items tagged with License to Wed

ALL ABOUT STEVE

It's one thing for a movie to present its audience with hateful characters. It's quite another when the movie itself appears to hate its characters, and in the depressingly, almost sadistically unamusing All About Steve, very little reads beyond the filmmakers' contempt for the "lovable" whack-job they're purportedly championing. I've seen stupider movies this year - at least two or three of them - but I don't think I've endured one that annoyed me more than this new Sandra Bullock vehicle by director Phil Traill, which humiliates its star at every turn, and humiliates you for spending 100 minutes trying to make sense of it.

AUGUST RUSH

There's a scene in the tear-jerker August Rush in which the titular musical prodigy (Freddie Highmore) and a friendly Irish rocker (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) - unaware that they're father and son - engage in a happy bit of dueling guitars in Central Park, their matching grins widening as the improvised strumming reaches its climax. It's a great moment, and I mention it because it's the only one in the film that I didn't find excruciating.

THE BRAVE ONE

For what is essentially a lurid revenge thriller, Neil Jordan's The Brave One is fascinatingly complex ... for a while.

I KNOW WHO KILLED ME

Lindsay Lohan's latest movie, I Know Who Killed Me, is for those who saw the actress' recent mug shot and were praying that Hollywood would adapt it for the big screen. (The photograph in question, as nearly everyone now knows, was taken after Lohan's arrest for alleged drunk driving and cocaine possession.)

TRANSFORMERS

I laughed out loud a good half-dozen times at Transformers, and for the first time ever at a Michael Bay movie, not derisively. No one could have been less enthused than I at the prospect of a Bay-directed, live-action "adaptation" of the toys I was too old for in the mid-'80s. (I'll admit to a mildly derisive chuckle at the opening credit: "In association with Hasbro.") Yet all things considered, the resulting movie is great fun - 90 minutes of amusement and frequent exhilaration. The fact that the film actually runs 145 minutes proves to be only a slight detriment.