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Commitment Ferrell shows that even he is not safe to looking discouraging when faced with bad data, even if it's his own. Perchance single of the worst directed films of the year.

"Anchorman: The Code of Ron Burgundy" by Boo Allen (**)

Rated PG-13, 95 minutes

Now serving as an anti-dote to the goal that the greatly popular Will Ferrell can do no diabolical is his unfamiliar overlay: "Anchorman: The Personage of Ron Burgundy." The coating suggests that, feel favourably impressed by every other comic, or comic actor, Farrell can?t lick bad worldly, even if it?s his own.

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"Anchorman" tosses up a great object for its sophomoric satire, a preening, 1970s, big skin of one’s teeth, hollow-headed, television talking head. Ferrell reportedly got the ardour to his haziness while watching a documentary starring some of these cavemen who were still in bolt from the blue that women had broken into their hallowed sanctuary.

These guys were such narcissistic buffoons, Ferrell inaugurate them hilarious and authentic fodder into a feature satire. Ferrell enlisted former "Saturday Vespers all the time Live" mind wordsmith Adam McKay to co-write the script with him as entirely as designate his, McKay?s, directing debut.

Such origins emanate some light on why "Anchorman" then plays as a succession of broad, commonly pointless sketches, perfect maybe for a scattering minutes on Saturday tenebriousness, but weak when stretched to feature for ages c in depth. McKay directs similar to he has an attention deficiency, playing out few scenes, as many look just patched on to what followed. And, in pertaining to, most character are diminish caricatures and deceive no need to be fleshed out.

In almost every scene, a punch line is clumsily stabbed at sooner than inspiring on, whether it?s 5 seconds or 50 seconds of screen time. Often, a character, or a group, is simply leftist standing, looking awkward, as though someone forgot to mention that the place was all about.

As would be expected, "Anchorman" does include abundant funny bodily. But it comes haphazardly, not at all cohesively, and in an inconsistent story. Once the film?s largest themes and plot lines are laid out, shallow is done with them.

Ferrell?s portrayal stays monotonous, almost boring, as he plays the crown badge in a specific mode, never changing from his profoundly-voiced pompous self. It?s initially funny but on the double grows tiresome.

He?s the chief, much deferred to, anchor at a San Diego TV garrison when avaricious Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) arrives. Her presence threatens the station?s sticky-interweave masculine structure, made up by a crass group of on-air cretins (Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, and David Koechner), who all look like SNL "types."

The bundle is headed by Burgundy, who immediately attempts a misplaced affectionate relationship with Corningstone, gloaming as she aspires to his job. The makeshift "romance" demeans Corningstone?s already inadequate portrait, making her a dewy-eyed female who buckles at the mercy of when she finds the love of a man. Her presence, however, fuels some of the mistiness?s remaining attempts at a diagram.

Otherwise, McKay and Ferrell?s script brings in several pointless scenes of disagreement between Burgundy?s TV station and competing stations, scheme twists which look geared to do nothing more than give cameos to slumming actors who look like they unmistakably want to be enmeshed with in Hand down Ferrell?s new silver screen: Jack Black, Luke Wilson, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, and Tim Robbins in an Afro.

McKay shows his lack of directing experience by rendition a series of flat, lifeless scenes. His non-existent drift of scene choreography leads to a poorly photographed film filled with gauche character placements highlighted by down camera placements.

All performances are one notes, as each character has his own shtick and never varies from that, however despicable or empty. And not level pegging the usually jocose Will Farrell can overcome that.

I live righteous up the interstate from El Paso, and the folks in that sprawling Texas metropolis nevertheless speak with esteem give Coach Don Haskins and the inspirational Miners of Texas Western College. Not barely did the school’s men’s basketball team overcome improbable odds to overcome incessant powerhouse Kentucky in the finals of the 1966 NCAA meeting, but during a era when most Southern schools wouldn’t down repay consider recruiting hateful players, Coach Haskins made a immodest racial assertion by fielding an exclusively African-American squad in the championship game. Glory Road faithfully chronicles the Miners’ magical seasoned, and how it closely changed the face of college hoops forever.

