Quick Review: This Is The End

And now back to our regularly scheduled movie review programming. (I hope.) I expected a lot from the trailer for This Is The End and, unlike a lot of movies recently, this one mostly lived up to my expectations. A comedy in which the Apocalypse takes place is one thing. When it focuses on how this event affects Hollywood celebrities, that's another story. And when those celebrities -- James Franco, Seth Rogen, Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel and Danny McBride are the stars, with many other cameos, from Rihanna to Michael Cera to Channing Tatum -- are playing exaggerated versions of themselves, it goes to the next level. Lots of raunch, but also lots of laughs and some meta commentary about the celebs themselves, their importance (or lack thereof), how they're perceived by the public and media, etc., and a little stab at religious beliefs (after all, the Apocalypse is happening). Had me laughing almost from the start to the finish. My grade: A-minus.

Quick Reviews: Scream 4, Your Highness

I don't like to combine movie posts into one, but it's been a little while since I've seen these and I need to get this out of the way, and with the Flyers game starting in an hour, I'm pressed for time. Maybe that's what I need to motivate me to write: deadlines.

Nah.

Anyhoo, one of these is already gone from theaters and the other won't be far behind.

"Scream 4" brings back original stars Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette and a bunch of new kids to be slaughtered by the latest Ghostface killer, who gets to killing when Campbell's Sidney Prescott returns to town on her book tour. The movie is most notable because the real-life martial issues of Cox and Arquette are eerily played out on screen -- their characters, now married, are having some issues of their own. While the film tries, after an 11-year gap, to reinvent itself for the digital era, it never really does. There's lots of talk of being "meta" but not enough that's actually meta-something. My grade: C-plus.

"Your Highness" had very few laughs. I never got invested in the plot, involving a medieval kingdom and the quest of two brothers (James Franco and Danny McBride) to save a fair maiden from an evil wizard, and...face it, the plot doesn't matter. This felt like an excuse to run around in costumes and make juvenile sex and drug jokes and curse almost constantly. Most of it fell flat, although I never was annoyed enough to think about walking out of the theater. Maybe that was because I enjoy staring at James Franco. My grade: C-minus.