Jeff likes Movies

2007-10-26T21:47:00.001-07:00

Well it's Oscar season, or near enough, and hence I'm at the movies a number of times a week.

I've had the joy of seeing Michael Clayton, The Assassination of Jesse James, Gone Baby Gone, Eastern Promises etc all relatively recently, and it's been great seeing good movies, since they were few and far between for the majority of the year.

I'm not gonna say much about Michael Clayton here, just that it's one of the best movies I've seen this year, and I highly recommend it.

This review will mainly be on Gone Baby Gone with a bit of Jesse James thrown in for good measure.

I was lucky enough to see AJJ on Wednesday and GBG tonight, both starring Casey Affleck, who I am digging more and more with every role I see him in. The similarities between the characters he portrays is evident, in their being small, young, and this being used against them. He's much more cocksure in GBG, which maybe doesn't make him as interesting, but it's still fun to watch.

Gone Baby Gone is a mystery directed by Ben Affleck and based off of a Dennis Lehane (Mystic River) book. This story is based in a poor area of Boston, much like Mystic River, though this urban Boston is portrayed much more real and gritty, which is a credit to the crew.

The story follows the younger Affleck as a PI hired to augment the investigation of a small girl, since some people will talk to PIs and not cops. Morgan Freeman is a captain of police, and Ed Harris is a detective. One of the unique things about this movie is the narrative structure. You're only about an hour into the movie when suddenly the mystery is solved, but there's still another hour to go. It's very offsetting and I was surprised by it, though it all comes together eventually.

Now as time goes on, and the plot comes around full circle, and you learn of everything, well I wasn't sold. I'm having a hard time explaining what I mean, but basically as Affleck starts investigating what happened, everything is just coming so easily. I have begun watching The Wire on HBO On Demand. The Wire, for those that haven't seen it, is a cop drama that blows all previous cop dramas out of the water. It's ultra-realistic, and thus it's warped my mind on this mysteries. I watched 13 hour-long episodes of the first season of the Wire to see them wrap up a case on some drug dealers, so it's hard to see people chase down some bad guys in the space of 30 minutes.

Basically, my problem with the mystery part of the movie was that it seemed somewhat humdrum. I love mysteries, but this one didn't particularly rock my socks, while Mystic River blew me away. However, the dilemma at the end is what sets this film apart from most mysteries you will see. I won't give anything away, but it'll get you thinking and possibly arguing. It was really the big thing that saved this film from being a run of the mill mystery.

The film is aided by the aforementioned gritty urban Boston and the denizens withing. Ben Affleck apparently got non-actors from the area to play parts, and it works to wonderful effect.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, also starring Casey Affleck as Robert Ford and with Brad Pitt as Jesse James was much more adored by me.

This is a western about the infamous outlaw. I'm not very familiar with Jesse James, I just know he's one of the villains of the Wild West, though this film painted him in a much more morose light. This film covers his gangs' final big time robbery and the months that would follow. Robert Ford is a sad creeeeeeeepy sap that is a hanger-on with the group, and has a sick sort of admiration for James.

Sam Rockwell, Jeremy Renner, and Paul Schneider play other members of the gang, and they're all superb. I love that they casted these guys for these roles, using actual actors over nobodies or pretty faces, as it adds something.

People have likened this movie to something that Terrence Malick might make. I've seen The Thin Red Line and The New World, and Malick loves to use poetic voiceover narration and beautiful shots of landscape and such. While that is present in AJJ, the narration is more straightforward and actually relevant to the story. This movie is definitely slow and long, coming in at 160 minutes, and I guess you could say it's Malickese, but there is also something of the violence that the director, Andrew Dominik, displayed in his prison drama, Chopper.

So the film covers the lives of James, Ford, and the others in the time following their last train robbery as James becomes paranoid of his friends turning him in for the crimes he's committed, and Ford getting more and more angry with the constant teasing for his oddness.

Casey Affleck is absolutely amazing in this movie. Brad Pitt is good, but Affleck steals the show. From his first scene when he asked Jesse James' brother if he can become a member of the gang, to when he kills someone in the middle of the movie, to his conversation at dinner with Jesse James one night about what they have in common... one thing that makes this movie so interesting and great is how I feel that it would only work this well in this genre during this era. It's so interesting seeing a movie about celebrity and fame, with a creepy character like Robert Ford in a Western based in 1882.

There was a review on AICN by the webmaster, Harry Knowles about how films like this killed the Western, and how a movie like 3:10 to Yuma was what a classical Western was like. He commends both movies for being great. I can absolutely see what he means with the former. You can truly feel that the age of the cowboy and outlaw is coming to an end with this movie. James, Ford, and the others are portrayed a bit pathetically, with none of the bluster you would expect. Even their one robbery at the beginning is done unprofessionally and messily. A masterful job is done humanizing these characters that would so often be represented as superheroes in a previous era.

So that's that. Go see Michael Clayton and AJJ if you possibly could, and also Eastern Promises, 3:10 to Yuma and In the Valley of Elah are all great movies. Gone Baby Gone is maybe a step down, but still worth seeing.

DVD rentals

2007-07-20T19:33:00.000-07:00

I rented a couple of horror movies recently, so I'll give them some quick mini-reviews.

First and foremost, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. The premise is that there's a new serial killer in town, in the vein of Freddy, Jason and Michael, and he is hiring a documentary team to film him preparing for the slaughter of some hapless teens. What it ends up being for at least the first two thirds of the film, is a rather hysterical satire on the slasher horror movie. Any cliche you can think of is broken down in this movie, to why the serial killers never get hurt and can always catch up with their prey, to how come so many of the victims die (because the killer has already prepared every inch of the site).

It's a rather brilliant look at the genre. However, for the final third, the movie becomes a typical slasher film, made only slightly more interesting by the fact that the victims know the killer's plan of action, and need to find a way out of it.

Still, this movie is a lot of fun, and if you like your Nightmare on Elm Street or Halloween, then you will like this one.

Unfortunately, I also rented this movie called Perfect Creature. Humorously enough, the box proclaims it to be Children of Men meets Underworld. I can envision something like that I guess, but this movie was nothing like it.

Basically, in an alternate Earth, before Gregor Mendel, some guy created vampires through genetic manipulation. These vampires are smarter than us regular humans, and thus become our protectors and scientists and such. Flu is a major problem, and they are the main workers trying to find a vaccine for it. So as a result, it creates an interesting hierarchy, where vampires agree to protect and serve the humans so long as the humans donate their blood to feed the vampires. However, a vampire named Edgar is eventually infected with a new vampire disease that basically makes them go insane and turn into the more violent vampires we are familiar with from other movies.

Edgar goes on a rampage, infects humans to make them bloodthirsty crazy vampires, and kidnaps a woman, and the movie deteriorates into convention and boredom. The movie is left open to a sequel, but hopefully that won't happen.

The acting is laughably serious, with everyone whispering for the most part. The budget was small obviously, but above average camera work does a pretty good job of hiding the limitations that low budget brings.

Still, it was a rather pointless movie. It started out well enough and I liked the idea of the vampires being the humans' protectors and helpers, but it all had to break down and be lame.

What else... Black Sheep was another horror movie I've seen recently. It's basically a zombie movie if you replaced the zombies with sheep. But because they ARE sheep, and it's a well done funny horror movie, I have to recommend it.

Basically, some scientists are working with gene therapy to create amazing sheep breeds, but they end up creating flesh eating sheep instead and all hell breaks loose.

Summer Blockbuster Wrap-up

2007-07-18T14:56:00.000-07:00

So another summer blockbuster season is over for me. I'm not going to consider Simpsons and Bourne Ultimatum to be blockbuster caliber, though both will hopefully be good.

My blockbusters were Spiderman 3, POTC3, Harry Potter 5, Transformers, and Die Hard 4. I've already done reviews for Spiderman 3 and POTC3. To summarize, Spider-Man I didn't find to be awful. I enjoyed it mildly... very mildly. Pirates I found to be very bad, about as bad as 2.

So what happened with the remaining three?

Well the next that I saw was Transformers. After seeing it, I thought, ok it was better than Spiderman, but just barely. Since, I've thought about it, and it's fallen from grace. I really can't stand it. People are saying "oh come on, it was fun, it was about big robots fighting each other, what did you expect?" Well for one, I expected Michael Bay to become a good director since The Island. I don't know why, I did, that's my fault. Really, it was Michael Bay that killed this movie for me. He's terrible. He doesn't get a free pass because every single one of his other movies was a mindless action film. I just thought Transformers was bad.

Harry Potter on the other hand improved greatly from the fourth installment, which I didn't like. OOTP could have suffered from the same things Goblet suffered from. That is, I thought Goblet was emotionless and vapid. I felt that they were just going over the major events in the book, and that was it. Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson were awful to watch "act".

In Order of the Phoenix, which was even longer, I felt that it was much sleeker, and a better job was done injecting feeling into the movie. It wasn's great, but it was based off of a 900 page book or something like that. Things were left out I thought might not have been. But for a shallower movie version of an already shallow book series, it wasn't as terrible as I might have feared.

Finally, Die Hard 4. While it wasn't really a Die Hard per se, it was still a well done action film, that could have done without the terrible John McClane standing on a flying F35 fighter jet scene. Unlike Transformers, which had awful out of place humor at all the wrong moments, the humor in this movie is wellplaced and actually funny. The action scenes were scattershot, some good, some ridiculous, but worked for the most part pretty well. Again, not great, but worthwhile.

So as the summer ends, at least for tentpole films, how did this summer do? Better than last year, thank heavens. Last year was disgusting. This year was alright. Nothing brilliant, and while Pirates really stunk it up, Die Hard and Harry Potter made up for it.

What else have I seen?

Well nothing really amazing, some good stuff though. Still a weak year for movies that I hope improves. I'll be back as soon as something blows me away, good or bad.

On The Lot and Top Chef

2007-06-20T20:11:00.000-07:00

This is not movie related, but rather reality tv related.

I don't much like reality TV. E! and VH1 have destroyed the genre, as has MTV. Not that it was anything great to begin with.

In any case, I watch two reality shows, those being On the Lot (for directors) and Top Chef (guess). In my life, I watched early seasons of Real World, when they casted the show with unique people named Genesis and Montana, as well as the first season of Survivor. But really, that's been about it. So, moving on.

On the Lot began with about 50 contestants, which they knocked down to 18 in about 90 minutes or so of tv time. right now, we're at 13. basically a group of them air their short films, and America votes.

To begin, this show began as poorly edited and put together as shows get. From 50 down to 18, it was sloppy, they totally skipped the 24 to 18 elimination round, it was just shoddy. Eventually, if you stuck around, you got to the live movie premiere part, where we now stand.

The first round, wherein we went from 18 to 15, was one minute comedy shorts. I voted for maybe half, granting a lot of leeway. There is one guy named Zach is ridiculous, but otherwise nothing spectacular, nothing that said "this person deserves a 1 mil dollar deal with Dreamworks."

Now we're in round two, which was do whatever you want in three minutes. It's been rough. Most of the directors stuck with comedy, and did it poorly. I mean, the short films have been crap all around. That Zach guy did another good one, and others have done ones that have been alright, but I mean come on now folks.

The judges are Carrie Fisher (the woman that played Tom Hanks' wife in the Burbs)

sidenote- I know she's Princess Leia, it was just that when I saw the first episode of this show, a contestant says "so I walk in and there she is, Princess Leia herself) and I thought ' it would have been funny if he would've substituted Princess Leia with Tom Hanks' wife from the Burbs).

also included are Gary Marshall (did Pretty Woman and some other stuff) and then they get a guest judge, which have been DJ Caruso, Michael Bay, and Wes Craven in previous eps.

The guest and Gary Marshall typically give good interesting advice, but Carrie Fisher is stuck in this whole opinionated quagmire of crap advice. If i were on that show, I'd be a much better Carrie Fisher.

I hope the quality of the shorts picks up, because it's just rough. Everyone loves one contestant Will Bigham, who makes "sweet" little live action cartoons. He sucks.

On the other hand, Top Chef is awesome.... I just lost the desire to type anymore. I might finish this later, goodnight.

Pirates and Others

2007-06-18T14:16:00.001-07:00

So it's been another long while between posts unfortunately.

I saw Pirates, and was not a fan at all. It started out well enough, slowly, was building nicely. And then the plot lost all cohesion. Things were happening that were not making sense. Maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention you might say. But I had the same problem with Pirates 2, so going into 3, I said to myself "The only thing you are concentrating on is the incredibly intricate plot of Pirates 3." And that's what I did. And STILL, characters are doing shit that makes no sense, there are a ridiculous number of plot twists and turns that don't really add up. If I had written this review right after seeing the movie, I might be able to go more in depth, but as it is, i have thankfully forgotten most of the ridiculous plot.

What is too bad is that the characters were a lot of fun in this one. I loved Geoffrey Rush' Captain Barbossa, Chow Yun Fat's short role was pretty good.

And then the ending fight scene. Well for one, the whole thing with Calypso was pointless. They built that whole thing up forever, and all she does is create a storm/maelstrom that did nothing. They might as well have not done it. And while Gore Verbinski (director) might not understand how cannonballs work, I believe I do. See, when they hit a ship, they create a hole, and in this hole, water might flow in. When this happens repeatedly, the ship begins to fill with water and sink. When it happens for a long period of time, as was happening between The Black Pearl and ... damn I can't remember it's name... ANyways, Davy Jones' ship, then the ships are going to be destroyed. I am nitpicking, I know, but I just wanted to see a movie, not a cartoon.

And also, there were maybe a hundred or so British ships, and ten or so pirate ships. The Black Pearl and Davy Jones' ship destroy the flagship, and that signals the end of the battle? It's still 99 on 10. I guess they really loved that commander.

In any case, I'm getting off track.

Knocked Up was great. I hope you have seen it by this point.

Saw Oceans 13. It was fun, much better than 12. Still, I had a major problem with this one also. This heist required an unbelievably complex setup. So complex, it's already pretty much in progress by the time the movie begins. The casino they're trying to take down is so well defended, it may seem impossible. And it would be, if Danny Ocean and his gang weren't involved. The movie builds up all these seemingly impossible to overcome conflicts and obstacles, but Danny Ocean et al constantly overcome them. And it's not really because of intelligence or finesse like in 11, but rather because of A.)The unexplained way in which they can get any of their guys a job anywhere doing whatever it is they need them to do
or B.)The fact that they apparently have hundreds of millions of dollars stored away somewhere.

And I Know, they're professional robbers, they would have a ton of money. But that is no excuse why everything that is defeated by our protagonists in this movie eventually can come back to the amount of money they can spend.

It just seems cheap. I gave up on logic maybe 20 minutes in, when they somehow got licensed a drill to shake the foundation of the casino as an exit strategy. They can also pimp out girls, which was a surprise. I guess you'll have to watch it to see what I mean. It just seemed that if you have the resources these guys apparently have, you could rob anything.

I just wasn't expecting this to basically be the least realistic heist film ever made. But that doesn't mean it's bad. It's really very funny, and the powerhouse cast doesn't nothing but help it. Of course, Pitt and Clooney don't really act so much as just be cool, but it's still fun to watch.

I have such a hard time commending a movie if I nothing to gripe about, and that's the case with Paris Je T'aime. This movie was a collection of short films by 18 famous directors, all based in Paris. Of course there were some meh shorts, but most were good, and a couple were amazing.

