Watching Like Crazy was a frustrating experience for me. The whole time I was watching the film, I felt as if I should have been enjoying it much more than I actually was. Visually, the film is both intimate and gorgeous, kind of like watching a home movie if your dad was a virtuoso filmmaker. The performances are all strong, from top to bottom. But despite all of the obvious talent on the screen, I just couldn’t find myself connecting to the story or the characters as they were crafted. Maybe I’m not much of a romantic, but I found the relationship woes of the main characters Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones) to be less than compelling. In fact, they were pretty frustrating to get through. Who were these kids and why should I care that they treat their personal lives like the most important things in the world? We’re not so much introduced to Jacob and Anna as we watch as they’re introduced to each other. The film opens with their meeting in a college course in which Anna is a student and Jacob a teacher’s aid, followed by Anna’s bold decision to leave a note declaring her infatuation under Jacob’s windshield wiper, and the stilted conversation and stolen glances of their first date. The getting-to-know-you sequence is cute, but it doesn’t last long. Soon we’re informed through montage (we’re informed of a lot of things through montage in this film) that the two kids are now very [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

When I first heard that a new version of The Three Musketeers was being made by Paul W.S. Anderson I initially thought that he was a bad choice for the material, that he would just end up making something ridiculous. Now that I’ve actually seen the movie, I’m certain that he was a bad choice for the material, because he did in fact make something ridiculous. You know this story by now, it’s been around for like 175 years or something, so too much plot summary probably isn’t necessary. There are three famous Musketeers, the king’s personal soldiers, Athos (Matthew MacFayden), Porthos (Ray Stevenson), and Aramis (Luke Evans). They used to be big time, but now they’re out of a job because a corrupt Cardinal (Christoph Waltz) is taking control of France and instituting his personal guard as the new power in the nation. Also there’s a young chap name D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) who has traveled to Paris to become a Musketeer, but he finds the place in disarray. Backstabbings and power plays commence. But let’s get back to how bad most everything in this movie is. The most egregious of all the offenses this new Three Musketeers commits is the punishment it doles out to its characters in the form of horrible dialogue. Never have you come across a script with more hackneyed, generic movie clichés than this. Everything that comes out of the characters’ mouths is clunky and unnatural. It feels like the movie went through absolutely zero [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

The opening shot of The Beaver is of a pool on a sunny day. A body drifts through the frame, slowly, on a raft. It’s Mel Gibson doing his best impression of a starship and The Beaver doing its best impression of Star Wars. It’s kind of a foreboding image. Walter Black isn’t doing so well. He’s depressed. But, more than that, he’s depressed to the point where he has completely checked out on his job and family. He has somehow reached such a hopeless state that he has sat passively and watched his once great toy company fall into financial straits, and his once loving family become isolated from one another. We are never explicitly told what has led to Walter’s current state, but The Beaver is mostly a film that focuses on the present moment. The past exists here as a ghost, haunting the characters and coloring their actions, but only half remembered and never spoken of. The big gimmick of the film, if you haven’t seen any of the advertising, is that Gibson’s character begins to deal with his inner turmoil by speaking through a plush beaver puppet and using a voice that sounds like Michael Caine in a bar fight. Much of the film details the phases of Walter’s beaver experiment; the initial shock, the turnaround when The Beaver starts helping Walter get his life back together, and then the darker stuff that comes as his mental state degrades again. If you saw only the ads, [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

