Sometimes a movie is more than a movie: sometimes a movie is a music-video inspired fever dream of foaming streams of Keystone Light pouring between bouncy breasts. Spring Breakers is by provocateur Harmony Korine, the mind behind Kids and Gummo. It’s light on plot and heavy on atmosphere, music, bikini-clad youth and nostalgia. The result is sometimes fun, sometimes boring and unlike anything I’ve seen before.

The little plot there is revolves around four college girls who decide they need to go to Spring Break in Ft. Lauderdale, at all costs. I capitalize Spring Break because in this movie, it’s a mindset as much as a week on your calendar. Characters often whisper “Spring Break forever” in voice over, that sort of thing. So these girls rob a Chinese restaurant to put together enough money to bus it down to the land of beer bongs and bad decisions.

Once there, they party hard, zoom around on matching Vespas, and (as they explain to their grandmothers on furtive calls home) find themselves. Then they get thrown in jail for doing too many lines of coke off a frat boy’s chest, and a white-boy-rapper-weirdo named Alien (James Franco) bails them out of jail. Franco clearly relishes the chance to play the corn-rowed and diamond-grilled Alien, who adopts the four girls as mascots/pets/body guards. Alien helps the film keep it’s momentum, because for all the beautiful atmospherics and bumping soundtrack, the movie seriously loses steam at the end of the first act. We barely know these girls or even their names, besides the fact that Faith (Selena Gomez) prays a lot and is the prude of the bunch. You know that character development is not a priority when you end up identifying a major character as “the one with the worst dye-job.”

So Alien brings the girls into his wacky world of drug money, machine guns, samurai-swords-on-the-wall-of-his seafront mansion. They do wholesome things like sing Britney Spears as Alien plays a white piano. Soon they’re helping him rob and steal, and then his childhood friend/nemesis Gucci Mane appears and delivers a Lamborghini drive-by. The movie makes less and less sense, even by its own standard, as it goes on. Very memorable, but sort of quaint and boring in its desperate need to shock you. Girls in bikinis! And ski masks! With guns!

Okay.  I have forty minutes to write this before I pick up my pizza and watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit?  I am so sick of my VHS collection, it’s pathetic.  But I won’t join Netflix because I’m too cheap and the disks skip and the streaming looks like shit.   I have a copy of the book Babe is based on, unread, somewhere in my room so I can’t go to the library for new movies.  Plus their DVD’s skip, too.

What I’m say is the only way I see movies I’ve never seen before, for the most part, is the old fashioned way.  Now I haven’t written for this website for a while.  But I’ve seen a lot of movies, most of them bad.  The last thing I saw was End of Watch.  My opinion of End of Watch:

Positive, for the most part.  Completely unclear if this movie will stand the test of time, but as of now, I would say go see it.  The acting, although clunky at times, has feeling and a better than decent sense of humor.  The chemistry of the two men, LAPD officers Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Zavala (Michael Peña), is palpable though sometimes forced.  As the movie continues its pattern of pull-your-hair-out suspense every ten minutes, their driving scenes in the squad car where they riff on each other are a more and more welcome relief from the scenes in South Central.  In these scenes, they have to: not get shot, not get burned to death, not beat up abusive parents, etc.

The wives of these men seem like real characters, at least compared to most women in male-driven stories.  Not that I’ve ever fully understood women (or The Shining, or football) and this movie was written and directed by David Ayer who is not a woman, but the women (Anna Kendrick and Natalie Martinez) are not phoned in.  They seem smarter and more adult than their respective lovers, and there is also sexual tension.  Although I did feel like Kendrick was making the chemistry happen for both her and Gyllenhaal, like Helen Hunt did for her and Bill Paxton in Twister.  You’ll have to see it to believe it.

Some of End of Watch is a little overblown and ridiculous to be sure.  The opening scenes are the roughest.  If it had been on DVD, I may have stopped it in the first ten minutes.  But I had a little faith it was going to get better, and luckily it did.

The main villian, with quite a name – Big Evil – was played by Maurice Compte, and he was totally weak, not scary, and he cursed too much.  The only scene he was good in was when he was too doped up to speak.  Then the name Big Evil was scary.  Otherwise he needed to listen to my mother about bad guys: they’re scarier when they’re cordial.

