Movie-Reviews

So, Kives Out.

This is one odd film.

On the surface, it’s an old-fashioned Whodunnit? reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s works. In this take, we open to find the Patriarch of a WASP-y family of trust fund babies dead, apparently at his own hand. His nurse Marta (Ana de Armas) discovers him, and it seems simple enough.

Oh wait…the guy is famous for writing detective novels, and all his kids and grandkids have a reason to kill him. And someone engaged the services of Benoit Blan (Daniel Craig) to “help” the dimwitted local police.

Roland Emmerich is famous for blowing things up.

He started small enough, just destroying the Whitehouse and several notable monuments

He got a bit more ambitious, destroying:

• New York (Godzilla)
• Colonial America (The Patriot)
• New York…again (The Day After Tomorrow), along with most of the Northern Hemisphere
• The entire SURFACE OF THE EARTH (2012)

Where do you go after you basically bring about the Apocalypse?  Do you weep, for there are no more lands left to conquer?

As the lights go up after a comic book movie, there are reactions one expects: Awed silence; various onomatopoetic words like “Whoa!,” or (in the DC Universe) grim reflections that it either did or didn’t suck as much as expected.

One does not expect seething, shocked anger like the gentlemen next to me, “Well, I’m glad I never saw Black Panther,” or the repeated, mindless exclamation of a teen across the auditorium.

So yeah, let’s spend 20 minutes flying around Pandora from Avatar but let’s leave off the part that makes the plot work…

“There is such a thing as a tesseract” – Miss WhatsIt
I’ll never forget the day I read Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time for the first (and thus far only) time.  I was in 4th grade–11 years old–and I was in my Aunt Norie’s house in Highway 205.  My mom dropped me off, and I was alone for hours.   I can’t remember the occasion exactly, and especially the reason for my solitude, but it didn’t matter.

Much as it takes a symphony in multiple movements to fully exercise an orchestra, Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver fully exercises film as a systemic input to your brainstem. I left exhausted, happy, and eager to see it again.

Act I, Take Me Away!

Act 1 is Wright’s original concept writ large: “Baby” is a getaway driver, and we see a contender for the best getaway scene in film set perfectly to a soundtrack. This is the overture, the who, what, and where. There’s almost no dialog–just searing “wow….Wow….WOW!!!!!”

Ah yes, John Carter, aka “John Carter of Mars,” aka “A Princess of Mars.”  You single handedly assured that Andrew Stanton of Pixar will never, ever be granted final cut again.  You lost something like a quarter of a billion dollars for your parent company, Disney.

You know I’ve seen many bad films in my life (current nadir being “Tristan and Isolde”), and John Carter isn’t one of them.

It isn’t a great film.  Comparison to other alien epics like Cameron’s Avatar inevitably come, and Carter does poorly.  We don’t truly care about our hero until well into the second act.  Worse, the framework of the story–that John Carter has died suddenly on earth and his nephew Edgar Rice Burroughs (get it?) is reading his fantastic account of his Barsoon Exploits–just feels like faux epic claptrap right up to the end.

• Joey and I went to TRON: Legacy 3D last night.  On the way home, he posed the following question: “Hey Harold, so what if when I was a freshman in high school, I met some girl who had hair just like Quorra, and who looked just like Quorra, and who had a TRON outfit like Quorra?”  My reply: “Turn and run the other way as fast as you can.”
• Yes, Olivia Wilde steals every scene she’s in.
• Oh, and the 3D wasn’t worth the extra $$$.  Tron in 2D on an appropriate screen is still a beautiful film, the minimalist counterpart to the sensory overload of Cameron’s Avatar.
• Sometimes, gravity is not your friend. Ouch.
• I welcome our new Verizon overlords.
• I love the motorcycle shots in TRON (those in the real world, on the Ducati), but I think I’d like something more comfortable in real life.

I sit here in office 249, staring down the last work week of the year, the Meghan McCain tome Dirty Sexy Money winking at me. Outside, the temperature hovers at 17 F, as arctic air chills most of America.

Yes, I blinked, and the weekend was over.

So, what happened?

First, I saw Despicable Me with Maria Thursday night (yes, a little Daddy/Daughter time). Wonderful film, even if the tickets cost us $3 and the concessions cost $19. I laughed a lot, and Steve Carell is a genius. I’ve subjected Whitney to my (bad) Gru impression since Friday.

I’ve been pulling lots of OT at work lately (as has my whole team) and this past week, the walls started closing in on me. That’s appropriate–I work in a windowless lab surrounded by high-walled cubicles and machines that wouldn’t pass FCC Class B certification with a bribe and a reactor radiation shield. Our lab has a sign with fake (?) blood on it that says: “Stress relief: Bang head here.”

you post a link on ur fb. BTW, Joey and I just ha…

Whitney - Jan 1, 2010

you post a link on ur fb.

