92 posts tagged “movies”

God bless The Asylum. When it comes to low-budget horror movies that are intentionally similar - at least in title and concept - to tentpole theatrical releases, they're basically the best there is, which is to say that their films are never more than incompetent and unwatchable. Last year alone, they distributed When A Killer Calls, Hillside Cannibals, The Da Vinci Treasure, Pirates of Treasure Island, Snakes On A Train, and Dragon. This year we're getting Transmorphers, The Hitchhiker, and The Apocalypse. Basically, if you want to make a crap movie that is a lot like a popular movie, The Asylum are the guys who will hook you up.

My plan with Snakes On A Train was to watch it drunk and make with a running commentary, a la my initial post on Skeleton Man. But Snakes On A Train is a movie that you need to really wrap your head around before you can really write about it. Why? Because the film is basically the story of the Nativity, except with killer snakes. And a train. Which the snakes are on.

Alma and Brujo are basically analogs for Mary and Joseph. With some slight differences. For instance, instead of riding a donkey into Bethlehem, Brujo drags Alma's unconscious body across the border from Mexico. Luckily, they aren't targeted by racist vigilantes, which would make for a short movie. On the other hand, where are the Minutemen?

If you didn't already know that 'brujo' is Spanish for 'male witch', it becomes readily apparent when he starts casting crazy spells. What do the spells do? I don't know. I'm operating under the assumption that they don't do anything and that Brujo is really just crazy. I do know that Alma starts to throw up a bunch of harmless garden snakes, who then go and kill some random cowboy with their nonpoisonous bites. After that, Mary and Joseph get on the train. Train = Manger.

Really, what writer Eric Forsberg is doing here is challenging the accepted notions of the Christian tradition, many of which are disputed by modern-day archaeology. Snakes on a Train is a brave allegory that says to its audience, 'Hey, maybe a manger isn't a barn. Maybe it's something more like...like a train.'

After giving the inevitable snake-victims some face time and introducing some danger to the Holy Family via a gang of surly undocumented stowaways, it's finally revealed that Mary has snakes inside her because of a powerful Mexican curse. Brujoseph is not strong enough in his shamany arts to cure her, so they're headed to the mystical center of Western civilization to find someone who can help her: Los Angeles. Little do they know that, upon arriving in LA five out of every ten people they meet will claim to be a magician, seven out of every ten people will assault them and beg to be in their movie, and only three of those seven will be wearing clothes.

The train passengers themselves are completely tangential to the movie. A pair of drug-running teen girls have a forced subplot that involves one of them getting naked, but that's really as engrossing as it gets. They're clearly people who are here only to die, but since this isn't a typical slasher/dead teen movie, none of them have even the requisite wisps of development that establish why they deserve to die.

Back in the cargo car, things get heated between our heroes and the illegals whose turf they're squatting on. Yes, illegal Mexicans = Herod. Obviously, Brujo's a bit on edge because of his magical snake-vomiting girlfriend, so he gets a bit violent with these guys. One of the things I never realized about Mesoamerican civilization is that all shamans are superninjas, and Brujoseph dispatches most of the gang with ease, except for a slouchy, out of shape guy who looks like Dave Attell. After a protracted fight, Dave gets stabbed with a knife that appears to be made out of tin foil and packing tape, and then he's thrown off the train. Which, you know what? No matter how bad the movie is, that's always awesome to watch. In fact, even with the admittedly poor quality of the fight choreography, acting, and effects, it's still satisfying to watch Brujoseph get down in the latter half of the movie, as he does awesome stuff like use magic to mess up the train's electronics, drive the train after the conductor gets eaten by a giant snake, and remove a snake victim's heart with psychic surgery in order to save his life. He's like Doctor Strange, except with an obvious fake knife and a less flashy wardrobe.

Now, Mary keeps throwing up more snakes, getting larger and larger. They get out into the train and start killing people. Nearly every death is completely unrewarding, but just like with the awesome of Brujoseph, there's a hidden gem here: one of the characters has a wound on his forearm that a snake leaps inside of. Does it make sense? Absolutely not. But you're watching Snakes on a Train. The inevitable climax is that the train doesn't get to L.A. in time. Mary turns into a giant CGI snake roughly the size of the train itself. Yes. Snake Jesus.

