Rick's Flicks Picks on AWN

Exec #1: Hey lets remake an iconic ‘80s horror movie. Exec #2: Sounds great, kids these days don’t want anything new; they just want to see the same story with more blood and shock. Exec #3: You’re right… and this way we really don’t need to hire screenwriters. Exec #4: We can just string all the best kills from the other films together with CG. Exec #5: Yeah, kids like CG. Exec #6: What’s for lunch?

That’s what you get in this pitiful excuse for a horror film. The story throws us right into a “creepy” dream with no character development. The first half of the film proceeds to be one kid falling into a dream where Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley, LITTLE CHILDREN) kills them. It literally goes from killing the first victim (Kellan Lutz, TWILIGHT series) to the blonde girl (Katie Cassidy, TAKEN) to her ex-boyfriend (Thomas Dekker, THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES) before we even get to know the main character other than she’s a loner waitress (Rooney Mara, THE SOCIAL NETWORK).

This film is everything I thought the first SEX AND THE CITY movie was going to be, but wasn't. The crass worship of excessive consumerism. I was surprised with how much I enjoyed the original film. That film turned out to be more than its sitcom roots. This one is a bad sitcom let loose with an enormous budget, gorging itself on every self indulgent wish possible.

Now Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker, L.A. STORY) is married to Mr. Big (Chris North, TV's LAW & ORDER), who just wants to silently watch old movies at night. She on the other hand wants to talk, but what does she have to talk about? Nothing remotely interesting comes out of her mouth the entire film. And she's a successful writer?

Jason Eisener won Robert Rodriguez’s SXSW Grindhouse trailer contest for his fake trailer HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN, which was featured in Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s GRINDHOUSE. Unlike that film and Rodriguez’s fake trailer turned feature film MACHETE, this film is simply an exploitation flick. The film has little purpose other than being violent and bloody.

Here, the Hobo is played by Rutger Hauer. It is a testament to his professionalism that he gives a real performance within this muck. He’s a homeless vet looking to save enough money to buy a lawnmower so he can make an honest living. He comes to Hope Town, which is like a cross between Detroit in ROBOCOP and some punk run town in MAD MAX. Why he thinks this is a good spot to beg is unknown? I would have picked the suburbs before panhandling in a place where the town’s welcome sign is spray painted over to read Scum Town.

Director Andrew Jarecki seems drawn to crime stories where the guilt of the accused is in question. He made the remarkable documentary, CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS, which told the tale of a father and his son who were both charged with child molestation. Now he steps into a fictional tale, but one based on true life. Those who watch ID or read true crime books will know this as a veiled version of the bizarre case of Robert Durst, whose wife Kathleen McCormack mysterious disappeared one day without a trace.

In this film, the "Robert Durst" character is named David Marks (Ryan Gosling, THE NOTEBOOK), the son of a wealthy land owner in NYC named Sanford Marks (Frank Langella, FROST/NIXON). Sanford wants his son to follow in the family business, which includes the ownership of strip clubs and peep shows on 42nd Street. David has other plans. The young man meets Katie (Kirsten Dunst, SPIDER-MAN) when his father is too cheap to send a plumber over to one of his buildings to check out a leaky sink. She's from a working class family, which is exactly the kind of girl that will adequately piss off his father.

Certainly not one of the pinnacle of Abbott and Costello's career for sure. When it came to them meeting fictional characters, they should have stuck to monsters. This pirate spoof does little to skewer the genre. The pirate theme serves only as a new dressing for their old routines.

Bud Abbott plays Rocky Stonebridge and Lou Costello is Puddin' Head, a duo of tavern workers. On the way to work, Lady Jane (Fran Warren) gives them a love letter to give to the tavern singer Bruce Martingale (Bill Shirley, I DREAM OF JEANIE). Dinning at the tavern that evening are notorious pirates Captain Kidd (Charles Laughton, MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY) and Captain Bonney (Hillary Brooke, THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH) and Puddin' inadvertently switches the letter for a treasure map. Captain Kidd spends the remainder of the film trying to get the map back.

There are a bunch of movies that this thriller brings to mind. It's like THE PROFESSIONAL crossed with the BOURNE series and a touch of KICK-ASS. The first and last of those films because of the young female protagonist and the middle one for its reality grounded action. But then you get a dose of fairy tale woven in as well.

Hanna (Saoirse Ronan, THE LOVELY BONES) is 16 and has been living in the frozen woods with her father virtually her whole life. He is Erik (Eric Bana, HULK), a rogue CIA agent who has trained his daughter to be a ruthless killer. She is a smart girl who speaks multiple languages and can best her dad in a physical fight. He has prepared her for the inevitable day when Marissa, known as The Witch (Cate Blanchett, INDIANA JONES AND THE CRYSTAL SKULL), finds them. His motto is "adapt or die."

Duncan Jones follows up his ingenious "ideas" sci-fier, MOON, with this more conventional sci-fi thriller. That said I'm not saying that film is mindless in the least. It actually has lots of ideas, maybe too many. It's like watching GROUNDHOG DAY filtered through Hitchcock and 12 MONKEYS.

Solider Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal, DONNIE DARKO) wakes up on a train. Christina (Michelle Monaghan, GONE BABY GONE) sits across from him and keeps calling him Sean. He thinks he's going crazy. The last thing he remembers is flying helicopter missions in Afghanistan. Then a bomb blows up on the train.

Stevens now finds himself in a capsule. Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga, UP IN THE AIR), a soldier, talks to him over a screen. He demands to know what is happening to him. Scientist Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright, MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE) explains that he is part of a new technology that can send his consciousness into the last eight minutes of someone who recently died. His mission is to discover who planted the bomb on the train before the terrorist can act again. But Stevens still believes they are keeping something from him and so do we.

Read my review of BLACK SWAN.

Fox's AVC-encoded transfer of Darren Aronofsky's dark ballet thriller is true to its source. Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique used a combination of 16mm film and digital cameras. For a relatively low-budget production, the smaller cameras were easier to move around and give the filmmakers a documentary feel. The 1080p Blu-ray is mixed bag of scenes with heavy grain and sharper digital imagery. So the noise to be found in the darker scenes, could be from the digital source. Despite these issues, the presentation provides nice detail in the brighter scenes. Note Nina's pink bedroom. That serves as a good transition into the transfers best quality. While the palette is mostly white, black and gray, those tones are represented in perfect contrast and inky black levels. As for any digital anomolies, I found none.

Director Rodrigo Garcia has history of making hyperlink films where the lives of various characters overlap. MOTHER AND CHILD actually focuses on less characters than his NINE LIVES or THINGS YOU CAN TELL JUST BY LOOKING AT HER. With a touch of poetry, the film is a character piece about what it means to be a mother and have a mother.

Karen (Annette Bening, THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT) is a nurse, who is caring for her ailing mother Nora (Eileen Ryan, MAGNOLIA). Though it happened more than 35 years ago, the dying woman won't let her daughter live down a teen pregnancy. That child was given up for adoption and later named Elizabeth (Naomi Watts, KING KONG). Now she's a ruthless businesswoman whose determination impresses her new boss Paul (Samuel L. Jackson, PULP FICTION). And turns him on. Meanwhile, Lucy (Kerry Washington, THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND) is struggling with her inability to get pregnant and decides to adopt with husband Joseph (David Ramsey, CON AIR).