Thighs Wide Shut

Sunshine Cleaning
Not Much More Than Meets The Supplies
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

Sunshine Cleaning starts with a bang (a man offs himself in a gun store) and ends in predictability (life’s tough, but we’ll make it through, together, as a family!). And it’s no real sirprize that it turned its decent potential (a house cleaner becomes a CSI quicker picker upper) into an underwhelming slice of familiarity when the movie typecasted it’s tight cast (we won’t even bother mentioning that Sunshine was produced by the team behind Little Miss Sunshine… although we juss did, and this new Sunshine coulda used a tad of the quirkiness that the other had too much of). Amy Adams plays a cheery, but vulnerable girl. Emily Blunt is an easily annoyed, eye-rolling sourpuss. Alan Arkin is a witty grampa who’s so loving, and so witty! And grumpy gus Mary Lynn Rajskub sports a look on her face like she was in a Willie McGee impersonator competition. That’s some of the least stretching we’ve seen since we didn’t stretch for every PE class during middle school (go Jags!). The movie isn’t anywhere close to being bad. Then again, so is eating at Taco Bell, but you don’t have to eat at Taco Bell

Most Kind of Wonderful: we’re pleased as punch to know that Eric Stoltz’ lil sister in Some Kind of Wonderful (Maddie Corman) is still employed as an actress

Verdictgo: Sum Merit But No Stinking Badges

Watchmen
Any Movie We See Twice In A Theater Is Bona Fide Bestness
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

no qualms from these sweaty palms in viewing #2 of the movie with the greatestesteistest opening credits mt EVERest, cept:

people probably won’t love it as much if they haven’t read the graphic novel comic books

Frank Langella should have played Nixon

Michael Sheen should have played /Frost

Stanley Hudson should have played Dr Malcolm Long

Ozymandias needed to be less British, more buff, less gay, less guy from Match Point

in addition to being JFK’s killer, the Comedian should have also been the Zodiac too

Zodiac should have won best picture

how can Zack Snyder get any more visionary than this?

more credits for Eli Snyder

more Akerman hotness

more NSFW Akerman hotness

let more women kiss Silhouette

more blue penis

why wasn’t it 17 hours long?

Verdictgo: still BREAST IN SHOW!!!!!, but not with even more!!!!!

Cleaning is currently playing in limited release, while Wacthmen is still being watched at a theater near Jews

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

The Edge of Love
Couples Retreated
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

It’s WWII and London’s being bombarded by Germany. A beautiful young girl (Keira Knightley) takes refuge in an Underground Tube station, while she awaits desperately for the return of her true love, an average Joe solider, fighting on the front lines on mainland Europe. Sounds purty much like the borefest that was Atonement (and to some extent, A Very Long Engagement), dunnit?

With John Maybury‘s The Edge of Love (with a script by Knightley’s mum Sharman Macdonald… who also suffers from mosquito bites) that’s where the similarities with Atonement end, since her boy (the always creepy Cillian Murphy) comes home after the war, to Wales where she waits, and instead of an annoyingly jealous lil sister gumming up the works of our lovers, it’s her real life (yep, this is a truish story!) childhood poet pal Dylan Thomas (Brothers & Sisters‘ Matthew Rhys, a semi-doppelganger for James McAvoy) doing more damage than a close-up of Glenn Close. Thomas is married to casual Mondays-Fridays Sienna Miller, but his heart belongs to Knightley (she’s a bit conflicted herself, but ultimately stands by her man). The two couples live and booze it up before Murphy’s deployed (the ladies share a bath, but sadly it’s not a dirty one), and when he comes home shell shocked, their relationships and friendships strain more than 89 tons of spaghetti in the world’s largest strainer

The four lead performances are golden (even if we’re all suffering from K Knightley period piece fatigue), the production values are top notch, and the settings are simply gorgeous (book us on the first flight headed to Wales please!), but when the story hits its post-war patch, it lost much of the flavor it built up along the way. Yet we stuck with The Edge of Love to the very end (involving the lowest-keyed courtroom scene we’ve viddyed in ages), which cannot be said of Atonement (we kissed it goodbye after the first act). So is Love Knightley’s atonement to us all for Atonement? Without that irksome typewriter score, we’d have to say yes

They Shoots, He Scores!: the film’s luscious soundtrack was overseen by the brilliant Angelo Badalamenti, a frequent David Lynch collaborator. Some of the songs in the film were performed by the likes of Siouxsie Sioux, Suggs from Madness and even Knightley herself! Lisa Stansfield appears in the film, but does not lend her pipes

Verdictgo: it borders a lil bit on Meritville, but it also has badges so Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Tokyo!
Three Stories Low
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

