Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away…. There was a young screenwriter named Lawrence Kasdan. Co-writer on “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “The Empire Strikes Back,” screenwriter of  “The Bodyguard,” his directorial career began under George Lucas’ wing with neo-noir “Body Heat” in 1981, and then he made “The Big Chill,” his 1983 remix of John Sayles’ “Return of the Secaucus Seven.” Some thought he spoke for the entire generation of Baby Boomers. Now Kasdan is sixty-three, and he hasn’t directed a movie since the lamentable 2003 Stephen King adaptation, “Dreamcatcher,” and his time away shows in the movie’s daring inconsequence. “Darling Companion” is a generational statement as well, more AARP than “Arf!”, for a post-middle-age demographic the movie industry could possibly profit from addressing, of citizens tending to senior whose attention tends to wander and who like going to the movies because it’s warm in there and dark and it’s okay if you fall asleep. 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 »

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Puerto Rico, 1960. Everyone is insane, everyone is a maniac. Period. The Eisenhower era tumbles tightly to an end up north across the water. Here, it’s humid and there’s rum. There is ludic cynicism—”The average guy don’t rock the boat because they want to get on it”—and there is brittle contempt—”A liberal is a commie with a college education thinking Negro thoughts.” There is also Gonzo avant la lettre in this period piece: “You’re giving me fear!”/”You’re high, you fool!” Read the rest of this entry »

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On one hand, the very funny and largely satisfying “Friends with Benefits” is yet another manic fantasy of a Manhattan media wonderland-cum-playground that never existed but in the movies, or maybe 1994. On the other, it’s an uncommonly fucky rom-com that whirls around the chemistry between co-stars Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake. Jamie (Kunis) is an executive headhunter who fields an offer to Los Angeleno Internet guy Dylan (Timberlake) to become art director of GQ magazine (its logo emblazoned at the entrance of Rockefeller Center). Their rapport is breezy; both are reluctant to fall into bed for fear of falling into like. Vulgar, sassy zest ensues. (“Shut up, Katherine Heigl, you stupid liar!” is just the beginning.) I get in trouble when I call romantic comedies “smart,” but there’s spark and spirit and chemistry in their give-and-take, even once genre conventions kick in. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

With “Hall Pass,” the Farrelly brothers return to what they do best: goodness, kindness, male cupidity, female patience and abrupt scatology in a generous R-rated package.

Working from the template of a script by Chicago native Pete Jones (“Project Greenlight”), Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s Providence-set comedy works from a simple premise that takes its sweet time setting up. Two essentially nice but quintessentially thick middle-aged ordinary guys (Owen Wilson, Jason Sudeikis), have decent home lives with their wives (Jenna Fischer, Christina Applegate, respectively) but feel a little bit of the itch when another woman catches their eye. (Good gags from them thinking their wives don’t notice and why, and later reveals that the wives do, and how.) The set-up’s sneaky: once the story’s gimmick kicks in—you’ve got a week off from marriage, see how you like them Applebee’s lady patrons—the jokes flow and bounce. It would be a disservice to give away the wealth of keen and foul, but there is one perfectly realized sight gag, in framing, timing and context, that tops even “There’s Something About Mary”‘s hair gel. Read the rest of this entry »

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How many versions of “Romeo and Juliet” have there been? With “Let The Right One In” and this, count two more. “Let Me In” is an American remake of Tomas Alfredson’s tender “Let The Right One In,” based on an engaging vampire novel by Alfredson’s fellow Swede, John Ajvide Lindqvist. Those who admired the 2008 import will recognize many of the same scenes, yet writer-director Matt Reeves’ (“Cloverfield”; writer, “The Yards,” seventy-three episodes of “Felicity”) transposition of the story to 1983 Los Alamos, New Mexico, feels wrenchingly personal in its own right. Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee, “The Road”) lives with his mother in a rundown enclave called Enchanted Hills, missing his estranged father, picked on by older boys. New neighbors move in: a weary older man (Richard Jenkins) and a girl, Abby (the ineffable Chloë Moretz, “Hit Girl”), who seems to be his own age. Reeves would have been 17 at the time, to his characters’ 12 or so; 1983 is also the year after the first release of another study of a Boy and his Other, “E.T.” Where Alfredson’s version is steeped in a prehensile sexuality both more suggestive and more intriguing than the chastity myths of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series, Reeves finds an American corollary to the essential loneliness of both vampire and child. (A contemporary version would likely turn out more mawkish, self-pitying, a kind of “Eat Prey Bleed.”) Read the rest of this entry »

