After starring in pointless drama roles trying to bridge his career with pointless movies like Man on the Moon and The Majestic, Jim Carrey is back in his top form with Bruce Almighty a funny, yet forgettable film that has Carrey inheriting the powers of God because he believes he can do the job better.

Carrey is Bruce Nolan a TV news reporter who is just having a bad time in life at the moment, forget the fact that Jennifer Aniston is his girlfriend. After being passed up for an anchor position by a slimy, sleazy co-worker Bruce has a meltdown on the air that proves to be one of the films most memorable scenes. Bruce then makes a plea to God on why he is being treated so badly for helping people out, stemming from a homeless man he tried to save from being hassled and got the crap kicked out of him. He makes a mention that he could do the job better so the big guy (Morgan Freeman) grants him his powers until the 7th at 7:00PM to help as many people as possible.

The movie, directed by Tom Shadyac, focuses on God as a general being rather than any denomination’s overseer, therefore pleasing any number of churches who don’t like to be made fun of. For those who see the movie as sacrilegious, they obviously need to take the holy rod out of their holy butt.

Bruce Almighty uses sight gags and a few regular jokes, which seem to cater to the least common denominator when it comes to dogs peeing on furniture or Bruce blowing wind up a girl’s skirt. Yet, you can’t help but be charmed by the very screen presence of Carrey whom we have missed since his days saving animals in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and making the court room funny in Liar, Liar.

The movie does get a bit preachy toward the end where the comedy rollercoaster comes to an almost horizontal flow. As with all funny movies released in recent time (with the exception of a choice few) once you have the audiences attention in the first 30 minutes you slowly wind down the laughs and bring up the drama. While this is to be expected the general tone of this last half-hour is one of the screenwriter and director preaching to the audience about the good inside. If I wanted to see a televangelist spew crap, I could do it for free at home.

Still you have a hard time not liking what Carrey can do on the big screen and many, many people have been looking forward to his return in a normal form (sans the makeup of The Grinch). Bruce Almighty suffers from a few problems but none of them are debilitating toward the likeability of the actors and story. If you can sit through some strange person telling you the way you live your life is wrong, and you want to laugh you butt off through the first half take in Bruce Almighty. If you are easily offended by God wearing a Yankees hat, or the very existence of the fellow in a movie then you need to get a firm grasp on reality and loose-up, possibly by seeing Bruce Almighty.

Old School is just one of those movies that you can pop in the DVD player at any time and watch it because it never takes itself seriously and boils down to stupid, harmless fun. While the movie doesn’t go for the same gross out edge that we have seen in previous teen-college-movies like American Pie and Road Trip, it does feature a great many parts where you will find yourself slurping down the bile in the back of your throat.

After Mitch Martin (Luke Wilson) comes home early one evening from a business trip in San Diego he finds his girlfriend engaged in a threesome with another couple. It seems Heidi (Juliette Lewis) has a thing for gang-bangs and Mitch is the last person to know, so he moves out, and buys a house on his old college’s property. Coming along for the ride is Frank (Will Ferrell) who has just recently been married and has been finding couple-hood a bit demanding, and Beanie (Vince Vaughn) a successful business man who is trapped in his marriage.

When the college-comedy-staple “Evil Dean” comes to shut things down at Mitch’s place for not using the college’s property to the benefit of the college, Mitch must band his makeshift fraternity together and pass a series of trials set down by the college committee for houses looking to be formally recognized as frats.

Coming off last weeks mediocre showing for Daredevil, I wasn’t expecting much from Old School, but early reviews had it filled with the humor of American Pie and the charm of, well, let’s just say it had charm. The most interesting character in the entire movie is Will Farrell’s Frank who is absolutely funny throughout the entire film. It is entirely obvious that Saturday Night Live was holding Will back in his creative exploits. Playing a Roxbury Guy can only get you so far in life. While Frank is the funniest, Beanie is a scene stealer. Every frame that features Vince Vaughn is stolen by him with witty comments about marriage and the happenings of the guy’s fraternity.

The movie has it’s fair share of gross out humor. The scene pegged the most would be the KY Jelly wrestling scene in which two girls take on a very old fraternity member and end up killing him in his place. The very thought of wrestling in KY is so gross it just boggles the mind. But not all of the comedy is low-brow, and while a majority of it hangs in the gutter, there is some times when just basic visual jokes and stereotypes come into play. Such as the fat kid, the geeky kid, the Evil Dean, etc.

