Screen Philadelphia Weekly

Six Songs More Famous Than the Movies From Which They Originate

By Matt Prigge — Tue, 22 May 2012 14:29:43 PDT

“Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” Song of the South (1946): No doubt most people at Disney would like to send every copy of this splashy musical about a merry slave plantation into the sun. Unfortunately, it contains one of the company’s most beloved songs. Whoops! Disney did rerelease its...

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Will Smith Reprises His Role as Agent J in the Unasked-For Three-quel to "Men in Black"

By Sean Burns — Tue, 22 May 2012 14:39:51 PDT

Grade: D+ A decade-late three-quel anticipated by nobody, this lumbering $215 million behemoth finally stumbles into theaters—punch-drunk, top-heavy, and sweating so hard it’s all but barren of wit. I doubt many would make a case for 1997’s Men in Black ...

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A Boy Hopes to Reunite His Family in "I Wish"

By Matt Prigge — Tue, 22 May 2012 14:37:42 PDT

Grade: B+ Despite being about a young boy hoping to reunite his broken family by a wish upon the Japanese National Railways’ new high-speed line (which co-financed the film), it’s impossible to read the drama I Wish as a work of sickening pap. (And...

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"Polisse" Follows the Impassioned Members of a Child Protection Unit in Paris

By Matt Prigge — Tue, 22 May 2012 14:32:32 PDT

Grade: B “Do you always believe the kids?,” asks an old man accused of raping his granddaughter. In Poliss , we follow the impassioned members of the Child Protection Unit in northern Paris, an arm of law enforcement almost all would agree walks on...

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"Battleship" is a Cobbled Together Junkyard of Stolen Scenes

By Sean Burns — Tue, 22 May 2012 14:35:36 PDT

Grade: D- Ladies and gentlemen, the reductio ad absurdum of summer blockbusters—and not just because it’s based on a fucking board game. Boasting not a single original shot in its entire 131-minute running time, Battleship is cobbled together from a...

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"The Dictator" is Sacha Baron Cohen’s Least Fleshed-Out Role

By Sean Burns — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:38:12 PDT

Grade: D+ Even the beard looks fake. Sacha Baron Cohen, the tall, spindly improvisational comic genius behind Borat and Da Ali G Show, has a way of burrowing into his characters. Part of the brilliance of Borat is his unwavering commitment...

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An Eternal Bachelor Goes on Dates With Elderly Ladies in "Bernie"

By Sean Burns — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:35:06 PDT

Grade: C- Neither fish nor fowl, director Richard Linklater’s hybrid whatzit takes a too-strange-not-to-be-true tale from the tabloids and fleshes it out halfway, relying on eyewitness testimony and documentary devices to fill in all the scenes that nobody probably felt like writing that...

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A Girl Goes on a Series of Dates to Scientifically Prove Her Fiance's Sincerity in "Losing Control"

By Matt Prigge — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:30:48 PDT

Grade: D+ As the irritating stereotype goes, most female comedy protagonists tend to be great at their jobs yet terrible at their lives. Give the indie romance Losing Control credit for originality: Its hero, Samantha—a biology grad student played by an Amy Adams-y Miranda Kent—is bad...

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Six Dark Films About Pregnancy

By Matt Prigge — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:58:28 PDT

Brink of Life (1958): Soon after doing a film about death (The Seventh Seal), Ingmar Bergman made one about birth. It was no less pessimistic. Of the three women who take up residence in a maternity ward, both Ingrid Thulin and Eva Dahlbeck suffer miscarriages while Bibi Andersson, having already...

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"Surviving Progress" is a Doomsday Doc in the Guise of a Dynamic Cine-essay

By Matt Prigge — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:21:16 PDT

Grade: B- The opening of Surviving Progress, a doomsday doc in the guise of a dynamic cine-essay, openly, if somewhat clumsily, quotes 2001: A Space Odyssey: An ape in a lab fumbles around with a pair of plastic letter L’s. As it starts to figure out a way to use them in a matter that would...