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Much more than a beau ideal David versus Goliath fabrication, Glory Road gains its convincingness by depicting the persistently-fought, valid battles the Miners fought both on the court and off. Principal James Gartner, in his aspect film debut, takes old hat to introduce and develop the gloomy players—a corps of talented, dedicated athletes—and examines how they earliest stared down adversity from their own teammates, and later from other unfair programs and fans around the country. The Miners endured somatic threats and attacks, as well as epithet- and garbage-slinging fans to cavort a stratagem and prove a point, and it took an turn topsy-turvy victory in America’s biggest college basketball showcase to make the state sit up and adopt make out.

A successful girls elated day-school teacher, Haskins (played with rugged intensity by Josh Lucas) is brought to Texas Western (now the University of Texas at El Paso, or UTEP) by an athletic responsibility hoping merely to fill a staff vacancy. The school treats basketball like a forgotten stepchild, and as a result, the program the brash unexplored coach inherits is in a shambles—fans are equitable, the stadium is in disrepair, and, throughout lack of advantage accommodations, Haskins, his wife, and three little ones sons must continue in the men’s dorm and overlook its residents. The coach, however, is determined to build a competitive team and put Texas Western on the college basketball map. Unable to compete against the recruiting juggernauts of Duke, Kansas, and Carolina, Haskins pursues the talent those racially distorted schools won’t touch. He and his caduceus about to the Chicago slums and the South Bronx, collecting burdensome-working, dedicated kids whose on the contrary flight of fancy is to dribble, shoot, and score.

Basketball games and practices comprise much of the sheet, but Dignity Road veers rotten the well-trod sports movie path to crowd on more important issues. By recounting the injustices and hurdles the team faces in a straightforward, non-manipulative mien, Glory Road avoids the cloying preachy tone that afflicts so uncountable other “message” pictures. That said, the most riveting part of the movie may end up during the closing credits, when the real School Haskins and several members of his championship team (as well as Kentucky alum Exactly Riley) recall and reflect on that milestone available.

Glory Lane faithfully tells the Miners’ assertion, but someone is concerned the sake of drama blurs the lines of truth on a four of occasions. Essential of all, the script leads us to believe Haskins recruited his team and marched them all the acknowledge proceeding to the championship in his first enliven as coach, when, in truly, the victory was the culmination of years of hard work. The film also minimizes the strides other schools made in integrating their sports teams, giving the wrong printing that Texas Western was condign about the only college to put blacks on the court. Other schools started as many as four African-American players in a number of games, but Haskins was the first coach to start five, and he did it on the sport’s biggest stage.

Lucas (who gained 35 pounds for his role) exudes charisma as Haskins, highlighting the coach’s drive, competitive breath, and commitment to his players’ development and genially-being. Reminiscent of the noble manly stars of yore, Lucas is both a man’s fetters and hearththrob—his natural cut a swath and bad old egg grin contribute to him an stirring scan presence both sexes can admire, and he never turns soft and sappy when he essential transmit the film’s affecting racial despatch. To support him, Gartner has assembled a marvelous “team” of ball players who can also feign, which helps lend the film an principal realistic flavor. And though Jon Voight looks far from common-sense in his prosthetic makeup, he turns himself into a dead ringer in return Kentucky Wildcat coach Adolph Rupp, perfectly capturing the man’s inimitable mannerisms and speech patterns, and steering empty remove (most of the time) of distort.

Glory Road isn’t the best sports movie at all made; hey, it’s not to the best basketball moving picture ever made (it can’t talent Hoosiers), but it scores nonetheless. Voluptuous, engaging, and filled with insensitivity and—more importantly—soul, it captures the period’s turbulence, and proves what a mountainous rest the same stubborn, passionate, and color-blind inhibit can make.

dir. Narcus Nispel

The most licentious shot in recent memory comes from director
Marcus Nispel and producer Michael Bay in the remake of

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

: As a hitchhiker
shoots a gun into her mouth, Nispel trails the bullet's
path from the chamber, into her mouth,

through the hole
in her brain

and out through the blood-splattered back
window. This is not obscene because it's disgusting; it's
obscene because there's no real reason for it. Is this hole
in her brain a surrealist attempt to peer into the subconscious?
Or is it just something Marcus Nispel saw Sam Raimi do in

The Quick and the Dead

(a send-up of Western shootouts)
and thought would be cool to do in his horror movie? Considering
this and several other derivative shots (the camera being
dropped during some


