watching movies one cup at a time

Really profound statements like “God just got sick of the bullshi*t” set the tone for this movie right away, and the level of ridiculousness remains high throughout the movie. The basic plot is God is going to wipe out humanity but a rogue angel comes down to stop it by protecting a newborn baby destined to redeem humanity… or something. It’s never really made clear exactly what’s going on or why anything is happening. The angel Michael just shows up at this desert diner, scowls the entire time, barely speaks yet convinces the people at the diner that they need to shoot every person that comes near the place because they are possessed by angels and will kill everyone. Whatever you say, mysterious stranger. Nevermind the fact that they are supposedly fighting against GOD. Somehow a handful of machine guns in a diner can withstand the will of God, good to know. And speaking of machine guns, pretty much any time there isn’t a bunch of guns being fires, the movie grinds to a complete halt with incredibly boring dialogue between 2-dimensional characters played by mediocre actors. Paul Bettany and Dennis Quaid do their best to break out of the extremely limited room they are given but ultimately they are forced in to a one-note performance just like everyone else in the movie.

Bottom Line: The movie is boring, the plot is ridiculous, and nothing makes a lick of sense. Skip it.

I love vampire movies, I have seen most of them. It’s been a bit overdone lately with television shows and films, the culture is getting a bit weary of it all. At this point it can be argued that vampires have been done to death, in just about any way you can think of. Daybreakers attempt at a fresh take on the subject is to transform the entire world into a society where vampires are now the overwhelming majority on the planet with humans being hunted down and harvested for their blood. The central conflict to the movie is that the vamps are running out of human blood and facing a starvation-induced mutation that essentially turns them in to the more monstrous end of the vampire legacy.

It’s a great idea and it did catch my attention. And while the movie does a good job of world-building, I wish they would have explored it more. Instead, we get glimpses but too soon we are thrust into a car-chase, manhunt scenario that shifts the focus away from vamp society on to human “rebels” perpetually on the run. The idea of our society shifted to a vampire world is much more fascinating to me than just another chase-down of fugitives. I want more vampire world twists on our own culture. I want more of our culture reflected through the eternal night and pale, blue of the vampire world. That is what is different and interesting than the other vampire sagas out there. Turning it into “humans on the run” just feels tired.

Most of the plot devices in the movie are done very simplistically and watered-down. This starts with a good idea that could have been so much better but then dumbs it down for the popcorn crowd. It will make a good cable movie, wait for it.

Pixar is really good as delivering a quality story along with it’s top-notch animation. It never fails to connect with it’s audience and use computer-animation as an artistic storytelling tool instead of a flashy gimmick. Up continues in that tradition and it is a quality movie. However, this film feels the least “fun” out of all the previous films. Overall it’s kind of a downer and not really something I would want to take a kid to. And the story itself just lacks a lot of the punch and cleverness of their earlier films. I’m not saying every Pixar film should be Finding Nemo or Toy Story, but these films are marketed to kids. And there just isn’t a lot here for kids to feel good about or relate to. Plus the entire first part of the film leading up to the main story of the floating house is a big bummer. It was a really gloomy way to start out and it really didn’t get much better until the very end.

Nevertheless, the overall movie maintained Pixar’s high standards. And I did appreciate the not-so-subtle message of our “baggage” weighing us down and keeping us from moving on and living in the present. Up is definitely worth seeing and has a lot of heart, but I would not put it up in the top grouping of Pixar films.

Okay, what the hell was this movie even about? There were some doll-things numbered 1-9, the world is blown up or something, robots are evil, the dolls have green pieces of some guy’s soul in them – huh? The trailers for this film are full of great images that appeal to my steampunk/distressed aesthetic with it’s broken doll heads mixed with robotic pseudo-insect looking creatures. But this movie is all style and no story. There is a very, very vague backstory about a war and humanity getting wiped out but why these living doll things were created and what the hell they are supposed to be doing is a complete mystery to me and after a while I just didn’t care anymore. This is why Pixar succeeds where so many other animation films fail. Pixar writes a compelling story to drive the animation, not the other way around. The story has to come first or else it’s all just pretty pictures. And unfortunately, despite it’s awesome look and occasionally clever visuals, 9 is precisely that. Plus it’s just plain boring and gloomy. Not worth the time.

This is the fourth major movie from Mike Judge, the creator of King of the Hill and Beavis & Butthead, and it is definitely the most boring and unfunny. Judge hit a high point with his second film, Office Space, that he hasn’t been able to match since. While that movie has gathered a strong cult following and continues to be quoted 10 years later, his latest film just fails to connect. I was even a fan of his third film, Idiocracy, with it’s clever premise and funny send-up of trash culture elevated to ruling status. But Extract lacks all the cleverness of his previous films and feels like a half-baked collection of unfunny, unconnected ideas that don’t really go anywhere or give us any reason to get interested in the story. It’s just very flat and most of the cast feels as though they are sleepwalking through it. Don’t bother.

(500) Days of Summer is a story about a guy named Tom falling in love with a girl named Summer and the entire course of their relationship over a year and a half. But what makes it an interesting and engaging story is a combination of the original way the story unfolds combined with empathetic characters that feel very genuine. This is a love story I can see happening around me in real life. It’s not a fantasy, a happily-ever-after, or overly-dramatic. In fact it’s pretty simple and uncomplicated, as life often can be. And it’s uncomplicated-ness is it’s charm.

