Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay - Review

Unbelievably, Kal Penn and John Cho are both in their 30’s, but they’re still the perfect image of mid-20’s slackerdom in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, the sequel no one would have expected when Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle made just $18 million in theatres. But thanks to the wonders of DVD, America’s current favorite stoners are back, bringing with them pretty much everything that made us love them to begin with.

The movie kicks off literally minutes after the first one ended, with Harold (Cho) and Kumar (Penn) preparing to fly to Amsterdam and meet Harold’s dream girl, neighbor Maria (Paula Garcés). You’d expect them to get tangled up in airport security, but they make it onto the plane and into the tiny bathroom, where Kumar can’t resist taking a puff of his special no-smoke bong. It’s no surprise than an Indian-American wielding a battery-powered bong on an airplane is doomed, and before too long Harold and Kumar have been shipped off to Guantanamo Bay, shown no mercy from the crazed Homeland Security officer Ron (Rob Corddry).

It takes them all of five minutes to escape, thanks to some handy real terrorists in the next cell, and from there they’re on the run through the deep South, hoping to make it to Texas to break up the wedding between Kumar’s ex-girlfriend Vanessa (Danneel Harris) and her politically connected fiancée Colton (Eric Winter). Their adventures involve a bottomless (as opposed to topless) party in Miami, a creepy trailer in Alabama, a Klan rally, an urban neighborhood’s basketball game, and, of course, a run-in with Neil Patrick Harris, who takes them to what might actually be the best little whorehouse in Texas.

Mixed in with the madness, as in the first one, are a lot of jabs of America’s simultaneous racism and fear of sounding racist. Corddry’s Homeland Security agent is so flagrantly racist he tries to tempt Jewish witnesses with a jangling bag of pennies and actually wipes his ass with the Bill of Rights. Ed Helms shows up in an interrogation scene as an interpreter who can’t understand that Harold’s parents can speak English. The pokes at racism were funny enough in the first movie, but when linked in this way to the American government they take on a deeper, more barbed meaning. And given that Harold and Kumar escape prison with the help of terrorists, the movie deftly avoids doing anything remotely like defending terrorism. When one of the angry Al-Qaeda members tells Kumar that Americans need to eat fewer donuts and pay attention to the world, Kumar shouts back, “Fuck you! Donuts are awesome!” Case closed.

Cho and Penn continue being the best part of the series—it’s hard to imagine the first one succeeding without their charm and camaraderie. Penn even gets a chance to show off his real acting chops, in a flashback to college when Vanessa helped him break out of his nerd shell. The men make Harold and Kumar enough fun to spend time with, even when the jokes get slow and repetitive. Same goes for Neil Patrick Harris, who tries valiantly to make his on-screen persona different from the character he plays each week on How I Met Your Mother; it doesn’t really work except when Harris takes mushrooms, which is something no one on CBS primetime ever gets to do.

Harold and Kumar is a bit grosser than Judd Apatow’s usual fare, and won’t have quite the same crossover appeal as the equally stoned Knocked Up. But its fans will leave the theater happy. Provided they ever make it to the theater to begin with. Hard to smoke in a public place, you know.

His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass - Review

When writer/director Chris Weitz adapted the first of Philip Pullman’s three His Dark Materials novels into a feature film, he skirted around the book’s anti-religion elements in order to cater to notoriously over-sensitive Christian groups. That’s alright, in The Golden Compass the Church was really only a stand in for any authoritarian, repressive organization and so Weitz has replaced them with generic fascists. It still gets the message across. Should the other books in the series ever get adapted, it may become more of a problem, since the story’s twists and turns lead to a desperate battle to kill God with the help of gay Angels. There’s no getting around that. No wonder the Catholic Church is protesting Weitz’s religiously cleansed Golden Compass anyway, perhaps afraid that if people see it, the rest of the books will get made and suddenly they’ll have a pew full of parishioners trying to stick Yaweh in the gut with a shiv. Or something like that.

For now though, Pullman’s tale is little damaged by a filmmaker’s fear of offending right-wingers, and The Golden Compass sticks rather closely to the narrative on which it’s based. It’s still the tale of Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards), a precocious little girl in a parallel world, caught up in magic and intrigue beyond her ken.

We first meet little Lyra scrambling through the streets around the University where she lives, playing games with the group of boys who are her enemies and friends. Her world is one not so different from our own, but yet very different in fundamental ways. It seems eternally trapped in the 18th Century, except an 18th Century where magic is real and often put to such humdrum uses as pulling horseless carriages. The carriages are horseless, because the animals in her world are all daemons. A daemon is the physical manifestation of a person’s soul. Every man and woman alive in Lyra’s world has one, and it takes the form of a talking animal, the shape it takes and the personality exudes being literal manifestations of who that person is on the inside. In Lyra’s world no one is ever alone, and on a cold night everybody has something fuzzy to cuddle up with. Teddy bear sales have no doubt been long mired in recession.

