Movie Review: Never Let Me Go

Justin turns in a review of a movie I desperately want and need to see but just haven't had the time for yet. It sounds as though it's going to be imperative for me to locate that time, however, after reading what he has to say about it. That fact is rather depressing after a weekend that saw me rising at the crack of 4:30 am on both Saturday and Sunday. Can you say Monday-morning-pukey-tired? Anyway, here's Justin's take on Never Let Me Go.

Lives for Sale
Never Let Me Go is a time-trapped tragedy
Justin Senkbile

In the special club of music video directors turned mainstream feature filmmakers, Mark Romanek is certainly one of the least visible members. That's probably because he hasn't actually made a film since 2002's creepy-but-minor Robin Williams vehicle One Hour Photo. Who would've thought, with only a handful of music videos made between then and now, that his latest feature, Never Let Me Go would be so good?

A medical breakthrough in the early fifties, which we learn all about soon enough, has precipitated the need for special boarding schools that keep their students regimented in health and behavior…and completely isolated from the outside world. One such school is Hailsham, located in some dreary English countryside, where we meet Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield, from The Social Network and last year's fantastic Red Riding Trilogy).

Without giving too much away, it's important to mention that, although a title card informs us that the average life-expectancy has passed 100, the students of Hailsham are destined for a short, controlled existence in service of “the greater good.”

We watch Kathy, Ruth and Tommy as children at Hailsham, puzzled by the mysterious outside world and the looks of guilt and pity elicited by deliverymen and teachers (primarily the one played by the always wonderful Sally Hawkins). As adolescents, they gain a bit more freedom and a painful awareness of their destiny. Anger, malaise and hormones swell but are assumed to be particular to their own special societal status and not necessarily typical traits. For all three, adulthood seems to bring a calm but fragile acceptance of fate.

Although the foundation of the story (based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro) is an inherently political bit of science-fiction, Never Let Me Go keeps itself staunchly apolitical, with no denouncing or indicting. That's the key to this film's success and also what makes it so bleak. The idea of our heroes escaping the life laid out for them, or overcoming the authority that laid it out, isn't even so much as whispered. The most they ever hope for, and gingerly fight for, is a little extra time.

And time is what Romanek is most interested in here. The always-too-few precious moments, the interminable distance between them and, in the case of these particular characters, the ache that accompanies having to live in the past-tense.

Mulligan, Knightley and Garfield are all exceptionally good here, but special attention should be paid to the young actors portraying the child versions: Izzy Meikle-Small as Kathy, Ella Purnell as Ruth and Charlie Rowe as Tommy. It's their work that grips us from the beginning, and these kids play out the intricacies of this love triangle just as impressively as their older counterparts.

Never Let Me Go is depressing as hell—no one is going to argue with that. But it's also very beautiful; it’s a sincere, totally unassuming movie that has you drawn in long before you realize it…perhaps even in spite of yourself.

Grade: A

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Movie Review: Hereafter

Justin reviewed this one so I didn't have to. FYI: I totally got his back and have absolutely no remorse about another Eastwood panning. Suck it, Filthy Harry.

Slow Death
Eastwood almost makes a movie about the afterlife
Justin Senkbile

No matter how deserving it may be, there’s no way to feel good about panning a Clint Eastwood movie. The man is a force of nature: in just the last two years he’s directed and produced four films, composed the score for two of them and starred in one. And he’s 80. His resume certainly demands respect; unfortunately his latest film, Hereafter, is a silly, sappy mess.

Hereafter hops around the globe visiting its three main characters. First there’s Marie LeLay (Cécile de France), a Parisian journalist who’s just miraculously survived a tsunami, albeit with some odd after effects. Then there’s Marcus (Frankie McLaren), a young London boy with a junkie mother whose twin brother has recently died. And finally, our star Matt Damon plays George Lonegan, a disillusioned psychic turned factory worker.

Obviously, what these three characters have in common is their proximity to death, either their own or someone else’s. What's strange is that Eastwood doesn’t ever explore grief, fear of death or even spirituality. He simply describes people who have a close relationship to death. For over two hours. Sounds weird, right?

