CLTV

By Matt Brunson

Clunky football metaphors are never out of season, so even though the NFL turned off its scoreboards earlier this winter, along comes Watchmen to inspire a gridiron grasp -- namely, that director Zack Snyder is the cinematic equivalent of the quarterback who's clearly no MVP but is just good enough to get his team to the Super Bowl.

In bringing (along with co-scripters David Hayter and Alex Tse) the sacred graphic novel by writer Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons to the big screen, Snyder makes almost all the right plays -- the movie is visually resplendent and remarkably faithful to the source material -- but too often fails to find the heart buried deep within the darkness. With the surprisingly adept Dawn of the Dead remake, the bloated fanboy fave 300 and now Watchmen, Snyder demonstrates that he knows his way around expensive movie equipment, but he hasn't shown much affinity for his fellow humans. It's no coincidence that the worst scene in Watchmen is the one in which superheroes Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) and Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) engage in hot and heavy sex. As staged, the sequence is completely risible; I've seen '80s teen sex comedies less awkward than Snyder's attempt at conveying intimacy through intercourse.

Read the rest of Matt's review here.

Watch the movie trailer here:

By Matt Brunson

In some cities, director Steven Soderbergh's epic look at revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara has been screened as two separate films: Che: Part One (subtitled The Argentine during production) and Che: Part Two (Guerilla). Locally, however, we're getting the whole enchilada in one 4-1/2-hour version. But whether viewed in one or two sittings, the fact remains that Soderbergh's ambitious but erratic film wastes its generous running time by failing to really burrow beneath the media myth, determined not to provide much insight into the individual whose iconic image has adorned countless T-shirts and posters.

Read the rest of Matt's review here.

Watch the trailer here:

Check out the trailer for the Watchmen's animated movie-within-a-movie Tales of the Black Freighter, which will be released separately from the film on DVD.

And read more about the new Watchmen movie, check out "A geek's guide to understanding Watchmen."

By Matt Brunson

Over the course of the American Zombie weekend, a half-dozen films helmed by George Romero will be shown at area venues. For showtimes and screening sites, go to www.zombiestakecharlotte.com.

Read about American Zombie weekend here.

Read Matt Brunson's reviews for each of the movies here.

And, watch the movie trailers here:

Night of the Living Dead (1968).

By Matt Brunson

Don't let the Harlequin Romance title fool you: The French import I've Loved You So Long is a potent drama that steers clear of undue sentimentality and forced bathos, relying almost exclusively on two strong central performances to stir up audience awareness and emotion. Read the rest of this review here.

Watch the trailer:

By Matt Brunson

Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas was actually Henry Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas, given that it was the latter who actually directed the film. Here, he displays his mastery again, helming an eye-popping animated extravaganza he adapted from Neil Gaiman's best-selling book. Dakota Fanning provides the voice of Coraline, a lonely little girl who discovers an alternate world hidden behind a small door in her family's new house. Read the rest of this review here.

Watch the trailer:

By Matt Brunson

The International is an action flick with smarts, but that's not to say the brain and the brawn always coexist easily. Clive Owen stars as an Interpol agent who, with the help of a New York assistant D.A. (Naomi Watts), tries to bring down a banking institution that's long been involved in illegal activities on a global scale (backing coups, purchasing weapons, that sort of thing). Read the rest of this review here.

Watch the trailer:

By Matt Brunson

Moral ambiguity seems to be the order of the day in most of modern cinema (recent examples include Body of Lies, Traitor, The Dark Knight, and even Gran Torino), but for purely cathartic purposes, there's still something to be said about films -- competent ones, mind you -- in which the line between Good and Evil is drawn oh-so-clearly in the sand. Take Taken, which operates on a very simple premise: Scumbags kidnap Liam Neeson's daughter; Liam Neeson fucks them up good. Read the rest of this review here.

By Matt Brunson

If Push comes to shove, then the only sound advice is to stay away from the theater and re-watch X-Men on DVD. Certainly, that's an infinitely superior mutant movie, yet don't think Push's plagiarism ends there: It's almost a given that the pitch meeting found the film's creators, uh, pushing the picture by declaring, "It's X-Men meets Jumper meets Heroes meets The Matrix!" Had they any sense of integrity, they would have ended the sentence by adding, "Only not very exciting or enjoyable!" In short, here's another sci-fi muddle that never breaks out of its geekspeak ghetto, with David Bourla contributing an overly busy screenplay that doesn't always come together and Paul McGuigan providing draggy direction that takes this far past the point of audience involvement. Read the rest of this review here.

By Matt Brunson

With Valentine's Day just around the corner, it's no wonder that a couple of studios have opted to release what they believe will be perfect comfort cinema for making couples cuddle up together in their auditorium seats. Yet given the sheer dreariness of the products at hand, they would have fared just as well luring lovebirds with, say, the latest installment in the Saw series. A romantic comedy (New in Town) and a romantic comedy-drama (He's Just Not That Into You) would seem like perfect V-Day fare to entice openhearted women and their agreeable mates, but to quote my girlfriend after she watched these duds alongside me, "These movies are where feminism goes to die." Read the rest of this review here.

Watch the trailer for He's Just Not That Into You here:

And the trailer for New in Town here: