Neither Tina Fey nor Amy Poehler Seem Invested in Baby Mama

Could have sworn I’ve seen this episode of Baby Mama before—like sometime in January 2007, when it was originally titled “The Baby Show” and aired on the other prime-time series starring Tina Fey, 30 Rock. (Wait a minute—you say Baby Mama’s a movie and not a TV show? Seriously? Coulda…

Harold and Kumar Get Shipped to Gitmo in a Forced Act Two

Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg wrote Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle with the novel idea: What if you made a John Hughes movie, but instead of writing garishly caricatured bit players with names like Long Duk Dong, you cast an Asian actor as the smart, handsome, upwardly mobile…

Jason Segel Uses His Balls to Great Effect in Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Jason Segel is responsible for two of the most cringe-inducing, hands-in-front-of-your-face moments in the recent history of television, both of which occurred during the sole season of NBC’s Freaks and Geeks, on which Segel played bright-eyed burnout Nick Andopolis. On the episode “I’m With the Band,” Nick imagined himself an…

Intelligence Goes Soft in the Obvious Smart People

Smart People got no reason to live—and, sure, that’s not quite how Randy Newman sang it, but the point still stands. Because in Noam Murro’s directorial bow—one of those Sundance premieres starring famous people slumming it in dingy Indieland—the smart people ain’t doing much l-i-v-i-n’ at all. They’re just drifting…

Street Kings is a Shallow Look at Dirty Police

For a movie built around questions of failed ethics and duplicitous behavior, Street Kings is just as dishonest as its characters. Though conceived as yet another sobering frontline report on law enforcement’s ever-expanding gray area, director David Ayer’s grim police thriller mostly plays as one long dick-measuring competition. You sense…

In Shine a Light, Seniors Scorsese and The Stones Together Again

Mick Jagger’s most essential physical feature, according to Martin Scorsese: his bellystache. On the poster for Shine a Light, the big-shot director’s Rolling Stones concert film, Sir Mick is frozen in mid-song aerobics, his back arched, his half-shirt raised, that yawning navel and faint hairline more prominently showcased than his…

Bringing Down the House Adaptation 21 Doesn’t Hit the Jackpot

Ben Mezrich’s 2002 best-seller Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas For Millions was a smart narrative about…well, you did see the subtitle, right? Mezrich more or less recounted a fantastic tale spun by an old acquaintance from Boston, an M.I.T. grad named…

Iraq War Movie Stop-Loss Does Its Best Not to Mention the War

Considering that the war in Iraq has proven to be Washington’s shot-by-shot remake of Vietnam, it’s only natural that Hollywood has followed suit, giving us a series of Iraq-themed films that can be set neatly alongside their Vietnam-era counterparts. Just as the initial wave of angry anti-Vietnam documentaries (In the…

Entering Its Second Year, AFI Dallas Avoids the Sophomore Slump

When it was revealed in September 2006 that the Deep Ellum Film Festival would be shuttered to make way for the AFI Dallas International Film Festival, and its attendant big-money corporate sponsors, local cineastes fretted that DEFF founder Michael Cain had sold out to the highest bidder. Which proved absolutely…

Not Taylor-Made

Rare is the star vehicle that is as poorly matched to its star as Drillbit Taylor, which casts Owen Wilson as a homeless Army deserter and con man, able to fool people into believing he’s both a substitute teacher and a master of hand-to-hand combat. It’s a part that requires…

Three the Hard Way

No Country for Old Men (Paramount) “A horror comedy chase” is how a grinning Tommy Lee Jones describes No Country for Old Men in the making-of — meanwhile, his fellow actors add to the list such adjectives as “a very primitive ride,” “a rabbit chase through Texas,” and “a very…

The Games People Play

For the crime of obliterating high culture, for the crime of getting off on vicarious degradation—and, above all, for the crime of sitting through any movie that resembles the one he’s (re)made—Michael Haneke sentences you (me, us) to Funny Games. Scratch that: to a second fucking helping of Funny Games…

Oscar-Starved

Into the Wild (Paramount) Sean Penn waited a good decade before adapting Jon Krakauer’s book about Chris McCandless, who graduated college in 1990, then disappeared into the American unknown, re-emerging as Alexander Supertramp before his final, tragic farewell in the Alaskan wilderness in ’92. Penn’s patience is evident in every…

Heist Flick The Bank Job is Too Fun to Fact-Check

Based on a true story,” brags The Bank Job before diving into the clear blue water of the Caribbean, where, in 1970, a topless woman frolics with two swimming mates—just another day in paradise. The trio retires to a hotel room for a sweaty, breathless afternoon quickie, which is photographed…

Morally Ambiguous The Counterfeiters is a Holocaust Tale of Survival

Near the beginning of The Counterfeiters, a fact-based Holocaust drama by Austrian filmmaker Stefan Ruzowitzky, we meet Jewish money forger and former jailbird Salomon Sorowitsch (brilliantly played by Karl Markovics), packing to flee Berlin in 1936 with a suitcase full of fake money. We know from an opening coda that…

Move Along, Kids

Justice League: The New Frontier (Warner Bros.) Based on Darwyn Cooke’s comic-book miniseries — a masterpiece starring all of DC Comics’ major-leaguers at the dawn of their immortality during the Cold War — this animated adaptation plays stronger, faster, and further than any direct-to-DVD in recent memory. It’s a grown-up…

Will Ferrell Fouls Up Semi-Pro

Semi-Pro’s much better than Blades of Glory, which wasn’t nearly as good as Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, which was a little better than Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, which was almost as funny as Old School, which was better than everything else Will Ferrell had done…

Band of Brothers

Last fall, The Band’s Visit made headlines after being disqualified as Israel’s foreign-language submission to the 2008 Academy Awards—an ironic fate, indeed, for a movie that takes language as its very subject. The official ruling of the Oscar referees was that too much of the film’s dialogue is in English,…