2010 - TAMARA DREW, a good comedy from a graphic novel for a change

Gemma Atherton is Tamara Drew a woman returning to her small home town in Dorset, England to settle her mother's estate and generally create havoc with a lot of the men in the village.  

The director is the talented Stephen Frears who is a good storyteller and works very well with actors who in this case were carefully cast.  Frears is a filmmaker who manages to pick interesting projects throughout his career.  He hasn't allowed himself to get locked into one particular genre.  The Hit, Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters, The Van, The Hi-Lo Country and Tamara Drew  couldn't be more different but Frears manages to bring a lot of skill when it comes to making entertaining movies

Gemma Arerton is a very talented performer who has been attached to some interesting films but her attempts at some large scale Hollywood films like the stupid Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters and the unnecessary Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and The King's Men have not really been successful.  She appears to have carved out a career in some off beat interesting films.  Arterton comes off on screen as a very likable performer and her character Tamara Drew is not a particularly likable person.

The film was based on a graphic novel aka "comic book."  It was well written by Moira Buffini, the running time is 111 minutes. An entertaining film.

2010 - THE WAY, a modest but very good drama

After the death of his son who was hiking on the Camino de Santiago a trail that has been a pilgrimage for Christian followers since 1492.  A father decides to mourn and pay tribute to his son by completing the son's pilgrimage.  Along the way he meets up with three other hikers, a divorced woman recovering from an abusive spouse, a British writer suffering from writer's block and an overweight man trying to lose weight.  

The story of The Way involves the interaction of these four individuals as they learn to bond with each other on the pilgrimage.  As trite as the plot may sound this is actually a rather touching film.  The relationships among the hikers are presented in an understated manner and there is no inappropriate love story to spoil the mood of the film.

The writer and director actor Emilo Estevez cast his father Martin Sheen as the grieving father and Estevez plays the deceased son in flashbacks.  Estevez shot this film on a tight budget with a small crew.  Sheen gives an excellent understated performance and the rest of the cast does very well as his hiking partners.

 

The film showcases some beautiful Spanish scenery and architecture.  The Way is touching and inspirational in a good way it could have easily went over the top with a lot of sloppy sentimentality but the restraint in the storytelling really works for the film.  The Way is kind of an undiscovered little gem of a film. 

 This running time for The Way is 123 minutes. 

2010 - THE A TEAM, remake of the TV show

 I guess The A Team isn't really that good of a film, but it is an entertaining one.  The film has a fun cast with Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Sharlto Copley and some bruiser called Quintin "Rampage" Jackson recreating the roles from the television series.  Jessica Biel is the Intelligence Officer assigned to catch this rogue team of Army soldiers and Jon Hamm shows up in a rather stupid cameo.

 The plot starts out fairly decent but descends into pointless confusion by the middle of the film.  It's hard to understand how it's going to resolve itself but you can be sure it will be in a big action climax like so many of these types of big screen action films usually did.

 

So what is there to recommend about this film?  Well the general light tone of the film with it's emphasis on comedy and character interaction.  The over the top action scenes and the silliness of the whole thing make this an acceptable no brainier entertainment. Some of the dialog is pretty funny.

 

The director Joe Carnahan wrote the screenplay along with Brian Bloom and Skip Woods.  These three guys have worked in the action genre where men are men and get to blow things up.

The running time is 119 minutes.

2010 - SOUND OF NOISE, a very quirky comedy

 Musical terrorists are on the loose in some unnamed Swedish city.  These are not your typical musical terrorists they are percussionists to make matters worse.  Assigned to stop them is tone deaf police officer Amadeus Warnebring.  

This is a very funny and weird comedy, highly recommended.

102 minutes. Written by Ola Simonsson Johannes Stjärne Nilsson and Jim Birmant.

2010 - PREDATORS, OK time killer

Another sequel to the original Predator.  The plot is basically an update and rehash of The Most Dangerous Game, that old warhorse.

This film has a decent cast who have to work pretty hard to bring any credibility of a rather outlandish story which has something to do with the Predator hunter aliens stealing humans from Earth and putting them into a planetary game preserve for the purpose of hunting them.  A real "oh brother" situation.

