What to Expect When You’re Expecting begins with what I assumed was a spoof of the confoundingly popular TV show Dancing With the Stars. Cameron Diaz plays Jules Baxter, a fitness guru who is a contestant on the show and is herself the host of a televised weight-loss contest that looks like NBC’s The Biggest Loser.

But these two shows within the movie aren’t actually parodies. They’re more like straightforward re-creations. What to Expect isn’t made for audiences looking to laugh ..read more

On Crooked Arrows’ website, the new movie about a ragtag lacrosse team made up of Native Americans is described as being “modeled upon the consistently successful underdog sports movie popularized by Mighty Ducks, Bad News Bears, Hoosiers, and Bend It Like Beckham.” You can take out the other three films; this is a blatant rip-off of The Mighty Ducks, one that does the original a disservice.

Part of the problem with Crooked Arrows is that its hackneyed, derivative plot is matched ..read more

In the Norwegian thriller Headhunters, Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) is a corporate recruiter who doubles as an art thief, using his position to probe potential victims for key information – when they’re going to be out of the house, if they have a dog, what art they own. Brown runs up against a tough opponent, however, when he finds himself recruiting Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) for a top spot at Pathfinder. Clas has a Rubens worth “up to 100 million ..read more

The Better Doctor, running now at Upstart Productions’  new home at The Nest in West Dallas, could be so much better. The play is presented with obvious care, but it’s hurt by a combination of things—a want for sure-handed direction, lackluster leads, sloppy slapstick. Considering playwright Matt Lyle’s success with his first “silent film on stage” venture, The Boxer, it seems odd that this would almost entirely failed to impress. Everything, from the writing to the acting to the attempts ..read more

If you find yourself watching The Five-Year Engagement (I know, I know, sometimes we’re dragged to these things, sometimes you just need a date movie, and sometimes things look better on paper then they actually are), come back to this post and answer this question for me: what has really changed at the end of the five years that makes marriage finally make sense for the movie’s two wandering protagonists, Tom (Jason Segel) and Violet (Emily Blunt)? All I can ..read more

Back in high school, I became increasingly familiar with Cliffs Notes, the tiny synopses of classic works of literature. I “read” Julius Caesar, A Tale of Two Cities, The Scarlet Letter, and dozens of other books that impeded my otherwise busy schedule of soccer practice and sleeping.

Sitting through The Raven, I couldn’t help but think the screenwriters had spent their high school years the same way I had: learning enough plot points and character names to get by, but not ..read more

Things were going quite well for Theatre Three lately. The Aaron Sorkin-penned The Farnsworth Invention just completed a great run upstairs, and the amazing Superior Donuts is finishing up its sold-out awesomeness downstairs in Theatre Too.  These were a pair of shows as good as anything in North Texas. A pity, then, that the awful Art of Murder by Joe DiPietro landed on Routh street to spoil all of that momentum.

DiPietro wrote the book and lyrics to that execrable, crowd-pleasing (why, God, ..read more

Christianity is a 2,000-year-old faith that has inspired men to fight and to die, to create artistic masterpieces, and to sacrifice worldly desires in the hope that an eternal paradise awaits in the afterlife. For millennia now the followers of Jesus have struggled not only to successfully spread their gospel across the globe but to hold tight to their beliefs even as the world has transformed into a place nothing like the Judea in which Christ lived.

Their history is at ..read more

Wrath of the Titans, the sequel to the loud, joyless 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans, is a nonstop action-adventure story that only very occasionally pauses to see if there’s anything it might do to entertain the audience.

The movie is a piece of junk mythology, a crude amalgamation of characters from the legends of the Greek gods of Olympus, in a story that Edith Hamilton probably wouldn’t recognize as fitting the classical tradition.

That in itself is OK: the original ..read more

Detachment, the third feature film from Tony Kaye (American History X), is an indulgent, sophomoric dribble that wastes its handful of good actors in a meandering, pointless, and relentlessly cynical story about public schools. The movie opens with confessional style footage of what we can only assume are real teachers, explaining how they happened into the profession. Notice, no one really wants to be in the classroom; that’s because Kaye has edited his reality to turn American educational system into ..read more

Crammed with celebrity cameos and half-hearted spoofs, Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie is a film cast in the image of its comedic godfather, Kentucky Fried Movie, rolling through a series of bizarre, disgusting, or stoner-oriented skits that pander for low-brow chuckles. It spoofs infomercials, cheaply-produced advertising, eighties low-grade action flicks, and corporate videos. It itself is an ugly thing, lazy, but also knowing and smug.

The premise finds the two unlikely of comedic stars supposedly owing a billion dollars to ..read more

Before the lights dimmed on Wednesday night’s screening of A Thousand Words, a young, overweight boy seated behind me repeated the word “okay” fourteen times in a row to get a rise out of his friend. At the time, I thought it was annoying, and hoped he wouldn’t repeat the practice throughout the film. Ninety minutes later, I wished that that was the worst thing that happened in the theater. In a career of continuing diminished returns, Eddie Murphy’s latest ..read more

If Pat Robertson were to see the comedy Friends With Kids, and wanted to deride it as symptomatic of everything that’s wrong with America today, then I would gladly take a seat on The 700 Club to lend him my support.

