Review: "Hereafter"

This is posted over at OK.

If you’ve ever brought together two good friends from different spheres of your life together, only to be stunned at how bored and tedious things got when you all hung out, you know what it’s like to watch a Clint Eastwood-Matt Damon pairing.

It’s exacerbated by how much you like both parties on their own, and how hard you try to convince yourself something lively will come out of the pairing. You try to start a conversation.

You: “So, uh, Matt, you know Clint likes the Red Sox, too.”

Clint: “No I don’t.”

“Oh, well, Clint, Matt starred in a Western just like you used to!”

Matt: “Yeah, I did All the Pretty Horses, but that was a flop and I don’t really like to talk about it.”

You: “Riiight. Who’s up for some Parcheesi?”

After suffering through the solidly made but slumber-inducing Vindictus and Hereafter, it’s clear that the duo go together like peanut butter and jellyfish. While it may well be that the writing on both projects is at fault for the lack of any spark, it’s time to cut our losses and stage an intervention to break this pair up before they start gaining more bizarrely undeserved Oscar success and thinking they’re some sort of Scorsese/DiCaprio unit.

To get a feel for the movie, imagine Crash meets Meet Joe Black with an extra dose of unwatchable. The movie spins three equally uninteresting tales about death, alternating from one to the other before eventually smushing together all three in a forced finale that doesn’t so much tie up loose ends as it does fray them with a blowtorch.

Story one stars Cecile De France as a French newswoman who nearly dies when the tidal waves The Day After Tomorrow barges in on her vacation. Story two features Damon as an all-grown-up Haley Joel Osment whose psychic medium abilities prevent him from having sex with Bryce Dallas Howard. And then there’s a tale of a sullen British boy who struggles through foster care after the untimely departure of his twin brother.

Damon’s story is the closest to amusement the movie comes, if only due to his character’s omnipresent confused scowl and obsession with Charles Dickens. The man is so into C.Dick that he falls to sleep to his audio books. What I don’t get is why he needs those audio books, since he obviously has the power to speak to Dickens and have him personally read his beddy-bye stories.

There is symbolic poignance to those scenes, though. They serve as psychic symbolism for this movie’s eventual fate, as a DVD that doubles as a sleep aid.

Starring Matt Damon, Cecile De France, Bryce Dallas Howard and Jay Mohr. Written by Peter Morgan. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Rated PG-13. 110 minutes.

Clever Dude Wants To Punch Me In The Face

Read about his animosity here.

Movie Review: Life as We Know It

Life as We Know It isn’t so much a movie as it is a social experiment. It proves, through extensive mixture of film formulas, that you can make two people who absolutely hate each other fall madly in love with one another as long as you trap them in a house with a baby.

The movie may drag more than it entertains, but at least it’s aware of the universal truth that despite common wisdom, babies bring parents closer together rather than push them apart. Raising a child is like being thrown into an insane reality show in which contestants are faced with inhumane challenges to the body and soul, driven together in moments of constant crisis and chronic sleep deprivation. It’s somewhat like what drew Boston Rob and Amber together in Survivor.

Any reality show setup would be more convincing than the sloppy plotting that turns bitter enemies Holly (Katherine Heigl) and Eric (Josh Duhamel) into parents of their mutual best friends’ 1-year-old girl. Following a fatal car crash suffered by the infants’ parents, a lawyer tells the protagonists that they must live together in their deceased pals’ mansion and raise their child together.

This part of the film highlighted a little-known fact about last wills and testaments: Whatever you put in there, no matter how stupid and harmful to others, it becomes law. You can will your best friend to have to jump on one leg for 25 years after you die, and he has to do it. You can will the Air Force to conduct a bombing raid on the Moon, and they have to go through with it or answer to the Make a Wish Foundation. You can’t will the Cubs to win the World Series though, because some things are just impossible.

I nearly sobbed at the funeral scene, sullen in the knowledge that I’d spend the next 90-plus minutes watching a painfully forced romance emerge. You watch bickering turn into flirtation, which leads to hot-and-heavy glances, which turns into sex-signifying fade-outs followed by screaming matches drummed up by contrived late-film fights. Such are the ways of love when conducted by complete morons.

