Film Articles

Erik: “You were a bit skeptical going in.”

Fred: “Sure. I liked the teasers for ‘Get Smart,’ but the trailer’s cartoon violence humour turned me off. Oh look. Here’s Smart harpooning himself. Oh look. Here’s a guy getting a piece of paper stapled to his head. This is humour? People getting hurt is funny?”

Erik: “That’s a good point. In the film’s defense, though, I’d say that the bulk of the film’s jokes doesn’t consist of violence inflicted or self-inflicted.”

Fred: “That doesn’t make it right.”

Six short films, unrelated except for whatever it was that Echelon Studios’ marketing people were smoking when they came up with the title “Shorts for Cats.” It’s a cute idea – catnip affair. Perhaps that’s why the fuzzies slept through the whole thing.

Deftly putting the “mock” in mockumentary in enough ways to make a mad punner happy, “Futile Attraction” peels back Reality TV’s implicit structural flaw and exposes it to withering satire. Director/co-writer Mark Prebble hits on a clever way to simultaneously propel the narrative “story” of the people making the documentary and their subjects while also taking apart, po-mo style, reality dating shows on a meta-level.

It’s the snap of the whip! The tip of the fedora! The leap of death! The hanging off the cliff! The last minute of the escape! The crack of the wise! The poison of the dart! The thrill of the chase! The dust off the artifact! The bones in the grave! The idol in the temple! The x on the map! In other words, it’s Indiana Jones!

But – well, there is a but.

The surprise in “The Forbidden Kingdom” isn’t the lack of a real surprise in terms of plot or characters. Any familiarity with the film’s component genres – Hollywood romances, Hong Kong Kung Fu, and so on – will make plain how this unabashed crowd-pleaser paints strictly by the numbers. Hence, the bullied kid will learn Kung Fu, exasperating teachers bewildered by his ineptness, and eventually turn the tables on the bullies. He will meet a pretty, and tough, girl (Liu). He will become, in short, a noble warrior steeped in the spirit of martial art virtues. No, the surprise doesn’t lie in the parts but in how the whole transcends its constituent clichés to become a fun-loving, thrill-seeking homage. It’s like inviting some good ol’ friends over for one heck of a popcorn-popping party.

David Mamet’s amusing soufflé “Keep Your Pantheon,” about the misfortunes of a desperate acting troupe, would be right at home with “historical” farces put on by Renaissance Faire troupes like Sound & Fury. Granted, this new short play by a playwright who needs no introduction is not quite so blatantly bawdy or low-flying as, say, “Testaclese and Ye Sack of Rome,” but the overall silly spirit of mirth and merriment is comparable, as is the discernible lack of any goal other than to make the audience laugh. Mamet throws enough jokes that most of them stick. Bonnie Grisan and director Neil Pepe stack the deck in the audience’s favour by casting actors of proven comic worth – David Payner and Ed O’Neill – alongside worthy co-performers. It’s ye olde-tyme comedy of errors, indeed; funny if inconsequential, with a deliberately old-fashioned theatricality that includes big, mouthy, quasi-stentorian dialogue.

Is the Hollywood machine’s decision-making process, the formula by which it sorts out the wheat scripts from the chaff, merely a crap shoot? Is there an explanation for why Hollywood puts out such awful movies on a consistent basis? These are, perhaps, serious questions at the cotton-candy heart of “Crap Shoot”, but they're also not especially profound.

Womanizing, gambling, larger-than-life merchant of death Tony Stark (Downey Jr.) finds himself on the service side of his own weapons and, as a result, becomes the proud papa of a moral epiphany. This, in a film in which the heroic journey celebrates the condemnation of war profiteering with an orgy of gunfire, explosions, and general mayhem. Call him “Irony Man.”

Why is it that overweight women in wannabe quasi-nudie-cuties are typically the butt of jokes, strange creatures whose sexuality is treated as something not to be taken seriously – something repulsive, even? Here’s another question: What would happen to films like “Pool Party” if there weren’t a surplus of nubile young women willing to take their tops off for the chance of being in a feature? The answer, of course, has to with Sarah Horvath, the boss’s daughter, appearing in various states of undress in all her scenes. There’s nothing quite like parading a bevy of bikini-clad beauties to keep viewers from noticing the plot’s recycled content and the used-joke smell of the comedy.

Review: Wait Up Harriet

The deus ex m­achina in “Wait Up Harriet” makes a near-literal appearance in the story of a depressed widower, a firefighter named Jake (Benfield), presented like Saul on the road to Damascus. The endlessly turning machine of grief, the monumentally dull grind of a grieving character, only shrieks to a stop when the screenwriters drag in religion. But not only religion. As Jake isn’t initially convinced by the bribe to believe in God to avoid everlasting hellfire and receive, instead, a happy and heavenly reunion with his dead wife, he is subjected to a mystical dream experience to drive home the epiphany. It’s theologically silly, convincing only to the already convinced, and it involves the inevitable angry-at-God cliché defined by a whiny “Why, God, why? You abandoned me! You suck!” But worse yet, it’s a cop-out for screenwriter Hanna Eichler, who struggles to pull Jake out of his deep, deep funk only to get mired in the quicksand of a drab character portrait and magical problem solving.