Lincoln plays in theatres now.  So see it.  I admit, that perhaps one third to halfway through Lincoln which rolled before us on the screen in this crowded cineplex theatre I did sense: obligation:  I should sit through this film; it will benefit me.

But for as well as any of us will ever know, Abraham Lincoln is alive and well for most of the film which bears his name.  Lincoln lives on the big screen through the brilliant performance of Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln.  Daniel Day–Lewis fully embodies this role.  He is Abraham Lincoln.  I suppose that is high praise, the highest praise.  Previously, Daniel Day-Lewis, who grew up in Britain, won an Oscar for Best Actor in My Left Foot.

The film Lincoln though, covers exhaustively and nearly exhaustingly the politics, wheeling and dealing and machinations within the 19th-century House of Representatives which finally approved the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, our Constitution.  Such political wrangling does not often make for riveting cinema, but it does lead to some interest here in a noisy, violent, earthy Congress which seems accurate to any viewer with some knowledge of American history of this Republic.

Sally Field,(an Academy-Award winner) performs admirably as the suffering Mary Todd Lincoln, who with her husband’s death lost both a husband, and her mind.  Her performance has depth, but not the sort of depths and shadows which her husband inhabits and which Daniel Day-Lewis, son of the Oxford-educated Poet Laureate, Cecil Day–Lewis brings to bear in this screen performance.  Hal Holbrook, who has portrayed both Lincoln and Mark Twain previously, performs well as Francis Preston Blair, a Republican politician who attempts to work a peace settlement within the beleagured nation of those warring parties: The North, or Union, and The South, or Confederacy, which Lincoln would not fully recognize.  And in this film the nation is indeed beleaguered.  Lewis as Lincoln mutters: “600,000 thousand” lives lost.  The film also depicts the blood and mud, the pale, amputated limbs, and those valiant soldiers and horses trudging through rain.

But Tommy Lee Jones(also an Academy Award winner) as Thaddeus Stevens outdoes all but Daniel Day–Lewis; Jones, the quirky, earthy, Harvard-educated character actor subsumes his persona within this role to brilliant effect. Stevens, a Vermonter by birth, grew up in penury, graduated from Dartmouth College, and then moved to Pennsylvania, the state which he represents in the 19th century.  Stevens never married, but in this film’s version of his life he sleeps with his mixed-race housekeeper near the close of the movie.

James Spader also effectively puts forth his role as James Bilbo, a lobbyist.  The always capable David Straihairn performs well as Secretary of State William Seward.  Joseph Gordon–Levitt (of 10 Things I Hate About You and 3rd Rock from the Sun fame) nearly grows up as Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln; Gordon–Levitt remains well cast as the younger Lincoln, champing at the bit to assume an active role as a soldier for the Union in the Civil War.

Toward the close of Lincoln, the film, the tall Abraham Lincoln beseeches Americans with his famous Second Inaugural Address: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, and firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”  Day–Lewis’s voice quietly, nearly pleads as he leans over and around his lectern reaching out to the crowd and the nation.  That Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln contains some of the most brilliant political rhetoric in our nation’s history.  Here, film-goers see Lincoln as he pleads his cause for the healing of a nation devastated by the Civil War.  Earlier in the film Day–Lewis as Lincoln comes across more as philosopher, not orator.

The film Lincoln is directed by Steven Spielberg, and produced by Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy.

Daniel Picker is the author of a new book of poetry “Steep Stony Road” which was published by Viral Cat Press of San Francisco in 2012.

Guest review by Isaiah Cambron. You can read more of Isaiah’s work at http://www.barcelonafootballblog.com

There’s something about modern man and the fearful journey through life that we all lead somewhere in The Dark Knight Rises, but I’m not sure I’m capable of breaking it down, especially since the movie plunges off a plot cliff about 10 minutes in. Is it about justice? Justice is integral to the entire Batman saga, especially in this incarnation where Harvey Dent and his image as Gotham’s shining star is the device upon which the whole of Rises rests, yet it is only mentioned in brief moments. Scarecrow judges the rich and condemns them to death in a courtroom symbolically piled high with the tomes of the learned. That is not justice, declares a defiant and soon-to-be-condemned-yet-obviously-also-saved-by-Batman Commissioner Gordon. He smirks. Scarecrow smirks. But it doesn’t matter, because the next scene is Batman lighting up the Brooklyn Bridge with the bat symbol while saving Gordon from the East River.