After an entire decade of nonstop irony during the 90s I felt like I was already done with snarky references to 80s pop culture. Then once VH1 systematically mined the decade, year by year, for every possible comment and quip that an army of B list comedians could come up with for I Love the 80s, I was certain that the book on the subject had been closed. At least until last year when we got the mediocre Hot Tub Time Machine, which went for every cheap 80s joke in the book, and suddenly the door was once again open to make fun of the decade of excess. I dreaded watching Take Me Home Tonight. I could not watch all of the same jokes regurgitated, yet again. How happy was I then, when this didn’t turn out to be that sort of movie at all? Super happy. Take Me Home Tonight has less in common with comedies like the aforementioned hot tub movie or something like Sandler’s The Wedding Singer and more in common with movies about young people from another decade like American Graffiti or Dazed and Confused. It bathes itself in an 80s aesthetic, but it doesn’t ever shine a spotlight on the trends and tropes in order to exploit them for laughs. This isn’t so much a comedy about the 80s as it is a comedy set in the 80s. The trailers really do it no favors, so don’t walk into it with a bad attitude like [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Finally dredged from the depths of cinematic hell, the classic Roger Corman-produced Humanoids from the Deep is finally back on to DVD (and even Blu-ray!) courtesy of the fine folks at Shout! Factory as part of their Roger Corman Cult Collection. One of the earliest films to deal with genetic modification, the film follows the denizens of a small town who come under siege from mutated, humanoid salmon monsters (no joke) after a cannery company’s experiments with growth hormone pollute the local waters. While tensions over the cannery on land result in fist fights, a massive swarm of humanoids play a different kind of game – the rape, murder, eat game. What follows is an awesome spectacle of exploitation cinema, which are somewhat wrongly called B-Movies these days.

Alan Ball goes back to his American Beauty form with a story of a young girl’s struggle to understand her own sexual obsessions.

We just can’t get enough Rhona Mitra, but is it possible that “Doomsday” delivers the blood and violence we expect with a woman who is out and out a badder chick than Rhona!? Prepare to meet Viper.

A member of the Reject Nation says that Witless Protection “is quite possibly the Dumbest Movie of the Year.” Go figure.

Denzel Washington helms his second motion picture and shows he has worthy skills behind the camera as well as in front of it, although there’s no question as to which he does best.

The screen adaptation of Cecelia Ahern’s novel was originally set in Ireland but has been transported to New York City to create a vehicle for Hilary Swank to show her softer, funnier side.

Though this film had me at “achingly romantic,” I cringe at the thought of someone rolling their eyes and overlooking this remarkable film at the fault of the advertisers who betrayed this film’s distinct uniqueness.

Christmas has finally swung in my direction. No more Tim Allen (though I like him), no Decking the Halls or Jingling of Bells but BLOOD.

Films that center around pregnant women, in this case a teenage girl, are nothing new, especially this year. Then how is it in 2007 the concept produces winner after winner? Damn good writing.

What better way to celebrate Christ’s birth than watching two warring alien races kicking the holy hell out of each other?

Like a lot of people, I did not have high expectations going in for Alvin and the Chipmunks.

After at least a decade, if not much more, of lackluster films from Sidney Lumet, the fading titan has strikingly returned to form with a fiery, blustering crash. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is easily the best-acted film of the year, but what’s more is that it’s a sharp piece of cultural criticism about late capitalism and the depths of tragedy it’s capable of producing. Nearly three-quarters of the way into the film, Marisa Tomei asks her husband, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, for car fare to her mother’s house; “I could really use some money,” she says, and she might as well be speaking for every character in the film. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is about money, pure and anything but simple: its role as America’s driving force, main object of desire and the one thing of which no one seems to have enough. Hoffman is introduced in a position of dominance, retrocopulating with his wife Tomei (it’s surprisingly graphic, despite being filmed in a non-revealing long shot), a dominance he’ll resume, though not in a porously-penetrative way, throughout the rest of the film in regards to his little brother, played by Ethan Hawke. Hoffman pushes him into a robbery he doesn’t want, nor have the brains, to commit but both, to their undoing, are in desperate need of the cash they assure themselves that they’ll score. (And Hoffman, the cokeheaded corporate exec, is too much the coward to do it himself.) Hoffman is obsessed with [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is as good of a film as Sidney Lumet has ever made and that is really saying something considering he’s been at it for over half-a-century.

The second installment of what will probably be a twenty-three-movie cash cow picks up after the charm of finding the last treasure has worn off.

Unlike the talkative Lions for Lambs, you can come away with an entertaining message movie that’s a breezy hour-and-a-half.

I hate to have to throw myself into the fires of minority hell, but I’m compelled to vote no on Tim Burton’s dour, overly dark and overly bloody Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.