Starring Bill Hader, Anna Faris, James Caan, and Mr. T
Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller
Rated PG
วันพุธที่ 23 กันยายน พ.ศ. 2552
Movie Preview : Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
Box Office :: September 18-20, 2009 Weekend

วันศุกร์ที่ 11 กันยายน พ.ศ. 2552
Halloween II (2009)
Written by: Capt_Howdy
I just returned home from the premiere of Rob Zombie's Halloween 2 (thanks for the tickets!) and I've got to say that I'm very disappointed. Being the first reviewer of the film on the site, I hate that I'm not raving about it. I wanted to like this film so bad! I really enjoyed Rob Zombie's original remake, too.

Let me give it some praise before I get into what I didn't care for: It starts with a bang, and keeps the tension up throughout the entire film. I can not say that I got bored at all, and the movie moved along really quickly. It also looked good. Say what you will about Rob Zombie, but I think he's got a distinct style that is pleasing to the eye.
Having said that, however, let me slide into my first complaint: This is Rob Zombie-ville. Where Haddonfield the first time around seemed like a middle class white neighborhood, this time it looks like a backwoods village that hasn't had running water in a month. I don't know why, but Zombie makes all of the characters greasy, dirty, and just really unattractive. Laurie this time around looks like shit run over twice throughout the film, (understandable considering), and everyone around her just looks...gross.
Secondly, I really didn't give two shits about any of the characters this time. Laurie bumbles her way through, either screaming hysterically or sobbing uncontrollably; her friend Annie is back, but to no effect; and most disappointing is Dr. Loomis. First time around, he was portrayed as a generally likeable guy with a questionable moral compass. This time he's just an asshole. When he's not yelling at someone, he's screaming profanities to himself. I really disliked his character this time. VERY disappointing.
Then there were the kills. The excessive blood didn't bother me, nor did the body count. What drove me crazy were the sound effects. The stabbing, slicing, crunching, snapping noises were so ridiculously loud and over the top, that I felt like they should have just taken the Batman route and had giant cartoon letters on the screen that yelled SPLAT! CRACK! It was one of those things that once you notice it, you realize how ridiculous it gets.
And finally, my biggest gripe is surely going to be the most controversial one. This film is not a Halloween film. If it weren't for the William Shatner mask, I wouldn't have ever known this was in the Halloween family of films. We complain with remakes at times because we feel like the remake served no purpose - that the filmmakers didn't take it in a new direction or add anything new to the mythology. Well, Rob Zombie can never be accused of that. He certainly puts his own spin on the story. We are in Michael's head for the first time...and I think it ruins part of the mythology. I personally hated the whole "Kill for Mommy" idea. I saw it in the trailer, and had hoped it was just one scene. Well, it's not. It's basically the driving force.
For a character that was referred to in the original script in 1978 as "THE SHAPE," this Michael sure has got a lot of backstory. He's Michael, for God's sake! We don't have to know why he kills, or see that he's got mommy issues and some weird, warped sense of family! While Zombie dabbled in the ethos of Michael in the first film, he dives in head first into it this time around. I can appreciate the fact that they were trying to make a horror film with substance, that had deeper meanings and symbolism, really, I can, but to me, Halloween 2 comes off as an akward, unsuccessful attempt at experimental film. There's flashing images and bizarre dreams, and a white horse, and Michael as a boy (played by a different kid than in the first, and he must be related to Zombie, because there's no way a kid that is that completely awful at acting would ever get a gig on his own. Honestly painful to watch.)
I have other problems with the film, (like how Michael does a lot of grunting when he's stabbing people, and the absence of even a note of John Carpenter's classic theme song until the end credits) but this is dangerously close to turning into one of those reviews where the reviewer seemingly just hates the world. I'm sorry if this dampens anybody's excitement, and obviously this is just my little opinion. Keep in mind that I enjoyed the first, which many of you didn't, and I really dislike this one partly because it's absolutely nothing like the first. So perhaps that means if you hated the first, you'll love this one? I don't know. Still go see it, tell me what you think, disagree with me, call me an idiot, it'll be fun.
I just returned home from the premiere of Rob Zombie's Halloween 2 (thanks for the tickets!) and I've got to say that I'm very disappointed. Being the first reviewer of the film on the site, I hate that I'm not raving about it. I wanted to like this film so bad! I really enjoyed Rob Zombie's original remake, too.
Let me give it some praise before I get into what I didn't care for: It starts with a bang, and keeps the tension up throughout the entire film. I can not say that I got bored at all, and the movie moved along really quickly. It also looked good. Say what you will about Rob Zombie, but I think he's got a distinct style that is pleasing to the eye.
