items tagged with Judy Greer

MIRROR MIRROR

Mirror Mirror is a slightly modernized, family-comedy version of the Snow White fairy tale, and offhand, I can think of few directors less suited to the material than this film’s Tarsem Singh, the music-video veteran whose big-screen credits include those wildly baroque (and decidedly adult) spectacles The Cell and Immortals. Yet every once in a while, when a director is spectacularly wrong for a project, the results can be much more interesting than if he were right for it, and that certainly seems the case here; this aimless, pointless little trifle is mostly a drag, but I can only imagine how deadening it might’ve been without Singh at the helm.

In a rather perverse bit of scheduling, at least for me, last weekend brought with it the area release of exactly zero debuting films, while this past weekend delivered six ... on the same weekend, I should add, that I had a lengthy road trip out of town and appeared in four performances of a local stage production. But I’m not one to complain. Onward!

THE KARATE KID

The opening scenes in director Harald Zwart's The Karate Kid remake, with the preternaturally confident and magnetic Jaden Smith taking over the Ralph Macchio role, are really good. But your first indication that the movie might wind up being really great - or, at the very least, a really great time - comes with its introduction of Mr. Han, the Pat Morita substitute played here by Jackie Chan.
Read More About Waxing On: “The Karate Kid,” “The A-Team,” “Marmaduke,” And “Killers”...

THE INFORMANT!

The film's madcap trailers -- to say nothing of the exclamation point in the title -- don't accurately capture the tone of Steven Soderbergh's The Informant! But I'll be damned if I know what kind of trailers would suggest the feel of this altogether remarkable corporate comedy, which starts off amusingly arch, becomes more funny and fascinating as it progresses, and winds up flat-out hysterical, with your laughter tempered by righteous anger, unanticipated pity, and stunned disbelief.

CLOVERFIELD

If the end of the world - or, at any rate, the end of Manhattan - eventually comes via a pissed-off, skyscraper-sized reptile, and the destruction is captured on video by an empty-headed twentysomething slacker goofus, the results will probably look and sound a lot like Cloverfield.