malojmovies

• Genre: Drama
• Duration: 1 hr. 57 min.
• Starring: Claire Danes, Glenn Close, Meryl Streep, Natasha Richardson, Toni Collette,
• Director: Lajos Koltai
• Producer: Jeff Sharp, John Hart
• Distributor: Focus Features
• Release Date: June 29, 2007 (limited)
• Writer: Susan Minot and Michael Cunningham based on novel by Susan Minot.

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Evening is a movie that’s full of sap. Like a tree. As in The Notebook but without all the action (seriously). So while this may be a great movie for mothers and daughters it was definitely not a great movie for me. It was a movie that was tiresome; attempting to evoke an emotional level that was nowhere near earned.

This is a story shown in two eras, with flashbacks used to bridge the gap between past and present. Ann (Vanessa Redgrave) is ill and bed-ridden; her two daughters (played by Toni Collette and her real daughter Natasha Richardson) stay by her side out of love and concern. That’s the present day scenario. She’s remembering back to a time in the 50’s, Claire Danes portrays her then. She was a young and lovely singer in those days. The scenes from the past all revolve around a wedding weekend in Rhode Island. Danes plays Mamie Gummer’s best friend (who is Meryl Streep’s real life daughter). Mamie is conflicted and in love with another man on the eve of her wedding. Sorry to get so involved with the cast and plotline, but it’s a large ensemble piece and to get an idea of whether you’ll like this it’s best that you have all the facts. Just one more and we’re off, Ann (Danes) is embarking upon a love affair of her own.

As far as the two eras go, the scenes from the past are much more palatable. The present day scenes involve a woman who can’t get out of bed. While I’ve been a part of these vigils I don’t think there is much that’s entertaining or enlightening about them. Especially given the fact that only three people have any interaction during these, and one of them is suffering from dementia. Ann weaves a convoluted tale (the scenes from the past) that doesn’t do much to progress the story. If it’s not the slightest bit interesting than why does half the film choose to revel in it? Because it’s based on a novel, so there was no choice.

Therein lays the problem with the adaptation as a whole. I’ve heard that the book had to be dramatically slashed in order to fit into a screenplay, but all that depth lost must have hurt this one. This is the main reason that when the time for tears comes most people will laugh instead. Evening wants to tug at your heartstrings, but it’s so shallow and transparent that it only tugs at your “I’m annoyed” strings.

I know for a fact that most women will like this more than most men. It was easy to gauge that in the movie, and in the time since I’ve seen it I’ve talked to a few women who appreciated it much more than I did. But I don’t think it’s a date movie (not enough laughs) and it won’t have enough activity to be considered a family movie either. All in all the best release date for this would have been Mother’s Day, but that ship has sailed. Sensitive types who don’t want to think too much should head out to this. The rest of us should stick with the fun stuff.

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• Genre: Comedy / Fantasy
• Duration: 1 hr. 35 min.
• Starring: John Goodman, Lauren Graham, Molly Shannon, Morgan Freeman, Steve Carell,
• Director: Tom Shadyac
• Producer: Michael Bostick, Neal H. Moritz, Roger Birnbaum, Steve Carell, Tom Shadyac
• Distributor: Universal Pictures
• Release Date: June 22, 2007
• Writer: Alec Sokolow, Josh Stolberg, Steve Oedekerk based on characters by Steve Koren and Mark O’Keefe

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Odd to see a character that was just a one-note bit part get his own movie, but Steve Carell (Little Miss Sunshine, Over the Hedge) continues playing the quirky newscaster from Bruce Almighty, oh, for about a couple of minutes.  The filmmakers immediately take Evan out of the newsroom and into congress, which also takes him out of Buffalo and into the suburbs of northern Virginia, then gives him a wife, Joan (Graham,  The Pacifier), and three young boys.  Other than Carell, the only returning player is that of God himself, once again played by Morgan Freeman (The Contract, 10 Items or Less), now asking Evan to build an ark, exactly as Noah had done in the Bible.  Trouble is, it’s hard to hide an ark so large that it will fit two of every animal on Earth, which draws the eye of the media, and makes his work in Congress all the more tense.  Even his appearance begins drastically changing, as he can no longer control the rapid growth of facial hair into a full beard, while he wears an olden robe that truly does make him look like a Biblical caricature.  If the rains don’t come, it will be the end of his career, and his family’s respect, for sure.

You don’t need to see Bruce Almighty to watch Evan Almighty, as it basically ignores its predecessor’s storyline almost from frame one.  Basically, it’s just a modern-day story of Noah, done in farcical form, with the protagonist embarrassing himself and his family because he believes he really is commissioned by God to build an ark and save the planet (presumably, by destroying it).  It’s also, underneath the silliness, a metaphor of the Hurricane Katrina debacle on the part of governmental agencies, although so simplistically executed, this commentary may go by unnoticed by the masses just looking for a few good yuks.