Snake Jesus starts eating the train, until one of the illegals, in true deus ex machina fashion, reveals that he's a powerful shaman, and magics SJ away. Of course, all of the survivors are stranded in the desert, but them's the breaks.

If you like bad movies, and you have a bunch of friends over, this is the exact kind of film you want to watch. It's easy to make fun of, has a bunch of unintentional comedy, and has one or two real diamond-in-the-rough moments. And it's the story of Christmas, to boot.

It's easy to compare Smokin' Aces to any one of the sleek, hyperviolent crime action jaunts that have popped up in the long wake of Reservior Dogs. After all, it's got a too-big cast full of geek-cred names, snappy dialogue that's high on its own swearing and pop culture referencing, a convoluted plot, and an absurd amount of bullets and blood. These are all true facts about Aces, but it's a film that's better than the sum of its parts suggests. Joe Carnahan's follow-up to the criminally underrated Narc is almost the antithesis of that movie, but it's every bit as fun as Narc is bleak.

The plot starts bare-bones - a mob boss has a hit out on Vegas entertainer/Cosa Nostra wannabe Buddy Israel and every hitman in the known world is vying to be the one to cut his heart out and collect on the bounty. Throw in the FBI and a gang of low-rent bail bondsmen trying to keep Buddy alive, and it's a recipe for chaos. As twisty and chaotic as the proceedings get, the basic plot remains unchanged until late in the game. It's fairly simplistic, but it's good that it is, since the first quarter of the film is spent bringing viewers up to speed on the roster of hired killers in play. It goes long, but it's probably the most entertaining part of the movie, so it's forgiveable rather than boring.

Jeremy Piven as Israel and Ryan Reynolds as fed Messner basically own the movie. Every other character is there as set dressing for them to gnaw. Alicia Keys as hitwoman Georgia Sykes has some winning one-liners and carries her few scenes pretty well. Martin "Torque" Henderson plays hillariously against type as ex-cop Hollis, and Matthew Fox turns in a totally unrecognizable and too-brief cameo, but beyond that, you're not likely to remember much. There's not a lot here beyond that, and if it weren't for Carnahan - who I'm banking on becoming the next Shane Black some time within the next year or two - Aces might not be worth your time. But if you like this sort of kinetic hipster-action, it's a must see.

FUN FACT: 12 years ago, Joe Carnahan wrote a screenplay for a film called Karate Raider. I've never seen it, but the title makes me want to.

'Experiment' is an oddly prescient word, in the sense that The St. Francisville Experiment is a concerted, scientific effort to discover just how bad a movie can be.

The 2000 film follows a team investigating an estate in St. Francisville, Louisana - formerly the capital of West Florida - for evidence of the paranormal. The film purports to be a documentary, with the footage recovered from the team's abandoned cameras. The footage consists of the four wandering around the house, fussing and fighting amongst themselves, until spooky things start to happen.

You're probably thinking to yourself that it sounds a lot like
The Blair Witch Project, the divisive but unquestionably popular horror mockumentary from 1999. This is because, in true horror genre fashion, every wannabe filmmaker and their brother found a bunch of unknown talent, a camcorder, and a spooky locale and mixed liberally with poor lighting, stilted mythology, and a heck of a lot of shaky cam in order to try and make lightning strike twice. Unfortunately, the makers of St. Francisville remembered all of the ingredients save the most vital - The Blair Witch Project is actually good. Experiment, well, it's like me putting a green dress sock on my hand and pretending it's Kermit the Frog.

What is supposed to be tense infighting comes off as people just stepping on one another's lines, and the sense of verisimilitude that the low-budget faux-doc tactic is supposed to evoke is never fully sold. 'Psychic' Madison consistently hams up her dialogue about "the white light" which she believes to be protecting the team, to the point where it's glaringly obvious that no real person talks like that. Ditto for 'historian' Ryan's constant screaming and crying and 'film student' Tim's ever-present, over-the-top abrasiveness. The goal here seems to be the recreation of a by-the-numbers ghost hunt that goes horribly wrong - even the name of the film is a shameless grab at the parapsychology audience, with St. Francisville being a real-life paranormal hotspot. The problem is that the recreation comes off as so fake and hollow that the viewer is going to be constantly distracted by just how fake and hollow it is.

