Farewell Richard Dawson
I woke to the unfortunate news of the passing of Richard Dawson, the King of the Family Feud. It may see odd to those of you who have gotten to know me and my likes or dislikes over the last couple years that I would comment on this, but there are a couple reasons for it hitting home. First of all, watching Family Feud as a kid was one of the few things we actually did as a family that did not actively involve feuding. Something about the way the show ran and the structure of the questions really appealed to my dad, and he like having my sister, mom, and me around to show off how smart he was with the questions. I won’t say watching it was something we all looked forward to, but when it was on we could all pass a pleasant evening together.
The second reason, of course, stems from his playing one of the greatest unsung movie villains of all time, Damon Killian of the Running Man. Go back and watch it again and you will see how civilly sinister he really could play it. A big part of the success of his roll (in my mind, at least) was the brutal contrast from the heart warming good guy he was on Family Feud. Kind of like if Gandhi took a role as a serial killer. (Nobel Peace Prize image courtesy of he Funny T Shirt category)
Anyway, I’m very sorry he’s gone. He lived to be 79, and had a recurring role on Hogan’s Heroes when he was younger. I will miss him.
Dave
Men in Black 3 Review
If someone has a functioning neuralizer please use it to erase the last 103 minutes from my memory.
I quick survey of other reviewers has revealed that about 70% of them think this film is a rollicking roller coaster through the magical land of comedy and the other 30% regret all the dinosaurs who had to die in order to make the film this movie was shot on. I, unfortunately, am in the 30% for one major reason: this movie is freaking stupid.
It always amazes me when a movie with the budget of a small countries GNP ($350 million) to have the very best in very expensive actors and special effects can’t seem to find $50 to hire a decent story writer. Will Smith has done some stupid movies in his career (Independence Day, Wild, Wild West, I am Legend) but this one really breaks new ground. The stupidity oozes from every pore and orifice, causing other weeping sores and lesions to develop that also ooze stupidity. It’s like of some stupid scientists were doing stupid research into the fundamental nature of stupidity and working on the Unified Field Theory of Stupidity only to discover a new stupid element (Stupidium), which they injected into their brains before writing a movie script.
All that being said, I cannot say this movie was really bad per se. The humor was strong, the special effects both puppets and CGI were good, and a lot of the supporting actors did a decent job. However the catch phrase “stupidly entertaining” is one that I feel is bandied around too much these days. Is it that difficult or bad to be “intelligently entertaining”? I actually consider this trend towards stupid movie scripts to be less about the writers being stupid or incompetent (although that is a possibility) and more about the absolute contempt that Hollywood currently has for the intellectual ability of the American movie audience, and as a member of that audience I am (and most of you should be) a little incensed. They are clearly writing stories for eight year olds and foreign markets and leaving those of us with a couple brain cells to die on the vine. (the Brawndo image, incidentally, is from Idiocracy and I think appropriate given that the mental decline of the human race is only being accelerated by movies of this stripe. The image comes courtesy of the Funny T Shirt category)
The violence and sex was deeply embedded in the PG-13 trench, with a lot of aliens exploding into kid friendly piles of goo rather than traumatizing alien corpses. The guy they got to play young Agent K (Josh Brolin-the Goonies, Wall Street Money Never Sleeps, No Country for Old Men) was amazing. He obviously studied not only the character but the Tommy Lee Jones mannerisms and gestures. In fact, he was much more Agent K in my mind by the end of the movie than Tommy Lee Jones, who seemed kind of tired through most of this (and really had limited screen time). The villain Boris the Animal (think Bug from the first MIB mixed with Lobo) was entertaining and disgusting. However, a big part of the appeal of the first film (we won’t talk about MIB2 in this review) was the aliens and how they could easily appear anywhere. Any human or animal on the street could potentially be another cool, weird alien. In this film they more or less ignored that all together and actually kept the aliens to a minimum. Instead they had a lot of humans (Andy Warhol, for example, could have been a really funny alien but instead is an undercover MIB agent. By the way, as a fan of Andy Warhol who sees him as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century I was kind of put off by his portrayal here) and human looking aliens. There was the obligatory walk through the MIB lobby with a ton of them and the inevitable disgusting fight scene against a giant slobbery fish, but other than that even the aliens that were part of the story always looked mostly human. I feel dirty for saying this as I normally hate this sort of thing, but this movie really could have used a small alien comic relief sidekick.
Anyway, the story. A few spoilers incoming, so if you really feel you will lose something from the story by know ahead of time what will happen skip ahead, but take it from me you probably won’t. I have seen scripts chock full of plot holes, but never on this scale. It’s like the first few massive plot holes started breeding smaller plot holes, who also started breeding with each other resulting in a massive six generation clan of inbred gaping plot holes. Boris the Animal is some kind of alien sociopathic killer from a now extinct race of aliens (did I mention that they borrowed heavily from Lobo on this one?) who has a crawfish living in his palm and can shoot spikes at people. He escapes from a prison on the moon staffed by the stupidest humans in the universe with the help of a super hot girl (don’t worry, this is the one and only time you will see anything remotely attractive and female in the entirety of the film) and his personal mud bug. He gets back to Earth, steals a time machine, and goes back in time to kill K (Tommy Lee Jones). He appears to succeed and K disappears from the time line, except for some reason J (Will Smith) can remember him (this was the first truly massive plot hole. There were any number of small to medium “practice” plot holes (how is it no one questions a human girl with a big cake visiting an alien in a prison that no humans are even supposed to know about, why would any prison on the moon have a armory 10 feet from the prisoners complete with weapons capable of blowing a massive hole to the vacuum, how does Boris the Animal talk when standing outside on the moon’s surface with no atmosphere, etc.) but this was the first one (of several) that felt like I was having a brain aneurism). J’s constant craving of chocolate milk was recognized by O (anyone feel like they were pandering a little when they gave the only thing resembling a love interest the code letter O?) as a sign of temporal displacement (at this point the plot hole generator switched from a garden hose to a fire hose in the face. She even said that this had only happened once in history but they knew enough to know what chocolate milk means? In comparison to the others this one was golf ball sized, however). At that point the now not extinct race of Boris begins a full scale invasion. J has to go back in time by jumping off a building.
