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

FROM MTV.COM: It's October of 1992, and Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), a hotshot executive at Archer Daniels Midland, the giant agricultural conglomerate, is going about his job. He has a full plate at the moment — some mysterious virus is screwing up the company's corn-syrup operation. Did you know there's corn syrup in everything — orange juice, maple syrup? It's true.

So Mark has a lot on his mind. Or at least that part of his mind that's not buzzing with a whole other swarm of odd fixations. Like ... sushi. "I wonder who went first on that one?" Mark wonders. "The guy without the grill?" There's also the threat of poison-winged butterflies. And ... polar bears! Do you realize that polar bears would be impossible to spot in their snowy Arctic habitat if it weren't for their black noses? It's true. Do you think a polar bear ever peered at his reflection in the water surrounding his ice floe and thought, "Without that nose, I'd be invisible"? Maybe. On the other hand, as Mark concludes, "That's a lot of thinking for a bear."

Continue reading 'The Informant!': Liars, Inc., By Kurt Loder

FROM MTV.COM: "The Baader Meinhof Complex" is a smart and explosively powerful movie about a German student terrorist gang of the 1970s, and the wave of arson, robbery, kidnappings and murder with which they shook their country's government — in the process triggering exactly the sort of right-wing repression against which they claimed to be crusading. The picture was a deserving Oscar nominee earlier this year for Best Foreign Language Film, and in its weaving-together of the intricacies of social ferment and the bullet-riddled reality of what the gang wrought, it's a fascinating achievement.

The Baader Meinhof Group, as the gang was called in the press (they styled themselves the Red Army Faction, or RAF), was actually led by Gudren Ensslin (played here by Johanna Wokalek), a blonde parson's daughter turned steely-willed Marxist revolutionary, along with her highly charismatic boyfriend, Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu), a petty thief and intellectual primitive with a taste for fast cars (usually stolen) and guns, and a grand vision of himself as a Brandoesque action-movie hero. Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck, of the Oscar-winning "The Lives of Others") was popularly portrayed as the group's other leader, but was essentially a subsidiary propaganda minister — a famous left-wing journalist who found herself drawn into the group's violent orbit after being confronted with the hypocrisy of her revolutionary rhetoric in print when measured against her failure to join in armed action herself.

Continue reading 'The Baader Meinhof Complex': Student Unrest, By Kurt Loder

FROM MTV.COM: There is no mention of "The Devil Wears Prada" — either the movie or the novel on which it was based — in "The September Issue," a new documentary about Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine. And yet the film feels like an attempt to set the record straight. The book, by Lauren Weisberg, who worked very briefly as Wintour's assistant, featured an icy fashion-magazine editor code-named Miranda Priestly, and was widely regarded as payback by a disgruntled ex-employee. In the movie, Meryl Streep played this character as an imperious grande dame, but without Wintour's trademark bobbed hairstyle and round-the-clock dark glasses; and the actress rounded out her portrayal with wisps of recognizable humanity. In the documentary, Wintour herself isn't quite able to do the same.

The picture was shot over the course of eight months in 2007, and focuses on the run-up to that year's September issue — the annual ad-stuffed doorstop that marks Vogue's yearly high point of profitability. (For 2007, it was projected to sell 13-million copies.) The director, R.J. Cutler, follows Wintour around the magazine's offices in the Times Square headquarters of Condé Nast Publications, and as we take in the sights — the fabled wardrobe racks, the sleek assistants' area and the editor's own capacious office — we realize how much the "Prada" movie got exactly right.

Continue reading 'The September Issue': Style Queen, By Kurt Loder

FROM MTV.COM: Given that his new movie concerns a guy who owns a small company manufacturing flavor-extract food additives — cherry, vanilla, that sort of thing — you might wonder why writer-director Mike Judge didn't call it "Flavor of the Month," or something similarly zippy. But then the picture is very low on flavor ("Vanilla" would be a more descriptive title), so the usually astute Judge just called it "Extract," and has now lobbed it out into the late-summer cinematic wasteland.

Jason Bateman plays Joel, whose little company (called Reynold's, as if it were owned by someone named Reynold) is so successful that industry giant General Mills wants to buy it. The windfall from this sale would allow Joel to retire and devote more time to wheedling sex out of his uptight wife, Suzie (Kristen Wiig), who marks the approach of bedtime every night by donning a pair of tightly-knotted sweatpants.

Continue reading 'Extract': Tasteless, By Kurt Loder