Rating: 2.5 stars

It occurs to me that there may be one perfect audience member for a Kevin Smith film and that person is. . . Kevin Smith. Who else besides Smith would have such a taste for extreme raunch and mushy, chick-flick style romance?
But Smith’s cinematic schizophrenia may actually work to his advantage. You see, he’s not the best director of romantic comedies (although Chasing Amy had a certain shaggy charm) and he’s certainly not the best director at raunch (he tends to go too far, and isn’t quite funny enough to get away with it). But put the two sides of Smith together and you’ve got something resembling a good movie.
Which leads us to Zack and Miri Make a Porno. The title gets points for literal-mindedness (although it loses points for accessibility—when I review it on WBAL, I’ll be shortening it to the more kid-friendly Zack and Miri).
Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) are best friends and roommates—no nookie—and they’re positively broke. So they get the bright idea to make a porno film...

Rating: 2 stars

Outrage is a completely legitimate feeling for a film to evoke. Indeed, collective self-righteousness and indignation can be very cathartic for an audience. But Changeling spoon-feeds us our outrage. It’s outrage for idiots.
Angelina Jolie—sporting flapper attire and alarmingly red lipstick—plays Christine Collins, a single mother in 1920s Los Angeles. One night, she comes home late from work—she manages telephone operators (in a nifty period detail, she glides from station to station on roller skates)—and is horrified to discover that her 10 year old, Walter, is nowhere to be found. She calls the cops, but they patronizingly tell her that she should sit tight—boys will be boys; he’ll be back before night’s end. He never returns.
It so happens that just as the LAPD are launching their investigation into Walter’s whereabouts, they’re under fire by a local pastor and radio personality (John Malkovich), who aims to publicly expose the department’s greed and corruption. The LAPD needs a feel-good story—so they invent one. They reunite Christine with her son...

Rating: 2.5 stars

Teen idols have always had to suffer the indignation of having to act wholesome, even if it couldn’t be further from the truth. (David Cassidy was notoriously hooking up with groupies and getting baked on the set of The Partridge Family). Cassidy, of course, hated his squeaky clean image. The kids from High School Musical 3 seem to love theirs. (Or, at least, they fake it extremely well).
The film—the first big screen version of Disney’s runaway hit TV franchise—starts with our hero Troy Bolton (Zac Efron) on the basketball court with his East High Wildcats and—quelle horror!—they’re losing. Suddenly, from the stands emerges the white-clad figure of Troy’s girlfriend Gabrielle (Vanessa Hudgens). The two begin singing at each other—Troy’s face positively racked with intensity and teen angst; Vanessa as ethereal and dreamy as an angel. You’ll never guess who wins the game. Cheesy doesn’t begin to describe it.
And yet, who can resist? All the kids are pretty and the songs—cheerleaderish, Disneyfied versions of the kind of pop and hip-hop you hear on...

Rating: 2.5 stars

The trailers and poster art for Oliver Stone’s W. make it seem like a scathing work of satire but in reality, it’s a fairly standard biopic, with a healthy dose of Freudian speculation about the relationship between the elder Bush and his wayward son. Sure, there are some funny moments—a guy like Dubya would have to yield a few chuckles—but it’s mostly benign and dare I say . . . sympathetic? (This from the guy who gave us Natural Born Killers and JFK?)
Of course, the film is already controversial—and unprecedented. While there have been many presidential biopics—Stone has done one of his own (1995’s Nixon)—this is the first time one has been filmed while the president was still in office. In that sense, W. works best as a novelty film—and Stone seems to know it.
Why else, then, would he start the film with a “name that cabinet member” tableaux, as George W. Bush (Josh Brolin) and his advisers sit around the Oval Office coming up with the phrase Axis of Evil? You spend the first few minutes trying to figure out who’s...