RocknRolla

I don't understand how this movie can just be titled RocknRolla. I feel like it needs to at least be ROCKNROLLA!!!! or ROCKNROLLAAAAAA. Only CAPS LOCK and multiple exclamation points can convey how hardcore it is. Perhaps a combination of the two: ROCKNROLLAAAAAAAAA!!!!

Anyways, RocknRolla is Guy Ritchie's coming-out-from-the-iron-grip-of-Madonna's-hooha flick (welcome back Guy!). Set in London's shady criminal underworld, RocknRolla is all about "sex, thugs, and rock n roll."

That's right: Thugs, not drugs. Why no drugs you ask? Because, my dear aspiring hoodrat, the hot new black market good is REAL ESTATE, not drugs. As in, this movie is basically propelled by a very lucrative real estate deal. Somehow this real estate business also involves a mysteriously vanished rockstar and a stolen painting and this clusterf*ck of a situation eventually results in skirmishes between various warring gangs...

Don't you love convoluted plots? Convoluted = Better. Bonus sexy points because real estate is involved. Lex Luthor and Donald Trump are getting all hot and bothered.

Smokin' Aces, uh, I mean, RocknRolla, features Gerard Butler* (sans 300 Spartans) as a modern day lone-wolf badass named One Two... Because a name based on numbers is EXTREMELY INTIMIDATING in this day and age (mostly due to our failing educational system). Then there's a bunch of other guys in this ensemble cast, notably Thandie Newton (a corrupt "accountant" for the sole purpose of rehashing that math is scary and evil), Jeremy Piven, and Chris "Ludacris" Bridges. Remarkably, everybody in this movie (that's set in London) has an English accent... Except for Ludacris. But that's only because they cast him as an American who is trying to break into the music industry, obviously a far cry from his real life. So yeah there's those guys and a laundry list of every conceivable underworld archetype.

Can you tell I'm bored? What can I say, RocknRolla just fails to "RocknRolla" me. Having said that, I strongly encourage you to see it (despite my trashing this crap movie) in order to support Guy Ritchie during this difficult time. Team Guy!

*Gerard, you're better than this. I mean, P.S. I Love You was a masterpiece man.

Stranded: I've Come from a plane that crashed in the Mountains

Ah! Stranded: I've Come from a plane that crashed in the Mountains, I have been waiting for you my whole life. Finally, a film adaptation of the Nobel Prize winner My Side of the Mountain. Not only was that, like, my most favorite book in 5th grade ever (way better than Goosebumps(tm)[RIP]), but to make things sweeter, it turned into a hella killer movie!

To see the influence of the original book on this stunning and immaculate picture, you need no more than a blunt wit, and maybe some eyeballs. You see Bilbo from MSOTM bravely hiked in to the mountains to carve out a home in a tree and befriend some Peregrine Falcon, wheras Shilo, from S:ICFAPTCINM, hikes OUT of the mountains, to carve out a home in a city dumpster and befriend a hemophilic rat-Mikey, portrayed brilliantly by ratctor Sniffles McWhiskers.

And here we arrive at the central theme of this brilliant work of film: hemophilia. My public school education taught me that all characters in books are Tragic Heroes, and Shilo is no exception. His flaw, hemophilia, though endearing at first, eventually leads to his downfall. Just as our hearts are lifted when he manages to survive the plane crash despite his condition, they are dashed to the ground when, in a nod to my most favorite 4th grade book, Hatchet, Shilo succumbs to a hatchet wound acquired during a civil dispute with Mikey. Heartwrenching stuff, seriously.

