User blog:Ceauntay/iCarly: The Sequel, Step Up Revolution, The Intouchables, The Watch Open

''Opening This Week



iCarly: The Sequel ★★★ They back and are funnier than ever. But in this story, their webshow iCarly has once again outcast their beloved fans, which became chaos. After dealing with stress after the situation that they are months away from high school graduation, Spencer (Jerry Trainor) took his sister Carly (Miranda Cosgrove) and her friends on a cruise trip. On a cruise sure sounds so relaxing. (G) (AMC Dutch Square; Carmike Wynnsong; Columbia Place; Regal Columbiana Grande)

Step Up Revolution ★★ Let’s be frank: Movies that exist exclusively to showcase dancing have existed almost as long as movies have existed. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that — provided you’re actually given a chance to appreciate the dancing. That’s the epic fail in this fourth installment of the connected-only-by-name franchise, which finds the leader of a Miami street-dance crew (Ryan Guzman) hooking up with the dancer daughter (Kathryn McCormick) of the land developer threatening to bulldoze a low-income neighborhood. It’s old-school “let’s put on a show” stuff tarted up for a new generation, the simplicity of the plot dynamics helping ensure there’s no distraction from the choreography. Instead, it’s left to the direction and editing to provide that distraction, as we get yet another example of filmmaking that cuts performances into snippets so microscopic that make it virtually impossible to appreciate the virtuosity. Comically conflicted attitudes about corporate greed and barely passable performances are less of a problem if a dedication to short attention spans doesn’t spoil the way we see the only thing this movie really has going for it. (PG-13) (AMC Dutch Square; Carmike Wynnsong; Columbia Place; Regal Columbiana Grande) The Intouchables The true story of a wealthy, physically disabled risk taker, the picture of established French nobility, who lost his wife in an accident and whose world is turned upside down when he hires a young, good-humored, black Muslim ex-con as his caretaker. (R) (Regal Columbiana Grande)

The Watch Suburban dads (Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill, Richard Ayoade) who form a neighborhood watch group as a way to get out of their day-to-day family routines find themselves defending the Earth from an alien invasion. (R) (AMC Dutch Square; Carmike 14; Carmike Wynnsong; Columbia Place)

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Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter Sixteenth President Abraham Lincoln (Benjamin Walker) discovers vampires are planning to take over the United States. He makes it his mission to eliminate them. (R) (Carmike 14) The Amazing Spider-Man ★★ Some people will argue this version should be evaluated independently from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, but if we’ve seen what a pretty-close-to-perfect Spider-Man movie looks like, how can we not recognize how much this one lacks? In the first place, it was borderline nuts to start all over with another origin, with nerdy high school student Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) once again bitten by a mutant spider. Garfield simply seems lost most of the time, and while Emma Stone’s charms, as Parker’s love interest Gwen Stacy, make her a welcome addition, she’s playing a relationship edited so carelessly that no emotional connections develop. Director Marc Webb had no history handling large-scale action, but surprisingly, that’s one of the few things the film actually gets right, providing a few nifty battles between Spider-Man and The Lizard (Rhys Ifans). But Raimi’s Spider-Man movies weren’t brilliant because of what they achieved technically, but because they gave a story full of digital effects a huge human heart, and an understanding of something being at stake for its characters. Those movies gave you something that stuck with you, not something the studio is hoping you’ve forgotten by the time they decide to make another one. (PG-13) (AMC Dutch Square; Carmike Wynnsong; Columbia Place; Monetta Drive-In; Regal Columbiana Grande; Regal Pastime; Regal Sandhill) Shadow the Hedgehog ★★★ 20th Century Fox brings the story to life to focus on a title character dealing his life ever since he was created 50 years ago. (PG)

Will & Grace 2 Warner Bros. brings back the romantic comedy featuring the return of two couples Will & Grace Truman (Eric McCormack and Debra Messing) with Jack McFareland (Sean Hayes) and Karen Walker (Megan Mullally). (PG-13)