As we reach the midpoint of 2007, I'm still hoping it takes off in terms of quality. As of right now, I have maybe 5 or 6 movies I really liked, and of those, only three are actually 2007 releases (Zodiac, Grindhouse, Paris Je T'aime). I haven't really hated too much, only Ghost Rider, Breach, and Pirates 3. It's just been real middle of the road. Nothing has stood out yet, but hopefully that'll change.

Spider-Man 3, and some other tidbits

2007-05-19T16:18:00.001-07:00

Alright, so Neuromancer is supposedly getting made into a movie finally. This is one of the pieces of source material Matrix took from. It is amazing, and was one of the first cyberpunk novels. It's a quick story, but is a lot of fun and I recommend it. Hopefully the movie will be as amazing.

Spider-Man 3... now I loved the first, but unlike many a person, I did not adore the second. I don't really like Doctor Octopus, and I just didn't dig it. Batman Begins and the first two X-Men movies are the pinnacle of superhero movies for me, along with Spider-Man 1. I read a bunch of reviews for the third Spider-Man, and it got shellacked in a number of them. So, whereas earlier in the year, this was my most anticipated summer blockbuster (which isn't saying much), I quickly lowered my expectations. And it worked accordingly.

Overall, I enjoyed it as much as I had hoped to. At first, I didn't think this was going to be so. The movie opens with Peter Parker talking about how great his life is, and Tobey Maguire is giving the narrative in this ridiculously fake happy voice. Not very long after this, the first action scene of the movie commences between Spider-Man and The New Goblin (James Franco). The special effects in this scene were pretty bad. It just looked incredibly computer generated. Eventually though, I felt the movie picked up.

James Franco is just weird in this movie. He gets amnesia for no real reason, because an hour later in the movie, he's the same spoiled Spider-Man hater he was at the beginning of the movie. I think they just did it so they could "realistically" leave that plot thread hanging for a bit while the other 40 plot threads get some time.

Sandman (Thomas Haden Church) was done well, but Venom needed MORE face time, and LESS Topher Grace.

"Evil-emo" Peter Parker was fun, and while I know some probably thought he was cheesy and lame, I enjoyed it.

I guess the bottom line is, Spider Man 3 was not a great movie. However, I found it to be fun. Being that I don't like the Spider-Man franchise as much as others, it didn't bother me that this movie was far less than stellar. Still, it was no X-Men 3 or Batman and Robin... woo wee.

So I wanted to talk about the remaining blockbusters, at least the ones I'm seeing. I am NOT seeing Shrek 3 or Fantastic Four 2. But lets see about the rest.

Next up will be Pirates 3. Pirates 1 was amazing, a genuine surprise that I did expect, with great acting and a fun story. Pirates 2 was the exact opposite. It was a boring retread on the second and suffered from "second movie in a trilogy-itis" worse than Matrix Revolutions, which is bad. It was just a pointless side quest, meant to introduce a villain and "kill off" Jack Sparrow. There were some bad action scenes mixed in also.

Now with the third, I am hoping they get back to the basics. The trailer looks fun, what with the various pirate groups meeting up. Chow Yun Fat is sweet. I DO NOT want another fight on some rolling wheel, vertical, horizontal or otherwise, which has appeared in the last two films. The special effects have been very good for the previous two, so I don't expect that to let up.

Die Hard 4... or Live Free or Die Hard. The studio is going for a PG-13 rating with this, but Bruce Willis claims it's even better than the first one. I don't know if this is necessary, but they're doing it anyhow. I just want it to be a good action movie. When was the last good big budget straight up, good guys vs bad guys action movie?

Transformers... I'm reading good things about it. It looks like fun, and Michael Bay, who is hit and miss on my chart, is the man to go to for fun summer blockbuster action fests. I of course enjoyed the cartoon as a child and even now. The robots in the trailer look astounding. I have a good feeling for this one.

Harry Potter... I'm counting this because they tend to make big money. The only harry potter movie I've liked was Prisoner of Azkaban. The first two were made for pre-teenagers, and the fourth felt jumbled and messy. And Daniel Radcliffe (who plays harry potter) and the girl that plays hermione truly showed there is no hope for their acting skills. They are just terrible. With Order of the Phoenix enters Dolores Umbridge, played by Imelda Staunton. Umbridge is probably one of my most hated villains in a book ever, and that's a good thing, so hopefully this will make the film fun. It's a pretty good book, hope it translates well.

So that's it for the bigguns. We also have movies like The Bourne Ultimatum, The Simpsons Movie, Oceans Thirteen, 1408, and Knocked Up which look poised to be pretty big earners. I think all five of these could be great movies. There are probably others that'll be good, but I don't want to be here all night typing.

I hope this summer as a whole is better than last, which was pretty bad. Mission Impossible 3 and Da Vinci Code were watchable, but Superman was boring, X3 was awful, and POTC2 was, as mentioned earlier, a mix of boring and awful.

Next summer is where it's at, even though Avatar, the revolutionary scifi film by James Cameron, got pushed back to '09. Next year we have The Incredible Hulk, with Edward Norton and Tim Roth. You can hate the Eric Bana one all you want, I know I do, but this is a restart with Ed Norton! There is Iron Man, with Robert Downey Jr and Terrence Howard. And The Dark Knight!! I mean, it's the summer of superheroes played by Jeff's favorite actors. I can't ask for much more. But there is.

The next Narnia movie is supposed to be released, Prince Caspian. The first wasn't anything amazing, but it was worth seeing. Speed Racer will be released, directed by the Wachowski Bros. Who knows how this'll be. They're able filmmakers, so maybe this will be good.

On the unnecessary remake front, we have The Day The Earth Stood Still. I don't know why.

Hopefully, Indiana Jones 4 will be released.

Hellboy 2... Get Smart with Steve Carell... and the new probably going to be laughably terrible M Night Shyamalan movie.

Alrighty I'm done. Later.

UPdate

2007-05-10T19:36:00.001-07:00

Man, I haven't posted since the Scifi Marathon, but I have not stopped seeing movies.

Lets see...

most recently I saw Vacancy, with Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson. This was a short 80 minutes long, but for the most part, it was enjoyable and intense. It becomes more vanilla as it continues, but to begin, it's a truly great scary movie. I absolutely loved when they first got to the hotel, there was something so REAL about it. Basically, they've just gotten into their room, and someones pounding on their door from the room next door. It's before the two heroes know they're meant to be part of a snuff film, and it's a lot of fun to watch, but also scary because you don't know just what is going on. It's still a quick fun movie, but I'd say wait for the rental.

Hot Fuzz was amazing, no Shaun of the Dead, but still just as brilliant at dissecting and making fun of a genre.

I still haven't seen Spider-Man 3, though I hope to within a few days.

I saw Fracture, which, for all it's great acting, turned to absolute crap. It was interesting and involving, and then suddenly the film treats the audience like a 12 year old, spelling out all the mystery of the movie with laughably obvious scenes. Definitely should be skipped.

24 hour Scifi Marathon at Drexel Gateway

2007-04-16T13:53:00.000-07:00

So I attended the 24 hour scifi marathon at the drexel for the first time this year. it was very good. here is a small review package:

The first film was 12 Monkeys, which I own and love. It's just superb. But I had already seen it, so no big deal.

Next we moved into a 1955 movie, King Dinosaur, which was a terrible movie, but was made better by the audience. Basically, a new planet appears in our solar system, and some people go explore it and discover dinosaurs, which are actually iguanas and baby alligators and stuff like that. At the end, they nuke the island the dinosaurs are on, and the best line of the movie is said:
"do you realize what we've done?" "yes... we've brought civilization to Planet Nova."

The Great Yokai War- this is a Takashi Miike movie, and the best way I can describe it as was what I heard from someone else, in that it is like a live action Miyazaki film. It's a pretty good movie and well worth watching.

Puzzlehead- very low key indie film about a man that makes an android in his likeness. if you liked primer or pi, you'll like this one, has that same feel to it. kind of loses steam at the end.

Frankenstein meets the Space Monster- similar to King Dinosaur in it's old B movie-ness and the fact that the audience made it much more watchable... has some hilariously stupid characters in it

fido- this one might give shaun of the dead a run for funniest zombie movie... it's hysterical, best movie of the marathon for me

automatons- .... this is the worst film i have ever seen. that is not an exaggeration either. oh man. let me delve into this further. this movie is filmed in awfully grainy black and white, and the sound mixing is friggin terrible. it has robots in it that are basically like what you would dress up as for halloween, in that they're like cardboard boxes. this movie was made in 2005. Basically, we have two sides at war. angus scrimm from phantasm is in it. i missed the first half hour, and i come in, and angus scrimm is continually giving updates on the war that's happening, and some girl is building robots in her workshop. this continues for thirty minutes, and the guy i was with said it had been like that for the thirty minutes before. then, the girl sends the robots out. Now before, the movie was just bad and boring. now it became another animal entirely. we have a 20 minute robot battle, but replacing the man sized cardboard robots, are miniature gi joe sized robots. and they're firing their little guns, and this is depicted with little circular flashes of lights, and sparklers are being thrown all over. And then, for 90 straight seconds, we see one of the miniatures burn. and then the surviving robots reach the enemy base and kill everyone in the base very slowly and disgustingly for about 10 more minutes. there is a lot of screaming and it's all terrible. then the enemy commander is stabbed through the heart, but she lives long enough to have .... forget it, i hate this movie. i'm not going on anymore, it's the worst movie ever made.

chopping mall- 80s slasher movie using robots, lots of fun... man that automatons review flashback took it out of me, i barely feel like continuing

so i'm going to stop

but i did see star trek: the motion picture and flash gordon which both rocked, and a couple of other 80s movies, lots of good stuff

Grindhouse

2007-04-13T11:21:00.000-07:00

Haven't been reviewing much lately, but I wanted to preach of my love for Grindhouse for a few minutes.

Grindhouse is the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez double feature tribute to theaters of the 60s and 70s that used to show B-movie fare. Tarantino did Death Proof, about a serial killer that uses his car as his weapon, and Rodriguez did Planet Terror, a zombie movie. I am familiar with these types of movies... well mainly with Planet Terror-esque movies, I cannot say I have really ever seen anything that Death Proof might be considered similar to.

We'll begin with Machete, the first fake trailer shown, this one done by Rodriguez. I can't say much about this one... I'd go see it. It's basically about Danny Trejo as a guy that uses machetes and awesome other weapons to kill "the bad guys". It was fun, but nothing amazing.

Next, we moved into Planet Terror. I enjoyed the hell out of this movie. It's hilarious, the characters are wonderful, it has Jeff Fahey and Michael Biehn, Bruce Willis and Sayid from Lost (Naveen Andrews) are both real cool in it. It's just a lot of fun, with great humor and great gore. Another Grindhouse like movie that Rodriguez has done is From Dusk Til Dawn, but I liked this one just a bit more.

After Planet Terror, three more fake trailers played.

The first was by Rob Zombie, and it was Werewolf Women of the SS. I have seen a number of vintage trailers that were JUST like this, and unlike the two that followed, if you didn't know it was fake, you might actually believe it existed. I mean, I've seen a real trailer about Werewolf Biker Gangs. This movie could exist, and it's goofy and fun to see, but still. However it ends with a great cameo from Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu that needs to be seen.

Next, we had Don't, by Edgar Wright of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz fame. This was the funniest 3 minutes of film I have seen in a very long time. I don't want to get into it, I don't know if explaining it could give it justice. It's unbelievable.

Finally, we had Thanksgiving from Eli Roth (Hostel/Cabin Fever). While nothing could beat Don't, this one came damn close. I greatly dislike Roth for Hostel, and the fact that he's making Hostel 2, but he showed that he knows his horror with this beauty. My favorite old type of trailer were the ones this one was spoofing, such as Black Christmas or My Bloody Valentine. It has this very deep voiced guy doing the narration for the trailer, and he's not stressing any words. He is just very dark, and just saying shit like "This year, death comes home for christmas" or something like that, but just really matter of factly, and with his deep voice, it just sounds scary. The sound is always terrible in the trailers, and entire death scenes are shown for whatever reason. Thanksgiving does this all wonderfully. It was so spot-on, I absolutely adored it. The discoloring of the film in the trailer was just right, everything was so perfect, the voice included, and of course it was absolutely hysterically over the top.

So with this perfect intermission over, we moved into Death Proof.

First the bad. This movie is so Tarantino, you forget it's supposed to be part of a grindhouse double feature. You have characters with a lot of smart-ass dialogue, people talking about movies, long scenes in cars or bars of people just talking and talking, and of course feet. Tarantino has a weird foot fetish, and he films feet, a lot, especially in this movie. Also, through Planet Terror and the first half of Proof, the film is artificially aged to look old. That just stops in this middle of Death Proof, and it's obviously being shot on present day digital. That was a weird choice.

And finally, the movie begins with some girls just shooting the shit, talking about guys, for a pretty extended scene. At the halfway point, another group of girls shoots the shit and talks about guys again, for another extended scene. Just couldn't get into that, especially twice.

Through all of that, Tarantino shows he's something special. There are two distinct parts to the movie and I won't spoil too much at all. The plotting of the movie is superb, though someone that expects the constant barrage of goofiness you see in Planet Terror might be disappointed as that is not present here. I haven't seen anything quite like Death Proof ever before. It ends with one of the best climaxes I've seen in a long while as well, it's intense, hilarious and exhilarating all at once. I was seriously breathing in short gasps for the last 15 minutes, it's very well done.

I know I'm not saying much about Death Proof here, but I don't honestly know what to say. I don't want to say much plot-wise, because it does twist and turn nicely. The acting is great, though I could go without seeing Vanessa Ferlito's ugly face ever again.

Death Proof is just so different and unexpected. See it.

Overall, Grindhouse is my favorite "movie" of the year, though I guess there was two in there, wasn't there. It's 3 hours, twenty minutes long, and I wanted more when it was all said and done. It's just a ton of fun to be had.

Some more reviews

2007-03-18T07:57:00.000-07:00

Still don't really feel like doing any long reviews, but here are some ratings.

Zodiac- 8/10- great mystery and police procedural, maybe a bit over-long, and robert downey jr/mark ruffalo didn't bring a new edge to their typical character

300- 8/10- very fun movie

a guide to recognizing your saints (DVD)- 7/10

tideland (DVD)- 3/10

the lives of others- 9/10

Black Snake Moan- 7/10

Update and Hiatus

2007-03-02T19:41:00.000-08:00

So as you can tell, I've been on a bit of a hiatus, and this will continue. I just don't feel like writing up long reviews, but I will bring you up to date on what I've seen.

The Good German (4 out of 10)

Sherrybaby (DVD) (7 out of 10)- buoyed by the very human, real characters in the movie, liked this one a good bit

Breach (4 out of 10)- so cliched and bland, but Chris Cooper was great

Unknown (DVD) (4 out of 10)- enjoyable characters, but I don't really understand their actions at all, considering the end of the film was given about halfway through

Reno 911: Miami (5 out of 10)- i liked the tv show, i mildly liked this extended version of the tv show

The Abandoned (3 out of 10)- like Unknown, gave away the ending far too soon, and then just kept going... also, if you're in a very haunted house, act like you are in a very haunted house

Ghost Rider (2 out of 10)- worst movie I've seen this year so far, Wes Bentley played the worst supervillain I have ever seen, he was so terrible... i think the director just watched a bunch of other superhero movies and ripped off of all of them, but made it bland enough so that the studio would be happy... the movie was laughably bad

Haha, I just read that the guy that did Ghost Rider did Elektra and Daredevil. I wouldn't have seen Ghost Rider if I had known that.

so yeah, it's been a rough month, but it's going to get better with Zodiac and 300 getting released!

