Dinner for Schmucks

OPENING: 07/30/2010

STUDIO: Paramount Pictures

RUN TIME: 114 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
Takes One to Know One.

Opening Statement
My reaction upon seeing the Dinner for Schmucks trailer was a blend of pain and pleasure. I like Steve Carell and Paul Rudd, but the premise seemed awfully flimsy. I also experienced a blend of pain and pleasure watching the film itself. To my surprise, the premise actually works, but other elements of the script do a lot of damage to a film boasting a wide variety of entertaining performances.
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Salt

OPENING: 07/23/2010

STUDIO: Sony

RUN TIME: 100 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
Who is Salt?

Opening Statement
I have to admit, the trailers for Salt didn’t exactly inspire much excitement in yours truly. It looked like a fairly typical action film rooted in a typical “innocent person wrongly accused” plot; a bit of generic noise to fill a gap in the summer movie season. I’m glad to have been proven wrong. Salt is one of the loopiest films of the summer, but also a tremendously well-crafted thriller and a grandly entertaining experience.
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Countdown to Zero

OPENING: 06/23/2010

STUDIO: Magnolia Pictures

RUN TIME:91 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
No nukes is good nukes

Opening Statement
Atomic apocalypse may still be upon us. That is what the filmmakers behind Countdown to Zero want us to remember. As President Kennedy said, “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness.” This quote is used as the thesis behind this film. They used this idea to scare the guano out of me. Seeing images of nuclear bombs going off while being told how your internal organs may explode if you’re close enough to the epicenter, really makes one ponder how to not have that happen. And that is exactly what they are going for. Getting that response is their way to get the audience to act and do what they want them to; whether that be writing their government, texting to a specific number, donating to a charity or reducing carbon emissions. It is emotional manipulation, and it works. However, the direction they are trying to get us to move in is not only naïve, it is futile.

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Winter’s Bone

OPENING: 07/11/2010

STUDIO: Anonymous Content

RUN TIME: 100 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
Bred and buttered.

Opening Statement
Winter’s Bone is a chilling tale set in rural Missouri which couldn’t have been cast any better. Jennifer Lawrence brilliantly leads the ensemble as a seventeen year old looking for her miscreant father in a small community of people, many of which are blood related. With a budget of only $2 million dollars, director Debra Granik has assembled a film more powerful than anything I have seen this year.

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Inception

OPENING: 07/16/2010

STUDIO: Warner Bros.

RUN TIME: 148 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
Your Mind is the Scene of the Crime

Opening Statement
After achieving remarkable success both critically and financially with The Dark Knight, Director Christopher Nolan has taken a break from Batman to pursue his own original idea: Inception, based on a script that Nolan developed for over a decade. The result is a film that sees Nolan reaching dizzying heights as an artist; an intelligent, original serving of thunderous elegance that towers over the rest of the summer movie crop like a giant in Lilluput.
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Solitary Man

OPENING: 06/02/2010

STUDIO: Anchor Bay Films

RUN TIME: 90m

ACCOMPLICES:

Trailer, IMDb

The Charge
Ben Loves His Family Almost as Much as He Loves Himself

Opening Statement
Solitary Man is the story of Ben Kalman, a character that Michael Douglas plays almost by second nature. Douglas shines in the role and his performance makes the film worth seeing, even if it is stronger than the film itself.

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Cyrus

OPENING: 06/18/2010 (limited)

STUDIO: Fox Searchlight Pictures

RUN TIME:91 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
John met the woman of his dreams. Then he met her son.

Opening Statement
The film sub-genre of mumblecore has been around since 2002. It is characterized by improvised scripts spoken by un-proven actors on shoestring budgets. The plots are simplistic, people talking about what people talk about as they would normally talk. Nothing particularly spectacular happens and it’s okay. Slowly, the directors of these films have been getting noticed and given acclaim. Last year, the film Humpday was a huge critical success for writer/director/producer Lynn Shelton. Now, mumblecore has come to a theater near you with actors you have probably heard of. The brothers Duplass, Mark and Jay, were given the go ahead to work the magic they brought to their previous works, The Puffy Chair and Baghead, into something with a bigger budget. What they have given us is Cyrus - a comedy that keeps its independent vibe and does not skimp on the quirk; yet by the end, if you stay with it, will surprise and charm you.

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Predators

OPENING: 07/09/2010

STUDIO: Fox

RUN TIME: 106 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
Fear is Reborn

Opening Statement
While I’m a fan of John McTiernan’s savage sci-fi thriller Predator, pretty much everything else about the Predator franchise to date has been uniformly unimpressive. Sure, Predator 2 and even the two Alien vs. Predator movies have their defenders, but to me they all played like weak attempts cash in on the popularity of the original. Now we have Nimrod Antal’s Predators, which easily bests the other sequels but still fails to match the first film.
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Knight and Day

OPENING: 06/23/2010

STUDIO: Fox

RUN TIME: 109 Minutes

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
Cruise and Diaz

Opening Statement
After briefly dabbling in the realm of serious-minded war movies with Lions for Lambs and Valkyrie, Tom Cruise returns to his default setting as the cocky, confident action hero in James Mangold’s Knight and Day. Alas, the results are underwhelming.
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Jonah Hex

OPENING: 06/18/2010

STUDIO: Warner Bros.

RUN TIME: 80 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
Revenge gets ugly.

Opening Statement
Oh, man. Here I was, fairly certain that The A-Team was the low point of the summer movie season, and along comes Jonah Hex to blast my theory to hell.
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