The producers did try to entangle a love story into the mix, with mixed success. Nicole (Ellen Pompeo) is the girl that Mitch lusted after in school, and how convenient she would turn up just after he broke up with his girlfriend (isn’t it funny how those things tend to happen). Unfortunately she is currently seeing someone else (Craig Kilborn) who has a knack for the knockers of other girls. Through misunderstands and misinterpretations they fight, but them come back together when she learns of her boyfriends cheating ways.

Old School comes away as a playful romp that doesn’t stick with you very long after you have seen it, but it doesn’t have to. Movies like these are to be enjoyed time and time again because, frankly, you don’t remember the first time you saw it. Just like director Todd Phillip’s Road Trip, Old School has a certain way about it that makes it stand out from the “other” teen movies. I, for one, am glad I can watch this movie and safely go home and consume different kinds of pastry, believing I didn’t see them befouled onscreen like American Pie and Van Wilder.

Over this past weekend (January 24), Entertainmentopia was able to attend a sneak preview screening of Shanghai Knights from Disney’s Touchstone Pictures, and it turned out to be an enjoyable film that lives up to the expectations set down by it’s predecessor and previous buddy-comedy flicks.

Shanghai Knights takes place, for a majority of the movie, in ye ole England where villainous Lord Rathbone (Aiden Gillen) has conspired to steal the Imperial Seal and assassinate every member of the crown in line before him so that he can become King of England. The catch is that the protector of the Imperial Seal is Chon Wang’s (Jackie Chan) father, and when he is killed, Chon must head to England to meet his beautiful sister (Fann Wong) and avenge his father’s death. In order to get to England, Chon must find Ray O’Bannon (Owen Wilson) and get his half of the emperor’s gold they received in the first movie.

The film suffers through a very hackneyed and unoriginal plot for a better part of the movie, but most of the better jokes and amazing fight scenes make up for lame-brained story. Adding to the plus side of things is the amazingly stunning beauty of Fann Wong in the role of Chon Wang’s sister, Chon Lin. She is just not on the screen for eye candy either, she delivers some of the more memorable fight scenes throughout the course of the movie.

The film itself is full of very funny jokes, but some of them seemed very forced, and a noticeable downturn into lower realms of humor may turn off some movie goers who found the first film’s jokes more high-brow and sophisticated. The “potty-humor” is more evident this time around with jokes touching on STDs, erections, and other bodily functions, and while you won’t see any pie-humping, you do see the difference in the jokes.

Acting, for the most part, is as well done as it can be. Jackie Chan just looks tired through a better part of the movie, and Owen Wilson too. Chan may have done too many buddy movies in his lifetime, or he just may be starting to show his age, but he looks as though he is only on the set to get a paycheck and get a workout. Wilson is probably hoping that everyone doesn’t remember his escapades with Eddie Murphy in I-Spy, and plays the same basic character that he plays in every single movie he has been in (Shanghai Noon, Meet the Parents, I-Spy), he never really changes his style. To his credit, he is still very funny delivering sarcastic comments at the right time, and the right way.

The fight scenes are just as amazing as those in Shanghai Noon. The most notable are the ones that place in a London Market and on a barge near the end of the film. The final battle between Wu Yip (Donnie Yen) and Chon Wang is easily one of the coolest you will see on film this year. The experience and finesse of both Chan and Yen shows just how good they really are, and just how underused Yen was in Blade II.

Plot holes may also detract for the overall experience. During the course of the movie, O’Bannon, Lin, and Wang are put into a number of precarious positions where they are able to escape, but for some reason only Roy and Chon are shown, and Lin has vanished into the shadows. This is most noticeable when they escape from the burning barn about halfway through the movie. We know Lin mad it to the roof, but then we don’t see her till the next day. Where the hell did she go?

Overall I was very surprised how well Shanghai Knights turned out. I knew it would be a great follow-up to Shanghai Noon, but I wasn’t sure what kind of follow-up it would be. Would it rip off jokes from the first movie and just switch them around (a la Men in Black II) or would it try to invent new ways to make us laugh while keeping us watching (a la American Pie 2)? Thankfully Knights came out as one of the movies that tries new things and, for the most part, succeeds.

The bottle of common sense that I have talked about in so many of my reviews over the years must be completely out, or at least the folks over at Sony must have lost the bottle in the washing machine, because I Spy, while a kind-of-cool spy movie, is just so utterly dumb that it pains me to watch.

