23 Feb 2009

Momma's Big House: "Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail" and "Fired Up!"

By Mike Schulz

Tyler Perry in Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to JailTYLER PERRY'S MADEA GOES TO JAIL

Tyler Perry's wildly popular, drag-act creation Madea - the tough-talking matriarch (played by Perry himself) with zero tolerance for foolishness, church, and most of her family members - is an admittedly entertaining figure. Yet she's a really odd character to build a movie around, because this bosomy yowler steadfastly refuses to change, or "grow," or develop in any way that could sustain a feature-length narrative; she's a one-joke, and one-rant, conceit. Maybe that's why it always feels like Madea is intruding on her films, even the ones with her name in the title. By necessity, the movies in which she appears have to treat her as a special guest star, because if they were just 100-ish minutes of Madea's antics, nothing would ever happen in them.

20 Feb 2009

Box Office Power Rankings: Derivatives

By Jeff Ignatius
friday-13-thumbCoraline won our Box Office Power Rankings for the past two weekends, and its success forces me to make two confessions: (1) I felt a touch ashamed and flawed for not adoring Henry Selick's two previous stop-motion features (The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach), and (2) I loved his live-action/animation hybrid Monkeybone. My memories of those three movies are too faded to justify or explain myself, and I haven't seen Coraline, but my conscience is now clear.

Let's move on.

What could possible explain Friday the 13th's $43.6-million holiday-weekend take?

16 Feb 2009

Jason Born: "Friday the 13th" and "Under the Sea 3D"

By Mike Schulz

Derek Mears in Friday the 13thFRIDAY THE 13TH

When the original Friday the 13th debuted, I was living in Crystal Lake, Illinois, and just a month shy of 12 years old. So you can only imagine how jazzed I was when I saw director Marcus Nispel's Friday the 13th reboot this past weekend, and the movie not only opened with its victims-to-be hanging out at Crystal Lake (as the series' inspiration demands), but with a title card reading "June 13, 1980" - my 12th birthday!

16 Feb 2009

Immaterial Girl: "Confessions of a Shopaholic" and "The International"

By Mike Schulz

Isla Fisher in Confessions of a ShopaholicCONFESSIONS OF A SHOPAHOLIC

Since I'm not their target demographic, I guess it shouldn't bother me that so many perky, theoretically harmless chick flicks these days are so breathtakingly shrill and stupid. But why doesn't it bother their target demographic? January gave us the offensively unfunny Bride Wars, and now, hot on that film's stiletto heels, comes Confessions of a Shopaholic, which trashes its promising setup and excellent performers in a candy-colored morass of clichés, contrivances, and incessant brainlessness. The film is like a rom-com take on Speed Racer - it even has John Goodman as a loveably ineffectual dad - and it doesn't feature one moment of recognizable human behavior. And audience members still applauded at the end.

16 Feb 2009

Slam Dunk, "Millionaire": 2009 Oscar Predictions

By Mike Schulz

I know, I know ... you heeded my Oscar advice to the letter last year, and wound up guessing correctly in only 11 of the 24 categories. I'm truly sorry if you ended up looking like an idiot at your Academy Awards party. But it was a tough year, and there were a lot of deserving contenders, and at least you were cool for predicting Marion Cotillard, and ... .

Ah, screw it. Let's try this again, shall we?

16 Feb 2009

Sean & Mickey & Kate & Meryl... and Melissa: Predicting the Oscar Races for Best Actor and Actress

By Mike Schulz

Mickey Rourke in The WrestlerIf you're looking to win your workplace's annual Oscar pool, you'll likely do pretty well this year just by going with Slumdog Millionaire for nearly everything, by picking The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for the tech awards Slumdog isn't nominated for, and by not making wild-card predictions in the gimme categories. Heath Ledger is winning Best Supporting Actor and WALL?E is winning Animated Feature. Just accept it. Don't try to be a hero.

12 Feb 2009

Eyes Wide Shut: "Coraline," "Push," and "The Pink Panther 2"

By Mike Schulz

CoralineCORALINE

Employing extraordinarily supple, nearly tactile stop-motion animation and 3D effects, the children's film Coraline is filled with visual magic, and just about corners the market on unsettling imagery. A grinning pair of parental doppelgängers, with buttons sewn into their eye sockets, serve a dinner composed of mango milkshakes and chocolate beetles. Two morbidly obese British dowagers unzip their skins and emerge as lithe trapeze artists. A feral alley cat talks, and a theatre full of mutts attends a vaudeville, and it's all strange and clever and tantalizingly designed. Is it ungrateful, if not downright senseless, to admit that I could hardly wait for this movie to end?

10 Feb 2009

Save the Dates: "He's Just Not That Into You"

By Mike Schulz

Ginnifer Goodwin, Jennifer Aniston, and Jennifer Connelly in He's Just Not That Into YouHE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU

With its nine central roles, dovetailing narratives, and 129-minute running length, He's Just Not That Into You is like a chick flick on steroids. Based on a jokey "self-help" book by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo, director Ken Kwapis' comedy concerns the romantic tribulations of a bunch of young (or young-ish) hotties in present-day Baltimore, and it's all pretty easy to pick apart; the characters are too archetypal, the plotting is too convenient, and none of the movie's frequent dating advice is as insightful as it clearly wants to be. Even that "present-day" aspect is problematic, as the film, completed in 2007, finds a character hooking up through MySpace, for Pete's sake.

06 Feb 2009

Box Office Power Rankings: A Career in Decline?

By Jeff Ignatius
renee-zellweger-thumb.jpgRotten Tomatoes has a feature called "Average Tomatometer by Year," and the default screen for Renée Zellweger looks grim. From 2005 to 2009, her score drops for two years (from 80 to 52), recovers a little (to 64), and falls off a cliff (to 19).

This is completely meaningless, of course. If you expand the time frame, the line jumps up and down mercilessly. If you've ever heard of the trouble with a "small sample size," this is prime evidence, with most actors being in one or two movies a year. And Renée is but one person in movies containing (and made by) multitudes.

Still, there's the sneaking suspicion that Ms. Zellweger is on a downward trajectory. Her latest, the romantic comedy New in Town, finished in last place in our Box Office Power Rankings (won by Slumdog Millionaire), and new releases only landed in that spot eight other times over the past year. Entertainment Weekly's recent "Recall the Gold" survey wanted to steal her Oscar for 2003's Cold Mountain.

02 Feb 2009

"Get Out of Our House/State/Country!": "The Uninvited," "New in Town," and "Taken"

By Mike Schulz

Elizabeth Banks and Arielle Kebbel in The UninvitedTHE UNINVITED

Based on a South Korean horror film from 2003, The Uninvited begins with ... .

Wait! Don't go! I swear, this one isn't that bad!

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