plus 3, A family movie you don't need a family to enjoy - Medford Mail Tribune

A family movie you don't need a family to enjoy - Medford Mail Tribune
MOVIE REVIEW: 'Wimpy Kid' fleshes out stick-figure ... - North County Times
Mel Gibson Viking Movie May Be His Last - Nymag.com
Movie review: Repo Men, starring Jude Law and Forest ... - Baltimore Sun

A family movie you don't need a family to enjoy - Medford Mail Tribune

Posted: 21 Mar 2010 01:53 AM PDT

It is so hard to do a movie like this well. "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" is a PG-rated comedy about the hero's first year of middle school, and it's nimble, bright and funny.

It doesn't dumb down. It doesn't patronize. It knows something about human nature. It isn't as good as "A Christmas Story," as few movies are, but it deserves a place in the same sentence.

Here is a family movie you don't need a family to enjoy. You must, however, have been a wimpy kid. Most kids are wimpy in their secret hearts. Those that never were grow up to be cage fighters.

Greg Heffley isn't the shortest student in his class. That would be Chirag Gupta. Greg (Zachary Gordon) is only the second shortest. He's at that crucial age when everybody else has started to grow. There's a funny slideshow illustrating how his class looked in sixth grade, and how they look now — some with mustaches. The girls, of course, are taller than the boys.

The onset of adolescence is an awkward age, made marginally easier for Greg because he still hasn't developed an interest in girls. Even his best friend, Rowley (Robert Capron), is flattered to be noticed by a girl, and Rowley is so out of it he thinks that at his age kids still "play," when, as we all know, they "hang."

The girl who notices Greg and Rowley is Angie (Chloe Moretz), who seems wise beyond her years. We first see her under the bleachers, reading "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg. Keep your eye on her in high school. She looks way older than her two new friends, but I checked, and Moretz was only 12 when she made the movie.

In middle school we find cliques, cruelty and bullying. The pack is poised to pounce.

"Diary" is especially funny about a slice of Swiss cheese that was dropped on a playground sometime in the distant past, and has grown an alarming coating of mold. Some kid poked it once, and all the other kids avoided him like the plague. He had the dreaded Cheese Touch. He only got rid of it by touching another kid. Then that kid had the Touch, until ... and so on.

The cheese nicely symbolizes the hunger kids have for an excuse, any excuse, to make other kids pariahs. Remember what happened to anyone who wore green on a Thursday?

Where do they find these actors? They come up on TV, I guess. Chloe Moretz has been acting since she was 7. Zachary Gordon has the confidence and timing of an old pro; he plays wimpy as if it's a desirable character trait. Robert Capron, as the pudgy Rowley, pulls off the tricky feat of being an inch or two taller than Greg and yet still childish; wait until you see his Halloween costume.

Greg's parents (Rachael Harris and Steve Zahn) aren't major characters because what happens in school consumes all of Greg's psychic energy. His older brother, Rodrick (Devon Bostick), is, of course, a sadistic teaser who makes life miserable. But at that age, so it goes.

The movie is inspired by the books of Jeff Kinney, and the titles reproduce his hand-lettering and drawing style. The movie reproduces his charm.

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MOVIE REVIEW: 'Wimpy Kid' fleshes out stick-figure ... - North County Times

Posted: 20 Mar 2010 11:59 PM PDT

The movie version of "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" manages to put flesh and bone on the stick figures in Jeff Kinney's wildly successful cartoon novel without altering the book's mildly subversive comic tone.

That fidelity plays mostly for the good, though the book's moron-plagued, middle-school protagonist ---- a sixth-grade boy, who, let's be honest, comes off as kind of self-absorbed, lazy and petty ---- loses some of his appeal when viewed under the harsh light of the camera.

What's funny on the page is less sympathetic on the screen, meaning the wimpy kid who's going to win the hearts and minds of most moviegoers is not the title character, but his best buddy, the I-gotta-be-me super-nerd Rowley.

Unlike Rowley, Greg (Zachary Gordon) is obsessed with being one of the cool kids as he enters the "glorified holding pen" known as middle school. Greg covets immediate status among his peers, but doesn't want to put in any actual work to win that recognition.

So he tries out various activities, which he sees as "rackets," in an effort to move up the popularity scale at his school. Best friend Rowley (Robert Capron), meanwhile, shows up on the first day of class wearing a serape and sporting a bowl haircut.

Then, after school, Rowley shouts across the courtyard, "Hey, Greg! Wanna play?", breaching middle school etiquette by failing to use the proper, codified language (it's "hang out," not "play") and for displaying undue enthusiasm.

Greg begins to believe that he's either going to have to remake Rowley or lose him as a friend altogether. What Greg doesn't understand is that Rowley, with his passion for self-expression, has an authenticity that will eventually win the kind of acceptance Greg so desperately desires.