The Avengers ★★★★ In some ways, it’s impossible for a fan-geek to separate anticipation from the actual film writer-director Joss Whedon has created. He assumes you already know the characters’ back-stories so that he can dive right into the assembling of Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and company to fend off an extra-dimensional invasion. A large chunk of the first half is devoted to battles between the heroes themselves, as Whedon gleefully brings “Who would win a fight between...?” conversations to life. But that’s just prelude to a 40-minute finale in which a hole in the sky over Manhattan begins vomiting forth an endless supply of faceless villains waiting to be dispatched with a flourish, especially in the brilliant showcases for the Hulk. The Avengers aspires to little more than gathering its geek-tastic all-star team, pointing them in the direction of the nearest impending apocalypse and saying, “Go get ‘em.” Those who’ve been waiting for that moment for decades are going to love that it seems to have been done right — even if, deep in our hearts, we also love that it was done at all. (PG-13) (Carmike Wynnsong; Regal Columbiana Grande) Bernie In a small town in Texas, the local mortician (Jack Balck) strikes up a friendship with a wealthy widow (Shirley MacLaine), though when he murders her, he goes to great lengths to create the illusion that she’s alive. (PG-13) (Carmike 14) Brave ★★★ After teasing with the idea that this would be yet another “misunderstood misfit” animated tale, Brave backs from that precipice to discover something considerably richer. Free-spirited medieval Scottish princess Merida (Kelly Macdonald) chafes under the expectations of proper ladyhood imposed by her mother (Emma Thompson) — but a witch’s spell could change Merida’s fate. It’s likely no surprise to anyone who’s seen a Pixar movie that it’s gorgeous to behold, though the night sequences are frustratingly hard to discern in 3-D. But the story delivers a surprisingly wise metaphor for the natural strain between teen girls and their mothers, recognizing where the need for individual expression intersects with parents’ valuable instruction on the way the bigger world works. It’s unfortunate that the parts of Brave less specifically about that idea involve scattered ingredients from the “How to Make a Contemporary Animated Movie” handbook; the film sometimes struggles to find its own distinctive voice. With Macdonald and Thompson providing lovely voice performances, Brave gets at the heart of something thorny and human, reminding us that all those animated tales of misunderstood young rebels are only telling half of the story. (PG) (AMC Dutch Square; Carmike 14; Monetta Drive-In; Regal 7; Regal Pastime; Regal Sandhill) The Dark Knight Rises ★★★ Christopher Nolan approaches the climactic, soaring aria of his trilogy — and his voice cracks. Set eight years after The Dark Knight, it finds a retired Batman (Christian Bale) returning to action to face an anarchist mercenary called Bane (Tom Hardy). The social and psychological material is ambitious, yet doesn’t always make the same thematic sense here that they did in Nolan’s first two Batman outings. That’s only one place where Nolan seems to have built too much stuff into the film — including its new characters — to bring to reasonable fruition. And yet, for all its small stumbles, The Dark Knight Rises still feels so powerfully consequential that it’s almost always gripping in the moment. That single, dramatic aria Nolan might have aimed for instead becomes a chorus, the voices sometimes converging in glorious harmony, at other times veering into cacophony. (PG-13) (AMC Dutch Square; Carmike Wynnsong; Columbia Place; Monetta Drive-In; Regal Columbiana Grande; Regal Pastime; Regal Sandhill) Dark Shadows ★ This eighth collaboration between director Tim Burton and Johnny Depp shows a creative marriage that has grown less creative with every passing reunion, stuck in a cycle of revisiting familiar pop-culture characters. In an adaptation of the cult-favorite 1970s Gothic soap opera, Depp plays vampire Barnabas Collins, freed from nearly 200 years buried undead to explore the world of 1972. Thus begins a supernatural melodrama, or maybe a fish-out-of-water period-piece, or perhaps a wild special-effects-heavy action movie. Indeed, it’s every one of these things, in a combination that rarely succeeds even temporarily at any one of them. Depp himself preens regally in his cape and plastered spit-curls, yet here he’s little more than a delivery system for jokes — and no matter how enthusiastically he pronounces the lines, he can’t make them add up to a movie. By the final 20 minutes, the whole thing has collapsed into a pointless clamor that goes nowhere and for no good reason. As is the case with many marriages, it has become clear to everyone except the people involved that Burton and Depp might not be good for each other any more. (PG-13) (Monetta Drive-In) Ice Age: Continental Drift ★ Can we just acknowledge that these features are little more than a Scrat delivery system? The acorn-obsessed critter has always brought an anarchic Looney Tunes energy to the recycled situations in which Manny the mammoth (Ray Romano), Diego the saber-toothed tiger (Denis Leary) and Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo) found themselves. The narrative this time splinters to give every character something to worry about as catastrophic tectonic behavior separates them, as though the franchise had turned the plotting over to Roland Emmerich. And there are precious few minutes of Scrat, unfortunately, though there are still more laughs to be found there than in the entire rest of the non-Scrat film. Then again, it’s pretty much expected at this point that 90 percent of Ice Age is just going to remind that you’d rather being watching something else. (PG) (AMC Dutch Square; Columbia Place; Monetta Drive-In; Regal 7; Regal Columbiana Grande, Regal Pastime, Regal Sandhill) Katy Perry: Part of Me A documentary that chronicles Katy Perry’s life on and off-stage. (R) (PG) (Carmike 14; Regal 7) Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted ★★★ Faced with the third installment of a never particularly inspired animated franchise, the filmmakers abandon the idea that you need a story at all. Technically, there is a plot involving Alex the lion (Ben Stiller) longing once again to return to New York from Africa, leading to Alex and friends joining a traveling circus as their possible ticket home. The utter lack of concern with setting up genuine obstacles allows the filmmakers to embrace spectacle and silliness, from lemur king Julian’s (Sacha Baron Cohen) love affair with a bear to the absurdist sequence in which animal control officer DuBois (Frances McDormand) retrieves injured henchmen from their hospital beds through the strange power of.a performance of “Je Ne Regrette Rien.” When a movie commits itself to nothing more than providing freaky fun, it’s amazing how a tired series can feel fresh again. (PG) (Carmike Wynnsong)

