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Disney's A Christmas Carol

With the release of Robert Zemeckis'  A Christmas Carol -- his latest movie crafted through capturing the motions of real actors and then draping them in computer-generated forms and putting those figures in animated backgrounds -- we have what you could interpret as the meeting of a classic tale and cutting-edge technology. Charles Dickens' timeless story of Ebenezer Scrooge's Christmas Eve visions and redemption has been brought to the screen over and over again -- but this time, it would be with 21-st century movie making magic. Jim Carrey would not only play Scrooge, but all the Ghosts of Christmas! Victorian London would be recreated in a magnificent way! Computer-generated images would be used to bring the story to life like never before! Watching A Christmas Carol, though -- in IMAX 3D -- I was curious about who, exactly, watched previous versions of A Christmas Carol and thought the problem with them was that the camera's point of view did not fly through the center of a wreath, or that there was no scene where a shrunken-down Scrooge slipped down a drain pipe like it was a waterslide before slamming his face and groin into a number of icicles.

In recent years it seems like technology has given moviemakers everything (or, rather, what seems like everything, but more about that later), but it's a double-edged sword: Advances in digital technology have given moviemakers opportunities from light-weight cameras that can capture an image almost as well as film at a fraction of the cost to the ability to create ancient cities, futuristic robots and other visions that as little as a decade ago would have been technically impossible or prohibitively expensive. Technology, however, cannot provide a reason for a film, a compelling reason to make it, and this seems to be the number one problem with Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol from the jump: There doesn't feel like any push behind it other than the fact that Zemeckis would like yet another chance to refine, re-invent and re-use the motion-capture technology that he previously used for The Polar Express and Beowulf. Pixels aren't passion; three-dimensional images are no substitute for three-dimensional storytelling.

The Fourth Kind

There's a couple of interesting things going on in The Fourth Kind -- it's trying to mess with our heads, suggesting that it's a fictional version of real-life events that offer evidence of alien abductions around Nome, Alaska a few years ago, combining dramatizations (featuring actress Milla Jovovich and actor Will Patton) with "documentary footage" of the videotapes and audio recordings that depict the startling, supernatural secrets of these (entirely phony) events. There's an intriguing idea here -- the split-screen contrast between the "real" interviews and the re-enactment, the contrast between real life and the Hollywood version, the straight-faced suggestion that Nome was plagued by creepy space aliens going in and out of people's houses as easily as Santa Claus and a lot more often -- but The Fourth Kind is so clumsy and clunky and stiff it's like watching someone attempt an intricate card trick while wearing oven mitts.

After a brief introduction where star Jovovich looks into the camera to introduce herself and explain the film's device and warn s that "some of what you're about to see ... is extremely disturbing," director Olatunde Osunsanmi interviews the "real" Dr. Abigail Tyler, who looks pale and shaken. We then see how Tyler, a psychiatrist, was trying to complete a sleep study she was doing alongside her recently-murdered husband; Abigail's husband was stabbed while they lay in bed, and the killer's yet to be found .. and all the participants in the sleep study, haunted by restless nights, tell of an owl who they've seen outside their window, or in their bedrooms, staring at them with implacable eyes ... that isn't an owl.

The Marc Pease Experience

There is a chance that some clever marketer will take advantage of currents in the culture and, noticing the audience's avid love for Glee, market The Marc Pease Experience as another plucky tale of high-school outcasts united and healed by the magical power of music and performance. This person would, in fact, be clever, but they would also, in fact, be evil with a capital 'E,' because The Marc Pease Experience is -- from horrible title to smug closing moment -- one of the least funny comedies in a long time, and a head-scratching exercise in how you can take three funny, talented people and wind up with them not being especially funny in any way. Fortunately, nobody seems hell-bent on marketing The Marc Pease Experience -- it was dumped unceremoniously into only 10 theaters nationwide, all in second-tier markets last August, and now comes ot a featureless, vanilla DVD in the hopes it might generate some cash on the strength of the names of its stars.

We meet Marc (Jason Schwartzman) just as he's getting ready to make his big entrance in his high school's production of The Wiz, as the Tin Man, egged and coaxed onstage by his drama teacher and the show's director Mr. Gribble (Ben Stiller) -- but Marc's stagefright gets the better of him, and the result is a disaster. Jumping forward 8 years, Marc's a limo-driver loser, dating a high school girl, Meg (Anna Kendricks) from his old school, and Meg also has an uncomfortable attraction to Mr. Gribble, who Marc resents and hates for ruining his life. So from the outset, we have a love triangle where two sides are creepily, disturbingly inappropriate for the other; who exactly are we supposed to root for?

