http://www.badmouth.net Look, Ma! No pants! Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:25:17 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8 en hourly 1 http://www.badmouth.net/public-enemies-2009/ http://www.badmouth.net/public-enemies-2009/#comments Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:24:32 +0000 Brian McDonough http://www.badmouth.net/?p=1211 [rating:4] Director: Michael Mann Starring: Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard, Billy Crudup Public Enemies is a well-drawn period drama, a look at America’s historic love affair with the colorful gangsters of the Depression era without celebrating them. Johnny Depp, a master at playing outsiders, gives us a John Dillinger who’s both a driven, aggressive man and one who’s realizing that he has no future. Director Michael Mann opens the film with an audacious jailbreak that quickly establishes the world of the film. Dillinger is decisive, bold, violent — but he’s contrasted with a crook who lacks discipline and shows wanton cruelty. We don’t get a hero in Dillinger, but he’s a cut above the likes of Baby Face Nelson, who later in the film is willing to mow down bystanders and cops for no good reason. Depp gives us a main character that we’re willing to watch and even root for (though history had written Dillinger’s fate before the screenwriters were born), without making him a hero, or soft-pedaling the man’s violent side. One viewer might feel sorry for Dillinger in the end, and another might think he deserved exactly what he got. Hell, you might think both.]]> http://www.badmouth.net/public-enemies-2009/feed/ 0 http://www.badmouth.net/away-we-go-2009/ http://www.badmouth.net/away-we-go-2009/#comments Fri, 12 Jun 2009 07:02:07 +0000 Brian McDonough http://www.badmouth.net/?p=1201 [rating:4.5] Director: Sam Mendes Starring: Krasinski, Maya Rudolph, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Catherine O'Hara This is a really good movie. It's touching, it's funny, and it takes universal themes and some familiar ideas but makes them feel fresh and original, at the same time catching a certain surreal feeling in its characters' lives. There should be more movies this good.]]> http://www.badmouth.net/away-we-go-2009/feed/ 0 http://www.badmouth.net/drag-me-to-hell-2009/ http://www.badmouth.net/drag-me-to-hell-2009/#comments Fri, 29 May 2009 05:38:53 +0000 Brian McDonough http://www.badmouth.net/?p=1190 [rating:4] Director: Sam Raimi Starring: Alison Lohman, Justin Long We love rollercoasters because they surprise and thrill us in a way that, while largely based on startling us, is also based on familiarity—you know how the roller coaster will surprise you. There's going way up, going way down, jerking one way or another, and the whole corkscrew thing. That's really all there is. But each new roller coaster recombines the simple elements, and throws them at us (more accurately, throws us at them) with so much speed that all we can do is surrender to the ride, laugh and scream at the silly wild thrill of it, and then stagger to our feet when it's over. So, that's Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell and it's freakin' awesome. Go see it. ]]> http://www.badmouth.net/drag-me-to-hell-2009/feed/ 1 http://www.badmouth.net/star-trek-2009/ http://www.badmouth.net/star-trek-2009/#comments Fri, 08 May 2009 06:06:02 +0000 Brian McDonough http://www.badmouth.net/?p=1166 [rating:4] Director: J.J. Abrams Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, Zoe Saldana, Eric Bana Star Trek is two hours of breathless awesome. Director J.J. Abrams and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman took a very quirky, more-than-slightly ridiculous old show that has a rabid fan base and a main character who is a staple of comedy club impressionists everywhere, a show that wore its soaring New Frontier heart on its velour sleeve and can only seem sillier as we (the cultural We) become more cynical and mundane. Seriously, to do adoring justice to that source material while still creating a frenetic special-effects film that will appeal to the Iron Man/Dark Knight/Transformers/James Bond crowd of modern thrill junkies is a pretty good description of a thankless and impossible task. What the fans would call a Kobayashi Maru scenario, a no-win situation. This movie is chock full of win.]]