Weekend Peep Show: Spring Cleaning!

Samuel Goldwyn Films

Sony Pictures

Perfect Stranger
Halle Berry tracks better than any other actress, which means that people really want to see her in movies. They don't care if it's a half-baked, absurdist thriller with an ending so stupid that the audience actually burst out laughing in my screening. Bruce Willis is here too; apparently sucking face with Halle is reason enough to take on an otherwise silly role. I'm gonna have to agree with the movie's only bright spot, Giovanni Ribisi, who said that one day on set Bruce lamented the $40 million budget and said that Stranger should have been made for $4 million. Were Stranger played for grit and weirdness, it could be a great story. Instead, it's slick and silly, like a tin jack-in-the-box. And really, who wants one of those?

Lonely Hearts
Want to see beautiful people behave like amoral, bloodthirsty savages? Lonely Hearts, which features Salma Hayek and Jared Leto as bizarrely perverse serial killers, is your chance. Man, this movie is weird. I went to a screening this week and was the only person in the theater. There were John Travolta and James Gandolfini up onscreen, fighting it out over how aggressively to pursue the pretty bad people. There was Scott Caan doing his Scott Caan thing over and over. And there was me, alone. If you go, bring a friend. It will be fun to giggle about the many toupee references...none of which involve Travolta!

Paramount Pictures/Dreamworks

Disturbia
The consensus is simple. If you want a thrill, skip Stranger and go for Disturbia, the Shia LaBeouf tension-festival. It's so clear that Shia is this year's Jake Gyllenhaal. Studios want him to be a big box office star. Disturbia, thank goodness, is a much better look-at-this-boy-go project than Jarhead. It's Rear Window for the teen set, simple and straightforward with twists that will make you go "aaaah" instead of "ha."

Doug Curran/20th Century Fox

Pathfinder
There was this sad girl in my sixth-grade class. Poor thing had no confidence. If the most popular girl showed up in a brand new Benetton shirt, sad girl would run to the mall, buy the very same distinctive shirt and wear it the next day. In that way, she never owned the shirt, she just seemed like she was copying. That's just how it is with Pathfinder, a Nordic Viking stab-'em-up bloodbath that 20th Century Fox has been hiding for a long time now. The trouble is that 300 just came out. Like the sad girl, Fox should have waited another month so that Pathfinder could seem original and not so incredibly copycat. Still, if war is your thing, then this is your movie.

Redline
One Enzo Ferrari was actually hurt in the semipromotion of this movie. What a shame. Sure, you could go and see Eddie Griffin play with other expensive automobiles, but really now, do you need to? Tag line: Risk everything. Fear nothing. Good approach to life, bad approach to the multiplex.

Cartoon Network/Adult Swim PR

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters
It's the movie that scared the bejesus out of Boston police. You remember the scandal, when Cartoon Network hired guerilla marketing kids to install Lite-Brite fixtures in major cities. And all the cities were cool except for Boston, which went berserk, thinking the Lite-Brites were part of a terrorist plot. Oddly enough, Boston is a college town. Yet there wasn't one stoned 18-year-old boy who could identify the Lite-Brites as those mischievous cartoon aliens, the Mooninites? Too funny. From what I hear, Aqua Teen is more of the same too-funny thing. You know, if you're into talking milkshakes.

Paramount Pictures

Year of the Dog
I can't help but mourn for the old Mike White, the one who was so zany, the one who wrote and starred in Chuck and Buck, the one who invented those poisonous blackberries in The Good Girl. Now, he's all tamed and big time, and Year of the Dog—which stars Molly Shannon and involves dog mourning—looks, well, tame and big time. Someone as deliciously sick as Mike White should tell deliciously sick stories. 

Slow Burn
Shhh! Don't tell anyone you're reading about this movie. Seriously, I think the distributor wants to keep this Burn very hush-hush. I challenge you to find a poster or, better yet, a TV promo. They don't want you to know that Ray Liotta, LL Cool J and Mekhi Phifer made a thriller together. So, let's play it safe. Don't say a word. We should honor their request. Hey, the movie was shot in 2003, and they've kept it quiet for four years. Here's to four more years of ignorance and apathy.