Movie-Reviews

Friday night, Whitney and I went on a date. Honest-to-goodness, dinner-and-a-movie evening together. We ate at Friday’s and went to see Hellboy II: The Golden Army. We even went to a theater that didn’t smell like urine this time! I loved the film. Loved it…it was relentlessly funny, beautiful, and fun. As the film opens, we watch a younger Hellboy watching Howdy Doodie with his father, who reads the overeager Hellboy a bedtime story about The Golden Army, a warrior race of 4900 indestructible Goblin-forged machines, commanded by the elf-king in his war against mankind. Though the Golden Army triumphs, the Pyrrhic victory fills the king with remorse: He has become the destroyer himself. To atone, he locks the Golden Army away and separates the crown that controls them into three pieces, one of which he gives to man. ...

Wow. Imagine Vince Vaughn, minus 30 pounds, plus lots of hair, still unable to act. Then imagine a vapid plot, based around hollow, vapid Hollywood people. At that point, you’ll have Swingers, a picture of the walking id that is maleness in America in the 1970’s…er…I mean, the 1990’s in Hollywood. From reading the trivia on imdb, it looks like Writer/Director/Star/Gaffer/Wardrobe-Mistress Favreau based the plot on his own life when coming out to L.A. ...

So, Kung Fu Panda This 92-minute computer-animated extravaganza has all the elements of a great kids-and-adults flick: Slick looks, top voice talent (Jack Black, Angie Jolie, Dustin Hoffman), a fat-kid-makes-good plot, and merchandise-friendly anthropomorphic animals for characters. The plot centers around a vision of the sage in residence (a Galapagos tortoise, natch!) who has a vision that the big bad, Tai Lung will escape from his prison to once again ravage the Peaceful Valley. In response, he thinks it time to choose the Dragon Warrior, who will gain cosmic power to defeat evil–and Tai Lung, the leopard on steroids. ...

Let’s get this out of the way first: This is an unnecessary movie made solely to bilk folks out of their hard-earned money. It stars an over-the-hill actor (Harrison Ford) and features a contrived plot line with holes like Swiss Cheese. It’s also great fun, laugh-out-loud funny in places, well-paced, and genuinely exciting. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, since the whole thing feels like National Treasure 2 and 1/2, right down to the treasure map and the hokey history references. ...

W-O-W. WOW. WOOHOO! This was an absolutely fun move. Great (not overwhelming) SFX, tight editing, and excellent performances from Downey, Paltrow, and Jeff Bridges. This movie made me appreciate: How dull the Superman movies are How overwrought the X-Men franchise is How truly BAD DareDevil and Electra were How much of a genius the Batman series was (Burton’s two and “Batman Begins”, only!) Look, I’m no comic-book geek (I know, I know, surprise!). I had no preconceptions going into Ironman but it’s a frickin’ feast–action everywhere, neat “gee whiz” gadgetry delights, and the quips and one-liners from the top-level actors remain punchy throughout. Robert Downey, Jr., is a revelation–Smart, self-deprecating, and yet utterly human. Gwyneth Paltrow plays the demure wallflower, Pepper Potts, and the stunner proves her acting chops by making us believe she IS unsure of herself. ...

* From the “not worth reviewing” file: Beowulf was awful. How do you take a blood-soaked elegiac epic and turn it into, essentially, The Devil and Tom Walker. Plus, the CGI was good, but not quite there. * A cold snap has hit, with frosty mornings and cool, windy days. * I’ve *got* to stop staying up late to watch bad movies on DVD. A netflix queue reordering is…er…in order. * Everyone’s doing well. Whitney’s recovered from her stomach virus last week. Maria’s managed to no maim herself lately, and seems ready to break-out running any day now (with injuries to follow, no doubt). Joey’s school year is winding down, and he’s enjoying baseball on his very good coach-pitch team, the Reds. (“Communism was a red herring”) ...

 Link In lieu of going skating with Joey and Whitney yesterday, I put Maria down for a nap and watched Cate Blanchett reprise her role as Good Queen Bess in Elizabeth: The Golden Age. As the story opens, it’s 1585, and Elizabeth has been on the throne 27 years. Still, intrigues surround her throne, as the Catholic Spain seeks to remove “the bastard whore” from the throne and put Mary Stuart (“Queen of Scots”) in her place, or so it seems. ...

I liked the movie…lol. Susan - Apr 2, 2008 I liked the movie…lol.

21 was great, if you like ill-paced movies with recycled plotlines. After enjoying other such pictures about genius kids (Real Genius) and breaking the bank at Las Vegas casinos (Ocean’s 11), I hoped for a tight, enjoyable romp, with a good “nerd + hot chick” love story and lots of nerd-rific references–sort of like War Games in Vegas. Yeah, not so much. The elevator pitch is dynamite: MIT students act as a team to count cards at Vegas blackjack tables, facing opposition from the latest technology (biometric scanners) and old-school Vegas security men, as well as internal turmoil. Somewhere between there and adapting the bestselling fact-cum-fiction book Bringing Down the House, this movie becomes a mess of recycled ideas and predictability. By the end, I was rooting for security guards to nab the lot of them. They’re just annoying people we’re given no reason to care about. ...

How is it that I’ve lived 29 years (21 of those a gearhead) and not seen Vanishing Point? This film is hard to pin down. It’s like: Easy Rider, in a car Smokey and the Bandit, but no midget and it’s not funny Cannonball run…no Dom DeLouise, and it’s not funny. Apocalypse now/Heart of Darkness but no jungle Homer’s Odyssey but no boat More precisely, this film has the same overall theme as “Cool Hand Luke”–an ordinary man comes back from war (in the case, Vietnam), knocks around awhile and gets into trouble, and pays the price. As the audience, we’re supposed to identify with the main character, and see how “the man” and “the squares” are hell-bent on destroying the utopian hippie vision of freedom and love. ...