At least I got to enjoy the long-overdue comeuppance of Josh Lucas, who plays Sam, a pediatrician who has the hots for Heigl. In the 2 billion romantic comedies in which Lucas has starred, he’s been the roguish free spirit who managed to sweep the heroine off her feet, derailing her from a life of blissful boredom with the nice but boring guy.

Not this time, sucka. Sam is forced to stand by idly as the nice but boring guy who’s powerless to stop Duhamel from taking the entire movie to decide his hate for Holly is really love because of the evil magic cast over him by the baby.

If only Sam had seen Knocked Up, he would have realized that Heigl was susceptible to bad romances with baby daddies.

Starring Katherine Heigl, Josh Duhamel, Josh Lucas and Christina Hendricks. Written by Ian Deitchman and Kristin Rusk Robinson. Directed by Greg Berlanti. 113 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Movie review: The Social Network

This is posted over at OK.

If The Social Network is to be believed, Mark Zuckerberg is a truly remarkable individual. Not because he invented Facebook – or at least managed to swindle close friends and business associates into owning the company that has collected 500 million members make him worth $7 billion – but because he is the world’s first rich
@hole who is incapable of getting any chicks.

Word has it that Zuckerberg is furious that the movie is making him look like a shyster who stole others’ ideas and ran with them all the way to the bajillionaire’s club, but what he should be angry about is how the movie makes him appear to have as much game as Screech from Saved by the Bell. As played by Jesse Eisenberg, Zuckerberg is a tunnel-visioned, shrewd businessman and genius computer hacker who can’t even muster up the nerve to send a friend request to the unrequited love of his life
who drove him to make something of himself.

The flimsiness of the central character is the only fault I can find with the cyberninja drama, which tugs you along with Farmville-like addiction into its
torrent of backstabbing and betrayals.

Shocks and surprises abound in the brilliantly directed film by David Fincher, pepped up by Aaron Sorkin’s silky dialogue and a spine-tingling soundtrack by Trent Reznor:

*Justin Timberlake can not only act, but he’s so charismatic as Napster founder-turned Zuckerberg partner Sean Parker that he may earn an Oscar to go with his Grammys.

*A movie about people standing around yelling at each other and occasionally typing can be as riveting as Rocky 3. Did I stutter? Yep, that’s Rocky 3, the one with both Hulk Hogan AND Mr. T.

*A key to Facebook’s success was making Baylor students jealous of it. Baylor!

*Someone actually remembers what Friendster is.

The best aspect of the movie is just how delightfully trashy it is. There are more “oh no he di-in’t” moments than in an episode of Jersey Shore. Characters treat each other like verbal punching bags, and the scenes you’d expect to be the least engaging – those featuring Zuckerberg and his former business partners sitting around a table meeting with lawyers – are often the most engaging. This despite the fact that many of the other scenes feature Timberlake hosting parties where people do coke lines off of tummies of stripping co-eds while covering up just enough skin to keep the movie in the PG-13 range.

Eisenberg has just enough of a soft touch to keep his ruthless, obsessive character relatable, while also ensuring that Zuckerberg’s virginity will continue to remain intact. Which is nice, because if this movie is true, we really don’t want this guy reproducing, because little Zuckerbergs would undoubtedly be smart enough to create death-dealing robots who enslave humanity while showing your girlfriend photos of that party you swore you didn’t go to the other night.

Or at least steal the idea to make those robots from giant twin frat boys.

Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Rooney Mara, Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake. Written by Aaron Sorkin, based on a book by Ben Mezrich. Directed by David Fincher. 120 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Movie review: Legend of the Guardians

This is posted at OK.

Shot on location inside the part of Zach Snyder’s brain that’s addled by owl opium, The Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole certainly has its share of owls. Nice owls, mean owls, owls who can fly, owls who can’t, and owls who start off not being able to fly but can once the plot requires it to be so.

The cinematic equivalent of the meme “I like turtles,” the movie is director Zack Snyder’s way of saying just how much he loves owls. Well, not just any owls, mind you.
The owls of Ga’Hoole. The ones who can talk like Agent Smith from The Matrix, and dive bomb and carry around magical blue things that make other owls freeze. Those owls.

