Easy A Is A New Film ,But Popular

Audiences have been hit with waves of raunchy sex and teen comedies over the years, all with varying degrees of success. Where most of them flounder is the lack of competent witty jokes and shallow two dimensional characters. EASY A does not fall victim to those pitfalls, and stands as a consistently funny and clever teen comedy that shows glimpses of movies that came before it such as MEAN GIRLS, but with characters that at times seem more like caricatures than real people.

 Olive (Emma Stone) is a well above average high school student, very smart and well liked by her teachers. She tells a harmless little lie to her best friend about having sex with a college guy and her friend quickly spreads the rumor all over school. She lands in trouble after snapping at a student in class and is hit with after school detention with her gay friend Brandon (Dan Boyd). She tells him the truth about the lie, and the two work out a deal to pretend to have sex at a huge party to help Brandon avoid harassment at school for his sexual orientation. When word gets around many more offers for similar favors come Olive’s way and her reputation gives unfavorable attention from the resident Christian students as well as many other pickles she finds her way into. She struggles with her new identity within the school and must find a way to regain her integrity and her dignity.

EASY A was surprisingly well written and even more entertaining than I originally wanted to give it credit for. I have a love of earlier raunchy sex comedies like PORKY’S or the more modern AMERICAN PIE movies, but have had a mixed reaction as of late with films such as JUNO or MEAN GIRLS. The dialogue is written in such a way that won’t alienate the older audiences that don’t understand high schooler's slang terms and sensibilities. The writers present us with plenty of strong characters that we can relate to and laugh at even if some of them can tend to be very over the top and cartoonish. The jokes are sharp and consistently funny while being very up to date with today’s culture.

Emma Stone is undoubtedly the star here, but there are plenty of recognizable names that make their way on screen and all adding very well to the festivities. Thomas Haden Church plays Olive’s favorite teacher, Mr. Griffith, and while he’s very mellow he always provides a good laugh when he’s around. Also, even though his character is very exaggerated, Stanley Tucci always turns in a fantastic and fun performance, this time as Olive’s easy going and hyper father, Gill. Emma Stone though has tremendous screen presence and comedic timing here, delivering her lines subtlety and confidently. Her character is very relatable; however, like Tucci’s there are many that resemble cartoons. It’s not an unforgivable offense; it just makes some of the characters a little harder to relate to, but still work with the comedy.
The film does borrow a lot from comedies that came before it, but unlike those other comedies it fixes the aspects that don’t work that well, making them more bearable and funnier. It sorts out the indecipherable mumbo jumbo from teens no one understands and lets us actually feel like these are people we could know or could have known when we were that age. There may be moments where they incorporate those teen tropes but they’re often used as the butt of the joke and not to be taken too seriously.

EASY A works like a solid entry to the high school comedies while also roasting them at the same time. It has an immensely likable lead, and is one of the funniest films released so far this year. There are a few characters that don’t quite fit in with the proceedings but they don’t distract heavily from the film. EASY A will open a lot of doors for Emma stone and rightfully so, it’s an easy film to sit and enjoy for her character as well as the laughs she brings along with her.

The Latest Film From John Carpenter: The Ward

The Toronto International Film Festival is in full swing, and Midnight Madness is delivering the goods as always with a mix of genre features from up and coming filmmakers and old school masters. The last few years showcased new films from Dario Argento and George A. Romero. This year fright fans were treated to the latest film from John Carpenter – The Ward.
It is hard to believe that it has been nine years since Carpenter’s last feature film – the highly underrated "Ghosts of Mars". I have read a number of interviews with Carpenter where he explained that his hiatus from film was the result of a lack of interest in filmmaking following a variety of difficulties he experienced with Ghosts of Mars. Fortunately he had two of the better episodes of "Masters of Horror" to keep him busy, in addition to regular trips to the bank to cash all of those cheques from the various remakes of his work that have happened over the past decade (with more on the way – Carpenter must be the most re-made filmmaker in cinema!).

Unfortunately Mr. Carpenter was not in attendance at the film’s screening. Apparently he was given a summons to appear for jury duty back in Los Angeles, and decided that staying out of jail was slightly more important than attending the premiere is his first film in nine years. Fans were, however, treated to a video from JC which he sent just in case. The video began with "if you’re watching this video, I have to report for jury duty". If was very funny, but couldn’t replace the real deal. Fortunately for everyone in attendance, the stars of the film were there and were much pettier in person than John!
The film, set in the 60s, features a young runaway named Kristen, who is captured by the police burning down an old farm house and is sent to the local mental institution. She is assigned to "the ward", which houses five other teens. Kristen soon discovers that the ward also houses the ghost of a girl named Alice, who is killing off the girls one by one. Of course, telling the nursing staff or the Psychiatrist that you are seeing a ghost in a mental ward is a sure way to ensure you won’t be getting released anytime soon and the longer the girls are locked up, the more likely they will fall prey to the serial killing spectre. Kristen must find a way to either escape, or unlock the key to Alice’s murderous bloodlust before she becomes the next victim.

