Turn Off The Spiderman Musical

Ray Gustini at The Atlantic:

With a history of sending spandex-clad stunt doubles hurtling towards earth and terrible buzz, there was little suspense about how the nation’s top theater critics would review Julie Taymor’s latest musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. On Monday night, they posted their reviews, breaking an embargo that was supposed to last until the show opens on March 15, and it became clear that the true contest was to see which critic could craft the most withering put-down.

Patrick Healy at NYT:

“Spider-Man” has not even officially opened yet. The date has been delayed five times to fix myriad problems, with Sunday afternoon being preview performance No. 66 and the opening planned for Monday night being pushed back five more weeks to March 15. But this $65 million musical has become a national object of pop culture fascination — more so, perhaps, than any show in Broadway history.

Starting with Conan O’Brien’s spoof of Spider-Man warbling in rhyme on Nov. 30, two nights after the musical’s problem-plagued first preview, the show has been lampooned on every major late-night comedy show and by The Onion, which portrayed the producers as still being optimistic about the show despite a nuclear bomb’s detonating during a preview. Recently, Steve Martin slyly referred to it in a series of tweets about watching the “Spider-Man” movies at home.

“Settling in to watch Spiderman 3 on deluxe edition DVD, but I fell from hanging cables in screening room. 2 hour delay,” he wrote.

Media celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Glenn Beck and the hosts of “Morning Joe” have all raved about the musical, especially Mr. Beck, who said in an interview on Friday that he had seen it four times.

Mr. Beck has framed its appeal on his radio broadcast as a face-off between regular Americans and cultural snobs (i.e., liberals). In the interview, however, he was more fanboy than fire breather, rattling off plot points and design elements with the practiced eye of a Sardi’s regular.

“The story line is right on the money for today, which is to be your better self, that you can spiral into darkness or — ” here he quoted one of the show’s anthemic songs — “you can rise above,” said Mr. Beck, who estimated that he sees a dozen shows a year. “In fact, I just wrote an e-mail to Julie” — Ms. Taymor — “about how much I loved the new ending.”

Last month, “Spider-Man” became the first Broadway show since “The Producers” to land on the cover of The New Yorker; the cartoon, by Barry Blitt, who also did “The Producers” cover in 2001, showed several injured Spider-Men in a hospital ward.

“For our cover we always ask ourselves, would our one million readers know what we were making reference to?” said Francoise Mouly, art editor of The New Yorker. “But in no time at all, ‘Spider-Man’ has gotten enough notoriety that we knew the cover would make people laugh. Even the show’s producers laughed; they’ve been hounding us to buy copies of the artwork.”

Nina Shen Rastogi at Slate:

Reading through the reviews this morning, it became clear that the main character in this drama isn’t Peter Parker—it’s Julie Taymor. Theater directors rarely receive the kind of mainstream attention that their Hollywood brethren do. (Do you know who Daniel Sullivan is?) But in this case, the specter of steely, uncompromising Taymor looms large over the critical discussion.

There’s a reason for this: Spider-Man is very clearly Taymor’s production, stamped with her trademark mix of spectacle and folklore. (She first gained widespread fame for her shadow-puppets-on-the-savannah production of The Lion King.) And she seems to have created a proxy for herself with Arachne, Spider-Man‘s ancient, eight-legged antagonist.

Scott Brown at New York Magazine:

Some of my colleagues have wondered aloud whether Spider-man will ever be finished — whether it is, in fact, finishable. I think they’re onto something: I saw the show on Saturday night, and found it predictably unfinished, but unpredictably entertaining, perhaps on account of this very quality of Death Star–under–construction inchoateness. Conceptually speaking, it’s closer to a theme-park stunt spectacular than “circus art,” closer to a comic than a musical, closer to The Cremaster Cycle than a rock concert. But “closer” implies proximity to some fixed point, and Spider-man is faaaar out, man. It’s by turns hyperstimulated, vivid, lurid, overeducated, underbaked, terrifying, confusing, distracted, ridiculously slick, shockingly clumsy, unmistakably monomaniacal and clinically bipolar.

But never, ever boring. The 2-D comic art doesn’t really go with Julie Taymor’s foamy, tactile puppetry, just as U2’s textural atmo-rock score doesn’t really go with the episodic Act One storytelling. Yet even in the depths of Spider-man‘s certifiably insane second act, I was riveted. Riveted, yes, by what was visible onstage: the inverted Fritz Lang cityscapes, the rag doll fly-assisted choreography, the acid-Skittle color scheme and Ditko-era comic-art backdrops. But often I was equally transfixed by the palpable offstage imagination willing it all into existence. See, Spider-man isn’t really about Spider-man. It’s about an artist locked in a death grapple with her subject, a tumultuous relationship between a talented, tormented older woman and a callow young stud. Strip out the $70 million in robotic guywires, Vari-lites, and latex mummery, and you’re basically looking at a Tennessee Williams play.

Kamelia Angelova at Business Insider:

We loved the show, and here is why we think people will see it:

• Flying is awesome.

There are aerial acrobatics; airborne fight scenes; the actors fly up and land among the audience. The wires are visible but don’t obstruct any of the view or movements of the actors.

• The story is familiar, yet fresh.

It is based on the classic comic books, and the movie, so the audience knows what to expect — nerdy Peter Parker gets bit by a mutating spider and acquires superpowers. After his uncle is killed, he becomes a crusader against crime. And, of course, Peter is in love aspiring actress Mary Jane who is in love with Spiderman.

Spiderman faces off with a bunch of villains, most notably the Green Goblin.

There are only two new story elements that the writers have introduced: the Geek Chorus — four teenagers that are obviously creating/narrating the story of Spiderman that unfolds before our eyes; and a new villain — Arachne, a character from Greek mythology, that tempts Spiderman to give in to his powers and cross over to some abstract dimension to become her boyfriend.

These new elements make Spiderman: The Musical fresh and different that the usual Spiderman adaptation. And who is to complain about an old-fashion love triangle plot?

• The sets are creative.

Unfolding backdrops, huge video screens; most of the set invokes the theme that this is a comic book story. The sets move surprisingly quickly, given how massive and detailed they are.

• The music is by Bono and The Edge.

The songs are very U2 and very rock at times, and it’s loud. As it should be.

• The cast

My favorite were the villains — the Green Goblin and Arachne.

• The choreography

Cool slow motion sequences.

• It’s the most expensive show ever.

With a price tag of $65 million, this is indeed the most expensive Broadway show ever produced — which is another reason why tourists and locals alike would flock to see it and judge it for themselves.

The show needs to make about $1 million a week to break even, and should run about 2-3 years to be profitable. Since the start of the previews in December 2010, Spiderman’s weekly gross earning have been about $1.2 million on average.

So if there are no more injuries, and the production irons out the technical glitches that do occur and are tolerable during previews but will be unacceptable once the show opens, Spiderman should pull through for its investors (who include theater veterans like James Nederlander and Terry Allan Kramer, as well as Disney via its acquisition of Marvel, the franchise for the Spiderman comics.)

Sorry, esteemed Broadway critics, but we are with Glenn Beck on this one.

Brian Clark at Movieline:

And so, while we usually reserve our “Most Scathing Reviews” feature for movies, we’ll make an exception for this Broadway production that seems to wish it was a movie.9. “Never mind turning off the dark. I spent much of this dreadful new musical muttering Please, Lord, make it stop.” — Charles Spencer, The Telegraph

8. “For without a book with consistent rules that a mainstream audience can follow and track, without characters in whom one can invest emotionally, without a sense of the empowering optimism that should come from time spent in the presence of a good, kind man who can walk up buildings and save our lousy world from evil, it is all just clatter and chatter.” — Chris Jones, The Chicago Tribune

7. “Spider-Man is chaotic, dull and a little silly. And there’s nothing here half as catchy as the 1967 ABC cartoon theme tune.” — David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

6. “More dispiriting is the music… [Bono and the Edge] transformed their sound into stock Broadway schlock pop—sentimental wailing from the early Andrew Lloyd Webber playbook, winceable lyrics and the kind of thumpa-thumpa music that passes for suspense in action flicks.” — Linda Winer, Newsday

5. “Or wait, maybe the bottom of the barrel is a weird on-the-runway sequence, in which a cadre of second-tier villains with names like Swiss Miss and Carnage do a bit of high-fashion sashaying. In the running, too, is a bizarre military number, as well as the first-act closer, a rip-off of a Rodgers and Hart song. The latter is sung by – get out your score cards – the other main-event evildoer, the Green Goblin, a former scientist played by the talented classical actor Patrick Page.” — Peter Marks, The Washington Post

4. “Who exactly is “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” for anyway? The only answer I can come up with is an audience of Julie Taymor types who care only about panoramic sensibility— a bit of slow-mo choreography here, a smattering of diabolical mask work there. Much as I enjoyed the clever shifts in perspective during the skyscraper scenes, it was hard for me to picture adults or young people yearning for a second visit, never mind critics who may feel obliged to check back in with the production when (or should I say if?) it officially opens. Nothing cures the curiosity about “Spider-Man” quite like seeing it.” — Charles McNulty, The LA Times

3. “After all this expenditure of talent and money, “Spider- Man” is probably unfixable because too much has gone into making humans fly, which is not what they are good at. It imitates poorly what the “Spider-Man” movies do brilliantly with computer graphics — and without putting live actors in jeopardy.” — Jeremy Gerard, Bloomberg

2. “This production should play up regularly and resonantly the promise that things could go wrong. Because only when things go wrong in this production does it feel remotely right — if, by right, one means entertaining. So keep the fear factor an active part of the show, guys, and stock the Foxwoods gift shops with souvenir crash helmets and T-shirts that say “I saw ‘Spider-Man’ and lived.” Otherwise, a more appropriate slogan would be “I saw ‘Spider-Man’ and slept.” — Ben Brantley, New York Times

1. “It’s by turns hyperstimulated, vivid, lurid, overeducated, underbaked, terrifying, confusing, distracted, ridiculously slick, shockingly clumsy, unmistakably monomaniacal and clinically bipolar…At this point, I honestly hope they never fix the (non-injurious) glitches: They puncture the show’s pretense and furnish meta-theatrical opportunities that can’t be staged. We’ve had Epic Theater, we’ve had Poor Theater — is this the dawn of Broken Theater?” — Scott Brown, From his review in New York Magazine, which is actually neither negative, positive or even neutral, but seems to sum up the irrationality of the whole enterprise better than any other.

Where Is Alfred Hitchcock When We Need Him?

