Review – The Benchwarmers

More than once while watching this movie I had to ask myself if I was really seeing a picture about three grown men vindicating the rights of nerds everywhere by playing baseball against little league teams. Despite my disbelief, that’s exactly what this turned out to be. Just about everyone here has done better work elsewhere. I was particularly disappointed in David Spade, who can usually be counted upon to supply a few good lines even in the worst of productions. I’ve seen some bad baseball movies in my time, but this one sets a new standard. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Sophie Scholl

This production serves as a poignant and important reminder that Germany wasn’t a single-minded, monolithic thing in World War Two, that many Germans resisted the Nazis and some paid a terrible price for doing so. In 1943 Sophie Scholl, her brother and a friend were executed for the high crime of distributing leaflets criticizing the government. The movie takes us through the “crime” itself, the interrogation, the trial, and (briefly at the end) the execution. The tale is touching, particularly in the simplicity of the characters. Sophie and her companions aren’t superhero resistance fighters. They’re just college students engaged in what a sane society would regard as completely normal behavior. Nor are the Nazis portrayed as demons with syringes full of truth serum and lines like “vee haf vays uff mekking you talk.” Instead the interrogation comes across as a bureaucratic process, almost church-like in the ritual comings and goings of the Gestapo officers. The movie is worth a look, though the special features left something to be desired; the parts I watched were dull, poorly-edited interviews with surviving people with a remote connection to the case. Worth seeing

Review – Click

By all rights, the title should refer to the sound your remote makes right about the time the first act ends. The story – overworked dad (Adam Sandler) receives a magic remote control that allows him to manipulate his life – has some potential. And as long as the picture sticks to the amusing ins and outs of our hero learning to pause, fast-forward, and otherwise manipulate his existence, it works as a simple-minded situation comedy. Unfortunately, that only supplies enough material for the first third or so. Once the gags run out, the show is left without a natural direction. So it meanders into a weepy blend of It’s a Wonderful Life and/or A Christmas Carol, ultimately hovering between maudlin and just plain dull. Overall this is roughly 30 minutes of funny followed by a big-budget Hollywood sermon on the evils of materialism. See if desperate

Review – Atlantis: The Lost Empire

As with Lilo and Stitch, this movie surprised me with the volume of violence present in a production presumably aimed at a juvenile audience. Here the gun battles seem slightly more apt, as this is an adventure yarn vaguely – and only vaguely – suggestive of Verne or Burroughs rather than a cutesy picture strictly for pre-teens. On the other hand, the casualty list runs high before the story plays itself out. The animation is good, at least by American 2-D standards. The casting is notable for its self-conscious multi-ethnicity and a rare appearance by James Garner as a villain. The plot – adventurers set out to find the lost city of you-know-where – is sufficient to keep the show going, though it bogs down if fake mysticism toward the end. Overall this is a craftsmanlike but not especially inspirational outing. Mildly amusing

Review – Terms of Endearment

This is the relationship many women of a certain age secretly think they have with their adult daughters. Our heroine (Debra Winger) has an uneasy relationship with her mother (Shirley MacLaine). We follow the characters through the twists and turns of their lives: the slow degeneration of the daughter’s marriage and the budding romance between the mom and her next-door neighbor, an ex-astronaut (Jack Nicholson). Usually I’d find a story structure as episodic as this off-putting, but here for some reason it worked for me. Some of the dialogue and plot points come across as contrived. But otherwise the only real defect here is the excessive sentimentality, particularly toward the end. Mildly amusing

Review – The Da Vinci Code

This is just about exactly the movie I figured they’d make out of the book. Everything about it is expensive: actors, effects, locations, the whole nine yards. In other words, this is pure Hollywood, crowd-pleasing entertainment. I admit that I thought it was somewhat fun to keep an eye out for the weird little bits of symbolism (or “symbology” if you prefer author Dan Brown’s term) sprinkled throughout the production. Beyond that, however, I repeat the criticism I leveled at the book: the question of Christ’s divinity is of considerable importance to many people. If this is a sincere attempt to sugar-coat the debate and thus interest a non-academic audience, then at least the producers’ hearts are in the right place. But if it’s just the cheap exploitation of controversy in order to increase sales … well, we’ll just have to wait and see how the less-scandalous Angels and Demons does at the box office. Mildly amusing

Review – Monster House

Here’s still more proof that good tech alone won’t make a good picture. The computer animation in this production is solid, occasionally even impressive. The story is about a trio of kids who discover that the house across the street is actually a living creature that eats toys, dogs, slackers, cops, kids, and whatever else it can get its pseudopods on. This premise naturally gives the film-makers plenty of opportunities to do cool visuals that would have been impossible without sophisticated CGI. The producers also kicked in the cash to get some fairly-well-known actors to do the voices. But none of that could overcome the script problems. This is a dumb, mean-spirited movie, and no amount of slick polish can cover up a defect like that. See if desperate

Review – An American Haunting

The Bell Witch legend could have been made into a terrifically spooky movie. And that’s just what this starts out to be. However, by 30 or 40 minutes in, the film-makers have obviously either run out of ideas or they’re trying to do something other than tell a ghost story. I almost wish the former had been the case. This turns out to be like one of those long, complicated tales that ends up being about how the protagonist’s life was changed by Jesus. Though the secret sermon is about something besides Christ (and I can’t say what the lesson is without ruining the surprise), it’s nonetheless unwelcome to find out at the end that you’ve been tricked into watching a message piece. Thus is one of America’s better “true” ghost stories rendered preachy and dull. See if desperate

