Kristen Stewart

Café Society

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Café Society
  • IMDb: link

Café SocietyDefinitely fitting into the category of lesser Woody Allen films, Café Society follows the rather uninteresting romance between a Brooklyn transplant to Los Angeles (Jesse Eisenberg) and a young woman (Kristen Stewart) who is also dating his older, and married, uncle (Steve Carell). The main problem with the film is we don’t care about any of the three characters or who ends up with who. There’s also an underdeveloped subplot involving the kid’s gangster brother (Corey Stoll) which, like the rest of the film, never goes anywhere all that interesting.

While capable, and beautifully shot, neither Stewart nor Blake Lively (in a much smaller role) have the wit or spirit of Woody Allen’s more memorable female characters. No one will confuse either with Annie Hall. And neither Eisenberg nor Carell seem particularly suited to Allen’s storytelling, although the blasé script gives them very little to work with.

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Jumanji Reloaded

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Zathura: A Space Adventure
  • IMDb: link

Zathura: A Space AdventureDanny (Jonah Bobo) and Walter (Josh Hutcherson) are brothers left alone by their father (Tim Robbins) one afternoon, with their older sister Lisa (Kristen Stewart) ignoring them upstairs.  Walter is the the bullying older brother who has outgrown Danny and thinks of himself as more mature than his little brother.  Danny finds an old board game in the basement.  Zathura is a game about space travel and to win you must be the first to the end.  After Danny pushes the button the boys are trapped in the game as all sorts of things start to go wrong:  meteor showers, spaceships full of Zorgons, the cryogenic freezing of their sister, a malfunctioning robot, and a stranded astronaut.

One of the best decisions in this movie is to center the movie on the boys and their reactions to what is happening.  The director gets the bickering of brothers so good that in parts I wanted to pull out my hair to stop the whining.  Kudos, but I wish you had turned it down just slightly.

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American Ultra

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: American Ultra
  • IMDb: link

American UltraThe tail end of the summer movie season is pretty much a crap shoot. While I was pleasantly surprised with the under-appreciated The Man from U.N.C.L.E., director Nima Nourizadeh‘s stoner-action comedy is more what I’ve come to expect from this time of year. American Ultra isn’t a bad film, but it’s not all-together a good one either. A hodgepodge of ideas from both better and worse movies, American Ultra is an occasionally enjoyable B-movie mess.

Jesse Eisenberg stars as stoner convenience clerk Mike Howell with a girlfriend (Kristen Stewart) too good for him, friends (most notably John Leguizamo) just as mentally-challenged, and a brain full of secret CIA training which has been locked away for years until the most over-the-top Topher Grace ever captured on film decides to have Howell killed by agents that make the bad guys in Hudson Hawk look like Bond villains.

Activated by the former leader (Connie Britton) of the project, Howell soon finds himself with the ability to instinctively kill in a variety of bizarre ways without ever understanding exactly how, why, or what he’s doing. Dumb, but at least it looks cool on camera.

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