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BComm Group 5

Gigli Movie

Film critics in the U.S. have slated the new movie starring Jennifer Lopez
and fiancé Ben Affleck, labeling it a "total disaster.” They said Gigli is
destined to be a box office flop after it left reviewers sniggering at the
"laughable dialogue and ludicrous plot". In the film, J-Lo plays a lesbian
assassin who is seduced by hitman Affleck. The couple fell for each in real
life while filming the movie, but on screen, their sexual chemistry is said
to be seriously lacking. In one scene Lopez tries to seduce Affleck by lying
on a bed and telling him: "It's turkey time!" When he asks: "What?", she
replies: "Come on, gobble, gobble". Another reviewer said: "It was possibly
the worst line ever said in a movie." The film has already undergone
extensive re-shooting after early previews showed audiences found the ending
unbelievable. Gay rights groups are said to be incensed that J-Lo's
character starts off as a lesbian but goes straight, thanks to Affleck. It's Kevin Smith I feel sorry for as his Jersey Girl movie will follow this in nine month's time, and could that be rubbish as well?

Gothika Movie

Halle Berry goes crazy and “rings” a little to close to another popular horror film.

Halle Berry stars as psychiatrist Miranda Grey, who works in an elaborate mental institution headed by her husband, Dr. Douglas Grey (Charles S. Dutton). Miranda’s friend Pete (Robert Downey Jr.) also works with Doug and Miranda.

During a freakish rainstorm, the institution suffers from several power-outages and forces Miranda to return home to Doug. During her trip home, she is detoured across a country bridge where she narrowly misses a naked girl wandering in of the middle road.

This is all Miranda can remember. And now she has just awoke within the walls of her own institution not as a doctor but as a patient. Is she crazy? She might just be because during her memory relapse, she also murdered Doug.

The first half of the film has a lot of the tension and paranoia audiences felt in last year’s horror phenomenon “The Ring” but by the second half I was waiting for Morgan Freeman’s Alex Cross to come out from the shadows and solve Halle’s case.

Halle Berry’s desperation, sweat-soaked institution attire and frayed hair add oodles to her powerful performance. But even as the role does allow her to go way over the top we still don’t feel a lot for her character. Within this performance is some of what we got in “Monster’s Ball” but not enough to make the film really captivate.

Downey Jr. is bored to tears in the pining for Halle role. It is such a waste to see such a natural and brilliant actor reduced to this “Demerol-induced” drone.

The performance by Penelope Cruz is strong and daring. It is her scenes with Halle that are the most memorable of this film. The two actresses together are quite impressive as we can see them feeding off each other.

The whole mass patient shower scene where Halle is struck down was in such poor taste that I was literally shaking my head thinking was I actually seeing a late-night “Cinemax” moment on the silver screen. It was awful probably the worst excuse for a shower scene since “Starship Troopers”.

The film did have a few frights and some very interesting camera angles. Some of the slow motion effects and visual effects were impressive and made for nice moody mental moments. But for the most part we had seen all of it before.

Hellboy Movie

Nowhere near the value of other recent comic book films like X2: X-Men United or Spider-Man, but Hellboy is more entertaining than last year’s Daredevil, LXG, and The Hulk.

Based on the Dark Horse Comic created by Mike Mignola in the 1990’s, writer/director Guillermo Del Toro maintains the spirit of the comic, but also adds his own flair and hiccups to the production.

