Planet 51's tragedy is that it could have been a decent movie. It starts off with a neat premise: on a distant planet, there is an alien civilization that strongly resembles 1950s Americas — right down to everyone speaking English and grooving to The Chordettes. They even have a love for alien invasion movies, and, through a remarkable stroke of coincidence, the scifi franchise du jour is titled Humaniacs and features a monster that looks like an astronaut. Into this world plunges Captain Chuck Baxter, a middling US astronaut who has been sent to explore the planet (which NASA mistakenly believed was uninhabited) and suddenly finds that, on this world, he is the alien. Naturally chaos ensues. The movie also has some endearing and well-animated characters, especially in rock-craving robot Rover, and a Xenomorph-shaped dog that pees acid. The early clips promised a fun, if light, movie filled with cute science fiction references.

The problem is, Planet 51 has no idea what it's precisely about. Sure, it has a plot: a teenager named Lem has to help get Chuck back to his ship and off the planet before the military captures him and removes his brain (and, hopefully, without ruining Lem's life in the process). But it has the feel of a movie written by committee: too many ideas stuffed in and not enough fat trimmed off. Planet 51 tries to be about so many different things that it ends up being about nothing at all. Is it about the dangers of automatically attacking that which we don't understand? How the media makes us suggestible and paranoid? What it's like to learn that the universe is much larger than you ever imagined? Or is it about having the cojones to take risks and do the things you dream of doing? Okay, so the pants-less aliens have no visible cojones, but you get the point. And this lack of a center is symptomatic in the film's cast of predictable stock characters. Only the dog-like characters get any bite.

Even the jokes are just so much spaghetti thrown at the wall. Crude jokes about alien probes are mixed in with references to classic science fiction films, and great swaths of the film rely on forgettable sequences of slapstick. The odd joke hits, but when it does, it's just a solitary joke, and doesn't contribute anything to the movie as a whole. And, though it's a ostensibly kids movie, the rare jokes that elicited laughs went over the younger viewers' heads. During the viewing I attended, the audience laughed in unison just once — at a penis joke.

There are certain sins that children's films can sometimes get away with because they're geared toward younger viewers: being too busy or too cloying, or having a wearying or simplistic sense of humor. But Planet 51's problems are far deeper: it's a film that simply never engages, and for a science fiction film, leaves us with depressingly little to think about after it's over. Do yourself a favor and, instead of seeing Planet 51, watch these clips and pretend you've seen the entire movie. You'll be better off for it.

In the vein of his recent slew of family comedies, The Tooth Fairy star Johnson as a minor league hockey player known as "The Tooth Fairy" for his habit of knocking out his fellow players' teeth. Being the nasty guy he is, he of course has no inner child, and nearly spills the beans to his young daughter that there's no actual tooth fairy. Turns out he's wrong on the whole tooth fairy issue, and his nasty demeanor has earned himself a week working as a fairy, complete with the wings and home invasion bit.

Julie Andrews, Billy Crystal, and frequent Ricky Gervais collaborator Stephen Merchant all co-star as fellow fairies, but the trailer still looks a bit too much like the mock movie clips from Funny People:

[via /Film]

Here's the official synopsis:

A bad deed on the part of a tough minor-league hockey player (Johnson) results in an unusual sentence: He must serve one week as a real-life tooth fairy.

Also in this film are Ashley Judd, Julie Andrews and Billy Crystal. Let's just go ahead and assume Julie Andrews is the old Tooth Fairy or something — as long as she has Glinda wings, I'm okay with that part of this film. But seriously can we be done with The Game Plan and The Pacifier-style "I'm a macho man doing dainty things" movies?

The film will be out on January 22, 2010.

[via Worst Previews]

I know I'm being hard on a kiddie film when I ask for a more inspired look into another world's lifestyle. But I shudder at the thought that on a distant planet aliens are lounging about on their lawn chairs just like me. Even though it was a a terrible film, I still prefer Terra over this - just because its aliens world were so much better than baseball cap-wearing green people. But that's just me. I will admit the Aliens-inspired fido is genius.

Planet 51 will be out November 20th.

To be honest, for a family flick about aliens, The Rock is selling it. It's not biting social commentary, but his clowning helps lighten the mood properly. After all, he is being chased by an alien bounty hunter who stole Master Chief's look, while trying to get two little blond aliens the heck outta dodge. Judge his ability to entertain the alien masses yourself. Race To Witch Mountain is in theaters March 13th.

Carla Gugino: Fast Talking Scientist


Nuke The Fridge Jokes Be Damned!


"Are You Listening To What I'm Thinking?"


Old People Are Funny


The Rock + A Dog = ??

According to Moviehole Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron have both signed on for the Jonny Quest movie. Is there still any demand for this movie?

The movie will probably follow the same course as the show, where a young Jonny Quest (Efron), his body guard Race Bannon (Johnson), his father Dr. Quest and a group of changing "others" go on wild adventures.

According to Johnson:

"I don't know if you've read the latest [draft] but it's awesome and it's badass and I haven't read, this is what I told everyone over at Warner Bros., and I love the studio too by the way, you know, I had my experience with them with Get Smart and they were great, I hadn't read an action script like that in a LONG time. And that action was unbelievable. That will happen."

Ok so maybe if they make it super-duper action packed and leave the Bandit cameo to a minimum, it could be entertaining. But it just screams Starsky And Hutch movie to me, and not in a funny Vince Vaughn-had-a-few-good-lines kind of way. But let's see who else they bring on board.

