The New Yorker’s back-up film critic has just published a surprising review of Hancock that is an unqualified rave.

If critics were cars, Denby would be a Ford Taurus. His writing is clear and logical, and almost as exciting as a tan-colored, four-door sedan. He not only lacks the flamboyance and savage wit of Anthony Lane, the top gun film critic at the New Yorker, he seems almost wholly devoid of personality whatsoever. Denby, at heart, is a dry academic lulling his readers to sleep with his texture-free analyses.

However, once in a while, he fires one hell of a shot across the bow of the film critics community. Imagine hopping into grandpa’s Taurus, and finding out at the first stoplight that he’s got a 230 horsepower V-8  engine in there that can take a Corvette off the line. There’s the shock of “holy shit, where did this come from?” Months ago, he illuminated the teen-dance flick How She Move with eloquent prose and made you look at a generic teen movie as an intriguing cultural artifact. This week, he tackles Hancock.

Fanboys have been circulating negative reviews of Hancock for months. The Rottentomatoes.com rating is at 36% and falling. (Notably, though, J.R. Jones at the Chicago Reader also gives it a thumbs-up, and the Reader has long been a high-water mark of film criticism.)

Denby digs in to Hancock, essentially calling it the next evolution in pop entertainment:

If everyone knows that digital has tossed realism overboard, then why not turn that knowingness into a joke? Hancock flips an obnoxious neighborhood kid into the sky and, looking up now and then, carries on a conversation with Ray, only to put out an arm and catch the howling towhead as he falls to earth. That’s a pretty funny trick, and there are others just as good…

He follows that thought with some eloquent observations about Will Smith and Charlize Theron.

We’re also puzzled by [director] Berg’s visual style, which, in these intimate scenes, depends on a handheld camera, restlessly moving yet pinned to the actors in super-tight closeups. It’s as if he were making a Cassavetes psychodrama….Suddenly, we realize why he stays so close. We are watching genuine actors at work, not well-paid hired hands filling up the space between agitated zeroes and ones.

I haven’t seen Hancock yet, so I can’t hold forth on his accuracy, but kudos to Grandpa Dave for breaking from the pack, and giving us a fresh way to contemplate a film that you might otherwise completely ignore. Right or wrong, that’s what good film writing is all about.

Wanted.

What did I want from it?

It’s easier to ask what I expected from it. Let’s go down the list. One, Angelina Jolie showing off her finely-toned posterior: check. Two, the most heavily enhanced CGI gunfights since… Shoot ‘Em Up, I suppose. Double check on that one. Three: heavy-handed social commentary. Check. Four: an unfaithful adaptation of the comic: check. Finally: Every action movie cliché. Check that one with permanent marker.

What did I not expect, that I actually received: To be on the edge of my seat; a satisfying resolution; to have fun; to not expect the twist when it came.

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I haven’t been writing about the BBC’s Life On Mars because it would be criminally unfair. It’s one of the greatest television shows in recent memory, and except for a brief run on BBC America, it’s been completely unavailable on these shores. No DVDs. No endless repeats on BBC America. Nothing.

The bad news is that ABC is prepping an Americanized version for the fall and it’s going to be awful. So it’s time to break radio silence. Find a torrent site, search Ebay for DVDs and buy a PAL DVD player, or scramble around online anywhere you can and download Life On Mars.

There’s only two 8 episode seasons of the British version, so it’ll be quick to pull down. If the powers that be won’t make it legally available - because they’re prepping a vastly inferior version - then civil disobedience to the IP laws of the land is the only option.

The premise of Life On Mars is simple. DI Sam Tyler (that’s Detective Inspector for us Yanks) is an obsessed, procedure loving detective chasing a serial killer in London in 2007. He gets hit by a car while investigating, and wakes up in 1973 as a junior detective working for the blustery DCI Gene Hunt. The opening credits ask the question - is he mad, in a coma, or has he really gone back in time?

It’s a simple gimmick, and the first episode plays out like a goof on the CSI procedurals. DI Tyler is used to extensive lab reports and forensic science tests. In 1973, it takes two weeks to match a fingerprint. Civil rights are an alien concept. Women and minorities can’t be taken seriously as detectives – even by themselves. And DCI Hunt is a garrulous English redneck, happy to beat a confession out of any poor sot in his interrogation room just so he can get to the pub by five.

What unfolds from there is some of the most engrossing television to have aired in years. Imagine Lost if it promised a satisfying resolution without jerking the audience around. Imagine Battlestar Galactica with a sense of humor. Imagine House playing out as a semi-surreal detective show.

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From our friends over at Trailer Trash, this is perhaps the best review of an M. Night Shyamalan movie trailer:

“The first stage is loss of speech. The second stage is physical disorientation. The third stage is fatal.

These are the symptoms of watching this trailer.

The Happening is M. Night Sham-alan’s newest descent into the bizarre and unexplained world of disappointment. With its cornucopia of overtly-stylized nonsense, this preview conjures up enough memories of “Lady in the Water” that I can only hope a bunch of trees will try to kill me (spoiler alert).

