(”Take me, you greasy ethnic beast! Of course, if anyone finds out I’ll have to say it was rape.”)
Did anyone here think Twilight Saga: New Moon was going to be good? Of course not. The best thing you could say was that there’s less Cam Gigandet in this one. But realistic expectations aren’t the point, the point is to bathe in the delicious, delicious hate. Ahh, it feels so good in my gills.
“The Twilight Saga: New Moon” takes the tepid achievement of “Twilight” (1988), guts it, and leaves it for undead [That's wordplay, motherf-cker! Ebert represent! -Ed.]. You know you’re in trouble with a sequel when the word of mouth advises you to see the first movie twice instead. Obviously the characters all have. Long opening stretches of this film make utterly no sense unless you walk in knowing the first film, and hopefully both Stephanie Meyer novels, by heart. Edward and Bella spend murky moments glowering at each other and thinking, So, here we are again.
Bella: So…you’re a werewolf?
Jake: Last time I checked.
Bella: “Can’t you find a way to…just stop?
Jake (patiently): “It’s not a lifestyle choice, Bella.” -Roger Ebert
The minute I told friends I loved Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, they asked, “You mean because it’s good or because it’s a train wreck?”
The truth is, I don’t really know. Imagine The Wire as written by Shane Black. It rides the line between 
brilliant and brilliantly terrible so well, all I know is that I loved every minute of it and I couldn’t turn away*. Like rock n’ roll, there’s something about a movie being almost bad that makes it infinitely better.
Now, before I get to my wholehearted recommendation, (and a wholehearted recommendation is what this is, in case you wanted to save yourself the trouble of reading the rest), I feel I should first clarify that if the crowd at the screening I attended is at all representative, a lot of people will not like this movie. But I believe I can provide a handy guide to the type of person who will or won’t. I illustrate by way of a story: Last week for Halloween, I dressed in a giant penguin suit with a fake mustache, an outfit I thought was pretty self-explanatory. And yet, a significant number of people came up to me throughout the night to ask, “What are you supposed to be?”
(Prayin’/and shootin’/and drinkin’/and prayin’…)
I feel bad that I always piss off half the people that read this when I rip on Boondock Saints, but the sad truth of the matter is that movie chugs cornhole lint. The sequel is out this weekend (you can see the first five minutes of it here), and that means the first reviews are starting to hit the web. Yay, time to pile on!
This comes across less like “Taxi Driver,” and more like what Travis Bickle might have made if someone gave him a camera. It can be ugly. There’s a vaguely racist subtext to the films, with derogatory phrases used for blacks in the first installment and for Hispanics in the second. Cloaking vigilante justice (not to mention casual racism and homophobia) in religion eventually turns “Boondock Saints” from merely a bad movie to a distasteful one. -Jake Coyle for the AP
Connor, Murphy and their affectionately dubbed “greasy spic” kill wops with the help of Special Agent Bloom (Julie Benz). Together, they aim to settle a score that goes back to the “Saints”’ father (Billy Connolly), who made the mistake of trusting an Eye-talian (Peter Fonda, no less). But seriously, in case you missed the part where Murphy says—in Spanish no less—that Romeo is “with us,” never fear: beaners are all right in the boys’ book. -NY Press
The Boston Phoenix’s review begins and ends with the same line: This is bullsh-t.
(Hot chicks dykin’ out? Hell yeah, now it’s a wild rumpus.)
Where the Wild Things Are is one of the weirder mainstream movies I’ve ever seen. The pacing is… off. It drags in spots. You’re not sure where it’s going, it feels like an imprecise parable, and it’s full of non-sequitirs. But in a way, it’s a perfect adaptation of the book — a book which is only ten sentences long and, if you read it as adult, isn’t even that well written. But there’s something strange and fantastic about it that it’s stuck with so many of us as a pleasant feeling well into adulthood, like an awesome dream you can’t fully articulate and doesn’t make sense after you wake up. Like the memory of reading the book for the first time, much of WTWTA is like being trapped in the mind of a 10-year-old, but it’s more like the 10-year-old you remember being, rather than the idiot 10-year-old Michael Bay makes movies for.
Jew Zombie Killers Can’t Hump: A Zombieland Review
Zombieland is a road movie about two of the last survivors of the zombie plague, who don’t really have anywhere to go. They’re instead driven by their desires: Woody Harrelson’s “Tallahassee” a desire to find the last Twinkies on Earth, and Jesse Eisenberg’s “Columbus” to finally kiss a girl. It’s a sort of funny premise for a sort of funny movie. A movie that turns out to be a lot like the Twinkie — tasty enough, but provides little nutritional value, and after you’re done you feel kind of dirty. It’s pleasant going down*, but you get the sense that the whole thing was ultra processed, created using proven science formulas to manipulate the consumer’s senses in a specific way. Crap, this is a really good analogy, someone call USA Today.
