It’s not a great time to be an aging action star.

The relative success of “The Expendables” and its sequel proved there was a legitimate appetite for old-timer butt kickers at the box office. Separate the superteam, however, and the results have been disastrous.

In January, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in his first leading role in years with “The Last Stand.” Backed by respected action director Jee-woon Kim, the movie fizzled with a $6.2 million opening weekend.

“Expendables” leader Sylvester Stallone opened “Bullet to the Head” last month to the tune of a $4.5 million opening weekend. Although to be fair, that’s an atrocious title for a movie, especially when the commercials suggested “Ax Fight” to be a more appropriate title.

Bruce Willis, the most durable of old-man action stars, tried to right the ship on Valentine’s Day with “A Good Day to Die Hard,” the fifth installment of his most famous franchise. It opened well enough, $36 million over its first five days, but the horrible reviews have caught up with it. “Die Hard” dropped 60% in its second weekend and is on track to be the lowest grossing film in the franchise by a wide margin. (more…)

The big lesson of this year’s awards season: Don’t snub Ben Affleck.

After Affleck failed to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Director, many Oscar prognosticators (yes, those are real people) assumed “Argo” had lost all chance for Best Picture glory. After all, no movie since “Driving Miss Daisy” has won a Best Picture Oscar without securing a Best Director nomination.

The snub incited Internet rage, more so than the snub of director Kathryn Bigelow for “Zero Dark Thirty.” Bigelow won just a few years ago for “The Hurt Locker,” but Affleck’s exclusion seemed like an intentional derailment of Hollywood’s feel-good, comeback story of the year.

“Remember Ben Affleck in all those awful movies?” “Well now he’s a really great director!”

But you can’t keep a good Affleck down. Many now consider “Argo” to be the frontrunner for Best Picture, and Affleck would earn an Oscar as producer alongside George Clooney and Grant Heslov. (more…)

The year in cinema shouldn’t really be gauged by its highs and lows, as there will always be a few terrible movies and a few great ones. The state of Hollywood is best measured by everything in between – the movies that range between pretty good and utterly forgettable.

Thankfully for 2012, the scale tips closer to “pretty good.” While greatness remained a rarity, the year had its share of standouts.

Out of the 103 movies I saw that were released theatrically in 2012, these were my favorites.  It doesn’t include “Zero Dark Thirty” (not screened yet) or some of the smaller films still in limited release. Even without them in contention, it wasn’t hard filling slots.

1. Moonrise Kingdom
Wes Anderson’s movies exist in a world slightly askew – rich with characters and details that seem trapped in a time that is simultaneously more romantic and somber than the real world.

Anderson’s lesser movies (think “The Darjeeling Limited”) lack an emotional connection to reality, but his best movies, like “The Royal Tenenbaums” and now “Moonrise Kingdom,” mix the eccentricities with universal truth.

“Moonrise Kingdom” isn’t particularly complicated. The central characters, two pre-teens played by newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, fall in love and run away together. Their relationship is pure, innocent and without the awkward mugging that more “experienced” young actors might attempt with the material. Their scenes capture a feeling of rebellious youth – something that can’t easily be recreated for those of us who are well past our grade school years.

That the movie fills in this altered-but-impassioned world with an outstanding supporting cast (Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand and Bill Murray) is an added bonus. This is Anderson’s most assured and relatable effort to date, and the best movie of 2012. (more…)

This year’s trifecta of “The Avengers,” “Amazing Spider-Man” and “The Dark Knight Rises” is easily the most widespread saturation of superheroes in popular culture we’ve ever had.

Going into the season, I, like many, wondered if comic book movies would need a break. The over-familiarity of “The Amazing Spider-Man,” especially in how it retells the origin story of Peter Parker, amplified a genre fatigue that has been growing from summer to summer.

“The Avengers” and “The Dark Knight Rises” at least provide a continuation of stories, and both do a good job of further developing the characters and conflicts in their respective worlds.

Still, on the eve of “The Dark Knight Rises” premiere, with the knowledge that director Christopher Nolan would NOT return for more Batman installments, I was ready for the superhero genre to take an extended vacation.

Then I saw “The Dark Knight Rises.” Now I can’t wait to see Batman on the big screen again.

It’s not that I particularly love everything about Nolan’s trilogy capper. It may be the biggest movie in the series, but it’s also the messiest. The final act especially fails to control all the sprawling storylines and characters that are introduced over the course of its exhausting running time.

Nevertheless, the movie celebrates the influence and importance of Batman in our culture. He’s a symbol for hope; something more than a single man can ever be. We need something like Batman to remind us that we can stand against evil and madness. Rather than succumb to fear, like Bruce Wayne, we must embrace the fear and use it as a tool against what frightens us. (more…)

It’s difficult to reflect on the experience of seeing “The Dark Knight Trilogy” Thursday night in the AMC Theaters at Spokane’s River Park Square without pausing to acknowledge the tragic shooting that happened at a screening in Colorado.

As an unsettling footnote, a plastic burning odor resulted in the complete evacuation of River Park Square around the same time as the Colorado incident. Thankfully our evacuation was the result of an overheated AC unit and not something unspeakable.

Listening to the news the next morning nearly eliminated my desire to talk about “The Dark Knight Rises” experience. But you hug your kid, get dressed and be thankful you even get to discuss the strengths and shortcomings of a superhero movie. Some people don’t get to do that today.