And because this is a trailer review, I can beat all the other film critics to the punch and be the first to christen this movie “The Crappening”

- Steve Jarczak”

Bravo, Steve. Couldn’t be said any better.

A&E’s remake of The Andromeda Strain was a blink and you’ll miss it affair. Once upon a time, a lavish 4 hour miniseries based on a Michael Crichton novel, and executive produced by Ridley and Tony Scott would have been a headline television event. Those days are long gone.

Whether this re-make disappeared off the radar because of changing audience tastes, or because it was supremely witless and inept, we’ll never know. Either way, audiences are lucky that this dreadful mis-fire will soon be buried in DVD remainder bins. Summarizing the plot holes and Knight Rider-level cliches would be tiresome. The only point of interest in this dreadfully tedious affair is as a measuring stick, a point of reference for how far science fiction has regressed.

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Two weeks prior to its release, I wrote a review of Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. My pre-release review was equal parts contempt and resignation, swirled around with a jigger of blogger’s snarkiness. It was a sophomoric stunt, to be sure, but one with a point… that this is a movie so predictable that one doesn’t even need to see it to comprehend it. And sadly, I was right.

The review was educated speculation, and extrapolated from the inert trailers and lavish pre-release hype. Vanity Fair’s puff piece “Keys To The Kingdom” was particularly noxious and fawning. The coverage in Entertainment Weekly was so single-mindedly rah-rah that it seemed that Paramount’s PR department had taken up residence in the editor’s office.

In the blogosphere, reactions range from bemused to apologetic. The short-tempered hotheads rush to defend their embrace of mediocrity. “It’s supposed to be entertainment, not high art,” they’ll clamor. What a stirring defense. Paramount and a troika of mall-cinemas’ most decorated icons invested $185 million dollars for 120 minutes of lowest-common denominator pabulum, and legions of bleeding hearts and press-kit plagiarists posing as critics trip over themselves to apologize for it.

What’s worse – the studio’s cold calculations of how much revenue can be extracted from a fourth Indy picture, or the blind enthusiasm of movie-goers who race to the theaters to reward those calculations, in naked defiance of quality? We’ve already seen large portions of Indy copied off in National Treasure and Tomb Raider, which were just copies of the original Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

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Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull is like that awkward drink you have with your ex-girlfriend years later. You smile, you laugh, you tell a few jokes and try too hard to act cool; but your heart isn’t really in it. After it’s all over, you smile through the half-hearted hug, but deep down inside you know it was a bad idea, and you’ll be happier when it’s all forgotten.

Twenty seven years ago, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Harrison Ford grabbed the audience’s imagination with the first Raiders Of The Lost Ark. It created the prototype for the big action movie in an era when big action movies weren’t a dime a dozen. The retro styling was inventive, and the protagonist model of the hero armored with irony instead of kevlar would set the standard for almost every action flick that would follow.

Every summer since, the silver screen has seen countless copies, including xeroxes of the original, flicker past with varying degrees of success. Memory is cruel that way. It’s easy to remember the golden thrill of the original - and audiences will turn out in droves trying to re-experience it - but it’s impossible to replicate. The key players might have returned, but the audience has long since moved on.

Coming nearly 20 years after the last Indiana Jones sequel, Crystal Skull wheezes across the finish line about 10 years too late; the occasional sparks of charm dying off in an airless script that talks too much and manages to explain nothing at all. The whole venture is a schizophrenic mess; a patchwork of half-ideas held together with autopsy stitching. A-list writers such as Frank Darabont, M. Night Shyamalan, and Tom Stoppard all took a pass at the script, each getting shot down by George Lucas, who used his digital wizardry to graft his favorite pieces together into an ungainly whole.

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A quick guide to In Rainbows.

I like Radiohead. “Creep” was a fluke that would have, no, should have been a footnote in pop music history. It’s a silly piece of mopery, with an unironically majestic chorus that caught the ear of the mainstream. Unfortunately, these guys are “smart” - something that is deadly in their chosen profession.

And that’s the tragedy of popular music: If it weren’t for “Creep” somehow seeping into the American mainstream these poor “chaps” would’ve never had the chance to grow - and growth is essential to all important and relevant art. The remainder of Pablo Honey is sub-standard, The Bends is adequate at best, but the formulaic depression of “Fake Plastic Trees” and the MTV friendly video with it’s silly anti-consumerist stance helped Radiohead beat the odds of fading into oblivion. They scored just enough hipster popularity to stay relevant long enough to record OK Computer, and it isn’t until then that they really make an original mark.

OK Computer is basically lauded by every critic in the world as the second coming, and generally they’re right. So once you live up to the hype, what happens next? They put out Kid A in an attempt to find an identity, all the while knowing you’ll never live up to your previous success. They put out Amnesiac saying “Hey, man, it’s b-sides.” But then your real slump is Hail to the Thief. I can’t even begin to go into what a schizophrenic morass that one is. [ed. note - I agree 100%, HTTT is so terrible that playing it at someone should be considered a war crime. Perhaps the interrogators at Guantanamo Bay should use it frequently.] After that your lead singer decides to sequester himself with a laptop and a microphone and vomit out a solo record with bleeps and farts.
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