Thighs Wide Shut

Burn After Reading
Fire Safety In Numbers
Trailers & Mo

If the Coen Bros never made No Country For Old Men, and Burn After Reading was the movie that followed up their uninspired, rudimentary Intolerable Cruelty and spirited, yet underwhelming Ladykillers, then it would be without question that their filmmaking skills were in serious decline. Yet, we can’t think like that cause No Country did happen, and in a huge way (4 frickin Oscars, a David, a Sierra and even a Saturn!), re-establishing them as geniuses for the longtime fans and putting them on the map for the other people with woolite over their eyes for the past two decades. BAR may be a minor work in the Coens’ canon, but coming off No Country, it’s nice to be treated to one of their fun and frivolous little diversions littered with their usual quirky characters and crazy capers, regardless if it all adds up to something meaningful or not. Sure, BAR aint in the same league as Raising Arizona and Lebowski (happy 10th anniversary!), but we’ll take the Coens’ Ocean 8 (with Malkovich and his endless use of the word ‘f&ck’ edging out Brad Pitt and his hair as the film’s main draw) over any of Steven Soderbergh’s three lifeless and narcissistic all-star fests. Still, the Coens’ do share one thing in common with Nerderbergh: an inability to make us love George Clooney, even if he can grow a beard that looks similar to ours and Jack’s

Pushing Daisy: Satan’s Alley has got some competition for bestest faux film of the year with the Dermot Mulroney-Claire Danes rom-com Pushing Up Daisy, which makes several apperances in BAR. The Coens’ even filled out all the credits on the poster, tapping Sam Raimi as the director and basing it off of a Cormac McCarthy novel [USA TooGay]

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Righteous Kill
The GodAWFULFather
Trailers & Mo

Imagine watching Dexter (for those of you missing out on one of the breastest shows on intellivision, Dex is a forensics expert who moonlights as a serial killer of really bad peoples who escape justice), minus the style and substance, and you don’t know which character is Dexter (we’re led to believe that Robert DeNiro’s the killer….), and by the time it’s revealed (…but there has to be a twist at the end, so guess who ends up being the killer????), you’re either too bored to death or too deathed to bored to even care. That purty much sums up Righteous Kill, the Italian-American equivalent of The Forbidden Kingdom, another 2008 flick that paired two former box office titans on the same screen, about 10+, or in this case 20+ years too late (we won’t count their 9 seconds together in Heat). The only good to come out of this mano e causing mono is the revelation that in this day and age, Robert DeNiro is by far the more annoyingierer actor of the two. We know that sounds more ludicrous than Ludacris eating only Luden’s cough drops, but it’s truly true. Juss compare and contrast their recent resumes (see Pacino in The Insider and The Merchant of Venice if you haven’t already). This movie blows more than all the blow-up dolls found in the Blow-Pop factory in Blowlivia. They shoulda burned this film after making it, cause if you end up seeing this hunk o skunk you’ll want to burn yer eyes after viewing. No real big sirpize here, coming from director Jon Avnet, who last wasted our and Al Pacino’s time earlier this year with the inept sloppy thriller 88 Minutes. We wished that giant mess was only 8 minutes long, but compared to Righteous Borefest, it’s Citizen Kane II!!

Fists Like A Glover: Avnet can eat our choda, but we’re glad he keeps casting hottie Trilby Glover (she was in both 88 and Righetous). if she and Juno’s BFF Olivia Thirlby merged into one person they’d be Trilby Thirlby (or Olivia Glover for you lame-wads). here be some niiice snaps of Alicia Silverstone 2.0 in Maxim. and here’s one of her with Chevy Chase

Verdictgo: Slit Yer Eyes Out Repoopulous

both films are currently playing at a theater near jews

until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Mister Foe
Oedipus Wrecks
Trailers & Mo