It could be said that the plot was relatively coherent up until this point. Time travel as a plot device is weak and confusing even in competent hands. When fed into the MIB grinder it gets spat out so fast and in so many directions the audience had better be wearing eye protection. How is it J gets shot by the alien spike thing, jumps off a giant gantry, and goes back in time ten seconds but is somehow not shot even though he remembers getting shot? Why when you travel back in time to 1969 you have to first visit the dinosaur times first? If the first time J travels back in time he goes to the same position he started in and effectively doubles himself, but the second time he jumps back into the exact same position he was in to start with and there is only one of him? The list goes on and on.
However, the time travel does do one good thing. It allows us to meet young K, who was really well done by Josh Broslin and my favorite character in the movie. K and J team up after some “who are you” hijinks and work to track down Boris and young Boris. They meet up with an alien who can see the future but do nothing to affect it, making him the most worthless expository sidekick in cinema history. They have to put up a shield in space and do so by attaching it to the moon landing rocket. Stuff gets blown up. Aliens do alien stuff. An ending is pulled from so far up the writers ass if he were the last person in a human centipede he would have actually pulled it from the person three bodies ahead of him.
The stars. There were a lot of really funny moments. Two stars. Young K was really well done. One star. Will Smith, in spite of his bad choices in movie scripts (and being the Fresh Prince of Bel Air) is entertaining. One star. Boris was a pretty cool villain. One star. Good special effects. One star. In spite of everything, I honestly can’t say it wasn’t fun or entertaining. Two stars. Total: eight stars.
The black holes. Really, really, really stupid story. Two black holes. I am running out of funny analogies for how massively huge plot holes can be in a movie, but the ones in this film could have eclipsed the sun. Two black holes. While I find him entertaining, there is only so much “Will Smith is the coolest guy in the world and everyone else is a dork on the screen” I can take. One black hole. The future telling alien was so hippy dippy I wanted to reach into the screen and slap him every time he opened his pie hole. One black hole. The ending was so dumb, contrived, and out of no where it could have been a supporting character Agent D (I actually heard they started filming this thing without a completed script and it make sense). One black hole. Total: seven black holes.
A grand total of one star. Meh. Better than MIB2 in my opinion. Worth seeing? Maybe. If you are a Will Smith fan or just have nothing to do at all on an evening it beats staring at a wall. Don’t see it just because you are a massive Tommy Lee Jones fan, as he is hardly in it (unless you like the idea of a great Tommy Lee Jones impersonator). Date movie? Sure, why not? Unless she is familiar with sci fi and the paradoxes of time travel most of this stuff won’t bother her. No hot girls to feel in competition with. All the guys keep their suits on so no losing a lot in comparison. Bathroom break? Most likely the entire scene with Andy Warhol. Once the joke that he is an MIB agent is made there isn’t much left but they keep beating it into the ground. You won’t miss much.
Thanks for reading. I will try to see something tomorrow afternoon. Probably Chernobyl Diaries. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. If you have comments about this movie or review feel free to post them here. If you have an off topic question or suggestion feel free to email me at [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
What to Expect When You’re Expecting Movie Review
Expect a lot of pain.
I actually want to thank the producers of this film because it has helped answer a question that has bugged me for years: what would it be like to be water boarded for 110 minutes? I might have gleaned something else on the prospect of kids and parenthood in my life, but in spite of this films best effort to convince me otherwise I think I still want to one day have a wife and kids (or some kind of android synthetic or VR equivalent, both of which seem more likely based on my current dating success rate).
Assemblage scripts are garbage designed to crowbar as much star appeal into a movie with minimum effort as possible. While this film was slightly more tolerable than New Years Eve in both story and acting effort, it still had that convoluted multiple character/story thing that results in the audience never really connecting to or caring about any of the characters. They all blur into a mundane paste of faces normally occupied by supporting characters. Each substory in turn is grossly undeveloped and comprised entirely of every pregnancy cliche in the history of the universe.
That being said, the director of this one (Kirk Jones-Nanny McPhee, Waking Ned Divine, Everybody’s Fine) at least made some effort to throw in some character development that had a little potential, but they were universally premature and undeveloped (haw!). The entire film suffers from the curse of Trying to do Too Much. There is a reason most good movies have a protagonist in one form or another, and one main story line with a few sub plots. Following the lives of five different couples is like trying to follow the lives of five of your friends, and we all know how hard that gets. I don’t go to the movies to work harder than I do in my real life.
Anyway, the story is of a bevy of insanely hot girls getting knocked up by their lame husbands, boyfriends, or one night stands. Cameron Diaz (Something About Mary, Gangs of New York, the Green Hornet) is a reality TV celebrity who gets knocked up by her dance show partner (Matthew Morrison-Glee, Dan in Real Life, Music and Lyrics) and has to balance pregnancy with her celebrity life. Jennifer Lopez (Gigli, Monster-in-Law, the Cell (very underrated movie IMO)) was looking super hot as the infertile unemployed photographer trying to adopt an Ethiopian orphan with her husband (Rodrigo Santoro-I Love you Phillip Morris, 300, Rio). Elizabeth Banks (the Hunger Games, the 40 Year Old Virgin, the Next Three Days) plays a baby store owner who desperately wants to have a baby with her wimpy husband Gary (Ben Falcone-Bridesmaids, Smiley Face, Garfield: a Tail of Two Kitties) who has series daddy issues with his race car father (Dennis Quaid-Vantage Point, the Day After Tomorrow, Frequency). His dad is also going to have twins with his perfect wife Skyler (Brooklyn Decker-Battleship, Just Go With It). Meanwhile, young food truck owners Marco (Chase Crawford-Covenant, Gossip Girl, Twelve) and Rosie (Up in the Air, Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, 50/50) get knocked up after a one night stand.
Really, that’s pretty much all you need about the story. The rest of the film plays out like a Chinese restaurant menu that only serves pregnancy cliches. One from column A, two from column B, etc. The closest thing to actual hardship is from Rosie and Marco, and the rest of them seem to be living in an idyllic world where discomfort and hardship are at worst temporary situations. There’s also a “dudes” group of daddies who punctuate the rest of the lame stories with some of the most emasculating testicle destroying dialog since Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Seriously, these guys are exactly the whipped boobs every guy fears turning into when presented with the prospect of marriage and kids. I don’t know what the director was thinking about shoving them into this thing, or how much they had to pay Chris Rock to agree to participate.
