Reviews

Ivan Reitman has a directorial history of examining hypothetical, but impossible situations. He's brought us professional ghost hunters, a male pregnancy, a regular guy breaking up with Supergirl, and now in No Strings Attached he looks at the mythical conceit of friends having sex outside the bonds of a relationship, aka "friends with benefits."

I'm not sure I could have thought of a more unlikely pair than Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman. Each plays a caricature of their own personalities. Portman is a serious, studious, and no-nonsense personality. Kutcher is, well Ashton Kutcher. Meeting first at summer camp as teens, the pair run into each other again and again in random places and become friends, with Kutcher's Adam having a solid crush on Portman's Emma the entire time.

When they finally, inevitably, end up in bed together, the sex is great, and Emma, who has always had a fear of emotional attachment, offers Adam an arrangement to become sex buddies. It is clear by this point that the two are already in a relationship, but they refuse to admit it. Through the continuing emotional ups and downs, they grow closer until it finally reaches a breaking point, and they each have to deal with their feelings.

Fans of Machete now can see Robert Rodriguez's brilliantly overdone homage to exploitation flicks on the small screen, and it loses none of its gleefully gory and sexy charm in the translation. The new Machete Blu-ray captures every severed limb, explosion and naked female body part in glorious HD video and superb sound. (If you don't have a Blu-ray player, you can enjoy Machete's brand of heartwarming family entertainment on DVD.)

For an exploitation film, Machete has a surprisingly complex and coherent plot, not that this matters terribly much amid all the mayhem. Set in Austin, south Texas and Mexico, the story follows Machete Cortez (Danny Trejo), an ex-Federale turned immigrant day laborer hired by sinister political operative Michael Booth (Jeff Fahey) to assassinate a Texas state senator, John McLaughlin (Robert De Niro).

Meanwhile, immigration agent Sartana Rivera (Jessica Alba) stakes out taco truck owner Luz (Michelle Rodriguez), the suspected head of The Network, an organization that helps Mexican immigrants cross the border and find jobs. The two storylines intersect when Machete befriends Luz at a day labor site, and Rivera suspects he is part of The Network also.

Things go horribly wrong during the assassination attempt, and Machete is the victim of a double cross. He finds himself on the run from several parties, including the cops, Rivera, Booth and Machete's old nemesis, a Mexican drug lord named Torrez (a perfectly miscast Steven Seagal). Vowing revenge on those who double crossed him, Machete sets out to give them their bloody comeuppance with the help of Luz, Rivera and Machete's brother, a well-armed priest named Padre (Cheech Marin).

This synopsis leaves out plenty of details involving a vigilante group, political corruption, shifting alliances, incriminating videos, drug smuggling, impressive weapons caches, lesbian incest, scores of dead bodies, way-cool lowriders and online porn, but to say more would spoil some of the surprises and all of the fun. It suffices to say that Machete delivers most every flavor of fu, all presented with great wit and style.

I tend to smirk when I hear about producers who've said a movie won't play well in Middle America. But if there is a movie to which such a ridiculous generalized statement might apply, it's Somewhere. I say this as a fan of director Sofia Coppola's early work (The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation).

Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is a fortysomething action movie star who dwells in the famed Chateau Marmont hotel in LA. He doesn't instigate much in the film -- things just happen around him or to him. A friend throws parties in Johnny's suite, female hotel-dwellers flirt ceaselessly with him, and work-wise, his assistant/agent arranges everything for him: he just shows up.

For a film directed by a female, it's strange how dominant the male gaze is in Somewhere. Johnny sleepily watches pole-dancing strippers from his bed, women flash their breasts at him at various points of the film, and the only long-term relationship Mr. Marco has with any female is with his tween daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning). It's too bad Cleo doesn't stick around for the whole film -- the scenes between her and her father are the liveliest this movie gets.

Amongst the many short films that I enjoyed at Austin Film Festival 2010 was I Love You Will Smith by local writer/director Bradley Jackson. This amusing film depicted how a casual office conversation about Will Smith’s latest movie can lead to a psychological breakdown -- and physical beatdown -- for some fans. I've found myself referencing Jackson's short in conversations with co-workers about movies so I'll admit I'm hooked. I Love You Will Smith was a Doorpost Film project finalist last year and can be watched on the Doorpost Film Project website here.

After seeing Jackson and his filmmaking crew in action on his latest short film The Man Who Never Cried during a set visit last fall, I was curious to see how the final film would turn out. The Man Who Never Cried has just received a $10,000 Audience Choice Award from the Doorpost Film Project, a prize that was determined by number of online votes through the Doorpost website. You can watch it in full at the end of this review.

The movie's central character, Ralph "it's pronounced Rafe" Winston (Keir O'Donnell), has never cried in his life, not even during his birth or as an adult when his former wilfe has a miscarriage. His inability to express grief and loss through tears has distanced himself emotionally from others. Ironically, his job as a clown enables others to express joy and laughter.