By the time the haunt begins in earnest, I've missed my window for becoming invested in these characters and honestly can't wait for them to die, but they can't even do that right. And speaking of lacking achievements, the few brief ghost effects we see on camera are godawful and will tear you right out of the movie, should you by some chance find yourself engrossed in it. In a movie so low-tech and so intent on establishing that ghosts don't want to appear on camera, the filmmakers go out of their way to throw some stale made-for-tv effects in at the last minute. The film's final scene tries hard to copy Witch's last few minutes, but as with everything else in the movie, the attempt falls flat on its face.

I never expected St. Francisville to be good, but I expected it to land squarely in so-bad-it's-good territory. I wanted to like it, and I kept holding out for it to get better, but it never did. On the heels of a post about my tendency to like things, it pains me to admit that there's nothing good about this movie at all.

File under avoid.

There's not a whole lot to say about Spider-Man 3 that hasn't been said already, so I'll keep it brief: I liked it a lot, and haters be damned. That jazz dance? I could have done without, to be honest, and I don't think Bernard should ever have had actual important dialogue, but the film was a hearty blend of great action set pieces, soapy melodramatics, and goofy charm. In short, it plays like a comic book. And comic book fans don't like it. That bugs me.

Being the third film in the franchise, we honestly should have seen the backlash coming. It's the way these things go. When the first film comes out, the fans are set to hate it, concocting all manner of ways for it to go wrong. And when what comes out isn't horrible, we cheer. A sequel gets to cash in on the first's earned good will, but it also has to face raised expectations (remember, nobody believed the original would be worth watching when they plunked down their 8 bucks for it). In the face of all that, it just doesn't perform as well. Not because it's bad per se but because it wasn't the most amazing movie we've ever seen.

And here the decline starts. Fanboy hyperbole can be powerful in a slow, subtle way. Every single one of you who likes Return of the Jedi and stays quiet about it knows what I mean. We don't like the third film, not ever, because we've set too high a bar and been let down too hard. And by this point, we're making flow charts and running bible codes to determine what 'needs to happen' in the next installment. It's hardly ever like the finished product, though, and this just makes us, the jilted audience, bristle at the film itself for not accepting our genius. If you think that I'm wrong about this, talk to your friends about The Phantom Menace sometime - a genuinely mediocre film that is lambasted as a cinematic hate crime largely because Lucas's plot was not "OMG JEDI FITE CLOEN!!!!"

Don't get me wrong. Sometimes threequels are just bad. Like Scream 3, or Superman 3, or The Godfather 3. That just builds the mythology, so to speak. It prompts viewers to walk into good third films and nitpick them to death.

There's some transitory joy in the critique, but I'd rather enjoy a movie on its merits than damn it on its few obvious flaws. Let's avoid being callow for a second - just a second - and ask ourselves if Spider-Man 3 did what it was intended to. Other than make money. I'm pretty sure that it did, and that the negativity we're seeing towards it is a perfect storm of expectation and/or demand that affects every franchise that gets this far.

I've never read The Golden Compass before, so I don't have any context for the image I'm seeing in this teaser poster that I stumbled on at AICN. That said, context doesn't matter when you see the coolest thing ever. Ever.

No, really. Ever.

If you're easily rocked or have small children in the room, you may want to click away right now.

Last chance...

But Jeff, you're saying, there's some little girl there. That's not cool, unless it's Runaways.

When Le Pacte de Loups came out I voiced a theory to my friends regarding the lack of an English dub in the theatrical release. The movie, I asserted, had to remain in French because it otherwise would have been too awesome for audiences. Like the "Master Exploder" scene in Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny. The French was the AIM-engineered cube holding back a vast and incalculable amount of cosmic power.

In much the same way, this little girl holding a magic compass is bleeding off some of the sheer face-shattering power of a giant polar bear wearing golden armor. In the original one-sheet, the girl was replaced by a samurai pirate who was riding the bear; it crashed the internet for two hours, and the first person to browse onto it is now blind, except that they can see angels.

The Crow, the first one, wraps itself up pretty neatly. With a nice gothy bow, even. So why do they keep making sequels? Because I, and others like me, are rubes. Rubes who will watch in gleeful terror as the franchise is beaten, burned, and broken over and over and over again. And, much like Eric Draven, it refuses to die. Or rather, it is dead, and yet still lives. Each part of the saga makes less and less of an effort to bother tying itself into the original, so City of Angels is a direct sequel, Salvation was entirely tangential, and Wicked Prayer is like something a mental patient wrote down on the back of a napkin during a bus ride.

