FOUR CHRISTMASES - er..."mistletoe"?

FOUR CHRISTMASES is a piss-poor generic holiday season comedy starring Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon. I normally like Vaughn's motor-mouth humour and Reese Witherspoon was great in LEGALLY BLONDE but they struggle to keep this underwritten movie afloat. The jokes are too thin and too few - the "big message" too preachy and obvious - the whole enterprise such a blatant shake-down it made me ashamed to have colluded with it. The high concept is that Vaughn and Witherspoon think that they are a happy independent couple until they are guilted into visiting each of their parents one Christmas day. Naturally, the movie spends eighty minutes showing how "they fuck you up your mum and dad" before telling us that, actually, we should all be nice to our families, before then telling us, hey, it's okay to exclude them from major life events. Huh?

So this movie is crass and inconsistent. It's also poorly made - just look for those awful continuity errors with Witherspoon's wig. Frankly, the only mildly interesting thing in the whole flick was the Steve Wiebe cameo. Seriously, director Seth Gordon should go back to making docs than hiring himself out.

FOUR CHRISTMASES is on release in the US, UK, Canada, Singapore, the Philippines, Australia, Germany, Portugal, Russia and Iceland. It opens next weekend in the Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong and Poland. It opens on December 18th in Argentina, Croatia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Estonia. It opens on Christmas day in Belgium and Brazil and on New Year's Eve in France.

PRIDE AND GLORY - tragically uninvolving dirty cop thriller

PRIDE AND GLORY is a dirty-cop thriller that brings nothing new to the genre at all. This is a great disappointment, given that it's written by Joe Carnahan - who wrote NARC - and it stars two great actors - Colin Farrell and Ed Norton. Norton plays a New York cop investigating the death of four rozzers at the hands of a missing drug-dealer. Unsurprisingly, the trail leads to his brother-in-law (Farrell), who's been shooting gangsters for pay. The whole thing is bone dry, over-wrought, boring and entirely uninvolving - and culminates in an entirely under-powered denouement in a bar. All this for a bout of fisticuffs. Do yourself a favour and chuck LA CONFIDENTIAL on the DVD player instead. 

PRIDE AND GLORY played Toronto 2008 and is currently on release in the US, GReece, Israel, Italy, Panama, Peru and the UK. It goes on release in Iceland on November 21st; in Belgium, France and the Netherlands on December 3rd; in Argentina on December 18th; in Germany on January 22nd; and in Norway on January 30th.

NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS - damp squib

The first NATIONAL TREASURE movie was a light-hearted unpretentious mix of Indiana Jones and The Da Vinci Code and much of the team behind the original is back for the sequel. Nic Cage reprises his role as the archeologist cum treasure hunter, Ben Gates. He's got an IT whizzkid sidekick (Justin Bartha), a hot chick girlfriend (Diane Kruger) and a pair of light relief bickering parents (Jon Voight and Helen Mirren). Instead of Auto-Bean, the bad guy is played by Ed Harris. And instead of Templar treasure, Ben Gates is searching for an ancient City of Gold hidden under Mount Rushmore. The adventure will take him to Paris, Buckingham Palace, the Oval Office and the Library of Congress too! One wonders just what is left for the heavily hinted at third installment of the franchise. Ben Gates decodes a puzzle on the moon?!

The problem is that somewhere between the insanely impressive sets and the ludicrously high-amp locations, the honest fun of the first film got lost. I didn't mind the cheesiness of the first flick because it kept me entertained. In NATIONAL TREASURE, I eventually got bored, especially during the final water sequences. And when you're bored, you start poking holes in a plot that can't stand up to such scrutiny. The motivation of the baddie, for instance, seems pretty thin. And a scene where Ben Gates is offering to sacrifice himself for his family is curiously lacking in emotional punch.

Overall then, NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS is a pretty damp squib. Still, I like the concept enough that I'll be hoping for a slightly shorter run-time and slightly less absurd locations in the inevitable next installment.

NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS was released in 2007 in the US, Kuwait, Oman, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Lebanon, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Thailand, Bulgaria, Canada, Estonia, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Spain, the USA, Venezuela, Egypt, Russia, Mexico and Panama. It was released earlier in 2008 in Belgium, Greece, Iceland, Poland, Turkey, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Peru, Colombia, India, Norway, Sweden, Argentina, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Germany and Denmark. It is currently playing in Denmark and the UK and opens next week in France and Finland.

