The Dictator arrives at the Carlton Hotel during the 65th Annual Cannes Film Festival on May 16 in Cannes, France. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)

The Boston public had a rare chance to support the great Republic of Wadiya yesterday, as AMC Boston Common Theater hosted a paid sneak preview of film “The Dictator.”

Paramount Pictures credited the preview to an “uncharacteristic stroke of generosity” by the film’s title character, General Aladeen of the Republic of Wadiya (played in the movie by Sacha Baron Cohen). The General’s “Virgin Guards” were on hand to greet supporters and offer complimentary snacks, t-shirts, posters and photos.

The film, which opens today, centers on Aladeen’s trip to America to ensure that his country can remain “lovingly oppressed” and free of democracy. Cohen’s character has made several public appearances in preparation for the film’s release, including on the 2012 Academy Awards red carpet when he accidentally spilled the ashes of deceased North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il on Ryan Seacrest.

Former lead anchor for San Diego’s Channel 4 –  and all-around “big deal”  - Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) demanded that his legion of fans stop what they were doing yesterday and listen to his latest announcement: starting today, the first look at the long-awaited sequel to 2004′s Anchorman, Anchorman 2, will debut in the form of a teaser trailer.  The trailer will air before the latest Sascha Baron Cohen flick The Dictator.

Burgundy took to Twitter to drop the bombshell, in his own inimitable way. “Don’t know what a teaser is,” he wrote. “World is crazy? Having a scotch.”

News of the sequel officially broke when Burgundy made an appearance on “Conan” in late March and announced that Paramount had given the project the green light.

This is the first real look at the film, the plot of which has only been teased by writer and producer Adam McKay: “Keep in mind we’re still writing the story, but I’ll say one phrase for you: custody battle,” he told Salon.com in April.

The 23rd installment of the James Bond movie franchise hits theaters on November 9. Help us celebrate 50 years of these iconic and sexy Bond girls by sharing this ‘work-appropriate’ piece of art!

One aspect of the James Bond movies that will never change is the beauties that can’t resist the charm of 007. Over the past 50 years James Bond has had no shortage of voluptuous vixens. Here is a well-made visual history of the Bond Girls in put together by the folks at CableTV.com in celebration of 007’s Golden Anniversary.

Who’s your favorite Bond girl of all time? Let us know in the comments section!

Via CableTV.com

Let’s get this out of the way. Sacha Baron Cohen exploded onto the feature film scene with “Borat” in 2006. “Bruno” quickly followed. Both movies combined the pseudo-documentary and mockumentary styles–along with a lot of potty mouth—to great effect. Both movies featured an odd and uninitiated foreigner coming to America to discover its wonders while at the same time exposing the unseemly side of many of its citizens—a sort of picaresque for the modern age. “Borat” was the more successful of the two, largely because Bruno was a rehash of the first movie with a lot more crudeness and staged scenes.

At first glance, “The Dictator,” which is the third film to combine the irreverence of Cohen and director Larry Charles, would seem to be the same gambit. A foreigner who has no internal censor winds up in America and must make his way with the aide of every masturbation and ethnic joke in the book. What’s different is that “The Dictator” is entirely fictional. There are no interviews with real people who have no idea they are being set up and mercilessly mocked. I think this was a good move for Cohen and Charles. Austin Powers was hilarious. The second installment less so. The third, stale. What started out as fresh and original became old news by film number three.

This is not to say “The Dictator” is a return to the glory of “Borat.” Don’t get me wrong: there are a million laughs in “The Dictator.” Every race, sex, and sector of society is skewered as the character Cohen plays, a fictional mid-east strongman, is replaced by a double on a trip to the United Nations. With the help of a progressive New York shopkeeper (who doesn’t know his identity) and an old countryman, he must thwart a plan to turn his dictatorship into a democracy.

But forget the plot. It’s so thin you’d need a microscope to see it. It’s all just an excuse to turn what feels like a Saturday Night Live skit into a feature film. The movie is as funny as hell, but herein lies the problem. The movie struggles to be an hour and twenty minutes, and at the one-hour mark I was tired of laughing. I wasn’t interested in finding out what was to happen, like I might in most movies, but simply looking for the next gag.

Many would consider Sacha Baron Cohen the comic genius of our time. Indeed, “The Dictator” may be channeling Charlie Chaplin, who made two movies that recall similar story lines. The first was “The Great Dictator,” in which Chaplin plays a fictional Hitler. The second was “A King in New York,” in which Chaplin plays a deposed monarch taking refuge in New York. Is Cohen cribbing or paying homage to Chaplin? Is Cohen the Chaplin of our times? Cohen is a great talent, but I’m not so sure jokes about “rape centers” and anal torture will earn him a place in the pantheon of great film comedians. Too often, Cohen departs from the field of satire and farce and goes for the cheap joke.

“The Dictator” is the kind of movie during which you laugh a lot, but when it appears on cable one year later, you only watch the funniest five minutes. Kind of like a Saturday Night Live skit, except you don’t have to bother with the other one hour and fifteen minutes of ostensible ‘story.’

We are no stranger to the concept of making a video game based on a popular movie. Usually these are shoddy attempts to cash in on a film’s popularity and most of the time designers are under a deadline to produce the game while the movie is still relevant.  Some movies just weren’t meant for this. Here are 10 popular movies that could never work as video games.

10. Air Bud

You're like Wally Pipp, but it's a dog and not Lou Gehrig

This seems like a pretty standard basketball game, except you play as the kid who gets benched so the dog can play. The first level is training so you learn the controls and hone your player’s shooting percentage. However, when the season starts you are replaced by the dog. You never see any playing time again. The subsequent levels consist of making sure the dog has enough water at halftime, helping bury a dead hooker found in the Dog’s hotel room, and not killing yourself. (Spoiler Alert: You end up killing yourself.)

9. The Human Centipede

Interactive gaming for kids

Well, yeah…you get it.

8. Arrested Development

Paneer Napaneer: Game Engineer

This game has a lot of hype. But no one knows when it’s coming out. The best designers are rumored to have been hired for it. The gameplay is supposed to be incredible. Every now and then rumors float around the message board that the release will be any day now. But no preview or concept art has ever been seen. You and your friends talk about how awesome it will be when it does come out. Some of you are waiting in line at Gamestop right now.

7. Pearl Harbor

If only you could play as Cuba Gooding Jr.

You can play as either Ben Affleck’s or Josh Hartnett’s character. Either way, you will do nothing. You play most of the game through flashback. Even though a great military travesty takes place, you were too busy trying to beat the “Have sex with my presumed-dead- best- friend’s girlfriend” level. If you opted for Ben Affleck’s character, then you get the alternate, “Be absent for the middle of the movie,” level. Most of the effort in this game’s design went into being able to customize your character’s outfits with different Hawaiian shirts.

6. Mrs. Doubtfire

Flammable breasts included, Matthew Lawrence sold separately

This was an ambitious project and Sega Dreamcast’s last attempt at mainstream success. The player MUST wear every part of Robin Williams’ Mrs. Doubtfire costume that he wore in the movie. Each piece– teeth, boobs, and face– is wired into the console. The overall concept of the game is to convince children to love you through deception. This is why it was voted NAMBLA’s number one game in existence. Recalls went out immediately after several people collapsed from heat exhaustion and the sheer weight of the controls…two people were found dead. Because it’s a Sega Dreamcast the console runs on gasoline and you have to start it like a lawnmower.

5. Passion of the Christ

From the makers of "L. Ron Hubbard: The Seclusion Years"

This game has an imaginative back story. You are the son of god. You are THE ONE. Here are the controls; pressing A allows you to “turn the other cheek” and pressing B “gently pats someone on the head.” These are your only defense when the army comes looking for you. You get the shit kicked out of you for 40 minutes and don’t have any access to the controls at this point. At the end you die. A group of people think a sequel to this game will be made, however it is quite obvious that is not happening…ever. So you know, just stop, okay?

4. The King’s Speech

At least you get to scream "fuck" once

It’s like the American Idol game. It’s played in real time and over the course of 8 years. You try to mumble into the microphone to match the stutter notes on the screen. It is excruciatingly difficult. A lot of early game testers actually developed a stammer from playing it too much. Geoffrey Rush pops on screen now and again to verbally abuse you. When you are not stammering, you sit very still. The game has no save option so it must be finished it one sitting.

3. The Artist

Stop smirking, Frenchy.

This is like “Dance-Dance Revolution,” except there is no sound. All you can hear are your own fat feet slamming down on the mat.

2. Inception

Hold "LT" and press "B" to access your dreidel

This game starts out awesome. You have a gun. You have Joseph Gordon-Levitt by your side ready to throw down for you. HE’S READY FOR ANYTHING BRAH. HE’D DIE FOR YOU. You’re close to completing a challenge and, boom, your ex-wife shows up and fucks it all up. Then you wake up…or do you? You’ve had a wet dream. You try to explain it to everyone else. Juno is grossed out. The Indian guy won’t make eye contact with you. No one will, except JGL. “GIVE HIM A BREAK YOU FUCKS! IT HAPPENS.” He slaps Juno. You can never finish the game because this series of events keeps happening over and over again.

1. Titanic

Seriously Rose, how do you live with yourself?

It’s set up as a first person shooter from Jack’s point of view, except there are no guns, knives or weapons of any kind. Using the controls you navigate through the gross,  poor citizens of the ship. Ewww Irish people! Sometimes you are presented with the quest of drawing someone before they recognize your creepy behavior. Then you must dash back below deck to the mole people (the Irish.) You eat dinner,  then dance on a table. The main boss in this game is Billy Zane’s eyebrow. It is perfectly sculpted and maintained so that, had any poets survived on the Titanic, they would have written about it for years to come. It’s very exciting for 30 seconds and the very END of the game, but you can never win because your partner allows you to drown instead of moving over on what appeared to be a very spacious piece of wood.

According to an early critic quoted in the latest trailer, “The Avengers” is the best superhero movie of all time.

My first thought was that saying anything is the “best of all time” is ridiculous. But then I thought about superhero movies as a genre- they have a spotty and flawed record at best. For every “Batman Begins” and “X-Men,” there’s a “Batman Forever” (also known as the Nippled Batman) or any version of the Hulk not involving Lou Ferrigno. Walking the delicate line between pleasing the masses, most of whom have never picked up a comic book in their lives, while trying not to incur the internet wrath of the fan-boys and girls is not something easily attained. As a result, the genre as a whole winds up having a split-personality: the movies are either candy-colored popcorn fare, flamboyant and silly, or high-brow noir films that end up seeming preachy and on-the-nose.

The more you think about it, the more you realize the bar isn’t all that high. And I say this as a fan.

I don’t know is “The Avengers” is the best superhero movie of all time, if only for the simple fact that I haven’t seen every superhero movie. But God help me if it isn’t the most fun, intricate and expertly executed blockbuster I’ve seen in a long, long time.

For the uninitiated: the Avengers are a selection of superheros from the Marvel canon, designed as a team, led by a spy named Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, being very Samuel L. Jackson-y). This film is the climax of a series of individual superhero movies, including “Iron Man,” (Downey) “Thor” (Chris Hemsworth) and “Captain America,” (Chris Evans) in an oddly endearing parallel to comic book narrative strategies. The movie follows the previously-named heroes, along with Bruce Banner/The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and former assassins Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), as they try to rid the world of demigod and megalomaniac with daddy issues Loki (Tom Hiddleston).