BTW, Joey and I just had the misfortune to watch this movie that was released in 2007, titled “Terra”. Same story, right down to brother being killed, humans looking for mineral to run their habitat, etc. comp gen’d animation of course. im actually surprised cameron and crew hasn’t been sued over this adult adaptation. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0858486/

I paid $4.00 at a matinee to watch Avatar, now 3 weeks after its worldwide release. The 2.5 hour video game movie amazed me, and at the same time, its overarching vanity and irony haunts me. Let’s talk.

The movie itself tells the story of former marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington)’s journey the new world Pandora, where he’s embedded with a corporate mining operation of ‘Unobtainium’, a mineral essential to old Terra. Jake takes over for his Ph.D. identical twin, who’s killed months before he’s supposed to ship out to be an Avatar driver. In return, they’ll fix his paraplegic legs after his 6 year hitch on Pandora.

yeah he has to say that to get away with the crush…

Whitney - Apr 5, 2009

yeah he has to say that to get away with the crush. which is why the tyra crush stopped talking so much. so how many ppl out there really think ZD and I are similar….in….anything? ;)

Linky

Oh, Jim Carrey, how far and hard you’ve fallen.

Last night, Whitney and I RedBox’d Yes Man, a movie completely devoid of plot. Plot: A progression of a story through introduction, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution (denoument).

Yeah, this story has none. It has a terrific *premise*, that of a man who is stuck in a rut until he magically transforms into a guy who can’t lie and hilarity ensues (wait, that’s that other movie by the same guy). No, this time, he’s a guy who can’t say ‘Yes,’ until he goes to a life-changing “Say Yes” seminar taught by General Zod.

As I sit here at 5:15 am, drinking coffee and eating Raisin Bran, this is pretty much the first time in 2 weeks I’ve felt like myself. A head cold turned into bronchitis, then back into a severe head cold. I had fever & chills 3 out of 4 days last week. Finally, the doctor prescribed a course of antibiotics and two days later I couldn’t hear out of my right ear.

Once you have been tagged, you are supposed to write down 25 movies you cannot live without. You know, the ones you can watch over and over and never get tired of. They don’t have to be in any particular order. These are the movies that make you laugh, cry, think of an old friend, whatever the reason.

Please note that these are not in any particular order, these are just the 25 films I feel are my favorites, and ones I return to often.

Linky

City of Ember is a gripping, family-friendly tale of perserverence and survival. It stars some no-name child actors amid a cast of recognizable adult faces (Bill Murray, Tim Robbins) as the residents of an underground city called “Ember”.

As the story opens, we see a group of scientists in a “doomsday” scenario: Huddled around a time capsule device, they discern that 200 years is “enough” time to wait for…something. Life to be sustainable on Earth again? The planet to give itself an enema? Memories of “Hannah Montana” to fade? Who knows.

Ah, Bond is back!

Whitney and I watched this at the Stoneybrook Cinemas de Lux (in assigned seats no less!) last night. Some thoughts:

* I now have epilepsy from watching 27 cuts per seconds during each action scene
* Like the other good Bond, Daniel Craig is going bald.
* The “Bond Girl” is awesome.
* The homage to Goldfinger (dead girl, prone on the bed)
* Judi Dench reprises as M, and she’s fabulous.

IMDB Link

My father-in-law surprised Whitney and I last night by offering to watch the kids while we went to the 6:30 showing of Fireproof in Lexington. Fireproof is another Christian-centered offering from Sherwood pictures, the same folks who made Facing the Giants.

In this film, Kirk Cameron stars as Caleb Holt, a fireman in Albany, Georgia with a darling house, a very attractive young wife, and aspirations of buying a boat. He seems to have the perfect life until you peel back the surface–underneath it all, he and his wife are virtual strangers, with enough resentment and hurt feelings to split apart Minneapolis and St. Paul. He’s hurt (yet unsurprised) when she starts talking of a divorce.

Now this is a movie.

It’s 1968; hipster counter-culture is ablaze in Europe. Somewhere, Austin Powers is out there in his Shag-u-ar telling the birds, “Oh Behave.” And, as our story opens, Charlie Croker (Michael Caine), the world’s best thief, has just been let of of prison….

Actually, as our story opens, a Lamborghini Miura is tearing up the Alps out of Turin on its way to Switzerland, driving up roads that look 2 feet wide at something like 120 mph. I got car-sick just watching it.

Watched the morbid, buddy-comedy The Bucket List last night. I enjoyed it…literally one of those “I laughed, I cried” kinda films, but for weird reasons. There are some genuinely good one-liners in the film, particularly the running gag about “The world’s most expensive coffee. Worth watching, but not if you’re in a bad mood. This movie is DEPRESSING.

I was sad much of the time I watched this film, for lots of personal reasons. My family’s on intimate terms with cancer. I hate hospitals. I haven’t travelled and seen as much as I’d like in my life. I’ve got alot of broken relationships and estranged friends in my past. The memory of Maria’s dramatic birth via C-Section is still with me, so any scene where a couple says “goodbye” and operating room doors close is tough for me to watch.