High School Musical 3

Go Wildcats! School is back in session and the exceptionally flamboyant students of “I didn’t care to research the name” high school are back with an action packed performance. It’s senior year and everything is on the line: male lead and female lead are going off to college and might never see each other again; male lead has to lead the basketball team to victory so he can get with female lead; female lead has to win an important scholarship so she can go to college; and most importantly, both need to help organize the best senior musical ever to raise enough money to put up bail for their beloved principal who was imprisoned for the brutal rape and murder of one of the unpopular, non melodic students who nobody liked in the first place, so he can attend their senior play. Circular reasoning… I know.
Male lead puts up a spectacular performance. He is the perfectly generic high school heart throb who can sing, act (his character can, not him), and play awesome Bball with amazing cinematic cuts that make it look like he’s sinking them from half court. But really, honestly… he sucks.
Now Female lead… don’t get me started on her, oh wait, that’s what I’m supposed to do. Well, female lead brings it home with a sonorous voice and some scintillating outfits that old Walt definitely would not have approved of(don’t worry, she just plays a high school student in the movie)! She is the one redeeming feature of the movie, and not for her acting.
But seriously, this movie was awful, and this reviewer believes that it may be directly responsible for the Dow Jones Industrial Average 3% decline in blue chip stocks on the day it premiered!
Game Set Match

Changeling

If there was such a thing as manliest man ever, it'd probably go to Clint Eastwood. He's pretty much the sweetest thing to ever happen to film ever. Think about it: the three brilliant spaghetti westerns that culminate in "The Good, The Bad, The Ugly"; the Dirty Harry movies (all five of 'em, but with special mention for "Sudden Impact", which he also directed); "Unforgiven". Not only is he one of the greatest film personae of all time, but he's an incredibly talented director. Like many of Eastwood's characters might, I'm unable to put into words how I excited I was to watch the trailer for his latest, "Changeling".

But then I watched it.

It stars Angelina Jolie, but it's a super-serious period piece drama, so she won't be hot in this movie. Making Angelina Jolie not hot is a shockingly unmanly thing to do. Frankly, though, that's not this movie's biggest problem. Instead, it's this movie's compulsion to be a super-serious period piece drama that really makes it lame.

For what it's worth, Jolie is a very talented actress. Watching this movie, however, will probably feel like a super-long, super-serious promotional video for just how talented she is. Eastwood himself is a minimalist actor, which makes it so surprising that the actors in his movies tend to be a little over the top. Let's look at this handy reference guide.


On the left, at zero, we have Clint Eastwood. I've seen almost all of his movies and I can say definitively that Mr. Eastwood has never shown any emotion once in his entire career. Showing slightly more expression is Gene Hackman in "Unforgiven"; I'll give him a 2.5. Sean Penn, who won the Academy Award for "Mystic River", pretty much landed it just right, achieving a 7. Ms. Jolie almost surely pushes it all the way to a 10 in "Changeling". If she was any more expressive, she'd be El Greco. You can just tell that once this movie gets going, it will feature Ms. Jolie shrieking in horror, weeping in despair, or bursting with nervous energy. Every frame will emphasize the super-seriousness of the period piece drama unfolding before us.

The basic plot of the movie centers around a terrible true story, in which Jolie takes on the LAPD because they returned the wrong kidnapped boy to her and covered it up or something. I didn't really notice the plot because I was too busy trying to figure out why we needed another movie in which Angelina Jolie ends up stuck in a mental ward or copes with the harsh realities of patriarchal oppression.

It's hard to believe I'm saying this, but this is a film probably worth skipping. Save your $10 for when Eastwood releases in January the Japanese-language version told from the perspective of the LAPD detective in conflict with Jolie

Pride and Glory

Let's get one thing straight: Pride and Glory is a Serious movie. It's easy to tell, because there aren't any jokes and because Edward Norton (The Incredible Hulk, Death to Smoochy) is in it and he is a Serious actor.

Norton stars as Ray Tierney, a Good Cop^TM from a family of less than good cops. Jon Voight is the family patriarch and police chief; Colin Farrell plays the brother; and some other guy rounds out the family as the other male member of the family. The movie is far too Serious to waste time with females. This is a movie about the important issues: Honor, Brotherhood, Family, Camaraderie, Loyalty, Masculinity, The NYPD.