Nick Neely at Audubon:

On New Year’s Eve, sometime after 11 p.m., several thousand red-winged blackbirds dropped lifelessly from the darkness onto suburban lawns, roofs, and roads in the small town of Beebe, Arkansas. “I thought the mayor was messing with me when he called me,” Milton McCullar, Beebe Street Dept. Supervisor, said to the local TV station the next day with a (nervous?) grin. “He got me up at four o’clock in the morning and told me we had birds falling out of the sky.” “When you first get the call, you think it’s a New Year’s joke,” said the mayor, Mike Robertson, himself. “But it wasn’t a joke.” News outlets quickly picked up the story, and today, it has twittered about. There are no conclusions yet as to why the birds perished—a hailstorm, perhaps, or even stress from nearby fireworks—and no one seems to have much to say about the incident, but for, look here, at this strange, ominous (and yes, Hitchcockian) thing.

Michael Marshall at The New Scientist:

Most such rains of animals are probably caused by waterspouts: tornadoes that move over water. Waterspouts can suck up soil and small animals in large quantities, and dump them many miles away after they dissipate. This explains why the animals most commonly reported as falling are fish and frogs, which of course live in and around water.

The blackbirds aren’t the only mystery animals in Arkansas. 100,000 fish have died in a river 125 miles from Beebe. It’s not clear what killed them but disease may be to blame. There’s nothing to suggest the two events are linked.

Besides animals, other peculiar things have fallen from the sky over the years. Scientists have long struggled to understand the “red rain” that fell in Kerala, India, in 2001. The colour has been attributed to algae, but a few researchers think the microbes in question came from space.

Joe Coscarelli at The Village Voice:

When thousands of red-winged blackbirds fell from the sky on New Year’s Eve in Beebe, Arkansas, it seemed like God was angry at the Natural State, especially considering the additional 100,000 dead fish in a nearby river. “I’m not drunk and I’m not on drugs,” said one local when he called the police department. “She said, ‘Oh, you’re calling about the birds.'” A handful of the fallen creatures were taken in for testing, but officials are now saying that loud noises, probably from fireworks, scared the birds, causing them to slam into trees or houses and that the weather had nothing to do with it. Extraterrestrials are still suspected.Via the Wall Street Journal:

A witness reported that the birds, which roost in the area in large numbers and don’t see well at night, were scared by the noise and slammed into houses and trees, said Arkansas State Veterinarian George Badley. A study of several carcasses showed the birds died of internal bleeding.”We’re still checking for germs and poisons, but we believe it was just trauma,” said Dr. Badley.

The total dead is somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000, but that’s not counting the 500 red-winged blackbirds found in Louisiana, in what CNN calls a “seemingly separate incident.”

Clay Dillow at Popular Science:

Later yesterday, other sources were reporting that loud noise could have been behind the Arkansas incident. Necropsies performed yesterday showed the Arkansas birds suffered internal injuries that formed blood clots that went to their brains. It’s conceivable that loud noise (NYE fireworks?) could have startled a flock, causing them to rapidly change course and plunge headlong into buildings or tall trees, sustaining blunt traumas that led to their collective death.

Of course, none of this accounts for the 500 freshly dead birds in Louisiana. Those, of course, could be completely unrelated to the Arkansas birds (don’t be fooled by randomness, people). But we like a good conspiracy theory better. Besides, what about all those dead drum? Something smells fishy indeed, but who could possibly benefit from knocking off a bunch of birds in the American south? NASA? BP? Aliens? Our money is on Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who was never really afforded an opportunity to even the score with his avian nemeses.

Roz Zurko at The Examiner:

Many people are looking to the bible for verses conveying the warnings of the apocalypse with dead birds, but according to the website God Discussion, this does not seem to be mentioned. There are bible writings that are close, but not that convey the end of the world or harm coming to mankind affliated with dead birds.

2012 Prophecies have some people concerned after the dead birds fell from the sky, according to one commentator on Fox News live. According to the God Discussion website, the first searches for this story consisted mainly of the search words “dead birds.” Later, as the day went on, the search words turned to “dead birds” and “bible.”  These dead birds have many people wondering today – what is the spiritual meaning in masses of dead birds falling from he sky?

One Connecticut housewife L. Kelly, admitted she did the same Internet search that many others did today, “dead birds” and “bible.” “It is just an eerie thing to happen, not something you ever hear about Kelly said.”  She too fell on many confusing claims, but nothing that states the bible has a quote about dead birds and the end of the world is coming.

Christopher Rosen at Moveline:

Point of truth: Here at Movieline HQ, we’re busy stocking up on batteries and canned goods in the wake of the mass bird and fish deaths that happened in Arkansas over the weekend. (Not to mention the flooding in Australia.) That said, not everyone has worked themselves up into a full blown lather of panic. Just ask born-again Christian Kirk Cameron: “I think it’s really kind of silly to kind of equate birds falling out of the sky with some kind of an end-times theory.” Wait, even Cameron is making sense? Maybe this really is the end of times.

Laura Conaway at MaddowBlog:

But take heart: Though this story seems strange and even apocalyptic, it’s not necessarily so. The Baton Rouge paper cites an official from the U.S. Geological Survey as saying that a thousand or more blackbirds have turned up dead some 16 times in the past 30 years.

 

Been Through The Movies With A Character With No Name

Erik Hayden at The Atlantic with the round-up. Hayden:

The options could hardly be starker for Labor Day movie-goers. On one hand, there’s the blood-stained Machete, which seems to revel in the number of body-parts it dismembers for the pleasure of audiences. And, of course, there’s also that European-tinged, art-house hitman movie with the relatively unassuming poster of George Clooney furrowing his brow. What’s that one about, exactly? It appears that nearly half of our nation’s finest critics lost their patience with the slow-burning film before trying to figure that out.

The film itself, directed by 2007’s Control helmer, Anton Corbijn, takes its cues from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1975 landmark The Passenger and builds upon the book it’s adapted from, Rowan Joffe’s A Very Private Gentleman. It follows a international hitman (George Clooney) whose real name is unimportant , and who quietly delivers all that’s expected of him (the closest thing to a spoiler is that the film is fraught with “butterfly symbolism”).

Christopher Orr at The Atlantic:

In his latest film, George Clooney plays an international hitman variously addressed as “Jack” and “Edward,” though we’re given little reason to imagine that either name has attached itself to him for long. In the hilly Italian hamlets where the bulk of the story takes place he’s known best, and most evocatively, as “The American”—which is also, for simplicity’s sake, the title of the picture.

The protagonist’s name, in any case, is largely incidental: Clooney is playing Clooney. (As if there were anyone else we’d genuinely prefer him to be.) He works here on the somber edge of his personal spectrum, more Solaris than Leatherheads. But dour or droll, he remains contemporary cinema’s most effortless star, and this easy magnetism is the primary engine driving director Anton Corbijn’s low-key, European-style thriller. Evoking Steve McQueen rather than his customary Cary Grant, Clooney is less Everyman than every man’s idealized self: stoic yet not unfeeling, bruised but unfaltering. Sadness lurks in the crinkle of his crow’s feet, but flickers of hope as well.

Dana Stevens at Slate:

For all the demands it will place on the viewer’s attention span, though, The American doesn’t start slow. It kicks off with an absolutely killer cold open in a snowbound cabin in Sweden, where the American of the title, Jack (George Clooney) is romancing a lissome Scandinavian honey. Their postcoital stroll turns unexpectedly violent—a development that’s all the more frightening for taking place in absolute, snow-muffled silence. Jack goes into hiding in Italy, instructed by his superior Pavel (Johan Leysen) to lie low for a while. (We never do learn exactly what kind of organization Jack works for—is he a CIA agent? An international operative of some kind? A mercenary?) A tiny hillside village in Abruzzo becomes Jack’s temporary home. Again on the instructions of the mysterious Pavel, Jack—who, apparently, is a world-class gunsmith—begins working on a special custom-designed weapon for a female assassin (Thekla Reuten).

The entire middle section of the film consists of long scenes of Jack alone in his pensione, machining gun parts. For recreation, he drinks brandy with the local priest (Paolo Bonacelli) and seeks the favors of a prostitute, Clara (Violante Placido). This part of the movie may lose many viewers: Hey, I didn’t pay 12 bucks for a George Clooney spy movie so I could watch the man sit silently in front of a lathe! But Corbijn’s bare-bones reduction of the spy genre to its constituent parts has its own dry, spare charm. By the time that gun is finally built, we know a lot more about Jack’s character than we did going in, and we’re keen to see what the weapon will eventually get used for.

Given that—even in character as a gaunt, brooding, emotionally remote assassin—George Clooney is George Clooney, Clara the prostitute soon falls in love with him. (It doesn’t hurt that he uses his brothel time to give her sexual pleasure.) The prospect of a new life with this adoring, implausibly softhearted young woman begins to crack Jack’s shell, and he entertains the possibility of retiring from the business after he finishes this one last job ….

It’s a testament to Corbijn’s directorial gifts that a movie featuring “one last job,” a taciturn loner, and a hooker with a heart of gold could feel as crisp and unusual as The American. Corbijn’s aesthetic choices are consistently unexpected: He films the Italian hill town where Jack holes up not as an Under the Tuscan Sun-style postcard, but as an intriguing set of geometric patterns. And Lord, what a relief to watch a movie, thriller or otherwise, that isn’t scored to within an inch of its life. (When it does appear, the music, by Herbert Gronemeyer, is appropriately contemplative.)

John Nolte at Big Hollywood:

Anyone looking for a thriller will be quickly disappointed. Director Anron Corbijn isn’t interested in action. At all. As a matter of fact, Jack’s pursuers are as easy to kill as red-shirted “Star Trek” crewmen. This is a mood and character piece experimenting with silence and stillness in the hopes of making large the small moments, movements and gestures that come from a character too emotionally isolated and permanently on guard to offer up anything else.  Chatter and exposition and back-story would only betray the essence of this character, which means that it’s up to Clooney fill in the pieces using only his screen presence. Thanks to his first truly outstanding and Oscar-worthy performance, Clooney not only accomplishes this, he also draws us in wanting to know more. Who is this man? What made him who he is?  Will he redeem himself?

Unfortunately, it’s here where the story finally collapses.

Okay, so there’s nothing cinematically subtle about a fallen man at a crossroads in his life and at the same time befriended by the extremes of priest and prostitute. But that doesn’t mean the idea at work there can’t be interesting. The problem is that like the rest of the thematic track you’re deceived into believing the film is laying, it’s all a cheat. Not a single thematic element goes anywhere or even attempts to assume any kind of meaning. Jack might be handsome, worldly and refined, but he also happens to be a sociopath. To root for him, to want Jack to become Edward and get out from under the sins of his past, we have to see something worthy of redemption.  But we don’t, and still the film roots for him, which is especially obvious in the melodramatic climax.

