Author: David Medsker

“Cars 2” is more entertaining than the 2006 original, but it damn well better be. “Cars” is the weakest movie in Pixar history, and this movie, when compared to the rest of Pixar’s titles, still ranks no higher than the second-weakest or third-weakest movie in Pixar history. It looks fantastic, and contains some nifty action sequences, but the story, quite frankly, is beneath them.

Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) is looking forward to taking some time away from the racing circuit to hang out with his friends in Radiator Springs, but he is goaded into joining a three-stage, bi-continental race by energy magnate Sir Miles Axlerod (Eddie Izzard) and hotshot Formula One driver Francesco Bernoulli (a very funny John Turturro). Lightning decides to take his best friend Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) with him, and during the Tokyo stage, Mater embarrasses Lightning in front of his more refined racer friends, while being mistaken for an undercover American spy by British secret agent Finn McMissile (Michael Caine). Soon Mater is off assisting Finn and Holly Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer) on a secret mission, and before long they discover that their mission involves McQueen and the other drivers in the World Grand Prix, and a plot to destroy them.

Here is the most important thing you need to know about this movie: Larry the Cable Guy has top billing. Larry actually turned in a nice performance as a supporting character in the original, but making him top banana…oh, how do we put this delicately…it makes for a dumber movie. They can put all of the spy gadgets and gearhead talk – and they supply plenty of both – as they want, but in the end, this is a slightly smarter version of one of Larry the Cable Guy’s live action movies, which is to say, still not terribly smart. The kids will love it. Grown-ups’ results will definitely vary.

Caine and Mortimer do a good job keeping the spy element interesting (even if the mystery itself would make Scooby Doo blush), and the Toyko sequence contains some great bits, especially the Japanese game show clip. That story, though, is death. Between the boatloads of exposition and the entire spy plot hanging on the four words Mater doesn’t say (you know what they are), there are few of Pixar’s trademark story elements in play. If anything, it’s a lot like “Megamind” or DreamWorks’ other non-“Kung Fu Panda” movies – it’s noisier than it is fun. And if you must see this film, for God’s sake do not under any circumstances see it in 3D. There is hardly anything 3D about it.

You can’t help but feel sorry for John Lasseter and the Pixar crew. They surely know that “Cars” is their worst movie, but from a merchandising standpoint, it’s just under “Toy Story” on the cash cow scale. They had to make a second “Cars” movie, and it must have killed them to know that they could never inject “Cars 2” with the emotional depth of “Up” or “WALL·E” or the smarts of “The Incredibles.” Transforming it from a road movie to a spy movie was a good idea, though. Making Mater the star, however, was not.

For the first time in their history, Pixar blinked. “Cars,” the last movie in the original distribution deal between Disney and Pixar and the first to be directed by John Lasseter since 1999’s “Toy Story 2,” certainly looks like a Pixar movie, but it doesn’t feel like one. It feels like one of Pixar’s less imaginative rivals trying to make a Pixar movie, but falling into the tired trappings that Pixar, up to this point, has deftly avoided. It is also two hours long, which is about 30 minutes longer than it needs to be.

The movie begins with the souped up Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson), a fan favorite on the racing circuit, blowing a lead in his latest race because he refused, once again, to listen to his pit crew chief. The race ends in a three-way tie between Lightning, the obnoxious Chick Hicks (Michael Keaton) and racing legend “The King” (real life racing legend Richard Petty), and they must all travel to California for a tiebreaker. Lightning insists that his carrier, a semi truck named Mack (John Ratzenberger, of course), drive straight through to California, which results in Mack falling asleep at the wheel, and Lightning sliding out of the back of the truck, finding himself in run-down Radiator Springs. After a mishap wrecks the town’s main road, the local judge Doc Hudson (Paul Newman) orders Lightning to repave the road. While performing his community service, he befriends tow truck Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), and falls for the local attorney and motel operator Sally (Bonnie Hunt).

