Daily Loaf

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in New Moon

I’d like to begin by saying that when it comes to Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, all faculties go down the drain. I like to consider myself a reasonably intelligent, slightly nerdy and only rarely socially inept twenty-something, which, to my mind, means that my obsessive — nay, rabid — devotion to a mediocre teen romance novel (about freaking vampires) is somewhat out of the ordinary. But millions of ladies (and dudes) of myriad ages and backgrounds can’t be wrong.

Which is why I should have been prepared for the onslaught of hysteria and hormones that accompanied last night’s pre-screening of New Moon, the anticipated sequel to Twilight that has had fans jonesing for another dose of Edward, Bella and Jacob for 12 long months (Which isn’t all that long I guess; I never had the fortitude to be a Star Wars fan.)

I know, I know; my fellow Twihards are itching to hear about the actual movie (and Taylor Lautner’s abs. I’ll save you the suspense: they’re amazing.) But I have to set up the scene. I arrived to a half-full theater of mostly women — and a few husbands and boyfriends (mine included) who had clearly been dragged along against their wills and better judgment.

Amidst unbearably high-pitched shrieks and screeches (mostly) from the audience’s younger members, the usual gaggle of TV and radio promotion people bestowed precious merch to the ultimate Twifans: she who knows the most trivia wins. By the time the movie actually began, I was thanking my lucky stars that my eardrums had somehow been spared. Boy, was I wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a sports snob. I strongly believe there’s only a handful of truly great sports movies. It’s just too difficult for filmmakers to recreate the drama that takes place on the field. So when the Creative Loafers asked me to review The Blind Side, a sports movie I would never see starring an actress I really don’t like, I was skeptical.

I fell into my comfy leather chair at the Cobb Theater Cinebistro in Wesley Chapel, fully expecting to pan everything about the movie. Then a strange thing happened. The film turned out to be pretty good.

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When you strip away all the pomp and circumstance from rock ’n’ roll — the fashion and politics and drugs and groupies and stardom and burnout — what’s usually left is a few simple chords and a tune you can hum. In the 50-plus years since Chuck Berry, Little Richard, etc. created an art form, rock ’n’ roll music has morphed from a powerful expression of freedom and rebellion into a multi-billion-dollar commodity to be packaged and sold by record company soul-suckers that view artists as cattle and the audience as ignorant rabble worthy only of being led around by the nose or dragged to court. It didn’t used to be this way.

The new film Pirate Radio remembers a time when the music was king. Well, OK, the music and a small handful of outlaw DJs floating just off the coast of Britain, pumping their pirate signal to millions of the Queen’s subjects while royally pissing off the authorities in the process. Pirate Radio isn’t a true story, per se, but elements of it are inspired by real events in 1960s Britain, when a legal loophole allowed unlicensed broadcasters to drop anchor within spitting distance of the mainland and thrill the masses with records by The Kinks, The Rolling Stones and The Who.

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Walking out of 2012, the latest disaster epic by Independence Day directer Roland Emmerich, I couldn’t help but feel that the Hollywood Industrial Complex has painted itself into a corner. Make no mistake: 2012 is the disaster movie to end all disaster movies. In the film, almost all of Earth’s continents are destroyed by a combination of massive earthquakes, explosions and huge fireballs that can only be extinguished by massive tsunamis. Cars are flung around like confetti, skyscrapers crumble into dust, and famous landmarks are crushed beneath overturned aircraft carriers. Give credit to Emmerich and his special effects team; 2012 looks terrific. If all you’re looking for is some mindless, high-testosterone action on a Saturday night, I highly recommend this movie.

But for the non-adrenaline junkies in the audience, 2012 suffers from all the same flaws as most of the disaster genre: weak characterizations, preposterous plot and story, and a length (2 hours, 40 minutes) that makes the film ideal for screening on flights to Australia.

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For a movie whose title references the most sinister level of encounter with an alien life form — abduction — The Fourth Kind should probably have come with a modest “buyer beware” warning.