There’s mention of the soul: Bruce Wayne, isolating himself in his mansion, ignoring his company and wasting away his future, is moved after eight years by the arrival of Selina Kyle into his bedroom to steal his mother’s pearl necklace. Why he’s really moved is unclear, of course, because actual character development would take away from the shots of fancy sports cars and random fistfights. And, incidentally, Kyle also steals Bruce Wayne’s fingerprints so that a rival can conduct some sophisticated hostile takeover plan of Wayne Enterprises using a stock market attack led by a giant masked man. Oh, but right, the soul in question is the soul of Bruce Wayne, of his masked alter ego, of Gotham, and of Selina Kyle. Is redemption possible? Is it a question of valor, commitment, or are humans simply good people deep down inside? Also incidentally, the whole stock market disruption thing makes no sense, but then when you’re playing a game where reality is meaningless, physics can be dumped on its head at a whim (motorcycles can turn by flipping their wheels over!), and everyone acts like they’ve got emotional blinders on, it’s perfectly easy to assume that men acting as janitors and shoe shiners would also have somehow snuck both motorcycles and automatic weapons into a supposedly secure location.

Bane (should I just spell it Bain, Mr. Limbaugh?) is the central antagonist, of course. He is supposedly leading the League of Shadows now that Ra’s Al Ghul is dead (thanks, Batman!), but is his aim chaos, personal gain, or proletariat revolution? The theme is muddled in a blaze of shootouts and unrealistic science: “Explosive-laced concrete!” shouts every foiled bank robber ever, slapping himself on the head. “Why didn’t I think of that?” Bane ends up coming off as a wannabe Joker who happened upon a much larger device for wielding power: a nuclear bomb. The witless leaders of the city urge every single cop to go underground in search of this madman. They dutifully file into the subway system as if they’re looking for fisticuffs with the Foot Clan only to be trapped by a ring of explosions. Bane then feeds them for months despite his plan being to destroy the city with his captured nuclear bomb. Did I not mention the bomb yet? Yeah, there’s the reactor from Dark Knight only now it’s a bomb thanks to the work of brilliant nuclear physicist Dr. Pavel, who—right, I forgot to mention this too—whose death was faked in a high-flying, stunt-filled escapade over Uzbekistan at the beginning of the movie when Bane decides it’s easier to tie a plane to a plane in mid air and hijack it via an elaborate pulley system than to, you know, hijack it normally.

With too many themes for one movie to handle, The Dark Knight Rises loses momentum early and never regains any sense of equilibrium. Batman is defeated in a fight with Bane, who breaks Batman’s back (comic book fans probably had a field day with remembering when they first saw it happen in Batman #497—I believe Bane even yells “…break you!” as he does it), and then thrown in a terrible prison where inmates have to fend for themselves, have rope but somehow can’t seem to make it the last 10 feet up to the top of an open air shaft the size of 2 tractor trailers and covered in footholds. Is this justice, soul searching, or chaos in action? Where do they get food? Why does the doctor who helps him speak not English at first and then switch to English replete with a great vocabulary for no discernible reason? Bane, ever helpful to his own cause, condemns Bruce Wayne to watching Gotham’s from inside the prison on a giant TV with satellite access. Bruce Wayne breaks the TV. Bruce (surprise!) recovers from his back injury and climbs out of the prison. Only one other person has ever been able to scale the precipitous heights of the prison’s giant, completely unguarded entrance: Bane

