Whether it be in an elevator, your reputation, or to a place you can go to "forget all your troubles and forget all your cares" regardless that it is the bank robbery capital of America, there certainly are a great deal of diverse films going down at the cinema this weekend.
About the only advice I can give to you regarding the new high school sex (minus the actual sex) comedy
Easy A is to see it, and see it as soon as possible. This is not just because the film is
really good, but because it is so good that in a months time it will have become so over saturated into popular culture that its presence will be inescapable. For every dozen or so stupid high school comedies that get released every few years there always happens to be one that somehow manages to slip through the cracks and stands out from the herd for being funnier, sassier, and especially smarter than than the rest. Much like
Juno and
Clueless that came before it, this film carries on that tradition.
Olive (Emma Stone) is all but invisible to her fellow students until one day she is overheard telling a lie to her best friend about the loss of her virginity. This causes her to be cast down even further amongst her female peers. Instead of correcting her newfound slutty image she boldly embraces it by wearing lingerie to class, and staging fake hook ups in exchange for gift cards. There are about million different ways this could have gone wrong, but it doesn't. It is fast paced, hilarious, and kinda charming. It helps to be blessed with a terrific cast, especially Ms. Stone who is so sharp and easy to admire. This film also might contain some of the best 'cool' adults ever seen on film with Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson as Olive's almost overly supportive parents, and Thomas Hayden Church is great as well as that one teacher you always wished you had. Easy A lives up to its title and passes with high marks.
After his stellar directorial debut with
Gone Baby Gone I had assumed that Director Ben Affleck's follow-up
The Town would be yet another Eastwood-esque gem. While it doesn't quite achieve that same caliber of greatness it is still a very well made thriller. Perhaps Michael Mann is the more true source of inspiration here considering it borrows heavily from films like
Heat and
Public Enemies.
The story is a pretty basic one involving a group of career criminals that perform bank and armored car jobs. During the film's opening heist a woman (Rebecca Hall) is taken hostage and quickly released, but when the group's hot headed wild card James (the amazing Jeremy Renner) becomes concerned that she might blab, the group's leader Doug (Affleck) decides to infiltrate her private life in order to find out what she knows and if she has been talking. In the natural order in films of this nature they end up falling for each other even though she is completely unaware and he is completely aware that he is her former kidnapper.
There are exciting and explosive shootouts and car chases, heavy dramatic turns, and great performances all around. Jon Hamm is given some of the best material as the overconfident FBI agent that you love to hate, and Chris Cooper makes a lasting impression in his five minutes of screen time. It may not crank the temperature up as high as Mann's classic, but it is perfectly acceptable to let Affleck's latest comeback steal a few hours of your time. Plus, when was the last time you got to see a group of nuns packing automatic machine guns?
Speaking of comebacks there are a number of viewers wondering if M. Night Shyamalan's latest writing experiment
Devil, which involves a group of strangers trapped in an elevator that are somehow getting bumped off one by one, might be a way for his career to get back on track.
A great deal of doubt obviously hangs heavy in the air, but as someone who just doesn't hate the poor guy I decided to step into this lift to find out for myself.
The good news is that the film is mercifully short. With a running time of only eighty minutes it gets right to the point, and doesn't waste a great deal of time. It also effectively kept me guessing which of these five strangers wasn't really human. Every time a different suspect is named the lights would go out and that suspect would be the next one dead. There are some decently creepy moments peppered throughout the film as well. The bad news is that each one of the characters is fairly unlikable and annoying, and after awhile I stopped caring who was going to make it out alive. It appears that in an attempt to regain his former greatness M. Night unwisely plagiarizes his own material (most notably
Signs) by declaring that perhaps all of these characters weren't brought together by pure coincidence, and that their fate is preordained. This even goes so far to include the cop trying to handle the situation from the security control booth. The final reveal is also something of a letdown.
This might have worked better as a
Twilight Zone episode and for all I know it already has. I actually happen to love paranoid "And Then There Were None" thrillers like
John Carpenter's The Thing and
Identity, but this just can't compare. As much as I wanted to have sympathy for this devil, I am sorry to say that for M. Night that this beelzedud might in fact have been a further step in the wrong direction. Take the stairs.
of the digital era with Facebook as Zuckerburg's Inquirer, his unwanted fortune as his Xanadu, and Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) as his Rosebud. It also happens to be the best film I've seen so far this year. :) A
's The Social Network is the "
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was a hoax, 
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biopic.
's The Social Network.
channel 
.
.
's Somewhere wins the top honor at the 
gushes. 
is somewhere laughing maniacally. 
.
is actually in this movie?
is now 
, instead of 
)? WERE YOU EVEN AWARE OF IT?
were originally meant to be one movie? Were You Even Aware of It?
in silhouette (the image is long, so keep moving right). I hope some of our readers are old enough to remember any of these besides Yogi Bear. 
. Who wouldn't want to watch Dwight working for 
is an example of how it is done right. The American is not. A movie is not a "thriller" if you know what is going to happen. 
. 
is probably the most un-obscurish of the bunch. My favorite (one to hate)? 
. Wasn't the first one punishment enough?
). Everybody knew 
was a dud at theaters, but 
?
is one of the saddest and most graphic documentaries I've ever seen. The setting is Taiji, Japan, which is the location of the cove where dolphins are easily rounded up by Japanese fishermen and either sold to aquariums or swim-with-dolphins-type businesses around the world or slaughtered for consumption. (Did you know that on average a bottlenose dolphin - like Flipper- only costs $150,000? That did not seem that expensive to me and I wondered why Paris Hilton, the animal lover, has never owned a dolphin.) Apparently, at the aquarium in Taiji, you can watch dolphins perform and eat dolphin meat at the same time. The mission of the documentarians is to film the actual slaughter, which takes place in a smaller cove outside of view from any public place in order to cause public outrage and potentially shut down the operation by the local fishermen.
