Admission (2013)

3/5

Admission is essentially a Tina Fey vehicle, which automatically makes it immensely entertaining. The perpetually-fantastic Tina Fey plays a Princeton admissions officer named Portia, who finds love in an alternative school's guidance counselor named John (played by the always-lovable Paul Rudd). John tells Portia some revelatory news: one of his students may be Portia's son, whom she gave up for adoption years earlier. On her new-found journey as a parent, she learns life lessons about relationships (both romantic and maternal) in hilarious fashion before the film finally ends in a sad but hopeful spirit.

The movie is fairly simple and mindless. The throwaway story does a fair job at serving up jokes, but any attempts to be meaningful and melodramatic fall flat. Luckily, they are easy to ignore. The characters are bland and forgettable, but the actors still manage to charm with their wry wit and precise comedic timing. This movie isn't great by any stretch of the imagination, but it's appealing enough to satisfy on a lazy weekend afternoon.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1814621/

Breaking Dawn: Part 2 (2012)

3/5

Unfortunately, the final piece of this five part saga was significantly better than I hoped and anticipated. I say unfortunately because it would be much easier to just malign the whole series and dismiss it as a silly tween's simple-minded fantasy. But this movie is better than all the previous ones. For one reason and one reason alone. There is an epic fight sequence at the finale. And instead of being a pastiche of piss-poor special effects you might find in original SyFy movies like Sharktopus (as I initially expected), it turned out to be a well-coordinated, well-shot, surprisingly visceral and white-knuckle experience. Seriously, the action was better than some blockbuster superhero movies I've seen recently (i.e., The Dark Knight Rises).

Now, don't confuse my meaning. I am not suggesting that the movie is good. It's not. Everything before the battle sequence is about what I expected from the previous four films. The majority of that first hour could probably have been condensed into a 3-minute montage. There is barely any plot advancement or character development (although I guess that's not something to be expected from this series). It felt like the ending of The Lord of the Rings, a collection of thirteen disparate loose ends that the movie was working on tying up in standalone scenes instead of integrating them into a broader context.

That is to say nothing of the story itself, which is simply laughable. It turns out that vampires are actually X-Men with sharp teeth, because they all seem to have special mutant powers. And apparently the only way to kill a vampire is by ripping off its head and setting it on fire. Who knew? (Who knew also that that kind of stuff was PG-13?) Also, inexplicably, they decided to use a CGI baby in a number of scenes instead of a real baby. Not for the baby to do anything special--just to be a baby. But I guess that's the whole Twilight series: a bizarre, out-of-body experience that is totally unnecessary and bordering on offensive.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1673434/

Midnight in Paris (2011)

4/5

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris is a delightfully light fantasy comedy that takes place in Paris over the course of several magical midnights. The plot follows Gil (Wilson) and Inez (McAdams) tagging along with Inez's parents in Paris for a few weeks. They bump into one of Inez's old pseudo-intellectual friends (Sheen), who is absolutely infuriating to Gil (and the audience), and Inez naturally wants to spend as much time with him as possible. After a few frustrating nights together, Gil decides to walk home by himself only to find himself wandering the streets of Paris utterly lost. An old Puegeot stops by at midnight and picks him up to take him to a very different kind of Paris (which I will let you have the pleasure of discovering for yourself).

The movie is very similar to Allen's previous works, especially The Purple Rose of Cairo, albeit with literary references instead of filmic ones. And it is just as charming, airy, and melancholy as that film. Unfortunately, because it feels so identical, I felt I didn't get much out of the film. It's hilarious in that Woody Allen way, but not much more. It's a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon, but nothing compared to Allen's best work.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1605783/

New Moon (2009)

1/5

New Moon is a bad movie. This is the extent to which I know the plot: the vampire (Pattinson) makes up some reason to leave the town, which of course makes the pale girl (Stewart) depressed. She starts getting closer with her werewolf neighbor (Lautner) and then has to choose between them. There's little else in the 2+ hour movie, although I did learn a few things during the course of watching it. First, Kristen Stewart is ugly when she cries. I think she's ugly all the time, but apparently that sentiment is not as universally shared as I thought. Second, Taylor Lautner has a fairly fit physique. I know this because EVERY SINGLE SCENE with him in it had him shirtless. Kyle thinks his back muscles make him look like a camel or something. Third, Robert Pattinson has kind of a grotesque, gargoylish, sickly frame that makes me think he should see a doctor for anorexia or heroin addiction. Fourth, the CGI werewolves looked like they have really fat necks. It was weird. Oh, and I presume the director had a call for extra pauses, and asked the male pauses to have sex with the female pauses, because there are a bajillion pregnant pauses in this movie intended to simulate fierce thinking and emo angst. Nearly half an hour is wasted on long, drawn out dialogue where the teenagers cannot find the words they want to say. The movie has a lot of forced writing, forced acting, and forced action. It's a round peg of a book being forced into a square hole of a movie. I can't wait for the third one!

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1259571/

Alice in Wonderland (2010)

3/5

Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is as weird and darkly comic as all his other movies. The plot follows the young Alice (Wasikowska) after being proposed to in front of a huge party by a wealthy lord named Hamish. She is a young independent soul who doesn't like corsets or stockings and certainly doesn't want to wed someone just because he is rich and she is getting older. But that is the option she is presented with, and the hundreds of guests in attendance seem to be pushing her towards the safe choice. She asks for some time to think it over. And with that time, she manages to fall down a rabbit hole and into "Underland," which she mistakenly calls Wonderland.

The movie is blandly quirky and innocently morbid, but somehow also reassuring and uplifting by the end. There were some funny moments (almost entirely involving Helena Bonham Carter) and some boring moments (almost entirely involved Johnny Depp). The oddness of the story didn't work for me. I found it neither charming nor endearing; it was just a charade to distract the audience from the simpleness of the story. And the visuals, while Burton-esque to a T, were filmed and/or animated poorly. Quite frankly, nobody understands 3D as well as James Cameron does right now. (That scene where Alice is falling down the rabbit hole made me almost vomit from nausea.) At first I thought Tim Burton just made bizarre movies for the sake of being bizarre, but now I'm starting to think that he doesn't really know how to make a movie that isn't bizarre. That, or he doesn't see the point in it. Still, this is a pretty entertaining movie. Watch it if you're a Burton or Depp fanboy, but don't expect anything grand.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1014759/

Frost/Nixon (2008)

3/5

Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon is better than most of Ron Howard's recent movies (Cinderella Man, The Da Vinci Code), but it's still a Ron Howard movie, which means it's still not great. The movie overdramatizes a series of long-winded and forgettable interviews between British talk show host David Frost (Sheen) and former president Richard Nixon (Langella) surrounding Watergate. There's a lot of build-up without a satisfying climax or conclusion (it takes about 100 minutes before the unfulfilling, deflated admission of guilt). Interspersed throughout the film are a number of fake interviews with the characters at some unknown time looking back on the Frost/Nixon interviews and how they affected them; maybe it would have been better if they were interviews with the actual people instead of the actors. The sole purpose of their inclusion seemed to be to explain what was going on emotionally and cerebrally instead of leaving it up to the viewer to understand by themselves.

The best part of the movie was the characterization and acting. I was surprised by how well-rounded, human, and fair Howard allowed his characters. The actors did more than their fair share, fully infusing their characters with nuance, tragedy, and comedy. The cinematography was also crisp and sharp, although at times a bit overwrought. If only the writing and pacing were better, this might have been a much better movie on the whole. Still, though, I wouldn't recommend this movie to anyone who isn't already intrigued by the relevant events.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0870111/