By Vic Holtreman

Short version: A schizophrenic and mind numbing movie. Who knew that so much action could be so boring?

I’m not going to spend too much time writing this review because I’m quite sure that it’s irrelevant. Based on the reaction of the audience at the screening I attended, most folks will not agree with this review, will go watch Transformers and leave the theater in a state of bliss.

Me? I just don’t get it.

Over the weekend I actually started to get excited about this movie based on the early reviews that had been coming out. I just checked Rottentomatoes.com and although in the overall category it’s just barely slipped into “Rotten” territory, the “Cream of the Crop” reviewer consensus is still well into “Ripe” (meaning good). Over at IMDB.com the user rating stands at 8.3 out of 10 at the time of this writing.

I can only conclude that all these people are on crack.

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By M Holtreman

Short version: Not completely awful, unless you’re a big fan of Nancy Drew from the books and video games.

For this film, I present the inaugural review of my daughter. She saw the film and she is the target audience for Nancy Drew, so I thought it would be appropriate to have her write the review.
At the start of the film we find Nancy Drew (played by Emma Roberts) solving a burglary in her hometown of River Heights. She solves the case and the police catch the burglars.

By Vic Holtreman

Short version: Unfortunately Ghost Rider lives up to its pre-release buzz: Boring and bordering on cheesy.

As I had written earlier here at Screen Rant, I went in to Ghost Rider without any preconceived notions about the character since I had never read the comic book. I was also mildly optimistic (based on one of the trailers) that it might turn out to be at least good, if not great.

Oh well…

For those of you unfamiliar with the character, Ghost Rider is actually Johnny Blaze (seriously) who here is played by Nicolas Cage. I like watching Cage onscreen, although there’s a “sameness” to his performances from film to film that’s starting to wear a little thin on me. Nothing personal against the guy, but he has such a distinctively quirky delivery that it’s starting to overshadow the characters he plays.

By Brian Rentschler

Short version: This is another superfluous, mediocre addition to the Hannibal Lecter franchise. Has this dead horse been beaten enough?

I think the Boy Scouts should add another merit badge to the list: Mediocre Movie Franchise Survival. I would certainly qualify for it; after all, this is the fifth movie I’ve seen that features Hannibal Lecter. One was excellent (The Silence of the Lambs), one was very good (Manhunter), one was terrible (Hannibal) and two were mediocre (Red Dragon and Hannibal Rising). This latest installment in the franchise left me with a feeling of ambivalence. I suspect most of the critics will end up complaining about how the teenage Hannibal is, in many aspects, blatantly different from the adult Hannibal. That is indeed a valid complaint, and I’ll touch on that a little during this review, but the questions going through my mind were quite different. Why do we need to know more about Hannibal’s younger years? Why do we need to understand his motivations and tribulations? The short answer is, we don’t. It is better for some things to remain enigmatic, and the character of Hannibal Lecter falls squarely into that category.

There are quite a few things in life that are more exciting because there’s an element of mystery to them. Hannibal Lecter didn’t have the lion’s share of screen time in Manhunter or The Silence of the Lambs, but that didn’t stop him from having a major impact on the storyline. Indeed, much of the allure of his character stemmed from the fact that we didn’t really know all that much about him. Whether it intends to or not, Hannibal Rising tries to throw most of that mystery out the window. It deigns to offer us an explanation for Hannibal’s eventual metamorphosis into a psychopathic serial killer, as if such a thing could ever be explained from a logical and rational standpoint. It even expects us to empathize with him, but it never comes close to giving us a good reason to do that.

By Brian Rentschler

Short version: This short film deserves some credit for being original and mildly entertaining, but it’s pretty lame overall.

For those of you who think the Jewish community is underrepresented in Hollyweird, Landau Motion Pictures has the answer for you. They made a short film (about nine minutes long) back in 2003 called A.P.U.: Art, Pot and Underwear that has quite an eclectic group of characters, including a Jewish action star. Long story short, the film is about as weird as the title implies.

Kiko Rosenberg (played by Seth Landau) is an action star whose marriage to his co-star, Adrienne Lennon (played by Jen Richey), is on the rocks. Adrienne hires two movers — Scooter (played by Scott Schwoch) and K.W. (played by Kenneth Bristow). However, Scooter thinks Adrienne is totally hot, and he wants to steal a pair of her underwear. During this epic quest, we meet an accountant who appears to be a cocaine addict, as well as a guy who looks like a girl from the back.