Michel Gondry slowly turns a girl into a chair for no reason, Leos Carax lets a bearded creature on the loose and then puts him on trial, while Joon-ho Bong makes a shut-in stack pizza boxes and then finally go outside. Yep, that’s the gist of the three pointless lil stories that are being spun in Tokyo!, a head scratching affair that shoulda been called Tokyo? What more is there to say? Nothing, cept you should Netflix Paris, Je T’Aime instead, where the shorts are shorter and the hit to miss ratio is even, not all misses

Verdictgo: Very Little Merit But No Stinkin Badges

The Edge of Love opens in LA today, NY next week, and elsewhere elsewhen, while Tokyo! is currently playing in limited release

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Crossing Over
An Immigrant Song Out of Tune
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

Traffic, minus the drugs and gratuitous color schemes + Babel, but with Australian NSFWness instead of Japanese + the beyond schmaltzyness of Crash = Crossing Over, which is sadly not the big screen adaptation of John Edward’s contacting the dead hocus pocusness. Yep, he we go again with yet another criss-crossing character overload, this time around tackling the topic of illegal immigrants in the LA area and their desire to become US citizens, and it is by far the weakest outta the group mentioned above. So if the thought of them films drive you more batty than William Peter Blatty, you may want to deport yerself from going to see director Wayne Kramer‘s expansion of his own short film of the same name. The subject matter is close to Kramer’s heart, as he was a South African turned naturalized USer, and his passion for this project (does that make it a passion project?) is obvious on-screen, but it’s thighly doubtful that you’ll be able to share in any of his feelings

There’s too many stories being randy the rammed down our throats at once, and a majority of them are either not interesting (cutie pie Jim Sturgess pretending to be a deeply devout Jew), underdeveloped (Ashley Judd feels sorry for some motherless African kid) or something anyone wants to see anymore on film (Ray Liotta playing his 8321763175th bazillion creepazoid). The main vignette revolves around an immigration agent with a heart (Harrison Ford), who goes out of his way to stop the Russians from unleashing alien powers from Mayan temples help helpless hot illegals (like Alice Braga) and deal with the Iranian old-world ways of his partner (Cliff Curtis, aka ‘that guy’)’s family. His misadventures ultimately come to a head at a swearing in ceremony at the film’s end, and unintended hilarity ensues. Luckily, amongst all the turds, there was one tale that shined through. It was about a young Muslim girl (Summer Bishil, proving she’s no one-hit wonder after the hard to watch but MUSS SEE Towelhead) and how the gov-mint wants to deport her after she delivers a class speech about identifying and understanding, but not necessarily supporting, the motives behind the 9/11 hijackers’ actions. That coulda been a mos solid movie on its own right (and wrong), but instead the story getz mostly lost amongst all the Crashing and Babeling Traffic noise

Poster Child Molester: tell Harrison’s eyes to stop scaring us. and can someone tell casting directors to stop hiring Ray Liotta

Verdictgo: Very Little Merit But No Stikin Badges

Crossing Over opens in select theaters today

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Friday the 13th
Who Could Axe For More? Everyone!
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

Jason Voorhees is back and he’s badder than ever just about the same/lame as you remember him! Producer Michael Bay and director Marcus Nispel (not to be confused with Nipsey Russell) have reteamed to remake/not improve upon another horror classic, like they pointlessly did with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (although we still stand by the claim that the TCM prequel was > than the Star Wars prequels). This is the 11th Friday the 13th movie (or 12th, if you count Freddy vs Jason) and you know they aint gonna stop making these until you stop paying to see em, or at least until they hit #13. Called a ‘reboot’ (still officially one of the wurstest/most annoying terms used in print, since at least 2006), this new and not at all scary FT13 is about as necessary as owning a They Are Who We Thought They Wereâ„¢ hat (come to think of it, owning that hat is kinda necessary). At least the moviemakers (we wouldn’t dare call them ‘filmmakers’) had the common indecency to include some solid T&A and have their refarted characters (including this dude who totally wishes he was Matt McCoughney circa Dazed & Confused and Aaron Yoo, who is also known as annoying Asian guy, but is not as annoying as this annoying Asian guy) spew dialog that was kinda sorta high-lariously written, such as ‘Your tits are stupendous!‘. Next up for Bay (and Nipsey Nispel) is a repooping of A Nigthmare on Elm Street, followed by a repoop of The Birds with Naomi Watts. What’s with all the repoops Bay? If you love these classics so much and want to introduce them to a whole new generation of moviegoers why don’t you juss re-release the originals in theaters (juss like the successful run of The Exorcist in 2000) instead of repooping all over them? Repoop!