Let me count the ways that this could have been a complete disaster. It threatened to simply be a showcase of Robert Downey, Jr.’s considerable talents backed up with…well a bunch of good-looking guys with talents less considerable. It was in 3-D. It’s two-and-a-half hours long. It’s about aliens with giant robot-dragons.

But under the steady hand of Joss Whedon, who wrote and directed this movie with obvious passion and care, everything works together like a well-oiled machine. No, that’s not right. Because unlike a machine, there’s also feeling, and that exclusively Whedon sense of soul. Maybe it runs like a well-oiled machine with a newly discovered sense of humanity and free will. Whedon deftly sidesteps all the pitfalls that would sink others. A major weakness lies with Thor and his nemesis, who according to canon need to speak in stodgy, renaissance fair dialogue. Solution? Tony Stark just makes fun of it every time he speaks. Captain America is kind of old-fashioned; Whedon centers a beautiful speech about how old-fashioned heroism is something everyone could use.

The movie is character-driven, yet lavishes unbelievable detail on major action scenes, as beautiful as they are exhilarating. My personal favorite were the aforementioned robot-dragons, gorgeous masterpieces of steampunk-influenced effect.

Mark Ruffalo and Jeremy Renner are the two newcomers to this party- Renner has a small but well-played role as archer Hawkeye, but Ruffalo pretty much steals the show as Banner. True to what I know of the original character, Banner is a soft-spoken nerd, confident only when he’s in a lab, and even then deferential. And in the most devastating moment in the movie, Banner changes into “the other guy,” and the last thing to leave before the monster takes over is the horrified, heartbroken look in his eyes.

There was perhaps no one better to tread that fine line between mainstream popularity and acolyte pandering than Whedon, an accomplished comic-book writer and fan-boy as well as a cinematic craftsman and master of genre storytelling. As in all his work, there is a beating heart in the middle of what could have been a soulless tent-pole movie, made for an easy buck and the extra two dollars for 3-D glasses. Does that make this the greatest superhero movie of all time? I’m not qualified to answer, but you can be sure I’ll be going to see it again. Maybe that will help me decide.

Profiles in History, “the world’s largest auctioneer of original Hollywood memorabilia”, announced yesterday that it will offer an as-yet unmatched collection of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory memorabilia for auction this July.

These props are of the last few remaining from the film’s production: the day after shooting wrapped, “Cabaret” began shooting on the same location, and the majority of the Wonka props were discarded.

The lot includes the iconic purple-jacket costume worn by Gene Wilder as Wonka in the 1971 film, expected to fetch $80,000 – $120,000.

Also up for grabs are three items from the personal collection of Julie Dawn Cole, who played Veruca Salt. A screen-used “everlasting gobstopper”, one of only two known to exist, comes with a notarized letter written by Ms. Cole describing its significance in the film. A golden egg, also including a notarized letter, used during one of the film’s musical numbers, is also included. Last, but not least, is an original Golden Ticket, found by Salt’s father and presented to her in the film.

Other items include a prop “Scrumdidlyumptious bar” from the collection of actor Peter Ostrum, who played Charlie Bucket, expected to fetch $3,000 – $5,000; a collection of five prop Wonka chocolate bars; and a screen-worn Oompa Loompa costume – the only complete costume of the kind known to exist.

More details on the auction are expected to be released soon.

Academy Award winner Geoffrey Fletcher is creating new opportunities for aspiring filmmakers. Fletcher, who won an Oscar for “Best Adapted Screenplay” for the feature film Precious, is working with Bombay Sapphire and the Tribeca Film Festival on a new project: The Bombay Sapphire Imagination Series Short Filmmakers Competition.

The competition, announced last Thursday, will allow aspiring to use their imaginations, and a screenplay written by Fletcher, to create their own interpretation of a story.  All participants can view the script at www.imaginationseries.com and begin submitting their five-minute films starting May 8.

The screenplay is very open-ended, using no-name characters and simplistic dialogue that filmmakers can add to as they see fit.  “With this Imagination Series, budding filmmakers really have a great deal of room to really take the story in so many directions,” explains Fletcher. The filmmaker the choice of genre, time period, style and production technique – even whether or not the setting takes place on planet Earth!

“There is a great deal of talent in the world but not enough opportunity,” says Fletcher. “Everybody has imagination but it is rare that it’s fully engaged. I think that there are wonderful things that can come from that, and wonderful things that can extend into personal life.”

The Tribeca Film Festival has chosen a panel (including Fletcher himself) to select five winners from the entries.  The five that reach the winners’ circle will then be given the chance to direct and produce their own feature length version of their submission and premiere it in 2013.

For Fletcher, filmmaking and writing are passions, not just efforts to earn recognition. “It isn’t just the idea of making a film, it’s the fulfillment that can come from self expression,” he says.

At the age of 12 he started to make short films, using his toys, and then moved on to bigger and even more creative things.

After graduating from Harvard University, he continued his education studying film at New York University’s Tisch School of Arts. Fletcher soon became a buzz-worthy student when his film, “Magic Markers”, won the Directors Guild of America Student Film Award and was featured at the Sundance Film Festival.

In 2006 he was asked to adapt a screenplay for the novel “Push”, by Sapphire, which turned in to the award-winning film “Precious”.  With this film, among other accolades, Fletcher became African American to win an Academy Award for writing.

Even while promoting the Imagination Project, Fletcher is an adjunct film professor at Columbia University and New York University’s Tisch School of Arts. He is also making his feature film directorial debut with “Violet & Daisy,” to be released later this year.

Through his career, he has realized that creativity distinguishes great filmmakers from others.  The status of “budding filmmaker” comes with a rather wilted film budget, but Fletcher stresses that it is talent that will bring success in this competition.

“What’s priceless is imagination,” he says. “Imagination is a big part of it and inspiration is the other. You can take so many details big and small that add up to an immersive experience for the viewer.”

He stresses that the competition is looking for films and storylines that have an impact not only on the audience but the filmmakers themselves.

“I hope that they will be inspired to imagine even more things.  For those who aren’t budding filmmakers, I hope they experience the profound and positive impact that imagination can have in their lives.”

Given its April 6th debut, there’s a good chance most diehard “American Pie” fans have already seen “American Reunion” by now. If this latest slice left you craving second helpings, never fear. Screenwriter David H. Steinberg recently penned a novel. “Last Stop This Town” follows high school seniors Dylan, Noah, Pike and Walker as they spend their days drag racing down residential suburban streets, bribing homeless guys to buy them beer, and signing yearbooks at pathetic house parties. When Dylan suggests they live up their last weekend of high school at an underground rave in New York, the guys are ready to go crazy and make memories for the ages. Chock full of Steinberg’s signature humor, “Last Stop This Town” should be enough to tide you over between now and the premiere of “American Midlife Crisis.” Here, the writer talks process, poop humor, and why your story won’t go anywhere if you can’t develop characters that make people care.

BLAST: What draws you to coming of age stories? Did you have a particularly interesting coming of age yourself?

DAVID H. STEINBERG: I actually left high school after my junior year to go to college and I’m sure a psychologist would say that writing in the teen genre is my way of filling in the gap in my teenage experience. But I think there’s something more to it than that. It’s just a magical time. Those high school years are the time in everyone’s life when the flood of emotions and surging hormones makes everything seem so important and dramatic and you go through a million highs and lows every day. It’s a time when you really feel alive, and that’s something really cool and unique. Of course, there’s something to be said for those feelings subsiding as an adult and living without the daily drama, but for me, I actually loved that feeling of being invincible, that everything was possible, and that my whole life was still ahead of me. That youthful optimism (and maybe a bit of naiveté) is really what “Last Stop” is all about, as the four friends are about to graduate and go off into the unknown. But it’s also a book about homeless dudes throwing poop at you, so don’t let me pretend this is “Catcher in the Rye.”

BLAST: Which came first: the characters or the plot?

DS: It’s really all about the characters. Once you breathe life into them and know them intimately, then the plot unfolds because that’s what these guys would do. It’s like your vacation pictures. No one cares about the shots of buildings—they only want to see the ones with you in front of the fountain–because people care about people. So I start with high school archetypes—the player, the monogamous guy, the guy who can’t get laid, and the stoner—and then try to build on this to create three dimensional characters. If I’ve done my job well, they become real and unique. Pike starts out as “the stoner” but winds up being a completely new and different take on the original archetype. Look at Spicolli from “Fast Time at Ridgemont High”—same archetype, totally different character.

BLAST: How long has this novel been in the works?

DS: I originally wrote it as a screenplay, then adapted it into a novel because I fell in love with my guys. Overall, the process took four years–not very fast considering it’s under 200 pages. But I have a day job writing and directing movies, so cut me some slack.

BLAST: Which character from your “American Pie” series would you most like to hang out with?

DS: Nadia, duh.

BLAST: Which to do you prefer to write: fiction or screenplays?

DS: It’s hard to choose. Writing for film is a pretty amazing gig. Watching a movie in a crowded theater, seeing your name flash on the screen, and hearing them laugh at your jokes—there’s really nothing that can compare to that. On the other hand, screenplays are like sonnets—the structure and formatting is very restrictive. Plus, when you’re done, other writers re-write you, the director puts his stamp on it, actors improvise, editors move things around—it’s a hugely collaborative medium. Sometimes that’s awesome when talented people “plus” the script and make the movie great. Sometimes it’s not so awesome. Novels are liberating stylistically. I can write what characters are thinking and feeling, and screenplays obviously can only contain moments that can be seen or heard onscreen. But really, it’s about flying solo. If you love or hate my movie, I’m not sure how to take it—I only wrote the screenplay. But the book is all on me.

BLAST: How does your process for writing fiction differ from writing screenplays?

DS: You want to know the biggest brain adjustment? Writing in the past tense! Screenplays are all present tense because it’s technically stage direction. (“Dylan picks up the yearbook,” not “picked up the yearbook.”) But on a less mundane level, it’s really all the same. Create the characters and outline. Months and months of outlining. Write a draft really quickly, then months and months of re-writing.

BLAST: You’ve gotten a lot of praise for penning raunchy scenes that are also somehow sweet. How do you manage to walk this line?

DS: I have to own the raunchy humor, but the truth is I’m all about the drama and emotion of teenagers going through this traumatic time in their lives. Look at the “American Pie” movie posters. “American Pie 2″ was literally just a picture of the ten characters standing there, doing nothing, because the marketing department knew that audiences care about characters, not the specifics of the raunchy humor. I think movies that try to “out-gross” each other without giving us characters to root for ultimately fail because they’re hollow experiences. Look at “Project X.” Sure, it’s funny and crazy, but the characters are unlikeable and no one goes through any sort of relatable life moment. So at the end of the day, who cares?

Now I know there are definitely critical people out there who will think this sounds pretentious and self-aggrandizing because really, I’m a guy who wrote this book where a homeless guy throws poop at people. But for me, it’s about four high school kids going to desperate measures to get beer for a party. Without the characters and the universally relatable situation and emotion, the poop joke isn’t funny. So ultimately, yes, I’m writing some very lowbrow material here, but I’m always also trying to say something worthwhile about the experience of being a teenager.