Batman returns to Gotham somehow and exacts terrible revenge on Bane, defeating him in hand-to-hand combat amidst a giant gun battle. Bane’s nuclear device (with a blast radius of 6 miles, we are constantly reminded) is going to go off at any moment, but Batman defeats Bane in their slugfest and is on the cusp of saving the city when Miranda Tate, supposedly Wayne’s girlfriend now and business partner, turns out to be Talia al Ghul and he stabs him. Five exclamation points. It is a neat twist to bring back Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter, to have Bane be her lover, and show her as the mastermind of this complex plot, but it is a sideshow that must end as quickly as it began. The bomb is going to go off, after all, and Batman has to save the day by flying it over the ocean where its blast will not destroy Gotham. So Talia is killed in a reckless scene where she tries to stop Batman and Jim Gordon from getting the bomb to the power core where it will be stabilized, all while knowing that the power core has been destroyed. Sit back and watch your bomb detonate, why don’t you? Oh, no, you got killed, revealed that the power core was destroyed, and now Batman can save the day by flying the bomb out to sea.

In some ways, a lot happens in the movie, but almost none of it is coherent. There are some scenes where Alfred, played by the obviously-bored-to-tears-with-his-role Michael Caine, says some emotional stuff that comes off as phoned in; there is a laughably bad sex scenes between Wayne and Tate; and Selina Kyle proves her humanity by returning to shoot Bane right before he kills Batman. Or maybe she just wants to marry Bruce Wayne and get a lot of money. It doesn’t matter because nothing is more than skin deep in this movie. The bad guys are classic lovers of Rube Goldberg machines for getting their devious plots completed whereas the hero simply goes about defeating their plots in a straightforward manner. If a street urchin crosses against traffic at 2:08pm causing a motorcyclist to spill a packet of beans into a sewer grate thus tripping a wire 12 blocks away that releases a grand piano onto the head of the Brinks guy as he’s carrying a bag of cash, we’ll be rich! Oh no, the grand piano was destined for Batman’s penthouse and now he’s mad at us! Foiled again!

I have one last bone to pick with this movie: Gotham City is not a real place. Throughout all of the previous Batman movies, there have been no distant scenery shots that show you the whole city. Tim Burton made Gotham a gangster noir Chicago mixed with the gritty density of 1980s New York. That’s the comic book feel that I’ve always understood. Subsequent movies played on that, lightening the mood when necessary, but never straying to the point of suggesting that Gotham is a particular place. Gotham City, for Christopher Nolan, is not a combination of American cities or even a stand-in for New York City; rather it is New York City. It is a place with scenery shots, bridges that aren’t just any bridges, the Holland Tunnel, etc. There are minor differences, of course, such as the football stadium, but they are quickly forgotten when New York’s latest skyscraper is shown standing over Gotham’s skyline.

The bottom line: don’t waste your money on this even if you’re a diehard comic fan. It’s all been butchered to pieces. Especially the phony dialog.

Review by Isaiah Cambron.

This past Friday, a gunman burst into a midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises and shot and killed over a dozen people, wounding close to sixty. As much as rational thinking tells me to separate the incident from the movie showing that night, I can’t. Before the massacre, advanced reviews described the film as grim and mentally punishing. Why would I want to spend my hard earned money on violent, bad vibes superhero movie, especially one with the stink of tragedy to it?

Like many others, I was swept up by The Dark Knight, the previous chapter of Nolan’s reboot. Heath Ledger’s Joker transcended villain clichés to suggest something closer to a god of destruction, a Shiva born out of the American subconscious. So luminous was the performance that people like James Holmes get obsessed with it, the charismatic nihilism of it.

Ten years ago I was adamant that American movies weren’t dark enough. And while I still enjoy dark and violent movies and books, something about the new Batman sequel repels me. The events of this past weekend felt like the snake catching up with its tail, a horrific conflation of our society’s obsessions with violence, escapism, celebrity, guns and hype. I’m sure many very talented people worked incredibly hard to make The Dark Knight Rises, and that it’s a powerful and well-made film. I for one, though, will be leafing through the listings looking for a purer distraction, preferably something full of singing animals.

Here’s some recaps.

Boardwalk Empire
Season two goes a little hogwild with the whole Oedipal angle. Gutsy move killing off your most likeable character. Like “Mad Men”, this show likes playing with American moralty at an earlier stage of development. The convoluted gangster subplots definitely remind me of “The Sopranos.”