When previews for The Dilemma aired on TV, I had little interest in seeing what appeared to be the latest bromantic comedy starring Vince Vaughn and Kevin James. I typically enjoy this style of comedy, and James's performance alongside Will Smith in Hitch is one of my favorites in the genre. However, I was apprehensive about whether there would be enough chemistry between James and Vaughn to believe an almost brotherly bond. I decided to take a chance after I learned that producer and director Ron Howard (Parenthood, The DaVinci Code) was heading this project. With his directorial talent, I expected The Dilemma to be well developed and more complex than the standard bromance.

The Dilemma starts off harmlessly enough as we meet confirmed bachelor Ronny (Vaughn) and happily married Nick (James). Buddies since college, they're partners in an auto design firm and are set on taking their company to the top with an innovative project to produce muscle-car sounds in environmentally friendly electric cars. Supporting them in their endeavors -- and in past trouble of Ronny's gambling addiction -- are Ronny's girlfriend, Beth (Jennifer Connelly), and Nick's wife, Geneva (Winona Ryder).

I'm growing tired of superhero movies and think it's time for a break, not that the Hollywood or comic-book honchos will listen to me. Superhero films, especially the first in a series, tend to be inherently predictable. And I don't much enjoy the final big showdown at the end, especially when they're CGI-ified and you're not even watching real people fight, like in martial-arts movies (which I do continue to love). The battle of the men in the metal suits was easily for me the dullest part of the otherwise amusing Iron Man.

Director Michel Gondry  -- yes, the director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- tries to mess around a little with the genre in The Green Hornet, but "mess" is sadly the operative word. The movie is an uneven jumble of comedy and the typical Nobility of the Superhero. The climactic fight scene might be set in a pretty cool environment, but it is so confusing and poorly choreographed that it isn't even fun on a kinetic gut level. Fortunately, the lighthearted and comic moments made this movie surprisingly likeable.

A five-word line of dialogue near the end of Blue Valentine sums up the film's central relationship. It is a line said with resignation and mild disgust: "Ah...you must be Dean."

A coworker of the film's lead female character, Cindy (Michelle Williams), utters the line when Cindy's drunk and agitated husband Dean (Ryan Gosling) arrives at Cindy's workplace to confront her about their latest marital meltdown. From the coworker's flat and frustrated tone, it's obvious that Cindy and Dean's marriage from hell is no secret, and Dean is taking most of the blame.

But laying all the blame on Dean isn't quite fair, and we know why by this point in Blue Valentine. A brutally honest, harrowingly real and strikingly nuanced look at an unlikely relationship that was probably DOA from the start, Blue Valentine wags a finger at both Cindy and Dean for the bad choices they've made. But it also explains with great empathy what motivated those choices.

In Rabbit Hole, director John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) captures a period of time in the life of a married couple in suburban New York, months after their young son has died. Given this set-up, you might expect the film to be maudlin and depressing. Miraculously, even as the film deals seriously with some unhappy issues, it is able to do so without pulling the audience through the emotional wringer. 

Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie Corbett's (Aaron Eckhart) son Danny was hit by a car in front of their house. To help cope with his death, they attend support group meetings -- where they meet Gaby (Sandra Oh) and her husband -- but neither seem to benefit from them.  

Becca has a rather fraught relationship with her younger sister Izzy (Tammy Blanchard, The Good Shepherd), and is annoyed that her mom Nat (a magnificent Dianne Wiest) keeps comparing Becca's current situation to her own. She begins a sort of friendship with Jason (Miles Teller), the high-school student and aspiring comic-book artist involved in the accident that killed her son.  

Nicolas Cage continues a string of performances in genre films including Kick-Ass, The Sorceror's Apprentice and Drive Angry with Season of the Witch, which opened on Friday. Along with Cage are Ron Perlman and a strong cast of supporting characters including Stephen Graham (Snatch, Doghouse), Ulrich Thomsen (The World is Not Enough), Claire Foy ... and  a fantastic cameo by Christopher Lee. Not unlike Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, this is a swashbuckling Middle Ages action adventure that discards any pretense of historical accuracy. Also like the Kevin Costner romp, this left me walking out of the theater with a smile on my face.

I've never been a Nicolas Cage fan, but I'm starting to warm to him with roles like these, and of course everybody loves Ron Perlman. Together, they make a crack buddy fighting team as they kill and plunder through the various Crusades, until Cage realizes they're not really doing God's work, just killing innocent people. So, they set off to find their own way and return home to find the land decimated by plague and the people in terror.

They say if you play a country song backwards, you get your job back, you get together again with your wife, your dog comes back to life, and your truck starts working again. Well, if you take a couple of up-and-coming actors, throw in an Oscar winner, have them record the above and then play THAT backwards, you get Country Strong, which opens today in theaters. This is a rumpled mess of a movie that I kinda liked, expected to hate, but just couldn't find much to love.

The story ostensibly covers Gwyneth Paltrow's down-and-out country superstar Kelly Canter as she attempts a comeback tour after leaving rehab a month early. Garrett Hedlund's Beau Hutton accompanies her as her "sponsor" and opening act along with her husband James Canter (Tim McGraw) and Leighton Meester as former beauty queen Chiles Stanton.