I’m not sure how to approach this review. I don’t want to be needlessly harsh, but I’m not sure the producers of this film approached it the right way.

At the end credits of “Goon,” we learn that the movie is based on the exploits of a real life hockey goon and are treated to some clips of his actual fights, as well as an interview with the original goon. A documentary would have been far more interesting than the mess that was this fictional narrative.

Instead of a doc, we get the story of Doug Glatt (who is apparently Jewish, though we never learn why we should need to know this), a guy who can take a punch. He can’t play hockey, but someone gets the bright idea to put a uniform and skates on him and get him on the ice as a ‘goon.’ For the uninitiated, a hockey goon is someone who lacks great skill with the puck but is an enforcer on the ice, ready to throw down the gloves and duke it out with anyone trying to intimidate his teammates. Doug is shipped to a team to help a once-budding star gain back his confidence, which he lost after a vicious hit from another goon. Doug, played by Seann William Scott, is set on a collision course with the other goon, Liev Schreiber of all people, who is a tough guy at the end of his career.

I had to ask a random moviegoer at the end of this film if I had missed something. This movie has more personalities than Sybill. I almost think the production ran out of money or started with one production team and then found another halfway into shooting. It’s part “Slapshot,” “Bad News Bears,” “American Pie,” and even “Full Metal Jacket” (the team’s hockey coach spews more expletives than Sgt. Hartman).

The character of Doug Glatt is portrayed as a simpleton and borderline moron (in the strictest IQ sense), and I think one reason Seann William Scott may have taken this role is because he’s sick of being known as Stifler and the guy from “Dude Where’s My Car?” But there’s playing against type and running so far from type as to make you look ridiculous. Unfortunately, it’s the latter that occurs in “Goon.” And to make things worse, someone decided to cast Eugene Levy as Doug Glatt’s father, who is disappointed with his son’s life choices. Levy plays the role straight up, but the implication of putting him in this movie is clear: it’s an American Pie cast reunion, in case you just couldn’t wait for the actual reunion in, wait for it, American Reunion. I half expected to see Jason Biggs show up or the hockey team hooking up with girls from band camp.

There are a few laughs in Goon, but every time it presents itself as comedic it then swerves into the dramatic or the romantically comic or styles itself as a typical zeroes to heroes sports film. And then there’s the violence. All the beat downs in Happy Gilmore were funny (marginally funny) because it was not to be taken too seriously, but in “Goon” the right hooks are at once non-believable and over the top ugly. I’m surprised they even made this film, considering the fact that the NHL has gone to great lengths to take fighting out of the game. But when the gloves do come off the fights are so unreal as to be laughable. Except at some point, the fights go from being Happy Gilmore-style to more severe and graphic than any the Rocky films could conjure.

There may have been a kernel of a good idea for this film once, but it ends up in such bad and bloody shape that no good cast can rescue it. A documentary would have been so much more interesting. In the modern game of hockey, where there are no goons anymore, it would have been compelling to get a look back at how the game used to be and what the function of a “goon” truly was—how they were used, gladiator-style, to thrill fans who went to a boxing match only to find a hockey game break out. As is, however, “Goon” really deserves to be placed in the penalty box.

Here’s a spoiler-free synopsis of this movie:

A bunch of college students go to a secluded cabin. They are being watched. Then they are being murdered.

That’s it. That’s all I can give you. And if that seems like every other horror movie you’ve seen since “Friday the 13th”…well, it is.

And yet it’s not. But you already know that, because Joss Whedon wrote this movie, and Drew Goddard directed it (a frequent collaborator with Whedon and J.J. Abrams, among others). Suffice it to say, there is more to this cabin, and this movie, that meets the eye. And it ain’t no “Blair Witch Project.”

But any other descriptions must wait until you go to see this surprising, slightly half-baked, and significantly self-important little comedy-horror show.

The young people are headed by Kristen Connolly and Chris Hemsworth, looking very much the pinnacle of horror movie archetypes they are. The people who have…set upon them are led by “The West Wing’s” Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins. There is slaughter, well-timed gore, a hilarious bit involving an invisible barrier and a motorcycle.

God, my hands are really tied in terms of plot here.

Now, I can talk about Jenkins (marvelous as a project manager and bureaucrat, but I won’t say more), and Hemsworth (surprisingly not terrible when he’s not wearing a Thor costume) but everybody knows that the real star of this show is Whedon. The sci-fi master’s gift to the world is that he can take a completely insane concept (A cheerleading vampire slayer! A crime-fighting demon with a soul! Cowboys in space! A super villain who runs a blog!) and shape it with plausibility, humor, style, and, much more importantly, soul. Whedon makes serious stories, beautifully grounded stories, tales that make you forget how ridiculous their precepts are.

This is hardly the strongest of Whedon’s work. In the end it’s just far too meta and too much of an inside joke to truly be taken seriously. It’s a horror movie that is about the audience relationship with horror movies- that’s the kind of navel gazing that only happens in graduate film courses and episodes of “Community”. But among the self-satisfied reflections of our participation in the ritual of watching topless young women get slashed on screen is still that Whedon flame of humanity. It exists in the soulfulness of Connolly’s performance as the gentle but steely Final Woman, in the details of the nightmares and ancient fears made physical by the Powers That Be within the film.

It’s generally understood that we as a culture fixate and revel in violence in art to work out our own anxieties and fears- we sacrifice imaginary people in order to ensure that we ourselves are not consumed. Whedon’s the first guy who actually made me realize how bizarrely cruel and selfish that is. “The Cabin in the Woods” is an odd little movie with a plot I cannot explain. It is very scary and very funny. And like all of Whedon’s work, its unexpected truth is painful.

This movie is barely 90 minutes long. And “Lockout” was the longest movie I’ve seen in the past year. At least.

It’s still a little unclear how this is possible. Was it the fact that in 2032 or whenever this movie is supposed to be set, it seems that anyone can be an astronaut? Was it the entire scenes and plot points that were so poorly cribbed from better movies such as “Blade Runner”, “Die Hard” and “Con Air”? Was it Guy Pearce’s inept Harrison Ford impression? Was it the near constant threats of rape against the President’s daughter who’s on the space prison where there’s a mass breakout?

Was it because the movie takes place in a space prison?

Let’s just call it all of the above.

Here’s what I think happened. Celebrated action director Luc Besson (“The Fifth Element,” “The Professional”) had a super-cool idea about a world where people keep their most hardened criminals in stasis in an orbiting space prison. There’s a breakout, and the government turns to one man to go in (Pearce), save the President’s daughter (Maggie Grace) who’s there on a humanitarian mission, and quell the riot. As movie ideas go, it is indeed pretty super-cool.

Then poor Luc hired a couple of rooky screenplay writers with only a vague idea of how to edit and produce a finished work, and just for good measure got a bunch of jagweed producers involved in the re-writes. Everyone was feeling lazy that day, so they just stole a bunch of crap from “Blade Runner” (a whole chase scene in a rainy, depressing futuristic Chinatown), and “Con Air” (the prisoners escape partly because the idiot secret service agent wouldn’t relinquish his gun).

Pearce deserves a lot of blame too. His version of Harrison Ford’s trademark sexy dickishness was half-assed and ridiculous- I’m fairly certain he actually called the President’s daughter “Princess,” though that may have been a hallucination. There might have been more for him to do, but the movie is so badly cut together, you never have a chance to get a handle on anyone, even the main character.

Grace is a little bright spot, imbuing her character with more dignity than this movie deserves. And British character actor Joseph Gilgun is mesmerizing as a mentally unhinged prisoner who keeps being pesky and shooting people for the funsies. Gilgun acts circles around Pearce and everyone else in this time-suck, providing comic relief while being simultaneously really, really terrifying.

Going to see a movie about space jail, you come prepared for a lot of things. You come prepared for crappy dialogue, and silly plot twists, and timers counting down ominously to zero. You come prepared for shlock. But dammit, you do not come prepared to be bored. To be bored in a movie that includes a line like “The International Space Station didn’t crash into the prison! The prison crashed into the International Space Station!” is simply unforgivable.

What would have happened if Besson had the time or the energy to complete this project on his own? Probably it still would have been silly and fleeting. But maybe it would have been a self-contained little work of pop art, the way “The Fifth Element” was, or “La Femme Nikita”. It may not have had the staying power of those movies. But at least I wouldn’t have left the theater, turned on my phone and been shocked it was only 8:30 p.m.

If you want to see a “film” –as opposed to a “movie” —make sure you check out A Separation, winner of the 2011 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

The Iranian work depicts a husband, Nader (Peyman Moadi) and wife, Simin (Leila Hatami), who struggle with a seemingly irresolvable conflict. Nader’s father suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and needs constant care, but Simin wants to move abroad, leaving her father-in-law behind. The couple’s daughter, too, is torn by these competing desires. A separation is the only thing that can reduce the tension.

Without his wife, Nader, a well-to-do banker, must find help to take care of his father while he is at work. He hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat) to assist his father during the days. Pregnant, simple, and pious, she is ill-equipped to handle the senile father; she ties him to the bed one day when she has to leave the apartment. Nader returns home to discover this and summarily fires her, sparking an argument. As Nader escorts Razieh from the apartment, she slips on the stairs, causing her to miscarry. Razieh’s husband, an out of work laborer with credit problems, blames Nader. Both families suffer as court proceedings unfold and the truth comes to light.

A Separation works on many levels: thematically, stylistically, and intellectually. It’s hard to compare the narrative to anything we might experience in America because the position of women in Iran is so inferior to that of men, but there are many more separations in this film than just that of husband and wife.

Class, gender, age, religion—it seems that no one in this society can see eye to eye. Indeed, the mise en scene of A Separation is brilliantly crafted. People are always separated by doorways, windows, rooms, plexi-glass. No one can make a connection without some divide being in the way. Art film junkies might be reminded of Robert Bresson’s L’Argent (“Money”) in which the subtext is emotional and social currency, or lack thereof.

The artful use of subtext is what makes A Separation a true “film” as opposed to a “movie” – the latter of which only seeks to entertain, not to challenge. Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing like a little movie fun. But the direction of motion pictures today –at least in the Hollywood sense – seems to be driven toward concept, with flashy visuals and punchy dialogue. All too often there is little beneath the surface.

Compelling characters that manifest an internal struggle and change, as well as an overall dramatic argument, seem to be afterthoughts in many American movies.  A Separation, in contrast, is proof that “cinema” remains alive and well.

“A Separation” is now playing locally at the Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge and the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline. Other locations and showing times are available here. 

Bob Marley fans who just can’t wait for Magnolia Pictures’ “Marley”, directed by Kevin Macdonald, to hit theaters on April 20 can take a shot at winning tickets, courtesy of none other than Blast Magazine.

Follow and tweet @blastmagazine to win passes to a pre-screening on April 19 at 7 p.m. at the Kendall Square Cinema.

“Marley” explores Bob Marley’s impact on music history and his role as a social and political figure. It details his life story and rise to fame using rare footage, performances, and interviews with those who knew him, including son Ziggy and wife Rita.