Death and loss are obviously compelling themes, but to make this story (by Peter Morgan, writer of Frost/Nixon and The Queen) work, they also have to remain pretty evanescent. The simplest explanation for Hereafter’s failure is that Eastwood, a product of traditional Hollywood genre cinema and one of the most classical directors working today, just isn’t suited for such a job. His old world instincts result in a film that, although clearly a very personal work, is so full of plot, details and explanations that there isn’t any room for the audience to reflect upon their own experiences and impressions of death and grief. More than the editing (there isn't nearly enough of it) or the dialogue (needs several re-writes), this is Hereafter’s essential problem. It’s like Norman Rockwell trying to work with Picasso’s perspective. Hats off for giving it a shot, but it’s not surprising that it didn’t quite work.

The overall film is disappointing, but quality tends to vary from scene to scene. And the same goes for the acting, with each of our principal cast members pulling off a genuinely compelling scene or two, only to deliver a strikingly awkward line reading a few moments later. Bryce Dallas Howard, as Melanie, a bubbly night school classmate of George's, leaves one of the film's few lasting impressions in this department, though she only appears briefly.

The bottom line is that in 129 minutes, I found only three reasons to see this movie: one wonderfully acted kitchen scene between Damon and Howard, one hilariously awful scene outside a palatial French hospital, and Miss de France, because she’s adorable. Everything else either feels emotionally shallow or is, frankly, uninteresting.

In spite of all this, let’s keep our hopes up for Eastwood’s next film. God knows its right around the corner.

Grade: D-

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Movie Review: Let Me In

Here's Justin's take on Let Me In.
Let Her in, Again
Swedish vampires move to New Mexico
Justin Senkbile

It'd be safe to assume that fans of Swedish director Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In have, at best, mixed emotions regarding the idea of a big, Halloween-season American remake. Good news: writer/director Matt Reeves seems to be a fan too, and his Let Me In is one of the best Hollywood remakes you're likely to see.

Between his mother (Cara Buono), who is drinking her way through a divorce, and the regular beatings he faces at school, 12-year-old Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) lives a brutal existence. As he begins to fantasize about taking drastic measures with a cheap pocket knife, a new neighbor moves in.

Her name is Abby (Chloe Moretz). She lives with a man who is presumably her father (Richard Jenkins), and she can only be found outside at night. Quickly, and despite her warnings, Owen befriends her and begins to experience a different kind of cruelty: frustrated young love.

It's no spoiler to reveal that the apparently adolescent Abby is actually an ageless vampire, although she doesn't define it that way, and her faux-father does the dirty work of scouring the town for fresh blood. The bodies he leaves behind bring a shaken but determined police investigator (Elias Koteas) on the scene, but we spend most of our time watching the progression of Owen and Abby's strange friendship.

If Jenkins' and Koteas' presences here aren't reason enough to see this movie, I don't know what is. Two of America's greatest character actors are both at the top of their game here, with relatively small, mostly thankless roles that are impossible to forget. But it's our tragic lovers, Smit-McPhee and Moretz, who make it all work, and they are as good as you could hope for. They're both fragile, frightening and vulnerable, in very different ways.

Instead of harvesting only the exclamation points, as we've come to expect remakes to do, Reeves has created what really feels like a loving adaptation. He takes great effort to capture the same eerie atmosphere and let the relationship between the two kids remain the essential point.

So Let Me In is both very good and very similar to the original…then what's the point? Besides being a convenient solution for the subtitle-averse (which isn't really a good thing), it's worth it just to see how Reeves has managed to take this Nordic story and make it feel quintessentially American. Set in suburban 1983, with a perfectly utilized pop soundtrack, it becomes a sort of twisted, poetic John Hughes movie. The setting also inevitably draws us back to the last golden age of American horror, when Jason Voorhies and Michael Meyers were problems counted alongside bullies and acne to their high-school victims.

With that in mind, Let Me In becomes less of a remake and more of an American counterpart to Let the Right One In. And although that might seem useless, the end result is just as magnetic and heartbreaking. Turns out, Reeves has made a movie good enough to survive any fan's comparison test.

Grade: B+

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Movie Review: The Devil

Here's Justin's movie review for The Devil. Folks, I'm as shocked as you are.

Devil's Day Out
Death rides an elevator in Devil
Justin Senkbile


I'm claustrophobic in my day-to-day life, but at the movies, I'm a sucker for all things small and confined, from Ingmar Bergman's stark chamber dramas to George Romero's original Dawn of the Dead. Just put some people and some tension in a room and I'm there. With that said, director John Erick Dowdle's Devil still surprised me.

