Tagged: Movie Review

Ruby Sparks is a happy surprise for at least three reasons: heroine Zoe Kazan is a fun new actress who also wrote the script, it is an enjoyable love story, and it is a pleasant comic variation on Frankenstein; unless one is very sensitive to bad language, I can’t see why anyone would not like it.

The Watch is a silly little comedy that should keep everybody entertained except some who will find parts of it too grisly realistic and some who are sensitive to bad language.

It is not out to inspire thought or emotions, just laughter, and it doesn’t try to conceal its dependence on other movies, snips of which you will recognize almost like a leit motif, especially if you see more action and sci-fi movies than I do.

Safety Not Guaranteed is a completely successful but highly peculiar little movie the Eagle’s Rod Pocowatchit started by calling “deadpan funny,” and then never mentioned humor again, referring instead to it as an “imaginative, unexpectedly wondrous journey,” “charming and warm,” using words like “heart and conscience” and “electric” and “the tenderness of the human condition.” I refer you to last week’s “GO!” section. Pocowatchit is dead on.

I try to avoid children’s movies because all that matters about them, most of the time, is whether they are funny and whether they may be offensive to parents, and my sense of humor does not seem to match that of thirteen-year-old boys who think nothing is as funny as gas leakages, and I do not empathize with parents who want to protect their young-uns from language they hear every day at recess. But every so often I am forced to review kiddies’ movies for lack of anything else new, and often as not I find myself thoroughly entertained from beginning to finish.

There is nothing particularly new about Oliver Stone’s Savages: the usual good guys want out of the rackets and the usual bad guys won’t let them leave, there’s the usual one last job before retirement, the usual endless betrayals and double crosses till you neither know nor care what anybody is up to, the usual big orange explosions, the traditional blonde heroine and black-haired villainess, the requisite car chases, and the criminal superorganization that has the whole physical world bugged so you can’t go the john without being taped, but also the villains who never thing to set