From the indispensable Kerry Picket at the Washington Times:

["The Undefeated"] is listed on the popular Rotten Tomatoes movie review website as not only a documentary but also a science fiction and fantasy film.

Hopefully, Rotten Tomatoes will claim this was all just some sort of mistake. Nothing would be more fun than to write  a follow-up investigating that theory with the full list of categories the Palin doc could’ve “accidentally” been placed under. But, you know, it just happened to be “science fiction & fantasy.”

Oh the sarcasm we’ll share.

Their best play is probably to blame it on a low-level staffer from a shady temporary agency who keeps to himself and  tortures small animals.

It’s fair to say Kyle Smith, one of the few right-of center critics out there, hated Grown Ups. He even accuses Sandler of begging for applause with the flag-raising scene. I think that’s unfair. The moment is really about how a family is coming together and to tell the audience it’s the 4th of July. The flag-raise is a story device to make a bigger dramatic point, not pandering. The scene’s quite short — a blip, really — and it’s not like Lee Greenwood’s singing in the background. The moment certainly caught my eye, but only in the sense of how refreshing it was to see this portrayed as the ordinary act it is for most of us. Hollywood’s succeeded at making such things feel so exotic that when what’s commonplace for a majority of  Americans occurs on screen it can only be interpreted as a Big Message.

Currently “Grown Ups” sits at a pretty rotten 8% Tomatometer rating. With “Top Critics,” the story of 5 childhood friends now grown and gathering together for a funeral, rises to 11%. As Christian Toto pointed out, “the reviews aren’t pretty.” No, they are not. Many are downright hostile.

I love Adam Sandler, especially when he teams with director Dennis Dugan. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t made a bad movie, but as prolific as he is, Sandler’s track record when it comes to delivering for his fans is impressive. Especially now that he’s moved successfully beyond the rage-prone juvenile persona that made him famous and started playing family men. Until I came across James Rocchi’s review at MSN, however, my intentions were to rent this, especially since Big Hollywood had already posted a review. In his hostile review entitled “Grown Ups is Infantile Trash,” Rocchi closed with this enticing piece of information:

In the present moment, though, in the theater during “Grown Ups,” I felt a deep and abiding sadness every time the audience laughed and the sounds of their chuckles turned into the ringing of the cash register, and all I thought was a sad, simple truth: This, America, is why we can’t have nice things.

In other words, the audience was amused, the critic was not. That’s all I need to know. Within a few hours I was sitting in a packed house, munching popcorn, and laughing my ass off.

“Grown Ups” is very funny, holds your attention and delivers exactly what the trailer promises: an unpretentious, well-paced 100-minute comedy with a lot of heart and a few too many gross-out gags. It’s like “The Big Chill” but without all the baby-booming, self-involved intellectual masturbation (I’m a fan of “The Big Chill” but that doesn’t mean I’m blind to what it’s about.)

In 1978, Lenny (Sandler), Eric (Kevin James), Kurt (Chris Rock), Marcus (David Spade), and Rob (Rob Schneider) were 12 years old and thanks to Coach “Buzzer,” local basketball champions. 32 years later the five friends have spread to the four winds but are brought together again for their beloved Coach’s funeral.

Today, Lenny is a big-time Hollywood agent married to Salma Hayek and worried about his ridiculously spoiled kids who are on the verge of being forever ruined by all the narcissistic amenities that come with wealth and fame. Eric’s married to Maria Bello and in a gag that gets old pretty quick, has a 4 year old who still breast feeds. Kurt is henpecked, Marcus never grew past high school, and Rob has turned into an insufferable new age guru married to Joyce Van Patton (a superb and under-rated character actress), who’s at least thirty years older than he is.

Taste is purely subjective and to each their own. Some of the criticism, however, makes no logical sense. Many of the complaints stem from the fact that “Grown Ups” has no plot. Well, that’s true but neither did “The Big Chill.” Dugan’s film (co-written by Sandler and Fred Wolf) is built upon five subplots and the story turns come from the development of the characters. An over-arching story would’ve completely stripped the film of its primary charm and that’s the comfortable, friendly relationship between the five men. It’s their inter-action and camaraderie that makes “Grown Ups” a winner.