The most exciting drama had little to do with what was going down onscreen – you know the drill: mean Nazi-like owls kidnap nice impressionable owls and preach to them about “purity,” only to have their whole system torn asunder by Coalition Forces – but what was going on in the aisles.

This is the first movie to which I took my 1-year-old, and she was fine watching the movie for the first 70 minutes before deciding to pretend she was an owl herself and hooting while running back and forth across the sides of the theater. It must have just felt like the thing to do. While chasing her likely caused me to miss key moments of visual splendor late in the movie, I’m not going to lie to you. By then I was willing to start running around the theater as well. There’s only so much owl-on-owl violence, owl philosophy and owl arguments you can take before you need to start running around the theater like a crazy person, you know?

From what I saw and listened to of the movie, I was reasonably entertained but a little disappointed by the weird but not-so-weird-it’s-awesome CGI puppet show.

Director Zack Snyder is one of the most exciting, unpredictable filmmakers around, and after watching this one, well, you can still say he’s unpredictable, if not always exciting. Here’s hoping his next effort is something akin to the subversive madness of his Dawn of the Dead remake, the unassailably brilliant 300 or the underappreciated Watchmen.

My 3-year-old sat calmly with my wife throughout, enjoyed the movie, then when he saw a commercial for it the a few days later, asked what movie that was for. He’d completely forgotten about The Legend of the Guardians. It’s best of Snyder and all of us follow suit and pretend this never happened.

Starring the voices of Jim Sturgess and Hugo Weaving. Written by John Orloff and Emil Stern, based on the novels by Kathryn Lasky. Directed by Zack Snyder. Rated PG. 90 minutes.

Movie Review: The Town

This is posted at OK.

And the Academy Award for most generic title goes to… The Town! One can only guess Ben Affleck and his team of writers came up with that gem only after discarding The Departed But Not Quite As Good, The Bank Robberies, The Movie and The One Where Ben Affleck Sexes A Drugged-Out Blake Lively.

The title is a work of unsurpassed genius in bland insignificance, much like Affleck’s acting career after Chasing Amy. But lo and behold, the writer-director-star makes a comeback worthy of the 2004 Red Sox in the stunning crime thriller. The movie is nearly mesmerizing enough to wipe away painful memories of Affleck leaping rooftops in red tights as Daredevil or stinking it up in Jersey Girl.

Chiseled down, bulked up and bursting with a fiery, I-may-not-be-Matt-Damon-but-I-still-got-skills screen presence, Affleck seizes the moment and re-establishes himself as a lead actor capable of carrying a film. And his dark horse Oscar-caliber performance as Doug, the ringleader of a Boston bank robbing gang melds as part of an elite commando force. Mad Men’s John Hamm is smoothly authoritative as an Inspector Javert-like FBI agent who tracks the gang’s every move.

Jeremy Renner brings a block-headed toughness as Jim, Doug’s best friend/sidekick who’s bitterly protective of his trashy single-mom sister (Lively), but not protective enough to keep Doug from stomping all over her heart. And Chris Cooper is chilling as Doug’s bitter, incarcerated father.

The only weak point is Rebecca Hall, who does what she can in the thankless role as Doug’s oblivious girlfriend, who also happens to be a hostage the gang seizes in the opening-sequence robbery. It’s a dopey, contrived character who is little more than a device to infuse Doug with some humanity.

The character is unnecessary because Affleck’s torrid storytelling and heartfelt acting make it easy to root for him and his brilliant-yet-ignorant cronies as they pull one ill-advised heist after another, begging for Hamm and his rules-bending gang of feds. The cat-and-mouse game succeeds despite its predictability, thanks much in part to the authenticity of the setting. The dialect, distinctive slang, Beantown delivery and distinctive city architecture meld together to create a tapestry reminiscent of the scary-yet-invigorating Bostons of The Departed and Good Will Hunting.

There are two or three jaw-dropping car chases in the movie, one of which Jim punctuates with the line “Now that’s how you f-ck-n’ drive a car.” Affleck shows this is how you f-ck-n’ direct a movie.

Starring Ben Affleck, John Hamm, Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall and Blake Lively. Written by Ben Affleck, Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard, based on a book by Chuck Hogan. Directed by Affleck. 125 minutes.

Sexy Video Game Land Excerpts Me

It's the chapter about returning used software for a full refund.

