Movie review by Greg Carlson

Mexploitation throwback “Casa de mi padre” may not be as satisfying as its surreal pedigree promises, but the Spanish language comedy featuring Will Ferrell as the dim bulb son of a rancher played by the late, great Pedro Armendariz Jr. (to whom the film is dedicated) is recommended viewing for anyone interested in vintage look, z-grade telenovela tributes. As Armando Alvarez, Ferrell delivers his dialogue straight, and press notes made hay with news of the actor’s one-month dialect crash course. Ferrell’s unshakable commitment to character has long been one of his assets, and he carves out a very recognizable persona as an eager-to-please second son yearning to be loved like his older brother.

“Casa de mi padre” echoes the low-fi techniques lovingly reproduced by Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Edgar Wright, Eli Roth, and Rob Zombie in 2007’s “Grindhouse,” including rough splices and print damage. Director Matt Piedmont applies the low-budget, poor production value aesthetic with a wide brush, from ongoing gags involving the liberal placement of mannequins as background “extras” to mismatched continuity within scenes that cut between location photography and studio sets. The silliness extends to the regular appearance of a spirit guide big cat fabricated by the Jim Henson Creature Shop, a handful of musical interludes and an after-the-credits endorsement from a game Dan “Grizzly Adams” Haggerty.

The plot of the movie lifts several of the most recognizable elements of Elia Kazan’s adaptation of “East of Eden,” as well as some of the equally triangular melodramatic whiffs of King Vidor’s “Duel in the Sun.” The filmmakers are certainly affectionate toward their retro inspirations, lavishing the same kind of reverence and attention to period detail “Pootie Tang,” Undercover Brother,” and “Black Dynamite” paid to Blaxploitation.  As the beloved first-born Alvarez scion, Diego Luna demonstrates his inner Tony Montana, engaging fellow “Y tu mama tambien” compadre Gael Garcia Bernal in a contest of flamboyant displays of swaggering machismo.

The movie’s firearm and squib count grossly outpaces the ribaldry, and “Casa de mi padre” skips much of the genre’s sleaze. Predictably, however, the opportunities for women within this world are defined by sexuality. Padre Alvarez employs a battery of scantily clad housemaids, but like any number of the film’s visuals, no payoff or reason is offered to explain their attire. Ferrell and co-star Genesis Rodriguez, who plays Armando’s irresistible, soon-to-be sister-in-law, engage in a ridiculous sex scene that fetishizes the male and female derriere to the brink of lunacy.

Current news items covering the brutality of the illegal drug trade in Mexico are a far cry from the bizarre comic treatment of the same themes in “Casa.” Even so, the movie’s lukewarm social commentary, embedded primarily in the officious, racist DEA agent played by Nick Offerman, reminds viewers that stereotypes can be a two-way street (an explanation of the supply and demand economics of cocaine hilariously sees American buyers as “shit-eating crazy monster babies”). The critique is a throwaway, and the agenda of “Casa de mi padre” is more appropriately concerned with Armando squinting into the sunset with “the eyes of a small chicken” while he tries in vain to roll a cigarette.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

WARNING: The following review reveals plot information. Read only if you have seen “The Cabin in the Woods.”

While major metropolitan critics were asked in preview screenings to avoid any significant revelations contained within the entertaining metafiction titled “The Cabin in the Woods,” any meaningful discussion of the movie would be worthless without the ability to address what amounts to the entire operational conceit of the horror-comedy. In other words, read no more if you plan to see the film. Cooked up by co-screenwriters Joss Whedon (who also produced) and Drew Goddard (who also directed), “The Cabin in the Woods” was shot in 2009 and caught up in MGM’s Chapter 11 problems. Time on the shelf has done little to diminish the movie’s catchy exuberance.

Five coeds pack swimsuits and climb into an RV in anticipation of a weekend frolic at the location of the title, unwittingly cruising into an elaborate trap marking them as human sacrifices. Their every move is monitored and manipulated by the eyes of a massive underground operation led by a pair of eggheads (deadpanning Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford) in white, short-sleeved shirts. En route to the remote destination, a stop at a cobwebbed gas station involves an ominous exchange between the travelers and the creepy, tobacco-chewing attendant Mordecai (Tim De Zarn), but needless to say, the kids ignore the harbinger as if they had never seen a horror movie.