The films opens in Germany during World War II, where the powerfully evil Grigori Rasputin (Karel Roden) and the Nazis open a dimensional portal to other worlds, in efforts of bringing additional forces to help in their plans of world conquering. Stopped by U.S. forces, the portal is closed, but not before something slipped through. A member of the government’s Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense named Trevor “Broom” Bruttenholm then discovers an aggressive demon child from the bowels of hell that does have horns, red skin, and a tail. The film then flashes forward to present day, where the Bureau has become a prominent top secret agency that defends the world against evil and monsters, among other things. Broom (John Hurt) is now the aging head of the Bureau, and Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is grown as his son and top agent. Unable to grow at the rate of human, Hellboy is a muscle bound demon that resents where he is from by grinding off his horns and maintaining his Catholic beliefs. Though he gets the job done, Hellboy is annihilative and charismatic, but he knows his job and has a good time doing it. Not the only so-called “freak” of the Bureau, Hellboy’s accomplice is a “mer-man” with telepathic abilities named Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), and his love interest is a troubled pyro-kinetically gifted woman named Liz Sherman (Selma Blair). Brought in as Hellboy’s new partner to perhaps tone down his antics is a young FBI agent named John Myers (Rupert Evans). Hellboy’s learns to like Myers, but becomes furious with him when he develops interest in Liz. However, the Bureau has other problems, when it is revealed that Rasputin has returned to earth to begin an apocalypse with his many indestructible monsters.

As cheesy and absurd a film as Hellboy is, it does capture the spirit of the comic book. Del Toro does take his liberties with the material, mostly with the additions of certain characters like Myers and the villain Rasputin. Myers seemed added just as the third piece of the love triangle with Liz and Hellboy. As usual, Del Toro massacres the film with loud special effects sequences that by the end of the film are complementary to just show expensive spectacles. The dialogue is also horrendous and supporting characters lack finesse or depth. What does work in this film is Hellboy himself. Del Toro focuses the film around the balance of Hellboy’s skills and personality. He is not indestructible, he has feelings and he is not a saint either. Hellboy is a complex hero that audiences can root for. Del Toro fought to get character actor Ron Perlman in the role, since the studios wanted a star like Vin Diesel. Perlman is a perfect choice, he captures the swagger, the deliver, the charm, the anger, and interpersonal cues that Mignola created with comic character. Perlman is also very amusing with the character, though the one-liners get old. The makeup on Perlman is also brilliant as a reflection of the comic book character.

As Hellboy’s love interest, Selma Blair just seems lost and out of touch as Liz. Her performance is just stale, even though she did not have much to work with. The great John Hurt steals every moment he has as the Bureau’s director Broom. As Myers, it seems that Rupert Evans was just thrown in as a subsidiary, and his acting is nowhere close in distance to Perlman or Hurt.

Scooby-Doo 2

The classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon about an inquisitive group of friends and their terrified canine companion has enchanted and delighted kids for the better part of twenty-five years.

When the live-action motion picture was released back in 2001, I was a little afraid that old Scooby would lose some of his charm after being transformed into a more realistic CGI version of his former self. I was also scared that the innocence and charm of the quintet of kids would be forever tarnished. Sadly I was right.

That brings me to the sequel. The sequel seems to have gone back and fixed all the problems I complained about in the original. Don’t get me wrong there are still some hang-ups annoyances and hair-pullers but for the most part it’s a huge improvement over the 2001 version.

The Scooby Gang (or Mystery Inc.) which includes Fred (Freddie Prinze Jr.), Daphne (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Velma (Linda Cardellini) and Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) arrive at a museum opening which is featuring an exhibit dedicated to the mysterious exploits of our heroes. The curator, Patrick Wisely (Seth Green) is a big fan and his new exhibit seems to be the talk of Coolsville. Covering the event is television reporter Heather Jasper-Howe (Alicia Silverstone) who wants nothing more than to get the story.

All is pleasant for our gang as they take the museum tour and get reacquainted with some of their more famous villains (which a lot of us will remember from the cartoon series). Velma also discovers she has a crush on Patrick.

The party implodes when the costume of The Pterodactyl Ghost comes to life and begins wreaking havoc on the museum guests. If that wasn’t bad enough a masked figure swears vengeance upon Mystery Inc. As the plot thickens more monsters arise and a figure from the groups past (Peter Boyle) reemerges. How does he fit into the mystery? How are the ghosts coming back? And are Scooby and Shaggy really full-blown detectives?

Can you believe it? The film actually has a concrete plot this time as well as they have found a way to journey back and visit key elements from the series. On top of that the visuals are outstanding for a kid’s film.

I really loved the whole transformation scene involving Shaggy and Scooby and frig full of colorful beakers. That felt so much like the goofiness that these characters endured every Saturday morning way back when. I also really enjoyed the crazy half-pike trip down the side of the mountain with those skinny cyclops-aliens in hot pursuit. It was nice to see how much Linda Cardellini was able to bring to her portrayal of Velma. She was really the only shining moment I found in the original. She is once again, spectacular.

Lillard’s Shaggy and his interaction with the CGI mutt has really come along as we actually see and laugh at the chemistry he has with his companion. I actually did start to feel like they were actually Shaggy and Scooby, laughs and all.

The film’s pitfalls for me were the ridiculous musical numbers which included one with Ruben Studdard from American Idol. Those musical numbers really hurt. Other annoyances mainly dealt with the overly-kid-friendly jokes but it is a family film.

Dawn of the Dead

One of the recent Hollywood trends is to “re-envision,” not remake, a classic cult horror film for the new generation of moviegoers. The latest entry in this “re-envision” movement is Dawn of the Dead, based off George A. Romero’s 1979 original zombie chiller. Close to the film’s only strength, is the shot selection by first time feature director Zach Snyder. Unfortunately, Dawn of the Dead’s numerous inconsistencies and brusque problems has this film coming nowhere close to being a classic “zombie” flick.

The hinted unleashing of the film’s zombies comes that when hell fills up, the dead will walk the earth. The flesh-hungry zombies move chaotically quick (like the zombies in 28 Days Later) in a raged mode and once a being is bitten, shortly they will join the zombie clan. The film’s first zombies appear in pursuit of a dedicated nurse named Ana (Sarah Polley) in her suburban Wisconsin home. After narrowly escaping her suburb and the apocalyptic chaos of the city, she teams up with a handful of human survivors. The group includes a hard-nosed cop (Ving Rhames), a salesman that continuously comes up with problem-solving ideas (Jake Weber), a street-wise soon to be dad (Mekhi Phifer), and his pregnant wife. The group make their way into an abandoned shopping mall and discover human conflicts from the mall’s security unit headed by CJ (Michael Kelly). The mall is put on lockdown as the survivors attempt to figure out what has happened and what does the future hold. The zombies themselves are huddled around the mall by the thousands and through the last minutes of emergency television broadcasting, the survivors learn that the zombies can only be killed by a shot to the head or fire. After a few more survivors arrive, the group has to fight off occasional zombies that squander into the mall as well as battle zombie transformations among themselves after being bitten. Though disagreement and continuos arguing comprises the survivors, each is driven to cherish their humanity and implement a basis of subsistence if they want to remain alive.

This film is of course driven by continuos jump out moments and gallons of blood and chunky gore. The zombies themselves make roaring sounds as if they are werewolves more than are the undead. As mentioned previously, this film’s zombie movements are reminiscent of Danny Boyle’s athletic and extremely fast choices in 28 Days Later. Director Zack Snyder shows flashes of promise, but the overabuance of inconsistencies and amateurish moments stoops this film down to the depths of monstrous. The editing is really appalling and the script does not fare much better. At first it seems that five seconds after being bitten or dying, that person becomes a zombie. As the film progresses, it seems that the bitten become zombies once the film needs them to be, or if there has been over five minutes without a shot involving gore or blood. One obvious inconsistency is that though the mall is lockdowned by the security unit, Ana and the survivors entrance is never shown. Also, after a initial defeat of many zombies in the mall’s open parking garage, the humans just go back into the garage to build their artillery buses without seeing a single zombie, though thousands are banging on the mall’s outer doors. These are really just nit-picky things that stick out, besides the insipid notions in the screenplay by James Gunn. There is also no balance of being serious or “campy,” with this horror film, it seems that the script goes back and forth. Humorously, some of the dead serious notions deliver the film’s worse dialogue, such as Sarah Polley’s line of “Michael is coming to kill you,” to one of the bitten survivors.

Mostly an independent film actress, Polley herself is suitable as the film’s heroine nurse Ana. Ving Rhames delivers a performance we have seen before, but is still admirable. Most of the cast as well as the characters are wooden, but for a film of this nature, acting is not the top priority. In fact, it is better to have flimsy acting in a zombie film.