The Art of Getting By stars Freddie Highmore (Finding Neverland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) as George, a lonely and fatalistic teen who’s made it all the way to his senior year without ever having done a real day of work, who is befriended by Sally (Emma Roberts – Scream 4), a beautiful and complicated girl who recognizes in him a kindred spirit.
The Art of Getting By is distinguished by a dullness that’s almost akin to being in high school again. This first feature from Gavin Wiesen (whose credits list him as an assistant to director Bruce Paltrow on the movie Duets) is about a Manhattan private-school senior named George (Freddie Highmore).
George wears a long overcoat, carries around a copy of Albert Camus’s The Stranger throughout the film (the book is less than 130 pages) and smokes an occasional cigarette. Now, here’s the really shocking part: He doesn’t do his homework. (The film’s original title was actually Homework.) It is because “everything’s so meaningless.”
Even in a meaningless universe, of course, schools have rules and George’s caring, hip principal (Blair Underwood) is forced to put him on academic probation. George’s teachers (Alicia Silverstone, Jarlath Conroy) are in awe of his talent but frustrated by his lack of engagement. His mom (Rita Wilson) worries – but she has other concerns because George’s stepfather (Sam Robards) is having financial problems.

Ally Darling is looking for love. However, after twenty guys she seems to be running out of options. After reading one of those love advice columns in Marie Claire magazine, she finds that the chances of meeting “the one” are near impossible once you hit that particular number of lovers. So with the help of her hunky neighbor – he has the skill of locating missing persons thanks to his police officer father – she begins hunting down her ex-boyfriends, hoping to rekindle a long lost fire. All the while, the man of her dreams may be living right next door.
It is oftentimes painful to sit through a bad romantic comedy that has promise. It is especially agonizing when you feel like you’ve seen the exact same moment done before, only better. This is especially true at the beginning of WHAT’S YOUR NUMBER? and what is nearly the exact same scene appearing in this year’s hit BRIDESMAIDS. In both films, a woman wakes before her lover. She sneaks into the bathroom and fixes herself up with hair and make-up. She then returns to bed and feigns sleep while her partner wakes. He looks at her and tells her how great she looks. She then pretends to be near embarrassed by such flattery because she couldn’t possibly look that good this early.
While that is one of the few similarities to BRIDESMAIDS that NUMBER has to offer, you have to wonder if that is something women regularly do or do they simply joke about it? Either way, this worked well the first time out, not so much for round two.
It is the story of a young woman named Ally Darling (Anna Faris) who reads in a magazine that if you don’t find your true love after being with twenty guys, you never will. At the time she reads the article, she is on nineteen. Desperately she turns to her hunky neighbor Colin (Chris Evans) for help. His father was a police officer who taught the now musician how to search for missing persons. She convinces him that she must locate her past loves and make sure she didn’t miss out. So what if she did? Well, she could always try and rekindle the fire with a willing ex.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a nice guy who finds out he has a serious form of cancer. While he deals with the unpleasant side effects of his treatment and the reactions of the women in his life, his best friend (Seth Rogen) supports him with plenty of humor. There are moments of pain and earnest drama, but a good laugh is never far away. Rogen shines with his constant comic comments and Gordon-Levitt delivers another touching, but strong performance. Don’t be dismayed by the subject and enjoy the jokes!

Part of this movie is about the ghastly ordeal cancer patients go through—pain, syringes, vomiting, and coughing up blood, and a cold, impersonal medical establishment that places little value on human life—and part of it is about everyone else—caregivers, family members and friends—all of whom care more about themselves than the patient. (All false generalizations for the sake of laughs, and like everything else in the movie, grossly exaggerated.) When Adam undergoes his first chemo treatment, his duplicitous girlfriend (badly overacted by Bryce Dallas Howard) waits four hours in the car because she can’t stand the interiors of hospitals. His stressed-out mother (and what, you may well ask, is Anjelica Huston doing in this blunder?) acts like a cross between Lady Macbeth and Zasu Pitts. Eventually Adam gives up and falls for his psychiatrist (Anna Kendrick) in a sex game that is pure cardboard.
Director Jonathan Levine, who proved his incompetence with two previous disasters, The Wackness and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (a sex thriller so bad it was never released), based the film on the autobiographical experiences of the film’s writer, Will Reiser. But nothing about it rings true. The gallows humor is unforgiving and the compassion is synthetic. The film reveals nothing new about advances in cancer research, addresses no issues like the drug companies that suppress alternative treatments to profit from human suffering. No, it’s just about one guy trying to get laid.

It is good to see Richard Gere again, not to mention Martin Sheen. We have to assume they had their choice of a hundred scripts before they chose this tightly wound spy thriller. They chose a screenplay written by the top-notch team of edgy anti-hero screenplays, Michael Brandt and Derek Haas. In their previous underground indie hit, Brandt and Haas penned “3:10 to Yuma” (along with Halsted Welles). The sweltering, dark anti-hero parade starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale was, and is, a hit on the cult-indie circuit.
“The Double” exudes even darker undertones than “Yuma.” Old hands Gere and Sheen turn out to be remarkably able to don the suits of latter day paladins and twist the edginess dial to full-on.
Gere plays Paul Shepherdson, a retired CIA super-spook who claims to have neutralized the Soviet super-assassin code-named “Cassius.” When a US senator gets uppity with the anti-Soviet talk and is found with most of his head disconnected from his neck, aging CIA supervisor Tom Highland (Sheen) knows Shepherdson cannot resist. The ex-agent is obsessed with Cassius and tormented by the possibility that the brainwashed monster might be on the loose. Something has to be done. Rookie CIA spy Ben Geary (Topher Grace) is bright eyed and bushy tailed and dying for the chance to make his mark. More to the point, he wrote his Master’s thesis on Cassius and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the man. He knows everything about him from his hat size to his favorite drink.
The brilliant, dedicated rookie is teamed up with the disillusioned, bitter veteran Shepherdson to find and take out the smartest, cruelest and best-hidden assassin of all time. A movie is born.
Plus, Ben Geary has a fantastically sexy wife and a darling child, who form the perfect target for a psycho killer. This injects a persistent kinkiness into the plot; a background of underhanded deceit and danger dealing with the highest stakes.
The plot has just the right amount of twists and turns, although some of them do not make perfect sense when put together at the end. Brandt and Haas may have overdone the whodunit angle when they simply could have relied on Gere to do the heavy lifting.

“Rise of the Apes”, a completely new take on one of the Studio’s most beloved and successful franchises. Oscar-winning visual effects house WETA Digital — employing certain of the groundbreaking technologies developed for AVATAR — will render, for the first time ever in the more »film series, photo-realistic apes rather than costumed actors. “Rise of the Apes” is an origin story in the truest sense of the term. Set in present day San Francisco, the film is a reality-based cautionary tale, a science fiction/science fact blend, where man’s own experiments with genetic engineering lead to the development of intelligence in apes and the onset of a war for supremacy.
“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”, as its title conveys, is an origin film to a possible sequel or even a trilogy. As such, the reboot film might test your patience in terms of what it is willing to give away (in terms of plot that is) to its viewers. Yes, there are subtle hints and clues to the keen-eyed watcher but most will see the film slowly plodding away until credits time. Although this is the case, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” will be best remembered as being polished not only in visual effects but what lies beyond it. The full review is right after the break.

The Smurfs make their first trip to the big screen in Columbia Pictures’/Sony Pictures Animation’s hybrid live-action and animated family comedy, The Smurfs. When the evil wizard Gargamel chases the Smurfs out of their village, they’re forced through a portal, out of their world and more »into ours, landing in the middle of New York’s Central Park. Just three apples high and stuck in the Big Apple, the Smurfs must find a way to get back to their village before Gargamel tracks them down.

Kids’ movies may be the most difficult cinematic mountains to climb. The filmmakers must cater to two perspectives at constant odds with one another: young ones, who find amusement in simplistic stories and broadly painted humor, and their parents, who need enough of a grounded hook, emotional core and clever jokes to keep them from nodding off. Not an easy task.
To see this winning combination pulled off by a 3-D, animation/live-action hybrid adaptation of a rather irritatingly sweet cartoon from the ’80s?well, it’s both a shocking and welcome surprise. The Smurfs transcends recent property-grabs like Garfield, Alvin and the Chipmunks and Marmaduke by embracing the cartooniness, relishing in the fact that it can get away with anything with the help of adorable little blue people.