There’s a sweet story in here, one that teaches children the importance of being a good person over being a famous or important one, and reminds them to take in the surroundings rather than spending your life racing from point A to point B. The execution of it, however, is deliberate and tedious. In fact, nearly every Pixar taboo is violated here, from the marketing of the voice talent – something Brad Bird, director of “The Incredibles,” denounced in an interview with “Entertainment Weekly” – to the use of a pop soundtrack instead of a score (no one, repeat, no one asked for Rascal Flatts to cover “Life Is a Highway”). Lastly, there’s the casting of the voice talent, which brings new meaning to the terms ‘old school’ and ‘stereotypical.’ George Carlin is a hippie VW van who sells organic fuel. Cheech Marin’s Ramone runs a detail shop and has a new paint job in every scene. I’m sure these characters were created as amusement for the grownups as they take their tykes to see the movie, but it feels lazy this time, like they didn’t really put much thought into, well, anything. Not only is it overlong, but “Cars” is sorely missing the comedic punch and energy that makes Pixar movies hold up to repeat viewings. And I won’t even discuss the ending, where the movie becomes surprisingly self-referential and takes some painfully easy jokes.

The one thing they did get right, though, is the voice direction. The performances from the leads are all great, with even Larry the Cable Guy showing some dramatic chops. Paul Newman, however, sounds less like himself and more like Lawrence Tierney (a.k.a. Joe, the guy who assigned the names in “Reservoir Dogs”). The movie looks fantastic, too, with a couple stunning shots during Sally and Lightning’s trip into the countryside. But Pixar has always been a story-first studio; it is expected of them that things will look great. Where they excel is how their movies make you feel, and this one didn’t make me feel much of anything.

It is an interesting turn of events that “Cars,” with its top-heavy voice talent, pop soundtrack, and half-hearted in-jokes, plays out more like a DreamWorks Animation movie, while “Over the Hedge,” the most recent (and far superior) movie released by DreamWorks, has the spirit and energy of a Pixar movie. Looks like your secret’s out, Pixar. Now quit fretting about it and start making good movies again. –

There are a million reasons to like “Caddyshack.” It’s pound for pound the most quotable movie of all time, and it features a scene-stealing performance from Rodney Dangerfield, not to mention the perfect breasts of Cindy Morgan. But here’s the catch: as funny as it is, “Caddyshack” is not a great movie. The story is seriously lacking in focus, plot devices appear and disappear without a word, and many of the supporting characters simply can’t act. (Ahem, Spalding) This is why the movie was so poorly received by critics upon its release in 1980, and they were not wrong. Missing the point, perhaps, but not wrong.

Set at the stuffy Bushwood Country Club, young caddy Danny Noonan (Michael O’Keefe) needs to make some money, or he’s doomed to a life at the lumberyard. When he discovers that the annual caddy scholarship is up for grabs, Danny reluctantly subjects himself to its benefactor, the boorish Judge Smalls (Ted Knight), even though he’d rather spend time with the younger and mysteriously rich Zen golfer Ty Webb (Chevy Chase). Smalls, meanwhile, is annoyed by the presence of garish real estate magnate Al Czervik (Dangerfield), and ultimately a class war erupts at the club, with Danny torn on which side to choose.

The above paragraph describes next to nothing about the movie itself, but that goes back to the earlier comment about the story. Most of the characters interact around the other characters, but rarely with them. Heck, Danny’s girlfriend Maggie (Sarah Holcomb) might be a figment of Danny’s imagination for all we know, since she doesn’t interact with anyone else in the movie. The story also dangles preppy slut Lacey Underall (Morgan) for roughly an hour, at which point she vanishes without helping advance a single story line. Likewise, there is one scene between Chase and Bill Murray’s spacey greens keeper Carl, and its sole purpose is to get the two in the same room together. Granted, the scene is funny, as is Chase’s scene with Morgan, but both are superfluous. Most of the movie is superfluous, if we’re being honest.