The other illogical criticism comes from those attacking the film as adolescent. Yeah, many of the jokes are childish but those jokes are not what the film is about. The film’s theme is actually a surprisingly mature one determined to remind us that what matters most in life are family and friends. As the 4th of July weekend passes and old and new relationships come to life, everyone eventually figures out — most especially the kids — that nannies and video games and fashion lines and trips to Milan and using the word maze instead of corn — that none of that phony Hollywood, pseudo-intellectual bullshit can compare to skipping a rock across a lake, a trip to a water park or fireworks on the 4th of July.

And how many movies today show family and friends gathered to raise the American flag on Independence Day? How many Big Stars allow their characters to wear the stars and stripes as though it’s no big deal — an everyday thing?

“Grown Ups” will make $40 million this weekend, and deserves to. My packed theatre not only laughed like Rocchi’s did, they applauded at the final fade.

Nerve.com:

“If Cameron wasn’t going to make a great movie with his rumored half-billion dollar budget, he could have at least given us an entertaining train wreck. But Avatar, which plods on for a punishing two hours and forty-two minutes, is more boring than bad. There’s no denying that the motion-capture 3D visuals are some kind of technical achievement, but after spending a while in the aquarium-like world of Pandora, I started to feel like I was staring at the world’s most expensive screensaver. The New Age-y rituals of the Na’vi put me in mind of dancing Ewoks, and the big battle scenes looked like outtakes from Attack of the Clones. Maybe that’s a little too harsh, but certainly Cameron does nothing with digital warfare that Peter Jackson didn’t do better in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Your mileage may vary, but to these eyes, Avatar looks like the emperor’s new clothes — and the King of the World is naked.”

Armond White:

“James Cameron’s love of technology is enough to sell Avatar to fans awaiting his first techno-feat since 1997’s Titanic. But will they understand the awful thing he’s done with it? Avatar’s highly-touted special effects depict an army from Earth traveling to Pandora, a moon in the Alpha Centuri-A star system, to mine rare ore from under its inhabitants, tall, blue-skinned creatures with tails called the Na’vi. These F/X show Cameron’s ex-Marine hero, Jake Sully (the great everyman Sam Worthington), taking part in a quasi-military program where he enters the alien society via a hybrid body (an avatar) made from human and Na’vi DNA. Cameron’s “fully immersive” 3-D technology is irritating to watch for nearly three hours. And then there’s his underlying purpose: Avatar is the corniest movie ever made about the white man’s need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt. …

“Cameron’s superficial B-movie tropes pretend philosophical significance. His story’s rampant imperialism and manifest destiny (Giovanni Ribisi plays the heartless industrialist) recalls Vietnam-era revisionist westerns like Soldier Blue, but it’s essentially a sentimental cartoon with a pacifist, naturalist message.”

Popsci:

“The CG characters are painstakingly rendered, but movie magic makers still haven’t found a way to make CG players look less like finely drawn cartoon characters. When CG-dominated films can create onscreen creatures indistinguishable from real-world humans and animals (without toeing the uncanny valley), a wall will come down. For this reason, Avatar remains visually impressive but not as groundbreaking as, say, George Lucas’ Star Wars, which pushed traditional special effects techniques to the next level.

“Unlike Lucas’ more playful science fiction epic, Cameron reaches for a heavy environmental message. Avatar is every militant global warming supporter’s dream come true as the invading, technology-worshiping, environment-ravaging humans are set upon by an angry planet and its noble inhabitants. But the film’s message suffers mightily under the weight of mind-boggling hypocrisy. Cameron’s story clearly curses the proliferation of human technology. In Avatar, the science and machinery of humankind leads to soulless violence and destruction. It only serves to pollute the primitive but pristine paradise of Pandora.”

Sonny Bunch:

“Anyone who has seen “Dances With Wolves” or “Quigley Down Under” or “The Last Samurai” will know the answer to that question.

“Some will be angered by the facile anti-business, pro-eco-terrorism plot Mr. Cameron has constructed, but that’s the least of the audience’s worries. Far worse is the utterly predictable — and, at 161 minutes, seemingly interminable — way in which the movie unfolds.”

