GireWire

A mother and baby walrus bond in Walt Disney’s new, phenomenally photographed nature documentary “Oceans.”

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If you’ve seen the TV commercials or theater trailers for “Oceans,” you already know what you’re in for.

Lots and lots of breathtaking footage of the strange and fascinating creatures that inhabit the world’s five oceans.

• Giant whales shoot to the surface, captured in magnificent, awe-inspiring slow-motion.

• Crabs comically climb into their shells to create instant mobile homes.

• A leopard seal tenderly plays with her offspring below thick slabs of white ice.

Like Walt Disney’s earlier nonfiction feature “Earth,” “Oceans” operates like a “Hooked on Classics” version of nature documentaries. It’s not really one movie. It’s a greatest hits of a zillion nature films all compressed into a single work.

“Oceans” skips around from one subject to the next, from one ocean to the next, with nimble alacrity. This has both positive and negative consequences.

Directors Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud (with editors Catherine Mauchain and Vincent Schmitt) move the film briskly along so nobody can possibly be bored.

Yet, many times the sharks and cuttlefish and other creatures prove to be so fascinating, it becomes frustrating to be yanked away to meet the next guest sea critter. (Read more…)

Zoe (Jennifer Lopez) realizes her dialogue is so bad that she tries to spit it into a paper sack during “The Back-up Plan.”

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Here’s a romantic comedy that thinks if a woman vomiting once is funny, it’ll be twice as funny if she vomits again.

Or that if a man “accidentally” falling down is funny once, it’ll be a real hoot if he falls down again. (Imagine the hilarity when several people “accidentally” fall down!)

Oh, stop, please! My sides are killing me! Oh, wait. That’s my head, not my sides.

“The Back-up Plan” casts romance and pregnancy in such an abysmally dismal light, that watching it instantly becomes the most effective form of birth control since the invention of the Pill.

It stars Jennifer Lopez as Zoe, a single New Yorker racing against her biological clock. Too impatient to wait for Mr. Right, she opts for Mr. Right Now, an unknown sperm donor who supplies the necessary component for her artificial insemination.

Wouldn’t you know it? On the very day this deed gets done, she dashes into a cab at the same time a handsome man enters the other side.

He’s Stan, played by the charismatic Alex O’Loughlin. He makes organic cheeses on his upstate farm and sells them as a New York street vendor. The moment he lays eyes on Zoe, he’s smitten and follows her around, trying to pique her interest in dairy. (Read more…)

Aisha (Zoe Saldana) and Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) enjoy a hot time in the action thriller “The Losers.”

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The action-packed, DC-comic-book-inspired “The Losers” has apparently been created for young male viewers with attention-span deficiencies, an aversion to intimacy with women and a need to have everything in a movie spelled out on a 10-year-old’s level.

Take Jensen, played by Human Torch actor Chris Evans. When he operates a computer, he has this weird habit of explaining what he’s doing, even though there’s nobody else in the room.

As he downloads data, Jensen announces, “Downloading!”

During a shootout, he takes a bullet in the shoulder.

“I’ve been shot in the shoulder!” he shouts. Gee, thanks for the update, Jensen.

He’s one of five members of the CIA’s Special Forces team – aka The Losers – dropped into Bolivia to take out a drug lord’s operations.

Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the guy with permanent 8 o’clock shadow, commands the team. Roque (Idris Elba), the mean-looking, knife-happy dude, likes to stab first and ask questions later.

Pooch (Columbus Short), the nice guy, worries about his wife back home in the States. Cougar (Oscar Jaenada), who never removes his cowboy hat, handles a sniper’s rifle with deadly accuracy.

And, of course, there’s Jensen, a wild and crazy guy who fearlessly changes clothes in elevators and gets caught by the hungry eyes of admiring women. (Read more…)

Hit Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) clobbers a villain in the horrifically violent. graphic novel-inspired action thriller.

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The title doesn’t lie.

Here comes one Red Bull of an action film that doesn’t play nice.

It combines the fantastic underpinnings of a superhero costume adventure with the excessively gory violence of a cheap martial arts exploitation film.

“Kick-Ass” may upset some viewers, especially during the scenes when an 11-year-old female superhero named Hit Girl energetically wipes out a room full of thugs with sharp and scary blades, resulting in geysers of blood and lots of screaming.

If that doesn’t do it, the scenes where the story’s chief villain holds little Hit Girl down and pounds her with his fists certainly will.

Forget your granddad’s cartoony superhero movies.

Matthew Vaughn’s sensationalized story stays true to the darker heart of its source – the comic book series by Mark Millar and John S. Romita Jr. – and proves to be unforgiving of a society that stands idly by while witnessing crime and violence. (Read more…)

Cesar (Clifton Collins Jr.) coaches young Mexican ballplayers to a U.S. championship in the fact-based “The Perfect Game.”

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The title “The Perfect Game” kinda gives away the ending, don’t you think?

This independent drama, directed by William Dear, tells the true story of Mexican ballplayers who won 13 straight Little League games and went on to win the league’s 1957 American World Series, which, as the title suggests, was a perfect game.

This movie throws no curve balls. Everything from the direct, functional dialogue to the superficial, easy-to-grasp characters reeks of an across-the-plate, made-for-television after-school special for kids.

The screenplay, written by W. William Winokur from his own book, serves up its politics with earnest sincerity. Racism is bad. Being optimistic and a self-starter is good. Working together gets you farther than working alone. Belief in God is good, too.

