Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Review
Extremely Depressing and Incredibly Painful
I am going to start this review with a lesson from my upcoming book “How to Make Movies that Don’t Suck”. The lesson is this: no matter how good the story, acting, direction, filming, or editing is, if you make the movie about 9-11 then the biggest American tragedy of the 21st century is going to overwhelm the story and plot in a depressing gloom and actually annoy the hell out of your audience. It’s like if you set out the world’s finest buffet table, with sushi, caviar, and all the best foods possible, set it out on a table covered with flowers, fine china, and a silk tablecloth, but then dead center put a big platter of dog feces. No matter how good the food may be, the very fact that it sat on a table with dog crap is going to put a lot of people off even touching it. Furthermore, when someone looks at your beautiful buffet their eyes will be drawn to the crap in the middle and they will want to look away. Some people might start on one end of the buffet and not notice the dog crap until halfway through, but as soon as they see it the food they have collected will end up left untouched on the credenza, while others will have been chased from the room by the smell wafting through the air alone.
Thus we come to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a movie about a troubled kid dealing with his dad dying on 9-11. I am not actually saying that this movie is the greatest buffet of all time except for the dog crap salad at the center. It has plenty of other issues, most related to pacing, but I can see what director Stephen Daldry (The Hours, Billy Elliot, The Reader) was trying to accomplish. However, it does have elements that in a movie without the dog crap centerpiece would have made for an excellent cinema experience.
The funny thing is at first I thought this movie was treating 9-11 as a main issue without forcing the audience to sit through it, to it’s benefit. The death of the father was related via expository scenes rather than footage of the Twin Towers falling. However, as the movie progresses through a never ending Vortex of Flashbacks we are subjected to everything from that day I never wanted to see or hear about again. I don’t even want to talk about it here. I watched all that stuff live on TV and still get the chills.
The story is basically As Good as it Gets meets Stand by Me set in the City of Lost Children. Tom Hanks plays super dad to his highly intelligent but disturbed kid Oskar (no other real credits). They play games and Tom’s character Thomas likes to give his son puzzles like a scavenger hunt to solve. Thomas dies in one of the towers and the kid has a breakdown of sorts. He finds a key in his dad’s possession and decides it must be part of the last game Thomas was setting up for him. He blows off his mother (Sandra Bullock-she is excellent in this movie, BTW) in a big way and undergoes an OCD inspired quest to find what lock the key fits into. Along the way he meets a ton of people, deals with his own phobias and issues, alienates his long suffering mother, and meets up with a creepy older man (Max von Sydow-Minority Report, Shutter Island, the Exorcist) who is mute and writes everything down on a piece of paper. The plot plods on and on like me trying to push my ’79 T-Bird to the gas station, with lots of boring non productive scenes punctuated by temper tantrums from the kid. The kid in a weird way describes a perfect character arc. At the beginning of the movie I found him painfully annoying. Towards the middle I kind of really got to like him and his eccentric ways. Then towards the end I found him really annoying again.
The story is obviously about the character development in the kid, and in it’s own way does an admirable (if boring) job of portraying it. The problem is the 9-11 basis for the story so overshadows everything else that you really couldn’t care. I will say the story managed to not step in any other major quagmires. While the ending was a little fanciful it did not really bend my mind accepting it. The acting was very good, and the dialog decent. If the story had been about about a kid dealing with his dad dying in a tragic Segway accident it would have been a decent, if slow, movie.
The stars. Acting was decent all around, although in spite of getting top billing Tom Hanks was only in about 15 minutes of the film and more or less played a grown up version of Josh Baskin from Big. I thought Sandra Bullock did a particularly good job. Two stars. For the most part I liked the characters, especially the mute old man. One star. The movie did what movies should at least try to do: actually have a character show some form of development (for most of you directors out there this phenomenon is called “character development”) and truly describe a true story arc. One star. Overall of a quality I wish more filmmakers would aspire to. Two stars. Total: six stars.
The black holes. 9-11 based story. Two black holes. The story kept coming back to 9-11. One black hole. Pacing felt like my mother was driving the movie. Sluggish and boring. One black hole. Total: four black holes.
So a total of two stars. I honestly did not want to see this film when I saw the trailers, and only “professional” obligations got me into the theater. Now that I have seen it I know I was right in that assessment. If you think enough time has passed and you are not disturbed by images and stories set on 9-11 then by all means go see it. 
You will probably enjoy it, but you won’t be invited to any of the wild parties I throw on a regular basis (the last one was in 1998, I think. Party like a Vulcan image courtesy of the Spock T Shirt category). I think the acting will carry this movie if you can ignore the subject matter. The kid is talented, and Tom Hangs and Sandra Bullock have a good chemistry together (I thought so when I reviewed Larry Crowne). However, overall the entire movie was pretty much a bummer.
Thanks for reading, as always. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. Nothing really on deck until Friday, so I think I will take a break and let Jason post more of his short rants. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Tree of Life gets two Oscar nominations???