Review – Slither

I liked this production better than I thought I was going to, but that’s about the nicest thing I have to say about it. The plot is a trite tale of body-snatching aliens, a mish-mash of several older, better horror movies. The dialogue and characters provide at least some sitcom-style entertainment value, and the effects hold up reasonably well. If nothing else, the idea that the monsters spend a bunch of time gobbling rotten meat has some gross-out appeal. However, what little welcome the production manages to build for itself is thrown away early on by the excessive dwelling on pet murder. As usual, that’s an automatic one-star deduction. See if desperate

Review – Strangers with Candy

If only they’d just let Amy Sedaris do her shtick, this would have been a better movie. As it is, the production is an uneven blend of really funny gags stuck into a lame, Comedy-Central-style sitcom. Sedaris plays Jerri, a woman recently paroled after decades behind bars. In order to wake her father from a coma, she resumes her life exactly where she left off: in high school. I’ve never seen the series upon which this movie is based, but I assume this is basically the same story (or at least the same idea). Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to just watch the funny stuff, as it’s sprinkled here and there throughout the picture. Overall it’s worth it, but only because the genuinely humorous parts are quite good indeed. Mildly amusing

Review – Stay Alive

What if people who die in a video game end up dying for real? Wow, nobody’s ever done anything like that before. Sadly, no element of this production is any more original or interesting than its premise. See if desperate

Review – The Goodbye Girl

If you’re a big fan of screen adaptations of romantic comedies from Broadway in the 70s, well, that’s kind of a specific taste to have. But by all means seek this out. Personally, I thought the dialogue was stiff and many of the plot twists so contrived that the whole thing became too artificial to enjoy. Even the premise – that due to some kind of real estate mix-up a single mom has to share her apartment with an obnoxious actor – is silly even by light comedy standards. I derive at least some pleasure from watching bad things happen to Richard Dreyfus, so the experience wasn’t a total loss. Still, this kind of thing really isn’t my cup of tea. See if desperate

Review – Hook

Though Peter Pan wasn’t one of my favorite tales from childhood, Barrie’s story itself has some charm. Add Steven Spielberg and the late-20th-century fascination with the “inner child” to the mix, however, and you get something a lot harder to take. Robin Williams stars as Peter Pan, grown up and become a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer with neglected kids of his own. Though he’s forgotten Neverland, Neverland hasn’t forgotten him. In particular, Captain Hook is still out for revenge, kidnapping our hero’s children in order to draw him back into a final battle. Dustin Hoffman does an amusing job as Hook, adopting the mannerisms of William F. Buckley to give the character some smarmy creepiness. Aside from little touches like that, however, the movie is an extended sermon on the importance of discarding the trappings of adulthood and openly embracing playfulness and imagination. The message isn’t necessarily without merit, but the execution is so stiff and inept that it’s hard to embrace. Imagine a Terry Gilliam idea produced and directed by the monster studio budget and ego of Spielberg, and you’ve got some idea what you’re in for. See if desperate

Review – The Scarlet Pimpernel

As near as I can tell, this movie’s influence on subsequent productions is seen primarily in only two places: Daffy Duck and Bunny Wigglesworth. Otherwise this is a swashbuckler with almost no action sequences, an exceptionally dull creature to say the least. Further, even the underlying plot is hard to take. One wants to sympathize with efforts to save anyone from imminent death, but the fact that they’re French aristocrats fleeing justice during the French Revolution makes them hard to root for. Indeed, at one point one of the “victims” sagely observes that at least to an extent they’ve got it coming. Nonetheless, Leslie Howard (as the dashing Scarlet Pimpernel and his foppish alter-ego) does his best for them. Hooray. Whatever. See if desperate

Review – United 93

It must have taken some guts to produce this movie. It’s the most un-Hollywood air disaster movie I’ve ever seen. There are no big-name stars; most of the actors appear to have been chosen based on physical resemblance to the real people they portray. But more than that, the whole production is designed to give the viewer a fly-on-the-wall view, relying on the inherent drama of unfolding events rather than traditional movie theatrics. The result is a powerful portrayal of the death of Flight 93 (not to mention the rest of the events of Sept. 11 leading up to the crash). Worth seeing

Review – Grey Gardens

The Maysles brothers made a whole career out of taking cameras where cameras usually didn’t go, but this is one of the weirdest places they ever shot a documentary. Apparently Jaqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onasis had a vaguely dotty aunt and seriously crazy cousin living in a decaying mansion in the Hamptons. As an intimate portrait of the mentally ill, this isn’t the worst production I’ve ever seen (though Titticut Follies was better). However, it’s hard to watch for a couple of reasons. First, the two women seem unhappy. Their house looks comfortable enough (however dilapidated). Their lives are simple and quiet. And yet they’re constantly at each other, their proximity apparently making them even crazier than they might otherwise have been. The second –and more serious – source of discomfort is how swiftly the joke gets old. By midway through the film had become so tedious that it’s downright hard to watch. Overall, then, this is one of the most depressing movies I’ve ever seen. See if desperate