But man, is there some comic gold in those pointless scenes. Chase does here what he’s always done best, which is playing straight man to the insanity around him, though his blindfolded putting sound will live on golf courses forever. Dangerfield is, well, Dangerfield, and that’s just what the part needs. O’Keefe is very likable as Danny, but ultimately the movie belongs to the late, great Ted Knight. His portrayal of Smalls is the textbook definition of pomposity, making him the perfect foil for everyone else in the movie. Murray’s Carl comes a close second for laughs, though one wonders how much better his role would have been if he spent more time interacting with human actors rather than the animatronic gopher. Everyone remembers the lines from his speech about golfing with the Dali Lama, but does anyone remember that he’s carelessly holding a pitchfork to a caddy’s neck the entire time?

So yes, “Caddyshack” is a far from perfect movie, but it works, and as a bonus, the movie’s contributed more quality quotes per minute to the pop culture lexicon than any other movie. So it’s got that going for it. Which is nice.

One gets the sense that Joel and Ethan Coen tried as hard as they could to steer clear of writing or adapting anything that had the faintest whiff of “Fargo” to it, and that’s understandable. After all, we are a here-today-gone-yesterday society when it comes to entertainment, and despite the Coens’ near-immaculate track record before the breakout success of “Fargo,” had they done another similarly-themed project shortly afterward, they would risk getting moved to the One Trick Pony column. Again, the facts clearly state that they are anything but a one-trick pony, but ask any agent and they’ll tell you: facts have nothing on perception.

Thank goodness, then, that the statute of limitations on re-entering “Fargo” appears to have expired, because no one does bumbling criminals better than the Coens. (See this year’s “Married Life” for an example of how not to do bumbling criminals. Or better yet, don’t see it.) “Burn After Reading” takes the hare-brained scheming of Jerry Lundegaard and adds one dose of government conspiracy and a whole lot of infidelity to the mix. It’s equally ridiculous and real, funny and sad.

Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) is a CIA analyst whose drinking leads to a humiliating demotion, and Ozzie quits rather than accept the new position. His wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) is having an affair with paranoid Treasury employee Harry (George Clooney), and plans to divorce Ozzie. Harry is married too, though he’s reluctant to lower the boom on his unsuspecting wife. Katie’s divorce attorney suggests that she plunge into Ozzie’s financial records, so Katie burns a bunch of financial data from Ozzie’s computer onto a CD, along with the notes for the tell-all memoir he plans to write. The CD is later found in the locker room of a nearby gym, where employees Chad (Brad Pitt) and Linda (Frances McDormand) hatch the brilliant plan to return the CD in hopes of a reward. The reward accidentally turns into a blackmail scheme, and Ozzie is having none of it. In order to raise the stakes, Chad and Linda contact the Russian embassy, to see if they would pay for the data on the CD, unaware that they have gone from engaging in blackmail to committing treason.

First off, Carter Burwell gets huge props for his fantastic score. The Coens went minimalist on “No Country for Old Men” – the score didn’t kick in until the credits – but Burwell’s work here is relentless and deathly serious, something worthy of “In the Line of Fire.” Its genius is in the paradox; as we match Linda, Chad, Ozzie and Harry make one stupid decision after another, the music ramps up the tension as if the fate of the Western world hangs in the balance. Very clever.

Malkovich has the money part here. His Ozzie can barely finish a sentence without throwing at least one ‘fuck’ in it, and his exchanges with the dim-witted Pitt (whose word of choice is ‘shit’) are priceless. McDormand’s Linda is a strange little bird; her life is full of bad decisions because she’s too busy talking to allow anyone else to knock some sense into her. In the hands of a lesser actress, she would be insufferable, but McDormand makes her more difficult and sad than obnoxious. Pitt is a little too good at playing dumb, but while we’re talking about typecasting, Tilda Swinton plays the stone-cold bitch like no other. She is pitch-perfect for the role of Katie, and in fact might be too good at it. By the time the movie ends, one wonders what Ozzie and Harry ever saw in her in the first place.

Much like “No Country,” the ending of “Burn After Reading” is a tad off. You get the sense that the Coens actually had the characters spinning even more wildly out of control, but instead brought in J.K. Simmons’ CIA character (Simmons makes everything better) to tie everything together with a neat little bow. Still, this is one of those movies where the journey is far more important than the destination, and “Burn After Reading” is one loopy journey.

