Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

This nonsense about drilling offshore infuriates me. It won’t do a thing to lower prices, it is sure to turn clean beaches into tarball traps, and it prevents people from discussing practical ways to cut consumption.

Case in point: How many times have you driven past a fast-food or Starbucks outlet with six to 12 cars in the drive-thru queue?

If I go to one of these places, I always park, go inside, get my stuff and go. Meanwhile, the losers are still in line, with their engines running. How many gallons of gas are wasted each day by idling vehicles in these lines? I don’t know. But it just makes sense to quit the practice.

No more drive-thrus!

Funny women salvage surrogate comedy

Kate Holbrook is a successful Philadelphia business executive. At age 37, she has it all — including a ticking biological clock. She’d like to have a baby (husband optional), but that doesn’t seem medically likely. Besides, she’s too busy and spoiled to go through the actual pains of pregnancy and birth.

So she finds an agency that will set her up with a surrogate. That’s the premise for “Baby Mama,” a modest comedy with two superb leads and not a whole lot else going for it.

Tina Fey, our current favorite female funny person, stars as Kate, and although Fey’s always a charmer (we loved her Weekend Updates on “Saturday Night Live”), she’s only half the reason to see the movie. The other half would be Amy Poehler (the current SNL Update anchor), who plays Angie Ostrowiski, a South Philly lowlife with neither scruples nor a sense of propriety. They’re an odd couple supreme, and whatever value this timid comedy offers comes through their interplay. Fortunately, there’s a lot of it.

Unfortunately, there are wasted distractions that don’t work quite as well. Sigourney Weaver, as the head of the agency that hooks them up, is a cold caricature, while Steve Martin, as a pony-tailed New Age phony, seems better suited to a skit than a full-length film.

Greg Kinnear plays a nice-guy part that offers him no challenge, and the script seems to wander off into we-ran-out-of-jokes territory before it should.

Still, Fey and Poehler are worth catching — but their goofy exchanges should work just as well on video.

PG-13; 96 minutes. C+

BobRossMovies.com

Spurlock’s search finds that people are people. Everywhere.

Remember Morgan Spurlock? He’s the plucky, plainspoken guy who earned comic-documentary cred with “Super Size Me,” in which he stuffed himself with McDonald’s junk for a whole month while his health and love life slid down the tubes.

After an unimpressive stint as a TV documentarian, Spurlock returns to big screens with “Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?” As the whimsical title suggests, it’s a tongue-in-cheek, self-indulgent quest for brotherhood and justice, based on the notion that the world isn’t safe until the famous t errorist can be located and captured.

Of course, Morgan Spurlock isn’t going to catch that guy. He doesn’t really try. But because his girlfriend is about to have their child, he announces that he’ll be leaving her in New York while he gallivants on a fact-finding fun tour of Afghanistan, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In each land, the viewer-friendly filmmaker — neither as incisive nor insightful as his role model Michael Moore — asks local folks how they feel about the United States, the war on t errorism and, of course, the notorious Bin Laden.

At first, we were appalled by the silliness of it all. We wondered why his lady didn’t punch him out for abandoning her during her third trimester. And Spurlock’s foreign-policy expertise is so lowbrow that we wondered what he really hoped to discover.

But the film sneaks up on you. The movie’s title only hints at his agenda, which is to remind us that there are good folks and hopeless jerks everywhere you go. And because Spurlock is such a rank amateur at interviewing and analyzing, we can’t help but relate as he’s informed, argued with, ignored and even a ssaulted. (That last part was in Israel, where ultra-Orthodox Jews would rather beat him up than talk to him. Seems they don’t cotton to outsiders.)

Some themes come through regularly, particularly the idea that Middle Easterners don’t h ate America as much as they deplore American policies. Some interviewees are bright and thoughtful. Others are idiots, like the one who tells a Spurlock that the 9/11 attack was merely a cinematic effect, like Babe the talking pig. You’d laugh if it weren’t so disturbing.

And just when you think Spurlock’s world tour is a repetitive waste of effort, a cumulative effect kicks in. By the time the end credits roll — to the tune of Elvis Costello singing “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding” — we appreciate what the man is getting at. His baby isn’t being born into a perfect world, and it will take more than catching one t errorist to make it right.

The 93-minute film is rated PG. We give it a B-.

More Movie Madness at BobRossMovies.com

Pacino thriller is bloody nonsense

If someone tells you he intends to kill you in exactly 88 minutes, what would you do?

Personally, I’d dash to the nearest police station and hang around for an hour and a half or so.

But not Dr. Jack Gramm. This professor is a forensic psychologist with a lucrative, admirable sideline: He testifies against murderers so they are put away for good. In “88 Minutes,” one such criminal is about to be executed when a fresh victim turns up — trussed and bled the same way the convicted one killed his prey. Did Dr. Jack mess up? Or is there a copycat on the loose? And what’s with the threatening phone caller who promises to end Gramm’s life in, as we said, 88 minutes?

Red herrings and dopey twists fill this homicidal thriller, which apparently sat on a shelf for a while before being released in the U.S.

Al Pacino fans won’t care. In a rare excursion into genre flicks, the master thespian turns Gramm into an unflappable investigator who seems to ignore obvious threats while trusting all the wrong people.

Sloppy writing and incomprehensible exposition dull this macabre excursion. Messy murders punctuate the action, while we wonder who the real villain might be.

Suspects abound. Gramm’s gorgeous assistant (Alicia Witt) seems too good to be true, while one of his prize students (Leelee Sobieski) is too devoted for words. Could it be his secretary (Amy Brenneman), his university colleague (Debra Kara Unger) or maybe his pal on the police force (William Forsythe)?

