Sure, the adaptation of a minor TV show few remember fondly is a weak pitch for a feature film, but that's not the problem with 21 JUMP STREET. Not really, anyway. It's produced adequately, and the effects work isn't bad. But...there's a talent problem. Not that there isn't talent, both on screen and off. It's that the talent is lazy, and attempting so very little.
Comedians with the ability of (Oscar nominee, for crying out loud) Jonah Hill can do…
One of the most inconsistent, insubstantial, and thoroughly insufferable efforts in Woody Allen's career...and if you've seen ANYTHING ELSE, you know that's saying something. A loose latticework of meandering premises, TO ROME WITH LOVE shows only a poor understanding of its exotic locale, plodding from location to location without ever connecting so much as a narrative dot. Adding insult to injury are some of the most overrated actors in modern cinema, indulging their worst screen habits -- Jesse Eisenberg's static…
Ten Things I Learned While Watching INTO THE WILD:
1. I am able to stay awake through a maximum of seventeen flashback sequences, 42 glimpses of the landscape, and nearly 100 long pauses per movie.
2. The problem with our commercialized, desensitized culture is its dispiriting lack of human truth, and its obsession with material goods and dysfunctional relationships. This problem can be remedied, however, by trekking out alone into the Alaskan wilderness, living inside an abandoned bus (that apparently…
Was Defiance the first action blockbuster about the Holocaust? Maybe...even against the backdrop of the Second World War, I can't recall many films with a guns-and-bombs body count higher than this true-lifeish tale of Jewish rebels who battled Germans from their hiding place inside a dense forest. As brought to bombastic life by Edward Zwick (Glory, The Last Samurai), this reclamation of the Bielski brothers, and the hundreds of lives they saved from certain death, pitches and rolls erratically, looking…