That’s because the film is less about getting prodded and probed by little green men than it is a test of what we are willing to believe and be frightened by. As The Fourth Kind opens, actress Milla Jovovich addresses the audience directly, telling us that what we are about to watch is based on a series of strange occurrences that purportedly happened in Nome, Alaska, during the first week of October 2000.

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If Alfred Hitchcock and Edgar Allan Poe got together to do their own version of The Matrix, it would look a lot like Richard Kelly’s The Box. The Donnie Darko director returns with a morality tale that twists and turns around a complex story like barbed wire around a rose. No matter what notion you have of the film going in, you’ll have a drastically different one coming out; that I can guarantee you.

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Relationship Card

It used to be that film festivals in the Tampa Bay area were a rarity. No longer. Totaling up all the fundraisers, workshops and side programming that go along with the ever-expanding number of festivals, it’s clear that fest-hopping has become a year-round sport. And that’s great, because we can all stand to broaden our horizons beyond the standard Hollywood pulp that fills the multiplex each Friday. In the next few weeks, there are two festivals of note: one with lots of local appeal, and one a bit farther south that attracts filmmakers (and filmgoers) from all over the world.

Independents’ Film Festival
Hosted by Tampa’s The Education Channel, the 16th annual Independents’ Film Festival promises an intimate look at locally produced films, including a strong program of student films out of USF. I say intimate because all screenings will be held at The Education Channel’s beautiful, newly upgraded screening room with seating for about 65 people. Festival organizers also promise ample opportunity to hob-nob with filmmakers and other fest attendees, as each themed evening begins with a food and drink reception and ends with coffee and dessert. (All included in the $15 ticket price.)

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[Editor's Note: This is the first post by new CL film contributor Daphne Hernandez. For reasons unknown, Wordpress swallowed this post last week and I was only able to track it down today. But hey, it's Halloween and this is a flick you might want to see this holiday weekend. So please, check out the review and excuse our tardiness.]

Cashing in on the popularity mass hysteria of vampire lore, Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant falls in line with the myth-deflaters of Twilight. Vampires don’t have to kill humans to survive, bats are just rodents that live in caves, and subspecies do exist.  They’re just like you and me, but not like you and me.

Darren Shan (Chris Massoglia) lives a cookie cutter existence best conveyed in a J. Crew catalog. In an alternate universe where everyone wears pastels and drab khakis; he’s the straight-A student your mother will likely trade you in for. After his rebel-without-a-cause best friend Steve (Josh Hutcherson) convinces him to ditch class, they get caught and Darren is grounded. In an effort to prove to Steve he’s not the “Mr. Perfect” goody two shoes, they follow a flyer tossed out of an Addams Family-style Studebaker (with a Des-Tiny vanity plate) to the Cirque Du Freak, “The oldest continuing freak show in the Western Hemisphere.”

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I went into Michael Jackson’s This Is It fearing the worst. After months of breathless coverage following MJ’s demise, what could a hastily assembled documentary about the rehearsals for the King of Pop’s comeback 50-night stand at London’s O2 Arena possibly have to add to the spectacle? I feared This Is It would be little more than a crass attempt by the financial backers of the concerts to not only recoup their money but make a killing in the process. After seeing the film, I can report that greed has won the day.

Read more and check out the This Is It trailer after the jump …

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I’m embarrassed to confess that I had no idea who Gertrude Berg was before I watched You-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, an enlightening if somewhat stock documentary from director Aviva Kempner (The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg). A radio and television pioneer, Berg enjoyed a long career playing signature character Molly Goldberg, a stereotype-shattering Jewish matriarch who maintained a decades-long run in the public eye. Berg starred in and wrote every episode of the radio and TV incarnations of The Goldbergs (and we’re talking thousands of shows), in the process inventing the sitcom and many of the tropes we find commonplace today.

