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...