Grafting the puppetmaster premise of “The Truman Show” and the less-known “Special Service” episode of the 1980s “Twilight Zone” to the self-referential, filmic Droste effects generated by Wes Craven’s “Scream” (“Cabin” includes a variation on the “rule” proscribing splitting up when in danger) and Sam Raimi’s Ash saga, especially “Evil Dead II,” “The Cabin in the Woods” favors humor over fright, even though the filmmakers jolt the audience with several shocks before an outrageous late-arriving turn where all hell breaks loose. Along the way, the filmmakers identify their own predilections for all manner of cinematic scare tactics, thoughtfully distinguishing between the plain old zombie and the “zombie redneck torture family.”

The vast number of allusions to horror conventions would take multiple viewings to tally, and Whedon and Goddard gleefully pile up references to H.P Lovecraft, EC Comics, lakeside psycho killer series, John Landis and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” Japanese ghost stories, and the “anything goes” spirit of Nobuhiko Ohbayashi’s “Hausu.” The film would have been even better had the elevators containing our collective worst nightmares included cameo appearances by additional iconic inspirations such as the key Universal Studios monsters portrayed by Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, and Boris Karloff, as well as more recent slashers like Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger.

Sigourney Weaver, whose Ellen Ripley is one of the quintessential “final girls” identified by Carol Clover – despite the lack of any preoccupation with the character’s virginity in “Alien” – pads the “voices of authority” category on her resume, adding “The Cabin in the Woods” to a list that includes “Avatar,” “WALL-E,” and “Paul.” The surprise of seeing Weaver is compromised by her duller narrative function as the denouement “explainer” who nearly blurts “If not for you meddling kids…” Kristen Connolly’s Dana, whose unisex name is another homage to one tradition of final girl protagonists, may be prevented from fulfilling all the criteria associated with the concept of the last survivor standing, but she may earn a spot next to some of the genre’s most tenacious veterans.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The latest if not the last entry in the teensploitation franchise known for its ribald antics and carnal humiliations, “American Reunion” is the fourth theatrically released movie in the series and the eighth overall. Missing the tenth anniversary by a couple years, the script clumsily but self-mockingly explains away the unlikelihood of a thirteenth class reunion with some expository dialogue as protagonist Jim (Jason Biggs) meets up with his core group of friends to relive the memories of 1999 and presumably generate a few new ones. Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, of “Harold & Kumar” fame, assume screenplay and directorial duties, but never quite capture the – dare we say, nuances – of Paul and Chris Weitz’s filmmaking and Adam Herz’s writing.

For admirers of the original film willing to overlook almost everything in the terrible sequels, “American Reunion” tries with no small amount of desperation to capitalize on the seemingly incongruous blend of familial warmth and penis jokes popularized though not originated in Judd Apatow’s movies. Both Apatow and the “American Pie” films owe a debt to John Hughes, not to mention “American Graffiti,” “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” and “Dazed and Confused.” The original film’s male-centered quest to dispense with virginity aligns “American Pie” with a long list of sex-as-rite-of-passage tales, including “Porky’s,” “The Last American Virgin,” and the lesser known “Hot Moves.”

Every principal member of the original cast returns, although Natasha Lyonne’s Jessica appears in a fleeting cameo. Only the most devoted fans would remember that of Jim’s best friends, Chris Klein’s Oz did not attend “American Wedding,” and neither did Lyonne, Mena Suvari, Tara Reid, or Shannon Elizabeth. Several minor characters, including John/MILF Guy #2 (John Cho) and Chuck “The Sherminator” Sherman (Chris Owen) are also on hand. We learn that Jim’s mother has died, but her passing seems to have been written essentially to facilitate a boozy encounter between Noah (Eugene Levy) and Stifler’s mom (Jennifer Coolidge).

