HollywoodIdiocy.com

When I first heard they were dusting off the old Matthew Broderick-Ally Sheedy movie WarGames and updating it for 2008, I was skeptical. The old film had been a fun thriller, but what with the mainstreaming of computer technology in the 25 years since the film’s debut, I just wasn’t sure they could carry off the same sort of “bumbling innocent” plot that had worked back when the tops in personal computer technology was either an Apple IIe or a Commodore 64, depending on your preference.

Happily, I was wrong. Not only has the concept been updated, it’s been brought to life by a solid post-September 11 re-conceptualization that makes the story more relevant than ever. War Games: The Dead Code takes place 25 years after the first film and JOSHUA is an historical footnote on diet pills. The hot new government super-computer is a piece of AI run amok known as Ripley (nice Aliens reference), who identifies terrorist cells by luring them with a big cash-for-play internet videogame that supposedly assesses terrorist skills and knowledge.

Basically, if you win at the Ripley war game, you are marked as a “person of interest” in bio-terrorism and the government comes after you, big time, guns blazing. Yikes! Yeah, that’s what Osama bin Laden and his cronies do all day when they’re not flying airplanes into skyscrapers … they’re playing videogames on the Internet. Right.

Despite the rather ridiculous presupposition of terrorist pastimes, the rest of the movie holds together rather well as a thriller; despite a PG-13 rating, however, parents should be warned that the language in this movie is nowhere near as clean-cut as its 1983 predecessor, which is a disappointment. Next thing you know, they’ll remake Short Circuit as a sexbot.

Matt Lanter of HEROES fame plays the lead role, while Amanda Walsh is his chess-club counterpart; neither seem destined to outshine Broderick-Sheedy, but stranger things have happened and both turn in solid performances and both are definitely better actors at this point in their careers than then-newcomers Broderick and Sheedy were at that time.

The extras are pleasant and in the end, War Games: The Dead Code delivers the goods well enough to say that it didn’t embarrass the legacy of its predecessor; however, aside from being a bit dated, the original is still the superior film and contains far less profanity, making it better family viewing than the remake.

Given its G rating, I wasn’t sure what to expect from Disney’s College Road Trip, but I was relatively confident that, at the very least, there’d be nothing offensive language-wise. On that count, I was correct and so the Martin Lawrence-Raven Symone father-daughter comedy was a welcome respite from the “unrated edition” stuff I usually wade through.

Despite being a Disney comedy, the film is not without some quirkiness; the most notable example is Lawrence’s obsession in the first half of the film with his son’s pet pig, which he claims is “eyeballing me.” The subplot shows promise for some genuine weirdness that I won’t spoil in the scope of this review, but then is dropped completely from the second half of the film with no real payoff on the idea.

Of course, the focus of the film is the father-daughter relationship, not the father-pig relationship; and despite the film being littered with promotional products and embedded advertising, the movie is enjoyable – if you’re a member of the younger set.

While a great “whole family” film, the comedy is a bit over the top for older audiences, and even the teen crowd that Symone’s character is part of would have a hard time swallowing the schmaltzy story being told. Still, better a bunch of sloppy sentiments about kids growing up and away from their parents than, saw, delving into the repetitive world of the Saw movie franchise, right? A person can only tolerate so much of that.

The conflict is a rather simple one; dad wants daughter to go to a college close to home and daughter, naturally, wants to go to a “much better school” halfway across the country. The action is livened up by a rare appearance by Donny Osmund, of all people, who submits an enjoyable performance as a Ned Flanders type.

By featuring Symone, who is anything but the typical emaciated Hollywood starlet that Miley Cyrus represents, the film offers an appealing protagonist who won’t make young kids feel quite so inadequate. Still, the bottom line here is that the film is funny in places, but probably in a way that will embarrass older kids, while younger kids will enjoy it quite a bit. As for the adults, well … anything’s better than the 500th viewing of The Parent Trap, right? Either version.