It takes a special kind of baseball fan to write about the minor leagues. In “Bull Durham,” Writer/director Ron Shelton, who spent five years in the Baltimore Orioles farm system, has put together the snappiest, funniest, and most poignant love letter to baseball ever written, though its ultimate moral deals with matters of the heart.

Based in the Carolina leagues, veteran catcher Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) is signed by the Durham Bulls to act as mentor for pitching prospect Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh (Tim Robbins), who has “a million dollar arm and a five cent head.” Crash has his work cut out for him. Nuke is a flamethrower, but has almost no accuracy (one box score shows 18 strikeouts and 18 walks). Outside a bar, Crash dares Nuke to hit him in the chest with a pitch. Nuke shatters a window ten feet away.

To make matters worse, Nuke has a new girlfriend, Durham Bulls groupie Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon). Annie picks one player per year to be her boy toy, with the hopes of making them better players and more well rounded individuals. (She reads Walt Whitman to Nuke while he’s tied to her bed. A flustered Nuke asks, “Hey, are we gonna fuck or what?”) This bothers Crash for two reasons. He thinks she’s distracting Nuke, but more importantly Crash knows that he is a much better match for Annie than Nuke is. Let the games begin.

The Bulls actually start winning games, but that is barely a plot point, which goes to show how different Bull Durham is from other baseball movies. Its characters play baseball, it takes place around baseball, but in the end the movie is about self-respect and following your heart. Surrounding that moral are invaluable tips about fighting (never lead with your pitching hand), shaking off your catcher (he’ll tell the batter what you’re about to throw), and what those meetings on the pitcher’s mound are really about (wedding gift ideas). Costner has never been better, and Sarandon was the pitch perfect choice for the well read-yet-naïve Annie. “Bull Durham” is for people who love baseball, but it’s mainly for people who love love.

It’s said that there are things in life that are so beautiful that men would go to war for them. “The Brothers Grimm,” on the other hand, is so bad that it will start riots. Indeed, three of the fellow viewers at the screening I attended were actually angry when they left, frustrated beyond belief that someone as talented as Terry Gilliam could make something so spectacularly awful. “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo” and “The Dukes of Hazzard” were bad too, but there was no chance that they would be anything but bad. Anytime Terry Gilliam is behind the camera, however, there’s the chance you might see something magical. Which makes it all the more frustrating when a Gilliam makes a movie that turns out to be complete and utter dogshit.

Matt Damon and Heath Ledger star as Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, two brothers in French occupied Germany who make a living battling ghosts and demons, which is easier than it sounds, since the ghosts and demons are just elaborate parlor tricks staged by the brothers and a couple of henchmen. (Jacob himself was swindled as a child by someone who sold him magic beans that would allegedly cure his ailing sister, who of course died. The seed, as they say, was planted.) The French ruler knows about them, and rather than merely put them to death, he decides to torture them a little bit first. He has heard rumblings about a village bordering a forest that truly appears to be enchanted, and young girls from the village are disappearing. The brothers Grimm are sent there to “solve” their problem, which the ruler expects will end with them getting burned alive by the townsfolk.

Will thinks that the woods are just the work of someone who’s performing an even more elaborate ruse than the ones that he and Jacob perform. But Jacob knows better; he notices that the trees are indeed moving, and he’s read all the fairy tales that Will dismisses, and recognizes a similarity to a story about a queen (Monica Belluci) who loved to gaze upon her reflection. They enlist the reluctant help of a tracker named Angelika (Lena Headey) to get them out of the woods alive.

It’s difficult to tell where to begin with what is wrong with this movie. It doesn’t seem to have any idea what it wants to be. Is it a comedic thriller? Is it a thrilling comedy? Actually, it’s neither, since the comedic bits aren’t funny and the movie is entirely thrill-free. Ledger didn’t even bother to switch his accent from Australian to English. Ehren Kruger’s script is insufferable, leaving nothing whatsoever to the imagination. Take the scene where Angelika stands face to face with the big bad wolf that prowls the forest (the same wolf that, yes, snagged Greta, sister of Hans, and a girl in a red hood). It’s clear she notices something in the wolf’s eyes, as they show her staring deeply into them while the wolf’s eyes seem to glow at the sight of Angelika. But they decide to go one step further; after the wolf runs away, Angelika says, “His eyes,” just in case anyone may have missed the sledgehammer subtlety of the moment.

