Fast Five

There’s more homoerotic tension between Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel than there was in Top Gun and all of the Lord of the Rings movies combined. The Oceans Eleven heist device seems like a good fit to transition to from all of the drag racing. But the filmmakers still whitewash the hundreds of innocent bystanders who were certainly killed during the climactic police chase/Armageddon in the streets of Rio so the protagonists could escape and buy brand new Italian sports cars. Here’s hoping that in the opening minutes of Fast 6 some of their stolen loot goes to the families of the Brazilian victims in remembrance of that horrible summer day.

Insidious

In Poltergeist, what if you actually got to SEE what JoBeth Willams saw when she went into the netherworld to find Carol-Anne? That’s the elevator pitch of Insidious, the low-budget profit machine from the director of Saw and the Producers of Paranormal Activity. The typical floating objects and jump scares are effectively hair-raising, but expected. The twists that pile on at the end reminded me of the great SNL/Andy Samberg/Ellen Page short The Mirror. Overall, it’s a noble testament to bloodless, PG-13 spookiness and a nice homage to Tobe Hooper’s classic.

Rio

There are millions of different colors in Rio, and one individual color never seems to repeat anywhere. The script is nothing special – it feels cobbled together from pieces of other, greater animated scripts. But man! Rio seems to use every single possible color visible in the electromagnetic spectrum to great effect, if you’re not counting the paint-by-numbers story.

Scream 4

Just don’t answer the phone, ladies. It’s that simple. Don’t answer the phone, and the killer can’t play out his evil script. But I guess the people that reside in Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven’s Scream 4 world don’t have voice mail. If they did, would there be a movie? The hapless residents also don’t seem to have any peripheral vision, either, because the killer almost always comes from the side. It seems like if there was killer this omnipotent and prolific, Dewey the sheriff would have a hotline to either the FBI or the National Guard. Dewey is well-meaning, but he can only do so much -- especially with a series of killers who can all disguise their voices in the exact same way. If there’s a different killer in each movie, shouldn’t their evil phone voices sound slightly different? Maybe I just miss Jamie Kennedy too much. No one could explain the rules of horror movies better than he could. I certainly can’t.

Source Code

No sophomore slump for Duncan Jones, director of Moon. Source Code is a taut, suspenseful and well-executed sci-fi thriller with a lot of big ideas about fate. The premise isn’t mind-blowingly original and neither is the resolution, but Jones, Ben Ripley and company are teeming with competence, which is more than you can ask for these days. The cast is strong, the pace is brisk, the look is cool and it gives a little hope for humanity. Not a bad night at the movies. Looking forward to the next big thing from these guys.

Your Highness

As I am writing this weblog entry, I am stoned out of my mind. Being stoned makes me hilarious and brilliant. I’m sure you, gentle reader, are amazed by how hilarious I am, whether you are stoned or not. As I write my brilliant and hilarious critique of Your Highness, I’m truly in awe of how articulate and clever I am. Marijuana in no way affects or inhibits my ability to judge my own hilarity. I am a genius, and pot just fertilizes the already fertile ground that is my hysterically funny imagination. Laugh, my children! Laugh heartily! I need no filter!

Hanna

It’s not really clear what Hanna, the vicious teen assassin, wants. All of her goals are very oblique. She wants to reunite with her father. She wants to hear music. She wants to kiss boys and be a hippie. In the lexicon of teen assassins, "Hit Girl" from Kick Ass is far more motivated. She wants REVENGE and she’ll kill anyone in her way to get it. Hanna’s a little too touchy-feely. Despite exceptional performances from the cast, Hanna needs to murder a lot more people for me to care.

Sucker Punch

Emily Browning plays an innocent stripper with a heart of gold who is SO sexy and SO sensual that any time she dances for men she can hypnotize them. And the movie NEVER shows her dancing. As soon as she’s about to dance, they cut away to her inner fantasy world, where she and her squad of fetishistic nymphs run combat missions in various “manga” fantasy worlds, shooting soldiers, killing Nazi robots, and repelling from various flying machines in dramatically tight-fitting leather underwear. The filmmakers believe we would rather see this than Emily Browning’s sexy dancing. So that’s really a toss-up. What’s funny is the sexuality of the nymphs is never portrayed. Dramatically speaking, they’re asexual, and the skimpy outfits are really just a cinematic fallacy, tricking us into watching the battle. It’s all a metaphor for something I think, but I’m not sure what. I bet Filmmaker Zach Snyder knows. Every second of this movie feels deliberate. Every frame is picture perfect, every sound and every music cue are relentlessly intentional. It’s a beautiful movie to watch and to experience. You can sit back and relax and trust that the filmmakers have seen to every single detail. Except one: Sucker Punch doesn’t make sense AT ALL! So I can’t recommend it.

Paul

Lots of swearing in this sweet, funny, and sometimes groan-inducingly obvious love-letter to the Spielberg and Lucas space movies. Kristen Wiig stands out in the funny cast mainly because she actually gets to play a character instead of a one-dimensional, scene-stealing goofball, like in previous movies. So for the most part, I liked this. But I am getting tired of Seth Rogen. He’s in too many things. I feel bad for Linda Cardellini. Where the hell is she? Of all the Freaks and Geeks alums, she’s due for a career jolt.