Madea’s Witness Protection A Wall Street investment banker (Eugene Levy) who has been set up as the linchpin of his company’s mob-backed Ponzi scheme is relocated with his family to Aunt Madea’s (Tyler Perry) Southern home. (PG-13) (AMC Dutch Square; Carmike Wynnsong; Columbia Place; Regal Columbiana Grande; Regal Pastime; Regal Sandhill) Magic Mike ★★★ It’s easy to imagine that, directed by pretty much anyone besides Steven Soderbergh, this might have been virtually unwatchable. Channing Tatum stars as the titular Mike, a nightclub stripper who brings 19-year-old Adam (Alex Pettyfer) into the business. If you’re getting a whiff of every cinematic tale of a naïve newcomer, veteran mentor and vaguely shady business from All About Eve to Boogie Nights to Coyote Ugly, your nose is trustworthy. Yet despite a structure that’s pasted together from other movies, Magic Mike gets a buzz of originality from Soderbergh’s facility with actors (including a terrifically narcissistic Matthew McConaughey) and unique visual sensibility. The script seems to be trying for something slightly ambitious in its economic subtext, but it seems absurd not to acknowledge that it could exist primarily as glossy, socially acceptable porn for girls. The fact that it’s something more is a result of a director with a sense for how to make any story singularly his own. (R) (AMC Dutch Square; Carmike 14; Regal 7; Regal Pastime; Regal Sandhill) Men in Black 3 Agent J (Will Smith) travels back to the 1960s to stop an alien (Jemaine Clement) from assassinating his friend Agent K. (Tommy Lee Jones; Josh Brolin) and changing history. (PG-13) (Carmike 14) Moonrise Kingdom ★★★★ Wes Anderson is consistently misunderstood as a shallow stylist simply because his surfaces are so distinctive. His latest is a lovers-on-the-run tale, but the lovers are 12-year old Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward), pen-pal romantics with emotional issues determined to get away from the adults chasing them down. At times, Anderson’s meticulously orchestrated mise-en-scène results in brilliant visual gags; at other times, it’s easy to see why some detractors feel Anderson treats his characters like puppets. But Anderson has always built his dollhouse sets on a foundation of sensitive themes, and here he crafts a funny, perceptive spin on coming-of-age, with Sam and Suzy play-acting at adulthood even as they worry about the ways they’re not quite grown up. Superficial pleasures abound in Moonrise Kingdom; just don’t fall for believing they don’t add up to anything more. (PG-13) (Nickelodeon Theatre) Savages ★★★ Sometimes it’s a curse having read the book first. That’s part of what puts a bullet in the head of this potentially engrossing thriller based on Don Winslow’s novel about small-time California pot dealers (Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson) who find themselves forced to do business with a Mexican cartel when the girl they both love (Blake Lively) is kidnapped. Director Oliver Stone puts together a terrific cast including John Travolta, Benicio Del Toro and Salma Hayek, all of whom sink their teeth into fun roles. But this is fundamentally a tale of the way no one can get involved in a business like this without getting corrupted, which demands that the violence culminate in the kind of uncompromising ending Winslow provided. The bizarre capitulation we get here is enough to make you hate everything Hollywood does to ruin stories. (R) (AMC Dutch Square; Carmike Wynnsong; Regal Columbiana Grande)

