Is there any performer more in love with his job than Jack Black? He’s not the greatest actor, he doesn’t choose the best scripts, or work with the finest directors, but he has a sheer and infectious ebullience that elevates the material, no matter how mediocre it is.  Thirty or so years from now, people probably won’t remember Gulliver’s Travels, but they’ll remember Jack Black—it’s no joke to say he’s the Fred Astaire of this generation.

And it’s no joke to say he’s the best part of Gulliver’s Travels, just as he’s the best part of Shallow Hal, Orange County, and a bunch of other vehicles that are all our guilty pleasures. They’re not great, or even really good, but there’s enough smiles to keep you watching.

And that’s Gulliver’s Travels, albeit it’s much more of a kid’s film than Black’s usual saucy romps (Kung-Fu Panda notwithstanding). Here he plays the titular Lemuel Gulliver, slacker mail-room drone for a New York newspaper and secretly in love with the travel editor Darcy (Amanda Peet).

One day, through a series of coincidences, he ends up claiming to be a travel writer to impress Darcy, and she puts him on assignment cover the Bermuda Triangle, and a hop, skip, and waterspout later, he washes up on the island of Lilliput, where all the residents are about 1/10 his size.

In the world of Marmadukes and Meet Daves, it was bound to happen that we would see something like the movie Gulliver’s Travels on the horizon. And why wouldn’t they make it even better by adding Jack Black as Gulliver?

In the newest film, from animation director Ron Letterman (Shark Tale, Monsters Vs. Aliens), Black plays Lemuel Gulliver, a nerdy, going-nowhere mail clerk who gets a once in a lifetime opportunity to write for a travel magazine by investigating the Bermuda Triangle. After a boat crash, Gulliver wakes up in the classical land of Lilliput where he’s gigantic and everyone else is tiny.

Black doesn’t really bring anything new to the role that we haven’t seen him do before, from his googly eyes to his outrageous flip outs, it’s all been done. We do get an interesting side cast consisting of Emily Blunt, Jason Segel, Amanda Peet, Billy Connolly, and Romany Malco, which could save the film, but don’t have gigantic (pun not intended) hopes.

Check out the newest trailer for the film after the jump. Catch Gulliver’s Travels in theaters on December 22nd, 2010.

There are several things that director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow) doesn’t seem too concerned about in the bloated, CGI-laden disaster movie 2012. These include, but are not limited to:  plot, character development, plausibility, restraint, and subtlety. I kind of understand why he chooses to ignore these elements. If you get bogged down with all these pesky details, how are you supposed to focus on THE SPECTACLE?

THE SPECTACLE is the star of this film, and clearly every resource available was used to ensure that this movie looks good, everything else be damned. 2012 is a full 2 1/2 hour visual assault of CGI, destruction, chase scenes, and every natural disaster a geophysicist could possibly imagine. It’s chalk full of action movie clichés, right down to the brooding and estranged ex-husband who happens to be near his old family when disaster strikes, and must lead them to safety. Not only is the movie wholly unoriginal, but it actually feels like Emmerich just cherry-picked his favorite scenes from action movies he likes, and found a way to throw them all into a threadbare story.

This is director indulgence gone too far. The movie is an hour too long, and a few key scenes would have had far more impact if there were not an action scene thrown in every 3-4 minutes. It’s as though Emmerich is saying to the audience: “You are going to sit there in your seat, and you are going to watch the crap out of this movie.”

We have been a bit hard around here on 2012, the new Roland Emmerich film about the end of the world, but given the director’s track record and the fact that the trailer doesn’t look like anything we haven’t seen dozens of times before on the big screen, we think we probably have just cause.

It looks like we aren’t the only people making fun of it, as a new fan film has popped up online using the first five minutes of the film. The edit proves that this film can become two things without it’s overblown special effects: quite pointless and outrageously funny.

For those interested in the film itself, it stars a cornucopia of celebrities from John Cusack to Woody Harrelson and Amanda Peet and is about a prophecy where the world comes to an end in December of 2012. Roland Emmerich is also the director that brought us gems like 10,000 BC and The Day After Tomorrow.

Check out the fan film after the jump. Catch 2012 in theaters everywhere this November.

While most disaster movies of late have gone the way of the Poseidon Adventure remake, there has been some positive buzz about the newest “the world is ending” film, 2012. Though the film is getting a November release (most disaster movies are known to do better during the summer) and has 10,000 BC’s Roland Emmerich at the helm, we do have some hope.

From what we know, the film focuses on the main character and his family on a microcosmic level as ancient prophecies come true. The world begins to literally fall apart around us, as the Earth has an expiration date of 2012. The tagline of the film is simply “We Were Warned,” which hopefully has nothing to do with the actual production of the movie and its resultant quality.

Writer Herald Kloser helped with the epic script and the film stars, in no particular order, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover, Oliver Platt, and Amanda Peet. Check out brand new footage and dialogue in the Japanese trailer after the jump.

Expect the world to end as we know it, at least according to 2012, on November 13.