By Ray Pride

Long-distance relationships never work, and romantic comedies about long relationships?

Nanette Burstein ups the average with confident glee in the zippy romantic comedy “Going the Distance.” In the New York-set feature debut of the director of “American Teen,” Drew Barrymore is Erin, a would-be journalist six weeks away from moving to San Francisco, where her sister (Christina Applegate) and possibly more jobs await. She lays it out: “I’m 31, I’m an intern, I’m gonna get wasted.” Drinking in a local bar that night, trying to beat her own high score at Centipede, Garrett (Justin Long), who works at a record label, intrudes on a dare from his friends (Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day), leading to Erin’s explosion: “Fucker put his face in front of the game! Who does that?” But friendship, flirtation, more, develop. Tick-tick-tock… Read the rest of this entry »

Eliot (Liam Neeson, “Kinsey,” “Taken”) either injects a powerful muscle relaxant (the make-believe “hydronium bromide”) into people incorrectly declared dead by the local coroner, then buries them alive, or this mortician is cursed as a corpse-whisperer. The first one was his mother’s. He listens to their unceasing insistence they’re not dead, and berates deceased in-denial schoolteacher Anna (Christina Ricci) after a car wreck: “You’re a corpse, Anna, your opinion doesn’t matter!” Anna cannot feel her pulse, but sees her breath fog a mirror. Eliot could be dead, too, although that possibility, posed in a single line of dialogue, is not long-lived in the script by director Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo and her co-writers. With its meaninglessly punctuated title, “After.Life” contains a lineage motif: Eliot handles Anna’s late piano teacher and also mentors her student. This morbid boy lives with his aged mother or grandmother, although she may not be living with him, since she is only seen sitting in a chair in front of a TV showing really, really old black-and-white programs. (This apprentice inters a live chick he abducts from a science project in Anna’s classroom.) Other dead-end allusions link a nosebleed, red hair dye, spilled red wine, a red Volvo, the red box for an engagement ring, a slinky red slip, a pulsing heart and a blood-flecked bobble-head doll. The score, shock chords and sound design are utterly routine horror-style, despite Wojtowicz-Vosloo claiming her debut feature is elevated by arty “European” ambiguity. With Justin Long, Josh Charles, Chandler Canterbury and Celia Weston. 103m. (Bill Stamets)

Straight teen male virginity is the crise du coeur for Nick Twisp, as played by Michael Cera (“Paper Heart,” “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist”). This fawn-like mumbler can endear as a supporting character, but cannot sustain a star turn in his first try. Twisp is the horny Californian invented by C.D. Payne for a book series that started in 1993 with “Youth In Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp.” Screenwriter Gustin Nash (“Charlie Bartlett”) adapts Payne’s material, and Miguel Arteta (“The Good Girl,” “Chuck and Buck”) directs this knowing, charm-impaired, low-key comedy in Michigan, where he fills in as “Illegal Immigrant #2.” Nick has two significant others. There’s his evil alter ego and id-enabler Francois (Cera with a slight mustache and gauche wardrobe) who goads him into juvenile delinquency. Nick’s acting out gets him into the bed of Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday, with such a movie-ready name). Residing at Restless Axles Trailer Park, she has bigger crushes on her poster of Jean-Paul Belmondo and on blond poet and classmate Trent (Jonathan B. Wright). “In the movies, the good guy gets the girl,” notes Cera in a script flaunting more cineaste quips than craft. For just one of the inane twists in Twisp’s saga, Sheeni’s ultra-strict parents get dosed with psycilocybin mushrooms at Thanksgiving. Buzz about some cute echo of “Fight Club” is off-point. With Jean Smart, Mary Kay Place, M. Emmet Walsh, Vijay Joshi, Zach Galifianakis, Fred Willard, Ray Liotta, Justin Long, Steve Buscemi. 90m. (Bill Stamets)