Watched Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers, and don’t quite know what to make of it. Told as a series of flashbacks about the American assault on Iwo Jima, the film follows the novelist son of one of the flagraisers on Mt. Surabaci from this famous picture taken in 1945. The film is a fine piece of work, and the acting in it is tremendous–Ryan Phillippe shines–but I didn’t like it at first. It’s not the deep immersion of Saving Private Ryan. Where Ryan was a gritty, sweeping story about a platoon amid the massive invasion of Normandy, Flags feels very small, almost claustrophobic. We’re rarely in fire-fights; mostly, we see the fearful anticipation or the horrific aftermath. A few days after watching it, I realized: The hardest part of surviving WWII was living with what you’d seen and done. ...

Yes, it’s over-the-top. Yes, it has plot holes you could drive a pumpkin carriage through. Yes, it’s not IMPORTANT CINEMA. So what? This is a fun romp through fairy tale land (and into modern-day New York), complete with a wayward princess, overblown prince, and evil stepmother/witch. It’s a mashup of every cliche from the Golden Age of Dinsey, right down to the poison apples. The premise is…er…complicated: Giselle is about to have her happily-ever-after in Fairy Tale Land (Andalasia), but the Prince’s evil mother casts her down a well, delivering her to Times Square in New York. ...

So, Chinatown. “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.” Iconic stuff. Nicholson back when was an awesome actor, not just paid to play himself (see “Witches of Eastwick”, et al.). Faye Dunnaway’s cheekbones. John Huston as the creepy dad. Umm…I hated it. Lined-up against L.A. Confidential, Chinatown is darker, more mysterious, but at the same time, distant. We learn about the characters bit-by-bit, but once we learn everything, we just want to forget them. ...

One the face of it, you’ll find few movies more different than End of the Spear and Black Snake Moan: One is a tale of Missionary zeal, the other a gritty portrait of depravity and betrayal. Thanks to an accident of Netflix and the sickness that descended upon our family, I got to watch both within a twelve hour span, and the messages of both harmonize – Redemption is available to anyone. ...

Really enjoyed this one, in spite of myself. Jessica Alba’s hot, thought her blonde hairdo is jarring at best. Lots of humor and social commentary here, especially surrounding Alba–she wishes for a normal life, she laments being the hottest woman on the planet, she exclaims after a ‘wardrobe malfunction,’ “Why does this always happen to me?!” The beginning was very slow, as they try to ease us back into the characters we knew from the punchier 1st installment. The Four have grown very accustomed to their powers and their role as planetary protectors, so much so that they seem bored. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the same feeling I get about the actors here–phoning it in, hitting their marks, but without the snap of the 1st movie. This felt more like a really, really expensive TV show than a summer blockbuster: The actors seem comfortable in their characters, and the scope of the action always centers around them. Some of the lines delivered seem like before-commercial, writers-room fodder, especially the lines from Ben Grim. ...

2 hours and 20 minutes of THAT?!!! This is a pretty-standard war/buddy flick. Some guys wanna go fly, they go through some training, meet an old salt who tells them they’re stupid, and get a rude awakening when they first meet the enemy. They ALL have backstories, and they’re all (poorly) developed. One resembles Porkins from Star Wars and dies similarly. There’s a love interest thrown-in and many long, conceited scenes flying about in a CGI wonderland resembling a decent WWI Video Game. ...

E! Article New Line, meanwhile, was the woozy-feeling patient after its would-be franchise starter The Golden Compass (third place, $9 million) fell off a cliff, down 65 percent from a disappointing debut weekend. So far, the $180 million fantasy film is the unwanted fruitcake of the holiday season, having taken in just $41 million overall. (It has performed stronger overseas; so, perhaps any sequels could be made expressly for Slovakia, et al.) ...

Yes, it’s that good. Just finished watching the Odyssey-in-a-Microbus, Little Miss Sunshine. It’s the type of movie my wife hates, but which I love, where all the characters are shades of gray. They’re intensely real, and flawed, and they love and hate one another. Yet they’re bound together by bonds that bring them together when it counts–death, adversity, and the bald insanity of life. Steve Carell is a revelation as Frank Hoover, the frustrated homosexual academic who we meet in a hospital fresh off his failed suicide attempt. Out of work, without insurance, he’s kicked out of the pysch ward to the care of his overwrought sister, Sheryl. We meet her blended family next: Her husband Richard the self-help guru, the vow-of-silence goth teen Dwayne, the heroin-snorting profane Grandpa, and the little ingenue Olive. ...

Hey, everyone you know won’t hate Little Miss Suns… BryanCombs - Dec 3, 2007 Hey, everyone you know won’t hate Little Miss Sunshine. I love it. It’s actually my favorite film from 2006. (Right ahead of The Departed and Borat) Dixie loves it too.

Watched several movies over the past few days (Thank you, Netflix). Some thoughts on them: Constantine: Creepy, dark film about a man blessed/cursed to see the interplay between angels and demons in our world. I really liked it, especially for its vivid portrayal of Hell. The Muppet Show: Wow, this doesn’t age well. It’s about as interesting to the modern eye as the 70’s variety shows upon which it’s based. Plus, without “Pigs…in…space.” Bah!