The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Fired Up shouldn't be worth a damn, and, for the most part, it isn't. The film, after all, details the adventures of two smug, smartass high school jocks sneaking into a cheerleading camp in order to bed as many cheerleaders as they can. The leads, played by Eric Christian Olsen and Nicholas D'Agosto, aren't characters so much as walking punchlines machines, and are really only distinguished by the fact that Olsen, who mugs a lot, is quite a bit more unsufferable than D'Agosto, who has a Beatles haircut and spends a lot of time looking soulful.

This is a good time for animation -- maybe one of the best ever. Just look at some of the films that have been made in the past few years, such as Pixar's Wall-E and Howl's Moving Castle from Studio Ghibli. Even a lot of the mediocre fare is great fun, such as the Shrek films, which might not be great art but know their way around pointed satire and clever parody. Heck, even television animation, such as Robot Chicken, is about as smart and as funny as you could hope television might be.

Taken is a movie about a government spook whose daughter is kidnapped abroad, so he tracks her down and kills everybody connected to her kidnapping. I'm not giving away anything by telling you that -- the plot is spelled out by the advertising campaign, which features the spook talking to his daughter's kidnappers and informing them, in a quiet and measured voice, that they will soon all be dead. Frankly, if the spook didn't do what he promised, there wouldn't be much of a movie. So there are no surprises in the film's plotting. For some critics, the surprise is in the casting.

I didn't really want to write about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I didn't like the movie, and I feel like my time is better served by writing about things I do like, but the Oscars seem to have fallen in love with the film, and that makes it newly important. In a sentence, I found the film to be a rickety and overlong affair that misapplies its essential concept and some superlative effects work to tell a story that is fundamentally shallow. The film purports to be the story of a life lived backward, but squanders that theme. The original story, by F.

Even longtime comic book/graphic novel devotees might admit to some fatigue with the apparent overkill of Hollywood translations at the multiplex, but the prodigious visual imagination, droll humor and sincere themes entertainingly weaved together by Guillermo Del Toro in Hellboy II: The Golden Army distinguish it among its peers.

To be honest, I didn't know who Hunter S. Thompson was until after he killed himself. It was a miserable year in college. Bush had slithered his way into the White House for the second time and winter at Carleton seemed even more bitter than usual. Our anger had given way to numb depression as we shuffled about our lives. Not that I was alive then, but I couldn't shake the feeling that we had lost something over the past 40 years. In the '60s and '70s, Hunter S. Thompson embodied the kind of restless anger the country needed during the Bush years. What happened?