(Full review available here.)

I didn’t like Zombieland. Except for you-know-who’s cameo, I thought it was derivative and unfunny, an uninspired recycling of other, better zombie movies. Plus a lot of it didn’t even make any fucking sense! Who’s that British guy doing the Hitchhiker’s Guide-style narrative intrusions? Who’s keeping score of the “kill of the week” in this post-apocalyptic wasteland? Nobody, that’s who! I call bullshit!

I have heard from others who feel similarly about Zombieland, yet it felt like everyone else liked it, which is why I periodically burst into righteous hate-flames like above when the topic comes up. Well, our side just got some pretty strong supporting evidence: the sucky failure that is 30 Minutes or Less.

Different writers, same deal: uninspired, unwitty, and un-capable of making me want to watch it ever again. Jesse Eisenberg and Aziz Ansari are funny together, yeah. But although director Ruben Fleischer showed a bit of style with Zombieland, 30 Minutes or Less is about as bland as it gets in visuals, framing, and pacing. It’s like if Judd Apatow made a movie except it wasn’t funny and it felt much longer than it was and all right, you can stop making jokes about Funny People already.

In my book, Fleischer is now 0-2. That’s a baseball metaphor meaning he blows. Well, not really. Any baseball player who goes 1-2 or better every day is the greatest baseball player of all time. But if he doesn’t improve soon, or attach himself to better writers next time, we could be looking at the M. Night Shyamalan of comedy directors–a successful debut leading to a long and crummy career.

Full review available at the Herald.

So. Rise of the Planet of the Apes should not have been good. Did you see the last one? Thank heavens, then. Get to a secure location where the infection can’t reach you. According to both minutes of my research, the 2001 Planet of the Apes marks the exact moment Tim Burton became Crappy Tim Burton. Possibly this actually happened during Sleepy Hollow, but since I am not a Burtonoligist and this post is not about Tim Burton, it is now time to move on.

To Planet of the Apes remakes that don’t suck! By all rights, this category should consist of no movies. It certainly should not include prequels/reboots of movies about talking, Earth-ruling monkeys. Yet here we are! Life: it contains surprises.

Turns out Rise of the Planet of the Apes is well-placed, well-plotted, and tightly written. It smartly establishes just how this crazy ol’ place got started while answering the big questions about the original movie. Also, it doesn’t give a shit about the humans. This story is the story of Caesar, the first and leader of the new apes. His “father” James Franco gets a decent chunk of screen time, but when it comes to emotional content, it’s all about Caesar and his evolving perspective on the human race.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes isn’t perfect–the “bad guys” are all one-dimensional, and the CG and its physics are just a little off (though you get used to them after a while)–but it’s much, much better than I anticipated. I’m actually looking forward to the next installment.

Full review available at the Herald.

A movie called Cowboys & Aliens is a movie I should like. A movie directed by Jon Favreau is a movie I should like. Jon Favreau directed Cowboys & Aliens. I didn’t like Cowboys & Aliens.

I cover this pretty thoroughly in the review, but I felt like this one is a case of Too Many Writers Syndrome. Typically, if you see a movie with a shitload of writers attached, that movie will be either a) an incomprehensible, wild disaster or b) a big bland dull-fest where nothing really pays off the way it should. Cowboys & Aliens is the latter.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with it. But I have a hard time understanding how on Earth a movie with this name feels like something I’ve seen a hundred times before. Daniel Craig is a man of few words and many ass-kickings. Olivia Wilde is a semi-mysterious love interest with an idiotic secret. (The secret isn’t idiotic because it’s nonsense–it’s logical enough–it’s idiotic that it gets like one sentence of explanation before never being discussed again. It’s like the whole Armand Tanzanian thing in sci-fi western action movie form.)

I was entertained, I guess!, but I was also pretty let down. I didn’t anticipate Cowboys & Aliens would be a sure-fire slam dunk. I was impressed enough by the cast, the director, and the concept to think it could have been a big success. I don’t think that will be the case.

Full review available at the Herald.

I have but a moment for this one, but Captain America is almost annoying in that we’re not supposed to have this many good-to-great superhero movies. Green Lantern sucked, sure, but we’re looking at a year that’s already had Thor and X-Men: First Class, which I was unexpectedly blown away by. Captain America is stocked with a bunch of middling talent (for the most part–Tommy Lee Jones is great, and Chris Evans continues to make me think he’s always better than I’m expecting), yet they really came together for a solidly entertaining couple of hours of a dude with a stars and stripes shield punching the fuck out of Nazi-demons.

I came in with low expectations, which always clouds things, but it’s possible I’m even underrating it a tad. Want superheroes, World War II, and stuff blowing to hell? Captain America is a good buy.

Full review available here.

So, Larry Crowne. Not just starring Tom Hanks, but directed and cowritten by Tom Hanks. And I pretty well hated it! How do you hate a Tom Hanks movie? I found a way.

It mostly comes down to two things: Larry Crowne is a mess, and its sensibility is very, very stupid, filled with quirky, fun! people and Manic Pixie Dream Girls ordered straight off the MPDG rack. I’m gonna go ahead and blame a lot of that on cowriter Nia Vardalos. Why? Because I can. It seems like her style. You can’t prove it’s not her fault!

