Baby Mama vs. Harold & Kumar

The SNL vibe you might think resides within Baby Mama is there in full force and sequelitis explains many things about Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay but perhaps not Neil Patrick Harris playing himself and getting shot to death by Beverly D'Angelo. There are Iranian films that share more of an esthetic ideology with American films than Baby Mama and H&KEFGB. Unless the new zeitgeist centers on pubes and the ability to deliver a baby being a prerequisite for graduating high school.
Harold and Kumar escape from a skit-com version of Guantanamo Bay in the first part but before the end of the film they are smoking a fattie with W in his Me Room at his Texas ranch. Everything is bottomless, turned to 11 on the fluid scale and even occasionally funny. Like when H&K are busted while hiding out at a Klan rally. "They're Mexicans," yells one redneck. Plainly speaking the movie is 50-50 on laughs that connect but John Cho and Kal Penn have at least the chemistry of Chris Farley and David Spade. Since this film comes at the end of the New Line era it will be interesting to see if further sequels bear the WB logo.
Baby Mama has equal laughs and equal groans and one might be tempted to write off the entire thing especially when wasting talent like Greg Kinnear and Dax Shephard on non-dimensional characters. It's like the filmmakers wanted to exceed their grasp but they were content to just get the thing off the ground. At least this is a film with PG-13 temerity to refer to the perineum as the taint, a term you couldn't even imagine being used outside of the bedroom.

Free Wesley

Let me give you a word of advice - always bet on black. A three year prison sentence for not filing income tax returns seems a bit steep. Willie Nelson didn't go to jail and he owed the IRS millions too. But so it goes for Wesley Snipes. Just a word of praise for Wesley dominating the air thriller genre of the 90s with such films as Passenger 57, and Drop Zone. The latter film may not be great, or even as good as Point Break, but its parachute (or lack of parachute) action sequences have never been surpassed cinematically.

Bear bites dude

Rocky, the bear that played a small part in the movie Semi-Pro, where it wrestles Will Ferrell, or more likely his stunt double seen in the video above, killed one of its trainers yesterday. Accidents happen, although Rocky has nowhere near the credits of Bart the Bear (last seen in Into the Wild).

Young @ Heart

If you're talking about spring chickens in this choral group you'd be referring to someone 73 years of age. Young at Heart chronicles a singing group of seniors who find inspiration in rock and soul poetry: Sonic Youth, James Brown, The Clash, and Talking Heads provide just some of the songs covered. Only this movie is froth, there may've been more substance further down the glass but all we get is the froth on top.
Young at Heart satisfies the masses and you rapidly fall into its groove. What's not to like about oldsters singing "I Wanna Be Sedated" by The Ramones, shot with a high contrast look to further emphasize the polarity. Although I suppose that even someone currently in their 90s would've been in their 50s or 60s during the period of time the songs used in Young at Heart were written, and I know plenty of people with gray hair who like to rock steady. However the film makes its central spine the fact that these kind souls, these once strong voices just like to sing. Yet none of them seem familiar with standards like "I Feel Good" when it's introduced by the leader and musical director, himself in his 50s and a baby to all concerned.
Where Young at Heart lost me was in the third act. The way it's edited creates peaks and valleys revolving around the death of two of the members. From that time on the film felt manipulative in a condescending way. The film doesn't need that kind of twist to be a crowd pleaser but that's the route it takes.

Where in the world is ... oh, nevermind

Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? is the second docu feature from Morgan Spurlock. His first film Super Size Me was a film with a place and time. But WITWIOBL feels like a dollar short and a day late with its whimsical light tone and brief snippets of actual humor, especially after such hard hitting Iraqi related docus as No End in Sight, Taxi From the Dark Side and upcoming Standard Operating Procedure.
WITWIOBL takes the viewer with Spurlock as he travels to the Middle East. The plot wavers on whether he will find Bin Laden before his wife has a baby. The one thing that makes sense in the film is when Spurlock asks a relative of one of the 9/11 hijackers about the video of the hijacker in question saying, yes, he did it. The relative merely states that in America we have the technology to digitally make an image have words coming out of its mouth that weren't originally there. His example is the talking pig in Babe. At least that barnyard tale traveled well.
88 Minutes is the kind of potboiler that gets bad reviews in principal, believe me when I say that there were news reports of how bad this film was from reporters who hadn't seen it. It's the kind of film that if Clint Eastwood had done it, and he has (think Blood Work), it would get a pass. But with Al Pacino the wolves bare their teeth. 88 Minutes came out in Europe a year ago and is already on DVD in many countries.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall would stand own its own two legs if it wasn't associated with Judd Apatow. But there's no way this film compares to Superbad. Save the "A film from the producer/director of ..." for classics and sell this film for what it is. A pretty competent mix of genitalia humor and bedroom tomfoolery. Apatow (the film's producer) has a strong ensemble of talent that follow him on project after project. In other words, Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill and Bill Hader pop up often enough to help Forgetting Sarah Marshall surf over the rough spots.

Tom McCarthy on The Visitor

Tom McCarthy may be one of your favorite actors and you don’t realize it. Take a look at his credits – Syriana, Flags of Our Fathers, Good Night and Good Luck, the reporter from season five of The Wire – and a sense of recognition awakens.
Then McCarthy blindsides you by also being the writer-director of The Station Agent and now The Visitor. The Station Agent (well reviewed in 2003) showed that McCarthy understands pacing and character and the film boosted the career of Peter Dinklage playing the moody lead character. For The Visitor McCarthy took another veteran supporting actor, one that everyone would remember, Richard Jenkins, and put him up front, playing a moody New England professor who befriends a Syrian man about to be deported.
Jenkins plays Walter Vale. “He’s worldly, a guy who’s derailed in life,” McCarthy tells FPH in a phone interview. “He makes no apologies and is a tough teacher.”
Vale’s such a prig he nearly makes one student cry and you begin to feel a kind of hatred for his character no matter what the cause of his pessimism. When Vale has to go to New York City to deliver a paper a series of events team him up with an immigrant couple. Given his previous behavior you expect Vale to have a glass of wine and forget about them, but a spark of humanity can be seen flickering in his heart. The glow of The Visitor shows people becoming true friends in a place away from borders. McCarthy spent time in the Middle East (Lebanon in particular) and researched the ramped up immigration policies in place since the end of 2001.
Vale tries to help the couple find an apartment when Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) gets picked up by INS. At this point Vale makes it a kind of mission to get Tarek a lawyer and deal with his detention. Tarek’s mother Mouna (Hiam Abbass) shows up out of the blue and the sub-text seems to suggest that Vale might emerge from his self-imposed isolation.
McCarthy was clear to the actors on “understanding the boundaries,” between Vale and Mouna and their relation grows stronger even as Tarek’s case looks bleaker.
“Being a character actor is hard work,” notes McCarthy about Jenkins an actor who has constant credits in television and film going back to the 70s. Yes, trained actors know how to properly hit their cues but as McCarthy points out “they command respect from other actors.”
For McCarthy the process of writing is “creating the tempo on the page.” Then when shooting McCarthy intuitively knew when to “play out the scene in a two-shot.” Partially shot in New York the film captures a drum circle in Central Park that plays into the story. Like the beat that Vale and Tarek pound on the djembe, The Visitor moves at its own tempo.