Read more of Joe Bardi’s review after the jump …
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The opening prologue to Lars von Trier’s Antichrist is so visually and rhythmically arresting that it lures the viewer into a state of calm that will slowly be smeared over broken glass as the film progresses. The director seems to take great pleasure leading the viewer through a wilderness of both pleasure and horrific despair. He knows he’s about to leave you unsettled — and he likes it.

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Under Mira Nair’s direction, Amelia is pretty enough to look at, but its lack of dramatic momentum and episodic nature are deficits the film’s handsome production values can’t overcome. As a biopic, Amelia falls short in two critical areas: It fails to sufficiently illuminate its protagonist, and it is unable to convey the weight of her accomplishments. For this, the script by Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan must also shoulder a considerable part of the blame. Perhaps because the writers seem to take for granted that their story has an automatically compelling subject at its center, they eschew illumination for melodrama. As a result, its title character remains a rather opaque figure dutifully hitting her marks in the story of her life — or, more accurately, its final 10 years.

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The only Disney franchise with a sequel good enough to get a theatrical releases is back, but should we care? The Toy Story 3-D Double Feature (TS3D) costs almost twice as much as a normal movie. 3-D movies have traditionally been a little blurry on screen, and those big goofy glasses can make your head throb. Plus, everyone saw Toy Story and Toy Story 2 years ago when they first came out (though they are now in “The Disney Vault,” and not the easiest movies to get a hold of).  You may also be wondering if Pixar’s early work still looks good over a decade later, given how far computer animation has come in the time since Toy Story’s release? So it’s not worth it? This 3-D double feature is a total rip-off, right?

WRONG! The Toy Story 3-D extravaganza is totally worth every penny!

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[Editor's Note: This review is by CL Atlanta's Curt Holman. You can check out more of his work here.]

Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers’ Where the Wild Things Are remembers something most adults have forgotten: A huge gulf lies between the simplicity of children’s entertainment and the complexity of actual childhood. Growing up may be a time of pure delight, but it also features stretches of agonizing boredom, sudden fright, occasional sorrow and general perplexity at the arbitrary nature of adult rules.

Most artwork aimed at children, even some of the great ones, grabs for the pleasure and maybe a pinch of terror, but seldom attempts to evoke the tangled youthful feelings that go hand-in-hand with the sense of the wonder. Where the Wild Things Are serves as a remarkable exception that grounds its visual splendors in bittersweet realism.

Being John Malkovich director Jonze and co-writer Eggers retain many images from Maurice Sendak’s archetypal picture book. Rambunctious young Max (played by a talented young actor named Max Records — really) wears an off-white wolf suit reminiscent of Ralphie’s bunny outfit from A Christmas Story and chases the family dog with a fork in an early scene. Jonze and Eggers provide the requisite feature film backstory with admirable economy. Max grows up as an imaginative, latch-key son of divorce with a working mother (Catherine Keener) and a neglectful teenage sister.

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[Editor's Note: This review is by CL Atlanta's Curt Holman, part of his Hollywood Product series. To see more reviews by Curt, go here.]

GENRE: Frat-pack vacation.

THE PITCH: Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell play spouses contemplating divorce who convince three couples to join them at a tropical resort that requires a mandatory “skill-building” session. Other pairs include Vince Vaughn and Watchmen’s Malin Akerman, Jon Favreau and Sex and the City’s Kristin Davis, and Faizon Love and Kali Hawk.

MONEY SHOTS: Bateman and Bell pitch their friends the trip idea with a Power Point presentation that enumerates their marital problems. A bucket of chum splashes Vaughn in shark-infested waters. A barely clad Adonis (Carlos Ponce) practically humps the characters — male and female — during a yoga lesson. Vaughn has a video game showdown with the resort’s supercilious major domo, “Sctanley” (Peter Serafinowicz).

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Who knew the zombie-filled apocalypse would be this much fun? Mixing comedy, horror, road movie and coming-of-age story, Zombieland manages to be gross, hilarious and — dare I say it — heartwarming.

