Available here.

I’d call myself a solid fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. I liked Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End more than most critics, especially the latter, which I found weird and over the top in good ways. So I went in to On Stranger Tides without feeling like the franchise was incapable of putting out entertaining entries.

The bad news: it wasn’t very good. The worse news: they are plans for up to three more.

I covered this in the review, but I can’t get over the decision to jettison Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley only to replace their love story with some lame romance between a church-guy and a mermaid. That simple description sounds much more entertaining than the actual results. Church-guy (he seemed too minor a character to note down his name) is introduced strapped to the mast of Blackbeard’s ship. Johnny Depp asks about him for some reason. During the following mutiny, Depp and his cohorts break off in the middle of a pitched battle just to release him.

Why? There’s no reason for any of these actions besides “If we don’t get a sexy dude to kiss a pretty lady at some point here, the young girls will just go watch Twilight again instead.” It’s a gross botchery of storytelling. Rather than finding an organic way to build this character into the plot, they just throw him into the mix and force the surrounding characters to be interested in him.

It’s a waste of celluloid. On Stranger Tides isn’t a terrible movie, but it’s not half as rollicking as it should have been.

Priest (reviewed here) is one of those movies that is objectively a junk pile yet that I would happily watch again if it showed up on my TV next month. That’s probably because of its total shallowness: it’s the kind of movie that makes zero demands on your attention. Its world is just sort of there, a mix of stuff we’ve already seen and stuff that feels like we’ve already seen it. Same deal with the characters. Paul Bettany (who I like) kicks ass and has a tragic past. Karl Urban (who I also like) just wants to ruin everything. And chew the occasional piece of dust-colored scenery. I think some other people showed up at some point, but who can be sure.

Actually, now that I’m thinking about all this, I don’t really want to see Priest again.

I was expecting mild crumminess from Thor. Instead, I got two surprises: a movie that was a) pretty damn entertaining and b) directed by Kenneth Branagh.

I gave it a B, and that might be underrating it a bit. Thor is a highly entertaining movie that’s maybe just a touch too familiar in all its throne-maneuvering and interfamily royal strife. I’d put it a notch below Iron Man–but given how great Iron Man is, that’s still a pretty strong notch.

Review available here.

I had high hopes for Dylan Dog. Unreasonable ones, given the director and writers’ previous credits include TMNT and the terrible, terrible A Sound of Thunder, but still. The other cinematic adaptation of Dylan Dog author Tiziano Sclavi’s work is Cemetery Man, a movie that battles Dead Alive for my favorite zombie movies and would probably crack the top 20 of my all-time general favorites. Cemetery Man is a strange, thoughtful, melodramatic, playful, funny movie.

Dylan Dog is not.

It’s kind of like True Blood minus the T&A plus Hellboy minus the Ron Perlman plus a crappy generic detective movie. The result is a movie that feels like it should be playing on a New Year’s Eve monster marathon. Not at the 10 PM slot, either. Dylan Dog would start at 3:47 AM.

Available here.

Water for Elephants is boring. I think just about everything involving the circus or the Great Depression is boring (some of the works of John Steinbeck excluded), but Water for Elephants is boring even by the “Hey, we’re so colorful and soulful” standards of circus and/or Depression stories. The main problem here is neither the character of lead Robert Pattinson nor love interest Reese Witherspoon are in any way interesting. They’re stock characters with the personality of the upcoming sentence. This is a sentence. Seriously, I don’t know who these two characters are. Pattinson knows stuff good about animals. Witherspoon rides stuff good about animals. They would like to see each other naked. They would like to bone each other. Both are oppressed by temper-tantrum-throwing ringmaster Christoph Waltz, but there’s no why to their love. They just do.

I gave this one a C, which is in some ways the worst grade you can bestow. That means it was neither interestingly good nor interestingly bad. It just was. Bad, that is. Now I wonder if this is a crummy adaptation of a touching, wonderful bestseller or a faithful adaptation of an overrated sack of literary white rice.