I Spy, a remake based loosely on the 1960s series of the same name, stars Eddie Murphy who is going for a record of how many flops he can have in one year, right now he is tied with Antonia Banderas for that honor, and Owen Wilson, who has been teamed up with just about everyone in the entertainment industry for buddy picture after buddy picture, fails to capitalize on his Shanghi Noon success.

The films premise is as follows. Wilson is Alex Scott and elite (loosely using the term here) secret agent who is given the task of finding a stolen top secret jet called the Switchblade that is currently in the possession of an arms dealer played by Malcolm McDowell. In order to get close enough to plant a tracking unit on McDowell’s character Scott and the Bureau of Nation Security (BNS) have him team up with Kelly Robinson a famous boxer, whom the arms dealer loves. The real problem is after the tracking bug is planted, why the hell does Eddie Murphy’s character stick around. His job is done, yet he just stays around for the hell of it, and the terror of the audience.

Overall the story is weak at best, and more cliché than any sappy love story you will seen on the big screen this year. From plot points that you can see from a mile away to the most lame-brained story ever, the movie just doesn’t do much for you, which is good in a way, because the people who were in the theatre with me could have used some help figuring things out rather than think about it on the drive home to their trailer park.

The biggest flaw of the movie is it isn’t overly funny, in fact, aside from a few parts where you get a good chuckle or a big hearty laugh, there isn’t a single time when you are cracking up continuously. Even with the James Bond spoofing and the campy action that makes no sense, the movie just isn’t that humorous at all. Maybe I have seen too many comedies this year, but most of the material is just stale when compared to some of the other stuff to be released this year.

Sticking around for the climax of the movie is like drilling a rusty drill-bit into your knee. This comes from the fact that the ending is just so utterly stupid, so utterly dumb, and so utterly infeasible that you just want to cripple yourself so you wouldn’t have to watch it. With the paper thin story and plot holes large enough to drive a Volkswagen through I-Spy just fails to impress when so many better comedies have come out this year. Stick with Undercover Brother or Austin Powers: in Goldmember for the laughs you are looking for.

Mr. Deeds was a great movie, and there was heated debate on the way out of the theatre if it can top Happy Gilmore as Adam Sandler’s best performance, and best movie, while Mr. Sandler may never win any awards, at the very least he isn’t trying to hard to break from his comedy roots to do drama (cough Jim Carrey cough cough Will Smith cough cough). Man there must be something in the air around here.

Mr. Deeds is a remake of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The movie features on Sandler’s character, Longfellow Deeds, who inherits $40 Billion dollars from his rich, dead Great Uncle. It seems though the CEO of this company that Deeds’ Great Uncle owns wants to take full control and sell it off in little bits and pieces. While rather predictable (right down to the way Deeds’ reconciles with his love) the movie is enjoyable for a good show, and trying to pick out instances when it looks like Winona Rider is picking Sandler’s pocket.

What works so well with the movie is Adam Sandler himself, he is such a charismatic and great actor, it is no wonder he can come back from a stink-bomb like Little Nicky and still be welcome to take money for our tickets. Any other actor would be scrubbing the crap stains off of the toilets in the restroom rather than starring in a movie playing in one of the biggest theatres in the joint.

And then there was Winona Rider trying to steal things, or we presume.

Oh, yes, Miss Rider whom has had some very troubling conflicts with the law up until this movie does a decent job as Deeds’ love interest, and keeping us on our toes to see what she is stealing from the set, we half expected her to be shown walking off holding all the props she could in one hand while shoving smaller objects in her handbag, and, well other places.

The star of the entire movie falls upon the foot-fetish butler, Emilo, whom has a “sneakiness” way to him and seems to be faster than light when he wants to appear in places. It becomes increasingly funny as the movie goes on to see just how he can move around so much, as well as Winona Rider stealing things (will this ever get old…hmmmm…No).

Mr. Deeds ranks right up there with Sandler’s best performances, but not quite the very best (which still belongs to Happy Gilmore). If you are looking for a good way to waste a couple of hours and don’t want to see Sandler in one of those annoying “accent-driven roles,” go out and see Mr. Deeds, but if you were alive for the original release, be sure to bring extra colostomy bags, because this is one funny movie.

And we get to watch Winona Rider…well you know…

Undercover Brother may be the funniest movie of the year, or the second funniest considering we have Austin Powers waiting in the wings, but for the first part of summer, Undercover Brother is the funniest movie of the year.

