As usual, it’s a slow week at the movies as the studios wait for the summer movie season to start. Since that seemingly begins a week or two earlier each year, though, we shouldn’t have to wait much longer for bigger movies. Like, oh, the highly anticipated Sin City, coming out next Friday, the first weekend in April.
The headliners this week are a couple of innocuous comedies starring mid-level stars. Both seem pretty middle of the road, quality-wise.
Guess Who features Bernie Mac and Ashton Kutcher in a riff on the ponderous Stanley Kramer movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? I had some thoughts on the film, which can be found here. Historians of the future will note that this was the first entry on this blog. The film inevitably earns a tepid Rottentomatoes.com rating of 52% positive ratings, and seems pretty much the acceptable time killer you’d expect.
Miss Congenialty 2: Armed and Fabulous…well, that subtitle really pretty much captures it. My thoughts can be found here. The critics, perhaps wondering why a triffle like the first film required a follow-up (hint: it made money), awarded the sequel a most non-congenial Rottentomatoes rating of 18%.
Oldboy is a grisly Korean thriller hitting the art house market, courtesy of the current vogue for Asian horror pics. From the reactions posted at Rottentomatoes.com (a quite decent 78% approval rating), this appears to be the sort of film you either love or hate. Put the Chicago Sun-Time’s Roger Ebert in the former camp; he gave it four stars. Admittedly, he’s not exactly stingy with those–his current release round-up features 6 four star ratings out of 30 films total. Oddly, he gave only four films three and a half stars.
The spoofy D.E.B.S. is apparently “Tatu, the Action Movie.” A team of hot girls in catholic schoolgirl outfits fight crimes or spies or some damn thing. I guess one of the girls is lesbian and so is the main villain. Ebert dubs it “no more than lesbian [Charlie’s] ‘Angels'”, which based on his reviewing record over the last few decades would seem to ensure it a newly invented five-star rating. Instead, amazingly, he gives it one and a half stars. On Rottentomatoes it earns a flaccid 32% approval rating, and what passion the film inspired seems amongst those who didn’t like it. Should make a lot of money on home video when the middle-aged raincoat crowd can buy it anonomously over the web without risking repulsed glares from the ticket sellers at their local cinema.
