Midlife crisis may be the strangest kid’s movie sell since the The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas tackled adult date life. But giving the friendly ogre an It’s a Wonderful Life experience provides his most inspired adventure. Making a corrupt deal with Rumplestiltskin that shows him the land of Far Far Away had he never […]
Mark Palermo
Posted inArts + Music
The Back-up Plan is too cute
It’s nice to see a born star like Jennifer Lopez back in a movie, even if it’s a movie like The Back-Up Plan. As New York pet store owner Zoe, a stagnant love life and biological pressure leads her to become artificially inseminated, only to fall for the right guy later that day (that’s just […]
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Kick-Ass is an empty comic parody
It’s possible for attitude to be at the expense of context and recognizable behaviour. Kick-Ass is a not-quite-there filtration of Daredevil, Mystery Men and the first Spider-Man (just given less genuine personality and more graphic and racist content). Peter Parker-style high school nerd Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) decides to reinvent himself as crime fighting superhero […]
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The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is skin-deep
The Swedish thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, based on the first novel in Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, strives to capture the serial killer grime-chic of Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs, with a twist. It’s contextualized through a culture operating on a hush-hush debasement of women. The movie is unfortunately only serious […]
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How to Train Your Dragon is a manual full of humour, heart and action
The moment where How to Train Your Dragon comes alive sounds obvious on paper. Young viking Hiccup, an outcast in his tribe for his sensitivity, finally has his chance to slay a dragon. It’s in the unspoken understanding as Hiccup’s and the dragon’s (later named Toothless) eyes connect that this 3D animated feature hits a […]
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Clash of the Titans a flash in the pan
Clash of the Titans’ trashy matinee aspirations make it easy to forgive its second-rate 3D, if not to stop finding it funny. It’s obvious this won’t match Avatar’s sensory rush when an early shot has baby Perseus’ head floating several visual planes closer to us than the rest of his body. Taken in its less […]
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Doodles of creativity found in Diary of a Wimpy Kid
Seventh grade is the worst, because nobody has the insight to be cool but everybody has a need to show off. Some of that feeling makes its way into Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Juggling experience (though I doubt many 12-year-olds in 2010 listen to “Whatta Man” and “Intergalactic”) with fantasy, this take on Jeff […]
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Repo Men repossesses its own message
Anybody who cared to know the facts about US health care debate wasn’t waiting to learn them from Repo Men. That’s why simple topicality isn’t good enough. In order to work as science fiction allegory, the movie needs satiric bite. A better movie would weigh the personal toll of corporate greed as a nightmarish comedy, […]
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Brooklyn’s Finest drops the gun
Brooklyn’s Finest looks like it wants be the ultimate modern day cop movie: Its three stories capture three angles of how duty is handled in the NYPD. In each, director Antoine Fuqua has his subjects struggle between morality and survival. Missing the operatic rhythms of Michael Mann’s Heat, Fuqua delivers something closer to the law […]
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Alice in Wonderland a disappointing trip down the rabbit hole
“All the best people are mad,” is a motto in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. But is Burton himself becoming too status quo? The unique blend of warmth and rebellion integral to Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Big Fish and Ed Wood makes way for an artist performing to stupid expectations. His Alice in Wonderland is merely […]
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Three strikes for She’s Out of My League
Perhaps the difference in physical “leagues” between Alice Eve and Jay Baruchel isn’t apparent because the movie is so cheaply lit, but it’s hard to see what’s making the other characters so stunned. The entire premise of She’s Out of My League is that she’s monumentally more attractive than him, when they’re both average pretty-good-looking […]
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Horrors delivered in Shutter Island
Especially in its middle-section, involving a search through a forbidden part of a mental ward and a rendezvous at a lighthouse, Shutter Island delivers the pulp excitement of digging too deep, crossing the point of no return in a dark mystery. Adapting Dennis Lehane’s novel into a homage of 1940s evoke-more-than-you-show thrillers, Martin Scorsese delivers […]