“The American” dares to burden itself (and us) with the heavy symbolism of priest, prostitute, and butterfly, not to mention Jack’s unforgivable crime, but then doesn’t have the courage to deliver on what it means – other than (snore) the futility of it all. This makes for a numbing third act and turns the hushed moments and clipped dialogue and lingering stares into something worse than pretense. Slowly, what once drew you in devolves into cold disappointment and watch-checking tedium — at least until the credits roll, at which point you’re completely numb.

No matter how good the acting, lovely the locations, pretty the cinematography or pregnant the pauses; no matter how much you might tart something up with the whiff of self-important existentialism, just as black is the absence of color, indifference is not a theme — it’s the absence of theme. Nihilism is not art. Nihilism is the absence of art. Which isn’t to say that this subdued and self-consciously quiet examination of the barren existence of an aging hit man tired of looking over his shoulder is without merit. What the film is without, however, is a point – which appears to be the point, which means that we have here is a deliberate act of artistic cowardice.

Todd McCarthy at Indiewire:

The tone of the film recalls the fine, spare 1970s work of screenwriter Alan Sharp in the perennially underrated “Night Moves,” “The Hired Hand” and “The Last Run,” the latter especially because it involved an American criminal dragged out of his retirement in a European village. The fact that John Huston started directing “The Last Run” (he was replaced by Richard Flesicher) and helped write “The Killers” establishes a Hemingway connection; like the hunted figure in “The Killers,” Jack/Edward knows what’s coming but doesn’t know when or from where, leaving him only with the choice of how to deal with it philosophically.

The emotion, such as it is, comes at the end of a very long fuse, when everything that the man has kept so tightly bottled up comes boiling to the surface; Jack/Edward has one shot at possibly escaping his presumed destiny and Clooney indelibly catches the character’s desperate anxiety and fearful hope as he tries to slip through the eye of the needle. You can see the blood rise to his face with his long-suppressed emotion and it’s a sight to behold.

Stephanie Zacharek at Movieline:

Watching The American, it struck me how unusual it is, in contemporary movies, to see a love scene involving a man and a prostitute that’s both carnal and tender. The unspoken wisdom is that these things have to be presented as something tawdry and dirty, because, heaven forbid, we’re not supposed to approve of them.

But even Corbijn’s approach to nudity is refreshingly nonjudgmental and unfettered; he isn’t looking for approval or disapproval, but simply to draw out feeling. Before the screening, a colleague and I wondered aloud why the studio releasing The American, Focus Features, waited until two days before the movie’s opening to show it to critics. The assumption most critics make when a studio “hides” a movie is that it’s lousy. But as we waited for the movie to start, I suggested that maybe Focus had kept the movie from us because they had something with no rapid-fire editing or shaky-cam, because the story makes sense, because the visuals show some thought and some care.

As it turned out, that’s exactly the kind of movie I found The American to be. And in this climate, how is a studio supposed to sell that? The movie’s distinctive qualities aren’t the sort of thing that generates buzz, and I’m beginning to fear that even word of mouth, of the “It’s boring” variety, may come to hurt it at the box office. Perhaps that’s what happens to a movie that asks you to see instead of just look. I hope not.

“I’m Pat F*cking Tillman.”

Andrew O’Hehir at Salon:

The death of Pat Tillman, the National Football League star turned Army Ranger who was killed by friendly fire — or “fratricide,” as the military puts it — in Afghanistan in April 2004, was a strange event in recent American history. On one hand, Tillman’s death was covered far more extensively than those of any of the other 4,700 or so United States troops killed in the Iraqi and Afghan combat zones. To put it bluntly, he was the only celebrity among them.

On the other hand, Tillman’s story remains poorly understood and has little social resonance. As a colleague of mine recently put it, Tillman didn’t fit, either as a living human being or a posthumous symbol into the governing political narratives of our polarized national conversation. That’s true whether you’re on the right or the left. If he struck many people at first as a macho, hyper-patriotic caricature — the small-town football hero who went to war without asking questions — it eventually became clear that was nowhere near accurate. Yet Tillman was also more idiosyncratic than the equally stereotypical ’60s-style combat vet turned longhair peacenik.

Mind you, Tillman might well have become a left-wing activist, had he lived longer. He had read Noam Chomsky’s critiques of U.S. foreign policy, and hoped to meet Chomsky in person. But as Amir Bar-Lev’s haunting and addictive documentary “The Tillman Story” demonstrates, Tillman was such an unusual blend of personal ingredients that he could have become almost anything. It’s a fascinating film, full of drama, intrigue, tragedy and righteous indignation, but maybe its greatest accomplishment is to make you feel the death of one young man — a truly independent thinker who hewed his own way through the world, in the finest American tradition — as a great loss.

Eric Kohn at Indie Wire:

Narrated by Josh Brolin, “The Tillman Story” tracks the uneasy investigation into the reality of the player’s death launched by his family in the wake of an official attempt to celebrate him as a hero. Each step of the way, the corruption grows slightly deeper: The military waits until after Tillman’s funeral before declaring that he was killed by friendly fire, but his parents and siblings determine that the story runs even deeper than that. An unnaturally humble public figure, Tillman never revealed his intentions for going to war—but a twisted publicity campaign launched in the wake of his death assumed otherwise.

The government turned Tillman into a hero, elevating his posthumous stature while burying the atrocious errors that led to his death. Recounting the events through interviews with the Tillman family and previously classified government documents, director Amir Bar-Lev provides an exhaustive account of the wrongdoings at hand. It’s not the sole definitive version of the story—Jon Krakauer’s “Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman” came out in 2009—but by framing the story as a conspiracy thriller, Bar-Lev finds a natural cinematic hook: Coming across like “The Manchurian Candidate” as a ghost story or “All the President’s Men” with civilian journalists, “The Tillman Story” is loaded with dramatic potential.

Bar-Lev assembles the story with layers of media, old and new. He finds a compelling plot point in the contrast between the mainstream Tillman narrative and his family’s background struggles.Voice-overs accompany footage of Tillman’s stone-faced relatives at a massive memorial held in the Arizona stadium where he used to play for the Cardinals. They express their frustration on the soundtrack while news cameras capture it on their faces. Distraught over the elevation of Tillman to the level of a trite patriotic symbol, their anger drives them toward detective work. “He didn’t really fit into that box,” exclaims Tillman’s mother, Mary, sounding both mournful and disappointed that the country her sons served let them down.

Kurt Schlichter at Big Hollywood:

Call me fussy, but I prefer that my conspiracies and cover-ups actually involve conspiracies and cover-ups.  The Tillman Story, a new leftist documentary on football player turned Army Airborne Ranger turned friendly fire casualty turned symbol of…something…posits a massive conspiracy to do…something…and an enormous cover-up of…something…but never quite explains what.  However, there are lots of ominous shots of George Bush and Karl Rove, so we can somehow gather that whatever it is is, in some way, all Bushitler’s fault.

This is a bad film, both in its execution and its intent.  As a lawyer, it insults my intelligence.  As a veteran, it insults my professionalism.  As an audience member, it failed me as a film.  Pat Tillman, first seen in footage sitting nearly silently in a studio, begins the film as a cipher and ends as a cipher.  I know little more about the man or his motivations than I did coming in.  All I know is that I could not wait for it to be over.

This over-praised documentary is based on the premise that there was an enormous, mysterious conspiracy surrounding the death of Pat Tillman, which is a problem for the filmmaker since it is clear there is no giant, mysterious conspiracy surrounding the death of Pat Tillman.  The filmmakers cannot explain who conspired, or what they conspired to do.  Was there a cover-up?  Of what?  The film desperately wants there to be one, as does the family – perhaps that would give them the story the producers need and generate the meaning the family wants.  But, as the film demonstrates beyond all reasonable doubt, there isn’t one.  This is a story of mistakes, not malice.

Pat Tillman died in a tragic battlefield accident.  That happens – young men, powerful weapons, and “the fog of war” all combine to make fratricide a terrible and ever-present reality of infantry combat.  I know nothing about the circumstances of Tillman’s death other than what the film showed (including several instances where the camera focused on Army investigation documents that revealed information the filmmakers did not highlight).  But what the film shows makes it clear that there are no “unanswered questions.”

John Nolte at Big Hollywood:

On May 3rd, 2004, a memorial for Pat Tillman took place in San Jose’s Municipal Rose Garden. Tillman was posthumously awarded the Silver Star and both his family and the whole world believed he had been killed in a Taliban ambush during a brave attempt to draw their fire in order to save his own men.  Just a few weeks later, the Army would come forward to acknowledge that this narrative was wrong and that Tillman had been killed by friendly fire.

At this point, the question that came to my mind was why would the Pentagon and the Bush Administration voluntarily come forward and uncover their own conspiracy? The film makes no mention of any outside pressure on the Pentagon from the Tillman family or even the media to get the bottom of anything. Meaning that at this point everyone believed the initial report and apparently all the Administration and military had to do to keep us all believing was to keep their mouths shut.

So the question is: If the idea was to use Tillman’s death for nefarious pro-war purposes, why just a few weeks after the memorial service would those with the most to lose from doing so, voluntarily kick over a political hornets’ nest by telling the truth? Why not milk the situation for as long as possible and for as much propaganda as possible, especially with a presidential election just five months off? At the very least, why not save all the political heartache and fallout this revelation was sure to bring (and did) and stall until after Bush is reelected?

A producer once told me that whenever you have a film character open a refrigerator door you either have to show them close it or include the sound effect of the door closing, or else the audience will get unsettled thinking the door has been left open. Bar-Lev’s refusal to address or explain why a supposed-group of conspirators would of their own volition blow the whistle on their own supposed conspiracy leaves that door open. And no fancy camera move or sinister scoring is going to close it.

Stephanie Zacharek at Movieline:

Bar-Lev — whose previous directing credits include the 2007 My Kid Could Paint That — trusts his instincts enough to know that he doesn’t need to embellish or intensify any angle of this story to make it more dramatic or more affecting. His treatment of Tillman’s parents is particularly low-key. Dannie Tillman, who has since written a book about her son’s case, speaks at one point about how uncomfortable it is to be a parent grieving intensely and privately in the midst of a grand and glitzy public outpouring of grief. Against that, Bar-Lev shows footage of Dannie, Patrick Sr. and Marie standing stiffly and politely on a football field as earnest speeches are made and marching-band music is played. At one point, incomprehensibly, a team of prancing and high-kicking dancers line up before them, a truly weird way of honoring a fallen soldier.

The Tillman Story is often painful to watch, even when the images in front of us are nothing more than military documents that have been marked, by Dannie, with a highlighter. Dannie was given thousands of pages of official reports and documents by the U.S. military, a sea of pages with every significant name or detail blacked out; the presumption was that once she started going through this material, she’d simply become exhausted and give up. But with Goff’s help, Dannie unearthed many of the more excruciating secrets surrounding her son’s death, notably the fact that the soldiers responsible for it (their story isn’t told here, and appears to be wholly shrouded in secrecy) explained their actions by saying, “I was excited,” and, “I wanted to stay in the firefight” — details the U.S. military wouldn’t be particularly eager to publicize, for obvious reasons, and which can only intensify a parent’s suffering.

