For those that aren’t completely sick and tired of trashy melodramas centered on Queen Elizabeth (I and II), director Justin Chadwick takes a slightly different approach with The Other Boleyn Girl: a movie that focuses not on the infamous rulers, but rather the series of nefarious events leading up to the first Elizabeth’s birth. Though it could have just as easily been titled Elizabeth: The Prequel, Chadwick’s film is seriously lacking a protagonist even remotely as passionate or interesting. Instead, he pulls together a group of ignorant and traitorous characters that the audience simply can’t identify with, ultimately resulting in one of the most pointless movie experiences since last year’s hugely overrated Into the Wild.

Based on the novel by Philippa Gregory, the historically inaccurate tale follows the two Boleyn sisters — Mary (Scarlett Johansson) and Anne (Natalie Portman) — as they vie for the love of King Henry VIII (Eric Bana). After Henry’s current wife, Queen Katherine of Aragon (Ana Torrent), fails in delivering a male heir to the throne, he begins looking for a mistress to bear him a son. Desperate to earn the respect and gratitude of the king, Sir Thomas Boleyn (Mark Rylance) offers up his eldest daughter Anne as a potential candidate, but when Henry visits their estate and falls for the recently wedded Mary instead, she’s quickly whisked away to court to serve her country.

Read the rest of Jason Zingale’s review of The Other Boleyn Girl at Bullz-Eye.com!

It’s fitting that Chicago 10, a Roadside Attractions release, is opening February 29. It’s a weird, once-every-four-years day, and Chicago 10 is a weird, out-of-time movie. Here we have a 40th-anniversary commemoration/celebration of a Vietnam-era carnival of civil disobedience targeted at a contemporary audience that has shrugged at every Iraq-themed film put in front of it. How what amounts to a lengthy ‘Nam flashback is supposed to get asses off couches and into a movie theater is a puzzle, man.

The director, Brett Morgen, has an idea or two about that. To bring the story of Hollywood rapscallion and lounge lizard Robert Evans to the screen, Morgen’s prior film The Kid Stays in the Picture used cut-out graphics and clever visuals, and to hell with the talking heads. It worked: If you were too tired to pick up Evans’ tome and actually read it, or had purchased the thing but hadn’t gotten it off the shelf, the doc did all the heavy lifting for you, as Evans’ sonorous voice recounted his adventures over all the retro-chic razzmatazz. The Kid Stays in the Picture took the book-on-tape concept and transferred it to film.

With Chicago 10, Morgen and co-producer Graydon Carter extend the experiment, lopping off every device that stinks of traditional documentary. (Carter, whose not having a Vanity Fair Oscar party got almost as much coverage as his having one, wants to define the cutting edge for the form with these pictures.) Voiceover, out. All that place-setting jazz, “It was a time of change in America,” etc., gone, baby, gone. Yes, it’s history, but it’s living history, relevant to our age, so let’s give the Doors and “Smoke on the Water” and whatever else that smacks of its time a rest and rock on with Eminem, Rage Against the Machine, and the Beastie Boys and what the people are listening to today. The actual trial was political theater, so the movie about it must be theater of the real — confrontational, in your face. It must be…animated. (more…)

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 matinée, 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.

Read the rest of David Medsker’s Be Kind Rewind review at Bullz-Eye.com!

You have to give the makers of Vantage Point credit for one thing: what the movie lacks in plausibility, it makes up for with raw enthusiasm. They think their movie is awesome — well, actually, they probably know it’s not awesome, since they’ve put off releasing it for over a year — but they sure do pull out all the stops to deliver a bullet-riddled, car chase-happy whodunit, Rashomon-style. How much you enjoy it depends on how much you like watching the same scene five times in a row. Much like last year’s flashback extravaganza, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, each flashback reveals new information, but there is little suspense attached to any of it. Thank God we didn’t have to suffer through Philip Seymour Hoffman’s bare ass a second time.

The movie, set in Spain, covers the events surrounding US President Ashton (William Hurt) signing a historic peace accord between the United States and Islamic countries. Our point of view is the production truck of an American cable news channel, with the no-nonsense Rex Brooks (Sigourney Weaver) directing traffic and managing the ego of her on-location correspondent. Rex is surprised to see Secret Service agent Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid) on detail, as he has lain low in the year since he literally took a bullet for Ashton. Ashton steps up to the podium after being introduced by the Spanish mayor, and is immediately shot twice in the chest. Rex tries to make sense of the chaos as Secret Service ushers the President into an ambulance, but soon loses complete control when the podium the President was standing on is blown sky high.