So after I read Dave’s review for Tree of Life months ago I went and saw it to see if he was right on how bad it was. It totally sucked. I’ve seen YouTube videos that had better plots and stories. How can the morons at the academy give a Best Director nomination on a film that was a random pile of weird footage? Dave’s probably smarter on movies than I am and he couldn’t figure out what the damned point was.
This is a pretty good sign that the academy is chock full of pretentious a-holes who use their position to try to prove to the rest of Hollywood that they are smarter than they really are. The question on my mind is if this is so why do they bother with such blue collar awards like best special effects? Shouldn’t they be focused on which movie had the best caviar at the catering trucks? If Tree of Life actually wins either of these awards I am going to set up a camera at the dog park near my house and submit whatever random footage I get as the animal movie of the year.
By the way, I don’t think Starfleet Academy is full of pretentious a-holes. This shirt from the Star Trek T-Shirts category was the only image I could find with the word academy on it.
Jason
Zac Efron to play Shotaro Kaneda in Akira???
Wow this is lame. Caucasian pretty boy Zac Efron of High School Musical fame is supposed to play Japanese badass Shotaro Kaneda? How does that even make sense? There are no qualified Japanese actors anywhere in the world?
Also, while I am on the subject how can the even decide to ruin great Manga like Akira by excreting a live action movie all over it? Didn’t they learn anything from Dragonball Z? I don’t think you can find it any more, but you should try to see the video of Manga fan Hitler finding out about the changes they made to the story to create that bomb. Vegeta image courtesy of the Cartoon T Shirts, by the way.
Jason
The Iron Lady Movie Review
This film was kind of out of focus, and I don’t mean by the projectionist.
Meryl Streep is an exceptional performer in every sense of the term, and delivers another great performance. The problem is I can’t figure out if the director (Phyllida Lloyd-Mamma Mia!, Gloriana) actually likes or hates Margaret Thatcher. I went in kind of expecting a tribute to one of the greatest world leaders of the 20th century, with highlights and low points presented in an interesting manner that included contributing personal moments and insights. You know, what a good movie would have. Instead we got a disjointed series of vignettes that seem to gloss over her triumphs and linger lovingly over Lady Thatcher’s mistakes and failures while alternating to the present where we get to see an ailing woman dealing with dementia. It’s like if you made a movie about a family trip to Disneyland but had 2/3rds of the footage be of them looking for their car in the parking lot at the end of the day.
This looks like another chance to use my recently coined term script confusion, but a more colloquial and possibly accurate term might be fence sitting. Growing up in the 80’s Thatcher had a well deserved reputation as a ball busting bitch (I mean that term with enormous respect). As a staunch ally to our country she was always perceived as a good person, but she definitely had her issues. However, this movie takes her triumphs and makes them into miniscule points that bookend long exploration of her failures, including the decline of her career, while completely glossing over the majority of her very serious personality issues (her total contempt for the poor and unemployed, not to mention her attitude towards other women). The director seemed unsure if she wanted to praise or denigrate Margarette Thatcher, and consequently never really committed far enough in either direction.
Interspersed between these vignettes was the story of a lonely old woman dealing with dementia and the death of her husband that was as depressing as possible without actually featuring your ex girlfriend sleeping with someone else on screen. I’m not kidding here. We are talking Leaving Las Vegas depressing. This over story only managed to break up any decent momentum the historical story had going and cast a terrible pall over every scene in the movie. SPOILER ALERT INCOMING. And does the film end with a scene of Margaret Thatcher’s triumph and happiness? No. It ends with her political career ending in ignobility and failure, more or less wandering down a corridor in an Alzheimer haze.
As you may have inferred from my rant so far, the story is of the infamous Iron Lady, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. There are two stories going in side by side, but as the main one seems to be a go nowhere plot about her failing years, I will sum that one up with she gets old, deals with the death of her husband, packs up his things for charity, and wanders off. The rest of the movie is a Cliffnotes version of her career, starting as the daughter of a grocer and advancing her politically as she runs for office, gets married, and becomes Prime Minister. The highlight seems to be her actions during the Falklands War, when she kicked the crap out of major world superpower Argentina. The rest of the events all seem to blur together with no real resolution. Somehow she managed to turn the economy around, but there is no real indication how she did it. There are about 1,000 scenes of riots, and the image of rioters beating on the sides of her car recurs several times. When she first gets into office the story seems to be about the trade unions destroying the economy of Great Briton, but then two scenes later the unions are gone and the economy prospering with no word of how it was accomplished. With a few exceptions this story about one of the most powerful and influential women in modern Western politics seems to treat her more like a passenger on a bus than the person behind the wheel.
The other thing that fails miserably in this film is the fact that due to the disconnected pacing and editing at no time do we actually get to connect with Meryl Streeps character. Just as you start to feel something for the crazy old lady hallucinating about her husband it cuts to her bitching out another minister in Parliament, and just as you start to connect to her as a political savvy woman struggling to make her way in the boys club of British government we cut back to her asking about her son visiting when he is in South Africa. There is nothing solid for the audience to latch onto and connect with. Meryl Streep is such a good actress that to treat her performance with such disregard for the continuity of the story is almost a crime. It’s building a house with the best bricks money can buy and assembling them with spit and chewing gum.
