Miss March

Posted on March 12, 2009 at 9:31 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Adult
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong crude and sexual content, nudity, pervasive language and some drug use
Profanity:	Extremely strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking including drinking to deal with stress, smoking, drug use
Violence/ Scariness:	Comic violence, some graphic images
Diversity Issues:	Offensive to every possible group
Date Released to Theaters:	March 13, 2009

A smarmy premise becomes an unspeakably offensive movie in a mess that is not just disgusting but dull. I don’t feel I need a bath after seeing it; I feel I need an exorcism.
Remember the song “Centerfold?” That’s pretty much the idea, but much coarser. On prom night, abstinence lecturers Eugene (Zach Cregger) and his girlfriend Cindi (Raquel Alessi) are about to have sex when he opens the wrong door and falls down the basement stairs. Four years later, he awakes from a coma when his lifetime best friend, the smarmy, juvenile Tucker (Trevor Moore) smacks him on the head with a baseball bat. He tells Eugene that not only did he miss having sex with Cindi and four years of his life but Cindi is now a centerfold in Playboy, Miss March. They decide to to to a party at the Playboy Mansion so Eugene can be reunited with Cindi despite Eugene’s muscular atrophy and a complete lack of money, much less an invitation, plus being on the other side of the country. This plan has the added advantage of getting Tucker out of town and away from his revenge-seeking epileptic girlfriend, whose fire fighter brother has alerted firehouses across the country that Tucker must be killed. She is angry because he repeatedly stabbed her face with a fork when she had a seizure during a sex act. No kidding.
This film has been inflicted on audiences by director/writer/stars the guys behind the television show The Whitest Kids U’Know. The term “triple threat” has never been so meaningful. They are also all about 10-15 years too old for their characters. Unfunny, offensive jokes are repeated as though that might make them hilarious. Over and over we get to experience Eugene’s post-coma lack of bowel control and a rapper whose name describes an animal’s body part. That sets the tone for the rest of the film. Offensive portrayals of women, Hispanics, African-Americans, lesbians, fire fighters(!), the disabled, and pretty much the entire human race are brain-numbingly off-key, never audacious or clever, just thuggish and sluggish. The only impressive aspect of the movie is how many ways it manages to be insulting and how few ways it manages to be entertaining.

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Must Read After My Death

Posted on February 19, 2009 at 6:00 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Adult
MPAA Rating:	Not Rated
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	References to drinking and drugs
Violence/ Scariness:	References to emotional abuse, sad death
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	February 20, 2009

A generation ago the technology first became widely available to allow families to document their lives with home movies and audio recordings. The use of these artifacts has transcended the “can you believe I used to look like that” and “remember that trip” family viewings and provided the materials for extraordinary films like Capturing the Friedmans, Tarnation, exploring the chasm between the sunny footage of birthdays and beach visits and the longing, failure, betrayal, and loss that was going on inside.

Film-maker Morgan Dews is the grand-son of a woman named Allis, who left behind a suitcase of home movies, ten hours of dictaphone letters sent to her husband on his annual four-month business trips to Australia, and tapes recorded for herself or for therapists consulted by the family. And there was a file of tape transcripts and notes labeled Must Read After My Death.

That became the title of a film assembled from these recordings, opening today in New York and Los Angeles and available everywhere via Gigantic Digital. The haunting images of Allis, her husband Charley, and their children, Chuck, Doug, Bruce, and Anne flicker on screen as we hear the recordings. The juxtaposition is artfully done and utterly heart-rending, the cheery footage of children playing as we hear the family fall apart.

At first, the words fit the “Leave it to Beaver” images of life in the tony Connecticut suburbs of the 1950’s and 60’s as Allis and the children make records tell Charley how much they miss him and he responds by telling them he loves them. But then, so matter-of-factly we wonder if we hear it correctly, Charley tells Allis about his involvement with other women and even asks for her help. And by the time the recording device has switched to reel-to-reel magnetic tape, the kids are beginning to reflect the anguish at home. Halfway between a time capsule and a Cheever story, we see the particularly of this family’s dysfunction and disintegration but it is the elements of its era make it so powerful. The suffocating restrictions on Allis as she tries to find a way to hold onto a sense of herself at a time when therapists were handing out tranquilizers and telling her to let her husband be the boss. In one tape we hear her decide that while she would like to work it would be better for her son for her to stay home — for another ten years.

Movies like “Revolutionary Road” and “American Beauty” cannot come close to the art and authenticity of this one in portraying the tragedy behind the manicured lawns and shiny appliances of the suburbs. The urgency of Allis’ message to us — not “please” but “must read” — is most honorably discharged by her grandson and the story she left behind lets us hear the voice that was almost silenced.

If you like this, try: Capturing the Friedmans, Tarnation, Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me, Tell Them Who You Are, and This American Life’s superb episode of found audio, including tapes found in a thrift store that were recorded by parents to send to their son in medical school. And this interview with Morgan Daws has more information about the film and the family and how they feel about using Allis’ recordings.

Fanboys

Posted on February 19, 2009 at 6:00 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for pervasive crude and sexual material, language and drug content
Profanity:	Strong and very crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, peyote trip
Violence/ Scariness:	Comic peril and violence, sad death
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	February 20, 2009

“Fanboys” has less of a sense of humor about its subjects than they do about themselves. It is so afraid of offending the demographic that it cannot decide if it is making fun of passionate fans of popular culture or making fan of everyone who is hasn’t spent hours debating the abilities of Boba Fett. Four high school buddies, now estranged, get together for one crazy mission — they want to break into George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch to get a look at the new “Star Wars” movie, “The Phantom Menace,” before anyone else. And the result is just another teen road trip movie, crammed with cameos and many many jokes about body parts and their functions, about mastery of minutiae and saying things like “It’s been parsecs since I’ve seen you” and name-checking things that are oh, so 1998 (Great big Palm Pilots! Chumbawamba!). And isn’t it hilarious that these guys don’t have girlfriends? Yeah, I didn’t think so, either.

The trailer gives away most of the movie’s best surprises including cameos from stars identified with a series of fanboy call signs. Billy Dee Williams is identified as Lando Calrissian, and Carrie Fisher is of course identified as Princess Leia. The real fanboys in the audience will also recognize Ray Park (Darth Maul) and will also appreciate the appearance of the now-indispensable slob comedy utility players Seth Rogan (in three parts), Danny McBride, and Jay and Silent Bob. There are some amusing confrontations between the “Star Wars” geeks and the Trekkers and Kristen Bell (whose brunette bob makes her look like Parker Posey) gives some snap to her lines and wears a Leia harem girl outfit. Someone needs to give the talented Pell James a better job. In her brief and thankless role as a Las Vegas “escort” she lights up the screen with obvious warmth and intelligence.

That is not enough to make up for way we keep getting pulled back to the four bland characters and even blander storylines (you think that conflicts will be addressed? is someone going to find true geek love? will we learn what life is all about?) at what passes for the heart of the movie. It could have been a lot of fun if they hadn’t cheesed it up with a character suffering from Movie Disease — you know, the one where you only have a short time to live but appear and act perfectly healthy — and another character who is struggling with whether he should “grow up” and behave responsibly. It is a shame that a movie about the people who are most passionate about edgy, imaginative stories is itself slipshod and formulaic.

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Push

Posted on February 5, 2009 at 6:00 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, brief strong language, smoking and a scene of teen drinking
Profanity:	Brief strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Teen drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense peril and violence
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	February 6, 2009

If you add up all the recent movies about ordinary-looking people who walk among us with special hidden powers, you might conclude that there are no normal people left. The accountant next door might be a secret mutant, time traveler, mythological character or cyborg, but he is rarely just an accountant.

