Gil Mansergh’s Cinema Toast

New Releases 12/18/09

Avatar (PG-13)
Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver
Director: James Cameron
What makes “Avatar” worth seeing is the fantastic, 3-D, computer generated special effects. The story, however, is less than stellar. It starts off like a first-generation “Star Trek” episode—a parapalelgic Marine beams his brain into a blue, 10-foot tall creature living on an alien moon because the atmosphere is poison to humans. Then the film becomes a “Dances With Blue Aliens” story as the ex-marine gradually learns to accept and love the blue creatures’ culture (and especially one hot, mostly naked female modeled on Zoe Saldana). “Avatar’s” amazing technology is well worth a visit and the story may provide some unintended chuckles as well
3 and 1/2 pieces of awesome 3-D toast

Did You Hear About the Morgans? (PG-13)
Starring: Hugh Grant, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sam Elliott, Mary Steenburgen
Director: Marc Lawrence
The stars play a couple who are supposed to have been married and divorced, but onscreen, they act as if they met each other ten minutes ago and don’t like what they saw. This zero-chemistry is further derailed by having the two witness a murder, get thrust into a government relocation program and shipped off to live happily together in Wyoming. The final part of the train wreck is the dialogue: i.e. when the Manhattan female first arrives in the country she whines “I can’t breathe. The air’s too clean.”  Ugh.
1 piece of every minute is painful to watch toast
The Messenger (R)
Starring: Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson, Samantha Morton, Jena Malone
Director: Oren Moverman
A wounded war hero is assigned to a two-man team who notifies families and loved ones that a soldier is dead, wounded, or MIA. With no training, and partnered with a men who allows himself to show no emotion (Harrelson in one of his strongest roles). “Never touch the NOK (next of kin),” is the prime directive, but  when one widow grieves for the messenger who brought her the news, the unethical is no longer unthinkable.
3 and 1/2 pieces of honest toast
The Hurt Locker (R)
Nominated for 3 Golden Globe Awards!
Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director & Best Screenplay. This has been re-released locally.
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Bryan Geraghty, Evangeline Lilly
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Films about recent wars have traditionally been box office poison, but although this movie is set in 2004 Iraq, it is really about  the boredom and terror of  all wars (at least since the invention of gunpowder).  The film opens with a bomb-sniffing robot and then shifts to the three members of Bravo Company who have volunteered and trained to disarm the IEDs which increasingly dot the landscape. The three are the quintessential nice guy, the somber professional, and the adrenaline-fueled alpha male—a composite entity made better by its variety. The actors who portray these characters and the director and script which guide them, never miss a step (both literally and figuratively) and the result is a level of filmmaking only seen once or twice in a decade.
4 pieces of must see toast
Me and Orson Welles (PG-13)
Starring: Zac Efron, Christian McKay, Claire Danes
Director: Richard Linklater
1n 1937, the fabled Mercury Theater presented an historic “Julius Ceaser” on a bare stage and with the actors dressed in Fascist uniforms. At the center of it all was a young genius named Orson Welles. In this movie, a high school student accidentally lands in the middle of things, falls for Welles’ young assistant and watches in awe as the brilliant director and star (playing Brutus) pulls everything together in a theatrical tour-de-force. Christian McKay nails it as Welles
3 pieces of theatrical history toast
NEW ON DVD

Inglourious Basterds (R)
Starring: Brad Pitt, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, Melanie Laurent
Director: Quentin Tarantino
The “basterds” in this much anticipated Tarantino WWII saga, are volunteer Jewish American soldiers who seek blood-soaked retribution on the evil Nazis. After several years of behind the lines activities which trample the Geneva Convention of 1929, the Basterds team up with a beautiful spy and a film critic turned British secret agent in a plot to eradicate most of the German High Command at one time. The question for you is if all this sadistic gore is indeed without a single redeeming social value  (a definition of pornography)?
3 and 1/2 pieces of Die, Nazi , Die toast
Hangover (R)
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Justin Bartha, Jeffrey Tambor, Heather Graham
Director: Todd Phillips
Todd Phillips, the man who created the likeable guys in absurd situations genre with “Old School,” returns to his tried, true, and gross-out funny formula once again. The set up is that three guys trundle their soon to be married friend off to Vegas for the biggest, crudest bachelor party of all times and when they wake up the next day, the groom-to-be has disappeared. So the guys turn into hungover detectives who grope their way from clue to clue set up like dominos on a gym floor—each one ready to topple and start the next funny bit happening. P.S. stay for the crude, but amusing bits in the credits
3 and 1/2 pieces of crude, but consistently funny toast
Taking Woodstock (PG-13)
Starring: Demetri Martin, Emile Hirsch, Liev Schreiber, Imelda Staunton
Director: Ang Lee
There are two or more movies here. One is the tale of a not very interesting interior designer who flees Greenwich Village to move into the dilapidated motel run by his parents. (It is telling that the mother is much more intriguing than her son). The other movie is PG-13, behind the scenes look at the happening which was (or at least purports to have been) Woodstock. Many people have been interviewed about those music, mud, sex and pot-fueled days at a farm in upstate New York and it is interesting that one of the most iconic couples of the event (the ones clad in a the bedspread on the cover of the “Woodstock” movie soundtrack) weren’t hippies at all, but local farmer’s kids who got married a few months later, recently celebrated their 40^th anniversary and work as an elementary school nurse and a county housing worker.
In short, what you get from Ang Lee’s concertless film about a concert, is what expectations about Woodstock that you bring into the theater.
3 pieces of epic, mud-spattered toast