That's your 2-star review for The Break-Up, right there. I'm waiting for a screener of B13, which already opened, so obviously there won't be a write-up of that.
On an unrelated note, we're watching Transamerica and it never ceases to amuse me that no one in road movies ever takes the interstate. If Bree and Toby hopped on I-70 they'd have been in Los Angeles in four days.
I know, I know...then it wouldn't be a "road movie." Tthhpht.
And it would help to credit her as a critic for salon.com and one of the best the Internet will ever have.
B13 rawks hard, best summer action flick so far, better than MI:III and XMen.
Not that those are hard to beat mind you.
Rory, it depends on how you mean "best". I find that Zacharek is notably close to perfectly wrong with regards to movies I like or don't like. That is admittedly nearly as useful as someone who's close to perfectly right, but it does make me leery of calling her "best".
Was writing a review of "Last Holiday" today and read a few other reviews and part of Stephanie Zacharek's review hit on the exact point you made:
"Leaving the theater, I heard two audience members derisively cutting down the mechanics of the plot -- for instance, the way the doctors so cavalierly, with just a minimum of testing and a glance at a few brain scans, announce that Georgia is going to die.
If you're looking for realism, that detail is absurd. On the other hand, the ability to spot such silliness doesn't exactly make you a discerning viewer. We take such pride in our sophistication as moviegoers, in our ability to call out every single marionette string in the moviemaking process, that sometimes we can barely bring ourselves to enter the universe of a movie -- the last thing we want is to seem silly or gullible. ("The plausibles," is what Hitchcock called viewers like that, the ones who always ask, "Why don't they go to the police?" Because then there wouldn't be a movie, he answered.)"