“Push” is the latest in this genre, and director Paul McGuigan has learned from and built upon many of the films that have gone before. “Push” offers a whole bestiary of people born with special talents, including Movers, Shifters, Pushers, Sniffers, Bleeders and Watchers. Some of their talents are familiar– Watchers, for example, seem to be your standard clairvoyants. But others, such as Bleeders, are a little further off the beaten track: they scream at an ear shattering, brain-pulping pitch.

The mutants in Push are pursued by a nefarious government agency called “The Division” which wants to harness their powers and exploit them for military purposes. Those who are fortunate enough to avoid being locked up in a prison hospital and subjected to horrendous medical experiments go underground in remote locations in an effort to escape detection by the authorities. The movie opens as Nick Gant, a young boy with the telekinetic powers of a “Mover,” watches his father being murdered by agents of the Division. Gant’s father’s last desperate words to his son are a prediction that some day a girl in need of help will come to him with a flower. Years later, our hero has grown into a young man (Chris Evans) who is hiding out in Hong Kong to stay one step ahead of the agents who killed his father. Lo and behold, he is approached by a young girl with a flower, Cassie Holmes (Dakota Fanning) who is another type of mutant– a “Watcher” who draws pictures of the future, and the two are off and running on an adventure to find the secret suitcase and bring down the evil “Division.”

This movie is a fast moving, erratic combination of clever and cliche, of imaginative visuals and unbearably corny dialogue. There are innovative moments, such as a shoot-out in a restaurant between telekinetically manipulated guns hovering in the air, or a chase through a Hong Kong shop filled with huge fish tanks where the screams of “Bleeders” cause the fish in the tanks to burst into red blossoms. On the other hand, sometimes the lines of dialogue are so awful that the screaming of the Bleeders seems like a welcome relief.

One of the best parts is the backdrop of Hong Kong — old shops and winding streets with ancient musicians playing traditional instruments and house boats on the dock — which proves more interesting than some imaginary alien planet. It may be better than the average mutant-next-door movie, even if it doesn’t have any hidden special powers.

Notorious

Posted on January 15, 2009 at 6:00 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for pervasive language, some strong sexuality including dialogue, nudity, and for drug content
Profanity:	Constant extremely strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking, characters sell drugs, reference to drug use
Violence/ Scariness:	Gang-related violence, characters shot and killed
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	January 16, 2009

Christopher George Latore Wallace lived fast, died young, and left a very big corpse. He started dealing drugs as a young kid in Brooklyn, went to prison, and was killed at age 24 in a gang-style shooting that is still unsolved. What makes him worthy of a biopic is that in between all of this he made two rap albums as Biggie Smalls/Notorious B.I.G. that were and continue to be enormously successful.

This movie will inevitably come up short when compared to documentaries like the one about the similarly brief life of the far more prolific rapper Tupac Shakur or full-scale Hollywood biopics like “Ray” and “Walk the Line.” It is produced by Wallace’s biggest promoters, his mother and impresario Sean Combs, who was then known as Puff Daddy and it has the soft edges of a hagiography. And its star, newcomer Jamal Woolard, evokes Biggie’s flattish affect without making the story’s main character particularly dynamic. The film benefits from very strong performances by the supporting cast, including Angela Bassett as Wallace’s mother, Derek Luke as Combs, Naturi Naughton as protege/girlfriend Li’l Kim, Anthony Makie as Shakur, and Antonique Smith as his wife, Faith Evans. But there is not enough in it to engage anyone who is not already a knowledgeable fan. It does not provide any context about why Wallace was different or important or how his experience informed his lyrics or what it was about his performances that connected with such a wide audience. It does not explore the notion of authenticity and “keeping it real” and the inability to understand how legitimate success was different by almost everyone but Puff Daddy that made the tragic outcomes almost inevitable. It is superficial and overly commercial, something the really Biggie never was.