The Place Beyond the Pines, or How to Ruin a Movie with Bradley Cooper.

Dear Derek Cianfrance,

I think I see what happened here.  I'll bet you had this really great idea for a film, and the whole time you were writing it you were thinking, "Damn, this is good."  And you kept writing it, it kept being brilliant, and then you finished it and realized that it was only forty-five minutes long.

And in this instance, you blew it.  The first segment of The Place Beyond the Pines is fantastic and the rest of it is a sub-par addendum; devoid of any real emotional or thematic connection to its predecessor.

Wreck-It Ralph: Rated E for Everyone, but Mostly Children.

Animated video game nostalgia.  What's not to like?  Not much, but Wreck-It Ralph just doesn't have the flair to pull off the Pixar style it attempts to emulate.  It's a cute, mildly funny feature that just doesn't accomplish all it set outs to.

It's a fantastic idea really: Wreck-It Ralph, the destructive villain in the fictional video game Fix-It Felix, just wants the chance to be a hero for once.  Unhappy with his day job, he begins jumping between video games in an attempt to prove his worth.  Unfortunately, after the first thirty minutes, Ralph finds himself in a saccharine racing game called Sugar Rush, where he stays for the rest of the film.  There a few amusing references to Tapper, Q-Bert, and a few others, but almost all occur in the film's opening moments.  Once Ralph reaches Sugar Rush, the film evaporates into little more than a childish underdog/outcast story and one amazing Oreo joke.

There are plenty of recognizable voices, but the typecasting is so meticulous, they might as well have named one of the characters "Sarah Silverman".  Disney Animation is trying its best to blend the adult with the childish, but it hasn't quite graduated from elementary school.

6/10

Super 8, or Transformers 3: Dark Side of the Childhood.

Dear M. Night Shyamalan,

Dear J.J. Abrams,

We get it.  You like Spielberg.  So do we.  Everyone does.  The only reason Osama Bin Laden was caught was that, in his haste to order the Jurassic Park Blu-ray, he forgot to change the name on his Amazon account.  Everyone. Likes. Spielberg.

But we didn't need you to make a Spielberg drinking game.  If I did a shot every time there was a lens flare or a child staring wondrously into space throughout Super 8, I would have died of alcohol poisoning halfway through.  Combine that with every other Spielberg homage, and this drinking game's inevitable popularity, you very well may wipe out the entire college population.  You cannot build a work of art on shout outs.  Unless you're a rapper.

A Necessary Interjection: If You Release Crap, at Least Make Original Crap.

"If you don't protect that quarterback, you better start pushin' drugs, boy."

I haven't written any letters lately. I apologize. However, there has been an underwhelming amount of film that has required my attention lately. Now don't get me wrong. There have been some bad films released. Unfortunately, most of them were so obviously bad that I could in no way justify spending money just to infuriate myself. So, if you saw 2012, Precious, Old Dogs, Boondock Saints II, Twilight, or The Blind Side, it's your fault not mine; you should have known better. Let's face it, you've seen all these movies before in some form or another. I, for one, do not wish to pay money to see them again.

The Fake Kind, or Jovovich Goes PG-13.

Dear film studios,

Please stop making fictional films and advertising them as based on real events. I understand that if people think something is based on a true story--especially one involving aliens or ghosts--they are more likely to see it, but you're constructing a false reality that gullible human beings are going to accept as fact. It's not this film in particular that worries me, but I'm starting to wonder where you're going to draw the line. You have the money and the influence to completely rewrite history, and a large majority of Americans are too dumb to even consider you might be lying to them.

Now, I realize I just described the government, but c'mon! You're better than them, aren't you? You're just a couple of guys looking to make a quick buck. Wait...are you the government?

But anyway, The Fourth Kind was hyped pretty well. People thought it was real; a lot still do. A quick google search will debunk that claim. If Dr. Abigail Tyler actually exists, she needs to show up on a talk show and show us some ID.

I do like the marketing campaign, and the hype surrounding the film; but it would have been nice to have some honesty--maybe after the credits? I'm not that big of a fan of after-the-credits content, but I like to imagine Ashton Kutcher showing up after the film and letting everyone know that they got Punk'd.

Anyways, forget marketing. Forget the lying scum that is Hollywood. Forget what happened that weekend your uncle babysat you...

The Fourth Kind was entertaining. Granted, I just saw The Box so I probably would have thought I Know Who Killed Me was entertaining too; but The Fourth Kind kept me intrigued. It certainly had its problems: The sheriff character was absolutely ridiculous, the broken fourth wall was a contrived cheap shot, and the dialogue was nothing to be proud of. However, the combination of "archive" footage and dramatization intertwined nicely to create a pseudo-documentary atmosphere that kept the film at a nice pace. I think enjoyment of the film hinges on whether you approve or disapprove of this stylistic choice.

This film will likely be panned by many for the wholehearted assertion that it is based on true events, when it is in fact complete fiction. But if one were to assess the film on its own merits, I can't see any reason to drastically raise or lower it above or below any other film of its kind. Due to the timeliness of its release, it will likely be compared to Paranormal Activity which everyone (except my sister apparently) knew was fake from the get-go. The "documentary" footage of Paranormal Activity was still unsettling to many, so there's no real reason to discredit The Fourth Kind just because it's claim of a realistic portrayal is a hoax.

Anyway, I was entertained. I don't really care about this one. Say what you want, masses. The only real purposes of this film are to entertain and to stimulate the viewer's thoughts on whether aliens exist or not. It's not that stimulating. Especially without Milla Jovovich's industry standard full frontal shot.



P.S. Maybe we should question Roman Polanski on the whereabouts of Tyler's daughter.

P.P.S. Yes, I used both the "forgettable" and "worth seeing" tags. Aren't most movies both those things?

Where the Sleeping Theatre Goers Are, or Spike Jonze's New Music Video.

Dear Spike Jonze,

If I wanted to watch eight children argue, I would take up babysitting. Where the Wild Things Are will forever be my ultimate reminder why I do not.

Certainly you've captured the elaborate capacity of childhood imagination and accompanied it with a phenomenal soundtrack, but that, sadly, is about all the film has going for it. Perhaps you should have made a music video instead. Any relevant or entertaining content is so thinly disbursed between random fits of brattiness and fort building/dirt throwing/pile making/[insert random childhood action here], that I would classify Wild Things (Not to be confused with the Neve Campbell film) as surrealism if the events had any driving force behind them whatsoever. But nope; It's just some kids playing. Oh, and some of them happen to be giant furry things.

At least the climactic metaphor (Max's "birth" from KW) actually made sense and gave the film some semblance of closure, but every other action Max and the nonhuman characters partake in seems like an exercise in time wasting. Thank the heavens this was just over an hour and a half; any longer and I would have taken a nap. There's more indie music/random event combos in this than there were in Juno.

What bothers me the most is that the first fifteen minutes of Wild Things are great. Kid feels neglected, throws a hissy-fit and runs away: a fine articulation of childhood frustration. When Max arrives at the island, the frustration wanders off and is replaced with a mess of childhood imagination tied together by thinly veiled tidbits of Max's actual life. The problem with this, is that all the characters on the island are Max; in that they are figments of his imagination, and therefore cannot possess any capacity for thought or emotion beyond his own. As a result, all events on the island are shaped by a grade-school auteur, and the characters can do little more than behave like whiny children.

I held out with the hope that once Max returned home the film would dazzle me at the end (with at least a fuzzy moment to make me feel good), but no such luck. Max's final scene at home is shorter than the end credits. Apparently, when a child runs away he should be rewarded with cake.



P.S. KW is a total pothead.