My complaints would not be based (as I can only assume his would be) on the fact that the story centers on a couple of platonic friends, Julie (Jennifer Westfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott), who decide to conceive a child ..read more

It is hard to overestimate the appeal of the new on the youngest of audience members. I brought my six- and four-year-old daughters to The Lorax, and after withstanding its 90 minutes of recycled humor and strained storylines, I was surprised how enthusiastic they were about it. Was it better than Horton Hears a Who, I asked? The answer was an emphatic “yes.” Why? Well, they have seen Horton Hears a Who plenty of times. The Lorax, I was told, ..read more

There’s a brief moment (very brief) at the beginning of Project X when I was almost fooled into thinking that I might have been sitting in the 21st century update of Dazed and Confused. On a level – a very basic level – the plot is similar: a few not-so-cool high school kids try to up their reputations (and increase their chances of scoring with their female classmates) by throwing the party of the century. In the early scenes, the ..read more

Larry Herold’s new play, The Sports Page, receiving its world premiere at Stage West, takes us back to the declining days of the almighty sportswriter. It’s about football, it’s chock full of crowd-pleasing Dallas vs. Fort Worth jokes, and there are plenty of witty one-liners. The trouble is the play, like many of us writers, loves the clack of its own keys. It’s like music, the click and return, the composition of a symphony one deadline after another.

Put aside the ..read more

Israel Luna’s IMDB biography says that the first film he ever saw was The Exorcist, at age five. Poor guy. I don’t think he’s recovered. The former Dallas-residing writer/director’s latest movie – the follow-up to the fantastically titled Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives – is The Ouija Experiment, a low-budget, hack-snore, that takes a half-ass swipe at the Paranormal Activity formula and delivers a nearly unwatchable, dull, and senseless succession of jump-out scares drowning in YouTube banality.

Set in a depressingly under-furnished ..read more

Here’s why most “haunted houses,” the kind that spring up in amusement parks around Halloween, anger me: They don’t frighten their customers. They merely startle them.

You know how it goes. You paid your five or 10 bucks to get in, and then you spend five or 10 minutes walking through a series of dark hallways wherein every so often some teenager lurking unseen in a “ghostly” getup will jump out at you unexpectedly. You’re momentarily taken aback, and then maybe ..read more

Chronicle really wants to take a page from Peter Parker’s playbook— and then rip the whole damn thing to shreds. With great power comes great responsibility, indeed. The same could be said for young filmmakers with a decently cool (but definitely done) idea and a decently big budget (a reported $14-15 million) for one of these “found footage” films. For comparison purposes, the first Paranormal Activity was shot for $15,000. Cloverfield, perhaps closer to Chronicle in intent, cost $25 million ..read more

A nuclear blast? A foreign attack? An alien invasion? Just what sets off the debasing, cruel, absurd drama of Xavier Gens’ The Divide is not important. All that matters is that the movie’s scenario is set in motion: a rag-tag group of men with a couple of women are stranded in the basement of a New York apartment building, and it isn’t long before they are all behaving badly.

While the French director does manage to string together an energetic and ..read more

In a galaxy far, far away, deep in a black hole, there exists a version of Joyful Noise that views like the absurdist comedy it should be, not the pandering, “Aw, shucks” monstrosity that will take over theaters Friday.

In that version (shot ideally by John Waters), a scene where Dolly Parton dances with the ghost of Kris Kristofferson will not draw groans from the audience, but rather applause for its tongue-in-cheek take on mortality. This same version will draw rave ..read more

The morning before I saw The Devil Inside, a press release dropped in my inbox: the Paranormal Activity franchise will get its fourth installment this October, not surprising given what opening weekend overachievers the cheaply made films have proven to be. Like Paranormal Activity, The Devil Inside mimics the ghost thrillers’ handy cam, pseudo-pseudo doc style, and it is also suspected to have a lucrative opening, knocking the big budget spectacular Mission Impossible from its two week run at the top ..read more

In the beginning of animation there was God, and God was Walt Disney. One day, Walt the father stretched out his finger at his greatest creation, Toon. This encounter birthed a strange and bastard genre, what Fredrick S. Litten called “Mixed Pictures.” Walt’s Alice’s Wonderland (1923) was the first of these hybrids, which certainly mind-fracked thousands of kid’s brains by seeing animated toons interacting with “real” people onscreen.

The subgenre hit creative high’s during Ralph Bakshi’s films of the 70’s, then ..read more

David Gordon Green used to make movies. I’m not sure if the stuff the Richardson native is turning out these days could be called that. First there was Your Highness, now The Sitter, an on screen mess with no style and no substance. It suffers from a hackneyed plot and clumsy exposition. Some sequences are incomprehensively cut together, others feel like they were patched up in the editing room. Sometimes the plot is moved along with afterthought overdubbing, sometimes it ..read more

This movie was so bad that it made me vomit. Okay, fine. Maybe it was the rapid onset of a 24 hour stomach virus. But whatever it was, it made Gary Marshall’s terrible piece of schlock (virtually identical to Valentine’s Day) infinitesimally more interesting, in that the three times I had to go lose my lunch allowed for a fun guessing game of what happened on screen the five minutes before. And by fun, I mean easy.

New Year’s Eve is exactly ..read more