Two business partners and lifelong best friends, Dan (Robin Williams) & Charlie (John Travolta), are in the middle of the biggest business deal of their lives. When Dan finds out he’s the father of seven year old fraternal twins (Ella Bleu Travolta & Conner Rayburn) – conceived during an eventful week after his divorce that included lots of booze and a one day marriage – he impulsively takes responsibility for them after finding out their mother, Vicki (Kelly Preston), has to serve a two week stint in jail.

After seeing previews of Old Dogs, I felt it had a “Wild Hogs”-like feel, which was why it didn’t surprise me to see Walt Becker’s name attached to the directing credits of this one. Hell, Travolta basically played his same regurgitated character from Hogs in Old Dogs with the only difference being Charlie didn’t have the money problems that Woody (in Hogs) did. It didn’t detract from the homogenized comedy he and Williams brought.

The children were just barely more than props. They were just a plot device to set the stage for Williams and Travolta to showcase their comedic chops. Ella Bleu Travolta couldn’t have had an easier lay-up for her first movie. Not only were both her parents there for support and advice, the role she lined up was as easy as they come…she could have played Jack Black’s character in Tropic Thunder for the amount of impact she and her male cohort had in this film. As far as movie children go, these two were the best behaved kids in the world. The Department of Child Induced Mischief was apparently closed for this shooting.

The opening sequence was done very cleverly in my opinion. I can’t think of a movie that did it similarly or with the same seamless effect of not having to use a caption or blurb to marry a seven year gap to the present. The supporting characters were great in Old Dogs, specifically Justin Long as the crazed camp counselor with a vendetta against Charlie. I think I’m starting to love Long’s bit characters more and more when I see ‘em. The camping sequence was probably my favorite, though Old Dogs has plenty of laughs throughout. And the special effects team apparently just learned how to use Photoshop, going to the well with the warp and smudge tools one too many times for my taste.

The Slanted View: I made the mistake of looking forward to Ella Bleu’s performance, not that I expected a whole lot from her, or even Old Dogs for that matter. It was disappointing to find that a story about a father and his seven year old children he just met centered more around him and his friend instead. While it didn’t stop the laughs from coming, it did bother me that the writers were afraid to explore the relationship the premise was set on. If you want to watch a kids flick, check out Planet 51. If you want to see a buddy movie, check out Hear No Evil, See No Evil. Watch this one on TBS in a year when you’re bored.

“Wait, who I am here?”

Swift shot: The original was much better, but how many of today’s target audience even know that Terry O’Quinn, Lost’s John Locke played the original Stepfather in 1987, or that it was much more violent, interesting, and sexually complex?  This new telling is more creepy than scary – unless you are a teenage girl.  The best scene from the preview was cut from the film.  This modern tale of caveat emptor was like watching The Stepfather Lite – less taste. . . more filling.

Centering around Michael Harding (Penn Badgley) a, supposedly, belligerent teenager who returns home from military school, “The Stepfather” is mired in the mundane.  Director Nelson McCormick seemed to be looking for the shell effect, wherein evil is hidden under an amicable or benign crust – but he failed by letting David Harris/The Stepfather (Dylan Walsh) skulk around with a scowl throughout the movie . . . which apparently only our ‘hero’ noticed.

Yes, others started to raise questions about this mysterious new beau and fiancee in Susan’s (Sela Ward) life, and they are eventually dealt with by the maniacal stepfather.  But, Susan seemed so blinded by her insecurities and loneliness that she never catches on that this dude is walking around like a serial killer without a puppy to set on fire.  And when he finally goes Bat-Shit-Crazy on her, yea like I spoiled something there, the effect of abrupt awareness is effective, and to her character’s credit, when the shit hits the fan, she comes out swinging.

I have seen creepier stuff on the Lifetime network – seriously.  While I wanted to completely trash this film, it does have some decent redeeming moments.  Some of the kills are authentically vicious, where the use of the victim’s perspective should leave some lingering thoughts of what it would be like to die in such a fashion – psychologically interesting to be sure.  That is where I found myself enjoying the film, but the rest of the movie was all build-up and then drop off, build up, drop off, and finally when things explode you are left wanting more resolution.

The film felt like it took forever to reach a “conclusion”, and I use that term loosely.  It will probably cause you to run out and rent the original for a social comparative study on violence in pop culture from the eighties to the new millennium.  But, other than that, wait for this to come out on regular cable; I doubt anything will be cut out for younger audiences.

Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, is your typical coming-of-age tale that you would expect from any niche film like this. When it comes to originality please look elsewhere, but formulaic perfection is achieved here bringing you equal parts action and teen angst. Ellen Page plays, well Ellen Page as a young a-social teenager who can only express herself through roller derby games.

The whole movie tries to show how undesirable it is to do what is so desirable to the masses. Drew Barrymore and Juliette Lewis bring their star quality, B+ games to the screen as teammates and rivals to the upcoming roller derby champ played by Page’s Ellen character. This film will be widely appreciated by people between the ages of 10-16, and people who enjoy a good roller derby flick that wasn’t made as an exploitation film in the seventies.

I’m sure anyone who would be visiting this site is familiar with the story of Diablo Cody: the stripper/phone sex operator who became a screenwriting wunderkind who won an Oscar her first time out the gate with “Juno”. She has a writing style full of witty catchphrases that can be mildly amusing at best and mildly irritating at worst. Her dialogue doesn’t at all reflect the way people talk, but it’s catchy nonetheless. She is to teenage girls what David Mamet is to tough guys and slippery salesman. Much like Mamet’s dialogue is referred to as “Mamet-speak,” I believe Cody’s words will become known as Cody-speak . . . assuming, of course, her screenwriting career lasts that long.

So, what does the Academy Award winning scribe of “Juno” do for an encore? She writes the sort of funny, sort of scary, but not enough of either horror flick “Jennifer’s Body”. The film stars the beautiful, tattooed, and over-exposed Megan Fox as Jennifer, the smart ass, cock tease cheerleader who every guy at the small town high school wants to nail. Every high school has a girl like Jennifer (God knows mine did), the smoldering, irresistible type who knew exactly the kind of power she had over men and how to use it; whether to get them to let her copy their English homework or to get them to buy drinks for her, whatever. She has that power.

One night she goes out to a local bar with her nerdy best friend, Needy (Amanda Seyfried), to try and hit on the lead singer of a local band whom she describes as “salty” (salty is Cody-speak for beautiful). Well, Jennifer’s powers of seduction apparently work, because while the bar is burning down due to some freak accident, the lead singer of the band, who is hilariously named Nikolai Wolf (Adam Brody), whisks her off to the safety of his van, while leaving Needy stranded. When Needy sees Jennifer again, she’s behaving very strangely, to put it mildly. And when local boys start turning up devoured, Needy starts to think that there is something very, very wrong with her friend.

Like “Juno”, this had enough quotable dialogue to fill a book. Unlike “Juno”, unfortunately, it didn’t give me any characters or story to give a damn about. By writing a horror film, Cody makes a game attempt to play in someone else’s sandbox, but there’s just not enough suspense or tension in the story to pull it off. Fox does a nice job of… um… filling Jennifer’s Body, and plays the uber-bitch and (literal) man-eater quite well (how much of that is actually acting, I’m not sure). Seyfried is good as the ugly-duckling best friend who reacts in horror to her friend’s… change, and Adam Brody is a hoot as the emo band’s lead singer/Satanist (watch and you’ll see). Johnny Simmons is okay as Needy’s geeky boyfriend Chip, but he kept reminding me of “Juno”’s Michael Cera, except with only about a fraction of his dorky charm.

Director Karyn Kusama does a passable job, and creates a few nicely stylish moments, but is ultimately let down by Cody’s script. The zingers are there, the fake-but-weirdly authentic Cody-speak still has its unique jive, and there are PMS jokes aplenty, but the scares and story momentum are nonexistent, and for the most part, I was neither scared, nor amused, and really bored by the whole thing. Lonely, horny fanboys do get an eyeful of Megan Fox, that’s for sure, but they can get just as good a look at her rack by checking out their nearest magazine rack . . . and saving their eight bucks in the process.

Will Mila Kunis’ hotness outweigh Ben Affleck’s Ben Affleckness?

. . . No!

From the get-go I was expecting a lot from this flick, Mike Judge is a comedic master, serving up Office Space and Idiocracy to the mindless masses about a decade ago now – to say nothing of creating Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill, the latter a vastly successful show in its final season on Fox.  I was thinking it was going to be an Office Space type comedy for the blue-collar working stiffs  – and it was, kinda.  And, while I laughed out loud a few times, I was hardly laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe which both Idiocracy and Office Space have achieved – even after a second or third viewing.

Mila Kunis busts out onto the screen in the opening shot, using her feminine wiles to wrap most of the town’s testicle-bearing populace into a purty good frenzy. (Yes, that is a Red Dawn line – deal with it).  The film is a character actor driven assembly line of quirky stereo-types and peopleofwalmart.com’s most wanted.  If you have ever worked on a factory line, maybe this one will strike a chord with you, but it didn’t really have much of an impact on me.  I was hoping to see more of Kunis, and was let down in every sense of the word.  Gene Simmons and David Koechner’s scenes, separately, provided the most laughs.

