A Nightmare on Elm Street - 2010

Director: Samuel Bayer

Writers: Wesley Strick & Eric Heisserer

Starring: Jackie Earle Haley, Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara, Kellan Lutz

"Wake up, Nancy, wake up. Nancy, please. Please don't do this please. Nancy, come back. Please wake up. You promised." A decade after the death of pedophile Freddy Krueger (Haley), his now-teenaged victims begin experiencing similar dreams of a knife-clawed Krueger out to kill them all.

I've never been one for horror movies. "Scared" is not an emotion I have any desire to experience any more than absolutely necessary. And while there where a few moments of poor writing ("if we survive the next 24 hours" being one, as well as when/how Mara's character determines how to lure Krueger into the real world) stand out, the mains all bring decent performances, especially Haley as the new nightmare killer. In addition, the movie was genuinely scary. When I can't watch something in theaters, I do the best I can to replicate the theatrical experience by watching in total darkness. I'll admit I jumped once or twice, and turned the lights back on sporadically as well. Guess that means that slimeball Michael Bay (whose studio Platinum Dunes is responsible for the recent spree of horror remakes) deserves some of his ill-gotten gains after all. C

Diary of a Wimpy Kid - 2010

Director: Thor Freudenthal

Writers: Jackie & Jeff Filgo, Gabe Sachs, & Jeff Judah

Starring: Zachary Gordon, Robert Capron, Grayson Russell, Chloe Grace-Moretz

"It all starts in middle school, you know? You're not a kid anymore. The coddling has stopped. Kids are now separated by intelligence. The weak are picked on and girls that you've known since kindergarten won't even talk to you anymore." Told through the main character's drawings and not-a-diary journal entries, Greg (Gordon) and his friend Rowley (Capron) attempt to survive the "glorified holding pen" of middle school.

Despite pandering a bit too much to the young audience, the film appeals quite a bit to the older crowd as well. The child cast all turn out fairly good performances, though there was far too little Grace-Moretz for my liking. It's a very good look at the hyperimportance of the minutiae of middle school, and overall I was surprised at how much better this was than I expected, and might even see the sequel. B

Nowhere Boy - 2010

Director: Sam Taylor-Wood

Writer: Matt Greenhalgh

Starring: Aaron Johnson

"There's no point hating someone you love." Nowhere Boy follows the life of a teenage John Lennon (Johnson), eventual frontman of the Beatles, and his struggle to reconcile the complex relationship between himself, the aunt who raised him, and the mother who didn't. He also recuits schoolmates, including one Paul McCartney, into his first foray into music: the Quarrymen.

I will be buying this DVD the day it comes out. My only problem with this film (aside from the trailer's excessive focus on the almost absent musical aspect of his life)? Some of the Liverpudlian accents were a little thick. Every performance is a knockout, and Johnson leads the way as the young Lennon. Unlike the also-great Kick-Ass, he really gets to flex his acting chops here, and it's proof positive that if he keeps picking proper roles, he could be one of the up and coming British actors. A

The Sorcerer's Apprentice - 2010

Director: Jerry Turteltaub

Writers: Matt Lopez, Doug Miro, & Carlo Bernard

Starring: Jay Baruchel, Nicholas Cage, Alfred Molina

"I have been searching all over the world for you. You're going to be a force for good and a very important sorcerer. But for now, you're my apprentice." Balthazar Blake (Cage), one of three apprentices of Merlin, trains Dave Stutler (Baruchel) as his own apprentice to help him vanquish his nigh-immortal foe Maxim Horvath (Molina), another Merlinian.