Read more of Sal’s review of Zombieland after the jump …

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Editor’s Note: This review is by CL Atlanta’s Curt Holman. (You can check out the original here.) For more movie reviews and news, check out CL’s Movies & Television site.

Drew Barrymore usually radiates high spirits and good cheer on screen, so it makes sense that her directorial debut, Whip It, would display the same virtues. In fact, Barrymore’s film shows more skill and subtlety than she often reveals in her acting, which comes as a particular surprise in a coming-of-age tale full of roller derby players with names such as Iron Maven and Maggie Mayhem.
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No one can explain capitalism in a simple manner, and Michael Moore is no exception. Yet Capitalism: A Love Story does a fine job tackling the different sides of a complicated issue and sets forth the premise that the struggle we now face, no matter what the pundits tell you, isn’t between capitalism and socialism.
It’s between capitalism and democracy.
Do we want a society based on profit for some, or freedom for all? That’s the choice and question at the heart of this important documentary.

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Not your average movie about a hot cheerleader and her nerdy best friend, Jennifer’s Body hit theaters last week. Staring Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried, Jennifer’s Body tells the story of a popular girl who is slighty more evil than the teenage girls of today’s society.

Jennifer’s Body takes place in Devil’s Kettle, a middle-of-nowhere small town where everyone knows everyone. Eager to up her slut status, Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) wants to see (and presumably, sleep with) a band playing at a local bar. She brings along her best friend Anita “Needy” Lesnicky (Amanda Seyfriend). After flirting with the “salty” lead singer Nikolai Wolf (Adam Brody aka Seth Cohen from the O.C.!), Jennifer ends up getting herself kidnapped and sacrificed to the devil. To keep herself hot and desirable, Jennifer needs to eat human flesh. She prefers boys but later tells her best friend that she “goes both ways.” It’s now up to Needy to save the day and her boyfriend Chip’s life.

Written by Diablo Cody, Jennifer’s Body is full of quirky one liners and made up words much like those that were enjoyed by all in her 2007 flick,  Juno. Read the rest of this entry »

[Tampa, FL-  Sept.21, 2009]  Tonight I attended the global premiere of the film The Age of Stupid. I was invited to this event by my friend Ingrid Esteves, a French national who doesn’t understand how the U.S. could back out of the Kyoto Treaty, or why we’d want to be as stupid as Napoleon and start wars on two fronts at the same time. Yes, there’s lots of ’stupid’ to discuss in our age, but let’s talk about this outstanding film first. This film is ambitious in several respects. Firstly, there’s the way it premiered.

The film opened globally tonight in synch with a star-studded live screening event in New York. Before the film began audiences were able to watch VIPs arrive at the Manhattan premiere by bike, rickshaw, electric car and sail boat via a satellite link that broadcast the event to 700 cinemas in 50+ countries. The celebrities then walked a green carpet (made from recycled soda bottles) to a solar powered cinema tent in downtown New York.
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Mike Judge’s Extract is an annoying movie instead of a funny one. Pitched as a return by the director to the workplace comedy of Office Space, Extract instead suffers from the same faults as Judge’s last film, the Luke Wilson flop Idiocracy. Both flicks have appealing casts and hint at good movies that could be made from the same material, but they are ultimately ruined by silly plot devices and lame characterizations. In the 10 years since Office Space, Judge has regressed as a film maker.

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Crank 2: High Voltage can classified as an opportunity to watch an amalgam of a violent video game, an overactive music video and a 4th of July fireworks spectacular thrown into your face. Will its DVD release electrify you?

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[Editor's Note: This review is by CL Atlanta's Curt Holman. Also check out Cooper Levey-Baker's interview with one of the stars of the original Inglorious Bastards. And for news and reviews of all the summer's biggest movies, go to CL's Movies & Television site.]