Letters from Iwo Jima (7 out of 10)

2007-02-10T20:08:00.000-08:00

I am feeling tired right now, so this won't be the greatest of reviews, but I want to get it typed out.

Letters from Iwo Jima is the second part of Clint Eastwoods' Iwo Jima duology, this one told from the Japanese perspective. (Flags of Our Fathers being the American one). It tells the story of three soldiers on Iwo Jima, a general (played by Ken Watanabe) and two infantrymen.

The characters are pretty much cookie cutter archetypes. The general is the guy with radical tactics that nobody else likes, and therefore he himself is not liked. One of the soldiers, Saigo, hates being in the war, and just wants to go home and be with his wife. The other soldier is believed by everybody to be a spy. Really, Letters from Iwo Jima is not entirely different than any other American war movie. Of course, it is greatly different because of the issues in the movie, such as all the ritual suicide, and the fighting to the death stuff that only the Imperial Japanese subscribed to. Still, the characters and the way they acted was very derivative of American war movies, and I'm not sure if this was on purpose or not.

LFIJ tells each characters' story wonderfully, past and present. The way in which each character interacted with one another and the way the plot progressed during the battle was my favorite part. Even though I didn't feel like this movie was entirely original, I was still captivated by the story and it's characters.

I'm not sure if there was meant to be any sort of bias in the movie. The Japanese look somewhat insane at times with their harikiri, and killing off soldiers that disobey. It is no wonder they lost the war if they commit suicide every time something doesn't go their way.

So yeah, I really thought about this movie. In retrospect, I don't really like Bobby as much as I thought I did. I wanted to make sure I didn't do the same here. But it was a well-directed film with great cinematography and colors, and while you aren't missing much if you don't see this movie, because you have seen nearly all of it's elements in other war movies, it is still interesting to see this sort of movie from the Japanese side. The characters and story helped a great deal as well to make this a very interesting movie.

But after seeing it, I don't think it as deserving as Babel/Departed for Best Picture or Scorsese for Best Director... I don't even really think it's worthy of a Best Picture Nomination, but I'm not in charge of that.

Smokin Aces (7 out of 10)

2007-02-06T14:49:00.000-08:00

Smokin Aces, starring a lot of peple, among them Ben Affleck, Ray Liotta, Jeremy Piven, Ryan Reynolds, and Andy Garcia, is about a gangster/casino showman that turns snitch, and is going to rat about the Mafia to the FBI. The Mafia answers by contracting a number of assassins to take him out, to the winner go the spoils.

As you can see, it's a pretty basic plot, and unless there was a ton of action, you couldn't make too much of a movie out of this. And there ISN'T a lot of action, and instead, there is actually character development and substance, which absolutely shocked me. I was expecting something in the vein of Domino or Running Scared, ridiculous, far-fetched, but still a bit fun, action movies. However, with Smokin Aces, the only action is with the end setpiece, and instead, the film builds off of character interaction and behavior.

I never thought I'd say in a cast of this size that Ryan Reynolds would have the best performance, but indeed he does. Everyone else is pretty good, Chris Pine is superb as the main Tremor Brother. Alicia Keys is alright until the end, when that falls apart. Andy Garcia is made to do a terrible Southern accent and it really kills his character. For the first part of the movie, Jeremy Piven is obviously channelling his Ari Gold character from Entourage, but eventually he plays someone with a bit more heart later.

This movie is incredibly unpredictable, and there is no guessing what is going to happen next. It also has it's fair share of greatly shot scenes, one of my faves being Ray Liotta in an elevator, I won't say anything more.

So, with all these goodness, why only a 7? Well, the "twist" ending. At the end, the director, Joe Carnahan, decides to toss out a few quick twists. They were absurdly out of place, and there was no point. They didn't add anything to the movie, but rather detracted from it. The movie goes through the typical playback of scenes where the end was hinted at, and that's getting old also. Ryan Reynolds' saves the train from going all the way off the tracks with a very good end sequence to close the movie.

Overall, this was a very fun movie that I liked for the characters and the unpredictability. I really want to see it again.

Alpha Dog (6 out of 10)

2007-02-04T12:25:00.000-08:00

Alpha Dog, directed by Nick Cassavetes, and starring Emile Hirsch, Ben Foster, Bruce Willis, Sharon Stone, and Justin Timberlake among others, tells the true story of the kidnapping and murder of Zack Mazursky by the order of drug dealer Johnny Truelove (Jesse James Hollywood in real life).

Basically, Ben Fosters' character, Jake Mazursky, owes Truelove some money, and it escalates to the kidnapping of Mazursky's half-brother, played by Anton Yelchin. The impromptu and odd kidnapping is not your average kidnapping, wherein Zack is actually treated like one of the guys, meets some girls, gets high and drunk, and becomes close friends with one of the kidnappers played by Justin Timberlake. However, things spin out of control, and eventually Zack is murdered.

I don't know what it is, but at it's most basic, the story sounds like something out of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy. Of course, get rid of all the modern day bits, but the whole idea has some classical about it, and that makes this whole movie a bit more watchable. It's hard to believe this is a true story, though some of it could be exaggerated or made up for film.

This movie was at times great, and at others ridiculously poor. At it's best, it was fun, with just the right amount of suspense and doom in each scene, but at other times, you really wonder what these people were thinking.

The performances were a mixed bag. Emile Hirsch was real good, Ben Foster was unbelievable, and even Justin Timberlake did pretty well for most of the movie until the end when he is supposed to do a crying scene and it fails horribly. Anton Yelchin still has not impressed me, and Sharon Stones' one dramatic scene at the end is literally covered up by her ridiculous fat suit.

This movie objectifies girls to an unnecessary end. Now, I wasn't there, I don't know if all of these girls actually hung all over the guys and made out with their necks and chests constantly, and did nothing but laugh and scream, but I doubt it. However, in this movie, that is ALL that they do. There is one girl that actually seems to have a working brain and is freaked out by the kidnapping, whereas every other girl in the movie acts like complete and utter idiots, and I'm saying that they don't even function as humans, but rather as some sub-race. It's embarassing, and I don't really know why this decision was made.

I had also feared this movie would go the way of Harsh Times, and just so the guys partying, getting wasted, and doing stupid stuff, and at the beginning, I thought that was what it was going to do. For example, everyone is partying at Johnny Trueloves' house, and Shawn Hatosy (one of the members of Trueloves' posse) is drinking and trying to make out with girls for about five minutes. It's just that for five long minutes. I understood that the guy was an idiot after about 20 seconds, but it just dragged on and on. However, this sort of thing ended, and the movie moved forward without getting mired in this sort of subject matter again.

Alpha Dog was a pretty interesting movie that had some bad decisions made during the filming obviously. After seeing Bully, nothing about this movie phased me. Bully still is the most disturbing movie I have ever seen, and it covers much of the same ground as Alpha Dog. Alpha Dog has better acting and is more mainstream, but it didn't affect me on the same level as Bully.

January Wrap-Up and February Look Ahead

2007-01-31T15:58:00.000-08:00

This is something I have decided to do and I will do it at the end of every month.

So, January. Normally January and February are throw away months, where studios toss out movies they don't anticipate making much money. However, there was an incredible flux of December independents and movies that made Oscar runs early that came out in January which lended to a month of incredible quality. I'm also lucky the Wexner Center chose to play The Aura. But being able to see Children of Men, Little Children, Pan's Labyrinth, The Aura, Smokin' Aces, and Notes on a Scandal among so many others is awesome. Sure, I probably saw TOO many movies this month, and it was overwhelming, but the only one that I rated low was We Are Marshall, and even that wasn't awful. Of course, I only saw two movies that were actual 2007 releases this month, those being Alpha Dog and Smokin' Aces, so the quality of this month doesn't say much for the quality of 2007, though both Dog and Aces were pretty good movies. I'll review them here in the coming days. But yeah, it was a good month.

And now for February.
This upcoming month, there isn't as much coming out that interests me. I still am going to see Letters from Iwo Jima, the Academy Award contender. There is also The Good German, a post WW2 era mystery, filmed in black and white, and starring George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, and Tobey Maguire.

There are three larger studio releases that I think could either be very enjoyable and very bad, those being Ghost Rider, Breach, and The Number 23.

I am just hoping Ghost Rider is fun, like Constantine. I really dug Constantine, it wasn't amazing, but it was an effective dark comic book movie. Then again, I don't think Nic Cage is Keanu Reeves, who was a superb Constantine. Nic Cage just seems cheesy as the Ghost Rider, but Sam Elliot is one of the main reasons I am going to see it. I think there are three different times in the trailer where somebodies' face becomes transluscent so you can see their fangs underneath, which, as a note to the editors of the trailers, is not scary.

Breach is starring Ryan Phillippe, Laura Linney, and Chris Cooper is about an FBI agent that is possibly selling American secrets to the Soviets, and a new agent needs to investigate him. It looks good, but we'll see.

And then Number 23, starring Jim Carrey and Virginia Madsen, about a guy that discovers that the number 23 is everywhere, and thus goes insane. I don't much care what movies are rated, but the preview screamed PG13 at me, and it was rated R so that's interesting. I heard a rumor that after seeing a screening of this movie, Carrey fired his agent, so that's not good. Joel Schumacher is directing.

Finally, we have two indies that might not even come to Columbus.

Seraphim Falls I don't think is going to but I'll hold out hope. It stars Liam Neeson and Pierce Brosnan as two men with a blood vendetta against one another during the Civil War. The former goes chasing after the latter in the West. I like westerns.

Breaking and Entering, starring Jude Law and Juliette Binoche, is another adultery thriller, but I've read some pretty good things about it. I have a good feeling this will make it here.

So yeah, only six, maybe seven movies this month. March picks back up, but I will welcome this break. See you soon with my reviews of Alpha Dog and Smokin' Aces.

Pan's Labyrinth (8 out of 10)

2007-01-30T18:43:00.000-08:00

Pan's Labyrinth, by acclaimed director Guillermo Del Toro, is a Spanish film set during the Spanish Civil War. Ofelia, a young girl, and her mother are moving to a villa in the forest to stay with her mother's new husband, Captain Vidal, an officer of the Fascist army. The Fascists are battling the Resistance in these very woods. Ofelia finds out she is the reborn princess of a king and must complete three tasks in order to be taken back to her kingdom.

If that sounds like a lot, it's because it is. For the first half of the movie, a number of different plotlines are threaded together, and it feels garbled. You can easily tell what each thread has to do with one another, but there is no real cohesion. Rather, it feels TOO epic. You are seeing the lives of about a dozen different characters and it can become overwhelming. One thing you need to realize is that this movie is not what the preview makes it look like. It's not 100 percent "adult fairy tale". That makes up a small fraction of this film. In fact, it is more a war drama than adult fairy tale. But the reason I start with this is that I just wanted to get out of the way the reason I didn't absolutely adore this movie like so many others have. For the first half, there was just so much going on and I was having trouble getting adjusted to any single thread.

Eventually, things start coming together, and while the pace quickens and the plot thickens, it became a lot easier to become absorbed into the movie. On a technical and artistic level, this movie is beautiful. The colors are dream-like, and the design of the entire film is amazing. The fantasy portions are in a league of their own, I don't think I can name anything that has the beauty and originality displayed here. There is a bit of gore, so if the presence of the fantasy element makes you think it is childish, think again. It's definitely deserving of it's R rating.

In the end, I really ended up liking this movie a lot. It is as well told a story as they come, and it is at once happy and unbelievably tragic. The ending gave me chills for days after. All of the characters are thought out and interesting. The protagonists and antagonists are so well drawn and convincing in their roles, adding to an already impressive wartime landscape.

Mini DVD Review- The Architect (3 out of 10)

2007-01-29T15:35:00.000-08:00

So I rented The Architect, a film starring Anthony LaPaglia as the titular character and Isabella Rossellini as his wife namely. It is a densely layered story, telling about the problems each member of LaPaglia's family is having, as well as the primary conflict wherein an activist is trying to get LaPaglia to sign a petition to knock down some apartments he designed. There are also some plots following denizens of the aforementioned apartment buildings. And this is an 82 minute film. So each plotline is really only covered rather shallowly.

I never really got into this movie, no matter how interested I tried to be in it. LaPaglia's two children both are having sexual problems, and like I said before, you never really understand why. I swear, the director just wanted to be edgy, but there is no explanation, no real substance. The daughter, played by Hayden Panettiere (the cheerleader from Heroes), developed at an early age and thus wants to be loved by a truck driver? Point A does not logically go to Point B right there.

Unfortunately for Isabella Rossellini, it is hard to tell her apart from Anthony LaPaglia. They have the same hair-do and body build and facial structure. Her character is also insane and I got the vibe that she was supposed to be like Juliette Binoche's character from Bee Season, but again, much less fleshed out.

There really is no humor in the movie, but the score makes this film seem like some happy-go-lucky family comedy with the way it marches happily along. It also sounds like a cheap Midi file at times.

The movie covers gentrification in a very interesting way, but it is often overshadowed by the melodrama that this movie wallows in.

The Architect ends strong, with a couple very good scenes, but it does nothing to save this boring, tepid affair.

The Painted Veil (7 out of 10) and other stuff

2007-01-26T14:10:00.000-08:00

First, the other stuff. We have Oscar Nominations just released, and Sundance Film Festival is currently going on (actually close to over with) in Park City, Utah. I am so happy Dreamgirls did not get nominated for best film, maybe the Academy is getting over their love affair with musicals. I am going to see Letters from Iwo Jima soon, and after that, I will have seen four of the five best picture nominees. I'm not going to see The Queen because I can fall asleep on my own, don't need a sedative. After I see LFIJ, I can better determine who I think should win, but as of right now I'm pulling for Departed, and wouldn't mind seeing Babel win, but Little Miss Sunshine, while a fun movie, is nowhere near an Academy Award worthy film. And Abigail Breslin one of the top five female performances of the year? Not at all. I mean, I liked the movie, it deserves its screenplay nomination and Alan Arkin deserves his nomination, but come on.

Pan's Labyrinth got six nominations, so that's amazing, and I'll be rooting for Children of Men to win cinematography and film editing.

For anyone that saw Click, maybe you can explain to me how it got nominated for Best Makeup, because I really need to know.

I thought Leo DiCaprio should've been nominated for Departed instead of Blood Diamond and that Jack Nicholson should've been nominated over Mark Wahlberg for Departed.

Forrest Whitaker, Helen Mirren, and Jennifer Hudson are all pretty much locks to win from what I've read.

I haven't seen any of the docs except for Jesus Camp, so I will root for that one because I loved it.

Otherwise, with the exception of Ellen Degeneres hosting, it should be fun, I love the Oscars, it's on February 25th at 8 pm, on ABC I believe but don't hold me to that.

So now for my Painted Veil review.

The Painted Veil stars Edward Norton as a doctor working in China, and Naomi Watts as his wife. The two marry early in the film, but Watts does it not out of love, but only to get away from her awful parents. It isn't long before Watts is being an adultress, and Norton finds out. He tells her to either go to a cholera outbreak in a small village, or be divorced which would be both embarassing and social-life ending for Watts. So she chooses the former and off they go to fall back in love.

