The Crazies
David feels remorse for his action, and doesn't know what to say when the man's grief-stricken wife and teenage son confront him. He assumed the incident was brought on by the man's alcohol problem, but the wife insists he had been sober for two years. Indeed, when the mortician's report arrives, there's no sign of any alcohol in the man's bloodstream. These opening moments intrigued me, and made me think I had stumbled upon the rare, thoughtful and character-driven horror film, but the plot speeds right on ahead, and introduces us to the Sheriff's wife, Judy (Radha Mitchell), who is the town doctor. She too has a strange incident with a despondent and unresponsive man who is brought in for an examination by the man's concerned wife. She can't see anything physically wrong with him, despite his odd behavior, and sends him home to rest. That same night, the man ends up locking his wife and young child in the closet before he sets the house on fire with them inside it. It's a chilling scene to be sure, and it would have been even more so if the film had slowed down to actually let us feel for the people these things were happening to. Instead, the plot plows on ahead once more.
Are you noticing a pattern here? The Crazies keeps on setting up interesting and terrifying situations, then just moves right on along, like it can't wait to get to where it's going. It'd be one thing if the movie was hurrying along to something truly interesting, but director Breck Eisner (Sahara) eventually settles down into a predictable and disappointing series of non-stop jump scares, with people leaping out of dark corners or just out the camera's eye. After the early promise, we get a fairly typical plot for this sort of film. We find out that the town's water supply has become tainted, and is turning the people slowly into mindless and murderous zombies. The military quickly swoops in and seals off the town, killing anyone on sight who shows any sign of illness. The film is a remake of a 1973 horror film by George Romero, and it feels like a remake, because you constantly feel like you've seen it all before. David and Judy try to escape from the town and the military forces with the help of David's Deputy (Joe Anderson) and a young woman from Judy's office named Becca (Danielle Panabaker, who after this and last year's Friday the 13th reboot, might want to lay off the horror remakes for a little while). All the while, they're constantly menaced by people who have succumbed to the disease ("the crazies" of the title), who all act exactly like every single generic monster villain that's ever walked, lurched, or slithered across the silver screen.
This really had the potential to be so much more. Aside from a scene where young Becca sees her boyfriend get gunned down and incinerated by the military, we never really get a sense of the tragedy of the situation. We don't know anything about the townspeople, or who they really were before the disease hit, so they become faceless monsters who jump out and attack our heroes on cue. I don't know what happened here. The script by Scott Kosar (2005's The Amityville Horror) and Ray Wright (Pulse) starts out smart, and offers some genuine thrills, such as a sequence in a high school where Judy and Becca are strapped down in gurneys, only to have a deranged man start stabbing the helpless people to death with a pitchfork. But then the whole thing goes on autopilot in the second half, and I found myself losing interest little by little, until I just didn't care anymore. The movie stops being tense and scary as well at this point. I'm tired of horror movies that rely solely on things jumping out for their scares. They don't even provide a good jolt, since we pretty much can sense a set up for an attack from a mile away.
At least I can complement the movie on a technical level. It's very well made for a film of its kind. The vast cornfields and desolate streets do give a small sense of isolation that I wish the movie was smart enough to utilize more. The cast also manage to wring out as much personality as they can out of their thinly written characters. At least none of the heroes are annoying. In movies like this, there's usually one character that you hope will get chomped by the zombies or shot by the army, but no such feelings were stirred within me here. The problem was I didn't really have any feelings for the characters. Annoyance at least would have been something to respond to. I don't ask for much in my heroes in post-apocalyptic zombie movies, just give me something to respond with.
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Not exactly a good start, when they're supposed to be playing characters who have not only been partners on the job for nine years, but also best friends. Willis is supposed to be the tough "straight" cop, while Morgan has the job of being the goofy comic sidekick. We're supposed to see how they can work together, despite their different personalities, but we never do. Willis often looks like he wishes he was acting along side someone else, while Morgan seems to mainly be playing for the cameras, rather than to his co-star. It's distracting, since we're constantly paying attention to the actors and their off key performances, not the characters they're playing. It's especially distracting to watch Morgan, who knows he's supposed to be the main jolt of comic energy in the film, but tries way too hard. He raises his voice, he bugs his eyes, and he quotes dialogue from other movies non-stop, but he never gets a single laugh. That's because he seems to constantly be making a conscious effort to be funny, like a failed stand up routine. He should have tried to build a genuine character, and let the laughs build from there.
