(1) Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (still in theaters) Here is a review I found with which I coldn't agree more (but I have only included part of it). It was 2 hours of my life I can't get back, not to mention the high ticket prices and the cost of a babysitter!
Review By Kirk Honeycutt
Bottom Line: A wearying onslaught of action and effects gives Indy little chance to charm as he did in days of old.
What do you know, the film billed as a return of Indiana Jones turns out instead to be a sequel to "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Extraterrestrials and a spaceship mix it up with well-lit caves, tumbles over waterfalls and swings through the jungle that would make Tarzan gape. Director Steven Spielberg seems intent on celebrating his entire early movie career in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." Whatever story there is, a murky journey to return a spectacular archeological find to its rightful home -- an unusual goal of the old grave-robber -- gets swamped in a sea of stunts and CGI that are relentless as the scenes and character relationships are charmless.
(2) Grace Is Gone (out on DVD) Well what do you know, I agreed with the same reviewer. I may have to start following him. Overall this movie was just a huge downer without much of a point.
Review By Kirk Honeycutt
Bottom Line: A disappointing and manipulative look at one family's loss in the Iraq war.
"Grace Is Gone" is not a dishonest film for you sense the fledgling filmmaker's sincere desire to deal with grief, the natural outcome of war. But the grief in writer-director James C. Strouse's "Grace" is so heavily manufactured that everything rings hollow. In John Cusack, Strouse has one of the screen's more versatile leading men. Yet Cusack seems strangely remote in a surprisingly one-note performance that requires the audience to supply the emotions.From the sounds of sniffles in the Eccles Theater here, many will do just that.
Much of these feelings owes to the highly manipulative use of two very young actors who play Cusack's adolescent daughters. The eldest, Shelan O'Keefe, is the best thing about the movie. But the younger one, Grace Bednarczyk, is Strouse's go-to person when he needs a quick emotional jolt.Sensing a hot property, the Weinstein Co. snapped up this picture over the weekend. As an antidote to the Bush administration's determination to keep images of grief over Iraq out of the media, the film may work at the boxoffice as a political statement. In theory though, shouldn't this movie be about any war and any family's loss? The marketing campaign may have to be as manipulative as the movie itself if the distributor is going to convince adult audiences they need a good weep.Instead of creating an air of normalcy before news of the tragedy breaks, Strouse allows the film to open with a sense of melancholy, loss and anger. One can rationalize this approach, but the film never undergoes a dramatic tonal shift to reflect the impact of unbearable news.
(3) August Rush (out on DVD)
Review By Lou Lumenick
They'd better stock some insulin along with the popcorn in theaters showing the extremely sticky and moist musical fantasy “August Rush." This is the sort of movie that requires you not only to suspend disbelief, but to check your sanity at the ticket counter.
The title character - named after a slogan on the side of a Daily Snooze delivery truck, no less - is an orphaned musical prodigy. In the space of six months, he is offered a scholarship to the Juilliard School and composes a symphony which he conducts in performance by the New York Philharmonic. Remarkably, August's only previous musical training is a brief stint with Wizard, played by Robin Williams in a red toupee as a cross between Fagin and Don Imus.
Wizard instructs August and other under-age street musicians by yelling at them in the ruins of the Fillmore East - which appears to have mysteriously moved from the Lower East Side to Queens - and delivering epigrams like “Do you know what music is? It's a reminder there's something else besides us in the universe."
No plot twist is too shameless for the unintentionally hilarious script attributed to James V. Hart and Nick Castle, who turned Williams into a middle-aged Peter Pan in his earlier, uh, triumph “Hook."
August has inherited his musical talent from his parents, a classical cellist (Keri Russell) and an Irish rock musician (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who conceived him during a one-night stand on a rooftop overlooking Washington Square Park.