The stars. Meryl Streep delivers the best performance possible given the flailing vehicle she was forced to drive. One star. Some of the history was interesting. One star. For such a mediocre script, the dialog was surprisingly good, although that might just be me once again being taken in by British accents. One star. Her husband Denis (Jim Broadbent-Moulin Rouge, Gangs of New York, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince) was fun and entertaining, although definitely felt 
out of place like a clown at a funeral (clown image courtesy of the Science Fiction T Shirts category). I won’t black hole them for that, as I think the movie needed some kind of comic relief. One star. Total: four stars.
The black holes. Really, really depressing to no purpose. Two black holes. Disjointed editing. One black hole. Pacing was awful. The scenes with Thatcher as a decrepit crazy woman dragged on and on, while the scenes with her as an effective and capable leader were rushed through at high speed, almost as if the director resented having to do them and was just trying to get them out of the way. One black hole. Meryl Streep really not given the proper treatment to deliver her normally great performance. One black hole. No sign of character development or anything for the audience to connect to. One black hole. The entirety of Thatcher as a senile old biddy was completely unnecessary and pointless. Normally I would give this one black hole, but since this seems to be the majority of the screen time I will bump it up to two. At the end of the movie I found myself wondering what the entire point of the movie was. I actually have a theory on the directors actual purpose that I will get into in the conclusion. One black hole. Overall I left the theater feeling like I had just wasted my time and money. One black hole. Total: nine black holes.
A total of five black holes. If you are a huge fan of the Devil Wears Prada and/or Meryl Streep see it just to see it, but I don’t think you will come away with anything worthwhile. While writing this review I did a little research and have come up with a theory as to what was really going through the director Phyllida Lloyds cranium on this on. You see, she is best know for directing opera, a genre not really known for its uplifting message. I suspect she was infused with a desire to make a film about a lonely old woman dealing with her dead husband and uncaring children. The scenes I wanted to see of Margaret Thatcher changing the face of Briton were rushed, stilted, and treated as secondary to scenes of her making two eggs, one for her and one for her eight year dead husband. Seems a shame. However, this production was entirely funded by the UK Film Council, and trying to hold a public commission to the same bar as a Hollywood production is an exercise in futility. I’m just surprised that the Britons wouldn’t want to see Thatcher painted in a more positive light. Of course, when we do a movie about an American historical figure we tend to look for all the dirt possible (most recently J. Edgar), so perhaps the attitude here actually reflects the prevailing attitude most Britons have towards her. I don’t know.
Thanks for reading. Not a lot coming out until Friday, so I will probably do more end of the year stuff tomorrow or just blow it off entirely. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu to get announcements of new reviews, or just subscribe to my RSS feed. Talk to you all soon.
Dave
War Horse Movie Review
Decent movie, but don’t see this if you actually love horses.
This movie was actually better than I expected. Sure, it’s Spielberg, but I had just been disappointed with Tintin and as masterful a storyteller as he is, he has a tendency to let his story dip into the sappy zone and hover there, like in E.T. However, while the sap was there (lots of young boys snuggling horses) the story, after a sluggish start, really drew you in.
Spielberg appears to be using this production as a tool to show the horror of WWI like he did with Saving Private Ryan. However, in spite of a much more terrible war (WWI was way more brutal than WWII. WWI is why they created war crimes) it does not come even close to how well Private Ryan did. The blame for this I put firmly on the PG-13 rating Spielberg bends bars to maintain. I am not one of those guys who feels the need for gore and blood in everything, but the impact of a battle scene loses something when nothing brutal is shown. Guys get shot and just fall to the ground. One of the main characters gets caught in a gas attack and in the next scene, instead of showing him lying in a cot coughing himself to death (mustard gas) he has a bandage over his eyes. There was none of the horrific desperate attempts to hold your own entrails in, or guys getting their limbs blown off. It was almost sanitized, like a video game, and that sensitization kind of washes away a lot of the impact.
However, as kind as Spielberg was to his human characters he makes it up in his treatment of the horses. Through a series of really good puppets and camera work with very little CGI he shows all kinds of horrible things happening to horses. To be honest it was more than a little stomach turning, and I had to look away during a couple scenes. A horse is a noble creature, and should not be shown in extreme pain and horrible situations. I can’t actually call anything that happened animal cruelty, as none if it was malicious or intentional, but just really hard to watch. This goes out to my horse loving friend Lauren in particular. Don’t see this if you have a love of horses.
