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"Sorry to all my readers (hello?) for neglecting this blog...it's been a rough season. I have manage to finally update my website, letsnotlisten.com, though, so for now you can kindly head there if you're interested in seeing what I had to say the past couple of months.Hope to get back in the groove with this after the holidays, and at least post my top-10 in a timely fashion. Until then, happy moviegoing. It's a great time of the year! " [More]
The Jane Austen Book Club
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"By Tricia Olszewski Hello. I'd like to trade in my testicles, please. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a movie in possession of a title such as The Jane Austen Book Club will be in want of a male audience. Based on a novel of the same name, the Robin Swicord-written and -directed film is exactly what you'd expect it to be: It's breezy one moment, somber the next, and, of course, full of women, sentimentality, and reaction shots of dogs. And when each showing lets out, it's likely there won't be a long line at the men's room. The somewhat interesting idea of Karen Joy Fowler's novel is that real people can find in Austen parallels to and guidance for their own lives. But it's a gimmick that was set up to fail. Go too deep with the theory, and you risk alienating viewers who aren't Janeites. Skimp on it, and there's little else to differentiate the story from countless other romantic comedies. Swicord, a first-time feature director ... " [More]
King of California
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"By Tricia Olszewski Michael Douglas is looking for spare change...I mean buried treasureIf you saw Michael Douglas' King of California character on the street, you'd avoid eye contact and walk quickly past. Having just spent the past two years in an institution, Douglas' Charlie is disheveled and wild-eyed, oblivious to the ideas of authority or boundaries, and talks of little but finding an ancient treasure buried somewhere in West Coast suburbia. But this is a movie, so Charlie isn't mentally ill, he's magical. His unkempt hair and bushy beard are charming. And his eyes aren't rheumy from manic, sleepless nights, they sparkle with life. Charlie's 16-year-old daughter, Miranda (Evan Rachel Wood), seems to understand that her father is perhaps not yet fit to leave the hospital as she moans in voiceover about how the relatively stable life she's made for herself, trading school for a full-time job at McDonald's to pay the bills, is about to ... " [More]
The Hunting Party
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"The Hunting Party If Kent Brockman came to life...The Three Stooges Go to Bosnia could have been an alternate title for The Hunting Party, an odd political thriller/comedy hybrid mined by writer-director Richard Shepard from a 2000 Esquire article. Naturally, the short piece about a handful of journalists and their attempt to find a war criminal required some tarting to be movie-ready, and Shepard isn't bashful about his embellishments; the end credits, in a rather fun touch, do a quick revisit of the film and point out who and what was real. But "fun" may not be what most people are looking for in a story about an ethnic cleanser and one man's need for revenge. It all starts out earnestly enough. Network cameraman Duck (Terrence Howard) is in Sarajevo with a just-out-of-J-school reporter, Ben (Jesse Eisenberg), for an easy assignment when he's tracked down by his former partner, Simon (Richard Gere). Simon has become a journalistic cliché – ... " [More]
December Boys
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"Daniel Radcliffe hasn't exactly taken a huge leap in December Boys, his first cinematic turn outside of the Harry Potter franchise. He's gone from playing a British orphan to an Australian one. Radcliffe isn't the first Potter kid to try on a new character; Rupert Grint costarred in 2006's Driving Lessons. And both films are dull, treacly affairs that, if not for their value as trivia, won't likely be remembered at all. Radcliffe plays Maps, the eldest of four friends who live in an outback orphanage in the 1960s. They share December birthdays, and when the orphanage gets an unexpected donation, the staff decides to send them on a holiday to "a special place on the sea." They'll be heading off to Lady Star Cove, an idyllic spot whose beaches are blindingly white and laced with rock formations that are far more interesting than the movie itself. The boys are naturally excited, even though it turns out that the couple they're staying with, Band ... " [More]
Dedication
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"It's so cool how tortured we areJustin Theroux's Dedication is aching to be an edgy Garden State. The actor's directorial debut, written by first-timer David Bromberg, premiered at Sundance and reeks of the festival's hipster-courting preciousness, telling a love story that's freighted with the angst of its protagonist and the messiness of life in general. Reality bites, and all that. But instead of insight, Dedication offers a world in which artists don't comb their hair and a headache in one scene means a brain tumor in the next. And although you're not necessarily supposed to like the film's central character, his trials might have been worth caring about if he hadn't walked right out of a Staind song. Henry (Billy Crudup) is an obsessive-compulsive, self-loathing children's-book author who tells kids there's no Santa Claus. He's in his early 30s, but still talks about how his father screwed him up. His friendship with a much-old ... " [More]
Sydney White