This movie could easily have suffered from being standard fare, but it is saved by the performances of Norton and Watts. Norton is very formal, but shows a lot of emotion for playing the stiff doctor, and Watts is wonderful. The movie often looks as if it's going to go off the tracks and become mired in cliche, but it narrowly avoids this. Frequently there are moments when the two begin falling back in love that I've seen so often before and are so sappy, like Watts is playing the piano for some Chinese children and Norton walks in and suddenly this is an excuse to love her again. I feared this was going to continue, but it never becomes overwhelming.

The film is also helped by being beautifully photographed. The village is nestled in a misty valley, and the landscape is truly something to behold. The overarching plot itself. of the cholera epidemic, is also pretty interesting, if a little watered down.

All in all, while at times a bit banal and ordinary, the movie does a good job becoming it's own piece due to the setting, mood, and performances of the leads.

The Aura (9 out of 10)

2007-01-20T10:38:00.000-08:00

Last night, I saw The Aura, an Argentinian film by recently deceased director, Fabien Bielinsky. It stars Ricardo Darin, and is about a reclusive taxidermist that has a photographic memory, and fantasizes about staging the perfect heist. He goes on a hunting trip with a buddy, and from there, the opportunity presents itself.

I loved this film. It is so dark and quiet, and I loved Darin's character so much. He plays the part so well. I have not seen Ricardo Darin in any other movies, so I don't know if this was a big turn for him, but The Taxidermist (as he is called in the movie, doesn't have a name, a la Fight Club) is such a fascinating character. He is so quiet, a 40 something year old almost-loser, that has a hard time sticking up for himself. He's not overweight or overtly nerdy looking, but he just looks like he is so miserable.

The plotline is original and great fun. I love crime movies more than any other, so of course if it was going to work, it would automatically hold a special place in my heart, and oh man did this one work. I'd say Bielinsky did for a crime story set in the wilderness what Michael Mann does for crime stories such in cities a la LA or Miami. I hate using words I've read in other reviews, but two I've seen a lot are "Atmospheric' and "Moody", and those are exactly right. The ending is wonderful and makes sense, and doesn't do what you would expect.

The title comes from the fact that The Taxidermist is epileptic and right before a seizure sets in, he gets an aura, a moment of clarity right before it hits. This happens a couple times in a movie, and is done very well.

There are some minor plot holes, nothing that takes away from the plot, and some scenes are overly and unnecessarily long. For example, The Taxidermist is explaining the aura he gets, and 10 second pauses are inserted after every sentence in his already long explanation. Or he is following a man after a robbery, and this is a ridiculously drawn out scene.

Still, this is one of the most original and intense crime movies I've seen in a while.

Notes on a Scandal (7 out of 10)

2007-01-20T10:29:00.000-08:00

Notes on a Scandal stars Cate Blanchett, Judi Dench, and Bill Nighy in a movie about a young teacher that becomes involved with a student and is basically blackmailed by an older teacher who finds out about it.

NoaS starts off and ends incredibly paced. For the beginning and end, the score, acting, and Judi Dench's narration all add together to create an intensely told story. Understandably, the movie slows down in the middle to allow the dread and suspense to mount as Dench finds out about Blanchett's affair and thus, manipulates her as a result.

The acting is superb by the three leads, but the boy involved in the affair is not realistically portrayed, and acts like more like a 35 year old than a 15 year old. The headmaster of the school also overacts greatly in his few scenes.

However, for as intense of a thriller as this is, as well done as it is for the most part, it ends so anti-climactically and poorly, it's something of a shock. I was so surprised when the film ended, all the buildup and what happens is so "meh". I also felt more could have been done to show Dench's manipulative behavior. We're given a lot of evidence she's somewhat crazy and obsessive, but no sooner does she learn of the affair, than the event which leads her to let the affair be known to the rest of the world occurs.

Also, Bill Nighy, who plays Cate Blanchett's husband, apparently doesn't like Judi Dench's character, but again, there is no background into this, and rather he goes from enjoying her company to calling her a witch in no time.

NoaS works as a superb thriller, but is also something of an incomplete movie. There should have been more to it I think, but the acting and pacing until the end make for a pretty fun time.

Volver (6 out of 10)

2007-01-16T17:48:00.000-08:00

Volver, the newest Pedro Almodovar movie, stars Penelope Cruz, and is about some Spanish women. Cruz and her sister, played by Lola Duenas, are just living their lives in the wake of their mothers' passing in a fire. Cruz gets involved in a bit of a crime, while the "ghost" of the mother returns to Duenas. I don't want to go into too many details at this time if you're planning on seeing it. But this review will get spoilery, so I'll let you know when.

I can tell you what I liked about the movie. The interplay between the sisters and the women of the neighborhood was great to watch. It seemed very natural. Also, at the beginning, the movie almost seemed to start getting Hitchcockian, and it was interesting for a while, but this didn't last long.

Penelope Cruz is amazing in this movie. I have seen her in a number of her English language movies and she is only so-so, but she shines in this movie.

Ok, now for the spoilers.

My biggest problem came with the plot. It just seemed so unrealistic at times, and mundane at others. For example, when the ghost of the mother returns, everyone believes it's a ghost. You can argue, come on, they didn't actually believe it was a ghost, but they kept saying that it was her ghost. However, she goes by no ghostly rules. She actually sleeps and eats, and everyone can see her, and she has no ghostly powers like flying through walls or anything. So she was definitely not a ghost. But the characters of the movie keep saying "She's a ghost." This killed the movie for me. If you know she's not a ghost, say so. Otherwise, you have me believing you honestly think she's a ghost. It killed the realism of this movie.

The plotline just moved along so humdrummingly (I don't know if that's a word). There was never any real revelations until the end, and even then, they just seemed forced. For example, it turns out Penelope Cruz's daughter is actually also her sister (conceived it with her father via rape). This is just said for no real reason, it was never an issue earlier in this movie, and it's pretty much forgotten afterwards.

Penelope Cruz also opens up a restaurant for a time to feed a film crew. This takes up a lot of time in the movie, and little happens.

So back to the ghost thing, since that really took me out of this movie. Dina has said that Lola Duenas didn't actually think she was a ghost, and I can somewhat believe this. Maybe I missed a subtitle that said that. But I was watching a great portion of the movie thinking to myself "Come On People, You don't honestly think she's a ghost do you?"

Even if I ignore that aspect completely, thinking maybe I didn't understand that part and that's my fault, I still was bored by the plot of the movie. There was nothing in the technical side of the movie that was stunning either. It was buoyed by strong performances, but otherwise, the fact that I'm a male and this movie is decidedly for and about females didn't help. This movie doesn't have me dying to see any more Almodovar movies either.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (8 out of 10)

2007-01-14T17:46:00.000-08:00

I just saw Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. This is directed by Tom Tykwer, the guy that did Run Lola Run. It stars Ben Whishaw, Dustin Hoffman, and Alan Rickman namely. It is based in 18th century France, and it is a mix of thriller, mystery, fantasy, and a bit of black comedy. Mainly, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), is born with an incredible sense of smell. He can smell anything and everything, and one of his talents is being to tell the types and amounts of oils within perfumes. Therefore, he begins his job as an apprentice perfumier. However, he finds the most beautiful of scents comes from women, and in order to preserve their scent and make the most amazing perfume, he starts murdering them.

This movie is based off of a book even Stanley Kubrick believed was unadaptable (I got that tidbit off of IMDB). Tykwer does a wonderful job here though. The premise alone is original and interesting, but the movie is so vibrant and interesting. Ben Whishaw, who plays the lead, looks like a more disturbing Hayden Christensen in a way, though Ben Whishaw can actually act. He does a great job in this movie, acting so incredibly eerie.

The movie dragged as it came closer to the ending, but it was all brought together satisfyingly. Perfume is so colorful and beautiful to watch in that so much attention is paid to the details of what you are seeing. It's as if the makers wanted the audience to see the way Grenouille smells. Therefore, at it's dirtiest and it's most elegant, the film is a wonder to watch.

The ending is hilarious, and definitely puts this movie into the "fantasy" realm, if the Super Sense of Smell did not do that already. I loved the ending in that it did not go down safer, oft-travelled roads, but rather did it's own shocking thing. It's get more and more out there, and culminates superbly.

Perfume is a fun movie on many levels, and is wholly original. It has a number of great performances, and is only harmed by the pacing, as, like I said before, it gets somewhat bogged down as it reaches the end.

I am movied out. I have a review for Volver, but I will do that tomorrow. I'm taking a small break from seeing movies, but I'll be back at it soon. Columbus is getting a lot of great limited releases this month.

The Good Shepherd- (6 out of 10)

2007-01-12T14:20:00.000-08:00

I just saw The Good Shepherd, starring Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, William Hurt, and Robert DeNiro among others. It was also directed by Robert DeNiro. It is "The Story of the Birth of the CIA", as is stated in the preview, and it centers on Edward Wilson (Matt Damon's character).

The story is told in the present time of the movie, 1961, following the Bay of Pigs, and in flashbacks from 1939 to 1960. Now, try as I might, I cannot confirm whether or not this is really a true story. I'm looking up information on the CIA, and I'm not sure where Edward Wilson fits into all of this. So it might possibly be that Wilson is a made up character used to help push forward this story.

While TGS has a long runtime (160 minutes), it actually moves along at a very brisk pace, moving quickly between scenes. At the same time, the movie did not need to be 160 minutes. There is a lot of chaff in this movie, which brings me to my biggest gripe (I use this a lot, so I should trademark it). The movie cannot select a story it wants to follow. There is the Birth of the CIA and there is the Edward Wilson's Life story. I have nothing against telling both, but the former is almost buried beneath the latter. You get the general gist of how the CIA was brought about, but it's not in depth or informative at all. You see the OSS in action during and after WWII, and you see some interaction with Soviets, but really the movie focuses a little more broadly on Wilson's personal life and problems. This would've been fine it was more enjoyable to watch, or if I had been expecting this, but the previews said "The Good Shepherd: The Untold Story of the Birth of the CIA." So that's what I was expecting.

Matt Damon gives a pretty good performance as the austere and silent Edward Wilson, though his makeup when he is supposed to look like he's in his 40s is awful. It's like they just covered his face in a purple tint. Eddie Redmayne plays his son at the age of 20 or so, and I never want to see him in a movie again. He was terrible, overplayed his role, and I never bought into the fact that he could or would ever join a secret society at Yale. However, the separate casting of the son as a 20 year old and as a 7 year old was remarkable. The older looked exactly like the younger, just... older.

Joe Pesci has a very small role, and I have missed him. However, his role in this movie is pointless. It has nothing to do with the story, but is rather there to give Edward Wilson and the CIA a meaner looking side. It's like the writer didn't feel like he was getting the uglier side of the CIA across to the audience, so he stuck that scene in there with it's "beat you over the head" dialogue, which I still liked, there were some good lines said in that scene.

So, The Good Shepherd I think suffered from spending too much time on Edward Wilson's personal affairs, and not on the reason for the movie, that being the CIA. It's almost more of a family drama at times than it is a political/espionage type of movie. I took a class in school on the Cold War, and I was hoping there'd be more of that in this movie, but it wasn't there. Still, it's an alright movie, that has some interesting tidbits in it.

I wanted to close with a discussion of the ending, but there are spoilers, so skip this if you plan on seeing this movie.

SPOILERS!!

I did not like the ending. I highly doubt the reason the Bay of Pigs was blown was because Edward Wilson's son let the info of the raid slip to a Congolese spy for the KGB. That was an unnecessary add. That's something I'd expect out of Oliver Stone. There's no need to add such a twist to an important event like that. This also pushed Wilson's son to the forefront of the movie, and he was truly painful to watch.

DVD Quick Review- Idiocracy (6 out of 10)

2007-01-11T18:34:00.000-08:00

Idiocracy, starring Luke Wilson, is the new Mike Judge movie. He made Office Space. This movie got screwed pretty bad in marketing and release, and was pretty much straight to video.

The basic premise is that Wilson is a military pilot that undergoes a hibernation experiment, only to wake up 500 years later when the experiment is forgotten about. He learns that the world has become unbelievably stupid, and he is now the smartest man on the planet.

I want to keep this quick, so I'll just say that the movie depicts a very scathing look at the future, in which man has become progressively more stupid. Take the dumbest person you know, and dumb them down some more.

The movie starts off great, with that really goofy humor you can only find in Office Space, and with some great jokes about a pimp and a military guy. Then Luke awakes in the future, and for a while, it's funny just seeing how things have changed, and the ways Judge rips on current American culture. However, after a while, the novelty wears off, and the movie definitely becomes a lot less funny. While I was rolling for the first half, I was sitting silently for the latter half, still enjoying the movie, but somewhat disappointed at the turns the plot had taken.

The special effects in this movie are also terrible. I don't care if it's low budget, if you can't afford to make something NOT look like it belongs on Playstation One, don't add it into the movie.

So, I recommend the movie as a cheap rental, it's fun, but it could've been a lot better. There was so much more that could've been done.

Little Children- 8 out of 10

2007-01-07T15:53:00.000-08:00

This review will be a quickie.

Little Children, starring Kate Winslet, Jackie Earle Haley, Jennifer Connelly, and Patrick Wilson, centers on a suburb and its' denizens. It covers the issues of adultery, sex offenders, and happiness. To bring you up to speed, Kate Winslet is a stay at home mom, and Patrick Wilson is a stay at home dad. Neither are entirely happy with their married lives, so they begin to have an affair with one another. Jackie Earle Haley is an sex offender recently out of prison, and living at his mothers. An ex-cop, played by Noah Emmerich, spends his time harassing Haley.

So half the movie is basically about living the middle class suburban life and finding happiness with it, and the other half is about the fear going through the neighborhood what with the sex offender having moved in. I'm always up for a movie discussion with anyone that might have seen this movie, but since this is only a little review, I'm not going to get into the themes and ideas of the movie. However, they are covered so dramatically and wonderfully, even if you think you've seen this type of movie so often before. The affair movie never really entices me, but I really like the way it was done here.

Tom Perrotta, the author that wrote Little Children, also wrote Election, which was made into a movie, and if you've seen Election, you can expect much of the same black humor and sharp wit in this movie. There is a great narration to the movie as well, done by Will Lyman, that adds to the dry humor of the movie.

My only gripe comes that even with the humor involved in the movie, and that the slow pace added to the film so well, sometimes the movie still is not unlike anything you've ever seen before. At times in the movie, it becomes your basic marriage-affair film. It's not incredibly often, but it still takes away from the whole package. This of course goes back my own personal preference in that I do not typically enjoy affair movies. Luckily however, the movie concentrates more on the why of the affair between Winslet and Wilson instead of the "how are they going to cover it up."

Another interesting thing that at least I felt was that, with affair movies I've seen before, the main conflict I feel is "Oh dear, how and when is the hubby going to find out, and what will happen then?". I never felt that with this movie. Instead, the main conflict was how were the lives of Winslet and Wilson going to turn out. Such a nice job is done with making the affair between these two seem so necessary and natural, that whether or not their hubbies find out becomes irrelevant, but rather that the two find happiness, however temporary.

So in the end, this is a really great movie with wonderful performances by everyone, and I absolutely loved the arcs of the characters and how much they made sense. Jackie Earle Haley puts on a great subdued performance as the sexual deviant, Ronald McGorvey. He was apparently in Bad News Bears years ago, but I barely remember that movie.

