By Matt Brunson

Look, it’s only fair. If impressionable frat boys can enjoy The Hangover this summer and impressionable teenagers can enjoy Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, then why not give impressionable women their own imbecilic film? An abhorrent romantic comedy, The Ugly Truth is so inept and ill-conceived on so many levels that mandatory sterilization seems to be the only punishment suitable for everyone involved in this mess. We probably wouldn’t want these folks breeding like rabbits.

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By Matt Brunson

Chance encounters and other extraordinary circumstances of this nature are tricky beasts when it comes to their employment in motion pictures. We swallow them when we want to swallow them — i.e. when the film in question has us completely in its grasp — but spit them out without even bothering to chew when we find them too artificial, when they’re employed merely for the sake of convenience by a filmmaker who lazily needs to connect Plot Point A to Plot Point B.

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To paraphrase Sen. Lloyd Bentsen’s smackdown of Sen. Dan Quayle during the 1988 Vice Presidential Debate: “Bruno, I screened Borat; I knew Borat; Borat was a review of mine. Bruno, you’re no Borat.”

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By Matt Brunson

In terms of sustained quality, I daresay that the Harry Potter franchise trumps all other series featuring more than three entries. That other “Harry,” Dirty Harry, falls just short, and even the entertaining James Bond canon has been subject to a few missteps over the decades. But Potter and friends have been delighting movie audiences since first taking their bows in 2001, and the individual works have been so consistently fine that it’s no wonder more than one title has been tossed around as the best of the bunch (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban seems to be the slight favorite among buffs, although forced to choose, I’d have to go with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire). And now here’s the sixth installment, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, to add more fuel to the fiery debate.

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It’s a fact that several of Woody Allen’s movies have found him paired on-screen with women decades his junior (Mira Sorvino, Tiffani Thiessen, Mariel Hemingway, etc.). But with Whatever Works, it appears the 73-year-old filmmaker finally drew the line and elected to pair 21-year-old Evan Rachel Wood with someone closer to her own age.

So he sent in 62-year-old Larry David to pinch-hit.

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Moviegoers hoping that Public Enemies would have been the film to save the summer season from its own worst impulses will be disappointed to learn that the Michael Mann production, while hardly part of the problem, is certainly no solution. A classy motion picture whose individual moments are greater than the whole, this period gangster saga may be filled with exciting gun battles yet can’t deliver the firepower in ways that matter the most: empathy, originality, and a willingness to burrow beneath the legend.

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By Matt Brunson

To both my horror and delight — horror because of my general disdain for the Michael Bay oeuvre, delight because of my desire to enjoy every picture I see (contrary to popular belief, film critics don’t enter a theater wanting to hate the movie; what sort of dreary, masochistic career would that make?) — I somewhat dug 2007’s Transformers, writing in my original review that “even folks who wouldn’t know a Transformer from a Teletubby can expect to have a good time” and praising the film for being “decidedly more character-driven than expected” and “balancing action with emotion.” For this, I credited the presence of executive producer Steven Spielberg, who was described in the press notes as being a “hands-on producer” during the making of a film that, in its best moments, recalled the mirth of Spielberg’s own 1980s output. Well, Spielberg must have been on an extended vacation and far away from the set during the making of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, a perfectly dreadful sequel that’s the filmic equivalent of a 150-minute waterboarding session.

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By Matt Brunson

Michelle Pfeiffer has been excellent in all manner of movies, but in such period pieces as The Age of Innocence and Dangerous Liaisons, she has proven to be especially memorable, ably portraying passionate yet stifled women who find themselves as constricted by the mores of society as by the corsets they don under their dresses. In Cheri, the movie itself is the corset, strangling the actress and everything surrounding her until all the breath has been driven out of the material.

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By Matt Brunson

Biblical times were milked for raunchy but riotous laughs in Mel Brooks’ History of the World: Part I and Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but the well seems to have run dry when it comes to Year One, a disastrous comedy that’s the cinematic equivalent of an old-fashioned flogging.

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By Matt Brunson

SUGAR
***
DIRECTED BY Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck
STARS Algenis Perez Soto, Rayniel Rufino

What’s this? An inspirational sports flick whose every step doesn’t lead up to the climactic Big Game in which the underdog hero must score that touchdown/hit that home run/kick that goal/deck that opponent? Is such a movie even allowed anymore?

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