Hallam Foe (Billy Elliot‘s Jamie Bell) is unwilling to let the memory of his mother’s suicide by drowning go (no more rhymes, we mean it, anybody wanna play Scene It?). The tragic event has stunted his growth, as he’s filled his adolescence of solitude with a lotta tom foolery and peeping tomage. To make splatters worse, he suspects his father (Ciarán Hinds, secretly the world’s greatestist actor) of having something to do with her untimely death, so he could take a new wife (welcome back Claire Forlani). Father, stepmother and son can’t live in harmony together, so Hallam has no choice but to escape this life and start a new one in Edinburgh. There he spots a cutie patootie bidness lady (hottie Sophia Myles, one of the only redeeming bits and NSFW pieces of Art School Confidential), who eerily resembles his mother, and it sparks a disturbing chain of events that will draw the two of them closer together. Presenting a perverse love story with flawed characters is nothing new for director David Mackenzie, especially if you’ve seen his Young Adam (where Ewan McGregor flung a lotta food on a nekkid Emily Mortimer [NSFW]), and once again, while it all may be a bit uneasy to watch, with no characters to really root for, you can’t help but be sucked into the film that’s filled with fantastic performances (including Jamie Sives, Maurice Roëves and the always incomprehensible Ewen Bremner) and one killer soundtrack (Franz, Clinic, Sons and Daughters, etc). Hallam Foe reminded us a lot of Max Fisher from Rushmore. They are both motherless misfits, who get way too emotionally in over their heads with an older woman, get burned, but in the process grow up. These aren’t average tales of teen rebellion, but then again, those teen characters aren’t very average to begin with, and that’s what makes both of these flicks stunningly complex and compelling

We Wanna Befriend This Foe: although she’s barely in the movie, playing Hallam’s sister, model turned actress Lucy Holt has juss replaced Torry as our #1 fantasy option

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peeping Tomers

Ping Pong Playa
& Everybody Wants To Be Italian
Ethnic Slurries
Ping Pong Trailers & Mo | Italian Trailers & Mo

If you see two comedies this year, whatever you do, DO NOT LET THEM BE Ping Pong Playa and Everybody Wants To Be Italian. If you took a dump and threw it on screen, it would be fleventeen times funnier than both of these movie combined. Italian-Playa are so downright humorless that they make Christopher Guest’s overhyped-underipe misfire For Your Consideration look about as Oscar worthy as Idiocracy’s Ass, which took home 8 Oscars in the year 2505, including best screenplay. You know how a lotta DVDs include deleted scenes? Well Italian-Playa are two movies filled with nuttin but deleted scenes. They’re so rotten and lame-stream that they feel like failed TV pilots that no one would ever bother to make cause they’re about as original as Kennedy Fried Chicken. Italian is by far the wurser of the two evils, and that’s purely based on the runtime (don’t think we needed 4 scenes of nuttin but early morning jogs). It’s a romantic-‘comedy’ that’s aiming to be the Tuscan-American version of My Big Fat Greek Snooze Fest, but it’s more like going to the Olive Garden for authentic Italian food. The biggest names in the cast are supporting players Laverne, Dan Cortese of MTV Sports fame, Fletch’s editor and Carl the Janitor from The Breakfast Club. Did we lose you already? If we didn’t, then czech out the previous [NSFW] work of its star Cerina Vincent, who played the Shannon Elizabethish naked foreign exchange student in Not Another Teen Movie. As for Playa, it was a huge personal disappointment for us since we’re such big fans of doc director Jessica Yu (In the Realms of the Unreal and Protagonist). Yu is so out of her league here, handing in a poorly acted and constructed full-length narrative debut that leaves little left to be desired for whatever her next fictional project may be. She woulda been better off making a documentary about Ping Pong instead. Many of you loathed last year’s Balls of Fury (we didn’t), and if that’s the case, you might as well swear off ping-pong flicks for the rest of yer life

The Story Is Utah: although this space coulda been reserved for Cerina Vincent’s NSFW work, we dug up this gem while putzin around the nets for Fletch’s editor, Theatrically Released Feature Films with Major Characters who are Latter-day Saints/Mormons