I don't understand a lot of the backstory in Wicked Prayer and, to be honest, it never bothered me much. What's going on on-screen is so puerile that I don't need to know the backstory. A cult of Satanist hot-rodders, led by David 'Angel' Boreanaz and Tara 'God, What Happened to Tara Reid?' Reid want to enact a ritual to turn Mr. Buffy into the devil (not just lose his soul, as is wont to happen). For this to happen, though, they need to execute Jimmy Cuervo (Edward Furlong), a name I swear I did not make up, and his starcrossed lover Lily (Emmanuelle Chriqui). After stealing Lily's eyes and Jimmy's heart, the two are dumped into an old refrigerator and tossed in a landfill.

Of course sometimes when a person dies with unfinished business, a crow carries them back to the land of the living. Or something. Armed with newfound invulnerability, angst, and the ability to make terrible puns, Jimmy dresses in black and paints his face to exact vengeance as...a doughy looking goth girl.

If you're dumb enough to watch The Crow: Wicked Prayer then at least let me suggest this drinking game:

Every time Jimmy wishes out loud that he'd stayed dead, take a drink.
Every time Danny Trejo is on screen, take a drink.
Every time Dennis Hopper uses urban slang, take a drink.
Every time Tara Reid annoys the hell out of you, chug.
Every time the movie cuts to a dreamlike scene of Jimmy and Lily near a tree in a field, take a drink.
Every time Boreanaz tries to be menacing but fails embarrassingly, take two drinks.
And if you actually find yourself understanding what's going on, then make everyone else drink, because you need to be cut off.

What's the best part? Danny Trejo does a shamanic dance to save The Crow's life.
What's the worst part? The sensation of having watched the whole thing.

This weekend, some thoughts on Supernatural's "Hollywood Babylon" episode, and an advance look at Severance.

Stephen J. Cannell needs to be stopped, people.

We cannot keep justifying his continued presence in film with, "But the A-Team!" Take a look at his IMDB listing, for crying out loud; it's like a war crime. The best thing Cannell's done in the past twenty years has been The Tooth Fairy, the saga of a ghost witch who kills people with a nail gun.

Wait a second.

I think I've made the movie sound oddly compelling in summary. It's actually very bad, though. Remember, I watch these things so you don't have to.

Tooth Fairy, however, is an evolution of Cannell's craft from 2002's aptly named Dead Above Ground, which is a tragically late and chronically atrocious Craven/Williamson cash-in about a homeless spree-killer masquerading as a vengeful ghost to get his five-minute-long horror film screened at Sundance.

Again, this is not as compelling as it sounds. Trust me.

Jeff Lucas is a troubled teen: he dresses in black, has spiky hair and quotes random bullshit Celtic mysticism nonstop. He even has a sycophantic goth girl who believes he's the reincarnation of some deity or another, possibly the god who rules over everybody's mom's basement or the god of hanging out at the Wal-Mart because this town sucks and you're all conformists, man.

Anyway, instead of making a documentary for his communications class as assigned, he makes an untitled, badly edited horror film where his classmates get butchered. He even makes a speech before the screening about how the film isn't titled because he defies labeling or some craziness. Of course you do, Count Chocula. Now go on down to the mall and hang out at the arcade. You know, with the 50 other teens dressed just like you. We get about thirty seconds into the film - the mark at which a blonde girl is decapitated with the aid of the free pack-in video editing software you get when you buy a new PC - before Jeff gets laughed off stage. His ire invoked, Kid Columbine curses his detractors in the most overwrought, sad, and painful dialogue ever written anywhere. "YOU SHALL DIE," he intones, "ON THE SEVENTH EQUINOX OF MABEN!" Exhaustive internet reseach leads me to believe that this doesn't even exist. Our hero is detained by the gym teacher and led off to the school counselor's office, where he promptly threatens her with a trophy.

Just a few days later, though, Jeff is in attendance at a pool party at the school principal's house. Before you can ask if this is in any way appropriate, however, he's punched a girl in the face and precipitated a car chase with the girl's jackass of a boyfriend - a boyfriend who's more concerned that his 80s-mobile is damaged than that his girlfriend, who he just swore he'd love forever, has been punched in the face by Fangs McDarkness. Proving to be as good a wheelman as he is a filmmaker, Jeff goes over a cliff while trying to force the guy - whose name I already forget - off the road. The car bursts into flames (this is the most exciting part of the movie).