The lustful chain of outrageous calamities bedeviling Jim over the years (pastry masturbation, superglue mistaken for lubricant, shaved pubic hair vented directly to wedding cake) forges a new link in neighbor Kara (Ali Cobrin), the girl-next-door that Jim used to babysit. Now eighteen and eager to lose her own virginity, Kara targets our married hero, straining his imagination as well as his fidelity to Michelle (Alyson Hannigan). Naturally, Jim’s understanding father is on hand to awkwardly share advice with his son, and even though we’ve been there so many times before, the nicely timed scenes between Biggs and Levy are among the movie’s high points.

On several occasions, “American Reunion” acknowledges the difficulties of growing up and moving on, from Jim and Michelle’s transition into parenthood to Stifler’s (Seann William Scott) angry realization that high school may have been the best time of his life. At the expense of other more promising stories, “Reunion” spends altogether too much energy on the boorish Stifler, the perpetual fifth wheel who emerged from secondary status to huge popularity, ala Arthur Fonzarelli. Scott’s character is much better in small doses, and even though a surprising turnabout reverses his previous failures, some small pleasure is derived watching “the Stif-meister” labor fruitlessly to reconstruct his former glories.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In the opening scene of Jay and Mark Duplass’ “Jeff, Who Lives at Home” title manchild Jason Segel humorously expounds on his dedication to M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs.” In breathless wonderment, Jeff outlines into his handheld recorder a philosophy dependent on barely-there synchronicities and a universe where even the most farfetched coincidences could be the markers of profound portent. Given the history of the filmmakers, the viewer cannot be sure whether and to what extent Jeff is sympathetic and meant to be taken seriously. Is he an ambitionless pothead whose embrace of a ridiculous Mel Gibson film suggests to sophisticates that he is not deserving of respect? That the monologue is delivered on the toilet initially points to yes, but the rest of the movie appears to argue on behalf of Jeff as a decent, worthy person.

Jeff’s easygoing lifestyle is mirrored by the movie’s uncomplicated plot, in which Jeff and his insensitive brother Pat (Ed Helms) reconnect while conducting an incompetent surveillance job on Pat’s frustrated and possibly adulterous wife Linda (Judy Greer). Meanwhile, Jeff’s mother Sharon (Susan Sarandon) attempts to figure out the identity of the entirely too obvious secret admirer at the office where she works. The character-driven orientation favored by the filmmakers allows the accomplished cast to riff on the subtleties and tics of personality that are needed to fill in the gaps between the slapstick shenanigans that echo so many dozens of TV sitcom scripts.

Tagged as practitioners of the so-called mumblecore aesthetic of do-it-yourself moviemaking and the low stakes, irony-dependent “white people problems” that almost inevitable accompany the plotlines of said films, the Duplass brothers began the transition away from outsider status with “Cyrus” in 2010. “Jeff, Who Lives at Home” is less engaging and accomplished than “Cyrus,” even though both movies share the premise of lead adult characters who still live with their mothers. As usual, the women in the movie carry the burden of responsibility while the males embody lavish quixotic pursuits of delusional fancy – minus the chivalry. Pat’s ill-conceived purchase of a Porsche becomes an operational symbol of his self-centeredness and his inability to listen to Linda.

The Duplass’ jittery photography embraces the unmotivated zoom in what feels like deliberate defiance of technical sophistication, and the distraction, as Andrew Schenker adroitly noted, “gets more tired with each film.” The movie’s episodic structure suggests a series of short films, some better than others. The section in which Jeff gets mugged following a pickup basketball game won’t do much to help the negative perception of mumblecore’s attitudes regarding race, but the sequence unfolds like a Raymond Carver short story and is significantly more interesting than the foolish chapter in which Jeff eavesdrops on Linda at a bistro.