Verdictgo: both are Slit Your Eyes Out Repoopulous to the Crème de ^Menthe degree

Transsiberian
Strangers On A Train
Trailers & Mo

Emily Mortimer is adorable and easily startled (and also a Non-Us Hottie), Woody Harrelson is nutty, Kate Mara looks like a raccoon, Eduardo Noriega is smokin hot (love this pic), and Ben Kingsley is appearing in his 2184938219th film this year with his 1283982929th different accent. Put em all together with some heroin and matryoshka dolls on the world’s longest train that goes from China to the Hoth Systemeish parts of Russia and whats yous gets is a slow simmering, nice little thriller that’s sure to satisfy all the Ping Pong Playa haters out there

More Time With Mortimer: we LOVE Emily Mortimer!!!!!

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

all three films join Transsiberian in limited release today

until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Traitor
A Momentary Lapse of Treason
Trailers & Mo

A Muslim working undercover to thwart terrorism in the name of US security sounds like a purty nifty concept for a movie, and even more so when the story was drummed up by none other than Steve Martin (yes, THAT wild and crazy guy who isn’t so wild and crazy anymo), yet when fleshed out and directed by the dude who wrote The Day After Tomorrow, one doesn’t and shouldn’t expect much from the finished product. Aiming to be a hot topic suspense thriller, Traitor is juss another one of these run of the mill shoot ’em up flicks with a modern message that will likely leave no impression on yer mind, like last year’s Rendition or something as trivial as Vantage Point. Movies like these used to be eggceptable, but with the rise of big explosions and plot lines on television shows like 24 they need even bigger bangs and wordier words in order to leave a mark. Don Cheadle plays the double dealing title turncoat, who is torn between saving our country and listening with an open ear to the righteous ideals of the terrorists he’s supposedly aiding (Saïd Taghmaoui is his friend and link into the group that’s led by the overly hammy Aly Khan). Guy Pearce is the FBI agent, with a southern uncomforting Sawyer drawl, tasked with bringing him down, although he has no knowledge that Cheadle’s actually working for the ‘good guys’. Both Don and Guy’s performances are solid, but they deserve a better movie. His partner, Neal McDonough, is the bad cop of the duo, and delivers his wooden lines as if he were a slightly more polished Paul Walker. The two criss-cross the globe and start to find more questions than answers. Eventually Cheadle will be forced to show his hand, for the safety of Americans and himself. When it does happen, the result is edward james almos laffable. If yer looking for a movie that takes its moral dilemma a lil more seriously, skip this and Netflix the Palestinian suicide bomber flick Paradise Now instead

Curry In A Hurry: while she may not be as sultry as Aishwarya Rai, we still dig on cutie and quality actress Archie Panjabi and would love to receive some jughead from her

Verdictgo: Sum Merit But No Stinkin Badges

Death Race
Pit Sh#t Stop
Trailers & Mo

Slain and pimple, this movie sizzzzzUcKsZzzZzZZz. So why on earth did an actress of Joan Allen‘s caliber agree to appear in it as a prison warden with the personality of Droopy the Dog, who also produces a TV show of deadly car races featuring her prisoners? Maybe she desperately wants to win an MTV Movie Award for Sneeringist Bitch of the Year, or perhaps it was her mos deepest desire to star in one of those ‘Jason Statham drives a fast car and looks damn cool whilst doing it‘ movies. Whatever the case may be, she can’t breathe any air into this flat tire. Death Race is sorta a remake of the pretty stoopid to begin with Death Race 2000 flick from ’75, which starred David Carradine, Sly Stallone and a host of other eye and thigh candy [NSFW]. The original is beloved in certain circles for its Roger Corman brand o’ campiness (watch this guy bullfight a Toreno), and this new one shoulda embraced that spirit in the form of an homage, instead of farting fromage. Gone is the cross-country Cannonball Run fun, and in its place are a bunch of garden-variety races ran within Joan’s prison walls, complete with 27446 zillion close-ups of Tyrese Gibson doing that scream-cheering ‘aaaaaaaah-yeaaah yo!‘ thing he does in every movie. The whole flick reeks of an 19th rate Running Man, with Statham as the innocent man playing the game by his own rules so he can avoid becoming one of last season’s winners losers. The Ham of Stat’s got a pit crew of other squirrelly inmates, including a man who calls himself ‘Coach’ (Ian McShane, further McShaming his post-Deadwood career) cause Stats need a coach(!), some Hispanic kid, and in one of the worstest screen characters of the year, a Rain Manesque kid who knows a lotta stuff but is retarded but they never say he is but he surely acts like it but isnt cause he’s with it but he’s not so lets juss say he’s socially retarded (Frederick Koehler, aka Chip from Kate & Allie and Jeri Blank’s son on Strangers With Candy, who we love to see get work, but takes 381283832 steps backwards here), and they add nothing but more stupidity to this beyond slit yer eyes out poop-a-thon from the opposite of PT Anderson, Paul WS Anderson (we only wish we had more eyes in which to slit). The only positive thang to come out of all of this is…

