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Review
Jennifer Lynch's morbid thriller "Surveillance" begins with masked intruders killing people and the slaughter never stops. It's been 15 years since David Lynch's daughter gave the world "Boxing Helena," but she hasn't lost her interest in minds that are seriously demented.
Somewhere in the desert, two flamboyantly reckless killers are leaving a trail of death including that of a local police officer. His colleagues are not best pleased when two assured FBI agents show up to interview three witnesses to the most recent carnage.
With a high splatter quotient and many scenes of deviant humiliation, the film will have its fans even if the eventual twist hardly comes as a surprise and probably isn't meant to. "Surveillance" will please the B-movie crowd in theaters and on into the ancillaries.
Police Captain Billings (Michael Ironside) and his men are not happy at all when FBI Agents Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormond) and Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman) arrive to take over a case they are keen to solve. It doesn't help that for all their professionalism the two feds appear to be very tightly wound.
Hallaway separates the three witnesses -- a female druggie (Pell James), a little girl (Ryan Simpkins) and a wounded police officer (co-scripter and producer Kent Harper) -- and watches them via camera as they relate the horrific incident on a deserted road in which five people were slain.
Each has a different take on what transpired but the agents have reason to believe which ones are lying as the story unfolds in flashbacks.
The film looks great with cinematographer Peter Wunstorf using different stock and inventive angles to good effect while Todd Bryanton's score helps maintain a constant undercurrent of dread. Lynch fills the screen with elements that some viewers of the film will want to go back to watch more than once, although not this one.
Review
Bottom Line: Crash, bang, wallop as the machines sweep in for another cataclysm.
LONDON -- Designed to give devoted fans of the 2007 "Transformers," which grossed more than $700 million worldwide, more of the same, Michael Bay's sequel "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a nonstop whirl of flying, battling and crashing machinery.
Characters and comedy are in short supply in a plot that's basically an Indiana Jones-style search for a buried treasure, in this case a 1,000-year-old matrix that will give life back to Optimus Prime, one of the alien robots who is on the side of humans in their fight against the evil Decepticons who are out to destroy them.
With Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox back as the leads and massive battles involving ships, planes, tanks, rockets and industrial level shape-changing machines, the film will make another huge dent in the global boxoffice.
With its intelligence at the level of the simple-minded, however, the film is not likely to attract moviegoers who seek something more than a screen filled with kaleidoscopes of colored metal. Fan boys will no doubt love it, but for the uninitiated it's loud, tedious and, at 147 minutes, way too long.
LaBeouf's nerdy character Sam is off to college in this one. He barely has time to meet his new roommates before the war games begin. Fox's hot-chick car mechanic Mikaela has come to visit, and the two are soon off on the international hunt for the missing matrix.
Sam's nitwit parents (Kevin Dunn, Julie White) are on holiday in Europe. They also get involved along with college fellow Leo (Ramon Rodriguez) and eventually Simmons (John Turturro), a former agent who now works at his mother's butcher shop. Rainn Wilson is wasted in one scene as a snarky professor.
Tyrese Gibson and Josh Duhamel return as stalwart soldiers, and there's the expected army of cars, trucks, assorted vehicles and mechanical implements that can become nasty metallic beasts in a flash. The long climax takes place in the Egyptian desert with ancient secrets to be found inside the pyramids with explosions going off all around.
Bay's team of four editors stitch together smashing but meaningless images, though it's as difficult to make out which machine is which as it is to tell what anyone is saying. The noise level -- not helped by Steve Jablonsky's relentless score -- is super-intense and everyone yells lines at high speed. Because nothing they're saying makes any sense, it's hardly important.
LaBeouf gets little chance to show what charm he might have. Meanwhile, Fox has little to do except look great in a tank top and tight jeans while running in slow motion through flying sand.
Review
“Comedy,” Jerry Lewis or some other professional wisenheimer once said, “is a man in trouble.” In Harold Ramis’s “Year One,” a thoroughly, sometimes gaggingly broad and sly conceptual laugh-in laced-with-jokes — about God, poop, circumcision, female underarm hair and the state of Israel — comedy is two men dressed in animal skins and neck deep in shtick. Set in what looks like a succession of B-movie studio sets, the film brings to mind a Hope and Crosby road movie, though only if Bob and Bing, after studying the Bible as children and reading Nietzsche as adults, were grappling with issues of faith.
Filling Hope and Crosby’s clown shoes nicely in “Year One” are Jack Black and Michael Cera as Paleolithic tribesmen. Zed (Mr. Black) is an inept hunter with a wayward spear while Oh (Mr. Cera) is a gentle gatherer who murmurs sweet nothings to his berries. After Zed is banished by the tribe for his blunders, the two hit a surrealistic road that takes them from the forest to the desert with stops along the prehistory and history continuum. Before they depart, however, Zed bites into a golden apple he plucks from the forbidden tree of knowledge, a defiant act that awakens his mind. “Everything is weird,” he declares with philosophical purity. Not long after he is down on his hands and knees sampling human scat.