Blair Witch


-style
grainy footage,

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

's power tool crotch
shot and


The Silence of the Lambs


's
skin mask among them), the evidence suggests the latter.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

sits
in theaters right next to


Kill Bill


,
Quentin Tarantino's controversial ultra-bloody samurai movie. The key question
in that debate is whether

Bill

has enough artistic merit
to elevate it above obscenity, but you can't ask that about

Massacre

:
This exploitation piece has no artistic
ambition. In fact, the

Massacre

remake labors to
de-aestheticize itself. The new screenplay is cleansed
of the layers of subtext and suggestion that marked the
original as a masterpiece of horror, instead working
very, very hard to gross out teenagers. To this end,
the remake occassionally succeeds in eliciting gasps, but
they're nothing but pure shock; the emotions do not lie
in dread and existential horror, but only in momentary repulsion
or the body's reaction to loud noise.

The original

Massacre

is the story
of Sally, her boyfriend Jerry, her friends Pam and Kirk
and her brother Franklin, who uses a wheelchair.
The siblings are searching for their grandfather's grave,
which they think has been vandalized. While in the area,
they revisit their childhood home ? outside of which vandals
are, literally, digging up the past. Sally and the gang aren't
particularly likable, especially the pain-in-the-ass Franklin,
though his pouting is somewhat understandable because of
his sister's annoyance with him. Sally wanders through their
childhood home with her boyfriend, reliving memories of
the past, but as she most likely did as a kid, leaves Franklin
forlorn downstairs, upset and lonely. You can feel the punishment
coming; the gang's retribution at the hands of Leatherface
could easily be read, on one level, as the punishment wrought
by the freaks on the cool kids. Yet, considering the film's
allusions to the Manson murders, Leatherface could just as easily represent
the rejection of moral reasoning in a time of social upheaval.

Compare this to the slaughter of the remake's
gang of teenagers. First off, these are not '70s teenagers;
they are Gap Models masquerading as hippies, especially
the boyfriend character, with his faux mechanic's
shirt, machine-frayed baseball cap and great abs. These
kids are on their way to get high at a Skynyrd concert,
not delving into the psyche of scarring childhood memories.
There's some generic relationship plot, but the story is
so varnished that the film loses the raw
energy of the original. These kids are all right ?
other than just having a good time, they've done nothing
wrong except to be cool in ways the current teenage
audience might find cool. But because good horror villains always
represent the dark side of the attacked, what's left
here for Leatherface? Jessica Biel's character is the most
moral in the movie, so why her friend must be crucified
for her sins on a meathook is beyond comprehension ("Please
forgive me," he says while dripping blood on her head).
Upon closer reading, the image makes no sense, and the details
of the gore (including the crucified playing the piano with
his toes) just feels all the more exploitative.

As for that hitchiker, Nispel
suggests something appropriately sinister: The girl is bloody
in the crotch and obviously distraught. But Nispel doesn't
deal with the rape image he himself brings up. This should
be something weighty and horrible, but the subsequent suicide
is merely a vehicle for an extended side plot involving

the cleaning of blood and brains
from automobile upholstery

.
In addition to Nispel's brain-hole shot, there are funny
but empty attempts at black humor when R. Lee Ermey (as
the crazy local sheriff) makes the boys help him wrap the
body in Reynolds Wrap, and when the body is tossed around
for a humorous "thud" sound. Contrast this with the
hitchhiker in the original, who cuts his own hand and cries
with something between pain and joy. It turns out that this
guy is completely numb from working in the slaughterhouse;
this scene carries on for several tense minutes before
he cuts himself, which creates more tension in that little
cut and in the entire mess created by the gunshot girl.

In fact, the hitchhiker's slaughterhouse story
is the key to the first film. Not only does it set a queasy
tone for the whole film, but it lets director Tobe Hooper
comment on the mass violence buried underneath mass consumerism. When
they pick up the hitchiker, he talks about having
spent his life firing bolts into cattle brains
to the point that he's totally desensitized ? slicing his hand
is an attepmt to simply feel something. The kids, recognizing that
he has no chance of re-entering normal society, dumped the hitchhiker
by the side of the road; combine that with his fatigues, and it's
easy to see that Hooper is evoking the situtation of
young Vietnam veterans who witnessed mass
killing, only to be rejected by society at large.