“The Perfect Game” is clearly intended for young audiences, and keeping that in mind, it succeeds on most counts, especially during an awkward, tacked-on romantic subplot, treated with a pre-adolescent mix of embarrassment and bemused mystery. (Read more…)

Steve and Kate (David Duchovny and Demi Moore) want the world’s metaphorical neighbors to keep up with “The Joneses.”

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“The Joneses” begs to be a farce.

It pleads to be funnier.

More acerbic.

More outrageous.

More critical of the consumer culture that eats away at American spirituality by focusing on material possessions instead of the things that really matter.

Nope. Nope. Nope.

Writer/director/producer Derrick Borte will have none of that.

He thinks “The Joneses” should be a ponderously serious commentary weighed down by soap-operatic subplots and capped with a forced ending that no thinking viewer will buy for a moment.

Not even at Walmart prices.

“The Joneses” (as in keeping up with …) move into a posh, stone-built mini-mansion in a super upscale section of town.

Steve Jones (David Duchovny), his wife Kate (Demi Moore), their son Mick (Ben Hollingsworth) and daughter Jen (Amber Heard) seem to be the perfect family.

Perfect, no. Family, no. (Read more…)

Anna Taylor (Christina Ricci) is caught between life and death by a mysterious funeral director in the drama “After.Life.”

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If Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo’s dullingly un-horrific and pseudo-enlightening “After.Life” ever becomes a cult movie, it will undoubtedly be one for necrophiliacs.

After all, the breathtaking Christina Ricci appears in this movie without a stitch, except for the one on her forehead to repair a wicked gash.

She lies down and walks around naked in a chilly morgue looking like a bleached cadaver with her pale skin, dilated belladonna pupils and blood-red lipstick.

As dead women go, she’s a sexual fantasy right out of an R-rated version of Tim Burton’s “The Corpse Bride.”

Ricci plays Anna, a hot, young elementary schoolteacher in a relationship with a local lawyer named Paul (Justin Long). One night, she has a fight with Paul, then drives away in a huff.

The next thing she knows, she wakes up on a slab in an undertaker’s office. She has no heartbeat. No body heat.

“I’m not dead!” Anna shouts.

“You all say the same thing,” Eliot Deacon, the irritable funeral director, replies.

If “After.Life” teaches us anything, it’s that being a clairvoyant funeral director is just about the hardest job in the world of the living. (Read more…)

Trent (Howard Walker) undergoes a few slight changes in the demonic horror tale “The Black Waters of Echo’s Pond.”

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If you crossed Sam Raimi’s “The Evil Dead” with Joe Johnston’s “Jumanji,” you’d sure have a much better movie than Gabriel Bologna’s “The Black Waters of Echo’s Pond.”

All the necessary exploitative elements of a sleazy horror opus are present and accounted for here: gratuitous shower nudity, gallons of splashing blood, possessed souls, cheap shocks and hideous creatures.

But forget about carefully constructed suspense or any degree of empathy with the nasty young people who become trapped on a Maine island before being heinously executed by an icky Greek god and their own dark vices.

“Black Waters” is a horror film that gets the superficial clichés correct (including the done-to-death “it was only a dream” device) but has no understanding of how to connect an audience with its characters so they can freeze the viewers’ collective marrow.

During this part of the review, we’d normally identify the various characters and the actors who play them. But since the partyers here are all a loathsome band of shallow, amoral dunderheads, we’re going to skip right to the plot. (Read more…)

A married couple (Tina Fey and Steve Carell) discover cops can be dangerous in the action comedy “Date Night.”

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“Date Night” steals its principal plot device from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic “North by Northwest,” its spectacular New York car crashes from “The Blues Brothers,” and its put-upon main characters from “The Out of Towners.”

By all rights, this should be a commercially successful but instantly forgettable lightweight popcorn movie to tide the American public over until Hollywood brings out the big summer guns next month.

But the irresistible pairing of Steve Carell and Tina Fey turns “Date Night” into something else, a breezy comedy of errors exploding with chemistry, quotable quips and a surprising amount of empathy, especially in a movie from Shawn Levy, director of the vacuous box office hits “Night at the Museum” and its sequel.

Carell and Fey play “just a boring married couple from New Jersey” who have gotten into a passionless rut. He plays a tax accountant named Phil Foster. She plays his real estate sales wife Claire. (Read more…)

“Avatar” star Sam Worthington stars as the demigod Perseus in the fantasy action remake of 1981’s “Clash of the Titans.”

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On the sandaled heels of the last silly Greek mythology-themed movie – “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief” – comes yet a sillier, clunkier, and more dramatically laughable new Greek gods adventure called “Clash of the Titans.”

It’s a frenetic, humor-challenged, computer-animated remake of a semi-beloved 1981 Ray Harryhausen stop-motion fantasy in which Laurence Olivier postures as Zeus while handsome Harry Hamlin proudly sports the togs of the heroic Perseus.

Harryhausen’s original possessed more than its share of dopey moments, including a cheesy, pre-Potter mechanical owl (used here as a throwaway inside joke) and a severely hokey Pegasus “flying” through the air.

In this new titanic “Clash,” every moment is a dopey one, from the dumbed-down screenplay that often drones on like a dry history lecture to Sam Worthington’s “ancient” Greek buzz-cut hair style and overtly Australian accent.

The story begins when a poor fisherman (Pete Postlethwaite) discovers a baby floating in the ocean. He adopts the baby and names him Perseus, not realizing he is the son of Zeus, who seduced a human queen.

As Perseus grows, his angry father rails against the gods of Mt. Olympus for their oppression and unfairness. (Read more…)