Complete review here.

I know Slither is loved in certain circles, but I get the impression those circles are pretty small. Yet it’s a very enjoyable little movie, funny and gory and decently suspenseful–if I rated non-new releases, I’d peg it at a B+. I know it didn’t make back its money, at least not in the theater, but studios need to take a look at this movie’s quality rather than its box office and give James Gunn more scripts. (Unless they’re still punishing him for writing Scooby-Doo and Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. Then they’re doing the Lord’s work.)

I see he’s got a couple upcoming movies, actually. Here’s praying they do well enough to lead Gunn into regular Hollywood circulation, because he’s a talented guy. Watch Slither.

Review of The Losers available here.

So I lied when I said I’d say more about Kick-Ass! To make it up to you, let’s go out to dinner sometime. Just you and me, internet. Then I’ll not only tell you all the extras about Kick-Ass, I’ll tell you that although The Losers was deeply, deeply derivative, and could easily have been D material, they brought enough newness to the characters (and by “they” I’m including the overqualified cast) to make it less of a been-there suckfest and more of a fleetingly entertaining 90ish minutes that is nevertheless hilariously misguided if it thinks it’s going to make a franchise out of this and the sequel they’ve set up.

Upcoming later in the week: James Gunn’s Slither! Here’s a preview. I liked it!

I’ll have more to say on this later, but here’s my Kick-Ass review, currently the most-read article on the Tri-City Herald website.

In short: I liked it a lot. Something about this caught Twitter’s eye, too. This piece has been tweeted about fifty times since it posted this evening. For me, that’s a lot.

Available here.

Date Night would have been really, really shitty without Fay and Carell. I mean, “dude falls into the shitheap in Slumdog Millionaire” shitty. Every time I thought to myself “Self, this side plot is utterly worthless” or “Hey, that joke failed to work for the fifth straight time,” the leads made me laugh and my objections temporarily boiled away. This might be the best example I’ve seen of a talented cast saving a talentless production.

Reviewed here.

Okay, so don’t get me wrong, total trendchasing shitpile, but not quite as bad as rumored. Howard the Duck has a very low fun factor, but its cringe factor, while moderate-to-strong, can’t compete with the very worst films I’ve seen.

As usual, here it is!

Watching this movie, you could almost mentally recreate what the makers of The Blair Witch Project thought as they watched it: “Dude, this movie kind of sucks, but some of the ideas and techniques are great. Like, what if we took what works and expanded that to be the whole movie? Think that’d go anywhere?”

I ain’t criticizing them for this, either. The Last Broadcast has a lot of flaws. It’s got some very innovative facets to it, too, but the Blair Witch creators separated the good from the bad and made one of the greatest horror movies ever as a result. It’s kind of like sampling, but when the Beastie Boys do it.

Gave The Crazies a B-, but in some ways that’s overrating it. Still, even as my brain lost interest, I was caught up in a gut-level way I can’t deny.

Incidentally, got some good–nay, great–news of the most useful variety: the kind I can’t share in public just yet. Not that there’s anything “public” about this wasteland. Updates when I’m allowed.

Review’s here.

Egads. Watched this one with my girlfriend–a rare treat; normally the job requires me to go see Alvin and the Chipmunks or Fool’s Gold or Twilight by my apparently pathetic and lonesome self–which helped me work out my response to this challenging movie. I was somewhat frustrated in my expectations by the ending, but she was downright angry. Even so, she thought it was great. I did too, for lots of reasons, especially Scorsese’s vivid and haunting dream sequences, but I may not have given Shutter Island the benefit of the doubt without our long post-movie conversation where we worked through our strong emotional reactions to it.

I noted in my review it’s going to piss a lot of people off. I don’t think that’s an unfair response, either. But me, I was pretty blown away.

SPOILER ALERT

Also: only seen it once, but the exposition-heavy opening scene makes infinitely more sense from an artistic perspective once you understand Leo’s character is trying to convince himself of the truth of what he’s saying as much as he is Ruffalo. Forgot/unable to explore it in the review, but this is a pretty well-written script, too.

Also, I’ve heard some people call it predictable (though they liked it anyway), but I don’t think it telegraphed its ending at all, really–it made sense in retrospect, and you knew something funny was going on, but not what. Then again, I am a credulous movie-goer.

Review here.

Anthony Hopkins is pretty awesome.

Again, I don’t have time to do get into this too far, but the review for Dear John‘s here.

My last job was at an independent bookstore. For a year and a half, I processed all our incoming used books. The last year I was there, I handled both the new and the used. Nicholas Sparks novels passed through my hands about fifteen million fucking times, and every one of them looked fucking stupid.

Dear John was slightly less stupid than I expected, mostly because it subverted my expectations for their romance. I can pretty well guess if I tried to read one of Sparks’ books I would need to be hospitalized for severe paper-related hand trauma after trying to tear it into its component atoms. But my overall take on him has been revised upwards from “execrable” to “dopey.”