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Sorry, Will Smith fans, this one belongs to Josh Brolin.

15 years after the memorable original and 10 years after its so-so sequel, the latest Men In Black reunites Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as Agents J and K who are on a secret mission to protect the world from those dastardly aliens that just can’t seem to leave us innocent earthlings alone (see The Avengers and Battleship for other aliens-are-bad-and-must-be-destroyed tropes of cinema).

The basic plot: an evil hench-alien named Boris the Animal is out to kill Agent K (Jones). Agent J (Smith) devises a plan to go back into the past and make sure that this never happens because Agent K is too valuable - and is played by Tommy Lee Jones, for pete’s sake! But in the past, Agent K is played by Josh Brolin, who ends up stealing the movie with an utterly believable performance as the younger version of Tommy Lee Jones. You’ll be astonished at how similar his appearance and voice are made to match the elder Jones. You’ll further be astonished if there aren’t a slew of upcoming movies made after this one where Jones and Brolin are paired as father and son.

The fun of the movie is that it combines the alien genre with the concept of time travel, and unlike, say, Battleship, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It knows when to laugh at itself and when to up the ante. It also helps that the characters and storylines in the third part of the trilogy are far stronger and more interesting than they were in either of the sequels, something very few film franchises can lay claim to.

Oh, and after four years of lying low, it’s nice to see Will Smith back on the big screen doing what he does best: entertain!

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Let me be perfectly frank: I am no fan of the horror movie genre. Pretty much every horror or slasher movie I’ve seen as an adult has been as predictable and formulaic as a Mitt Romney campaign event: you know what’s coming, which hollowed-out facsimiles of human beings will present, and how nothing is ever ultimately resolved because there has to be a sequel, goddam it!

So it is with relative surprise that I can honestly recommend the new horror movie from Drew Goddard, The cabin in the Woods. This one works because it doesn’t really care about the genre – it just wants to do something different. Different and bizarre. How bizarre? Very.

It starts off the same way all horror movies do: a bunch of dimwitted tens pile into a van and head off to the woods for a weekend of “fun”. Mistake number one. The teens are stock characters from every movie about pre-adults you’ve ever seen, led by a jock named Curt (Chris Hemsworth) who is way out of his breadth here. Just once I’d like to see the nerd lead the group to its demise (just once!)

Mistake number two happens when they actually get to the cabin and refuse to leave at first sight. It doesn’t look so inviting, you see.

The cabin, it turns out, is a laboratory-trap devised by two (let’s call them ‘evil’) scientists who have nothing better to do than to present their victims with situations that demand they make choices that will result in death or a chance to perhaps die at a later date. Why do they do this?

We’re not exactly sure, though it seems that these two men (played by Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford) are simply fascinated by the consequential choices human beings make and why they make them. It’s a highly controlled behavior experiment, the kind that usually begins with rats in a lab and ends with animal rights protesters outside.

Only this time, the rats are high school students and there’s no one outside to save them. Definitely worth checking out.

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Visit the "American Reunion" official website!

If you’ve enjoyed movies like The Hangover, Bridesmaids, and The Change-Up you can thank the runaway success of American Pie, the 1999 runaway hit that ushered in the Golden Age of Hollywood’s Gross-Out Sex and Raunch Comedies that audiences line up by the billions to watch. And download.

Ah, downloading! Downloading porn, that is. Gone are the attempts by awkwardly horny teenagers to lose their virginity to freshly baked goodies and in their place is the now standard lament of married people that their sex lives actually entail having sex. American Reunion might sound like it’s just going to be about old crushes and grudges coming to a head at a high school reunion, but that’s really just the crust.

The gooey filling is about how 13 years have passed and the cast of characters we’ve come to know and love (and sometimes secretly admire) have settled into recognizable patterns of adulthood. Jim Levenstein (Jason Biggs) is now the proud poppa of a toddler. Married to Michelle (Alyson Hannigan), they spend less time co-parenting than they do watching online porn and sneaking off to the shower for self-gratification. Oz (Chris Klein) has matured (?) into a douchier version of his younger self with a shrill and brainless (but still smokin’ hot) girlfriend (Katrina Bowden of 30 Rock fame) who you just know will never find happiness in his career as an overly tanned sportscaster. And then there is Jim’s father, the uber Jew, who is tethered to reality only in so much as the Torah will allow. Oiy ve!

The movie is a big improvement on the two sequels, delivering consistent laughs throughout even though you can probably see them coming from a few feet ahead of their arrival. Hey, at least it’s just a few feet and not miles. You can thank the boisterous cast for that, mostly Seann William Scott whose Stifler steals each and every scene in which he appears and who makes sex seem like it’s more of a militant religion than a consenting act between two adults. Submit or die! If the Libido Gods were to descend upon America, they would appear – as one – in the body, mind, and groin that is Stifler.