Children of Men (10 out of 10)

2007-01-05T19:35:00.000-08:00

So this week a number of the limited movies that have been lingering in NY and LA finally came to Columbus, and while I plan on seeing all of them, it was a tough decision to pick which would be seen tonight. Eventually, we chose Children of Men, which I was kind of iffy not. Not because I didn't want to see Children of Men, but because of the onslaught of movies coming up in January, I didn't want to have to compare everything to Children of Men, I would rather give some other films the chance of being the best film of the year, if only for a few days.

I anticipated this movie greatly and rarely when I anticipate does it pay off.

Children of Men is a dystopian view of the future, wherein all women are infertile for the past 18 years and thus, the world has taken on a very nihilistic point of view. Britain is one of the last bastions of "functioning" civilization, though they deport refugees and treat them inhumanely in order to maintain their status as best remaining place on Earth. Clive Owen is a London citizen, just living his life, somewhat cynical, and complacent considering how far the world has fallen. He is asked by his ex-wife and freedom-fighter/terrorist leader, played by Julianne Moore, to transport a young woman to the coast to meet up with a boat to get her out of the country. It turns out this young woman is pregnant, the first pregnant woman in 18-plus years.

This movie is brilliant. It is unbelievable. I don't want to start listing positive adjectives or I'll be here all night. Let me just say that I can nary find a flaw with the movie. It is the best directed film I've seen in a long time. There are a number of scenes where the camera shot goes unedited for minutes and minutes. I still don't know how that was done.

I don't really want to spoil anything, but this is by far one of the best films I have ever seen. Going into the movie, I had read that the direction and camerawork was superb, so I was looking forward to it and prepared. I did not expect Clive Owen's acting performance, Michael Caine's goofy character, the raw emotion conveyed so well, and how hopeful the movie is, no matter how desolate the landscape. It is incredible how deftly the movie can switch from happy-go-lucky to deathly serious and intense. There will be joking and laughing, and then suddenly an action sequence in the matter of seconds, and it all works. Multiple times I could barely breathe because every scene was being done so well. This isn't hyperbole either, this movie was just that good.

Of course, as I do so often, I need to laud the music for being great. I love movies with good music, and this has a great original score, which emphasizes opera vocals, as well as a lot of 60's and 70's acoustic soft rock that goes so well with the movie.

This movie does fall into the realm of science fiction, but don't let that hold you back from seeing this. It is very realistic and believable.

As I was leaving the theater, I overheard two people say "That was weird." ... " Yeah, that was SO weird." Weird? WEIRD? I mean, you can dislike the movie, that is your prerogative. But it wasn't an art movie. There wasn't any blatant metaphor(although there was a great nod of the head to Pink Floyd's Animals album art). It wasn't a WEIRD movie. It depicted a fictional future, but everything that happens in the movie is completely realistic with realistic human characters. I mean, 1984 was a "weirder" dystopic future scifi movie, as was 2001. Heck, Blade Runner could even be considered weirder than this, this movie is that not-weird.

Anyways, I digress.

I will talk to everyone later, Go Bucks.

We Are Marshall- 5 out of 10

2007-01-04T14:35:00.000-08:00

Starting this year, I am going to start putting numerical ratings on my reviews, so if you don't want to read the whole thing, you can get an idea of what I thought of the movie by just reading the number I gave it.

We Are Marshall is the new movie about the aftermath of the 1970 plane crash that killed the entire University of Marshall football team and coaching staff. It stars Matt McConaughey, Matthew Fox, David Strathairn and Ian McShane among others.

After the plane crash, the university is thinking of shutting down the football program, but in comes McConaughey, who becomes the new head coach.

I cannot say I really liked this movie too much. It did not resonate with me at all. I didn't find it to be particularly emotional, true story or not. I understand it's a sad event, but there are all sorts of sad movies out there, some that are effective, some that aren't, and this just was one of the latter to me. To be honest, I was rather bored with it at times, and there was nothing unique to this movie save the event itself. But a movie can't just be sad and get away with being mediocre as a result. Pearl Harbor was a terrible event, but the movie was one of the worst affronts to American cinema. I think McG (the director) took the easy way out, and made a very homogenized movie about a tragedy.

The good... well the performances were great, the two Matthews and David Strathairn were a lot of fun to watch, and the movie offered a pretty in-depth look at the running of a football team and team strategy during the middle portion, much more than what a lot of other football movies will give you. There's also a part with Bobby Bowden that I liked. Having lived outside of Huntington, it was neat seeing places I recognized, but that novelty can only carry you so far.

I don't think this movie ranks near Rudy or Remember the Titans in terms of emotional sports movies, or Hoosiers or Friday Night Lights in terms of an in-depth realistic look at a sports team. Perhaps in the hands of someone different, but as it was, it is no different than any other inspirational sports movie. Like I said before, it's worth going to see for the performances of the main three actors in the movie, but the scenes involving Ian McShane are painful at best, in a bad way. I don't know if that's his American accent, or his West Virginian accent, but either way, it sounded awful.

Most Anticipated Movies of 2007

2007-01-02T19:41:00.000-08:00

I saw some sites doing this, so I thought I'd put in what I am looking forward to.

Movies that I am so incredibly pumped for that are 2006 movies-
Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth (these are coming out this month, so you will see my reviews soon, I won't say anything more about them)

Movies that I am so incredibly pumped for that are 2007 movies-
300- If you have seen a single trailer for this movie, you will understand why, it looks incredible
Zodiac- David Fincher's return to the serial killer movie, about the Zodiac Killer of San Fran
Smokin Aces- great cast, great looking zany action movie
Grindhouse- Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez doing 70's style horror
Sunshine- another Danny Boyle (trainspotting, 28 days later) movie
stardust- based off of the Neil Gaiman book, my favorite author, fantastic book by the way
I AM Legend- based off the Richard Matheson book, but they are changing the vampires to vampire-zombies, so hmmmm
Shoot em up- buzz is that it will be one of the best action movies ever
3:10 to Yuma- never saw the original, but it has Christian Bale, Russell Crowe and Peter Fonda, directed by James Mangold
American Gangster- Russell Crowe, Denzel Washington and Ridley Scott in a movie about a drug dealer in the 70s
the mist- Frank Darabont, the guy that did Shawshank Redemption and Green Mile, doing a Stephen King horror movie about monsters
beowulf- take the animation quality of Polar Express, the direction of Robert Zemeckis, and a great voice cast, and the story of beowulf

Summer Blockbusters that look great-
Spiderman 3- I love the Spiderman movies, and Venom is my favorite villain
Transformers- I hope it's just a fun mindless action movie with robots
die hard 4
Pirates of the Caribbean 3- lets hope it's better than 2, it's based in Asia, it has Chow Yun Fat
Harry Potter 5
The Simpsons

Political/Espionage/Movies based in Middle East- Big year for this genre
Vantage Point/Rendition- Very similar in that they will employ the Rashomon many POV of one event plot device, both based in Middle East, both with great casts
Charlie Wilson's War- Tom Hanks in a movie about a congressman that helped fund the Mujaheedin of Afghanistan against the soviets
Breach- movie about a CIA operative that helped the Soviets
the garden of elah
Lions for Lambs- Cruise, Meryl Streep and Robert Redford
The Kingdom

Movies you could be seeing at Next Years oscars and Independents- Other movies i listed above could be there too, but these didn't fit in those categories
Reservation Road- Mark Ruffalo kills Joaquin Phoenix's son in a hit and run, about the aftermath
Margot at the Wedding- Noah Baumbach did The Squid and The Whale and this is his next
My Blueberry Nights- Wong Kar Wai's first American film, great cast
Eastern Promises- David Cronenberg's next
Paris, Je t'aime- 20 different directors direct five minutes of a movie about Paris
The Kite Runner
Michael Clayton- George Clooney movie
The Golden Compass- based off the Philip Pullman fantasy series, His Dark Materials, has a promising cast and the series is supposed to be real good
No Country for Old Men- The next Coen Brothers movie
There Will Be Blood- The next PT Anderson movie
Before the Devil knows your dead
Synecdoche- the next Charlie Kaufmann movie

I think that is good, there is a lot that looks good this year, more than what it on this list... there is also Sundance coming up, but who knows what will be purchased there

Rocky Balboa

2006-12-31T09:29:00.000-08:00

I have a quick review for the new Rocky movie.

I wasn't originally going to see Rocky Balboa. Instead, I was thinking of seeing Eragon, the new fantasy movie. However, I started reading some guys saying it was one of the worst movies of the year... the general consensus seemed to feel this way. On the other hand, Rocky Balboa was getting good reviews, so I went to see that.

This movie takes place after Rocky V, and about four years after the death of Adrian. I read that originally Adrian was still going to be alive, but Stallone didn't think that gave the movie enough power, so he rewrote the script where she was dead. It was this that really really helped the movie. Her being dead created so much more emotion than I think would have happened had she been alive in the movie. It was made the movie more than a simple retread on tired ground.

Basically, Adrian is dead and Rocky is a suffering widow with his son (played by Heroes' Milo Ventimiglia). The big time Heavyweight Champ, Mason Dixon, has no real challengers and is criticized for this. ESPN has a mock computer matchup between the young Balboa and Mason Dixon, and it says that Balboa would win in a match. Rocky feels like getting back into boxing to have something to do, when Dixon's manager and a promoter come up to him saying Balboa and Dixon could have an exhibition match. And so on.

Let me tell you, I like Stallone as much as any action star like Schwartzenegger.... well I guess that's it... I only like Stallone and Arnold, I can't stand Van Damme, Seagal, or Chuck Norris. But I never really thought Stallone had the best acting skills, even after seeing Rocky I and II. I haven't seen Oscar, which I heard he is good in, but I have seen a lot of his action movies, and he's an action star, not a real actor. But he wowed me with this movie. He has some unbelievable monologues in this movie which he delivers with such umph. He was truly great in this movie. The other actors are pretty good, though I'm still not sold on Milo Ventimiglia.

The presentation for the boxing scene itself is great too. Michael Buffer, as well as the regular HBO PPV boxing commentators are there, and it's a lot of fun, especially seeing the contrast between now and Rocky I which didn't have all the flash and pop of a modern boxing match. As you might expect, the boxing match itself is pretty damn good as well. I really didn't know who was going to win, but the result makes the most amount of sense.

The movie isn't perfect. There might be a couple too many monologues for the movie's own good. All the main characters have their own massive speech or two or three, and that can get wearing as I prefer some subtlety, instead of raw emotion constantly getting rammed down my throat. But that's Rocky, and I don't think it really detracted from the movie at all. There's also an incredibly annoying scene in a bar near the beginning of the movie concerning some trashy bar denizens and Rocky and buying a round of beers that I didn't like for how forced it seemed.

I was not a big fan of any of the Rocky's that I have seen, but this one really blew me away. I just really appreciated how it tied the series all together. It took a somewhat pulpy movie series and gave it a truly emotional strong ending. Now for Rambo 4.

Apocalypto

2006-12-30T09:09:00.000-08:00

Apocalypto, as you probably know, is the latest by Mel Gibson, a film about a period near the end of the Mayan civilization. The plotline (THERE ARE SPOILERS) is as follows: There are these happy-go-lucky village folk living their lives when warriors from the city come and ransack the village, kidnapping some and killing the rest. The kidnapped are herded back to the city where they are to be sacrificed to the Mayan gods, as the religious people believe this will make things better for the Mayans, as times were quite rough. Well, the main character, Jaguar Paw, escapes after killing the lead warrior's son, and the chase is on.

END SPOILERS

If you read that, you can see it is a pretty neat backdrop for a movie. That was what drew me. There aren't too many Mayan movies out, and this is very well done. To be honest, it was a lot of fun... until the end. But I'll get to the end in a bit. It is adventurous, violent, and intense. There is very good acting, and it is quite exciting. I had somewhat feared that the chase scene was going to be very boring. I mean, how exciting could running through the woods be? But I was wrong, it stays fresh throughout.

The ending I was talking about... woo wee... ok first SPOILERS!!!

Now, when the city warriors invaded the village, Jaguar Paw hides his pregnant wife and child in a small cave in which there is no way out if Jaguar Paw isn't around to get her out. So, she is waiting around down there hoping they are saved. Meanwhile, Paw gets into his hectic run home to be with her again. On the way, it starts raining hard, therefore the cave starts to fill up with water. The wife and child are close to drowning. And then the wife starts pushing out, like she's going into labor. And I start getting really really nervous. No way, this is NOT going to happen... but it does. The camera goes underwater, and bam, out pops a baby (so obviously a doll in this scene). It was so awful, and yet so hilarious. It was absolutely pointless and ridiculous.

That killed the mood of the movie for me. Why was that even in there? Why? It's not enough to have her nearly drown in a cave, for all the intense action scenes with Jaguar Paw, we got to add in this awful birthing scene? You haven't seen anything until you see the scene where the baby pops out. It might be somewhat shallow of me to be mired in talking about this scene, but it was such a terrible scene.

End SPOILERS

So after the above mentioned scene, I was rather lost. I had loved the movie up to that point. I just can't think of a reason for that ending.

But as an action-adventure movie set in a very interesting period, this is a pretty good, fun film. There is a good bit of violence so be ready for that.

Mini DVD Review- Altered

2006-12-24T07:45:00.000-08:00

I guess I'll do a small review for a bad movie I just rented.

It is called Altered and it's by the guy that did Blair Witch Project. That's really the only reason I rented it. I wasn't at all expecting a cheesy horror movie, but rather a psychological thriller type. The movie is about a group of guys that kidnap an alien that abducted them and killed on of their friends years before. It's a pretty cool little plot. However, the alien is ridiculous looking, I SWEAR I've seen that same alien in another movie before. The writing is also bad. There is some pretty good gore if that's what you are looking for, and the music is very creepy and well done. Still, it's predictable as any other bad direct to video horror movie. There is one really cool shot at the end of the movie where there are a bunch of aliens climbing the walls of the house the main character lives in, so he blows the house up, and it shows the house blow up, and the camera pulls out to show the spaceship above the house (which was a pretty nice ship) retreat and zoom off into space.

So in conclusion, Altered, while with some pretty neat moments, is a pretty bad movie.

Fur

2006-12-24T07:26:00.000-08:00

Fur, a movie by Steven Shainberg (Secretary), is a fictional biopic on the photographer Diane Arbus. The fictional biopic thing is what interested me the most. It's not actually about Diane Arbus, but a bunch of made up events that might have pushed her to make her superb photography. Fur stars Nicole Kidman as Diane Arbus and Robert Downey Jr as her hypertrichosis-stricken neighbor one floor up. Hypertrichosis is the "werewolf syndrome" where you grow hair uncontrollably all over your body.

When I first saw Robert Downey's character in this movie, I instantly thought about Chewbacca, he is THAT hairy. And yes, there is an extended, painful to watch shaving scene. He is just flowing with hair. I looked on wikipedia, and apparently there are severe cases where people look like that. So there you go. I normally love Robert Downey Jr, but man did he ever send me over the edge with this movie. He talks in this pretentious soft voiced whisper the whole movie, which might be attributed to his dying lungs, but was still nevertheless incredibly annoying. He's also not a very good person over all in this movie, though his characters' main reason of being is to awaken the artist within Arbus.

This movie is very arty, much more so than any movie I have seen in a while. There is also a lot of weird to it, a lot of in-your-face nudity and circus freaks. It wasn't overly artistic to detract from the movie, and really, that added to it and made it more like the fantasy biopic I was expecting.