Read the rest of David Medsker’s Vantage Point review at Bullz-Eye.com!

We critics like to make a big fuss over films that have had their release dates pushed back — usually because it’s a sign of a studio’s lack of confidence in the final product — but every once in a while, there’s a movie that endures a similar treatment for very different reasons. Last year, Charlie Bartlett was pulled from the release calendar mere weeks before its scheduled date, and understandably so. The movie’s a hard sell — essentially, it’s a black comedy set in high school — but all that waiting looks to have finally paid off thanks to the recent success of the like-minded Juno. Sure, it’s a little shady of MGM to be cashing in on Junomania now, but there’s no better time than the present to release what could easily become one of the most overlooked films of the year.

Charlie Bartlett (Anton Yelchin) may not be pregnant, but he still has a common case of teen angst (Ritalin not included). After being kicked out of every private school in the region (the latest because he was manufacturing fake IDs), Charlie’s mom (Hope Davis) has no other choice than to enlist him in the local high school. Eager to gain the attention of his new classmates, Charlie appoints himself to the role of school psychiatrist, doling out advice and prescription drugs from within the boy’s restroom. Along with new girlfriend Susan (Kat Dennings) and class bully-turned-business partner Murphey (Tyler Hilton), Charlie quickly becomes the talk of the town, but when the school’s principal (Robert Downey Jr.) finds his authority threatened by the new student, he sets out to make an example of him.

Read the rest of Jason Zingale’s Charlie Bartlett review at Bullz-Eye.com!

Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges is an interesting little film. It’s one part action-comedy, one-part Shakespearean tragedy, and no matter how fucked up that may sound, it completely works. Arranged like an off-Broadway production of Sexy Beast, the film lives and dies by McDonagh’s words (no matter how explicit) and star Colin Farrell’s ability to make you sympathize with a bigoted hitman. It’s a great relief, then, to discover that both McDonagh and Farrell succeed in their respective tasks, all while delivering one of the most original films in years.

Opening with a narration from Ray (Farrell) explaining how a hit-gone-wrong landed him and partner Ken (Brendan Gleeson) in Bruges, the film follows the unlikely duo as they hide out in the Belgian city by order of their boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes). Ken plans to make the most of their detour by playing the dutiful tourist, but Ray is absolutely miserable, claiming that “if [he'd] grown up on a farm and was retarded, Bruges might impress [him], but [he] didn’t, so it doesn’t.” Unfortunately, Ray doesn’t know the real reason why he’s been brought to Bruges, and when Ken refuses to whack him for botching the job, Harry arrives in town to clean up the mess himself.

Read the rest of Jason Zingale’s In Bruges review at Bullz-Eye.com!

Never in my life have I been so glad that I wasn’t caught up in the hype for a film.

Yes, obviously, I was aware of Cloverfield. I’m way too big of a movie geek for it to have stayed completely off my radar. But while some spent the months before its release doing little more than surfing the web and scrutinizing every piece of information that leaked out (or, more likely, that producer J.J. Abrams knowingly and willfully released, albeit in a manner to make it look like it had been leaked), before going into the theater, I really only knew two things about it:

1) It was a creature feature about New York City being attacked by a monster big enough to rip the head off the Statue of Liberty.
2) It was done in a manner resembling “The Blair Witch Project,” where the footage was supposedly a found document, made by people who’d survived the attack.

Hey, man, you had me at “a monster big enough to rip the head off the Statue of Liberty.” (more…)

Ellen Page, welcome to the show. In Juno, the Canadian actress portrays high schooler Juno MacGuff, who gets knocked up after a sexual encounter with her crush and best friend, Paulie Bleeker (Arrested Development’s Michael Cera). After realizing that she is — as she puts it — “for shizz up the spout,” Juno decides to bring the child to term and give it to a seemingly perfect couple, played by Jason Bateman (also from Arrested Development) and a surprisingly great Jennifer Garner.

At first glance Juno seems like a rather conventional teen movie, but thanks to screenwriter Diablo Cody’s sharp writing, Jason Reitman’s steady direction, and great performances by all of the actors involved, it manages to transcend the teen genre’s clichés and deliver a story that is at once original, thoughtful, and completely, utterly human. (more…)