Exhaustive list of three-sentence reviews, Volume I

I have been idle on blog for a bit, so I decided to start posting a bunch of three sentence long reviews of almost every movie that I have seen since my last update (though I am surely forgetting some of the worse ones) until I am all caught up. Here we go with VOLUME ONE!

AVATAR (2009)- Despite the fact that he is an historically immense asshole, James Cameron is nonetheless a very smart man, a man capable of crafting very effective cinematic entertainment. While AVATAR suffers from many problems, among them profound racism and a script with about a third of the wit of PUNISHER: WAR ZONE, it uses some of the most rudimentary storytelling techniques to rehash a familiar trope to great effect. To deny the technical mastery of AVATAR is foolish, even though it is still okay to laugh at the fact that that guy from GRANDMA'S BOY was cast as one of the scientists.



THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE (2000)- This film is a sparkling example of the right way to make an animated feature as well as sad reminder of how horribly Disney's traditionally animated films have gone wrong in the last ten years. NEW GROOVE features a unique and perfectly executed visual style, a hilarious script full of excellent jokes, and a slapstick tone that is greatly benefited by the epic proportions and gestures of its characters. The brilliantly cast voice acting and the fact that Sting was supposedly enraged that the songs he wrote that were originally supposed to be incorporated into the less comedic first draft of the script are both sweet icings on the cake.



THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (2009)- Ti West's THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL starts out very promisingly with a slick, speedy first half that sets up a potentially potent third act. Regrettably, both the final narrative push and its meager set-up feel rushed and uninspired. While the visual aesthetic of the film is pitch perfect, it lacks the soul and profoundness which elevated the cannon of films that it is so desperately trying to imitate.



THE HURT LOCKER (2008)- While the vignettes in THE HURT LOCKER are tingling with tension and effectively transport the audience to the sand swirled plains of Iraq, they are nothing more than fragments that never cohere into a whole story. The leads, most notably Jeremy Renner as a reckless team leader, attempt to bring as much vitality to their characters as the disparate sequences allow, but none of them ever gain enough traction to make them seem like real people rather than wartime caricatures. THE HURT LOCKER functions best as a series of kinetic shorts, particularly the electric and visceral desert sniper assault, but feels too disjointed to function as a true character study of the men on the ground in the war on terror.

JAWS (1975)- It's stunning how clearly JAWS adheres to the Spielberg aesthetic that is still present in every film he does today despite the technical and financial restrictions he was under in his debut feature. The nighttime dive scene was brilliantly shot and utterly beautiful. Fun fact: the Blockbuster nearest my house does not have JAWS, but they do have JAWS 2 as well as JAWS 3-D (surprisingly starring Dennis Quaid).



PINOCCHIO (1940)- I have been rewatching a lot of the older Disney library as it is always fun to compare the impression you have of a film as a child versus your opinion on it as an adult. PINOCCHIO struck me as a particularly odd experience, largely due to the creepy and dark sequence where Pinocchio is brought to Pleasure island, where errant little boys are transformed into donkeys (?) and sold to salt mines as slave labor. Some of the narrative leaps were also very jarring, such as when Pinocchio is seated on a step, believing that his adoptive father is dead only to have a shimmering dove drop him a note explaining that Geppetto is in the belly of a whale named Monstro.



SHERLOCK HOLMES (2009)- Guy Ritchie has never struck me as more than a hyperkinetic one-trick pony, but SHERLOCK HOLMES is a welcome departure from his previous oeuvre. The saving grace of the film is not the storytelling or the story, however, so much as the charisma of Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr. as the (what I thought were very obviously overtly homosexual) leads. It's a wonder what a divorce from Madonna will do for a fellow, and I suggest another separation before he helms the inevitable sequel.

WHIP IT (2009)- I do understand what rookie director Drew Barrymore was trying to accomplish with WHIP IT: creating a film with strong female leads and a story that empowers them. A flimsy script written by Shauna Cross, who has seemingly never had a conversation with another real human, and recklessly amateurish direction and editing prevent WHIP IT from rising above direct-to-video quality. Worse still, it seems as though the actors were all given the script two days before filming and just told to have fun with it, as even reliable character actors like Kristen Wiig (GILLY ALERT!) seem cardboardish and robotic.

