28 Dec 2009

Laid Off, Laid Out, Laid: "Up in the Air," "Sherlock Holmes," and "It's Complicated"

By Mike Schulz

George Clooney and Vera Farmiga in Up in the AirUP IN THE AIR

Heading to Chicagoland on December 23, I spent the whole of my journey driving through a torrential and laughably unseasonable rainstorm, and the trek that normally takes two-and-three-quarter hours wound up taking close to four. Consequently, I missed out on dinner with my folks, arriving in town just in time to meet them for our planned evening screening of the new George Clooney movie.

21 Jun 2009

... And They All Lived Wealthily Ever After: "The Proposal" and "Year One"

By Mike Schulz

Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds in The ProposalTHE PROPOSAL

"All right, you've got five minutes to sell me your pitch. Go."

"Well, it's a romantic comedy - I'm thinking about calling it The Proposal - and it's about this bitchy, selfish book editor in Manhattan who learns deeper values and becomes a better person after falling in love with her assistant."

"That doesn't sound very funny."

11 Jul 2006

Yo-Ho-Hum: "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," "The Devil Wears Prada," and "An Inconvenient Truth"

By Mike Schulz

Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST

I know a bunch of you bought tickets for it this past weekend, so allow me to ask: Did anyone else find Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest a little, you know, incoherent? A degree of senselessness, of course, has to come with the territory, but while I'm positive that I didn't nod off during Gore Verbinski's opus - the booming soundtrack and relentless, CGI-enhanced action won't let you - I'm not sure I ever quite understood it. There seemed to be a whole lot of plot in Dead Man's Chest but none of it meant anything or was revealed with an urgency that might make it mean anything; at some point, I simply gave up trying to figure the damned thing out, and just waited for Davy Jones and the rest of his barnacled baddies to show up again.

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