Just the Ticket

After seeing the incredible make-up job that turned Leonardo DiCaprio into J. Edgar Hoover, I was disappointed to see that Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar was not available for rent this week. However, I was fortunate to see a somewhat well-concocted comedy in Tower Heist. Ben Stiller, Michael Pena, Casey Affleck, and Matthew Broderick star as employees of the Tower hotel who have their pensions Ponzi'd away by Arthur Shaw (a Bernie Madoff stand-in played viciously by Alan Alda). Enlisting the help of Eddie Murphy's professional criminal (words which should have sarcastic quotation marks around them) and a locksmith's daughter ( Precious star Gabourey Sidibe), they plan to steal back the money while avoiding federal agents and "the most sophisticated security system in New York" (yes, these quotation marks are sarcastic, too). As this is a comedy, some leeway must be granted when considering the use of mass stupidity and ignorance as plot devices, but sometime...

We finish up our journey Back & Forth through time, trading the Horrible for the merely Bad on our way to the Stranger Tides of October 23, 2011: As you may have guessed from the title, the two movies up for review this week are Bad Teacher and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides . We begin with the R-Rated comedy Bad Teacher , starring Cameron Diaz ( Knight and Day ), Justin Timberlake ( In Time ), and Jason Segel (who co-starred with Timberlake in this year's Friends With Benefits ). Diaz stars as the gleefully mean-spirited Elisabeth Halsey (the Bad Teacher in question), who must return to work at the school she retired from as a cover to earn herself enough money to pay for the plastic surgery she believes will land her a well-to-do husband. While dodging the unwanted advances of gym coach Russell Gettis (Segel) and pursuing substitute teacher Scott Delacorte (Timberlake), Halsey grows as a person, coming to realize (as much as such a character can grow an...

This issue, we venture Fourth (rather than Forth) on A Not-So-Horrible Trip through October 19, 2011 by means of a pair of comedies that deliver in completely different ways. In Horrible Bosses , Jason Bateman ( The Change-Up ), Charlie Day ( It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia ), and Jason Sudeikis ( Hall Pass ) star as best friends who hire a "murder consultant" (Jamie Foxx, Law Abiding Citizen ) to help them kill their unrealistically abusive bosses. Bateman's boss is played by Kevin Spacey ( 21 ), who fits comfortably in the money-grubbing, egotistical, curmudgeonly shoes of his character, Dave Harken. Day works as a dental assistant for Jennifer Aniston's blackmailing nymphomaniac Dr. Julia Harris, D.D.S., a role (it was quite obvious) that she enjoyed as much as I did. But the biggest surprise, given "complete license [by director Seth Gordon] to act as pathologically screwed up as possible," and all but unrecognizable in his comb-over and potb...

Having gone Back, we will now venture Forth to October 10, 2011 with prominent science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who once wrote that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." This statement describes just one of the elements common to the two movies up for review this week. First, we look at the most recent film of this unlikely pairing, Transformers: Dark Of the Moon . After establishing themselves as clandestine protectors of Earth in the course of the original Transformers and its unfortunately more juvenile sequel, Revenge Of the Fallen , the Autobots learn of a technology kept secret by man that could spell disaster in the wrong (ie: Decepticon) hands. The intro to Dark Of the Moon provides a nice integration of science history and science-fiction to explain how mankind came to possess said technology. Since the events of Fallen , Sam "Spike" Witwicky (Shia LaBouf), has a new love interest, played by English model Ro...

In this super-sized installment of Back & Forth, we step back to a week before the first issue to October 8, 2010 , where we visit a Nightmarish villain, a hero from DC Comics' past, a historic LA theater, and a well-engineered pot enterprise. No, you're not watching Only In America With Larry the Cable Guy . You're being sent on a trip Back & Forth through time, and I have Just the Ticket. I saw a few movies on DVD this past week. The new Nightmare on Elm Street was a good effort, but Jackie Earl Haley didn't project the same sick whimsy that Robert Englund famously brought to the role in his day. It is a fairly true remake (actually, the blurbs on the jacket refer to it as a "re-imagining," but as the scenes and dialogue are carbon copies of the Wes Craven original, very little making or imagination went into the new Nightmare ). 'Nuff said. C- I also saw Jonah Hex , based off of my favorite cameo character from when I watched the Batman an...

I am starting this series as a brief return to movie reviews from 2010 that I neglected to post in order with the preceding five issues of Just the Ticket, four of which were posted online at the Columbia Basin Herald in October 2011. In this first trip back, we visit October 13, 2010 and discover than No Man is an Island : Every family has its secrets. Such is the premise of City Island , as personified by the Rizzo family. Vince Rizzo ( Andy Garcia ) is a proud prison guard—“I’m not a prison guard, I'm a correctional officer!"—with a few things to hide. One being that he is pursuing his lifelong dream of being an actor (under the tutelage of the wise and grizzled Adam Arkin , and managed by a personal-yet-professional Emily Mortimer ), all the while telling his family that he is going to poker games. Enter our hero's second secret—“My biggest secret, my darkest secret, the secret of all my secrets”—his unexpected relationship with one of his inmates ( Steven Strait )...