Recently the film’s British director Danny Boyle, serving as jury president of the 12th Shanghai Film Festival, confided during a panel discussion that on “Slumdog” he had shed the patronizing, “imperialist” mentality, relying heavily on a local Indian crew. Boyle also observed that while it was “regrettable” that Beijing imposed censorship restrictions on its filmmakers, he’d nonetheless love to work in China, as it would be a “challenge learning Mandarin.” Boyle neglected to mention that on “Slumdog” he’d skipped the challenge of learning Hindi, necessitating an Indian co-director, and also skipped the patronizing practice of paying Western wages, and the low pay for local child actors would fuel most of the subsequent controversies.

After its national US release in January 2009, “Slumdog” received a positive critical reception in the West, with a 94% rating by Rotten Tomatoes, though some critics raised what would become ongoing issues, with “The Guardian’s” Peter Bradshaw regarding it as “an outsider’s view” and “a product placement” for the very quiz show owned by Celador, the film’s producer. But on its release in India, including in a dubbed Hindi version of this mostly (2/3) English language film, “Slumdog” did only moderate box office, especially the English version, which one trade analyst found “not ideally suited for Indian sentiment.” Indian critics mostly bought the film’s energetic ride, while others puzzled over the mix of languages and the key issue of authenticity, questioning whether the film was “a white man’s imagined India,” a superficial “poverty porn.” Even novelist Salman Rushdie was unhappy, objecting to the film’s slick yet improbable pop version of “magical realism.”

Then the issue of pay for the child actors began to make news, with the Times of India claiming Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, who played Salim as a child, was paid £700 and Rubina Ali, who played Latika, £500, with both still living in makeshift shacks in the slums of Bandra, a suburb of Mumbai. Distributor Fox Searchlight replied that for their month of work the kids were paid three times the average annual adult Bandran salary. Boyle and producer Christian Colson added that they had “paid painstaking and considered attention to how Azhar and Rubina’s involvement in the film could be of lasting benefit to them over and above the payment they received for their work.” This attention included trust funds to cover education, transportation, and expenses for the next eight years. Boyle declined to reveal the amounts of these trust funds, as this could make them “vulnerable and a target,” but according to the India Times Azhar got £17,500 in trust until age 18. His father, Mohammed Ismail, responded, “My son has taken on the world and won. I am so proud of him, but I want more money now.” Both Azhar and Rubina attended the Oscar ceremony in February, Azhar accompanied by his mother and Latika by her uncle, and soon after the Maharashtra Housing Authority announced that both kids would be given “free houses.”

In April the filmmakers responded to further charges of exploitation by donating $747,500 to a charity for the welfare of Mumbai street children, a modest amount for a film brandishing the moral authority of these destitute kids, made for only $15 million while grossing $350 million.

In May Azhar was awakened by unannounced bulldozers demolishing his Mumbai slum home as part of a drive against illegal shanties, and the next week Rubina’s shanty home was razed to make way for an overpass. Rubina and her father were briefly hospitalized, and “Slumdog” director Boyle and producer Colson then announced that in addition to the education trust and grant to charity, they were raising the amount, revealed to have been $30,000, now to $50,000, for Azhar and Rubin to purchase new apartments, as well as giving each family a lump sum of $3,000 and $130 a month stipend.

Then in June it was announced Azhar finally got his new house, a tiny 250 square foot apartment, all that $50,000 would buy in Mumbai’s hot real estate market, casting a new light on the “post-imperialist” filmmakers’ claim of munificent reward according to local standards. Crystallizing the paternalism of this whole sideshow, the ownership of the home is to be transferred from a trust to Azhar when he turns 18, provided he completes school. As if to promise the sideshow would continue, it was announced that Rubina has signed on with Random House to publish her life story, Slumgirl Dreaming: My Journey to the Stars. Boyle is reportedly reassembling his “Slumdog” team for a future project, adapting Maximun City: Bombay Lost and Found.