The second film installment of the “Hunger Games” series phenomena, “Catching Fire,” may be postponed from its original November 2013 opening date.

Director Gary Ross spared no praise while addressing his experience with the filming of the first film, but Ross has apparently expressed a desire for a substantial increase in his paycheck for the upcoming sequel.

The flick has earned more than $300 million thus far, 5 percent of which is given to Ross along with a $3 million paycheck. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that, according to sources, Ross was unwilling to bargain, and that the negotiations were “a terrible experience.”

Ross, unlike the stars of the film, did not sign for the sequel.

Captain America to the rescue once again.  Walt Disney Studios announced the superhero will star in a sequel to his last blockbuster smash, to be released on April 14,2014.

The Sequel to Captain America: The First Avenger will star Chris Evans right where he left off. Marvel reports that this movie will continue Captain America’s fight to accept his place in the modern world.

I’ve got a confession to make.

Until Tuesday night I was an “American Pie” virgin.

The first “American Pie” came out in 1999, which means I was about 13 years old and just a little too young to see it. Then I got older, the Clinton Administration ended, I started reading feminist literature in high school, and I never did catch the bandwagon to see either of the sequels, nor of course the straight-to-DVD issues.

I know all the cultural references. I’ve seen the t-shirts and heard the jokes about Stifler’s mom, so it’s not like I was going in blind. But here I was, with an assignment to see the sequel to a major 90s cultural icon, and for once I knew less than the Broseph sitting next to me.

Here’s what I learned:

1. Everyone has a story about the first time they saw “American Pie.” Seriously. It’s right up there in significant life memories as “the first time I had sex”, “the first time I had my heart broken” and “the first time I realized wrestling was fake.”
2. For a series that is supposed to act as a bellwether for teen raunch comedy, “American Reunion” was pretty damn tame compared to a lot of other things I’ve seen.
3. 90s rock music (of which there’s a significant amount in “American Reunion” is still 10,000 times better than David Guetta or dubstep or any other piece of club crap put out within the past decade. Harvey Danger 4 evah.

Your opinion of “American Reunion” is going to be based primarily on whether you find a bunch of 30-year-olds hitting on barely-legal girls in bikinis hilarious or deeply creepy. For me, it was a little of Column A, a little of Column B, probably because I don’t have daughters. The 30-year-olds are our fierce cast from the four previous movies, back in town for their 13th (?) class reunion. Led by hapless Jim (Jason Biggs), now raising a son with his wife Michelle (Alyson Hannigan), most of the group seems very much like most of 30-year-olds I know. They’ve settled into mundane but steady jobs, are either married or in steady relationships, and are more or less happy with their lot. Stifler (Scott) is the exception, of course: permanently stuck at 17 emotionally, he works as the sexist temp in an investment firm, lives to re-live his gang’s past glories, and is perpetually horrified that all his friends have grown up and left him behind.

There’s a lot of bouncing B-cup tits, and jokes about masturbation, and lines about that one time in band camp, more than enough to satisfy the average “American Pie” fan. My personal favorite moment is when a naked and hung over Jim awakes in his family’s kitchen and tries to hide his shame in front of his wife and her friend by covering himself with a pot lid. A transparent pot lid. And Eugene Levy, who pays the rent by appearing in all these movies as Jim’s sweet and over-sharing dad, has a wonderful couple of scenes with Stifler’s mom (the fabulous Jennifer Coolidge).

But Scott is without a doubt the most surprising. I had always assumed that Stifler was just the crass, bullying misogynist that’s contractually required in these movies. And he is all those things, but mostly Stifler is a man who goes through life literally vibrating with manic sexual energy, like a revved engine with the parking brake on. Upon seeing someone he only vaguely remembers from high school, he comes up to the poor bastard with a crazed Joker smile, and says, “Hey, bro, how the fuck are you doing?” It’s a throwaway line, but Scott makes it simultaneously exciting, friendly, hilarious, and slightly terrifying.

It’s not Shakespeare. It’s not even the funniest movie I’ve seen in the last six months. But the best thing I can say for “American Reunion” is this. When I left the theater, I wanted to go back and watch the other ones. I wanted to make that cultural connection, to fully pop my “American Pie” cherry.

And who knows? Maybe I’ll finally get around to watching “Dude, Where’s My Car?”

We’ve seen a number of teasers and trailers for next month’s superhero team-up Blockbuster The Avengers, but we’re now finally getting our first full clip from the film — and it’s a doozy.  Check out Scarlett Johansson, as The Black Widow, busting out of captivity and kicking some bad guy ass.

The Avengers hits theaters nationwide May 4.

I always loved Greek myth, mainly because it was predicated on the idea that our cosmic beginnings were just as filled with marital strife, petty greed and familial resentment as our normal lives are. The gods of old were just human beings with more power and cool toys, and they acted accordingly.

In this way, there’s actually a lot to recommend “Wrath of the Titans,” the completely unnecessary sequel to “Clash of the Titans,” which was the completely unnecessary re-make of 1981′s “Clash of the Titans.” Liam Neeson, reprising his role as Zeus, Ralph Fiennes as Hades and Edgar Ramirez as Ares all play their roles as normal people who happen to have the the creative powers of gods. They are jealous and hold grudges. They are capable to human love, and simple Freudian motivations.

The fact that all of them display atrocious acting skill in a story that makes little sense at the beginning and has little resolution at the end is almost beside the point. Almost.

“Wrath of the Titans,” is truly as ridiculous as you could imagine, with stodgy awkward dialogue and unnatural delivery from all those listed above, as well as leading man Perseus (Sam Worthington). There seems to be a beat between every line that comes out of the mouths of these worthy gentlemen, giving the film a quality of being a well-produced school play.

According to the story, the demigod Perseus is a now a widower with a young son, living his life out in a fishing village. Zeus, his father, comes to him and tells him that there something brewing in the state of Tartarus, and it might be Kronos. Or something. Frankly, I wasn’t paying that much attention during that part. Anyway, Zeus is kidnapped, and sapped of his power by a big Tim Burtony tree in Tartarus, and Perseus will have to save him before Earth is devoured by chimera. Or…something. Anyway Zeus’ power wakes up Kronos, and he’s trying to escape Tartarus, and destroy the Earth? And Rosamund Pike is Andromeda and her soldiers are fighting the Chimera? And there’s a big labyrinth to get to Tartarus?

I’m sorry what were you saying Liam Neeson? I dozed off for a bit there. Oh right, this is an insane plot created by three different writers who seem to have only a vague idea of what a complete narrative looks like.

It’s not all bad news. First of all, it’s not nearly as long as I had anticipated. Pike kills it as the warrior queen Andromeda (and looks both incredibly sexy and also like she could pull your throat out if you talk back to her.) And Bill Nighy, the brave soul, plays the exiled god Hephaestus as a burnt-out hippie who’s been alone a little too long with just his thoughts and his weed. The man could make an HBO soft-core porno seem charming and watchable, so this is a cakewalk for him.

You know what I would love to see? I would love to see a Greek epic centered around an awkward and unsettling family reunion. Zeus would preside over everything as the blowhard family patriarch, Ares would be sulking in the corner stabbing at the roast, Athena and Hera would be snarking passive-aggressively over who’s the better cook. Kronos would be the slightly demented grandfather in the wheelchair at the end of the table, telling racist jokes, cracking on Aphrodite’s fake tits and making everyone uncomfortable. Hephaestus could still be played by Bill Nighy, needling the conservative Poseidon into a political argument and slipping food to Cerberus the three-headed dog under the table. The gods are just a dysfunctional family, like anyone else’s. So let’s just can the crappy 3D, and the chimera fights and the magic god weapons and watch these gods do something truly amazing: tolerate each other for several hours.

There really is no greater sign of Hollywood being out of ideas than this recent trend of remaking classic fairytales. Have we run out of sequels, prequels and trilogies already? Aren’t there a few more obscure graphic novel heroes that we can attempt to make into summer blockbusters?

Following in the footsteps of 2011’s “Red Riding Hood,” “Mirror Mirror” attempts to bring a fresh, modern take to the familiar children’s story of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”. However, a few jarring differences from Disney’s adaptation cannot transform this classically boring tale into anything more than a predictable, laugh-less snooze-fest.

The story behind “Mirror Mirror” is just about as boring and cliché as a kid’s story can get. The tale begins with a happy and bountiful kingdom ruled by a beloved king. But one day the king disappears into the woods never to be seen again, and his Evil Queen takes over his rule. She taxes the people into poverty and uses magic to bring a state of constant winter to the land. She keeps the king’s daughter, Snow White, locked up in the castle, forbidding her to leave her room under any circumstance. Will a hero come along to stop the Queen from taxing the commoners to death?

The creators of “Mirror Mirror” try to disguise an unimaginative story by introducing stark variations to some aspects of the old animated film. The Seven Dwarfs are now grubby, thieving bandits who walk on stilts and steal from rich people who pass through their section of the woods. The “mirror mirror on the wall” is actually a magic portal that transports the Evil Queen to her own evil hideout, where she can communicate with her magical reflection. And some kind of dreadful beast roams the forests, causing the villagers to live in fear. All of these updates are superfluous and in no way help save the film.

Armie Hammer as Prince Alcott

The only redeeming part of “Mirror Mirror” is Armie Hammer (“The Social Network”) as Prince Alcott. Hammer successfully transitions from his previous serious roles in “Network” and “J. Edgar” to this silly role as a handsome fairytale prince. Legitimately amusing parts are very few and far between in this movie, but when they do occur they almost always concern Prince Alcott. The Seven Dwarves are meant to be a major source of hilarity but instead are mostly annoying. Julia Roberts as the Queen is equally irritating, and Nathan Lane as her bumbling servant is a lame re-hashing of Lefou from “Beauty and the Beast”.

As retched a film as “Mirror Mirror” is, it does deserve praise for one thing in particular. Actor Sean Bean, known for his roles in “The Lord of the Rings” and “Game of Thrones”, makes it to the end of the movie without being decapitated, shot full of arrows, blown up, or meeting his demise in any other hapless ways. That has to be why Bean agreed to appear in “Mirror Mirror”, because I can’t think of any other reasons.

With “Mirror Mirror”, Director Tarsem Singh has given us another disappointing flop after the bomb that was “Immortals”, which ended up with a 37% on RottenTomatoes. It’s a shame too, because if you’ve seen “The Fall”, you know that Singh is capable of making films that are not only visually stunning but also contain captivating narratives. Here’s to hoping he will soon right the ship and give us another great movie that will help us forget the bitter taste of the likes of “Mirror Mirror”.

Fans of Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence can get a first look today at her upcoming thriller House at the End of the Street, due in theaters this fall.

Lawrence’s character, Elissa, has just moved with her recently-divorced mother Sarah (Elisabeth Shue) to a new house in a seemingly charming small town. Against her mother’s wishes, she begins a relationship with her next-door-neighbor, Ryan (Max Thierot) – the only member of his family that remains after a series of brutal murders years before. In learning more about Ryan, Elissa and her mother begin to uncover the dark secrets that lurk just beyond their front door.

The first teaser trailer for the upcoming, and final, installment of the massively successful Twilight series is online today. It can be viewed here.

The film, starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and Taylor Lautner, is set to hit theaters on November 16.

Sundance Selects – a video-on-demand platform providing independent documentary and world cinema films to customers of major cable companies like Comcast and Time Warner – will have two works featured in the 2012 Independent Film Festival Boston.

Ai Wei Wei – Never Sorry, directed by Alison Klayman, profiles “China’s most famous international artist and its most outspoken domestic critic,” from his work to protest through art and organized efforts to the merciless pushback from the Chinese government.  It opens in Boston on July 27.

How To Survive A Plague, directed by David France and Peter Staley, opens in Boston in September. The film tells the story of the groups ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group), whose efforts, without any formal scientific training behind them, helped to turn AIDS “from a death sentence into a manageable condition.”

The Festival, in its 10^th year, will run from April 25 to May 2. It aims to showcase a number of American films made outside major studios as well as International films, be they animations, narrative features, or documentaries.

More information on the festival and its films can be found at http://www.iffboston.org

There can be no comparison between “The Hunger Games” and “The Twilight Saga” because (and I want to make this abundantly clear) "The Hunger Games” is actually -- good.

A summary (Because if we literally covered every possible way in which “The Hunger Games” is better than ‘Twilight’ we’d be writing a book, not an article, and it would still be better written than ‘Twilight’)

Ever since Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games” trilogy arrived on the young adult literature scene, it has been compared to “The Twilight Saga” by Stephenie Meyer. Now that “The Hunger Games” movie is coming out, more and more we’ll be hearing that it is “the next ‘Twilight.’” Not only is this comparison completely illogical and bizarre, but it’s offensive. To compare “The Hunger Games” to “The Twilight Saga” is to suggest that they are at least equal in quality, which is of course preposterous.

We compare apples to oranges. We do not compare apples to moldy, putrefying globs of vegetable matter that hate Christmas and kill puppies for fun. Thus, there can be no comparison between “The Hunger Games” and “The Twilight Saga” because (and I want to make this abundantly clear) “The Hunger Games” is actually – good.

There are those who believe that “Twilight” is a good book. They’re wrong.

Those who believe that the movies based on the “Twilight” books are good are also wrong. And those who believe that there are books based on the “Twilight” movies are wrongest of all, on a number of levels.

We can allow for different literary and film taste. After all, there’s something for everyone, and there must be someone out there (some out-of-their-mind person) for whom “The Twilight Saga” is the be-all and end-all of literary greatness (they’re wrong, of course, but let’s humor them for the sake of discourse). Their high opinion of “Twilight” is valid as far as opinions are concerned, and so we shouldn’t look down on someone simply for their love of “Twilight” (though we do).

No, Twihards are welcome to love “Twilight”. But the moment they imply that the affront to the English language and feminist sensibilities that is their sparkly glorified abusive relationship story is equal to “The Hunger Games”, those of us with fully functioning brains must take a stand.

Ladies, gentlemen, and Twihards: “The Hunger Games” is in no uncertain terms way better than “Twilight” and I’ll tell you why.

For one thing, “The Hunger Games” has a plot. If we’re just focusing on the first book in either series, on one side of the arena we have a complex coming-of-age story with a heroine who defies both authority and gender roles in the name of survival and building a better world, which deals with adult themes of life-and-death magnitude. On the other side we have a story about the importance of having a cute boyfriend, to paraphrase Stephen King.

Nothing happens in “Twilight.” We spend the first three quarters of the book marveling over Bella’s hackneyed descriptions of Edward’s hunky marble ass and watching her brush her teeth. Then Stephenie Meyer remembers that books are supposed to involve some kind of conflict, so she throws in a bunch of meany-pants vampires who conveniently want to suck our heroine’s (and I use that word lightly) heart out through her neck. It’s lazy writing, and it means that about 70% of “Twilight” could’ve benefitted from the backspace key.

By contrast, a whole helluva lot happens in “The Hunger Games.” We begin the story by getting introduced to our heroine and her world. Collins sets up clear rules and systems for Katniss’s society right away, and then the rest of the plot revolves around how Katniss alternately bends to those rules, or learns to break them. There are characters outside of the love triangle who are fully-realized and important to both Katniss and the plot. And speaking of the love triangle: It exists, but is not the most important thing in “The Hunger Games”.

The most noticeable difference between “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games” is the main character. For one thing, “The Hunger Games” has one. Don’t ask me why Stephenie Meyer thought it was cool to have a limp noodle narrate her magnum opus. I’m still trying to figure out why she thought it was ok to cast all the people of color in “Twilight” as savage beasts (the appalling cultural appropriation rampant in “Twilight” is for another article).

Nothing happens in “Twilight.” We spend the first three quarters of the book marveling over Bella’s hackneyed descriptions of Edward’s hunky marble ass and watching her brush her teeth.

Bella Swan is both a blank slate and a completely negative role model. Meyer has been quoted as saying that she deliberately wrote Bella with very little character description so the reader could more easily slip into her skin and experience the story as Bella. For one thing: That’s a bullshit excuse for lazy writing. For another: Writing a character who spends every waking moment criticizing herself, thinking poorly of herself, and submitting to the wills of other (male) characters as a vehicle for the imaginations of impressionable teenage girls is utterly reprehensible. If I had a teenage daughter who was at all unsure of herself, I would be terrified to expose her to the ideas of self-loathing that are glorified in “Twilight.”

Not only does Bella have literally nothing good to say about herself, but she is perfectly willing to let others walk all over her, or to walk all over others. She has one of two reactions to everyone around her: 1) “I worship the ground you walk on and will endure physical pain and emotional degradation if you so wish,” or 2) “I can’t be bothered to acknowledge you exist or care about your petty feelings, Charlie, Jessica, Mike, Angela, Eric, or all of my other so-called ‘friends.’”

Katniss, on the other hand, is a fully-realized and complex character. She has mommy issues. She was raised in abject poverty. She makes decisions fueled alternately by a calculating ruthlessness and desperate emotional instinct. Katniss is a person in a way that Bella could never be because Katniss is not a blank slate, and yet she is still remarkably easy for readers both male and female to relate to. Katniss has a strong sense of self that allows her both to admit that she is in the Hunger Games to survive, and to admit that she is confused and conflicted about her feelings for Peeta and Gale. She is strong in her moments of weakness. She is a contradictory character… much like real people in the real world.

Then there’s the romance. Again, “Twilight” is a story marketed to teenage girls. And speaking as a former teenage girl, I know what balls of unpredictable hormones and self-consciousness they can be.  The Prince Charming romance is tried and true, but in “Twilight” it takes a darker twist.

Bella’s relationship with Edward is horrifying. He sneaks into her room at night to watch her sleep. He stalks her. He dictates who she can spend time with and when. He controls her comings and goings. He admits to wanting to kill her. He withholds physical intimacy and makes her feel guilty for having perfectly normal feelings of attraction. When they consummate their relationship he leaves her black and blue from head to toe, and by that time she’s so indoctrinated into the Cult of Edward that she basically tells him “Oh no, dear. It’s perfectly fine that you severely injured me during my first sexual encounter. I completely forgive you for not being able to control yourself and avoid hurting me. It’s perfectly understandable”

Parents of teenage girls: This is not a healthy relationship. This is not a relationship you want your daughters fantasizing about. This is not the relationship you want your daughters to find normal when they’re grown up and at the mercy of real life Edwards who will terrorize and abuse them. Stephenie Meyer is blatantly irresponsible by glorifying an abusive relationship to teenagers.

To be fair, Katniss’s relationships with Peeta and Gale are by no means healthy, but they are at least semi-normal. And Katniss’s romance with Peeta in particular subverts gender roles in a way that is both empowering to young people reading the books and utterly romantic.

While Katniss is a hunter with deadly skills in archery and snaring (a traditionally masculine role), Peeta is a baker and an artist (traditionally more feminine skills) and a gifted speaker. Yet they complement each other. Peeta’s talents don’t make him a weaker person than Katniss, or make him obsolete to the woman who can both feed and defend herself. On the contrary: Peeta’s artistic skills allowed him to camouflage and save himself in “The Hunger Games” until Katniss could find him. They also give him a vehicle for expressing his emotions that make him in ways stronger than Katniss. His eloquence proved invaluable in uniting the districts during their victory tour, and his paintings of the arena expressed quite vividly the experiences that Katniss found it difficult to share with Gale and her family.

So in short, Katniss and Peeta are equally matched, though their strengths lie in different areas. When one treats the other poorly, it is not glorified by Suzanne Collins. When Katniss drugs Peeta so she can go to the cornucopia without him, Peeta feels betrayed and has difficulty forgiving her. As he should. Katniss, like Edward, believed that she was violating her partner’s rights to keep him safe, but unlike Bella (who simply rolls over and accepts Edward’s decrees on her behalf), Peeta does not simply excuse Katniss’s violation.

Beyond the plot, the main character, and the romance, there is one other fundamental level on which “The Hunger Games” kicks “Twilight”’s ass. Suzanne Collins can write. I’m not sure what Stephenie Meyer thought she was doing for four massive books, but it certainly wasn’t a credit to the English language or artistic expression.

It has been argued that Stephenie Meyer’s writing isn’t bad it’s just “her style.” In the words of Dana from the anti-“Twilight” blog Reasoning With Vampires: “Fine. Her style is tacky.” Good writing is not simply about being grammatically correct. It’s about knowing the rules of grammar and understanding when it’s effective to break them. Both Collins and Meyer include sentence fragments in their writing, but the difference is that Collins’s use of fragments is meant to heighten the tension of exciting scenes and spur the action forward. Meyer’s sentence fragments simply indicate that she doesn’t know what she’s doing.

Meyer’s syntax choices are baffling, her spelling is laughable (I don’t know about you, but if I had a “moat” of dust stuck in my eye I’d be screaming in pain), and her over-use of the thesaurus makes for humorously purple prose (Edward’s “liquid topaz”  eyes were just a little too much for me, but I guess when every other sentence is used to describe the physical perfection of Sparkle Boy, one has to change it up somehow). The only thing natural about Meyer’s writing is that it reads like a tenth grader’s creative writing assignment.

But Meyer is not a tenth grader writing a story for school. She’s a professionally published author writing for the public market and somebody somewhere along the line should’ve forced her to revise. As a publishing professional, I’m a little embarrassed on behalf of Little,Brown’s editorial department. Just because the romance of Bella and Edward sprang fully-formed from Meyer’s dreaming mind does not mean that that is the best possible way it could have been written. Quite the opposite in fact, since many professional authors will tell you that shoddy first drafts are a necessary step in the writing process.

Collins writes for the same young adult audience that Meyer writes for. Both “The Hunger Games” and “Twilight” are narrated by teenage girls. And yet Katniss’s narration manages to remain fresh, interesting, and intelligent throughout three books. No one ever excuses the prose in “The Hunger Games” because “Well, the narrator is a teenage girl and that’s just how they think/speak/write,” and yet defenders of “Twilight” use that excuse all the time. It is possible to write in the voice of a teenager without writing like a teenager. Collins does this beautifully, even while including sentence fragments and unorthodox syntax.

“The Hunger Games” comes out in theaters on Friday, and no doubt the “Twilight” comparisons will go into full force then. “Will ‘The Hunger Games’ dethrone ‘Twilight’ as the reigning teen craze?” the entertainment writers will ask, just as they did of “Twilight” “dethroning” “Harry Potter” (another ill-fitting comparison).