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"Amanda Bynes may not have decided to follow the Lindsay Lohan path to self-destruction, but that doesn't mean her career's in any better shape. After a rather impressive supporting turn in this summer's Hairspray, Bynes is back to clunkers like Sydney White, a spin on the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs fairy tale that posits her earnest sorority pledge as the unlikely leader of a group of male misfits one day, campus conquerer the next. Sydney (Bynes) isn't at all like the blond, size 2 girls that flock to Kappa, but her dead mom was a sister, which should make her a sure thing. Until she dares talk to the sorority head's ex and commits enough various other no-nos to get turned down. Needing a place to stay, Sydney ends up at the Vortex, a forgotten building where approximately seven "misfits" crash. She's a queen to these guys, who aren't merely stammering nerds, they're infantile – and you're too busy wondering what the hell is ... " [More]
I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
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"By Tricia Olszewski Cheese: The new Brussels sproutsAt one point in I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, a struggling Chicago actor named James is giving a career-day talk at an elementary school when he starts rambling. "Get this," he tells the stone-faced kids about his latest job. "It was supposed to be a funny show, but I made people cry. Isn't that silly?" Curb Your Enthusiam's Jeff Garlin plays James – and also wrote and directed – and although he won't make you cry here, he'll probably make you yawn. Garlin's pet project with the unwieldy title feels terribly familiar, with its chatter about minutiae and throwback, accordion-heavy soundtrack making it seem like a Curb episode directed by Woody Allen. But instead of neuroses that are black-tinged and deep-seated, most of Cheese's navel-gazing is genial to the point of being childlike. "Where'd the term 'dealership' come from?" James asks a receptionis ... " [More]
The Brave One
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"By Tricia Olszewski Damsel no longer in distress Erica Bain "walks the streets" of New York City and relates eloquent meditations about what she observes on her popular radio show. She loves her job, but resists when she finds out that a television station is courting her. "I'm not a face, I'm just a voice," Erica insists to her boss. More than her job, though, the storyteller loves her town, and seems deliriously happy to spend that evening with her fiance and dog at the park. Then they're assaulted, and her boyfriend is killed. Suddenly, New York doesn't seem so shiny. So Erica's new companion becomes a gun. Neil Jordan's The Brave One is consistently and profoundly unsettling – and not just because it brings Charles Bronson to mind. But star Jodie Foster hasn't undone a career's worth of choosing smart if similarly themed female-in-peril roles to make Death Wish VI: A Woman Scorned, even this movie's plot is remark ... " [More]
The King of Kong: A Fistful of ...
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"By Tricia Olszewski It’s a little hard at first to believe Billy Mitchell, the subject of the documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. It’s not because the Florida restaurateur and hot-sauce shill, now in his early 40s, was once crowned “Gamer of the Century” after setting records on a number of classic video-arcade games—most notably Donkey Kong, on which he recorded a seemingly unbreakable high score of 874,300 in 1982. Nor is it because he’s still proud of those achievements and was happy to talk about the good ol’ days with Seth Gordon, the film’s director. Rather, what’s difficult to believe is that the character of Billy Mitchell you see onscreen actually exists. Now that reality shows and mockumentaries have hardened us to the truthiness that’s out there, your natural reaction to Mitchell may be that the dude’s been coached. The hair: long but tidy and businessman-slick, accompanied by a trimmed ... " [More]
Superbad - Rocket Science
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"By Tricia Olszewski You'd imagine that most 14-year-old boys feel the same way about sex comedies as they do about each of their battled-for baby steps toward the big deed itself – it doesn't matter if it's any good, the point is that they're getting some. About a decade ago, though, budding horndogs Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg allegedly became fed up with the subpar antics of their cinematic counterparts. Fuck this noise, they thought. We can do better, they said. And today you have Superbad, a movie to be filed under “ribald” whose script started out as a seed in two boys' dirty minds. Of course, the final product has gone through polishings and fleshings-out since its first wobbly-legged drafts, informed by the writers' subsequent experience (Goldberg's penning for Da Ali G Show; Rogen's starring on such Judd Apatow productions as The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up) and maturity (though a certain period joke might have be ... " [More]
The Nanny Diaries - The Invasion
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"We'd like this off our resumes, pleaseThe setting is Manhattan's Upper East Side. A fresh college graduate, eager to put some sort of imprint upon the world but clueless about how to properly do so, takes a job – so easily gotten! -- as a nanny. If she squints really hard, this young woman can see the position being sorta-kinda related to anthropology, the field she eventually wants to enter. She's thrilled. Until she finds out that the exhausting, humiliating, and often just plain impossible mother-child-nanny power struggle she's now engaged in is its own circle of hell. If The Nanny Diaries sounds familiar, it's because you've seen it before – only it was called The Devil Wears Prada, with a fabulous spring collection standing in for the baby that a slave-driving bitch casually bears, then orders an exasperated lackey to kill herself trying to care for it. Oh: And it was also a book, a novelized bit of composite nonfiction by former New York ... " [More]