Anyway, the movie, with a few spoilers. It follows the life of Joey, a thoroughbred horse born on a Scottish farm prior to WWI. His birth is witnessed by young Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine-no other film roles), who takes an instant bond with him. The horse goes up for auction and Alby’s drunken father Ted (Peter Mullan-Trainspotting, My Name is Joe, Boy A) makes the mistake of buying him for a very large amount. This is going to cause them to lose the farm, literally, unless Alby can train Joey to pull a plow and can then plow the most rock filled field in all of Scotland. He does so and all seems well until the crop is ruined from a storm. Ted is forced to sell Joey to a cavalry officer (Tom Hiddleston-Loki from Thor, Midnight in Paris, Conspiracy), who takes him to France where he learns what happens when sword wielding cavalry charges machine guns. Joey is captured by the Germans and put to use hauling ambulances. He then goes through a long series of owner changing, from two German deserters, a French jam maker and his granddaughter, and a German artillery officer who seems to relish putting down injured horses. He finally breaks free in a panic and runs out into No Man’s Land and gets caught up in the one scene I had the hardest time watching. He gets rescued by a Scottish corporal with the help of a German infantryman (a love of horses supersedes the need to kill each other) and is eventually reunited with Alby, who apparently joined the infantry while all this was going on. Some other drama goes on before the end.
The stars. Decent if sappy story. One star. Amazing camera work and visuals. Two stars. While not graphic enough to really impact, the fighting did illustrate a lot of the horror of WWI. One star. The uniforms and equipment seemed correct, including the German spiked Kaiser helmets, and the entire film was very well within period. One star. This is something only a treadhead would appreciated, but they actually did show a rhomboid tank (I think it was a MkV Heavy, but they didn’t really show it off entirely). I don’t know if they found a functional unit (there are a few in the world) or just built a replica, but really cool. One star. The horse handling, puppets and special effects were stunning. One star. I don’t want to get into it too much, but this movie did manage to draw out an emotional response from me. One star. Overall good movie. Two stars. Total: nine stars.
The black holes. Stomach wrenching horse-in-pain scenes. One black hole. For the most part, all the characters seemed flat and uninteresting. I don’t know if this was the writing or the fact there doesn’t actually seem to be a real protagonist. The focal character changes every 15 minutes or so, never allowing you to connect with any of them, and Joey the horse does not show enough of a distinctive personality to really connect with. For the most part he acts like a horse and a horse is a horse (of course, of course). One black hole. Each sub-character seemed to have a whole new sub plot that disappeared with that character. One black hole. What could have been a great R rated war movie got a PG-13 rating tied to its feet. One black hole. Total: four black holes.
So a grand total of five stars. Decent movie in all regards, and well worth watching. I will also say that the visuals are amazing, and if you don’t see it in a huge theater you will not get the full effect. Go out and see it. I don’t know how this would work as a date movie. Sure, it has horses, but it also has a lot of other stuff that might turn a girl off. She might respond well to the ending, but I personally don’t like to leave stuff like that to chance.
That’s it for now. I have a freakishly busy weekend coming up (party, party, dinner with friends) and don’t know if I will get to see anything. It might be Monday before I blog again. (Party Like a Vulcan image courtesy of the Star Trek T Shirts). Thanks again for reading. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Goodbye, Harry Morgan
So Harry Morgan died today at the age of 96. This is actually really sad for me, as I watched a lot of M.A.S.H. as a kid. I loved that show. Honestly, I can’t put my finger on why, as I was always more into military shows with more actual combat. At first I just liked it because it was about the Army, but as I got older I really got into the characters and the horrific situation they were in. Shows where they were doing endless hours working on horrifically injured men, surrounded by blood and gore, really spoke to me. I won’t get into the details of my miserable childhood, but something about those guys somehow in my childhood mind spoke to the daily grind of dealing with all the jackasses who I went to school with and who dared to call themselves my peers (when they weren’t kicking my ass), as well as some other stuff having to do with my family. (M.A.S.H. 4077th image courtesy of the Television T Shirt category)
Anyway, I loved all the characters. Radar was always my favorite, but honestly I like Col. Potter the next most. He was the father figure I always wished I had, tough but fair. I like his aspect as a career officer, and enjoyed him most when he was yelling at people. Honestly, I never missed Henry Blake much when he left, or for that matter Trapper John. The best shows were with BJ, Col. Potter, and Radar.
So this show was a big part of my childhood. Not on the level of Star Trek, which was about the life and friends I wished I had had, but rather about the life and friends I actually had. Harry Morgan was always great. In addition to M.A.S.H., he starred on Dragnet, the great Third Rock from the Sun, an episode of Twilight Zone, the Jeff Foxworthy Show, and a bunch of parts on shows like the Simpsons and the Love Boat. He did make the mistake of starring in the ill fated After Mash, but I forgive him for that for all the years of fun he has given me.
So he passed. I am glad he lived to the grand old age of 96, and will miss him.
Thanks for reading. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. I’m headed to LA to hang out with a bunch of my old college friends this weekend. I will try to get a post or two up, especially if I can see some of the movies coming out this weekend. Talk to you soon.
Dave
The Muppets Movie Review
For once, my sense of nostalgia managed to beat down my sense of cynicism.