Check the red band trailer below:

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Photo Credit: Lionsgate
Visit the "Hunger Games" official website!

There will be lots of hand wringing in the days that follow the release of Hunger Games - and not for the reason you might suspect. Its main issue will not be the problem that dogs so many who watch the Twilight movies. Viewers of Hunger Games, I suspect, will be chastising themselves for liking it too much.

I know I certainly did.

What’s it about? It’s deeply convoluted and complex, but here’s a very brief synopsis: in the North America of the future (known as Panem), a tyrannical regime demands that each of its 12 regions send a teenage boy and girl to compete in a game of violent bloodlust that is televised like a sport across the land. A teen named Katniss offers herself up to fight when her sister is recruited to compete in the kill-or-be-killed Hunger Games. The rest is a lot of ironic ass-kicking and social commentary that would have made George Orwell proud. The romance, I am happy to report, is kept to a minimum.

So why the self-flagellation? Well, for one thing, this is some mega-compelling storytelling – the kind we aren’t used to seeing in stories about teens. We expect teens to be mopey and temperamental and confused. And in this story they are. But they are also fiercely intelligent, driven, and (how can this be?) battling for survival. These are teens who live at the guttural level of human instinct, not the pretty almost-weepers of the Twilight movies and the average Disney Channel sitcom. It’s definitely more Harry Potter and less That’s So Raven. Don’t be afraid to embrace it.

The movie is also difficult because at the very base of its theme is a quandary that will probably go unnoticed by most moviegoers who just want to see Jennifer Lawrenece kick some butt: it explicitly condemns and glorifies physical violence at the same time.

I haven’t read Suzanne Collins’ trilogy of books, so if you’re looking for a critique of how faithful the movie is to the source material, look elsewhere. But in terms of its basic moral positing, the movie has some deeply heavy-handed things to say about the human impulse to destroy while simultaneously making many of its most thrilling sequences the scenes in which its main characters are slicing, dicing and piercing their enemies as the only viable way to “freedom”.

Such considerations aside, the film is a triumph, and precisely so because of its star Jennifer Lawrence. Just as in her breakthrough performance in Winter’s Bone, Lawrence carries the film with a fierce grit and natural ease that makes you want to root for her as though the story were nonfiction. Lawrence, I feel, is not interested in being another pin-up who headlines romantic comedies Hollywood believes women will line up to see. She is interested in the reality of existence, even when filtered through fantasy.


Photo Credit: Lionsgate
Photo Credit: Lionsgate
Photo Credit: Lionsgate

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21 Jump Street seems like an odd choice for a movie in 2012. Based on the television drama of the 80s which gave us Johnny Depp (thank you!), it’s kind of a hybrid between a traditional cop drama and a coming of age story. Like all things 80s, it’s ripe for a renewal (at least according to the powers that be in Hollywood) and since it’s also a story about boys becoming men, we can be sure many lessons will be learned by the time the closing credits roll. And a few of them will surely involved learning how to handle those most devious of creatures: women. It's the classic formula.

And yet – somehow- the movie is exactly what it should be: funny. Yeah, it’s a buddy movie, and yeah Jonah Hill gets all the best lines, and yeah, Channing Tatum kind of comes off as a tool, but in the end, all of these things make the film work. It’s funny and fresh and not without a certain laid back charm which it achieves without trying too hard. If you saw The Change Up you’ll know exactly what I mean.

Here’s the basic premise: two former high school classmates who couldn’t be more different (one is a pudgy brainiac, the other a lady killing jock) end up graduating from police academy at the same time. Their first arrest goes awry, so to prove themselves, they have to return to high school undercover where they learn that the world they once knew no longer exists. Let the hilarity ensue!

No brownie points for guessing what happens (it becomes standard issue high school torment pretty fast) but extra brownie points for both Hill and Tatum who clearly enjoyed making the movie. It’s fun to watch actors enjoy themselves – and both get to put their comic chops on full display. You will laugh . . . and you’re supposed to!

Imagine that.

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Another movie, another story about a loveable loser.

Jeff Who Lives At Home has the distinction, however, of actually being quite likeable – even loveable. What sets this apart from other movies about similarly forlorn adults is the idea that some who seem lost are not nearly so lost as they’ve been led to believe. If only they could believe it themselves!

At first I was kind of confused by the title. "Jeff Who Lives At Home"? Where else is he going to live? Doesn't everyone live at home? Oh, he's a hapless loser? Okay, now I get it.