The problems with Evan Almighty are many, but the real liability is the fact that it makes little sense even within its peculiar, offbeat world.  For instance, no one seems to believe for even an instant that there is anything to Evan’s story about God telling him to build an ark.  We’re talking about a nation that, in real life, has seen people traveling from all over the country to see the image of the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast.  It’s also rural Virginia — not exactly the hotbed of Atheism.  OK, so most Christians and Jews would readily disbelieve anyone who claimed to be told by God to do anything as monumental as building an ark, but when you see mass migrations of birds not indigenous to the area following Evan around, there has to be a moment where even an agnostic would pause to think, "What if he’s telling the truth?"  The appearance of polar bears  in the South should a a tip-off that something more than mundane is going on.  However, people see these crazy events happening before their eyes and still can’t seem to make the connection that something else is at work in Evan’s world.

It’s also not strong on laughs.  Unless you’re one of those people that is taken completely by surprise when you see a flock of birds in a film and they end up pooping on someone, usually as the punctuation to a scene to embarrass or get revenge, this is scraping mighty low in the gag department to turn this into a comedy.  Then there are gags about Evan sporting a beard, which aren’t even a tenth as funny as similar quips against one of the roommates in the infinitely funnier Knocked Up.  The remainder of the sight gags involve Evan hurting himself by building the ark, hammering his fingers, rolling onto his ass, and falling off of every height more than a foot off of the ground.  Jim Carrey might have made some of this physical humor a bit more tolerable, but then, he’d also be encroaching on territory already explored, in the animal-loving farce, Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, coincidentally, also written by Steve Oedekerk (Barnyard, Kung Pow).  Carell is the kind of comedian that is funny mostly because he plays everything so straight sometimes, but is just not the same kind of comedic actor, and they rarely play to his strengths in this film.  At least he is given a more interesting role than Lauren Graham, who, as Evan’s wife, does little but constantly tell him what he is doing is madness and to stop immediately because it is embarrassing her and the kids.

God is essentially having Evan make good on his promise of saving the world, which his actions, environmentally dubious (he drives a Hummer), keep going against.  It’s hard to talk about the ending without it being considered a bit of a spoiler, but another nonsensical aspect of the film is that there appears to have been no reason for Evan to do all that he does in the film.  Here’s a big question I had: why does God have all of the animals of the world get in the ark if he isn’t going to flood the entire world?  Surely the camels of the Middle East need not make the trip if they are going to be unaffected, right? I suppose the makers of the film had painted themselves into a corner with that one, as anyone who has read the Bible could tell you that God had made a covenant with man that he would never again flood the world (as symbolized by rainbows).  At least that still holds true in this film, but barely.

After watching this film, I come to the conclusion that the entire exercise from God’s point of view shows how bored he is.  Showing up Evan by making him a mockery in front of his family, friends, and comrades gives him a good laugh at his expense, although I suppose it does announce to the world as to his existence if he makes good on his flood promise.  Sadly, I expect more out of God, who I would think would have a flair for the dramatic, if he’s going to choose a two-bit politician who has his head up his ass to finally show the world he exists once and for all.  Certainly, with all of the crime, hunger, war, and death in the world, the saving of a quaint little valley in Virginia doesn’t smack of the sort of thing that should anger God enough to call him to immediate action.  Unless the message of the film is that God likes beautiful vistas much more than he does humankind.  Then again, with characters this obnoxious, who can blame him for trying to wipe them out?

I wasn’t a big fan of Bruce Almighty, so I went into Evan Almighty with strong reservations, wondering if they stood a chance to make the premise work without the talents of Jim Carrey.  Steve Carell is an undeniably funny guy, but not in that "carry a bad film to success" way that Carrey was able to do earlier in his career,  When you realize that Carell got more laughs in the miniscule amount of screen time he had in Bruce Almighty than he does in the 90 minutes he is in front of the camera for this sequel, that’s really all you need to know in terms of this film’s overall comedic quality.  The best thing you can say about it is that it isn’t out-and-out toxic, and it does have cute animals, with special effects that are fairly impressive (at a reported $175 million budget, it better look damned good).  However, despite His awesome powers, there is one miracle that God isn’t quite able to do, at least as evidenced by Evan Almighty, and that’s to make such a flimsy, half-realized premise funny.

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• Genre: Adventure, Comedy
• Duration: 1 hr. 25 min.
• Starring: Carmen Electra, David Carradine, Jennifer Coolidge, Kal Penn, Adam Campbell
• Director: Aaron Seltzer, Jason Friedberg
• Producer: Paul Schiff
• Distributor: 20th Century Fox
• Release Date: January 26, 2007
• Writer: Aaron Seltzer, Jason Friedberg

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There’s no question that with all the major sci-fi and fantasy franchise films floating around there’s also bound to be a solid spoof film worth of material out there to rib them. Such a movie would be full of witty jabs, playful parody and laugh-out-loud mockery. Unfortunately that movie hasn’t been made yet. The only effort made so far is Epic Movie, but it’s less a comedy and more the cinematic equivalent of peeing and missing the toilet by a good three feet.

Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer demonstrated a minimum aptitude for spoof comedy as two members of the six man committee that wrote Scary Movie. For some reason that compelled them to strike out on their own and the result was the appalling, embarrassing Date Movie. Lucky for them, America seems to like stupid and so the movie turned a profit. Likewise, Friedberg and Seltzer have turned their attention back to parody yet again and this latest attempt may be the worst yet.

Four “young” orphans find themselves desperate to escape their tragic lives. Peter (Adam Campell) is a misfit at the Mutant Academy of Arts and Sciences. Edward (Kal Penn) dares to dream of a world beyond his orphanage life where Nacho Libre serves up roadkill and snotty Doritos for lunch. Susan (Faune Chambers) gets thrown out of a plane full of snakes for complaining that Samuel L. Jackson is repetitive. Lucy (Jayme Mays) is the ward of a museum curator who leaves clues behind to lead her to safety after he is slain by a black albino.

Each of the orphans finds their way out through a golden ticket in a Willy chocolate bar. Arriving at Willy’s (Cripsin Glover) factory for what they hope will be a wonderful new life, they quickly discover that all he wants are their bodies. Human flesh is the secret ingredient to his magnificent candies and he’s fresh out of stock. On the run yet again, the four orphans hide in a wardrobe they discover in Willy’s house. The wardrobe turns out to be a gateway to the magical world of Gnarnia.

Up to that point most of the story is piece-mealed together from other movies and the cameo moments from those films had me grinning from time to time. For example, I actually laughed out loud as Lucy was trying to escape from the museum. She shines her black light on the painting of the Mona Lisa revealing the cryptic message “So lame the hair of Tom”. She checks the next painting to find a perfect rendering of that bizarre hair-do that Hanks sported in The DaVinci Code. If the whole movie had been at least that clever there may have been some hope for it, but once the children arrive in Gnarnia it becomes one long chain of tired, boring and mostly vulgar gags.

Gnarnia is ruled by the cold-hearted White Bitch (Jennifer Coolidge). Friedberg and Seltzer must have been laughing to the point of wetting themselves when they thought up that one because it gets tossed around so many trite ways. She lives in a White Castle (cue the inevitable Kal Penn / Kumar joke) and drives around in a sleigh-like snow mobile terrorizing the peoples of Gnarnia. The four children, guided by Mr. Tumnus (Héctor Jiménez) and his life partner Harry Beaver (a relationship that gives rise to one too many creepy make out scenes between Héctor and an animatronic puppet), must find the half man, half lion Aslo (Fred Willard) and join forces with him to save Gnarnia.

Somewhere along the way they get a battle training montage from middle-aged Harry Potter and friends (an overplayed gag on actors being too old to play child roles). Oh, did I forget to mention the overused Jack Sparrow spoof? Despite the fact that those characters have little or no reason to be in Gnarnia in the first place, they pop up anyway for comedic bits that drag far too long to stay fresh and funny.

The real losers here are the actors. I’m mortified in particular for Jennifer Coolidge and Fred Willard who deserve far better than to be caught up in this sort of pseudo-comic tripe. And then there’s poor Crispin Glover reduced to prancing around as Willy. I wanted to weep. The only truly bright spot was the movie’s score. Ed Shearmur brilliantly mimics and sends-up the music from every single movie spoofed, from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe right down to Harry Potter, X-Men and Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s nice to know someone involved with the project was able to interject something that wasn’t completely embarrassing.

When the humor isn’t painfully predictable, it’s annoying and juvenile. For every hundred fart gags and sex jokes there might be one genuinely funny bit. As useless and un-entertaining as the movie might be, I have no doubt that Seltzer and Friedberg have nothing to worry about. Like I said before, there’s a significant portion of America that seems to love stupid. That part of America has inexplicably kept the Scary Movie franchise alive for four films now and I’m sure they’ll hand over the cash for this one too.

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• Genre: Comedy
• Duration: 1 hr. 28 min.
• Starring: Craig Hall, Joel Tobeck, Jemaine Clement, Loren Horsley, Rachel House,
• Director: Taika Cohen
• Producer: Ainsley Gardiner, Cliff Curtis
• Distributor: Miramax Films
• Release Date: June 15, 2007
• Writer: Taika Cohen

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Before seeing Eagle vs. Shark, all I knew about the film was that it was an indie effort about a nerdy couple in the vein of Napoleon Dynamite. I assumed the tagline “Luckily, Love Is Blind” meant that this unattractive pair was lucky to have even snagged each other. I figured the film would address the “beauty is only skin deep” concept and how a person can be attractive on the inside.

My assumptions were only partially correct. In an unexpected twist, Eagle vs. Shark also reveals that sometimes ugly is ugly on the inside as well. And when this seemingly “made for each other” couple get together, it’s far from nerdy bliss.