Hipster filmmaker Quentin Tarantino refuses to explain the intentional misspelling in the title of his weird World War II epic Inglourious Basterds. The titular Basterds apparently care no more for spell-check than they do the rules of war. Dashing, drawling Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) leads a squad of eight Jewish-American G.I.s into occupied France with the sole purpose of killing as many German soldiers as possible. The idea is that the “disemboweled, dismembered and disfigured bodies” will freak out Hitler’s high command.

The Basterds aren’t just guerillas but wartime terrorists who scalp their victims and never hesitate to kill, torture or deny medical care to fight the “Natzis.” At first, Tarantino seems to present an inflammatory apologia for torture and prisoner abuse, a la 24. Inglourious Basterds arrives in theaters in the midst of an American health care debate that’s hurling Nazi metaphors and swastikas around like blunt instruments. Will town-hall meeting protesters take up the film’s symbolism and call themselves Basterds?

Maybe not, for Inglourious Basterds isn’t the movie it’s sold as, or initially seems to be. Sorting out Tarantino’s intentions for his bold, eccentric WWII fantasy is like defusing a meticulously crafted time bomb that could be either a dud or a high explosive.

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In remaking the 1973 Wes Craven classic The Last House on the Left, director Dennis Iliadis tries to scare us like Hollywood used to with this story of a vicious crime and a family that seeks bloody revenge. The movie comes out on DVD today, so let’s find out if it’s worth your hard earned cash.

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The new marine doc The Cove takes you on an aquatic journey with elements of suspense, horror, tragedy and beauty that serve as a wake-up call to a problem that seems insurmountable: the systematic murder of dolphins by humans. I can tell you from personal experience that seeing The Cove will change you.

The film begins with seemingly paranoid animal-rights activist Richard O’Barry, a man who appears to blindly charge into situations hoping only to make a big stink and “change the world.” As the movie progresses, however, you start to learn more about O’Barry. Turns out he was in charge of capturing and training dolphins for the TV show Flipper. After a horrific event, something inside him snapped, and O’Barry realized he had become a torturer of dolphins.

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Ed. Note: This is the first post by new film contributor Alex Czysz. For more reviews of the summer’s biggest movies, check out the CL Movies & Television site.

There’s always a problem with time travel. It isn’t the disruption of the space-time continuum, or the existential questions posed by our entering and exiting the chronological confines of which we are bound, or even the very question of what time is in and of itself. Ultimately, the problem is whether or not we can accept the very concept of time travel. If so, there’s no turning back, and no questioning the structure of internal logic posed by the author. It is — as the saying goes — what it is.

All things considered, the chronological mechanics in Robert Schwentke’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (based on the recent bestselling novel by Audrey Niffenegger) are coherent enough. Eric Bana (sporting a rather distracting mullet for a good portion of the film) stars as Henry, a librarian afflicted with a rare genetic disorder called Chrono-Displacement which causes his involuntary disappearance from the present and subsequent reappearance in another segment of his life-line.

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Be sure to check out Alive in Joburg, the short film that inspired District 9. And for reviews of all the summer’s biggest movies, go to CL’s Movies & Television site.

Somewhere near the middle of Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, corporate bureaucrat Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) and his alien friend Christopher Johnson blast their way into the headquarters of an evil multinational corporation known as MNU in search of the only trace of fuel left on the planet that can get Johnson home. The pair turns wave after wave of MNU security goons to jelly using an assortment of alien weapons before locating their prize and making an explosive getaway with an army of MNU’s finest in land-and-air pursuit. District 9 isn’t a video game adaptation, but watching the movie I kept thinking that it might as well be.

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I recently got an e-mail reminding me that it’s been 10 years since I graduated high school. So, when I sat down to watch 17 Again, I realized I wasn’t exactly the target audience. Still, I was hoping for something to identify with beyond a Zac Efron love-fest and a bunch of 20-something actors playing teenagers. Fortunately, Matthew Perry is in this movie.

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With just one word — “Butter!” — she’s got you.

Meryl Streep slathers so much salacious joie de vivre onto that one line reading early in Julie & Julia that we know we’re in for a glorious ride.

If only.