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Paramount's feature-film live-action adaptation of the '80s comic-book and animation and toy franchise, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, is one of the most fascinatingly flawed big-budget movies imaginable. I stumbled out of it overcome with special-effects-induced sensory overload when it played in the theaters, wondering just how narrowly Hollywood is marketing its films these days-- is it, say, down to the year? The month? I'm moved to ask this because G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra feels like the perfect film for a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old-boy -- not one day more, not one day less.

You can't imagine someone much older enjoying G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra because, frankly, it is silly -- cartoony and crude, full of phony high-tech pseudoscience and heroes and villains with goofy codenames like "Snake Eyes" and "Ripcord," plus hidden bases that look like something from a Roger Moore Bond film on steroids. And I can't recommend someone much younger watching G. I Joe: The Rise of Cobra because while it is silly and nonsensical, it is also incredibly violent. And I'm not talking about the red-laser/blue-laser violence of the cartoon that inspired the film, either, where no blood was spilled and bad things happened far away; in the first reel of G.I. Joe, we see someone get a red-hot iron mask latched to their face while they're screaming, then a few people getting stabbed in the eye with knives and crossbow bolts; it is fun for the whole family, but only if your family likes watching people burned alive and stabbed in the brain. And I know plenty of fans of the '80s comics and TV show and toys who liked the nostalgia trip G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra offered, but, much like Transformers, I don't have that spoonful of sweet, toxic nostalgia it takes to make those big, stupid pills go down.

James' Latest Radio Spot

Wanna hear James give his take on last week's DVD releases, including Ice Age 3, Orphan and The Maiden Heist, as well as films currently in theaters, including Michael Jackson's This Is It and Paranormal Activity?  Then click here to listen to his spot on KPAM's Bob Miller Show this past Friday.   

You'll also learn what scary movies James likes to watch on Halloween.  Nope, I'm not going to spoil the surprise -- you have to tune in yourself!

The Rocchi Files -- Winter Comedy Preview!

Winter may be larded and filled with Oscar contenders, to be sure, but Hollywood -- knowing that a little desert makes the broccoli go down -- has made sure to fill the winter Oscar-qualifying and Oscar-waiting season with a few comedies to break up the drama and depression. There's plenty of funny stuff if you know where to look -- with, of course, the warning that you may not find the same things funny as Hollywood. ...

The Men Who Stare at Goats (Nov. 6)

Packed with an all-star cast - including George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey --this comedy would be absolutely unbelievable, if it weren't all true. Based on journalist John Ronson's book, The Men Who Stare at Goats tells the true tale of the U.S. Military's Cold-War era experiments in creating psychic soldiers who could spy and kill with the power of their minds alone. McGregor's a journalist who tracks down Clooney's ex-psychic, while Bridges and Spacey butt heads over how the psychic soldier program should continue -- or if it should at all. The Men Who Stare at Goats has been getting some play on the festival circuit -- I saw it in Toronto -- and while it's a bit uneven, there's a few solid laughs in it, especially when Clooney plays the silly psychic stuff .... perfectly ... straight.

Did You Hear About the Morgans? (Dec. 18)

Directed by Marc Lawrence -- who's previously struck gold with Hugh Grant in Two Week's Notice and Music and Lyrics -- Did You Hear About the Morgans? has a plot as old as the hills, the fish-out-of-water-but-in-trouble. The unhappily married Morgans (Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker) of New York are witnesses to a mob murder, and have to be put into witness relocation. Together. In Wyoming. Sure, it all sounds a little too much -- the odds that the Morgans will reunite seem approximately the same as that of the sunrise tomorrow -- but Grant and Parker are always reliable. More interestingly, the supporting cast is amazing -- Sam Elliott, Mary Steenburgen and Elizabeth Moss of Mad Men, for starters -- and as theaters get crowded with Oscar contenders, Did You Hear about the Morgans? might be the down-home vacation from deep, dark movies that audiences want.

Echelon Conspiracy

Watch enough movies and you start to notice patterns, coincidences, odd synchronicities. Watching Echelon Conspiracy, a thriller that played in less than 400 theaters on its release, comes to DVD with a plot where, if you hold it up to the light just right and squint, there's a strong resemblance to one of 2008's one-hundred-million-dollar blockbusters that was released just six months before -- a spacing too close to suggest that any deliberate plagiarism going on, just that two different writers heard something in the wires and the wind and the world. I can't name the film, of course, for fear of spoiling Echelon Conspiracy, but I will say that, with one exception, I liked how Echelon Conspiracy handled the central plot idea more than I liked how the big-money blockbuster did; whereas the multi-million-making version was bloated and a little silly in its excesses, Echelon Conspiracy stays relatively close to the ground.