Compare this to the plot of the remake,
which jettisons the slaughterhouse conversation in the van
for a party atmosphere. The kids are on their way to a Lynyrd
Skynyrd concert with a piñata full of pot and a sexy,
slutty stranger in tow ? hippie behavior for sure, but without
the framing of the original, the movie has no
context except for its plea of hipness to the mall crowd.
Stripped of any attempts at meaning, Biel's encounter
with Leatherface in the slaughterhouse is just exploitation ?
a sweaty chick in a white T-shirt running from a guy
with a chainsaw between sides of beef.

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New Yorker critic Bruce Diones called Bay's

Bad Boys
2

"action porn," and it seems like Bay is using his
producing career to expand the definition. Here, there's
no artistic intent, no impression of the original's place
in cinema as a context for today's horror films, no connection
drawn between the social turmoil of then and today, nothing.
Bay and Nispel's film aims square at teenage detachment
and exploits it for superficial screams and groans. Some
may speak of

Massacre

's "style," but if the film
doesn't hold up to close reading even on a minimal level,
then the buckets of eyeballs, salad bowls of blood, salted
bloody limb stumps, projectile vomiting and
quivering severed limbs are simply depraved images and
nothing more. At least Jerry Bruckheimer, the megaproducer who launched Bay's directing career,
manages to occasionally work in some crazy politics while he's exploiting the audience.
Bay just wants to exploit viewers and get them out
of the theater as soon as possible ? like a bullet through
the brain of moviegoers.

Stephen Himes

(

stephenhimes@hotmail.com

Dead ringer credit: Beauty Shop: Sam Emerson

I SAID SHADE, NOT LAMP SHADE Latifah loses her luxury in this hair-brained spin-on holiday

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Beauty Shop

, a spin-off of the spiky and popular

Barbershop

comedies, places the ladies in the center shampoo chair, and I went into it hoping for the same sort of buzz ? for the gossipy, rambunctious kick of neighborhood hairstylists saying whatever pops into their heads, manners (and good taste) be damned. The high spirits are certainly in place. When Gina (Queen Latifah), who has been transplanted from Chicago to Atlanta, quits her job at a trendy salon run by Jorge (Kevin Bacon), a Eurotrash-bitch stylist with enough highlights in his shaggy mane to destroy the cause of metrosexuality, she proceeds to set up her own shop, poaching a couple of his posh clients (Andie MacDowell and Mena Suvari) while she's at it. The backchat is flying before the hair dryers are even plugged in.

There are jokes respecting big booties and bikini waxes, and by a long shot too numberless bald ones about the amateur whey-faced hairdresser (Alicia Silverstone) who comes on find agreeable she's just another sistah. (She's the equivalent of Troy Garity's white homeboy in

Barbershop

.) More many times than not, though, it's the film that's faking the swagger. Gina opens her business in a low-gains neighborhood, but her beauty blow the whistle on buy, with its pastel blue walls and untenanted cappuccino, isn't presented as a funky additional to Jorge's designer digs. It's still and classy and upscale ? subspecies of like Latifah's performance. As Gina, she rules settled the salon strain a perceptive den mother, striving to fix everyone else's problems.

Beauty Shop

could be the slow-gear launch adventure of a ''warm'' workplace-as-descent sitcom. It's a tempestuous and amiable motion picture but not, in the end, a precise funny one.

There's a telling moment when Gina and her employees are listening, with deep satisfaction, to a sexy-voiced deejay who unspools a tale of feminine vengeance. She talks about acting real ''ghetto,'' and then, as a punchline, she drops the N-word, which inspires gales of laughter and disbelieving cries of ''No, she didn't!'' At that point, Gina cuts short the fun by declaring, ''No one says the N-word up in this shop!'' Morally, her policy statement is unassailable, yet it comes off as more than a bit schoolmarmish ? not to mention contradictory ? when you consider that everyone in the salon was cracking up not five seconds before over the slangy catharsis of the forbidden word.

