items tagged with Taylor Lautner

G.I. JOE: RETALIATION

If you handed a box of crayons to a group of eight-year-olds with action figures, they’d probably come up with a more entertaining storyline for G.I. Joe: Retaliation than the one we’re stuck with, which is your standard blockbuster nonsense about a megalomaniac’s plan for world dominion and the crack team of well-armed, quip-ready hotshots attempting to thwart him. In a welcome surprise, though, director Jon M. Chu’s follow-up to 2009’s G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra is, unlike its forebear, quite a bit of zippy, throwaway fun, a fast-moving and happily unpretentious diversion with jokes, and good ones, obviously written specifically for viewers well over the age of eight.

LINCOLN

Steven Speilberg has never directed a talkier movie than his presidential biopic Lincoln, and only on rare occasions, it seems to me, has he directed a better one.

THE WORDS

Three separate narratives dovetail in The Words, a modestly engaging morality drama by writers/directors Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal. Yet ironically enough, the one narrative I never bought into was the one that’s meant to be the most believable, though heaven knows the other two aren’t exactly models of cinematic authenticity.

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN – PART 1

We’re now four films into the five-part series of Stephenie Meyer adaptations, and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 is the first one that I wouldn’t hesitate to call unpredictable. As someone who couldn’t care less about the tortured love triangle involving the human Bella (Kristen Stewart), the vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson), and the lycanthrope Jacob (Taylor Lautner), I was confident that this moody romance would perk up with an added dash of Rosemary’s Baby, once the now-married Bella found herself pregnant with Edward’s child. (So the undead have living sperm, then?) But how could I have guessed this would be the exact moment that, at least for me, the movie stopped being interesting?

MONEYBALL

On paper, the casting of Brad Pitt as Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane in Moneyball must have seemed inspired. On screen, it’s so, so much better than that. Pitt has, of course, given many wonderful performances over the past two decades (and just as many blandly acceptable or downright dreary ones). But to my mind, his Billy Beane – driven, hopeful, cocky, incensed, funny, tender, and smart as hell – is the actor’s first chance to employ all of his gifts in the service of an emotionally expansive, fully shaped character, and Pitt’s beautiful and generous work here is truly a sight to behold. Director Bennett Miller’s last feature film was his 2005 debut Capote, which netted Philip Seymour Hoffman a Best Actor Oscar. With Moneyball, Miller might find himself batting 2-for-2 for his stars in that category.