Hollywood—particularly during Oscar season—functions on the assumption that no trauma has entered the national consciousness until it's been undergone by a flaxen-haired gamine with major box-office draw.Dana Stevens, Slate
Critics borrowed from the Beatles to express their disappointment in Julie Taymor's Across the Universe.
Contrary to what you may have heard, love isn't all you need.
Ty Burr, Boston Globe
I saw a film today, oh boy. (Headline: Hey Dudes, You Made it Bad)
Sean Burns, Philadelphia Weekly
Nothing is real. (Headline: She can't work it out.)
Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
And my favorite:
I wanted to turn the sound down on them and say rude things.
J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader
(On Rotten Tomatoes, there's a perfect follow-up comment from Captain Siberia: "Then Julie Taymor is that posh bird who gets everything wrong?")
From the New York Times: With “The Ten,” David Wain uses the Ten Commandments the way a suicide uses a bridge.
Most critics didn't much like "I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry," and many pointed out its essential hypocrisy, as I noted earlier.
In Time Out New York, Melissa Anderson wrote:
Chuck and Larry wants it both ways, indulging in ass obsession and the lamest queer stereotypes since Franklin Pangborn was in short pants, then hoisting the rainbow flag at half-mast in a panicky cry for tolerance.
Essentially, "Chuck & Larry" is an oafish chance for audiences to laugh at gay-bashing jokes and then feel morally redeemed for doing so -- courtesy of an obligatory wrap-up scene that reminds us that homosexuals are humans, too.
Somewhere in the cafeteria at GLAAD headquarters, girlfriend is about to choke on her quiche, but here goes: Tremendously savvy in its stupid way, "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry" is as eloquent as "Brokeback Mountain," and even more radical...Where the clowning queers of "Birdcage" invite us to laugh at their antics, the faux-mos in Chuck and Larry disarm prejudice by unabashedly reveling in its idiotic assumptions. "I used to wrestle in high school," is the gayest thing Chuck can think of, "and, uh, I liked it." The movie isn't effective despite the egregious gay stereotypes; it couldn't work without them. Through the medium of an Adam Sandler comedy, with all the requisite vulgarity, we're given access to what it feels like to be ostracized, to live under false pretenses, to suffer a sham marriage. It does with crass what Brokeback did with class, slipping dangerous sentiments into the safest of genres.
Can it be that there is a gender difference among the critics who reviewed "Knocked Up?" Not a split exactly, but a slant. Male critics were more likely to be unabashedly positive about the film, finding it not just funny but smart, even profound.
At the New York Post, Kyle Smith gave the film a "Standing Ovulation" (that was the headline), calling it
an era-defining comedy classic to rank with "Little Miss Sunshine." It's this generation's "When Harry Met Sally," and it's even better than "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," because the freakish situation it uses as a setup is life....
Like Rogen's character, "Knocked Up" is a lot more mature than it looks. It's a brilliant comedy disguised as a dumb one.
is full of huge laughs and witty pop culture banter but also offers insightful and honest explorations of marriage, relationships, friendship and parenthood.
more than just laugh-out-loud funny. It's the relationship comedy of the summer and likely the best boy-meets-girl movie of the year.
an instant classic, a comedy that captures the sexual confusion and moral ambivalence of our moment without straining, pandering or preaching.
[Writer-director Judd] Apatow writes men with far more insight and acuity than he writes women. As a result, his portrait of contemporary gender relations is unbalanced: Crude and hilarious in Guyville, he seizes up when he gets to Ladyland and allows himself to take refuge in comfortable clichés. It's not that Knocked Up is misogynistic—if anything, Apatow is uxorious to a fault, scrupulously respectful of chicks and the chick stuff they do. He just doesn't seem to get exactly what that stuff is....
Paradoxically, the tenderest, most emotionally intimate scenes in "Knocked Up" aren't the romantic ones between Alison and Ben, but those involving Ben and his profane posse and his growing relationship with the developmentally stunted Pete....in his next film, maybe he could honor women by striving to create female characters with the depth of humor and humanity he gives to men.
the sympathetic, if undeveloped Alison (what does Ben, who lives for one-liners, see in his bland goddess?) that confirms the essential zoological status of the female of the species in Apatow-land. They can’t make you laugh but they can certainly make you cringe.
From my friend and colleague Ally Burguieres:
I didn’t include a plot summary because the Internet didn’t have enough space.
