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Imagine the fragile bravery of a comic: One man, one mic, and an audience—what other art is as perilously codependent for success? Michael Addis’ documentary, produced by and starring Jamie Kennedy, kicks off by examining the potential cruelty of the audience-stand-up relationship  with every comic in the biz from Andy Milonakis to Bill Maher sharing the times strangers felt justified shouting “You suck!” and threatening to kill their families. Are hecklers drunk, needy, or opponents of the First Amendment? Before attempting to answer, Addis unearths clip after clip of stress-induced meltdowns—in one instance, Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada explains what happened to Michael Richards (and Arsenio Hall is allowed a rebuttal). Just when the psychology gets interesting, the flick detours to question if film critics and bloggers are also bullies—the uniform answer is yes—and Kennedy confronts critics about why they’ve panned everything in his oeuvre, asking “Why do you hate me?” and “Have you had sex lately?” The only comic more denigrated than the star of Malibu’s Most Wanted is Carrot Top; when Kennedy reads him his savage press, an empathetic Top is confused as he counters that his audience enjoys themselves every night. Heckler is a fun cathartic screed—it’s the best thing Kennedy’s ever made—but though it invites us to navel-gaze the destroy-your-idols culture that spawned Perez Hilton, the comics circle back around from defending their right to free speech to denying others a voice. Kennedy objects to objections about his mean-spirited jokes; the unexplored subtext of this solid film is why all humor has gone negative? And while the progress of art depends on detractors justifying their hatred for Son of the Mask, Kennedy can’t point to anything good about his film except a buff CGI baby.

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Now that the boys’ club has stormed the romantic comedy genre, it’s tough being a female heroine. The current template for the would-be brides is Brittle Carole Lombard: frantic, beautiful, and clumsy, with the sense of humor of a crocodile pump. Claudette Colbert and Katherine Hepburn got to wear posh dresses and outsmart their suitors; today’s workingwoman drone thinks she has it all until a charismatic blue-collar lug gets her drunk on tequila and/or knocked up.

And so into the breach of director Griffin Dunn’s bog goes Uma Thurman, who at 38 makes a weary ingénue—though her Dr. Emma Lloyd, a love advice radio host whose credentials may be as apocryphal as Dr. Phil’s, is precisely the kind of cautious lover to wait a decade past the average age of marriage. Her new book R.E.A.L. Love (acronym for a man who’s Responsible, Equal, Adult, and Loving) is so certain of its path to what Jane Austen would consider well-matched bliss that Emma’s engaged to marry her publisher, a stiff Brit named Richard (Colin Firth).

Of course he’s the wrong guy. The “right” one is a NYPD fireman (still our post-9/11 dream hunk) slapped with the pub-crawling name of Patrick Sullivan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Morgan is bearish and honey-sweet; he’d be at home in sitcoms patting his wife on the ass and begging for a grilled cheese. Still, he’s got charm to spare, once he gets over his enmity of Dr. Lloyd for encouraging his ex-fiancée Sophia (Justina Machado) to dump the mofo already. (Their meet-cute comes when Sullivan’s tech nerd buddy hacks into city files to register the pair as husband and wife, the better to have the blonde at his mercy.) As Dunn allows Thurman only one dewy scene before she morphs into a shrew with a bruise on her forehead and hair frizzed like lightening (her over-processed locks are a Geiger counter for each scene’s hysteria), the question isn’t why him but why her? The dreary flick’s three gender-betraying female writers Mimi Hare, Clare Naylor, and Bonnie Sikowitz, novices each, take Uma’s odd-duck gorgeousness as a given, over-estimating the value of beauty and under-valuing everything else. The Accidental Husband suffers doubly from Dunn’s hagification of his star, but at this point the flick’s desperate floundering feels like dessert. The plot points tick by with the usual blend of over-determined mirth and begrudging satisfaction, but there’s little fun in being asked to identify with yet another female character who spends her running time being shamed like a dog who soiled the rug.

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Inspired by a bowl of sukiyaki, a dish swirling with tofu, mushrooms, cabbage, and noodles, Japanese auteur Takashi Miike has concocted an eclectic western: A Nevada brawl interpreted through Italian spaghetti westerns starring a Japanese cast brandishing samurai swords and an armory of pistols. The enemy clans—the Reds and the Whites—wear a color-coded Mad Max combo of letterman jackets, chaps, and hair extensions; they bark threats at each other in a phonetically-learned dialect of English where villains still hiss “I’m gonna clean your plow.” The head of the Reds played by Asian megastar Koichi Sato even insists on being called Henry IV in tribute to Shakespeare’s retelling of the War of the Roses (a floral metaphor Miike borrows). With the entrance of a gunfighter (Hideaki Ito) whose solution for the violence is Kill ‘Em All, the flick’s a lot of sound and fury and dynamite that signifies nothing while paying tribute to everything Miike and artistic cohort Quentin Tarantino (who has an extended cameo) hold dear. Cinematographer Toyomichi Kurita gilds Miike and co-writer Masa Nakamura’s straight-forward revenge plot into a spectacle where feathers burst from wounds, snow falls during duels, and nobody drops their weapon until their eighth bullet wound.

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If Legally Blonde screenwriters Karen McCullah Kutz and Kirsten Smith have penned another sly send up of female roles, director Fred Wolf is too distracted by easy excuses for T&A shots of star Anna Faris’ ruffled panties wafting in the breeze to notice. The combo of leers and heavily-watered down femmepowerment should irritate audiences of both genders, though if there’s any justice in the world, this won’t be Faris’ last shot at center stage.

Faris plays Shelley Darlingson, a once-homely orphan who blossomed into a high school swan and then one of Hugh Hefner’s princesses. Shelley loves the endless shopping sprees and mangotinis. More, she loves having a big family, even if most of the tree is made of competitive girls and horny men. She’s cameo-ed in pictorials like Girls of the Midwest, Girls of GEDs and Girls of Charlie Sheen and is certain Hef’s about to proclaim her Miss November. But the morning after her 27th birthday (59 in Bunny Years), she’s evicted from paradise and forced to find a new place like home in a skimpy version of Dorothy’s gingham and pigtails.

That this is the real biography of most pinups should have a comic bite, except there’s no venom. Playboy prefers younger girls—that’s a fact, and it’s fine, so do gymnastics coaches. In this version, however, Shelley’s secretly been ousted by a rival (Monet Mazur) and an abandoned Hefner mopes in his bedroom drowning his sorrows in Haagen Dazs. Also timid is a gag about Shelley’s response to a cop who pulls her over when we learn she’s used to unzipping pants and performing.

Where Kutz and Smith are more comfortable heading is another fish-out-of-water comedy where a blonde in candy pinks discovers academia. Here, Shelley stumbles into being the house mother of the loser sorority on campus, which is about to lose its charter thanks to both the members’ geek status and a scheming rival sorority. The dorks of the Zeta house all look like they’re auditioning for Velma in Scooby Doo. Save for a hunchback farm girl with a look only Dorothea Lange would love, there’s a weaker attempt than in most makeover comedies to hide the gals’ inner and outer beauty—they’ve got legs and smiles for days. Emma Stone, Superbad’s main crush, is the Zeta’s awkward leader; Rumor Willis and American Idol’s Katherine McPhee saunter through wearing their respective back braces and pregnant bellies. Most have interchangeable personalities except for the lovely Kat Dennings, who resembles a young, punk Winona Ryder studded with facial piercings.

Dennings’ Mona is the only coed to blast Faris on sight for being “an archaically superficial representation of the male fantasy.” (The rest hope she’ll be able to teach them to pick up dudes.) The comedy lumbers towards a middle act in which the newly-hot chicks become the mean girls they’ve always loathed and Faris realizes that her mansion seduction skills don’t work on her brainy beau Oliver (Colin Hanks). A date where she’s mortified that her three surefire moves all fail—talking about her ass, talking about her other suitors and exclaiming “Your biceps are so huge! Kiss me!” is one of the only scenes where Wolf’s USA Up All Night tone doesn’t trumpet tits over thoughts. (By the credits, the flick’s merely neutral.)

