Bill Wine

courtesy Chronicles official site
“Oh, hi. You just caught us blogging.” 

This sequel is an equal.

Which is to say, with the new Chronicle, it offers slightly stronger visuals and slightly weaker story values, so, overall, you can pretty much expect the same level of quality as the original delivered.

In this second children’s adventure, the four British Pevensie siblings are summoned back to Narnia from London during the World War II blitz to do battle with a new enemy, who is threatening to render the kindly creatures who inhabit this enchanted kingdom extinct.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, based on the second book in the fantasy cycle by C.S. Lewis, follows The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which was based on the first, to the family-film marketplace. And it’s been produced on a somewhat larger scale, with additional cast, effects, comic bits, battle scenes, and CGI creatures — which is what happens when your first entry makes three-quarters of a b-b-billion bucks.

courtesyWhat Happens in Vegas (all rights reserved) What Happens in Vegas 

Jack and Joy are girl and boy whose love is nevermore. But judge decrees, “Stay married, please,” so now begins the war.

Maybe I should just stay with prose, and maybe this flick should have just stayed away from Vegas. Because the first act, set in Sin City, is loud, frantic, strained, ham-fisted, and off-putting, with little of note other than the enthusiastic and obnoxious product placement. Then What Happens in Vegas moves to New York, and things pick up considerably.

WHIV is a battle-of-the-sexes comedy that revolves around two New Yorkers, played by Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher, who’ve just met. Joy and Jack – she’s a commodities trader (which neither she nor the script makes in any way convincing) who just got dumped; he’s an underachieving party boy who just got fired by his own father – wake up together after a very wild and very drunken night in the Neon Nirvana.

courtesy Iron Man official site / all rights reserved Iron Man 

Hey, a superhero movie with no Spandex. Will wonders never cease.

Sorry, this icon wears iron. And star Robert Downey, Jr. must be some kind of Iron Man himself, surviving his high-profile personal problems of recent years to become this summer’s leadoff hitter and flavor of the month. Not that his talent was ever in question.

Former bad boy Downey ascends to the lead in a high-budget, potentially sequel-spawning blockbuster for the first time, completing an improbable comeback.

Or maybe it’s that he’s also Irony Man, which comes in quite handy as his character has his mettle — and metal — tested throughout Iron Man and never loses his cool.

courtesy Baby Mama official site / all rights reserved Baby Mama 

If it’s not quite a bundle of joy, it’s at least a bassinet of laughs.

Baby Mama is a relatively fertile comedy about surrogate motherhood that teams former Saturday Night Live “Weekend Update” newsdesk partners Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, both of whom emerged from Chicago’s improvisational comedy troupe, Second City. Together, they midwife this audience-friendly romp with their crackerjack chemistry and timing.

Fey plays neat freak Kate Holbrook, a 37-year-old single Philadelphia organic-food-store executive who, while winding her biological clock, discovers that she’s infertile. Wanting to have a baby and maintain her career, she turns to Sigourney Weaver, the steely owner of a surrogacy center, a specialist in “maternal outsourcing.” She pairs Kate with the unsophisticated Angie Ostrowiski, the slovenly slacker played by Poehler, as a surrogate mother.

courtesy 88 Minutes official site / all rights reserved 88 Minutes 

Talk about underemployment. 88 Minutes lists 19 – count ’em, 19 – producers in the credits. That works out to approximately 4-1/2 Minutes per producer. And, apparently, not one of them bothered to point out to the 18 others that the story they were telling in the movie they were making was a truckload of hooey. Consider it pointed out.

88 Minutes, which actually runs 106 minutes and feels a heck of a lot longer than that, is a sorry suspense thriller and a wholesale who-dun-it. But by the time the villain is revealed, you’ll be too busy deciding whether to give up moviegoing altogether to even notice. Or, as they say in the trade: Who done it? Who cares?

Smart People poster Smart People 

“We’re smart people,” says a character in Smart People, “we can figure it out.”

Maybe.

But there’s no dumbing down for the audience of Smart People, a cerebral seriocomedy set in academia exhibiting behavior so dumb, it smarts. This is a movie about a dysfunctional family that wants you to think, “If these people are smart, imagine the mistakes that dumb people make.” And you do.

Dennis Quaid plays a widowed professor of Victorian literature at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University. Still depressed by the loss of his wife a decade ago and stung by the recent industry-wide rejection of his latest scholarly book, he’s pretty much camped out at the intersection of Disinterestville and Grumpyland at this late stage of his academic career.

While recovering from a concussion, the jaded and self-absorbed prof begins a tentative romance with the emergency room doctor who tends to him, played by Sarah Jessica Parker. She’s a former student of his, it just so happens, who used to have a crush on him, but he, of course, who gave her a C, doesn’t even remember her. Anyway, before you can say “sex in the univer-city,” they’re a couple.

courtesy Leatherheads official site / all rights reserved Leatherheads 

There’s no screwball in football, but there’s plenty of football in this screwball comedy.

George Clooney’s Leatherheads is, appropriately enough, a real kick, a return to the jaunty, wisecracking romps of the ’30s and ’40s. George Clooney is the equivalent of the football triple threat, a player who can – say – run, pass, and kick.

As Hollywood’s version, he’s a multi-hyphenate, someone who gets his kicks acting, writing, producing, and/or directing.

This is Clooney’s directorial follow-up to 2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck. Oh, it won’t be the same kind of Academy Award player. Hey, Good Night, and Good Luck received six – count ’em: six – Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture, and writing and directing nods for Clooney. But Leatherheads, fueled by Clooney’s fondness for the screwball genre, is both warmly nostalgic and richly entertaining.

It’s a retro tribute to football in 1925, when the college game packed fans in while the professional game – with its nonexistent rulebook and freewheeling style – remained an under-attended afterthought. (How times have changed!)

courtesy 21 official site 21 

Remember, casino gamblers, the house always wins. Moviegoers only sometimes. And this happens not to be one of those times.

21 is the tale of a brilliant student at MIT who, along with four other students and the mentoring help of his mathematics professor, learns to win big at blackjack by counting cards. Jim Sturgess (the lead in the Beatles flick Across the Universe) stars as Boston townie and math whiz Ben Campbell, with Kevin Spacey, one of the film’s producers, as Mickey Rosa, the maverick prof who teaches him the infallible beat-the-house system.

Ben gets accepted to Harvard Law School, but he can’t afford to go without a full scholarship. When he first hears about the card-counting scheme involving his professor and several not-as-gifted-as-he classmates, he politely declines. More than once. Then the scholarship falls through.

Let’s see: How might he make a fortune fast? Hmmm.

courtesy Drillbit Taylor official site Drillbit Taylor 

Bully for this bully comedy?

Nope. But at least young victims of school bullies now have a movie to point to that’s purportedly telling their sad/funny story.

Three freshmen – Ryan (Troy Gentile), Wade (Nate Hartley), and Emmit (David Dorfman) – are hassled on their first day of high school by Filkins, the psychopathic school bully (Alex Frost) whose mission in life is to sniff out dorks and do them harm.

By the second day, however… things get even worse. And will obviously continue to as the curriculum now features daily beatings and humiliations. So, in need of protection, they place an ad for a personal bodyguard in Soldier of Fortune magazine.

Those Whos from Whoville are back on the big screen, littler than ever, in Horton Hears a Who!, the third and best so far of the Dr. Seuss movie adaptations.

Why did a government coverup, a gag order, and a media blackout follow one of the biggest robberies in the history of the United Kingdom?

There’s a good comedy to be made about the American Basketball Association — which gave us, among other things, the three-point shot — but Semi-Pro isn’t it.

A one-joke premise it may be. But the central joke in Be Kind Rewind has lots of funny variations.

The universal desire of children to learn the details of how their parents met provides quite the bouncy springboard for this smart, winning romcom.

Alternately annoying and wearying, Fool’s Gold is a specious, mechanical, monumentally uninteresting romantic misadventure, a sunken clunker about sunken treasure that’s no treasure by any measure.

Over Her Dead Body isn’t exactly dead but never comes to full-blown life either.

Untraceable is a cat-and-mouse thriller about computer-driven crime.

It’s a disaster thriller that wisely shows just enough of its central monster — that is to say, not much at all — to keep the flames of fear burning throughout. Once things get rolling, just try, I dare you, to take your eyes off the screen.

It’s as if everyone in the movie is a psychic who has just screened The Da Vinci Code.

A Cellophane Man no more, John C. Reilly gets to play and sing the lead this time out, and he looks and sounds just fine.