Odds are I should have seen Hugo, as that would have helped maintain my nerd credibility, but the fact is I used to watch the Muppets as a kid and loved it. If there is a puppet character on the planet greater than Gonzo the Great then I will eat one my my t-shirts. I loved almost all of them. Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, Beeker, Scooter, the Swedish Chef, Animal, Link Hogthrob, Lew Zealand (and his boomerang fish), Sam the Eagle, Statler and Waldorf; just listing them here puts a smile on my face. Ironically it was the main characters who annoyed me. Miss Piggy drove me berzerk, Fozzie the Bear I wanted to stuff into a microwave, and even Kermit the Frog bugged me. I liked him, but he was such a wimp sometimes it drove me nuts. Also, the romance between a hideous hog in a blond wig and makeup and a bug eyed frog kind of made me cringe.
However, the secondary characters always carried me through, and before you really get into this review understand that I will be writing it while viewing through rose colored nostalgia glasses. To be honest, I laughed my ass off throughout the film. For those of you who are regular readers and see this as completely divergent from my normal style rest assured that the next horrible script that comes across the screen I will jump on twice as hard for all the good things I say about this one.
Anyway, this movie starts off badly, actually, with the introduction of a new Muppet character named Walter, who is growing up in Smalltown USA with the two script anchors, his brother Gary (Jason Segel – How I Met Your Mother, 
Forgetting Sarah Marshal, Despicable Me. How I Met Your Mother image courtesy of the TV Show T Shirt category) and Gary’s girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams- Enchanted, the Fighter, Catch Me if You Can). Walter is a super Muppet fan, while Gary is is big brother who keeps more or less neglecting his girlfriend in order to help take care of his brother. They are taking a bus trip to LA to visit Muppet studios. At this point my early warning suckage alarm was blaring in my ear. However, while on the tour of the abandoned, decrepit, crumbling Muppet Studio Walter sneaks into Kermit’s old office and overhears a meeting between the great duo of Statler and Waldorf, in the process of selling the studio off to Tex Richman (Chris Cooper-American Beauty, the Bourne Identity, the Patriot) who plans to demolish the place and drill for oil. After finally giving the plot a kick start Walter tracks down Kermit and convinces him to reunite the whole gang to do a telethon to save the studio. At that point we go into a series of funny “where are they now” scenes the eventually morphs into a montage. I don’t want to give a lot away, but the one that made me laugh the hardest was seeing Scooter working at Google. Hilarious.
They managed to convince a TV executive (Super hot Rashida Jones-Parks and Recreation, the Social Network, I Love You, Man. She was looking a lot better than she did as a lesbian in Our Idiot Brother) to give them two hours to run their show. Muppet hijinks ensue. Jack Black (School of Rock, Tropic Thunder) gets kidnapped to be the celebrity host and managed to not annoy me. A ton of celebrity cameos surface to operate the telethon phones. Zach Galifianakis plays a local homeless man (not much of an acting stretch, although I like him a lot). The cameo list is really impressive, and it’s not just a bunch of washed up losers. Really cool.
The story progresses. The show has some great Muppet skits. I laughed a lot. The characters frequently break the fourth walls in really clever and funny ways. I left the theater smiling.
The stars. The Muppets. Two stars. Story, characters, and dialog mostly true to the original show. Three stars. A PG film that felt appropriate at PG. One star. A couple of scenes in particular, especially the Gonzo the Great recruitment scene and the Scooter thing, had me really laughing. One star. A few of the skits for the final show were worthy of the original show, just done with higher production values. One star. The celebrity cameos actually added a lot rather than slowing things down. One star. All puppets. No attempt to render in CGI or make them cartoons, live action cartoons, or anything in between (that would have ruined this film on about 14 levels. Suck it, Alvin and the Chipmunks). One star. Overall, super fun. Two stars. Total: twelve stars.
Now the black holes. I will admit that there were issues with this film that I would have pushed a lesser film off a subway platform for, but my enjoyment of the movie has helped me do a mental wash over most of them. I will focus on the really glaring ones. The biggest flaw this movie suffers from is the same one that plagues all of the Transformers movies: too much of humans, not enough of Muppets (or, in the case of Transformers, robots). If you recall the show the humans were always at most ancillary characters who mostly there just to highlight how cool the Muppets were (IMO), and there was never more than one. Here, there are entire scenes and horrible song and dance numbers featuring only humans. Two black holes. Introducing a new Muppet as the protagonist who is really kind of bland and boring, with nothing notably about him at all. This is what happens when you don’t have Jim Henson involved. One black hole. That’s it. Three black holes.
So a grand total of nine black holes, and my hearty endorsement. Go see this film. Take your kids. They will love it. If you grew up in the 80’s this will rock for you, and the humor is sophisticated enough to keep an adult entertained. Good date movie? Absolutely. If your date isn’t laughing, feeling good, and having her inhibitions lowered by this film leave her at the theater as odds are she is really a serial killer looking to gut and make a new skin suit out of you as soon as you get alone.
Thanks for reading. I will probably see Hugo tonight at the Grand Lake Cinema and write it up tomorrow. I also saw the Descendants and have some funny thoughts about that film, but I there is so much good stuff out right now I think I will save it for Sunday. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. Thanks again. Talk to you all later.
Dave
Moneyball movie review
Pretty much on the money.