Here we have Jeff (Jason Segal) who is 30, single, and living in his mother’s basement where he spends most of his time obsessing over the M. Night Shyamalan movie Signs which he thinks holds the key to the Universe. That key, he believes, is that transformative coincidences are occurring around all of us all of the time, and the only thing one needs is to pay attention to the right coincidence to achieve existential lift off.

Simple, right?

Sure, except that “loser” Jason has a “settled” brother Pat (Ed Helms) who has all the conventional trappings of success (career, marriage, family, real estate) but whose life is pretty darn lifeless. His wife doesn’t get him and he doesn’t get her because, well, no one is getting any getting in this story.

Jason and Pat have a mother named Sharon (Susan Sarandon) who finally demands that Jeff leave her basement . . . but there is a condition first: Jeff will have to fix her kitchen shutter and then commence with life as an adult. What, mother? You’re going to ask me to work? Now?

The movie works for a variety of reasons (its fun and funny and all too relatable in this era of boomerang youngsters who wind up living at home after college) but mostly it works because of the amazing chemistry between Segal and Sarandon. Instead of going for the cheap, easy laughs that Jeff’s situation warrants, they play it for the reality of thr situation (sometimes too real) which elicits warmth and understanding, two thing we usually don’t find in Hollywood comedies about losers.

If nothing else, you’ll laugh a lot and maybe tear up once in a while, if for no other reason than it will help you understand how and why your mother suffered all the indignities that you and the universe colluded to inflict upon her.

That Universe is good for something, isn’t it?

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Wow, this one just floored me. By that I mean I literally couldn’t move from the floor after watching this one. I just . . . I mean . . . Wow. I repeat: WOW.

And I don't mean that as a compliment.

Michael, the disturbingly brilliant, creepy and horrfying new film from Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer, details the life of a 35-year-old man named Michael (played by Michael Fuith). He leads a seemingly dull existence as an insurance agent: to the external world, his greatest concern is keeping his immaculately clean house immaculately clean. But behind the perfectly carved front door of his house lies a secret that is so bizarre, it’s normal.

Normal for Michael, who is a pedophile – a pedophile who has taken hostage a 10-year-old boy named Wolfgang who is kept prisoner in his basement. He abuses the boy regularly on his arbitrary sexual whims: though nothing explicit is ever shown on screen, much of what the boy must endure in daily rape is implied repeatedly.

And yet the film goes far beyond the fact that Wolfgang has been kidnapped and is being kept against his will in a basement dungeon where a pedophile rapes him daily. Most of the film is spent trying to depict the relationship between the two: if you delete all the sexual innuendo, the scenes that remain would make a believable portrait of a relationship between a father and a son: they visit the petting zoo, they decorate a Christmas tree, they go for walks, hold hands as they walk the streets, they eat dinner together, play games and puzzles, and even sit down and watch their favorite television shows together. It all seems so normal. And that's the horrifying part. "How can this be so normal?" I asked myself over and over . . . and over.

There is no proper “plot” in the film: it doesn’t start with a kidnapping, focus on a boy’s time in imprisonment, and end with the child being rescued or found dead. It simply shows a pedophile’s life for what it is: seemingly normal to the outside world where Michael buys groceries, celebrates holidays, and is even promoted at work. It deliberately resists judging the man and refuses to apply labels to him like “kidnapper” or “pedophile” or even “evil”. In the end, the fact that the film doesn’t label Michael makes you the viewer feel labeled. At least it did for me. What kind of society is it that can allow such tragedies to occur in open space and open time . . . and what will happen to Wolfgang if he is lucky enough to survive, escape, and reach adulthood? That is a consideration almost too terrifying to contemplate.

In the film’s only real moment of devastation, Michael discovers letters that Wolfgang has written to his parents, telling them that he loves them and longs to see them again. Michael flies into a rage and tells Wolfgang that his parents didn’t want him and that he – the pedophile – is the only one who does.

The point – and the hope, I suppose – is that Wolfgang doesn’t believe him. At least we hope he doesn’t . . . because Michael, it seems, is preparing to take a second victim.

Shudder.

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Daniel Radcliffe is back on the big screen . . . NOT as Harry Potter. The good news is that he’s believable as someone other than the Boy Who Lived. The bad news is that the movie is pretty . . . eh. Even though it’s supposed to be a thriller, it’s often times less than thrilling. It gets the set-up right, but the payoff never seems to materialize the way it should.

Radcliffe stars as Arthur Kipps, a Victorian lawyer whose wife dies in childbirth. Arthur is consumed with mourning for his wife and pays scant attention to the toddler Joseph who is his son. He is assigned an out-of-town case where he has to manage the estate of a noble lady in the village of Crythin Gifford (I love British names of towns).