In the movie, they play Jimmy (Willis) and Paul (Morgan). At the start of the movie, they're chewed out by the chief for letting some drug runners get away during a botched undercover job. Here is where we get another sign of trouble in the film early on. During the undercover job, Morgan is dressed in a foam rubber cell phone costume. He doesn't get to do anything funny while wearing the costume, mind you, the costume itself is the joke. Then, while the chief is ranting and raving, he's still wearing it. Why? And why does he continue to wear it the entire rest of the time he's at the police station? It's like the movie is wondering why we didn't laugh the first time we saw him wearing the phone suit, so he keeps it on, hoping we'll laugh if he keeps it on long enough. We don't, and the plot creaks on. We learn that Jimmy's adult daughter (Michelle Trachtenberg) is getting married, and wants a big, expensive wedding. Jimmy doesn't want his ex-wife's slimy new boyfriend (Jason Lee) to pay for the ceremony, but he doesn't have any money to cover it. He decides to sell a rare, prized baseball card, only to have it get stolen by a pair of incompetent burglars before Jimmy can sell it.
One of those burglars turns out to be a goofy dimwit played by Seann William Scott. He likes to practice parkour (a martial art that consists of doing flying leaps across rooftops), break into people's houses so he can use their toilets, and tell non-stop obscene knock-knock jokes once Jimmy and Paul finally capture him and have him locked up in the back seat of their car. They want to know what he did with the prized baseball card. Turns out he sold it to the same drug dealer they were after at the beginning of the movie. Now a cop movie about a stolen baseball card would be pretty thin stuff, so there's a lot of pointless subplots that try to hold our interest, but never go anywhere. Paul's worried that his wife (Rashida Jones) is cheating on him with their neighbor. There are two other cops (Kevin Pollak and Adam Brody) investigating the drug dealers. There's also a beautiful young woman (Ana de la Reguera) who is on the run from the villains and wants Jimmy and Paul's help, but can only speak Spanish. She's in the movie to provide sexy eye candy (which she does quite well), but never grabs our attention in any meaningful way.
It's hard to believe that so many talented people can be involved with a comedy as tone deaf as 
Consider the scene where Jimmy and Paul stop a car thief, only to have it turn out to be a foul-mouthed 11-year-old boy. Why is this scene funny? The movie seems to think it's because the kid drops four-letter-words every two seconds, and strikes one of the cops in the privates. A good screenplay could have possibly made this funny. Instead, we get Bruce Willis threatening to tell the kid's mother about what he's done, and the boy breaks down in tears. End of scene. Or how about the scene at the beginning when Tracy Morgan is interrogating a suspect by quoting movies? He quotes everything from Al Pacino in 
The film finds a clever way to get around this. Ledger had already shot a lot of his scenes to begin with, and the film's fantastic and whimsical premise allows for his character to be played by multiple actors, including Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell. The film's central premise revolves around a magic mirror that allows people to enter bizarre, CG-filled worlds made up of their own imagination. Whenever Ledger's character, Tony, steps through the mirror, he changes his appearance and is played by a different actor. It's a clever way to cover up the death of your star, but not exactly a successful one. It's never really explained why no one else who enters through the mirror changes their appearance. We're just supposed to accept it. Unfortunately, we can't, because it's a glaring reminder of the tragedy that occurred behind the scenes. People were able to watch 
The idea behind the film is certainly interesting on paper. The titular Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is an aging old street magician who travels across London in an ancient and run down traveling circus that seems like it comes from another time and place. Considering that the good doctor is immortal, it probably is. This immortality came about due to a deal he made with the Devil long ago. These days, the Devil goes about by the name of Mr. Nick (Tom Waits). The deal that was struck concerns the magic mirror, and how Parnassus must use its powers to convert five different people to his cause. If he cannot by the time Parnassus' only daughter, Valentina (Lily Cole) turns 16, then Mr. Nick gets to take Valentina as his own. Business has not been good for the traveling circus, and they have not been able to convert any souls. That's where Ledger's character, Tony, comes in. The crew of the circus first discover him hanging from a noose on a bridge, and barely alive. They revive him, and although he doesn't remember anything about himself, he does seem to have a keen business sense, and knows how he can drum up stronger business for the circus as Valentina's sixteenth birthday approaches.
