Funny thing about formula pictures: Sometimes, all you need to do to make a good movie is put the formula together without any mucking around. And sometimes, the formula itself is the problem.

Here are this week’s releases. See if you can guess which movies are which.

“After the Wedding“: This is definitively not a formula picture. But it’s a really interesting take on the Shakespearian tragedy and the modern soap opera, and Mads Mikkelsen is an endless subject of fascination.

“Disturbia“: “Rear Window” riff or “Fright Night” without the vampire? Lotta people are thinking about the former, but it’s the latter that seems more obvious to me. However you choose to see it, a no-bullshit psychological thriller seems like a pretty good idea right about now.

“Pathfinder“: Viking orphan raised by New World natives as one of their own grows up to be Karl Urban and defend his adopted people against the return of his blood kin. That is precisely as much story as director Marcus Nispel can hold in his pointy little head, which explains why the rest of the movie is entirely composed of brutal, brutal violence, shot and edited so incoherently as to make Uwe Boll look like Stanley Kubrick. (And Uwe, that’s not a compliment.)

“Perfect Stranger“: In which Halle Berry plays the Glenn Close / Debra Winger / Jessica Lange / Michael Douglas / Sharon Stone role to Bruce Willis’ Jeff Bridges / Tom Berenger / Armin Mueller-Stahl / Sharon Stone / William Baldwin. Joe Eszterhas really should think about suing for a cut of the box-office … however minimal that’s going to be.

“Sleeping Dogs“: Terrance Odette’s minimalist digital feature about two men wandering through Kitchener-Waterloo means well, and I admire its social conscience. But it’s kinda pretentious, and really, really dull, and his non-actors can’t, you know, act. So that’s kind of a sticking point.

I am off for a sit-down with Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright at a pub on the Danforth. If I ever complain about my job, please remind me that I get to do stuff like this on occasion. That should shut me up.

As promised, here’s a little more on “Grindhouse”, which is very hard to review in 300 words … even though Metro let me stretch the piece out to about 340, risking the very sanctity of the bite-sized newspaper format.

I also took a run at the movie from a different angle in today’s Sympatico/MSN column, which you may or may not find interesting.

Robert Rodriguez’ section of the film, which includes a faux trailer for a Danny Trejo revenge picture called “Machete” (which looks like the lost prequel to the “Spy Kids” films, and was apparently so much fun to shoot that Rodriguez is now actually producing the rest of it) and the feature-length zombie romp “Planet Terror”, is precisely what you want from a movie called “Grindhouse”. It’s got endless affection for the source material, it’s playful and intelligent, and it even features a couple of surprisingly solid performances in the middle of all the splatter.

“Planet Terror” is very similar to Rodriguez and Tarantino’s most recent collaboration, “From Dusk Till Dawn”, in that it sets itself up as a straight-up people-in-a-jam picture — John Carpenter’s “Assault on Precinct 13” is the most obvious point of reference — and, having established its bona fides, proceeds to go batshit insane in the most enjoyable way.

It’s followed by three more fake trailers, “guest directed” by Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright and Eli Roth. This is probably the high point of the picture, with note-perfect parodies of three very specific types of exploitation movie (and, though few critics seem to have noted, three very different types of movie marketing) running back to back to back. As with “Machete”, the trailers leave you sorta-kinda wanting to see these movies that never were … well, Zombie’s and Wright’s, anyway.

And then we get to “Death Proof” … which would probably have been a lot more effective if it had just been another fake trailer.

Yes, there’s a really impressive car chase at the end, but to get there you have to sit through two 40-minute stretches of Quentin’s trademark conversations about pop-culture ephemera, and you will not be able to avoid the painful realization that all of his black characters have the same speech pattern as Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules in “Pulp Fiction” now.

I know exactly how this came about. Quentin rationalized that the makers of this imaginary grindhouse picture would have spent 90% of the budget on the two car sequences, and would have had to pad out the rest of the film’s running time. Thus, it makes perfect sense that the characters sit around jawing.

Except that no grindhouse movie would be structured the way “Death Proof” is structured. The shocking act of violence that ends the first half of the picture belongs at the front of the film, possibly even before the credits, the better to grab the audience and keep them waiting for the next big action sequence. Can you think of a single one of these movies where nothing happens in the first two reels?

I will allow that the climax is pretty amazing, as car chases go … though it does go on about three times longer than it should, which gives the viewer plenty of time to wonder why our heroes don’t simply hit the brakes at several pivotal moments. “But then there wouldn’t be a movie,” someone could argue. And we would say: “Sure, there would. It’d just be a lot shorter, and a little less dumb.”