Anyway, the stars. A hotter bunch of women you will not find in this universe. One star. As much as I would like to just dump all over this film in all ways, there were a few cliche driven laughs. One star. I will award a star for this movie a star for sticking to it’s PG-13 guns and not showing any graphic birthing scenes. 
There are some things that cannot be unseen. One star. One of the food trucks specialized in bacon. One star for deliciousness (Bacon image courtesy of the Funny T Shirt category). Total: four stars.
The black holes. Five different intertwined stories, none of which I could give a damn about. One black hole. Most of the stories were undeveloped, trite, and uninteresting. One black hole. This script fell out of the cliche tree and hit every branch. One black hole. Predictable as hell. One black hole. Pacing really dragged on at points. One black hole. Kids are cute, but parents generally suck. One black hole. Somehow they cast two guys who look like they went to the same high school together as father and son. Also, for the most part I hated all the male characters. One black hole. The “dudes” group insulted both my intelligence and machismo. Two black holes. Total: nine black holes.
Grand total of five black holes. Not great. Worth seeing? Not if you respect your testosterone. Date movie? In one sense yes, in that she will probably love it and be thinking about what could be. On the other hand, if you are not into having kids this may start her down a path that could have unexpected results. If you don’t want to have kids and she suggests it I’d say run screaming into the night. Bathroom break? This is another film that has the sideways benefit having no moments be critical to the story. You can cut out at any point and be fine. However, if you feel like you want to retain the desire to continue urinating standing up you will miss as much of the “dudes” group scenes as possible.
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed reading this more than I did watching it, although honestly that wouldn’t take much. Nothing on deck for tomorrow or the next day. I’ll see what I can do for Friday but am going to Kublacon and might not be able to see much. Also on the 6th I am going to Italy for 11 days so I will not be reviewing anything for a while. Jason might still post some stuff. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. If you have a comment about this movie or review feel free to post it here. Off topic questions or suggestions can be emailed to [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Girl in Progress Review
Migraine in progress.
Girl in Progress runs 93 minutes and believe me, you will feel each one of them, especially after it feel like the movie is over but then drags on for another fifteen minutes. It’s like passing 93 kidney stones. At first glance it looks like a chick flick but honestly I have a hard time believing this is the kind of film women want to see (of course, based on my dating life there is a lot about what women want that I don’t have a clue about, so maybe I’m wrong). It is completely contrived, manipulative, confused, and stuffed with artificial import.
All that being said, the writer took a semi-novel approach to dealing with all the teenage coming of age cliches. You see, I like to think of the writers and directors of a movie as the captains of a mighty ocean liner navigating a cold and unforgiving sea. In this analogy I liken cliches to giant icebergs (or perhaps sea monsters). A competent captain will steer around these icebergs to avoid disaster, whereas an incompetent one will blunder into several, threatening the integrity of of the ship. What the captain of the R.M.S. Girl in Progress did was point the bow of the ship directly at the nearest one and then bounce between them all like a pinball inside a group of bumpers. (Titanic image courtesy of the Funny T Shirt category)
This was a direct and purposeful move. The teen age girl decides she needs to experience a classic coming of age story and then scripts out a series of events based on research into the genre. She lays it out in a detailed plan including failing to live up to her potential, disappointing her teachers, dumping her nerdy best friend, and culminating in losing her virginity to a callous womanizer. Unfortunately, instead of using the cliches as a tool to rise above the medium the story gets mired in them, stuck in the mud and slowly sinking. Furthermore, the creepiness factor, starting out at about a 7, shoots up to 11 when we get to the deflowering stage. In a graphic example of miscasting the girl, who looks barely fifteen through most of the film, is about to hook up with a guy who looks like he should have already dropped out of college and been working at Trader Joes for three years while living in the Mission.
The other interesting thing about this film is it is rare that I can say I hated every character in a film, but in this one I did. It was like a contest to see who could be the least appealing character on the planet. The teenage girl Ana (Cierra Ramirez-All In, Wish Gone Amis, Star and Stella Save the World) was overly precocious and so artificial (her character, not Cierra herself. I thought she did a decent job) I kept looking for an off switch on the back of her neck; her mother Grace (Eva Mendes-Fast Five, We Own the Night, the Other Guys) was a cartoonish caricature of both a struggling single mom and neglectful parent; Grace’s love interest Dr. Hartford (Oh, God Matthew Modine. What happened to you? Remember when you were cool and played Private Joker in Full Metal Jacket?) was a conniving, cheating manipulative bastard; Grace’s boss Emile (Russell Peters-New Years Eve, Source Code, the Legend of Awesome Maximus) was a greasy abusive boss; Ana’s deflowering target (Richard Harmon-Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, Judas Kiss, Trick r’ Treat) was a sleazy hipster loser; and Grace’s other sort of love interest Mission Impossible (Eugenio Derbez-Jack and Jill, Rob) looked, sounded, and acted like the local serial killer. If it was a contest I can’t accurately tell you who won but I can certainly tell you who lost: the audience.
I feel spent already and I haven’t even gotten into the story. It is of young Ana and her mother Grace. Grace blatantly ignores her daughter, who is feeling it. In an English class Ana learns what a coming of age story is and decides to experience one in order to escape her childhood sooner. She embarks on a mission that has “desperate cry for help” written all over it which everyone manages to miss. Meanwhile her mother is sleeping with the married least appealing man in movie history while holding down two jobs. Ana purposefully does increasingly bad behavior and plans to lose her virginity to the school creep. She dumps her best friend in order to hang out with the school bad girl (I say girl because that was her roll, but in another example of bad casting she looked ten years older. Brenna O’Brian-X-men Last Stand, Beneath, Charlie St. Cloud), steals money, lies to get alcohol, and basically strives to ruin her life as efficiently as possible. Coming of age cliche crap ensues. The ending manages to avoid actually having an ending.