Makes Our Hearts Race: Cuban-American model/actress/hotness/future Mrs Thigh
Master Natalie Martinez

Verdictgo: Slit Your Eyes Out Repoopulous to the Crème de ^Menthe degree

Traitor opens at a theater new Jew today, while we pray that Death leaves them as quickly as possible

until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

The House Bunny
Rumor (Willis) Has It, This Movie Has No Hop
Trailers & Mo

Like the Playboy scented TV show The Girls Next Door, The House Bunny sends an awful message to young females that in order to succeed in this world you gotta be pretty and pretty dumb (even if they do try to say otherwise at the end of the film). If only Bunny were anywhere near as entertaining as Girls is (Holly, Bridget and Kendra + Hef appear in the film, along with some other pointless cameos like Dan Patrick, Shaq and Matt Leinart), let alone, was as short as a single episode of the giggle and jiggle fest. While the set-up about an expelled mansion bunny finding a new home as the house mother to a sorority of misfits certainly sounds like a perfect fit for Anna Faris‘ brand of dopey humor (and her Jennifer Coolidge wax lips), this ‘comedy’ turns out to be about as flat as the flat-chested women who get rejected by Mosquito Bites Magazine. The two screenwriters behind Legally Blonde attempt to strike the same women empowerment magic here (although luckily we’ve always been able to deflect their spells), but this thing is so terribly ‘vapid’ (the word people keep calling Faris’ character that she takes as a compliment) that it makes Elle Woods look like Thelma & Louise

One of the main things that irked us more than Urkel was the gaggle of girls in the sorority. They’re all such oddballs who loathe glamor and glitz that it’s hard to comprehend why they’d ever want to be in a sorority in the first place. There’s a nerdy one (Emma Stone in glasses, yum), a mute one, a dwarf, a pregnant one (Katharine McPhee, who woulda been better off starring in From Justin To Kelly 2), a tomboy hick (Dana Goodman, who eerily resembles Jeremy Renner), one covered in Joan Cusack Sixteen Candles-type protective metal (Rumer Willis, whose face scares us) and a goth with piercings everywhere (Kat Dennings, being annoying, juss like she was in The 40 Year Old Virgin). You juss knows they have inner beauty, in a She’s All That kinda way, and only Faris has they keys to unlock it. When she makes them over, Stone resembles a whored out version of Lohan and Dennings, Hillary Duff. Of course the girls have some lessons in humility to impart upon Faris’ empty mind, as she attempts to woo a normal guy (Colin Hanks… someone please explain why he keeps getting jobs, besides the fact that he’s Rita Wilson’s son). Oh yeah, and all of this shiz is goings on within the pseudo-plot about trying to raise money and find a new class of pledges before the Dean throws the sorority off campus. This could been the female answer to The Revenge of The Nerds, but instead it ended up being about as poopified as the straight-to-TV flick Revenge of the Nerds III: The Next Generation. Lamar, stick a javelin in this one, please!