But back to the mess. Is this the story of a man going through a mid-life crisis? An inspiring school drama? Or a romantic dramedy whose greatness is on full display when Julia Roberts’ porn-obsessed sketch of a husband bellows about “huge knockers”?

Larry Crowne is all of these things. Larry Crowne is none of these things. This might sum it up best: Tom Hanks’ titular character says “Speck-tack-ah-lur!” on several occasions. Why? What is this supposed to say about Larry Crowne? Is it supposed to say anything at all? Is it supposed to be funny?

I have no damn clue. Somewhere in there is a much better movie. But you’d have to strip out the drapes, the carpet, and most of the furniture to get there–they’re tacky, confused, and awfully hard to look at.

Full review here.

Okay, and it’s the craziest thing, but.. Dark of the Moon didn’t suck.

I mean, there were parts about it that still sucked as hard as first Transformers and Revenge of the Fallen. There is still a manic disconnect between the slapsticky, broad, exaggerated humor of the first two acts with the ostensibly tragic, bone-charring deaths of hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans in the third act. Michael Bay is kind of weird.

Overall, it’s pretty coherent, but it stands up to scrutiny less well than a Steroids Era-slugger. Or the accounting practices of Enron. Or, and you may have gotten the jist by now, something that doesn’t have a leg to stand on, such as a frostbitten penguin. Decepticons pop off of the walls sometimes to ambush plucky little Shia LaBeouf, which is cool until you think “Wait, how long has that guy just been hanging around there? Did he decide to spend his vacation time being a stereo? Is that how these guys relax?” Then you have literally a dozen or more situations where a character is on the verge of being killed only to be rescued at the last possible second. After a while, all those fictional close shaves started to lose all meaning!

Yet for all its clownish buffoonery and dramatic manipulation, I couldn’t bring myself to hate it. And I hated the first two. I hated them so much I wanted to revive Unicron on the condition he hover over Michael Bay’s mansion and suck him up like the world’s hackiest jello shot.

Instead, with Dark of the Moon, well, it was kinda fun. That Chicago battle sequence may have lasted as long as a Lord of the Rings movie, but it looked great and had reversal after comeback after reversal. Was Dark of the Moon good? I wouldn’t go quite that far. But it’s far and away the closest the Transformers series has ever come to good.

Full thing available here.

Jake Kasdan movie. I like Jake Kasdan movies. In the past, I have enjoyed such Jake Kasdan movies as The Zero Effect, The TV Set, and Walk Hard (not to mention his work on Freaks and Geeks). All that may have something to with the fact Bad Teacher underwhelmed me.

But not all of it, I don’t think. There’s a lot of vulgarity, crassness, and rudeness to Bad Teacher that doesn’t go any further than the initial shock of Cameron Diaz calling a student a fucking idiot. I did laugh on not one, not two, but multiple occasions, but I always had that nagging feeling that I wanted to enjoy the movie more than I actually was.

On the other hand, I’ve generally found I’ve liked Kasdan’s movies more the second or third time I watch them, so I suppose it’s possible I’ll warm up to Bad Teacher sometime in the future. I mean, we put a goddamn man on the moon. Anything’s possible.

Available over at the Herald.

Green Lantern. This movie. There is almost nothing to say about it. Ryan Reynolds, who I’m pretty ambivalent about, is okay in a character who is extremely boring, the embodiment of every test pilot ever. He’s got to fight this fog-monster with a fivehead who’s apparently destroying entire worlds, but they’re too dull to actually show him/it doing so. Trust us–Parallax is killing everybody. He’s a bad dude. And he can’t be stopped.

Green Lantern is one of those movies where I just never really have a grasp on how all this shit works. I get that green represents will and yellow represents fear, but where does the relevant strength of each come from? If Parallax is powered by absorbing fear, wouldn’t he get even more powerful when he’s actually threatened and thus terrified of being destroyed? What’s up with that, logic? What’s up with that?

But you really only see that kind of serious nitpicking when the rest of the movie isn’t succeeding. If you’re laughing or you’re scared or you’re really rooting for somebody to overcome the odds arrayed against them, you don’t spend a lot of time poring over these logical flaws. That, to me, is an almost sure sign you’re watching something that isn’t that great. It’s certainly a warning sign. Look out for it.

Over at the Herald.

In short, Super 8 is pretty great, and the main reason for this is simply that J.J. Abrams is an excellent storyteller. Well, also an excellent director, a guy who gets equally superb performances out of his cast and his action scenes. Oh, and his lens flares. Can’t forget the nonstop march of lens flares.

Even though I couldn’t quite buy Super 8‘s emotional payoff, I was affected by it anyway. I left the theater feeling so, so good. I think a movie deserves extra credit for that. I’ll be waiting for Abrams’ next one.

I don’t have a lot of time right now, but the short and the long is I loved it.

I’m getting the impression I really like director Matthew Vaughn. I thought Layer Cake was pretty kick-ass and I thought Kick-Ass was pretty layer-cake. I mean, great. Anyway, summer blockbusters don’t get a whole lot better than First Class. It’s no Dark Knight, but it is definitely a Batman Begins-plus. So there you go.