Bar-Lev recently lost an appeal to have the MPAA ratings board change the rating for The Tillman Story from an R — for the movie’s use of, as the ratings board so delicately puts it, “excessive language” — to a PG-13. That’s particularly cutting considering that one of the most piercing revelations in The Tillman Story is that Tillman’s last words, shouted out as a last-ditch effort to keep his fellow soldiers from shooting at him, were “I’m Pat f*cking Tillman.” Sometimes the use of an expletive, beyond being a sticking point for a group of de facto censors, really is a matter of life and death.

The Michael Keaton Comeback Continues…

Stephanie Zacharek at Movieline:

Adam McKay’s comedy The Other Guys has a lot going for it: Even though it mines perennial cop-buddy-movie material, it doesn’t feel generic or strained, and unlike other recent comedies — Dinner for Schmucks pops to mind — it never descends into grating self-consciousness. Forget impressing us with its cleverness; it’s happy to seduce us with its dumbness, and when McKay and his performers — chief among them Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg and Eva Mendes — dangle that shiny lure, damn it if it doesn’t work at least half the time.

But The Other Guys isn’t easy to peg. It’s not a comedy that loosens you up and mellows you out; it works by needling you progressively into a state of anxiety. I walked out of the thing with my nerves humming. Part of that has to do with the chemistry between its two stars, Ferrell and Wahlberg. They’re an uneasy yet inspired match: Ferrell is Allen Gamble, the most timid New York City cop imaginable (he was transferred over from forensics accounting), who’s happy to sit at his desk whenever an urgent call comes in over the radio. His partner, Wahlberg’s Terry Hoitz, is a thundercloud with a badge who can’t wait to get out there and prove his stuff. The problem is, he’s already proved it: A hothead with a gun, he gained renown in the force after shooting Derek Jeter by mistake. (Jeter himself appears in a tiny, amusing cameo.)

At headquarters, Alan and Terry sit opposite one another — Alan tapping away at his computer, Terry perpetually tapping his leg. Alan annoys his officemate first by absent-mindedly humming the theme from S.W.A.T., then moving on to I Dream of Jeannie. Terry responds to these happy-go-lucky tics by blowing up. He calls Alan a fake cop before progressing to even harsher, if inane, insults: “The sound of your piss hitting the urinal — it sounds feminine to me!” he blurts out. He’s cooped up in the office, and he hates it. “I am a peacock! You’ve gotta let me fly!” he tells the world, or at least the office.

Rob Hunter at Film School Rejects:

The Other Guys is Adam McKay’s fourth feature collaboration with Ferrell, and while its ranking among Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and Step Brothers will vary from viewer to viewer there’s no question that the duo remains one of the best comedic relationships in recent Hollywood history. (For the record, I’d place it second in their combined resume.) McKay, who also co-wrote the film, does a fantastic job milking every scene for laughs like they were ‘La vache qui rit’ Babybels. (I swear that made sense when I typed it.) The humor isn’t story based but instead comes from all corners… jokes, running gags, and brief detours into insanity fly fast and loose. We get some fun at the expense of action movie tropes during car chases and shootouts, a priceless re-definition of the term ‘soup kitchen’ involving homeless folks having an orgy in a Toyota Prius, a flashback to Gamble’s college years with Ferrell intermingling with much younger co-eds, and if you thought laughs associated with TLC died in Honduras eight years ago guess again my friends.

One of the biggest obstacles in creating a good buddy-anything movie is finding a pair of actors with chemistry capable of  playing off each others strengths to the benefit of the film as a whole. Ferrell and Wahlberg succeed pretty well here. Fans of Ferrell’s particular style of goofiness and comedic charm will be reminded why they find him so damn funny, and newcomers to the Ferrell fold (located right below his perineum) may find themselves adding his back catalog into their Netflix queue. And Wahlberg has already teased his comedic chops in I Heart Huckabees, Date Night, and The Happening, but this flick confirms it. His funniest bits are more passive compared to Ferrell’s flat-out zaniness, but he still garners big laughs. The scene where he’s first introduced to his partner’s bombshell wife (Mendes) is five straight minutes of his perfect reactions and delivery.

The supporting cast is just as successful at extracting laughs from your gullet and add to the non-stop barrage of chuckles. Coogan is joined by Eva Mendes, Rob Huebel, Rob Riggle, Damon Wayans Jr., Dwayne Johnson, Samuel Jackson, and Michael Keaton. Even Ice-T gets to be a funny man via some sharply written narration. They’re all on top of their game here, but Keaton in particular shows that he still has the brilliant comedic timing that first made him a star. There’s no excuse for his absence from the big screen.

Scott Tobias at Onion AV Club:

It’s a testament to Will Ferrell’s comic genius that his movies are any good at all. Ferrell isn’t a satirist or an observational humorist, and he isn’t comfortably confined within the guardrails of a script, even a well-written one. His natural outlet is the sketch comedy of Saturday Night Live, where his gift for digressive silliness could be packaged into five- or 10-minute bits. So a good Will Ferrell movie, like the inspired buddy-cop comedy The Other Guys, gloms together enough clever riffs and random funny business to overcome the inevitable lumpiness and dead ends. It helps that Ferrell’s regular collaborator, director Adam McKay (Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers), has a visual panache that’s rare in Hollywood comedies, and especially useful when shoot-outs and car chases come into play. Cop Out this ain’t.

[…]

Great casting takes The Other Guys most of the way: Ferrell draws a wealth of good material from his character’s oddball ineffectuality, and he partners perfectly with Wahlberg, who’s always best at his most incredulous. In the role of their commander, Michael Keaton finally gets a chance to return to the unhinged comedy of his early films, and Coogan is appropriately oily as a preening moneybags-type who charms people with Broadway tickets and cucumber water. Some running gags get stretched to the breaking point, like Ferrell’s unaccountable ability to attract hot women (Eva Mendes plays his wife) and a story from his past, but McKay gives the film enough structure and style to keep the action moving. And as in the best Ferrell vehicles, if a joke fails, several disarming and original ones always follow in short order.

Josh Levin at Slate:

Left alone, Ferrell and Wahlberg struggle with the constraints of a well-worn genre. What happens when a mild-mannered accountant and an insult-heaving hothead try to put the screws to a rapacious, scheming capitalist (Steve Coogan)? Pretty much what you’d expect, including the car chases. With The Other Guys‘ comedy kingpin under wraps as a strait-laced “paper bitch,” McKay et al. needed to give the less yuk-inducing Wahlberg the gift of better lines. But Wahlberg doesn’t say anything memorable the entire movie, perhaps on account of the movie’s PG-13 rating—his tough-talking cop in The Departed was a lot more fun to watch, thanks to the 50 different ways he had to say Go fuck yourself. By the time Ferrell sheds his tie and gets manic, the movie’s formula has gotten a little too stale to salvage.

In fairness to McKay and Ferrell, their movies are properly evaluated less as coherent narratives than as sequences of quotable nuggets. Even so, The Other Guys has too few quotable moments—I’m partial to Ferrell’s inspired rant about how a pack of tuna could stalk and devour a pride of lions—to fill the gaps between the big laughs, which are yawning compared to Anchorman and Talladega Nights. One big reason for this deficiency is that the supporting cast doesn’t offer enough support after Danson and Highsmith’s untimely passing—Eva Mendes just stands around looking pretty, while Michael Keaton’s captain does little else besides unintentionally quoting songs from the TLC back catalog.

At times, The Other Guys‘ cop clichés get shoved aside for a critique of the financial world, as Coogan’s slimy, Bernie Madoff clone defrauds his investors of $32 billion. Strangely, the movie saves its sharpest critiques for the closing credits, when a series of slick charts and graphs detail how Ponzi schemes work, how the ratio of CEO-to-employee salaries has skyrocketed, and how much AIG executives have received in bonus payouts. If it was a little more ambitious, The Other Guys could’ve been the funniest episode of Planet Money ever. Instead, it’s just another cop comedy.

Vic Holtreman at Big Hollywood:

Anyway… I didn’t go in to The Other Guys expecting much (I think that the buddy cop/action film parody was done to perfection with Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz), but I was mildly surprised to find myself chuckling throughout and laughing out loud more than once.

Until John pointed it out in the aforementioned story, I didn’t know the political affiliations of Adam McKay or anyone else behind the film – but having been educated I went in forewarned and expecting to be beat about the head with political potshots.

The movie was actually funny in parts, which as I said, I didn’t expect. The plot MacGuffin was that a billionaire lost $32 billion from an investment fund and had to find some “sucker” to replace it before the news got out and crashed the stock of the firm for which he managed it. By the end we find out who the sucker is, but while this is the “mystery” to be solved by the two protagonists (Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell), it never feels like the focus or driving force of the story – just a device around which the exploits of our two main characters can revolve. They focus on it right towards the end and that’s the end of it (you think).

But then the credits start to roll with 1960s style graphics and some overlaid text describing what a Ponzi scheme is with some simple 2D animation. From there they go on to start listing the biggest Ponzi schemes starting with the first major one from the 1920s(?) that cost investors $15MM and then on to Bernie Madoff and his $60+ billion. THEN it continues on comparing CEO/executive pay to the average worker in an elevator graphic showing the multiple back to the early 20th century (7X I think?) to present day with a dramatic pause where it jumps from 100X to 300X in the last few years (complete with images of CEOs as fat cats relaxing by the beach). Then on to the average person’s 401K value in the 1990s, to a couple of years ago, to today (huge drop, of course).

It was like being pummeled – as if the credits were designed by Michael Moore. On the bright side (I suppose) the credits also slammed the TARP bailouts.

What’s odd is that I really didn’t feel like there was much of a political slant in the film itself – you could either interpret Will Ferrell as the even-keeled, kind-hearted Liberal or the nice-on-the-surface yet repressed Conservative.

But the end credits… I could NOT believe the studio signed off on tacking something like this to the end of a comedy. If this had been at the end of Oliver Stone’s upcoming Wall Street 2 I wouldn’t have batted an eye, and it would have been very appropriate. But you’d think with a comedy they want people to walk out laughing and happy to recommend it to others – this will leave people walking out most likely angry, regardless of whether one is on the Left or the Right (for different reasons, I would think).

Dead Mice And Schmucks

Tom Shone at Slate:

Amid all the septic-tank gags, Meet the Parents had one standout scene—at De Niro’s dinner table, where a nervous Ben Stiller delivers an excruciating soliloquy about cat-milking. It’s one of the age-old tenets of farce—goofy stuff, said at the dinner table, sounds twice as goofy—but director Jay Roach was obviously so enamored of his discovery that he has sought to turn it into an entire movie. In Dinner for Schmucks (Paramount), a group of L.A. financiers meet regularly for dinner, each bringing along an idiot for everyone’s amusement. The one with the best idiot wins.