Pledge Pin-Ups: meat Rachel Specter & Sarah Wright (sometimes credited as Sarah Mason), two ladies in a rival sorority who have no purpose being in this movie other than looking fine!

Verdictgo: Slit Your Eyes Out Repoopulous

Hamlet 2
Something Is Rotten In Arizona
Trailers & Mo

Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan) is at his wits’ end. Having failed as an actor, unless you count that Herpes medication ad he appeared in, he’s retreated to suburban hell in Tuscon, Arizona as a high school drama teacher. To make splatters worse, due to budget cuts, and the poor critical receptions of his last few plays based off of modern movies (his Erin Brokovich was nowhere near as good as Max Fisher’s Vietnam opus), the school has decided to shut down his class by the end of the year. Yet nothing will stand in Dana’s way of succeeding, even his giant lack of talent. He decides that Shakespeare’s Hamlet tragedy needs a happy second life and drums up an abortion of a sequel complete with a rocking Jesus and plenty of Grease lightening

A majority of the film centers on putting the play together, with the help, or lack thereof, from his rowdy class mainly consisting of a bunch of yo boys and girls, and is filled with some dreadful lame bits of humor as seen in the trailer (people running into things! gay jokes!). It almost feels as dead as The House Bunny, but as soon as the curtain rises on the actual production, the film comes alive and makes up for any shortcomings that came before it. Coogan’s manic energy (which reminded us a lot of Paul Dinello’s Geoffrey Jellineck character from Strangers With Candy) saves the production, both liguratively and fiterally. The rest of the cast try their best to keep up with him, but their characters are either underdeveloped (esp the students, but we didn’t let that stop us from continuing our rising love for Melonie Diaz, last seen in Be Kind Rewind), purposeless (Catherine Keener, Amy Poehler and David Arquette) or wasted (Elizabeth Shue… playing ELISABETH SHUE!), that this puppy is purty much a one man show. To see or not to see may be the question, but if you do go, juss remember the play’s the thing!

As We Like It: dude, Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, is so bangin

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Henry Poole Is Here
Take A Dip In The Holy Water
Trailers & Mo

Henry Poole Is Luke Wilson, a mopey man looking to drown his sorrows with alcohol in the new sunny neighborhood he juss moved into. One day his nosy next-door neighbor Esperanza (Adriana Barraza, returning from Mexico after almost killing Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett’s kids) notices the face of Jesus on the exterior wall of his house and all heaven and hell breaks lose. While she’s convinced that it’s a sign from above (muss be the blood dripping from it), Henry, who simply wants to be left alone, takes it a sign of annoying things to come. Soon the holy rollers start rolling in (including a priest understatedly played by George Lopez), looking for a miracle (including this girl, whose face is 80 zillion times scarier than Rumer Willis’) to cure all their ills. Some of dem ills do get cured, including the muteness of his other neighbor’s (Radha Mitchell) daughter (Morgan Lily, perhaps the mos adorable lil girl ever!), yet Henry remains unconvinced, even as he starts to fall for her (Radha, not the daughter you sick-o-phant). Why is he so against these possible acts of Gawd? It’s as if he doesn’t believe in hope and faith (no, not that TV show that no one ever watched). OK, so the ploting and conclusion is quite obvious and is pieced together a tad too unevenly, and the soundtrack is beyond awkward (Blur’s ‘Song 2’, aka the Wooo-Whoo song, is played as Luke attempts to remove the Jesus face with a hose), but director Mark Pellington (Arlington Road, Mothman Prophecies and Pearl Jam’s ‘Jeremy’ video), who’s using the film as therapeutic way to help get over the loss of his beloved wife, provides enuff spiritual enlightenment to earn our praise

Pareidoliamania!: now you can make your own miracles at home with the Jesus pan!

