Welcome to the Newsroom

Twists are cliché. So is calling them a double-edged sword, but that’s what they are. Anyone witness to recent horror flicks can attest to how a plot’s jumping the shark can drive one out of the movie theater, wishing the mind could have been wiped blank after the good stuff. But sometimes a twist is masterful, and can subvert the audience’s interpretation of everything they had seen before, changing every future re-viewing of a work while never matching that initial feeling of suspension and enthrallment. Like The Sixth Sense. Not like Hancock. Ever.

Crime Scenes and a Touch of Sunshine

There’s a lot of talk at the end of the year about Oscar-baiting. Epic films with dark themes and scenery-chewing performances abound; it’s a time for “serious” films about fresh concepts like the mentally challenged and the Holocaust, or the odd deifying biopic about a drug-addled, recently deceased musical icon.
Well, now there’s Sundance-baiting. The “quirky” films featuring no-name actors aside Hollywood giants moonlighting in miscast sagas about oddball misfit characters engaging in topsy-turvy meditations on life, relationships and art. Shit happens, indie songwriters jangle in the background, and everything ends on a quizzically upbeat, if not offbeat note. A great example? Little Miss Sunshine.

Seth Rogen – Laying Down the Law

Hundreds of students flooded Uris Auditorium Wednesday night for the sneak preview of Observe and Report anticipating some of the lovable Seth Rogen unfiltered and inappropriate humor. He did not disappoint. Any hopes of vulgarity, crudeness or indecency were fulfilled; as far as substance, meaning or refinement, not so much. Although the movie isn’t entirely overboard, as many students exiting the movie indicated, it absolutely crosses the line on so many levels.
Sex, drugs and tasers — one thing is for sure about Observe and Report (the second mall cop movie of 2009) Ronnie Barhardt would kick Paul Blart’s roly-poly ass.

Fighting Evil … and Bad Filmmaking

Reasons to go see Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li:
1. Plot: The Legend of Chun-Li centers around a classically-trained, millionaire pianist who receives mysterious scrolls in another language by mail and decides to give up everything to aimlessly wander through a far-off, quite dangerous city for weeks searching for the scroll’s owner, knowing only their first (or possibly last) name.
2. Believability: The Legend of Chun-Li is the kind of movie where said classical pianist looks like Kristin Kreuk, with hair and makeup still fresh after two weeks of living on the street with almost no money and just the clothes on her back.

Watch Out — Watchmen Disappoints

Cult comic book nerds rejoice! The film rendition of your beloved Watchmen is at long last in theaters. Having been in development hell for over 20 years — suffering from a revolving door of directors, innumerable re-drafts and legal battles between studio backers — the 2009 Zach Synder-directed incarnation of Watchmen is finally upon us as the movie goes public. And to be honest, I would rather the film just go back to its dusty shelves, as Synder’s much-anticipated adaptation of the world’s most celebrated graphic novel is an insufferably interminable adaptation of the ’80s graphic stories, whose reverence for its origins suffocates nearly all the intriguing nuances of its parent novel.

Looking For A Little Cash, A Little Optimism

Life is hard. Making money is hard. Being on your own is hard. Recently, these messages have been ingrained into our brains from every media outlet and from all our friends that suddenly decided to forgo a financial career and take a stab at the LSATs. Therefore, it is difficult to sit through another movie that reiterates how depressing life can be without monetary resources. No wonder people willingly gravitated towards the dazzling, though excessively impractical, Slumdog Millionaire this past year for a fantastical escape.

Getting Wet and Wild

Who wouldn’t love to watch a movie about the sexual awakenings of 15-year-old girls, especially French girls that spend a good portion of the film frolicking in swimsuits (sometimes not even that) and kissing each other? Water Lilies may seem like the dream movie for every male pervert, but beneath the surface, this film is a frank coming of age study that is intimately relatable to the female viewer.

In the Mood for … Blood!

Boy, are they remaking every horror movie classic or what? First The Hills Have Eyes and its pointless sequel, then Rob Zombie’s (re)take on Halloween, then Prom Night (ugh), and Black Christmas (blarf) and now the unholy goalie Jason Voorhees gets the treatment. What next? Elm Street again? Last House on the Left? Wait they are remaking those? Really? Why? Why?!