No 'Go' for Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep

A PR rep handling Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep says Square Enix has no plans to release the game as a download, bucking the trend of PSP publishers releasing games as downloads alongside UMDs with just about all PSP games that have been released in the 11 months since the download-only PSP Go came out.

A representative from Ogilvy, which handles Square Enix games writes:

"Just found out that there unfortunately are no plans to release KHBBS on PSP Go. If that changes, I will certainly let you know!"

Bad news for the 7 PSP Go owners out there, myself included. The game comes out Sept. 7.

Review: Going the Distance

This review is posted over at OK.

Justin Long’s character in Going the Distance is a Mac and Drew Barrymore’s is a PC. He lives in New York, she’s a NorCal girl. He takes two steps forward and she takes two steps back. But they go together like Janet Jackson and animated music video cats. And they overcome the travails of their long distance relationship to get together every 15 minutes to make sweet PG-13-rated love in a movie that’s rated R for no reason.

The rating is one of the many confusing things about the movie, which underuses It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia genius Charlie Day in a throwaway role as Long’s dirtbag roommate and gives Christina Applegate far too much screentime as Barrymore’s disapproving nag of a sister. The movie has some wildly funny moments, such as all of Day’s lines, a scene in which Long gets a comeuppance for texting too much at a driving range, and the part in which wannabe newspaper reporter Barrymore is denied a job when her would-be boss tells her he just laid off 100 people.

I was the only one in the theater who laughed at that one, possibly because it wasn’t meant as a joke, but Barrymore’s crack that she thinks the newspaper business is about to rebound drew big chuckles.

The funny stuff is canceled out by too many story-intensive stretches, which dispense with the humor and make the movie feel as long as Braveheart. Director Nanette Burstein expects you to dangle in suspense, wondering whether Long and Barrymore will be able to settle on a place to live together and sort out their trust issues. Meanwhile, Day sits offscreen with nothing to do, waiting for the chance to come back into the film, breathing life into the otherwise dull affair before slipping back to crazyland.

Long and Barrymore lack the chemistry that makes you believe they’ll run away together after filming to start adopting African children. Long, who is better in supporting roles as a put-upon straight man, struggles to stay interesting as a put-upon music promoter who’s forced to recruit boy bands instead of striving to uncover the hipster garage bands he loves.

Barrymore conjures up a mix between her Wedding Singer waitress character and the Never Been Kissed reporter. Her character earns your sympathy for her tireless efforts to strive for low expectations. She goes to Stanford with the goal of becoming a print reporter, hoping to land a job that won’t pay off her student loans for four lifetimes. She stays single, fending off advances from a British coworker to pine for a self-hating, directionless commitmentphobe who lives on the other side of the country.

Much like her sister does, you glare at the character with scrunched eyes, wondering why she can’t do better for herself. Or maybe you just stare through the character, at Barrymore herself, wondering why an actress as talented as her signed onto a mess like this.

Starring Drew Barrymore, Justin Long and Charlie Day. Written by Michael Geoff LaTulippe. Directed by Nanette Burstein. Rated R. 102 minutes.

Review: Nanny McPhee Returns

Oh, to be Nanny McPhee. To travel early-20th century England, using your magical powers to torture bratty kids into behaving at will. To be able to command your pet bird to disarm Nazi bombs with a wink of an eye. To possess the benefit of inexplicably vanishing your unsightly blemishes whenever you correct a family crisis.
What we truly need as a society is an Aliens vs. Predators like extravaganza in which McPhee goes nanny-a-nanny against Mary Poppins.

But until then, we’ll have to settle for McPhee sequels such as Nanny McPhee Returns, which one by one grant the good Nanny Google-search superiority over her American Idol descendant, Katharine McPhee.

This time around, screenwriter-actress goes all out with the poop and flatulence jokes, as though she’s just discovered her inner 1990s Kevin Smith. If you ever wanted to see a close-up of a cow heeding nature’s call, a geriatric woman use manure as a picnic seat cushion or a bird lay waste to a wheat field with a titanic gas blast, this is your film.