There is little doubt that the climax of “Jeff, Who Lives at Home” resorts to the feel-good banalities that tidily conclude so many mainstream Hollywood comedies, and the movie’s journey is significantly better than its ultimate, huggy destination. The contrivances surrounding the culmination of Jeff’s quest to discern the cosmic purpose of his “Signs”-inspired ideology take place during a traffic jam that is too shapeless to align with either Hal Needham’s “The Cannonball Run” or Jen-Luc Godard’s “Week End.” All the characters conveniently end up in the same place at the same time, and make validating, split-second decisions guaranteed to divide audience goodwill.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Suzanne Collins’ mighty young adult turned crossover publishing phenomenon “The Hunger Games” arrives in theatres as the franchise heir apparent to book series-to-screen juggernauts like “Harry Potter” and “Twilight.” With a ready-made fan base eager to see heroic Katniss Everdeen come alive in the person of Jennifer Lawrence, “The Hunger Games” will almost certainly make a very big star out of its talented lead. Lawrence’s Oscar-nominated work in “Winter’s Bone” runs in thematic parallel to the flinty “girl on fire,” a resourceful, intelligent, and welcome female leader in a world dominated by male action heroes.

Classifiably critic-proof, the release of “The Hunger Games” movie has already launched a library of interpretation, from critiques of clueless, racist Twitter users flabbergasted that certain characters (Rue in particular) are not played by white actors to iron-willed defenses of Koshun Takami’s “Battle Royale” as the unsung – and, until recently, largely unacknowledged – origin of Collins’ core story elements. Collins denied familiarity with “Battle Royale” in a detailed “New York Times” profile by Susan Dominus, shrewdly identifying the ancient Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur as her inspiration, but as Irene Peter quipped, “ignorance is no excuse, it’s the real thing.”

Certainly, dystopian fiction featuring life and death consequences did not originate with Takami’s novel, and “The Hunger Games” owes additional debts to Orwell’s “1984,” Jackson’s “The Lottery,” and Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game,” to name just three items on a growing list of suggested influences. But whether one reads the novel as a protest of economic disparity between rich and poor, an expose of societal dependency on lowest-common-denominator reality television, an exploration of the horrors of war, or simply as an allegorical corollary to the real and imagined struggles of adolescence, “The Hunger Games” is elastic enough to withstand a variety of wide-ranging interpretations.

The production design, special effects, and costumes place “The Hunger Games” somewhere between “Twilight” and “Harry Potter” on the scale of visual value. The computer generated images of the galloping quadrupeds known as mutts outpace the werewolves of Forks, Washington, but the garish fright wigs and pancake makeup favored by the faux-aristocratic denizens of the imperial headquarters are deliberately redolent of foppish French Revolution-era aristocrats, and the enterprise often feels surprisingly cheap. With the ironic exception of the scenes in which Stanley Tucci’s Caesar Flickerman interviews the ill-fated tributes on television, many of the Capitol sets resemble something from made-for-TV movies.

Stylistically, “The Hunger Games” falters in its nausea-inducing handheld camerawork, a poor choice that offers no deep insight into the omnipresent media coverage demanded by the bloodthirsty Big Brothers of the Capitol – other than to serve as a weak reminder that nearly everything we see is presumably being captured for broadcast. Additionally, the demands of the film’s PG-13 rating drain the blood from Collins’ visceral descriptions of death in the arena. In place of the stark immediacy of the text, Ross dances around the horrors of children killing children, cutting away or staying in close to avoid showing any detail that might run afoul of the MPAA (the depiction of the tracker jacker attack is particularly flimsy and ineffective). One supposes there is some kind of insincerity suggested by the movie’s compromise position, but the broken state of the movie ratings system offers no alternative for a massive, mainstream release.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Riveting, humane, and vibrantly alive with closely observed detail, Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation” showcases dimensions of contemporary Iran that few Americans could imagine while at the same time remaining steadfastly universal. Tumbling headlong through a series of increasingly contentious legal dilemmas, Farhadi’s restless, urgent storytelling – captured in crowded frames by cinematographer Mahmoud Kalari – bounces between domestic and municipal locations as a painful and complex examination of marriage, parenthood, caregiving, class, gender, and adolescence consolidates into the kind of masterful cinematic storytelling crafted by the great Italian neorealist filmmakers of the 1940s.

The first Iranian motion picture to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlin International Film Festival,  “A Separation” deposits the viewer in the middle of a searing standoff between middle class Tehran spouses Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami), at odds over Simin’s desire to move the family out of the country to provide better opportunities for their child Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, the filmmaker’s daughter). Nader refuses to leave his aging father, whose struggle with Alzheimer’s disease makes constant supervision a necessity, and the bitter standoff only signals more rough times ahead.