By Brian Rentschler

Short version: Overall, this movie was silly and formulaic. The threadbare plot and insipid dialogue made it almost unwatchable at times, but the movie partially redeemed itself by including a few action sequences that pandered to me.

Given the fact that this movie was directed by Michael Bay, I wasn’t expecting Citizen Kane when I sat down to watch it, but I have to admit that despite a few interesting action sequences, I was really surprised by how bad it was. After the movie was over, I watched a “Making Of” documentary about the movie, which I thought was far more interesting than the movie itself. The first shot in that documentary is Michael Bay being interviewed on camera. He’s talking about how he told the writers not to go into details about the action sequences. He only wanted them to put the word “action” in the script where they wanted an action sequence, and he would come up with the specific details himself at a later time. At first glance, such an approach doesn’t seem unreasonable, but trust me, that’s his way of saying that he puts far more value on action scenes than storyline or character development.

The Island is a very unique film for Michael Bay in a couple of different ways. It’s the first feature film Bay has directed that wasn’t produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and it was a box office failure, earning only about $36 million in the U.S. According to IMDB, Bay’s next project is the Transformers movie. That doesn’t sound like every director’s dream to me, but Steven Spielberg is listed as an executive producer, so what do I know?

By Vic Holtreman

Short version: Shyamalan seems to be off his meds with this very odd and sometime extremely technically botched cross-themed film.

If I were to come up with a single word to describe what I felt while watching Lady In The Water it would be: confusion.

By Brian Rentschler

Short version: This movie is funny and daring at times, but it mostly falls flat. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what point it’s trying to make. If you want to see a funny and effective religious satire, rent Dogma instead.

Saved! is one of those movies that seems difficult to review. After all, how are you supposed to effectively review a religious satire without a common frame of reference? Or, as others might argue, isn’t it better to have no common frame of reference at all so you can see how effectively the movie engrosses the viewer in its subject matter? Ultimately, though, I don’t think it matters. I think it boils down to how entertaining the movie is, and how effectively it makes its point. Saved! is funny and daring in spots, but for the most part, it’s not all that entertaining. Even worse, the movie doesn’t really seem to know what it wants to say. I watched Dogma right before I watched Saved!, and I found Dogma to be a much better movie in every aspect.

Co-produced by Michael Stipe (otherwise known as the lead singer of REM), Saved! first gained attention when it won the Audience Choice award at the Nashville Film Festival. Ebert and Roeper gave it two thumbs up, so what’s not to like? The problem is that everyone who liked the movie appeared to single out the religious satire aspect, while overlooking the fact that most of the movie is not truly satirical. The movie alternates between messages that are misleading, confusing and (ironically enough) preachy.

By Vic Holtreman

Short version: Do yourself a favor and rent the orginal version.

Based on how Poseidon, the remake of the 1972 disaster-film classic The Poseidon Adventure is doing at the box office, I’d say that most people are going to agree with my review. I’ll only touch briefly on the nausea that the creation of yet another movie remake brings to me, and here, once again with good reason.

For those of you young ‘uns, The Poseidon Adventure was released way back in 1972, and it was one in a string of very successful disaster-themed movies produced by Irwin Allen. It starred Gene Hackman in his prime and a handful of other actors who were popular at the time, including Ernest Borgnine, Stella Stevens and Shelley Winters. The plot was simple: Rogue wave flips ocean liner and a small group of folks try to survive by making their way to the bottom (now top) of the ship, hoping to be rescued.

By Vic Holtreman

Short version: Although you might expect that people in their forties would find this funny, it will probably be funnier to folks in their twenties to whom forty seems infinitely far away.

Now I’m sure I haven’t lost my sense of humor because I just watched a comedian parody President Bush and although I voted for him I found it laugh-out-loud funny.

This DVD, not so much.

“But why are you rating it 2.5 stars?” you may ask… Basically because upon a second viewing it did elicit a few chuckles and when I step back and look at it, I imagine that if I was in my early to mid 20’s I might actually find his routine a lot funnier.