The plot really kicks into high gear when a number of Ray's boys get killed and he's assigned to find the killer(s). SPOILER ALERT: The trail leads to Colin Farrell's boys, and ultimately to Farrell, thus setting up the central moral question of the film. It's one everybody has dealt with at some time: When your cop brother is actually a cop killer, do you turn him in even when it means ruining your entire cop family's career?

Naturally, being played by Voight, Papa Tierney is on hand to be morally ambiguous and try to dissuade Ray from Doing the Right Thing in favor of Thinking About His Family. And the other male family member almost has to die to remind the viewer that in Serious things like this the innocent are always the ones who suffer the most.

Of course, the viewer, suffering through this painful film, is already keenly aware of that fact.

Saw V

Let me get this out in the clear: I'm biased against horror flicks. I don't see a lot of them because I'm fragile and delicate and don't want to see people getting sliced up and gashed up by loonies. What can I say? Blood makes me antsy. Why expose yourself unnecessarily, even if it's the fake stuff? I'll pass, thank you.

But really, I think most horror films are abysmal. There's plot holes galore, horribly clichéd gloom-and-doom suspense music, and scantily clad girls who are only on screen for 5 seconds before they scream rather obnoxiously and are removed from the film in a grotesque manner. What a buzzkill.

Enter Saw V, which succeeds in encompassing all these things that I despise. Absolute garbage.

Seriously, eff Saw V. I didn't see the first four, and I'm sure as hell not about to start now. And WTF is up with there being a FIFTH installment? That's just a sorry excuse for a villain if he can't get his shit locked down in four feature length films. Don't give me that BS about it being a different incarnation of the killer, or that there are loose ends to be tied up... I mean, how the hell are there still loose ends the FIFTH TIME AROUND? The nerve of some people, really.

Get over it bro, hang up your chainsaw, or whatever the fuck "Saw" refers to and get a regular day job because you're obviously not "cut out" for the serial killing business. Hee hee.

Still, if my words of persuasion fail to dissuade you, Saw V opens October 24th.

Again, I strongly encourage you to stay home and clip your toenails. Now that's some straight up horror shit for you.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Kevin Smith's latest flick Zack and Miri Make a Porno is going to make October 31st (its release date) the day that we will remember for the rest of our lives. It will overshadow Halloween. In fact, it will blow it out of the water as the opening of this film is going to be so monumental that in the future, only historians with the weirdest, most obscure areas of interest will be able to tell you that October 31st was anything but "Zack and Miri" day.

Even then they'll doubt themselves when they dig up ancient photos of Halloween, because all the girls in slutty outfits will simply resemble extras in the epic porno that Zack and Miri made.

Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) are platonic friends that need to come up with some money to pay the rent. Naturally Zack proposes making a saucy skin-flick for cash. Hilarity ensues - not just your regular hilarity, but hilarity that will leave your underwear soiled. Theaters nationwide are being equipped to deal with this as we speak.

Rogen is his usual oafish self, delivering one-liners that are anything but throwaways, while Banks makes Meg Ryan blush with her top notch fake orgasms. She gave us a glimpse of this talent in the 40 Year Old Virgin, but you can see in Zack and Miri that she's committed to her craft and really honed it.

Having said that, Miri's not just eye candy or an orgasm-on-cue machine. Ultimately it is Miri's genuine sweetness that sends you home crying yourself to sleep, your love for her unrequited because she's not real. Zack is kind of a hopeless loser, but he's like your best loser friend (or yourself, if you're that friend) meaning he's awesome, because we love our tragically flawed heroes.

On a sidenote, Craig Robinson (Darryl of The Office) basically steals the movie as Delaney just like he did as the bouncer in Knocked Up. He's that good. It's almost distracting, because you end up feeling like he should get an hour onscreen just by himself.

Finally, this movie is not the box office powerhouse it is without the women. The boobs in this film played a large role (like DD large) in propelling Zack and Miri to its place among the pantheon of Hollywood classics. We salute you.