Game Of Thrones
Shakespeare reimagined by Tolkien on a soft-core porno set. Trashy in a lavish way. God knows how many millions of dollars each episode costs. Peter Dinklage is totally solid, and makes up for half-dozen scruffy and handsome indistiguishables.

VEEP
Funny. Nice to see Julie Louis Dreyfus and Tony Hale (Buster from Arrested Development) back on TV. Sometimes I felt like I was laughing sort of inspirationally, like if I show some support, the show will become funnier.

Girls
This is the one everyone has an opinion about, at least on the internet. I watched the first episode and thought it was well written. It reminded me a lot of the kids I went to school with. In fact, I went to college with creator Lena Dunham. I remember lamely flirting with her once. We talked about Prison Break, specifically the bolt-cutter toe amputation at the end of the series premiere.

Did I walk out?  Yes. Did I like the movie? 

Sort of, yes. What was my favorite part?  I can’t remember.  But there were laughs. 

This is yet another movie I paid big bucks to see in the theater, and if it were on television, I would change the channel within two minutes.

Think Like A Man is really an advertisement for the Steve Harvey self-help book, Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man.  The book is ostensibly for women; the movie is not.  Though Kevin Hart is the narrator, Steve Harvey often looks at the camera knowingly quotes his book.  I haven’t read Harvey’s book, but it seems like it would be up my alley since I’ve recently, more than ever, imagined the kind of woman I would be.  I have found I have much more confidence in myself when I describe the woman I could have been: good looking, funny, all about the sack, messy hair and apartment, crazy but fun, great ass and legs, very solid drummer, and too emotional when it comes to love.  In short, I would have been mulch when it comes to men and I would have needed every word of Steve Harvey’s manuscript.  On how to get and keep a man.  I guess the point of all this is, I am closer to buying Steve Harvey’s book than I was twenty-four hours ago.  I wonder if Harvey was even paid to play himself in Think Like A Man, or his publisher advised him to do it for free.

Besides Harvey as Harvey, how many characters were there?  Too many.  Five dudes maybe?  And an equal amount of women, I guess.  There is the ultra successful woman (Taraji P. Henson) who is cut off emotionally.  The single mom who needs a father for her son – and what a role to dig into for Regina Hall!  The hot babe (Meagan Good) who will not have sex for ninety days.  The semi-pothead girlfriend (Gabrielle Union) who is tired of pretending she likes to play with her boyfriend’s action figures late into the night.  (The truth is, I can only think of these women in relation to their respective men.  That’s bad.)  I can’t remember the fourth woman, if there is one.  In terms of the men, I liked Romany Malco, the smooth ladies’ man.  I found him charming and I liked it when his date makes him play his R&B band’s CD and the opening lyric is, I believe, “I had a dream about a dream about you.”  He makes jokes and has a good straight face.  The only part about him that I did not buy was that he’s a ladies’ man.  He seems more like a husband.  If I were a woman, I would want to settle down with him, not have a fling.  But maybe that’s his angle.  Like I said, I would be mulch.  Then there is the extremely handsome chef-to-be (Michael Ealy).  Working as valet and caterer and short order cook, he has dreams of opening up his own restaurant and he is trying to date Henson, the successful CEO with her devil horn eyebrows and hair that sometimes hides one of the horns.  And there’s more: the mama’s boy and the single mom – how appropriate.  Like a two piece puzzle.  That was the most boring.  Why do I care about this relationship?  Did I care about any relationships in this movie?  Not really, no.  The all dude scenes are the best, like in Knocked Up, but not that drastic.  Okay.  Here’s my point.  A movie with a plot as basic as this one – the When Harry Met Sally mold – should not be over ninety minutes, and at the very most, a hundred minutes.  However, because of the five piece storyline thing – or it could have been four, I can’t remember – the movie is one hundred and twenty-two minutes, which feels never-ending. 

The saving grace, of course, is Kevin Hart: the only single character in the movie with no romantic storyline, unless you count divorces as romantic.  Kevin Hart is a comedian who I was introduced to a few months ago.  In Think Like A Man, he has the obligatory job of dominating every scene he’s in.  He is rants and puffs out his chest and appears vulnerable; most of it he pulls off.  But even for someone who loves Kevin Hart, I would still say skip this.  It’s not worth it.  Watch Laugh At My Pain or Seriously Funny, though the latter of which I have not seen.