But Faris is so sincere and good-hearted that she never cheapens herself with the bimbette role as she widens her Bambi eyes and squeals in her breathy voice that dips into a Sepultura imitation whenever she repeats the name of a person she’s just met. Her startling demon grunt gets laughs every time (no small feat, as they use it a lot) and reminds fans of her strengths as a go-for-broke screwball talent. The criminal waste of Faris’ comedic gifts should have half of Hollywood locked up. (Oddly, only Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain has given her a chance to shine.) Like her character, she deserves respect.

Click here for The House Bunny in Boxoffice Magazine

In three years, LA punk band The Germs went from jokes to legends. Lead singer Darby Crash, young and unhinged, wrote lyrics that read like political-philosophical screeds but sounded like yeaaawrooghh! (Penelope Spheeris had to subtitle him in The Decline of Western Civilization.) Though in 1977 Crash and the Germs released LA punk’s first ever album and their shows broke taste and safety barriers, director Rodger Grossman’s biopic hews so closely to the rock-faux-doc genre they could have easily been The Eagles. Even those introducing themselves to the band can predict Crash’s drug addiction and death before he ever picks up a needle. More interesting are actor Shane West’s confrontational monologues as the doomed screecher who used Hitler as a template for his plans of world domination. The battering live shows prove West’s dedication to the role (the band’s since reunited with the actor taking Crash’s place), but as always there’s too little insight into both music and musicians and too much period design, though Bijou Phillips’ tattered glam outfits help make her a credible bassist Lorna Doom. As Crash’s manipulative bisexual lover, Ashton Holmes is a slimy underground Yoko Ono—a grim sort of irony for a minor star with the misfortune to die the same news week as John Lennon.

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“My life is a parody of a tragedy” mopes Phoenix high school drama teacher Dana (floppy-haired Brit comic Steve Coogan, recently blown up in Tropic Thunder). His classroom is 14 times overcrowded, his job’s on the line, his theatrical production of Erin Brockovich was savaged by the school’s ninth grade drama critic, and wife Catherine Keener hates their roommate (David Arquette), wishes Dana would go back to drinking, and ends every sentence with an insult and every insult with “Just kidding!” In a desperate move, Dana decides to stage an artistic coup by—gasp—writing his own material, a sequel to Hamlet (the first one was such a downer, he sighs) that opens with a time machine, Bill Clinton, and an orgy. In his first starring American turn, Coogan is a mess, baring his gums and bugging his eyes. The script by comedy veterans Pam Brady and Andrew Fleming isn’t better—the classroom of kids including Melonie Diaz is criminally wasted and the jokes routinely mistake uncomfortable racist humor for its savvier cousin, uncomfortable racist humor with a purpose. If there’s one thing you don’t want to sound like an afterthought, it’s a joke about Jews, but chipper Amy Poehler as an ACLU lawyer has to end every sentence with one that’s mumbled, awkward, and not even clever. Better is when Coogan realizes his star hunk Octavio (Joseph Julian Soria) is being pulled out of the play by his parents. He rushes over to confront them for their provincial “ethnic narrow-mindedness” but is dressed down when the dad, a novelist, tells him it’s because his writing is terrible. Oddly, what’s supposed to be a great comedy about a bad play is in fact a bad comedy about a play that looks pretty frigging amazing—a balls out musical with numbers like “Rock Me Sexy Jesus” and “Raped in the Face” that’s actually resonant in examining the relationship Hamlet, Jesus, and Dana had with their fathers.

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Brother, can you spare $175,000? If every man, woman and child in America ponied up 175 Gs each—yes, all 300 million of us—we could pay off our outrageous national debt. But we’d better act quickly: in the time it takes to read this paragraph, our global bill racks up another cool million. Sage audiences already concerned about their cash money will budget a few bucks to learn more; most aren’t and won’t, but will hopefully soak up the gist at cocktail parties.

Every generation since 1885 has been born into debt. Your grandmother never had to hock her jewels. Why should we care now? Dave Walker and Bob Bixby, the activist stars of Patrick Creadon’s unnerving documentary, have spent the last year on a Fiscal Wake Up Tour sounding the alarm for largely deaf ears.