Because, unfortunately, this movie is not just about Julia Child, godmother of French cooking in America, TV legend (via PBS and Dan Aykroyd) and all-around great dame. It’s about Julia and Julie: Julie Powell, office drone, who in 2003 embarked on the seemingly quixotic task of cooking every recipe in Child’s classic cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and writing a blog about it.

Nora Ephron’s screenplay is, as the tagline announces, “based on two true stories”: Child’s autobiographical saga of her own introduction to French cuisine, My Life in France, and Powell’s best-selling book (based on her Salon blog), Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. And while the real Julie Powell seems, from her writing, to be as gutsy and iconoclastic as the woman who inspired her, Amy Adams’ performance in the role is all twinkle and pout — and pretty soon just a distraction from what we really want to see: more Meryl.

After the break: More on Julie & Julia, plus video of Meryl Streep, Dan Aykroyd and Julia Child as… Julia Child.

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Dwayne (formerly “The Rock”) Johnson and director Andy Fickman are the talent behind Race To Witch Mountain, an action-packed family film based on the 1968 Alexander Key novel and its later Disney incarnations. Johnson and Fickman previously worked together on 2007’s The Game Plan. How does the pair do the second time around?

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For more reviews of the summer’s biggest movies, check out the CL Movies & Television site.

What’s often missed about the sense of humor is that it’s a defense mechanism. Behind every biting joke, taunt or put-down is a kernel of fear or hurt. Maybe if we keep laughing, all that pain and uncertainty hiding just behind the smile will stay contained. Judd Apatow’s excellent Funny People is a hysterical, profane, entertaining, challenging, honest, touching, sentimental, overwrought jokeathon of a movie. It’s loaded with great performances and wants to make Big points about Big topics. Life and death literally hang in the balance. This is a movie that stares into the abyss and sees a dick joke staring back.

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[Editor's note: This review was written by film critic J.R. Jones for our sister paper the Chicago Reader. You can check out more of Jones' reviews and the rest of the Reader's film coverage here. For more reviews of the biggest movies of the summer, check out CL's Movies & Television site.]

The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow’s white-knuckle drama about a U.S. Army bomb squad in Baghdad, will be the first Iraq war movie to open across America since our forces pulled out of the city. Granted, when Bigelow started shooting the movie in Jordan in July 2007, the surge was still going strong, and when The Hurt Locker premiered in September 2008 at the Venice film festival, the word timetable was still politically radioactive. But when the movie finally arrives in flyover country this month, it will be the first combat drama about Iraq to chronicle a past operation instead of one that’s ongoing. Strangely, it will be history.

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For more reviews of the summer’s biggest movies, be sure and visit CL’s Movies & Television site.

Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back. It’s a formula as old as drama, but it’s also sort of fanciful. In real life, the boy who loses the girl often sits brooding on the sidelines for months while his lost love lives it up with a new paramour. Enter (500) Days Of Summer, a movie that wants you to know up front that it’s not some silly love story. Instead, Summer is a movie about love and all its messy fallout — hurt feelings, confusion, resentment, etc. The film is also an assured directorial debut from music video director Marc Webb, and he gives his tale a clever structure and playful visual style that helps separate it from the standard rom-com pack.

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[Editor's Note: Moon is currently playing in Tampa. Check here for showtimes. And for reviews of all the summer's biggest releases, be sure and check out the CL Movies & TV site.]

Without a doubt, director Duncan Jones‘ upbringing as pop hero David Bowie’s son is apparent in the sci-fi psychological thriller Moon in a sense that the movie is, well, weird. However, I was determined not to let someone’s quasi-celebrity status fool me into liking a movie that wasn’t actually any good. For this reason, I wasn’t expecting much.

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With the sequel/reboot Fast & Furious arriving on DVD today, I decided to take a look at what the release brought to the table to see if it’s worth buying it, Netflixing it or simply waiting for it to appear in endless reruns on Spike. The film’s tagline is: “New Model, Original Parts.” Let’s have a look under the hood …

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