Back of all this noisy fallout, it’s still the film “Slumdog” Millionaire and the novel from which it is adapted, Q & A by Vikas Swarup, that raise the deeper issues. Like director Boyle wooing the Chinese, both film and novel adopt fundamentally anti-Western postures. The book’s hero, Ram Mohammad Thomas, suffers much at the hands of Catholic priests (some gay), malevolent Australian diplomats, English-speaking tourists, and Westernized figures like gangsters and movie stars (some also gay). In the film most of hero Jamal’s antagonists – police, beggar-chiefs, gangsters, the TV host (none gay), are visual figures out of Western media, a motif wickedly established when the child Jamal dunks in outhouse sewage for a photo autograph by a helicopter-borne Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan. For novelist Swarup, a diplomat from a line of distinguished Indian lawyers, there is some irony here, as he is beneficiary of the two great Britannic legacies, the English language in which he writes and which most of the film speaks and the common law.

Moreover, the very narrative hook of the novel, the improbable quiz show leading to the fulfillment of dreams of wealth and love, constructs a state of mind: what you know that is most important is simply the inscription of the injustices you have suffered. It is the epistemology of victimhood, the right answers magically accessible to the wretched, or so “it is written.”

At the heart of any current look at India is the key issue of economic development, and both the film and book display related views. Globalization in India, while bringing slick modern media and flashy urban nightlife, is viewed as little different from the old imperialism, with slums and beggars replaced by ugly concrete construction and chai wallahs in phone call centers, an extremely discontented, leftist view of globalization as simply a worldwide extension of the old exploitative gangster/hooker relationships of capitalism, enforced by oppressive police. Such is “Slumdog’s” facile, distorted view of modern India.

This year 700 million Indians voted in month-long elections that returned the secular Congress party to power, an endorsement of religious toleration in a complex land with a Hindu majority plus a minority of the world’s second largest Muslim population. Since moving away from Soviet-style socialism and protectionism, India has been growing almost as fast as China, and now contains a middle class of about 200 million people. To suggest that this enduringly secular, agonizingly multicultural, authentically democratic, free market miracle is little more than a corrupted media show is delusional. As if to repudiate the film’s facile view, the entire subsequent saga of Azhar and Rubina’s pay and housing can stand as a case study of the vulnerability of those at the bottom in the third world, not without luck but without legally recorded and capitalized property as described by economist Hernando de Soto.

Regarding the film as an “outsider’s view” of India, the filmmakers have trumpeted their veneration of Bollywood films, especially the masala genre, and “Slumdog” is full of many of its elements and conventions, notably veteran actors, the score, and the final musical production number, as a kind of assertion of authenticity. This hardly proves a “post-imperialist” mindset. Hollywood films have been voracious appropriators of international trends, notably any avant-garde style, especially since WWII, when their audience increasingly became a youth audience and their business increasingly the sale of figures and tales of rebellion, like the “New Wave” Bonnie and Clyde, to the young. Director Boyle is an accomplished contemporary film stylist, comfortable with post-modern irony and pastiche, as in his successful “Trainspotting,” a breathless pixilation of charming young lowlife junkies.

Adaptation of a novel to film is usually a process of reduction and activation, and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy did a skillful job on “Slumdog,” eliminating characters, simplifying events, constructing the romance, and setting a ticking clock for the last act. There is, however, one change that involves more than streamlining. The novel’s protagonist is named Ram Mohammad Thomas because he is an orphan raised by a Catholic priest named Thomas in a religiously mixed community of Hindus (Ram) and Muslims (Mohammad), a personification of religious toleration appropriate to anyone with hope for India. The film changes this, with Ram, now Jamal, and his friend Salim now brothers in parallel lives, a trope of Indian gangster films, but both Muslim victims of Hindu mob violence, no less than the murder of their mother. As Jamal captains the triumphant main plot of the quiz show and romance, Salim works the parallel gangster/success subplot until its end in renunciation, when aspiring gangster Salim explodes against his false compatriots. Reminiscent of the classic film gangster’s moment of tragic recognition, the martyred Salim, now bathed in cash (millions?), goes out declaring “God is great.”