The idea is lifted from the 1998 French film, Le Diner des Cons, directed by Francis Veber, in which a snobbish publisher befriended a fool for the purposes of civilized mockery, only to see the fool visit chaos upon every corner of his life. It wasn’t Feydeau, but it delivered a neat kick to the shins of Parisian literary snobs—boo hiss. I’m not sure what you get from shifting the whole thing to the world of Los Angeles private equity, not a field that is world famous for its air of intellectual brinkmanship; or from giving the lead role to Paul Rudd, who happens to be one of the most affable, easy-going invertebrates on the planet.

“That’s messed up,” he protests when he first hears about the scheme—and just in case we miss his principles the first time, here they are again: “That’s messed up” says his girlfriend Julie, who is played by French-born actress Stephanie Szostack, presumably on the principle that if you are to ransack a country’s most venerable farceur traditions you may as well grab their most winsome, button-nosed actresses while you’re at it.

Carl Kozlowski at Big Hollywood:

But just as he asks his secretary to tell Lance that he can’t attend the meal, Barry steps in front of his car and the two literally meet by accident. Tim pretends to be friendly to Barry, and Barry believes he’s made his first friend in years.

Since Barry’s biggest skill is his ability to make artistic “mousterpieces” – dioramas featuring dead mice that he taxidermies, clothes and places into settings based on famous paintings, including Leonardo di Vinci’s “The Last Supper” – he just might win, if he can beat his worst rival: his own boss at the IRS (Zach Galifianakis in a ridiculously funny performance), who has tormented Barry for years with his alleged ability to control Barry’s mind.

Now that I’ve lavished praise upon Carell, Galifianakis and Greenwood, and spelled out the film’s utterly bizarre premise, one might wonder, “So what’s the problem?” The film’s pacing is off in some places, a fact that’s surprising given the fact that director Jay Roach was at the helm of five of the biggest screwball-comedy hits of the past 30 years with the “Austin Powers” trilogy and the first two “Meet the Parents” films.

The film lumbers at points in its first half-hour, and occasionally feels like it’s trying way too hard with the wacky antics at other points in the rest of the film. Yet enough moments work – including a freakishly funny subplot involving a stalker (Lucy Punch) of Tim’s – that you likely won’t be able to keep from laughing loudly and thinking back on the film as being better than the sum of its parts.

“Schmucks” is surprisingly free of profanity (or at least nearly enough so that I didn’t notice any), but in keeping with Roach’s other films, there are some outrageously risque sequences. While there’s nothing graphic in the visuals, some of the verbal jokes’ topics carry things pretty far out, yet for adults and teenagers, these situations are also absurd they’re nearly impossible to take serious offense at and the film’s overall sweetness and humanity still rules the day.

And thanks to an absolutely beautiful use of wistful pop classics like The Beatles’ “Fool on the Hill,” it is also the rare broad comedy film that manages to get its emotional moments right as well. You’ll be glad you RSVP’d to this film, rather than feeling like a schmuck for paying to see it.

Stephanie Zacharek at Movieline:

It’s possible Roach — whose credits include Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers, as well as the Austin Powers movies — was simply trying to set up the movie as a vast party by itself, one whose conviviality would enwrap the audience, too. And there are plenty of gags that almost work: Zach Galifianakis shows up as a scary IRS agent who intimidates his poor co-worker Barry with his amazing “mind control” skills, which essentially amount to a psychotic stare. The funniest part of Galifianakis’ schtick, though, involves an article of clothing that those of you born after 1975 may never even have seen before. And Carell, whom I consider an off-and-on genius (as long as you don’t make me watch Evan Almighty or Dan in Real Life again), has some terrific, throwaway moments, as when he slumps into a chair, loosens his shirt, and yanks off his necktie — which is a clip-on. The gag itself is pedestrian; Carell’s off-the-beat timing, and the forehead-smacking, “How did I not see that coming?” element of surprise, are what make it work.

But before long Carell’s character, perpetually squirrelly-eyed and wearing a bland, rabbity smile, becomes a chore to watch. Even Rudd, who’s both a marvelous straight man and a stealthy funny guy, recoils from him a little bit too believably. Because most contemporary mainstream comedies, unfortunately, have to have some deeper meaning, there is a moral to Dinner for Schmucks: Be nice to squares. And that moral would be acceptable, if only the movie didn’t bore us so interminably along the way. It takes forever to get to the climactic dinner scene, and even then, the schmucky guests we’ve been waiting to see offer nothing but disappointment: There’s a psychic who communicates with dead pets (Octavia Spencer), a blind fencer (Chris O’Dowd), a guy with a hungry pet vulture (Patrick Fischler). Each runs through his or her act as if trying out for the Gong Show.

The few moments of relief in Dinner for Schmucks come from some of the supporting performers, most notably the British actors David Walliams and Lucy Davenport as a pair of humorless Swiss kajillionaires. (Just looking at Davenport, with her robotic Ultra-Brite smile and electronic blue Village of the Damned eyes, made me laugh.) Jemaine Clement, of Flight of the Conchords, also shows up as a self-important, sex-obsessed artist, and sometimes he’s funny-sexy, in a Cro-Magnon way. But the best things in Dinner for Schmucks by far are the mice, nattily dressed stuffed creatures who inhabit their tiny, meticulously detailed worlds with more life and spirit than their human counterparts do. In one of these tableaus, our little rodent friends gather ‘round one side of a long, rectangular table to partake of the Last Supper. Now that’s what I call a party.

Cole Abaius at Film School Rejects:

Barry is a whirlwind of life change – destroying property, relationships, tax statuses – but he comes off like the puppy who looks up at you with giant eyes after peeing all over your favorite shirt. Unfortunately, Paul Rudd doesn’t come off like much of anything except a stock character. He’s Misguided Hero #4 Who Has To Learn to Be Himself and Not Mock the Guy Who Makes Dead Mouse Dolls.

Their relationship leads to the true focal point of the movie – a dinner party where the stakes are equally high for Tim to win the multi-million dollar client, for Barry to stand up to his bullying co-worker Therman (Zach Galifianakis), and for the weirdo with the female dummy to creep everyone out. The movie does its math correctly, and the destructive power of one idiot is amplified by seven.

There are some truly disturbing, shockingly funny moments (particularly when Barry hands a note written on a napkin to a wealthy possible investor), and they are welcomed after a fairly average start. The laughs are there, but the film is not much more than what it needs to be – a clever distraction that’s as digestible as the popcorn it comes with.

The Upside: Steve Carell doing his best Harold Lloyd, Paul Rudd doing his best Paul Rudd, and a few great comedic set ups that are milked for every laugh out there.

The Downside: A fairly average story, too much downtime between the funny stuff, and an opening that looks like it came from a robot programmed to write modern comedies.

On the Side: Were you aware that this film is a remake of a French film that Rob Hunter really enjoyed despite having to read the entire movie? It’s true!

John Farr at Huffington Post:

Even in the midst of decent, more than respectable reviews, why am I not more excited to see the new Dinner For Schmucks?

Here’s why: in my experience, American remakes of foreign hits are most often inferior. Most anyone fortunate enough to have seen Francis Veber’s original Diner de Cons (The Dinner Game) from 1998 knows that to improve upon it would be virtually impossible — or at least, I hope they do.

This delightful, intelligent farce about a mean-spirited game in which handsome, well-heeled gentlemen bring the biggest nerds they can find to a dinner, and how one smug player has the tables turned on him by a most memorable nerd well before they even get to the dinner, stands out as one movie with little need of a remake.

But since there’s nothing original out there anyone wants to touch, of course mainstream Hollywood just has to try.

For those of you who don’t know it, over the past thirty-plus years Veber has been perhaps the most gifted and prolific director of film comedies in France, and time and again, Hollywood has tried to recreate his magic via flat re-makes drained completely of the Gallic charm that animates the originals.

Raise your hands: has anyone recently re-visited The Toy (1982) with Jackie Gleason and Richard Pryor, or The Man With One Red Shoe (1985), starring Tom Hanks? I didn’t think so. Both were inspired by successful Veber outings in France starring the inimitable Pierre Richard.

Though some will undoubtedly differ with me on this, even Mike Nichols’s The Birdcage (1996), by far the most successful Veber adaptation this side of the pond, pales next to its predecessor, La Cage Aux Folles (1978).

You’d think that Hollywood might give up on Veber remakes, but no. They believe that by manipulating a proven formula, usually making it more obvious to attract a broader audience, and then pushing it out to the world via their enormous marketing and distribution machine, they will turn a handsome profit in the end. And — maddeningly — most of the time they are right.

I read all the reviews I could find for Schmucks, and overall I concede they were mostly positive, though somewhat qualified. However, it’s pretty evident Schmucks is no comedic masterpiece, which i submit the original is (or if not, damn close). In the New York Times, A.O. Scott termed it “less a full-scale comic feast than a buffet of amusing snacks,” just the sort of faint praise that puts me on my guard.

Salt, But No Pepper?

Erik Hayden at The Atlantic with a round-up.

Christopher Orr at The Atlantic:

I was planning to let this one pass. Honestly. What purpose would be served, I asked myself, by cataloguing the manifold deficiencies of the Angelina Jolie spy thriller Salt, a second-tier summer offering unlikely to inspire much critical or commercial enthusiasm anyway?

But as I was coming to this conclusion, the film itself shamed me back into an appreciation of my duty. It happened near the end, when the heroine committed a homicide that was not strictly speaking necessary, and another character asked her, “Why did you kill him?” She replied firmly: “Because somebody had to.”

Somebody has to. If government assassins and reviewers of mediocre summer cinema have anything in common (and, in fact, we have quite a bit), it is an appreciation of this Spartan credo.

In this instance it’s best, I think, to be quick and businesslike, avoiding emotional involvement and the unnecessary infliction of pain. So here goes. Salt is a dull, dumb, humorless film. I’ve written before about Hollywood’s failure to produce B+ (and even B-) genre films, and Salt is a prime example—a movie that ought to have been a competent if uninspired entertainment but instead approximates Bourne for Dummies.

Dana Stevens at Slate:

Though Salt will appeal to Bourne fans, it’s slicker and less gritty than those films. Also, Evelyn Salt is more inscrutable and less vulnerable than Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne; every time we think she’s revealed a truth about herself, it’s eventually exposed as a bluff. Had a man played the lead role, which was originally written for Tom Cruise, Salt would have come off as dated and predictable. With a woman—with this woman—all the invincible-spy clichés feel fresh and fun again. Jolie gets to doctor her own wounds in a bar bathroom, scale the side of a building, leap down an elevator shaft, and—most impressively—pull off at least three successful makeovers by giving herself chic haircuts and stealing fab wardrobes on the fly.