It’s almost noon, and Lily (Loren Horsley) is at her station behind the cash register of a fast-food joint, Meaty Love. Her coworkers treat her with scorn and disregard for no real reason other than that she’s quiet and awkward. Lily doesn’t react to this mistreatment, instead she anxiously watches the clock in anticipation. That’s when out of blurry focus comes the bespectacled Jarrod (Jemaine Clement), a video game store clerk who’s the object of Lily’s affection. Using her power to offer free fries, Lily attempts to woe Jarrod, who barely notices. Instead, he wants Lily to pass on to her sexy coworker an invite to his “dress as your favorite animal” party. When the coworker tosses the invite in the trash, Lily decides to go to the party herself.

At what has to be one of the nerdiest parties ever — highlights include chucking shoes at a guy in a helmet and a cheesy “Fight Man” video game competition — Lily finally manages to get Jarrod’s attention. Jarrod’s invites her into his bedroom to impress her with his large array of homemade crafts — a guitar with a fretboard made of emery boards, a wallet watch, and hideous-looking candles. It works and thus begins the tale of this likely pairing and the discoveries they make about each other and themselves.

Taika Waititi wrote and directed this New Zealand-made hilariously skewed romantic comedy, which doesn’t always rely on the cheap laugh or the embarrassing moment. Waititi goes for the Napoleon Dynamite retro-in-the-present style mainly in the set design, which has the characters sitting in front of outdated wallpaper and paintings. Since the film is not dialogue heavy and doesn’t have the characters explain everything, a lot about the characters is revealed by through the hideous trinkets, knickknacks, and homemade creations, along with trophies of various achievements, that are jam-packed into the scenery.

There are a few aspects of Waititi’s effort that differentiates it from other films in the “lovable geek” genre, most specifically that it deals with a man and a woman in their late twenties trying to maintain an adult relationship, as opposed to the usual teenaged boy dealing with the usual complications of adolescence. There’s no worrying about acne or the prom or getting laid, though there is plenty of arrested development.

While Lily’s low almost monotone speaking voice makes her come across as unenthusiastic and downtrodden, she’s actually optimistic and persevering. We learn to love Lily as we see her handle the juvenile antics of Jarrod and his life-long quest to enact vengeance on the Samoan guy who picked on him all through high school.

Another diversion from the lovable geek genre is the portrayal of Jarrod. It’s true that both Lily and Jarrod are social misfits, but we realize that Lily is more shy while Jarrod basically has a psychological disorder. After 10 minutes, it’s obvious he’s a classic psychology textbook case. He’s not your classic well-read, smart, detailed geek whose inward beauty surfaces the more you get to know him. He’s an emotionally crippled, over-confident, immature, selfish narcissist, and he’s physically unattractive. To know him is to loathe him. The film’s tagline clearly means that Jarrod is lucky that Lily is blind to his inner ugliness.

What Eagle vs. Shark does through humorous tension is explore whether people like Jarrod and Lily can ever change enough to progress beyond the tragedies that stunted their emotional growth.

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• Genres: Comedy
• Running Time: 90 minutes
• Release Date: August 17th, 2007 (limited)
• Starring: Matthew MacFadyen, Peter Dinklage, Ewen Bremner, Rupert Graves, Alan Tudyk
• Director: Frank Oz
• Producers: William Horberg, Bruce Toll, Andreas Grosch

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"Death at a Funeral" is the kind of movie that inspires anticipatory eyeball-rolling–you feel like you’ve heard permutations of its punch lines in craftier incarnations numerous times before, even as it’s just getting going. This hunch was confirmed when I was cued to chortle mightily at the incongruous impropriety demonstrated when one of the characters screams out the car window after a driver cuts her off, "We’re on our way to a funeral, you wanker, don’t you have any respect?!"

Hewing closely to the preciously cheeky British comedy standard, director Frank Oz focuses on a family as they come to pay their last respects to the patriarch–a ritual, which, natch, devolves into a daffy, disastrous reunion, set amidst one of those outrageously picturesque, vine-covered English estates, the better for the requisite farcical slamming in and out of doors to take place.

The film’s cast of eccentrics (watch them work through their issues!) includes the two sons of the dead man, an aspiring writer named Daniel (Matthew Macfadyen) and successful author Robert (Rupert Graves); a lawyer (Alan Tudyk as a gleeful Simon) unhinged after having mistakenly ingested a hallucinogenic substance in lieu of valium, thoroughly spoiling his knickers-in-a-twist fiancee’s plan to impress her father; and Uncle Alfie (Peter Vaughn), a crotchety, cussing old man one’s expected to find absolutely adorable. The actors uniformly ape and exaggerate the tendencies of stock movie characters rather than root them in reality, so when a mysterious little man (Peter Dinklage, unable to work his charismatic magic under such constraints) with unknown relations to the deceased appears, and confronts Daniel with some photos establishing an affair with his father, you know it will only go downhill from here.