This is the usual mindless action film which is probably 10 minutes longer than it had to be.  The film has a lot of alien violence and blood (green colored).  The film cost about 40 million bucks which was cheap for this kind of stuff.  Mindless big budget action films are almost more obscene for the amount of money they waste than the amount of violence they inflict on the viewer when you are watching them.

107 minutes.

2010 - CHRISTMAS CUPID, #5 in the Christmas countdown

This is the Christmas movie where our heroine is called a "slut" and a "bitch" by a Christmas spirit in this updating of the Charles Dickens story.

What can be said by now upon finishing this Christmas film.  Some singer who I've barely heard of named Christina Milan is visited by the ghosts of three boyfriends from the past, present and future.  I've got the drill by down by now, it's another film about a woman trying to get a boyfriend with the Christmas holiday serving as the background to all this relationship stuff.

I'm not exactly sure who the intended audience for this film was.  You wouldn't want to watch it with Grandma and probably not with your younger daughter the last thing anyone needs in a Christmas movie is a bunch of pseudo sexuality stuck into a so called Christmas film.

Well anyway as with the previous films, it's poorly acted and badly written.  This movie does have a little more polish to it mostly because the production had a bigger budget than the other films I've been watching.  Still Christmas Cupid is a very worthless film.

85 minutes.

2002 - THE SUM OF ALL FEARS - more spy vs spy stuff from Tom Clancy

An attempt to reboot the Tom Clancy/Jack Ryan thriller franchise with a new actor playing Ryan, Ben Affleck.  The role had previously been played by Alec Baldwin and then Harrison Ford.  Those films had been highly successful at the box office.  However the studio did not want to continue to payout the large sums of cash Ford was asking for with each successive film.

The Sum Of All Fears was like one of those Spider man films.  The studio pretended the first series never existed and just started the whole thing over with a different and cheaper actor.  So in The Sum Of All Fears, Jack Ryan is no longer the deputy CIA director.  This film takes him all the way back to being a desk bound intelligence analyst.

This film is watchable but a little lazy.  The bad guys are the movies favorite villains the ex Nazis.  They are attempting to start a new world order by tricking the United  States and the Soviet Union into going to war with each other.  This old standby of a plot has been used in just about every other James Bond film.

 

This is a perfectly acceptable B-flat thriller nothing special but watchable.

124 minutes, screenplay by Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne.

2010 - SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO - Space is the place

The live action version of the early Anime series known as Star Blazers in this country.  This film follows the story of the early anime film fairly closely and I have to give it credit it certainly is action packed.

The film run over 2 hours but it seemed like a quick 2 hours.  If the crew of the Yamato isn't blasting away at the "Gamilas" fighters in Star Wars type space dogfights the crew of the Yamato is mowing them down in hand to hand laser weapon fighting.  The special effects are actually pretty well done and the cast does manage to keep a straight face

This is one of those films that 12 year old boys will love.  It keeps that gross kissing and love stuff to a minimum and concentrates on the action.  Let's face is this film was never going to be confused with Kurosawa's Ran.

Given what this film is I was impressed by the semi downbeat ending the studio allowed the filmmakers to tack on to it.  Pretty well done considering the source material is from an old cartoon series.

138 minutes

2010 - SUPER, very bizarre super hero film.

The writer/director James Gunn's take on vigilante violence. An ordinary citizen decides to be a masked super hero in order to fight crime, this a very strange film.  Gunn mixes comedy, drama, violence and satire.  Gunn takes a lot of shots at Christians and has a Christian hero, in this case a short order cook who becoming a masked super hero called "The Crimson Bolt" whose ex addict wife becomes mixed up with a drug dealer.

This film kind of walks the same path as Kick Ass except the female sidekick in this film isn't a potty mouthed little girl but a half crazy comic book store employee who can't separate reality from comic book fiction.

It's hard to know what to make of this film when it shifts into a very serious tone towards the end of the film.  Gunn appears to trying to make some statement about real violence vs fictional media violence and the individual's inability to separate the two. 

