Next Day Air

Posted on September 16, 2009 at 8:00 am

I was plenty offended by “Next Day Air’s” contempt for its characters. But the racism and sexism of this vile movie about dumb crooks and dumber would-be crooks and even dumber people who get mixed up with the first two groups is not as offensive as its contempt for its audience. It isn’t just insulting; it is boring. The ten zillionth time someone on screen said “Know what I’m sayin'” or “That’s what I’m sayin'” I wanted to stand up and yell, “No one has said anything!” Richard Pryor and David Mamet can make profanity into poetry, transforming a few simple explicatives into infinite varieties of expression. But the script here is slack and listless, throwing four-letter words, shotgun blasts, “what is he/she doing in this movie” moments, bad judgment, insults, and drugs around as if they are all inherently funny. Trust me, if you ever thought that might be true, this movie will prove once and for all that it is not.
Leo (“Scrubs'” Donald Faison) is a pot-smoking deliveryman for an overnight package service who has messed up so many times that his manager — who is also his mother — says he just one more complaint and he will be fired. So he immediately tokes up again and delivers a package to the wrong apartment. It should go to Jesus (Cisco Reyes) — who prefers to have his name pronounced the English way — and his girlfriend Chita (Yasmin Deliz). Instead, it is delivered to three failed bank robbers across the hall, one who sleeps through almost all of the movie, and his roommates, Brody (Mike Epps) and Guch (Wood Harris). They think they’ve hit the jackpot when they open it up to discover — guess what! drugs! So they call in Brody’s cousin Shavoo (Omari Hardwick) and his no-name sidekick to monetize their new asset. Meanwhile, big old meanie drug lord Bodega (Emilio Rivera) is very interested in getting his product back and every bit as interested in hurting anyone who might be in the way of achieving that goal. Mayhem ensues, and it feels like it takes forever.
Every single character is a grotesque stereotype, from the Latina spitfire who does the salsa as she cooks and calls her boyfriend Papi to the evil drug dealer, the dopey crooks who think they’re all that, and the shiftless package delivery guy and his angry black woman mother. Watching it is an excruciating experience. And then, to add insult to injury, the mindless comedy turns into a mindless shoot ’em up. Mark this package delivery refused.

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Comedy Crime

Extract

Posted on September 3, 2009 at 6:40 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language, sexual references and some drug use
Profanity:	Very strong and explicit language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking, characters smoke marijuana
Violence/ Scariness:	Comic violence, character injured, character dies
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	September 4, 2009

The fans who have been waiting for a new workplace comedy as wickedly on target as Mike Judge’s cult classic “Office Space” will have to keep waiting. Judge’s new film has no red stapler, no TPS reports coversheet problems, and most of all, it has no flair.

This time, Judge has us on the side of the boss. He is Joel (Jason Bateman), who owns a small manufacturing company that makes flavor extracts. His life is flavorless, get it?

Joel has an office with a window that looks down on the assembly line that conveys the little bottles to the boxes and the forklift. And he has to deal with petty and incompetent employees. But no matter where we are on our own corporate totem poles, it is always going to be more difficult for the audience to identify with the guy who gets to tell everyone what to do before he goes home to his big house and his big bank account.

And it turns out that this movie is less about the workplace than it is another weak frustrated married life comedy. On one hand, this is a good thing because the workplace plot line, involving an industrial accident than unmans one of the workers (Clifton Collins, Jr., you can do better than this) and a scheming temp (ditto Mila Kunis) is neither interesting nor original. On the other hand, it is not a good thing because neither is the marital plot line. Joel is frustrated. His friend (Ben Affleck, bearded) advises Joel to entrap his wife into an affair, thus giving himself carte blanche to do the same. This was briefly popular back the days of, what was that again, oh yes, “Love, American Style.” There is a reason that show is no longer on the air. And it’s the same reason this movie should immediately move to the 99 cent bin and stay there.

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Comedy Movies -- format

State of Play

Posted on September 1, 2009 at 8:00 am

You need six things for a successful Washington thriller: a reporter, a Congressman, a dead girl, a choleric editor, some ugly secrets, and, for some reason, a chase inside a parking garage, not so sure why that last one seems to be so indispensable. “State of Play” has them all. You don’t necessarily need authentic Washington locations, but “State of Play” has that, too, and it is a pleasure to see more than the monuments, with real-life Washington landmarks like Ben’s Chili Bowl and the Americana Hotel providing an extra layer of realism.

There may be some of-the-moment gloss on this sharp Washington thriller, with references to hard times for newspapers and boom times for outsourcing national security, but its essence is struggles between power and accountability and that are always at the intersection of politics, money, and journalism and of course the movies about them, too.

Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck play former roommates with a lot of baggage — Crowe is a reporter for the “Washington Globe” and we can tell he has integrity because his apartment, car, hair, and clothes are such a mess no one would otherwise keep him around. The traditional cub reporter with more spirit than experience but who will show surprising grit and ingenuity before the third act has evolved into a blogger (Rachel McAdams). The traditional handsome young Congressman who may have compromised his ideals and his disappointed wife are played by Ben Affleck (good) and Robin Wright Penn (better). And the traditional peppery newspaper editor who wants copy NOW because every hour we delay print costs some astronomical sum and we’re losing our readers, dammit! (yes, that tradition stretches back to the movies of the 1930’s) is played with frosty fury by Helen Mirren.

There are chase scenes, including one in a parking lot, another standard for Washington thrillers. But the up to the minute details, sharp talk, smooth performances, and a couple of surprising twists hold the interest and keep us engaged.

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Duplicity

Posted on August 26, 2009 at 8:01 am

What do Egyptian launch codes and a new frozen pizza topping have in common?

They’re both secrets that are of value to both those who know it and those who want to know it. Where there are secrets, there must be spies. Where there are spies, there must be counter-spies. And where there is conflict, there must be some sparks.

Writer-director Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) has produced another sharp, twisty, and very stylish thriller, this time with romance and a bit of stardust. The result is a top-notch date movie for grown-ups.

Julia Roberts plays Claire and her Closer co-star Clive Owens is Ray. They meet at an American embassy 4th of July party in Dubai and it is not clear whether their opening exchange is flirtation or something a little more professional. The same can be said of the subsequent encounter, leaving one of them triumphant and the other feeling used and embarrassed. As we go back and forth in time, pieces of the puzzle come together. Once spies for the CIA and MI6, Claire and Ray move on to the more-lucrative career of corporate espionage and perhaps the even-more lucrative career of working for themselves.

Gilroy gives the film a bit of a retro gloss, with a soundtrack that has a 70’s flavor and sleek camera effects with sliding boxes reminiscent of the original “Thomas Crown Affair.” Roberts makes a welcome return to the screen, looking less willowy and more curvy. Owen, most often seen in movies glowering or cynical, is more natural trying out a Tennessee accent than he is trying out a smile, but he has a sure sense of timing that makes the best of Gilroy’s clever banter. This movie sparkles with witty exchanges, and the back-and-forth time shifts in story-telling reveals just how much every word of that dialog matters. The stakes are not as dire as in “Michael Clayton,” but that is part of the fun, watching former top spies use all of the resources available to track down information about items sold in a grocery store. More fun is seeing how two people whose careers depend on not trusting and not being trustworthy test each other and themselves to see if they can build a lasting connection. “Duplicity” may refer to a double-cross, but this movie is double-entertaining.

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Drama Romance Spies

Adventureland

Posted on August 25, 2009 at 8:00 am

We all have at least one, a summer when everything changes, when we first start to become the person we truly are. Every writer tries at least once to tell the story of one of these summers and the best of them connect us to our own stories as we laugh and cry along with them.

Director Greg Mottola’s last film was the box office smash “Superbad,” and like that, this is the story of young people at a turning point, told with sex, drugs, rock and roll and with some surprising sweetness. The mix is much more on the sweetness side in this frankly autobiographical film; don;t let the ad campaign mislead you that this is another wild and raunchy story.

For one thing, this movie’s lead is four years further along. James Brennan (“The Squid and the Whale’s Jesse Eisenberg) has just graduated from college and things are not going the way he planned. His parents have had some financial reversals. Not only is his planned trip to Europe with his friends canceled so he can stay home and get a job but there’s no money to pay his tuition at graduate school, and his parents seem disturbingly callous about how this affects him. He finds to his distress that an undergraduate degree in literature does not qualify him for pretty much anything, so he ends up getting a job for which no qualifications of any kind are necessary — working at a decrepit amusement park called Adventureland.

We know what to expect, of course. In just about every summer job, summer camp, and summer trip movie ever made there will be a girl of great sensitivity and insight and a girl of great hotness. There will be a bully or menace of some kind and a boss who is clueless or evil or both. But the humiliating lessons are more in the painful twinge than wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-20-years-later-in-a-cold-sweat category. The bosses (SNL’s very funny Bil Heder and Kristin Wiig) are not evil and not really clueless. They just have the requisite benign obtuseness that enables them to continue to run a business that (1) relies on children in unleashed frenzy mode as customers and (2) relies on teenagers in major hormonal crisis mode as staff. Mottola manages to avoid the cliches and create characters with warmth and specificity and — that rarest quality in movies of this genre — some grace.