Review – Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde

I guess this works about as well the second time around, though as with most leftovers it comes across as, well, reheated. In this round the bete noir is animal testing, and our bubble-headed heroine has gone to work in Washington in an attempt to save her dog’s mother from a cosmetics lab. I was a little less in the mood for this sort of thing than I was when I watched the first one, but objectively if you liked number one then number two should keep you entertained as well. Mildly amusing

Review – The Motorcycle Diaries

Though somewhat cliché-ridden, this nonetheless turns out to be an entertaining and understated (at least compared to most Hollywood fare) portrait of the tour of South America shared by two men: Alberto Granada and Ernesto Guevara. What starts out as a middle-class-kids-road-tripping-on-a-motorcycle experience turns into a profound discovery of the plight of the downtrodden, particularly after the bike breaks down and our heroes are forced to continue their journey on foot. The course of the plot is I suppose more than a little pre-ordained when one of the protagonists later grows up to be Che Guevara. But predictability aside, this is a pleasant story supported by good acting and some spectacular cinematography. Worth seeing

Review – Ray

Ray Charles was a brilliant musician. You don’t have to know anything about his personal life to know that. All you have to do is listen to his music. Nonetheless, I take it from this production that he had some problems with drugs and infidelity. That’s interesting enough, but if I’m being offered the choice between spending two and a half hours watching the seemingly endless pageant of his shortcomings or just listening to him sing and play the piano, I’m going with the latter. I also thought a lot of the editing gimmicks were a little over-wrought, cliché and/or amateurish. Finally, I wish I’d left the extra footage feature off when I watched it on DVD. The extra scenes rarely added much to the story, and the pausing and restarting was more than a little annoying. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of Jamie Foxx’s performance. Who would have thought that a guy who made his reputation playing stereotypical goofball roles could do such a solid job? Mildly amusing

Review – The Forgotten

Few times in cinema history has a title ever so aptly described the ultimate fate of its own movie (Woody Allen’s Sleeper is the only other example that comes immediately to mind). Julianne Moore stars as a woman who has recently lost a child, and for some strange reason everyone around her is trying to make her forget that she was ever a mother. “Some strange reason” becomes stranger and stranger as the story goes, until finally we have people simply being yanked away into the sky and disappearing. Some of the effects are kinda cool, understated in a way few big budget Hollywood productions ever dare. But the is-she-crazy-or-are-aliens-messing-with-her plot wears thin long before the celluloid runs out. There’s only so many times you can yank the rug out from under folks before your audience won’t get back on your rug anymore. Mildly amusing

Review – Species 3

Third verse, same as the first. Actually not quite the same, because this one’s even dumber and has even worse production values than the first two. There’s superfluous cat death early on, and things just go downhill from there. This one just barely escaped an “avoid at all costs.” Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Shark Tale

As is the general pattern with Dreamworks animations, this one’s marginally for the kids but features a load of stuff for their parents as well. Unfortunately here we seem to have reached the point where the asides to the grownups have overwhelmed the kid-oriented fare. I guess the average tot would find this entertaining enough, but the real fun of the picture is the references to other (often R-rated) movies. Further impressive is just how hard the animators must have worked to make a bunch of fish look like the actors who supply their voices. Overall this is a colorful yet content-free parade of gimmicks. Mildly amusing

Review – Inspector Gadget

What can I tell you? The remote was on a chair out of my reach, and I was just flat out too lazy to get up and change the channel. I’ll bet younger kids will get a real kick out of this tale of a security guard turned into a cybernetic super-cop. But it’s just too dumb for anyone above the age of ten or so. See if desperate