Which brings us to the movie's main problem: The Wimpy Kid is a wet blanket. True, that's always been the conceit behind Kinney's series, at four books and counting. Being 12 is an awkward, imperfect, in-between time. Few people remember middle school fondly.

But in transferring the clean, precise humor of Kinney's illustrations and prose to the big-screen, the material loses just a bit of its charm. All the highlights from the first book have been kept ---- the moldy mysterious cheese lying on the basketball court (you don't want The Cheese Touch!), the Zoo-Wee Mama comic creation, the Halloween night trick-or-treating misadventures ---- and they're presented in the same episodic structure.

Director Thor Freudenthal and two teams of screenwriters have also shoehorned in a girl, a too-cool-for-school seventh-grader named Angie (Chloe Grace Moretz), attempting, one supposes, to broaden the material's appeal. The effect is negligible.

"Wimpy Kid" remains very much a story about boys taking their first tentative steps toward becoming men. It's a journey fraught with embarrassment and small-mindedness. If you're lucky, the movie suggests, you might have a friend like Rowley to help you get by.

"Diary of a Wimpy Kid"

2.5 stars (out of 4)

Starring: Zacharay Gordon, Robert Capron, Chloe Grace Moretz

Director: Thor Freudenthal

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Rated: PG ---- for some rude humor and language

Running time: 91 min.

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Mel Gibson Viking Movie May Be His Last - Nymag.com

Posted: 12 Mar 2010 03:59 PM PST

Photo: Getty Images

Mel Gibson and Bill Monahan, the screenwriter behind The Departed, are currently hammering away on what might be Gibson's last film ever: a Viking epic starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

"I saw it in my mind back when I was teenager. Seriously, it's the first movie I wanted to make. And I think it will be the last film I direct. It's the thing I have been going toward, in a way, since I was young, and I think when it's done I may be finished."

Gibson cited the need for a Viking movie because "it's something the audience hasn't seen in a long time." Over 50 years have passed since Kirk Douglas's The Vikings, and apparently The Thirteenth Warrior doesn't count because, well, it starred Antonio Banderas.

People close to Gibson brushed off the suggestion that this film would be his last. He's probably just taking a page from Brett Favre's playbook to make sure the film is extra, extra epic. Viking epic.

Mel Gibson says Viking movie (starring Leonardo DiCaprio) may be his last [Hero Complex/LAT]

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Movie review: Repo Men, starring Jude Law and Forest ... - Baltimore Sun

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 04:53 PM PDT

Plenty of interior body parts are forcibly removed from reluctant humans in the violent futuristic action film "Repo Men": kidneys, hearts, livers, all high-tech and artificial, and in the movie's cautionary premise, rented to the medically needy at usury-friendly rates by a nasty corporation called The Union. But there's a key organ missing from the movie itself: a brain. In its place is a memory bank of other, better movies.

That's a shame because creeping around the edges of "Repo Men" is the potential for a funky and prescient piece of gory dystopian satire. For starters, it's got three game male leads: Jude Law as one of the titular enforcers, Remy, a blue-collar Everyhunk whose task — if you're a customer overdue on payments — is to slit you up and retrieve that expensive biomedical breakthrough inside that you thought was prolonging your life; Forest Whitaker as his prankish colleague, who'd love nothing more than to be a repo forever; and Liev Schreiber as their oily, always-be-closing boss, The Union's top salesman.

When Remy, estranged from his wife (a scowling Carice Van Houten) and kid, gets hurt on the job and wakes up sporting his own pricey Union ticker and a crushing debt, he experiences — wink, wink — a change of heart about his mean, bloody job. Knowing what the day of collecting means, Remy and a nightclub singer (Alice Braga) with a hot bod of black market parts decide they must fight to foreclose on the system instead.

But where screenwriters Eric Garcia (adapting his own novel) and Garrett Lerner start off with a nifty sci-fi hybrid of headline-conscious concerns about where subprime blues, biotechnology and unconscionable health care are taking us, they and director Miguel Sapochnik would ultimately rather sell you a loud and ludicrous tour of genre references. It starts with John Cleese's "Can we have your liver then?" from "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life" and barrels through "Blade Runner" (production design), "Logan's Run" (fugitive scenario), "Coma" (all-white room reveal), "Brazil" (everything) and Cronenberg's "Crash" (don't ask).

It takes a more skillful hand than Sapochnik's to mix cinematic homage, thrills and thematic fluidity — think "Minority Report" or "Children of Men" — which leaves "Repo Men" feeling like its own desperate case of debt obligation.

MPAA rating:
R (for strong bloody violence, grisly images, language and some sexuality/nudity)
Cast:
Jude Law (Remy), Forest Whitaker (Jake), Alice Braga (Beth), Liev Schreiber (Frank), Carice Van Houten (Carol)
Credits:
Directed by Miguel Sapochnik. Written by Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner. Produced by Stott Stuber. A Universal Pictures release. Running time: 1:51.

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