Most critics found the latest installment of Shrek to be not quite up to the happily ever afters of the first two, except for The New York Times, where A.O. Scott said:
[T]he movie’s liveliest humor and sharpest drama take root in decidedly grown-up situations. Shrek’s anxious, less-than-overjoyed reaction to the prospect of becoming a parent is not something most youngsters will relate to. (In one brilliantly executed sequence he has a nightmare of being besieged by hundreds of gurgling, saucer-eyed ogre babies.) And the depiction of Cinderella (Amy Sedaris), Rapunzel (Maya Rudolph) and Snow White (Amy Poehler) as bored, catty moms is likely to tickle fans of “Little Children,” a group that I hope doesn’t include any actual little children.
Whether these bits would seem as fresh or incisive if they were not embedded in a noisy cartoon remotely based on a beloved picture book is an open question. The strategy of the “Shrek” movies has always been to appeal to the easy, smirky cynicism of the parents while whetting their children’s appetite for crude humor and plush merchandise. “Shrek 2” pulled off the trick in a way that struck me as coarse and overdone, turning travestied fairy tales into the stuff of hackneyed Hollywood satire. But “Shrek the Third” seems at once more energetic and more relaxed, less desperate to prove its cleverness and therefore to some extent smarter.
The problem is, Shrek the Third doesn’t take its own advice. It isn’t itself. The first two movies were family films with an adult edge. This third one is a watered down kids’ movie through and through, and the script plays out like something written for one of those assembly line produced direct-to-DVD sequels Disney is fond of releasing to fill up Wal-Mart bargain bins. Except this isn’t Disney, this is the franchise that makes fun of Disney for doing things exactly like that. Instead of sticking to what made it great, Shrek has become a part of the homogenized mediocrity it was railing against in the first place.
The series has jumped the Shrek.
On Georgia Rule:
Many critics did not like the weird mood swings and uneven tone (though some liked it for just that reason). Suzanne Condie Lambert described the problem well:
Director Garry Marshall's comedy-drama suffers from an unfortunate role reversal. The comedy is stunningly unfunny, while the drama is sometimes disturbingly funny.
The Arizona Republic
An incoherent dramedy of rampant parental insufficiency.
The Village Voice
Maybe "Georgia Rule" should be required viewing for Paris Hilton during her term in the slammer. But not for us.
Chicago Tribune
Lucky in cards, unlucky in reviews. "Lucky You" drew some poker metaphors in its mostly negative reactions from critics.
The love story is a bluff...A decent movie just wasn't in the cards.
Lisa Schwarzbaum Entertainment Weekly (D-)
After several delayed release dates, Warner Bros. finally lays down its cards with Lucky You, and it's a weak hand.
Brian Lowrey Variety
By the fifth All In, I wanted All Out.
Willie Waffle Wafflemovies.com
And on (or should I say in) the other hand:
Robert Duvall, Eric Bana and Drew Barrymore all give persuasive performances that add up to a royal flush.
Cole Smithey Colesmithey.com
Of all the reviews I read, Slate's Dana Stevens best conveyed and illuminated the transgressive pleasures of "Grindhouse."
We've all experienced some degree of Tarantino fatigue since ["Pulp Fiction"], whether with the director himself (who sometimes seems to be using the screen as a place to play out his own airless adolescent fantasies) or with the endless imitations spawned by his particular brand of fast-talking, genre-savvy splatter (this year's dreadful "Smokin' Aces" is one latter-day example).
But Death Proof is a reminder of what there was to like about Tarantino in the first place: his uncanny ear for dialogue that's at once naturalistic and deliriously wordy, his kinetic action sequences, and his voracious love for cinema in all its incarnations, especially the sleazy ones. With its lean 90-minute running time and a near-complete absence of CGI, "Death Proof" feels like an experiment in austerity after more than a decade in which Tarantino had free run of the special-effects candy store. And it works fabulously, much to the surprise of this generally Tarantino-weary writer.
From A.O. Scott's hilarious review of "300" in the New York Times:
It offers up a bombastic spectacle of honor and betrayal, rendered in images that might have been airbrushed onto a customized van sometime in the late 1970s...The Persians, pioneers in the art of facial piercing, have vastly greater numbers — including ninjas, dervishes, elephants, a charging rhino and an angry bald giant — but the Spartans clearly have superior health clubs and electrolysis facilities...Allegory hunters will find some gristly morsels of topicality tossed in their direction, but you can find many of the same themes, conveyed with more nuance and irony, in a Pokémon cartoon...In time, “300” may find its cultural niche as an object of camp derision, like the sword-and-sandals epics of an earlier, pre-computer-generated-imagery age. At present, though, its muscle-bound, grunting self-seriousness is more tiresome than entertaining. Go tell the Spartans, whoever they are, to stay home and watch wrestling.
