From the pages of Electric City and Diamond City, two of Northeastern Pennsylvania’s premier arts and entertainment publications, comes Richlier founder Jeff Boam’s weekly column:

 

Previews (Opening this Weekend):

 

All About Steve

Sandra Bullock, Bradley Cooper

 

Forget the lure of go-to rom-com star Sandra Bullock (While You Were Sleeping, Hope Floats, Forces of Nature, Two Weeks Notice). Tabloid fixture Bradley Cooper (Has he chosen Jennifer Aniston or Renee Zellweger in his love life—stay tuned?) may prove to be the biggest draw for moviegoers this weekend. Before cameras finished rolling on All About Steve, Cooper had not yet been cast in The Hangover. This particular movie, of course, went on to become the highest-grossing R-rated comedy of all time, so audiences will be curious as to his follow-up. In her and his latest, this PG-13-rated screwball comedy, Bullock falls head over heels for Cooper’s TV newsman after one blind date and follows him and his crew (Thomas Hayden Church, Ken Jeong) around the country to win his love. The Plus: The players. Not only is Bullock still burning hot from the recent success of rom-com The Proposal, she is also serving as producer on her latest. Also, this is Cooper’s follow-up to The Hangover, yes…but he also caught filmgoers’ attention in last year’s rom-com ensemble He’s Just Not That Into You. The Minus: The odds. One weekend…three high-profile debuts. Even though All About Steve is the only romantic comedy on the docket (and PG-13-rated movie to boot), Extract and Gamer could certainly thin out its audience.

 

Extract

Jason Bateman, Mila Kunis

 

To 30-something slackers (former or current), Mike Judge’s ‘90s TV cartoon phenomenon Beavis and Butt-Head may very well still appeal to their inner rebellious child. It was Judge’s cult film favorite Office Space, however, which probably struck an adult nerve in this MTV Generation as they grew up. Though this worker drone comedy failed to wow at the box office, it became a home video underground hit—selling over 6 million DVDs. Though his animated Fox comedy King of the Hill ended on a high note (11 seasons—not too shabby!), Judge’s last film, 2006’s Idiocracy, never even registered on the box office radar. Judge hopes to return to form with the R-rated comedy Extract, in which a flower plant extract owner (Bateman) deals with workplace issues and a string of bad luck, including his wife’s (Kristen Wiig) affair with a gigolo. The Plus: The players. Judge’s cast includes Bateman (Hancock, TV’s Arrested Development), Kunis (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Max Payne), Wiig (TV’s Saturday Night Live), Ben Affleck (He’s Just Not That Into You, State of Play), and J.K. Simmons (Spider-Man, Juno). The Minus: The competition. Even though The Hangover recently broke box office records, Miramax’s Extract may not attract these same audiences with its smaller (read: indie) marketing budget.

 

Gamer

Gerald Butler, Amber Valletta

 

After the lackluster grosses of Crank: High Voltage, the dubious future of the Jason Statham-starring Crank series is anyone’s guess in H’Wood (the second movie baited moviegoers into yet another sequel). Still, this setback is not keeping writer/directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor down. No, this twosome has kept busy adapting cult comic book Jonah Hex for director Jimmy Hayward and writing/directing this blood-splattering thriller. In the R-rated actioner Gamer, Butler stars as a futuristic gladiator imprisoned against his will in an ultra-violent mind-controlled first-person shooter game. The Plus: The players. After the blockbuster success of 300, Butler wowed critics with RocknRolla and wowed audiences with The Ugly Truth. Amber Valletta (Hitch, Transporter 2) and Kyra Sedgwick (The Game Plan, TV’s The Closer) are joining him. The Minus: The timing. The summer blockbuster season is over now that the kids are headed back to school and the adults are headed back from vacation…so what’s with this R-rated action flick opening on the busy Labor Day weekend?

 

Reviews (Now in Theaters):

 

The Final Destination: Death Trip

Bobby Campo, Shantel VanSanten

 

Pretty people dying. While this is a common daydream of your reviewer, it may not appeal to all moviegoers. For the rest, however, there’s THE Final Destination. Your reviewer has never feasted upon the Z-grade ridiculousness that is Final Destination and its sequels (whether it be Citizens on Patrol or Electric Boogaloo), but he was able to piece together this franchise’s rickety semblance of a story in time to watch the CG blood-n-guts splatter all over a ready-n-willing audience…to what end, he will never know. The suspense of the build-up was almost heart-stopping (especially in 3-D), but the execution (please do not pardon the expression) was almost video game-like…as in Contra NES graphics, circa 1988. 

 

In this three-dimensional R-rated gross-out (also available in 2-D), a group of friends (Campo, VanSanten, et al) survive a horrific ordeal only to get killed off one-by-one in increasingly gruesome ways.

 

A vexed young man has visions of death-capades and races to stop them from coming true. That pretty much sums up this 90 minutes blown to all Hell. It is a gratuitous excuse for director David R. Ellis to merge the America’s Funniest Video-style hokum of Faces of Death with the cunning technology that dubiously made Jaws 3-D blockbuster entertainment back in 1982. He accomplishes this, but not without sacrificing a piece of all of our ever-living souls. He sets it up only to either throw away the moment (elevator of terror) or ignite the action (messy Nascar lap)..,to the dubious delight of moviegoers checking themselves for gray matter.  

 

Down-to-the-Wire: Destination unknown.

 

Halloween II

Tyler Mane, Malcolm McDowell

 

There is a bold film by a noteworthy director whose frenzied and often psychedelic style serves to point up our media-induced society’s blood-drenched fascination with serial killings. Moviegoers can find it in their local or online video store under the title Natural Born Killers. With the latest Halloween II (because yes, there is another one from 1981), they are left with an unapologetically grisly and laughable flick that masquerades as murder porn. Worse, it puts viewers through dimestore armchair psychology involving visions of the serial killer’s inner child, the director’s wife, and an unfortunate white horse that must have wandered into the shot. This is not psycho-babble—this is psycho-bubblegum…and it plays out about as well as the first craptastic Halloween sequels did back in the day.

 

In this R-rated sequel, Michael Myers’ (Mane) murderous rampage continues…with his sister (Scout Taylor-Compton) seemingly dead in his sights.

 

If John Carpenter directed Twin Peaks or David Lynch directed Halloween, it would probably look a lot like this indulgent mess. In 2007, your reviewer gave this sequel’s predecessor one plaudit (“the concentration on providing a back-story to silent maniac Meyers makes for somewhat compelling cinema”), but he also faulted how distracting the flood of Karo syrup proved to be. Director Rob Zombie handles the suspense and thrills in good measure, but his blood-lust is so excessive that it becomes downright silly, not scary. Putting slasher movie icon Michael Myers on the shrink’s couch with John Q. Moviegoer acting as psychologist, however, is just bloody awful cinema.

 

Down-to-the-Wire: Tainted Trick-or-Treat candy.

 

Taking Woodstock

Demetri Martin, Imelda Staunton

 

In this R-rated fact-based account, a young man trying to revitalize his parent’s Catskills motel (Martin) inadvertently sets in motion the generation-defining summer of ’69 concert. Though the Zeitgeist tent-pole known as Woodstock certainly deserves epic attention, this cutesy and folksy dramedy does not. There are great moments that endear this memoir adaptation to your reviewer, an unapologetic rock history nut. He knows of no other film – other than Michael Wadleigh’s legendary concert film – that perfectly summons up that electric eclectic atmosphere of what attending Woodstock must have been like. As director Ang Lee expands its reach from documenting the often comical true events described above to becoming a sprawling coming-of-age story, however, the film takes the brown acid, becoming a long strange trip that takes itself way too seriously.

 

Down-to-the-Wire: Take it or leaf it.