Almost three days and I still feel like a python that hopes to digest some large creature wrapped up in a thick Turkish carpet. If “Eat Pray Love,” Ryan Murphy’s inert adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s beloved, best-selling memoir of spiritual exploration (adapted by himself and Jennifer Salt) could wring out the weight of tears that have stained its pages in thousands of copies, it will make a fine fortune. Reportedly, the book’s epiphanies of a fortysomething seeker with a moneyed life hitting the road evoke spiritual qualities that a raft of readers found moving. Unfortunately, Murphy’s movie is ethnographic tourism of a low order. Julia Roberts makes an ideal embodiment of an entitled narcissist—me me me—who learns almost nothing other than a couple of words in Italian that she lords over others. The extensive narration is a model of tell-don’t-show. Sound effects are Mickey-Moused: the line “everybody needs a husband” would be accompanied by the loud burst of a cock crowing. It’s the aural equivalent of the aphorisms narrating her life lessons. To make a satire-cum-pastiche of the latterday “women’s picture” this accomplished requires a cruel and uncommon sensibility, and you can only assume that the producer of “Nip/Tuck” and “Glee” is putting on. Right? Really. C’mon. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Forces soldier John (Channing Tatum, “G.I. Joe”) meets special-education major Savannah (Amanda Seyfried, “Jennifer’s Body”) on a South Carolina beach on spring break. She goes back to class; he goes back to war. Many letters and seven years later, their love makes for a sweetly weepy saga. This is the fifth novel by the prolific Nicholas Sparks to make the screen, preceded by “Message in a Bottle” (1999), “A Walk to Remember” (2002), “The Notebook” (2004) and “Nights in Rodanthe” (2008). And there is already a trailer at the multiplex for his next one, “The Last Song.” Screenwriter Jamie Linden changes John’s first-person voice in the novel to voice-overs for John’s letters. Fans of the 2006 bestseller may be pleased that one death is added to allow for a happier ending. But don’t look for the cinematic equivalents of Sparks’ lines by self-deprecating characters who originally said: “Yeah, I know, I’m a walking cliché” and “I know it sounds trite.” Producer Marty Bowen lauds his director Lasse Hallström: “He’s uniquely untroubled with the notion of trying to make things overly intellectualized, overly self-important, or overly melodramatic.” Nor is Hallström troubled with any of those ambitions, if that’s what was troubling Bowen. “Dear John” is a romance with more poise than impact. Full moons outnumber love scenes in this PG-13 product. Hospital visits, rather than trysts. Its topical nod is not to John’s overseas deployments, but to autistic secondary characters who ride horses and collect coins. With Richard Jenkins, Henry Thomas, Scott Porter and Keith Robinson. 102m. (Bill Stamets)

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A tiny mouse with unusual tastes is the star of this children’s tale made with uncommon craft. Despereaux (voiced by Matthew Broderick) has an un-mouse-like love of light, music, reading and Princess Pea (voiced by Emma Watson). He undertakes a quest that will remake the kingdom for rodents and royals alike. The painterly style of this lovely animated feature refers to Old World parchment, thread, and fairy tales, not state-of-the-industry software, tie-ins and fart jokes. It’s also an anomaly for articulating humanist values, a reading enhanced by the choice of Sigourney Weaver as the narrator. (Who better to map a land cursed with fear upheld by tribunals?) In a let-me-tell-you-a-story manner, she makes knowing asides to viewers, just like the original narrator of “The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread.” Author Kate DiCamillo asked “dear readers” to pause on key words in her 2003 book: “quest,” “chiaroscuro,” “perfidy” and “empathetic.” (DiCamillo’s “Because of Winn-Dixie” was earlier adapted to the screen.) “Despereaux” director Sam Fell displayed a knack for handling caste-conflict in the realm of rodents in his “Flushed Away” (2006), and here relates the distinctive cultures of meek mice and nasty rats. Co-director Rob Stevenhagen is an animator making his directing debut. Writer Gary Ross lends a lighter touch than felt in his more pedantic “Pleasantville,” another allegory of outcasts, esthetes and liberators. With uplifting whiffs of savory soup, “The Tale of Despereaux” champions storytelling as the light of the world, from torture-racked dungeons to castle spires, a land where a mouse scampers across the words “Once upon a time…” all the way to “… happily ever after.” And Despereaux makes it just so. With the voices of Dustin Hoffman, Tracey Ullman, Kevin Kline, William H. Macy, Stanley Tucci, Ciaran Hinds, Frances Conroy, Frank Langella, Richard Jenkins and Christopher Lloyd. 94m. Widescreen. (Bill Stamets)

Lazy yuks about lazy schmucks. Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly have crafted fine characters in a raft of past comedies, comic dramas and dramas, but here work rather little to play 39-year-old and 40-year-old boys who live at home, sleep in, watch TV, don’t work and do masturbate; Ferrell’s Brennan with his mother (Mary Steenburgen) and Reilly’s Dale with his dad (Richard Jenkins). When their respective parents wed and blend families under one roof, the step-bros spar, then bond while swordfighting with their piss streams in the toilet. It’s a replay of a tiresome SNL standby: semi-monstrously immature over-aged idiots (emphasis on “id”) who appeal to suburban males fixated on their everlasting not-so-inner adolescence. “It’s a galaxy of this sucks camel dicks,” blurts Ferrell at one point. He asks his therapist if being an adult means he ought to carry around his high-school diploma. Another comic device is adult-acting characters using “fuck” in their expressions of exasperated disbelief at the two boys. Director Adam McKay (“Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” and “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy”) co-wrote the screenplay with Ferrell, and both co-wrote the story with Reilly, who also wrote a song titled “Hairy Balls.” Producer Judd Apatow continues his bulk output. With Adam Scott, Kathryn Hahn, Andrea Savage and Rob Riggle. 95m. (Bill Stamets)