The high-treble irritation of “Alvin and The Chipmunks” (2007) is now doubled. The original trio of chirpy brother chipmunks hooks up with a female trio of conspecifics breaking into showbiz billed as The Chipettes. Global pop squeakers and animated critters Alvin, Simon and Theodore are on their own after two mishaps with wheelchairs put their live-action human caretakers in the hospital. Feckless slacker Toby (Zach Levi) sort of looks after the boys who enroll in high school. The message is sacrifice personal opportunity for the sake of sibling solidarity: a boy chipmunk is shamed for playing on the football team and a girl chipmunk is shamed for wanting to open solo for Brittany Spears. All six end up squeaking in sync and then sleeping in matched bunk beds. Betty Thomas (“The Brady Bunch Movie”) competently directs a contentless screenplay by Jon Vitti and Jonathan Aibel & Glenn Berger. The only reason to see this is the off chance that the frequency of the chipmunks’ chatter kills head lice in kids and liquefies hardened earwax of their grandparents. With David Cross, Jason Lee and Wendie Malick; and the voices of Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler, Jesse McCartney, Amy Poehler, Anna Faris and Christina Applegate. 91m. (Bill Stamets)

In their unlucky thirteenth year of marriage, Louise (Meg Ryan) and Ian (Timothy Hutton) cross paths at their country house. She arrives earlier than expected to find he has set up a rose-petalled tryst with his 24-year-old girlfriend Sara (Kristen Bell, “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”). Ian planned to leave a letter informing Louise that he was filing for divorce and flying to Europe with Sara. Instead, the spouses spar and spat. One head injury later, Ian awakes wrapped in duct tape. Louise interrogates him about their marital crisis. Another head injury renders her unconscious, leading to Todd (Justin Long, “Drag Me to Hell”), a home invader on a riding lawn mower, to ask Ian, now duct-taped to a toilet: “Shit, nice tits. Mind if I touch them? God, I could never get sick of these.” Then Sara turns up and gets tied up too. Further tit-fondling does not ensue. The script by the late Adrienne Shelly (“Waitress”) is directed by Cheryl Hines as a romantic comedy of remarriage with extreme mood swings toward the misanthropic property lines of Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games.” The late Rainer Werner Fassbinder might have done justice to the image of marriage as prison, with the wife as warden, but Shelly and Hines deliver a peculiarity that only ponders the cliche of temporary loss of consciousness for comedic expediency. With Andy Ostroy, Nathan Dean and Kimberlee Peterson. 85m. (Bill Stamets)

Spanish videogamer Jorge Blanco directs his debut, a passable PG-rated animated sci-fi comedy, with co-directors Javier Abad and Marcos Martinez. Joe Stillman (two “Shrek”’s and “Beavis & Butt-Head Do America”) writes a snarky tale rife with references to flying-saucer films. The third installment of the alien-invader film franchise is about to open on the planet Glipforg when American astronaut Captain Chuck Baker (Dwayne Johnson) lands. Planting the U.S. flag on what NASA identifies as uninhabited Planet 51, he interrupts a backyard barbeque. On the run from General Grawl (Gary Oldman), Buck finds an ally in Lem (Justin Long), the 16 year-old Junior Assistant Planetarium Curator who’s failing to impress girl-next-door Neera (Jessica Biel.) The planet is set in the 1950’s, with long-haired protest singer- guitarist Glar (Alan Marriott) driving a VW bus. Indigenous pop culture is full of mind-control conspiracy paranoia. The human alien, though, can hide in an alien look-alike contest at the premiere of “Humaniacs III.” Twix candy bars are out of place, as are gags about plugs to block anal probes by aliens. Cutest behavior belongs to the robot dog Rover, modeled on the moon and Mars rovers. This frantic jokey fare is engineered to distract kids and their handlers alike. Music quips go from “Macarena” to “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” With more voices by Seann William Scott, John Cleese Freddie Benedict, Alan Marriott, Mathew Horne and James Corden. (Bill Stamets)

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Sam Raimi’s made three of the most expensive movies ever made, utilizing terabyte farms of huge dimension to produce the teen anxiety comic adaptations of the “Spider-Man” series. But does his beating artistic heart lie more in productions like his “Xena” television series, or in the “Evil Dead” movies, made with little more than rude good cheer? In the case of gob-of-schlock “Drag Me To Hell,” Raimi demonstrates he’s still up for a game of vomit and nosebleed and mucus and drool and flies and formaldehyde, and the never-aging Alison Lohman (verging on 30) also demonstrates a willingness to embrace indignity with verve. Is this my cup of pus? Only in its dynamic widescreen velocity: it’s a tsunami of oddly playful grue. Whether you’re boo’ed! or given nightmares depends on your own constitution. Read the rest of this entry »