Just a few notes here.

Expect new reviews for "Avatar", "Sherlock Holmes", and perhaps "Extract", which was surprisingly good, soon. Do not anticipate reviews for "G-Force", "Date Movie", or "Meet the Spartans".

New this upcoming TUE on DVD: The Hurt Locker, a film atop many critics' year's best lists, and Moon, which I am excited about despite the presence of Kevin Spacey. We are getting a new hi-def digital projector next week, and I am already looking forward to checking out each and every one of Jeremy Renner's pores.

"Legion", which is dropping at the end of JAN, appears to be an unironic take on Planet Terror but with angry angels instead of zombies. I HIGHLY recommend checking out the red band trailer for it on YouTube if you enjoy '80's-brand sci-fi/action.



To the video store!

PAPER HEART (2009)

If one were to assign a crack team of sociologists, professional actors, and expert filmmakers to make the most cloying, insulting and twee love story that they could, they still couldn't match the level of irritation created by "Paper Heart". The film, which purports to be a documentary about finding the true meaning of love, is instead a pointless and extremely creepy narrative about the feeble, imagined romance flowering between Charlene Yi and Michael Cera, as recorded by "documentary filmmaker" Nicholas Jasenovec(Jake Johnson, playing the film's actual director).

The problems start at the get-go, as "Jasenovec" immediately begins taking a disturbingly profound interest in Yi's social life (or lack thereof), as established at an opening sequence set at a depressing, acoustic guitar-drenched LA house party. "Jasenovec" coerces Yi, who is collaborating with him on the aforementioned love documentary, into letting him document all the interactions between the prudish, spineless Yi and the puppydog-like, personality-free Cera. Between brief interludes of couples explaining their perceptions of what true love is and cutesy paper figure sequences, "Jasenovec" begins adopting increasingly stalker-inspired means of capturing of every tedious moment between Cera and Yi, whose concept of courtship apparently extends to eating pizza together whilst perhaps (*gasp*)...dare I say it? ... holding hands. Potential for cooties? High. High indeed.

The narrative nadir arrives when "Jasenovec" purchases tickets for Yi and an increasingly uncomfortable Cera to make a trip to Paris on the film's dime, with an aim of generating some kind of limp-dick coda francais. How he paid for the tickets (much less the reels and reels of film he purchased to capture the couple dramatically traversing every single aisle of the grocery store) is never fully explained and thus it is at the audience's discretion to guess whether it was: a large withdrawal from a trust fund; the hefty settlement resultant from "Jasenovec"'s lucrative tort against the doctor who left him mentally handicapped; or, quite simply, a grant from his wealthy father. The just-totally-sick-of-it-man! Cera finally bolts on the production, perhaps worried about the damage it would do his cred with alt-comedy or Year One fans. I would be hard-pressed to imagine a more self-congratulatory ending than Yi and "Jasenovec" travelling to Cera's native Toronto to invade his parents' home, with "Jasenovec" smugly patting himself on the back for not invading with camera and microphone on the pair's reunion.

There are so many things wrong with this movie that it's simply not worth cataloging any but the most heinously offensive of them, that being: why did ANYONE think that this story should be told as a pseudo-documentary? Did the real Jasenovec think he was one-upping Charlie Kaufman by creating an irritating, obsessively self-important character like "Jasenovec" in order to tell a trifling tale that says absolutely nothing novel about a well-worn subject, a subject which has been cinematically examined in much more interesting ways by the likes of Jon Favreau and Jennifer Aniston?

Sadly, this movie probably has enough box office (largely thanks to the inchoate Cera performance) that this maroon is going to be able to toot out another offensive, wretched pellet of a film. The true tragedy of "Paper Heart" is that while the real Jasenovec surely believes himself to be standing on the shoulders of giants, he is actually swimming through the sewage from Rob Reiner and Steeve Coogan's pipes.