As she did in the graphic-novel adaptation Wanted, Jolie makes for a natural action hero. Her physical confidence and self-possession are absolute, and even if she’s not doing all of her own stunts, she makes you believe she could. She’s having great fun, but it’s not smug, jokey James Bond fun. Though the story is ridiculous, she plays her character straight, and though the inconclusive last sequence is a shameless setup for a sequel, you give it a pass because, truth be told, you’re not quite ready to be done with the icy, invincible Evelyn Salt.

The audience’s relationship to Jolie as an off-screen superhero—a bona-fide, old-school movie star—makes her ludicrously competent character seem contiguous with her real-life persona. After leaping from overpasses down onto the roofs of semis and single-handedly dispatching a White House bunker full of armed guards, it seems perfectly logical that Salt—if that really is her name—might stop off at the U.N., make a speech about world hunger, then head home to nurse the twins and have sex with Brad Pitt.

Kurt Loder at MTV:

The story does kick off with a clever hook. Top CIA agent Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) is in the middle of grilling a Russian intelligence operator named Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski) when he tells her that the Agency has been infiltrated by a Russian mole, whose ambitious mission it is to destroy the United States. Salt asks Orlov the mole’s name. “Salt,” he says.

Two of Salt’s fellow agents have been watching this interrogation, and they’re naturally startled. One of them, Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber), says he’s certain that Evelyn can’t be a mole. The other, however, a hardass named Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor), isn’t so sure. Salt herself doesn’t stick around to explain — she takes off. All kinds of pursuers leap into action, and as the chase proceeds, we marvel at her ability to dispatch hordes of heavily armed soldiers (all terrible shots) and her easy access to guns, chemicals and high-end designer clothing. (At one point in her flight, attired in a flowing fur-trimmed cape and matching hat, she looks like a fugitive from a fashion shoot.) She has also brought along a venomous pet spider. Well, her husband’s pet spider. Her husband’s name is Mike (August Diehl), and he’s an arachnologist so esteemed, we’re told, that he has “unlimited access to the border areas of North Korea.” This would explain why he was on hand when Salt was freed from the North Korean prison where we’d seen her being beaten to a pulp in her underwear at the beginning of the movie. Unfortunately, it doesn’t explain what the Norks have to do with the story, which seems to be nothing.

When it’s not swamped in uproar — one damn thing after another — the movie attempts to maintain its focus on the Russian mole. Or moles, actually — because there’s a whole nest of them, raised from childhood to become deep-cover saboteurs. (We see the devious nippers being schooled in the nuances of colloquial English by watching old “Brady Bunch” episodes!) At first we don’t think Salt is one of these spies, but then it begins to seem that maybe she is. Anyone hoping for a resolution to this question should be aware that the movie is openly intended to be the first installment of a franchise. Stay tuned, presumably.

Stephanie Zacharek at Movieline:

Jolie is great fun to watch — for style and grace, she’s the closest we’ve got to a modern-day Errol Flynn or Burt Lancaster — and Noyce makes sure she looks her best. The action in Salt is shot and edited so cleanly that it makes the movie feel like a miracle of modern-day action filmmaking. There’s no choppy, rapid-fire cutting. Instead, Noyce and his editors, Stuart Baird and John Gilroy, connect the visuals into thrilling but logical mosaics — we always know who’s coming from where, and more often than not, that who is Jolie, running, jumping or sprinting into action.

Noyce has made his share of action thrillers (he’s the director behind the Tom Clancy adaptations Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger), but he’s pulled off more serious, emotionally complex material too (like his meticulous and thoughtful version of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American). Salt is, of course, closer in style to the former than the latter; still, Noyce approaches the material with a healthy sense of humor. The subject matter alone is likely to give moviegoers of a certain age a pleasant shiver of Cold War nostalgia, and Noyce runs with that. (The Cold War wasn’t so much fun while it was going on, but as much as we feared that the Soviets might someday come over and liquefy our buildings, they never actually did so.) Touches like Orlov’s dumpling-thick Russian accent, or the way Salt wraps herself in a swishy fur-trimmed cape, topped off with a Dr. Zhivago toque, are served up with a sly wink.

And yet Noyce takes Jolie and all her capabilities seriously. We’re meant to enjoy her kung-fu kicks and rock ‘em-sock ‘em punches. But her face is the real secret weapon here, and Noyce never loses sight of that. The plot twists of Salt unfold with delicious silliness, but Noyce gives his star a moment of great emotional gravity — we’re allowed to witness a horrific event, but how we might feel about it is inconsequential. Noyce trains the camera on Jolie’s face, and across a span of mere seconds, we see a color-wheel of emotions — horror, suppressed pain, anger and resolve — drift across it.

Shannon Hood at Flickcast:

Angelina Jolie does a very good job in the role, but her body is so frail looking that you fear she will snap in two.  She has no muscle, and no brawn, so no matter how good her performance is, I can’t buy her as an ass-kickin’ chick.  I’m pretty sure I could knock her over with my pinky. I understand why she was cast, but a Jennifer Garner or Alice Braga type with a little muscle would have been more convincing.

Liev Schreiber plays one of Evelyn’s CIA handlers and Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a counter-intelligence expert. Everyone else sort of fades into the background next to Jolie.

Salt is equal parts The Fugitive and the Bourne movies. It is perfectly serviceable as a summer popcorn movie, no more, no less.

I See Dead Filmmaking Careers

Carl Kozlowski at Big Hollywood:

There’s perhaps nothing more heartbreaking to a filmmaker than knowing that their first major film was considered their masterpiece, and that the rest of their career was a slow progression into frustration, mediocrity, or – worst of all – sheer awfulness. Just ask Orson Welles who created what is considered the greatest film of all time, “Citizen Kane,” when he was just 23 but spent much of the next half-century begging for financing and doing work like voice-overs for an animated “Transformers” movie.

If he doesn’t watch out, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan is heading towards the same fate. His latest film, “The Last Airbender,” continues a string of disappointments that began at least three films ago, with 2004’s “The Village” (a film I admired, but which flopped after a huge opening weekend), the misfired 2006 fairy tale “Lady in the Water” and 2008’s utterly embarrassing and inert “The Happening” (or as I like to call it, “The Nappening.”)

“Airbender” is Shyamalan’s attempt to reverse his fortunes and return to the heady blockbuster days of his early films, 1999’s “The Sixth Sense” and 2002’s “Signs.” After the ridiculously bad “The Happening,” no studio would trust him with an original idea again, so he turned to making an adaptation of a popular children’s cartoon series originally called “Avatar: the Last Airbender.” For obvious reasons, he had to drop the word “Avatar” from the title, but unfortunately there’s little else of interest to be found in the film.

Christopher Orr at The Atlantic:

The story, such as it is, follows Aang (Noah Ringer), a bald, tattooed boy-mystic who is found packed in an ice bubble one snowy morning by siblings Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone). Katara and Sokka, we learn, belong to the Water Nation, some of whose members (Katara among them) can manipulate ice and water with their minds; Aang, meanwhile, is the last survivor of the Air Nation (no relation to the Aryan Nation, tattoos and baldness notwithstanding). All three have suffered at the hands of the Fire Nation, which bullies the Water folk and has eradicated all of Aang’s people save him. Aang, as it happens, is the Avatar, the sole being in the world with the power to manipulate all four elements (air, water, fire, and earth). Unfortunately, his Avatar training was cut short before he’d learned to manipulate anything other than air. So he spends the duration of the film hanging out with tribes of the Water Nation, learning to use their element and overcoming various attempts at kidnapping or invasion by competing Fire Nation bands led by ambitious Commander Zhao (Aasif Mandvi) and exiled Prince Zuko (Dev Patel, looking decidedly cranky at the wrong turn his career has taken since Slumdog Millionaire).

It’s a remarkably flat arc, though tolerable movies have been made from less. But I think it’s fair to say that none of those movies boasted quite the array of leaden performances, overscripted dialogue, narrative inertia, and underwhelming visual effects that characterize The Last Airbender. This is a film that resembles a video game in all the bad ways–Manichean premise, non-existent characterization, an obsession with dutifully explained “rules”–while still managing to miss out on the kinetic momentum of Xboxiness. If there has been a duller, more stagnant action film released this decade, I managed, thank God, to miss it.

Keith Phipps at Onion AV Club:

Where to start with this one? How about this: If any movie ever warranted a class-action lawsuit against the filmmakers, it’s The Last Airbender. Not because it’s a terrible movie—though it is—but because its release as a 3-D film becomes false advertising a few seconds after a comin’-atcha gush of water appears behind the Paramount logo. From there, it becomes painfully obvious—even more painfully obvious than in Alice In Wonderland—that a few 3-D elements have been added to satisfy the current 3-D craze, and the higher ticket prices they allow. Worse still, the process makes the already-dark imagery darker, and turns the action blurry. Viewers who see it in this form will pay more for an even shittier experience than the one they would have had in 2-D.

And that would have been plenty shitty already. Adapting a well-regarded, epic-in-scope Nickelodeon animated series, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has failed to do right both by his source material and his own strengths as a filmmaker. Set in a world in which the population is divided amid the four elements, and some skilled practitioners can control those elements to their own ends, the film vomits out complicated mythology in mouthfuls of exposition, when not putting a supporting character’s voiceover narration in charge of relaying major developments. Shyamalan manages a few striking images, most of them involving otherworldly landscapes created in Greenland and Vietnam. But none of the care and craftsmanship evident in projects he originated, even lousy ones like The Happening, find their way into this movie.

Stephanie Zacharek at Movieline:

It’s clear that Shyamalan’s ambition is to create a grand fantasy epic; at times the picture’s production design has an almost Middle Earth-y look. (The cinematographer here is Andrew Lesnie, who also shot the Lord of the Rings trilogy.) But oddly enough — or perhaps not oddly at all — the most impressive and entertaining aspects of the picture have less to do with spectacular effects than with human skill. The movie’s young star, Ringer, is a Taekwondo champ, and it’s fun to watch his hands slice through the air ever so gracefully, or execute kicks and jumps and pirouettes that defy gravity. So many action movies these days are devoid of real human action. At least Shyamalan understands that watching the human body move is one of the pleasures of moviegoing.

Of course, because this is an M. Night Shyamalan movie, the stink of pretension is high: There’s no doubt that these warring, troubled tribes are supposed to be metaphorical, revealing big truths about the messed-up world we actually live in. But some of the actors rise above the sillier-than-silly dialog: Aasif Mandvi (who played Mr. Aziz in Spider-Man 2, but who was even more wonderful in a smallish role in David Koepp’s superb romantic comedy Ghost Town) plays an amoral military commander; he walks a fine line between sending up the movie’s kiddie hokum and treating the material as seriously as if it were Shakespeare. And Dev Patel, of Slumdog Millionaire, shows up as the unfortunately named Prince Zuko. (Would you want to play a character whose name sounds like a sugar substitute?)