Simin moves in with her parents, and Nader hires the pregnant Razieh (Sareh Bayat), who illegally hides the employment from her husband Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), as a housekeeper and caretaker. Misunderstandings and poor choices lead to tragic results, and Nader and Razieh find themselves entangled in an escalating series of accusations that place their loved ones under tremendous stress. Farhadi filters a great deal of the film’s point of view through the perspective of Termeh, whose childhood disappears bit by bit every time she is called upon to make grown-up decisions.

Delivered with the precision plotting of a procedural, “A Separation” unveils an agenda less concerned with uncovering a single truth than with recognizing the shades of gray that complicate strict interpretations of the law. As we watch Simin struggle with the obstinate, unmovable Nader, Farhadi observes parallel husband/wife discord between Razieh and Hodjat, whose own young daughter provides an additional visual echo between the two families. While the class divide between the sets of couples implies different types and sources of friction, Farhadi constructs a unified, parallel study of gender-dependent predicaments.

“A Separation” resists black-and-white reductionism, and Farhadi’s shrewd objectivity makes room for disparate readings. More conservative viewers, and one presumes some of the Iranian power brokers who originally endorsed the movie’s Oscar candidacy, might readily identify the film’s wrenching events as a blistering critique of divorce. Others will certainly see the story as a reminder that restrictive conditions for women exacerbate problems in a church-and-state linked society. Brilliantly, Farhadi retains all the familiar, recognizable messiness of life without overtly passing judgment on the individuals who populate his movie. This ambiguity, reminiscent of Yimou Zhang’s 1990s work with Li Gong (another instance in which tension between artist and regime was publicized in the West), has made for interesting news items in the wake of Farhadi’s awards season successes: Ethan Sacks reported in the “New York Daily News” on March 12, 2012 that Iranian government officials had canceled a planned celebration of “A Separation.”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Everything good that director Andrew Stanton brought to the lauded “WALL-E” in 2008 is completely absent in the dreadful “John Carter,” a frustrating, soulless sarcophagus of a movie that feels even longer than its already bloated 132-minute length. Released one century after Edgar Rice Burroughs’ primary source material “A Princess of Mars” began its serial debut in the pulpy “The All-Story,” “John Carter” was nearly made into an animated feature pitched by legendary artist Bob Clampett in the 1930s (a brief glimpse of Clampett’s test footage can be found on YouTube). The “John Carter” we get unspools like the doughy offspring of George Lucas’ “The Phantom Menace,” and never escapes the affectation of a copy of a copy of a copy.

Civil War-era Virginian John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), presumably hunting for gold in Arizona, stumbles upon the means to teleport himself to Mars, and there encounters a convoluted political struggle pitting several factions and species against one another. Allegiances shift with little explanation, and Carter – along with the viewer – hurtles himself headlong into the fracas without stopping to ask any substantive questions. Inexplicably, Stanton pauses for flashback scenes in which Carter recalls the loss of his family on Earth, the shots bearing an eerie resemblance to similar components in “Cowboys & Aliens.”

So much of what resembles story development in “John Carter” rolls by without any differentiation in emotional urgency that every single scene blends together in a kind of cinematic white noise. Carter’s humanness allows him to negotiate the gravitational fields of Mars like a miraculous flea, but the computer-enhanced weightlessness only calls to mind the same ridiculous gag in Ang Lee’s stupefying “Hulk.” The four-armed mantis-esque alien race known as Tharks (voiced by talents like Willem Dafoe, Samantha Morton, and Thomas Haden Church) aren’t as pretty as James Cameron’s Na’vi, despite the similarities in their height and impossibly svelte waistlines.

Laughable dialogue is belched in every scene, and while several dozen lines contend for most embarrassing status, Lynn Collins probably won’t be adding “We may have been born worlds apart, but I know you, John Carter” to her audition reel. Mark Strong plays main heavy Matai Shang, a shape-shifting immortal whose reasons for doing just about anything are as hazy as the Martian horizon. Strong, whose villainous skill suggests a modern-day Basil Rathbone, can make even the most mechanical dialogue menacingly convincing, and he is certainly stuck with some of the script’s foulest sentences.