In Boyle’s flashy, fragmented, rhythmic style this renders an aspect of the film’s resolution a jihadi music video. Why would these “post-imperialist” Western filmmakers give this film such an Islamist twist? Perhaps it is just the same savvy recognition of their young audience that leads A-list Hollywood types to wear keffiyeh scarves as markers of hip transgressive style.

Perhaps it’s akin to what Michael J. Totten has called the “Orientalism of fools,” maybe even an expression of a suicidal self-loathing, an endgame for Western radicalism, which has been an attitude of the leftist cultural elite for some time.

Having now seen it, I have just one question: What are these critics smoking, and where can I get some (ok, that’s two questions)?

To be sure, the first installment of the proposed “X-Men” prequels has its share of flaws, and some of the criticism is more than fair. So let’s get the bad out of way first:

The film is oddly unfocused as far as the main character is concerned, all the more strange because in the first three ”X-Men,” though ostensibly ensemble films, Wolverine nonetheless emerged as the clear standout character.  Here, in his own movie, he all too often takes a back-seat to a large and (for the most part) completely superfluous cast of fellow mutants who add little to the plot and seem included only to please various X-fans (Gambit and Deadpool, for example, while interesting in their own right, do not belong in this movie).

Second, the computer effects are often shockingly shoddy. (But of what modern action movie can that not be said? I have been lamenting the odious advent of CGI since the ridiculous cartoon dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park.”) Wolvie’s claws, for example, which you would think would be the one thing they would spare no expense to get right, look amateurish and two dimensional.

These are the major flaws, but there are others as well; the dialogue is often cliche riddled, and too much left unexplained for an origin tale (why does he go from being called James or Jimmy to Logan? Why are Canucks fighting in the American Civil War?). None of these, however, prevented me from enjoying the hell out of this film.  A few reasons:

1) Some breathtaking action sequences – Wolverine brings down a chopper full of agents trying to kill him with nothing but a motorcycle and his claws; the fights between Wolverine and his ferocious and estranged brother Victor (a.k.a. Sabretooth); the exquisite opening montage, which show the two feral brothers throwing themselves into battle after battle in every major war in the last century and a half.

2) Hugh Jackman. Yes, he kissed a dude on Broadway in ”The Boy From Oz,” and embarrassed everyone with his song and dance at this year’s Oscars. Nevertheless, Jackman infuses Wolverine with tightly coiled badassness, a strange mixture of conflicted pathos and barely contained, murderous rage. It’s clear that he cares about, even likes, the character, and plays Wolverine with a rare humanity for an on-screen comic book hero.

3) Some surprising plot twists, as well as some abrupt tonal shifts that kept me guessing throughout, a rare and welcome trait in a summer blockbuster – hell, in any movie. 

I had a blast watching ”Wolverine.” True, it hasn’t the flawless execution and gleeful joy of ”Iron Man” or the beating black-heart sublimity of ”The Dark Knight.” But at bottom, Wolverine is about a guy with knives in his fists fighting a guy with knives on his fingers.

And if you can’t have fun at a movie like that, well, you’re just not trying.

Matt Patterson is a columnist and commentator whose work has appeared in The Washington Examiner, The Baltimore Sun, Townhall, and Pajamas Media. He is the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story.” His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.

Gomorrah is a slightly fictionalized portrayal of life under the influence of the criminal organization Camorra (unknown to most of the U.S., but apparently running things with bloody fists in Italy). It’s a situation that deserves attention. A picture could have presented events as riveting entertainment or art, and perhaps helped to bring about change. Yet Gomorrah fails as art, entertainment and promotional tool. Any publicity about the horror of the Camorra has come from the existence of the film, not the watching.

Gomorrah is dull and flat and emotionally uncompelling: It is a sprawling tour of future-less lives and hollow days punctuated occasionally—very occasionally—by brief set pieces in which something violent and terrible happens. That may be true-to-life, but so is sitting at a desk all day, and neither is particularly interesting to watch. If filmmakers have any foundational obligation, it is to make a picture that makes you want–need–to keep watching. These filmmakers feel no such burden. It is as if they have taken the seriousness of their subject as license to relieve themselves of the obligation to sustain the interest of the audience. They’re counting on guilt or something to keep us interested, and they could not have been more mistaken.

