Mel Valentin hails from the great state of New Jersey. After attending New York University as an undergrad (politics and economics double major, religious studies minor) and grad school (law), he relocated from the East Coast to San Francisco, California, where he's been ever since. Since Mel began writing about film nine years ago, he's written more than 1,600 reviews and articles. He's a member of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.
When Steve James (Hoop Dreams) started the cameras on film critic Roger Ebert, the central subject of his latest documentary, Life Itself (a partial adaptation of Ebert’s 2011 memoir of the same name), he didn’t know that Ebert would only live for another five months. When James met Ebert, Ebert was in unfailingly good spirits, but his …
Hollywood executives don’t think in terms of slates, of individual films, anymore. Instead, they think in terms of series, franchises, and now that Marvel/Disney has brought comic-book-inspired serial storytelling to mainstream audiences, mega-franchises. It’s not a total surprise then when a modestly budgeted action-comedy…
The words “romantic comedy” and “abortion” aren’t usually associated with one another, for good reason. As a genre, the romantic comedy offers moviegoers a simple formula, one in which deviations rarely, if ever, occur and where variations are limited to casting, location, and time period…
Tom Cruise’s latest addition to the science-fiction/action genre, Edge of Tomorrow, opens this weekend, so what better than now, than today (and tomorrow) to visit and/or revisit other entries in the genre, some even with Cruise.
Whoever came up with the “Live. Die. Repeat.” tagline certainly earned their salary (or deserves a reward of some kind). Those three words perfectly capture the semi-familiar premise behind Tom Cruise’s (Oblivion, War of the Worlds, Minority Report) latest foray into the science-fiction/action genre, Edge of Tomorrow, a loose …
When a filmmaker’s stumbles—as inevitable as the seasons turning and spectacle-filled summers—he (it’s usually a he) will often return to the genre or franchise where he saw his greatest commercial and critical success. For Bryan Singer, two expensive and underwhelming…
It’s a road movie. It’s a crime-caper. It’s a musical comedy. It’s a prison break comedy (no drama allowed). It’s Muppets Most Wanted, the second entry in the newly rebooted, Jim Henson-created, Disney-owned Muppets franchise that once, not that long ago (as in 2010), seemed like its days of drawing family-friendly moviegoers to multiplexes were well behind it. But 2011 changed everything – well, at least for the time being. With multi-hyphenate Jason Segal co-starring and co-writing (with Nicholas Stoller), Amy Adams as his love interest, and an irresistibly catchy Oscar-winning song written by Bret “Flight of the Conchords” McKenzie, the return of the Muppets to the big screen wasn’t just for nostalgia buffs. It was a fresh, invigorating – not to mention reinvigorating – return to what the Muppets do best: Entertain audiences with a clever mix of pun-filled skits, self-aware songs, and classic comedy shtick. What wasn’t there to love about The Muppets? Short answer: Not much.
Before we begin, let’s get something straight: the TV ads proclaiming Ride Along—the action-comedy co-starring the suddenly ubiquitous Kevin Hart and the not-quite-ubiquitous Ice Cube—as the “comedy event of the year” are, by any non-hyperbolic measure, wrong. Unless, of course, whoever shared that nugget of hyperbole with a publicist as they exited a screening meant that comment sarcastically. After all, it’s only January; “comedy event of the year” shouldn’t be taken seriously. And Ride Along is nothing if not a (mostly) comedy-free zone filled with endless mugging and/or screeching from Hart, endless furrowed-brow reaction shots from Ice Cube, and stale, tired, clichéd plotting worked around increasingly unfunny, increasingly desperate jokes.
After the success of Crazy Heart, the Academy Award-winning (for Jeff Bridges Best Actor award) country drama, writer-director Scott Cooper could have made practically any film (within financial reason, of course), but rather than taking a work-for-hire assignment and a safe, mainstream film, Cooper decided to use up that goodwill on Out of the Furnace, a grim, downbeat, backwoods/Rust Belt crime-drama. Cooper filled out his cast with two Academy Award winners, Christian Bale and Forest Whitaker, and several nominees, Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, Willem Dafoe, and Sam Shepard. Not surprisingly, the cast, including non-nominee Zoe Saldana, give strong, layered performances, but unfortunately, their performances are in a service of a dull, faux-profound screenplay Cooper co-wrote with Brad Ingelsby.
By the time the title characters in The Sapphires, a ‘60s Aboriginal girl group modeled on The Supremes, gather together for one more joyously infectious cover of a well-known Motown hit, The Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)”, they’ve created enough good will to negate most, if not all, of the questionable—maybe even objectionable—decisions made by first-time director Wayne Blair and screenwriter Tony Briggs (adapting his fact-based 2004 play) to sidestep or downplay the endemic and systematic racism present in Australia in the late 1960s or anything approaching a realistic or even semi-realistic depiction of the Vietnam War, here serving as mere backdrop for The Sapphires’ overly familiar, conventional journey toward personal and professional fulfillment.
…all, of course, while the Vietnam War wages on in the background unconvincingly (due to a combination of The Sapphires’ modest budget and the script’s consciously light approach to the subject).