When he arrives, things are decidedly creepy: the manor seems to be encased in a permanent fog, it’s filled with furtive figures who do little and say even less, and the staircase creaks at all hours of the day and night. Something (or someone) is in the house . . . a lady in black. What does she want? Revenge, of course, though not against those who wronged her. She wants to torture the souls of children because she lost her own son in life. When all this is revealed, Kipps’s little boy is naturally on his way to the haunted mansion. Kipps will have to fight her for his son's life. You see where this is headed.

The film looks, feels and plays a lot like an attendant subplot from Harry Potter but without any of the magic or fun. Radcliffe does his best with the material he’s given, but at times even he seems a bit tired of constantly having to be surprised. The woman in black is scary, sure, but she ain't Voldemort. She's not even Bellatrix Lestrange!

Final Verdict: Unless you’re an absolute diehard Radcliffe groupie, you won’t be missing much if you decide to skip it.

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Here's more about the film.

If someone told you that there’s a movie about a couple whose child has a fatal brain tumor, you might be thinking it was some sort of sentimental drivel made for Lifetime or the Hallmark Channel. You’d probably also balk at the fact that it’s in French. Imagine having to watch the slow motion suffering of a child through the cold lens of contemporary French cinema’s pretentious sensibilities.

You’d be wrong on both counts. Declaration of War is a movie not about how two parents’ lives are torn apart by the impending death of their child, but how the couple is spurred into action to do whatever they can to not only save the boy, but to make whatever time he has left feel like real living. Real Life is not often fun and sometimes it is unbearable – but even in its worst moments and under its most trying circumstances, it elicits the opposite of surrender. It demands conformation, and confrontation can be wondrous if certain things fall into place.

Starring Valérie Donzelli and Jérémie Elkaïm as a couple whose brief but magical courtship quickly turns into a living nightmare when their son is stricken with cancer, they marshal whatever resources they can to protect their all too young son from a disease that is his life but of which he has almost no understanding. It doesn’t help that the couple's names are Romeo and Juliette: they joke when they meet that they are destined for tragedy. It turns out to be true, but not the star crossed fate of their more famous literary namesakes. This Romeo and Juliet make it to the altar. They even have offspring. And then it all comes undone.

Or does it? The movie consciously works against the maudlin nature of its subject by focusing instead on the real moments in life – the fears and hopes of every parent for their child, the madness of hospital bureaucracy, and above all, learning to adapt to life’s biggest challenges and changes. No one goes into marriage or parenthood expecting their child to be ripped from their lives – or for that same relationship to be tested by fears of mortality just a few years in. But when such things happen, it’s not that they happen that counts most: it’s how we react to them that matters most.

Everyone falls, the film tells, somewhat preachily. Sometimes we trip on our own accord and sometimes we are pushed down. It’s what we do after the fall that counts.

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Visit "The Grey" official website.

I’ve been eyeing many a poster for Liam Neeson’s The Grey over the past few months here in Tinsel Town. For some reason, I just assumed it was an action flick about an aged man whose prime is way, way passed. The trailer, by the way, looked simply awful.

But I got invited to a free screening, and, as a film critic, I had to go. Boy, was I wrong: not only is it not an action flick, it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long, long time – this, despite the fact that some natural and environmental liberties have been taken to tell the story of the Big Bad Wolf.

The movie is about a group of oil company workers who toil for their livelihoods far north in the land of arctic tundra, polar bears, giant walruses, and vicious, ravenous wolves. The men we encounter in the story are not the average, run-of-the-mill Joe Blow: these are men who can only live on the fringes of society because they are programmed for extended periods of extreme physical suffering and isolation. And when they’re not on an oil rig crashing into glaciers, they’re drowning their sorrows (or perhaps dreams) in alcohol. The “bar” that they frequent is one where everyone knows not only your name, but the name of your internal devastation. Bottoms up!

A group of workers, including Ottway (Neeson) are on a plane flying out on leave when it crashes in The Middle of Nowhere. Most of the men perish soon thereafter, leaving just a scant seven who must find their way out of the planet’s Frozen Hell.

They hope and pray to be rescued, but the only beings that find them are wolves. Scary, starving wolves that are only too eager to pounce on the wandering men whose only line of defense is fire. Remember the scene in Beauty and the Beast when Belle flees the Beast’s castle in the middle of the night and is attacked by a gang of bloodthirsty wolves? The Grey paints an even harsher picture of nature’s least friendly canine; you know it isn’t a fair portrait (they’re just trying to survive, the same way the men are clinging to their lives) but you buy it for the sake of the movie.

The big story here is that Ottway was on the brink of suicide when the plane crashed – now he realizes for the first time how precious his life is. He has to fight every element – nature, beast, and even himself – to preserve what should have been dearest to him all along.

Will he survive? Will it matter if he does? It all depends on what he does after. He just has to get to the ‘after’ first.

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