JACK & JILL

I'm a card-carrying member of the Regal Crown Club so I earn free movie tickets for seeing so many damned five dollar movies.  Since the ticket is free, I'll see something that I would otherwise never watch.  This is Free Movie Free For All!

Lets not beat around the bush.  This movie is fucking terrible.  It's a horrendous miscalculation on pretty much every level and it's fundamentally unenjoyable.  The audience's sympathy does not lie with obscenely wealthy everyman Jack (Adam Sandler) or his anti-Semitic caricature of a twin sister Jill (Adam Sandler again); the audience's sympathy lies with the audience.

HUGO

If you like movies because they are a pleasant distraction then I'm not sure you'll like this movie.  If you loves movies because you love movies then you will love this movie.  The name 'Martin Scorsese' might trigger images of Italians shooting/beating people but he's made mostly films that don't feature those things and this is one of them.  Possibly his most personal film yet, Hugo is about believing that movies really are magic.  Magic to make, magic to watch, magic to remember, and they create magical conections between people.

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES: SNEAK PREVIEW

The first scene of the next Batman movie plays before select screenings of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.  You get an introduction to one of the new villains, Bane.  And?

Bane is very hard to understand, what with the mask and accent.  He is easier to understand in the trailer.  Hmm...  Maybe he'll be a little easier to understand in the movie.  Maybe not.  He could be an iconic incomprehensible villain just like Jeff Bridges's iconic incomprehensible hero Rooster Cogburn in True Grit.

This film will be, like the other two, global in scope.  It will also feature some damn impressive IMAX action sequences.

You get a cameo from one of the co-stars of a current beloved HBO series who was also one of the co-stars of another now ended beloved HBO series.

I predict an epidemic of bat-fever in America.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL

Here's how to ruin Mission Impossible.  See it at one of a few dozen participating (authentic) IMAX theaters and you get to see the opening scene of next summer's The Dark Knight Rises with deafening sound and a towering screen, the way Batman intended.  Once you've had a taste, the long-dormant bat-fever in your system will overtake your senses and leave you bored to tears during the two plus hours of bland movie you paid for.

MACHETE MAIDENS UNLEASHED (2010)

This is the funniest film I've seen in quite some time.  And it's a documentary.  Don't let that scare you away.  The subject is the glut of American made-exploitation films shot in the Philippines, starting with blood soaked monster movies (like the Blood Island trilogy) and sweaty sexy prison romps (like Women In Cages) during the 60's and leading up to the end of the 70's and the unofficial greatest Filipino exploitation movie ever made, Apocalypse Now.  Why were movies made there and why is this a brilliant subject for a documentary?  Let me answer that with a quote from the film that comes pretty early on, courtesy of producer Jon Davison: "Human life was cheap, film was cheap, it was a great place to make a picture."

THE MUPPETS

It's a miracle!  This film is hilarious and heart-warming.  Fuck computers, puppets ain't dead yet.  Many hallmarks of Muppet humor, like meta jokes, have become much more commonplace today, thanks to shows like Family Guy, which proudly features Muppet appearances in their cutaway gags.  I don't want to ruin any jokes, so just go see the film.

WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

Where do celebrities come from?  Other celebrities?  Not always!  Now you can watch famous people (Sarah Jessica Parker, Emmit Smith, Lisa Kudrow, Matthew Broderick, Brooke Shields, Susan Sarandon, Spike Lee) track down their ancestors with the help of expert genealogists and historians.  Long-unsolved family mysteries are finally cracked, distant relatives in foreign lands are befriended, and some people are surprised to learn that they’re more black/less black than they thought.

They really should have used Jean Knight’s Mr. Big Stuff as the theme song.

Find out how black you really are at CHUD.com!

J EDGAR

It's weird that the one word I might use to describe this movie, a film about a self-righteous power-hungry demagogue, a film about a closet case who routinely and ruthlessly blackmailed those with any hint of 'moral weakness' in their lives, a film about a man who ran his own ostensibly unaccountable branch of the federal government for almost 50 years, is boring.  It's kinda boring.  And not because it's set in the past.  Director Clint Eastwood is a master at under-laying things, preferring quiet dignity to bombast.  His color scheme is muted, almost black and white, and many if not most of the main characters are total ciphers.