It is a conundrum of my life that I find baseball painfully boring to watch or participate in, but for some reason love baseball movies. Eight Men Out, Major League, the Bad News Bears; they all have a freakish fascination for me. I especially love movies where the team in question is a come from behind underdog. There is just something weirdly fascinating about it for me.
So, Moneyball. I liked it. Fun, interesting, and basically shot around Oakland, the town I have lived in for the last ten years. There is a special thrill when you see a scene shot in the parking lot where one of your friends puked his guts out after getting blackout drunk. You somehow feel closer to the movies.
It is the story of the Oakland A’s, known as the poorest team in professional baseball. One of my favorite actors, Brad Pitt, plays Billy Beane, the Oakland general manager as he struggles to put together a winning team on a budget. The problem is all his best players recently got hired away by other, richer teams and he is left with the dregs. While trying to negotiate a player trade he meets Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, the fat kid from Superbad. He was also in Knocked Up and had a voice over roll in one of my personal favorites, Megamind), a recent Yale graduate with a degree in economics. Turns out young Peter has been looking at baseball players from a statistical analysis point of view, and Billy hires him to help put together a budget team that can win. Peter goes through the dregs of players, looking for ones that can get on base and actually score. They put together a team that, while lacking any major stars that dazzle, manages to deliver a solid performance and set a record breaking winning streak. I won’t spoil the story by telling you how it ends, although if you are familiar with the Oakland A’s you probably already know. (Baseball jersey t shirt image from Eastbound and Down courtesy of the TV show t shirt category)
There are some subplots tied into the team manager having issues with how Billy is putting together his team, Billy’s twelve year old daughter, and a bunch of flashbacks to his own youthful baseball career that honestly seemed a little forced in and pointless. We got some good character development from Billy and his daughter. The flashbacks didn’t seem to add a lot.
The stars. Baseball movie. One star. Brad Pitt. One star. Great performances all around. One star. They didn’t feel compelled to lower the story to the lowest common denominator and crowbar in a stupid hot girl to be some kind of love interest or team intern or whatever. One star. There was a definitive story arc for Billy and you can really see his character develop. One star. The analysis they did made a lot of sense, and nothing seemed weird or out of place. One star. They gave us a nice look into the inner workings of major league baseball and how the whole team development works. One star. Billy’s daughter didn’t annoy. One star. Set in Oakland and about our local team. One star. As far as I know they kept to the actual story. One star. The managed to avoid a dumb Hollywood ending. One more star for an overall good movie experience. Total: twelve stars.
The black holes. Pacing seemed sluggish at times. There were times when I found myself bored as we watched yet another video of some forgotten baseball player with a hidden talent and Peter telling Billy why he was worth looking at. The editing could have been tightened up some. One black hole. There were a couple sub plots that didn’t need to be in the movie, including the whole Billy flashback sequence. Also there was one scene where we meet Billy’s ex wife and her hippy dippy husband that went no where. One black hole. Brad Pitt and about 80% of the cast spent the whole movie dipping, a habit I find uber disgusting. Seriously, it turns my stomach, like a giant pus and maggot hoagie. I know it’s a baseball thing, but it really threw me off the whole time. One black hole. Weirdly enough, in spite of my actual dislike of watching baseball, I feel this movie would have benefited from some more actual baseball footage. A lot of time spent indoors. One black hole. Total: four black holes.
So a grand total of eight stars, a great score for a great movie. Try to see it in a theater, if you can, although there would be nothing wrong with seeing it on your TV. It will work in both venues. Decent date movie too, as there is a lot of humor and heartwarming scenes, particularity with Billy and his daughter.
Killer Elite review tomorrow. I saw it tonight and will write it up in the morning. Thanks for reading. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Star Trek Movie Retrospective: Star Trek Generations
The warning stroke of the Star Trek franchise.
I can’t keep putting it off. I promised I would do the entire series and am at the dross of Star Trek. This is like dinner as a kid, when I would rush to eat all the delicious mac and cheese and be left staring at a bowl of steamed spinach and broccoli. The fun is over. Time to put the work in.
Ugh. Where to begin. I suppose I should just do what I have been doing so far and talk about what happened in 1994. Tonya Harding went nuts. Nelson Mandala became president of South Africa. The US invades Haiti. The Northridge earthquake hits LA (I slept through it). OJ is arrested for the murder of his wife and her lover. A Finnish ferry sinks, killing over 900. NAFTA is signed. Most of Montana burns up in a wildfire. No one else in the US notices. Java is released as a programming language. The Channel Tunnel is dug. Other movies included the Lion King, Forest Gump, Dumb and Dumber, the Mask, Clear and Present Danger, and Pulp Fiction. Popular music included Beastie Boys, Snoop Dogg, Rod Stewart, Sting, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Rolling Stones, Celine Dion, Sheryl Crow, and Boys II Men. Television was Law & Order, Ren & Stimpy, Beavis & Butthead, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Frasier, Star Trek DS9, and the great X-files (one day ask me about my Scully fantasies).
