The Muppets

Jason Segel with some very cute muppets.

Pretty close to a perfect muppet movie, nicely written by Jason Segel. He finds that fine line between satire and heart and skates along it the length of this very funny film. There's probably a few too many cameos by stars who will be forgotten in just a few years (I'm looking at you Selena Gomez), so I'm sure this will feel dated before long. But fading celebrity status is one of the themes of this movie so maybe it was intended.

The Fighter

David O. Russell is such a great filmmaker but it's hard to imagine he'll ever top Three Kings. The Fighter, however, comes close; it's really, really good. Although there is plenty of boxing it's essentially a story of two brothers, Mickey Ward and Dicky Eklund, played by Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale. Bale is the showier of the two performances, and a lot showier. He's like a Warner Brothers cartoon character on crack, and it's a great performance. I liked everyone else too--Amy Adams, just believable enough as a tough townie, Melissa Leo as a monstrous mother with her brood of terrifying daughters, and Wahlberg as a simple guy just trying to become a boxer. None of this would work, however, if Russell wasn't pulling the strings. It's beautifully paced, cut and packaged, and he handles the boxing scenes perfectly, making them realistic instead of aestheticized to death a la Scorsese.

Leap Year (2009)

I don't really have much to say about this movie except that it was truly awful, a terribly written piece of shite. The only thing that could have made it worse would be if it starred Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler.