Note: If you have any interest at all in seeing this film, I firmly advise that you go in completely cold and don’t read this until after you’ve seen it.

I don’t know if Chronicle is the first found-footage superhero film, but I’m certain it’s the best—and will remain so for a very long time. I had no idea what the film was about, and when it opened with a shot of a gloomy teenager filming the door to his bedroom while his drunk father angrily shouts to let him in, I groaned.

Goddammit, another one of those movies. When the kid said he was going to start filming everything, I groaned again. Dying mother? Ugh. Ugly kid clad in black? Blarg. By the time the kid started filming his cousin driving him to school and brought up Schopenhauer, I was about ready to check out.

Then it took a turn from the typical High-School-Sucks Movie into Horror, and I started to get interested. Then it took another turn into the Jackass realm. And just when I thought it would settle on Superhero Film, it just lingered on having a lot of fun with superpowers. But the best twists are saved until the end. Needless to say, when one character threw a baseball at another and it stopped dead in midair, I was hooked.

Continue Reading →

Okay, okay, there aren’t many summer movies that you’re willing to take the younger kids to, and something has to fill that void, so Mr. Popper’s Penguins is pretty much your only non-animated choice.

It’s odd, because I don’t think of Jim Carrey as being much of an attraction for kids, but it’s likely intended as a draw for the 30-something parents looking for a non-panda-centric film to placate their brood. Or for those who loved the 1938 book as kids themselves, though I never read it, and, from what I gather, it’s vastly different.

Carrey plays Popper, a semi-weasel (would that make him a ferret?) of a real estate agent with a golden tongue and flair for convincing hard cases to sell their property to his high-risin’ New York firm. In this, he’s ably aided by his alliterative assistant Pippi (Ophelia Lovibond), an adorably saucy little Brit with an impediment that causes her to pepper her speech with a proliferation of p’s. One day Popper receives a crate from his recently deceased father, a world-renowned explorer who never had time for his son, and in it is a penguin, which proceeds to destroy Popper’s apartment and provide the first in a series of unnervingly graphic defecations.

Continue Reading →