However since this is a film, the storytelling gods must be served and good trumps evil in the end.  In reality this story would end in a tragic mess for everyone involved.  Unfortunately James Gunn didn't have the courage to go there.

96 minutes.

2010 - THE EXTRAORDINRY ADVENTURES OF ADELE BLANC-SEC or Adele: Rise of the Mummy

Finally an adventure film featuring a female lead that actually gets it right.  After sitting through the terrible Lara Croft films this piece of whimsy from Luc Besson a director not exactly known for his light touch i.e. The Transporter series.

This film is based on a comic book series and mixes two plots.  One involves a pterosaur on the loose in Paris during the early 1900's and a bunch of Egyptian mummies brought back to life.

The heroine Adle Blanc-Sec manages to interact with all this craziness without running around in extremely tight or cleavage enhancing outfits.  She also doesn't perform ridiculously over the top action stunts that would seriously injure or pretty much kill anyone else.  However she does have a brain in her which she actually uses.  

Probably one of the better adventure films I have seen in a long time.

107 minutes, written by Luc Besson.

2010 - IRON MAN 2 - finally got around to seeing this thing.

Been putting off watching this thing, it ended up being what I expected.  This is the same film as the original Iron Man except they just jacked it by being bigger, noisier and more expensive.  In the last film Tony Stark ended up fighting a guy in another Iron Man suit who was more powerful than him.  In this film he fights a whole bunch of bad robots instead of just one robot guy.  In the previous film, Tony Stark is a drunk and a playboy.  In Iron Man 2 he's drunker and a bigger playboy.  You get the picture. 

Not much of a plot mostly a bunch of random incidents.  Iron Man fights some Russian guy with electronic whips, Iron Man fights him again, Iron Man fights his robots etc.  The secret spy organization SHIELD is mixed up in this so called story.  Some agent named Black Widow has infiltrated Tony Stark's company for reasons I was not entirely sure of except that she wears tight clothes and beats up lots of guys. 

Everything wraps up with a big action climax with Tony Stark and his friend wearing some robot armor that shoots missiles.  Lots of computer images blow up.  No picture needs to be painted for this movie.

As far as the cast goes, Robert Downey does his little cute playboy thing again.  Gwyneth Paltrow is probably grateful she is in a hit movie series, ditto Scarlett Johansson.  Mickey Roarke plays some brilliant Russian scientist who builds the evil robot army which is kind of amusing considering Roarke looks like he can barely groom himself. 

125 minutes.

2010 - TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL, a horror comedy

This film reminds me of The Evil Dead II, which had the same mix of horror and comedy.  Tucker and Dale vs. Evil probably has a little more going for it than The Evil Dead  II, since there is an attempt at creating more likable characters than that film had.

Inverting the evil hillbillies vs college kids trope is a clever idea and this film has enough ideas and situations to pull it off for about 90 minutes.

I particularly enjoyed watching Dale munching on a jar full of pickled hard boiled eggs and the scene with the chain saw was funny.  Naturally the actors playing the "college kids" don't look like college kids but that's part of the fun.

Tucker and Dale vs Evil does a pretty good job of playing out it's premise.

89 minutes.

2010 - THE LOSERS or the assembly line

An undercover team of commandos are after a drug lord in Bolivia (where else).  They are betrayed by their leader and now seek revenge.  Teaming up with a hot chick who is good with weapons they shoot a lot of people in their quest for justice,  etc.

Chick with a weapon 1

Nine count them nine writers were involved in adapting this comic book into yet another cookie cutter action film complete with washed out color, computer generated explosions jumpy editing, lots of smart ass one liners and lots of slow mo shots of the team walking around looking looking like bad "mo fo's."

Chick with a weapon 2

The Losers has dialog and plotting in that A Team like way.  In fact it's safe to say that The Losers is basically The A Team, not the film but the TV show version.  The cast is a group of actors I have never heard of playing characters I have seem in action films all my life.

Chick with a weapon 3

It's very comforting watching The Losers.  You know exactly where it's going from the first five minutes of the opening gunfight to the last five minutes of the ending gunfight.

