In the past year, we’ve seen the seamier side of paradise: The Descendants showed us the darker side of Hawaii, a side which most of us landlubbers didn’t even know existed, while Drive illuminated the grimier aspects of Southern California. Filmmaker Oliver Stone, however, restores the luster of the West Coast in Savages, a cautionary tale of doublecrossing, drugs and a weird threesome. Color, scenery and the beautiful people of California are all on vivid display here, even as those peoples’ poor decisions create a twisted plotline that makes everyone seem bad in the end. Savages is an …
A warning to south suburban parents: This is an R-rated comedy featuring a foul-mouthed, beer-swilling, bong-huffing stuffed animal. It’s not a cute kids’ movie. The 7-year-olds you brought to the theater Saturday morning, and filled with popcorn and Coke for breakfast, are going to be scarred for life. This was proven by the way your daughter crawled onto your lap during a sad part of the movie. This movie also answered the question, “What do Joliet residents do when it’s 100 degrees out on a Friday night?” They go to the movies (or they literally ride the storm out with REO Speedwagon): Ted…
Woe to all of you thinking of seeing Rock of Ages. It’s a tepid attempt at resurrecting a best-forgotten era of music and of culture in general: The mid-’80s were just not much fun, and this movie reinforces that notion. I quit listening to popular rock in general in mid-1987, when this picture is set, at the height of big-hair, cutoff sleeves and the hammer-on, metally overtones of Motley Crue. So this picture’s setting, at the ground zero of the American cultural wasteland, immediately alienated me. Meanwhile, “Oh the movie never ends/it goes on and on and on and on ...," a reference to a …
I hated Men in Black III (let’s refer to it as MIB3 from here on out). But I didn’t hate it for the conventional reasons that people hate sequels. Instead, MIB3 rips open the still-festering wounds brought about by the 1969 Cubs and dumps in a pound of sea salt. In the film, which everyone but Cubs fans will thoroughly enjoy, Agent J (an affable Will Smith) travels back in time to 1969 to save the future life of his work buddy, Agent K (a deadpanning Tommy Lee Jones). J must hunt down and assassinate an intergalactic baddie whose escape from a moon-based jail threatens the modern-day Earth, …
In The Chernobyl Diaries, viewers are forced to answer the question, “Would you rather die being attacked by a pack of angry wild dogs, from injuries sustained while running through a nuclear reactor meltdown site or at the hands of the psychotic, nuke-addled residents who live near that reactor?” It's a scenario that reminded me of the go-go mid-'90s, when a co-worker and I found an adventure travel company that offered thrillseekers the chance to climb Devils Tower, that monolithic, chimney-shaped mountain in Wyoming memorialized in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We were going to climb…