And there’s the leering but possibly innocent man on death row (Neal McDonough), who never misses a chance to embarrass the man who helped put him away. How does he do it?

It’s fun to wonder, but the solution is such a letdown that you might be disappointed or even angered.

The film is rated R and runs a long 105 minutes.
We grade it a C.
Find more film fun at BobRossMovies.com

Jackie-Jet show filled out with mumbo-jumbo and splashy effects

A fantasy-adventure-comedy geared for mass audiences, “The Forbidden Kingdom” is a sort of kung-foolish paella, with a little of everything thrown in so that everyone can find something to like.

For kung-fu fanatics, there’s the first-ever pairing of legends Jet Li and Jackie Chan. For youngsters, there’s a teen heartthrob (20-year-old Michael Angarano). And the script borrows from all over: “The Wizard of Oz,” “Crouching Tiger” and “The Karate Kid” come easily to mind.

A pleasant pastiche from family-friendly director Rob Minkoff (”Stuart Little,” “The Lion King”) and writer John Fusco (”Hidalgo,” “Young Guns”), “The Forbidden Kingdom” relies on all manner of made-up prophecies, myths and magic spells to get its young hero from modern America to ancient China and into a movie’s worth of trouble. The portal to the past is the armed robbery of an old shopkeeper (yes, that’s Chan in heavy makeup). Somehow, our young hero finds himself whooshed into the past, where he encounters a drunken master (Chan again) and a whole raft of evil tidings. We particularly liked the whip-wielding wicked witch Ni Chang (Bingbing Li).This film’s universe is one of mystic transformations, of warriors turned to stone (and back again) and epic, special-effects confrontations.

But the highlight is human. That’s when Chan’s drunken master confronts Li’s Monkey King. Watching these two old pros go at it is indeed a treat — one that makes the rest of this lightweight epic more tolerable.

The film is rated PG-13 and runs 113 minutes.
We give it a B-.
Find more reviews at BobRossMovies.com

Stones, Scorsese team up for Imaximum exposure.

Shine a Light: We love the Rolling Stones, as much for their longevity as for the great albums they made in the ’60s and ’70s.

The material never seems stale in this startlingly close-up concert film from director Martin Scorsese. He’s a Stones fan, too, as anyone who knows “Mean Streets” or “GoodFellas” can tell. Now in their 60s, Mick, Keith, Charlie and Ronnie haven’t lost a lick of stage presence or musical power. Scorsese’s cameras get right in the guys’ wrinkled but joyous faces, and you really ought to catch this flick on an Imax screen, both for the visual detail and the kick-ass sound system.

If you aren’t a fan, you probably shouldn’t bother. If you are, this is a guaranteed delight, a mix of hits and surprises that never lets up.

We give it a B+

More movies, movies, and movies at bobrossmovies.com

An “Island” only young children can love

Nim’s Island: Oh, Lord, please make Abigail Breslin grow up before she has another chance to play an insufferably precocious, spoiled child.

After her splendid, unaffected work in “Little Miss Sunshine,” she did the cloying, cute-kid bit in “Definitely, Maybe” and now she’s starring in a juvenile fantasy-adventure that insults the intelligence of even its youngest potential patrons.

Breslin plays Nim, the spoiled daughter of a widowed marine biologist (Gerard Butler of “300″ fame). These two live on one of those impossibly well-appointed uncharted islands, where their house is an exotic treetop structure and the food is as friendly as the local creatures. A pelican and sea lion are Nim’s best friends, and when her dad is missing while off on a scientific study, Nim is understandably worried.

This is the kind of movie where a sudden storm can tear up the house but in the next scene all is dry and tidy. It’s a fairy tale for adventurous little girls — girls so young that they won’t look for logic and they’ll be surprised by the most obvious of twists.

My question is this: What is Jodie Foster doing in this simplistic tale? She plays Nim’s favorite novelist, creator of a grand action hero (also portrayed by Butler) whose character is the exact opposite of his author. The writer, we soon learn, is an agoraphobic weirdo who never goes out. But of course she winds up headed for Nim’s island before the story slogs to its finish. This one’s fine for the very youngest (it’s rated PG), but grownups will find their patience strained.

It gets a C-.

As always, find lots of movie reviews by Bob Ross at bobrossmovies.com

Prison-camp drama raises tough questions about actual event.

The Counterfeiters: Just when you think you’ve seen every Holocaust story possible, along comes “The Counterfeiters,” this year’s Oscar-winning foreign-language film.

Yes, it’s in German and set largely in a concentration camp, but this drama — based on the memoir of a Jewish survivor — raises issues that the other World War II stories don’t. That’s because instead of pure black-and-white good-and-evil, we get disturbing shades of gray.

Specifically, we get a cynical, selfish forger named Salomon (Karl Markovics) who gets caught and imprisoned — and then gets a better deal from his captors when he agrees to help the Nazis attack the Allies in a unique fashion.

The German commanders think they can destroy the English and American economies if they can flood both lands with fake currency. Salomon becomes a sort of captive team leader, with his crew getting special privileges — you know, like edible food — and we get to see how an ill-equipped genius can improvise clever counterfeits. But one of the fellow prisoners tries to sabotage the effort: He would rather be hanged than help the Nazis get ahead in a war they are losing (this part of the story is set in 1944-45).

Is he right? What would you do? It’s the sort of question that explains the film’s Oscar and makes the movie more than just another atrocity tale.

We give it a B+

As always, find lots of movie reviews by Bob Ross at bobrossmovies.com