Michael Ealy, Taraji P. Henson

By Ray Pride

What’s the secret to making a good, contemporary, satisfying, successful commercial romantic comedy? Not even a classic, not even an “Annie Hall” or a “Some Like It Hot,” just one that embraces the here-and-now?

Just to be good. Talky, funny, headlong, “Think Like A Man” succeeds in its modern multi-couple roundelay by being brisk, breezy and sometimes shameless while feeling as modern as can be, and capturing its milieu in and near Culver City, California, as well as any urban-set story out this year. So what possible problem could it have reaching a wide, eager audience, the kind that makes hits of earnest movies from filmmakers like Nancy Meyers, about urbane, optimistic neurotics battling their worst impulses and eventually embracing their best? Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

There’s a weave of wicked play in “The Cabin in the Woods” that makes it tough to describe without giving away the game. Although the most recent commercials do indicate some of what’s afoot, they’re more tease than giveaway. The studio’s synopsis reads: “Five friends go to a remote cabin in the woods. Bad things happen.”

Let’s see… Drew Goddard’s directorial debut, co-written with longtime colleague Joss Whedon, is about what’s under what’s in the basement and what goes on under that? Talking to the extremely affable and extremely tall Goddard recently, I suggested this comedy-horror-puzzle could honorably earn a three-word review from someone who didn’t want to give away too many particulars. “What. Th’. Fuck.” Read the rest of this entry »

A lightly likeable effort at “Swingers”-meets-”Bridesmaids” (made, obviously, before that smash success), writer-director Kat Coiro’s “L!fe Happens” (note the minor explosion of cute punctuation) furrows into the about-to-burgeon genre movement of women writing women talking gaudily bawdy. (As a less naughty sample, “You’re having anony-sex with a guy we met in a Costco parking lot?” is a minor early gag as two of the roommates leave bedmates behind in search of condoms.) Three female roommates (Kate Bosworth, Rachel Bilson, co-writer Krysten Ritter) share sexual exploits until a one-night stand leads to single motherhood for one of the trio, who’s adamant about continuing to date even into single motherhood. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Damsels in Distress” may be one of the most charming and memorable movies I’ve ever seen that also plays as if the filmmaker had no experience whatsoever in making feature films. Whit Stillman has littered the pages of an eager press with his tales of his time in the wilderness, writing ambitious scripts for films that were never made, set thousands of miles from the home turf of his first three films, “Metropolitan” (1990), “Barcelona” (1994) and “Last Days Of Disco,” which began his public silence as a filmmaker in 1998. Expatriate days. Failed romances. It’s a much more cleanly told story than “Damsels.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Does this sound fucking PG-13 to you?”Joseph Kahn’s megameta nihilisploitation genre maelstrom, “Detention,” gets an A+ if only for its endearing ADDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD. Suspended from the armature of high-school movie memes, horror and otherwise, Kahn and co-writer Mark Palermo flaunt the entrails of movies from “Back to the Future” to “Breakfast Club,” from “Prom Night” to “Donnie Darko,” nurturing an intense kinship to “Heathers,” and lifting from “Freaky Friday,” all careening at tender velocity. Read the rest of this entry »

Intermittent strangeness and goodheartedness are the most appealing characteristics of “American Reunion,” a sequel willing to throw out the idea of a thirteen-year high-school reunion without bothering to make even a cursory explanation why. (The real reason, of course, is that “American Pie” came out in 1999.) As written and directed by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg (“Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay”), the underlying sentiment that these characters can have their life transformed by a little bit of sexual reciprocation is optimistic and even healthy, even if the gross-out gags gross out in largely familiar ways. (Cf. blood, shit, dicks, a comely topless eighteen-year-old woman on her eighteenth birthday, more shit, vaginal juices, Stifler’s mom, conveniently placed flutes.) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In an early scene, the narrator of Mario Van Peebles’ energetic multicultural musical coming-of-age high school tale, “We The Party,” identifies one of his classroom fears, a fellow African-American teenager, shoulders hunched, cloaked in a dark hoodie, plugged into his music. “A wannabe rapper, ‘cept no one ever hears him rap, straight-up scary,” he says on the soundtrack. While that may be the film’s most timely image, the director of “New Jack City,” “Panther” and “Posse,” doesn’t show himself as a filmmaker in his fifties. Working in a busy style of multiple screens, changing frame rates, freeze frames and other play with the image, he matches the iPads, iPods and laptops of his Los Angeles protagonists with a sense of life lived at the speed of the moment, and an awareness of the clashes of race and class that shape our society every moment of the day. Read the rest of this entry »

Where do quirky talents with a strong eye go, like the director of “Desperately Seeking Susan,” (1985) Susan Seidelman, when the film industry shuts its doors to all but the largest-budgeted and micro-budgeted of productions? The low-simmer “Musical Chairs” is the answer, a likable yet earnest semi-musical about a Puerto Rican dancer-in-training in the Bronx who works as a handyman in a Manhattan dance studio. From across the divide, he winds up teaching the studio’s star pupil after an accident breaks her spine and confines her to a wheelchair. Dreams of ballroom dancing turn toward New York’s first wheelchair dancing tournament. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Chow Yun-Fat stars in “Let The Bullets Fly,” (Rang zidan fei), a winning, mischievous 1920s-set Chinese action-comedy screwball western that became that country’s highest-grossing film ever in 2010. (The boom in theater construction in China doesn’t hurt record-breaking returns for local films.) Actor-director Jiang Wen (“Devils on the Doorstep,” 2000) co-stars with Chow as one of two crooks who descend on Goose Town, a tiny town in the wilds of China. Provincial politics provide some of the ample banter and complicated plot twists. Read the rest of this entry »