Author: David Medsker

There was one movie that my movie critic peers and I were looking forward to seeing in these dog days of winter, and it was “Be Kind Rewind,” Michel Gondry’s wacko tale of a video clerk and his oddball friend who shoot their own versions of hit movies. Then, without a word, the movie disappeared from our screening schedule. Further research revealed that New Line was yanking all screenings from certain markets, and we lived in one of them. Considering that they had just shown us “Over Her Dead Body,” a movie that they should have set on fire, flattened with a steamroller and buried 50 feet below ground level, the decision to screen that but not this struck us as curious, to say the least.

Ah, but good news! The rep has passes for us to see the movie for free…but they’re only good beginning the following Monday after it opens. Whaaa? Surely the rep knows that we need to get our reviews up as soon as possible and will be seeing the movie at a Friday matinee, right? Why is the studio trying so hard to discourage us from seeing this?

I’ve now seen it, and I think I get it. “Be Kind Rewind” does not live up to the fragmented genius that is Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” and is closer in spirit and tone to “The Science of Sleep,” his maddeningly loopy 2006 movie about a delusional dreamer. When the movie works, it is delightful. The problem is that those moments are far too infrequent.

The movie stars Mos Def as Mike, who works at the local VHS-only video store run by Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover). Mr. Fletcher puts Mike in charge of the store for a week as he leaves to do research on a larger, more successful video store, and gives him one instruction: do not let Jerry (Jack Black), a local goofball, into the store. Jerry is, well, a little nuts, and after a plan to sabotage the local power plant goes horribly awry, Jerry has magnetic properties. Once he enters the store, the entire catalog is erased.

But Jerry has a plan: they can re-shoot the movies themselves. After all, Miss Falewicz (Mia Farrow), one of the store’s most loyal customers, has yet to see her most recent request (“Ghostbusters”), which means she won’t know what she’s seeing isn’t the original, so Mike and Jerry spend all day making their own version of it. The movie falls into the hands of her gang-banging nephew; he and his friends like it, and want to see more. Pretty soon, they’re remaking everything in the store, making more money than the store’s ever made, and drawing some unpleasant attention in the form of an FBI agent (Sigourney Weaver) who could put them away for hundreds of years.

The scenes of Mike and Jerry remaking movies are fabulous, guerilla filmmaking at its finest. (It brings to mind the story of the three Mississippi boys in the early ‘80s who remade “Raiders of the Lost Ark” shot for shot.) The problem is that the movie doesn’t seem to value the importance of those scenes, focusing instead on a subplot involving the demolition of the video store and the power struggles and romantic entanglements between Mike, Jerry and their new female lead Alma (Melonie Diaz). The movie also fast-forwards through character development, leaving us with a bunch of people who don’t quite act normal but no explanation as to why.

This brings us to Black, who is completely wrong for this movie. Gondry may swing for the fences when delivering the crazy, but it takes grounded actors to pull it off; Black’s manic energy is simply too much. The part was originally supposed to be played by Dave Chappelle, and while Chappelle is not the model of subtlety, it’s a lock that he would have had better chemistry with Mos Def than Black does.

All griping aside, I still maintain that New Line would have been better off screening “Be Kind Rewind.” This was never going to be a mainstream film, Jack Black or not. The movie’s target audience is movie critics, and people who want to be movie critics; let them see it, so they can spread the gospel. Sure, some of them will come away nonplussed, but that is bound to happen with any movie (look at all the people who hate “Juno”). In the end, both the filmmakers and distributors of “Be Kind Rewind” could have benefited from a little backbone. The movie didn’t seem to believe in the story it was telling, and ultimately, neither did the people distributing it.

Whatever you might think of “Battle: Los Angeles,” you can bet that the US Marine Corp loves it, because it makes them look like the baddest motherfuckers on the planet. See the enemy, kill the enemy, die with your boots on. There’s something oddly refreshing about a war movie that makes no effort to humanize its characters. Pity the entire movie is made from the parts of a dozen other, better movies, and shot in a manner that suggests the cameraman is riding a pogo stick.

The movie takes place in the future (well, August of this year), where a series of meteor showers strike off the coasts of two dozen major cities around the world. The military quickly deduces that they were not meteors but in fact alien spacecraft, and moves in to evacuate the citizens of each city. In Los Angeles, a group of inexperienced Marines, aided by a recently retired Staff Sergeant with a spotty past (Aaron Eckhart), go on a mission to retrieve a group of civilians stranded at a police station within the radius of a massive blast scheduled to detonate in three hours. The Marines are jumped almost immediately, but as they get to know their enemy, they formulate a plan to bring the attack to the attackers.

Notice that there is not one character name in the plot summary. That is because the people in this movie do not matter in the slightest, with the exception of Hector, a boy whose father (Michael Pena) commits an extraordinary act of courage. Everyone else is defined by either their special skill (veterinarian, tech expert) or personal baggage (one Marine lost his brother under Eckhart’s watch on an earlier mission, one has a baby on the way, one wants to be a doctor). Roland Emmerich’s trilogy of “Destroy LA” movies (“Independence Day,” “The Day After Tomorrow” and “2012”) look like Mike Leigh-esque character studies by comparison.

For a movie about a group of soldiers in the so-called heart of darkness, “Battle: Los Angeles” is not terribly visceral. There is one exception to this, and that is the scene where Eckhart takes an injured alien and ruthlessly pokes and prods it until he finds its weak spot. It’s as war-like as the movie gets; everything else is behind-enemy-lines chaos, glassy-eyed reaction shots and that damn shaky cam nonsense.

There isn’t anything in “Battle: Los Angeles” that hasn’t been done before, and while that’s not always a death sentence (“The Town” and “RED” both rose above their familiar premises), you still have to give the audience something to latch on to, be it drama, disaster sequences, cool CGI, or pithy one-liners. “Battle” has none of those things. It has carnage, but that isn’t enough; you have to make people care about the carnage, and there is little here worth caring about.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here. “Batman & Robin” is staggeringly bad, even in comparison to the amusingly bad “Batman Forever” (1995) that preceded it. That movie was at least occasionally entertaining, thanks to Jim Carrey rising above his poorly written Riddler character (by Oscar winner Akiva Goldsman, no less). The laughs in “Batman & Robin,” also written by Goldsman, are purely unintentional, and usually when Arnold Schwarzenegger is onscreen. Before the movie was released, George Clooney said, to anyone who would listen, that he would be to blame if this movie kills the “Batman” franchise. Very courageous, and not at all true. This movie was dead in the water before they started casting.

The intro is “Batman Forever” shot for shot; the opening credits and subsequent Batsuit shots, finishing with the Gratuitous Bat Butt Shot (director Joel Schumacher just couldn’t help himself), are nearly identical. They then begin a humorous exercise in character development; we see Victor Fries’ life-altering accident from a security video feed (it appears the filmmakers thought the way they handled Two Face’s “development” the last time around was effective), while Pamela Isley’s (Uma Thurman) decent into madness isn’t much of a leap, since she’s played as a crackpot from the beginning. Interspersed throughout are the obligatory party scene, a preposterous motorcycle chase sequence, and…hell, it’s been eight years since I’ve seen this. Whatever doesn’t spring to mind hopefully never will.

Schwarzenegger’s dialogue is nothing short of awful. “My name is Fries. Learn it well. For it is the chilling sound of your DOOOOOOOOOM” is like something out of a McBain movie on the “Simpsons.” (In fairness to “The Simpsons,” “Ice to see you” would have been an upgrade to what Schwarzenegger has thrust upon him here. Good thing he got $25 million to do it.) Clooney gets even less to work with as Bruce Wayne than Val Kilmer did in “Batman Forever,” but plays it better. Thurman and Silverstone are completely unnecessary, and what they did to the villain Bane (think Phil Hartman playing Frankenstein) is just unforgivable. Quite simply, they didn’t get anything right, and the Warner Brothers reps present at the screening knew it.