I wasn't expecting a lot from this film; maybe that's why I kind of liked it. Molina's great at playing villains (remember Spider-Man 2?) and Cage, while it's not one of his best performances, it's not one of his worst either. The role plays to his natural insanity, shall we say. Baruchel...is yet again the girl-repellant nerd he's been playing lately; I hope he can grow out of it, and sooner rather than later. The writing surprised me most, though. While it's a slightly-above-average summer popcorn flick, the science-as-magic premise really appealed to me, and while the dragon wasn't terribly realistic, the effects are otherwise executed well, and the obligatory mop scene is executed without a hitch. My only real problems were two: there's an elderly man that Horvath goes to (who seems to already know him) in search of an apprentice, and this man's background is glossed over completely. Is he another sorcerer? Your guess is as good as mine. In addition, a character near the end just sort of gets forgotten about by the writers during the film's climax, which is one of the worst things a writer can possibly do. He's there one moment, gets knocked out, and then not seen for the rest of the film. Regardless, I'd say this one's worth renting for a single watch. C/C+

Get Him to the Greek - 2010

Director: Nicholas Stoller

Writer: Nicholas Stoller

Starring: Jonah Hill, Russell Brand, Sean Combs, Rose Byrne

"This is it, Aaron. This is rock 'n' roll. Did you enjoy the party?" To please his boss (Combs), Aaron Green (Hill) flies to London to escort Aldous Snow (Brand) to a 10th anniversary concert at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. However, Green does not account for Snow's far from sober lifestyle threatening to derail the trip at ever turn.

I try to stay away from anything connected to Judd Apatow, but maybe I should reconsider that. I didn't see Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but I thought this movie was really solid, and funny on top of that. The film starts with Snow's latest music video, "African Child," which dances on the line between funny and offensive perfectly. Hill's given a good line here or there as well, mostly in the mold of the character he always plays, but the reason to watch this movie is Combs. Essentially playing an exaggerated version of himself, the recording executive's shouting about his personal life and doing what it takes to keep the rock star happy almost entirely overshadow having Hill vomit onscreen three separate times (my only real issue). B

She's Out Of My League - 2010

Director: Jim Field Smith

Writers: Sean Anders & John Morris

Starring: Jay Baruchel, Alice Eve, TJ Miller, Krysten Ritter

TSA agent Kirk (Baruchel) has a chance encounter with party planner Molly (Eve) based on an iPhone mishap, and the two gradually enter into a tenuous relationship, which seems impossible not only to their peers, but even Kirk himself.

I'll be the first to say that I'm a big fan of Canadian actor Jay Baruchel. Fanboys? Loved it? How to Train Your Dragon? It should win for Best Animated this year. The Trotsky, a Canadian film where his character thinks he's Leon Trotsky reincarnate? Next on my list. This movie, however...not so much. Aside from an abrupt turn in the last half hour, the writing is nothing special (thanks again, Hot Tub Time Machine writers), and the supporting cast is mediocre at best (very glad that Eve won't be playing Emma Frost in the upcoming X-Men film). In addition, and this doesn't normally bother me, but the film went out of its way to secure an R rating, and I think it suffers for it. Lots of F-bombs dropped, and the vast majority feel unnecessary (unlike the films of Kevin Smith, for instance). There's also a scene shot from behind that Baruchel insisted on a very obvious body double for, and the camera is fixed for a horribly long time; some better cinematography could have completely avoided that. D-

Wait. Baruchel did this AND Sorcerer's Apprentice with Nick Cage this year? Please start choosing your parts more carefully, sir. It'd be a shame to see you disappear.

Shrek Forever After - 2010

Director: Mike Mitchell
Writers: Josh Klausner & Darren Lemke
Starring: Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, Antonio Banderas, Walt Dohrn

In the final chapter of the Shrek tetralogy, Shrek (Myers) has become dissatisfied with the monotony of his life with Fiona (Diaz) and their three children. After one particularly bad day, he makes a deal with Rumplestiltskin (Dohrn) to get a day to "live like a real ogre" again, in exchange for the erasure of a day from his childhood that he won't remember. Rumplestiltskin being the trickster that he is, the childhood day is the day Shrek was born, launching the characters from the series into a dystopian alternate universe where Rumplestiltskin is king and Fiona, still under the curse, leads a band of rogue warrior ogres against his tyranny.