The “Kill Bill” movies were a lot more successful at translating the grindhouse sensibility to the contemporary screen; more to the point, they were grounded in character and peppered with spectacular action sequences. “Death Proof” never quite captures the sleazy tang of cinema’s underbelly; it’s more like a catalogue of how many movies its director has memorized. And you know, he could have rattled off all the references in two and a half minutes, and I’d have been just entertained. Maybe even more so.

Metro doesn’t publish on Good Friday or Easter Monday, so you lucky people get to read tomorrow’s reviews … today! Or at least some of them.

These are the reviews that went up on the site, anyway:

“Grindhouse“: I’ll get into more detail on this tomorrow, but the skinny is this: Robert Rodriguez nails his half of the picture, sublimating his showier impulses (mostly) to better serve the overall concept … and Quentin Tarantino decidedly does not. Dammit.

“La Tourneuse de Pages“: Opening for an exclusive run at the Royal, Denis Dercourt’s very French tale of revenge is a distressingly serene study of psychological violence … and, quite possibly, the missing link between Chabrol and Haneke. (See? I’m cosmopolitan and stuff.)

“Young Triffie“: Mary Walsh is a very talented comedian, which makes this absolute atrocity of a directorial debut — revolving around a wacky murder investigation in pre-Confederation Newfoundland — even harder to explain. If this wins a single Genie next winter, we should just dismantle the system.

For reviews of “First Snow”, “The Hoax” and “The Marsh”, check out today’s Metro Toronto — here’s the link to the larger-than-usual PDF. I’ll post links when they become available.

The Easter weekend is upon us, which means families will gather for church services, egg hunts, candy sacrifices and so on. Lotta time to fill, lotta sugar to metabolize.

Which explains why the megaplexes are filling up with family comedies. “Meet the Robinsons” opened Friday, and today we get “Are We Done Yet?” and “Firehouse Dog” … both of which, when you think about it, could not bear more appropriate titles.

Someone needs to tell Bruce Greenwood that he needs to stop making animal movies, by the way. It’s downright bizarre to see him — and his “Thirteen Days” co-star Steven Culp — in a wacky dog movie. They played the Kennedys, and played them well, and now they’re being upstaged by Irish terriers named after characters from “The Lord of the Rings”.

The one good thing about having endured these movies this week? Metro just launched its Edmonton edition, which means my reviews are running in an additional market. Feel free to praise the risen Christ; I’ll be genuflecting in the direction of syndication fees.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a Sympatico/MSN movie column about the Eighties resurgence as embodied by “TMNT.

And because I’m kind of a flippant bastard, I threw out a whole mess of ideas for remakes of as-yet-unexploited properties, like “Adventures in Babysitting”.

Well, you’ll never guess what.

Turns out Disney is indeed developing “Further Adventures in Babysitting“, to star Raven Symone (didn’t there used to be a hyphen in there?) and someone named Miley Cyrus. Title notwithstanding, this is a remake rather than a sequel — I guess Disney doesn’t want to confuse people when the new movie comes out on DVD.

One has to question the necessity of this project. The original film’s charms are very specifically rooted in its era, and Shue’s performance is so singular in its weird comic energy that I fear for anyone who tries to duplicate it. On the other hand, the script is pretty lame, so a reworking couldn’t exactly hurt.

Still … do kids today even know who Thor is? They’ll probably change it to Yu-Gi-Oh, and good luck getting that to pay off.

… because the next couple of days are going to be a little nuts, what with accelerated deadlines and the whole short-week thing.

But I did want to let you know that Metro’s finally posted my reviews for “Congorama“, “Meet the Robinsons” and “Radiant City“, so if you were curious, by all means check ’em out.

And while you’re surfing, take a look at this marvelous April Fool’s offering from the reliably mad hatters at IWOOT; let me tell you, I’d buy one in a second. It’s much more appealing than Google’s TiSP service … and I imagine it’s a lot easier to install.

So, like, six weeks ago Noel Murray filed this amazing post to The Onion AV Club blog about the phenomenon of the “Good” movie — the movie that isn’t objectively great, and doesn’t really satisfy you the first time you see it, but endures for all eternity because it’s comfortable and pleasant when you stumble across it again further down the road, because your guard is down and your expectations are zeroed out.

The example Murray uses is “Music and Lyrics”, which had just opened theatrically; in the comments, readers break down the stuff that worked versus the stuff that didn’t, and dammit if I didn’t find myself thinking fondly back to the moments cited, and agreeing with some of the constructive criticism. (“Galaxy Quest” comes up a few times as an example of another movie that’s evolved into goodness, but I have to say my boy David Mamet is right on that one: It was a perfect movie to begin with, you just weren’t paying attention, sit down and watch it again right now.)

