At what point will the Dane Cook experiment end? The bland quipster has tried to ride his one million MySpace friends and sold-out Madison Square Garden shows to movie stardom, but he hasn't yet gone the way of Andrew "Dice" Clay. Cook has plenty of opportunities to riff in Good Luck Chuck (Lions Gate), and this puerile, staggeringly unfunny comedy lives down to his stand-up material. The "unrated" DVD tacks on an extra five minutes, so perhaps those are the 300 seconds that save the movie…
The uneven yet frequently hilarious anthology comedy The Ten (ThinkFilm) didn't do much during its theatrical run, in spite of a star-studded cast including Winona Ryder, Adam Brody, Jessica Alba, and the usual comedy suspects. But the film, which Stella, The State, and Wet Hot American Summer funster David Wain based very, very loosely on the Ten Commandments, seems destined to find a devoted cult following on home video, where audiences tend to be more adventurous, forgiving, and stoned…
The lame comedy Mr. Woodcock (New Line) sat on the shelf for more than a year before finally getting shuffled quietly into theaters last September. The one-joke idea is right there in the title, which also conveniently suggests the sophistication of the humor therein. Does the name "Mr. Woodcock" give you the giggles? Then this is the movie for you…
For anyone who still needs a primer on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and its sociopolitical aftermath, Robert Stone's documentary Oswald's Ghost (PBS/Paramount) covers the subject well, rehashing all the old arguments in favor of a Kennedy-killing conspiracy, and a few—maybe too few—of the arguments against. Oswald's Ghost isn't about settling the who-killed-Kennedy question in any conclusive way; it's more about the creeping paranoia and distrust that began to seize the American people beginning in the'60s. And while little about the movie is revelatory, it's still fairly gripping…
An unconventional twist on the typical Iraq War documentary, Operation Homecoming (New Video Group) is composed of stories and poems written by soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and assembled via a National Endowment Of The Arts program. Each of the 11 featured passages attempts a different stylistic approach, but while the results aren't as formally adventurous as Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, the film provides enough visual support to bring these powerful reflections to life.