And then, they make her say it again. “His eyes.”

Are, you, kidding me? Was there anyone who needed her to say it a first time, never mind a second time? It’s clear that the filmmakers had no idea how the movie was going to turn out, and therefore covered all bases to make sure it wasn’t too obtuse. In other words, they knew they were making a turkey.

The love triangle between the brothers and Angelika is woefully mishandled. Her feelings for them are so unclear, she winds up looking like she’s trying to bed both of them. Kruger wrote the script for “The Skeleton Key” as well, which is a beacon of timing and subtlety compared to this. He’s not the best screenwriter in the world, but he’s absolutely better than this, which suggests that someone else tried to punch the script up after Kruger was involved with the production, but left his name on it. Poor bastard.

Harvey Weinstein is almost as well known for the movies he doesn’t release as he is for the movies he does release; the vaults at Miramax/Dimension allegedly hold hundreds and hundreds of movies that will never see the light of day. I’m not sure if releasing “The Brothers Grimm,” after missing multiple deadlines, was one of Weinstein’s last missives or the act of the new regime, but they would have been wise to shelve this one for all eternity.

Certain things go together. Peanut butter and chocolate. Jack and ginger (yes, ginger, not Coke. Try it). “Bridge of Spies,” on the other hand, is proof positive that Steven Spielberg (the film’s director), and Joel and Ethan Coen (the film’s co-screenwriters), absolutely do not go together. In fact, this would have been a much better movie had the Coens directed it themselves. There are these subtle, effective and surprisingly funny moments that are clearly the Coens’ work, and then Spielberg steps in and drowns everything else in syrup. That it remains a watchable movie is in spite of Spielberg’s efforts, not because of them.

It is the late ‘50s, and Cold War paranoia is at an all-time high. The F.B.I. captures Brooklyn resident, and Russian spy, Rudolph Abel (Mark Rylance), and the government assigns a local law firm to represent Abel. The case is assigned to James Donovan (Tom Hanks), even though he is primarily an insurance lawyer. James quickly realizes that no one is interested in giving Rudolph a fair trial, which only leads James to fight even harder to get him one, regardless of the hardships that may mean for him and his family. He loses, but successfully lobbies to pardon Rudolph from getting the death penalty, arguing that the U.S. would be wise to keep him around as a bargaining chip.

Sure enough, James proves to be right, as American pilot Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) is captured after his U-2 spy plane is bombed out of the sky by the Russians, and he is sentenced to hard labor in a Russian prison. The U.S. government asks James if he can negotiate an unofficial trade with the Russians to swap Rudolph for Powers. James is game, but he wants to sweeten the deal by also getting the Russians to convince the German Democratic Republic – who are building the wall between East Berlin and West Berlin as these events are taking place – to also release Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), an economics student that the GDR has falsely accused of espionage in the hopes that they will get invited to the political big boy table.

The first 15 minutes of this movie are near-perfect. We are introduced to Hanks as he is discussing an insurance case with the prosecuting attorney, and he is dazzling. The dialogue is snappy, and Hanks’ timing is sublime. (He’s worked with the Coens before, and his understanding of their rhythms is on full display.) There is no musical score. The film is given a chance to breathe. And then the C.I.A. get involved in James’ life, Thomas Newman’s score kicks in (more on that later), and the movie ticks off every ‘good man persecuted for doing the right thing’ trope in the book. Dirty looks on the train. Drive-by shooting into his house, and to add insult to injury, the cop on the scene verbally assaults James. The judge of Rudolph’s trial denies him any attempt at a fair one, despite ample evidence. The movie trades one set of clichés for another when James travels to Berlin to negotiate the exchanges, and even then, it’s not quite the cat-and-mouse game that it’s proposed to be. It’s more like a game of Texas hold ‘em, but everyone is playing with house money and has nothing to lose. Not once is there the sense that James or the U.S. stand to lose anything. In a spy thriller, that’s not a good thing.