The daemons are a neat gimmick, but one fraught with filmmaking peril. Too much of them and Pullmans’ intrinsically dark and edgy tale turns into a mad caricature full of silly, Bugs Bunny like creatures running amok amongst humans. Too little of them, and the essential oddity of the story is lost, leaving us with yet another in a long line of bland, Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings clones. Weitz acceptably walks the line between those two extremes, giving us enough daemons to keep it interesting, but leaving the humans at the center of the story while daemons hang around in the background, out of frame, off camera, sometimes barely noticed as they would be if we were actually there with Lyra, and as used to seeing them and interacting with them as you would be any other appendage, like a pinky finger.

Soon after we meet them, Lyra and her daemon Pant are launched into adventure. She’s taken to live with the evil Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman), who though breathtakingly beautiful, is up to no good. Mrs. Coulter had a hand in kidnapping Lyra’s best friend Roger and so Lyra, with the help of an all too conveniently introduced band of nomadic sea-faring Gyptians, journeys to the far frozen north. There she’ll attempt to rescue her friend, meeting witches, Ice Bears and aeronauts along the way. Moment to moment the movie’s entertaining enough. Watching a talking polar bear slap on a suit of armor and charge into battle is pretty cool, and in his all too few and too brief moments on screen Sam Elliott runs away with the movie as a cowboy balloonist named Lee Scoresby with a jackrabbit daemon named Hester (voiced by Kathy Bates). But there’s a lot going on beneath the surface of the movie aside from the CGI and hand to hand fighting, intrigue and political maneuvering which Weitz glosses over with tedious, and predictable exposition scenes that never really fit in with the rest of the movie.

There’s just too much exposition and not enough explanation in Weitz’s film. His script spends a lot of time talking about the complexities of Lyra’s world, but little time showing any of it. I wonder if anyone who hasn’t already read the book will have any idea what’s going on. Most of what happens comes off as convenient, lazily written coincidence; if you haven’t read the book you’ll probably think it one of those movies where things turn out the way they do simply because it’s a movie, and not because there’s any rhyme or reason to what’s happened. Whether or not you’ve read the books you’ll enjoy The Golden Compass on some level, but it feels rushed, and I doubt anyone who hasn’t already read the books will be interested in going back for more if there’s ever a sequel.

Martian Child - Review

Don Cheadle has a neat, and apt, summation of the stages of a film career: "The first stage is 'Who the hell is Don Cheadle?' The second is 'Get me Don Cheadle.' The third is 'Get me a Don Cheadle type.' The fourth is 'Get me a young Don Cheadle,' and the last is again 'Who the hell is Don Cheadle?”

With all the progress John Cusack has made in his career, what is he doing now playing what Cheadle would call “a John Cusack type"? Cusack has been on the verge for several years of escaping Lloyd Dobler once and for all, and with December’s Grace is Gone, he finally seems poised to pull it off. Martian Child however, is a complete retread: Cusack playing Cusack, except this time he’s got a kid in tow. At least it’s coming out before Grace is Gone, so it won’t be called a step backwards for the star, who really does deserve a hit.

Martian Child is based loosely on a story by science fiction writer David Gerrold, about his adoption of an eccentric young boy. Gerrold is single and gay, but since this is Hollywood Cusack’s version is a widower, having begun the adoption process before his wife’s death. Ready to quit wallowing David goes through with the adoption process and winds up with Dennis (Bobby Coleman), a boy who spends his time in a refrigerator box (since he’s allergic to the sun) and wears a weight belt made of batteries (since, without it, the Earth’s gravity would not hold him down). David is a science fiction writer after all, so these quirks appeal to him, despite warnings from his sister (Joan Cusack), slacker agent (Oliver Platt), and a stern adoption agency employee (Richard Schiff) that he has to eventually help Dennis learn to live among the earthlings.

The one person supporting David in his efforts is his wife’s friend Harlee (Amanda Peet), and wouldn’t you know it a love connection comes about by the end. The fact that Harlee and David barely spend any time together on screen doesn’t matter, because that romantic subplot has to find its way in there somehow, dammit. In fact, nearly all of Martian Child takes place off-screen, with the film hitting the high points—spirited bonding! tearful fighting!—and leaving us to fill in the emotional development. David tells Dennis to “stop saying that” when he asks “Was I bad?” but we’ve never heard Dennis say it before. Director Menno Meyjes doesn’t want us to join David on his emotional journey, but just trust Cusack to report back all the relevant details.

