Zombieland

This was fun and silly. The gore wasn't so over the top that it turned me off and the characters were likable enough. A couple of things bother me. 1) Jesse Eisenberg. What must be do to end this scourge? This kid has ZERO charisma, one-note in his acting arsenal and isn't even good looking. I just don't get it. 2) Oh my God that fucking voice-over narration. It was endless, moronic and repetitive. It's a decent flick, but it mostly played like the inflated TV pilot that it is.

Guru of Go / Run Ricky Run

Two more chapters in ESPN's "30 For 30". These are two of the strongest to date. "Guru" is about Paul Westhead. It covers his entire career and I learned a lot about him (didn't know he'd won a WNBA title), but primarily focusses on the LMU team. It's just simply one of the most amazing sports stories EVER. Unfortunately the pace of the film accelerated right at the point in the story where Gather's team made a run in the tourney after his death. It felt like there were some critical details left out and then the WNBA chapter felt like an unrelated coda. But the emotional impact of the story of Gathers and Kimble was resonant.
"Run Ricky Run" is about Ricky Williams fall and return to grace in the NFL. It is a remarkable film, with incredible access to Williams and everything he was going through in that time. It changed my perspective on him and impressed me that he is truly one of the most interesting people in professional sports. A great film.

You Don't Know Jack

HBO's engaging biopic about Jack Kervorkian. It let's the story tell itself without too many bells and whistles. It is an interesting story. Somewhat analagous to "The People Vs. Larry Flynt", but not quite as epic in scope. Kervorkian is an exciting figure and Pacino's performance is (as usual) overly mannered, but subdued enough by his standards that it's engaging. He never quite vanishes into the character however. There's not much more going on than the central character. Still, it's a story I did not know all the details to that worked really great.

Four Christmases

That title is really more of a table of contents. Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon each have divorced parents. They have to go to all four on Christmas. Simple. And it mostly works. Vince and Reese are both charming and funny. Not all the gags work, but enough of them do. And the format of the film made it so it was basically four short films. When I got bored of one, I didn't tune out because I knew we'd be moving on soon. It was paced well and there was enough funny. It's not great film, but it was made well and moved along.

Zoolander

I don't know why it took me ten years to see this movie. I like so many people who made it. It's not a comedy "classic", but there are a lot of good laughs. Owen Wilson and Stiller are great together. Will Ferrel is great as a demented fashion designer. Vince Vaughn is weirdly fun in a wordless part. It's goofy and the story is rudimentary and predictable. But the funny stars are given chances to be funny. Stiller's character, however, if a vain, dumb model. There wasn't a way to take that character into new areas as the film wore on. It seems like Wilson's character would have been a more intriguing lead. But it made me laugh.

Silly Little Game

Another one from ESPN's "30 for 30" series. It documents the first ever fantasy baseball league. This film tells the story of a historic sports moment that is, frankly, not all that well documented. The characters who invented the league are colorful and funny. However, the filmmakers elected to stage re-enactments of the pivotal early days of the league. It's off-putting and made the thing feel like old school History Channel. Worse, they conspicously do stylish things like having the re-enactment actors mouth the words of the real person's interview as the audio overlaps. It was just too much cheese and the whole thing felt cheap and underproduced.

W.

It was a struggle to get to the end of the abysmal pile of shit. It's hard to believe that Oliver Stone was once a relevant film maker, let alone arguably the most important director of a decade. This movie fails in so many ways. It starts with the writing. The effort to shoehorn in ever catchphrase and awkward moment and Bush-bashing antecdote into the script was handled so ham-handedly and conspicuously that it was impossible to treat the film as believable. It's like they were winking at the camera the whole time. This film is largely about the build-up to the Iraq war, but it takes detours all over Bush's life. But the shifts in time are completely arbitrary and leave the entire film meandering and muddled. The performances are uniformly awful, but there should be special distinction for Thandie Newton as Condeleeza Rice. It's hard to believe that she was able to commit to such a garish, cartoony performance for the entire run of the movie, but she did. This movie was so bad I think I would have preferred to see Bush in office again.