With Ben Affleck finally fitting into a role I can accept him in as Dean the loser, stoner half-ass friend to lead Joel (Jason Bateman).   Kristen Wiig played Joel’s wife.  I usually enjoy seeing Wiig on any size screen, but she only slightly pulled me into her sweatpants clad bored house-wife character.  She did manage to end the film with a pretty good laugh though, and people even clapped when the film was finished.  And, as you might expect with a Mike Judge film, stick around for the credits.

The film has some interesting, unique plot developments, albeit a tad predictable.  You will probably be disappointed with this film if you are a Mike Judge fan.  And, unless you like seeing a guy get practically neutered on the big screen, rent this one!

Taking Woodstock, Ang Lee’s newest film spends too much time covering Elliot Teichberg’s (Demetri Martin) outing and screwed up relationship with his immigrant parents, and only dipping it’s toes in the free loving, music festival it borrows it’s name from. Mis-marketed and at times mis-directed, Woodstock is rarely the funny adventure comedy its trailers and marketing execs want you to groove to.  Contrary to what they want you to believe,  Taking Woodstock is a young man’s coming of age or coming out of the closet tale that happens to be surrounded by the most famous music festival to take place in upstate New York.

The plot hinges on a Jewish family’s inability to make their mortgage payments – thus forcing the youngest member to invite half of the United States to his neighborhood for what would be known as the last attempt at a free society. Unfortunately instead of concentrating on this concert, the film is plagued with scene after scene of the problems the concert had – set alongside the problems Elliot is having leaving his parents behind and starting his new life as an openly homosexual artist. There are dabs here and there of some inkling of a back story . . . hidden somewhere is his past life in New York City where he clearly led his life sans judgment or inhibitions.

Overall Lee has taken a great story of free love and some of the greatest musicians to ever overdose on their choice of sin and overshadowed it with a young man’s struggle to confront his sexuality with his family and with a small town. It seemed like two separate films that someone tried to seamlessly edit together forgetting that each story is important on it’s own.

Steve Lopez (Robert Downey, Jr.) is a Los Angeles Times reporter who is stuck in a rut, when he meets Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a one time Julliard music prodigy who is now homeless and playing a two stringed violin in a park. Lopez is immediately intrigued by Ayers, writes an article about him, gains some notoriety for him, and ultimately tries to help the troubled but clearly gifted musician re-integrate back into society. The main obstacle is Ayers himself, a schizophrenic whose mental illness has gone untreated for decades, and who doesn’t seem to want to be helped.

This had all the makings of a solid drama; an interesting (true) story starring two of the best actors working today. I remember seeing the trailer for this a while back, and thinking, “Hum… that should be good.” Then… I heard nothing more about it. Several months passed, and the next thing I know, it’s on DVD. Huh? Did I miss something? I thought this movie had “Oscar Bait” written all over it? What happened?

Well, after finally checking it out, I think I might have an idea; despite the story’s potential, despite the strong leading actors, “The Soloist”, ultimately, just isn’t very good. As I stated, all the ingredients are there, but the film just ultimately falls flat. It gets off to a strong start with Robert Downey, Jr. doing his typical dry, sarcastic Robert Downey, Jr. thing and doing it well. When we first meet him in the story, he’s a jerk. An entertaining and vaguely likeable jerk, but a jerk nonetheless. However, when he becomes involved in Ayers, he changes. Helping Ayers has given him a purpose, and we see some humanity emerge from his character. Downey handles the change admirably and delivers another fine performance.

Jamie Foxx, as Ayers, is also very impressive. He has all the ticks and quirks and mannerisms of a crazy street person down pat (going to college in downtown St. Augustine, I got to know the type). He and Downey play off each other well, and I did get a sense of the bond that developed between the two characters by the end of the film. However, despite the great performances on display, I remained, for the most part, curiously unmoved by the story. I can’t say why, but I was just never really pulled into it. Perhaps it was something about Susannah Grant’s script that kept me at a distance from these people, I’m not sure, but I do know I was never truly invested in the characters or what was going on the way I thought I should be, and when all was said and done, I just didn’t give a damn.

Surely, the desired effect wasn’t to have no effect. Surely I was supposed to, by the end of this, feel something for the characters, or the plight of the homeless, or… something… anything… but, nope. Didn’t happen.