97 minutes, written by credited writers Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt.

2010 - HEREAFTER, drama about the supernatural is mighty low key

Three stories about people interacting with the supernatural.  Matt Damon is a psychic who can't handle his psychic powers.  Some kid in London sees his brother killed and then wants to communicate with him from beyond the grave.  In the third story, a French reporter survives the 2004 tsunami and has a near death experience where she sees ghostly images.

This film was directed by Clint Eastwood and it's so low key and quiet that all the supernatural stuff doesn't have a fighting chance in the film.  It’s  hard to see what the big deal about the afterlife is when the afterlife is so damn laid back and low key.

If you are going to make a film about the supernatural it would be nice if there was actually a little more interaction with the supernatural.  At the very least the humans could have run in to Fatso, Stinky, and Stretch from Casper the Friendly Ghost,  which would have introduced a little action to this film.

Gratuitous tsunami victim picture

Clint Eastwood has been a prolific filmmaker since he started working behind the camera,  32 films since he started directing in 1971.  They have all been of very variable quality.  For every Unforgiven the viewer has to sit through 5 of 6 films like Space Cowboys or Hereafter.

129 minutes, written by Peter Morgan.

2010 - LETTERS TO JULIET is a crummy chick flick.

It's not horrible, it's not terrible, it's not bad, it's just stupid.  A young woman on an Italian vacation helps an old woman find her long lost love blah blah blah.

A starring vehicle for an actor named Amanda Seyfried, she has to be charming enough to carry the entire film.  Seyfried is no Audrey Hepburn, she's just another bland blond who can't work up any charm or chemistry with her costar an equally bland blond named Chris Egan.

This leaves Vanessa Redgrave and her real life significant other Franco Nero to carry the emotional heart of the film, but they have hardly any scenes together.  So that leaves only the Italian scenery worth watching and frankly that's not much of a reason to sit through  Letters to Juliet.

 A film that was made for the express purpose of letting the cast and crew have a free vacation in Italy on the studio's dollar, I'm sure everybody had a nice time.

The star of the film, Amanda Seyfried's lack of charisma sent her back to the kind roles she is best at, hookers and porn stars in films like Chloe and the forthcoming Linda Lovelace biography.

105 minutes.

2010 - THE TROLL HUNTER aka TROLLIJEREGEREN

Would be Michael Moore filmmakers have stumbled on to a cover-up.  The Norwegian government has been eliminating trolls and keeping it a secret from the public.

Troll Hunter is in the "found footage" genre of films.  Hand held camera work made to look like a PBS Frontline special.  This is a horror film with a very underground sense of humor.  It's played with a straight face and filmed in some very good looking Norwegian  locations.

Normally I don't care for this kind of film, I prefer my camera mounted on a tripod, however in this film the annoying shaky camera movement and the night photography kind of works for this nonsense.

I still feel that these phony documentary films are of a "Johnny One Note" kind of film making.  What kind of film do you make after this?  A film with a camera mounted on a steadicam?

Thought The Troll Hunter U/V gun was very cool.

103 minutes.

2010 - CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, another odd documentary from Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog and a small film crew enter the Chauvet cave in southern France to photograph cave paintings that are probably 32,000 years old.  

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams is another meditation by Werner Herzog on art and the human condition.  For a Herzog documentary this is a relatively restrained piece of film without a lot of the expected weirdness that is a Herzog documentary.

  There is something fascinating about seeing this cave art and knowing that primitive man has already gone where... well whatever.

It would hardly be a Herzog film without some kind of ultimate bizarre stuff somewhere in the film and Herzog's postscript involves nuclear power plants and albino alligators because why wouldn't it.

90 minutes, written by Werner Herzog of course.

2007 - THE KEY TO RESERVA, 2010 - A LETTER TO ELIA, two short films about filmmakers from Martin Scorsese.

A couple of short films from Martin Scorsese about filmmakers and filmmaking.  These two minor films say a lot about his attitudes towards a couple of major filmmakers, Alfred Hitchcock and Elia Kazan.