Spoilers!!

Diane Arbus and the hairy man start hanging out a lot, and eventually Arbus' husband gets angry and suspicious, and it comes to a head at their anniversary party. Arbus tells her husband that she is going to end this once and for all, and then goes upstairs and shaves the hairy man in the scene I mentioned before. This scene was over the top, as with every piece of skin she uncovers, she looks at it in wonder, as if she's never seen a leg before. Finally, he's shaven and then they go sleep together. That lost me. What an adultress, it was so terrible. You can argue with me all you want that she needed to become the artist she was meant to be, but she told her husband she was ending her relationship with this guy, and then she goes and does that. I'm not against women breaking out of being housewives, I rooted for Julianne Moore's character in The Hours, and the mother in Lovely Bones, but my moral side was really against Diane Arbus' decision at the end of this movie to hook up with Robert Downey Jr like that while she was still married and had just lied to her husband like that.

End of Spoilers!!

Anyways, Fur was an alright movie. Sometimes the straight up weirdness took away from the movie, but most of the time, it was fun and fantastical. Still, Robert Downey Jr's character was the king of overly pretentious, arrogant sleazeballs that I've seen this year, and I really didn't like how he was portrayed as a good kinda guy in this movie.

My worst movies of the year list

2006-12-22T17:54:00.000-08:00

Ok, so if you look earlier in my posts, you can find my top ten films of the year. All I would change is adding The Proposition and Bobby to Honorable Mention, but the Top 10 remains the same as 2006 draws to a close.

So here is my Top 5 worst movies I saw this year. This is only my opinion of course.

Honorable Mention- Pirates of the Caribbean 2- This movie was just boring and rehashed all the same stuff from the first movie (which i adored). Only the ending is bringing me back to see the third one.

5- Freedomland- very melodramatic (I hate bad melodrama), and Julianne Moore was terrible in this movie, her emotional scenes were laughably bad. I had the "mystery" solved in no time.

4- The Holiday- read my previous post on this movie to understand why I didn't like it.

3- X-Men 3- I can't believe how bad this movie was, considering how good it should have been. Every mutant is given a scene of screen time, enough to exhibit their powers, then it's on to the next one. They ruined the Dark Phoenix storyline so bad it hurt me physically.

2- Hostel- I am sick still that this movie made money. It was atrocious, it had no point, it was basically pornography. There was no horror, there was just torture scenes, and the guy with any redeeming qualities is killed, while the idiot frat boy makes off, and gets revenge on all the bad guys in a really bad ending chain of events. I am also upset that a sequel is coming out, as if this movie was bad enough. Eli Roth is said to be the American Takashi Miike, but he showed nothing in this movie.

1- Lady in the Water- The only reason I didn't walk out of this one is because I needed to see how ridiculous Shyamalan would let it get. That guy has the hugest ego in the entire directing world and he proved it with this one. Only he would cast himself into a movie as the character that is going to save the world with a book. Every character was horrible, but it all comes down to Shyamalan.

Blood Diamond

2006-12-22T17:43:00.000-08:00

Firstly, I only recently realized people are replying to my posts, and i did not know this. I am going to respond to your comments, I just didn't know before. Also, I have heard I might use too many spoilers. I can't really help using them, but I will make sure I say so before I do.

Blood Diamond is directed by Ed Zwick (Glory, The Last Samurai), and it stars Leonardo Dicaprio, Djimon Hounsou, and Jennifer Connelly. It is about the diamond trade in Sierra Leone and the civil war that started over it in 1999. Leo works for the British government in a way, and smuggles diamonds and guns in and out of the country, financing the chaos. Hounsou is a Sierra Leone native who is taken captive by Leone gangster army men. Connelly is a journalist.

I thought the movie started off great. One thing I was unprepared for was just how large of an action epic this film is. This seems like a weird comparison, but it was a grittier Indiana Jones in parts. I'm not saying this is anywhere on Indiana Jones's level, I just thought there were similarities. To it's credit, it does not let up a bit for the whole moment. It only gets tedious in the way all the action scenes become the same. There is great cycling between the two leads, Hounsou and Dicaprio, and the acting is great, if you can get over Dicaprio's so-so accent.

I said the movie started off pretty good, but this tapers off. Eventually, it begins to feel long, and this is brought on by the aforementioned redundant action scenes and a really bad script (the writing was so overly melodramatic, and the scenes between Dicaprio and Connelly felt wooden).

Deja Vu

2006-12-21T19:50:00.000-08:00

I am quite backlogged on reviews.

Deja Vu is a time travel movie starring Denzel Washington and directed by Tony Scott. Denzel plays an ATF agent that is investigating a terrorist bombing of a ferry in New Orleans. He is contacted by a special task force that uses new technology to investigate the crime.

To begin, I like Tony Scott, I think his movies are a more complex type of Michael Bay movies, the big action blockbuster, with the stylish colors etc. He makes good action movies generally. I also really like time travel movies for the most part. So as a whole I liked this movie a good bit. The time travel bit is done pretty well, and if you can get over the inconsistencies that plague it, it is very fun and intense.

The movie is split up into three distinct parts, the first being Denzel's solo investigation of the attack, the second being the investigation using the monitoring device, and the final being the part where Denzel actually time travels. The first two thirds are great, and I was loving the movie as a whole. However, once Denzel goes back to the last hours before the attack, the movie hits a rut. It starts going over all the events that you saw previously in the movie (bloody bandages at a victims house, certain victim wearing a certain color dress, etc), and you start to realize "oh man, everything is the same! it's leading up to the same conclusion." This is done so slowly. I understood what was going on in the first couple minutes, but it just dragged. Eventually the movie reaches it's gripping conclusion, and while it was very intense and thrilling, it didn't make any sense how the past changed like that. But that's time travel movies for ya.

When Denzel is first told about the technology the task force uses, they say it is an orbital satellite system that has four satellites on every part of the planet at any given time, and they can watch anything 4.5 days ago. I instantly thought this was ridiculous, and the most far fetched idea for a device I've heard in a long time. Finally, Denzel calls BS as well, and it turns out it's basically a wormhole camera that some physicists actually discovered. I thought this was interesting, and while not possible, it was a good plot device. It also leads to one of the most innovative car chases I've seen in a while, in which with a wormhole camera watching 4.5 days ago, Denzel is chasing a guy through New Orleans. Just different.

So, Deja Vu was a pretty good action movie, and a good scifi movie. Don't go in expecting brilliance on the science end, it glosses over any realism in that aspect, but it is still pretty good. I was physically drained afterwards, in a good way, because it is a really tight thriller.

The Holiday

2006-12-17T14:11:00.000-08:00

Oh man was The Holiday ever awful. The Holiday, a Nancy Meyers movie (the woman that did Somethings Gotta Give), is about two women both coming off of hard relationships that do a home exchange and go on vacation. While on vacation they meet men and fall back in love and so on. Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet are the women and Jude Law and Jack Black are the men they meet respectively. I went into to this movie because Dina wanted me to go, and because I had hopes after seeing the cast and the person making the movie, that it could at least be as good as In Her Shoes or something like that.

I am gonna start with one of the most ridiculous sequence of events I have ever seen in movies that was in The Holiday. Cameron Diaz meets Jude Law, and they hook up. Law gets calls from two girls named Sophia and Olyvia on his cell phone and you think "Hmmm, so Jude Law is a ladies' man." And Cameron Diaz thinks the same thing. Eventually Diaz goes to Law's house, only to learn that Sophia and Olyvia are his 7 and 4 year old daughters. So I begin to think "aww that's nice." and then it hits me... Sophia and Olyvia, again SEVEN and FOUR years old, have their own phone numbers. No, just no. I laughed out loud when this realization struck me. Well moving on with the scene... take the sappiest, cheesiest, sugary sweetest things little British girls could say, multiply that by two, and squeeze it into a five minute scene. As Diaz meets these two little girls, they just keep saying the cutest things one right after the other. When this script was written, realism was absolutely abolished, and anything that could elicit an "awww" from the audience was thrown in. This scene was so painfully stupid I could barely bear it.

Finally, Diaz asks Law later why he never mentioned that he had two daughters. Instead of his reason being at all immoral or negative, it is a purely good-intentioned reason, and Law and Diaz fall further in love.

Which brings me to my big problem with the movie. Nothing happens. It is absolutely devoid of conflict, with the exception of the beginning which merely sets the movie in motion, and the end which has the typical conclusion. Winslet, Black, Diaz, and Law are all just the most amazing people, and there is never ANY doubt that the two couples will end up together. What makes it worse is that it is not funny at all. Diaz and Winslet are not taking their roles seriously either. In scenes were Winslet is supposed to be crying, it's more of a cartoony wailing noise that you know is not her actually acting-crying voice. Jack Black is so fake, that part was miscast.

While in LA, Winslet meets an old screenwriter that has become something of a recluse from Hollywood since he doesn't like the new Hollywood that only cares about commerce over art. On a couple of occasions in the movie, this screenwriter has small diatribes about how bad Hollywood is now. This is all good and well, and I agree, except that this movie is exactly what the screenwriter is complaining about. It's a plain, homogenized romantic comedy that is in no way edgy, different, or artsy. It doesn't do anything unique or new with the genre.

For Your Consideration

2006-12-12T13:51:00.000-08:00

Another quick review.

For Your Consideration is the latest by Christopher Guest, the great mockumentary director that did This is Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind among others. I have loved the three Christopher Guest mockumentaries that I have seen, they are just so goofy and well written. It is a certain type of comedy, unlike any other. FYC differs in that it is not a mockumentary, but rather a classic plotline, sprawling look at the creation and marketing of an Oscar baity movie named Home for Purim/Thanksgiving. All the regular players from Guest movies are there like Harry Shearer and Fred Willard etc etc.

The movie does not have near as many laughs as the previous Guest films that I have seen. It is still funny at times, and smart, but it starts very slow. It's not trashy so that's good, but funny moments are few and far between for most of the movie. Or maybe I just didn't understand it.

At about the three-quarters mark of the movie, it springs forward in time to after the completion of the film, when it is being marketed. At this time, the feeling of the movie gets almost angry. Guest tears into Hollywood marketing, such as where the studio execs want the name changed from Home For Purim to Home For Thanksgiving to make it "less Jewish" and more accessible to the American people. Harry Shearer and Catherine O'Hara, who both were in the movie, absolutely sell their bodies out to make themselves look younger and make the movie more appealing I guess? Either way, it is off-putting how sudden this change in the mood of the film comes. It is rather depressing and shocking.

I enjoyed parts of FYC, I found those parts to be very funny and mocking of movies in general. Still, it was only a subpar comedy, and the ending was too blatant a rip on Hollywood, there was nothing subtle about it. I didn't so much like that.

Fred Willard is superb though, I love that guy.

If you didn't see The Lost Room on Scifi last night, I recommend that. It is a lot of fun, it has some Stephen King-ishness going on, and it's very interesting and fun and creative. It is a little scifi, a little fantasy, and just very good for being on Scifi channel. Although Battlestar Galactica is also amazing and on Scifi.

Bobby and some other stuff

2006-12-12T13:38:00.000-08:00

I have had the hardest time making up a long, in-depth review of Bobby, and have failed. However, I still want to recommend it highly. It is shocking that Emilio Estevez wrote and directed this movie, as I can only think of him as Coach Bombay on Mighty Ducks. This movie was incredibly powerful, if a bit too big. There are TOO many characters, too much going on, and a little too much melodrama packed in there. However, this is still a very very good movie, and like I said before, I recommend it.

I think I am going to change my mind and actually go see Dreamgirls when it comes out. This type of movie is getting overdone. I understand that this is based off of a Broadway musical, and that it is itself a musical, and only somewhat based off of Diana Ross and the Supremes, but this formula is getting tiring. You know what is going to happen by seeing the previews, which gives the whole plot away. However, I keep reading great reviews, especially for the performances of Eddie Murphy and Jennifer Hudson. It is the favorite to win the Oscar this year, and it would be foolish not to see it. I saw all the Oscar nominees last year before the ceremony, which made the Crash win all that much harder to swallow. I think because of it's early great reviews, and how powerful everyone says it is, I will see it now.

I have some more reviews coming soon, so stay tuned.

Tenacious D

2006-12-01T04:56:00.000-08:00

The Sundance Film Festival's lineup has been released. There are about 18 movies that interest me on logline alone. I don't need 18 more movies to want to see. I'll wait and see what the word on all of them are, and we'll go from there.

I saw Tenacious D yesterday. If you don't know who Tenacious D, that is shocking. It is the comedic band formed by Jack Black and Kyle Gass. They sing about being the greatest band in the world, and their songs are pretty funny. This movie is about how they came to be.

I don't really have much to say about it. I thought it was going to be terrible at first with the opening segment which consisted of animated Tenacious D flying around on the power of their farts. However, the movie doesn't wallow in embarassingly bad toilet humor. That's not to say it's brilliant. It's an alright movie. It wasn't hysterical, it had its moments. Can't really say much more.

I would have to give Tenacious D a Vivacious C. HAHAHAH.

Have a great weekend everyone, I'll be back next week with my review for For Your Consideration and Bobby. In the meantime, go watch a good movie, not a romantic comedy. Or the Rise of Taj. Or Nativity Story or Turistas. If you are going to go to a movie this weekend, look no farther than The Fountain or something that isn't crap.

Fast Food Nation

2006-11-29T05:02:00.000-08:00

I viewed Fast Food Nation, the latest by Richard Linklater. I really like Richard Linklater, there has not yet been a movie by him I didn't like. He normally does dialogue heavy films that are very real and smart. He is also incredibly leftist, and it shows in most of his movies. I'm pretty lefty myself, so I dig that, though I find some of his views to be really out there. Fast Food Nation is much the same. You could probably tell from the beginning this was going to be a liberal movie, being that it's based a book that rips on the fast food industry and the cattle killing industry. But Linklater takes it a step farther, and rips on everything big business.

This movie had a big cast, with a number of small cameos from names like Bruce Willis and Ethan Hawke. The main stories were: Greg Kinnear, a marketing exec for Mickey's investigating reports that there are fecal coliforms (bacteria that is found in fecal matter) in the meat, the fictional fast food chain in the movie, Wilmer Valderrama and Catalina Sandeno Moreno, two illegal migrant workers just over from Mexico that work with UMP, a corporate meat packager and slaughter house, and Ashley Johnson who was the little girl on Growing Pains, a high school student that works at Mickey's that gets involved with a bunch of left-leaning college students.

To start, the movie was good. I really liked Kinnear's story arc as he learns that the execs of UMP are knowingly selling filthy meat, and that Bruce Willis' character, who is the head of UMP or something, I never really caught what, and his boss at Mickey's are at odds, and he could lose his job both if he tells of the filthy meat, or if he doesn't tell. Being the human sellout he is, he takes the easy way out, and just goes on marketing crap. It's the most interesting storyline, in my opinion. The storyline with the Mexicans was also good, but very sad, especially when it gets Marion Silver-esque (requiem for a dream).