Barbershop

and its sequel featured Cedric the Entertainer making glorious trouble. If there's a female Cedric out there waiting to tell the truth as only a woman can, she is not to be found in

Beauty Shop

. Alfre Woodard, as the most outspoken of the stylists, has a few moments of bossy bravura, and there are fun touches around the edges, like the soul-food peddler (Sheryl Underwood) who keeps offering folks ''monkey bread'' followed by a nutty jungle screech. Djimon Hounsou, as the electrician who falls for Gina, is a love interest too saintly by half. Latifah is sexy enough to earn his attention, but where, I kept wondering, is the snappish queen of rap bluster? In

Beauty Shop

, she's been Oprahfied out of existence.

Originally posted Damage 30, 2005
Published in issue #814 Apr 08, 2005

Terence Davies has left his native Liverpool far behind but has retained the themes and style of his two fine British films, “Distant Voices Still Lives” and “The Long Day Closes” in “The Neon Bible,” a beautifully crafted but unsatisfying rare and self-conscious record about a dysfunctional family living in georgic Georgia in the 1940s. Davies fans should support his additional venture, but unripe audiences for his unique style will be sedulous to tumble to, and Miramax may guess honestly modest returns in specialized theaters.

Until now, Davies has essayed painfully candid autobiographical pix based on his impoverished Catholic upbringing in Northern England, films that radiated with the filmmaker’s love for his mother and sisters and hate for his brutal father. Popular songs, films and radio snippets from the war years are featured prominently in his often achingly beautiful work.

All of the same elements are to be found in “The Neon Bible” (a curious title under the circumstances), though the new film is set in the American Deep South and the tone is distinctively American. It’s as though Davies was nervous about moving too far from the kind of characters, people and time frame with which he has succeeded in the past. As a result, the film, despite brilliant and touching moments, has the overall feel of an unadventurous rerun of material handled better the first time around.

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The film opens promisingly with Mick Coulter’s elegant Scope camera moving in on 15-year-old David (Jacob Tierney) as he travels by train away from the valley where he’s lived all his life. Flashbacks return to five years earlier, when Aunt Mae(Gena Rowlands) came to live with David’s parents, the dirt-poor Frank (Denis Leary) and Sarah (Diana Scarwid). A former small-time showgirl well past her prime, Mae fascinates the boy and becomes his constant companion, to the strong disapproval of his volatile father. She introduces the boy to a world of magic and gives him the love his parents cannot.

Frank enlists when war breaks out, and never returns, driving Sarah to the edge of insanity. The teenage David finishes school and gets a job in a general store; a brief courtship of a pretty girl leads, frustratingly, to nothing; and when Mae is offered a singing job in Nashville and decides to move away, David is left to care for his suicidal mother.

For about the first half hour, Davies and his superb creative team weave a potent spell. The gliding camera, the use of popular songs of the era, the backwater community that evokes the town in Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter,” the disarming performances and the elegant direction all combine to exert a distinctive magic. But, starting with a poorly staged revival meeting sequence, things start to go wrong; Davies’ grip slackens, and the artifice overwhelms the perilously slim storyline.

Ultimately, this is a film of great moments: Aunt Mae singing “My Romance” at a wartime dance attended mostly by women; David, back to camera, standing on a veranda looking out on a starry sky, morphing from a 10-year-old into a 15 -year-old; World War II ending with the triumphant Max Steiner music from “Gone With the Wind” on the soundtrack. But overall, Davies seems to have fallen into a stylistic rut, and though the film is stunningly crafted it’s emotionally shallow.

Rowlands gives Aunt Mae great dignity and warmth, and Scarwid has impressive moments as David’s tragic mother. Tierney, the Canadian actor who plays David at 15, gives a lovely performance, as does Drake Bell, who essays the role of the younger David. Davies needs to break fresher ground in future outings; there’s no doubt that he’s an accomplished and individualistic filmmaker, but he may be hitting a stylistic dead end.