Two problems compound today’s debt: Social Security and foreign loans. By 2050, 75 percent of the national budget will be allocated for Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. The remaining 25 percent must cover oh, say, everything else from roads to schoolbooks, parks, museums and machine guns. During World War II, Americans loaded up on bonds to keep the nation economically independent. But if we follow our current pattern, the government will borrow the difference from China, Japan and the oil-rich Gulf States. They’re already holding the tab for 46 percent of our current debt. (We’re the world’s No. 1 borrower—worse, No. 2 owes only one-tenth of our debt.) What happens to our economy if just one of the three refuses to keep bailing us out … or decides to collect? For an idea, consider Latin America. In the ’60s and ’70s, they were in debt to the U.S. and the World Bank and found themselves in the jaws of loan sharks with the power to oust their leaders, pillage their resources and ensure that the continent would spend the next half century playing catch up.

Bixby is an abstemious economist whose only indulgence is a stockpile of Tab. Cox was the comptroller general (aka America’s top accountant) from 1998-2008. Together, they break down the four major debt crises—trade, savings, loans, and leadership—and elucidate terms like the GDP versus the trade deficit.

For his end, Creadon and co-writers Christine O’Malley and Addison Wiggin do their best to muck up the clarity. The doc’s editing and structure are a mess, and the tone skips from plaintive to jocular with most of the humor coming from Saturday Night Live and Daily Show clips. Man-on-the-street pop quizzes seem designed to prove only that we’re a nation of idiots. We don’t need a teenager shrugging that our debts are probably in the millions to prove we’ve a culture with disturbed fiscal priorities. We spend more than we earn—the last time Americans had a negative savings rate was 1934. In the two years Creadon spent stockpiling interviews with Alan Greenspan and Paul O’Neill, we’ve gone from somnambulant to panicked. We need solutions. And in this election year, we’re ready to debate them if our media would can it already on Rielle Hunter and Michael Phelps. Creadon lazily orders us to a website for Bixby and Cox’s Concord Coalition. I’d rather he budgeted the 10 minutes to spell out the tough decisions our country must make: retool our health and retirement funds. Reclaim our factories. Readjust to the higher prices of American-made goods. Pay extra now or pay exorbitantly later.

Click here for I.O.U.S.A in Boxoffice Magazine

If you want to humanize the war on terror, you’d better cast a more complicated actor than Don Cheadle. Writer/director Jeffrey Nachmanoff’s political drama Traitor puts its star and the audience through stress positions—now so familiar—but rarely makes us feel more rattled than if someone was pelting us with feathers. Co-starring Guy Pearce, the name-brand cast might lure in those not burned out on post-9/11 flicks, but A-list stars haven’t helped the rest of the lot, either.

Cheadle plays Samir Horn, a Muslim Sudanese American who lost in father in a car bomb before he was old enough to get behind the wheel. Now Samir’s left the States after getting discriminatorily fired from the U.S. Special Ops squad and pops up on the government’s radar after he’s arrested selling detonators to terrorists. For half the movie, FBI agent Roy Clayton (Pearce, with a syrupy drawl) tracks Samir and Samir’s new BFF Omar (Said Taghmaoui), an Al Qaeda-esque higher up, across the globe from prison breakouts to embassy explosions. We’re meant to be in suspense about Cheadle’s inner wickedness, but c’mon—it’s Don Freaking Cheadle. The man would be more comfortable playing Joan of Arc than Robert Mugabe. The big reveal is that he’s a deep undercover double agent under Jeff Daniels. That Daniels’ agent conveniently neglects to mention it to Pearce at any of their briefings is preordained. The real dramatic crises should be how many victims bomb expert Cheadle is willing to expend to worm his way closer to the top terrorist mastermind. Yet Cheadle’s inner struggle is enigmatic—he’s a noh mask who accords himself only one instance of the sniffles.

Still, what’s dull about the globetrotting thriller isn’t solely Cheadle’s Oscar-seeking stiffness. It’s hard to fault him for being flat when the script is determined to reduce its people to platitude-spouting symbols who expound their philosophies in the near-identical repetitive poetry of southern preachers. Proclaims one, “Terrorism is theatre, and theatre is always performed for an audience.” The only blunt voice belongs to Pearce’s partner Max (Neal McDonough), a hybrid of Dick Cheney and Ted Nugent given to bumper-sticker incendiaries like “Arrest All the Muslims!” and “Sorry, left my Bill of Rights at home.” Nachmanoff’s clinical approach puts a gulf between us and his characters that cinematographer J. Michael Muro’s in-your-face verite camera work can’t narrow.

