Category Archives: 2010 movie reviews

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The Town

Throughout my filmgoing life, one fact has held true no matter how much else has changed: I love crime movies. From the classic 70s genre flicks to the latest and greatest (which invariably copy those classic 70s genre flicks), I’m in heaven watching cops and robbers onscreen.

The best films in the genre number among my favorite films of all time — The Godfather, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, Miller’s Crossing, Out of Sight and Miami Blues, to name a few. But even those that fall short of classic have littered my top ten lists for decades — films such as L.A. Confidential, Shaft, True Romance, The Usual Suspects, The Departed and Gone Baby Gone.

Add The Town to that second list, and add Ben Affleck to the list of directors who know how to knock this material out of the park. Affleck, long an unfairly maligned actor, has emerged as an expert director of modern film noir.

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Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the most comic book-y comic book movie I’ve ever seen. Director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) uses every trick in the book to make the screen come alive with BOOM! POW! WHAM! awesomeness.

Few moments in film this year have packed the exhilarating punch of the scenes where bassist Scott Pilgrim and his band mates tear into some garage band grunge and the room literally quivers with visible electricity.

Wright is working with an audio-visual palette that feels brand-new and award-worthy. It’s not often I watch a film that seems like the first of its kind, but this one does.

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Inception

Few directors in Hollywood can boast an artistic and commercial winning streak to rival that of Christopher Nolan. He has successfully split his time between psychologically meaty brain-teasers (Memento and The Prestige) and big-budget summer spectacles (Batman Begins and The Dark Knight).

With his latest film, Inception, he has managed to deliver both at once.

Inception is as twisty and debate-worthy as any film Nolan has made, but it works just splendidly as straight-up entertainment. On its face, this is a heist film about a team of well-skilled thieves who join their leader on “one last job.” The twist is that on this job they aren’t stealing something but leaving something behind, and they aren’t breaking into a place but into their target’s subconscious.

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The A-Team

When I first saw the trailer for The A-Team, a man behind me in the audience said to his companion “This is Charlie’s Angels for guys.” And he hit the nail right on the head.

Like the first Charlie’s Angels film, The A-Team turns a campy, beloved TV series into a big-screen summer popcorn extravaganza full of cartoonish action, complete with equal helpings of laughs and thrills.

And just as Charlie’s Angels offered men in the audience the mesmerizing sight of Cameron Diaz’s swinging panty-clad rear end, The A-Team saved money in the costume budget by having Bradley Cooper go shirtless 75% of the time. Based on my wife’s reaction, this decision is popular with the ladies.

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Shrek Forever After

It’s been more than a month since I saw Shrek Forever After, the fourth film in the lucrative Shrek franchise, and as I’ve put off writing this review the details have receded in my mind. And that’s sort of a given, I guess, with a film like this. It’s not meant to stick with you.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Mindless escapism is often just what the doctor ordered. And when it comes to childrens’ movies, you can do far worse than the Shrek films, which at least serve up some legitimate laughs for the grown-ups in the audience.

Still, in a summer movie season that has given us Toy Story 3, it’s hard to accept the premise that animated movies (or kids’ movies in general) should be judged on a different scale.

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