A lot of talent obviously went into the making of 
If the movie needs structure, than the cast needs it even more. They often seem lost and adrift in the director's imagination. If none of the cast get to make most of an impression, it's not entirely their fault. They're often written in simplistic terms, or not given much to work with to begin with. If Tom Waits makes any impression as the film's central villain, it's because of what he brings to the performance, not by anything he's been given by screenwriters Gilliam and Charles McKeown. As for Heath Ledger and the other actors who play his character during the fantasy-filled sequences, they certainly seem to be trying. Ledger brings some gusto to his scenes, but never enough to make us truly attached to the character. As for Depp, Law, and Farrell, only the last actor makes any sort of impression, since he gets the most screen time. Depp and Law never come across as anything more than a gimmick, and sometimes seem to be winking at the camera.
Despite this, it comes across as a better film than the Jackson one, because Dion is often much more involved, and comes across as a real person in her film. In 
Aside from that, 
We do get some lovely shots of the different countries and cities she visited during her tour, and we even get to see her visiting some places like Mandela's prison cell, and a former Nazi concentration camp (where she breaks down and cries in the middle of the tour). It just never really adds up to a lot. The movie lingers too long on the fluff and the praise, and when something seems to threaten Dion's happiness, the movie is all too quick to cut away. At one point, she has to cancel some concert dates when she becomes ill. We see a five second clip of two fans who seem disappointed and a little angry that they missed out (this clip seems to have been taken from a local news program), and then it immediately cuts to Dion being perfectly healthy and performing moments later.
He plays a country western singer named Bad Blake. He was once at the top of the music industry, but years of alcohol abuse, and the fact that he hasn't written a new song in years, has reduced him to playing in bars and bowling alleys. He has his loyal fans, who seem to hold onto their memory of his past glory as much as he does. They don't even judge him when he has to leave in the middle of a song in order to throw up in a dumpster out back. Bad still has some friends in the industry, as well. There's a young upstart singer named Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell) who views Bad as a mentor, and wants to help re-launch his career. But Bad resents Tommy. He helped get the young man's career off the ground, and now he's gone off and become a bigger star than he probably was back in his prime. In Bad's eyes, the world has screwed him over one time too many, and he doesn't see any reason to care anymore.
In terms of relationships, Bad was married once and even had a child, but walked out on both of them. Now his main form of human contact are the one night stands he has with women he meets at his concerts. He hasn't given a thought to a serious relationship in years, until he meets a young journalist named Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who interviews him. She is attracted to him, even though she is well aware of his alcohol problem. She has had bad luck with men in the past. She's a single mother with a four-year-old son named Buddy (Jack Nation). Despite this, she is drawn to him, and he in return. Bad bonds with both Jean and her son, and before long, he begins to see himself as the father figure he never knew he could be. But first, he has to battle his own personal demons.
The outcome of the story we can pretty much predict from the start. We can also predict a lot of the crises that Bad will face along the way. 
That's not to say the other performances are completely forgettable. Gyllenhaal is wonderful, and portrays her conflicting feelings of this man who has entered her life with skill. She obviously has feelings for him, and he gets along good with her son, but she has seen this all before, and she probably has an idea where it will end long before it does. Farrell and Robert Duvall are also good in small, supporting roles. But let's be honest, the movie belongs to Bridges. He is what makes 
The two men on board the boat are Federal Marshals, who have been summoned to the island, which is home to a hospital/prison for the criminally insane. One of them is a veteran by the name of Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio). He's the type who's seen it all, and he looks like he has. He's strong, but he's also weary. We learn why through flashbacks placed throughout the film which cover his days in the military, and the doomed relationship to his former wife, Dolores (Michelle Williams), who was killed in an accidental fire. His partner is a rookie named Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo). If he seems a little more optimistic, it's only because he hasn't been on the job as long as Teddy has. The two have come to investigate the mysterious disappearance of one of the inmates on Shutter Island. They are informed by one of the head staff members, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) that a dangerous and delusional patient by the name of Rachel (Emily Mortimer) has disappeared from her cell, seemingly without a trace. None of the staff members who were on duty that night saw anything, and there's no sign of an escape attempt.
