![]() “Source Code” is also fortunate in the actors it has for its quartet of key roles. Duncan Jones’ first film was the Sam Rockwell- Kevin Spacey “Moon,” cinematographer Don Burgess shot both “Forrest Gump” and “Spider-Man,” and while writer Ben Ripley, whose credits include the straight-to-video “Species III,” stumbles in some areas, his sense of plot is undeniably strong. It also helps that the film team has a feel for the genre. Far from making “Source Code” dull, those repetitions add to the tension as we wonder what Stevens will do next and how that choice will play out. It may sound like a version of hell for moviegoers to have those eight minutes on a train replayed over and over and over again, half a dozen times at least, but the film has come up with a surprising number of variations on that theme. His assignment during those eight minutes is to identity the bomber, an individual who simply must be stopped before he plants a bigger, deadlier bomb in Chicago itself. Stevens can’t change the past, can’t prevent that train explosion, but he can affect the future. Roughly stated, it turns out that “source code” is the name for a mysterious process that allows Stevens to in effect go back in time to a kind of parallel universe and assume another person’s identity for the last eight minutes of that man’s life. Rutledge, the man who finally provides the details, is played by as calm and persuasive an actor as Wright. ![]() He called the movie "a phenomenally successful two-man war against narrative clarity and continuity" and went so far as to call movies in general "the storytelling black hole into which we all seem to have fallen.It is the conceit of “Source Code” that we find out what is going on at the same time Stevens does, and the explanation is so complicated that it’s a good thing Dr. Harrison Ford was depressing, the racial politics were appalling and Olivia Wilde's performance is really an insult, but the most condemning reviews were written out of a sense of affront, as Christopher Orr of The Atlantic's was. (That line usually arrives in the form of a fart.)" And even if there is no one in the theater to hear that fart, Sandler's malicious indifference to the world definitely still makes a sound. Club describes the film as "an inventory of new lows." As for Sandler, he "sits around the house with his movie family, seemingly waiting around for somebody to feed him a line. The funniest thing about this Adam Sandler vehicle is how obvious it is that no one involved cared remotely about making a decent comedy. But it sounds a little like Roger Ebert was driven to tears of rage by it: "The film is reprehensible, dismaying, ugly, artless and an affront to any notion, however remote, of human decency." There was no doubt that reviews for the needless sequel to Human Centipede would be bad. In the words of Ty Burr at the Boston Globe, "In the grand tradition of following an Academy Award with the worst film of one's career, Natalie Portman appears today in Your Highness, a radioactive turd disguised as a sword-and-sorcery comedy." The poop metaphors continued: "The most painful movie so far in a year that's already scraping the bottom of the barrel, Your Highness is a tedious, dung-colored misfire that sullies the genre of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Princess Bride." But too bad for Portman, gay-panic jokes and topless women equaled the opposite. ![]() A raunchy period romp starring Natalie Portman, James Franco, Zooey Deschanel and Danny McBride could have been hilarious. ![]() ![]() What made this particular failure disappointing was its potential. Your Highness Your Highness was a truly wretched movie, but there are many of those. It is called schadenfreude and it isn't beneath us.ĥ. So pardon us if we like to see the condescending makers of insultingly bad movies get what's coming to them. We ordinary humans slave away all week, the government takes our money and all we want to do on Saturday is relax at the theater, but the only thing playing is the steaming pile known as The Smurfs. A great negative review is like a really amazing "Your mom" joke - cutting, but longer and often with more existential despair. But some of the year's movie reviews have proved even more interesting than the films themselves, especially when the movies are bad.įilm critics reach the zenith of their verbal capabilities when excoriating such terrible movies as The Change-up, Twilight: Breaking Dawn and Trespass. As the February 26 Academy Awards ceremony approaches, all 2011's best and worst movie lists have already been circulated and debated ad infinitum. ![]()
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