Father and son.  Is there anything more adorable?  Well, maybe a puppy licking ice cream.  But really, the theme of father and son is something that tends to warm the cockles of anyone’s heart.  And since warm cockles is a good thing (so I’ve heard; as I don’t know what a cockle is, I’ll take that as truth) wouldn’t the team of Jaden Smith and his father Will be just a cute fest of awesome?  Well….

Cute fest?  Yes.  Absolutely.  Awesome?  Um, not so much.  Their new movie After Earth isn’t bad.  The problem is After Earth isn’t particularly good either.  Sorry M. Night Shyamalan, you’ll have to look to your next directorial effort for redemption from The Last Airbender.  Or The Lady In The Water.  Or The Happening.  Perhaps a vacation to rejuvenate is in order?  I hear stone massages are the bomb.

Speaking of bombs, After Earth takes place after we humans crapped up the planet we call home.  And much like locusts, we then flew off to someplace else (and probably crapped that up too), leaving Earth to go do it’s own thing.  A thousand years later, Earth is Darwin’s theory come true, with all sorts of evolved beasties turning our once habitable planet into a danger zone of the highest order.  Heck, humans can’t even breathe the air comfortably anymore, as Earth’s atmosphere is too low in oxygen to support the current crop of folks.  Meanwhile, on the planet humans now call home, there are dangerous beasties too; aliens called Ursa that can carve us up like deli meat and sniff us out based on our fear are hunted by the Ranger Corps.  Nobody embodies the Ranger Corps better than living legend Cypher Raige (Will Smith).  Problem is, his young wanna-be Ranger son Kitai (Jaden Smith) lacks the discipline necessary to “Ghost” — turning off fear so the alien beasties can’t find you — and isn’t making the grade.  But Cyper decides to bring Kitai on a training mission or something (honestly, it’s tough to care enough to remember) and when things go wonky, guess where they crash land?  With a captured Ursa on board?  That totally gets loose?  With Kitai the only one that can save his dad?  Yeah, you’re absolutely right.

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Don’cha just hate when a movie looks like it’s going to be really amazing and show a side of life that you’ve never seen before, only to whip a 180 and bore you to tears?  Well, if that’s you then At Any Price doesn’t have much to recommend it; it’s a film that starts off with all sorts of promise only to get mired in so many “important messages” that it loses itself and it’s audience.

Henry Whipple (Dennis Quaid) is a corn farmer in Iowa.  He’s also a salesman for GMO (genetically modified organisms) corn seed, and is making a pretty darn good living at it.  Son Dean Whipple (Zac Efron) is the obligatory kid who wants to get out of the sticks, and he’s got a good chance of that thanks to his skill at auto racing.  When the Whipples aren’t busy squeezing Charmin with the farm, they’re doing the usual things that folks in Corn Country seem to do in movies; party out in the middle of nowhere, cheat on their wife with the secretary/former prom queen, drive to the nearest town (two hours away) to steal stuff, and try to cheat the system.  But for Henry and Dean things start to fall apart, and when they do you know it’s going to affect everyone around them.

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Oh please, let this not be Vanilla Sky.  

That was the thought that ricocheted through my brain at the start of Oblivion.  With it’s sleek, hip visuals and promise of Deep Dark Secrets, I worried that it would be an echo of that head-scratcher.  I needn’t have worried.  Oblivion isn’t a retread of Vanilla Sky, it’s a retread of just about every other Sci-Fi movie you’ve seen lately.  It’s also a lovely way to waste a few hours.  Like a chocolate-covered pill from Miracle Max, damn if it doesn’t go down smooth.

In 2017, the Earth gets a smackdown from an alien race.  But all ended well, sorta; the humans won, but in order to do so we had to unleash the nukes.  So now the bulk of surviving humanity lives on Titan, the largest of Saturn’s moons.  A small handful of survivors are the “clean-up crew”, extracting what little viable resources earth has left for use in our new planetary digs.  How does war veteran Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) know that’s true?  Because that’s what he was told after a “mandatory memory wipe” a few years back.  Does anyone else think that’s kinda fishy?  That’s an affirmative, y’all.

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