This second dose of McPheever covers the bases of the first movie, peppering in a little more humor while removing some of the sentiment. Set during World War II, a ranch-at-home mother (Maggie Gyllenhaal) struggles to corral her three wild kids and live-in niece and nephew as her husband battles it out against Hitler’s cronies.
The farm kids despise their city-slicker cousins and make mommy want to tear her forced British accent out, but in comes McPhee to save the day with her snaggletoothed witchcraft.

McPhee clearly holds herself in high moral regard, ignorant of the fact that she’s truly a tyrant who forces others to bend to her will by tossing around her supernatural heft. Believe me, you’d start sharing your toys too if the alternative was to be stuck in a perpetual zombie state spanking yourself over and over until you finally tell McPhee “sorry.”

Luke, my 3-year-old, enjoyed the movie while also becoming mildly terrified of the heroine. Only time will be able to tell whether or not the nightmares he’ll have about Nanny McPhee coming in to trap him in his room with a wild elephant until he agrees to share a bed with his cousin turn out to be worth it. Until then, I can always warn him that if he doesn’t pick up his Legos I’ll revel in the ability to send Nanny McPhee and her farting shoulder bird after him.

Starring Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Rhys Ifans. Written by Thompson, based on characters created by Christianna Brand. Directed by Susanna White. 109 minutes. Rated PG.

Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

This is posted over at OK.

If you allow video games to warp your brain enough, you start to view life as series of pixilated levels to be conquered. When you get out of work, you see the fireworks that Mario gets when he slides on the flagpole. On the drive home, stuck in traffic, you dream about clearing the way with a lightning bolt that makes everyone in front of you shrink and spin out. On payday, you hear the “dingdingdingding” of jumbo-sized coins accumulating in your bank account. When you go to sleep you see the outlines of falling Tetris pieces inside your eyelids.

OK, so maybe it’s just me. Well, me, Scott Pilgrim graphic novel author Bryan Lee O’Malley and his legions of fans.

If you haven’t wasted a significant portion of your life on video games, particularly those in the 1980s and 90s, the magical realism-infused Scott Pilgrim vs. the World may seem about as relatable as a non-subtitled Czech comedy. But if you have, discovering the movie is as blissful as hitting a random coin block to see it spawn a fast-growing vine that launches you into coin heaven.

Michael Cera stars as the same waifish, insecure bundle of post-adolescent nerves he always plays. Some are tired of the schtick, wishing he’d branch out and try different roles, but not me. When you do something well, I say run it into the ground until the paychecks stop coming in. Cera’s characters are some of the few leading men in movies who make you feel better about yourself. You think, hey I could take that guy in a fight.

Except you’d be wrong, at least in this movie, because Scott Pilgrim is an unstoppable dynamo of ass-kicking fury. He’s tasked to defeat the seven evil exes of
his dream girl, Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth WInstead).

Sometimes the fights are Street Fighter-like throwdowns, with yoga flames and tiger uppercuts, while other times they’re guitar hero bass battles and Tony Hawk rail sliding challenges gone wrong. Each tangle ends with Scott dispatching the mini boss into a poof of disappearing pixels, and naturally, a pile full of coins.

Director Edgar Wright, who’s proved to be an ace of offbeat humor in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, maintaings his niche momentum in the movie, collaborating on a ridiculously quotable script and peppering the screen with infinite sight gags. It’s a movie you could probably watch five times and still find new sneaky references on each additional viewing. It’s filmmaking that makes you feel –well – not smart, but well informed on a trivial, arguably pointless topic.

The only knock on the film I can fathom is that the theater seems like way too formal of a setting to watch it. It’s destined to be playing in the background at bars and house parties. It will be worshipped in pot-smoke filled dorm rooms and cause rubber-necking when played on commuters’ iPads. The movie taps into something shallow and false that too few will be able to relate to. It’s an obnoxious, navel-gazing, uproarious tribute to a life well wasted.

Starring Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Written by Michael Bacall and Edgar Wright, based on the Bryan Lee O’Malley graphic novel. Directed by Wright. Rated PG-13. 112 minutes.