Greg Kinnear's story only goes on for about half the movie. At the conclusion of his arc, Ashley Johnson's begins. This one was just cheesy, and it had Avril Lavigne. Who the hell casted that? Patricia Arquette played her mother, and Ethan Hawke was her uncle. And here's where I come to my biggest gripe. Ethan Hawke was basically a proxy for Linklater's leftist views. I could have handled it if he were the only one. However, these characters are scattered throughout the film, from the college students Ashley meets, to the rancher that Greg Kinnear talks to (played by Kris Kristofferson). It's just constant, all these different characters bitching about Corporate America, how money is all that matters, even going on about the timber and coal industries. I mean, I get it, yes, I hate how powerful those corporations are, and how like six corporations own everything. But I came here to watch a fictional interpretation of the book Fast Food Nation, not to hear MORE rants. It is like Linklater is just getting desperate at the lack of change in the world. I just hope this doesn't become a normal thing, using every opportunity to rant about the current state of things.

But yeah, I could go on more, it really disappointed me that he did that. It was purely a directorial decision I think to go that route. There is a lot about the terribleness of the fast food industry in there, but it really did not need anything more. Ethan Hawke's character just pushed it over the line, he was so ridiculous. Everything he said was some leftist proverb to live by. I'm guessing he was stoked to play that role, but it was so pointless.

I also really don't like Wilmer Valderrama, primarily because he hosts that insult show on MTV. I really don't like Fez either. And no, he doesn't really do anything in this movie either. CSM (Catalina, not cigarette smoking man) and Kinnear put on the best performances. Bobby Cannavale is a huge bastard, but pretty good to watch.

When Kinnear is talking to Kristofferson about UMP, Kristofferson mentions how bad the kill floor is. You really don't want to go to the kill floor. The movie still goes there at the end, and it is foul, and awful.

Ok, I think I got it all out. Drexel needs to stop showing previews of movies that are already out, i.e. Bobby and Shut Up and Sing. They also need to stop playing movies like Shut Up and Sing.

Stranger than Fiction

2006-11-27T07:12:00.000-08:00

First, quick thing, Fountain Soundtrack is awesome, check out The Last Man or Stay with me for an idea of how great it is. Death is the Road to Awe also is striking, it's the song from the climax of the movie, it is so epic.

So, I saw Stranger than Fiction, starring Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, etc. Plot is Ferrell starts hearing someone narrating his life, the narrator being Emma Thompson who uses him as a character in his book, and she is going to kill him off. Ferrell lives his life to the fullest while also trying to find the author to stop her from killing him.

Now this whole plot device is never explained, so don't expect there to be any resolution in that regard. Just try to enjoy the movie, ignoring any reason.

Will Ferrell puts on a superb performance. Normally the comedy actor we all know and love, he plays an IRS auditor absolutely brilliantly. He is innocent, and this helps the romance plot with Maggie Gyllenhaal work so much better. Normally, I wouldn't believe an auditor and auditee could fall in love, considering the circumstances, but Ferrell plays such a genuinely nice guy, you believe it. The other performances are great, nothing bad at all. The mood was odd, not bad, and overall I think it worked. There were comedic parts, there were parts that were meant to be sad, but weren't because they weren't done very... sadly I guess? Yet, it was quirky in a way. Not indie film quirky, but rather it looked at the world in a sweeter, more skewed fashion.

Gripe Time... The movie slogged down into Clicheville in the middle portion. At this time, Hoffman tells Ferrell to live his life as he always wanted to if he knows he is going to die. So, Ferrell lives his life to the fullest. All the stuff about the narration is forgotten so Ferrell can live his life to the fullest. All nice, expect this story has been told countless times. This is used so Ferrell can woo Gyllenhaal, and there is some nice stuff, but I really don't like the "living life to the fullest" story and I thought it was a cheap way to fool me. Luckily, the narration plot was brought back and I was happy. In the long run, the plot for the whole movie was only average. The lack of any sound explanation did deter from full enjoyment, even if I did say to just ignore logic at the beginning of this review. I aslo felt they could have gone deeper into looking at books, how books are written, what makes up a good book etc... although I guess that would have been too smart for a Hollywood movie.

All in all, this was a good movie. Don't expect your world to be shaken to its' core. It was worth seeing for Ferrell's performance, but the plot demanded a lot of suspension of disbelief.

Coming This WEEK!- Fast Food Nation and For Your Consideration

My tentative Top Ten

2006-11-27T07:06:00.000-08:00

I made this list last week after reading some other tentative top tens around the internet world. There's still about 36 or so days left in the year, which is going to be a lot more movies, since December is pretty packed, so there is still an opportunity for other movies to jump in this list.

Couple of other quick things... I don't remember for the life of me when I saw The Squid and the Whale, but I don't believe it was this year. I don't have my 2005 list with me, so it might be on there, I don't remember. Anyway, if it was this year, it would be around 5 or 6, but I don't think it was this year.

So here it my current top ten, subject to change by Dec 31st.

Honorable Mention- Little Miss Sunshine, Babel

10- Bubble- I loved how realistic this movie, for an experimental film, it was a success imo, and i swear, they could have been filming people i know in southern ohio, and i wouldn't have known the difference

9- The Proposition- a great modern western... well the movie is set in the 19th century, but it was made now... anyways, great acting, i love guy pearce and ray winstone, the violence reminded me of oldboy in how it's almost a vibrant character itself... great story about brotherhood too

8- Tsotsi- i loved the music in this movie, and it was just a feelgood movie

7- Match Point- when i first saw this in january, i seriously thought nothing was going to unseat it as the best movie of the year... it's really a 2005 movie, but i start my lists Jan 1st... this script is ridiculous, john rhys-meyers character is such a bastard, the way the plot twists around

6- The Prestige- christopher nolan can tell a story like nobody else... i will love nearly any movie if it is plotted and paced expertly, and with this, nolan once again shows brilliance... sure, i didn't like some of the twists, but bale and jackman's performances alongside a very smart story won me over

5- Lady Vengeance- had to rent this one, but i love the way chanwook park went with this movie... it was a bit lighter than oldboy, but his creation of these incredibly unique, funny and original characters and situations, while having a very dark storyline is great, i want more and more of him using this type of mood

4- Brick- most anticipated movie in a long time for me before i went and saw it, after hearing how it did on the festival circuit... this was a first movie for the director, and he created this beauty... if you can allow yourself to get taken up in the high school / private investigator amalgamation that is brick, you will see the most original hybrid film in a long long time

3- A Scanner Darkly- this movie was hated by a lot of critics, but i dug it hard, for personal reason, and because i love philip k dick and richard linklater... this movie was a super mix of comedy and social commentary, and i don't know why i have it so high, but i couldn't bear placing it any lower

2- The Fountain- even more anticipated than brick... most beautiful film i have seen in a long time... it says something about the strength of film this year, that this is only my number two film... i just saw it 2 days ago, and i am still shaken up by it, in a good way... again, hated by critics for being too different

1- The Departed- oh man, the best scorsese since goodfellas, the best crime movie since heat, the best acting by every single person involved, the funnest time you could have in a movie theater or at home, i know it's an HK film that was remade, but scorsese killed it, this movie was so well done, i did not expect this

still to come- Children of Men, Little Children, maybe Pan's Labyrinth, blood diamond, apocalypto, bobby, for your consideration, the good shepherd

Death as a form of creation

2006-11-23T20:31:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving!

Now for my review on The Fountain.

As I sat waiting for this movie to begin, I was shaking. Well, maybe not totally shaking, but squirming in my seat, anxious for what was about to begin. I have been waiting months, maybe over a year for this movie. I can't remember when I first heard about it, but I have been dying. I saw Requiem for a Dream and Pi in high school and Darren Aronofsky instantly became one of my favorite directors. I have been following this project ceaselessly since day one, and now, finally, I was sitting in the theater, and the turn off your cell phones thing was playing.

The Fountain... woo wee. To sum it all up, it was everything I could have hoped for, and nothing I expected. That line has probably been used before. The Fountain was as innovative, original, and genius as anything I would expect from Aronofsky, and yet like nothing I had seen before. After leaving, I LIKED the movie, but was not head over heels for it. And then I started thinking.... ok, don't think of this movie as you think of most movies that are released. I started thinking of it as rather a dissertation on life and death, and a way to look at death, a happier way if you will, put to film. The movie is not THE STORY of Thomas through history trying to find a way to save his wife. It's the theory that death is a form of creation, and from everything that dies, that energy springs forth and can help or create something else. Of course this is an obvious natural law of the universe, but no one really thinks about it, much less makes movies about it.

I can totally understand why people might be turned off by the movie. (though the people at the showing I was at that were incredibly audible in their leaving of the movie was absolutely unnecessary, you can leave a movie, you don't need to act like a bull in a china parlor walking down the stairs) If you go into this movie expecting that story I was talking about before, you will be disappointed. If you let yourself be treated like a person with a brain, you will love this.

There is so much I loved. I loved how all the tenets of a great movie were there. There was conflict, there was character development, there was plot. But it was all done so differently. They are big ideas, but there isn't a twist in this movie or anything like that. But the way the end works, the ingenious way the Present Day and Future Thomas's come to learn that death is OK, make me think of those late 90's, early 00's movies. Like where it goes back to where Thomas has the choice to work with the monkey or go to spend time with his dying wife, and he chooses the latter. Ok, maybe it's not at all like Memento or any of those, but the story was expertly crafted as any of those.

The smaller things... the music was beautiful, especially the music set during the 26th century, with the electronic overtones. I do not know when I last heard music this good. Clint Mansell is brilliant.

The visuals, the art, the nebula. I cannot say enough about this without reusing expressive adjectives. It is simply the single most beautiful movie I have ever seen in terms of visuals.

That first scene in the Mayan Temple, the violence as Tomas moves forth. The four minutes that the Inquisitor was in the movie, and yet I want to see a film based around that whole character.

If I had any gripes, it might be that the movie drags in the middle, where the melodrama mounts. That's it.

I had some personal issues this past summer about death, dumb stuff like that. This movie struck a personal note with that, so again, another reason I am enamored with this movie.

I feel awful this movie is getting shellacked by critics. It shouldn't be. It is superb, and yet, in all likelihood, we will be lucky to ever have a movie with the artistic genius that this movie had to come out in a long long while. The local independent movie chain isn't even playing this movie. They have four theaters throughout town, and not one is playing this, not even the one that plays larger releases. I don't understand why AMC is playing it, and yet the indie chain that prides itself on not playing Hollywood schlock isn't playing one of the smartest things to come out of Hollywood in ages. It's almost enough to make it not like them anymore, but there's nowhere else to go for indies and fake indies.

It's really really sad after seeing this movie. I look at the list of movies I am going to see in the future, and there's some really really good ones, yes. But there is nothing like The Fountain, and I am truly afraid there never will be again. I will just hold out hope that young geniuses like Aronofsky, PT Anderson, and Christopher Nolan are allowed to continue crafting these ridiculously awesome movies, that crap like Hostel, Nameless Remake, Soulless Urban Dance Movie, and Vapid Animated Film don't ruin film for the rest of us.

Casino Royale

2006-11-22T05:19:00.000-08:00

I saw Casino Royale!!!

This is I think, the 21st Bond movie. I've never been a massive fan of James Bond. I loved GoldenEye, but all the Brosnan ones following that were awful. They were boring and unrealistic. Occasionally, I'll catch one of the early Bonds on TV, they don't look bad, but not nearly good enough to keep me tuned in. I dig Daniel Craig, I liked him in Munich and Layer Cake and Road to Perdition. He's just a cool dude, and a major reason I wanted to see Casino Royale.

This is a prequel of sorts for Bond, detailing how he became a double 0, and his very first mission, which was to win a high stakes poker game with Mads Mikkelsen, a banker to the worlds' terrorist. Mads Mikkelsen looked really familiar, and it turned out he was Tonny in the Pusher trilogy.

I am going to be very disjointed in this review, because that is how I want to be.

There is a great scene in the beginning where Bond is chasing a guy who happens to be a master of Le Parkour, the stuff you see on District B13. I don't think a lot of people in the audience had seen this stuff before, so they were shocked by the moves and jumps the guy was making. It was also a funny contrast between the chased and Bond, whereas the chased would make this amazing jumps and moves, and Bond would just crash through walls.

This movie was an all around great action movies. I think there are three types of action movies. The Very Realistic (ala Michael Mann action movies) The Not So Realistic (Bond movies and a lot of the other mainstream action movies) and the Hyper Unrealistic (Running Scared, Crank). They all have their good and bad. This one is at the forefront of the Not So Realistic. I mean, of course you gotta suspend disbelief at parts, it's just an action movie. But there is still a glimmer of realism there, and the characters are so well fleshed out. The story, which sounds simple, is also great, and the poker game, I wish it had gone on twice as long. Unfortunately, it ends rather abruptly.

My gripes comes in with plot mainly. For one, as the card game plotline comes to an end, there is a very long denouement-like period. However, it is a false ending, because there is still another large action scene to come. This pacing just did not work. The denouement period is where Bond and Vesper Lynd, played by Eva Green, fall in love and run off to Italy together. It all comes together in the end however, I just think it would have been aided by better pacing.

Also, there were small nitpicks that threw me. Biggest example being, at the beginning of the movie, Bond and another guy are tailing Le Parkour Guy. Le Parkour receives a text that says Ellipsis. Eventually, Bond gets that cell phone and traces it to a guy named Dimitrios that texted him that message. Later, Dimitrios leaves a bag in Miami for a guy that dresses up like an airport security guard. The guy uses the Ellipsis code on a door at the Miami airport, in a plan to blow up a plane. Now, why did Le Parkour receive that text? I would be fine with it if he was the original plane-bomber, but he was COVERED in burns. Is he seriously going to pass for a guard? I don't know if he spoke English either.

Also, Vesper gets a text from a guy working for the good guys at the card game, and says "Mathis (the guy) needs me," and leaves. Suddenly, Bond says "Mathis!", realizing Mathis is double crossing them, and chases after Vesper (too late though, Vesper gets caught). Now, where did this moment of clairvoyance come from? How did he suddenly just know Mathis was setting Vesper up to get kidnapped?

So, Casino Royale was a very good action movie, with only a few problems with plot and pacing. It was also a great Bond movie, and I would definitely watch any Bond movie that had Daniel Craig in the lead role.

The Fountain tonight!!

Horrorfest at Lennox

2006-11-21T07:00:00.000-08:00

This past weekend, a small distributor called After Dark released some low budget horror films to around 450 theaters to be shown in an event called Horrorfest. Only two of the movies interested me, and I couldn't see one because it was only being shown during the Michigan game. This idea was real cool though, so I needed to support it somehow. I was cognizant of the fact that the movies weren't going to be very amazing, but this idea of showing a number of lesser known movies at a larger movie chain for a weekend is great.

So I chose The Hamiltons. The premise is that these four kids' parents have died, and they are taking care of themselves. Now they're older, the oldest is maybe mid to late 20s, so they're not like 8 year olds, and this is a real sad movie. Well, the oldest three are all killers it turns out and cannibals at that. The youngest, our protagonist, hates this life, but loves his family too much to turn them in. The film goes much deeper than most horror films, especially incredibly low budget ones. It is also pretty funny and satirical.

Of course, the acting isn't that great, and you probably haven't heard of anyone in the movie. That's probably the greatest fault with the movie. It is never too distracting, but the acting just comes across as cheesy at points, though I wonder if it is trying to seem 1950's sitcomish on purpose. The oldest brother wants an ideal family, and he tends to act somewhat ridiculous. His inability to act doesn't help matters.