The main character is a young woman and the story contains a love triangle, but the similarities end there. While there are probably some fans who enjoy both, the two stories aren’t even in the same ballpark. In fact, “The Hunger Games” is way out of “Twilight’s” league.

Never send a boy to do a man’s work or so the old saying does. But what about sending a man to a boy’s (or girl’s) movie? Such was the question I asked myself when Blast Magazine asked me to review the latest sensation in the young adult novel/movie genre: “The Hunger Games”.

I was not a fan of “Twilight” and checked out after the first film. It was a decent enough movie, but it didn’t hold my interest. Something about a rural, logging town in Washington State where everyone looks as if he or she walked out of an Old Navy ad did not sit right with me.

“Twilight” was pretty much my only frame of reference as I sat down for “The Hunger Games”. I hadn’t read the novel and only vaguely knew it was set in a bleak future. This post-apocalyptic future works to “The Hunger Games’” advantage, for I was not relating the action in the movie to any real life situation— whereas in “Twilight”, despite the vampire aspect, the story world was very much present day America. Thus, a detail about “The Hunger Games,” where our protagonists come from a starving community but seem too rosy in the face, bothered me less than the lapses of logic in “Twilight”.

A quick plot summary: “The Hunger Games” depicts a world where an autocratic central government holds twelve outlying districts under its sway. In return for protection, every year each district sends two of its children –a boy and a girl—as “tributes” to compete in a battle to the death, with only one winner emerging. The “Hunger Games” are a hugely popular television show, and the society seems to revolve around this mashup of American Idol and Survivor. But in this reality show competitors don’t vie for points, cash, or flattering comments. They want each other’s blood.

From District 12, we follow Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark as they are chosen (Katniss volunteers to go in place of her frail sister), trained, and set loose in the wilderness to fight for survival against an array of other children, some savage and some ill prepared for this deadliest of games.

“The Hunger Games” very much reminded me of “The Running Man,” the Arnold Schwarzenegger action vehicle where political criminals are stalked in a game zone by maniacal gladiators while rabid fans watch on television and bet how long competitors will survive. “The Running Man” seemed to succeed more than “The Hunger Games,” for not only does Arnold’s character survive, but he also manages to launch a rebellion against the oppressive state which sponsors the show. Perhaps this will occur in what appeared to be the set up for an inevitable trilogy at the “The Hunger Games” end, but since we don’t see that in this chapter of story, the latter half of the movie felt flat.

Indeed, there seems to be a moment in “The Hunger Games” when Katniss’s heroics put the game’s producers on edge. They scramble to change the rules to the game as a rebellion breaks out in one of the districts. There can be only one, (for you “Highlander” fans) becomes Well, there can be two. But then the rules change again…and again…and nothing seems to come of Katniss’s triumph (plot spoiler: she survives). In a movie where the stakes could not be higher — life and death — the story meanders about halfway in and loses the strength it had built up.

Furthermore, in The Running Man, the host of the television show –played obnoxiously and brilliantly—by real game show host Richard Dawson, is the focus of Schwarzenegger’s revenge and that eventual showdown feels natural and satisfying when it comes. In “The Hunger Games”, Stanley Tucci and Wes Bentley play an announcer and “The Hunger Games” organizer, respectively, but they are the two hats Dawson wore in his one role—and Dawson did both better—and having two characters dilutes any power either can muster. Tucci is more engaging as a smarmy and saccharine version of Ryan Seacrest, but the inclusion of all these characters (including a brooding Donald Sutherland as the President of the government) leaves too much on the table and none are really resolved in any more than cursory fashion.

But our real interest and attention is with the children on the field (it’s actually a forest) of battle, and one of the reasons I preferred this to “Twilight” was that our heroine, Katniss, is truly heroic. In “Twilight,” Bella was a weak and passive character, always requiring the protection of others. In “The Hunger Games,” Katniss is a warrior, as good as Robin Hood with a bow and arrow, who uses strength, intelligence, and cunning to outlast all others. I really was rooting for her to win.

In all honesty, I simply might not get this movie. It’s an adventure for younger people, though I think you can enjoy it even if you are 30 and up. It appears as if it will be a box office and pop culture hit, but I’m not sure I found anything meaningful to hold onto in “The Hunger Games,” It’s a fast two hours, and if you don’t go in expecting too much you’ll most likely emerge hungry for more.

WACO, Texas — The movie “The Hunger Games,” a story about adolescents in a post-apocalyptic survival contest, opens in theaters March 23 and offers “a perfect tale of apprehension for our time” of financial upheaval and a bleak job market, says a Baylor University culture critic and author.

The film, based on a bestselling science fiction book trilogy, “allows its readers and viewers to consciously or unconsciously wrestle with some of our biggest issues” among them “dog-eat-dog capitalism where you have to roll over your rivals or starve,” said Greg Garrett, Ph.D., a professor of English at Baylor and author of One Fine Potion: The Literary Magic of Harry Potter and The Gospel According to Hollywood.

Garrett noted that the author, Suzanne Collins, says the idea for the series came from channel-surfing, in which images of the Iraq War and American reality television blended. Written in first person, the trilogy is the story of Katniss, 16, who lives in a future world where the countries of North America once existed. The Capitol holds absolute power, and The Hunger Games are an annual event in which one boy and one girl aged 12 to 18 from each of 12 districts are selected by lottery to compete in a televised battle in which only one person can survive.

“In cultural criticism, we ask what needs are served by popular culture — especially best-selling books and top-grossing movies — and I think The Hunger Games addresses the anxiety caused by the biggest recession in generations and a job market in which the guaranteed way of life Americans have always expected — a job out of college, some financial security, maybe a house — is falling farther out of reach,” Garrett said.

“Many of the book’s core audience may have older siblings who have had to move back home, so they may be aware that their future prospects aren’t rosy,” he said. “We also live in a political climate where some of the loudest voices are speaking about self-sufficiency and individual achievement rather than the common good.”

Garrett said the concept is not new, citing The Running Man science fiction book and film as well as the Japanese novel and film Battle Royale.

“The Hunger Games” contains “some implicit political criticism, although maybe not as much as in Battle Royale, where the Japanese kids forced to fight each other realize that their culture values conformity and authority so much that it will do whatever the government says — even feeding their children into a system where they have to fight or die,” he said.“But certainly The Hunger Games is aware of the problem of war and wrestles with what it does to a culture —and also with what kind of culture would embrace this kind of deadly entertainment.”

If you accept that you’re watching a movie in which the funniest bit is watching Channing Tatum stick his tongue out when he’s stoned, then “21 Jump Street,” the comic re-boot of the 1980s television cop drama, is actually pretty awesome.

The absolute best thing this movie has going for it is the fact that it seems to be fully aware of itself. Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller are content with a basic framework of a plot with a few twists on the normal formula, and two leads (Tatum and Jonah Hill) who do a workmanlike job of keeping us entertained for two hours.

The movie follows the basic story of the TV show: young-looking cops are sent in undercover into area high schools to investigate youth crime. There’s actually nothing all that memorable about the show; the only reason it’s stayed in the public consciousness was that it cast a young, unknown Johnny Depp in the lead role.

Writer Michael Bacall chooses to use the backdrop as a buddy comedy, and Tatum and Hill do a serviceable job as the two friends fresh out of police academy and sent to the 21 Jump Street program after they arrest a man without reading his Miranda Rights. Channing Tatum, as the lug head Jenko, has more comic timing than I’d thought to give him credit for; whether he simply received good direction or has improved himself is unclear, but he’s come a long way from stuttering his way through “She’s the Man.” He’s an excellent other half for a newly svelte Jonah Hill as Schmidt, and the two have a rapport that really crackles.

The rest of the movie is filled with little pleasant surprises. The two men roll into high school assuming that they will fall into the roles they played when they were teenagers (Jenko of course was the dumb jock, Schmidt- not so much). But high school has changed since the late 90s: suddenly Jenko’s gas-guzzling sports car and laziness is considered lame, while Schmidt’s quirkiness and newly-found confidence make him a star among the hipster classes. Finding themselves so clearly out of the element that defined them as teenagers is just as disconcerting, and even more difficult to navigate than the drug-ring they’re supposed to be investigating.

There’s a lot more that the movie could have done with the resources it had. A subplot involving Ellie Kemper as a teacher with an inappropriate crush on her “student” Jenko could have been a comic goldmine, but it’s abandoned halfway through. And the entire drug-ring plot deteriorates in a messy climactic prom scene that puts far too much focus on a cameos by Depp and former “Jump Street” co-star Peter DeLuise. But again, ignoring the giant plot holes you could drive a truck through and the inherent silliness of re-making “21 Jump Street” at all, this isn’t a terrible way to spend your hard-earned money.

Brothers Jay and Mark Duplass’s talent shines through their new film, “Jeff, Who Lives At Home.” And with the help of actors Jason Segal and Ed Helms, this film could very well put them on the map

To start off, the movie is just fun, but how can it not be, especially when you have actors like Segal and Helms, and even Susan Sarandon who is guilty of making it hard for the audience to suppress their laughter? There is nothing conventional about this film or the family in it, and that is why you can’t help but to fall in love with everything about it.

The film did have its moments where it seemed to be slow and drifting, but it was at that moment when something unforeseen takes place. It’s why the film was so successful; the directors always the audience wondering what could possibly be next. So I think it’s only proper to give credit where credit is due. Jay and Mark Duplass put together a great film.

“Jeff, Who lives at Home” starts off with Segal, who plays the very unique title character, recording his journal-esque thoughts. The movie begins with Jeff saying, “I watched ‘Signs’ again last night. It gets better every time you see it.” First of all, who still watches “Signs,” and second of all it was impossible to even attempt to take him serious since he was recollecting his thoughts while sitting on a toilet. And I don’t use unique too lightly for a 30-year-old stoner man with a free spirit personality and a residence in his mother’s basement. Jeff has this overbearing innocence to him that makes you want to punch his brother, Pat, played by Ed Helms, in the face whenever he makes a condescending comment. Rooting for Jeff from the beginning of the movie is completely unavoidable.

The story takes place in Baton Rouge, La. and begins when the mother (Sarandon) asks Jeff to go to the store to buy wood glue. This errand sends Jeff on a life changing experience that shows the audience how truly tragic each family member’s life is. Jeff is portrayed as this complete nobody, it’s as if the only thing he can do correctly is hit a bong without coughing up a right lung. His brother Pat has a lousy marriage that is deteriorating and he is way too clueless to even comprehend it. And their mother feels as if there is no purpose to her life at all. Yet, through all the chaos of the events that take place, you can’t help but want to make sure that Jeff is going to be okay.

Jeff is convinced that there are such things as destiny and fate, and throughout the film he is engrossed with trying to figure out if he is on the right path in achieving his. His bases his theory’s on the film by M. Night Shymalan, Signs. He thinks that there are all these signs pointing us to path of our lives. From beginning to end, it’s hard to not be envious of his free thinking and open mind.