Having said that, however, let me slide into my first complaint: This is Rob Zombie-ville. Where Haddonfield the first time around seemed like a middle class white neighborhood, this time it looks like a backwoods village that hasn't had running water in a month. I don't know why, but Zombie makes all of the characters greasy, dirty, and just really unattractive. Laurie this time around looks like shit run over twice throughout the film, (understandable considering), and everyone around her just looks...gross.
Secondly, I really didn't give two shits about any of the characters this time. Laurie bumbles her way through, either screaming hysterically or sobbing uncontrollably; her friend Annie is back, but to no effect; and most disappointing is Dr. Loomis. First time around, he was portrayed as a generally likeable guy with a questionable moral compass. This time he's just an asshole. When he's not yelling at someone, he's screaming profanities to himself. I really disliked his character this time. VERY disappointing.
Then there were the kills. The excessive blood didn't bother me, nor did the body count. What drove me crazy were the sound effects. The stabbing, slicing, crunching, snapping noises were so ridiculously loud and over the top, that I felt like they should have just taken the Batman route and had giant cartoon letters on the screen that yelled SPLAT! CRACK! It was one of those things that once you notice it, you realize how ridiculous it gets.
And finally, my biggest gripe is surely going to be the most controversial one. This film is not a Halloween film. If it weren't for the William Shatner mask, I wouldn't have ever known this was in the Halloween family of films. We complain with remakes at times because we feel like the remake served no purpose - that the filmmakers didn't take it in a new direction or add anything new to the mythology. Well, Rob Zombie can never be accused of that. He certainly puts his own spin on the story. We are in Michael's head for the first time...and I think it ruins part of the mythology. I personally hated the whole "Kill for Mommy" idea. I saw it in the trailer, and had hoped it was just one scene. Well, it's not. It's basically the driving force.
For a character that was referred to in the original script in 1978 as "THE SHAPE," this Michael sure has got a lot of backstory. He's Michael, for God's sake! We don't have to know why he kills, or see that he's got mommy issues and some weird, warped sense of family! While Zombie dabbled in the ethos of Michael in the first film, he dives in head first into it this time around. I can appreciate the fact that they were trying to make a horror film with substance, that had deeper meanings and symbolism, really, I can, but to me, Halloween 2 comes off as an akward, unsuccessful attempt at experimental film. There's flashing images and bizarre dreams, and a white horse, and Michael as a boy (played by a different kid than in the first, and he must be related to Zombie, because there's no way a kid that is that completely awful at acting would ever get a gig on his own. Honestly painful to watch.)
I have other problems with the film, (like how Michael does a lot of grunting when he's stabbing people, and the absence of even a note of John Carpenter's classic theme song until the end credits) but this is dangerously close to turning into one of those reviews where the reviewer seemingly just hates the world. I'm sorry if this dampens anybody's excitement, and obviously this is just my little opinion. Keep in mind that I enjoyed the first, which many of you didn't, and I really dislike this one partly because it's absolutely nothing like the first. So perhaps that means if you hated the first, you'll love this one? I don't know. Still go see it, tell me what you think, disagree with me, call me an idiot, it'll be fun.
Inglourious Basterds
By Kirk Honeycutt, May 20, 2009 05:58 ET
Bottom Line: A surprisingly tame war movie from the king of pulp fiction Quentin Tarantino.
More Cannes reviewsCANNES -- History will not repeat itself for Quentin Tarantino.
While his "Pulp Fiction" arrived late at the Festival de Cannes and swept away the Palme d'Or in 1994, his World War II action movie "Inglourious Basterds" merely continues the string of disappointments in this year's Competition.
The film is by no means terrible -- its two hours and 32 minutes running time races by -- but those things we think of as being Tarantino-esque, the long stretches of wickedly funny dialogue, the humor in the violence and outsized characters strutting across the screen, are largely missing.
Boxoffice expectations for this co-production that will see the Weinstein Co. handling domestic and Universal handling international distribution still will be considerable, but there isn't much of a chance of the kind of repeat business Tarantino normally attracts.
The film borrows its title but little else from Enzo Castellari's 1978 WWII film. In Tarantino's version, a small group of Jewish-American soldiers under the command of Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine terrorizes Nazi soldiers in Occupied France, performing shocking acts of savagery and corpse mutilations. How close they come to war crimes is unclear because, in a very un-Tarantino manner, he shows little more than a few scalpings that earn Aldo the nickname "Apache" from the Germans and one execution by a baseball bat.
As a matter of fact, for a war movie there is very little action. People talk, soldiers scheme and a German war hero pesters a French woman in Paris.
Otherwise, the action comes in short bursts such as the machine-gunning of a hiding Jewish family through a farmhouse floorboards and a shootout in a bistro.
Reportedly, Tarantino has been having a go at this script for more than a decade, and it looks like he never licked the dramatic problems. The "Basterds" are formed in 1941, then suddenly it's 1944 and they have firmly established their reputation. But only one scene gives the flavor of what they do to deserve it.