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"Mansome" Takes a Look at the Evolving Definition of Masculinity

By Matt Prigge — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:26:08 PDT

Grade: C- Give Morgan Spurlock credit: He’s savvy. He’s got a good thing going, cranking out documentaries with gimmicks so basic that he wins simply for doing it before anyone else. Never mind that few would feel compelled to “reveal” that McDonald’s is unhealthy...

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"What to Expect When You’re Expecting" Borrows the Name, But Not Much Else

By Matt Prigge — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:18:06 PDT

Grade: D+ The thoroughly shitty What to Expect When You’re Expecting makes two movies look better than they deserve. First, Bridesmaids, because any welcome trendsetter inevitably yields a plague of opportunistic, unsightly copycats. (Just ask Pulp Fiction.) Second, and far less deserving,...

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A Vampire Assimilates to Modern Times in "Dark Shadows"

By Matt Prigge — Thu, 10 May 2012 08:27:55 PDT

Grade: C+ There’s no doubt Tim Burton was one of the many weird kids whose mind was corrupted by Dark Shadows, the absurdly gothic cult soap opera that ran during the height of the counterculture and the Vietnam War. But the real driving force behind his perhaps inevitable adaptation...

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"First Position" Trails a Group of Ballet Dancers En Route to Competition

By Matt Prigge — Thu, 10 May 2012 08:16:26 PDT

Grade: B- Ballet doesn’t have the same visceral kick to it as spelling bees, and truthfully, First Position is only generically similar to Spellbound, the hit competition doc that birthed a litter of them (Murderball, Mad Hot Ballroom, etc., etc.). Trailing a sextet of teens en route...

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A Group of Rich Boomers Search for a Dog in "Darling Companion"

By Sean Burns — Tue, 08 May 2012 14:08:36 PDT

Grade: F Perhaps the least consequential film ever made, writer-director Lawrence Kasdan’s first film since 2003’s howling camp classic Dreamcatcher gathers a bunch of uninteresting, aging boomers in a bubble of unquestioned wealth and...

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Bobcat Goldthwait Imagines Life Without Annoying People in "God Bless America"

By Matt Prigge — Tue, 08 May 2012 14:07:58 PDT

Bobcat Goldthwait remembers when he heard about Bubba Smith’s death last fall. The comic admits he didn’t stay in touch with his fellow Police Academy alums, save Tim Kazurinsky, aka the diminutive Sweetchuck. So, he learned of his onetime co-star’s demise the classy way: by...

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A Man Tries to Escape the Mean Streets of Philly in "Changing the Game"

By Matt Prigge — Tue, 08 May 2012 12:46:17 PDT

Grade: C There are two books ritualistically quoted in the twisty, low-budget ghetto thriller Changing the Game : the Bible and Machiavelli’s The Prince. These twin tomes would seem to offer contradictory life paths: one, a holy...

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A Reporter Investigates Parisian College Girls Who Turn to Prostitution in "Elles"

By Matt Prigge — Tue, 08 May 2012 13:04:43 PDT

Grade: C+ The predominant attitude toward on-screen prostitution, let alone sex, is one of grimness. The two young call girls presumably referred to in the title of Elles—a pan-Euro production boasting a Polish filmmaker and a French mega-star—remind us (as though...

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A Dying Man and a Bloodthirsty Teen Decide to Kill Annoying People in "God Bless America"

By Sean Burns — Tue, 08 May 2012 13:00:54 PDT

Grade: C+ Bobcat Goldthwait’s scabrous media satire plays like a sick and twisted wish-fulfillment fantasy for folks fed up with a modern culture that rewards crassness and stupidity. But while Goldthwait’s bile is cathartic, it also feels a bit cheap. Joel Murray (brother of Bill)...

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Six Left-Wing Vigilante Movies

By Matt Prigge — Tue, 08 May 2012 13:09:00 PDT

Joe (1970): When it comes to vigilante justice, the right gets all the fun. While Paul Kersey and Dirty Harry placate conservative wet dreams about shooting first and never asking questions, the left makes somber killjoys like The Ox-Bow Incident and ...

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