The big release of the day is Doubt, which Christopher Frizzelle loved:
Doubt is the best kind of challenging movie—where the intellectual challenge facing the characters becomes an intellectual challenge for you, the person watching it, and the difficulty, the doubt, the taboo question, has enough batteries to long outlast the movie, to bug you in the car on the way home and keep bugging you days later.
He also liked I.O.U.S.A., which he said is "perfect for anyone who'd like a little help understanding philosophically where the fuck we went wrong and who's to blame."
Megan Seling was overwhelmed by The Tale of Despereaux:
Then the narrator (Sigourney Weaver) starts asking questions like "So think about this: What happens when you make something illegal that is a natural part of the world?" and "What would you do if your own name were a bad word?"Yeah, kid, what would you do if your name were Cocksucking Motherfucker? WHO CARES!
Evan Stewart was unimpressed with Bedtime Stories:
Disney is obviously phoning it in this time, throwing in its patented heartstring-pulls whenever the story seems like it's sagging. And mama, this story sags more than a cheap hammock.
Three movies I hated are out on DVD today. The Day the Earth Stood Still remake with Keanu Reeves:
The vaguely brain-damaged-seeming Reeves is, in theory, a great choice to play a dispassionate alien. This is the one role that would've been perfect had he brought his usual himbo vacuousness to the job. Instead, Reeves tries to act—you can tell because his eyebrows are knit in a couple scenes—and the result is the expected blend of ineptitude and unintentional hilarity, like when he tries to eat a tuna sandwich the way an alien would.
and Yes Man with Jim Carrey:
It doesn't help that Carrey is experiencing the Robin Williams Effect in full force: His sense of humor has been cuddlied up and plasticized to the point where the sight of him invokes a weird melancholia. He's become a too-tan creep, like those guys back in the mid-'90s who used to do unfunny Jim Carrey impersonations when they got drunk at parties.
and the mess that is Shuttle gets blessedly delivered to an early DVD grave.
Did you know there was a TV show based on the movie The Paper Chase? Well, it's true! Season 1 is available on DVD today, along with Donkey Punch. Also debuting are a bunch of old movies (not "classics" exactly) like Tunnel of Love, movies with titles like Da' Booty Shop and Hookers Inc, and two movies with promising titles: Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders and Scooby-Doo and the Samurai Sword. There's a full list over here.