There is no way that you will be able to predict the end of the movie, but one thing is for sure, it might encourage you to call up your sibling that you might be fighting with when the lights turn back on. If anything, Mark and Jay do a brilliant job of leaving you contemplating about the universe and how somehow, we might all be connected.

Universal Studios is not planning to release the movie “Battleship” until May, but it has recently released the third trailer for the film.

Starring Liam Neeson, Rihanna,Taylor Kitsch and Brooklyn Decker, “Battleship” is based on the popular Battleship game by Hasbro. People on Earth are trying to fight off alien invaders. This trailer is the first to give a glimpse of what the aliens look like.

The alien species, called the “Regents,” is trying to construct a source of power in the ocean, but they encounter a naval fleet. Taking place in the Hawaiian Islands at Pearl Harbor, the film informs the audience of the locations of the ships on both sides of the battle.

You have to give Disney a certain amount of credit for taking on this unwieldy beast: an incredibly expensive epic based on a 100-year-old sci-fi pulp series with Western and sword-and-sandals elements and an untested star whose primary acting style is being taciturn and effectless.

And if you ignore anything regarding, you know, science, or reason or good acting, this movie succeeds in being what it set out to be- a rollicking adventure with fancy swordplay and women in sexy Princess Leia bikini costumes and fabulous steampunk flying machines. And even though it’s about 30 minutes too long and the 3-D cinematography is terrible and everyone in it appears to have learned how to deliver dialogue from Jean-Claude Van Damme, you start to have fun in spite of yourself.

So here we go:Based on the pulp fiction series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the eponymous John Carter (Taylor Kitsch, of “Friday Night Lights”) plays an ex-Confederate soldier who talks in Christian Bale’s spooky Batman voice and lives in Arizona looking for gold. He passes out in a cave and wakes up on Mars (called Barsoom by its inhabitants). He’s discovered there by huge green aliens with extra arms, who take him in when they see how the reduced gravitational pull of the planet makes him super strong and fast and able to jump comically impossible distances. There’s also vaguely ethnic red aliens who are engaged in a Civil War, and they live in a city called Helium. There’s a sexy princess (Lynn Collins) who’s supposed to be a genius but spends most of her time striding around the Mars desert in a series of increasingly skimpy outfits. The villain is McNulty from “The Wire” (Dominic West) who wears the most fashionable military uniform in creation and is guided by a mysterious sect of bald men, who maybe want to rule Barsoom, or feed off of its destruction or something?

Insane? Of course. Unintentionally hilarious? Yup. But somehow, through the sheer will of director Andrew Stanton, it sometimes manages to walk right up to the edge of the ridiculous without completely diving over. Stanton is making his live-action debut after helming several Pixar films, but there’s still a cartoonish quality to the production that works pretty effectively. Mars is demonstrated in extremity of color, burnt reds and oranges mixed with icy blues, and the machines and tools that populate the world are a marvelous concoction of industrial gears and switches.

But for all of this beauty and clever design, goodness the acting is just terrible. The Hollywood powers-that-be are attempting to make Kitsch into a big new star, but besides a ludicrously sculpted core the poor guy has no charisma or magnetism. He’s lost in a movie like this, wading through an insane plot, forced to try to deliver lines that weren’t that great to begin with and coming out of his mouth are cringeworthy. The movie just is too big, it surrounds him and swallows him whole. Ciaran Hinds does slightly better as the alien beauty Dejah’s father, and Willem Dafoe demonstrates lithe voicework as the leader of the green multi-limbed aliens. But even they can’t tame the story and give it a center. As a result you never feel entirely comfortable on John Carter’s Mars, and can’t quite get your arms around it.

“John Carter” will probably bomb. It’s source material is too obscure with little brand recognition, the star is a relative unknown, and even the trailer makes the movie look confusing and weird. And even though I have zero desire to ever see the movie again, I wish that more production companies took that kind of risk instead of just continually putting their money on the safe bet. It’s a bad movie. You shouldn’t pay your hard-earned dollars to go see it. But if you do, appreciate that this is an underdog in a tent-post project’s wrapping. And that’s a very rare beast indeed.

Imagine the following story elements. The rain forests of Mexico and Latin America, alien beings loose in said rain forests, and a man and a woman trying to make their way through this landscape (without being eaten) to get home to America. Sounds exciting, no? Similar to Skyline or Battle Los Angeles?

Not exactly…

Monsters, the 2010 sci-fi, alien invasion movie, is not at all what you would expect. Yes, there are huge monster aliens in this film. They look like giant squids or octopi and stomp around like Godzilla or Cloverfield, but they are only backdrop. This film is not about aliens: it’s about two people, who live lives of quiet desperation, trying to outrun their own emotional turmoil with the aliens being the external manifestation of their feelings.

Monsters does have a plot. At some point in the future, the United States launches a probe to seek out alien life somewhere in our solar system. The probe returns but crashes into the jungle south of the border. The aliens escape and begin to multiply in this area. The United States and Mexican governments have a hard time controlling these entities and establish an “infected zone” where travel is discouraged.

Unto this come Andrew and Samantha. Samantha is the daughter of a wealthy American publisher. Andrew is a freelance photographer who works for Samantha’s father. Samantha is traveling in Latin America but finds it hard to get home. Andrew is tasked with finding Samantha and bringing her home. Naturally, this is not easily done, and the pair must travel through the infected zone to get to America.

Samantha is engaged but doubts her fiance. Andrew has an out of wedlock son whom he rarely sees. As the two brave travel via planes, trains, and automobiles (substitute boats for planes) and a variety of corrupt and suspicious locals, we learn more and more that neither Andrew or Samantha is at peace. As they continue to skirt the aliens –the encounters becoming increasingly frightening—they reveal more of themselves and their pain to one another. By the film’s end, when we finally see the monstrous aliens up close, Andrew and Samantha realize they are in love with one another. As the monsters engage in a right of courtship hundreds of feet in the air, Andrew and Samantha share their first kiss. Metaphor city!

Monsters is beautifully shot, and the characters’ journey on the rivers of Latin America reminded me of Werner Herzog’s seminal work, Aguirre, Wrath of God. If you are looking for heart-pounding chases, heroic acrobatics, or a shoot ‘em up flick, Monsters will disappoint. Netflix categorizes this film as “sci-fi, fantasy” and “sci-fi, horror/thriller,” but it really should be classified as a drama and one with an indie feel at that. Monsters is not a popcorn film, but if you must think of it that way have this snack lightly-salted.

An upcoming film following the making of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” is due out next year, and Scarlett Johansson will be making an appearance as Janet Leigh in the notorious shower scene.

The original film tells the tale of a secretary who runs away to get married after stealing money from her employer, only to get murdered by the owner of a hotel she stays in along the way. The violence in the film was the first of its kind, and shocked viewers.

Now, Sacha Gervasi directs a film chronicling the making of the original, centering on the relationship Hitchcock and his wife, Alma Reville, held, and the struggles behind making a film so controversial. Hitchcock will be played by Anthony Hopkins, and Reville by Helen Mirren.

Johansson’s role as Leigh in the shower scene reportedly took seven days to film.

I am really trying to write this review without sounding like a humorless shrew. It’s not going well.

I admit, I tapped out of the this movie mentally from the moment a bunch of drunken teenagers shoved a little person into an oven to keep him from punching people in the groin. (You wouldn’t think a little person punching people in the groin would be a tired cliche already, but you would be wrong.)

This movie wasn’t meant for me anyway, of course. This is a movie with a title that was only supposed to be working title, starring a guy who’s previous credits include an episode of “iCarly.” It’s that movie about a bunch of horny nerds who throw a party that runs out of control. The party is for sweet, nerdy Pasadena resident Thomas (Thomas Mann), planned and executed by his friends, New York-born Costa (Oliver Cooper) and Lothario-in-training JB (Jonathan Daniel Brown), and recorded by the slightly-sinister AV-fanatic Dax (Dax Flame), who in one captured image displays more personality than the other three combined. The party, obviously runs out of control, and ends up involving the aforementioned little person, a lot of humping and grinding, broken limbs, naked high school girls in the pool and the bouncy castle, and culminating in an angry ecstasy dealer with a flame-thrower.

The entire evening is “captured” by Dax’s camera, giving the movie a home-video quality that was edgy and cool, oh, about 10 years ago. The jokes are from 10 years ago as well, based on the idea that rubbing your friend’s toothbrush on a soap bar and calling them a fag when they won’t drink is hilarious.

There is a certain amount of this one should expect. This is a movie by and for teenage boys — crazed, stupid hormone monsters who for the most part want nothing more than to steal their parents’ liquor, set things on fire and watch a topless girl jump in a bouncy castle. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s part of the human condition; and just because they are crazed, stupid hormone monsters doesn’t mean they don’t have complex internal lives and souls. It doesn’t mean their stories don’t deserve to be told.

But there’s a difference between accepting a teenage male’s appetite for destruction and naked young women, and acting as if those instincts are heroic or, God help me, revolutionary. When Thomas climbs to the roof of his home and discovers just how many people are running rampant in his neighborhood (and all for him), he reacts with the joy and gravitas of a young, sweaty Caesar. He then gives the finger to the news helicopter flying overhead, howling something that I believe was supposed to be an incitement or call to action. But it didn’t look like a hero surveying his domain, or a rebel asserting his victory. It looked like a drunk, spoiled brat from Southern California destroying his parents’ home.

As magnificently repulsive as the party itself is, the denouement is just, well, repulsive. Thomas’ party has inadvertently destroyed his house and his neighborhood, obliterated his parents savings, and generally turned him into a scummy guy. But it’s totally ok, because he’s popular now! Plus the girl he likes still likes him, even though he hooked up with someone else in a drug-induced haze. And his father literally pats him on the back for having so many people at his birthday party. It’s all good, man!

It’s a weird moral at the very least, but that’s the fantasy behind “Project X”: not that a nerd could have the craziest party in history, but that you could destroy an entire suburb and get away with it. You could be revered for it, loved for it, re-made from a drunken little piss-ant into a god of hedonism and destruction. And maybe it’s my shrewishness rearing its ugly head, but bro? That is not cool.

“John Carter” is set to be released in theaters nationwide on Friday, March 9.

The film is about a military captain, John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), who is transported to Mars and finds himself participating in a civil war between the inhabitants on the planet.

The sci-fi, action film, from Walt Disney Studios, was co-written and directed by Andrew Stanton (“Wall-E”) and is based on the novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Though I doubt we’ll ever see it highlighted on Netflix, there has been an interesting film sub-genre emerging in the last few years. It might never be as prominent as the “Depression” era type of film (of which The Grapes of Wrath is the epitome), but in the last two years I’ve seen three films which could very well fall into the “Great Recession” genre. “Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps” and “The Company Men” are now joined by “Margin Call” in this genre (call it a financial drama if you want to define it more broadly), the last having been nominated for an Academy Award in original writing. That nomination is deserved, and I believe Margin Call to be the best of the three films, with The Company Men a close second.

Margin Call depicts the events, over a 24-hour period, at a fictional –and never named—brokerage, which discovers it is immensely over-levered with toxic mortgage debt. The firm’s brain trust gathers to figure a way out. Unlike Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers, the firm realizes it’s in trouble ahead of anyone else and devises a way –a slightly unethical one—to survive.