Teddy knows that things are not what they seem, and so does the audience. Nothing quite fits together. The staff seem to be stealing glances off to the side whenever they are interviewed, almost as if they are afraid to tell the truth. The patients that are questioned are obviously not in the right frame of mind, so we don't know if they're telling the truth or not. And then there's the very presence of the building itself on the island. It's an old Civil War fortress, and has many dark corners where whispers and strange voices can be heard. Even when Teddy and Chuck are looking at the facts, none of it makes any sense. The island terrain is rough and covered with dangerous cliffs and poison ivy. So how did Rachel manage to escape while leaving her shoes behind? The movie slowly chips away at its own mystery, only to add more questions just when we think we're getting somewhere. And Scorsese seems to revel in every moment of it as a filmmaker.
What's most impressive is the film's ability to invoke fear. There's the fear of mistrust that we feel from just about everyone on the island. Even Teddy and Chuck come across as being questionable in our eyes. There's the fear of the unknown, as the movie takes us deeper into the institution's history, and into the dark and forgotten corners of the island. At it's heart, the film is a ghost story, but not in the traditional sense. The ghosts of the past seem to be all around, and as we learn more, the more intrigued we become. The characters seem distant to us, but it's not because they are underwritten. From the not-very convincing smile of the suspicious Dr. Cawley, to Teddy's nervous glances, we constantly feel like there's something we don't know. And when the answers come, they don't disappoint. We want to know the answers, and for once, our curiosity is rewarded.
The film is a collection stories that are all tied around Los Angeles on Valentine's Day. The characters in these stories sometimes cross over into other plots, but for the most part, we're supposed to get the feeling that we're watching a bunch of short stories that all take place during a 24 hour period. It's a gimmick, mainly, and that's just the problem. It never turns out to be anything more than that. Some filmmakers (like the late Robert Altman) could successfully pull off a concept like this, and make it work. But Garry Marshall is known for doing entertaining fluff like 
The main plot in 
Of the many plots, the ones that probably should have been cut all together are the two concerning the teen couples, as they go absolutely nowhere to begin with, and seem to be thrown in at random to remind us that these actors are in the movie, also. Aside from these two completely pointless vignettes, the other stories seem to be constantly elbowing each other out of the way in order to compete for our attention. Out of all of them, the one that seems to have the most promise is the one between Hathaway and Grace. They're likable, and you wish they could have a full movie to themselves, so they could flesh out their characters. The one with the two strangers on the plane is pretty good as well, and has a nice ending, but once again, the actors never get to go as far with these characters as we would like them to. There are hints at chemistry here and there, but then the movie keeps on cutting to stuff that doesn't work at all, which sends us crashing back down to reality. The problems seem to vary with each story. Some are not as strong as they could be (that would be the one concerning the elderly couple questioning their faithfulness to each other), some suffer from the standard Idiot Plot (the center storyline about the florist torn between two women), and some are just completely pointless to begin with and are wasting our time (the one concerning Taylor Swift and Taylor Lautner).
Because of the loose structure and uncertain tone of 
One fateful day, Percy takes a school field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A teacher pulls Percy aside into a secluded room, and reveals herself to be a winged demonic monster, who demands to know where Zeus' lightning bolt is. Percy, obviously, does not know, and does not know what's going on. Fortunately, another teacher named Chiron (Pierce Brosnan) and loyal Grover show up, and seem to know what's going on. It also turns out that Grover is a satyr, a half man-half goat creature from Greek mythology. He has somehow managed to keep this a secret all these years, though I couldn't understand how. Not only that, Chiron is eventually revealed to be a centaur (half man-half horse), who has somehow kept his secret by posing as a cripple in a wheelchair. The two chase away the demon, and take Percy home. His mom also seems to know what's going on as well, and is forced to tell her son the truth. He is a demigod, and the son of Poseidon, god of the seas, whom she was briefly married to at one time. Sadly, we don't get to see the Honeymoon video, or even a sex tape.