Unlike Tarantino's previous films, "Basterds" does not build to a climax through a series of ingenuous episodes -- each one upping the stakes and the tension -- but rather it rolls the dice on one major operation.
The head of Germany's film business, Joseph Goebbels, wants to hold the premiere of a movie celebrating the exploits of the army's finest sharpshooter, Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), in Paris. All the top Nazi brass will be in attendance, including Hitler. A British lieutenant (Michael Fassbender) parachutes behind enemy lines to organize the Basterds to blow up the cinema.
Unbeknown to the Allies, however, the cinema's owner, Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), a Jew who seeks revenge for the execution of her family, has the same general idea, only she wants to lock the doors and set the theater on fire. Best of all for her, the head of security for the event is none other than the villainous Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who killed her family.
The maneuvering by both groups -- the Basterds and Shosanna and her lover-assistant Marcel (Jacky Ido), with the Germans always seeming to be one step away from discovering the schemes -- occupies most of the movie leading up to the premiere. Then Tarantino rewrites the end of WWII.
There are a few moments of classic Tarantino tension in the farmhouse when Colonel Landa interrogates the French farmer hiding a Jewish family, in the bistro where an SS officer grows suspicious of a Basterd's German accent and at the premiere, where Landa appears to uncover one of the plots.
Otherwise the film lacks not only tension but those juicy sequences where actors deliver lines loaded with subtext and characters drip menace with icy wit. Tarantino never finds a way to introduce his vivid sense of pulp fiction within the context of a war movie. He is not kidding B movies as he was with "Grindhouse" nor riffing on cinema as with "Pulp Fiction" and the "Kill Bill" films.
Tarantino has been quoted as saying of "Inglourious Basterds," "This ain't your daddy's World War II movie." In fact, it pretty much is. His scalp-hunters are any Dirty Dozen on a mission, the bread and butter of war movies. The major difference is that some fine European actors simply aren't given enough to do.
Diane Kruger's role as a German movie star is close to being unnecessary. Bruhl does have a key role as the war hero who plays himself in a German propaganda movie, but Til Schweiger is little more than a dress extra.
On the other hand, Tarantino can waste time on a scene back in England, where the British officer receives his orders, simply for the opportunity to get Mike Myers into makeup and prosthetics that make him unrecognizable.
Even Pitt, sporting a somewhat overdone Southern accent, and Laurent, the film's two leads, don't get a chance to explore their characters in any depth. They are who they are the minute they appear onscreen, and nothing much changes through the film.
In fact, in your daddy's war movies, men and women often did undergo interesting transformations. So perhaps Tarantino is right.
วันพฤหัสบดีที่ 10 กันยายน พ.ศ. 2552
Gamer
by William Goss Sep 4th 2009 // 1:02PM
Filed under: Action, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thrillers, Lionsgate Films, Theatrical Reviews
A colleague of mine once observed that the very manner by which Chev Chelios had to keep himself alive in the Crank films respectively represented the approach that writing/directing team Neveldine/Taylor took for each of them, which is to say that Crank 1 was all about keeping our hearts racing and Crank 2 was all about shocking us as an audience. It's a simple, literal assessment that nonetheless cleared up why yours truly was a fan of the first and yet let down by the second -- I'd rather be excited than appalled any day.
And at the intersection of 'thrill' and 'shock' is precisely where N/T's latest, Gamer, falls, and it succeeds considerably more when it's shooting for the former than when it's reveling in the latter.
"Some years from this exact moment," the future of entertainment consists of tuning in for the latest episode of "Slayers," in which death-row inmates serve as real-life avatars for anonymous users out on a rubble-strewn battlefield. If they last thirty missions, they would theoretically earn a pardon; naturally, no one's been so fortunate so far. But coming in close is Kable (Gerard Butler), under the thumb of cocksure teen superstar Simon (Logan Lerman) and under the threat of show runner Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall), a Southern-fried megalomaniac who had his reasons for putting Kable in the game and has his reasons for taking him out...
Yes, you're right, it does sound quite a bit like The Running Man, not to mention last year's Death Race remake (with its all-felons, no-civilians policy), and no, concerns about the responsibility of violent entertainment and the consequences of living and killing vicariously -- let alone being controlled by others -- are not priority one. Neveldine and Taylor are more interested in having excess meet excess, by having Castle's previous program, "Society," be a place where the desperate, like Kable's wife (Amber Valletta), can whore themselves out to virtual deviants who want a taste of anything while being anyone.
Like 'em or not, N/T have established themselves three films in as action auteurs who know their genre well, although they can admittedly let their proudly disorienting aesthetic and sleazier touches get the better of genuine excitement and thrills. The world of "Slayers" is a convincingly frantic environment, full of bangs and booms, but when Kable and others start to work on breaking the rules of the game, things become a great deal more interesting (his strategy for fueling an uncovered vehicle is unique, to say the least). However, given enough time, there will turn up a gratuitous shot or two of an obese man pawing himself as he seduces other men in the guise of women in "Society." It's a gratuitous implication of this particular future, one worthy of maybe an insert shot in a montage, not an entire subplot as is the case here.