Despite much aping of “Avatar,” “John Carter” opts out of an interspecies romance between Carter and the Thark warrior Sola (Morton), whose storyline consists principally of a lukewarm recognition of father-daughter bonds in a culture otherwise unable or unwilling to recognize paternity. Instead, Carter’s less interesting love interest is Collins’ Dejah Thoris, the plucky princess whose experiments with some convoluted energy source called the Ninth Ray might be the key to the Red Planet’s survival. Both Kitsch and Collins are appropriately comely and sculpted, but despite the obvious design debt to Frank Frazetta’s paintings and illustrations – the visual standard by which any adaptation of “John Carter” will be measured – the flesh and blood incarnations can’t summon the same kind of wonderment captured in Frazetta’s brushstrokes.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Comic journeys in which out-of-touch yuppies follow their bliss are many in number, and often trace their roots to Hy Averback’s 1968 “I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!,” a groovy Peter Sellers vehicle penned by Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker in which an uptight lawyer falls under the spell of a prototype Manic Pixie Dream Girl. In “Wanderlust,” David Wain and Ken Marino update the rough contours of the scenario as a commentary on the current economic climate’s anti-corporate occupation attitude. Unlike Sellers’ soon-to-be-wed square, Paul Rudd’s character is already married, but both “Toklas” and “Wanderlust” play with the fantasies of free love before reinforcing the values of commitment and the middle path.

Rudd and Jennifer Aniston are George and Linda, a couple unable to make the payments on their West Village “microloft” when HBO passes on Linda’s foul penguins with testicular cancer doc and George gets the boot from his suit and tie operation. Accepting defeat, the protagonists pack their bags and head for the humiliation of the Atlanta McMansion owned by George’s portable toilet mogul brother Rick (co-writer Ken Marino), a brilliantly coarse jackass. Unable to cope with Rick’s alpha male autocracy, George and Linda decide to return to the Elysium Bed and Breakfast where they stayed en route to Rick’s monstrosity.

The dwellers at Elysium, an “intentional community” that operates like the halcyon ideal of a world where Charles Manson never happened, happily share everything from chores to possessions to each other’s bodies, and “Wanderlust” makes hay with George’s discomfort when his car is abused and his personal privacy invaded (the end credit outtakes from the toilet scene featuring Jordan Peele are hysterical). Malin Akerman’s cheerfully sunny sexual availability (“Think about being inside me”) pushes George to the limit of self-control. When Linda insists that George take advantage of Eva’s offer, his mirror monologue as he practices painfully awkward seduction talk develops into a tour de force display of fearless humiliation. Rudd deserves some kind of award for it.

Wain’s accomplished supporting cast includes veteran Alan Alda as the aging commune founder, Joe Lo Truglio (who appeared at the Fargo Film Festival in “High Road” and live on stage during the closing night improvisation show “Celebrity) as a nudist winemaker/aspiring writer whose earnest dreams of success are as outsize as his manhood, and Justin Theroux in what may be his best screen work to date. Theroux’s confident, patronizing alpha act is perfect, and a goofy scene in which he scorches Rudd’s hopeless acoustic guitar attempt on the Spin Doctors’ “Two Princes” in a music circle is one of many funny sketches in which he excels.

Accompanying tropes of the genre provide fodder for gags, with the “intoxication ensues” device a centerpiece echoing the memorable pot brownie feast that sends Sellers into psychedelic overdrive. Aniston tripping her ass off doesn’t quite measure up to the “Toklas” standard, but Wain fools around with some loopy visual effects that approximate what the character sees in her altered state. Generally, Aniston is outpaced by the improvisational veterans surrounding her (the Wain-Michael Ian Black-Michael Showalter triumvirate appear in a terrific cameo), but “Wanderlust” affably suggests that we still might be able to find a few more laughs sending up the era that the film’s target audience never experienced firsthand.