watching movies one cup at a time

This is basically a war movie thinly disguised as a sci-fi alien flick. But despite it’s alien invasion, all it winds up being is a bunch of marines running around getting shot at and shooting stuff. There is lots of yelling, close-up camera shots, and guns as we follow the marine unit through the streets of Santa Monica. But it never delivers on anything remotely sci-fi. The enemy could have been anything. Maybe the aliens represented something else, who knows, because they really didn’t do much to explain or inform us at all about what was going on. It really was just 2 hours of marines at war, and not even an interesting take on that.

Bottom Line: Boring war movie. Skip it.

This movie is about a mysterious group of guys in hats who manipulate people according to some divine plan. Matt Damon’s character fights against this plan in order to be with Emily Blunt, whom he has been told to stay away from. Unfortunately this movie doesn’t deliver on any level. The relationship between Damon and Blunt feels very forced, and the mysterious guys in hats really don’t explain anything that is going on. It winds up being just a rather slapped together fantasy about people you never really connect with. And worst of all, it was just rather boring. I didn’t buy anything that was going on, and the movie felt paper-thin.

Bottom Line: Boring and forced, skip it.

This movie is about a ballerina in an NYC ballet company who starts to lose herself under the intense pressure she feels when she takes on the lead role in the company’s production of Swan Lake. Basically it’s two hours of Natalie Portman being stressed out. She has this terrible look on her face at all times like someone just shot her dog. Portman does a tremendous job with the ballet dancing and perfectly fills the role of lead dancer. But it is her pained expression that makes this challenging to sit through. Maybe the pressures of being the lead in the ballet make it a miserable experience as she tries to please everyone by working to achieve an unattainable perfection. Her sanity starts to unravel as the pressure increases and she has delusions of actually becoming the swan character she is portraying. Her stage-mom mother, played by Barbara Hershey, is another authority figure she needs to please but whom also has her own psychological issues that dominate her relationship with her daughter.

Director Darren Aronofsky uses a very loose, almost handheld, camera style that adds a claustrophobic feel to all the scenes. The dancing is filmed very close and immediate, adding to the feeling of tension and stress level. You don’t really get a break throughout the entire movie, especially when delusion starts overlapping with reality. Overall it was a very well done movie and the director communicates the tension and feel of the characters very well. I just don’t know if I want to sit through two hours of that much stress.

Bottom Line: Two hours of Natalie Portman stressed out, proceed with caution.

This is a true story about fighters Mickey Ward and Dickey Eckland from Lowell, Mass. Mickey is on the path to the welterweight championship while his brother Dicky is fighting drug addiction and facing up to the fact that his best days are far in the past. Their mother acts as Micky’s manager and she has all the trappings of the stage-mom persona. When her self-centered motivations get Micky in to one too many bad fights, Micky moves on and begins training with a new team that is determined to get him a championship bout.

I enjoyed the story and was very impressed with the performance by Christian Bale. He dove in to the role of Dicky with both feet and really communicated the role of the drug addict. Bale’s wild mannerisms and speech made up a perfect performance. Melissa Leo as their mom also does a tremendous job, as well as Amy Adams. They all deserve the acting awards and nominations that have been coming their way. Mark Wahlberg’s Micky is very underplayed and subdued. This may be the way the character is meant to be portrayed or it may be Wahlberg’s pretty typical acting style of the quiet tough guy. It works for Micky but he doesn’t shine next to the other compelling actors.

Bottom Line: Solid acting, very enjoyable performances.

This movie is about a family consisting of a lesbian couple and their two children and what happens when the children decide they want to find the man behind the sperm donation that helped conceive them. The film doesn’t necessarily draw attention to the lesbian couple, instead focusing more on the family unit and the stresses connected to that unit pulling apart as the children get older. I found the movie to be well done and well acted but I didn’t really feel there was enough story for me to really enjoy the film. It stayed a little too on the surface for me and I never really got much connection to the characters or the loose story. The movie just kind of happens and plods along for 2 hours. Sure there is drama and plot points, but everything feels a little muted. And maybe that’s the point, family life, no matter what the family dynamic, can be rather mundane. Even same-sex couples have the same mundane problems that straight couples do. It just didn’t make for much of a movie. Of course the acting was brilliant and I believed the characters, but in the end I just didn’t care that much about what happened to them.

Bottom Line: Worth seeing but not best picture material

This is the third film in the “Fockers” series and it really shows that they ran out of ideas after the first one. Meet The Parents had funny moments and generally struck a good balance with keeping the jokes moving and not beating them in to the ground. It wasn’t great but it was entertaining. But after 2 lifeless sequels, the jokes are stale and we’ve seen it all before. It’s gotten tedious, boring, and repetitive delivering a watered-down, bland version of the original. This is a movie that has no point and did not need to be made. It only got released to capitalize on the original’s success without any attempt at actually making a quality movie.

Bottom Line: A complete waste of time.

Tron: Legacy is the long-awaited sequel to the 1982 Tron movie starring Jeff Bridges. And like the original, Tron: Legacy is a visually stunning movie filled with a lot of stylish images inspired by computers and digital gaming. However the stories between the two movies diverge greatly. And while Tron: Legacy is a brilliant visual update on the original, the story fails to build on the original ground-breaking concepts of the digital universe and instead delivers a rather lifeless, convoluted plot largely centered on “daddy issues” and merely vague references to the world inside the computer.

Back in 1982, the internet was nowhere near it’s commercial debut and even the concept of a “personal computer” was limited to a small, but growing, minority. Tron’s vision of a physical/visual representation of programs, operating systems, video games as avatars and existing in a neon-lit universe of bits and surges was exciting and new. When South Park mocked Facebook in a recent episode, it’s no wonder they chose the world of Tron to represent the online identities created by the “users.” However, Tron: Legacy chose to completely ignore the great potential of building on that concept and pushing the notion of program and avatars from our contemporary culture in to the world of Tron. Instead they wrote a story about a completely isolated “offline” virtual universe what wasn’t connected to anything and who’s origins are never fully explained or even given much weight. Seriously, what the hell was the whole Iso storyline and why should we care?

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Danny Boyle continues to make interesting and compelling movies on a great variety of subjects. Following the award-winning success of Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle takes another radical turn in a completely different direction to tell the story of Aron Ralston, self-described adventurer who finds himself trapped in a canyon for 127 hours. The movie mostly takes place within the narrow space of the canyon and in the hands of a lesser filmmaker this film could be one long bore. But Boyle is able to turn this experience into a transcendent moment filled with beauty mixed with the claustrophobic tension. With his team of filmmakers, Boyle is able to mix in remarkable views of the canyons that were truly beautiful. You could almost imagine them as an Imax nature film. James Franco basically has to carry the entire film himself and gives a great performance, often in very intimate and up-close shots that are not pretty. The movie had an emotional weight to it that was unexpected, thanks in a large way to Franco.

Bottom Line: Compelling and well done, go see it.

There is nothing original in this movie. It’s all been done before and with better people involved. The most recent example is District 9. This movie desperately wants to be the next District 9 but it comes up way short. The acting is mediocre, the characters are pretty cliche, and the story just doesn’t connect with any real suspense or cleverness. Ultimately it just leaves us bored and waiting for something of interest to happen, but it never does. The ending was hyped as a great twist that would redeem the whole film, but even that was rather ho-hum and simply not enough. It could have been pushed more and better explained to connect with the audience. One plus I will give the filmmakers is that the movies was essentially all shot in their condo complex for a very small budget. It shows what you can do with very little.

Bottom line: Not great, wait for cable.

This is an American version of Let The Right One In, which was made in Sweden, and many people, including myself, had some concerns about how they were going to change it up for American audiences. I’m happy to say it is just as good as the original and has just the right extra touch to make it appealing to a broader audience.

The story is about a boy named Owen who is lonely and bullied, with absent parents and no real source of support except for the inner world he creates out of his room. A young girl named Abby moves in next door and it’s clear that she is unusual. They strike up an unexpected friendship and all of a sudden Owen has a connection to the outside world again. But it comes with a price. Abby too needs a connection to the outside world that she is maneuvering Owen in to. One that involves a need for blood to survive. And despite the raw horror that survival requires, Abby’s world offers Owen more than anything he may have to leave behind to be with her. There are nightmarish images in this film, and Abby is a monster, but all of that is overshadowed by the outright despair and emptiness that is somehow even more unbearable. Ultimately this is not a vampire movie, but more of a coming-of-age movie for a lost and lonely boy.

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