Author: Jason Zingale (Page 81 of 154)

It wasn’t that long ago that I saw a poster for “Mama’s Boy” promoting its upcoming release at a major theater chain (after all, you don’t forget a poster featuring Jon Heder wearing a goofy Viking outfit), but its recent debut on DVD seems to indicate those plans have since been abandoned. Of course, with a recent string of box office duds under their belt, Warner Bros. probably felt that a theatrical release wasn’t worth the effort, and they were right. It’s not that the movie is unwatchable, but rather that it’s so much like the ill-received “Mr. Woodcock” that the chances of it turning a profit weren’t strong enough to warrant a publicity campaign. The film stars Heder as Jeffrey Manus, a 29-year-old mama’s boy who, following the death of his father, has pledged to remain at home with his mother (Diane Keaton) for the rest of his life. But when her new boyfriend, Mert Rosenbloon (Jeff Daniels), suddenly moves in, Jeffrey engages in a childish rivalry to win over his mom’s attention. Though the film shares many similarities with “Mr. Woodcock,” the one thing “Mama’s Boy” is not is a dark comedy. Instead, the film takes a more straightforward approach, and it’s all the better for it. It’s not a great film by any means, but “Mama’s Boy” is innocent enough that fans of Heder won’t feel entirely guilty picking it up.

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American moviegoers may have lost interest in Asian horror remakes a long time ago, but that hasn’t stopped Hollywood from attempting to cash in on the next “The Ring.” Unfortunately, every movie since then has only looked like an inferior knock-off (namely because a lot of these Japanese ghost stories are the same), and though “The Eye” hails from a different part of the Far East, it shares a similar fate. Jessica Alba stars as Sydney Wells, a blind concert violinist who’s been given the chance to see again thanks to a surgical transplant. With her vision restored, Sydney attempts to reimmerse herself in society, but when she begins having vivid nightmares about the dead, she teams up with a therapist (Alessandro Nivola) to track down the history behind her donor.

Though David Moreau and Xavier Palud (the two-man team behind the cult European horror flick, “Them”) are extra careful about respecting the source material, “The Eye” is incredibly dull. Then again, so was the original film, so if it was their intent to make a scene-for-scene remake, they’ve succeeded. There’s just not a whole lot of substance to the story. Sydney spends most of the film trying to convince her friends and family that she’s not crazy, but it never actually goes anywhere until the final act. By then, most of the audience has already tuned out, and though its Hollywood-sized budget (not to mention Jessica Alba) makes watching the film easier on the eyes, there’s no other incentive to choosing this version over the one directed by The Pang Brothers.

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Originally filmed in 2003 (only to get shelved for the next five years), “The Onion Movie” may seem like a low-rent rip-off of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer’s recent barrage of spoof movies, but its from a completely different ilk. Sure, it follows the same formula of slapping together a bunch of random sketches that have nothing to do with one another, but “The Onion Movie” plays more like a bad episode of “SNL” than a game of pop culture Russian roulette. The basic idea of the film is that the Onion News Network has been assimilated into a media conglomerate, and as a result, disgruntled anchorman Norm Archer (Len Cariou) has been asked to compromise his journalistic integrity in favor of less newsworthy events. Though most of the sketches are clever on paper (and would no doubt garner a giggle or two if you saw it in an issue of The Onion), they never quite develop on screen. Steven Seagal’s cameo in a fake movie trailer for “Cock Puncher” would have been funny if it weren’t featured so prominently in the real trailer, while jabs at underage sex icons like Britney Spears and a commercial for a company that specializes in “penis retrieval” are mildly humorous. If there’s anything to learn from an experiment like “The Onion Movie,” it’s that just because a certain style of comedy works in one medium doesn’t mean it will work in another.

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