> http://www.badmouth.net/star-trek-2009/feed/ 10 http://www.badmouth.net/earth-2007/ http://www.badmouth.net/earth-2007/#comments Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:01:27 +0000 Brian McDonough http://www.badmouth.net/?p=1151 [rating:3] Directors: Alastair Fothergill, Mark Linfield Starring: Lions, Elephants & Polar Bears, oh my! Here’s a fact: If you’re going to make a documentary called Earth and fit it into a ninety-minute run time, you are doomed to failure. Big topic, “Earth.” Even if you’re sticking to the natural world, and even if your main goal were to fetishize waterfalls and cute baby animals, you’re still never gonna produce a ninety-minute film worthy of being called … Earth. The first film to be released by the new DisneyNature label (timed to Earth Day!) is in fact a two-year-old BBC-funded documentary that was produced in parallel with Planet Earth, a series whose total ten-hour runtime sounds a little better-suited to covering the subject. Knowing this somehow makes one more forgiving of the flaws of the cinematic release. Earth feels like a poorly assembled hodgepodge of brilliant footage whose glory is nearly lost beneath weak storytelling (and a truly crap score). Imagining the filmmakers having to cut the 600 broadcast minutes they’d already culled from thousands of hours of video to get this hour and a half at least makes you appreciate how stacked against them the deck was.]]> http://www.badmouth.net/earth-2007/feed/ 3 http://www.badmouth.net/alien-trespass-just-like-the-real-thing/ http://www.badmouth.net/alien-trespass-just-like-the-real-thing/#comments Thu, 02 Apr 2009 07:51:05 +0000 Brian McDonough http://www.badmouth.net/?p=1125 http://www.badmouth.net/alien-trespass-just-like-the-real-thing/feed/ 0 http://www.badmouth.net/watchmen-2009/ http://www.badmouth.net/watchmen-2009/#comments Fri, 06 Mar 2009 06:17:02 +0000 Brian McDonough http://www.badmouth.net/?p=1112 [rating:3.5] Director: Zack Snyder Starring: Malin Ackerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Jackie Earle Haley Watchmen, the holy grail of comic book movies. Not only have reverent fans of the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons opus either passionately longed for or absolutely dreaded a film adaptation, it also seems to be of high interest to the general public. Weekend box office will tell that tale). but this seems to be the first comic book movie to make a real general-public splash that’s not based on a household-name character. Maybe it’s just that from the trailers alone — hell, from the posters alone — you can tell it’s not going to suck as much as Ghost Rider. Also, it’s dark, moody, urban and sexy. That’s not a failing formula. But is the damn thing — all two hours and forty minutes of it, any good?]]> http://www.badmouth.net/watchmen-2009/feed/ 2 http://www.badmouth.net/ed-brubaker-criminal-mastermind/ http://www.badmouth.net/ed-brubaker-criminal-mastermind/#comments Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:30:36 +0000 Brian McDonough http://www.badmouth.net/?p=1095 http://www.badmouth.net/ed-brubaker-criminal-mastermind/feed/ 2 http://www.badmouth.net/wonder-woman-2009/ http://www.badmouth.net/wonder-woman-2009/#comments Tue, 03 Mar 2009 07:42:33 +0000 Brian McDonough http://www.badmouth.net/?p=1079 [rating:3] Director: Lauren Montgomery Starring: Keri Russell, Nathan Fillion, Virginia Madsen, Rosario Dawson Wondercon offered an opportunity to do the roundtable interview thing with the makers of the Wonder Woman DVD hitting stores today. The Q&A sessions came a couple hours before the new movie was screened for convention attendees, so the assembled web writers hadn't seen the production yet. Fortunately, the obsessiveness with which the animation of comic icons is tracked online meant that my fellow interrogators knew to ask about the violence. The movie starts with brutal war in ancient Greece, and the whole film contains enough violence, and a few sexually risque lines, to have earned the movie an R in its initial cut. Yeah, think about that for a minute: A Wonder Woman cartoon scoring an R. No, I don't know what the hell is wrong with the world, either. What the hell is wrong with the world, after the jump.]]> http://www.badmouth.net/wonder-woman-2009/feed/ 5 http://www.badmouth.net/zoe-bell-not-stunt-casting/ http://www.badmouth.net/zoe-bell-not-stunt-casting/#comments Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:07:22 +0000 Brian McDonough http://www.badmouth.net/?p=1045 http://www.badmouth.net/zoe-bell-not-stunt-casting/feed/ 3