How To Survive Stay At Home Dadhood

I wrote a guest post for the Noob Dad. An excerpt:

Lesson 3: Trick the Poop Gods. Toddlers, much like grandparents, do not control their own bowel movements. Instead they’re determined by the Greek or Roman, I forget, god of poop. What’s his name? Always skips my mind. Oh yeah, Satan! Satan waits until you’re about to head out somewhere before giving your child’s lower intestine the go-ahead to start filling the diaper with stinking waste. The goal of Satan is obviously to trap you at Costco or Barnes & Noble story time with a putrid load that somehow doubles your toddler’s weight, rendering you a Keystone Kops-like mess of madcap 1920s silent comedy as you grab Luke by the scruff of his neck (or ankle) with one hand into the bathroom while hauling the crying post-baby in the other. Once inside you’ll have to use a spare elbow or knee to tae kwon do open the ancient changing table that was installed in the 1970s as a token nod to the women’s lib movement but never intended for actual use. Then you will change Emma’s diaper with one hand and half an eye as you unsuccessfully verbally warn Luke not to pick up the urinal cake with both hands.

To avoid this situation, simply say you’re going to take the kids somewhere, wait until Satan has you on record, and then pull a fast one on him and say “Tricked ya, fool! We’re not going any damn where!” And then call up Sesame Street from Comcast On Demand for like the fifth time that day. Once Emma has finally been tricked into pooping, you can be on your way.

Review: The Other Guys

This is posted over at OK.

The people who cut the trailer for The Other Guys had an interesting strategy: Rather than show all the funniest moments in order to sucker people in, they chose to make the movie seem as terrible as possible, lowering expectations so much that even if the movie was only sort of bad people would still be happy because they were
expecting ludicrously awful.

So since the movie -- a buddy cop comedy teaming Will Ferrell as an uptight Murtaugh to Mark Wahlberg’s testosterone-bursting Riggs – is actually pretty good, I’m pretty much ready to declare it will sweep the Oscars, cure cancer and repeal Arizona’s SB 1070.

Director Adam McKay is master of the first half hour. Each of his previous movies – Anchorman, Talladega Nights and Step Brothers – is rib-shatteringly funny in the first act, golf-clap, half-smirk OK in the second act and get-me-out-of-here-now bad in the finale. McKay breaks his routine in The Other Guys, which is impossibly funny for the first half and half-smirk OK in the second half. With comedy being one of the most difficult arts to accomplish in moviedom, that makes The Other Guys a breakthrough on the level of Lethal Weapon or Pineapple Express.

Or not. I’m probably getting a little too carried away, and the more I think about it the more I’m sure the movie isn’t quite good enough to one day notch a spot in my crowded DVD case, but then again, maybe it just might sneak in. Moments from the movie keep playing in my head in a cycling highlight reel:

*Ferrell sprawled on the ground, wailing that he needs an MRI.

*Ferrell smacking Wahlberg in the face with a wooden gun. OK, that was the one funny part of the trailer.

*Ferrell spontaneously pretending he’s a pimp, referring to himself as “Gator.”

*Two important characters plunging to spontaneous, unexpected death.

*The background revealing an approaching, impossible-to-avoid car accident that no one onscreen is aware of.

The movie is pretty much a shameless ripoff of Lethal Weapon, aping its ludicrous, though amazing, set pieces and relentless banter. But that’s just fine because big, fun, grown-up action flicks don’t come around often enough. The Other Guys is everything I hoped Cop Out would be but ended up being the complete opposite of. This thing sings. Wahlberg’s angst-ridden thuggishness clashes nicely with Ferrell’s tactless buffoonery, and the plotting actually surprises you as it rumbles toward its inevitable conclusion, with the partners solving the big case.

This is the sort of movie that will turn up on Spike or TNT in a few years. You’ll stop channel surfing, give it a few minutes and before you realize what happened it’ll be two hours later and you’ll be reciting Will Ferrell quotes in that special method of yours that renders them in no way funny. A true sign of a great film.

Starring Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. Written by Adam McKay and Chris Henchy. Directed by McKay. 107 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Review: Dinner for Schmucks

In Dinner for Schmucks, wealthy Wall Street types invite stooges to a dinner, holding a contest to see who has found the biggest moron.

The M. Night Shyamalan-style twist is that the movie ends up awarding the prize to you. The movie scoffs, “I suckered you into paying $10 to re-watch the few funny moments I already showed you in my trailer! Now sit there for two hours of misery, sucker!”