The movie ends on a couple of pretty good twists that I enjoyed. All in all, this was quite the good movie considering the low budget. If you can allow yourself to not be bothered by the lower than what you might be used to production values, than you will like an entirely different horror movie that is funny, and looks at family in a very interesting way.

Not a whole lot to say about the movie, as you can see.

On a side note, there were A LOT of people at the movie, which surprised me because there was not a lot of marketing for the event. There were also a LOT of little kids there (like around 10 yrs old), and considering this was a pretty hard R rated film, that surprised me.

I am seeing Casino Royale tonight and Fountain Tomorrow, good times.

The Blue Man Group

2006-11-17T08:39:00.000-08:00

I saw the Blue Man Group last night, Dina had cheap tickets.

For those that are stupid and don't know who the Blue Man Group is (this is unnecessary, since my only reader went with me to the BMG show, so she knows who they are), they are a group of blue humans that are very good at playing drums and PVC pipes. For this show, the theme was how to be a rock megastar, so they were learning how to do that, and we as an audience got to watch.

It was fun, but man, some of those songs that were sung. What the hell? They were really weird, depressing, poorly written songs, I didn't understand. Well, to be honest, I don't really understand the whole Blue Man Group philosophy, don't care to either. They did cover Pink Floyd and The Who though, that was sweet. Though a woman sang Baba O'Riley, and nothing against women, but she did awful.

In 28 hours, The Game will be begin.

Nickelback sucks.

2006-11-16T08:35:00.000-08:00

Nickelback tried getting special tickets to the OSU/Michigan game, but were turned down which is awesome. I hate Nickelback and I hate them more for thinking they're worthy of special treatment. On the same note, Rascal Flatts is getting special tickets and they suck, but not as much as Nickelback. I think Nickelback is the worst band of the decade, worse than Creed.

Anyway, 2 more days until The Game. OSU 27, UM 17 is my current prediction.

Babel

2006-11-16T04:49:00.000-08:00

I finally saw Babel last night. I guess you could say I was disappointed. I had incredibly high hopes for this movie. I was anticipating it greatly. But I will explain.

Babel is a international tale, four stories, all connected in some way. There is Brad Pitt/Cate Blanchett, a married couple who just recently had a baby die of SIDS, and are trying to work through their problems by taking a trip to Morocco. There are Moroccan farmer boys that are given a rifle to use against jackals. There is the nanny of Pitt and Blanchett's kids, who is trying to get to her sons wedding in Mexico, but cannot find someone to watch over the kids. And there is a deaf Japanese teenager who is upset over her mothers suicide among other things. All of these tales are told deftly, though the chronology doesn't always match up. I liked that though.

I think my high expectations are what hurt my enjoyment of this film. I heard that it was an intense thriller from start to finish, which wasn't true. When I realized I wasn't feeling incredibly excited, I was wondering whether or not I was getting into the movie well enough. I did not get into the Pitt/Blanchett storyline until near the end of it, and I felt there were moments in all four storylines that were just pushed for dramatic effect instead of realism. I hope this movie doesn't Crash on me. Haha, pun. But seriously, I liked Crash after I saw it. And then I started to actually think about Crash, and I hated it and was shocked that it won Best Picture. Babel and Crash are very much along the same lines, following disparate storylines, and commentating on the state of affairs in the world today. I think the difference comes in that Crash was not acting like there was any hope, there is racism, everyone is inherently racist, Ryan Phillippe kills Larenz Tate even though he seemed like the least racist of the bunch. Whatever. Babel at least acts like there is hope. One of my largest complaints with the world today is addressed with Babel also, that being how people are so separated by culture/politics/language, it is so hard to find unity. Babel manages to be about that, but also find light at the end of the tunnel. If Babel were Crash, it would have ended on an incredibly down note, and there would only be the statement "the world is divided, there is no solution." But Alejandro Inarritu is not Paul Haggis, thank heavens.

The direction in this movie is superb, the acting is as well. Really, EVERYTHING in this movie but some of the plot is great. But the Moroccan plot was predictable from the get-go, and the only thing I was feeling was "oh gee, i hope no one in these threads die." Nothing against Babel, but there should be more to a movie than that. Of course you don't want non-villains to die in any movie. The Mexico plot was much less predictable, and I really liked this one until Amalia left the children in the desert to find help. It's not that I did not understand why she left them there, I just feel this one of those moments where the story was going to a place it didn't need to go, it was just being manipulative in order to create tension. And the Tokyo storyline, while this one was the best done cinematically, thematically it left me wanting. I have never seen a movie about a deaf girl being treated like a mutant, but again, I felt it could have gone deeper than deaf girl looking for love in all the wrong places because she is deaf.

Gael Garcia Bernal is awesome, he had a small role in this movie, but he is just so awesome.

In the end, it's partially my fault that I didn't enjoy Babel as much as I would have liked. I just can't set my expectations that high. But this was in my top 4 movies that I'm looking forward to from now until mid Jan. The Fountain, Pan's Labyrinth, and Children of Men round out that list. Hopefully I can level off my expectations for those films before the same thing happens.

I read some reviews about the movie saying that people that cannot deal with the coincidences and happenstances will not enjoy the movie and that is their loss. I am in the middle of the road on not being able to deal with those occurrences. It wasn't so much the coincidences, but the pushing of the envelope, taking the plot to unnecessary places in order to evoke emotion.

But still, Inarritu is amazing.

Game shows

2006-11-15T05:42:00.000-08:00

There is a new game show on ABC called Show Me the Money, a stunningly original name for a show. The premise is that William Shatner, the host, asks you questions... the questions begin like The last..., and then there are three choices. You pick A, B, or C and all have different questions, all beginning with the two words The last... You can pass on the first two you choose if you don't know them, but then you have to answer the third.

This is ok, if somewhat unnecessary. I guess if you have two words and you SWEAR you know something about those words. Still...

so after you answer the question, right or wrong, you choose one of the girls that have a mystery dollar amount, and they show that amount, and you get it if you answered correct, lose it if you answered incorrect. This continues until you either get six wrong, six right, or get the Killer, which ends your game with no winnings. I think the dollar amounts are ridiculous. No question is worth 200,000 dollars, at least not in some trivia game.

The worst part is the dancing. i.e., contestant answers a question right, and Shatner suddenly says "It's time to celebrate! Ladies, salsa!" and all of the girls start to salsa, and everyone starts cheering. This also continues going into and coming out of commercial breaks. Shatner and the contestant dance obnoxiously too. And the camera is zooming in and out and cutting to different dancers like a music video. It's upsetting.

On Jeopardy, someone from the Broadway version of Mamma Mia! came out and started singing one of the sings, just a 20 second clip, but overexuberantly. She looked ridiculous.

Are game shows so idiotic now that they need this non game show shit? The Jeopardy one just shocked me. Those questions they ask On Location are fine. But the woman singing, and all this dancing. Whatever happened to good old 21, the game show on the movie Quiz Show. That was a hardcore gameshow, hard, no dancing, just sweat and concentration.

dane cook and movie stuff

2006-11-13T11:03:00.000-08:00

It appears opinion on Dane Cook is souring, at least the opinion of anyone not in college. I just read three separate articles (Salon, Slate, Rolling Stone) that were rather anti Dane Cook. My own liking of Dane Cook has diminished greatly since I first discovered him sophomore year of college during my own stand up comedy phase. I think I really began to hate on DC with Employee of the Month. That movie had Harlan Williams, Jessica Simpson, Efren Ramirez, Dax Shepherd, and Andy Dick all in one movie. That is terrible. That is, I think, the worst cast ever produced, and I would be hard up to look through IMDB to find something even worse.

So I understand DC is really maybe trying to break out, so he signed on to Employee, get even bigger, etc etc. But come on... that is embarassing to be in that movie. That's almost sell out material right there.

I also hated his attitude on his tv show on HBO, Tourgasm. He was cocky, and whiny. Having heard Harmful if Swallowed, and then a special on TV, and then Vicious Circle, another HBO show, I think his material is getting less funny and derivative. Is there going to be an evolution? Is it going to constantly be "have you ever noticed..." or "what is with this?" I loved H if S, because it was somewhat geeky, and relevant for someone my age. Now though, mehhh.

What else... I saw a movie called Clean, Shaven. With the comma. It is about a schizophrenic that is looking for his daughter. The movie was made to make you see what it's like being a schizophrenic, what with the paranoid feel to the movie, the music, the eerieness. However, a schizophrenic is not someone I want to look through the eyes of. If there is one illness I woul like to never have anything to do with, it would be Ebola. Schizophrenia is right there though. So, I slept through about a third of this movie. It was just a tough movie to digest.

The OSU/Michigan game is in 5 days. I am going to vomit every hour in anticipation until then.

Harsh Times

2006-11-13T05:07:00.000-08:00

I went and saw Harsh Times with Christian Bale and Freddy Rodriguez. I read that the movie was similar to Training Day, it had the same writer, and I really dug Training Day. I also really dig Christian Bale. So I figured, how can you lose?

Quick synopsis: Bale is an ex-Army Ranger trying to get a job in law enforcement, Rodriguez is his friend, married to Eva Longoria, trying to get a job, is on probation. Bale has a girl in Mexico that he is trying to bring to America. He says he loves her a lot.

TD and HT have a little in common; they are both set in L.A., they both have an unhinged character as the lead, etc. But Harsh Times is literally about two unemployed guys looking for jobs, and drinking/getting into trouble. There is some commentary here about the military being responsible for Bale's character going insane, but these serious moments are intertwined with rather tedious and annoying scenes of Bale and Rodriguez yelling and whooping and drinking and saying "Dude" in an incredibly annoying way, as well as Salut every time they drink.

Bales' character Jim pushed Rodriguez's character Mike into a lot of the bad things they do, but Mike was never a very moral or good character to begin with. He's a idiot from the beginning himself, just not insane because of his time in the Army Rangers. I had gone into the movie hoping for something more than the tale of two unemployed guys being idiots, but when I saw that that would not be the case, I then hoped that Mike would play a good foil to Jim's insanity. This would not happen either. To say Mike is the nice guy and Jim is the bad guy is incorrect I believe. Sure, when Eddie at the bar gets his throat slit in front of Mike and Jim, Mike is freaked out, while Jim doesn't care and is almost turned on by it. But until the end of the movie, when Mike is angry that Jim brought pot over the border of Mexico into the USA, Mike never truly acts like a good person. It's his idea to constantly lie to his wife.

Anyways, whatever. I'm gonna go into some more spoilers now.

At the end, Bale/Jim loses it, and kills some gangsters, and gets shot pretty brutally. Mike frigging mercy-kills him, and runs back home to Longoria. That's the end of the movie. I don't want to be the guy that explains THAT story to his wife. Mike has got to be screwed, his fingerprints were all over the place.

So in conclusion, Harsh Times blithered about too much. The scenes were Jim and Mike were basically frat boys looking for jobs totally lost me. I wouldn't have seen it if I had known that were so. The more serious scenes made the movie more watchable.

Oh, Christian Bale is again ridiculous. If it weren't for Reign of Fire, I don't think he would have had a bad role yet.

Babel is going to be seen later this week.

I saw Borat last night.

2006-11-07T06:16:00.000-08:00

I went to see Borat last night. This is one of Sacha Baron Cohen's characters that he played on Da Ali G show. I liked Borat on that show, in small doses. He was hilarious, but after Tom Green and Jackass, there is only so much exploitation of the public I can take. That was the reason I did not plan on seeing Borat only a couple months ago. I figured 84 minutes of what I saw of Borat on the Da Ali G show would not be worth it. It was not until the explosion of good publicity for this movie did I decide that it would be worth seeing.

With that said, Borat is unbelievably hilarious, but not absolutely amazing. It is basically about Borat, who comes to America to film some stuff for the Kazakhs back home, when he discovers Pamela Anderson, who he falls in love with and sets forth to find in LA. Now someone I saw it with thought the movie dragged when it got into these storyline bits outside of the public embarassment parts. However, that is what made this film great in my eyes. I would not have enjoyed it if it were what Jackass and Tom Green were, just funny bits, nothing holding them together. Sure, Borats story is ridiculous and not very original, but it's funny and sincere. And the parts of the movie meant to progress this story are still in and of themselves hilarious.

It eventually got to the point in the movie where I could not take anymore bits involving unsuspecting Americans because that can get old after a while. Luckily by this point, the only bit left was involving Pamela Anderson, and that was amazing. Like I have mentioned a few times already, I am burned out for the rest of my life on what Tom Green and Jackass did, because I watched that shit so much, and I just can't take anymore of it. Borat is infinitely better in that Cohen is smarter, funnier, and there is a point to what he does. It's not pure "being funny". Very much of what he does in this movie shows how insane some Americans are. Still, after a while, I am just cringing at what he is doing because it is embarassing for me to be a part of the same country as the Chi Psi boys or the rodeo fans.

I think Borat set a record for me for most times convulsing uncontrollably with laughter. The Running of the Jew, the naked fight in the hotel, the Pamela Anderson part, the rodeo part... this interspliced with the storyline parts made a complete movie and not a lame attempt at making money off of a funny tv show. I would not have enjoyed it as much if it had just been those bits and nothing more.

So that is that.

I have been playing Final Fantasy 12 lately. I started the FF series on 7, when my friend Sean bought it. That changed my video gaming world, and for the better. It gave me the idea that games could have so much substance. Well I haven't really dug an FF since 7... except for 6, which I got in one of those Anthology packs released after 7. I liked 11, but it was Online. But 8-10 were all meh. 8 was worse than meh.

12 is so much fun thus far. It totally changed the battle system, taking out random battles, and it is more online RPG like now. The story is super so far, graphics are great, and I just dig it hardcore.

That's all for now.

I am going to do this again.

2006-11-06T04:51:00.000-08:00

I had a movie review blog type of thing a while ago, but I stopped because it just became too difficult to review every movie that I saw. I would get frustrated because it would just be too hard to write about some of the movies. Moriarty of AICN, an online movie/tv/anime/comic news website, said something about how movie reviews generally write themselves, and some other stuff I can't remember. I find this to be true, if I hate or love a movie, I will be able to write a number of paragraphs about it. Otherwise, if the movie was just meh, ok, good, not that good, then I might not have such an easy time. So with this new incarnation of my movie blog, I will review movies only when it is easy to write about a movie. I won't review every single movie I see, because oftentimes, I don't feel strongly about the movie either way.

For example, I saw Catch a Fire yesterday, starring Derek Luke and Tim Robbins about apartheid/government sanctioned terror squads/freedom fighters etc. This movie fell under the ever growing "Movie that shocks about how terribly white people treat black people in Africa" genre. Other movies in this genre include the Constant Gardener, Last King of Scotland (somewhat), and the soon to be released Blood Diamond. Unlike my girlfriend, I don't mind this genre. Of the three that I have seen that have been released in the past year, I have dug all three, Constant Gardener the most, Scotland the least. Sometimes they can be manipulative, but for the most part, they're incredibly sad and eye opening.

Now I liked Catch a Fire. It had it's moments, a very strong ending, and some interesting subplots. However, it was neither so good or so bad that I could write a long review about it without pissing myself off and taking well over 3 hours getting one finished. So in the future, when I see a movie that leaves me feeling like Catch a Fire did, I will come back here and say "So I saw this movie, and it was good because of this: ......" and that will be all.

I am also going to write about non-movie stuff on occasion.

Next up on my list of movies to see is Borat, which I am probably going to see tonight. Babel is getting released soon, and I really want Little Children to come to Columbus ASAP.