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Diary of the Sleeping Vampie Apprentice: Day Eclipse

By Genevieve Burgess | DVD Releases | November 30, 2010 |

By Genevieve Burgess | DVD Releases | November 30, 2010 |


The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: “As for the movie itself, it’s a bore. But it’s a bore with some occasionally decent special effects, if you’re into gratuitous plasma balls and Tesla coils. Otherwise, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is the sort of movie you’re actually thankful to see Nic Cage in because he offers the dimmest hope that a little freak-out meltdown crazy might break the tedium. I’ll crush your hopes in advance: It doesn’t. Cage is freak-out free in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. And as if to prolong the agony of the film, Cage is the only actor that doesn’t chew through scenery like a bat out of Wicker Man hell, which is a shame because Cage is best when he’s Loony-Tunes ham-hocked.” - Dustin Rowles

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse: “Congratulations, Twilight: Eclipse. You didn’t manage to suck as much as the first two entries into the franchise. Of course, that’s like wereboning a geriatric with dementia during a rare moment of lucidity. Sure, he remembers your name, but he’s still a wheezy, barely erect sag-ass bag of flesh and bones with old-man balls. But that’s not stopping over half of the critical community from tea-bagging the old fuck. Why? Because the standard set by the first two movies is so low that we’re supposed to feel blessed because the dude put in his dentures, metaphorically speaking, never mind that the teeth marks he left on your back are covered in Polident.” - Dustin Rowles

Going the Distance: “2010 has been a terrible year for an already maligned romantic comedy genre, as studios continue to pair bad leading actresses with absurd high concepts, which is like pairing boxed wine with frozen Salisbury steak. They’re barely palatable and it all goes straight to your thighs. Going the Distance actually pokes its head out of the muck by offering a nugget of sincerity and surrounding the middling main narrative with outstanding supporting comedy, primarily from Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day, who has not — as was feared — been muzzled by the studio brass. He’s downright hilarious, and much of Going the Distance feels like an episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” awkwardly stitched together with a rom-com. The result is not bad. Not bad at all, really.” - Dustin Rowles

Knight and Day: “The irony, however, is that — if we were living in a pre-Transformers world — Knight and Day is as generic as they come — a generic spy film bred with a generic romantic comedy. But in this marketplace, it feels almost new, buoyed by the novelty of seeing Tom Cruise in a genre with which we haven’t seen him (in Cruise’s 30-year career, he’s never really carried a comedy, much less a romantic one). And though the one-liners don’t particularly suit Cruise (some of them are bad enough that they wouldn’t even suit Willis or Schwarzenegger in their prime), he’s not what’s wrong with Knight and Day. Cruise — whose on-set professionalism borders on sociopathic — works in this role precisely because of his public perception — look up “crazy” in the Urban Dictionary, and Tom Cruise is literally the definition. And until around the three-quarters mark of Knight and Day, we’re not meant to know for sure whether Cruise’s character — Roy Miller— is a nutjob rogue federal agent or the only sane person left in the FBI. Cruse’s methodical brand of crazy is perfect for the role — he’s calm, cool, and collected, but behind those eyes and underneath that manic grin, there’s a wackjob lunatic screaming to get out.” - Dustin Rowles

Waking Sleeping Beauty: “Disney wasn’t doing shit in the animated marketplace in the early 80s. They had just released The Black Cauldron — one of the four “children’s” movies that I can directly point out as the reason where my generation went horribly Cthlulu (the other three are Labyrinth, The Last Unicorn, and The Dark Crystal) — which was a commercial nightmare. Disney lost the mojo, and it looked like the animation department was on the outs. Roy Disney brought in a dream team to try to fix the Mouse House: Michael Eisner and Frank Wells. Eisner later brought in Jeffrey Katzenberg, and between the three of them, they would take axes to broomsticks and revamp the entire Disney process. Disney, Eisner, and Katzenberg would play round robin kicking each other in the shins and taking all the credit. Frank Wells stood aside, kept the ship afloat, and was basically a motherfucking saint. And so the movie becomes this uncomfortable mash up of horror stories and bickering about Katzenberg and Eisner, intercut with montages of Disney animation magic, and the occasional sob story about the two only decent people in the entire industry dying tragically.” - Brian Prisco

Vampires Suck: “Is it bad? Of course it’s bad. And I’m sorry. Because of the nature of our site, we have to pay for every film we see. And I put money in the pockets of Aaron Seltzer and Jason Freidberg. Which means they’ll be able to crap out more Movie Movies. I didn’t need to see this film to know it was going to be fucking terrible. Why wouldn’t it be fucking terrible? Someone pointed a camera at this, and those someones were Seltzer and Freidberg. I thought about not going to see it: just cutting and pasting completely random lines from the reviews of Eclipse, New Moon, and Twilight from our site and from other sites and calling it a review. But then, I realized, I wouldn’t be doing my job. So I went. And that was my mistake. Because as a film reviewer, I’m supposed to review films. And this — this isn’t a fucking film. It’s the script for Twilight, read out loud by a ten year-old with Tourette’s who only ever watches the TV Guide channel and doesn’t know swear words. There aren’t jokes. Jokes would imply punch lines. There are loudly shouted references. Each riff happens once, like instead of a contract, they were given a checklist. Fart joke, belch joke, punch in the face joke, puppy joke, bling, Jersey Shore, Kardashians. Did we do all that? Next scene. Vampires Suck is the cinematic equivalent of building a demolition company at ground zero. Only there’s not enough room, so they have to tear down more buildings. With people still in them. By crashing an airplane full of toddlers into them. Only if you videotaped the people plummeting to their deaths from those buildings, it’d still be funnier than this.” - Brian Prisco

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: “Essentially, Wimpy Kid is only slightly better than its trailers (“Wanna see my secret freckle? It’s got a hair in it!”) would suggest, and it’s sort of like “The Wonder Years” with much less charm and no sense of nostalgia. Unlike the young Fred Savage, actor Zachary Gordon doesn’t make us feel for Greg, who isn’t so much an anguished soul trapped in a short kid’s body but, instead, a conceited, opportunistic, and unfeeling prick with an inexplicably inflated sense of self worth. At home, Greg has a sadistic older brother Rodrick (Devon Bostick) and inattentive parents Susan (Rachael Harris) and Frank Heffley (Steve Zahn, nooooo) who are portrayed as idiots. At school, fellow outcasts Fregley (Grayson Russell) and Rowley (Robert Capron) are company; the latter is Greg’s best friend from grade school, who is suddenly a huge embarrassment with a girly bike, rotund body, and innocent way of shouting, “Do you want to come over and play?” Within our antihero’s misguided search of cool, the perpetually clueless Rowley is suddenly everything that Greg doesn’t want to be, so he mercilessly rids himself of what he considers to be far too much dead weight upon his potential popularity. Yet, Greg doesn’t even deserve a friend like Rowley, who actually earns more cool points by genuinely not caring what anyone thinks and, as such, is the only character of the movie that moves beyond mere caricature.” - Agent Bedhead