It’s bad enough the new Jonah Hill comedy “The Sitter” is getting blasted by most movie critics. More than a few film scribes are claiming the R-rated comedy is racist to boot.

Let’s back up a moment. The film casts Hill as a slacker forced to babysit three precocious teens. Consider it “Adventures in Babysitting” with a very foul mouth.

The foursome get mixed up with an effeminate drug dealer (Sam Rockwell) as well as some thuggish black characters (including rapper Method Man). It’s here where some critics are crying foul. Consider the following comments:

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For a guy who’s made mostly conventional movies in his career, Jonah Hill finds himself in a very unusual career position these days.

He’s built his reputation on being an offbeat yet obnoxious slob in such movies as “Superbad” and “Get Him to the Greek,” while occasionally showing a deeper side in the outstanding “Cyrus” (my favorite film of last year) and “Moneyball.”

But for thus far unspecified reasons, Hill has spent the past year on an impressive effort to lose more than 100 pounds. While this will no doubt prolong his life and has transformed him into a surprisingly dapper fellow, it also means that he will have to completely reinvent his performance style.

That might be a good idea after his new movie “The Sitter,” in which he plays Noah, a college-dropout slacker who stumbles into a babysitting gig on the same night the hottest girl he knows makes him a deal: she’ll finally have sex with him, but only if he brings her some cocaine from her drug dealer (Sam Rockwell).

Well, the man’s got needs, so despite being in charge of three young kids – a 13-year-old dreamboat of a boy (Max Records) who turns out to be gay, an 8-year-old girl (Landry Bender) who aspires to be a Kardashian-style club tramp and reality TV star, and an adopted Latino boy named Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez), who steals the movie with his nonstop criminal antics – he takes her up on her offer.

But when Rodrigo not only steals a porcelain egg filled with cocaine from the dealer but also sets off cherry bombs in the bathrooms of two luxury restaurants, events spiral out of control and the gang is on the run for their lives from the dealer’s henchmen.

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Near the end of the new drama “Conviction,” Betty Anne Waters (Hillary Swank) says that “people don’t like to admit” to their own mistakes. The movie features a series of bad decisions made by law enforcement officials, jury members and a local politician that ultimately kept an innocent man in prison for over two decades. To confront the mistakes that landed her brother in prison, Betty Anne decides to earn her law degree so that she can defend her brother in court. Her story is told in “Conviction,” a well-made and well-acted film that is unafraid to make accusations against people who stood in the way of justice.   

Hilary Swank, winner of two Academy Awards, is no stranger to good scripts and “Conviction” has a great one. Betty Anne is a young mother with a reckless brother named Kenny (Sam Rockwell) who is constantly in trouble and getting arrested by the local police. After a while, he starts joking about all of his arrests, jokes that will come back to haunt him in the years to come.

The police eventually arrest Kenny on a murder charge for a crime that took place a few years earlier. This charge is no laughing matter and Kenny is soon sentenced to life in prison. Betty Anne, who knows that her brother is a fool but no murderer, believes that Kenny is innocent and decides to fight for his vindication as his attorney.

However, when she makes this decision, she isn’t a lawyer. Actually, she’s not even a high school graduate yet. (more…)

Sam Rockwell has been hauled back to the cinematic slam, and that’s a good thing. His Green Mile portrayal of Louisiana psycho murderer ‘Wild Bill’ Wharton bouncing around his death row jail cell was a standout performance. Now he shows us another facet in Conviction as Kenneth Waters, a Massachusetts man wrongly convicted of a murder because of police and prosecutorial corruption.

Rockwell’s Conviction performance  is enhanced by double Oscar winner Hilary Swank and Oscar-nominee Minnie Driver.  Together, they perform like a well-matched troika, the Russian three horse team that pulls sleighs, where the middle horse provides steadiness and stability while the two outer ones gallop with abandon. Driver provides that centeredness with a humorous, smoldering femininity,  allowing Rockwell’s  and Swank’s characters to respectively express the gut wrenching emotion of a man unjustly convicted and the journey of a sister trying to free him against all odds.

