By Mathew Kumar

So, who else remembers that Rambo III was about Rambo going to Afghanistan to help the Taliban, huh? We do (and apparently the Sun’s Jim Slotek does too). It’s rather a shame that Sylvester Stallone hasn’t seen fit to continue from that point and deal with the consequences of the conflict, instead jumping straight to Burma/Myanmar for, as far as the reviews tell us, an absolute ton of incredibly graphic (and meaningless) violence. Eye’s Adam Nayman leads the charge with (by far) the most disgusted review: “Rambo is simply reprehensible.”
We’re sure it is! But is it really more reprehensible than the works of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer? We sat through both Date Movie and Epic Movie and managed to laugh roughly one and a half times. We’ve got high hopes for Meet the Spartans, the latest work they’ve decided to inflict upon us, and think we might actually manage to double the amount of laughs so far (a whole three laughs across three movies!) thanks to a few of the cameos (we like MADtv, and we’re not ashamed to admit it), but still.
Let’s move on, neatly skipping new releases Waiter, Untraceable, and They Wait while we do so. We will mention All Hat, however, as it’s Canadian, and also (well, to be honestly, mostly) because its name reminds us of the South Park episode “Free Hat.” That’s not really a positive thing, and the film itself is “a mere pleasant time-waster” according to NOW’s Andrew Dowler.
If you’re looking for something more specifically local, there’s How She Move, a Toronto-set coming of age drama about step-dancing. It’s nice to see films made in Toronto and set in Toronto, but these kind of films are so clichéd now that they leave us utterly cold. Metro’s Chris Atchison finds the film hard to recommend, noting, “How She Move simply lacks the originality to make it worth stepping into a movie theatre to watch.”
This week, the Royal is showing Jia Zhang-ke’s latest film, Still Life, and the Bloor shows The Rape of Europa, for those of you interested in what those naughty Nazis did with all of the art they stole (well, the stuff that they liked, anyway.) Cinematheque Ontario begins Canada’s Top Ten tonight, and the screenings are mostly sold out, but it does look like there are still tickets available for the screening of Eastern Promises, tonight at 9:30 p.m.