Even in its second week of release, The Dark Knight, the follow-up to 2005’s Batman Begins, is still high atop the weekend box office with a grand total of over $75 million in receipts domestically. The movie broke the record for opening weekend last week, and by Friday had broken the record for quickest movie to reach the $300 million mark.

The Dark Knight sits at approximately $314 million in domestic ticket sales after 10 days of release, and with foreign markets added in, that total jumps to $355 million. That places The Dark Knight well ahead of SpiderMan 3’s pace, and has some in Hollywood even whispering about eclipsing Titanic’s final total before it’s all done.

That might be a bit premature after only two weeks, but the film is certainly valued far above Tahitian pearls at this point, and is well on its way to becoming the most successful superhero movie of all time. That’s due in large part to Chris Nolan’s continued sober treatment of the Batman character; whereas Batman Begins felt like a James Bond film, The Dark Knight has more of a feel akin to Scarface, The Untouchables, or perhaps a James Patterson thriller.

In other words, Batman doesn’t feel like a “superhero” movie so much as it feels like a solid crime thriller; the gangsters in the film are not bumbling fools that the Joker rules over, but are hardcore, ruthless criminals who might have stepped out of the set of Oz or The Sopranos, rather than a comic book adaptation, and The Joker is genuinely at risk to the lowlifes he’s seeking to control, staying atop only by being just a bit more bloodthirsty and less predictable than they are.

But enough with the love-fest for The Dark Knight; two new movies made their mark this weekend as well. The Will Ferrell comedy Step Brothers notched a solid $30 million to take second place, and Mamma Mia!, the smart counter-programming film to The Dark Knight, held onto third place with a respectable $17.8 million.

The surprise of the weekend was the poor performance of the very-well-done X-Files movie, I Want To Believe, which barely squeezed $10.2 million out of the weekend. Of course, being nearly six years removed from the TV show’s final bow, and almost a decade since the franchise’s last big-screen appearance, didn’t help. The film has been well-received by reviewers, but perhaps the biggest reason the film has stumbled is that it pursues a very similar demographic to that of The Dark Knight, and was released only one week following The Dark Knight’s debut; Fox would have been wise to push X-Files: I Want to Believe back into August, to get more breathing room from what most of Hollywood knew would be a monster hit in the form of The Dark Knight.

If Fox doesn’t stop believing in the X-Files film, though, it could become one of those long-run quiet hits that never really has a huge weekend, but does solid business for a long time as folks get other films ticked off on their must-see lists, and start searching for those quieter films they missed when concentrating on The Dark Knight and other top hit movies.

Next week brings the last huge “box office blockbuster” of the summer, the long-delayed Mummy sequel, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emporer. Identical demographics to The Dark Knight’s audience spell trouble for that one, too, I’m afriad. Swing Vote isn’t expected to make a big splash either, and August is a wasteland of quiet films, so The Dark Knight could have a good, long run and X-Files: I Want To Beleive could easily bounce back, given the chance, over the next five or six weeks.

Step Into Liquid is the sort of Blu-Ray DVD that only has two levels of appeal; first, as a niche title appealing to a small but devoted demographic, and second, as a showcase for the wonders of 1080p high-definition format media. Watch the film on standard definition and it’s nowhere nearly as impressive on a visual scale, although the cinematography is quite nice throughout.

Step Into Liquid is a mix of documentary and pro-surfing propaganda, since 90 percent of those interviewed seem on a mission to convert everyone within earshot into a devotee of surfing while somehow, by and large, still maintaining a somewhat elitist tone. That’s a feat.

In the annuls of the Cold War, one of the most honest moments that led to a breakthrough in diplomacy is when pro-military strength Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan sat down opposite Mikhail Gorbachev and said, without blinking, “Here is why we don’t trust you.”

In similar fashion, while at times a great and thrilling testament to the sport of surfing, Step Into Liquid allows those it interviews to go off on elitist rants about the wonders of surfing, how surfers are so misunderstood and how only surfers “get” surfing. As such, Step Into Liquid stands as Exhibit A when this reviewer sits down opposite a surfing devotee and tell them, “Here’s why we think you’re an elitist snob.”

The movie gets a bit surreal as one moment, you have a seemingly down-to-earth guy like X-Files creator Chris Carter talking cogently about how surfers get wrongly portrayed as flakes, followed up by a nameless surfing elitist who then goes on a flakey rant about how maybe if we all just surfed a couple hours a day, there would be no wars. Way to undercut the flakiness charge, there, guys!

Still, there are some high points to the movie, like the five minutes or so spent on the Great Lakes surfing community in Wisconsin – something new I’d never been aware of before. Or how there was a real-life Gidget who the 1950s surfing movies were based on, and who is still an active surfer today, even though she needs more wrinkle creams than ice creams these days.

If someone is big into surfing and doesn’t mind some pro-surfing proselytizing, Step Into Liquid should be of some interest. However, after seeing it once to show off some of the details visible at 1080p that other lower-def screens just can’t achieve, I can’t imagine this being a long-term part of very many people’s Blu-Ray libraries. Unless, of course, as I said before, they are surfers.

No, you’re not in a time warp reading about a Jessica Alba sequel that won’t be made until 2012 (if ever). You see, The Eye may be familiar to US audiences as an Alba vehicle, but over in Korea, hot-shot Asian directors The Pang Brothers have already turned the movie into a somewhat successful series, of which The Eye 3 is only the most recent installment.

While the Pang Brothers’ version of The Eye and its American remake are similar, The Eye 3 may lead some viewers unfamiliar with the Korean original films a bit disoriented. By the third movie, gone is the concept of seeing ghosts because of a corneal transplant (The Eye) or because you attempted suicide while pregnant (The Eye 2), and instead, it is merely the challenge of getting to see the dead that drives the series forward.

Much like The Blair Witch Project 2: Book of Shadows, the action of The Eye 3 focuses on a group of college students who, one somewhat inebriated night, decide they want to see ghosts. One of them has a list of methods, which includes corneal transplants and the suicide-while-pregnant thing, as a bow and a nod to the first two films, but then start listing odder methods that are less drastic, like banging chopsticks on noodle bowls to get the “hungry ghosts” to come out and play.

Of course, there are risks in seeking out the undead, and it goes well beyond the one drunken night, as these foolish kids soon learn. You can guess at how the plot unfolds from there, because spoilers end now on this one.

To be honest, the third movie is already beginning to stretch the core concept to the point of no return and personally, I felt The Eye 3 jumped the shark a bit; what’s next, being able to see ghosts via the use of a Canon Powershot? Wait, no… that’s Fatal Frame. Kinda.

Played for more comedy than the previous installments, The Eye 3 his some fun, mind-bending moments, but is scarce on the genuine chills. Although it delivers a PG-13-level thriller as the previous two installments did, this one just falls flat, and the special features are minimal, although there are English subtitles, thankfully, to help those of us who don’t speak Korean.

Jessica Alba is the main reason most people will give The Eye a try, but the big secret of the movie is that it’s actually not that bad as a suspense-horror-thriller, either. An American remake of the 2002 original by the Pang Brothers, The Eye casts Alba as a blind violinist who has a chance to see again by undergoing a double corneal transplant.

The operation is an apparent success as Sydney (Alba) slowly learns to see again, her vision initially fuzzy and untrustworthy. She begins to see some things she thinks should not be there, although she is reassured by everyone that it’s all normal and part of her adjustment. But is it normal to see the spirits that reap souls from the land of the living to the land of the dead? Or is Sydney just paranoid and confusing dreams with reality.

It’s an intriguing premise that’s not unlike a handful of other horror stories where a transplant recipient of one sort or another have trouble when they find out the organ they received came from a criminal or a crime victim or some such thing. The core concept dates back at least as far as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with The Eye simply being the latest variation on that general theme.

One of The Eye’s cinematic forebears is Blink, which starred Madeline Stowe as a very similar character in a similar plot; however, that movie went off in a different direction, so you won’t confuse the two by the time it’s all done. Fans of the Pang Brothers will be pleased to note that American directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud maintain some of the style of the original Asian film, including a cameo by the “report card boy,” who has appeared in all three installments of The Eye directed by the Pang Brothers.

With virtually identical special features on Blu-Ray and standard DVD, The Eye is a rare commodity in today’s world of “unrated special editions.” It is a genuine PG-13 thriller that maintains a sense of suspense and horror without resorting to “director’s cut” excesses that amount to nothing more than a couple seconds more nudity, a few more cuss words and other needless toys; fortunately, The Eye delivers its spookiness without relying on offensive excesses.

Ever since his debut in the well-received Napoleon Dynamite, comic actor Jon Heder has been stuck in a series of low-budget comedies playing, essentially, the same slacker-loser-nerd character. Mama’s Boy isn’t the movie that is going to change Heder’s typecast career, but it is a movie with a bit more heart to it than some of the pale imitators that followed in the wake of Napoleon Dynamite.

This time out, Heder plays Jeffrey Mannus, a slacker-loser-nerd who, at 29, still lives with his mother and window-shops men’s jewelry. Heder knows his set up is sweet, but when his mother meets a motivational speaker who starts courting his mother, Jeffrey feels his set-up is threatened and begins to engage in the movie-world-typical war of undermining his mom’s suitor in ways that just never happen in real life. And of course, motivational speaker Mert responds in kind.

At this point there were two ways the movie could go; it could really ramp up the undermining hijinks of Jeffrey and Mert, pulling the movie in a Farrelly Brothers direction, and leaving any sense of real humanity behind for the rest of the film, or it could show some character growth. Unexpectedly, Mama’s Boy chooses the road less traveled: character growth.

This growth is, in part, sparked by the relationship Jeffrey suddenly finds himself forming with Nora, an anti-establishment singer-songwriter whose work is a bit over the top and ridiculous; yet the script ignores this and takes her career aspirations seriously in another atypical move for a Hollywood movie.

It’s as though Mama’s Boy is the result of a collaboration between two completely different writers; one, a Farrally Brothers wannabe and the other striving to be the next William Goldman. The result is a watchable movie that, although enjoyable, seems to be suffering from a greater identity crisis than its main character.

Does Mama’s Boy want to be a rolling-in-the-aisles gross-out comedy? Then its script is far too humane and takes its characters too seriously. Does Mama’s Boy want to be more of a thoughtful comedy-slash-social commentary? Then why have Anna Farris perform songs that wouldn’t even be good enough to get her in to be ridiculed by Simon, Randy and Paula?

The movie is pleasant enough in a quiet kind of way, but lacks the punch to be either one type of movie or another. The end result’s middle-of-the-road approach leaves the viewer feeling like it’s a cinematic experience that never fully realized its potential.

Al Pacino and Colin Farrell star in this Blu-Ray release of The Recruit, a spy-in-training suspense film that is supposed to be about mind games. Farrell comports himself quite well in the role, managing to come off as more innocent and naïve than he has in most of his films. He plays a CIA recruit who is singled out by Al Pacino’s character for induction into the Agency.

The film makes good use of the talents of its two-star cast and gives them more screen time with each other than with anyone else. Unfortunately, the film is held back from being as shocking as it might otherwise be by two important elements.

The first element is that the script is a fairly by-the-numbers suspense flick that telegraphs its punches and never really keeps you guessing. Predictability is one of the seven deadly sins, right? Eh, maybe not, but it ought to be, at least in Hollywood.

The other element holding the film back is the filmic legacy of Pacino; when the time comes for various plot twists involving his character, it’s hard to be too shocked because of the acting legacy Pacino brings to any film he appears in, especially a film using him to “play to type,” rather than countering his established image.

The film is not without its merits; Bridget Moynahan appears and is effective in her role as a fellow recruit, but her character Layla is flat and uninspired despite the on-screen chemistry she pulls off with Farrell. While the film takes us through its mind-game paces, creative uses for shower faucets are among the many forms of mind-breaking that James Clayton (Farrell) faces. But I don’t want to spoil too much of the plot.

Although its pedestrian script holds the film back from being truly watchable, it’s also not unwatchable. In other words, the film is worth seeing once, but perhaps not quite worth owning; a better example of the genre is the film currently in theatres, Wanted, starring Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman. The Recruit is OK, but it’s not one you’ll want to go out of your way to see, unless you’re a devoted fan of either Farrell or Pacino.

There is a solid audience for Oprah Winfrey-produced films, and I realize Mitch Albom has a following thanks to his early works like The Five People You Meet In Heaven and Tuesdays With Morrie. However, even among folks who normally like this sort of thing, including my wife, Mitch Albom’s For One More Day is both annoying and snooze-inducing. In fact, I dozed lightly a couple times watching it and my wife almost needed GPS tracking to lure me back to the land of the wide awake.

The story revolves around a washed up baseball player who has screwed up his life and his relationship with his family so badly, he’s at the verge of committing suicide; but just as he is about to pull the trigger, he sees his mother, nine years dead, looking on from the other side of a Little League diamond.

As the title predicts, he gets to spend “one more day” with his mom, who takes him on a sort of “Ghost of Christmas Past” journey of his life, ala “A Christmas Carol,” to see what an utter piece of doo-doo he’d been to his mom throughout his life, because he was so eager to please his emotionally distant dad.

The cast offers little to speak of in the way of allure. Ellyn Burstyn is the biggest name in the cast, although 1980s starlet Samantha Mathis, made mildly famous in the movie Dream A Little Dream, suddenly re-emerges from obscurity to play a younger, early-40s version of this guy’s mom.

While Albom has mixed sentimentality well in the past, and the book may be more effective, the movie is plodding and ponderous and about as riveting as watching paint dry. Also, I just don’t follow the logic of the movie; his mom’s ghost is there to convince him not to kill himself, and does this by … showing him what an ass he’s been all these years? Way to motivate a fellow that life’s worth living, huh?

The DVD is short on extras, but it’s not the sort of film most folks will want to spend extra time with. If you’re an Albom fan, I’d say pick up his novels and start reading, or if you must see Albom’s work on film, rent Tuesdays With Morrie instead. For One More Day is, for this reviewer, one day too many.

The roadmap for the filmed fate of Harry Potter and his Hogwarts cohorts is finally laid out. The sixth film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, will make its debut this winter, November 21, 2008. With all the principals signed to finish out the series, the winter release is expected to be a big hit as Harry Potter films released in the winter holiday season always tend to do better than those released in the summer season.

The plans for the final book are a bit more complex in its translation to the silver screen. First, the book will be divided into two films, rather than compressed into one. That’s because producers felt too much of the final book was vital, so rather than cutting content, they chose to make Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows into a four-hour, two-part event.

Deathly Hollows Part 1 will release two years after Half-Blood Prince, on November 19, 2010. Part 2, however, will be released far more quickly, as the two films will be shot at the same time. Part 2 will release only about six or seven months later, sometime in the Summer 2011 season.

The extra passage of time between Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows parts 1 and 2 is disappointed, as it will allow actors Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emily Watson to continue to out-age their roles; with all the books now out, it would have been nice to see the production schedule moved up so that Deathly Hallows fell on November 2009, rather than November 2010.

Time will tell if this is a good judgment call on the studio’s part or if someone should have invested in a speaker mount into the Warner Brothers executive office buildings to shout some sense into them.

British drama has always been a bit slow paced with typical English reserve, and My Boy Jack, a BBC production, is no exception to that general rule. The tale revolves around Rudyard Kipling and his son, Jack, with the latter being portrayed by Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame. However, anyone picking up this film expecting anything like the action and adventure of, say, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will be bitterly disappointed. There is no magic, no cloak of invisibility, not even a laptop computer to be found; it is a straightforward historical drama. Sorry, kids.