Trying too hard to hit its hijinks marks, "Death at a Funeral" hams up its homophobia in bids for bigger laughs as Daniel and Robert go to ridiculous lengths to cover up the shame of their father’s gay relationship. The cringeworthy conceit is compounded by maudlin showmanship when the entire trying day boils down–or builds up–to one incredibly reductive scene wherein Daniel (no, not literary lion Robert, as everyone had hoped) delivers the eulogy. Casting aside his index cards, he steps out from his brother’s long shadow and improvises what is meant to be taken as an eloquent oration (judging from approbatory reaction shots), though it dabbles in trite sentiment along the non-eureka lines of "the most important thing is to have tried." Smugly believing itself edgy where it’s laughably fusty, bold and original where it’s insipid, this final send-off is a microcosmic display of what’s wrong with the whole damn thing.

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• Actors: Ryan Kwanten, Amber Valletta, Donnie Wahlberg, Michael Fairman, Joan Heney, Bob Gunton, Laura Regan, Dmitry Chepovetsky, Judith Roberts
• Genres: Science Fiction/Fantasy, Suspense/Horror and Thriller
• Running Time: 1 hr. 30 min.
• Release Date: March 16th, 2007 (wide)
• Directed by: James Wan
• Produced by: Peter Oillataguerre, Oren Koules, Gregg Hoffman
• Synopsis: A widower returns to his hometown to search for answers to his wife’s murder, which may be linked to the ghost of a murdered ventriloquist.

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The film opens as cute married couple Jamie (Ryan Kwanten) and Lisa (Laura Regan) are interrupted from their routine of acting like a cute married couple by a knock on their apartment door. When they open up, all they find is a crate containing a creepy-looking ventriloquist’s dummy that Lisa inexplicably finds charming. Having had a mysterious package dropped off at his apartment at an odd hour by an unknown individual, Jamie immediately decides that this is the perfect moment to run out and get some Chinese food. Naturally, the moment that he departs, the lightning begins to flash, the power goes out and Lisa is killed by an unseen force that rips out her tongue. When the cop in charge of the case (Donnie Wahlberg) assumes that Jamie was guilty and doesn’t want to hear anything about a mysterious dummy, Jamie decides to investigate things himself and, with dummy in tow, returns to his now-dilapidated hometown of Raven’s Nest, a place that has had its own share of ventriloquism-based tragedy in the past, according to his estranged father (Bob Gunton) and his hottie stepmom (Amber Valetta).

Decades ago, the town was the home to a ventriloquist named Mary Shaw (Judith Roberts), a performer who was evidently so popular that she was able to build a vast theater (called The Guignol, no less) in the middle of nowhere. Alas, her act was heckled one day by a little boy (and you can’t really blame him because the act isn’t that great) and a few weeks later, he went missing and it was assumed that Mary whacked him in response to the bad review. In revenge, a bunch of townspeople formed a mob and killed her by slicing out her tongue. Having taken the law into their own hands by slaughtering her, they then inexplicably chose to follow the instructions of her will explicitly by having the local mortician turn her corpse into a dummy and burying her 101 dolls along with her. Ever since then, those that wronged Mary have met violent tongue-ripping deaths and the town essentially died out in the way that most ventriloquism-based economies often do. It would appear that Mary’s spirit has somehow inhabited the dolls, which have all been dug up, and it is up to Jamie to discover why they have come back and where he fits into all of this before he gets the full Mortimer Snerd as well.

“Dead Silence” was written by Leigh Whannell and directed by James Wan, whose previous collaboration was the highly influential horror hit “Saw.” That film was by no means a classic but it at least displayed a sort of fiendish ingenuity as well as a genuine sense of filmmaking style. In the case of “Dead Silence,” the only ingenuity they had must have been spent on convincing Universal to fork over the money to produce and distribute a tale that would have been rejected from that “Freddy’s Nightmares” show for being too trite and stupid. The screenplay is little more than a crazy-quilt of ideas borrowed wholesale from other sources (beyond the obvious doll-based horrors, huge chunks of “Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Silent Hill” and “Saw” have been thrown in as well, to name just a few) that nevertheless fails to disguise the fact that there is maybe 15 minutes of plot in the whole film. The few-and-far-between terror sequences are bereft of suspense, ingenuity or even creative gore–a typical Wayland Flowers & Madame routine is likely to inspire more genuine chills than anything seen here. And if you think that a film with a premise as risible as this might at least have a certain sense of humor about itself, you would be mistaken–every single fog-shrouded scene plods along at an agonizingly slow place without a single moment of levity outside of the inexplicable decision to have Wahlberg’s character carry an electric razor in nearly every scene.

Then there is that twist ending that I alluded to earlier. If you believe nothing else that I have ever written, believe me when I say that in the entire history of inane twist endings, this one may well be the most idiotic ever foisted on a paying audience. Take the worst twist ending that you have ever seen in a film (the finale of “The Village,” for example) and tack on the old “It’s Only A Dream” schtick for good measure. As horrible as that sounds, such an idea doesn’t even begin to approximate the sheer stupidity of the climax that Wan and Whannell have offered up here. It is an ending so awful that there is a small and dark part deep inside of me that almost wants to suggest that you check it out just so that you spend the rest of your moviegoing days knowing full well that you will never see a finale as bad as the one seen here.

