Odds And Ends

This review was originally published on August 6th, 2008.

“Well, it wasn’t as bad as Step Brothers.”

Pineapple Express is the worst kind of film a critic must write about. It succeeds admirably at its implied goals, entertains well enough, and doesn’t fail in miserable ways. You enjoy yourself while watching it, but when you leave the theater it flits out of your mind like toilet paper in the wind. As you sit down to pound out a review, you realize you can’t remember anything about it, so you pull your little notepad out that you scribble random thoughts on during screenings, looking for inspiration, only to discover you wrote nothing. The film engendered no thoughts of significant worth, either negative or positive, at least no thoughts that compelled you to record them for later use. You are, in a word, ambivalent. And now you have to write about your ambivalence in an entertaining and fair manner, when all you want to do is go into the other room and watch the latest episode of The Wire.  Read more... (837 words, 7 images, estimated 3:21 mins reading time)

This review was originally published August 12th, 2008.

Two days after seeing The Wackness, I’m still trying to figure out what I disliked so much about it. Some suggestions…  Read more... (732 words, 8 images, estimated 2:56 mins reading time)

1. The fact that I’ve already seen the whole premise — drug dealing high school kid falls for the daughter of an authority figure who has more than his own share of vices and addictions — played out this year in the far-superior Charlie Bartlett, which managed to be a lot more fun, meaningful (even if a bit overly-earnest), and genuinely honest, despite an almost total lack of “indie cred”;

Every year, December rolls around, and every year, we get the usual glut of movies that really, really, really, want to win Oscars. It’s simply a foregone conclusion, and that little statuette has been around long enough that people know by now what the Academy likes. And one of the things that it likes is, of course, World War II.  Read more... (607 words, 8 images, estimated 2:26 mins reading time)

“We should have total freedom to do as we like, just so long as it’s not dull. A critic who talks to me about plausibility is a dull fellow.” – Alfred Hitchcock, on the artistic freedom of filmmakers.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve never worried much about the plausibility, or rather implausibility, of a given movie. Enforcing an outside reality on a piece of insular entertainment seems to be on par with showing up at an all-you-can-eat buffet with a calorie counter in hand. Watching your waistline certainly is an admirable goal, you’ve just come to the wrong place to do it. Director D. J. Caruso seemingly shares this viewpoint. Thus far in his career he has gravitated towards stories that allow him to throw the physics and expectations of the real world out the door, in the service of making an entertaining flick.  Read more... (567 words, 5 images, estimated 2:16 mins reading time)

Ghost Town is a film that’s somewhat obviously inspired by M. Night Shyamalan’s hit 90’s horror film The Sixth Sense, and it makes no bones about that — going so far as to use the tagline “He sees dead people…and they annoy him.” As the second half of the line suggests, however, Ghost Town is about as far from a horror film as this sort of story gets. The ghosts here bear no gruesome marks to indicate how they died (although they do wear whatever they died in — making things a bit awkward for those that died in the shower or while engaged in coitus), and you won’t hear a single bloodcurdling scream. No, Ghost Town is a simple romantic comedy — and a very good one, at that.  Read more... (799 words, 6 images, estimated 3:12 mins reading time)