Not that you’re seeing this kind of criticism from most mainstream critics—they have lauded the picture. (As of this writing, it has received a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.) But most critics get it a little bit: If you read the reviews, their enthusiasm is largely for the nobility and realism of the effort, not for the movie as anything viscerally engaging—which is exactly what this material should have been.

Movie critics tend to be cheerleaders for what I call “eat yer peas” pictures: They’re often more interested in a sackcloth-and-ashes display of appropriate concern than they are about whether a picture “works” or is worth your ten bucks and a sitter. Allow me: Gomorrah doesn’t work, and it isn’t worth your money. It’s two hours and 15 minutes of barely developed story arcs and run-it-in-the-ground atmospherics populated by characters we hardly meet. (In fact, the people in Gomorrah are so indistinguishable that the filmmakers could be criticized for painting the poor as interchangeable.) Gomorrah has lots of villains and lots of conflict and lots of interesting locations, but none of them are put to a captivating purpose. What it needs is characters we care about doing things in a timely way toward an identifiable purpose. That’s the heart and soul of storytelling in general and good filmmaking in particular.

If the point of Gomorrah is to publicize the plight of the victimized poor of Naples and Caserta, the credit for any success should go to the marketing department behind this movie, not the filmmakers. Imagine what change might have been generated if the filmmakers had made something that moved people. Instead, Gomorrah is self-indulgent arthouse ballet, slow and uninteresting—and with less than a million dollars in U.S. box office so far, mostly unseen. More’s the pity. Gomorrah is a wasted opportunity. Tragically so.

This is somewhat anecdotal, but when you look at the Metacritic scores below it boosts my theory that truly awful leftist films frequently get better reviews than deserved while solid, entertaining conservative films (now that the left’s ceded “liberty” to the right) get worse reviews than deserved and films critics didn’t understand were pro-Bush receive fantastic reviews, but once found out, no Oscar nominations.

Metacritic scores:

Redacted -52; The Lucky Ones – 53; Rendition – 55; Stop Loss – 61; In the Valley of Elah – 65; Grace is Gone – 65.

Taken – 50: 300 – 51: The Dark Knight – 82.

As of right now, Metacritic shows “Watchmen” getting killed with a score of 30, but that’s with only 5 reviews in — albeit from the big boys like Variety, Hollywood Reporter, and the New Yorker…. On the other hand, Rotten Tomatoes has over 30 reviews in and the film sits with a fresh rating of 78%.

The Rotten Tomatoes split appears to be among the more elite critics (Cream of the Crop) and their less creamcroppy counterparts. Among the cream is Anthony Lane’s devastating pan in the New Yorker, which is especially interesting:

“Watchmen,” like “V for Vendetta,” harbors ambitions of political satire, and, to be fair, it should meet the needs of any leering nineteen-year-old who believes that America is ruled by the military-industrial complex, and whose deepest fear-deeper even than that of meeting a woman who requests intelligent conversation-is that the Warren Commission may have been right all along. The problem is that Snyder, following Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power, that the film ends up twice as fascistic as the forces it wishes to lampoon. The result is perfectly calibrated for its target group: nobody over twenty-five could take any joy from the savagery that is fleshed out onscreen, just as nobody under eighteen should be allowed to witness it. You want to see Rorschach swing a meat cleaver repeatedly into the skull of a pedophile, and two dogs wrestle over the leg bone of his young victim? Go ahead.

I’m not familiar with the source material, but “Watchmen” director Zack Snyder’s “300″ was a grand surprise both in its embrace and understanding of the idea of liberty and from a pure storytelling stance. That’s not to say “Watchmen” doesn’t look a little campy, overlong, and overblown. It does, but so did “300.” And Snyder’s storytelling gifts also managed to melt the huge chip on my shoulder for his daring to remake “Dawn of the Dead,” which remains one of the best horror films in years. 

As much as I respect Snyder, however, I wasn’t excited about “Watchmen” until the New Yorker used the words ”twice as fascistic.” As someone proudly “aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power,” — which in non-elite terms probably means: kicks unholy ass — Friday can’t get here soon enough.