We're clued in on the plot. Someone has stolen the legendary lightning bolt of Zeus (Sean Bean), and he thinks Percy is the culprit. (Why, it is never revealed.) Grover and Percy's mom drive him to a camp where he will be safe, but before they can arrive, mom is kidnapped by a Minotaur sent by Hades (Steve Coogan), who holds her captive in the Underworld. Hades thinks Percy has the lightning bolt, wants it so he can take over the realm of the gods, and won't give back his mom until Percy hands it over. The camp, it turns out, is a training ground for demigods. We find out that all the Greek Gods have sons and daughters in our modern world, and they spend their time training for battle at a camp that looks like a cross between a Renaissance Fair, and a summer camp. While there, Percy is befriended by Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario), daughter of Athena. With Annabeth and Grover's help, Percy sets out to find a way to enter the Underworld so he can save his mother, as well as figure out who framed him for stealing the lightning bolt before a war of the gods can begin.
If 
It should all be ludicrous enough to be a fun time, but it's not. The movie doesn't explain enough, and leaves us asking too many questions. It's also suffering from a curious lack of magic and wonder. All these fantastic creatures and gods, and the kids barely get to react to them. They're just another obstacle for the heroes to overcome, like enemies in a video game. Maybe this is all to distract us that the plot makes little sense. As I mentioned earlier, it's never really explained why Zeus thinks Percy is the one responsible for stealing his lightning bolt. And despite the bolt being the object that sets the plot into motion, Percy actually spends no time whatsoever looking for it. He spends the entire span of the film searching for some magical pearls that will allow him and his friends to exit the Underworld once they find and rescue his mom. It's only during the climactic moments that he accidentally stumbles upon the bolt itself, and the true identity of the thief, whom he has spent absolutely no time searching for. Speaking of the lightning thief's identity, it's terribly anticlimactic, and nowhere near as shocking as the script would want us to believe.
The film opens like any good movie about werewolves should. A lone figure, illuminated only by the lantern her carries and the light of the full moon above him, nervously makes his way through a foggy forest filled with dead trees. He seems frightened, leaping at every shadow around him, until one of those shadows turns out to be the titular beast. The man runs, and the wolf creature makes short work of him. The man's fiance, Gwen (Emily Blunt), writes a letter to his brother, a Shakespearean actor named Lawrence (Belnico Del Toro). She urges him to return to his childhood mansion home to help search for his brother. (At this point, the man's body has not yet been found, and is considered missing.) Lawrence returns home as requested, and we quickly learn that the mansion holds a lot of unpleasant memories for him, most of them surrounding his cold and distant father, Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins). The home itself is equally chilly in its demeanor. It's filled with cavernous halls, a snarling guard dog, and a lot of stuffed and mounted trophy animals, which naturally take on a more ominous shape when the sun goes down.
The body of Lawrence's brother is soon discovered, and when he sees the mutilated state of the corpse, Lawrence becomes obsessed with what kind of man or creature could have done it. The talk at the local tavern seems to point to a mysterious beast that wanders the woods, and may have ties to some traveling gypsies that camp there. Lawrence goes to the gypsies seeking answers, the camp is attacked by the wolf beast, and he is bitten by the monster but survives. From that point, 
It's gothic melodrama that's been put together quite well by a talented team. Despite having limited experience working in the horror genre, director Joe Johnston (
As mentioned, a majority of the effects to bring the Wolfman to life are done with physical make up effects by Rick Baker. For this, I am grateful. As someone who has been disappointed by CG attempts at werewolves in past films, I appreciated this approach. In fact, it's when the film does switch to CG that the effects start to lose their hold on the audience. There are some questionable shots of the Wolfman himself leaping across rooftops, as well as some laughably obvious attempts at a computer generated bear in one sequence. Fortunately, this doesn't happen enough to take us out of the film. The computer-enhanced transformation sequences at least are effective. The scenes where Lawrence becomes the beast are the obvious money shots, and seem to have gotten the most attention.