(Generations image courtesy of the Star Trek t shirt category)
While TV was doing OK, I think it pretty obvious that movies and music had both hit a slump. Paramount needs another hit Star Trek film. However, as the last one has more or less shown, the cast is well past their prime and not likely to appeal to the modern generation (haw!). The obvious solution would be to create a Next Generation movie. However, anti-movie producer Rick Berman failed to have enough faith in the TV show he produced for years to believe it could stand on it’s own, and like attaching water wings to a young (or severely disabled) child managed to convince the TOS stars with the least respect for their characters, Walter Koenig, James Doohan, and of course, Bill Shatner, to step in and make their TOS roles look even stupider.
So, the story. A giant space ribbon is tearing ass across the galaxy and sucks up Captain Kirk or something. Still not sure what happened there. Later, Picard comes across Malcom McDowell (remember that really cool movie he did a while ago about a violent sociopath? The movie with the great story that made sense and came from a book. I’m talking about Tank Girl, of course), who wants to get sucked back into the Nexus (the name of the ribbon) again because for some mysterious reason that is like Heaven, where you can do or be anything you want (my plan is to become an erotic dancer named Destiny). The only way he can do that is to attract the ribbon, and the only way to do that is to blow up a star with a populated planet around it. Picard and his crew do what they can to stop him, but fail.
So Picard gets sucked into the Nexus, where he gets bored of Heaven pretty quick. He runs into Guinan, still wearing the dumb hats, who explains that she is not really there but is a shadow and Picard can exit the Nexus anywhere he chooses, at any time he chooses. So he wants to go back to stop Malcom, but needs help. He recruits Captain Kirk, who was happy just chopping wood. Together they get into the lamest geriatric fight action sequence of all time (think a less coherent Bum Fight). Kirk dies, but Picard succeeds. Then, Picard leaves Kirk’s body to the rats as he goes rushing off to more adventure.
That’s pretty much it. I don’t want to get too deep into the what it had and didn’t have, although the value of what it didn’t have grossly outweighs what it did. What is specifially didn’t have was Mr. Spock or Dr. McCoy. Leonard Nimoy and DeForrest Kelley both either had too much integrity or they hired a third grader to read the script and let them know it was a steaming pile of crap. Uhura managed to miss it too. Sulu they only got by promoting him.
What the movie had was some massive, gaping plot holes you could fly the Enterprise through. Let me go into a couple.
OK. You are Captain Picard. You are in the Nexus, and need to stop Malcolm McDowell. You can come out at any point you wish. Why would you pull an old man out of retirement and then appear 2 minutes before Malcolm launches his doomsday rocket? Why would you not show up three days earlier on the bridge of the Enterprise and just throw his ass into the brig right then and there? Or paste his little base from orbit? Or transport to the surface with like 100,000 security guys? How dumb are you, man? He could have saved his brother’s life too
What the hell was Worf doing on the Enterprise? Wasn’t he supposed to be on DS9? And if he somehow transfered back, why was he still wearing his DS9 uniform, along with about half the crew? Was the costume budget so small they had to recycle old uniforms from other shows?
So Malcolm is about to launch his death rocket. According to Worf, it will impact the sun in something like 11 seconds. Assuming, since everyone can breath on the planet, it is a class M world similar to earth, that means it is 8 light minutes from the sun. This rocket would have to be able to do warp 46 to get there that fast. Lazy writers piss me off.
Why didn’t Picard recruit like 100 people to help him? For that matter, if time has no meaning in the Nexus why not enjoy a few million years of happiness and hair before dealing with the problems at home?
The planet’s ionosphere prevented the Enterprise’s sensor from detecting Picard? How lame are these sensors? This planet has an ionosphere. Also, given that we can now read a credit card from space couldn’t you just have the computer visually look at most of the surface, searching for the distinctive reflection off Picard’s shiny pate? How about getting off your lazy, bearded ass (yes, Riker, you) and send down a couple shuttles to look around a bit? I mean, it’s just the captain, right? He’s not really critical to the operation of the ship. No way he has broken a leg and is currently dying of thirst.
Why would Picard pick Kirk anyway? It’s not like he needed Kirk’s years of experience. He basically needed a red shirt to distract Malcolm and die while Picard saves the day, which is pretty much what Kirk did. While I do find irony in Kirk finally going down like a red shirt, it still bugs me that Picard didn’t recruit some kind of young combat guy or something.
What was the point of Data and his emotion chip, other than to completely annoy and distract the audience from the rest of the plot? Actually, now that I think about it, given the quality of the rest of the plot I don’t know if that was such a bad move. Still, it sucked.
If after Picard failed the first time and he and Malcolm were both in the Nexus, what was to prevent Malcolm from going back in time and killing Picard as a child, then jumping back into the Nexus at the first point he encountered it? For that matter, why didn’t he just fly up to it in a ship and shoot himself at it inside a photon torpedo?
Why did Picard leave Kirk, a galaxy wide hero known across Star Fleet, buried under a pile of rocks? His ship was about to pick him up. Are coffins so expensive in space? How about a nice memorial and tomb for him? I hope your final wish was to be eaten by alien worms on a forsaken planet, James.