My own theory? Movies like “Music and Lyrics” seem better in retrospect because we’re further away from the experience of watching them go wrong the first time. There’s nothing more disappointing than watching the air go out of a movie that seemed to be working just fine three minutes ago; I am now accustomed to that moment in almost all of Tim Burton’s movies where the film seizes up and dies, because Burton got distracted at some point in the screenwriting process. Remember that scene in “Planet of the Apes” where Tim Roth gets angry and jumps around the set for about a minute? It is that about which I am talking.

And I liked “Grosse Pointe Blank” even more the second time, because I knew it wasn’t going to go off the rails, and I could relax into it. This also explains why people think the “Austin Powers” movies are good, despite every last one of them containing excruciating chunks of time in which nothing funny happens. You watch them now because there’s a good bit coming up later … or at least that’s the way you remember it.

Minor aside: Have you heard about Myers’ latest picture? He’s making a movie about a wacky Indian guru. I understand his follow-up will be a DV documentary in which he dry-humps the disinterred corpse of Peter Sellers for 100 straight minutes.

Perhaps I should sit down and watch “So I Married an Axe Murderer” again. Like, right now.

… I’m off at a screening of “Grindhouse” this morning, and then there’s this funeral that will, unfortunately, take up most of the afternoon. But oh, am I looking forward to “Grindhouse”.

Yeah, the Tarantino thing’s gonna be all kinds of self-referential fun and Edgar Wright made one of the fake trailers, but Robert Rodriguez has finally made a zombie picture, and that is going to rock, I just know it.

Anyway, that’s not a topic for discussion until next week, so let’s turn the focus back to what you can see right now. Not all reviews were online at press time, but I’ll fill in the links as they go up. UPDATE: Done!

“Blades of Glory“: Will Ferrell does another of his arrogant idiots, but pairing him with Jon Heder in a figure-skating movie is a stroke of genius; ditto for casting Will Arnett and Amy Poehler as their evil rivals. If “Dreams are when you’re asleep” doesn’t become a catch-phrase in my lifetime, well, I will have failed this movie.

“Congorama“: I was a huge fan of Philippe Falardeau’s first feature, “La Moitie Gauche du Frigo”, but he really missed the mark with this comedy-drama about two men — one Belgian, and one Canadian — who share a life-changing encounter in rural Quebec. Yes, it’s ambitious and convoluted, but it’s ambitious and convoluted in a way that does nothing but serve its own ambition and convolution. Plus, it’s kind of boring.

“The Host“: Giant monster terrorizes Seoul, and Bong Joon-ho makes the best movie of the year. It was pretty much the best movie of last year, with the possible exception of “Children of Men” and “Pan’s Labyrinth”. I’ve written about it plenty — and I write plenty more in today’s Sympatico/MSN movie column — but it all amounts to the same thing: You need to see this one as quickly as you can, with the largest crowd possible. This must have been what it felt like to see “Jaws” in the early summer of 1975.

“The Lookout“: Scott Frank’s directorial debut (after writing “Dead Again”, “Get Shorty”, “Out of Sight” and some of “Minority Report”) is an intelligent reworking of “After Dark, My Sweet” with a dash of “Memento”, and wouldn’t feel out of place alongside either one of those terrific neo-noir exercises. And this Joseph Gordon-Levitt kid? He’s the real deal.

“Meet the Robinsons“: About a third of this Disney CG adventure is a triumph of production design and character work — specifically, anything with chrome on it, and anything involving the Bowler Hat Guy. The rest of the picture is a frenetic jumble of ideas and images, some of which look like they’d be really interesting if the movie could slow down long enough to explore them. On the other hand, if it slowed down too much, we’d all realize it’s just “Back to the Future” told from Doc’s point of view. Anyway. Bowler Hat Guy is awesome.

“Radiant City“: Gary Burns and Jim Brown look at the problem of urban sprawl in this fascinating work of cinema, which I think I would have totally enjoyed even if I wasn’t inclined to agree with every one of their conclusions. (Yeah, I know, lawns are fine, but I really like living within walking distance of fourteen coffee shops.)

“Spaceman: A Baseball Odyssey“: Wanna watch my video of my fantasy baseball league’s trip to Cuba with the legendary Bill Lee? Okay, this documentary about the pitcher-philosopher is a little more polished than that — they interviewed some of his contemporaries, and got a couple of journalists to provide additional context — but not by much. Lee’s going to be at the Bloor tonight for the premiere screening, if you’re a fan.

Well, that was my week, anyway. And now is the time for the zombies.