Writing scores is undoubtedly hard, but Newman’s score here is just unbearable. The most shocking thing about it is how lacking in self-confidence it is. It sounds like the kind of thing a musically talented teen who’s only seen a handful of movies (all directed by Spielberg, presumably) might write. “Wait, tense moment; write some shrill string lines. Patriotic moment here; use a bunch of snare drums and press rolls.” It’s really that simplistic, and very distracting.

I’ve spent most of this review ripping this film to shreds, but the opening of “Bridge of Spies” was so unbelievably good that it nets out in the middle. There is nothing original about it after the opening, but it gets a pass because of the moments where there is a Coen-esque moment of genus or levity. That they follow some of those moments with another moment of blatant hypocrisy – Hanks’ character tells someone else that it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks about him, only to follow that with two (!) scenes of Hanks’ character’s redemption at the hands of random strangers, in addition to his own somewhat estranged family– appears to be irrelevant. This movie will seem fine up until the credits roll, but it will have you asking yourself a lot of questions as you’re walking to the car.

There’s something cynical about the very existence of “Bridesmaids.” You can almost see Judd Apatow and his friends having a brainstorming session, and one of them (Seth Rogen, probably), says, “Hey, we should make an all-girl comedy. We’re always accused of not writing good parts for women. Well, let’s have two women write parts of their own!” High fives all around. The scotch flows freely, until Martin Starr pukes in the pool.

And to the credit of all involved, “Bridesmaids” has its good points. While the majority of the supporting characters have the depth of stick figures, Kristen Wiig’s scenes with Chris O’Dowd are touching and real, and her character, while a mess, is a relatable, human mess. Having said that, it’s time to let this whole raunch-com thing die already. Look at what they did to “Going the Distance” last year. It’s this sweet little story about two people who help each other get back on track, and they filled it with dick jokes in order to “compete.” What a waste.

Annie Walker (Kristen Wiig) is down on her luck. Her bakery went out of business, and her boyfriend left her. She tries to put on a brave face when her lifelong best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) gets engaged and makes Annie her maid of honor, but Lillian’s new BFF Helen (Rose Byrne) is threatened by Annie, and as the two face off to establish themselves as the alpha female, they ruin each step of Lillian’s engagement in the process.

There is one key difference to the events in “Bridesmaids” that separates it from the Todd Phillips movies, which are loaded with zany antics but don’t back up their actions with logic: even when Annie is screwing up at her worst, she does so while trying her best, as opposed to, say, Zach Galifianakis blowing all of his money on weed in “Due Date” for no other reason than because he’s an idiot man-child and the plot requires them to be broke. When Annie takes the bridesmaids to the Argentinean place – which produces an admittedly good gross-out scene – it’s because she thinks Lillian and the girls will love it, and they do, at least until they realize it doesn’t love them back. The movie’s secret weapon is that these things could happen in the real world, and in this genre, keeping it real is a rare gift.

But sweet Jesus, is this movie long, a good 15 minutes longer than it needs to be. The scene where Annie and Helen are trying to out-toast each other is like watching the bit in “The Simpsons” where Sideshow Bob keeps stepping on rakes; it’s clearly going for the ‘it’s funny, it’s not funny, it’s hilarious’ vibe, but it never gets to the ‘it’s hilarious’ part. The scenes at the jewelry store are equally brutal. It’s good that they gave some scenes room to breathe (the airplane scene in particular), but with a running time well over two hours, “Bridesmaids” has a bit too much breathing room.

The acting, though, is quite solid. Annie might be the most true-to-life character Wiig’s ever played, and she does a great job finding the humanity in such a screw-up. Byrne is disturbingly good as the verbal assassin Helen, and Melissa McCarthy pretty much steals the movie as Megan, the human steamroller (literally and figuratively). O’Dowd plays an Irish cop that Annie has a meet cute with, and his openness plays well against an amusing cameo by Jon Hamm as Annie’s jerkoff fuck buddy.