The stars. I will say that both Cierra Ramirez and Eve Mendes did the best they could have done with the limited and artifical roles they were handed. Acting overall wasn’t bad. One star. Eve Mendes was super, duper, uber hot in this film and had the right outfits to illustrate the point. One star. There were a couple scenes that didn’t totally suck, including the opening one. One star. Total: three stars.
The black holes. Complete failure to give me a character I at all found appealing. Two black holes. The movie was massively confused. Was it a drama? A comedy? A tragedy? A coming of age film? Two black holes. A big chunk of this film was creepy x100. One black hole. The entire premise of the film felt contrived. One black hole. Mistaking the cliche bull for the cliche cow and trying to milk it for the entirety of the film. Two black holes. The ending came out of left field and resolved next to nothing. One black hole. Casting that looked like they didn’t even try to get kids of approximately the same age. One black hole. Total: ten black holes.
A grand total of seven black holes. Gah. I’d like to give this film an A for effort, but really can only give it more than about a B-. The director (Patricia Riggen-Lemonade Mouth, Under the Same Moon, The Cornfield) did try to do something different and I’ll give her credit for that. Should you see it? Probably not. Date movie? Only if she suggests it. However, if you do see it as a date movie I can say there isn’t a single appealing or sexy male in this film. It won’t be hard to shine in comparison, unless you are a registered sex offender and/or missing most of your face. Bathroom break? Pretty much anywhere in this film, but if I were pressed for a moment I would say any of the scenes involving the English teacher (Patricia Arquette-Stigmata, True Romance, Ed Wood). She is cast as some kind of Yoda-like spiritual guide but most of her messages are pretty prosaic and her exposition generally redundant.
Thanks for reading. Dictator coming out tomorrow so I will try to see that, although Wednesday is also my normal movie night at my friends house. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu or post comments about this film here. If you have an off topic question or suggestion feel free to email me at [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
P.S. Want to hear something weird? I just looked up Patricia Riggen, the director of this film, on IMDB and have to say I find her strangely attractive. She has that nerdy intellectual look I really like. Of course, after having just dumped all over her movie if I were to meet up with her she would probably set fire to my car, most likely with me tied up in the trunk. Not a lot of chance for romance there. However, I think you, my beloved readers, might use this fact to appreciate the integrity if my reviews. Normally when I find a woman attractive I try to find the positive in everything she does (“Wow, you blow your nose in such a demure and ladylike manner. I’ve never seen such clarity in mucus before!”). Have a good night.
13 Assassins
My friend showed this last night at movie night and as I expected, it was awesome. I am not going to do an actual review for it as the movie has been out for a while and also, since it was so awesome, it would just be 800 words of me gushing on about how great martial arts movies are. If you don’t like Martial Arts movies that I am sure you will enjoy a nice quiet evening in with Teddy Ruxpin.
By the way, for an image I was all set to pull one of the Martial Arts or Bruce Lee shirts, but then came across this gem from the Funny T Shirt category and once I stopped laughing decided I had to roll with it.
Anyway, the first thing I want to talk about from 13 Assassins is the cultural differences in the aesthetics of death. In Western movies deaths of characters are really formulaic. Either they are bad guys who fall over nicely dead after one punch or bullet, or they are heroes who die relatively peacefully after imparting some sage last words to the other characters. What you do not ever see in Western films is characters crawling through the mud, writhing in agony as their disemboweled guts spill out. You don’t see bad guys crawling along the floor or begging for their lives as they try to get away from the “good” guys (unless it’s Kill Bill). However, 13 Assassins showed all that and did so with more blood than you will ever see in a Hollywood film. I don’t know if it’s actors in Hollywood demanding that their faces be seen cleanly and relatively pristinely (aside from the occasional artistic smear of grease or dirt) or if this is something that Hollywood producers think the American audiences needs for our soft brains, but in this film every character has enough blood, mud and guts on their face to fill a biohazard bag of medical waste. It’s like they were all wrestling chainsaw juggling bear/porcupine hybrids (borcupine?).
The second thing I noticed from a film production point of view was the difference in action segmentation from Western to Eastern films. What do I mean by that? Basically in Western films even long, extended action sequences are punctuated by moments of relative calm wherein the heroes collect their breath, express feeling for each other, or just stand looking around a bit while the camera pulls back to pan around the amazingly wrecked set they have produced. Again, I think these are more evidence of producers having no respect for American audiences and feeling like we need a break in order to collect our breath and prepare for the next action barrage. Some movie producers go so far as the interject the action with a more mundane or slower sequence (defusing the bomb, trying to save the life of an injured person, etc) or simply mash multiple action scenes together into a horrible murky soup (cough cough Lucas cough cough).
In this film once the final action starts it is 55 minutes of swords and blood. Every time the good guys kill off all the bad guys in sight instead of a break they get…more bad guys. Instead of blasts of action it’s like trying to move forward while someone shoots a fire hose into your chest, but in a good way. I don’t know if this style will catch on here as it is entirely possible the American movie producers are right and Western audiences actually do need short breaks between action in order to properly process our emotions, but I found it fun and interesting.
Finally, and this point will seem very obvious to anyone who has studied feudal Japan and the Samurai culture, but it was interesting to see the nature of duty explored from the Japanese perspective. There was no debate or discussion of what everyone’s duty was. Each character had an absolutely clear, black-and-white job to do and never had to debate or hesitate. Even the few times it came up it was almost an insult to even discuss it. Very cool in my opinion.
Anyway, the movie rocks. If you enjoy Martial Arts films or Kurosawa than this is a must see. Watch it sub titled as a lot of the emotions behind the action is transmitted via voice and tone. I don’t think dubbed would do this film credit.
Thanks for reading. I’ll see a midnight movie tonight (Dark Shadows, I think) and review it tomorrow morning. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu or post a comment here if you have seen this movie and would like to make a point. If you have suggestions or specific questions feel free to email me at [email protected]. Have a great day. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Upcoming movie rundown
I am slammed with this whole business move and don’t have a lot of time to blog right now. Sunday night I was supposed to see Think Like a Man and in a surprising twist of fate it was sold out. I really didn’t expect to see that happen, but according to the interlink the movie is doing shockingly well. I will try to see it tonight and let you know if it looks at all better than the trailers (who all make it look like it is only slightly more appealing than a case of whooping cough).