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• Genres: Comedy and Sports
• Running Time: 1 hr. 24 min.
• Release Date: October 19th, 2007
• Actors: David Koechner, Carl Weathers, Matt Lawrence, Brooke Nevin, George Back
• Directors: Tom Brady
• Producers: Adam F. Goldberg, Peter Abrams, Robert L. Levy
• Country: United States

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The Comebacks  is a very weak spoof on well-known recent sports films that succeeds in cramming as many different films in as it can, but fails to really capitalize on the humor value in satirizing them.  It’s a collection of moments that take scenes or characters similar to the ones you may remember in flicks like Radio, Friday Night Lights, Miracle, Remember the Titans, Invincible, Gridiron Gang,  The Longest Yard, Bend It Like Beckham, Rocky, Stick It and several others, and converts them into slapstick or injects crass sexual innuendo.  Although the decision to lampoon these feel-good sports dramas isn’t a bad one, sadly, this movie doesn’t come close to having the comedic juice to be worthwhile.  Obvious jokes abound, such as the championship bowl game is the "Toilet Bowl" (who hasn’t thought of that one?), and very dumb sight gags like a coach yelling to the refs after a missed call, "What are you, blind?," followed by a shot of the referees with sunglasses and white canes flailing about.

It’s probably not worth going into the plot, as viewers are more likely trying this one out just to get a few yuks, but it does have one, so I’ll briefly relate it.  David Koechner (Barnyard, Talladega Nights) plays a man who has been involved with a variety of sports fiascos, never knowing what it’s like to win on any level.  He is asked to coach a college football team, The Comebacks, but his QB (Lawrence, The Hot Chick) is a fumbler, his RB (Ri’chard, House of Wax) gets on the IR and his wide receiver (Long, ATL) is not only a poor team player, but he’s also involved in an interracial relationship with his sexpot daughter (Nevin, "The 4400").  With many distractions and terrible practice sessions, he has his work cut out for him for his team to live up to its name, and its potential.

Although there are easily over 100 jokes in its meager 84 minutes, you will probably be able to count on your fingers how many are actually amusing, even if you’re already missing a hand.  People have joked for years about Rocky Balboa being a geriatric fighter in the ring, so the joke is already as old in this flick, but the sight of him exploding into dust upon first contact still will merit a chuckle.  As I mentioned, there is an inability to truly capitalize.  For instance, in the cast, you have Apollo Creed himself, Carl Weathers (Predator), in your movie, and you don’t include him in any of the Rocky gags — and not even a Happy Gilmore reference either.  On occasion, they get one in.  Getting Bill Buckner to spoof his career-defining flub in the 1986 World Series is a highlight, showing him distracted by his coach who keeps pestering him for the solution to a crossword puzzle.  It’s far from the best gag, but the real-life Buckner is in it, which is the only reason it merits a laugh.  These scenes prove more the exception than the norm.

However, most of the gags fall flat on their face, such as a recurring one involving players being hit by a speeding bus on the field. These very juvenile gags are closer in style to the recent lazy spoofs like Epic Movie and Date Movie than they are to Airplane or The Naked Gun.  I think the key difference is that the successful satires are spoofs of genres, while the unsuccessful are merely spoofs of scenes in particular movies in a genre that require you to know and remember the individual characters and dialogue satirized.  Given how scattershot the film is in approach, it isn’t always easy to spot the movie they are trying to ridicule, especially since their targets aren’t broadly popular.

When you find that the funniest thing about the film is seeing that it is directed by a man named Tom Brady (apparently NOT the All-Pro Patriots quarterback), and that isn’t even meant to be a joke, you’re in for a very long and excruciating time at the movies.  Despite its title, this feeble attempt at a screwball comedy is eliminated from any chance to turn it around not long after the opening credits roll.

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• Genres: Comedy, Kids/Family and Sequel
• Running Time: 1 hr. 29 min.
• Release Date: August 8th, 2007 (wide)
• Actors: Cuba Gooding Jr, Lochlyn Munro, Paul Rae, Richard Gant, Spencir Bridges
• Directed by: Fred Savage
• Produced by: John Davis, Matt Berenson, Derek Dauchy
• Release Date Aug. 8, 2007
• DVD Release Date Jan. 29, 2008

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Belching, farting, puking, pooping, and peeing are natural body functions, and not anything clever or witty enough on their own to claim as being true comedy devices.  The only thing that makes these acts "funny", especially to kids, is that they are considered to be excessively rude or embarrassing to do in front of others,   If we can agree that bodily emissions are a fact of life, and not true comedy, then we should also agree that Daddy Day Camp is not a comedy as well.  Practically every single instance of humor in the film revolves around the gaseous eruptions, liquid waste expulsions, urine splattering, projectile vomiting, and noxious belches.  There’s even the suggestion that one of the kids not take a dump for a couple of weeks because he apparently wiped his butt with poison ivy.