But how else can you expect to excuse the sight of a character named Rick Rape (played by Milo Ventimiglia, one of many Pathology alums to pop up) dry-humping a stone-faced Ms. Valletta? And in what other movie are you going to see an impromptu musical number set to "I've Got You Under My Skin" turn into a burly brawl of sorts? That last part is an indulgence on behalf of Hall's cackling baddie, which doesn't make it any less an indulgence on part of the filmmakers. To be proudly amoral or even a little surreal is one thing; to willfully welcome the logical extremes of the unleashed id seems like more overkill than the actual overkill.
Butler and Valletta nimbly balance the slight differences between acting as they are and acting as they're told, when not playing up the simplistic melodrama that is their plight. Lerman is a suitably brash teen; Alison Lohman and rapper Ludacris are feasible freedom fighters; Kyra Sedgwick plays a TV host overdue for a change of heart regarding the morality of her favorite show (a transformation wholly expected and yet surprisingly swift in its execution); and there are scant appearances by Keith David, John Leguizamo and Terry Crews beyond that.
Gamer is at times striking, and at others silly, and and yet at others sickening, but never too stupid, at least not compared to so much else flash and pop peddled to the masses these days. Whether you want 'em or not, Neveldine and Taylor brings their concepts to brash life; the day, though, when they learn to value the subversive over the sensational will be the day that we all win.
Top 10 Films for September 4-6, 2009
TW | Title (click to view) | Studio | Weekend Gross |
1 | The Final Destination | WB (NL) | $12,368,882 |
2 | Inglourious Basterds | Wein. | $11,629,394 |
3 | All About Steve | Fox | $11,241,214 |
4 | Gamer | LGF | $9,156,057 |
5 | District 9 | TriS | $7,076,937 |
6 | Halloween II (2009) | W/Dim. | $5,745,206 |
7 | Julie & Julia | Sony | $5,324,583 |
8 | G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra | Par. | $5,175,113 |
9 | Extract | Mira. | $4,340,108 |
10 | The Time Traveler's Wife | WB (NL) | $4,326,787 |
11 | Shorts | WB | $2,734,938 |
12 | G-Force | BV | $1,999,582 |
The Final Destination
The Final Destination
by Eric D. Snider Aug 28th 2009 // 9:03AM
Filed under: Horror, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, Remakes and Sequels
When the decision was made to produce a fourth Final Destination movie, there must have been conversations about whether the same formula would work without any reconfiguring. Audiences were pretty familiar with it by now: someone has a premonition that saves a bunch of people's lives; then Death comes back around to kill everyone anyway, in the order they'd have died in if they hadn't gotten away the first time. Someone must have asked, "Should we tweak the formula a little? Offer some kind of new angle or a surprising twist we haven't used before?"
That person, if he existed, was outvoted. The new film, senselessly called The Final Destination, follows the formula to the letter, without deviation. You might just as well stay home and watch one of the other three, where at least there will be some devilish wit and ironic humor in evidence. You'll get none of that here.
This time we're at a racetrack when Nick (Bobby Campo), a young man with no defining personality traits, has a vivid daydream about a horrific accident that kills him, his friends, and 50 others. Spooked, he gets out of there just before the real thing happens, saving his own life and the lives of his girlfriend, Lori (Shantel VanSanten), her best friend, Janet (Haley Webb), and Janet's preppy d-bag boyfriend Hunt (Nick Zano). A security guard (Mykelti Williamson) is also spared, along with a few tag-alongs.
What was the source of Nick's premonition? Not explained, or even really wondered about. Why does he continue to have premonitions detailing how the survivors will die, one by one? Also not an issue.
What's important is that they do indeed die, and in the bizarre, elaborate ways that have been this franchise's hallmarks. The gimmick this time is that director David R. Ellis (Final Destination 2, Snakes on a Plane) shot it in 3D and takes every opportunity to fling gore and viscera at us. But the writer, Eric Bress (a co-writer on FD2), evidently took this as an excuse to get lazy with the screenplay. After all, why waste effort on imaginative deathtraps when the whole thing can be spiced up with 3D? There are no humorous exchanges or amusing characters. The central figures apparently don't have families, jobs, or other friends, existing only as cardboard cutouts to be run through the paces of the story.
I say all this as someone who really enjoyed the first and third Final Destination films as clever, self-aware horror machines. This fourth one is strictly by-the-numbers, without a moment of genuine tension and no real surprises. (Small wonder it's from the same creative team as the lackluster part 2.) Even Death himself seems a little bored with it.
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