Trolls

Review by Bob Ignizio

Even when it's just a cold, no parent wants to see their kid sick. But I gotta' admit, when my five-year-old asked to leave an advance screening of TROLLS about 30 minutes before the film was over because he was feeling under the weather, part of me was secretly rejoicing.

Having not stuck it out to the bitter end, I will not be assigning a star rating to my partial review. Hey, maybe that last half hour suddenly got really good. Maybe Godzilla showed up and annihilated all the happy, fuzzy haired little bastards as well as their grumpy enemies, the Bergens, with a blast of atomic breath. That would have been worth an extra star for sure. All I saw was the first two acts, though, and based on what I that, it's doubtful the movie was heading towards such a satisfying conclusion.

In Time

Review by Matt Finley

My biggest issue with Andrew Niccol’s 1997 film GATTACA is its overall failure at anything resembling subtlety. The movie’s visual symbolism is boorishly hammy; its structure so transparent, it could match a Robert McKee PowerPoint scene-for-slide. Yet somehow Niccol’s new film, IN TIME, makes GATTACA look like a Martian cryptograph. Playing out like a Sesame Street skit for junior activists, IN TIME manages to deliver an embarrassingly infantile socialist polemic while simultaneously turning a middling hard sci-fi premise into spongy, incomprehensible twaddle. The only things separating it from recent flash-bang, popcorn-nauseated action fare like JUMPER and HITMAN are Coen Brothers-regular Roger Deakins' gorgeous cinematography and Niccol’s own tortoise-wins-the-race, over-cooked writing. And, of course, its abject lack of noteworthy action.

Bad Teacher

Review by Pamela Zoslov

As if to fill the void in summer raunch left by the disappointing HANGOVER sequel, BAD TEACHER, directed by Jake Kasdan, brings us Cameron Diaz as the sleaziest middle-school teacher in the history of education.

There is a certain wicked pleasure in beholding Diaz’s unregenerate misanthrope, whose character is mildly reminiscent of Billy Bob Thornton’s BAD SANTA in its twisting of traditional expectations. How, and why, did this woman ever become a teacher? The character, Elizabeth Halsey, edging over the hill but still gorgeous, stalks the corridors of the Illinois school where she scarcely works, wearing five-inch slides and tight skirts, hung over from booze and bonging, dozing while she feeds her students – whose names she can’t be bothered to learn — a pedagogical diet of school-themed movies (STAND AND DELIVER, LEAN ON ME). She is crass, mean, profane and callous to other people who aren’t wealthy, eligible men. Her plans to leave her hated job for marriage are foiled when her oblivious, opera-obsessed fiancé dumps her after his mother discovers she’s spent tens of thousands of his dollars.