FROM MTV.COM: Do fish have dreams? Do they dream of ominous iguanas, perhaps? Or maybe the disembodied breakdancing souls of freshly capped gangsters? More to the point, will Nicolas Cage ever make another movie that makes sense? Judging by his new one, "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans," and considering his current financial straits, the prospects seem dim.
The director — the esteemed Werner Herzog, stupefyingly enough — claims never to have seen Abel Ferrara's original 1992 "Bad Lieutenant," and I think we can take him at his word. The Ferrara movie, which I'd recommend seeing before — or better yet instead of — this one, concerns a viciously bent New York City cop; and Harvey Keitel, in the title role, is the embodiment of rank, skeezy corruption. In Herzog's take on the story, the action has been relocated, for no reason at all, to New Orleans, "in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina."
Continue reading 'Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans': Drug Bust, By Kurt Loder
FROM MTV.COM: In "New Moon," a new character joins the "Twilight" family of nuzzly PG-13 creatures. It's the Invisible Man. Not far into the picture, the undead Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) fades out of the action for a bit, and is replaced by wolf boy Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner). Edward eventually returns, but he never really comes back. Last year's sensitive hunk, with his pasty face and glum, mopey demeanor, is no match for this year's actual hunk; and Jacob — vibrant, funny, and madly muscular — romps off with the picture.
It's a silly picture, of course: Given the series' source material — Stephenie Meyer's blathery teen novels — what else could it be? But thanks to Lautner and newly-recruited director Chris Weitz, "New Moon" is a notable improvement over "Twilight."
Continue reading 'The Twilight Saga: New Moon': Eclipse, By Kurt Loder
FROM MTV.COM: Even if most of the Earth were to be destroyed by a natural cataclysm predicted long ago by the ancient Mayans (or Hopis, or even the I Ching — take your pick), director Roland Emmerich would surely survive, if only to crawl back and polish off what little was left.
Going in to Emmerich's "2012," I was prepared to set my brain on spin-cycle and just roll with it — who doesn't enjoy a good CGI soak now and then? And there is in fact some snazzy digitalia on display here: a monster tsunami crashing over the Himalayas; a spectacular White House takedown (yet again); and some monster-wave ship-twirling that's truly, uh, titanic. An L.A. freeway buckles and falls, Las Vegas craps out, and the coast of California rears up and slides right into the ocean. All that, plus lots of collapsing high-rise real estate, fireball storms and geysers of boiling black magma.
Continue reading '2012': The End Again, By Kurt Loder
FROM MTV.COM: Claireece Jones is one of life's write-offs: an illiterate, junk-food-fat Harlem teenager living on welfare with her viciously abusive mother and, from time to time, her father, who drops by to rape her. She already has one child as a result of his assaults — a little girl with Down's Syndrome — and is currently pregnant with another. Claireece's future seems anything but uncertain. Somehow, though, she's managed not to write herself off.
"Precious" is one of those rare movies that come winging in from nowhere and knock you out. Gabourey Sidibe, who plays the title character (Claireece goes by the name "Precious"), is an untrained actress — a Bronx college student whose only performing background is in school stage plays. But she has great instincts, and watching her draw out flickers of hope through the mask of sullen indifference that Precious presents to the world is thrilling to watch.
Continue reading 'Precious': Hell Up In Harlem, By Kurt Loder
FROM MTV.COM: What went wrong with this movie? The subject — the U.S. military's apparently actual flirtation with paranormal warfare — has rich comic promise. And the cast — George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges — couldn't be much stronger. But while the trailer for "The Men Who Stare at Goats" suggests a quirky, Coen-esque romp, the picture itself lacks the Coen brothers' sardonic intelligence and deft pacing. It wanders and wilts and very quickly falls apart.
The story begins in 2003, with aspiring combat reporter Bob Wilton (McGregor) waiting in Kuwait for clearance to cross over into Iraq. Biding his time, he encounters Lyn Cassady (Clooney), a man with a strange tale to tell. Cassady says he's a "Jedi warrior" (wink, wink) in the New Earth Army, a sub-rosa military unit dedicated to psychic battle strategies — mind-reading, "remote viewing," the whole new-age imaginarium. He says he's been reactivated to locate Bill Django (Bridges), the ponytailed Vietnam vet who founded the NEA back in the early '70s and has now gone missing. Wilton senses a story here, and decides to tag along.