 

(500) Days of Summer

Zooey Deschanel, Joseph Gordon-Levitt

 

In this intelligent and refreshing PG-13-rated romantic comedy, a no-holds-bar year and a half love affair between a young couple (Deschanel, Gordon-Levitt) is uniquely dissected for viewers as a non-linear turn-of-events. The ‘square’ comparison in Pulp Fiction, the animated fish in The Life Aquatic, the breadth of Amelie..,these were brave and – ultimately -whimsically enchanting risks taken by their respective directors. Director Marc Webb deserves ample credit for delivering a barbed-wire Valentine romance rife with moments like those described above. It helps that the cast is stocked with such ably game players as Deschanel and Gordon-Levitt—two crazy kids so legitimately smitten and, then, unsmitten with each other that filmgoers may see fit to bill their insurance companies for the therapy session.

 

Down-to-the-Wire: Summer of L-O-V-E.

 

District 9

Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope

 

In this R-rated sci-fi tale, problems arise when alien refugees in South Africa are forcibly moved to another encampment by a hapless bureaucrat (Copley). Following in the footsteps of movies that have made both creature features and in-the-moment thrillers seem starkly real (*Rec, Cloverfield), District 9 initially comes across as more of the same…but District’s story is so much more intelligent and its thrills compelling. If District 9 seems plausible, most of the credit goes to writer/director Neill Blomkamp’s politically charged South Africa-set script. But much of the movie’s success is also due to the movie playing out like a faux documentary. When it goes from doc-like to simply a hand-held doc-feel early on, however, it loses some of its edge.

 

Down-to-the-Wire: Beam it up.

 

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Dennis Quaid, Channing Tatum

 

In this PG-13-rated cheese platter, an elite covert military organization (Quaid, Tatum, Marlon Wayans) travels the world to battle a mysterious terrorist operation called Cobra (Sienna Miller, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Christopher Eccleston). Well, what do filmgoers expect from a $170 million movie based on a 3 and a half inch-tall tall action figure? There is no denying G.I. Joe’s entertainment factor. Thankfully for the kid in all of us, the story smacks of make believe, the cast chews the scenery, IQs drop, and all involved are somehow baited into an obligatory sequel. Somewhere along the way, however, the adult reality sets in that G.I. Joe - with its overblown terrorist ass-kicking in Paris and randy soldiers - has become the punchline to the joke that Team America: World Police set up.

 

Down-to-the-Wire: More zero than hero.

 

Inglourious Basterds

Brad Pitt, Eli Roth

 

In this bloody damn good R-rated war flick, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Pitt) leads an unscrupulous team of Jewish-American Nazi hunters (Roth, B.J. Novack) into German-occupied France. With such a gloriously misspelled title, filmgoers should march into the theater fully expecting an off-kilter war film, but Basterds truly measures up to some of filmdom’s greatest WWII pictures in terms of action and chatter. Christoph Waltz’s portrayal of an unscrupulously brutal and opportunistic Nazi, however, will court Oscar come February—as will the film itself now that the Best Picture category has been extended to 10 selections. Tarantino’s audacious ending will surely cause some head scratching among audiences, but the suspenseful shots (especially the Paris-set movie premiere) and intelligent dialogue (especially the tavern-set face-off) is gloriously keen cinema.

 

Down-to-the-Wire: Basterdly good.

 

Julie & Julia

Meryl Streep, Amy Adams

 

In this PG-13-rated comedy famed chef Julia Child (Streep) and a young blogger (Adams) who embarks on a culinary quest to cook all 524 recipes from Childs’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year. In a summer where killer robots from outer space and live action action figures have failed miserably to entertain the Bejesus out of your chauvinistic reviewer, leave it to this chick flick to pick up the slack. Meryl Streep nails the specific eccentricities of Julia Child with such precision that her turn does not come off as imitation—just uncannily spot-on. The other star performance comes courtesy of writer/director Nora Ephron for pulling these dueling storylines together in such an entertaining– though not always seamless or breezy - fashion.

 

Down-to-the-Wire: Bon appetit.