Still, The Last Airbender, for all its Shyamalan-style grandiosity, is completely harmless and inoffensive, and at the very least, Shyamalan appears to be having a little fun here. The movie’s finale comes not as a big surprise but as a turn we’re completely ready for. There’s something to be said for giving the audience what it needs, instead of what you think it wants.

Joseph Lawler at The American Spectator:

At 5 percent approval on the film review site Rotten Tomatoes, M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie The Last Airbender is in the running for the title of worst-reviewed movie ever.

Lane Brown at New York Magazine, interviewing Shyamalan:

Have you read the reviews for Last Airbender?
No, I haven’t.

Well, are you aware of the reviews?
No, actually.

Well, for the most part, critics have not been kind. Are you just ignoring them? Will you read them this weekend? Have you just not had time?
Are you saying that in general they didn’t dig it?

In general, no. Roger Ebert, who liked The Happening, did not. The first line of his review is, “The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category that I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.” How do you react to something like that?
I don’t know what to say to that stuff. I bring as much integrity to the table as humanly possible. It must be a language thing, in terms of a particular accent, a storytelling accent. I can only see it this certain way and I don’t know how to think in another language. I think these are exactly the visions that are in my head, so I don’t know how to adjust it without being me. It would be like asking a painter to change to a completely different style. I don’t know.

Critics haven’t been kind to your last couple of films. Do you still worry about reviews?
I think of it as an art form. So it’s something I approach as sort of immovable integrity within each of the stages. So if you walk through the process with me, there’s not a moment where I won’t treat with great respect. So it’s sacred to me, the whole process of making a movie. I would hope that some people see that I approach this field with that kind of respect, and that it’s not a job.

Were you trying to please critics with this film? Did you have an audience in mind while you were making it?
For everybody, actually. It’s just a very cool, spiritual, action-y, family film — a family adventure.

Eighties Nostalgia Almost All Played Out… Cue Up The Stirrings Of Nineties Nostalgia…

Dana Stevens in Slate:

Hanging over any remake, but especially over the remake of a classic, is the question “Why?” Sometimes that syllable is muttered with a shrug of resignation (“The Wicker Man with Nic Cage? Why?”). Sometimes it’s bellowed to the uncaring heavens in agony (“Last Tango in Paris with Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes? WHYYY?”).

The notion of remaking The Karate Kid (Sony Pictures) elicits a “why?” of midlevel outrage. The 1984 original, in which Noriyuki “Pat” Morita coaches bullied teenager Ralph Macchio to victory in a karate championship, may have seemed like a standard-issue inspirational sports picture at the time, but (as with another box-office hit of the same year, The Terminator) a generation of remove reveals what a well-crafted movie it actually was. Rewatched today, the original Kid, directed by Rocky‘s John G. Avildsen, feels smart and fresh, with a wealth of small character details and a leisurely middle section that explores the boy’s developing respect for his teacher.

The first job of the new Karate Kid, then, was to not defile the spirit of the original—at that task this version succeeds almost too well. The script, by Christopher Murphey, reproduces the story of the earlier film beat for beat, and, at times, line for line. It’s respectful to the point of reverence, an odd stance to take toward a film that was fun in the first place because of its unpretentious pop schlockiness. To the credit of both Murphey and director Harald Zwart, that unhurried middle act remains intact—instead of using the nearly 2 ½-hour running time to cram in extra fight scenes, they give the mentor/student relationship at the movie’s heart time to unfold. While the fight scenes have been (literally) punched up by the inclusion of more spectacular martial-arts stunts—along with the bonecrunching sound effect now required to accompany all onscreen fisticuffs—this Karate Kid isn’t the rushed, coarsened, CGI-infested ripoff that fans of the original may be dreading. It’s as sweet-natured a movie as you could expect about a 12-year-old learning to beat the crap out of his schoolmates.

Cole Abaius at Film School Rejects:

Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) and his mother Sherry (Taraji P. Henson) have been relocated (with no other real financial options) to China, where Sherry will be working in the automobile plant there. When Dre gets his eyes blackened by another boy on playground, he becomes obsessed with learning how to defend himself, and finds an unwilling mentor in maintenance man Mr. Han (Jackie Chan). Dre falls in puppy love with Meiying (Wenwen Han), but he faces difficult training ahead and the threat of fighting his attacker in an open kung fu tournament.

This movie, directed by Harald Zwart, is about as seriously dramatic as you can aim at a younger audience, only lit occasionally by sparks of humor. For the most part, it weighs just heavily enough to make all of the situations of its story seem intimately dire. The humor comes from a sarcastic young lead and the ubiquitous warmth of character that can be found in just about any movie Jackie Chan sets foot in, but the moments are few, far between, and welcomed not because of the heaviness of the film, but because of its effectiveness in making the audience feel almost as isolated as Dre.

Tonally, it’s a very quiet film that builds to its crescendo steadily. In the beginning, Dre and Sherry are the only characters focused on – they are in a foreign country, don’t speak the language, don’t understand the culture, and Dre is graphically, violently bullied on his first day. The physicality and impact of some of the fighting sequences – especially early on when Dre can’t fight back – are brutal in light of the fact these are 11 and 12 years old fighting.

Finally, a movie with the kind of child-on-child violence America has been demanding.

But it works. The Karate Kid is decidedly un-campy in its attempt to show what it might really be like to be young and forced to move away from the safety of everything you know. This is matched by Mr. Han’s storyline – an ultimately tragic one that explains why he’s so sullen until he finds the small joy of Dre taking to the training. It’s also matched in some small way by every main character. Dre is a stranger in a strange land, his mother Sherry is upbeat but also never shown socializing with anyone but her son, Mr. Han barely speaks or interacts with anyone, and the love interest Meiying is isolated by her parents’ pressure on her to succeed as a violinist which results in her practicing away her childhood for hours on end.

Erik Childress at Cinematical

Marshall Fine at Hollywood & Fine:

Director Harald Zwart’s resume includes such stellar entries as “Agent Cody Banks,” “The Pink Panther 2″ and now this dreary recapitulation of a movie that was tired when it was new, 25 years ago. Plodding doesn’t begin to describe the turgid pace of the film. And limited is a kind description of young Smith’s acting talent.

As for Oscar-nominee Henson, she has no character to play, only a mother figure. Which leaves Chan, who actually rises above the treacle to give a touchingly stolid and subdued performance. But he’s stuck with yet another subplot, one meant to explain why his character has isolated himself from the world – until he takes on Dre as a surrogate son.

Will Smith isn’t in “The Karate Kid” remake but this is a vanity project nonetheless. Kids will lap it up; their parents, however, can only hope to endure it.

And to our other flashback to the 80s, Carl Kozlowski at Big Hollywood:

Movies based on TV shows are often some of the most painful offerings studios have to offer. Whether suffering through the big-screen versions of “The Beverly Hillbillies” or “Car 54, Where Are You?”, “My Favorite Martian” or this summer’s mega-bomb “MacGruber,” the ratio of awful adaptations to successful ones is vastly disproportional.

Of course, once in awhile, some work: “Wayne’s World,” “The Blues Brothers” and (at least financially) the “Mission: Impossible” films come to mind. But with the new film version of “The A-Team,” Fox has concocted a wildly uneven yet (at many moments) even more wildly entertaining edition of the ridiculously fun ‘80s NBC series that manages to both disappoint and enthrall action fans within the span of a rollicking two hours.

Series purists may find plenty to grouse about, as the film kicks off with a somewhat-different take on the group, having Col. Hannibal Smith (played by Liam Neeson here and George Peppard on TV) meet B.A. Baracus (Quinton “Rampage” Jackson here, and the immortal Mr. T on TV) for the first time, as he forces him to let him hitch a ride en route to saving his friend “Faceman” (Bradley Cooper here, and Dirk Benedict on TV). They are immediately at odds before bonding over their mutual Army Rangers tattoos, a trait they share with Faceman and their final member, an insane chopper pilot named “Howling Mad” Murdock (Sharlto Copley of “District 9” here, and Dwight Schultz on TV).

The tattoo discovery and subsequent bonding is a bit heavy-handed and produced unintended chuckles from the audience, and the opening action set-piece involving rescuing Faceman from Mexican killers features both underwhelming action and annoying rap-rock on the score. Just when the film seems to be mired in bad writing and an obnoxious sensory overload, however, something starts to click.

Once the storyline jumps ten years from the opening action to the present, where the A-Team is mixed in with US troops in Iraq, it quickly finds its footing. A CIA agent named Lynch (Patrick Wilson) enlists Hannibal to bring the team out on a mission to find and retrieve US currency-making plates stolen by Iraqi soldiers during the first Gulf War, and which are now in danger of falling into even worse hands.

The team pulls off the plate retrieval, only to have a surprise twist occur that results in their being accused of high crimes, put on trial by the military and sent to individual prisons scattered around the planet. When they eventually get a chance to escape and save the day, the resulting four breakouts are again highly entertaining, although nothing tops a sequence in which the guys wind up in an aerial dogfight with two US fighter drone jets with heat-seeking missiles, while flying a tank. Crazier still is the sight of Faceman popping open the tank roof and manning a machine-gun turret against the drones.

Yes, you read right: they fly a tank. The sequence is absurd, over-the-top, and utterly amazing – to my mind one of the best action scenes I’ve ever witnessed, and it’s nearly matched just minutes later with an incredible heist and shootout involving the skyscrapers and streets of Berlin. Director/co-writer Joe Carnahan (the also audaciously entertaining “Smokin’ Aces”) is fast becoming a major force to be reckoned with.

Stephanie Zacharek at Movieline:

The A-Team would be more enjoyable if its stars had any charm, or if, five minutes after leaving the theater, we could remember anything about what their characters were like. Copley (who starred in last year’s low-budget sci-fi hit District 9) is Murdock, the crazy pilot. Cooper is Face, so called because he’s always sucking one. (Jessica Biel wanders through the movie, lost and underused, as one of his old love interests.) B.A. Baracus is played by former UFC light heavyweight champ Jackson, who has almost nothing to do except scowl and look brawny. And Neeson struggles not-so-valiantly in the George Peppard role as the cigar-chomping Hannibal Smith.

I have renewed respect for Neeson since he started taking roles in trashier movies: I loved watching him knock heads in Pierre Morel’s joyously disreputable Taken. Roles like these loosen him up, and in the opening sequence of The A-Team — in which he almost magically dispatches a duo of snarling Rottweilers without harming them — I thought he, and the movie, might be fun.