I did not make it a month without going to the movies.  I almost did.  I was one day short.  It was February: the shortest month.

I was roped into Project X because all my friends were going.  And as much as I love Raymond Carver, the idea of sitting on my concrete couch, reading “Blackbird Pie,” thinking about my friends laughing and cavorting with this supposedly hilarious party movie seemed fruitless.

An hour later, I walked out of the movie in a rage.  I punched a wall.  I cursed myself for my stupidity, my insanity – meaning doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. 

Many days have passed since I saw the first half of Project X and my anger has worn off.  But I want to show you what I wrote in the theater and then outside on the street when the feelings were still fresh:

See now I’m starting to get angry.  What don’t people understand about this?  You’ve got to create characters that you care about.  Otherwise it’s really boring.  Why is Wayne’s World a great movie instead of just a funny one?  Because you care about the characters.

Okay.  I fucked up.  I broke down. And I hate that feeling of “I’m bored now but maybe I won’t be bored in ten minutes.”  That’s how I felt all throughout The Social Network.  Then I walked out.

You know I love movies.  It’s not that I don’t.  I’m just tired of hollow characters.  (Look up hollow.)  Should I have been amused?  A fat, wimpy kid talking about different ways to finger women: is that supposed to amuse me? 

Project X is a movie about a high school party that goes crazy, not the type of party I would stick around for longer than forty-five minutes.  I would be depressed that the girl I had a crush on was topless in the pool.  If I saw my friend vomiting, I might feel bad, too.  But fuck.  Maybe I am hollow.  I don’t know.  The bottom line is, in the movie, it didn’t seem like a very fun party.  So I left, and missed the crazy parts, like when the neighborhood was set on fire.  I have nothing good to say about leaving either.  It’s not like I found ten bucks or had a conversation with a police officer about action movies.  It was a shitty night.  I should have stuck with Raymond Carver and my concrete couch.  I’m not going to say I’m going to go on strike again (see below article “On Strike”), even though at the time, I said it would be another year before I saw another movie in the theater.  But I am going to exercise my right to say, “You are very kind.  But thank you, no.”

There’s a thin line in comedy between stupid/smart and stupid/stupid. 21 Jump Street humps that line for 90 minutes. Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum’s turn out to have great chemistry, and the writing keeps things fun and inane.

I spent many a prepubescent evening watching the original 21 Jump Street team earnestly break up high-school steroid rings. In the updated version, Smidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) play underachieving cops assigned to go deep undercover to break up a hallucinogenic car freshener ring, led by James Franco’s smirking little brother.

Several characters point out how they look twenty-eight, and the movie goes out of its way to make fun of itself. Early on Nick Offerman (who plays Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation) has a speech about how the Police are reviving the dormant 21 Jump Street initiative because “we’re all out of ideas.” The whole movie has a cheeky vibe and brisk pacing. If you think that a misunderstanding about saying you’ll “beat someone’s dick off” sounds remotely funny (I do), you’ll love this movie (I did).

Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie is the movie version of an Adult Swim television show. Those who enjoy the show will probably like the movie; I found it to be 80 plus minutes of unmitigated torture.

Tim and Eric’s trademark comedic style involves stilted non-jokes taped in a purposely amateurish visual style. I’m guessing it works better 20 minutes at a time. What little plot there is revolves around Tim and Eric buying a decrepit, garbage and wolf infested mall. I clung like a life-preserver to the few short scenes involving Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly. Other cameos included Will Forte and Jeff Goldblum in one of the tiresome and tangential skits strewn throughout the movie.

There is also a framing subplot about Tim and Eric making a horrible movie that loses a billion dollars. It’s a self-referential joke that comes off defensive and most importantly, not funny. Another joke is that the pair run without moving their arms. Oh, and there’s penis mutilation and scat humor to boot. To I’ll Watch Anything’s resident psychologist, a subtext ripe with pan-sexualism and self-hatred was apparent. Zero stars (with the caveat that the audience I saw it with ate it up like corn flakes).