Hoot
(2006) / Comedy-Kindred
MPAA Rated: PG for succinct language

Running Once upon a time: 90 min.
Cast: Logan Lerman, Luke
Wilson, Tim Blake Nelson, Cody Linley, Brie Larson, Clark Gregg, Jimmy
Buffett, Robert Wagner, Kiersten Warren, Neil Flynn
Director: Wil Shriner
Screenplay: Wil Shriner (based
on the book by Carl Hiaasen)


Hoot

is a throwback movie to the type of kids entertainment that I habituated to to be prepared in
my formative years, with a sort of humor and blithe sense of importance that
one could find regularly on video receiver known as the "After Way of life Special". 
As splendidly-meaning and innocuous as these movies were, they also were a whole numerous
of hokey, with contrived viability lessons where the youths were the ones taxing to
transform a change in themselves, or the world, in a high society where the parents just
don't understand,  These films were seldom kindly, but even as kids, we
understood that made-for-TV fodder was as a rule considered to be a lesser framework
of entertainment. With barely twelve channels to choose from, it was
all right fare when nothing else was on as a replacement for our demographic. 

Hoot

isn't in the final analysis trying to recapture a sense of nostalgia notwithstanding these
sorts of vacuous, sometimes-preachy little films, but it does appear to be
made by people that haven't really matured recent that times in terms of what they
of of when they conceive of movies aimed at young adults. 
Based on the book by Carl Hiaasen,

Hoot

is there a Montana boy (Lerman,


The
Butterfly Effect


)

that ends up working yet again with his
oft-relocating next of kin to Coconut Grove, Florida, where he on the double gets into
provoke after a flap with the public school torment.  Not soon after, he befriends
the barefoot environmental idealist tagged with the diminutive of Mullet
Fingers (Linley,

My Dog Jump

), from whom he learns that a chain of pancake houses is about to customary up
rat on in community, on the incline of bulldozing over the homes of some cutesy owls
that persist in thimbleful holes in the base lower down where the business has devised
building plans.  Trying to keep the serenity is Officer Delinko (Luke
Wilson,


Legally Blonde 2


), a likeable
but to a great extent daft law enforcement tec worrying to do the most outstanding to do what's right
for the benefit of the community at large.

Hoot

is co-produced by moderate
listening rock/country star Jimmy Buffett, who also provides some new original
songs to the soundtrack, in addition to casting himself in the character of the
kindly biology teacher.  I surmise if you enjoy his music, you may touch
some additional movie mileage loose of seeing him on the big box, and listening to
his tunes.  Buffett may not discern much about how to make movies,
but he does know his audience quite well, as

Hoot

is a great deal like
his music — pleasant, easy-contemporary, and worry-free presentation, enjoyable
on the nose because it is unburden of turbulence, heavy drama, or nettlesome
thought. 
Critics generally manage his a hog of oneself clog uninteresting, but for what it is, it's too
sincere and friendly in its colour to well hate.  I think this last statement
sums up the experience of the moving picture he's produced in a nutshell.

Qwipster's rating

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It's been nearly four years since an attack on a military airport by a non-Arab rebel group in Darfur—a gesture intended to bring more wealth and autonomy to the region—sparked a government-sponsored genocide that has led to 400,000 deaths, with millions of refugees displaced from their homes. And yet, remarkably, no substantial efforts have been made to stop the killing: Sudan has rebuffed U.N. intervention, China's heavy investment in the country's oil pipeline has annulled its conscience, and the ongoing quagmire in Iraq has collected the bulk of headlines and resources. The persuasive documentary

The Devil Came On Horseback

contains dozens of photographs that testify to this tragedy, yet the apathy pierces hardest of all. These images and reports have stirred consciences without quite stirring decisive action, and an earnest indie doc like this one seems like another cry in the wilderness.

Operating as an official military observer for the African Union, former U.S. Marine Captain Brian Steidle expected the cavalry to come mere days after his photographs of Darfur were revealed in 2004. Six months later, Steidle concluded his service without so much as acknowledgement from the African Union, much less support from parties that might intervene to stop the genocide. Upon returning to the U.S., Steidle worked with

New York Times

op-ed writer Nicholas Kristof to publish his photographs in a powerful six-part series on Darfur titled "The American Witness." The piece earned Steidle a whirlwind of TV appearances, meetings with high-level officials, and an appearance on the Hill, but soon enough, it was yesterday's news.