BRATZ - THE MOVIE - better than you might think; still not particularly good

I am constantly at a loss to understand popular culture's obsession with audition shows and talent contests. It seems as if we've all reverted into a pre-modern era of entertainment. Before irony and Woody Allen we had vaudeville and freak shows. Now, we can have both at the same time thanks to X FACTOR, POP IDOL, STRICTLY COME DANCING et hoc ad nauseam. If HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL perfectly captures and exploits this trend, BRATZ: THE MOVIE is a weak parody of it. The story arc is pretty similar to HSM1 and HSM2. Four aggressively fashion-conscious friends turn up to their new high school to be confronted by extreme segregation between the different cliques. As the girls all fall naturally into a different clique, they soon find themselves hanging out in different crowds. When they want to hang out together, their new friends make them feel guilty. Then, pace HSM2, we get a classic haves versus have-not situation. The control-freak alpha-female who's running the school is also stupidly rich, and she's throwing an amazing Sweet Sixteen party to cement her popularity. Part of her schtick is to embarass one of the Bratz who is from a poor family. Of course, everyone is healed by the Power of Music a.k.a. a big song and dance number where we learn that we should move beyond cliques and stand united. But if that were to happen, what would Hollywood teen comedies do for plot devices?!

BRATZ has a far weaker cast, script and score than HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL and is as predictable as the Huckaboom turning to a Huckabust. God knows what Jon Voight is doing here - cashing in his pension presumably. But for all that BRATZ isn't a complete pile of pants. It has a certain slickness and professionalism that one might expect from a production team schooled in American kids TV shows, from That's So Raven! to Boy Meets World to Home Improvement. And, given how obnoxious the dolls that inspired the movie are, its painfully politically-correct, saccharine message is arguably something to be thankful for.

BRATZ went on release earlier this year and is now available on DVD.

Early review from Al - TRANSFORMERS

This review is by guest reviewer, Al, who can usually be found here....

I've never been a fan of TRANSFORMERS, but since the first trailer debuted couple months back I promised myself I would watch it. It comes out in Asia/Aus before anywhere else, so there haven't been any reviews to provide me anticipation of what the film would be like. Let's cut to the chase - TRANSFORMERS was just really disappointing. The special effects were predictably impressive and the larger-than-life robots left me gawking in awe like a child - but once the amazement and fascination wears out, I start wanting more Unfortunately beyond the robot huha and grandiose CGI, the movie just has little else to offer.

The biggest problem I had was with the script. Historically, one of the worst. Most of the lines/phrases are so ridiculously dumb and banal it's not even a laughing matter. You just have to witness it for yourself to truly experience the sheer nightmare that the script is. A couple of times one of the robots (usually Optimus Prime - is this misspelled Who gives a damn) launches into some preachy monologue that's so cheesy, cheap and Hallmark-ish, I feel like ripping my gums out.

Moreover, Megan Fox can't act for nuts - the whole way she was pouting with this bimbotic blank face like she was permanently stuck in a Revlon commercial. Shia LaBeouf fares a whole lot better, but once the focus shifts completely to the conflict between the two robot clans, Shia's character gradually phases out of significance and becomes ornamental (aside from having to run endlessly and protect the cube on which the fate of the planet rests on, but I can't hardly give a damn about). The final street battle scene starts off grea but quickly becomes unfocused and messy. It starts and ends repeatedly, to the point where it becomes anti-climactic and I'm just done with the damn thing. With the material, they had the potential to invent something imaginative, new and possibly groundbreaking, and it's obvious the special effects team worked their butts out to ensure things looked perfect on their part. But in the end, the mediocre, uninspired story and shit stain of a script brings the entire film down.

*Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 100% rating (although I'm sure the figure will go down as more reviews come in). What a joke.

**I know noone gives a shit, and even IMDB doesn't acknowledge this - but there's a part in Transformers that plays homage to Jet Li/Kill Bill.When Bumble Bee changes from the old Chevrolet to the new one, which is yellow and has two black stripes in the middle (the same pattern on The Bride's suit in Kill Bill Vol. 1/Jet Li's old movies), the song that comes on is the song used in Kill Bill Vol. 1 when Oren Ishii and the Crazy 88 is first introduced at the House of Blue Leaves.

TRANSFORMERS is on release in Australia, Italy, Malaysia and Singapore. It opens on July 4th weekend in New Zealand, Austria, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Norway, Russia, South Korea, Sweden, the US, Israel, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Spain and Turkey. It opens on July 20th in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico; in Belgium, France, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the UK on July 27th. It opens in Estonia, Japan, Iceland and Slovakia in August.

Bina007 adds: I was really interested to read Al's review, because like him I'd been taken by surprise at how cool the ad campaign looked. I have to say, though, that I'm not entirely surprised it sucks. Apparently, like Pirates 3, this is a movie who's release date was set BEFORE they had a cast or script. So it's another case of getting a product - any product - to justify the marketing. Does anyone else think the PR goons have taken over the asylum?