We cut to one year later. Boyfriend (I'm not even pretending to remember names) is a suspect in Jeff's murder. Gym Teacher is now living in his van and camping in the school parking lot. Which happens all the time. Thrown out by a gun-toting principal (who's receiving threatening phone calls), he relocates (where else?) down by the river. Realizing that this moron is in fact living in a van down by the river is probably the second funniest thing about the movie after the 'seventh equinox of Maben' nonsense. Soon enough, a robed figure shows up and kills him with an axe. Pinned to Coach's chest by the axe is a picture of the principal.

The cops decide that this is pretty clear proof that the principal is the murderer. Because murderers leave pictures of themselves laying around at crime scenes. I mean, I don't read a lot of true crime stuff, but it happens, right?

And this brings me to the cop. The cop in Dead Above Ground may be the worst law enforcement official ever. I mean, he assumes that killers leave vanity shots of themselves on their victims. Once the principal turns up dead he's forced to forgo that theory, but he then starts to suspect one of the teens on the basis that the cop doesn't like him very much. I'm pretty sure that this suspect's death would make him come to an even broader, more unfounded new conclusion, like "The Irish must have done it," or "I knew it was the zombie principal!" This guy makes the sherriff in Nail Gun Massacre, a guy who stood around, looked at corpses and said things like, "I suspect she was killed with a nail gun," look like that author chick from Murder, She Wrote.

The sycophantic goth girl from earlier in the movie somehow manages to convince everyone that Jeff's vengeful ghost is responsible. Because ghosts kill people with axes. So the kids start to have a bunch of goofy seances, and this where they discover that the ghost will stop killing if and only if they can get Jeff's awful movie screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Why Sundance? Well, who knows. I mean, any savvy film buff knows that Slamdance is the better platform for a low-budget genre film. Then again, Jeff Lucas is not, as we've seen, a savvy anything.

The end of Dead Above Ground is a graveyard of forced revelations, cheap plot twists, and instances of the killer breaking his own rules, which long-time readers should know absolutely galls me. I won't ruin the ending, because I just know you're dying to see this movie, but here's one of those forced revelations I talked about: remember when Jeff threatened the counselor with a trophy? Well, the cop decides to dust the trophy for prints, one year after the fact. And he finds out that our favorite goth is actually the son of a recently murdered Hollywood director who'd been living outside town with a bunch of hobos. Why did he bother to create a fake identity and enroll in high school? Who knows. If hard-pressed, the writer probably couldn't tell you either.

The only redeeming feature of Dead Above Ground is that the overly sententious dialogue about the mystic arts and Celtic lore elevates the movie from 'irredeemable' to 'unintentionally funny'. Is it worth your time? Maybe two minutes worth of YouTube hunting with fingers crossed, just to see if someone's done a Good Parts version. Or if you need to know how not to make a horror film. In that case, this movie is like a textbook.

I went to church twice Easter weekend. The Friday night service was worlds better than the equally long affair the following night.

If you have the stomach for it, Grindhouse is the most fun you'll have at the movies for at least another month, and possibly even longer. If you're worried that it's too long and want to catch it on rental, just go. You need to see Grindhouse on a big screen; that's where it's intended to be seen, to the point where film crackle and missing reels and fake trailers, etc. have all been added into the proceedings. I love these movies, but I have no idea how they're going to play on DVD. The charm it has in the theater might turn annoying, or it might not.

Yes, it's ridiculously gory. But if you're reading this blog, I'm guessing you're okay with that.

Yes, Fergie is in it. But she dies. Painfully.

However, there's also a tow truck driver and a one-legged go-go dancer killing zombies. And explosions. And that's just the first half.

Blame my wife for this one.

I like the first Bring It On a lot. There's some gene in me that responds to well-done teen flicks, and well, Bring It On was directed by Peyton Reed, and I like Jessica Bendinger's script well enough to forgive her both Aquamarine and First Daughter. And as a Whedon nerd, it gratified me more than a little bit to see a vampire slayer (Eliza Dushku) crawl into bed with a vampire (Kirsten Dunst) at a sleepover, and also to see Dushku share some screen time with Clare "Gravedancers" Kramer (Faith was incarcerated during Buffy's fifth season - the one featuring Kramer as the 'big bad'*).

