Past the Popcorn film roundup—An Improved Sequel and a Bunch of B Movies
Each week, Past the Popcorn offers a thorough look at the latest round of films opening on big screens.
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, says Mike Smith, is the rare beast: a sequel that improves on the original. The secret? More mature actors, he says… and a director that really gets the material. “Call me sexist,” Smith writes, “but Sanaa Hamni gets the chicks. Sorry, Mr. Kwapis—you’re a guy (like me), which pretty much prevents us from really ‘getting’ the psyche of the target audience convincingly. The original enjoyed some success, but I expect the sequel will outdo the first—it is simply the better film.”
Meanwhile, three of this week’s releases begin with the letter B.
Bottle Shock is a logical successor to Sideways, a veritable history lesson about how Napa wines outdid the French. “I do think some thanks are indeed in order” for that, says Greg Wright, “though there’s still enough ninny-muggins in this particular vintage to call it a corked film.”
Wright liked Boy A a bit better, though he wouldn’t call it great or original by any stretch. “To be sure,” he acknowledges, the film “treads a lot of familiar ground while it explores the breadth of the ‘leopards can’t change their spots’ vs. ‘clothes make the man’ spectrum. … It seems that I’ve been screening of lot of films about disaffected youth, but I may have enjoyed this one the most.”
Baghead is a different matter. “By the time the horror setup is really in play,” cautions Wright, “the film is well past half-over. And people aren’t dying near quick enough.”
Also this week are two mainstream releases that pretty much qualify as B-movie fare. Jeff Walls liked them both—Pineapple Express and Hell Ride—well enough forwhat they are, but cautions audiences strongly about the strong content of both.