Strangely, this is how I reacted to director Joe Wright’s previous film, the much lauded, Oscar Nominated (and supremely over-rated) “Atonement”. Like this film, that one had an intriguing premise, good performances, was technically well made with beautiful photography… but story wise it just dropped dead in the second act and never recovered. Sadly the same goes for “The Soloist”. I was with it at first, but gradually I just lost interest and lost interest and by the final third of the movie, it just became a real chore for me to watch.

I looked at some reviews on-line after finishing this film and found, to my surprise, many critics heaping a ton of praise on it. Giving it four and five star reviews and calling it things like “an overlooked gem!” So, much like with my assessment of “Atonement”, I appear to be in the minority on this one. I can’t explain it. Maybe I have some inexplicable bias against all films directed by Joe Wright, or maybe, like Nathaniel Ayers, I’m just crazy.

As long as you have a college degree, everything afterward will fall into place, right?? Not quite, according to “Post Grad”.

Ryden Malby (Alexis Bledel) is about to graduate college. The world is hers for the taking. She is about to lease a beautiful loft apartment, apply for her dream job at a publishing house, and generally have a perfect life. Until Jessica Bard (Catherine Reitman), Ryden’s nemesis, gets the job instead of her. I guess this movie takes place in our time, as jobs are scarce, because now Ryden has to move back home with her eccentric family: Walter and Carmella Malby (Michael Keaton and Jane Lynch), Grandma Maureen (Carol Burnett), and brother Hunter (Bobby Coleman). Also in Ryden’s circle of people is her best friend Adam (Zach Gilford) who has clearly been in love with Ryden forever, but Ryden is either clueless or she realizes Adam’s feelings and she is leading him on (which is not nice!!).

In between Ryden applying for other jobs, she manages to hook up with her hot neighbor David Santiago (Rodrigo Santoro), who I think could pass for a Brazilian version of Orlando Bloom).  She tries out several jobs to eek out a post grad existence in today’s economy.

“Post Grad” started out promising. The beginning credits rolled over Ryden’s vlog (that’s video blog, in case ya didn’t know) recorded as she’s getting ready for her college graduation. I thought that was something different and cute. But, as Ryden’s life started unraveling, so did this movie. It seemed like there was a lack of character development. Also, Ryden’s family was just TOO weird, and she was TOO normal. I would have liked to see a better balance of the two – and if they were shooting for a zany comedic tug-of-war, /fail.

I know I always complain about movies being too long, but this one was just lacking something. It seemed to me that there were some scenes that were removed that could have filled out the story better. Overall an OK movie, but I would have expected more from a movie starring the man who was Beetlejuice!!

Please pass the crack, these people aren’t funny!

Storyline

When seasoned comedian, George Simmons (Adam Sandler) learns of his terminal health condition, his desire to form a genuine friendship causes him to take a not-so-funny performer under his wing. But he ends up learning some things about life from his new hatchling.

Cast

Judd Apatow, thinking out load: “Gee, I want to make another movie, but keep the money within my family… **tapping fingers** I GOT IT! I’ll cast my whole family in a movie! My wife – everyone loves her. My daughters – they’re so cute folks will just want to eat ‘em up – and MYSELF—wait. That’ll mean I’ll have to trim my beard, maybe shave it off—Oh, hell no. Not in this lifetime. But wait, I’ll be the writer AND director! Yeah, baby! Me and a sack-o-cash just  L O V E  this plan!

That’s exactly what happened with this slow motion train wreck. I’m not a huge fan of Adam Sandler to begin with, but Seth Rogen, Jason Schwartzman and Jonah Hill, I am. “Hats off” to Leslie Mann and Eric Bana for an outstanding performance. Seth and Adam deserve a “hats off” as well for playing two different characters – of which I have yet to see either or them pull off and they did it well.

The cast was okay; pretty powerful ensemble for such a weak script…

The Good, Bad and Indifferent

Just a non-compelling story. The character arc for Adam’s character should have been more powerful. I really felt somewhere between a could-of-been good indie and mainstream commercial film; not enough in either direction which made me feel lost at the end. I was disgusted to learn the budget was $70M !!! Give me a break. All that money was spent on the cast and director and the script most likely sucked because these folks can act. In my opinion, the only funny thing about this film was the lumpy character Seth played and Jonah’s rants and penis jokes which made him famous in Superbad, but is now becoming old . . . like him.

The Bottomline

This is a netflaxseed film. Watch it at home. Save your gas. No one likes you farting in the theater anyways . . . yeah, I am looking at you Teddy Blair.