

One major detriment is Bullock's appeal. She isn't a blonde bombshell anymore and has become a bit too old to play these cutesy roles. She hasn't gotten away from the clumsy pretty girl roles that made her famous and now seems more like a woman in desperate need to cling on to the last shred of a dying career than someone with an affinity for acting. As for Bradley Cooper, his intense beauty, I mean talent, is wasted on this insipid, uninspired, vacuous movie succubus. The only person who squeezes any charm out of this rubbish is Thomas Haden Church, who plays a news anchor egging Mary on so he can amuse himself by making Steve's life miserable.

But a smile or two here and there certainly doesn't make up for the lack of direction, style or heart. In fact, it could be one of the poorest written films I've seen this year, with a sloppy narrative that was so predictable, I was quoting lines before they were said. This is a dumbed down movie for the dumbed down crowd, including seemingly random instances of wholly unnecessary narration where Mary tries to put some context to the situation despite the simplicity of the film making its relevance moot. For example, after one character curses in front of her, she comes on with a voiceover explaining how cursing isn't appropriate for crosswords, but is great with friends. Wow. Thanks for the enlightenment, Mary.

This is what happens when no effort is put into a movie, or at least I hope it is. If the people involved actually tried, then they should go home, look in the mirror and really contemplate whether or not they chose the correct career path because All About Steve is wretched. It's a horrid assault on the brains of the unfortunate folks who watch it, akin to what it would be like if somebody decided to take a knife and plunge it into your skull, not killing you, but hitting the correct nerve to make you stupider, because you will feel that way after watching it. If you're a glutton for punishment, have at it. But everyone else, for the love of God, stay as far away from All About Steve as you possibly can.

All About Steve receives 0.5/5