However, there seems to be a bumper crop of movies I am into coming out, so I thought I would do a quick rundown on what we can see in the next month or so. Here we go:
The Pirates! Band of Misfits-I am a fan of Wallace and Gromit (I plan to name my first son Gromit (or Gromitina, if it’s a girl. Sometimes I wonder why I’m still single…) and am really looking forward to this one. Definitely kiddy, but the thing about this style of cartoon is it generally makes for entertaining adult fare as well.
The Pirates! Band of Misfits-I am a fan of Wallace and Gromit (I plan to name my first son Gromit (or Gromitina, if it’s a gir). Sometimes I wonder why I’m still single…) and am really looking forward to this one. Definitely kiddy, but the thing about this style of cartoon is it generally makes for entertaining adult fare as well.
The Five-Year Engagement-it rarely bodes well for a movie that I plan to review when I can think of a funny one liner for the subtitle before even seeing it. In this case if the movie sucks or is slow the subtitle would most likely be something like “The Five-Year Movie”. However, watching How I Met Your Mother has recently given me an appreciation for Jason Segel and I will give this rom com its day in court.
The Raven-of all the movies coming out in the next few weeks this one excites me third most. I am a huge John Kusak fan and the story of Edgar Allen Poe fascinates me. A movie based around his life done should be amazing. There is a chance of suck, but for the most part this should be good.
Safe-what can be said about this other than it’s a Jason Stratham action film? I predict decent action, intensity, and an aversion to razor blades.
The Avengers-this is my second most anticipated movie of the early summer. It looks like it could really rule. Unfortunately, the crowbarring in of a couple of the lesser Avengers (Hawkeye?) has all the hallmarks of “design by committee”, so the potential to run off the rails into the abyss of too much/too little remains. I have faith in Joss Whedon as a director. The problem is he is operating with a 300 pound anchor tied to his neck known as “PG-13”. I predict I will enjoy the hell out of it, but the movie will feel short and have too much human not enough action. Also I think the action will be very sanitized.
Looper-I’m really intrigued by the concept of this one. Also, in spite of all his efforts to make me hate him I still love Bruce Willis, and have of late also become a fan of Joseph Gordan-Ellis. We’ll see.
Dark Shadows-I am really enjoying the trailers for this one, which is usually a bad sign for the movie. However, Johnny Depp and Tim Burton is inevitably a winning combination, like chocolate and peanut butter. I expect to love it.
Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter-I am actually getting really annoyed at movie audiences laughing at the trailers for this one. If they don’t understand how freaking cool this movie is going to be they should all shut their lame, ignorant noises holes and stuff Reeces Pieces into their nostrils until they pass out, thus sparing us their stupidity. I think this movie is going to rock. Also, I think America needs to be reminded of the fact that vampires are not romantic dreamboats who sparkle in daylight but rather are evil monster who only want the blood in your veins. (Buffy Staked Edward image courtesy of the Funny T-Shirts category)
God Bless America-this one looks like two of my other favorite movies, Heathers and Natural Born Killers. Check out the trailer.
That’s all I’m really interested in right now. There will no doubt be a number of dross films that I either don’t care about or don’t want to see but have to, so you can look forward to those. However, with this lineup I am actually excited about the upcoming movie season, which is saying a lot as the last two year of seeing everything that comes out has more or less burned out my excitement gland and replaced it with a backup bitterness gland.
Thanks for reading. Look for that dating movie review tomorrow morning. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu or email me at [email protected]. Feel free to post a comment here if you are curious about an upcoming movie and I can look into it and express my poorly informed opinion. Talk to you soon.
Dave
The Cabin In the Woods Review
Awesome in almost all ways, but honestly I was expecting a little more from Joss Whedon.
As far as horror movies go, this one is pretty amazing. It is extremely derivative in almost all ways, with elements taken from the Evil Dead, Friday the 13th, Hellraiser, Resident Evil, the Omen, and pretty much every other horror movie know to man. However, like a great assemblage artist Joss and Drew Goddard (Cloverfield) have fit the borrowed pieces into a new artwork who’s sum is greater than the combined value of the individual parts.
That being said, there were two things that annoyed me during the course of this film (sorry Joss. I am still a huge fan of all your work). The first one is spoilers. I hate spoilers and work to avoid them in my reviews (or at least throw in a spoiler warning). In this film, however, it opens up to a spoiler and keeps on going. The spoiler element added a different twist on the overriding horror of the story (basically adding an active and malevolent intelligence directing what was going on) but really took away a lot of the adrenaline inducing surprise behind every event. It’s tough to be surprised by a creature when a bunch of guys are watching it approach the cabin on a TV monitor. That being said, there were still plenty of surprises left and you will be jumping fairly often.
The second issue has a tertiary spoiler in it, so if you don’t want it then skip ahead one paragraph. The thing that bugged me was what I like to call “the dumb super villain kill switch”. I am not going to get too far into the story on this one as I really don’t want to throw in more of a spoiler than absolutely necessary, but if you have an evil plan do not put in a big, giant red self destruct button that can be easily accessed by a couple of dopey kids. I have passwords for pretty much everything in the universe. Did no one think to password protect the self destruct button, if not from meddling kids than from the occasional disgruntled employee? For that matter why even put in a single button that can destroy everything? You don’t see ships with a scuttle button on the bridge for the captains girlfriend to trip and fall onto. (Curses Foiled Again image courtesy of the Funny T Shirt category).
Anyway, the story is of five college kids (the jock, the slut, the brain, the virgin, and the stoner) head off to a vacation in a cabin that basically has “Impending Doom” written on every board and nail. There are some mitigating circumstances that explain why they are so dumb later but early on you actually want to see them die for stupidity. There are some people apparently running everything from a hi tech secret base underground for nebulous reasons. They make a long series of really bad decisions and are attacked by zombies. Horror hijinks ensue. Secrets are revealed, and more and more horror movies are either spoofed or ripped off. I don’t want to get into the story any more than that.