But when it comes to Bring It On's sequels, I have no love, only a desire to share a bath with a toaster oven. I haven't seen Bring It On Again lately enough to really lambaste it, but my wife wanted to watch Bring It On: All Or Nothing. It'd been a few months since To Be Fat Like Me and over a year since Travelpants, so I figured I was due.

I've never felt such an overwhelming desire to tear my own eyes out of my head and pour boiling acid into the wounds.

Race relations are an important facet of the first Bring It On - the culture clash between the Toros and the Clovers is the motivating point behind Kirsten Dunst's long dark night of the soul, but the talent on hand managed to pull it off without being as unentertaining as the series' third film. It's like, when writing this death trap of a film, Alyson Fouse (one of the committee that made Scary Movie 2 unfunny) tried to distill the first movie down to its essence, missed the mark badly, and ended up with this. It's like assuming that coloring something red and drawing speed lines makes you Carmine Infantino.

This is the only time I will ever compare Jessica Bendinger to Carmine Infantino. Because that's horribly forced. If I manage to do it again, yell at me.

The worst part of the movie is that my math tells me that Hayden Panettiere has to be like fifteen years old here. Watching her flip around in a really short skirt makes me want to call Chris Hansen and turn myself in. I have a friend with a frightening crush on Daniel Radcliffe; I don't make fun of her anymore.

I'm searching for positive things to say about the movie. Oh! I've got one. I wish, in my life, that personal disputes could be solved by the appearance of international singing sensation Rihanna. The deus ex machina ending is just not seen enough; ask Shakespeare about its effectiveness. Unfortunately, Rihanna doesn't force anybody to get married, so that's another minus, but you've got to admire the classics. Right?

*Yes, I'm a Buffy encyclopedia. We can still be friends, right?

I'm so clever.*

My plan was to dig up a negative review of Star Wars: A New Hope and copy/paste it. After all, Eragon is the tale of a young, blond farmboy who finds a MacGuffin (sent off by a beautiful princess) that endangers his adopted family. He is accosted by a crazed old man that shares a secret connection with him, storms an enemy fortress to rescue the princess (the old man dies) and joins a band of rebels in time to turn the tide of an ongoing conflict with an evil empire.

After watching Eragon, though, my main critique of the movie is not its derivative nature. I mean, I enjoyed Christopher Paolini's novel even at the same time that I recognized it as a simplistic Star Wars riff. This is mainly because I like swords and dragons and fighting. Probably more than an adult should. At any rate, I can digest any kind of pulp fantasy and find something good about it. What I liked about Eragon, and mind you, this is before I read Naomi Novik's absolutely wonderful Temeraire series, was the way that Saphira was protrayed as a character. On top of that, while not as deft as Tolkien, who he's also obviously cribbing from, Paolini was more than capable of telling his story with enough lyricism and verve to make it stand out.

Eragon the movie, while still shamelessly borrowing from The Holy Trilogies, has a whole new crop of problems, chief among them that it's just bad. The movie keeps trying to be epic and, with its name-droppable cast, beautiful locations, and at-times-amazing effects work, it might have happened. Unfortunately, the cast mostly phones it in, and the real focus is more on being pretty than effectively communicating a story within an obviously cramped running time. Instead of spending time with the characters, we get lots of cuts to the villains scheming and trying hard to look menacing and lots of footage that's totally spurious. The beginning of the movie plods, but the end of the movie is so quickly paced that you feel like you're being pulled along by the ear to the closing credits.

The final sequence, Durza's attack on the Varden, was pretty cool. I have to give credit where it's due. I'm a sucker for any kind of aerial combat, visually speaking, and you can really tell that WETA was involved in the effects work. A giant melee with elves, dwarves, dragons and magic? Yes, please. And as much as I enjoyed it, I'd have loved it a lot more if I had a better idea of what exactly was going on and who all of these characters that populate the latter half of the movie even are. One of the perpetual weaknesses of the Harry Potter films is the assumption in adapting them that everyone has read them, which makes the screenplay just a Cliff's Notes of the book, a practice that is thoroughly obnoxious. That's on full, frustrating display in Eragon.

Capsule review: If you occasionally make lightsaber noises and cover up the dragon with your hand, Eragon is totally indistinguishable from a high school theater production of Star Wars. Except with John Malkovich.

*I'm not, actually.