Based on a 1998 French film, the movie makes you wish Steve Carell would retire from movies instead of his role on The Office. His character, an IRS agent named Barry who moonlights as a taxidermist with a specialty of crafting dioramas with mice dressed in human-like clothing, is meant to be grating and unnerving. Carell does too good a job at making his schmuck an intolerable annoyance. A cross between Jim Carrey in Dumb & Dumber and Jerry Lewis’s madcap stooge schtick, Barry is a miscalculation that makes the movie implode.

Paul Rudd is a game straight man as Tim, a corporate climber who recruits Barry to the big, film-ending dinner despite his morals and the nagging of his distant live-in girlfriend, Julie (Stephanie Szostak). The most entertaining character by far is Kieran (Jemaine Clement of Flight of the Conchords), a pretentious artist who is Tim’s rival for Julie’s affections. I wished the movie would have stuck with Kieran, who graphically describes himself becoming one with nature while living with goats and delivering baby zebras with his bare hands.

Director Jay Roach tries hard for a Planes, Trains and Automobiles vibe, pairing the doe-eyed, eager-to-please Barry with the poker-faced, ever-flustered Tim in an evolving relationship that develops into mutual devotion. Rudd has a few moments of hilarity when he launches into angry tirades, showing hints of the brilliance he displayed in Role Models, but too often has to step into the background as Carell goes for slapstick gags that seem tired enough to be from a movie from half a century ago.

By the time Tim sees the light and gives Barry the obligatory apology and accompanying respect, you smack your head and just wish the movie would stop with the moralizing and get back to its floundering attempts at jokes.

There’s no excuse for this thing to stretch to nearly two hours. The movie could have benefited from some serious editing, maybe to get it down to 90 minutes, or better yet, that 30 second trailer that will earn the movie any success it manages to steal.

Starring Steve Carell and Paul Rudd. Written by David Guion and Michael Handelman, based on the film by Francis Veber. Directed by Jay Roach. 110 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Time Magazine

Mentions the book in a post about how not to save money.

Lifehacker jumps in

Lifehacker picked up on the medical bill slashing story in the Times. So, ahem, did the Consumerist.

The New York Times blogs my book

I hassled them for months and months and months about this and my badgering has finally paid off. Now I'm looking at you, Newsweek and Maxim.

Movie review: Salt

This is posted at OK.

I’m fairly certain Salt is not a fictional drama, but instead an insider documentary on the secret life of Angelina Jolie.

Just look at those eyes of hers. You can just tell she’s up to crazy things in the dark of night. So it stands to reason that she’s a triple agent superspy capable of assassinating multiple heads of state within a 24-hour period, start and end a nuclear war before it begins, murder hundreds of gun-toting cronies with hand-to-hand death grip kills and dye her hair black just because.

And what a perfect cover it is to make a movie about this secret life. Now if anyone were to accuse her of being superspy Evelyn Salt, people will just laugh it off as mistaking movies for reality. That is, unless you’re as smart as me, and know that everything you see in movies – especially spy movies -- is exactly true.

The movie does solve one other mystery about Jolie’s life, which is why it is she adopts approximately 700 kids per day. The reason, my friends, is guilt. See, on a daily basis she offs at least 388.888 mindless goons who foolishly stand in her way, so being that the goons are family goons who have an average of 1.8 goonchildren each, Jolie takes it upon herself to raise the innocent youngsters. Which seems nice and all, but is actually obscenely cruel, given that if Angelina Jolie is your mother you can’t think of her in, you know, that way.

It’s a small condolence for the kids that they’re likely given free passes to their mom’s movies. They’re in luck with Salt, which is as exciting and wonderfully ludicrous a spy thriller as I’ve seen in a while. It’s basically the Bourne movies without all the calmness and stark attention to reality.

Remember the scene in one The Bourne Identity in which Bourne races around in a Mini Cooper and wrecks a city? Yeah, Salt doesn’t need a Mini Cooper to do that. Girlfriend is intense. She’s an unstoppable hurricane of fists, feet and bullets.