The stars. The story starts off with you scratching your head and thinking it’s kind of dumb but ends up really cool in concept and execution. Two stars. All of the kids in the movie turn out to be decent actors and deliver a good performance laced with nuance (since I glossed over it they are Kristen Connolly-the Happening, Mona Lisa Smile; Chris Hemsworth-Star Trek, Thor; Anna Hutchinson-Power Rangers Jungle Fury, Go Girls, Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior (sorry about this Anna but I just burst out laughing. I sincerely hope you get more and better roles.); Fran Kranz-Training Day, Donny Darko, the Village; and Jesse Williams-Grays Anatomy, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Brooklyn’s Finest). One star. There are some points that have you jumping out of your seat. One star. Both of the girls are easy on the eyes. One star. Anna Hutchinson does a completely gratuitous (and highly appreciated) topless scene. One star. The creatures are really horrible, and the CGI and special effects really good. One star. The way they got the disparate elements of different movies and genres to meld seamlessly into a great movie was awesome to watch. One star. Overall a fun movie. One star. Total: nine stars.
The black holes. The fact that the entire movie has spoilers built in rather than delivering the information in an expository style. One black hole. The whole thing I talked about earlier (that might be a spoiler). One black hole. While I appreciate the purposefully derivative nature of this film, it made the story pretty predictable. You don’t have to have read the script to figure out who was most likely to die. One black hole. Total: three black holes.
A grand total of six stars. Really good for horror, but honestly not at the level I would expect for a Joss Whedon joint. I left the movie thinking that the man who wrote Out of Gas or Objects in Space from Firefly could have done better. Should you see it? Absolutely, in a theater as soon as possible. It is good enough and different enough to be worthy of your attention for those alone, but honestly we need to keep on supporting Joss so he keeps making great stuff. Good date movie? Yes, as long as she can handle horror. Odds are she will be in your lap with fright pretty early on. If she is a Buffy or Firefly fan you have the perfect excuse to get her to the movie. If on the other hand she doesn’t like horror then maybe you should just go see it with your friends.
Before I go I want to add a thought on what I see as an ugly trend towards the overuse of zombies in media. While I appreciate the aesthetic choice to make zombies the baddies in this one I am afraid we are rapidly reaching the saturation point for zombies. This is of course the inevitable conclusion of any popular trend as Hollywood gets a hold of anything cool and milks it so hard all the internal organs come out of the teats, but I for one am a little disappointed that this trend is coming to an end. I have been a zombie fan since high school (which is a long time ago) and at the risk of sounding like every hipster I hate was into them way before they became cool.
Anyway, thanks for reading. More to see coming up, including the true horror movie of this weekend, the Three Stooges. I expect it to truly suck, which is why I have opted to see it tomorrow on cheap movie day. Lockout could either suck or rule, but the trailers I have seen reek of badly of cheese so we will see. Maybe I will make tomorrow a two movie day. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. If you have any suggestions or questions email me at [email protected]. Specific comments about this review can be made right here for all the world (wide web) to see. Talk to you soon.
Dave
John Carter of Mars in 3D Review
Much better than the trailers make it out to be.
These guys need to fire their marketing team, as the trailers for this movie had me convinced I would end up seeing another cheesy Disneyfied victim of the PG-13 serial movie killer. While it does labor under the duel yokes of Disney and the PG-13 taskmaster, it manages to make for a somewhat entertaining film. It also successfully pays tribute to the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel (which I read as a kid) while making it modern enough to not feel archaic.
That being said, it does have its problems. Honestly, the whole thing felt like they were trying to do too much in one film. Overambitious. The story lags quite a bit in the middle (actually to the point of boredom at a couple points), and there are a lot of bad story leaps that progress without logic. It actually seems to fall apart towards the end. I think the main issues there come from trying to fit pretty much everything from the book into one movie, and while I appreciate that as a fan of Burroughs it makes the movie drag. I found it very difficult to tell any of the characters besides John Carter or Deja Thoris apart (even the main bad guy I kept getting confused with Kantos Kan) and the CGI was actually weaker than I expected. It wasn’t bad per se, but the green Martians looked more cartoonish that I would have anticipated from a Disney film with a $250,000,000 budget. Honesty, horrible movie Ghost Rider had better graphics. I also felt the 3D was underused and less than impressive (I actually saw it on IMAX).
On the other hand, some of the visuals were pretty stunning, and they managed to keep the savage Barsoomian tone in the costumes. I thought the two main actors were pretty impressive for relative newcomers (on the other hand, how hard is it to play a character in a pulp action film?)
Before I go into the story, let me call on my old friend Science and talk a little about gravity and the effect it would have on a Terran suddenly transported to Mars. Mars has 38% of the gravity of earth. That means you could pretty much jump three times farther on Mars than you could on Earth. This means if you could long jump 6 feet on Earth you could jump 18 feet on Mars. Pretty impressive and probably a lot of fun. However, what you could not do is jump six football fields up onto a giant tower. Also, lower gravity does nothing to stop inertia. I don’t plan to black hole this movie for this, as the whole jumping thing was a pretty integral part of the book, but just thought you should know. (Pigs Fly image courtesy of the Funny T Shirt category).
Where you would be superhuman, however, is in your reflexes. Most science fiction doesn’t really address this, but here is how it works. On Earth if I drop my keys while trying to get into my apartment door a lifetime of video games has given me the reflexes to catch them with my other hand before they fall too far in most cases. If I were a Martian I would have almost 3 times as long to catch the keys, most likely causing them to evolve with slower reflexes. John Carter, while maybe being able to jump 10 yards or so, would actually be insanely fast on Mars and the Martians would to him appear to be moving in slow motion. That does not make for good visuals, however, but there it is.
Anyway, the movie. John Carter (Taylor Kitsch-Friday Night Lights, the Covenant, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) is an ex Confederate cavalryman trying to make his fortune in Arizona. He runs afoul of the local military and has to run off into the desert. While being pursued he and his pursuers are attacked by Apaches. He ducks into a cave and is attacked by one of the bald bad guys (Therns-kind of like much less interesting or menacing versions of the Strangers from Dark City) whom he shoots and gains an amulet. Then, 20 minutes into the movie about Mars, he ends up on Mars. There he discovers that his musculature from Earths gravity lets him jump super high and far. He is captured by Tars Tarkus (William Dafoe-Boondock Saints, Spider Man 2, Finding Nemo), Jeddak of one of the green Martian tribes. They are four armed Martians who live in a semi-savage state (if you read the books you might recall this was the start of some pretty serious racism. Disney managed to avoid most of it). He starts off treated as half prisoner, half child. Meanwhile, we learn of the two factions of red Martians, who look human, fighting it out and the bad guys are winning thanks to a ninth ray weapon given to them by the Therms.
