Another Summer Movie Round Up

DISTRICT 9
Produced by Peter Jackson. This sci-fi lesson about racism has some nice ideas—unwanted aliens stranded on earth and kept in camps, growing inter-species mistrust, a plan to return the aliens to their planet gone awry. But the follow-through is lacking, the performances second-rate and the film withers pathetically on the vine.

G-FORCE
Animated, from Disney. Talking CG guinea pigs are secret agents. Why, Disney, why?

HANNAH MONTANTA
Starring Miley Cyrus and Billy Ray Cyrus. After so many bad films, Disney takes a kids’ Disney Channel sitcom and stretches it out to an hour and a half motion picture, and what do you have? A pretty watchable film, actually, and much to my surprise. Although the first part of the picture (set in Hollywood) is pretty much business as usual for the “Hannah Montana” show, the rest of it takes on some meaning as Robbie Ray takes his daughter Miley (who is actually superstar Hannah Montana) back to the family farm in Tennessee, much against Miley’s wishes, where she learns lessons about the importance of family, integrity and closeness, lessons her big time life in Hollywood never taught her. This movie is actually about something, has some interesting characters and there is character development, juvenile as it may be. There are also decent performances from the supporting cast, some humor, and a story you can hang a hat on.

INGLORIOUS BASTERDS
Starring Brad Pitt; written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino is back with a violent, talky and exceptionally crafted motion picture about a squad of Jewish American soldiers (led by a Tennessee-accented Pitt) dropped behind enemy lines in occupied France in order to kill and scalp as many Nazis as they can get their hands on. A second storyline, involving a young Jewish woman living as a Parisian Gentile in order to escape the Nazis who murdered her family, intersects with the first in a Paris cinema where dual plots to assassinate Hitler and his cadre of Nazi killers are hatched.

STAR TREK
Starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Leonard Nimoy, Bruce Greenwood; directed by J.J. Abrams. Director Abrams got it right, and Star Trek is retooled for the 21st century. The story is clever and manages to preserve the canon while introducing a new cast and new elements to the classic Star Trek universe.

ORPHAN
Peter Sarsgaard is rarely bad in anything he does, though he is not above appearing in a bad film. Like this one. Clumsy and predictable, the film should have been abandoned on a doorstep and not distributed to theaters nationwide. Someone might have adopted it. Sarsgaard, maybe?

PUBLIC ENEMIES
Starring Johnny Depp and Christian Bale; produced, co-written and directed by Michael Mann. I expected much more from writer/director Michael Mann (Collateral, Heat), but Public Enemies failed to deliver much of anything. Johnny Depp as John Dillinger dialed in a performance unworthy of the great actor, but I give him a pass given that the story was confusing and uninspired, and the dialogue uninteresting. The cinematography was too “TV drama,” and did not service the needs of a period piece like this one. The final scene seemed shot on DV. This film just did not look good, and it did not help that the set design and art direction were bland and uninspired. The only thing I really enjoyed here was Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, but it was not enough to render the experience the least bit entertaining or enjoyable.

TERMINATOR SALVATION
Starring Christian Bale; directed by McG. The time-bending Terminator back story can be mind-bending as well, and McG and company make the most of it and deliver a film that looks good, and incorporates a welcome cameo by Arnold Schwarzenegger, but on the whole is soulless and unremarkable.

TAKING OF PELHAM 123, THE
Starring John Travolta, Denzel Washington, John Turturro and James Gandolfini; screenplay by Brian Helgeland; directed by Tony Scott. Unnecessary remake of the 1974 film with Robert Shaw and Walter Matthau manages to stay tense and entertaining throughout despite a mediocre performance by Travolta as a baddie who hijacks a New York subway train. Washington is terrific as the dispatch operator who finds himself the conduit between Travolta and the New York police. John Turturro as a police negotiator and James Gandolfini as New York’s mayor are well cast.

WHATEVER WORKS
Starring Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood, Patricia Clarkson, Ed Begley, Jr., and Michael McKean; written and directed by Woody Allen. Larry David, co-creator of "Seinfeld" and creator and star of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” is a perfect Woody Allen New York curmudgeon in this comedy about a bitter genius whose life is transformed when he takes in a runaway from the deep South (Wood). The supporting cast is terrific and the story, although a little tired and recycled, works thanks to David’s energy and amusing performance.

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