What’s the deal with everyone in the universe being totally familiar with Tri-Lithium when it is an experimental compound the Romulans (not well known for sharing secrets) were experimenting with? Also, if it is such a rare, exoctic material, why did they have to come up with such a common sounding name? Lithium is pretty commonplace, and Tri-Lithium sounds like you just packed three of them together. Why not a Romulan name?
Did any of you ever watch the TV series? Apparently none of the movie producers did. Remember when Picard had to change his pants after being given a 12,000 year old “curlin nescar” (I don’t know how it’s spelled) and has a whole speech about how priceless it was? Well, why then would he drop it on the floor of his wrecked ready room and leave it for future archeologists after picking up his stupid photo album? For that matter, why the hell was his photo album and curlin nescar (Curling NASCAR? Maybe it had something to do with that weird Olympic sport where you sweep the ice combined with stock car racing) in the ready room and not his quarters? Isn’t that where he is supposed to keep important personal items?
Actually, the list goes on and on. The script was stupidly and lazily written, the TOS charactes were really out of place, Shatner’s overacting totally clashed with Picard’s Shakespearean training, Data acted completely out of character, and more or less the movie experience sucked. Of course, was it the worst of the Star Trek movies? Nope. It was more the harbinger of more pain to come.
Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. Thanks for reading. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Movie Review: Apollo 18
OMG Scary!
Look, I’m about to reveal that I must be some kind of amateur or idiot. Every review I have seen on this film has panned it as unoriginal and lacking tension. While I concede the unoriginal claim (it is the bastard three way love child of Paranormal Activity, Blair Witch Project, and Alien) I found it scary as hell. (Alien image courtesy of the science fiction t shirt category)
Maybe it’s because I love astronauts, and understand how dangerous what they do really is. Like most guys my age when I was a kid I wanted to be one, and used to get up early to watch the space shuttles launch (until the Challenger blew up. That was a pretty crappy day in a childhood full of crappy days). I also have a good understanding of the dangers of just walking on the moon. You don’t need a creature to die a horrible death out there.
Anyway, maybe I am an idiot and should not be doing reviews, but I will not be dishonest and to be truthful, this movie had me hunched over gripping the arm rests.
It’s 1974 and after NASA announces the scrubbing of Apollo’s 18, 19, and 20 they secretly launch 18 in order to do some kind of secret DoD mission. The entirety of the movie is filmed on home movie super 8 and/or onboard mission recorders. Three guys are sent up with orders to set some kind of secret tracking devices up around the South Pole of the moon. The two guys in the lander land and start working. Weird crap starts happening. They find footprints that they follow back to a Russian lander, and they find the Russian Cosmonaut dead and desiccated. Rock samples keep moving around. You catch a glimpse of weird movement. Alien creature sneak around, and all hell breaks loose.
I don’t want to get to far into the story, as I don’t think a lot of people will actually want to read this review, but I will say the filming effects added a lot to the overall experience. They really made it look like some found footage. Basically everything blows up.
Anyway, the stars. Scary. Two stars. They really made everything as authentic as possible. One star. Good acting. One star. Good camera work. One star. They never really show you a good view of the creatures, and that actually adds a lot to the movie. One star. Astronauts. One star. Decent filming and CGI (although watching this film you gain an understanding of how some people can claim the whole moon landing was a farce cooked up in a film studio). One star. The story made sense, as far as such thing can go. One star. Totol: nine stars.
The black holes. Extremely predictable (when you see a Soviet lander and they determine it has oxygen and fuel it doesn’t exactly strain your brain to figure out that they will be escaping aboard it). One black hole. Sound effects in space (a pet peeve of mine). One black hole. The action was obviously at Moon’s 1/3rd Earth gravity when they were outside the lander but seemed to revert to full Earth normal whenever they were inside the lander on the moon (stuff still falls slower, guys). One black hole. The two astronauts pretty much fell into every bad horror cliche available, starting with the “we just found an abandoned moon lander (farmhouse, amusement park, hospital, campsite) exactly like ours, except the inside is covered with a lot more blood. Instead of bugging the hell out let’s look for more stuff to kill us” thing. One black hole. While the set and everything was as authentic as possible, there were a bunch of dopey technical glitches that bugged me, mostly have to do with the physics of matching orbits with no calculation done whatsoever. One black hole. One of the astronaut, with no training really and no sign of any ability to read Cyrillic, manages to figure out how to operated a Soviet space craft in about two minutes. One black hole.
I would like to mention that most of the other reviews I read had issues with the pacing and found it boring, but I actually didn’t mind. It seemed appropriate for a movie set on the moon to move at a measured pace, and I found the tension buildup to be pretty good.
So a final score of three stars. Not particularly good, but not bad either. I can see a lot of the points the other reviewers raised, but I did indeed find it scary. I’d like to see this movie do OK, but it looks like it has already tanked. Too bad. NetFlix it I guess. You shouldn’t have to wait long.