It’s nice to give the women a chance to play what is by and large a man’s game, and in many ways “Bridesmaids” one-ups the male-driven raunch-coms in terms of believability and emotional heft (though enough with the shots of the puppies, already). The problem is that the territory the movie covers, on both the bridal side and the gross-out side, is well worn, and while the blending of the two genres is unique, the material isn’t. Still, it could have been much worse.

(Imaginary conversation between two women, presumably in their 20’s)

“Okay, so, Jennifer Aniston is, like, totally dumped by her hubby Brad, who shacks up with that homewrecker Angelina Jolie. But get this, she tooootally gets him back by hooking up with that “Wedding Crashers” guy, you know? Anyway, so Jennifer and Vince made this movie, but it’s about them, like, breaking up! I mean, who wants to see that?”

Who wants to see that, indeed. The entire Hollywood community, it appears, just wants Jennifer Aniston to be happy. So after test audiences revolted to the original ending to their movie, “The Break-Up,” cast and crew reassembled in Chicago in order to shoot a more pro-Jen ending…and audiences hated it even more than the original ending. But the problem with “The Break-Up” isn’t the ending, or the alternate ending (they chose the right one in the end, not that it mattered), but the execution of everything up to the ending. They made the same mistake that Danny DeVito made with “The War of the Roses”: the relationship between the two leads is so horrifically lopsided that by the time it comes to its inevitable conclusion, it’s hard to disagree, never mind care.

The movie begins with a meet-cute at Wrigley Field between Gary (Vaughn) and Brooke (Aniston), and after the happy-couple photo montage over the credits (it includes a lot of shots of Vaughn shirtless, which made me wonder who was shooting these seemingly intimate moments between Gary and Brooke), we see the domesticated Gary and Brooke, who share a condo. The friction between them is clear from the beginning: Brooke feels unappreciated, and Gary feels smothered. This presents itself in a rather unfunny fashion during an otherwise funny dinner scene involving both families that is absolutely stolen by John Michael Higgins, who plays Brooke’s a cappella singing brother. After the dinner party, Gary and Brooke have an argument, and by the end of it, Brooke breaks up with Gary.

But what to make of the condo that they bought together? Neither will move out, and so each takes turns trying to either assert their dominance or make the other jealous, with varying degrees of success. Gary buys the pool table he’s always wanted, while Brooke brings her dates to the condo when she’s not waltzing through the condo naked, after receiving the “Telly Savalas” treatment (please tell me you don’t need me to explain what that means) courtesy of her employer Marilyn Dean (a very pale Judy Davis). One of Brooke’s dates winds up blowing off their evening so he can keep playing video games with Gary.

The rules dictate that with a premise like this, hilarity must in fact ensue. And in some regards, it does, though it’s usually the supporting players who provide it. If Higgins is there for Aniston, Jon Favreau (who, as a White Sox fan, mocked the fans in Wrigley in a manner that I have seen with my own eyes, minus the subsequent fight and ejection from the park that fan received) is there for Vaughn, playing the only guy with any real sense of reality. Vaughn gets lots of funny lines, but he’s also clearly the bad guy in this relationship, leaving Brooke holding the bag at nearly every turn. To make matters worse, Gary’s attempts at getting even with Brooke are nothing short of juvenile (yes, he does something even worse than the pool table). Aniston, meanwhile, is given very little funny to do, and ultimately serves as the movie’s straight man, which is a waste of her talents. The girl can do funny. She spent 10 years doing it on TV; she knows her way around a punch line.

In order to make a movie like this work, both characters have to have flaws, but the filmmakers are so clearly determined to make a victim out of Aniston that we eventually agree and cannot wait for her to get rid of Gary once and for all, even though it’s not what she really wants. Some may say that the movie’s too mean for its own good, but the script’s inherent meanness isn’t the problem; the distribution of the meanness, however, is a problem. Gary, quite simply, does not deserve Brooke, which puts the movie’s premise on shaky ground from the beginning, and the laughs along the way turn out to be distractions, not enhancements. Also, someone needs to explain the jumpy camera shots in the kitchen during the first fight scene. I’ve seen hasty reshoots on movies before, but never that hasty.

