More than 10 years ago, Greg Mottola made a near-perfect indie gem, The Daytrippers, about a woman who suspects her husband of cheating and embarks on a car ride from hell to Manhattan in a wood-paneled station wagon with her squabbling parents, her kid sister, and her kid sister’s pretentious boyfriend. It was funny, it was wise, it was drolly hip. Then Mottola kind of disappeared for several years, mostly directing TV shows. Finally, he resurfaced in 2007 with the hilarious blockbuster Superbad—a film I actually loved, but that didn’t share the intimate indie sensibility of his first feature.
It’s no surprise that the ads for Adventureland trumpet: “From the Director of Superbad!” (I mean, what are they supposed to say: “From the guy who directed a few really good episodes of Arrested Development?). But that’s slightly misleading. In fact, if you split the difference between The Daytrippers and Superbad, you pretty much haveAdventureland, which has...

Rating: 2.5 stars

In the 3-D animated sci-fi flick Monster vs. Aliens, blushing bride Susan Murphy (Reese Witherspoon) gets zapped by an alien meteorite and becomes 50-feet tall, much to the chagrin of her smarmy TV weatherman husband (Paul Rudd). She then gets absconded by the government and placed in a secret laboratory with other “monsters.”
“But I’m not a monster!” Susan protests. Eventually, she bonds with her fellow charges: Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie), a brilliant scientist who, a la Vincent Price in The Fly, accidentally turned himself into a roach; The Missing Link (Will Arnett), who just wants to party; B.O.B. (Seth Rogen) a brainless but loveable blob; and the Mothra-like Incectosaurus.
Monsters vs. Aliens is about rejecting convention and embracing your inner freak. It also has lots of fun sending up those 1950s sci-fi films, although most of those jokes will go over little ones’ heads. There are several laugh out loud moments: Susan, now nicknamed Gigantica, dangles perilously off the side of a building before she realizes...

Rating: 2 stars

The key to watching Knowing is to simply enjoy the ride. Because if you start to connect the dots—and they’re all there, laid out pretty obviously—you begin to realize that something truly silly and self-important is about to transpire. Anticipating a horrible ending—and Knowing’s is a real doozy—is a surefire way to ruin a film.
But at least for a while, Knowing is a decent, if overly noisy, sc-fi/action/horror film about a creepy little girl who buries a series of frantically scrawled numbers in a time capsule. Fifty years later, that time capsule is dug up and her scrawlings are given to 10-year-old Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) who is being raised by his widower father John (Nic Cage) an MIT astrophysicist.
John, an atheist who believes that everything in life is random, inspects the numbers and begins to see that they correspond to the dates and casualty counts of world-wide disasters—many that took place after the capsule was buried and some that are yet to come. John becomes convinced that it’s his job to alert people to...

Rating: 2 stars

I suppose when you film a nihilistic and profane graphic novel about morally ambiguous super heroes in a dystopian alternate universe, you have an obligation to the novel’s hardcore fans. After all, they’re your guaranteed audience, the only ones invested enough in the material to show up no matter what. But here’s the problem with that logic: The readership for The Watchmen may be sizeable, but they would amount to a mere gnat on Spiderman’s spinneret, relatively speaking. Those cult fans alone ain’t going to move the box office needle.
So you could attempt to make the adaptation more tame, less dense with mythology, less pornographically violent, and more user-friendly. Whoa, boy—then you’re really in trouble. Pissed off fans and a watered down product. Not exactly a recipe for success.
So director Zack Snyder, the blockbuster wunderkind behind the hyper-stylized (and soul-dead) 300, chose the only route he could—talmudic faithfulness to the novels—with predictably shaky results. Maybe The Watchmen...