No, I take that back. I like white rice. I would eat it by itself. A comparable book version of Water for Elephants would be unsalted bow-tie pasta.

Over at the Herald.

I would need to rewatch them to be sure, especially the third one, which as far as my memory’s concerned may as well not exist, but right now I’m operating under the belief Scream might be the most solid horror franchise out there. Even Scream 4 isn’t a waste of 1s and 0s. Of course, it’s running at the advantage–if it had 7-12 movies like Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, or Hellraiser, the balance would undoubtedly be different–but even comparing Scream‘s four entries to the first four of any other set, I think Scream has the edge, despite the fact its best doesn’t match up to, say, the original Nightmare on Elm Street.

Like I say in the review, I think this is attributable to the fact writer Kevin Williamson’s scripted three of them and director Wes Craven has handled all four. This lends a continuity to the series; you don’t have some D-list guys swoop in to cash in with sequels that take the original mythology in bold, stupid new directions. They haven’t exhausted their creativity yet, either.

Also contending, Best Horror Franchise: the Return of the Living Dead series. Though the second one sucked.

Blah blah available here.

With Arthur, I had the fairly rare experience of laughing a lot more than the rest of the audience. As a professional snootyman who gets paid to tell you what you like is stupid, I will, in most cases, spend significantly less time laughing during a comedy than my hooting, armpit-scratching fellow theater-goers. Either that or there are lots more not-me people in the crowd than people who are me, so, taken as a whole, it sounds like they’re laughing more, but that theory suffers from the fatal flaw that it’s not making fun of anyone.

Whatever. This time, I was laughing the hardest. Basically every line out of Russell Brand’s mouth is a joke of some kind. I’m not sure about Arthur‘s rewatchability factor, and pretty much the entire Brand-Greta Gerwig romance storyline was the movie’s weakest part, but I had a pretty great time.

Available here.

Source Code is the second movie from director Duncan Jones, he of the awesome Moon. As a followup, I found Source Code neither as potent or as weird as his debut, but you know what? It was pretty close to great. I would watch it again right now. It’s a well-crafted, well-paced thriller. Jones has a natural instinct for quietly revealing something horribly disturbing without pushing things too far into manipulative or ridiculous territory. He seems to be a natural storyteller, too: he knows right when it’s time to reveal a new plot detail, and never indulges in “I know something you don’t!”-type shenanigans.

I’m really excited to see where his career goes from here. He’s off to a hell of a start.

Available here.

So The Adjustment Bureau is a Philip K. Dick adaption. A loose Philip K. Dick adaption. It’s so loose, in fact, the only recognizable Dickish element is the basic plot, where protagonist Matt Damon ends up realizing what he thought about the nature of reality is false. Other than that, well, it’s just another generic sci-fi semi-thriller.

Like I say in the review, I don’t mind when adaptations depart from the source material. But if you’re gonna diverge, you have to fill in the gaps with material of your own. With The Adjustment Bureau, in an attempt to capture people with heart, the focus is squarely on the love story. Fine. Awesome. We all love love. But the details of the Bureau and its rules are flat, unimaginative; the reasons Damon and would-be lover Emily Blunt are kept apart come down to fairly trite rules of life. There’s nothing really there. The end result is something far blander than Dick ever wrote.

Available, as usual, here.

Like I say in the review, I should have guessed Hall Pass was a Farrelly Brothers movie: a bit of genuine sentiment buried under loads of prop shit. Also I had the same gut reaction I normally do to their work: “Well, I kinda respect what they’re doing here, but I just can’t get behind the scene were he drinks the bucket of bull semen.”

Hall Pass did inspire me, however, to begin the Full-Frontal Male Nudity Watch. Cocks have popped up in a lot of comedies lately: Walk Hard, The Hangover, now Hall Pass, among others. Hall Pass features three wangs, including two in the same scene. Groundbreaking recent-comedy history made before your very eyes as you frown and chuckle uncomfortably.

I am very much looking forward to all the upcoming alien invasion movies. Just nine days until I get to see my new hometown blown to meaty cinders in Battle: Los Angeles!