indefinite articles

Glossy and laminated on the surface but cradling something truly special, ABBA’s music is a uniter of uniters. The Swedish troubadours’ starry-eyed anthems celebrating love and life divided the public throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, but came into more widespread acceptance as a younger, more morose generation sought comfort in nostalgia. In the late ‘90s, this nostalgia gave birth to the most successful stage musical of all time. Touting an all-ABBA setlist, Mamma Mia! raked in $2 billion worldwide, its posters securing a permanent spot atop every taxicab in America for the next nine years and counting.

Amid the swirl, the musical’s plot remains a mystery to everyone but the 30 million people who have gone to see it. The trailer for this week’s much-anticipated movie adaptation doesn’t shed much light on this troubling issue, except that 1) it involves a wedding, and 2) a bunch of people in white dresses spend most of the film singing ABBA songs on the beach. So as a public service, based on these facts and my own knowledge of ABBA’s music, I’ve tried my best to cobble together a synopsis, song by song.

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Whenever I watch a Guillermo del Toro movie, it kind of feels like a day at the races. I put my money down and cheer in the stands, hoping Guillermo will launch forward to take the cup. But so far, he’s never been able to pull ahead of the pack. Not to say that his films are necessarily bad, but Del Toro’s enthusiasm for directing drips from his every frame, and with his chutzpah I expect nothing short of greatness.

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A lumbering T-Rex. A runaway minecart. A bottomless pit. Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking — boring! The wonders of CGI and digital compositing have given us just about anything imaginable, time and time again. This is hokey old stuff, right? Think again. Journey to the Center of the Earth is being presented in theaters in REAL-D, a new 3D process that’s downright incredible.

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The population of superheroes is not as diverse as the melting pot of a world they fight to protect. Predominantly, they are unassuming white men with day jobs or some other similarly bland, digestibly mild mannered figure. In the title role of Hancock, Will Smith valiantly flies in the face of this paradigm, playing a lazy homeless alcoholic black man who is known by the public at large to possess extraordinary post-human abilities. Despite the best of intentions, his lackadaisical nature results in the destruction of cars, buildings, and other property while fighting crime.

Not surprisingly, Hancock’s persona and the collateral damage caused by his chaotic good shenanigans are not well received by the public. Apparently they expect the guy that takes out the trash to be clean cut and wear an X-men inspired black leather bodysuit instead of sporting a dirt encrusted beanie, uneven stubble, and grease stained cargo shorts.

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When The Matrix hit theaters in 1999, it was the 9/11 of the cinema world - suddenly, nothing would be the same again. Directors Larry and Andy Wachowski brought the world bullet time, the special effects technique in which the action is slowed while the camera continues to move in the audience’s real-time. When Keanu Reeves bent back and let the those bullets spiral past him, it felt like time had leapfrogged the present and taken a swan dive into the deep end of the future.

Afterwards, of course, came the wave of movies eager to try out the new technology. Wanted, which comes out this Friday, looks to be little more than a continuation of this trend, the sort of chaff that rolls out between bigger, better summer blockbusters. But under the hood there’s more horsepower than is evident in the trailers. Namely, the newly released bullet time 2.0.

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From the moment I saw a photo of The Adventures of Andre and Wally B in Video Magazine, I’ve loved Pixar. They’ve ushered in a new age of technological progress, eye-popping animation, and quality storytelling in animated pictures. But I have to admit, I’ve approached WALL-E with more than a little trepidation.

Once upon a time, Pixar’s films were a joy to watch. Toy Story breezed by in a fun and exciting 81 minutes. A Bug’s Life and Monsters, Inc. ran about an hour and a half. But like one of those foam dinosaur eggs tossed into a bathtub filled to the brim with hubris, Pixar’s films began to fill out, getting bigger and longer. 111 minutes for Ratatouille. 115 for The Incredibles. A stultifying 116 minutes of the unblinking Cars.

But none of that can be compared with what is about to come. WALL- E is poised to be the Berlin Alexanderplatz of animation, the Decalogue of CG, running over 20 hours long.

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Today, Get Smart premiered in theaters across the nation. My prediction: It will be a financial success. However, the movie’s critical acclaim will largely hinge on the performance of one actor, and one actor alone. Yes, that’s right ladies and gentlemen: Dwayne Johnson will finally rise like a phoenix from his professional wrestling ashes and emerge as the most electrifying actor in the entertainment industry.

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In the 1980s, an urban legend began propogating about role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Beyond rumors that D&D players performed Satanic rituals during game sessions, word spread that some hardcore players would take their tabletop adventures down into the sewers to heighten the game’s sense of realism and danger.

More recently, news stories have begun popping up one-by-one reporting cases of World of Warcraft addiction: players dying from a lack of sleep and malnutrition, a baby dying after its parents went to an internet cafe to log in, and numerous other tales of gamers who found themselves unwilling or unable to step away.

Two weeks ago, these two gaming juggernauts collided with the release of Dungeons & Dragons, 4th Edition.

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If you’re not a parent or pre-teen girl, you may not be familiar with the American Girl juggernaut. Now owned by Mattel, American Girl is a dollmaker that goes far beyond the lonely racks of Toys R Us or Target to push their product. In their massive American Girl Place stores in ritzy zipcodes across America, there are showrooms, doll hospitals, doll hair salons, and theaters featuring live, big-budget musicals involving the dolls. Weirdest of all, they feature restaurants complete with custom seats — so that one’s dolls can sit at the table like “real” people, staring at the food with an eerie, glossy-eyed gaze.

So why do parents buy into this palace of plastic commercialism, this Cheesecake Factory of dolls? American Girl tries to wipe away the smell of capitalism with their back stories, elaborate epics of historical fiction. Felicity, for example, is living through the American Revolution. Kirsten is a pioneer in the Minnesota Territory. Kit Kittredge is living through the Great Depression.
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The 20th Century Fox marketing team has made a grave error. They’ve been pushing The Happening as a M. Knight Shyamalan movie. They are trying to excite people with the film’s greatest liability: its director. His last two efforts were flops, and the whole twist-ending shtick is growing tired. No one expects much from Shyamalan or his latest film, so let’s instead focus on the figure on whose Atlas-like shoulders The Happening is supported: Mark Wahlberg.

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