MTV got their mits on this trailer before it airs on Superbowl Sunday, and I have to say I'm quite intrigued by the whole alien bounty-hunter sub-plot. I mean, that's a dead ringer for Master Chief, right? Disney's Race To Witch Mountain comes out on March 13.

So why is the Rock's head so much bigger than the kids' heads? It's the classic movie poster thing of head size arranged according to paycheck. Also, Disney's new poster is clearly striving for that, "come see the Rock" because we paid him a lot.

Race To Witch Mountain is the rebooted children's movie about a couple of tyke aliens with mind powers, who are being hunted by the government (and, in the new one, Master Chief). The kiddies must rely on the kindness of one do-gooding cab driver to get them home before they get exploded by the alien bounty hunter or dissected by the government. Check out the trailer and tell me if you think The Rock is cooking, whatever it is he talks about cooking.

But for now, let's pay homage to the classic floating heads that came before this orange beast, such as Captain EO, many Star Wars one sheets and Indiana Jones. But I can hardly mention the floating head with out showing the hilarious making of clip from funny or die.

Movie Poster Floating Heads - watch more funny videos

Race To Witch Mountain will be out next March.

[via First Showing]

Race To Witch Mountain has a similar plot to the Mountains of its past. A couple of kids with telekinesis are stranded on the planet and entreat a kindly cab driver (Dwayne Johnson) to get them back to Witch Mountain where their spaceship is before the evil government can kidnap them and use their powers for evil. But apparently that wasn't good enough this year so they added Master Chief to hunt down and kill the little tykes with his Texas Chainsaw Massacre sounding gun.

Don't get me wrong, I love kiddie scifi movies. Most of the time they're light handed fun that stretches the boundaries of imagination (like in Flight of the Navigator and the one where Kirk Cameron is a robot and his dad is Alan Thick). But this franchise reboot is such a slick version of a classic it's like if you gave The Apple Dumpling Gang automatic assault rifles and sent them out on an anti-terror mission.

Plus it has to be said again: They spent all that money and not a single freaking harmonica puppet dance? Kids these days.

Here's some old-school Witch Mountain harmonica action:

Race To With Mountain comes out on March 13, 2009

So the Rock admitted to believing in aliens, fine — he should! His new movie is about little kid aliens with mind powers. But what kind of aliens do you believe in Rock, little kid aliens of big slime aliens? He explained, "I think they come in all forms and they increase when you drink."

The 3-D film, which was originally supposed to be distributed by New Line but is now coming out on Warner Bros., is about astronaut Capt. Charles "Chuck" Baker, who leads an expedition to the title world, which is inhabited by those human-fearing aliens, who dress like humans from the 1950s. Says Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson:

I go on their planet, and I'm actually the alien... Of course, I befriend a little boy [to try to] get back to my spaceship. It's really great.

Planet Due in Late 09 [Sci-Fi Wire]

They clamored for him to play Black Adam, who's had a lot of play in DC Comics' 52.

Johnson's decision to play Black Adam means scriptwriter John August has to revise the Shazam script to beef up Johnson's role. What's next? Fans doing costume design via webcam? It's yet another sign that Hollywood takes fan opinion way too seriously when it does cult (or sub-cult, in the case of Shazam) franchises. The result? Bland movies that leave their pulp roots visible. In the case of Shazam, the fan-chosen casting will actually mean a total rewrite of the film's script after the strike ends.

Dwayne Johnson talks Shazam [About.com, via Moviehole]

The main problem is that this movie has been a lame duck in the movie pond, trying to paddle for shore ever since the Cannes Film Festival. Kelly rushed the film into competition there, even though it "wasn't finished," and it got savaged by the critics as a result. Most people who saw it had no idea what was happening with the story, and even The Rock had trouble following along. You know your film is in trouble when braniac former pro-wrestlers lose the plot. Kelly vowed to finish (and fix) the film, adding over 100 visual effects, trimming scenes and having J.T. re-record his voiceover track. Did any of this work help?

L Magazine's film critic Michael Joshua Rowin had a real soft spot for it, saying "Here it is, at last: the worst film of the year." Even New York Times film critic Mahnola Dargis, who seems to be one of the few loners who enjoyed the film to some degree, calls it "messy" Granted, Donnie Darko was called messy and confusing in plenty of reviews when it came out, but it didn't have the albatross of bad Cannes reviews hanging around its neck when it was released. Southland Tales does have that albatross, and these reviews are pulling it under like an anchor. The film is playing in limited release right now, which means if you're near New York or Los Angeles you might have a chance of seeing it, but if you live elsewhere you'll have to pray for a DVD release. With reviews like this, you won't have to wait long.

Review: Southland Tales spins nonsense [AP]
More on Southland Tales [GreenCine Daily]

We say he's been hard at work, because this film premiered at Cannes amidst some pretty dismal reviews. In fact, some of the reviews were so bad that they make the two word review Spinal Tap got for Shark Sandwich look eloquent in comparison.

He's added over 100 visual effects shots to a film that "wasn't ready" for Cannes in an effort to clarify the story. Does that mean that George Lucas was saying that the Star Wars flicks weren't ready when he put them out with all new effects?

We'll let you know if it worked when we're sitting front and center for its November 14th premiere. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson plus Sarah Michelle Gellar plus Seann William "Stifler" Scott plus 100 new visual effects shots = we have to see what comes out of this mix. That's not even mentioning the musical number from Justin Timberlake.

Southland has new shots [Sci-Fi Wire]