Remove these things from this film and you’d have a family drama, and one barely an hour long at that.  It wouldn’t be good, but it would be mercifully shorter, and less toxic. All that would be left in terms of comedy is a bunch of slapstick that also isn’t funny, unless you think that youth caregivers that would willingly allow children to attend a camp that they know to be a veritable deathtrap with no functional bathroom facilities as humorous.

Daddy Cay Camp stinks, in a figurative sense of course, but it gets to the point where you might even begin to think that you can actually smell that flatulence whenever it erupts on the screen.  The MPAA rates these sorts of films PG, regardless of how much crude humor they throw in.  I think we need a new rating system for family fare that only has potty humor going for it in terms of laughs: "Rated PU: No one over the age of 10 will be admitted".

The film starts off with Charlie (Gooding, Radio) and Phil (Rae, Air Buddies) a success in their business venture, "Daddy Day Care" an opportunity to branch out by extending their services to a camp for kids, just like the one that Charlie attended as a kid.  In fact, the camp they plan to start is Camp Driftwood, the very same camp, which has fallen on severe hard times now that their rival camp in the area, Camp Canola, has upgraded their services to include paintball, river rafting, and sundry other things that the low-budget Driftwood can’t come close to offering.  Wanting to strike back at Canola’s grown-up bully of an owner, Lance Warner (Munro, Little Man), Charlie and Phil decide to try to overcome formidable debts, a mountain of renovations, and Lance’s underhanded tactics to make the camp a success.  However, to get it in tip-top shape, Charlie finds that he needs a real leader, and so he turns to his estranged father, Colonel Buck Hinton (Gant, Nutty Professor II), to get the kids to believe in themselves and compete against the uppity Canola bullies in the annual Olympiad competition.

Daddy Day Camp isn’t as much of a rehash of Daddy Day Care as it is a regurgitation of other family films featuring outcast kids, especially Meatballs, with its camp hijinks, motley kid make-up, and Olympiad competition against a rival upscale camp.  Interestingly, all of the previous cast took a pass on reprising their roles for this needless sequel.  One could claim they did so on artistic merits, but when Eddie does films like Norbit, it’s not like he is really making anything better.  Of course, given that Cuba Gooding Jr. was also in Norbit, it makes me wonder how horrendous the scripts must be that Cuba passes up, if there are any.  Probably the ones that end up starring Jerry O’Connell.

I didn’t really have great love for Daddy Day Care, so my expectations of the quality of any sequels that stem from it were already pretty low.  I expected bad, and that’s what I got.  Fred Savage, a former child star himself, has been busy directing quite a bit of youth-oriented TV shows of late, and given the restrictions on humor in bad taste on those shows, it’s a head-scratcher as to why he employs so much of it in this big screen outing.  I think "The Wonder Years" might be a term to just as easily apply to this phase of Savage’s career, if this is the kind of material he deems worthwhile.

I sincerely hope I never see a third film in this series, as it’s impossible to imagine the films getting any cruder and still hold on to their family film status.  If there is a way, I already know the title for it: Daddy Day Crap.

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• Genre: Thriller
• Running Time: 1 hr. 38 min.
• Release Date: July 13, 2007 (wide)
• Distributors: After Dark Films
• Cast: Elisha Cuthbert, Pruitt Taylor-Vince, Daniel Gillies, Laz Alonso, Michael Harney
• Director: Roland Joffe
• Producers: Mark Damon, Leonid Minkovski, Sergei Konov

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Notoriety and controversy have so far been the only aspects in the marketing machine for “Captivity,” ensuring it possibly mild cash return at the box-office. When a film can get under the skin of a few lazy parents over an innocuous message board that provokes “offense” over a basically ignored ad campaign, it’s almost a surefire bet that the film itself will fail to muster up anything of value beyond said ballyhoo.

That’s the case with “Captivity.” It’s yet another title in the utterly exhausting torture genre that died in the clutches of the terrible “Wolf Creek,” and it has basically mimicked everything that garnered “Saw” success, along with gambling on and likely over – estimating Elisha Cuthbert’s appeal. Receiving a bad reception from critics, it was re-shot in some areas to garner it a more bankable horror oriented pigeonhole, and yet still received a poor reception.

Reminding us of the joys of censorship, and the lengths studios will go through to promote a film, “Captivity” is an embarrassing mix of “Saw” and “Se7en,” it’s yet another torture film with a woman in peril that involves a masked madman in the shadows, and a young woman that must be forced to look at herself in a cheesy morality theme, all the while avoiding certain death under his traps.