Cusack and Coleman play well off each other as father and son, but you get the sense that their interactions would be a lot more fun to watch if we got to see their relationship progress naturally, rather than being crammed into an awkward plot about “being true to yourself” and “learning to love again.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that of course, but other movies have done it better. With the sci-fi element so glossed over and confused as to be almost irrelevant, Martian Child is just a generic version of any other dramatic comedy about familial love—that is to say, not terribly interesting. Hang on until Grace is Gone, when hopefully we’ll finally see a project worthy of Cusack’s talents.

Mr. Woodcock - Review

Mr. Woodcock. Does just saying that name aloud make you giggle? Then you might have the underdeveloped mental capacity necessary to truly enjoy this movie. You might also enjoy hanging out behind the building after school with mid-high students who are desperately failing at trying to insult each other and chortling over dirty slang terms for having sex. Actually, there’s not a whole lot of difference between that and watching this film.

There is a semi-sweet storyline in the midst of all the repetitive jokes and predictable setups. Inspired by his own efforts to overcome his traumatized childhood, John Farley (Sean William Scott) has written the latest cult-craze self-help book “Letting Go – Getting Past Your Past”. Most of Farley’s demons revolved around his abusive mid-high gym teacher, Mr. Woodcock (Billy Bob Thornton), a man who seems to enjoy embarrassing and belittling his students.

While on tour Farley learns that his little mid-western hometown has decided to bestow upon him its greatest honor: the Corn Cob Key (think key to the city, but with a giant ear of corn on the end). It’s handed out during the town’s annual Corn-ival, a festival full of corn-tests and corn-gratulations to the winners. Do you seem the theme there? It’s only one of several dull running jokes that the movie beats to death during the mind-numbing hour-and-a-half. Farley comes home only to discover that town has also decided to honor Mr. Woodcock, naming him Educator of the Year.

Much to Farley’s further dismay, his mother (Susan Sarandon) is engaged to Mr. Woodcock. Apparently she loves him for his meat. Of course, she’s referring to his talent for cooking steaks, but cue up another series of lame jokes repeated way too many times to be funny. Tossing all of his own self-help principles to the wind and making a complete idiot of himself along the way, Farley desperately tries to prove to his mother and the town just what a horrible person Woodcock really is.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that nearly every gag has been done in another movie before (and usually done better), every single setup is also absurdly predictable. It might have helped if Farley was the kind of guy you could rally around, but the character is too pathetic to cheer. All I could see through the whole movie was a grown-up Steve Stifler who was reprising his American Pie chore of running around complaining about the guy sleeping with his mother.

Sarandon and Thornton are no help either. It’s not entirely their fault as they both do the best with the material they’re given; but there’s the rub: the script is completely worthless. I can’t help but wonder if they were both drunk when they read it or maybe took the roles on a dare. Blackmailed maybe? I don’t care how many times Sarandon and Thornton have won or been nominated for an Oscar, there’s no excuse for wasting time on Mr. Woodcock

I’ll grant the movie this: it made me laugh once. I’m not sure if I laughed because it was the only gag I didn’t see coming from a mile away or if I was so desperate for a chuckle that I would have cracked at a knock-knock joke. If you’re willing to wait seventy minutes for a laugh or the name Mr. Woodcock alone is enough to keep your infantile sense of humor afloat, this may just be the film for you.

Shoot 'Em Up - Review

Websters defines a “shoot’em up” as a “movie, television show, or computer game with much shooting and bloodshed.” In the simplest of terms, this film is exactly that. Writer/Director Michael Davis basically thought up the most ridiculous circumstances for a shootout (while delivering a baby, having sex and skydiving were the obvious choices) and then formed an interesting, if unbelievable plot around those moments. What results is like a John Woo movie on crack, with non-stop action, cheesy but deliciously quotable one-liners and bad ass performances that make up for the just plain bad plot.

Shoot ‘Em Up begins along a deserted street where Mr. Smith (Clive Owen), a jaded loner who hates just about everyone (especially people who don’t signal or slurp their coffee), notices an extremely pregnant mother chased down by a gun-toting bad guy. Armed with only a carrot (his favorite snack), Mr. Smith plays the reluctant hero, telling the bad guy to “Eat your vegetables” as he shoves the carrot full on through his throat. Already the film has set the cartoonish violence bar very high. As the woman goes into labor, Smith helps deliver the baby while using her gun to ward off the rest of the goons. The shootout ends when the mother takes a bullet in the crown, leaving Smith with the innocent child.

Not your typical family man, Smith enlists the help of a lactating prostitute Donna Quintana (Monica Bellucci) or DQ for short (yes the Dairy Queen pun comes back later), to help care for the baby as he fends off a seemingly endless supply of goons courtesy of uber-villain Hertz (Paul Giamatti). Meanwhile, Smith slowly unravels a convoluted political plot involving an ill presidential candidate, a “baby factory,” and a large gun corporation. It’s best to ignore all the preposterous details and just concentrate on the main points: Smith has baby, Hertz wants baby dead, Smith and Hertz try to kill each other, 87 minutes of movie fun ensues.

