Labor Day Review

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Guys, it's fine to just go out and kinda-sorta kidnap the lady you love. In fact, you don't even have to know her or love her yet. You can just pick one, force youself on her, tie her up and put any children she may have in danger; it's chill. She will not mind one bit as long as deep down you're really a nice person.

Welcome to Labor Day, based on the novel by Joyce Maynard, a novel I have not read but that I'll just assume was as nuanced in its explorations of control and loneliness and bizarre, desperate behavior as this adaptation is not.

It's 1987 and Frank (Josh Brolin), serving time for a murder he didn't exactly mean to commit, has busted out of prison. He takes it on the lam to a local discount store where, with nothing but brutish force of will and no weapon (?!) he manages to bully depressed, divorced mom Adele (Kate Winslet) and her young son Henry (Gattlin Griffith) into helping him escape in their wood-paneled station wagon. Once at their home, he ties them up for appearances and sets about handymanning his way into their hearts.

The prison he was in must have had a hell of a rehabilitation program because Frank is a master of auto repair, carpentry, chili prep, mopping, laundry, furnace-fixing, the rhumba, gutter-sweeping, ironing, grilling, sex, baseball tutorial and pie-making.

It's the latter skills that really seal his position as New Daddy, though. As he assists young Henry -- now freshly re-named Hank for maximum male bonding -- with his ability to choke-up on the bat for more hits, we learn that Frank also controls the sun, as shafts of golden light knock Winslet into a deep swoon. Later, he helps her make a pie in a scene as weirdly and hilariously not-erotic as that pottery wheel moment in Ghost. Then he forks her crust. Not making that up. That the kid is involved in the group pie-love just makes it more uncomfortable.

Frank is a gallant misunderstood murder-guy in a judgmental goofus world and this can only end tragically for all. Or can it? Without giving away the sweeping absurdity of every single scene, suffice to say that enduring for true love takes a lot of extremely weird, laughable shapes. Screenwriter/director Jason Reitman has clearly made something he believes in here, adapting Maynard's book with an eye toward tenderness and wonder. But it's really just a wonder that anyone will be able to watch it with a straight face.

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That Awkward Moment Review

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Sometimes films based entirely on medium-strength flashes in pop culture's pan come along, asking for your time. Almost without exception these are movies that stake their flag on a disintegrating hill. That's how we wind up with Roller Boogie (disco music plus roller-skating), Heavenly Bodies (competetive aerobics), The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (see title). And then we have those films forever, baffling -- yet still oddly valuable -- objects as lessons in junk-film history.

But the flashes are getting smaller and, somehow, even less resonant. Now it's enough if your movie is named after something that was popular for a moment on the internet, like LOL, the Miley Cyrus-starring remake of a French film with the same title, for example, or this male-centered romantic comedy that's barely about awkward moments but that takes its meaningless name from a tepid little internet meme. It could be called anything, really, and would perhaps be more accurately known as Dudes Can Do Anything They Want And It's OK. Based on what does down in its hundred minutes, that's what it's really about anyway.

Zac Efron, Michael B. Jordan and Miles Teller are three twentysomething bros in Manhattan (shockingly large, art-filled apartments borrowed from the cast of Friends) who decide to remain single. They're very young so they think themselves bold for coming up with this. And their pact, fittingly, features all the formality and gravity attending a decision made at a street corner holding paper cups from Starbucks. Jordan's a doctor whose wife (Jessica Lucas) is banging a new guy and wants a divorce, Teller is falling for his rich-girl pal (Mackenzie Davis) and Efron hooks up and discards a new co-worker (Imogen Poots) before realizing he's actually smitten. So many knotty problems. Sure hope male privilege hasn't taken the day off or else this could get complicated.

Oh good, it's still on the clock. That's why Teller and Efron, the world's laziest "chick-lit" book cover designers, manage to work wizard-magic on every single woman at their in-house publishing job by talking about Louboutins in a pitch meeting. The women nod their heads, smirking knowingly, tingling deep down in their lady-zones that a scruffy, handsome man has their number with the whole shoe-lust thing. "I love it," says their tough, female boss.

And that's why these men can use women as props in their hijinks and prostitute-based misunderstandings and not experience anything resembling a consequence. That's why they can go to their love-target's job and wreak havoc and come away from it smiling. That's why they can attend a party with a dildo hanging out of their pants (one purchased from a New York City sex shop that allows haggling) and turn everyone there into their fan because they're so wacky. That's why they can free-spiritedly steal property from a house a real estate agent is showing them and never feel the heat of the law.

It's also why this film can be lazy with comedy and logic and humanity. It can make tired dick jokes -- there are never enough of those, just ask Last Vegas -- and equate a childless marriage with failure and, later, demand the audience take the flimsy pact seriously as a cry for men's bonding. ("I want my friends back together," pleads Efron, nearing what would love to pass for a third act moment of heft; one problem, though, when were you apart?)

That's why it can play Backwards Day with every emotion it attempts to tackle. That's why it can freely get everything wrong -- women, men, relationships, jobs, apartments, sex toys, literary fiction, Thanksgiving, urination -- and still believe itself charming. That's why no fewer than five first-draft-quality scenes where characters simply wrap up the dispute by calling each other "idiot" are allowed to remain in the finished product. For the record, here are those lines of dialogue: "Idiot!" and "You're an idiot." and "You're a f

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The Lego Movie Review

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The Lego Movie -- but probably not the actual Lego company -- is having an argument with itself. In one corner of its philosophical boxing ring are the "free jazz" Legos of olden times, the kind that arrived blueprint-less in the hands of children, no finished version pictured on the box pointing the way to their correct usage, the kind even a dummy could play with properly provided s/he didn't try to swallow them first; this mindset is represented here by the character of simple-brained Emmet (the voice and doofus energy and Parks and Recreation aura of Chris Pratt). More about him in a moment.

In the other corner are the countless specialized puzzle sets of officially licensed tie-in product, like the pirate ship set or the gender-constructed, pink-bricked Disney princess sets or, guessing, eventually, the The Lego Movie set or, on a more adult level, the hot-hot-hot $400 Star Wars Death Star set, meant to be enjoyed by anyone with the patience, instruction-reading ability and disposable income to burn. In The Lego Movie, this is the world in which Emmet exists, an atmospheric Goliath no tiny, chill-bro David with a Free to Be You and Me attitude can knock down. On a corporate level, that's still a pretty comfortable perch from which to allow the film to obsess all it wants over the war on childhood creativity.

Emmet is a type currently trending, the Idiot Hero devoid of specialness until forced by circumstances to step up his game. A construction worker whose personality-free life allows his own co-workers to forget him entirely, Emmet is still happily clueless and sings along daily to the ironically titled, group-think anthem "Everything Is Awesome" (and he does this for hours at a time). Emmet is also The Special, the one prophesied to battle the evil, conformity-driven Lord Business (Will Farrell) inside an all-Lego world populated by Lego Batman (Will Arnett), Lego Shaquille O'Neal (Shaquille O'Neal), Lego C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) and a rebellious Lego warrior named Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks). And Gandalf and Abraham Lincoln and pirates and Shakespeare. With Morgan Freeman. And Liam Neeson.

In other words, the pre-planned play sets have invaded each other's territory because, the film asserts, no amount of boxed separation can, in the end, limit a child's imagination. So with Emmet as that adult-child leading the way, the colored plastic bricks cross every boundary. You can thank on-fire directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (21 Jump Street, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs) for continuing the practice they've begun, one of throwing everything into the air at once to see where it lands and letting the stuff that floats just float on. They've arrived at the precisely perfect moment in animation's march of normalizing the weird, one that encourages Pixar-quality visual extravagance and allows for the sort of somewhat irreverent, laid back comic storytelling employed by entities like Robot Chicken and The Cartoon Network. It's a world where it feels like stoners are inventing stories for children and/or adults not immune to the charms of talking slices of pizza.

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The Monuments Men Review

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They don't storm the beach at Normandy, these art-expert soldiers, they casually walk ashore, striding toward their mission as they would if they were visiting the Met.

That mission (one that really took place) is to rescue the great art treasures of Europe, the ones Hitler seized and secreted away in mines with a view toward opening a Fuhrer Museum in Austria after he laid claim to all the power in the world. Failing that, he planned to destroy every last painting and sculpture. Enter the Monuments Men, a team of American/Allied academic art and architecture experts, here played by Matt Damon, John Goodman, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, The Artist's Jean Dujardin, Downton Abbey's Hugh Bonneville and director/co-writer George Clooney. These guys are jaunty.

So is the film, and weirdly so. But that's kind of understandable given the nature of Clooney as a filmmaker. Over the course of his acting career he's built a public persona as America's thinking-man's man, your favorite handsome bachelor uncle, the one who scores with the ladies and urges you to read great books. He wants you to take him seriously but not too much. And this is good of him. It's nice having a National Coolness Treasure. But when that spills over into his directorial work it can sink everything.

This is a film, after all, about an extremely dark moment in 20th century history, one that wants to convince contemporary audiences that risking lives in the hunt for a priceless statue of The Madonna and Child was worth anyone's time or effort (and there are no fewer than four heart-stirring mini-speeches about the gravity of that task, not to worry). But when much of the rest of the action consists of Bill Murray comedy-squabbling with Bob Balaban -- and for what reason, exactly? Who are these guys again and do they really hate each other? And why? -- or Matt Damon mangling the French language and stepping on an amusing landmine, or the men slowly saving treasure after treasure with no real trouble getting in their way while Alexandre Desplat's score happily whistle-marches itself over the bridge on the River Kwai, it's probably a bad idea to suddenly lurch the action into abrupt death, emotional arm-twisting, or the Shoah-lite moment of finding a barrel full of the gold fillings of tens of thousands of slaughtered European Jews. If a movie could be wrung by the neck and forced to pick a tone, this one would be in for some rough treatment.

But you're in luck, art aficionados and World War 2 cinema enthusiasts. There's a great film about this subject you can sit down and watch right now. It stars another man's man, Burt Lancaster, and it was directed by John Frankenheimer and it's as exciting and tense and meaningful as this one is slack and confused and bumbling. It's 1964's The Train. Get on it.

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Vampire Academy Review

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There's a special kind of unhappiness that attends a very bad film made by people who have known better and done much, much better, people who've made movies you don't just like, but love. That's the case with this project's main men: Daniel Waters, who wrote Heathers, and his brother Mark Waters, who directed Mean Girls. And while they've both been involved in other movies that weren't nearly as resonant as either of those sardonic teen comedies, just saying their names out loud is enough to make you think that teaming them up for yet another stomp through bad-attitude adolescence is a perfect idea, no matter how derivative the source material they're adapting may be.

How derivative? Vampires, that's how. Just in case you were still not getting enough of those contemporary YA lit staples thrown at you all the damn time. Or magic at a highly specialized private school, another under-represented area of fictional endeavor. At this point in the history of paranormal subject matter, when all mythologies have been convoluted and blown open to the point of parody, attempting parody by grafting your own best work onto the re-animated corpse of these two overworked revenue sources and dunking it all in a Pretty in Pink bath might seem like a great idea, a way to devour the silly goth-animal that's already chasing its own tail right into a black velvet-lined irrelevancy. Because, sure, vampires, I know, but then again because Mean Girls! Heathers! They have to weigh more, yes?

Nope.

The plot isn't simple but it involves teen vampires known as Moroi, protected by a specialized class of supernatural half-human helpers known as Dhampir. The Dhampir must shield the Moroi from the bad news Strigoi. Specifically, it concerns Dhampir Rose (Zoey Deutch, daughter of Pretty in Pink director Howard Deutch, hence all shout-outs -- Ducky! -- cutely nestled into the plot and dialogue) and Moroi princess Lissa (Lucy Fry). They're symbiotically connected as protector and protectee, food-friend and feeder. Initially on the run from their own hellish Hogwarts, they're captured and dropped back into high school drama, with all the cattiness, backstabbing, slut-shaming and vampire ninja battles that entails.

The girls just wanna have a strange blood-version of fun but the boys are jerks and the other girls are jerkier, the parents just don't understand, the teachers won't leave them kids alone and the poor, misunderstood evil Strigoi just need to please please please get what they want, which is to destroy all these annoying kids. Will it happen at the big dance? And after everyone is done fighting and silver-staking instead of dancing will love finally bloom between Rose and her trainer Dimitri (Danila Kozlovsky) or Lissa and her brooding Christian (Dominic Sherwood), the Moroi with the Strigoi parents?

The answer doesn't matter. Everything new here is old again, slinking around in the shadows of past glories, avoiding the sun, trying to cast a franchise spell. The quips and smart-ass banter were funnier, sharper and smarter when they did all this the first couple of times, but the powers that be are counting on you not caring or being too young to remember. And that means it was probably out of the Waters' hands from the moment they signed on, The Weinstein Company being notorious for taking films away from filmmakers. Delay the release, test market the thing into shapelessness, chop away the stuff that's over your target demo's collective head, drain all the blood from whatever creative vein was formerly pulsing with life. Take the money and run, sequel or no. Sucks, really.

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