I'm almost willing to put aside the fact that this is merely a Shrekified version of It's a Wonderful Life. Unfortunately, the series is now a bitter shell of what it once was. Klausner and Lemke's attempt to literally rewrite the beloved film from nearly a decade ago falls short of even the third entry in the series, making the same things that were once entertaining and amusing now painfully annoying at times. In addition, there's a star-studded cast of minor characters that (aside from the ogre played by Mad Men's Jon Hamm) are lucky to get three lines each over the course of the film. What a waste! Unless you're a die hard fan, you'll agree that "the final chapter" had come and gone before this one went into production. D

Hot Tub Time Machine - 2010

Director: Steve Pink

Writers: Josh Heald, Sean Anders, John Morris

Starring: John Cusack, Craig Robinson, Rob Corddry, Clark Duke

"Do I really gotta be the asshole who says we got in this thing and went back in time? " Three men (and one's nephew), wholly dissatisfied with their lives, return to a beloved ski town from the three men's past for a weekend of male bonding. However, a night of intoxication in their hot tub leads to the four being transported from 2010 to 1986.

This film is a mess. It's a comedy lacking a sole funny moment (though it tries every possible way to have one). The writers didn't bother explaining ANYTHING (like a certain character who appears at random, or why Duke's character still looks like his 2010 self). The time travel aspect is contradictory at best, and the plot either namedrops or full-on rips off legitimately good time travel stories (A Sound of Thunder, Terminator, and Back to the Future twice). When I saw the first commercials for this, I wondered how John Cusack ended up with this motley crew of actors below his station; imagine my surprise when he was also a PRODUCER. That's right, he helped this movie get made. I'll never understand some motives. And what stellar film can we next look forward to from the writer's? Why, it's the Jim Carrey-helmed adaptation of Mr. Popper's Penguins. Oh, happy day! F

The Virgin Suicides - 1999

Director: Sofia Coppola

Writer: Sofia Coppola

Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Josh Hartnett, James Woods, Kathleen Turner

"We would never be sure of the sequence of events. We argue about it still." The film tells the tale of the events leading up to the suicides of the five Lisbon sisters, told from the perspective of one of the neighborhood boys.

I think Sofia Coppola's one of those filmmakers that I'll never understand. I've seen both this and Lost in Translation (and am familiar enough with her take on Marie Antoinette) and I've yet to really enjoy any of them, but I feel like I should. Woods plays this great eccentric father type, and Turner's pretty good as the overprotective mother. All the girls are good too, I suppose, although some don't come off as young as they're meant to. My biggest issue was that this whole movie, I got a feeling of watching it through a veil or smokescreen. I know this is a fault of the novel this was adapted from (and I've been told aside from a scene dear Miss Coppola tacked on at the end featuring a debutante ball, it's pretty faithful), but telling a story from the perspective of someone besides the girls themselves, the viewer's left just as much out of the loop regarding the motivation behind the titular event, i.e. the most important thing in the whole movie. I'll give it a C, but I'm bumping it up a letter grade only because I know she's gotten so much praise over the years.

Babies - 2010

"Director": Thomas Balmes

"Starring": Ponijao, Bayar, Mari, Hattie

The movie compares and contrasts the first year in the lives of four babies: Ponijao (Namibia), Bayar (Mongolia), Mari (Japan), and Hattie (USA).

This film does not exist for people like me. It was made because people will apparently pay money to ooh and aww over 80 minutes worth of what amounts essentially to babysitting footage (or perhaps end up discussing the deplorable conditions of child-rearing in Namibia). I had my fill of cute baby moments fifteen minutes into it; the remaining 65 were wholly pointless. There's no narration or non-chronological order to give any sense of cohesion or direction to it. Shame on you, Balmes, and shame on the parents of these babies, especially the American ones who fed their child with a piece of bark because they forgot to bring a spoon. F