The clever story technique employed here involves taking each day of their relationship and jumping around the numbered days 1-500 to piece together how their relationship began, unfolded, and eventually fell apart. The natural highs and lows, the awkward moments, the painful conflicts, the expectations and realities. There is a brilliant sequence where Tom, riding high on a positive post-breakup experience with Summer, gets invited to her place for a roof-top party and we are shown how his high-hopes for the evening play out next to the all too crushing reality. It’s a scene most people can relate to and reinforces the sense in the film that life is rarely one beautiful scene after another. It’s messy, unplanned, and unpredictable, but that is also it’s source of hope. An unexpected turn, a chance encounter, a moment of intimacy can come seemingly out-of-the-blue and change our entire perspective.

The acting is great here as well. I’m a big Joseph Gordon-Levitt fan and he does his usual brilliant job here. There is a classic dance sequence in the middle of the film that beautifully articulates the feeling of the euphoria the character has, and JGL pulls it off effortlessly. Zoey Deschanel is a perfect fit for her character, however, I often feel like she is just playing herself. I suspect that Summer is really just Zoey with scripted dialogue. Nevertheless, I believe these characters and I believe this relationship. These feel like real people, not two-dimensional caricatures.

(500) Days of Summer is warm, endearing and clever film that rises above a lot of other “relationshop” flicks, even the cool, hipster indie ones. I enjoyed it from beginning to end. Go see it.

James Cameron set out to make a groundbreaking film that not only raised the bar for 3D filmmaking, but also married the technological breakthroughs to a rich and detailed world inhabited by characters and creatures that drove a great story. So often story and character development get sacrificed in the name awe-inspiring special effects. But Cameron has spent such a great amount of time filling in the details of this new world that I believed in the reality he created and could easily connect with the characters it spawned. This is a world that doesn’t exist but watching it I believed every moment. And the 3D effects were nothing short of brilliant. Pandora felt alive and amazing.

The film is set about 150 years in the future where a company has set up a mining operation on an alien planet named Pandora to get a rich element that will feed an energy-starved earth. The problem for the company is that Pandora has a rich and complex ecosystem that includes an indigenous population called the Na’vi. These people live in harmony with their environment as each plant and animal is connected and sustained by the balance maintained by Pandora. The human scientists discover that each tree is in fact literally connected to every other tree and that the planet functions like a living organism. The company disregards this in the name of obtaining their precious minerals and proceeds to destroy anything and everything getting in it’s way. Special avatars are created with organically grown Na’vi bodies that are operated through a mental connection to a human. Essentially the human “drives” the avatar like a possessed puppet, each avatar specifically grown for a specific human. Initially the avatars are used to try and bring about the cooperation of the Na’vi and put them at ease with the company. But due to the nature of the relationship between the Na’vi and Pandora, there is little the humans can offer besides being an intrusion and invasion. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve already said in my review of the first Twilight movie that I am way more in to vampire movies than I am in to sappy, teenage romance movies. And these are the lamest vampires ever. The new sequel doesn’t change any of that and in fact is WAY more sappy and melodramatic than the first one. New Moon is a way over-the-top romance novel come to life as pouting, angsty teenagers say god awful dialogue about being together forever, being hurt, never leaving you, and then leaving you. It’s SO cliche and SO ridiculous I wonder how anyone can actually buy in to it. Are people that lonely and desperate that they think this qualifies as a movie they can actually sit through without completely gagging?

And oh my god, could Kristen Stewart possibly be any more whiny and miserable? Constant drama with her. No wonder her “normal friends” at the high school got sick of her. She spends the entire movie looking awkward and traumatized, occasionally screaming or doing something stupid like fall off a motorcycle because she “can’t live without Edward.” It get’s really old, really fast.

The one thing I did enjoy in this movie were the Volturi, and specifically Michael Sheen as Aro. Michael Sheen has already done some amazing work in Frost/Nixon, The Queen, The Deal and the Underworld Trilogy. And every time his vampire character is on screen it lights up the scene and reminds you what a real actor can do, not just some pouty teenager with too much makeup and a staring problem. I would have much prefered an entire movie just on him and the rest of the Volturi. They make the Cullen tribe look like the Brady Bunch.

But that’s the main problem with this movie. It’s all about pouty teenage romance novel crap and barely about vampires at all. I’m not a teenage girl, I’m not a lonely housewife, I don’t watch soap operas, I don’t read romance novels. This movie is clearly not for me. But on top of that it’s just a really bad movie, overly dramatic and ultimately boring.

Two words: Disaster Porn. If you saw the trailers for this movie, you pretty much saw the whole thing. Stuff falls apart, blows up, and chases John Cusack and his kids. Done. Is there anything in the movie that wasn’t in the trailer? A few boring scenes with Oliver Platt and Chiwetel Ejiofor yelling about survival and government or something. Yawn. Basically any time there isn’t something blowing up or crashing, this movie is pretty boring. And you saw all the cool crashy stuff in the trailer already! So don’t bother. This movie is going to make it to basic cable in about a year and get replayed about about a million times. Just wait until then. I’ve seen Roland Emmerich’s other disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow about 50 times on FX, TBS and Spike. 2012 will follow in the fine tradition soon enough.

This is an interesting sci-fi movie set on a massive ship that has left Earth with the last remaining survivors from Earth. They are headed to an Earth-like planet far away but somewhere along the way something has gone wrong. 2 crew members woke up from hypersleep to find the ship is derelict and the crew has disappeared. Slowly they find out the truth and discover many of the ship’s survivors have mutated into monsters or have been killed by the cannibalistic creatures. It’s a dark and claustrophobic movie filled that does a pretty good job of keeping the suspense going throughout. The ending is very satisfying and overall it’s a good schi-fi flick. However it’s not great and I felt they could have pushed it a little further.