Damsels In Dis-Dress:

gawd bless the bodies of work of Julianna Guill, Danielle Panabaker & Willa Ford… although cutie-pie mcgee/young Jeanne Tripplehorn look-alike Panabaker sadly keeps her clothes on the entire time

Verdictgo: with all this repoop talk, you’d think that this would be a no doubt repoopulous affair, but it’s not entirely unwatchable, so Sum Merit But No Stinking Badges

Push
It Comes To Shove
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

Push looks 100% awesome, but makes -348386 sense and is about .001% entertaining. It’s kinda like Heroes or X-Men, where everyone and yer nana has a special power and everyone else is out to get them, yet it’s more confusing and doesn’t star Greg Grunberg or is directed by Brett Ratner. It hactually stars a sorta growns up Dakota Fanning (who draws the future like that drawer of the future from Heroes) and that dude from Amistad and that guy who’s the flaming gay brother of Jessica Alba and Camilla belle’s eyebrows, which are so hot, but for most of the movie they make her too sweaty and beat-up looking, which totally is not her steez, but later on in the movie she cleans up and looks like good old Camilla Belle and she’s the bestest belle since Albert Belle was on the O’s, justin case you plumb forgot. We can’t remember what the premise of the movie was or what anyone’s powers were (besides the power of Asians screaming) or why any of it mattered, but wethinks it inolved some sorta ongoing battle between the Movers, Pushers, Wacthers, Bleeders, Sniffs, Shifters, Wipers, Shadows and Stitchers (thanks Wikipedia!). Wonder if the Movers are also Shakers and if any Quakers are also Shakers and if any of them live in Shaker Heights, Ohio? Are you as lost as Hurley? So are we, so we’ll stop now and forever hold our peace pipe about a movie so hard to watch that it makes the new Friday The 13th look like the old Friday The 13th

We Wanna Be Her Pusher: meat 李小璐 aka Li Xiao Lu aka Jacqueline Li aka Lu Lu aka our future wife

Verdictgo: Slit Yer Eyes Out Repoopulous

Friday and Push are currently playing at a theater new Jews

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

He’s Just Not That Into You
She’ll Be Into It, You Just Won’t Not
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

There’s a wildly popular book that we haven’t read called He’s Just Not That Into You (which is based off of a line of dialog from a wildly popular show that we didn’t watch called Sex & The City) that explains to women the most obvious truths about men and their actions and how they don’t want to bang you. The fact that a tonz of ladies out there couldn’t figure that out on their own, from the fact that they weren’t being banged, and had to be told thru a book makes us want to cry (and bang some women, but not necessarily those particular ladies cause we’re not that into you). Anywho, for those who never took on this reading assignment (most men, women who get banged, people who can’t read, people who hate people), here comes a dumb downed motion picture version that’s basically 19 generic romantic comedies rolled into one giant generic romantic drama (or were they aiming for comedy? hard to tell since it wasn’t funny or very dramatic). Anywho, it appears that director Ken Kwapis has access to an amazing casting director and has some sorta of vendetta against paying audiences cause all he wants to do is hand in films with scripts that were written in urine, in the snow, and everyone knows that urine in snow tell the worstest stories!! First Kwapis tortured us with License to Wed (aka I Now Pronounce You One Giant Piece of Sh$t) and now he’s back, but at least he had the good sense to leave Robin Williams on the sidelines this poo around. We’ll give Kwapie a minor pass in general since he’s produced episodes of The Office, one of if not the best show goings on the telly

The movie focuses on straight white ladies and the straight white men they either want to bang, are banging, or aren’t banging enuff. What, gay, Asian, black and purple womensz don’t have love problems like straight white womenz have? And who cares about straight white ladies’ problems hispecially since straight white people be more out than the Bull Moose party. Letttuce meet our lovebirds and how they’re all loosely related and loosely developed, shall we? There’s poor lil Ginnifer Goodwin, who’s more clueless than a person who once owned the board game Clue, lost it, and is now Clue-less. She can’t score with Kevin Connolly cause maybe he only dates ducks cause he talks like a duck. Anywho, Kevin’s trying to bang Scarlett Johansson, cause she looks like a lion and has an enormous rack, but she’s totally sweating Bradley Cooper (who kinda looks like a porn star), a married man married to Jennifer Connelly, who isn’t a man, but she works with Ginnifer and Jennifer Aniston and like twenty other ‘innfers. Aniston has been with Ben Affleck for ages but he’s not the marrying kind cause his old lady was J-Lo and after she took up with that ghoul Marc Anthony his pride was hurt and he knows that Aniston in real life will never end up marrying anyone so he juss strings her along cause he’s just not that into marrying her. Anywho, Justin Long is a wise bar owner who sells Apple products at a discount price. He also avoids banging his hostess Busy Philipps cause he’s a bit too busy AND philipps. Long takes Ginnifer under his wing and helps her learn to fly. They’re perfect for each other, but the characters won’t realize this until the end credits begin to roll, which doesn’t happen until the 1283819 false endings finally become true endings. Drew Barrymore is in the movie for no real reason other than the fact that she’s got a killer smile and she’s a producer of the film and that she totally wasn’t into that dude who wanted to have a date with her cause no one is into that guy. Kris Kristofferson and that gay dude from My So Called Life pop their heads in from time to time and we’re happy to see them working, but we’d rather see a movie where the two of them are lovers and own a glass blowing factory. Stuff happens in this movie, yet nothing really happens, bonds are made and hearts are broken, and white people are white people, so why should this movie be? Sorry, but it weren’t juss that weren’t into it just not, although czech out a ladies opinion on the film from our gal pal over at the bestest Bachelor Bloggg