The film’s plot, while approaching the line of ludicrous and offensive, centers around a secret conspiracy in the world to undermine the influence of African-American culture. The group headed by “The Man” is out to tame the farthest reaches of black culture in order to keep things the way there are in the world. Out to stop them is the B.R.O.T.H.E.R.H.O.O.D. (don’t even ask me what it stands for) a group of freedom fighters looking to take out “The Man.” Even for a comedy the plot is paper thin (I call them Kate Moss Plots!). The Brotherhood recruits Undercover Brother to help infiltrate “The Man’s” business practices and uncover the dirt that is going down.

It seems that a prominent African-American general may be running for President and that is the last thing “The Man” wants to see, so they use a mind controlling substance to take over the general’s thoughts and make him open a chain of Fried Chicken Restaurants (get it Colonel, General, see it’s poking fun at KFC!). The Conspirators plan is to use the Fried Chicken to spread the substance to every African-American citizen of the US and successfully purge the political and cultural influences from the United States in whole.

Eddie Griffin stars as Undercover Brother with a great supporting cast in the form of Denise Richards as White She Devil and Chris Kattan as Mr. Feather who, himself, seems to have an overdoes of influence from the hip-hop community. Richards excels as her character and looks as hot as ever in her tight little….uh…err Kattan, who is expected to leave SNL soon after the departure of Will Ferrell, is utterly hilarious as Mr. Feather and shows that even though he doesn’t get lots of screen time on Saturday Night Live, Chris sure is a funny guy.

The movie is funny, there is no doubt about that one. With the playful humor on the differences between the different races, and the types of stereotypically characters portrayed. While everyone in the movie has their moments no one is funnier than Dave Chappelle, he steals the show as Conspiracy Brother and rightfully so, the man is h-i-l-a-r-i-o-u-s.

While never winning any awards for originality, acting, plot, or anything those stuck-up blue-hairs at the Academy look for, the movie is funnier than anything else to come out in a long time, and should only be outshined by New Line’s upcoming entry into the Austin Power’s franchise.

Sony seems to be rocking the box office the last couple of months. With the awesome Panic Room in March and Spiderman last week, now we have The New Guy, a rather cliché, but enjoyable, teen movie about a geek who goes from getting beat up to helping those on the bottom of the tier.

The problem I have with movies like this is the way the stereotypical characters are portrayed. We have the cool guys on top, with their girlfriends who want nothing more than to have their clothes stripped off and their bodies examined by high school boys looking for nothing more than pie and Coke, or at least that is what I have been told. As you move down you get to the real people, aka normal kids who enjoy going to the mall, having real friends who don’t rely on the talking of others to improve their self-esteem to “I think I can” levels, and actually have something called personality.

The New Guy focuses on Dizzy Harrison (DJ Qualls) as he attempts to be expelled from his current school so he transfer to the school across the tracks and start a new life as a cool, reformed prison inmate. Aiding him in his quest is Eddie “Undercover Brother” Griffin who seems to be really struggling for something that could be called work in the unemployment office. Fortunately, for the audience, Griffin is hilarious in the parts he is in, as is the disturbing image of Horatio Sanz in fitness clothing.

No matter how hard Dizzy tries to be expelled the school’s nurse, who needs two more brain cells to make a pair, and some higher cut shirts, feels that he is just crying out for attention and convinces his dad, Lyle Lovett, that he needs to spend more time with his son.

As I stated before the main problem, and overall theme, is so cliché that you can guess every plot point as it happens, if you want to call them plot points. Dizzy gets expelled, goes to the new school, becomes cool, identifies with the geeks, uses status to help, gets found out, gets the girl, possibly gets some. Doesn’t that sound like your High School years?

Not to say The New Guy is all bad. It has a wealth of celebrity cameos that would make George Lucas piss himself. Tommy Lee (Method of Mayhem, Motley Crue) shows up at the ending party, with two women none-the-less. And the surprise appearance by David “Shut up KITT” Hasselhoff is just the icing on the “What the Hell” cake. Also appearing are Vanilla “Paycheck, Paycheck Baby” Ice and Tony Hawk who has some of the funnier moments in the movie.

If anything The New Guy is an enjoyable way to waste a couple of hours, or if you don’t want to see Spider-Man again (although I don’t think that is possible). See it if you have the time, but if you want to really laugh, rent Not Another Teen Movie, or answer your Spidey-sense and see the web-slinger again.

Not Another Teen Movie is not going to win any awards in anyone’s book. The movie is cliché, the characters lack anything resemble character (and therefore a brain), and the acting is sub par at best, but that is what makes this movie so much fun to watch.