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Bunny and Hamlet 2 join Henry P in theaters mos everywhere today

until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Pineapple Express
Two Bongs Don’t Make A Right
Trailers & Mo

If there were a Mount Rushmore for filmdom’s finest smot pokers, Cheech & Chong, Jeffrey Lebowski and Jeff Spicoli would be our picks for a foursome chiseled outta stone(r). There are plenty of other memorable midnight tokers worthy of such an honor, like the Texan kiddies from Dazed & Confused, the porch rockers of Friday, the mini-hamburger obsessed Harold & Kumar, the fully baked Half-Baked crew, the freedom lighters of Easy Rider and Brad Pitt’s method man acting in True Romance, but where do Judd Apatow’s Pineapple Expressionists Dale Denton (Seth Rogen) and Saul Silver (James Franco) rank? Well, if they made a Mount Poopmore, they’d be on there right next to any of the hammy actors from Reefer Madness and Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut. It’s not that Rogen and Franco can’t act stoned (and you know they can if you’ve seen the vastly overrated TV series Freaks & Geeks), it’s juss that the movie these stoners appear in isn’t much of a stoner movie so their performances are wasted (poor choice of words) and ultimately forgettable. It’s not even much of a comedy for that splatter, as the ‘jokes’ are about as flat as a 2-liter of RC Cola that has been cap-less for ten days. We’re sure you’ll laff more than we did (the total came to 2 chuckles, so BEAT THAT!), but then again, you probably worship Dane Cook and saw Semi-Pro in a theater. What the film ends up being is a silly (not in a good way) 8th rate action flick that makes the Eugene Levy-John Candy crapfest known as Armed and Dangerous look like Terminator 2 written by vintage Woody Allen. What’s even more disappointing is that the film was directed with such little skill or flair by David Gordon Green, a man of great talent who is way outta his league here. So peas, pass this douche-y on the left hand side and instead czech out Green’s other ’08 pic Snow Angels or The Wackness, although we weren’t fully enamored with it , you’d be better off inhaling from that joint than partaking in the shwag that is Pineapple Express

Shirt Tales: the bestest part of the entire movie is James Franco’s kitten being eaten by a shark t-shirt, yet the tee is a rip off of a shirt designed for Urban Outfitters by a clothing company called WOWCH and they aint too happy about it

Verdictgo: Slit Your Eyes Out Repoopulous

Bottle Shock
The O-enophiles: Pleasant Napa Valley Fundays
Trailers & Mo

There once was a time when California wines were considered to be about as classy as Married With Children and as world-renowned as Burger Chef. Then a lil thing dubbed the Judgment of Paris happened (aka the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976), where a bunch of stuffy Frenchies sirprizngly awarded blue ribbons to some Napa vineyards, and the rest is history. Bottle Shock recaptures these events, focusing primarily on Chateau Montelena (even doing a bit of filming on the grounds), its owner Jim Barrett (Bill Pulman, who on this ship you refer to as ‘idiot’, not ‘you Captain’) and his dippy refried beaned son Bo (Chris Pine, on this ship you refer to him as the new Captain Kirk!!), and how a British gent named (no, not that one) Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman, finger looking good with a bucket of KFC) plucked them from obscurity and changed the face (and taste) of wine forever. Also along for the ride are Federico Diaz, that annoying Australian girl from Transformers who loves saying the word ‘supercomputer’, Count Dooku’s daughter [ytmnd] and Dennis Farina (doing the best he can w/o a gun). The film has an overly sundrenched and smiley tone about it, that’s reminiscent of the yumcredible Juicy Fruit ad from the 80s (the taste that’s gonna move ya!), yet despite all it’s wine & cheesiness, you juss can’t stick a cork in this one. It’s like a happier, lamer Sideways [TWS review], so take a whiff and then a sip and enjoy

Is Anything Sacred?: there’s a rival movie in the works based off of George M. Tabor’s book Judgment of Paris and Chateau Montelena was recently sold to a French wine company

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Bottle Shock opens today in limited release while Pineapple is currently playing at a theater near Jew. Happy b-day M Night!

until next thyme the balcony is clothed…