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In his seven-minute animated short “Terra” (2003), Aristomenis Tsirbas portrayed a teenaged being named Mala who defied The Elders by inventing a telescope to peer at a distant entity headed toward their planet Terra. “Terra” ended with the revelation that the anticipated “new god” in the sky was in fact an approaching warship emblazoned with a U.S. flag. Instead of stars for fifty states, there were 765 stars. Now Tsirbas expands his CGI short into an animated feature in “RealD 3D.” Evan Rachel Wood voices the intrepid Mala, who looks like a saucer-eyed planaria with a pug nose and a nice smile. Read the rest of this entry »

A line in a 2003 episode of the HBO series “Sex and the City” turned into the title of a 2004 self-help book that is now the title of a romantic comedy. “He’s just not that into you” is what every single straight woman needs to hear during her pointless, pathetic wait for a call or a commitment from that man she really ought to do without. “Sex and the City”‘s consultant Greg Behrendt and executive story editor Liz Tuccill co-wrote the book, and Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein co-write the screenplay directed by Ken Kwapis (“Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” and many episodes of “The Office,” “The Bernie Mac Show” and “Malcolm in the Middle”). Subtitled “The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys,” the book runs through scenarios where its one-line mantra cues women to move on, and endlessly lies that all of you are lovely and sexy and likely to meet that super-fine guy you truly deserve. But no chasing: “men like to chase and you have to let us chase you.” Fortunately, this ensemble film is smarter than that about its 20- and 30-year-olds in Baltimore, despite traces of the book’s set-up of case studies and letters-to-dating-experts. Bar manager Alex (Justin Long from “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” “Live Free or Die Hard”) dispenses shots of tough love—”If a guy is treating you like he doesn’t give a shit, he genuinely doesn’t give a shit”—to Gigi (Ginnifer Goodwin). Diverse relationships are interpreted by a likeable cast that includes Ben Affleck (“Jersey Girl, “Chasing Amy”), Jennifer Aniston (“The Break Up”), Drew Barrymore (“Music and Lyrics”), Scarlett Johansson (“Vicky Cristina Barcelona”) and Jennifer Connelly (“Reservation Road”). Connections between the coupled and the uncoupled are not played for cute. Insights on dating are deeper than the genre typically tenders. So is the film’s coy wisdom about happy endings. With Bradley Cooper, Kevin Connolly and Kris Kristofferson. 129m. Widescreen. (Bill Stamets) 

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Class and cash remain at the center of Kevin Smith’s latest, the epigone of scat-chat called “Zack and Miri Make a Porno.” The material sings because of his casting of his two leads, with Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks as the platonic Pittsburgh roommates who hatch a quick-cash scheme to make amateur porn to get out of debt and discover the feelings they’ve been hiding. (Their giddy rapport almost makes up for the glimpses Smith provides of Jason “Jay” Mewes’ junk.) Smith starts with the idea of the ickiness of thirtysomething poverty, of a sense of not being able to get ahead in the modern workplace. Rogen’s timing is complemented by Banks’, as well as her seraphically deranged laughter at embarrassing moments and brightly pointed passages of frank japery about sex. To put it one way, Smith starts at “snowball” and snowballs from there: the cascade of everyday-vulgar verbiage in “Zack and Miri” is unmatched. And there’s something sweet about the two characters who banter, “Anybody wants to see anybody fuck”; “Who the fuck would want to watch us fuck?” And leave it to Banks: “Fuck you. I have dignity.” Advisory: “Star Wars” porn, clumsy sex and scatology ensue, as well as a joke saying the word “DreamWorks” sounds like “an underground fuck club.” “Rated R on appeal for dialogue, graphic nudity and pervasive language.” Yum. With Justin Long, Tom Savini, Traci Lords, Gerry Bednob, Jen Schwalbach, Brandon Routh. 102m. (Ray Pride)