MOVIE REVIEW: 'Hancock'
Nitpicky viewers will love the chipper opening scene of "Hancock." As the film's initial action sequence - which features Will Smith's airborne superhero character wrecking cars, thrashing highways and wiping out several hundred thousand square feet of office space as he brings a group of thugs to justice - comes to an end, a news-reporter voiceover informs us of the price tag for the mayhem: a whopping $9 million. A personal record!
MOVIE REVIEW: 'Kit Kittredge: An American Girl'
Somewhere between the original idea and the final product, "Kit Kittredge: An American Girl" lost its mystery.
MOVIE REVIEW: 'Savage Grace'
Tales of high-toned decadence don't come a lot more shocking then "Savage Grace," a true-crime tragedy charting an elite American family's descent into hell.
MOVIE REVIEW: 'Mongol'
"Do not scorn a weak cub," reads a proverb at the start of "Mongol." "He may become a brutal tiger."
THE MOVIE MASOCHIST: All toilet, no humor
Few filmmakers can make potty humor funny, or even tolerable. "The Love Guru" defiantly fills its entire running time with one gross-out gag after another, making it seem like nothing less than a motion-picture weapon designed to hurt the weak-stomached and easily embarrassed.
MOVIE REVIEW: 'Get Smart' lacks imagination
Apparently there are two actors named Steve Carell.
MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Incredible Hulk' successfully reboots franchise
Green, lean and mean, "The Incredible Hulk" is a thrill-oriented reboot of the superhero franchise that should have action fans cheering. Setting aside the ponderous Freudian themes of Ang Lee's 2003 "Hulk," this installment substitutes momentum for depth and bombastic battle scenes for character development. It lacks the graceful balance of those elements that made "Iron Man" the gold standard for superhero films, but it's a blast for demolition fans.
MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Happening' starts strong, ends lamely
In "The Happening," Mother Nature decides that humanity is a dangerous virus - and gets to work eliminating the threat.
MOVIE REVIEW: Cliches ruin 'City of Men'
When it was released in 2002, Fernando Meirelles' remarkable debut, "City of God," felt like a revelation - an exhilarating work of stylized, energetic filmmaking that adopted the same reckless attitude and swagger of its protagonists, two childhood friends from the "favelas" (or slums) of Rio de Janeiro whose lives took different paths as they edged into adulthood.
THE MOVIE MASOCHIST: Dressed to nil
As far as genre movies go, romantic comedies probably adhere to formula more rigidly than any others. Many contain the same elements laid out in such predictable ways that they could have been authored by the same machines that crank out pornographic stories for the proletariat in "1984."
THE MOVIE MASOCHIST: A brand-name headache
There's a type of movie that comes out around the holidays, a family movie that rails against commercialization while situating the action in a sea of brand-name products. This year that holiday chestnut is "Alvin and the Chipmunks."
MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Mist' delivers some serious scares
Some scary movies can stand your hair on end. A few can make your skin crawl.
THE MOVIE MASOCHIST: It wasn't so bad
One would think a critic who chose to review only bad movies would always have at least one obvious target within spitting range. So in a movie landscape that's teeming with bad product, do you go after the holiday film starring Patrick Swayze or the low-budget indie that's part of a dubious horror film "festival"?
MOVIE REVIEW: 'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead' is an instant classic
To state it in the bluntest terms, Sidney Lumet's "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" is one of the great American films of the past decade, and the crowning masterpiece of Lumet's long career, which spans a stunning 59 years since his first TV dramas for "Studio One" and 50 years since his first feature, "12 Angry Men."
MOVIE REVIEW: 'Gone Baby Gone' wrings compelling drama out of ambiguity
Moral ambiguity permeates "Gone Baby Gone," Ben Affleck's accomplished directorial debut. It starts with a mother who doesn't seem sufficiently upset when her 4-year-old daughter goes missing.
THE MOVIE MASOCHIST: Harry Squatter
The trouble with successful movies is that each spawns a legion of imitators, most of them awful. Each megahit is like an oil well descended upon by greedy prospectors hoping to get some of the wealth flowing from the ground, even if it's quickly tainted by manure.
MOVIE REVIEW: 'My Kid Could Paint That'
She watched her dad paint, picked up a brush, and did her own thing. Pretty soon, the abstract canvases of 4-year-old Marla Olmstead were on the walls of a local Binghamton cafe, then a gallery. The press picked up her scent, Jane Pauley wanted her, "Inside Edition" phoned, NPR followed suit. Within the space of a year, an Olmstead original went from $250 to $15,000.
THE MOVIE MASOCHIST: A zombie of a zombie film
A genre that horror filmmakers never get tired of is the zombie movie.
THE MOVIE MASOCHIST: Crouching Tolkien, hidden gagging
Asian and Western filmmakers have always borrowed from one another, and one can safely say movies have only been the better for it. For the most part.
MOVIE REVIEW: 'Hatchet' knows the formula and does it right
To the dishonor-and-dismember roll of Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees and Freddie Krueger, you may now add Victor Crowley, the deranged and deformed bogey man of "Hatchet," an homage to '80s-style horror from writer-director Adam Green that avoids the post-irony smirk of the "Scream" satires. Green, who appears to have memorized the "Halloween"/"Friday the 13th"/"Nightmare on Elm Street" playbooks, comes not to kill the Slasher Kings, but to celebrate and emulate them.
THE MOVIE MASOCHIST: The movie that bled to death
Skilled cinematographers have all sorts of tricks to affect the way movies look - they can create hyper-real, color-saturated images that look more intense than life or they can remove the brighter hues so the movie looks as bleak as the city of Buffalo.
MOVIE REVIEW: 'Balls of Fury' is amusingly dumb
The cheerfully dumb "Balls of Fury" thumbs its nose at sports movies, underground fighting tournament flicks, and squares in the audience. It's schlocky and tasteless but also good-natured and harmless, and the people who come out to see it will get just what they want: 90 minutes of freewheeling, switch-off-your-brain laughs.
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Copyright © 2008, The Modesto Bee.