The makers of the “Spider-Man” movies have so far been very smart, but while their role model is clearly the first “Batman,” it would do them good to watch “Batman & Robin” again too, as painful as that may be. The most important lessons to learn are, know when to walk away, know the difference between good casting and stunt casting, and for God’s sake, don’t take Brett Ratner’s phone calls. The “X-Men” people will tell you about that one in a couple years.

When Warner Brothers announced that they were going to make a “Batman” movie modeled after the Dark Knight series of the comic, the fan boys roared with approval. Then they announced that Michael Keaton would be Bruce Wayne, and Tim Burton, who only had two movie credits to his name at the time (“Pee Wee’s Big Adventure,” “Beetlejuice”) would direct. The Comic Book Guys were appalled. Advance buzz was troublesome, with other studios wondering if Warners was about to make “Superman 5.”

Warner Brothers, meanwhile, breathed comfortably. In fact, they didn’t even bother to screen the movie. They knew they were sitting on a gold mine.

“Batman” completely rewrote the rules for how summer blockbusters were made, how they were promoted, and how they were expected to perform. Its $42 million opening weekend was staggering for the time, easily making back its $30 million budget. Keaton turned out to be an excellent choice for Bruce Wayne, making him guarded but vulnerable. Burton, who was only 30 at the time, showed remarkable vision as well as restraint, treating the source material with the respect it deserved. And then there’s Jack Nicholson, whose portrayal of the Joker is the most nuanced performance, from a villain or hero, that you’ll ever find in a comic book adaptation.

Set in the ageless, timeless Gotham City, the police are hearing stories about a vigilante crime fighter who’s cleaning up the town on his own. Investigative reporter Knox (Robert Wuhl) is on the trail, but gets sidetracked by photographer Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger), who’s come to get some pictures of this mysterious “Bat Man.” Vale soon meets cute with Bruce Wayne (Keaton) at a benefit, completely unaware of his alter ego. But Wayne has bigger problems. Jack Napier (Nicholson), a loose cannon henchman of local crime boss Grissom (Jack Palance), has plans to take over the business, and after a horrific accident at a chemical plant leaves him disfigured, Napier, who’s christened himself the Joker, steps up the offensive, on both the city and Batman.

To call “Batman” an action movie is misleading. In fact, it’s more like a very colorful crime thriller, with a twisted character study at its core. The scene at the museum, set to Prince’s excellent “Partyman,” (they were actually listening to “1999” when they shot the scene) may be raucous, but it’s really a big, loud setup to a quiet conversation between the Joker and Vale. In fact, the quietest lines are the most memorable (“Where does he get those wonderful toys?” and “Never rub another man’s rhubarb,” to name but a couple). You get the sense that the Joker is trying his damndest to maintain his sanity, but is slowly unwinding before your eyes. That Nicholson could make this homicidal maniac so sympathetic is a testament to his performance.

If there’s anything that’s off in “Batman,” it’s Basinger’s Vicki Vale character. She seems to serve little purpose outside of the damsel in distress (and she’s in constant distress). Wuhl may have been upset that Knox didn’t come back for “Batman Returns,” but there was really no place or need for him. Billy Dee Williams played Harvey Dent with the goal of becoming Two Face later, so one wonders how upset he was when the studio bought out his contract and offered the role to Tommy Lee Jones for “Batman Forever.”

The most ironic thing about the tremendous success of “Batman” was that people seemed to instantly forget what made that movie work so well. “Batman Returns” was delightfully weird, but despite their efforts to develop the villains, it doesn’t nail the landing the way “Batman” did. The two Joel Schumacher sequels (1995’s “Batman Forever,” 1997’s “Batman & Robin”) didn’t even try, choosing style over substance. In retrospect, the most worthy successors to “Batman” are Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” movies. Which is why everyone waits impatiently to see what Christopher Nolan has up his sleeve for “Batman Begins,” and whether it will be the follow-up “Batman” so richly deserved.