In terms of scale, Nolan has outdone himself with “The Dark Knight Rises.” Whereas Batman fought individual villains in previous films, this time he’s faced with the full-on Occupation of an entire city. This is no mere superhero movie; Nolan has much more on his mind about class inequality and the nature of authority in our post 9/11 society. (more…)

We can have our good values and we can have our dignity, but sometimes we just need a paycheck.

This is most true in Hollywood, where even the most respected actors and filmmakers work on a project for the sole purpose of banking a few million bucks.

Some actors, however, seem perfectly content taking money for less-than-passable projects. Some are stuck trying to repeat iconic past performances, while others appear to be sleepwalking through every endeavor.

This list is particularly painful, because I love a lot of these performers. But these people are slumming it, and we all should expect more. (more…)

I’m a firm believer that good movies are relatively easy to find, and of the 108 movies I saw from 2011, I enjoyed quite a few of them.

I just didn’t love very many.

North Idaho has yet to receive late season standouts like “The Artist” or “A Separation.” Still, the calendar year hasn’t been marked by any significant benchmarks in cinema (although “The Tree of Life” could go down as this generation’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”).

Nevertheless, my top 20 films of 2011 definitely deserve your attention. A few you will love, some you’ll probably hate, but hopefully most are easy to enjoy.

Update: An updated article will be posted in the first part of February, which will (hopefully) include more late season titles.

1. Moneyball
On the surface, it’s a movie about baseball and statistics. It’s all the characters talk about, yet “Moneyball” tells a compelling and universal story about what it means to be the underdog.

Brad Pitt plays Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane as a man who learns that winning a little less than the big guys can be winning enough. It’s the most compelling performance of Pitt’s career, and you won’t find a snappier script this year than the one effortlessly crafted by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin. Available Tuesday on home video.

2. Super 8
The smartest and most entertaining blockbuster of the year, made by J.J. Abrams as a tribute to the science-fiction work of Steven Spielberg, who serves as a producer on the project. Stacked with a talented cast of young actors and a more-than-meets-the-eye monster, “Super 8” pays homage to all the best parts of “E.T.,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Jaws” and “The Goonies” while also playing on its own terms. Available on home video.

3. The Descendants
George Clooney delivers another terrific performance as a man who must deal with a comatose wife, rebellious daughters and a land deal that will literally change the landscape of Hawaii. It’s another unique mix of comedy and drama from Alexander Payne, writer and director of “Sideways.” (more…)

It could have been much worse.

Of all the 2011-released movies I saw this year (a little more than a hundred), most fell into the “merely OK” category. Like many of you, I chose not see some of the year’s obvious clunkers, like Adam Sandler’s cross-dressing “Jack and Jill” or the new “Chipmunks” movie. And, after sitting through 120 excruciating minutes of the last “Twilight” movie, I decided not to bother with “Breaking Dawn.”

The following list, however, were cinematic experiences I hope will be forgotten by 2012.

In alphabetical order:

Arena
I typically don’t see straight-to-DVD movies because, well, they’re terrible. Samuel L. Jackson stars as a sleazy promoter of an online fighting league where the competitors brutally kill each other. I’ll watch Sam Jackson in anything. I just won’t be watching this ever again.

The Hangover Part II
It’s the same as the first movie minus humor and originality. How did this make so much money?

Larry Crowne
Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts play “ordinary” people in this insulting and insipid look at middle-aged, middle-class folks trying to make it in the new economy. Oh, and Hanks’ character joins a hipster motor-scooter club.

To make things worse, Hanks and Roberts spend the closing credits waving and smiling at the audience as if to say, “Look, we’re movie stars! We’re only pretending to be like you!”

Mars Needs Moms
A dull, grimy-looking motion-capture cartoon about Martians kidnapping and murdering human moms. Don’t worry. Your kids will be too bored to even notice the nightmarish storyline. (more…)

Reclusive filmmaker Terrence Malick tries to explain the meaning of all existence in “The Tree of Life,” a sprawling, non-linear drama now available on Blu-ray and DVD (but not on Netflix or Redbox until Nov. 8).

The film enthralled some and frustrated more with its fragmented storytelling, minimalist dialogue and lengthy sequences in space and with dinosaurs. Most of the movie, however, follows a young family in the 1950s, with Brad Pitt starring as the stern father to three boys. He’s particularly hard on Jack (Hunter McCracken), the oldest son who grows up to be played by Sean Penn in a few brief but pivotal scenes set in the present day.

There’s an hour stretch of the film that takes place exclusively in the 1950s with loosely connected scenes of Jack’s upbringing and the contrasting relationships he shares with his father and mother (Jessica Chastain). While his mother is more of a nurturing free-spirit who skimps on discipline, his father is determined to teach Jack the skills to survive an unfair adulthood, a worldview he has adopted from his own professional failures.

But wait! Malick isn’t weaving a simple coming-of-age tale. The film opens with the death of one of Jack’s brothers, which takes place sometime in Jack’s early adulthood. “The Tree of Life” then jumps way back to the creation of the universe, leading into the Earth’s formation, the development of primitive life, and the emergence of dinosaurs. Then we get the 1950s and Brad Pitt, and then things get really weird. (more…)