Snow White & the Huntsman In a twist on the classic Brothers Grimm fairy tale, the Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) ordered to take Snow White (Kristen Stewart) into the woods to be killed winds up becoming her protector and mentor in a quest to vanquish the Evil Queen (Charlize Theron). (PG-13) (Carmike 14; Regal 7) Ted ★★★ An honest question from someone who hasn’t watched a single full episode of Family Guy: Is Seth MacFarlane always such a combination of really funny with really undisciplined? His feature film debut posits a childhood wish that brings a teddy bear to life — and 27 years later, John Bennett (Mark Wahlberg) is still hanging out with foul-mouthed Ted (voiced by MacFarlane), to the occasional frustration of John’s long-suffering girlfriend (Mila Kunis). MacFarlane finds some hilarious stuff to do with his concept, almost all of it predicated on the assumption — often validated — that anything crude is funnier when done by a stuffed animal. Yet he also doesn’t seem to have a real story to contain it all — missing out on a unique stab at washed-up child celebrity — or the kind of withering satire that helps anchor similar shenanigans by Sacha Baron Cohen or the South Park boys. For every truly inspired punch line, there’s a fart gag waiting just around the corner. (R) (AMC Dutch Square; Carmike 14; Columbia Place; Monetta Drive-In; Regal 7; Regal Pastime; Regal Sandhill)

Think Like a Man Four friends conspire to turn the tables on their women when they discover the ladies have been using Steve Harvey’s relationship advice against them. (PG-13) (Carmike 14)

Theaters AMC Dutch Square 14 800 Bush River Rd., 888-262-4386 Carmike Cinemas 14 122 Afton Ct., 781-3067

Carmike Wynnsong 10 5320 Forest Dr., 782-8100 Columbia Place Stadium Cinemas 8 7201 Two Notch Rd., 661-1483 Monetta Drive-In 5822 Columbia Hwy North, Monetta, S.C., 803-685-7949 Nickelodeon Theatre 937 Main St., 254-3433 Regal Cinema 7 3400 Forest Dr., 790-9001 Regal Columbiana Grande Stadium 14 1250 Bower Pkwy., 407-9898

Regal Pastime Pavilion Cinemas 8 929 North Lake Dr.,951-3604

Regal Sandhill Cinemas 16 450 Town Center Place, 736-1811 St. Andrews Road Multi Cinemas 527 St. Andrews Rd., 772-7469