If a critic screams in a middle of a Michael Bay film and the film is too loud for anyone to hear, did it ever actually occur?-My thoughts, after leaving the Transformers screening.

Okay, so I didn’t actually scream in the middle of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. But I sure wanted to.
Part of my dismay was not just the film’s bone-crushing noise, stupefying action, gung-ho conservatism, thinly-veiled racism, predictable sexism, bloated running time (two and a half freaking hours!), and crass commercialism (actually, compared to the film’s other sins, the crass commercialism is kind of quaint)—it was knowing that no matter what I say, it won’t amount to squat. Transformers II is going to make its buckets of money, paving the way for a third and possibly even a fourth iteration of this soulless franchise. Hoo-yah.

“That was AWESOME!”-Actual 11-year-old boy leaving the Transformers screening.

I suppose it could be argued that the world can be...

John Krasinski’s character Burt Farlander is afflicted with something I’ve decided to call the indie stupor.
We’ve all seen this before, in films as varied as Garden State, American Beauty, Broken Flowers, andElizabethtown. Our hero is a sheepish and sometimes benumbed observer of the wacky world around him. The wackier the supporting characters, the more our wounded hero looks blankly at the camera, as if to say, “Everyone is crazy except for me. In contrast, I am a deeply sensitive and intuitive human being.”
But it begs the question: Why would I care about such a passive hero? I prefer someone who is actively engaged in the world around him, not just standing around in an “I’m With Stupid” shirt.
Burt is supposed to be a stand-in for novelist and indie lit hero Dave Eggers, who cowrote the screenplay—about a rudderless 30something couple about to have their first child—with his wife, Vendela Vida. We know Eggers to be a highly intelligent, possibly even brilliant man. So why make his cinematic double such a...

As I was settling into my seat for the screening of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, a young man came up to me and asked, “Are you excited?”
“I guess,” I said (unconvincingly). “I really loved the original, so I’m not exactly sure why we needed a remake.”
“This is a remake?” the kid asked.
And there you go.
To be honest, I actually feel sorry for people whose sole experience with this film—about the hijacking of a New York subway car—comes courtesy of Tony Scott’s slickly efficient but soulless version. The original was gritty, funky, funny, and humane—positively redolent with a sense of New York City and its people.
The new flick has its moments—mostly the scenes between Denzel Washington as Walter Garber, the mild-mannered NYC transit worker, and John Travolta as Ryder, the pissed off philosopher-hijacker he must negotiate with—but Scott is clearly much more interested in keeping the action swift and the body count high than giving us a sense of place.  In Joseph Sargent’s original, we felt the  anxiety of the hostages, plus a bit of their...

When the trailer for The Hangover first came out—with its promise of a bachelor party run amok (tigers! babies! Mike Tyson! oh my!)—it became an instant YouTube classic. But I wondered, could the film sustain that kind of hilarity? Could it really continue to up the ante of outrageousness?
The key to a film like this is to reveal the insanity in pieces: How did square dentist Stu (Ed Helms) lose his tooth and get married to a hooker (Heather Graham)? How did Doug the groom (Justin Bartha) get lost? Why does the hotel valet think they’re cops? Why is there a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet, and a naked man in the trunk of their vintage Mercedes? And most importantly, why can’t the guys remember anything? (The in-retrospect ironic toast, the night before the mayhem? “To a night we’ll never forget.”)
The details are meted out brilliantly as the boys search for Doug and try to recreate the events of their lost evening. It would be easy to do it all in flashback, but director Todd Phillips (Old School) plays it more...