From the Desk of A Critical Caster

by Rachael Nisenkier 

Oh hey, new images of Peeta and Gale from the upcoming Hunger Games adaptation. I, personally, love them. I stand by my (cautious) belief that the seemingly look-blind casting approach that led to a naturally blond Katniss, dark haired Peeta, and Viking God-related Gale will lead to a movie cast with actors who actually can behave like their parts.

What do you think? More at Ew.com

Cowboys, Aliens, and other uninteresting things

by Rachael Nisenkier

What if the director of one of the most enjoyable superhero movies of the past ten years (Jon Favreau) and the charismatic star of the well-received James Bond remake (Daniel Craig) teamed up with a rough and tumble Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) to make a movies western that features extraterrestrial life, and whose title is a cute pun (Cowboys and Aliens)?

Goofy I was expecting, maybe a little implausible. Yawn-inducing didn’t really even enter the picture.

Cowboys and Aliens fails at the number one component of the successful summer Blockbuster: entertainment. It’s got kick-ass explosions, suitably bad-ass acting from Craig and Ford, and a pretty cool concept. Yet somehow, despite all of that, the film is as lifeless as the towns left deserted by the alien menace.

"The Change Up": making good off a bad premise

by Rachael Nisenkier

The Change Up is exactly what you see in the commercials. It’s crass to the point of gross, it’s awkward to the point of putting your hands up to cover your eyes, and it’s funny. It also hinges heavily on the charisma and comedic chops of Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds*, which as far as places to hinge go, is not such a bad idea.

The Change Up tells the story of David (Bateman), stand-up lawyer and father who works all the time and neglects to have fun, even to the extent that his wife feels neglected and he’s started to lose touch with his childhood friend, Mitch (Reynolds). Mitch, for his turn, is a perpetual quitter who has skated by in life on a mixture of money from daddy and ridiculously good looks, and who spends most of his life behaving like a fourteen year old who woke up in Ryan Reynolds' body (ooo, someone get me an agent quick, so I can sell that screenplay idea!).

The Art of Nothing At All

The Art of Getting By is a truly terrible film. I had high hopes for what looked like a sweet, earnest and artsy coming-of-age story but what I got instead was a pretentious wannabe indie darling with a lame hipster “New York insider” attitude. The film’s principle themes of art and love as salvation are admirable but their condescending and derivative presentation left me literally yelling at the screen (seriously, I was the only person in the giant theatre, so I took the opportunity to scold the characters and filmmakers- it was wonderfully cathartic, if a little lunatic-seeming).

The story essentially boils down to that of an exceptional boy (played by Freddie Highmore, who apparently has been busy ageing in these last few years while we weren’t watching- whod’a thunk?). Said exceptional boy spends the entirety of the film (and his life preceding it) trying his darndest not to be exceptional. The plot really kicks off when he falls for a girl who is, in every way, unexceptional (Emma Roberts, the powerless victim of a vile role).

The Antidote to Cynicism

My best friend informs me that “Larry Crowne is so stupid!” He’s usually more eloquent than that, just not when he’s wrong. On his international press tour for the film, writer/director/star/most-beloved-man-in-Hollywood Tom Hanks had a single line that he trotted out in some form or another every one of the 4 million or so times he was asked what the film was about: “it’s an antidote to cynicism”. I think it’s that very feature that my “realist” friend so ineloquently can’t get behind. I, on the other hand, am all for it. When Conan O’Brien was leaving The Tonight Show, endlessly bitter and fundamentally heartbroken, his parting words were a plea that his audience not be cynical. “It’s the most useless thing in the world”, he said of the state he had every right to be in. And Conan was, as he often is, very right. For almost everyone I know, 2011 has been an absolute shit (excuse the language, there just is no true synonym). But the people who are making it through the best are the ones with the acute awareness that 2012 is just around the corner and that it, surely, will be better. Larry Crowne is a film about possibility, the counter-argument to the “lost potential”, “missed opportunity”, “you only peak once” narratives that have come to dominate our overly competitive lives.