FROM October 15, 2011: I had not seen any of the The Fast & The Furious series prior to watching Fast Five , and didn't have high hopes for the fifth installment despite seeing that Dwayne Johnson ( Faster ) would star in the film. I was pleasantly surprised (but not in love) with the results. Original Fast cast Vin Diesel , Paul Walker , Jordana Brewster , and Matt Schulze reprise their roles as members of a highly skilled auto-theft team, this time falling in with a ruthless Brazillian drug lord ( Joaquim de Almeida , Che: Part Two ) and hiring a team of characters from previous sequels ( Tyrese Gibson and Chris "Ludacris" Bridges , 2 Fast, 2 Furious , Sung Kang , Tokyo Drift , and Gal Gadot , Fast & Furious ) to bring him down, all the while being pursued by Diplomatic Security Service agent Luke Hobbs (Johnson). Diesel appears to have grown as an action star, for once showing a level of personality not seen outside his dramatic or comedic roles, and st...

FROM October 8, 2011: I just finished watching the original Scream Trilogy for the first time in ten years, and was far more impressed with it than I was at the time of its release (1996-2000). Ten years have also passed in front of the camera as Scream 4 welcomes a new generation of moviegoers to experience the franchise for themselves. Back for a fourth time are Sidney Prescott ( Neve Campbell ), Dewey Riley ( David Arquette ), Gale Weathers-Riley ( Courtney Cox-Arquette ), and Roger Jackson as "The Voice." As we Scream into the twenty-first century, everyone has a Roger Jackson app on their phone that allows them to sound like the killer, webcams, smartphones, and social media are everywhere, Stab (the movie-within-a-movie based on the events of the original Scream ) has grown to a seven-movie franchise, and Dewey and Gale are now married, following his proposal to her at the end of the previous movie. Sydney Prescott is now a successful self-help author and moti...

FROM October 8, 2011: It has been over ten years since I've seen the original Scream Trilogy , and before embarking upon my recent serial (ha-ha) re-watching of the series, I expected to once more complain about the degenerating quality of each successive sequel (as I remember doing at age 16, following Scream 3 ), after which I would tend toward the excuse that I have seen too many movies. However, I have matured a bit, and come to realize that watching copious amounts of slasher fare has made me appreciate the quirky (albeit blood-drenched) charm of the Scream series. For those who are behind on their Scream trivia, it is a mystery-comedy-slasher film series created by Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson , the minds behind the Nightmare on Elm Street series. The villain is a serial killer of unknown identity and extreme charisma, dubbed Ghostface or "The Voice" ( Roger L. Jackson ), who is always someone connected to the dark family history of the series' heroine...

FROM October 1, 2011: There wasn't much that I saw in the new release guide this week that drew my attention, but on star power alone, I elected to rent The Ledge , and the movie itself did not disappoint. Following an opening sequence that invokes images of religion overshadowing an industrial apocalypse, The Ledge begins with police officer Hollis Lucetti, played by Terrence Howard ( Crash ), at a doctor's appointment that will bring some dark family secrets to light. We soon see him responding to an apparent suicide-in-progress, where he matches wits and woes with hotel manager Gavin Nichols ( Charlie Hunnam , Sons of Anarchy ), who stands on a ledge, threatening to jump at noon. But things are not as they seem, as early in their conversation, it becomes apparent that Gavin is not poised to jump of his own volition. The bulk of the movie centers around Hunnam's character and the terrible life choices he makes regarding his gay roommate Chris ( Christopher Gorham , C...

Following a 144-issue revival on Blogger that spans everything from MySpace and Today.com to its origins in Yahoo! Groups , SW@ Ticket is finally growing up and catching up to today's media by dropping the SW@! Of course, I will still be sharing Piece Offerings and looking through the Sniperscope from time to time, and would not be a man of my word if I didn't deliver a review of the Dark Tower Saga or continue with the Dead Parade as promised. But for now I begin anew with a review that's Just the Ticket : FROM April 25,2011: Somewhere , starring Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning (a dead-ringer for her sister at that age), is a mostly uneventful indie film about a washed-up action star whose pointless life is disrupted for the better when his abandoned daughter comes to live with him and his chummy roommate ( Jackass 's Chris Pontius). The viewer is first annoyed by long stretches of footage (a Ferrari endlessly circling a dirt track, strippers pole-dancing ...