All signs pointed to “The Bank Job” being a disappointment. For starters, the movie stars Jason Statham who, like him or not, does far more bad movies than good ones (his last film was directed by critical punching bag Uwe Boll, yikes). The movie’s second strike: the dreaded Thursday night screening, timed so print publications cannot get their reviews submitted in time for Friday’s paper. But then a funny thing happened: the movie turned out to be pretty damn good. Credit director Roger Donaldson, himself no stranger to the occasional box office dud (“The Recruit,” “Cadillac Man”), for keeping Statham’s eye on the prize.

The year is 1971, and Statham is Terry Leather, a small-time London crook who runs an auto shop but is deep in debt. He needs cash, and quick, and former flame Martine (Saffron Burrows) comes to his rescue with a big-time proposition: knock off a Baker Street bank. She knows that the bank is getting a new security system and is currently operating without one, so she convinces Terry to get his crew together to dig underneath the bank from an empty shop two doors down and hit the safety deposit box vault. What Terry doesn’t know is that Martine is doing this as a plea deal with MI5, in order to avoid arrest on a drug charge. Terry and his crew can keep whatever they want (provided they don’t get caught, of course); MI5 is only interested in the contents of the deposit box owned by Michael X (Peter De Jersey), a black militant leader who possesses naked photographs of a member of the Royal Family, which he uses as blackmail in order to stay out of trouble. The problem is that the bank also contains the deposit boxes of a strip club owner Lew Vogel (David Suchet) and local madam Sonia Bern (Sharon Maughan). Once word is out that their assets are on the street, MI5 becomes the last concern of Terry and his crew.

Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais’ script, a few groaner lines of dialogue aside, does two very smart things: the first is getting the robbery out of the way relatively early. Unlike “Inside Man” or “Dog Day Afternoon,” the robbery itself is merely the setup to the movie’s true action. The other smart move is putting every character in play to shifting alliances. What allows that to work convincingly is the fact that everyone in the movie is dirty. The protagonists are crooks, and everyone else (save one character) is corrupt or compromised in some way. David Mamet movies don’t sport this many double-crosses.

Perhaps Statham should go the ensemble route more often. When it is not required of him to carry a movie, he seems much more relaxed and convincing as an actor. (Don’t worry; he still gets the chance to kick some butt.) Burrows has little to do but be Statham’s bait, a task she performs rather effortlessly. The MI5 superiors appear to be playing their roles satirically at times, which is jarring. David Suchet’s scenes are amusing in their banality; for a guy that’s tied into some dirty deeds, he’s hilariously bored by it all. Terry’s crew, along with his wife and kids, are window dressing, but they do well enough to not be a distraction.

For those hitting the multiplexes this weekend, do not hesitate to choose “The Bank Job” over Roland Emmerich’s dreadfully dull “10,000 BC.” Warts and all, it is far more entertaining, and shows that Statham is indeed capable of vaulting to the next level, provided he become a tad choosier. Seriously, Jason, does the world really need “Transporter 3”? More to the point, does “Transporter 3” need you? Time to move up and move on.

Think of whatever taboos you thought were broken by those edgy R-rated comedies from last year, “Wedding Crashers” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” Got those thoughts locked in your head? Good, now watch “Beerfest” absolutely obliterate them. It’s more vulgar, there is even more gratuitous nudity, and the main characters are drunk in nearly every scene. Simply put, this is going to be every college male’s new favorite movie. Shocking to me, though, that this is the work of the same man responsible for “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Sure, it helped him land a three-picture deal at Warner Brothers for his Broken Lizard brethren, but what a steep price to pay in terms of your dignity.

The movie begins with Jan (Paul Soter) and Todd (Erik Stolhanske) burying their German immigrant father (can’t tell you who plays him, that would be spoiling the fun). Their Great Gam Gam (Cloris Leachman) asks them to take their father’s ashes back to Germany and spread them at Oktoberfest, a wish that the boys, experienced drinkers themselves, happily oblige. Almost as soon as they arrive, though, they are escorted by a local to an underground, “Fight Club”-style drinking tournament called Beerfest, which is sponsored by Baron Wolfgang von Wolfhausen (Jurgen Prochnow), the boys’ estranged uncle. In light of learning some embarrassing information about their father, Jan and Todd attempt to save face by challenging the German Beerfest team to a competition, only to get humiliated. The boys then come back to the States and recruit college drinking buddies Fink (Steve Lemme), Landfill (Kevin Heffernan), and drinking game legend-turned-prostitute Barry (“Beerfest” director Jay Chandrasekhar) to go back to Beerfest in a year’s time and bring the title to the US, who has never even been invited to the competition in the past.

The most amusing aspect of “Beerfest” is how it knowingly exploits numerous plot devices, from the cameo to the conveniently unknown relative (what they do with that waves a middle finger at every movie critic alive, which is why I found it so funny) to needless boob shot after boob shot after boob shot. In fact, there is only one scene in the entire movie that actually calls for nudity, but the fact that they squeezed it into so many other places…hell yes. This is a movie about drinking lots of beer (it even comes with a crawl at the beginning warning people how silly it would be to attempt the events depicted therein). But what is a movie about drinking lots of beer without a whole bunch of topless women? That’s right, LAME. They even pull off a very amusing sequence where you see through the eyes of a drunk, and as predictable as it may be – and let’s be honest, you’ll see a lot of these jokes coming down Broadway – it’s the execution that matters.

“Beerfest” is not a great movie, but it’s a damn funny one, which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for movies like “The Break-Up” that claimed to be funny but were painful instead. Indeed, it makes me look back on the last three months and conclude that the end of the summer, often considered a wasteland after the July 4 weekend, actually turned out to be better than the beginning of it. “Beerfest,” “Clerks II,” “The Descent,” “Snakes on a Plane” and even “Talladega Nights” were far better than any of the “tentpole” movies that the summer originally boasted. But enough about that whole re-imagining August rant I was on (which, of course, has nothing to do with the fact that I was born in August). If you were thinking about seeing this movie, you’re going to love it. If the whole idea sounded silly and sophomoric, well, it’s that, too. The movie is what it is, and it hits its mark surprisingly well for a souped-up teen comedy. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the new “Old School.” Better than the old “Old School.”

Watching “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story” is like watching “Best In Show,” “Family Guy” and the Pin Pals episode of “The Simpsons” back to back, although the sum is not nearly as good as the individual parts. Some moments are sublime. Others are shockingly lazy. Most of the material is horribly, and deliberately, inappropriate. There are also cameos galore. The end result is sometimes side-splittingly funny, but overall wildly uneven.

Vince Vaughn stars as Peter La Fleur, a not too terribly ambitious man who runs a small gym called Average Joe’s that is on the verge of financial ruin. Across the street is GloboGym, a fascist mega-gym run by White Goodman (Ben Stiller), a pompous dork with ridiculous hair who wants to take Average Joe’s and turn it into a parking structure. Between them is Kate Veatch (Christine Taylor), a lawyer assigned by their bank to organize the takeover for one and the foreclosure on the other. La Fleur needs $50,000 by the end of the month, or Average Joe’s is done for. One of his few regulars, an obscure sports fan named Gordon (Stephen Root), suggests they enter a Las Vegas dodgeball tournament, which pays the winner, wouldn’t you know it, $50,000. Goodman gets wind of their scheme and enters the tournament as well.