“The Break-Up” is going to disappoint a lot of people who saw the movie’s hilarious trailer and expected another rapid-fire “Wedding Crashers”-style laugh fest. Chalk one up to the guys in editing for reducing the movie’s best bits to two minutes in length, and give a thousand lashes to everyone else who thought that they were telling a well-balanced story. These people have clearly never seen “Election,” Alexander Payne’s brilliant high school comedy that tells its story from multiple points of view and supports them all equally. There’s the lesson for the next person who dares to do a mean-spirited breakup movie: it can definitely be done, but you better, ahem, do your homework first.

When the Pixar brain trust (namely John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, and Pete Docter) first began throwing around ideas for feature films, they came up with the bases for what would ultimately become “Toy Story,” “Monsters, Inc.,” and “Finding Nemo.” The last idea from that first brainstorming session to hit theaters was “WALL·E,” which means if we were to look at Pixar’s output as if they were a band, everything up to “WALL·E” could be considered part of Pixar’s debut album. And no matter how you slice up those first nine films, that is one hell of a debut album.

Continuing with that analogy, we’re now four songs into Pixar’s second album, and the pressure to live up to their own admittedly high expectations is clearly having an effect on their songwriting, so to speak. After delivering another original and heartwarming tale with “Up,” Pixar did back-to-back sequels for the first time in their history (red flag), and the while the first sequel proved to be wildly successful (“Toy Story 3”), the second one was the first movie in the studio’s history that could be called a flop, though it still grossed $191 million (“Cars 2”). And now we have “Brave,” which marks another dubious first in that it’s the first Pixar movie that doesn’t feel at all like a Pixar movie. If anything, it plays like a Disney movie with Pixar’s title card slapped on it.

Set in Scotland, Merida (Kelly Macdonald), like it or not, is a princess, and the time for her betrothal to the first-born son of one of three neighboring tribes is fast approaching. Merida’s mother, Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson), tries to teach her proper etiquette, but Merida is much more like her father, King Fergus (Billy Connolly), and would rather choose her own, less princess-y path. After a fight with Elinor, Merida rides off into the woods, where fairy “wisps” lead her to a witch (Julie Walters). Merida tells the witch that she wants to change Elinor so she’ll look at things differently. The witch obliges, but there is a nasty, and potentially permanent, twist to Merida’s spell, and now mother and daughter must mend their differences against a ticking clock.

Apart from the stunning visuals – and really, what they did with Merida’s hair alone deserves an award for technical achievement – there is nothing here that resembles Pixar’s other work. The story bears uncanny similarity to “The Little Mermaid” (stubborn daughter puts family in danger for selfish reasons), the dialogue is pedestrian, the soundtrack features contemporary pop songs in the montages, and perhaps worst of all, it’s the crudest Pixar movie to date. For a studio that has prided itself on smart, clean humor, it’s shocking to see them resort to bare butts (twice), boobs and snot. Pixar’s competitors have taken great steps to be more like them – DreamWorks in particular has improved by leaps and bounds with “Kung Fu Panda 2” and “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted” – while Pixar appears to be doing just the opposite, happy to feed at the sequel trough and go for the easy joke whenever possible. Is this really happening?

“Brave” has its good points; the bits where the cursed Elinor tries to maintain her dignity are amusing, and the movie’s moral that parents and children could mutually benefit from listening to each other is a good one, but they cannot make up for what amounts to the weakest story Pixar has assembled to date. Several Pixar staffers have said in interviews that nearly all of their previous films had a come-to-Jesus moment during production where stories were drastically altered in order to most effectively capture that Pixar magic. “Brave” feels like the ‘before’ movie, the one that is scrapped in favor of something better. Lasseter, Stanton and Docter, all of whom served as “Brave’s” executive producers, will probably never admit it, but you have to think that they know they dropped the ball here.