The Key to Reserva is an extended sparkling wine commercial about Scorsese discovering some lost script pages from an unfilmed Hitchcock script.  Scorsese's really the whole show at his motormouth best.  He blathers on at 100 miles an hour talking about preserving a film that was never made in the first place and carries on about recreating the lost scenes to Greed.  His short film The Key to Reserva does a pretty good job of mimicking Hitchock's style and contains enough in jokes to amuse just about any film nut. 

10 minutes.

A Letter to Elia is something very different from The Key to Reserva.  Scorsese is again the star in this film. This time he's much more serious as he discusses the career of director Elia Kazan a filmmaker he clearly feels a lot of kinship for.  Scorsese does a brief overview of Kazan's life and career focusing on some of the highs and lows of his personal life.  Towards the end of the film Scorsese speaks movingly about his friendship with Kazan, his appearance at the Academy Awards to give Kazan his honorary Oscar and in particular, Kazan's late 50's and early 60's films which had a personal resonance for him.

60 minutes.

Scorsese clearly enjoys Hitchcock's films but seems to have a more emotional connection to individuals like Kazan or Cassevetes.

These films are an interesting insight into what makes Scorsese tick film wise.  The Key to Reserva is floating around the Internet, but don't bother with You tube which for some reason has suppressed the audio track on this film.

2010 - HOW DO YOU KNOW, very low key romantic comedy.

This romantic comedy about a female athlete and a businessman from the writer/director James L. Brooks was rejected by the critics and public.   Brooks was accused of losing his comedy touch, overpaying the stars and taking part in the massacre of cute little kittens at an animal shelter.

How Do You Know doesn't seem all that different from the previous five films he's written and directed.  If you examine his other films two of them have been serious under performers.  Spanglish and I'll Do Anything have left him with a batting average of about .500.

Part of the problem for audiences and critics may have been that Brooks conceived How Do You Know as a more intelligent romantic comedy than audiences have been used to.  People were actually expected to think about the relationships and situations  for a change. 

The cast and the acting with the exception of Jack Nicholson isn't too bad.  Nicholson is just way off as the conniving father of Paul Rudd who will even railroad his son into jail to protect his company. 
Paul Rudd is good as the stressed out businessman, Owen Wilson is the clueless jock trying to figure out this whole relationship business.  Reese Witherspoon may not have been the best choice for the female jock but she works hard and gives a professional performance. 

How Do You Know is not a perfect film, it has serious flaws but it is certainly not worthy of all the scorn that has been heaped upon it. 
 
116 minutes.

2010 - BLACK SWAN, grand guignol ballet film is a camp classic.

In The Red Shoes, Moira Shearer's character, Victoria Page doesn't crack up until about 10 minutes before the end of the film.  In Black Swan Natalie Portman's character, Nina Sayers is clearly some kind of mental case 10 minutes into the film.

Looks like the director Darren Arnofsky had been watching a lot of Roman Polanski films before he made this, particularly Repulsion and The Tenant.

This Arnofsky film also has a lot in common with his previous film The Wrestler.  Both have central characters that are to put it mildly a little on the edge.  Portman starts out the film as a nervous wreck and manages to stay hysterical throughout the whole film.  It's a daring performance and almost redeems her work in those awful Star Wars films. 

Times have certainly changed all right.  In The Red Shoes, Boris Lermontov the impresario of the ballet company manipulates his dancers for his own artistic ends.  In Black Swan, Vincent Cassel's Thomas Leroy the ballet director manipulates his dancers and manages to cop a feel all at the same time and all in the name of his art.

Still the show must go on and like The Red Shoes, Black Swan dances its way to an inevitable conclusion.

This is certainly very assured film making.  Arnofsky is a master at capturing extreme characters in stressful situations and then ramping it up to the nth degree without the whole thing looking really silly.

If you are looking for a horror film set in the classy world of ballet this is it.  Otherwise you would probably be best off watching the ballet segment in Disney's Make Mine Music.

The music's nice.

108 minutes, written by Mark Heyman,  Andres Heinz and John McLaughlin.