Where the Wild Things Are

Completing my Spike Jonze marathon. I was always unimpressed by the book that this film is "adapted" from. I put "adapted" in quotes because it has so much more going on than the book... yet so much less. Like the book the visuals are striking, perhaps even haunting. But... like the book... the story is simplistic and well... trite. The boy who plays Max did a really strong job and the "Wild Thing" suits are excellent. The color palate is a bit one note throughout, but it is always beautiful. But the film is dull... 94 minutes seemed to drag... and the plot seems pretentiously heavy-handed. I think this probably could have worked as a short film. There's a lot here that's interesting, but being in this fantasy world for so long wore me out.

I'm Here

This one also may not "count", but...

An internet short for around 45 minutes that was directed by Spike Jonze. It's a story about a world where robots live and work among us as virtual slaves to humans. Yet somehow a romance blooms between an uptight male robot and a quirky female who is determined to let the world know she's "here." It's visually interesting because the robots have a funky, found-art feeling to them. The voice performances are casual and engaging. The meeting and intitial flirtation is a lot of fun and although the "message" about minorities, etc. is heavy-handed, it was still an interesting exercise in perspective shifting. The second half of the movie devolves into a demented version of Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree." That got a little repetitive and the ending left me unmoved. Still, it's an interesting exercise and I thought it was inventive in the way Jonze literally brings the robots to "life."

No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson

This is probably pushing it to describe this as a film, but it's 90 minutes on TV. So I'll count it. Steve James, who famously directed "Hoop Dreams" - one of the best sports documentaries in history - tells the tale of Allen Iverson's notorious upbringing in Hampton, VA which, coincidentially, is also James's hometown. While a prep phenom, Iverson was involved in a riot in a bowling alley. The racial overtones to the fight divided an already racially tense community and Iverson eventually went to prison for nearly a year before having his sentence commuted by Virginia's first black governor. It's an interesting story and while it's told in more detail than I've ever heard before, this movie misses by a long shot. James was unable to speak to Iverson or any of the principal characters of this narrative. He returns to his hometown and although this is the biggest thing to have happened there in this lifetime, no one will talk to him. Except for his own mother. He gets some accounts which give a perspective of the community, but the heart of the story is completely unexplored. Frankly, I don't know why this film even got made without access to Iverson. Also, James failed to really give much of a bio for Iverson after high school. It seems like an interesting story that remains untold.

2012

Roland Emmerich made "Independence Day" and is a disaster movie auteur, so you would think he would have seen in the middle of this one the essential problem. What makes disaster movies work is some kind of flaw in humanity that nature or some outside force is correcting. Here, however, it's just the Earth is going ot blow up. So if they story isn't going to work, the visuals had to be spectacular. Unfortunatley, I think the filmmakers over-reached their budget. You can see that the visuals were SUPPOSED to be spectacular, but they just don't get there. They look low-rent and not finished. Like a first draft of digital effects. There's also an overdose of exposition via news reports, always a warning sign that you're watching a sloppily made film. I had hoped to see John Cusak infuse this with a little charm or wit, but he's really hamstrung by an unlikeable character with no discernible arc. There were few moments where he had scenes with Woodey Harrelson (in an inspired, if inspid cameo) that were fun to watch. But they were crushed under the weight of the uninteresting exposition.

Angels & Demons

I'll say this. The significantly improved upon "The DaVinci Code." Hanks' hair is almost contained and more importantly there's a lot less talking about arcane historical trivia. There's less, but that's not to say there's not still too much. It's a LOT of talking. And people explaining things to people who already seem to know the things being explained to them. So it's just for our benefit that we understand the historical context of the boring and predictable plot. Like the book, the third act "twist" which reveals Ewan McGregor's villany is first seen from miles. There's virtually no coherence to the story as motivations shift arbitrarily merely to get us to the next "shocking" "reveal." It's preposterously bad and the acting is specifically terrible. Not a shock given the stilted, expository dialogue. Yes, it's better than the "DaVinci Code." But that's an awfully low bar.