What we do receive in the terms of gore and carnage is goofy bordering on pure absurdity. For ninety minutes, we have to sit and watch this young girl take a brutal beating, and for what is seemingly all for nothing, in the end. “Captivity” is that film in a horror fad where you know they’ve all run out of ideas, so the writers stretch as much as possible to bring us disturbing sequences that are really just idiotic. The body part smoothie is a scene smacking of desperation that really has to be witnessed.

Cuthbert plays vain and self-involved magazine model Jennifer whose life revolves around her career and her dog. One night at a party, she’s drugged, kidnapped, and awakes “Oldboy” style, in a chamber where she’s closed off from the rest of the world. After painfully repetitious sequences of attempted escape, screaming, capture, torture, attempted escape, screaming, capture, and torture, she comes across a fellow prisoner who attempts escape, screams a lot, is capture, and somehow dodges the torture.

Either way, Joffe’s film suffers from many flaws, one of which is utter monotony with a story, or lack thereof that defies logic, or any sense of belief. Cuthbert’s performance is mediocre, while her character simply has no likable qualities nor does she give us a reason to root for her at any moment. She’s focused on herself, and only herself, while the poor man’s Jigsaw performs torture routines that would make the actual Jigsaw lower his head in shame and sick Amanda on him.

All the while, Cuthbert teases us yet again by getting almost, but not quite nude, and continues an endless routine of suffering that never lends credence to the possibility that this woman may have some brains. You figure after the fifth time of attempting escape, failing, and being punished, you might want to… I don’t know, stop? Perhaps play the games? Perhaps learn your lesson after being threatened with an acid shower? I’m just saying.

After the pre-requisite torture, “Captivity” drags itself on after the one hour mark long after its run out of steam, and yet continues on with utterly outlandish plot devices including snoopy cops, the identity of our madman given away much too soon, and a limp climax that almost seems derived from a different film altogether. It makes you appreciate films like “Alone with Her,” doesn’t it?

The weak hype “Captivity” has mustered is about the only thing that has kept it in the spotlight, for Joffe’s film is a terrible rehash of better torture genre exploitation, with none of the charm. It feels desperate from beginning to end, and is only offensive in that it presumes to be better than we think.

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• Genres: Comedy, Drama and Crime/Gangster
• Running Time: 1 hr. 39 min.
• Release Date: May 18th, 2007 (limited)
• Distributors: City Lights Pictures
• Cast: Alec Baldwin, Freddie Prinze Jr., Scott Caan, Jerry Ferrara, Mena Suvari
• Directors: Michael Corrente
• Producers: Annie Marter, William Herinzerling, Terence Winter

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Brooklyn Rules, a small budget mafia film with some semi-big names, hits theaters this May, and despite starring Freddie Prinze, Jr., it is a surprisingly good and engaging film. Alongside Prinze, who actually does a pretty good job, the movie stars Scott Caan, Mena Suvari, Jerry Ferrara of "Entourage" and the bad man himself, Alec Baldwin.

It’s deliciously fun to watch Baldwin play a mafia boss, not quite to the same calibre as watching Jack Nicholson playing a ruthless villain, but satisfying nonetheless. Baldwin doesn’t have a large role in the movie, but he commands the scenes he’s in. Beyond him, Rules has plenty of other talent to spread the wealth to, as Caan has found a role made perfectly for him (an up-and-coming mafia hit man), Suvari continues to beg the question why she has only appeared in sporadic films since her central role in American Beauty, and Ferrara plays pretty much the exact same character he does on "Entourage" – but we love him for it. And amazingly, Freddie Prinze, Jr., who has been called a flat actor to say the least, carries the movie quite well. His starry eyed, almost innocent expression most of the movie conflicts well with his street smart, Brooklyn demeanor, and in Brooklyn Rules he finally sheds the pretty boy teen act he has been relying on for so long.

So what is Brooklyn Rules about? It’s a relationship story, most of all, not unlike other films of the genre. The movie is about three guys who have been friends since they were kids. They’ve all grown up in Brooklyn, and none of them know anything beyond Brooklyn. As they edge into adulthood, though, you can see the three are at a crossroads. Prinze is attending college, dating a beautiful girl from Connecticut (Suvari) and wants something more with his life than to just stay in Brooklyn. Ferrara is too stupid to know anything better, but he is content with his life. Then there’s Caan, who is starting to see the charm of the mafia. The movie explores how the three men adapt to the world around them, and how the mafia slowly affect their lives in different ways.

The movie is written by Terence Winter, who has penned several episodes of "The Sopranos", and his ability to write about the mafia shows. Brooklyn Rules really isn’t about the mafia; it is more about three characters who just happen to be affected by the mafia in the area. Still, Winter is able to bring a subtle balance to real, engaging characters who are surrounded by the violent, hypocritical phenomenon that is the mafia, not unlike "The Sopranos." If you like "The Sopranos", you’ll probably find you like Brooklyn Rules, as it essentially uses the same formula.

Brooklyn Rules is not one of those movies you’re going to watch over and over again, and it is probably one that will be forgotten in a year, but for the time being, it is a quality film with good acting and an excellent screenplay.

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