Continue reading 'The Men Who Stare At Goats': Destination Nowhere, By Kurt Loder
FROM MTV.COM: With the fumbled release of "The Fourth Kind," sneaky-hip viral movie marketing shoots itself in the foot. It's been 10 years since the makers of "The Blair Witch Project" used the Internet to plant eerie suggestions that the events in their film were real. Today the Internet is patrolled by a legion of bull-sniffing bloggers, so any attempt to do the same thing again is doomed to fail. And the picture expends so much of its energy trying to pound home its preposterous assertions that there's very little left over to animate the story, which is in any case a hopeless jumble.
The movie is an attempted alien-abduction thriller. It begins with what is probably the most laughable opening scene of the year. Walking through some misty woods and straight up to the camera, the film's star, Milla Jovovich, informs us that everything we're about to see is true — that it's "supported by archived footage" and is "extremely disturbing." But then we're also told that the names and professions of the characters have been changed. Why would that be, if they're all real people? The silly premise instantly begins to crumble.
Continue reading 'The Fourth Kind': Impossible Dreams, By Kurt Loder
FROM MTV.COM: Claireece Jones is one of life's write-offs: an illiterate, junk-food-fat Harlem teenager living on welfare with her viciously abusive mother and, from time to time, her father, who drops by to rape her. She already has one child as a result of his assaults — a little girl with Down's Syndrome — and is currently pregnant with another. Claireece's future seems anything but uncertain. Somehow, though, she's managed not to write herself off.
"Precious" is one of those rare movies that come winging in from nowhere and knock you out. Gabourey Sidibe, who plays the title character (Claireece goes by the name "Precious"), is an untrained actress — a Bronx college student whose only performing background is in school stage plays. But she has great instincts, and watching her draw out flickers of hope through the mask of sullen indifference that Precious presents to the world is thrilling to watch.
Continue reading 'Precious': Hell Up In Harlem, By Kurt Loder
FROM MTV.COM: Anyone wanting to turn Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are" into a movie must face a steep challenge. The 1963 book — esteemed as a classic for ... I guess "kids of all ages" would be the term — is only 48 pages long, and consists largely of Sendak's cozy-strange illustrations; there's very little text. So to assist in plumping up this story for a 90-minute film, director Spike Jonze brought in writer Dave Eggers, who last lent his alt-lit touch to the languid "Away We Go." The result is a picture whose pleasures are almost entirely visual. The dialogue gets some energetic spin from the actors involved, but — no surprise — there's too much of it, and it wears you down.
The story, for those who may have forgotten, or never known, concerns a little boy named Max. In the movie as in the book, Max (played wonderfully well by newcomer Max Records) is a handful. He's raucous and needy in the usual little-boy manner, and is constantly being fobbed off to go play alone by his single mom (Catherine Keener), who's preoccupied with her job, and by his older sister (Pepita Emerichs), who's preoccupied with being a teenager. After pitching a fit in the kitchen one night, Max runs off into the nearby woods, where he wanders for a while before coming upon a small boat pulled up on a beach. Climbing aboard, he sails away in search of a more agreeable life.
Continue reading 'Where The Wild Things Are': Fretting Zoo, By Kurt Loder
FROM MTV.COM: "Zombieland" may be the first undead road-trip movie. The picture is light and unassuming, but it has a jaunty spirit; it's funny beyond the call of genre and — the cool part, of course — wonderfully disgusting.
The premise has a nice, low-budget simplicity. A nationwide zombie plague has turned the country into a wasteland of stumbling gut-munchers (although they can move pretty fast when they want to). Only a few uninfected outriders remain, following 10 simple rules to stay alive. One of these is "Beware of bathrooms" (zombies like to crawl up on you under toilet-stall doors). Another — which should be retroactively posted in every monster movie ever made — is: "Check the backseat!"
Continue reading 'Zombieland': Road Kill, By Kurt Loder
FROM MTV.COM: Just as he's about to rip the beautiful Jennifer's tightly bound body to shreds with a knife, hunky young Nikolai tries to tell her why. Nikolai is the lead singer of an indie band called Low Shoulder. They're desperate to make it big — to be the next Maroon 5! But the world is awash in indie bands, so it's hard. "There are so many of us," he says, "and we're all so cute. ... Satan is our only hope." In the group's quest for diabolic new management, Nikolai has downloaded a Satanic ritual off the Internet. All that's required is a virgin sacrifice. Unfortunately, he's picked the wrong girl: Jennifer's days of sexual innocence are far behind her. ("I'm not even a backdoor virgin," she later admits.) So the ritual goes seriously wrong. Instead of leaving Jennifer dead, it transforms her into a snaky-eyed, flesh-eating demon. Oops.
Continue reading 'Jennifer's Body': Girl Trouble, By Kurt Loder
