Here is the summary for the movie Orphan from imdb
"Orphan" is a seriously tasteless motion picture, but it's equally as spineless. A suspense piece with numerous acts of violence and torment involving children, "Orphan" endeavors to unnerve the audience by hitting below the belt, taking on the taboo concept of kids in peril to come across as provocative and unsettling. Instead, the film mostly bores with its repetition; the little originality it clings to dearly is neutered and slowly drained of shock value by the film's end.
Seeking to fill their life with a new child after the stillborn death of their last baby, couple Kate (Vera Farmiga) and John (Peter Sarsgaard) are looking to adopt this time around, adding to their brood, which already includes Daniel (Jimmy Bennett) and young deaf girl, Max (Aryana Engineer). The couple soon comes upon Esther (Isabella Fuhrman), a gifted nine-year-old Russian girl who's keen to have Kate and John as her parents. Enjoying the initial period of adjustment, Kate soon starts to perceive something evil within Esther, trying to articulate her fears to her doubting husband. When accidents start to occur around Esther and people go missing, Kate is sure her daughter is behind the confusion. Trouble is, there's no one left to believe her as Esther goes about her business charming everyone with her unusually perceptive charisma.
I could see "Orphan" bothering a lot of potential viewers. While a one-dimensional Hollywood horror film peppered with screenwriting stupidity, the film does highlight an inordinate amount of bloodshed and threatening poses featuring the young co-stars of the film. Director Jaume Collet-Serra relishes the heightened circumstances, using Esther's wicked ways to yank gasps out of the audience, toying with the innocence of youth, juxtaposed against the pigtailed antagonist's body count. "Orphan" consists primarily of poor taste, but all would be forgiven had Collet-Serra actually strived to follow Esther's wrath to its natural conclusion. Instead "Orphan" cheats with a clumsy last-act spoiler twist, intended to shotgun some jaw-dropping surprise into the picture, but also to cover its own behind from accusations of unforgivable exploitation.
"Orphan" is B-grade horror entertainment, and Collet-Serra follows the map submissively. After his first-rate work unearthing fresh nightmares in the 2005 "House of Wax" remake, I was disappointed to see the director sleepwalk here. "Orphan" hits every cliché around, with numerous empty calorie boo scares and a liberal dosage of idiocy passed around to all the characters. The suspense electricity of the film is designed to come from Esther's cool menace: the angelic, neatly trimmed dream daughter who also has working knowledge of handguns, murder weapon disposal, and possesses the ability to break her own arm at will. She's the pale nightmare Collet-Serra trusts will go a long way to creeping out the room.
Nicely ornamented with porcelain purity by Fuhrman, the character is nevertheless a figure of high camp, and while the production knows it's pushing easy genre response buttons, there's little inspiration beyond the sheer goofy to hold the film together. It's the "Bad Seed" and Damien all over again (not to mention a retread of 2007's "Joshua," which also starred Farmiga), only here there's a distinct pleasure in staging graphic violence around kids. A slimy sexual element with Esther is introduced as well that might've made for pristine horror fodder had the script maintained some gumption and cheerfully waltzed into a wonderland of sleaze. Instead, it pulls every last punch.
We have Vera Farmiga doing her umpteenth take on wild-eyed big screen panic (she's supremely gifted, but wasted here as the mother-in-the-way), Sarsgaard woefully miscast as a suburban dad (even he refuses to believe the performance), and a screenplay that can't stop recycling moves from other, better horror pictures (bloating the running time past two hours). "Orphan" had a distinct shot at infamy, but the feature lost its nerve on the way to capture ideal disease. Instead, the resolution kicks the legs out from under the entertainment value, leaving Esther a horrific demon without much of a lasting bite.