David Haig portrays Rudyard, a full-on British patriot who happened to work for the War Office’s Propaganda Department as World War I broke out. Based on Haig’s stage play and screen adaptation, My Boy Jack tells the tale of how Kipling’s son, Jack, struggled to gain entry into the British military despite severe near-sightedness and then went missing in battle one day after his 18th birthday. The story effectively portrays the terrible human cost of war without betraying genuine patriotism the pro-War Kipling embodied.

As Jack’s mom Caroline, Kim Catrall of Sex and the City fame makes an appearance and skillfully disappears into her character, rather than standing out like a sore thumb among the otherwise all-British cast. Virtual unknown Carey Mulligan makes a good first impression in the role of Jack’s sister, Elsie.

The best thing that can be said about Radcliffe’s performance is that it stands resistant to Harry Potter comparisons; he captures the spirit of his character and immerses himself in it for the entire 90-minute running time. And although he is the actor most likely to be recognized on US shores, it is Haig’s performance as the great British author that steals the show. He portrays a broad range, from comedy to sorrow, almost exclusively with amazing reserve and understatement.

The main trouble, however, is with Haig’s script, which builds to a satisfying climax but even at just over 90 minutes, feels slow and drawn out. While this is in the classic tradition of British moviemaking, the pace may come off a bit too slow for some US audiences. Nevertheless, it is a noteworthy film that marks Radcliffe’s maturity as an actor outside of the Harry Potter franchise.

Nauseating, pretentious, self-important, annoying, holier-than-thou. All these words, unfortunately, aptly describe the excremental proceedings awaiting viewers unfortunate enough to rent or, horrors, buy the DVD known as the Crave Film Series. A series of three short films, all under 10 minutes long, comprise the thankfully-brief collection that seems packaged to be marketed specifically to only the most obnoxiously self-righteous and smug of Christian churches.

OK, perhaps I’m being a bit unfair. The films themselves, for as long as they last, are not necessarily terrible, although their brief running time reduces them to little more than character sketches than anything significant. All three films are unrelated to each other, nor do they even comprise an overall story arc; only the loose theme of “crave,” as in “craving human and spiritual connections,” binds the package together.

Still, “Midnight Clear,” “Pop Star” and “Nameless Moment” are, in and of themselves and taken alone, mildly inoffensive. Of these, “Nameless Moment” has probably the best twist ending, while “Pop Star” is the most effective character study. Had they all been collected together without additional material, the collection might barely be tolerable.

Unfortunately, each film is bookended by commentary courtesy of Erwin Raphael McManus, lead pastor of the Mosaic Church and founder of Awaken, a group of Christian artists, poets and the like. That is where the pain begins. Pain the likes of which might drive you to want to hang yourself with a theater rope.

Now, although I’m not the same brand of believer as McManus, I am a person of faith and, that being said, I could not discern one lick of coherent thought in McManus’ self-important, pretentious ramblings that rob any enjoyment the short subjects might otherwise have rendered the viewers.

A blend of artistic pretentions, pop psychology and pseudo-spirituality all go into the mix of McManus’ pointless ramblings, but taken as a whole, he came off more effective than a politician at streaming off an endless supply of words without communicating one iota of meaning or real content in the process. His segments are simultaneously hyper-intellectual while at the same time coming off as insulting, demeaning and superior.

Perhaps the real miscalculation is in balance; by offering up both an introduction and an afterword to each film, McManus’ undesirable presence and contributions nearly rival the films themselves in running time, which is probably what makes matters so painful to endure.

The whole experience comes off like a bad concert performance by a drunken pop star who rambles on for 10 minutes about what each three-minute ditty means to her as a protest of the Bush presidency, the Iraq war, global warming or whatever other pop-culture obsession Hollywood is embracing at the moment. Eventually, you are just itching to scream at them, “Shut up and sing!”

The same urge applies to the Crave Film Series DVD… you’ll be best served by watching only the films themselves and skipping McManus’ pretentious prattle. Believe me, by doing so you may just be saving yourself years of therapy bills.