Friday movie roundup – June 19

Hollywood has dropped its pants and befouled cinemas with two pungent piles of movie poop this week.

One is “The Proposal,” of which the best that can be said is that it’s not quite as suicide-inducingly awful as it looks. Strangely, I seem to have written about this movie twice already, once when I mocked a flier for a screening of it (that’s the screening I attended, by the way), and once when I imagined what the pitch meeting for it was like.

The other bad new release is “Year One” (review at Film.com), which actually had the potential to be good, given its cast and behind-the-scenes pedigree. Sadly, it’s an unfunny, desperate mess.

In limited release is a Norwegian splatter film called “Dead Snow” (review at Cinematical), about young people in a remote cabin who are menaced by zombies — Nazi zombies, as it happens. It’s not as good as you’d hope, given that premise.

Woody Allen’s “Whatever Works” opens in limited release today, too, but I won’t have a review until next week. A friend of mine in Orlando said it’s not screening for critics there because, according to the publicist, the filmmaker only approved screenings for certain critics and certain markets. Right, because who ever heard of a Woody Allen movie doing well in South Florida?

Sometimes I Twitter things.

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