Here is the summary for the movie G.I Joe from imdbAfter a prologue in the 1600s (this movie has a prologue in the 1600s!), we skip ahead to the near future, where a weapons manufacturing company run by James McCullen (Christopher Eccleston) has just finished their latest invention. Using nanobot technology, their missiles will literally consume their targets, whether that means tanks, planes, or entire cities. The first four are packaged and given to the U.S. Military, who sends an entire convoy to deliver them. En route, the deliverymen are attacked by a ship carrying Baroness (Sienna Miller), who attempts to kill everyone and steal the missiles. Soliders Duke (Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) fight back and are prepared to die protecting the payload when General Hawk (Dennis Quaid) and his elite team step in to save them. Duke and Ripcord are taken to the Joes' base, and they join to try and stop the missiles from being stolen again.
The movie's ludicrous imagination kicks in almost immediately. At first, Duke and Ripcord train on fairly standard, if unrealistically advanced courses, like a shooting gallery with holographic targets and in hand-to-hand combat using big, futuristic-looking sticks. Then the movie just cuts to a short clip of Duke piloting an underwater spaceship-looking thing in a miles-long tank filled with giant rings, and my brain was happy to shut off and enjoy the spectacle. Other critics will say it's just like a video game, but it's so unabashedly, gleefully, purposefully like a video game that I kind of think that's the idea. In the accelerator suit chase through the streets of Paris (seen in most of the trailers), Scarlett (Rachel Nichols) flies after Duke and Ripcord on a commandeered civilian motorcycle that magically moves about 300 miles an hour, and all I could think of was driving motorcycles like that in Grand Theft Auto.
Speaking of that chase sequence, it's a jaw-dropping tidal wave of awesomeness, with Duke, Ripcord and Scarlett aided by the silent good-guy ninja Snake Eyes (Ray Park), clinging to the underside of the villains' Hummer as the group causes untold amounts of damage. Cars fly through the air like they're made of paper and buildings are reduced to craters, all at a dizzying, breakneck speed. It even changes method of transport, switching from a car chase to a foot chase without missing a beat. I promise, at the very least, this fifteen minutes alone is worth your hard-earned matinee dollars.
The Joes are all well-cast. Personally, I liked Rachel Nichols and Marlon Wayans, who are both charismatic and have an entirely playful chemistry with each other. I didn't even mind Wayans' cheesy comic relief. His jokes aren't particularly funny, but he doesn't scream for attention the way he has in other movies, and all of his comedy bits put together couldn't take up more than ten minutes. My only complaint is that I'd have liked to see more of Dennis Quaid's General Hawk. There's a scene in the movie that briefly reminded me of Innerspace, and while it's totally not right for the character, I still would have liked to see him slip a bit of "the Tuck Pendleton machine" (zero defects!) into the role.
The good guys are complemented by a solid roster of villains. Christopher Eccleston, as far as I can tell, is supposed to be the main bad guy, and he's good at standing around in fine suits, sneering and being slimy (and when given the chance, he wisely refuses to reveal his evil plot), but for all intents and purposes, I'd say his evildoing in the movie is equal to that of Sienna Miller's Baroness. The shared history she has with Duke is worked in to varying degrees of success over the course of the film, but even without it, she's got more personality than any of the other action-movie villains I've seen this year (both the villains in Wolverine AND Terminator were silent!). Minor spoiler ahead. Skip to the next paragraph to avoid reading it. There's also a psychotic doctor (of course there is!), played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and he really dredges up some entertaining evil, covered with creepy makeup and practically cackling some of his lines. The only letdown is he spends most of the movie with his voice altered, which takes away from the experience of seeing him play the role.
It's all about tone, and director Stephen Sommers has it down. I haven't seen Deep Rising, which by several accounts is his most entertaining picture, but I've always thought he deserved a little more credit than he gets. If Sommers made slightly better movies, he'd be a genre favorite on par with Sam Raimi (certainly the directorial style of Van Helsing owes more than a little debt of gratitude to Army of Darkness). Despite rumors he was fired, this is his movie through and through, the kind of movie where a character calmly admires a military complex hidden under the polar ice caps because "It's the perfect hiding place. Undetectable and untraceable," and not because it's totally freaking ridiculous. Sommers even brings a few friends with him, including the reliably weaselly Kevin J. O'Connor, Arnold Vosloo, and another fun cameo I won't spoil. The Rise of Cobra is just like the Joes themselves: gets in, gets the job done, and gets out clean, all because Sommers knows what he's doing. And as they say, knowing...