Everything is indeed weird in Mr. Ramis’s highbrow slapstick, in which theological questions are smuggled in between silly bits about excrement and body hair. Much as Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner did with the 2,000 Year Old Man, Mr. Ramis, who wrote the screenplay with Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, is playing with history, or rather with the serious stories familiar from religious instruction and Hollywood epics. “Is it true that you were at the scene of the Crucifixion some 2,000 years ago?” Mr. Reiner asks the 2,000 Year Old Man. “Oh, boy! I knew Christ,” Mr. Brooks replies. “Thin lad. Always wore sandals. Hung around with 12 other guys. They came in the store, no one ever bought anything. Once they asked for water.”
In “Year One” Zed and Oh keep up a similarly nonsensical running conversation during their travels, which take them first to a meadow where they meet two pastoral types, one of whom has a really bad attitude. That would be Cain (David Cross), who’s soon brutally whaling on his brother, Abel (Paul Rudd). (“You want some of that?”) Er, spoiler alert! Cain kills Abel, beating him to death with a rock. Mr. Ramis stages the murder with so many (off-screen) blows that the scene rapidly morphs from funny to queasily humorous to just plain unpleasant before rebounding to the uneasily comic. Mr. Ramis likes to push humor to its tasteless edge, but the violence here feels almost personal, as if he were wielding that rock.
In some ways that’s precisely what he’s doing in “Year One,” which, as Zed and Oh amble through different historical periods and Bible stories, takes knowing and often profane swats at the sacred. Cain proves to be a real pest (a nice observation on the persistence of evil), and things go from bad to worse. Zed and Oh are sold into slavery and marched across the desert by Romans with British accents. They escape, only to inadvertently persuade Abraham (Hank Azaria wearing a long glued-on beard) not to slay Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Jokes about snipped foreskins and the Holy Land’s borders ensue, as does a trip to Sodom, leading to an assortment of predictable, if unprintable, puns and yuks.
In his 1981 satire “The History of the World, Part I,” Mr. Brooks revisits the past, starting with the dawn of hirsute man and ending with the French Revolution, tossing in some religious broadsides along the way. Mr. Ramis, by contrast, fashions a seamless narrative from Zed and Oh’s adventures, jettisoning the usual time frames associated with these foundation stories to create something of an ahistorical collage. In this film Stone Age man walks alongside Roman centurions and heroes and villains from the Old Testament, which suggests that when Mr. Ramis hasn’t been listening to old comedy routines he’s been boning up on the debate about evolution versus creationism. Riffing on the movie’s title: in the beginning there were multiple beginnings, each good for lots of laughs.
For the most part those laughs are generous, tasteless, groaningly goofy and irresistible, though I wish the filmmakers had resisted the temptation to sacrifice, for an unnecessary gag, a Sodomite priest (Oliver Platt) who had taken a liking to Oh. By that point the film has run out of steam, having mined various B-movie clichés (the kind in which prehistoric women wear eyeliner) and even taken a time out for a discourse on God. I would like to think that the final scene, which finds Mr. Ramis playing Noah and sending Zed and Oh off with female mates, was a lazy afterthought, simply an admission of how the past was written. Here’s hoping that in “Year Two” the Stone Age finally gives way to Stonewall.
“Year One” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Violent sacrifices and excremental snacks.
Review
How are the elements of the charming,
traditional romantic comedy The Proposal like the checklist of a charming, traditional bride? Let me count the ways...
Something old: The story of a haughty woman and an exasperated man who hate each other — until they realize they love each other — is proudly square, in the tradition of rom-coms from the 1940s and '50s. Or is it straight out of Shakespeare's 1590s? Sandra Bullock is the shrew, Margaret, a pitiless, high-powered New York book editor first seen multitasking in the midst of her aerobic workout (thus you know she needs to get...loved). Ryan Reynolds is Andrew, her put-upon foil of an executive assistant, a younger man who accepts abuse as a media-industry hazing ritual. And there the two would remain, locked in mutual disdain, except for Margaret's fatal flaw — she's Canadian. (So is X-Men's Wolverine; I thought our neighbors to the north were supposed to be nice.) Margaret, with her visa expired, faces deportation and makes the snap
executive decision to marry Andrew in a green-card wedding. It's an offer the underling can't refuse if he wants to keep his job. (A sexual-harassment lawsuit would ruin the movie's mood.) Okay, he says. But first comes a visit to the groom-to-be's family in Alaska. Amusing complications ensue.