Carpenter proves he is still the master of shock, and knows exactly how to manipulate an audience for "one good scare". There are plenty of chair jumper moments, and he creates a great environment inside the mental ward for ratcheting up the tension. Much like "The Fog" (the original – not that remake crap) this is a ghost that doesn’t just say "boo", but grabs the nearest sharp instrument and physically murders her victims. While this film is not as good as "The Fog", I will definitely say that it has some of the strongest performances of any Carpenter film. The actors are outstanding. Amber Heard, in particular, is incredible as Kristen, and it is easy to see why "All the Boys Love Mandy Lane". She is an excellent actor who carries the film with the support of the rest of the cast.
It’s great to have John Carpenter back in the horror game – and I can’t wait to see what he does next.

The Devil Inside Movie Review

The Devil Inside is one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen. The film dishes its horror subtly over the course of the film until its furious finish.

Devil Inside is that rare horror movie that plants its horror seeds in your brain in its opening moments. They then bear fruit with increasing fervor by scaring you as the film progresses. Therefore, that fear emerges from deep inside your soul as the minutes pass in the theater, and that's exactly why Devil Inside is so deliciously ghastly in its ability to shake you to your core.
In fact, soul is at the heart of Devil Inside: Humans' ongoing battle against the netherworld’s demons. Isabella is a twenty-something woman. When she was a young girl, her mother was found not guilty by reason of insanity for the murders of three Catholic Church members. Now in the present, she has hired a documentarian to film her efforts to get to the bottom of her mother’s illness… or is it possession?

They head to Rome, where her mother is being cared for in a mental institution. Isabella visits a school for exorcism where she meets two priests who will eventually aid her in her efforts. That, my Movie Fanatic friends, is all we will say about the plot of The Devil Inside. What you need to know about this spellbinding film is that it is purely terrifying, riveting in every way and one of the most extremely original films we’re seen in the horror genre in some time.
Writers Brent Bell (who also directed) and Matt Peterman have crafted a film that some may say is a found footage type of flick, yet that would do it a gross injustice. There is a real narrative at the heart of Devil Inside. The plot and the bumps in the road that the audience experiences through the eyes of our priests and Isabella are as scary as Hollywood can produce.

The Devil Inside is actually a deeply personal film and that is probably why it is so horrifying. The audience can commiserate with Isabella as we all have mothers and most of us would do anything to see them well. Her struggle is ours, but when there are supernatural forces at work, there is only so much a human being can do. Thus she puts her hope in the professional exorcists. When the priests are fearful, we as an audience are completely petrified.
At the beginning of the film, and as is shown in The Devil Inside trailer, it is stated that the film is not sanctioned by the Church, nor did they aid in the filmmaking. It makes us think, as an audience, if these classes for priests really exist that delve into the art of the exorcism. Are there individuals, soldiers of God if you will, who go to battle every day for the sake of men's souls? Even if the history behind the story of Devil Inside is fiction, the tale is told with such bold strokes that it feels all too real. And because of that, it is sheer terror incarnate on screen -- an instant horror classic.

Norwegian Wood Movie Review

With his intuitive penchant for lingering, privileged sensations, Tran Anh Hung would seem to be an inspired choice to film Haruki Murakami's languid-erotic 1987 bestseller Norwegian Wood, where the eponymous Beatles anthem can have the effect of Proust's madeleine. When it does come, sung softly in English in a cottage in the pastoral outskirts of Tokyo, the tune quickly brings tears to the eyes of Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi), whose private anguish is momentarily alleviated and then unsettled by the pop song's wistful evocation of ephemeral affairs: "And when I awoke, I was alone, this bird had flown…" With its gentle camera movements and wizardly cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bin's amber light, the moment glows and shivers. It also illustrates, unfortunately, how Tran's adaptation works most effectively in such impressionistic glances and instants than as an emotional whole, where the swoony aesthetic comes to veer perilously close to postcard art.

Naoko is one side of a sorrowful romantic triangle set against the restless backdrop of Japanese student protests in late 1960s. Untouched by the political turmoil is freshman Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama), whose own brand of youthful rebellion boils down to books and inert longing. The missing third side is Kizuki (Kengo Kora), Naoko's longtime beau and Watanabe's best friend, whose suicide both damages their already fragile psyches and brings them closer together. Their one night of sex further unmoors Naoko, who retreats to an asylum and leaves Watanabe to shoulder the double whammy of alienation and guilt. Relief and tentative healing enter in the form of Midori (Kiko Mizuhara), a bouncy coed whose mischievous ribaldry is meant as the life-affirming sunshine to Naoko's endless despondent night, though the young protagonist is so inextricably bound to the past that he would rather listlessly crawl into a coastal cave with his mournful regrets than again risk anything with the present.

It's this passivity that, while thematically attuned to the wry moodiness of Murakami's novel, frustratingly keeps the characters at arm's length, short-changing the narrative of its emotional resonance. In that sense, the ideal Murakami screen adaptation may be Jun Ichikawa's 2004 visualization of Tony Takitani, where the author's distance was complemented by fastidiously miniaturist filmmaking. By contrast, Tran's best films (The Scent of Green Papaya,Cyclo) are chastely lush but scarcely rarefied. The camera contemplates Edenic expanses, surging rivers, and snow-carpeted woods with the same tranquil, drifting rhythm, underlined by the hushed notes of dread in Johnny Greenwood's score, and yet his lush eye often feels peculiarly divorced from the people on screen. Still, even if Norwegian Wood amounts to a gorgeous but lethargic emo ballad, there's no denying the stately lyricism of its melancholy, where the weight of loss and the unease of romance creep like clouds over endless verdant fields.