Here is the summary for the movie Bruno from imdbIt appears the trilogy is now complete. After creating starring vehicles for his characters Ali G (2002's "Ali G Indahouse") and Borat Sagdiyev (2006's smash "Borat"), the time has come for Sacha Baron Cohen to allow Bruno an opportunity to carry his own picture. "Bruno" will likely be welcomed by an adoring audience fully equipped to endure the traditional blast of Cohen-approved smut and merciless social commentary, especially after "Borat" turned his obscure antics into box office gold. However, don't hold sudden international success against Cohen's superb modus operandi, who once again tears into a clueless world seeking to mock, celebrate, and disgust anyone who will welcome him.
Watching his success on German television taken away from him, fashion expert Bruno (Sacha Baron Cohen) is ready to make the leap to America. Traveling to Los Angeles with assistant Lutz (Gustaf Hammarsten), Bruno hopes to hit it big on network television, only to watch as his special brand of homosexually charged antics fail to impress American test audiences. Dejected, Bruno travels around the globe trying to make himself famous, finding nooks and crannies of culture to test his charms. Armed with his gumption, his adoptive African baby O.J., and his innate sense of cutting-edge style, Bruno finds he must make peace with himself before he can change the world.
With "Bruno," Sacha Baron Cohen finds his velvet bag of magic tricks nearly empty. With the megaton success of "Borat," the actor is a now a fixture of the media spotlight, unable to hide behind careful disguises and fool unsuspecting victims. To help control the necessity for surprise, "Bruno" is caught somewhere between the faux-documentary shenanigans of "Borat" and the straight-laced comedic stylistics of "Ali G Indahouse." It's a bubbling potion of the staged and the real that supplies a suitable comfort zone for Cohen to manufacture his most outrageous character: a hulking gay fashionista with a tireless libido and a limited appreciation for personal space.
"Bruno" doesn't feature a rigid structure, but merely provides a faint sense of purpose for our Austrian hero to go out into the world and try to spread his special brand of tight-pantsed cheer through increasingly preposterous situations. If Ali G trafficked in B-boy stupidity and Borat represented extreme foreign cluelessness, Bruno is a big gay menace. Using the character's homosexuality as the bayonet on the rifle of satire, "Bruno" is more consumed with stirring up homophobic response than trying to stitch together a consistent feature film. "Bruno" eventually sheds all dramatic pretenses to run free in the fields of Cohen's pervy imagination, sticking the character in impossible situations of conflict to capture the often colorful reactions.
Whether he's enlisting in boot camp, trying to seduce Ron Paul to help market a sex tape, appearing on a Jerry Springeresque talk show to defend his African baby, meeting with Christian homosexual conversion experts, struggling to interview Paula Abdul while using Mexican day laborers as furniture, looking to broker peace in the Middle East, visiting a swinger's party, or assuming disguise as "Straight Dave" and staging a UFC event (taking the sport to its natural conclusion), Bruno is craving fame at any cost. Cohen's enviable energy in the role goes a long way toward smoothing out the rough edges of the filmmaking, working to mold a thin structure of fame-whore ridiculousness to a picture more concerned with gags and punchlines, often accompanied by graphic male nudity. "Bruno" is habitually shocking, especially in the manner it fixates on anal play and the defiant heterosexuality of the marks, but Cohen keeps the horseplay frothy enough to avoid a hate crime mentality.
"Bruno" doesn't break new ground for Cohen and his marvelous comic impulses, but it gives him room to play, and that's just as welcome. "Bruno" contains plenty of belly laughs, audible gasps, and provides a sly refresher on obscene civilian prejudice, drilling to the cancerous heart of intolerance one laugh at a time.
