New Year's Eve (2011)

2/5

New Year's Eve is the bland, uninspired follow-up to Garry Marshall's mediocre Valentine's Day. There is no story to speak of. There are instead about a dozen trite, overused blueprints of ideas that are empty and meaningless. They are all instead vehicles for the two dozen stars to be themselves on camera and try to make money without doing any acting whatsoever. The movie over-relies on archetypes, movie tropes, and celebrity status. Lea Michele sings. Jon Bon Jovi sings. Robert De Niro plays a gruff old guy with regret. And Sofia Vergara plays a sexy lady with an accent. It's the same thing we've seen over and over again. (And Sofia Vergara was significantly funnier on Conan than in this movie.)

The best thing about this movie is the Zac Efron and Michelle Pfeiffer storyline. It had cutesy charm, much more than I expected. But even their portion of the movie lacked motivation and backstory. The other thing I liked about it is a line Josh Duhamel says (although he is in fact just quoting his dead father, and it seems to come out of nowhere): "What would you do today if you knew you wouldn't fail? Now go out and do it." Despite all the ridiculous star power in this movie, it holds no power and deserves only two stars. Avoid.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598822/

Glee: The 3D Concert Movie (2011)

2/5

Glee: The 3D Concert Movie is, as the title so blandly suggests, a concert movie of Glee in 3D. It also briefly documents how the lives of three teens were changed by Glee, which is surprisingly fascinating and affecting but also chintzy and overly melodramatic. It gives a little staying power and substance to an otherwise forgettable and disappointing film. The problem with releasing a concert movie for a TV show is that there are newer, more popular songs with every new episode that everyone will want to hear when they watch this movie. Not knowing when this concert took place, especially in the context of the show, will make it very unsatisfying to people who are expecting to hear specific songs that were released after this movie was made. Unfortunately, there's no way to really find out which songs they will sing and which ones they will not unless you go see the movie. And that's really my problem: I wanted to hear them sing a lot of songs they never sang. The ones that they did sing were great and I really enjoyed them, but it was an entirely frustrating experience overall.

Of note, in the screening I saw, the audio and video were out of sync by about half a second throughout the entire movie. That, combined with the bad 3D filmmaking, made it all the more headache-inducing and annoying.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1922612/