Now in Theatres: Volume 2

Battle: LA: Battle: LA is *yaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwn* a story about a group of marines *yaaaaaaaaawwwwn* who are fighting a war against alien invaders in Los Angeles. There is really nothing to this threadbare piece of big budget, high concept filmmaking. Essentially District 9 with no political symbolism (and worse camera work) crossed with a Bruckheimer film that has been stripped of any real sort of knowing fun, Battle: LA plays like clips of someone playing video games on YouTube. The script does the film no favours with ludicrous amounts of expository dialog (sometimes characters just repeat what another person has said after they have said it) and any characterization is banged out with almost PowerPoint like precision in the first reel. Why didn't I write a full review for this one, you might ask? Because writing about it would have really bored me to no end and because much like how the movie is unoriginal, pretty much everything I can say about the film has been said already by those poor souls who are actually paid to review these things.

Rating (out of 4 stars): * 1/2

Incendies: Following his wonderful work on Polytechnique (which I believe to be one of the most under valued films from any country in the past decade), Quebec director Dennis Villeneuve's return to the screen feels like a bit of a mixed bag. The story of twin sisters tasked with the delivery of sealed letters to their father and to a brother they have never met definitely has an emotional charge to it. Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette deliver wonderful performances as the sisters forced into a mystery created posthumously by their mother for reasons that make very little sense and take them to the Middle East for an emotional journey of closure. Much like his previous film, Villeneuve is best when focusing on the subjugation of women and all of the emotions on display ring true, and the film itself is gorgeous to look at as every frame is filled with lush colours and details. On the other hand, Villeneuve is less successful in establishing his fictional Middle East setting as being truly dangerous and foreboding. It feels almost as if he is censoring himself at times; wanting to touch upon other major issues that he doesn't feel he is capable of taking on. Despite this, Incendies is a well made film and definitely worth watching.

Rating: ***

Just Go With It: "Have you seen Just Go With It? Then you can't say Red Riding Hood is the worst film of the year." That was an actual conversation that transpired this past week. Twice. In an effort to silence everyone, who has made this assertion/dare, I went to see the film this past weekend. I didn't pay. I snuck in after seeing Battle: LA (which I used a gift card for) knowing that I probably wouldn't have cared if I got kicked out of or got caught sneaking into a late period Adam Sandler film that has already managed to gross $100 million at the box office despite some of the worst reviews in recent years. I sat watching Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston try to pretend to be married to help Sandler get a no-strings-attached relationship from an impossibly hot woman who will probably need his character's plastic surgery skills in about 5 years. I didn't laugh a single time. I elicited a chuckle occasionally, but only because I was thinking in my head about what the writer's room was like for this film. I thought about casting decisions and just how little Sandler sycophant Dennis Dugan actually directs a film. I can, however, say that on a purely technical level Just Go With It is not incompetent. It functions in the worst way possible, but unlike Red Riding Hood, at least it is functional.

Rating: *

Mars Needs Moms: Bloom County creator Berkeley Breathed's children's book of the same name works much better on the page than it does on screen. The story of a boy (with the body and mannerisms of Seth Green thanks to the art of motion capture animation) who travels to space to get back his mother who was kidnapped by martians for her disciplining powers works better in the small confines of a children's book. The film wheezes to barely make an 80 minute run time and despite some creative touches and good action set pieces The creepy animation (courtesy of The Time Machine half-director Simon Wells Robert Zemeckis who needs to get back to making actual films without motion capture at any cost) does the movie no favours. In an animated film that is supposed to be founded on the joys of having a loving family, I don't want all the human characters to be utterly expressionless. As Roger Ebert once said, when it comes to these characters, it's all in the eyes. I couldn't connect to them at all. Also, avoid seeing this in 3D if at all possible. It might have seemed like a good idea at the time but the film is so dark it manages to look even worse than The Green Hornet did.

Rating: **

Rango: The year is still in it's infancy, but Gore Verbinski's Rango is already a front runner for the biggest disappointment of the year. The best animation I have seen in years is used in service of an unoriginal story that fails as both a film for children and anybody but the smuggest of adults who will feel smart simply by getting a litany of film references thrown at them. Johnny Depp voices the title character, a domesticated lizard who finds himself in the middle of the Mojave Desert and happens upon a town inhabited by various desert rats, birds, and lizards who are in the midst of a debilitating drought. Borrowing quite liberally from classic westerns and taking it's third act almost word for word from Chinatown (minus the incest angle), Rango doesn't really offer an adult audience anything new and the film is far too long and self referential for kids to really get anything out of it. Also, it is far too dark and violent to even really be properly viewed as a kids film. It does have moments where I laughed quite heartily in spite of my misgivings, but I felt drained by the end of it. Watching Rango was simply exhausting and not necessarily in a good way. Looking around the theatre, I could see a lot of the children in the audience were fidgety by the 40 minute mark (the entire middle third of the film really goes nowhere and just serves to set up an action sequence that apes the Star Wars attack on the Death Star), and by the end of it, many of them had fallen asleep. I know the film failed with me, but I couldn't help but wonder if this was a common occurrence at Rango screenings elsewhere. Haven't we learned from Family Guy that simply making references for the sake of appearing smart barely works in 30 minute doses? Try dragging that out to nearly two hours with better animation and a better cast and you will know how I felt watching much of Rango.

Rating: **1/2

Unknown: Liam Neeson stars as an American doctor who loses part of his memory following a car crash in Berlin. Upon waking from a 4 day coma over American Thanksgiving, he awakens to find that his wife (January Jones) has no idea who he is and that he has been replaced by someone who seemingly knows everything about him (Aiden Quinn, who really needs to be in more movies). Unknown functions quite well as serviceable Sunday matinee fare and director Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan, House of Wax) finally has good material to work with and shows that he can deliver the goods in a film actually worthy of his talents. The big plot twist is pretty obvious by about the halfway mark, but the action and acting will keep you more than simply entertained. Neeson is as good as always, but this film belongs to the supporting cast, especially the oily Quinn who you are never quite sure about until the last second and Bruno Ganz as a former East German secret service operative turned private detective who is hired by Neeson for help. A scene between Ganz and a great Frank Langella (seen all too briefly as Neeson's mentor and colleague) is the best scene in any film this year. That sequence alone is worth the price of admission.

Rating: ***