It’s a predicament that many have shared and still do. Evidence fakery and coerced lying under oath by law enforcement officers happens way more often in America’s justice system than most know or would ever believe because too many people think stories like Waters’ are aberrations or exaggerations. In fact, that’s what Hilary Swank thought at first. “There’s a part of you that has to be like,  This could never happen.  And then you realise that it is happening.” (more…)

Left-wing film site Cinematical:

Here’s a film I expect to annoy some religious groups: Sweet Baby Jesus, which will star Bette Midler, Kim Cattrall and British actress/singer Pixie Lott (pictured) in a modernized telling of the Nativity. Well, it’s kind of modernized, at least relative to the original story, but the comedy is set in the 1970s and in this setting Mary (Lott) is a pregnant hippie chick whose condition was mysteriously not caused by her boyfriend, Joe, who Deadline now claims might be played by Sam Rockwell, who is more than 22-years Lott’s senior.

Instead of giving birth in a manger in the little Middle Eastern town of Bethlehem, Mary, along with Joe, is staying in a guesthouse at a woman’s (Midler) house in Bethlehem, Maryland, after being denied room at her mother’s (Cattrall). At Christmas, of course. According to Variety, Sweet Baby Jesus will be directed by Peter Hewitt (Garfield), who is quoted as saying, “The script has such fun subverting the treasured details of the Nativity, posing the question, ‘What would we do if it all happened again?’” ….

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Though the highly anticipated “Iron Man 2” qualifies as a hilarious, entertaining, irreverent, and openly patriotic summer blockbuster well worth the price of admission (and then some), like most sequels, the continuing story of Tony Stark and company does falls short of its predecessor, especially in what I call the “lift department.” Superhero films that transcend their genre contain an unforgettable moment or two that lifts the hair on the back of your neck, pulls you out of your chair, and urges you to stand and cheer. The original “Iron Man” had a number of those moments. And while the follow-up has a whole lot going for it, this is where it most lacks.

Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) has privatized world peace. Yes, all on his own as Iron Man, Stark has whipped the world into behaving itself and it’s completely gone to his already bloated head. Obviously this wasn’t accomplished through the changing of our enemies’ hearts, but rather through the superior firepower that comes with being Iron Man. This is the reason/excuse our government, led by the oily Senator Stern (a very funny Gary Shandling) uses to demand Stark turn over the suit to the Pentagon. During a hearing televised on CSPAN, Stark can’t bring himself to politely decline. With his ego red-lining, (he has saved the world, after all), he both insults the Senator and dares him to try and take the suit away from him.

Game on.

In this vacuum steps a rival arms dealer, Justin Hammer (a delightfully twitchy Sam Rockwell), who’s desperate to replicate the Iron Man technology and scoop up all that Pentagon money while at the same time fulfilling a desire to humiliate Stark by elbowing Iron Man into irrelevancy. Hope arrives in the form of Ivan Vanko (a quietly menacing Mickey Rourke), a Russian scientist burning with both a hate for Stark and the technical know-how to fulfill Hammer’s mercenary desires. (more…)

With a cold, foreboding atmosphere and perfect pacing, director Duncan Jones’ impressive feature debut, “Moon,” immediately sweeps you up in its existential look at the human condition of Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), a mining engineer on the dark side of the moon with only two weeks to go on a three-year stint spent in almost total isolation.

In what’s pretty much a one-man show, Rockwell’s superb as an ordinary man counting down the days until his flight home to a wife he misses more with each passing minute and a daughter born just before his shift began. Due to technical problems, he can’t communicate in real-time with anyone, including his loved ones and the people who run the company he works for. The long delay between each space transmission only serves to increase Sam’s feeling of disconnect and loneliness — and the strain’s starting to show. Every day he looks as though his very lifeforce is draining from him and the hallucinations have begun. (more…)