Something new: The chemical energy between Bullock and Reynolds is fresh and irresistible. In her mid-40s, Bullock has finessed her dewy America's Sweetheart comedy skills to a mature, pearly texture; she's lovable both as an uptight careerist in a pencil skirt and stilettos, and as a lonely lady in a flapping plaid bathrobe. Reynolds, meanwhile, is just refining his dry comedy thing, learning to get the most from his deceptive cute-face looks. Who knew these two would, hmmm, complete each other? Working together, both are surer and more disciplined in delivering their comedy goods.
Something borrowed: The boisterous family dynamics. The eccentric supporting players (none more extreme than Oscar Nuñez from The Office). The snappy screwball
dialogue in Pete Chiarelli's script. And the way Anne Fletcher directs like a camp counselor wrangling bunkmates...it's all been seen before. For a reason. These elements work.
Something blue: As the wise and saucy matriarch of the family, the divine 87-year-old Betty White has fun as one hot grandma — and inspires her younger stars to say ''I do,'' too.
Review
Of the many Woody Allen surrogates past—some skilled, others considerably less so—Larry David, the professional curmudgeon behind Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, may be the most philosophically harmonious. Allen and David express their obsessions and neuroses differently—Allen is more nervous and retiring, while David tramples brazenly over social norms—but their misanthropy forms a heavenly chorus during the best moments of Whatever Works, an otherwise wobbly odd-couple comedy. Dusting off an ancient script intended for Zero Mostel three decades ago, Allen tweaks the material enough to supply David with bilious rants about the stupidity and meaninglessness of man and the universe, but not enough to bridge the modern world with dated, All In The Family-style comic stereotyping.
Hobbled by a limp incurred after a failed suicide attempt—jumping from his apartment window, he hit a canopy on the way down—David lives in a shabby basement apartment and spends his days teaching chess to unpromising child prodigies and bloviating about humanity’s shortcomings to anyone who will listen. But like a lot of stock codgers, David has a heart of gold, which shines through when he takes in Evan Rachel Wood, a naïve teenage runaway from deepest Mississippi. Wood proves a malleable hunk of clay for David to shape with his “wisdom,” thanks to her need for a father figure and her willingness to absorb his abuses. Eventually, the two enter into a weirdly platonic marriage—a late reference to Viagra is, mercifully, the only evidence of anything physical—but the arrival of Wood’s conservative, hyper-religious mother (Patricia Clarkson) throws a wrench in the works.
Though Clarkson acquits herself reasonably well in a terribly conceived role, her entrance interrupts David’s hilariously twisted mentorship of Wood and sends the movie careening in a far less promising direction. For a good 40 minutes or so, David all but disappears from the action, leaving the Southern hayseeds alone to undergo an unlikely transformation from Bible-thumpers to bohemians. Whenever the focus falls back on David—sometimes talking straight to the audience in an extremely effective breach of the fourth wall—Whatever Works gives effective voice to Allen’s jaundiced philosophy of life: In a world without order, justice, or any belief systems that are uncorrupted or rational, you do what makes you happy. Then you die.
Review
I'm not generally in the habit of praising movies for being good for you, but Food, Inc. is more than just a terrific documentary — it's an important movie, one that nourishes your knowledge of how the world works. Or, in this case, has started not to work. The director, Robert Kenner, features and builds on the muckraking testimony of Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) to create an essential, disturbing portrait of how the food we eat in America has become a deceptively prefab, even hazardous industrial product.
Kenner doesn't rant. He connects the dots — from the huge, aggressively lobbied government subsidies for corn to the transformation of farms into factories of mass-produced, corn-fed cattle, which are then slaughtered and ground into ''hamburger meat filler,'' which is cleansed with ammonia, all so that we can buy a double cheeseburger for 99 cents. Food, Inc. shows how the use of high-fructose corn syrup in almost every supermarket product is part of the same system that masses chickens in concentration-camp coops, where they're bred for their oversize, flavorless white meat (and you thought breast enhancement was just popular for humans). It all traces back to the assembly-line techniques pioneered by the fast-food industry, which were then adopted everywhere else. A big-picture vision of conglomerate duplicity and control, Food, Inc. is hard to shake, because days after you've seen it, you may find yourself eating something — a cookie, a piece of poultry, cereal out of the box, a perfectly round waxen tomato — and you'll realize that you have virtually no idea what it actually is.
Review
n Dead Snow, a group of Norwegian medical students — pals on an Easter vacation — bunk together in a mountain cabin, ready for fun involving skiing, beer drinking, and sex. What they get is an invasion of WWII-era Nazi zombies who haunt the hills. (The undead bastards are gluttons for dining on guts.) Cheery, silly, splattery, and respectful of its elders (and betters, particularly Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead), this bloody/cheesy subtitled Scandinavian lark is written and directed
by Tommy Wirkola, who has a nice touch with severed limbs.