At times, this movie had the feeling of a stage play. The locations are hardly more than boardrooms, offices, taxi cabs, and elevators, and there are a few soliloquies delivered. The writing is sharp, however, and though the sets are simple and the action little, the narrative and the characters are engaging throughout.

The cinematography is also compelling. Margin Call’s cast is quite recognizable: Demi Moore, Jeremy Irons, Kevin Spacey, Stanley Tucci, Zachary Quinto and Simon Baker. Though undoubtedly these stars had makeup applied for the film, the filmmakers seem to emphasize the vulnerability of the characters. Faces show cracks and crinkles and wear. The stress of the events and the lives these men and women lead does not leave them unblemished, and you can see that every time the camera lingers on a face.

If I had a criticism to make of this movie it would be that the characters all seem too self aware, as if they know they are going through the Great Recession. Every moment is dripping with portent, and these men and women behave in an a posteriori way when they should be more oblivious to what they are going through. In addition, they are all self-loathing. They like the money but seem to hate the lives they lead. They are soulless husks, which may be the belief filmmakers have about people in finance but is something that strikes me as unfair. Stocks, bonds, commodities, and other instruments get traded, and because of this interchange medical research, education, technology, and a vast array of other fields benefit. In bad times, everything takes a hit, but the general trend is upward, and I’m not sure most financiers, traders, and analysts view themselves the way the characters in Margin Call do, even when things go wrong.

That gripe aside, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. It probably won’t achieve the legendary status the original Wall Street did and it doesn’t have that outrageous tone that made Boiler Room one of the best financial films of the last twenty years, but Margin Call is definitely worth seeing before the closing bell sounds.

Here is a list of the Oscar winners from last night, courtesy of ABC News:

1. Cinematography: “Hugo.”

2. Art Direction: “Hugo.”

3. Costume Design: “The Artist.”

4. Makeup: “The Iron Lady.”

5. Foreign Language Film: “A Separation,” Iran.

6. Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer, “The Help.”

7. Film Editing: “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”

8. Sound Editing: “Hugo.”

9. Sound Mixing: “Hugo.”

10. Documentary Feature: “Undefeated.”

11. Animated Feature Film: “Rango.”

12. Visual Effects: “Hugo.”

13. Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer, “Beginners.”

14. Original Score: “The Artist.”

15. Original Song: “Man or Muppet” from “The Muppets.”

16. Adapted Screenplay: Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, “The Descendants.”

17. Original Screenplay: Woody Allen, “Midnight in Paris.”

18. Live Action Short Film: “The Shore.”

19. Documentary (short subject): “Saving Face.”

20. Animated Short Film: “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.”

21. Directing: Michel Hazanavicius, “The Artist.”

22. Actor: Jean Dujardin, “The Artist.”

23. Actress: Meryl Streep, “The Iron Lady.”

25. Best Picture: “The Artist”

The 84th annual Academy Awards last night was not a night for the new.  Billy Crystal returned to host the show for the 9th time; Meryl Streep won her third Oscar after seventeen nominations; and Christopher Plummer set a record as the oldest actor to win an Oscar.

In another ode to the old-fashioned, The Artist, a silent film in black and white, won the coveted award for Best Motion Picture, along with three other Oscars.

The Muppets made their big screen comeback this past year and Miss Piggy made her grand appearance at the Oscars introducing the Cirque Du Soleil performance with her long time friend (lover?) Kermit the Frog; they even walked away with an award (or at least the guy that wrote their song did).

Sacha Baron Cohen pulled a crazy stunt at the awards, which is also not new.  The Dictator actor dressed like his character in the movie and spilled what he claimed to be the ashes of Kim Jong Il, the late North Korean dictator, all over Ryan Seacrest. Overall, the night brought back “old Hollywood glamor,” as Tim Gunn kept repeating on the preshow.  The dresses were long, the heels high and the carpet, well, red and ashy.  I guess that was the new development.

This of course does not mean the movie is bad, at least not in the conventional meaning- if it had been, I would have had a lot more to say. Rather it seems so faint, and so relentlessly inoffensive in its execution, I cannot find anything remarkable to say.

This is odd for an R-rated film, which features lots of discussions of free love, jokes about pooping in front of other people, and pretty unbelievable amounts of nudity. Said hijinks ensue when a married couple (Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston) lose their Manhattan jobs and, unable to pay their mortgage, decide on a whim to join a commune in Georgia. But hijinks aside, this is a pretty tame movie, gently poking both those who drink the alternative lifestyle kool-aid and those who prefer air conditioning.

Rudd and Aniston are pretty much who they’re supposed to be- an intensely likable couple, with a normal couple’s cares and woes. Even when the debate about whether or not they should stay at the commune permanently threatens their relationship, the fight that ensues doesn’t seem any worse than one about who did the dishes the night before, or who paid the electric bill late. Neither of them does anything spectacular- the exception being a hilarious scene where Rudd talks dirty to himself in the mirror in an effort to try to psyche himself up for a free love session with one of the other women at the commune (he ends up sounding like one of the “Deliverance” hillbillies and it’s just as disgusting as you can imagine.)

Among the third-billed, Justin Theroux is pretty good as the commune’s de-facto leader and Kathryn Hahn is excellent reprising her aggressive hippie character from “Our Idiot Brother”. And in another, better movie, Ken Marino could be one of the great comic villains, playing Rudd’s heinous Atlanta yuppie brother.

Hey, speaking of “Our Idiot Brother”- you should see that instead. Not only does it include Rudd as the wacky character instead of the straight man (always better in my opinion), it has a lot more to say about those who reject the social norm, and the mixture of derision, jealousy and grudging admiration the rest of us have for them. “Wanderlust” was a decent 90 minutes. It’s just 90 minutes I most likely won’t remember next week.

I salute the Navy SEALs (and all personnel in the United States Armed Forces). They keep us safe, get the bad guys, and many make the ultimate sacrifice. They are heroes one and all. But can they act in a motion picture?

In “Act of Valor,” the rock and roll tribute to Navy SEALs who counter an array of national security threats around the world, actual SEALs star in the film. Unfortunately, there are no budding Audie Murphy’s or R. Lee Ermey’s among them. When the SEALs are in action they are entirely believable and compelling, but when authentic pathos in the form of non-fighting dialogue is required of them they come up short.

But it really matters little because the point of this movie is not to delve into the inner lives of the characters too much. “Act of Valor” is about kicking terrorist ass, and in that regard it delivers like a well-placed shot from an assault rifle. If you like guns, equipment, technology, and double taps to the head this movie has it all. We travel the world with a SEAL team which, at first, simply rescues a hostage from a terrorist camp. At the camp, however, they recover intelligence that leads to something much, much bigger, and they then race from Asia to the South Pacific to Mexico to neutralize the threat.

In this movie, there’s no shortage of sky diving, submarines, Chinook helicopters, UAVs, exotic firearms, mountains, deserts, and so much more. At times I thought I was watching the kind of military recruitment advertisement that one sees on NFL Sundays. There’s no question that films like this have the cooperation of the Department of Defense, but “Act of Valor” also capitalizes on the gaming trend, and frequently the audience’s point of view is similar to what one would see in a video game such as “Call of Duty.”

I’m guessing the reason for casting real SEALs was mainly to hype the film, but I think it was a mistake. I have no doubt they make the battle scenes more realistic, but I did not notice any more technical competence in this movie than I did in, say, Black Hawk Down. Indeed, “Black Hawk Down” used an array of very good, professional actors as leads, and the comparison, in that regard, to “Act of Valor” is stark.

“Black Hawk Down” also did not indulge in clichés—the wife and child who seem there solely to set up an eventual tragedy, the heirlooms passed from previous generations of soldiers, and the soldier who jumps on a grenade to save the rest of his squad. In Act of Valor, any depth the producers give to the characters feels contrived (along with the toothpick that dangles from the mouth of the team leader through the whole of the movie). And since the performances aren’t quality enough to give the quieter scenes any life, they feel that much more mannered. By comparison again, “Black Hawk Down” simply felt much more organic and original.

Nevertheless, “Act of Valor’s” production value is enough to keep you engaged throughout—the battle on the river at the terrorist training camp is masterfully filmed and will thrill any war-film junkie.

I do have one plot quibble, and please read no further if you don’t want the story spoiled. I am by no means a geopolitical expert, but I simply don’t see Mexican drug cartels, which have no ideology, wanting to aid suicide bombers hoping to gain entry into the United States. This is where the entire film leads and ends up, with the SEALs tracking down would-be suicide bombers as they attempt to cross into tunnels on the southern border with the help of the cartels. The cartels exist to make money off drugs, so why would they risk bringing down the wrath of the entire American military apparatus by helping some radical jihadist? Is there some of this activity on our southern border and in Latin America? I’m pretty sure there is, but I’m not sure it would receive major cartel support and the sacrifice of dozens of their fighters, which is what happens in the final shoot out.

“Act of Valor” is an interesting glimpse into what the Navy SEALs do around the world, and it’s probably no coincidence this movie comes just a short time after SEAL Team Six found and killed Osama Bin Laden. If you are looking for a wild, two hour ride, then this is your movie. If you’re looking for a memorable war film in the mold of “The Dirty Dozen,” “Platoon,” or “Black Hawk Down,” then you’re best off returning to base, mission not accomplished.

Is there anyone who can play charming yet unsettling like Denzel Washington? Even when he’s not playing a legitimate anti-hero, there’s always a vague sense of threat from his characters, in the stillness of his face and the wryness of his delivery.

Washington uses the trademark sociopathy to great affect in “Safe House”, the new spy thriller meant partially to re-charge Ryan Reynolds career after the “Green Lantern” disaster of 2011. Reynolds seems to exist mostly to get out of Washington’s way, the tactic followed by every white guy in a Denzel Washington movie which I like to call the “Ethan Hawke Defense.”

Matt Weston (Reynolds) at the beginning appears to have the un-sexiest job in the CIA, as a keeper of a CIA safe house in Cape Town, South Africa. He spends most of his time listening to French language tapes in an empty room, and telling elaborate lies about his work to his French national girlfriend. His uniquely boring life is upended when Tobin Frost (Washington) a former agent who’s been selling secrets for almost a decade, inexplicably wanders into a U.S. Consulate and allows himself to be captured (the trailer gives you a rough approximation of what will happen next).

Cape Town is shown in gritty, stunning glory, and director Daniel Espinosa makes the best use of location shooting I’ve seen in a long time. The city operates as both an ally and a potential enemy to the two fugitives, from its upscale downtown, to the chaos of Green Point soccer stadium, to the maze of a shanty town. There is very little politics in “Safe House”, but Espinosa doesn’t ignore the realities of Cape Town either, allowing the city to tell the story and add to the sharp realism of the action sequences.

The cat and mouse game at the heart of the story is a little played, and frankly most of it is stolen from other spy movies anyway. But the exquisite little details, ingeniously picked by the director and his stars, allow you to forget that this is a story that’s been told before: a spectacular crane shot of truck barreling through a shanty town’s throughways; the jaunty smile Frost gives when taking pictures of himself to add to a forged passport, the way Weston hugs his girlfriend and buries his face in her hair. The details make this movie special, make it more than just another Saturday-night throwaway picture. Washington’s charming villain is just the cherry on top.