Carter and the green Martians witness a battle in the air between the two factions and he rescues Deja Thoris (Lynn Collins-X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the Lake House, the Number 23), Princess of Helium. He wants her help getting back to Earth, she wants him to fight for Helium. They run away from the green Martians with the aid of Sola (Samantha Morton-Minority Report, In America, Control) and a kind of cool dog like creature who can run ridiculously fast. They travel all over Mars and more or less do a bunch of stuff. The problem is I kind of lost track of who was doing what for what reason. The bad red Martian Sab Than (Dominic West-300, Phantom Menace, the Wire) is involved in some kind of plot with the Therms, but I still can’t figure out what they were trying to accomplish. I was practically begging for John Carter to be taken in chains in front of him just so I could hear a evil monolog telling me what the hell was going on.
Anyway, the stars. Sci Fi movie based on a serious of books I really enjoyed. One star. While they didn’t stay locked on to the story 100% they did enough to not annoy me. One star. Both Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins did a good job as the good guys. One star. I’ll always give a star for William Dafoe, and his character Tars Tarkus was the coolest one in this film. Two stars. A lot of really good visuals. One star. The action and fight scenes were pretty good, and the jumping thing, even though provably not possible, was pretty cool to watch. One star. I thought the airships looked really cool. One star. Overall entertaining. Two stars. Total: ten stars.
The black holes. The pacing really plodded at points, especially at the beginning and the middle. One black hole. Except for the fact that some were green and some were red, I found it impossible to keep the supporting characters apart. One black hole. While the heroes were good, the villains sucked. The Therms had all the menace and threat of a meter maid, and Sab Than felt as dangerous as a rabid purse dog. One black hole. The story had too much stuff packed into it, which led to the characters making decisions based on pretty much plot convenience. One black hole. The movie ramped up in the third act and then petered out in a really drab and boring ending (which was also a massive lead in towards the inevitable sequel). One black hole. By the end of the movie you come to the slow realization that this film is actually kind of dopey. One black hole. Total: six black holes.
A grand total of four stars. Not bad, but not great either. Worth seeing in a theater? Sure, I supposed. Some of the visuals were pretty good. Worth seeing in 3D? Not really, in my opinion. Of course, I don’t actually like 3D that much so take that for what it’s worth. Date movie? Probably not. I think the dopeyness of the film would be much more apparent to anyone who is not a geek or fan of science fiction, and by the end of the film that dopeyness might extend to you especially if you start talking about having read the books, which any nerd is likely to do.
Thanks for reading. More movies coming up this weekend. I’ll probably see Silent House tonight, although that looks like it will freak me the hell out. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu, or feel free to post a comment here on this blog. If you have specific questions or suggestions feel free to email me at [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Dr. Suess’ the Lorax 3D Review
It’s like a Pixar movie without the Pixar writing.
So I saw this Friday night but have been busy with a Warhammer tournament (I went 3-2 and am disappointed. In retrospect I wish I has brought my Skaven) and couldn’t write it up. I am seeing Project X later tonight and if I feel the love might write it up so this might be a two review day.
This movie definitetly fell into the “overhyped marketing should be a warning of it’s impending suckage” category. The trailer played on every movie I have seen in the last four months (and that is a lot of movies). It has been all over buses, billboards, and bus stops. They even came up with the lamest silence your cell phones movie PSA ever (honestly, everyone who has enough of a conscience to care about this knows you need to silence your cell phones by now. I don’t need the Lorax telling me in a 45 second commercial for it’s own movie what the still slide, Regal opening snack selling montage, and about 50 signs in the theater have already told me) starring the Lorax. Obviously they felt this movie had some failings and needed an extra push.
By the way, as this is a kid’s movie in every sense of the word I will not be doing my usual star/black hole thing. Just feels like punching puppies with I get that detailed.
This film did have some serious failings but the weird thing is it wasn’t what I thought the fail was going to be (Lord of the Fail image courtesy of the Funny T Shirt category). I thought the most annoying thing about this movie was going to be the voice characterization. Every time I would see a trailer with Danny DeVito doing the voice I would think “That’s Louie De Palma from Taxi“. The thing about great cartoon voice characterization is that when it is done right the cartoon character doesn’t actually sound like the person doing the acting. A good voice over person will “cartoon it up” or at least make an attempt to change it somewhat but in this movie it is pretty much Danny talking into a microphone. While that carried through and bugged me most of the movie (and, to be perfectly blunt, at least Danny DeVito had a distinctive voice. Zac Efron and Taylor Swift added nothing the their characters and were a blatant ploy to try to suck in a few kids past the age of 11. Based on the audience, that ploy failed) it wasn’t the thing that bugged me the most. Here are a few things that I feel really hurt this movie.
First off, the art. The thing about Dr. Suess that really rocked is he could deliver a cool story (I guess. I was never a huge Dr. Suess fan, except for the Star Bellied Sneeches. Those guys rock!) and do so with an extremely primitive seeming art style. Very classic, very Suessian. What this movie did was more or less recycle all the images from Despicable Me and change…pretty much nothing. Everything looks like a bloated slightly less life-like Happy Meal Toy. I truly believe they made this call simply for the ability to create more toys to sell to impressionable youths (a Google shopping search for “Lorax movie toys” gave me 248 items), but seriously to the detriment of the film. Instead of a distinctive Suess look we got another generic computer rendered 3D exxxxxxxxtravaganze. Nothing in the art is distinctive or even that interesting.
Secondly, the story is ham handed and amateurish. They managed to keep most of the original story (thank you Wikipedia) but added a dopey villain and love plot. Apparently no one in a kid movie can do something unless motivated by sex. Also, the anti-materialism message kind of loses impact in a film that just charged me an extra $3 for a disposable pair of 3D glasses to maximize profits.
