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Front Row at 5 Movie BlogJames Owen is the on-air film critic for KY3 and writes for the Front Row at Five blog at ky3.com. He brings a unique and quasi-academic approach to talking about movies. Prior to that, he was the film columnist for Springfield Go! and a freelance writer for 417 Magazine. Until recently, James was co-editor and writer for www.filmsnobs.com. The site, which he co-created, was subject to profile in the Lawrence (KS) Journal-World and the Kansas City Star. Additionally, the Star named James one of the Top 30 Artists Under the Age of 30 in the KC Metro area in 2004. While on Filmsnobs, he was a member of the Kansas City Film Critics Association and the Online Film Critics Circle and was featured at www.rottentomatoes.com. In his spare time, James is an associate attorney with Hosmer, King, & Royce, LLC in Springfield. 
New offerings this week are Jim Carrey's digital counterpart in A Christmas Carol as well as the tony cast and crew behind the Army psychic film The Men Who Stare at Goats.
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Joel and Ethan Coen's "A Serious Man" is a dark, nasty tale about a man looking for meaning and purpose in his life. Read more »
On this Halloween weekend, the scariest thing Hollywood has to offer is dead Michael Jackson in This is It and the independent comedy Gentleman Broncos.
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Oren Peli wrote and directed "Paranormal Activity" but you wouldn't know that from watching the film. The beginning is simply a "Thanks" to the families of the characters in the film for allowing Paramount Pictures to use the following footage - which gives you some sense these characters aren't going to bode well for the duration of the flick. Read more »
Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things Are" is a beautifully inventive film about the wonders and the pitfalls of a child's imagination. It is by no means perfect or smooth, as nothing gestating from a ten-year-old's mind would be. The benefit of this adaptation from the classic Maurice Sednak's book is that the stories and images are filtered through the visual styling of the fantastic Jonze, who made his reputation as one of the great music video/commercial directors ever. (The anecdotal evidence I would offer is his Nike ad from 1999 that perfectly captures the apocalyptic dread of Y2K, the positive aspects of New Year's resolutions, and the product itself in a span of 59 seconds.) The sparse text of the story has also benefited from a screenplay co-written by novelist Dave Eggers who finds a way to make the mind of a young boy vividly alive and believable. Read more »
The wild things desperately long for a leader to guide them, just as Max
longs for a kingdom to rule. Read more »
One new offering is the classic children's book-turned-flick Where the Wild Things Are, as well as the hard-core vigilante celebration Law-Abiding Citizen.
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Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story" is an ambitious mess of a movie: Part filmmaker autobiography, part historical lesson, part exploitative emotional narrative. All of this focused around the American economic system. It is perhaps the most sweeping topic Moore has ever covered. In turn, "Capitalism" is also one of his ill-focused works; a film that does not find its emotional or intellectual thrust until the last third of its two hours and twenty minutes of run time. Read more »
Reuben Fleisher's "Zombieland" has a clever concept at its core that does not crib as much from Edgar Wright's classic comedy "Shaun of the Dead" as I had expected: This film examines the benefits of a zombie invasion. There's lots of great parking, no lines at amusement parks, and the violence against zombies act as a great stress reliever. These segments of "Zombieland" have a gleeful zeal. However, Mr. Fleisher has never directed a film before so he leans heavily on bathroom humor and has a real problem with consistency. As fun as it is, "Zombieland" could have been a little tighter. For a film that only 82 minutes long, that's almost a fatal flaw. Read more »
Robert D. Siegel's "Big Fan" follows Paul Aufiero (Patton Oswalt) as he contemplates whether he should put his own interests over the interests of his beloved New York Giants. In the process, he goes from being a psycho sports fan to just being a psycho. Siegal's theory is that the only thing distinguishing the two state of minds is one word. While there has been plenty of celluloid spooled out on the deranged loner, "Big Fan" is a very specific, tightly wound examination with a surprisingly good, central performance by Oswalt.
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For the masses, there's the Vince Vaughn laffer Couple's Retreat and The Moxie in Springfield has the darkly funny Patton Oswalt vehicle Big Fan.
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If you want your humor with a little controversy, there's Capitalism: A Love Story. If you just want some guilt-free funniness, there's Ricky Gervais in The Invention of Lying.
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If I sat down and gave it a lot of thought, I don't think I could think of a movie character I've seen recently as unpleasant and unlikable as Kyle Preston in Bobcat Goldtwait's "World's Greatest Dad". This is a teenager that likes spending time with himself a little too much (if you know what I mean), says horribly misogynist things to his female classmates, and treats his caring father Lance (Robin Williams) as an object of contempt. Kyle has has a foul mouth, little intellect, and zero friends. Well, he does have one friend, Andrew (Evan Martin), who is really more like an emotional punching bag. Just think, this character is played by Daryl Sabara, the actor who was one of the Sky Kids leads. (Yeah, go look it up. I was shocked when someone told me.) Read more »
Hollywood is still in the netherworld between summer blockbusters and holiday fare with the fresh remake Fame and Bruce Willis in the clone/robot stupid-fest Surrogates.
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Steven Soderbergh's "The Informant!" could have easily been a corporate thriller about big money and deeply-ingrained greed or it could have simply been a slight satire about arrogance and ego among our country's boardrooms. At certain points, does both. But, more interestingly, the film becomes a character study about Marc Whitaker - a man who starts out as the highest-ranked executive in US criminal history to serve as a government witness and ends up serving a longer jail term that several of the people he was spilling secrets about - and about how one character's perspective can vastly impact the framing a story. Like Christopher Nolan's "Memento" or Ron Howard's "A Beautiful Mind", "The Informant!" offers the events of its story only from the main character's perspective so we learn things only when that character learns things. In those films, things that seemed real turned out not to necessarily be true. Here, the truth we were told just turned out to be a lie. Sometimes.
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