But he, and the movie, only ground me down. Neeson barely registers as a presence here. (I kind of remember Cooper, because of his radioactive glowing teeth.) The movie is cut in such a way that it doesn’t really contain scenes; it’s more like a bundle of dangling participles. That’s not good for actors, especially a performer like Neeson, who’s at his best, even in a total piece of crap, when he can inject a little soul here and there. There’s no room for soul in The A-Team. Even in the context of junky-fun action adventures, this one hits a new low. It’s a worst-case scenario for the way action movies are headed: It’s all action and no movie.

Andrew O’Hehir at Salon:

For a movie that reportedly required 11 writers and more than 10 years to complete — all without any real reason for existing in the first place — “The A-Team” is reasonably good fun. If you’re a 12-year-old boy riding an intense Cherry Pepsi buzz and totally devoted to destroying some brain cells, that is. But then, I can’t imagine what other demographic could possibly be intended for this carbo-loading action spectacle, which makes only the vaguest gestures at plot or characterization (or the not-so-lamented ’80s TV original) in between its helicopter chases, Frankfurt bank heists, Mexican drug-lord takedowns and other balletic but incoherent production numbers.

OK, I do have two younger colleagues who sheepishly admit that they thought Stephen J. Cannell’s NBC series, which starred George Peppard and Mr. T (he of Nancy Reagan fame) and ran from 1983 to 1987, was “cool.” They were little kids at the time; I suppose it’s forgivable. So there must exist a micro-generation of youngish adults for whom this title exerts a nostalgic pull. Well, you can keep your hoard of Pop Rocks and Ninja Turtles in storage a while longer, because “A-Team” director Joe Carnahan (a Tarantino or Guy Ritchie wannabe who’s been kicking around the film world for a generation) and his bevy of writers make no effort to create some clever retro-camp lovefest.

Which is just fine with me; we’ve seen quite enough resuscitated mid-’80s pop-culture mediocrity, thank you, and the TV “A-Team” didn’t even rise to that level. (I’m sorry, Flock of Seagulls and Tears for Fears fans. The time has come to move on.) What Carnahan and company have done instead is attempt to launch a new megabucks action franchise, aimed at younger viewers for whom the original “A-Team” is a misty fragment of cultural prehistory, perhaps referenced by their drunken hipster uncles at Fourth of July barbecues: “I pity the fool who gets between me and my Pabst Blue Ribbon!”

Alex Eichler at The Atlantic

K. Diddy’s A Film Star And Other Improbable Tales

Peter Hall at Cinematical:

There is a quick and simple litmus test to tell whether or not you’ll enjoy Get Him to the Greek. If you found Aldous Snow, Russell Brand’s caricature of a rock star, to be one of the funnier elements of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, then you will no doubt have a riot with the increased raunchiness his character once again brings to the screen for director Nicholas Stoller. If, for whatever reason, you find Brand’s larger-than-life presence to be as insufferable as the real rock stars he’s lampooning, chances are good his spin-off film will do little to convince you there’s more to him than just an outrageous persona. Get Him to the Greek is exactly what the trailers advertise: Aldous Snow turned to 11.

The record company Aaron Green (Jonah Hill) works for is taking a beating in the recession. In an attempt to turn business around, Aaron’s boss, Sergio (Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs), agrees to go ahead with Aaron’s suggestion to put on a massive concert marking Aldous Snow’s band’s ten-year anniversary at the Greek theater in Los Angeles. Trouble is, the eccentric lead singer of Infant Sorrow is half-way around the world in London. Aaron must then fly to the UK just days before the concert is set to take place and escort the easily distracted rocker back to LA in time for the show. Aldous, who could care less about the concert, is far more interested in forcing his new pet Aaron out of his timid shell. Hilarity ensues.

That may sound mocking, but it’s not. Get Him to the Greek’s plot may be a feature film version of a sitcom, but it’s also the first film of 2010 that’s left me breathless from laughing too hard. Jonah Hill and Russell Brand have an enormous reservoir of chemistry together and every scenario the two are written into, almost all of which revolve around Brand’s perpetual quest for drugs, pays off with raucous, R-rated (but not gratuitous) glory. So, provided you actually enjoy Aldous Snow, there’s no denying that the film will have you convulsing with laughter throughout its brisk running time. At 109 minutes, Greek is one of the shorter films that bears Judd Apatow’s name as a producer. It also happens to be one of the most unique titles amongst that roster. Unfortunately, that’s not exclusively a compliment.

Dana Stevens at Slate:

If this frantically paced buddy comedy had a motto, it would have to be the one uttered by Spinal Tap’s glassy-eyed keyboardist near the end of This Is Spinal Tap: “Have a good time … all the time.” There’s no buildup, no narrative arc, just one scene of comically debauched partying after another. The only shifts occur in the locale (London, New York, Las Vegas, L.A.) and the substance being ingested: champagne, absinthe, heroin, and a joint that’s laced with everything but the kitchen sink and innocuously nicknamed a “Jeffrey.” Marathon revelry as a crucible for the forging of friendship is a time-honored trope, both at the movies and in college. But you don’t come to value a person just because the two of you get shitfaced together. You come to value them because you embark on ill-advised escapades, share indiscreet confidences, inadvertently hurt and then sloppily forgive one another … while being shitfaced together. A good party movie understands this. But recent guys-on-the-town comedies like Get Him to the Greek—I’d also include Hot Tub Time Machine and Superbad in this category—seem so keen to amp up the hurt that they neglect the part about forgiveness.

Stephanie Zacharek at Movieline:

It also contains numerous moments of unrepentant absurdity that work in spite of themselves, as comedy so often does. When Sean Combs, as Aaron’s crazed, demanding boss (he has the great, ridiculously unlikely name Sergio Roma), coaches him in the management of unruly rock stars, he stresses the importance of that time-honored intimidation technique so beloved by upper-management types, the mind-f***. “I’m mind f***-ing you right now,” he tells Aaron, staring him down with the faux-nutso intensity of David Byrne performing “Psycho Killer” circa 1977. Aaron patiently endures this act of imaginary penetration before going for the kicker: “I hope you’re wearing a condom, because you’ve got a dirty mind.”

Get Him to the Greek is filled with gags like that, jokes so lame and ludicrous they somehow circle ‘round back to being funny. It doesn’t hurt that the movie is dotted with an assortment of lively second- and third bananas, Combs among them. (He has the megalomaniacal record-industry exec thing down cold.) Rose Byrne, as Snow’s ditzy, kittenish ex, Jackie Q., also has a few deliciously zonked-out scenes, including a faux rock video that shows her romping around in a tiny, flouncy French milkmaid costume. Byrne, in addition to being a good sport, has marvelous comic timing: At one point she blinks out at us from behind a set of enormous feather eyelashes, fluttering her lids as if it were the most normal thing in the world to have Cleopatra’s fans affixed to your lashline.

Even Hill is, for once, reasonably funny here, possibly because he’s used sparingly and carefully. The character he’s playing is painfully realistic: He’s a wholly believable rendering of every obsessive LP-collecting schmoe who thought it would be cool to turn his love of music into a full-time job in what used to be known as the recording industry, only to find that working said job for more than a year or two is enough to kill off your love of music altogether. Hill is perfectly happy to play the foil here, settling down to play the stereotypical down-trodden schlub who dips a cautious toe into the fabled rock-and-roll lifestyle and finds it overrated.

Rob Hunter at Film School Rejects:

Brand and Hill both prove they can carry a comedy by constantly and consistently bringing the funny. Brand’s range is obviously limited to, well, playing himself, but he does so brilliantly. Dryly sarcastic and giddily triumphant, he is pure leather-clad, booze-soaked id strutting across the screen. From the opening music video for the song that sinks his career (“African Child”) to convincing Green to smoke, snort, and snog with pure abandon, Brand has enthusiasm and energy to spare. Between this and Cyrus Hill is showing a bit more acting talent here than just the surly comedic dick he’s contributed to flicks like Funny People and Superbad. He doesn’t always hit the mark on the more serious bits, but he manages the straight man pushed to be snarky with definite comedic skill.

The two surprises here though are P. Diddy Combs and Byrne. Combs’ take on the boss from hell begins fairly straight-forward but each subsequent appearance finds him more animated, unpredictable, and gut-busting to watch. Whether espousing the benefits of smoking a “Jeffrey” or dancing a tribute to Carlton from The Fresh Prince he threatens to steal scenes from his more established co-stars and proves himself a worthy comedian. Byrne comes out of left-field too, as nothing on her resume prepares you for the bawdy, raunchy, and hilarious British tart she brings to life onscreen as Snow’s ex, Jackie Q. Like Brand, she gets to sing some witty and dirty little pop numbers including one cheeky little number about her bum hole. Toss in brief but funny cameos from the likes of Kristen Bell, Rick Schroder, Aziz Ansari, and Paul Freaking Krugman, and you have a steady stream of giggles.

The movie’s only real weakness is in an area that it’s predecessor got so effortlessly right. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is equally humorous throughout, but it’s also filled with a fair amount of heart and emotion. You come to love some of the characters, you feel their pain, and you care what happens to them beyond simply the next punchline. That heart isn’t beating nearly as strong here… although it’s not for lack of trying. Stoller and his cast work really hard to make you see the heartbreak, loneliness, and internal struggles facing these characters, but seeing it and believing it are two different things. It looks like a lot of work when it should feel natural and organic, and because of that it isn’t fully believable. The two leads are both fantastically funny guys but neither are experienced enough actors to pull it off completely. Brand comes surprisingly close though at times as he reveals the degree of love he feels for his son and Jackie Q, but it fades quickly with the next vomit scene.

Foster Kamer at The Village Voice:

Nobel prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has recently enjoyed his time in the sun for being (A) a 2008 Nobel prize-winner, (B) correct about a bunch of things, (C) smacking down flashy upstart Andrew Ross Sorkin. All of which are beside those times Loudon Wainwright wrote a song about him and a moderator during a discussion at the London School of Economics once introduced him a “rock star”. But this thing might have gone too far, now.

From Roger Ebert’s review of the new Judd Apatow comedy – Get Him to the Greek, starring funny fat Jewish kid Jonah Hill and funny Limey sex-addict Russell Brand, about a lackee who has to get a rock star to LA’s Greek Theater – this is your New York Times-related “WTF” parenthetical aside of the day:

In a movie jammed with celebrity cameos (New York Times columnist Paul Krugman?), we see…

P. Krugman is in a movie with P. Diddy? At this rate, dude’s about to get pelted with a bunch of economist groupie-panties next time he walks in the Times building. Somewhere, Ross Douthat is on the phone, screaming at his agent while Charles Isherwood stews somewhere, feeling upstaged.

UPDATE: Huffington Post