Pearce has a few moments where a personality shines through, but he’s overwhelmed by the fast, noisy pressures of a film shot in 17 cities and on three continents. Better developed are Cheadle’s vengeful co-conspirators, debonair and sympathetic Omar, who passingly mentions his Euro boarding school, and more violent Fareed (Aly Khan), who twists the Koran to reinterpret an allowance about disguising their religion to persecutors into an excuse to eat bacon and quaff champagne. We might not know why they fight, but we at least know their moral code. More questionable is a scene in which Nachmanoff cuts between a half dozen American-based Muslims listening to a high-alert news broadcast about dangerous undercover operatives. Initially, we interpret it as a dig against racial profiling. Later, when these students and baristas are revealed as terrorists, what would this shallow, if well-meaning film have us conclude?

Click here for Traitor in Boxoffice Magazine

Narcissists beware: Looks can kill. In Alexandre Aja’s thriller remake of the Korean flick Into the Mirror, those simple sheets of glass and silver are murderers. Or conduits to murder. Or something. Moderate opening traffic will have a few dozen kids afraid of their reflections before the nation forgets the film ever existed.

Writers Aja and Gregory Levasseur can’t define exactly what their flat shiny villains can do—like Barbie, seemingly everything. They bloom uncleanable hand prints, reflect ghosts, absorb bullets, engrave messages, flicker like computer screens, distort faces and convince people they’re on fire. Then, beyond all 2D sense, these inert pieces of furniture graduate to screaming, bulging, possessing children, mimicking loved ones, driving victims to suicide and slicing people’s throats by showing them images of the pain. In one nonsense homicide, a bathing woman’s jaw is handlessly ripped off merely because a mirror was in the room. Aja proves a horror truism: The more, the unscarier. With every cruelty unique, the fear is muddled—a single strand makes the best noose. One madman, one shark, one simple premise like “Don’t Fall Asleep.”

As Ben, a former NYPD detective of ill repute, Kiefer Sutherland rasps and panics as a newly hired security guard for the old Mayflower department store, a grand, Grecian-columned behemoth charred like a marshmallow after a deadly fire 28 years ago that torched 28. Ben’s an ex-boozer and current pill popper sleeping on his sister’s (Amy Smart) couch. In the last year, he accidentally killed a man and estranged his wife Paula Patton and kids Cameron Boyce and Erica Gluck. He’s desperate, but darned if I’d believe he’s so hard up he’d stick around the spooky, electricity-less joint that can’t be torn down or cleaned up due to what boss John Shrapnel sniffs is an insurance fight.

Mirrors aside, the Mayflower is a terrific spot for a haunting. The department store appears to stock nothing as mundane as blenders. Mannequins line the rooms—some still dressed for the beach or a ball—and, of course, it’s infested with Shock Pigeons. But there’s something lurking in the mirrors that’s made past guards off themselves and their families and a snowballing series of secrets about schizophrenic child and a mental hospital stack up to nonsense. The dialogue is piffle, and the plot never makes sense—why, for example, is Ben haunted on Day One when his boss hasn’t seen anything for 15 years? Aja’s best stroke is making us aware of how impossible it is to avoid our image. Everything from metal to doorknobs to TV screens is suspect. At one climax, Sutherland barks “Be careful of the water! It reflects!”

Less clear is exactly why the mirror thing wants to off his loved ones when Sutherland’s trying to do its bidding by tracking down a mysterious “Esseker,” and how exactly the mirrors communicate with the hive mirror that might be The Devil Himself. (I say “might” because I sat through the whole things and I still can’t tell.) Perhaps these black magic mirrors have telepathy? Perhaps they’re controlled by Snow White’s evil queen? Or perhaps they’re windows to the dead or whatever … glaring at us from within a chrome toaster? Next time you’re heating a Pop Tart, watch your back.

Click here for Mirrors in Boxoffice Magazine