Director David Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves very nearly meet the impossible demands of wrapping up the past decade’s most successful film series, resolving character and story arcs while serving up the requisite action. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) continue to search out and destroy the pieces of Voldemort’s (Ralph […]
Empire 8 Park Lane
Posted inArts + Music
Horrible Bosses not bad at all
The creators of this comedy are so enamoured of their premise that they almost forget to convert their slick concept into actual entertainment. A sluggish half-hour is dedicated to the setup, as financial guy Nick (Jason Bateman), chemical company middle manager Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) and dental assistant Dale (Charlie Day) decide to murder the work […]
Posted inArts + Music
The Tree of Life podcast
Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life has been critically adored, though its left many scratching their heads. It’s a wildly ambitious film with a fractured narrative and many unexplained images. It’s also beautiful, compelling and emotional. (Click here to see Matt Semansky’s original review.) On this podcast The Coast film writers try to get to […]
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Stinky Zookeeper
For reasons unbeknownst to me, director Frank Coraci and a slew of writers birthed Zookeeper. Dumped by his bombshell GF (Leslie Bibb), zookeeper Griffin (Kevin James) schemes to win her back half a decade later with the help of the chatty animals he cares for and his sexy colleague (Rosario Dawson), who harbours a crush […]
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Larry Crowne sweet, schmaltzy
Larry Crowne is very cute and very slight. Director Tom Hanks is also the titular Crowne, one of his typically effervescent-but-naive characters, a wageslave at the local big box suddenly downsized. His neighbour clues him into the possibility of adult education, so off he goes to community college, where the decades-younger students welcome him as […]
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Monte Carlo not worth the gamble
This female buddy flick with elements of chaste rom-com and coming-of-age conventions teeters to the edge of decent escapist entertainment but doesn’t quite make it over. Teen queen Selena Gomez stars as Grace, a recent high school grad from Texas who’s been saving the money from her waitressing job for a trip to Paris with […]
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Transformers 3 fails to excite
Mega-budget schlock director Michael Bay re-imagines the space race and historic moon landing not as products of a Cold War pissing contest, but rather a military mission to investigate the crash landing of an alien ship. That’s the lone decent idea in this otherwise formulaic and tedious sequel, which once again finds the good-guy extraterrestrial […]
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Reviewer unmoved by Cars 2
Pixar’s run of quality animated movies is stellar, with the first Cars the exception proving the rule: It looked good, but was hollow as a wheel-well. The sequel exists only because the merch haul of the first one was so large, and somehow it manages to be slicker, more action-packed, and even less moving. Its […]
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Bad Teacher barely passes
Jake Kasdan’s comedy is a series of disjointed gags and one-liners without a satisfying through-line, intermittently amusing but ultimately unsatisfying. Cameron Diaz plays the unprofessional educator, Elizabeth, whose teaching repertoire consists of R-rated movies and whose life ambition amounts to finding a sugar daddy. Spotting a candidate for that role in a wealthy colleague (Justin […]
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The Tree of Life about nature versus grace
Terrence Malick’s movies are more poetry than prose, tethered to conventions like plot and character by only the thinnest of connective strands. So it is in The Tree of Life, which is in one sense about a man (Sean Penn) recalling the grief, anger and joy of a childhood ruled by a loving but stern […]
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Perfunctory Mr Popper’s Penguins
Jim Carrey does his best impression of a manic businessman turned penguin-hoarder for an hour and a half. Mike Waters (Ghosts of Girlfriends Past) alters a classic children’s novel beyond recognition: As Mr. Popper, Carrey winterizes his swanky Manhattan apartment for Antarctic waterfowl bequeathed to him by his absentee father, attempts to reignite a broken-up […]
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Green Lantern provides comic relief
It’s hard to take this shade of green seriously. Martin Campbell’s (Casino Royale) adaptation of the DC comic establishes the universal battle between the yellow power of “fear” and the green power of “will.” Unfortunately, this “info-dump” happens twice: first for the audience, then again for pilot turned superhero Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds). We get […]