I know it’s an oxymoron to call a villain in a cartoon movie “cartoonish”, but the villain in this film (a rich entrepreneur who got rich selling idiots bottled air. By the way, if you were hoping your kids would learn something cool about recycling and environmental science besides “cutting down all the trees is bad” prepare to be disappointed) was so two dimensional (haw!) and dumb he made Arnold Swartzenegger’s Mr. Freeze from Batman and Robin look like Heath Ledger’s Joker from the Dark Knight. No complexity, no motivation besides being evil for money, and his complex plan to stop the heroes is more or less “chase those guys”. Ironically the villain from Despicable Me was pretty cool. I don’t know what happened.
Finally this story (and most of the other decisions) reeks of “design by committee”, which makes sense as this film has not one but two directors (Chris Renald-Despicable Me, Despicable Me 2, No Time for Nuts and Kyle Balda-Despicable Me, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc.). It seems like each director had ideas of how to cram as much as possible into the movie and see what aspect rose to the top. There is a strong divide between the chacacters created by Dr. Suess (Ted, the Once-ler, and the Lorax) and the characters created to take a 30 minute story and pad it out to 86 minute (Mr. O’Hare, Audrey, and the entire rest of the cast). Other things are tacked on to the script like the writer was the architect in charge of the Winchester Mystery House. Need to appeal to more kids? Let’s through in some snowboarding for no reason. Not enough excitement? How about some random axe blades for even less reason than the snowboarding? Teeny boppers? Zac Efron and Taylor Swift should pull in their soft sheep-like brains. The list goes on and had I reviewed this the morning after seeing is as per usual I could probably list more.
Anyway, the story is of Ted (Zac Efron-17 Again, High School Musical 1-3. Wow. Pretty much everything he has done except for a couple episodes of Robot Chicken bugs me. I think I found a new actor to hate) lives in Thneed-Ville, a town comprised entirely of plastic including the trees and bushes. The cars are all giant and ridiculous (think of Gru’s car from Despicable Me with a bright and colorful paint job and less fins or spikes), the architecture a failed attempt to 3D render the buildings from the book, and since there are no trees around everyone buys air from Mr. O’Hare, who delivers it in Sparklets jugs (if you listen carefully you can hear your kids grades in science slip a notch right about then). He is in love with the girl across the street Audrey (Taylor Swift-Hannah Montana the Movie, Valentine’s Day, Jonas Brothers the 3D Experience. I just looked at some pictures of her and there is something really off putting in her facial expressions. It’s like she’s looking at you through a worm hole from another dimension) who tells him about trees, which apparently everyone has forgotten about. She says she would sex up (I mean marry) anyone who brought her a real tree. He embarks on a quest to find her a tree. Apparently the only person who knows what happened to all the trees is the Once-ler (Ed Helms-the Hangover, the Hangover Part 2, the Office), whom Ted finds by going on a journey out into a barren and polluted wilderness populated by tree stumps. The Once-ler opts to tell Ted the story of what happened to all the trees, which kind of drags on.
Basically the Once-ler started to cut down all the trees in order to make his invention, the Thneed (imagine if you wanted to knit a scarf for Cthulu). He cut one down and was at once confronted by the Lorax (Danny DeVito-Taxi, Get Shorty, Batman Returns, LA Confidential), a mystical orange creature who “speaks for the trees”. The Once-ler agrees to not cut down any trees but once his stereotypically southern hillbilly relatives show up they go slash and burn on them. While being told the story by the Once-ler Ted is confronted by Mr. O’Hare, who doesn’t want trees as they produce free air. The Once-ler gives Ted the last tree seed, at which point the movie devolves into a chase scene like Scooby Do doing a cameo on a Roadrunner cartoon.
Again, I don’t do my usual rating system for kids movies but instead base my recommendation on how the kids in the audience react. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t hear kids laughing their asses off. There was laughter, and some cool visuals for the kids, but nothing like I heard in any number of kids films from the last year. Even Tintin seemed to have kids enjoying it more. I think the problems for kids are it was too polished, too clean, too many attempts to make the movie appealing to adults (which for the most part failed IMO), and no kids really care about ecological recycling save the trees messages. However, I think the most disappointed viewers will be the adults who grew up reading Dr. Suess and were hoping to see a tribute to a great and classic teller of children’s stories rather than a punch in the stomach attempt to exploit a dead man’s work and run off into the night with as much of their money as possible. I saw a few people in the audience wearing Cat in the Hat hats and I don’t think they were too terribly pleased by the end of the film.
Should you take your kids to see it? Sure, why not? The scenes with the Lorax in it will entertain them and at the least shut them up for a couple hours. I don’t think they will necessarily be bored. However, in the lexicon of childhood movie memories this one will barely register and will not stand out 20 years from now as a warm remembrance, motivating them to buy it on brain wave or whatever media storage device we are using in 2032. See it as an adult? Not really worth it. Except for aspects of the story and the fact that it stars an orange furry guy the connection to Dr. Suess is tenuous at best, kind of killing the nostalgia and leaving you watching a film made for grade school children.
Thanks for reading, as always. Look for Project X tomorrow (I expect it to suck, but you never know). Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu (who wants to be my 146th follow?), or feel free to post a comment here or email me at [email protected] with any questions or suggestions. People asking for specific movies are a boon, as it helps me figure out which ones to review next. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Wyoming wants to create it’s own Navy?
So I read today on the Drudge Report that State Representative Kermit Brown of Wyoming had put a bill forward that passed that creates a commission study options in case of a nationwide economic or political collapse. While I may or may not question the need of such a bill, I saw something really funny in it. The bill wants to study options for creating Wyoming currency, starting up a draft, creating it’s own standing army, acquiring aircraft for an air force, and best of all, acquiring an aircraft carrier.
Now I may not have gotten all A’s in geography back in high school, but apparently I am better at it than State Representative Brown because I happen to know that Wyoming is completely landlocked. The nearest ocean is the Pacific, which is at least 600 miles and two states away. What oceanic interests would they need to protect? Where would they dock it? I mean, if you are going to front a bill that could be interpreted as silly by any number of political opponents why would you include a provision that takes it from the kind of silly category and catapults into the whoopee cushion zone?
Anyway, I thought it was funny. This Titanic image I found in Dave’s funny t shirts. Have a good one.
Jason