Peter Rainer, in the Christian Science Monitor:
Maybe Jackson should avoid any more movies with "snake" in the title.
though.)
I loved what my friend Willie Waffle had to say about "Ghost Rider" --
I kept hoping in the middle of the movie the Scooby Doo gang would come out, rip the mask off of Cage and reveal Ghost Rider really is crazy old man Ben Affleck!
Johnson is doing something deeply wrong here by refusing to give his fictional world its own constant reality, which in turn makes it impossible to believe in the characters, and their lives, and their actions, and their consequences.
Perhaps worst of all is Johnson’s curious take on the ins and outs of damnation. As J.B. says to the caretaker, “He may have my soul, but he doesn’t have my spirit.” The caretaker then responds, “Any man who sells his soul for love has the power to change the world,” before going on to pontificate that since J.B. sold his soul for the “right reason,” maybe that “puts God on [his] side.” Johnson’s wavering fictional universe is one where the devil is everywhere and God doesn’t show up much, and where Johnny Blaze hates the cursed monster he sees himself becoming but also won’t relinquish that curse when given the opportunity. Johnny pines for a second chance to fix his past, a shot at atonement to make things right, but he’d rather be the devil’s whipping boy than live free. If Johnson’s hero can’t even summon the courage to save himself, how can he save the world?
Nothing like a good, old-fashioned, awful movie to inspire eloquence in critics.
Norbit isn't farce--it's a thoughtless, cancerous, viral, irresponsible pollution whose existence speaks ill of the society that produced it and of any society that would endorse or defend it. It's not the end of civilization, just symptomatic of how easy it is to get laughs on the backs of the disenfranchised--and of how African-American actors get awards for singing and acting like criminals (or bright children and athletes) but generally get paid for acting the fool.
Walter Chaw, Film Freak Central
Usually, it takes six or so months for an actor to parlay a Best Supporting Actor nomination into a cringe-worthy career-derailing performance in an unbelievably awful picture.
Jon Popick Planet Sick-Boy
I swear, I don’t look away from horror movies nearly as much as I did this film...Possibly the most poorly-done politically incorrect movie to be released – and during Black History Month, no less – “Norbit” has something to offend everyone. It’s got fat women jokes, fart humor, mind-numbing racial stereotypes and Eddie Murphy in the Asian version of blackface playing his own adoptive Chinese father. All you need is Isaiah Washington and Michael Richards in the movie spewing homophobic and racial slurs to make it complete. Kevin Carr 7M Pictures
Surely some humanitarian organization will recognize the selflessness with which Murphy has taken three of the movie's major roles, thus saving two other actors from a nasty black mark on their résumés.
Sam Adams LA Times
A little glass half full action here:
The only thing you can't fault in "Because I Said So" is Keaton's integrity, as she commits herself completely to a disastrous role.
Bruce Newman, Mercury News (He also says, however, that "but the pyre that Keaton makes of her career with this ghastly contrivance is unforgettable. And unforgivable.")
If these are the only kinds of roles we can conceive for actresses who have grown into their faces, as Keaton has, it's no wonder so many younger performers are seeking the knife.
Stephanie Zacharek, Salon
Movies about therapy are fun. Movies that need therapy are not.
Washington Post And love her description of Keaton's performance: Acting like a whooping crane on Ritalin and getting hit in the face with a bar mitzvah cake.
"Stay home. Because I said so."
Victoria Alexander, FilmsInReview
It's always a challenge to come up with new Christmas metaphors to describe horrible new holiday movies like the excruciating "Deck the Halls," this year's "Christmas with the Kranks." Coal in the stocking is popular. Fruitcake always works. But I like these:
Like a fatally snarled string of Christmas lights, "Deck the Halls" promises holiday cheer but delivers only frustration. Sam Adams, Los Angeles Times
Like garish snowflake sweaters, Christmas movies are a regrettable, disposable part of the season. This one is worse than most. How bad? So bad that it makes “The Santa Clause 3” look like ... well, “The Santa Clause 2.”A.O. Scott, New York Times
One of those dreadful, pandering, seasonal pictures that sneaks into theaters, Grinch-like, and makes off with tons of cash each year.
Josh Larsen, Sun Publications (Chicago)
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