Nodds & Bends: lil Morgan Lily > Eli Lilly + The Morgan Library, extra Chihiro Fujii apparently does some NSFW extracurricular activities, and Jocelin Donahue definitely earned the role of ‘Cute Girl’

Verdictgo: Very Little Merit But No Stinkin Badges

Fanboys
The Force Is Not Strong With This One
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

Remember seeing Spaceballs back in the ’87 and thinking it was the mos genius spoof of the Star Wars galaxy, but later in life came to realize it really wasn’t all that funny and was hactually (gasp) purty darn lame (look, we love ‘we aint found shit‘ as much as the next guy, but
the movie aint nearly as good as you remember it)? The same won’t be said of Fanboys cause we don’t need the passage of time to figure out how purty darn lame this Star Wars-fused comedy is. The events in the film take place in the year leading up to The Phantom Menace‘s release as our freaks and geeks (the new Jimmy Olsen, that skinny kid, the voice of Gossip Girl, one of those kids from The Girl Next Door, and Dan Fogler, a huge comic talent waiting to explode… if only someone could get him a decent script) will stop at nothing short of breaking into Skywalker Ranch to catch a sneak peek at it (and their motivation to do so is cause one of the characters is dying, yet they treat that fact so lightly that we thought it was a joke). Their excitement of the first new Star Wars film in 16 years is certainly understandable, since we all felt the same way, and had this movie been made in 1998/9, maybe this mild mannered Lucas love affair woulda worked, but as we all know the new Star Wars episodes ended up sucking and who really wants to celebrate a movie that celebrates the release of a movie that shouldn’t have been released. That aside, the film never takes full advantage of its golden opportunity to riff on Star Wars fan culture. Sure, there’s some yucks (and by some, we’d say a total of 4 laffs) to be found when referencing the old films, but it’s no mountain that hasn’t been climbed before, like with Family Guy‘s overrated ‘Blue Harvest’ episode or Robot Chicken’s roast. As for the Billy Dee Williams, Carrie Fisher and William Shatner cameos? They woulda been better off starring in a Cash 4 Gold commerical with MC Hammer and Ed McMahon than wasting their time with Fanboys. You shouldn’t either and instead juss gaze at its hammazin (Apatowish) poster. Then again, what are we to expect from a movie that has Seth Rogen playing two different roles? One Seth Rogen is enuff, but two? That’s way too much Seth Rogen for anyone to handle

Dex’s Diner: never forget Jedi Chefs!

Verdictgo: Very Little Merit But No Stinkin Badges

Coraline
Dread Buttons
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

The stop motion magic from the dude who gave us The Nightmare Before Christmas is back, and after working with the zany creations by such loony bins like Roald Dahl and Tim Burton, he’s returning to weirdo alley again by tackling a Neil Gaiman book, but this time the stakes are higher, cause this baby’s in 3-D (it’s like watching that Scarecrow GE commercial thru a View-Master)!!! Lil Coraline (not ‘Caroline’, but juss as sweet as the one in Neil Diamond’s song, who looks like a claymated Punky Brewster and is voiced with perfect pitch by Dakota Fanning), and her family just moved to cloudy Oregon, where her days are filled with loneliness and boredom. Mom (Teri Hatcher, actually better heard here than seen anywhere) and pop (the PC guy… wonder who’s gonna win the battle of MAC vs PC at the box office this weekend?) won’t give her the time of day, let alone cook her something decent to eat. Then one day Coraline finds a portal to an alternate world that’s just like her own, yet in this new one she’s the center of her parents attention, and the home cooked meals can’t be beat (plus she gets to listen to the voices of Ian McShane and Keith David). Everything’s perfect in this idealized place, but maybe a little too perfect (and what’s with everyone having buttons for eyes?). Cracks begin to show and Coraline becomes caught between two worlds. The proceedings are a lil too strange, cold and creepy for most tykes to fully enjoy, and while some parents may feel the same way, it’s hard to pass up a gloriously vivid color paletted 3-D adventure that will make you wish you were ‘shrooming your balls off

Giants of Industry: originally They Might Be Giants were to create numerous songs for the film’s soundtrack, but only one teeny 28 second song made the final cut

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Not That Into You and Coraline open thighs wide, while Fanboys hits up limited theaters today

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…