If you’re not a fan of suspending disbelief to watch a character miraculously avoid getting shot while using MacGyver-like skills to turn ordinary objects into murder accessories, then you probably should skip Shoot ‘Em Up. With all its highly stylized action sequences, the film wastes no time on character development or believability and even some of the shootouts fall flat (e.g. the skydiving sequence….literally). But for those action-junkies looking for cool characters, innovative shots (both with a gun and camera), and some memorable dialogue, there is little to complain about. Clive Owen is perfectly cast as Mr. Smith (who else could make shoving a carrot through someone’s eye so unbelievably sexy?), while Paul Giamatti’s villainous Hertz is simply delightful.

Ultimately, what the film lacks in story it makes up for in sheer entertainment value and with such a short runtime, the film ends before that runs out. Head into Shoot ‘Em Up prepared for ridiculous violence and some very poor taste… also be prepared to laugh at said violence and taste. If you can appreciate the film as a stylized tribute to action classics like Woo’s Hard Boiled, you won’t be disappointed. If not, well, no one has a gun pointed at your head, which is more than we can say for Smith.

Fracture - Review

Can a movie where Anthony Hopkins plays a clever murderer go wrong? The answer is no, no it can’t - thank goodness! Though he trades “Clarice” for “Willy Boy,” and cannibalism for a more calculated sort of murder, Hopkins evokes his Silence of the Lambs heyday in what is definitely one of the best thrillers of 2007.

You’d think after countless movies where jealous husbands kill their wives women might take a few extra steps to ensure that their spouses aren’t complete psychos before embarking on scandalous affairs. And if you’re married to Ted Crawford (Anthony Hopkins), a super-intellectual obsessed with building strange marble structures, you probably should have seen the warning signs. Still Jennifer Crawford (Embeth Davidtz) obliviously continues her dangerous liaison with a man whose true identity she refuses to learn, while Ted patiently waits for the perfect moment to strike.

When Jennifer returns home after a hard day’s cheating, Ted innocently requests a hug before shooting her in the face. When the police arrive, Ted only permits hostage negotiator Rob Nunally (Billy Burke) into the house, knowing full well that Rob is the man his wife has been cavorting with. Ted confesses his crime as Rob frantically searches for signs of life from his lover and then desperately attacks her shooter. Doctors manage to stabilize Jennifer in a coma while Ted is sent to court where, he elects to represent himself. Hot shot Assistant District Attorney Will Beachum (Ryan Gosling), agrees to take on the open and shut case to add one more to win to his seamless record before beginning a new lucrative position in corporate law. With Willy distracted by his overblown confidence and his sexy new boss Nikki (Rosamund Pike), Ted begins to manipulate the system so that Willy’s slam-dunk case quickly turns into an air ball.

Thanks to the endless slew of recent disappointing thrillers, I was on the edge of my seat waiting for Fracture to well, fracture. During a rather haunting interrogation scene, Ted tells Willy “Look closely enough and you’ll find everything has a weak spot…” I found Fracture’s in the unnecessary romance between Nikki and Willy. Not that anyone would mind a job where you get to screw your sexy boss before you even unpack your stapler, but an invite to Thanksgiving dinner is where I draw the line. Director Gregory Hoblit could have at least left us the steamy sex scene for good measure, but half of a shoulder doesn’t justify the untimely affair. However, unlike what happens with Willy’s case against Ted, one little crack doesn’t lead to a break. As the film progressed, I continued to anticipate melodrama, cliché, and unintentional comedy, but when the credits rolled, I realized that Fracture is actually a GREAT movie.

It’s a testament to just how bad the film industry can be that anyone would even doubt a movie pitting Anthony Hopkins against Ryan Gosling …but then again, Harrison Ford versus Paul Bettany led to the disaster known as Firewall. Fortunately, Hoblit lays fresh and compelling visuals over a script rife with witty banter, creating a film that entertains while it intrigues. As expected, the title actors give incredible performances, with Gosling shining as a haughty go-getter who has to be put in his place before he can put Ted in his. The real standout though is the plot itself, which doesn’t try to reinvent the genre with some ridiculously shocking ending (ahem, M. Night Shyamalan) but instead oozes cleverness, while allowing its actors to subtly carry the triumphant conclusion.

Even if you manage to guess its surprising ending, the movie will shock you with how well it’s put together, from the seamless acting to constricting camera angles. If you’re a fan of psychological thrillers, or if you are just eager to hear Anthony Hopkins call someone “Old Sport” in his chillingly playful voice, you surely won’t be disappointed by Fracture.