You can survive Christmas, but not this stinker flick
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Our parents&#39; generation had Bing crooning &quot;White Christmas,&quot; and angels getting their wings in &quot;It&#39;s a Wonderful Life.
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Analysts have offered their latest judgment of the Christmas shopping season: good, but not great.
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Scarlett Johannson stars in an adaptation that is better than it has any right to be
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The season of laughter is upon us again. And this time thereÂs no holding back the outpouring of humour even if the comedies get a raw deal at the boxoffice.
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It wasn&#39;t as bad as I thought it would be, but neither is it a great horror movie -- definitely not of the stature of David Friedkin&#39;s &quot;The Exorcist,&quot; the film that started it all.
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Tycho:  Heavenly Sword is, as you will soon discover, the very definition of a rental title.  Clocking in at somewhere between five and six hours (depending on your appetite for overwrought cinemas) it's a decent game saddled by impossible expectations.  It has silly ideas and grandeur in close proximity to one another.   It tries hard.  And it's not bad, by any means.  But it's not excellent, and perhaps unfairly it had this onus placed upon it.  I've said that Lair is not the Playstation 3, and nor is Heavenly Sword, but taken together one must come to the unmistakable conclusion that the Playstation 3 is a game console and not the supernatural artifact they have presented it as.  That however many processors and however many gigs of space are not especially relevant when put in the service of middling entertainment.    It has a decent combat system, and using this combat system you will progress from locked room to cramped, locked room until you come face to face with some jeering asshole.  You might kill them either because of the jeering or because you think that death might cull their interminable monologues.  There's a mean snake bitch and a pervert and an oaf.  Oh!  And en evil king.  The only thing running through my head during the lavish and no doubt expensive mo-capped cutscenes was that these kings and bitches and so forth should form a band.  It never seems to know if it wants to be a hilarious comic circus or a stark medieval saga.  Play it, and you'll know what I mean.     There are successes, though:  Kai, the mostly deranged sidekick, charms from the outset.  Her feral animations and nuanced delivery really make her stand out against this batch of also-rans.  Any object that can be thrown can also be thrown and then guided in slow motion, including corpses, which is something you must see to believe.  We didn't even have a target; we would just throw bodies so that they flew like Superman head-first into gongs.  This is something you can do for a half an hour - or more - without tiring of it.  This guided firing is called "Aftertouch," and it's about fifty percent of the game.  One wonders what the game's length would actually be if you didn't play half of it in slow-motion.        Some measure of your enjoyment will be bound up in whether or not you "buy" the story that they are telling.  I've heard it described as epic, when it's pretty rudimentary fantasy-by-numbers bullshit, so who knows.  It's all a matter of perspective:  are we judging it against only PS3 games?  If so, things are shaping up!  If you own more than one console - or a personal computer - your standards for grand storytelling were recently adjusted upward.
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com. When you hear the clichÃ© &quot;It&#39;s the most fun you&#39;ll have at the movies all year!&quot; that&#39;s usually a good sign to avoid that particular film like Cool Springs at Christmastime.
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Steven Soderbergh's unabashedly trivial sequel may be slim pickings, but when it works, it's a blast.
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&quot;Surviving Christmas,&quot; a dark comedy that co-stars James Gandolfini of &quot;The Sopranos,&quot; could not survive the critics&#39; wrath and drew few moviegoers in its opening weekend.
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Geleya may well appeal to the young and the mass audience. In a nutshell the film is high on technical aspects, but low on content -- a clichÃ©d fare with some entertaining moments.
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The woozy, sinking sensation this Christmas comedy produces suggests a movie slapped together after the consumption of far too many gallons of spiked eggnog.
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Top 5 Movies of the Week (As on December 16th, 2004)
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for every âA Christmas Storyâ there are three â8 Crazy Nights.â (Admittedly, there are few films of any
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Looks like Ben Affleck won&#39;t have to worry about surviving Christmas. After this weekend, his new movie likely won&#39;t make it much past Halloween.
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Scored a gift card for Christmas? Maybe cool, maybe not.
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But the film will not draw in the audiences.
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Though occasionally successful as an animated wonder, the film is a mundane seasonal tale.