Max Peterson (Shane West) is a blue-collar jet-setting high-tech hardware guy -- working with the computing equivalent of big iron, setting up a secure server in Thailand when we meet him. Preparing to check out of his hotel, he gets sent a package -- a new top-of-the-line cell phone. And he starts getting messages from an unknown sender who's always right, in some very interesting ways, which means that when the mystery texts recommend he head for Prague, he heads for Prague ... and follows the phone's hints and tips until he gets on the radar of both a Prague casino security head , John Reed (Ed Burns), and FBI man Dave Grant (Ving Rhames). Back Stateside, the head of the National Security Agency, Raymond Burke (Martin Sheen) is taking a special interest in Max's seemingly magical phone ... which is unusual, considering he's busy with trying to get an expansion of the NSA's powers rammed through congress. ...

Road Trip: Beer Pong

The there are plenty of indications along the way that Road Trip: Beer Pong might, in fact, be much smarter than it has to be, best summed up when Jenna (Julia Levy-Boken), the French-born young woman whose work as the face (and uh, other body parts) of the beer pong championships has inspired her long-lost love (and beer pong genius) Andy (Preston Jones) to drive from Ithaca, N.Y. to Atlanta, Georgia to reconnect with her, explains that she's going to behave when she and Andy are reunited: "I'm a lady ... who sells beer with her breasts."

And, like that contradictory and self-aware moment, Road Trip: Beer Pong sums up its own self: It's a good-hearted, smarter-than-it-has-to-be comedy ... that sells beer and breasts. Branded as a follow-up to 2000's Road Trip, Road Trip: Beer Pong inspires the skeptical question of why you'd follow up Road Trip with a direct-to-video sequel nine years later and the cynical one of why Paramount waited 9 years; if Universal's pumped out 7 American Pie films, clearly, we're in an age when the line between shameless profiteering and giving fans what they want is harder to find than the bottom line of profit.

The Maiden Heist

You would think that a comedy with four Oscar-nominated or Oscar-winning actors would have a high enough profile to make it into theaters, and yet The Maiden Heist, starring Christopher Walken, Morgan Freeman, William H. Macy and Marcia Gay Harden went straight to DVD. To be sure, there were specific business problems challenging its distributor, the Yari Film Group, but The Maiden Heist also faced the problems of the modern movie business in general, where studios seem averse to releasing any entertaining film that doesn't feature an immediately marketable hook like talking robots, talking animals or talking robot animals. If The Maiden Heist's cast were in a grim, grueling drama, that movie would probably make it into theaters for Oscar time; since they're in a light, bright and breezy caper comedy, and have an average age well above the industry's target demographic, someone somewhere calculated the cost of a release to theaters against the potential profits and made the call to put it on the silver disc of DVD as opposed to the silver screen of the theater.

And I'm not going to say that The Maiden Heist would have made buckets of cash if it played theaters, or rail against the way the movie business seems to be running these days, but I will say that The Maiden Heist works remarkably well on DVD, where it plays slick and slight and funny. Walken plays a security guard at a Boston museum, who loses himself for hours in one of the gallery's classic 19th-century paintings, a portrait of a lady by the sea. One day, though, he's told that to make room for more modern pieces, the painting of the maiden is bound for Copenhagen. This, to Walken is unacceptable; it turns out it's also unacceptable to Morgan Freeman's guard, an amateur artist who's fascinated by a painting full of cats, and William H. Macy, who's grown a little too attached to a bronze nude statue that's bound for Denmark as well. ...

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant

More and more these days, movies are presented to us not merely as films in and of themselves, not as something as simple and strong as a single story well-told but, rather, as the first installment of the franchise the studio would like to start up and running. You can sense it in the film's shape and structure; all laborious set-up, a climax that feels more like the lead up to the halftime whistle, the introduction of too many characters and an overall feel of pained, panicked over-exertion that's about as appealing as watching your waiter grow sweat-stains under the armpit of his shirt at a restaurant.

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant is based on a series of young adult novels by Darren Shan; interestingly, or creepily, the hero's name is Darren Shan (Chris Massoglia), a good-hearted teen drawn a little to the dark, who is eager to bear witness, along with his friend Steve (Josh Hutcherson), when the creepy Cirque du Freak comes to town. One of the Cirque's lead performers, Mr. Crepsley (John C. Reilly) is a showman to die for who's never going to die; he's a vampire. And soon -- to save Steve's life -- Darren is as well, and hurled into the war between the immortal-yet-moral vampires and their bloodthirsty brethren, the vampineze, while the malevolent Mr. Tiny (Michael Cerveris) looks on waiting for a long-prophesied war to begin ... which, yes, sounds like pretty much every other work of young adult fantasy in the past 100 years, doesn't it?