The Ides of March Is A Shallow Exploration of American Politics That Wastes So Many Talented Actors

MASSIVE SPOILERS WITHIN!!

George Clooney is a great actor. He's usually always a charming presence in whatever he pops up in but he's especially stellar playing more troubled characters that serve as a subversion of his movie star persona, like in Up in the Air or in his outstanding voice work in Fantastic Mr. Fox. He also seems like a decent fella in real life and his 2005 directorial effort Good Night and Good Luck was a well-made piece of historical drama cinema. All of that being said, Clooney's attempts to direct and/or star in films that have some kind of sociopolitical message in the 2010s (Suburbicon, Money Monster, even Tomorrowland) have been a big o'l miss, Clooney always ends up being a part of films that have really nothing need to add to the conversation, they just add surface-level observations at best and downright nonsensical takes on real-world problems in the worst instances like Suburbicon.

The Future May Be Uncertain But At Least One Can Be Certain That Private Life Is Exquisite

The way Private Life depicts the day-to-day life of a married couple feels so quietly revolutionary to me in a number of ways. Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti) have a number of issues to work through but they're mundane issues, the film doesn't drum up conflict by way of having one of them cheat on the other or have one of them go off and spend a whole bunch of money without discussing it with their partner. Private Life is far more interested in exploring the fascinating day-to-day struggles that crop up between the two and how they navigate them as they struggle to have a child and limiting the scope of the film to such a realistically intimate degree turns out to be one of Private Life's most brilliant decisions.

Lady In The Water Is Listless Fairy Tale Storytelling

Lady In The Water was a game-changer for M. Night Shyamalan but not in the ways he intended, good Lord no. His previous movie, The Village, may have generated a divisive response that resulted in strong but frontloaded box office but at least that one has its ardent fanbase. Lady In The Water, on the other hand, has spent its eleven years of existence under intense derision and has been widely seen as a turning point for Shyamalan from titan filmmaker to the nearly decade long stretch he'd spend in the land of awful cinema before The Visit revived him. I wish I could say I was going against the tide and found Lady In The Water enjoyable, but alas, I found it be a kind of interesting but mostly boring misfire.

The Final San Andreas Trailer Shakes Things Up

I love me a good disaster movie, and I similarly love me a good action film featuring The Rock (hello Fast & Furious 5-7!), so frankly, I feel like I should be more excited for San Andreas than I currently am. But the first two trailers haven't been that compelling, with The Rock being in a more restrained mode that zaps him of the kind of charisma and charm that made him so famous, and none of the spectacle being that memorable. So I watched the newest trailer for San Andreas, which is below, with great interest, hoping it'd boost my anticipation for the film.

Fred Claus Is A Mean-Spirited Misfire Of Gigantic Proportions

Welcome to 25 Days Of Christmas Pop Culture! From now until Christmas Eve, I'll be tackling one piece of Christmas pop culture! It could be a book, movie, TV special, song....so long as it's festive for this time of the year, it'll be checked out in this daily column!

The success of Tangled begat Frozen. The success of Shrek begat Puss In Boots. When a movie studio finds financial favor in a certain property, original properties taking cues from that successful feature are just as common as sequels. So it's not hard to imagine Warner Bros. taking one look at all the money fellow Time Warner owned movie studio New Line Cinema made with Elf and wanting their own family Christmas movie with a big comedian. They decided to also take a cue from 2005 smash hit Wedding Crashers by reuniting Vince Vaughn with that movies director, David Dobkin.