From the first shots (hugely disorienting, beautifully simple zooms into an upside-down Philadelphia skyline) to its final scenes, Devil manages to get nearly everything right. Most importantly, it embraces its simplicity when most other films would scramble to hide it.

The above mentioned skyline views eventually take us into a large office building, from which someone has just jumped to their death. According to the voice over, this suicide is setting in motion a bloody chain of events. As detective Bowden (Chris Messina) arrives on the scene to investigate, five strangers enter the building for appointments and end up in the same elevator, which soon stops working.

Inside, there's a security guard (Bokeem Woodbine), a salesman (Geoffrey Arend), an ex-Marine (Logan Marshall-Green), a high-strung older woman (Jenny O'Hara) and an apparently affluent young one (Bojana Novakovic). As their time in the elevator elapses, strange things begin to happen and, one by one, they inexplicably start becoming corpses.

The whole concept is basically that Satan has come to Philadelphia to mess with people for a day. If you have a problem with Devil, it'll probably be this premise, which I'll admit is a little silly. But the movie's creepiness comes not from the potential presence of the devil, but from the simple idea of people in a box going crazy. The “twist ending,” if you can call it that, is hinted at early and often, and you'll have a much better time if you ignore it altogether. Unfortunately, the devil ends up becoming Devil's only problem.

M. Night Shyamalan, the executive producer and man behind the original story, has his name all over this thing. And if that name is bringing good things to the screen and people in to see it (debatable these days, I know), then he certainly deserves some credit. The real praises, though, belong to Dowdle, whose impressive directorial instincts, along with the solid work of his relatively small cast (Messina in particular) make Devil a creepy and intense late-summer surprise.

Grade: B+

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Movie Review: Harry Brown

Here's Justin checking in with a review of Michael Caine doing his best Charles Bronson impression.

DVD Discovery Dirty Harry Brown Michael Caine insists you get off his lawn Justin Senkbile What's the scariest thing in the world? According to freshman director Daniel Barber's Harry Brown, it’s a sad, emphysematous old man. The eponymous vigilante, played by Michael Caine, is scary in the way all revenge picture heroes are: he has a gun, an idea and nothing to lose. Harry shoots and stabs his way past various riffraff while barely blinking an eye. And, although it has plenty of problems, the picture itself is equally brutal.

In a matter of days, quiet, gentle Harry Brown finds himself grappling with the loss of his wife, Kath (Liz Daniels), after a prolonged sickness, and the murder of his best friend and chess partner, Leonard (David Bradley). The murder seems to be linked to the brutal gang violence that's recently been swelling in and around Harry's apartment complex, violence that the police seem either unable or unwilling to take on.

He doesn't talk about it much, but Harry is an ex-Marine with a large collection of medals. And somewhere between his friend's murder and a botched mugging under a bridge, Harry reconnects with those military roots and decides to take matters into his own hands. This is just about the time that detectives Alice Frampton (Emily Mortimer) and Terry Hicock (Charlie Creed-Miles) begin investigating Leonard's death.

Although the tag line on the poster (“Every man has a breaking point”) begs for it, Barber avoids the typical dramatic “moment of decision,” and the moment Harry moves from domestic solitude to gun-toting neighborhood watchman is hidden quietly away. Harry himself is unusual as a revenge picture protagonist in that he's neither hellbent on retribution nor obsessed with noble ideas of justice. He seems lost in a vacuum, killing without remorse but without any apparent catharsis and hunting down his prey without a set plan but with complete confidence.

It's a brisk 103 minutes to the bloody finale, and in that time Harry Brown manages to do some strange things. At times, the film seems to be trying to widen its scope, introducing new characters and providing details on minor ones. Then, just a few scenes later, everything narrows down to Harry again. Caine's muted, naturalistic performance seems almost minimalist. Barber unfortunately never completely strikes a balance with these two styles and the result, although it has few dull moments, leaves many loose ends.

The one thing the movie does perfectly (or, at least, viscerally) is depict the slum world of the neighborhood gangs. It's overflowing with random violence, hard drugs and sloppy gunslinging to such a degree that, although not entirely believable, it is disturbing and fully felt.

Harry Brown is entertaining and affecting enough for your run-of-the-mill vigilante story, leaving several images and impressions that are hard to shake. But it ultimately fails to reconcile its two stylistic extremes and get a handle on itself. It's a bit too over-the-top for one to take it to heart and yet too dark for one to really enjoy the extravagance.

Grade: C

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Movie Review: Eat, Pray, Love

My wife and her friend are going to go see Eat, Pray, Love soon, and because they have a strong relationship with the book, my bet is that they'll like it. I think Justin's review below is very interesting for the way he seems to acknowledge what the film is trying to do more than what it actually achieves. Travelogues play different in book form, especially one in which you imagine yourself as the character experiencing transformative moments. It's easier to imagine that the character in a book is you, or at least more like you, than a familiar movie star. Just take this for example. Elizabeth Gilbert, the author, is a very pretty woman.
But she was played by this person:
Which can you envision yourself being? It's an interesting facet that I've been wondering about myself. Anyway, here's Justin's take on it.

Postcards from a Midlife Crisis
Julia Roberts searches for meaning and pizza
Justin Senkbile

Based on the much-loved memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert and directed by “Glee” creator Ryan Murphy, Eat Pray Love is something of a romantic road movie. Sure, it's slight, puffy and has its fair share of problems, but it manages to avoid the pandering and the veiled sexism of most other romantic comedies.

After a messy divorce from Stephen (Billy Crudup) and a stagnant rebound with David (James Franco), writer Liz Gilbert (Julia Roberts) finds herself with a sudden detachment from and lack of passion in her life. Desperately needing a jump start, she does what any self-respecting romantic with the financial means and a bit of bravery would do: spends a year abroad, traveling between Italy, India and Bali.

In Italy, Liz finds companionship mostly around the dinner table and discovers the joy of eating the leisurely, not-so-American way. Solace through meditation is found in India. And in Bali she seems able, after quite a bit of struggle, to accept love in her life again (with Javier Bardem, no less).

The problem is that Liz seems to be on a great, albeit emotional, vacation rather than some transformative journey, so any “balance” she's found by the end feels arbitrary and impulsive. Perhaps the subtleties of such an introspective journey are something that Roberts and Murphy just aren't able to communicate. Perhaps it’s too complex to be expressed convincingly on screen at all.

Regardless, the coherence of Liz's evolution isn't helped by the fact that it's set in such exotic locales and photographed so gorgeously. It simply can't avoid playing into everyone's latent wanderlust instead of starting an introspective spark. Liz keeps on waxing existentially on the soundtrack, but we're held captive by images of an incredible looking breakfast or a picturesque villa in Bali. It ends up being inspirational only in the sense that it inspires further daydreams.

With her trademark charm, Roberts traipses easily, if unremarkably, through the film. In fact, the only standout performance comes from Richard Jenkins, who plays a recovering alcoholic also named Richard, whom Liz meets at the ashram in India.

Although its problems make it tempting, it'd be unfair to pass of Eat Pray Love as just a way to watch rich people do expensive things. That description belongs to stuff like Sex and the City 2, and not something as harmless and well-intentioned as this. Let's instead call it a pleasant trip through a stack of flimsy postcards.

Grade: C

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Movie Review: Dinner for Schmucks

Here's Justin's review of the weekend's top new film. I say top NEW film because Inception can't be stopped.

Fresh Leftovers
Dinner for Schmucks is tastier than the usual
Justin Senkbile

Like any sensible mouse stuck in a corporate maze, financial something-or-other Tim (Paul Rudd) is eager to find the cheese. To do so, he has little choice but to accept an invitation to a dinner where eccentrics (thinking they're attending some lavish talent contest) are secretly mocked by their more socially sound hosts. His girlfriend Julie (Stephanie Szostak), who runs an art gallery, isn't thrilled by the idea, just as Tim isn't too fond of her latest client Kieran (Jemaine Clement), a monstrously macho painter. For each of them, these details are just unfortunate parts of paying the bills.

By chance, Tim stumbles upon the perfect dinner date: Barry (Steve Carell), an unquestionably dim IRS auditor with a large, probably unhealthy body of taxidermic artwork. But before they even make it to the party, Tim discovers Barry's uncanny ability for absent-minded meddling and destruction. Smashed sports cars and severed fingers are the kinds of destruction we're talking about here. Director Jay Roach's Dinner for Schmucks is the sort of chaotic slapstick comedy that everyone seems to have something of a taste for, only with smarter jokes, better performances and more feeling than its contemporaries.

Not that the movie's overarching moral is anything refreshing (everyone's a winner, dorks are people too, etc). What's interesting instead is that Schmucks finds time to explore Barry with unusual sharpness. The details of his divorce and his inferiority complex in the face of his boss Therman (Zach Galifianakis) are revealed to be acutely painful. Pathetically funny, sure, but the laughter comes uneasily.

And who doesn't get a kick out of the relentless bashing of callous corporate caricatures like Tim's higher-ups (one of which is Office Space's inimitable Ron Livingston)? It's almost America's pastime these days, and in a genre comedy like this, it's a bulletproof ingredient.

Carell, whose stardom has put him in a position where he seems capable of doing everything besides surprising us, turns in what is perhaps his best performance since the early days of “The Office.” Sure, Barry is the kind of geek that Carell already excels at, but here he has added a host of wonderful little nuances and gracefully handles all the character's emotional scars mentioned above.

We can't praise Carell, though, without mentioning the other two standouts. Clement (“Flight of the Conchords”) is perfectly cast as the droll Kieran, giving Russell Brand's Aldous Snow a real run for his money as the accented, libido-crazed “artiste” of the year. And though he only has two real scenes, Galifianakis is unforgettable. Finally, he's found a big-screen role on par with the surreal brilliance of his stand-up work.

Dinner for Schmucks is very funny, but in many ways it’s still just more of the same. Consequently, one can't help but look on it as little more than a welcome improvement on a tiresome comedic formula. In terms of the big picture of movies, it isn't incredible. Among its peers, it's one of the best comedies of the year.

Grade: B

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Movie Review: Despicable Me

Happy Monday morning, minions! It's going to be a gloomy week in these parts, with the weather liar drawing those little frowny clouds crying on every single day this week. I spent the weekend driving like a banshee from here to Minnesota and back, and most of yesterday trying to get done all the things I needed to get done long ago but still didn't quite finish. What I'm trying to say is, I'm not amused by the start of this week. I find it presumptuous and annoying.

The good news is that whilst I was away, both Justin and Ben were able to file their reviews of the week's new releases. So, without further ado, here is the first of them, Justin's take on Despicable Me.
Despicably Yours
Despicable Me is pretty good, and it isn’t from Pixar
Justin Senkbile

It isn’t hard to imagine that a super villain’s accomplishments might provide them with a bit of an ego boost. Gru (Steve Carell) certainly has a sense of pride in regards to his work; however, aside from stealing the Times Square Jumbo-Tron, he hasn’t really made much of a mark. Now he finds his fledgling reputation threatened when a fumbling young upstart, Vector (Jason Segel), causes a sensation by stealing one of the ancient pyramids.

Gru quickly hatches a plan to regain the crown of villainy. Part one: steal back a shrink ray from Vector’s headquarters. Part two: Steal the moon and secure his place in the evildoer history books. Part one proves to be the hardest, and Gru resorts to adopting three cookie-selling orphan girls, Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Elsie Fisher) in order to infiltrate the cookie loving Vector’s lair.

Quickly, Despicable Me becomes a typical Scrooge story, where a cold heart gets melted by some almost sickeningly cute kids. Its characters also end up following the formulas drawn out by most every animated film in recent memory. The main thing that sets this movie apart from the rest is its mile-a-minute, “Looney Toons”–indebted fights and its wonderfully absurd technology. They have freeze guns, shrink-rays, robots disguised as cookies, secret labs and home security systems of mass destruction. All that’s missing are the anvils and falling pianos.
Taking on the slapstick role (think the claw machine aliens of Toy Story and the wisecracking penguins of Madagascar) are the minions, Gru’s legion of babbling, yellow, pill-shaped workers. They’re adorable, funny and completely unintelligible, easily the most memorable ingredient of the whole film.

Of course, since Gru isn’t really despicable, the whole idea of him somehow becoming good falls completely flat. In fact, he’s frightfully ordinary, with a lack of confidence (due to a disinterested mother, voiced by Julie Andrews) and an inability to get a loan from the bank. The nastiest thing we ever see him do is pop a balloon animal he’s just made for a sobbing child. One soon realizes that Despicable Me is basically the story of a bumbling eccentric learning to become a parent. Who wants to see that in 3D?

That isn’t to say that Gru’s story with his adopted daughters isn’t touching. A little bit sappy and cheap, yes, but still touching. The problem is that it pales in comparison to the fun of Gru and Vector battling it out, and, as the film progresses it ends up becoming the main focus.
Despicable Me is a bit uneven, and, not surprisingly, isn’t willing to stray too far from the usual formulas. But it does make up for most of that with its enthralling visuals and voice talents, which combine to form this movie’s own weird kind of charm. Its best moments are very good, just not as frequent as one would hope.

Grade: B-

Movie Review: Splice

I'm not reviewing every single movie out there in the world, so here's someone else's opinion for a moment. Justin got to see the creepy Splice this weekend, and here's what he had to say!

It’s Alive!
Splice is Shelley via Cronenberg
Justin Senkbile

Despite its jumping, shrieking trailer, director Vincenzo Natali’s Splice has a lot in common with James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein and David Cronenberg’s The Fly; these are movies that are not so much terrifying as they are strangely unsettling…and as far as unsettling movies go, Splice certainly earns its place on that list.

After creating Ginger and Fred, two grotesque lab-made creatures that prove the viability of new gene-splicing techniques, scientists Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) probably should've just gone on vacation. Instead, with hopes of making an even larger mark on scientific history, Elsa coerces Clive into joining her on the next step: adding human genes to their DNA cocktails.

What results is a clicking, hissing creature, distortedly human in appearance but mysterious in every other sense. Clive, sensing the possible consequences, wants to kill it. Elsa, on the other hand, finds a long-buried maternal instinct beginning to blossom.

This is where Splice takes its defining turn, devoting its attention to the dynamic within this synthetic family unit. At first, Elsa dotes on her faux daughter, whom she’s named Dren, dressing her up and showering her with gifts. But as the “specimen” matures (it ages several days in a matter of minutes and is, as a young adult, played by Delphine Chanéac), Elsa becomes cold and harsh, like an exhausted mother losing patience with her temperamental teenager.

Polley clearly dominates the film, her manipulative matriarch Elsa being the driving force behind the experiment itself and the story's eventual fall into violence. Her counterpoint, Clive, is played aptly by the perpetually languid Brody. Submissive but not exactly timid, Clive's inability to stand up to Elsa earns him an equal share of the guilt.

Though Chanéac's is the most exciting role, it's also a pretty thankless one. Because she's heavily made-up, partially computer generated and spends most of the film twitching and squirming, it's easy to miss fact that there's also a bit of acting going on here. Despite of the burden of all the physical alterations, Dren ends up as frightening and heartbreaking as Boris Karloff's lumbering monster from 1931, and all of Splice's most moving moments belong to her.

Things do get pretty bizarre near the end (Macgruber has officially lost the "Most Uncomfortable Sex Scene of 2010" award), but Splice is really more of a close-quarters character study than a hunter-versus-hunted scare-fest. After all, Natali is toying with some weighty moral issues here. Technological and scientific responsibility is the most obvious, but the most striking is the focus on the sticky business of parenting, which, as you might imagine, only gets hairier when you're not sure just how human the kid is.

With all of the hyper-weirdness in the third act, it's debatable as to how successful Splice is in raising and articulating its questions. What's undeniable, though, is that it's magnificently creepy, a smart, surprising piece of early summer entertainment that manages to really leave a mark.

Grade: B

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Movie Review: MacGruber

I was busy writing a Summer Movie preview and getting ready for/watching "Lost" to be productive enough to also review a movie this weekend. Thank God for Justin Senkbile, who turned in this!

G.I. Joke
Macgruber versus the legacy of SNL films
by Justin Senkbile

How can you possibly stretch Macgruber, the briefest of "Saturday Night Live" sketches, into a feature-length film? Well, you can't. Director Jorma Taccone (one third of The Lonely Island), along with co-writers Will Forte and John Solomon, apparently realized that, as opposed to Wayne's World, for example, where the characters were already fleshed-out beforehand, they'd have to invent Macgruber before they could film him.

The hapless dork we know from the show, who always sidetracks himself with trifling conversation and runs out of time before he can de-fuse the bomb, has been developed into something quite unexpected. Here, he's more of a misguided egomaniac than a simple fool.

He’s been playing dead for nearly ten years, but explosives expert Macgruber (Forte) is suddenly brought back into action when a massive nuclear warhead goes missing. The thief, Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer), who also happens to be Macgruber's arch-nemesis, has plans to hurl the bomb towards Washington D.C. during the State of the Union address.

Macgruber, of course, isn't about to let that happen. With his team members Vicki St. Elmo (Kristen Wiig) and Lt. Piper (Ryan Phillipe), he sets out to stop Cunth and save America.

It's not nearly as funny as one would hope but, if nothing else, Macgruber is a pretty perceptive parody of 80's action movies and Reagan-era patriotic paranoia. Many of the interior scenes are flooded with that gaudy, soft white light that used to indicate romance, the stakes are the infinity of American pride, and the villains are all eastern European.

To make all these ingredients work together, Macgruber needed to be a little less twisted Dr. Phil and a little more bloodthirsty G.I. Joe. Unfortunately, the laugh-ratio seems to suffer because of this.

This shouldn't give the impression, though, that the Macgruber here really has a handle on much of what's going on, or that this movie isn't as loony as any other big screen "SNL" offerings. Macgruber's obsession with a certain license plate number is a wonderfully stupid touch, as are two of the weirdest sex scenes in recent memory (which come back to back, mind you).

The important thing here is that Macgruber, in spite of its shortcomings, doesn't come close to being one of the worst "SNL" films. When it's funny, it's very funny, it just unfortunately doesn't do justice to Forte's talent, or to the brilliant sketches from where it came.
Grade: B

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Movie Review: Cold Souls

I haven't seen Cold Souls...and despite what you're about to read, I'm probably going to give it a go anyway. My esteemed colleague, Justin Senkbile, did not so much care for it...as in, he pretty much hated it. This brings me to the thing about us reviewer folks: I know you can't (and don't...and shouldn't) 100% rely on us. What you should do is read our comments to see what sounds like something you'd identify with. For example, it seems like Justin's main hangup is an unnecessary complex plot with some overacting from Giamatti and a general lack of energy to the film. The first two don't bother me, I like overly complex sci-fi conceits and Giamatti overacting sounds pretty par for the course for what I was expecting. However, the lack of energy does make me a little concerned. So now my expectations are tempered, but I still want to see it. That's how I read critics anyway, I'd be curious to see what you take away from movie reviews...BREAK YOUR SILENCE below. Anyway, here's Justin's take:

Soul Searching
Cold Souls is tepid at best
Justin Senkbile

Writer/director Sophie Barthes' Cold Souls begins with a quote from the philosopher Descartes about the location of the soul (he says it's in the pineal gland). We're supposed to take this literally, as a justification for the film's quirky conceit: soul extraction is made possible through a simple medical procedure. I doubt any of us need this justification—Charlie Kaufman has long been plowing similar terrain with success. What we could really use at the beginning is some kind of explanation for the uneven messiness that follows.

Paul Giamatti (playing himself) is nearing the end of rehearsals for a production of Uncle Vanya and is beginning to lose it. On the advice of his agent, Paul signs up to have his soul removed, making it easier for him to separate from his on-stage character at the end of the day. But soullessness isn't all it's cracked up to be, and the neurotic Paul quickly regrets his decision.

Running parallel to all of this is the story of Nina (Dina Korzun), a Russian "mule" running discarded souls back and forth from New York to Saint Petersburg for sale on the black market. She steals Paul's stored soul for use by an aspiring actress, and the two stories finally come together, with more of a slight bump than a crash.

Cold Souls is nothing if not complicated. In fact, it's nothing but complicated. It obviously aspires to be a Kaufman-esque black comedy, but nearly every joke falls flat for various reasons. Sometimes it’s cringe-inducing overacting (surprisingly, from Giamatti), but mostly it's just plain old bad direction. Many scenes feel like an initial run-through, with the actors stumbling around their dialogue, and the concept of comedic timing is nowhere to be found.

One shouldn’t overlook the several great moments Giamatti is able to achieve. Heck, some of the Vanya rehearsal scenes are so captivating that one wishes they could be watching that instead. Barthes follows Paul and Nina very closely, so the supporting cast doesn't get much chance to stretch, with the exception of David Strathaim as the slick and suspicious Dr. Flintstein.

It'd be tough for any director to keep so many narrative and thematic shoestrings tied up, and Barthes' sheer guts in taking on so much with her first picture is admirable. But for a movie so concerned with the human condition, Cold Souls is shockingly lifeless.

Grade: D