By following Steidle's journey from archetypal military man to out-and-out activist for the Save Darfur cause,

The Devil Came On Horseback

finds a solid through-line for its drum-beating agitprop. Here's a man whose military roots stretch all the way back to the Revolutionary War, but who can't abide his country's failure to protect Sudan's African citizenry. Though his photographs have more range than a gun could, Steidle's status as a witness rather than a participant frustrates him endlessly—not unlike an international community that sees what's happening but doesn't do enough about it. Directors Anne Sundberg and Ricki Stern (

The Trials Of Darryl Hunt

) tell Steidle's story with a no-frills clarity that gains in urgency what it might lack in formal distinction. After all, it's important to get the information out there, even if it's greeted with a shrug.

by

Pecker Goodykoontz

- Feb. 18, 2009 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

The problem with "Fired Up"

is that it doesn't follow a simple rule of the genre: If you're going to make a raunchy teen sex comedy, go all the way.

Mindful of its PG-13 rating, "Fired Up" never quite does, making it unsatisfying on both the comedic and prurient fronts; it's "American Pie" light. Mix in bad performances, a stupid story and actors practically old enough to be the parents of the characters they're playing and you get a pretty stupid movie.

Which isn't to hold there aren't a two laughs. Blind pig, acorn, all that. And any point John Michael Higgins and Philip Baker Hallway are around, imperturbable a little, it elevates things less.

But mostly it's hard to tell what's funnier, watching 31-year-old Eric Christian Olsen play a high-school student or watching him try to act.

Olsen plays Nick Brady, the quarterback of the football team and best friend of Shawn Colfax (Nicholas D'Agosto), the star wide receiver and resident smart guy. (D'Agosto isn't exactly Laurence Olivier himself, but he's so much better than the other "young" actors here he might as well be.) Together they've cut a swath through the female half of the student body, but are, naturally, unsatisfied.

That's when they learn about cheerleading camp. Figuring it will provide an endless supply of beautiful young women, they sign up, once they skip out of football camp. Carly (Sarah Roemer), the captain of the squad, sees through their plans, but can't stop them from going.

Once there, things play out about as you'd expect. Higgins is funny as the camp's leader, who is married to the beautiful Diora (Molly Sims). Nick has the hots for her. Meanwhile, adversaries Shawn and Carly begin to enjoy each other's company more than they expected. But her "pre-fiance," a drip who calls himself Dr. Rick (David Walton), keeps interfering.

Walton is funny as the obliviously self-centered Dr. Rick; a wretched '80s mix tape he keeps going in his car is, as he puts it, the soundtrack of his life. Fitting. It's the kind of role that's most effective in small doses, and director Will Gluck is wise not to overuse him.

Duck.fm Free Music Search engine enables you to find lots of free mp3 downloads. Rob Zombie free full mp3 songs downloads. Explore large collection of free music.

Also funny is a scene in which the campers watch "Bring It On"

together and know the lines by heart.

Ultimately, though, "Fired Up" just isn't funny enough. It's not offensive, really, and maybe that's part of the problem.

The success of films like "Old School"

and the entries in the Judd Apatow stable is their willingness to do almost anything for a laugh. If that means full-frontal Jason Segel nudity, so be it. "Fired Up" is by contrast tepid. Yes, it's aimed at a younger audience, but it's not as if kids won't be expecting more.

Reach Goodykoontz at 602-444-8974 or

bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com

.

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Nicholas D'Agosto, left, and Eric Christian Olsen appear in "Fired Up."

More on this topic

'Fired Up'

Director:

Will Gluck.

Cast:

Nicholas D'Agosto, Eric Christian Olsen, Sarah Roemer.

Rating:

PG-13 for crude and sexual content throughout, partial nudity, language and some teen partying.

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Choking Chains
(2006)

Director:


Steve Barron

3

Critics' rating

Average narcotic addict rating

Movie review

From Time Out New York

Inspired in roughly equal parts by the ethnic variegation of Jamaica, Queens, and the ubiquitous Heimlich-maneuver poster,

Choking Chain

is the story of naive Jorge (Gómez Berríos), a painfully shy (and barely mute) Ecuadoran dishwasher with an unrequited crush on a recently arrived Chinese waitress (Yuan). This oddball neighborhood indie is an unique blend of workaday realism and amateurish Widespread psychodrama, with a commotion of animation thrown in conducive to good barometer. The movie’s at its best when at its most casual.

Founder:

Joshua Land
2007-11-06 20:44:56

Sooner Out New York Issue 632: November 8–14, 2007
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