The setup is admittedly preposterous, but writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber still didn’t have to stoop to the depths that he does. After a hilarious sequence showing renowned dodgeball champion Patches O’Houlihan (Rip Torn) whipping the Average Joe’s crew into shape (with the help of wrenches and traffic), we’re subjected to the most perverse masturbation scene in the history of film, a bit that’s not just unfunny but seriously disturbing. The games themselves are lots of fun, with each team a group of silly stereotypes like the Lumberjacks and Skillz That Killz (hence the Pin Pals reference). The play-by-play commentary, provided by Gary Cole and a very funny Jason Bateman, nearly steals the movie.

The biggest flaw with “Dodgeball,” besides how desperately hard Thurber tries to test our limits (fat cheerleaders, dyke jokes, inflatable shorts), is Stiller’s Goodman character. He simply has too much screen time. Villains, as a rule, are not supposed to have more screen time than the hero, but Stiller is onscreen a good 10 minutes more than Vaughn. But never mind the rules of moviemaking, because this would be acceptable if Goodman were an engaging villain (think Jack Nicholson’s Joker), but a little of him goes a really long way. By the 60-minute mark, he’s worn out his welcome, and you’re left wondering why his oversized minions haven’t rebelled against him, given him a swirlie and hung him from a flagpole.

“Dodgeball” had the opportunity to be the Little Slapstick Movie That Could, ala “There’s Something About Mary.” But in their quest to offend, they forgot one simple rule: being offensive works best when you’re smart about it. Unlike the Farrelly Brothers, who love all their misfits, Thurber seems to view his subjects with contempt. As a result, we do, too.

“Balls of Fury” is one of those monkeys-with-typewriters kind of movies, the inevitable result of someone watching “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story” and “Beerfest” enough times for a synapse to finally fire in the back of his oxygen-deprived brain that says, “Literal sudden death ping pong.” Does the world need another ‘non-athletic sport becomes high-stakes battle’ movie? Probably not, though the world would have made room for “Balls of Fury” had the filmmakers given us enough reason to.

Dan Fogler stars as Randy Daytona, a onetime Olympic table tennis prodigy who’s now reduced to performing his ping pong skills for bored dinner theater patrons. Randy is approached by a federal agent (George Lopez) who wants Randy to play his way back into form so he can enter an exclusive, top secret ping pong tournament hosted by a notorious Japanese crime lord, and ping pong fanatic, named Feng (Christopher Walken. Yes, that Christopher Walken). Feng also happens to be the man that had Randy’s father killed when he was a child, so Randy is up for the task, but he needs the guidance of the blind Master Wong (James Hong), plus the love of the Master’s niece Maggie (Maggie Q), to whip him back into shape.

The amount of enjoyment you will receive from this movie is in direct proportion to how hard you laughed at the part where Christopher Walken plays a Japanese crime lord. If you find that funny, then you’ve successfully suspended disbelief to a level where you can potentially enjoy this movie, since God knows it will take a lot to get audiences to swallow the movie’s lesser qualities, not the least of which is Fogler as a leading man. I can only assume that having Maggie Q play Fogler’s love interest is proof that the writers/monkeys are in on the joke, but the truth is that had those writers/monkeys, “The State” alums Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant, worked a little harder on their script, they would have landed Jack Black, the man who was clearly Number One on their wish list, to play Randy. I’ll buy Jack Black landing Maggie Q. Fogler, not so much.

Besides the non-casting of Black (smart move, JB), there are issues with, well, the entire second half of the movie. The tournament itself is rather dull compared to the training sequences, and the espionage aspect of the story is laughable. The final showdown between Randy and Feng feels like a tribute to the video game scene from “Never Say Never Again,” the worst Bond movie ever made. Why would you rip something off of the worst Bond movie ever made?

There was a good bad movie to be had here, but Lennon and Garant gave up on “Balls of Fury” before it had barely begun. What every writer should remember, even when they’re making a movie about a Def Leppard-loving bas-been ping pong player, is that even bad movies need good stories.