Let me cite an example of just what a badass she is. Early in the movie, a Russian dude tells the CIA that salt is going to kill the Russian president when he comes to the U.S. The CIA, Secret Service and basically every ninja warrior fed in the country bands together to prevent this from happening, but guess what? In comes Salt, hair dyed black because Salt with black hair looks nothing like Salt with brown hair, and, well (spoiler alert) they don’t make movies about superspy assassins who can’t make their targets fall through giant holes in churches she makes with improvised explosives.

From there it just gets crazier. Salt meets up with an ex Soviet spy guru who trained her to become a sleeper agent by, no joke, making her watch Brady Bunch and kiss his ring. He has even crazier plans for her, but Salt has her own plans, one of which involves dressing up like a dude who’s about as convincing as Amanda Bynes in What a Girl Wants. Why? Because nothing in this bat-doodie crazy movie makes a lick of sense. But don’t blame the writers, blame Jolie, live-er of what Ricky Martin once referred to as “La Vida Loca.”

Review: Inception

This is posted at OK.

We've all seen these opaque, befuddling Inception trailers for months now, and everyone knew it would be mind-blowingly awesome because it's directed by Christopher Nolan, maker of the two amazing Batman movies, The Prestige and Memento. The guy is so talented he could make a blockbuster if you gave him a still camera, a monkey, a beach ball and a glitter pen.

The thing is, no matter how much you read up about the movie, you had no idea what it was about. I can't tell you how many times over the summer I've had conversations that went just like this:

Person: Hey, have you seen Inception yet?

Me: No, but it looks awesome.

Person: Yeah it does. What's it about?

Me: I have no idea. But it will definitely be awesome.

So now I've watched Inception, had my mind splattered all over the theater just like I knew it would be, and I still don't really know what it's about. That's just how amazing this movie is.

The movie is so good that I feel superior to you for having seen it though you haven't. Sort of like how your grandparents lived through the Depression and can always shoot down any sob story you've got by saying "Well, I lived through the Depression." This is the exact opposite of that. You can tell me you've won the lottery and are going to be a back-up dancer in the next Beyonce video and I can top it with "Well, I've seen Inception."

Without giving too much away, here is what I learned from the movie:

-"Inception" means implanting an idea into someone's brain. The act is believed, in the world of this movie, to be impossible. Which, of course, means that it totally IS possible, but will take an entire 2 1/2 hour movie to prove that this is so.

-Leonardo DiCaprio and his sidekick, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, play dream-hackers who travel the globe sedating targets -- secret agents and big business types -- and siphoning secrets from their subconsciousness as they sleep.

-Secret agents and big business types would rather not have their dreams hacked, not only to protect their secrets but because then they'd have to wake up and explain to their wives, girlfriends and therapists why they were dreaming about Leonardo DiCaprio and Joseph Gordon-Levitt all night. So they purchase Norton Utilities Dream Security 7.0, which puts lots of skiing, white-camouflaged, machine-gun toting assassins in their dreams. They're pretty scary but not so great at aiming. Which is good because if they were the movie would have been a lot shorter and ended not as happily.

-Everything, and this is the most important, is not what it... wait for it... seems.

Ellen Page checks in later as a Padawan dream Jedi in training, Ken Watanabe is the billionaire businessman who bankrolls the heroes' latest expedition and Cillian Murphy, the Scarecrow in Batman Begins, plays the billion-heir energy corporation scion whom everyone is hacking with a dream within a dream within a dream.

Confused yet? Good, because Inception totally inceptions the idea of confusion into your brain. Along with unrelenting awesomeness and many "there is no spoon"-like moments of profound bewilderment that will get you philosophizing, arguing, pontificating, hoping for a sequel and praying you don't dream about Leonardo DiCaprio tricking you into thinking your dream is a reality so he can make you fall asleep into a second dream which you think is yours but is actually his and find out your ATM pin number and by the way my brain is melting so I should really stop.

In sum, the most important thing to take away is that I have seen Inception and you have not.

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ken Watanabe. Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Rated PG-13. 148 minutes.

Best Video Games Of The Year So Far

1. Tecmo Bowl Throwback

2. Red Dead Redemption

3. Heavy Rain

4. Picross 3D

5. God of War III

6. Alan Wake

7. Super Mario Galaxy 2

8. Bayonetta

9. No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle

10. Darksiders

11. Mass Effect 2

12. Super Street Fighter IV

13. Blur

14. Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker