watching movies one cup at a time

Holy Hell, that sucked! You know, going into Transformers 2 I didn’t have very high expectations. Exploding crap, fighting robots, hot chicks, I get it. But even with low expectations this film was painful to sit through. It goes so far beyond ridiculous that I have to narrow it down to the Top 10 Reasons Transformers 2 Sucked:

10. Whirling robot chaos – when the robots fight, there is so much going on that I can’t even tell where one robot ends and the other begins. It’s just one big flurry of robot crap. I’m all for robots beating the crap out of each other, but this a mess.

9. Egypt is a stereotype from hell – This movie makes Egypt out to be every generic cliche someone who has never been there could possibly come up with. According to this movie, the entire country of Egypt is one big dessert with ancient runes all over the place, camels, and blown-out remnants of walls. The Egyptian people are just ignorant peasant in robes with chickens running around their homes in the middle of the dessert where they all apparently live. It’s ignorant and racist.

8. The “Ghetto” robot twins – Speaking of racist, what’s up with the f-ing Amos and Andy robots? They are practically in blackface doing a minstrel show. It’s just one cliche stereotype after another!

This is Denzel Washington’s fourth film with Director Tony Scott and it maintains the same intensity that Tony Scott is known for. He’s got a very stylized way of doing action films that gives it some flair, making it a touch better than the rest of the genre. And as for action movies, this movie has a lot to offer. The story follows a hostage crisis in NYC on a subway train during rush hour. Denzel Washington’s character is working that day in Central Command and gets put in to the position of hostage negotiator by John Travolta’s character. There are a few similarities to Spike Lee’s Inside Job, which also puts Denzel in a hostage negotiator role, but the emphasis here is on the action. The story isn’t weak, but the intensity is kicked up a lot by guns and claustrophobic tension.

Denzel does his usual brilliant job and John Travolta is great. It’s a popcorn flick but a quality popcorn flick. If you’re looking for something fun to pass the time, this will work.

James Cameron set a pretty high standard with Terminator 2: Judgement Day. It was a smash hit, raised the bar for action, sci-fi movies and was probably the best movie Arnold Schwarzenegger will ever be able to accomplish. But as with any big success in this genre, sequels MUST follow. Terminator 3 was okay but left you wanting more. And ultimately Terminator 4 (aka Salvation) leaves you feeling the same way. It’s not a bad movie but it’s just not a very good one either. And next to T2, it has none of the intensity, cutting edge effects, or even the humor that film was so good at. After watching Terminator 4, you feel like it’s just no big deal.

The story takes place in the future after the machines have taken over but before the events of the first Terminator take place (sending Arnie back and the character of Kyle Reese). The thing I never really understood about the whole Terminator mythology is if it’s entirely based on screwing around with history by going back and killing people who will be important later, why do the machines pick the points in time they go back to and wouldn’t they know immediately in the “new future” if the mission failed or not? Like if a Terminator goes back to kill Sarah Connor, wouldn’t they know immediately in the future if it failed or not. And if it did fail, which it did, why not just keep sending Arnie’s back in time until it was done? Or send them back to kill John Connor’s great grandfather? And they probably figured out that Kyle Reese is John Connor’s dad so why not kill his parents? And if they keep messing with the past, do the people in the future know what’s been changed? Or is it just the same old, same old to them?

There are a million questions that logic wants answers for. And the best the filmmakers can come up is “Ummm, cool robots blow stuff up good!” Which is fine if the movie is as good as T2. But T4 is not and I just wasn’t satisfied.

The acting was actually pretty good. I never liked Nick Stahl in T3. Christian Bale was a little too hard but overall it was fine. I would have liked to have seen more Helena Bonham Carter. She’s basically just a cameo. But I thought the “fake” Arnold Schwarzenegger was a brilliant move. Overall it’s a decent movie but not really worth the effort.

When they said “reboot” they weren’t kidding. This basically flips the Star Trek mythology on it’s ears and pushes it in a whole new direction. The way they do that is thanks to the old Star Trek friend – time travel.

Star Trek has always had a pretty cozy relationship with time travel. And I always appreciated the way the Next Generation handled it in particular. After the cancellation of the most recent Star Trek television series and the less than spectacular performance of the last Star Trek movie 7 years ago, many considered the franchise to be dead. The Next Generation cast wasn’t getting any younger and the Original Series cast is dying off slowly. And without a bankable new television show, where could it go? Well time travel can solve everything.

Technically this is a sequel to the last movie, Star Trek: Nemesis. But by sending some of the characters back in time, the Original Series characters are spun off into an alternate reality. They even go as far as to say that “this is a new alternate reality” rather explicitly in the film. Basically all bets are off now because this new cast is free from the past mythology, which has now been made irrelevant.

Is this a good thing? Ultimately it’s a good thing for the franchise. The new cast is good, it’s got action, it’s got humor, it’s an enjoyable movie with some style. But I can see Star Trek purists not being into this. And my personal preference was always for the Next Generation, which was already very different from the Original Series, and is very different from this cast. However, judging this separately from the rest of Star Trek, this is a very enjoyable movie. The goal here is to win over new fans and I think this Star Trek will do that. It’s a much better fit for our current culture than the previous films and much more inviting to non-Trekkers.

If you like Sci-fi, you’ll like this movie. If you are a Star Trek fan, watch this with fresh eyes. It’s a bold step and I think it pays off.

This is a comic book movie for movie fans. There is less of a concern about sticking to the history of the comic book characters than there is for making a blow-em-up action movie. So characters from the books are kind of thrown around and stuck here and there without any regard to their literary history. And that’s all fine considering this movie will make more in one weekend than all the comic books combined for one year. But as a movie it’s pure popcorn entertainment. Forget story or logic, clearly this about fights and explosions. And it does deliver that. Hugh Jackman continues to do an amazing job as Wolverine. He has really fleshed out a real character that at this point no one else could play. Danny Huston is great as Stryker and Liev Schreiber, though not an obvious choice at all for Sabretooth, pulls it off in his own way by going for more of the sinister, evil angle than the brute force of the character in the first X-Men movie. Will.I.Am however totally sucks and should stick to whatever the hell he does these days in music.

Good popcorn flick. Fans of the series should enjoy it.

This movie is clearly the bastard child of Road Warrior and Escape From New York. You could even consider this a sequel, it’s so close to the same stuff those films were made of. Just replace nuclear war and rising crime with something a little more contemporary like a deadly virus, but keep everything else pretty much the same and you got Doomsday. It’s set in the near future where a “Reaper Virus” is killing people within Scotland at a rapid pace. The government responds by walling it off and putting the whole region under quarantine. 25 years later the virus pops up in London and the government sends a team back into Scotland to find out why there are survivors in there. Did they find a cure? Well Scotland has sunk into chaos and the survivors are split into two camps. One are the city-dwelling punks that look they turned the Road Warrior movie into a religion, and the the other camp lives in an ancient castle and totally reverted to a medieval way of life. There are sword fights, cannibalism, gladiator matches, crazy tattoo chicks, and a bad-ass car chase that could have easily had Mel Gibson behind the wheel.

Overall it’s a fine movie for what it is. Fans of Road Warrior should eat it up.

Adam Sandler takes a turn toward more family fare with essentially a kid’s movie here. This is the first film produced by Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions that has received a PG rating. It’s not bad but there isn’t much too it really. And the fantasy element about the bedtime stories coming true never makes it to the land of believability. It just sort of happens and then is accepted as normal almost immediately, without any attempt at explanation or even curiosity.

I found the funniest character to actually be the unexplainably big-eyed guinea pig thrown in for comic purposes, Bugsy. He’s just the right balance between weird and adorable. More could have been done with him.

For a mild, enjoyable movie, it fits the bill. No big laughs here but a few light chuckles.

In general I am a fan of Kevin Smith movies. He’s usually good for a few good laughs and I appreciate his unique style and talent. He makes good movies that are true to his vision and they always have a lot of heart in them. Now, having said that, I do usually find his films lacking in several areas. Most often in the character development and in the very lengthy stretches of dialogue some of his characters spew out that can sound forced and unnatural. But that may just be a fault of the actors too. He’s cast a lot of so-so actors in the past that couldn’t really deliver the words effectively. The scenes that work best are always the ones with the best actors in them because you need someone with some skill to make the speeches flow naturally.

Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks do a great job as Zack and Miri in this movie. All their scenes feel natural and I believe these characters. Kevin Smith has said that he really wanted Rosario Dawson in the role of Miri but I think that would have been a mistake. Elizabeth Banks is perfect as the flawed Miri. She’s very pretty but she’s not perfect and has kind of a downtrodden edge to her that is a perfect match to Seth Rogen. Rosario Dawson is too much “the hot chick” and would not have been anywhere near as believable. I don’t see her and Seth Rogen together. I very much see Elizabeth Banks and Seth Rogen together, but not in a very overt way, which is perfect for the movie.

The reason why I didn’t give this film a higher coffee cup count is because I didn’t buy the story. The whole porno idea seemed rather half-baked and it just never connected for me. Plus it did not pay off at all by the end of the movie. It basically got dumped and forgotten about so the love story could take center stage. That just didn’t work for me.

One highlight though was the one scene with Justin Long. His scene at the high school reunion with Brandon Routh was the funniest thing in the whole movie and I would have much rather kept them around the whole time.

See the movie, support Kevin Smith, but it’s not perfect.

There is a new trend cropping up with 3D movies becoming more and more frequent. And this isn’t the crappy blue and red 3D your parents had to deal with, this is very intense and in your face 3D like you’d expect to see in a theme park in Florida. Except now it’s everywhere and more and more films are jumping on the bandwagon. I haven’t seen too many yet but this Monsters Vs. Aliens was very effective at using the 3D as part of the film and not just as a gimmicky trick. It’s huge scale environments and large-scale action scenes were very effectively done using the depth the 3D world allowed.

The story in this film is pretty simple and centers on the recently mutated “Ginormica” character. There really aren’t that many “monsters” here and only one alien. I would have liked to have seen more variety but it’s a good start to what might potentially be a series of films. And while the plot of the film didn’t have a lot of depth to it, it was more than enjoyable for the younger audience without relying on the more gross-out humor of Shrek. Like Shrek, this is a Dreamworks film and Pixar still has the high bar for it’s storytelling. But it did succeed in creating characters that the audience can root for and the movie does wrap up it’s story very well.

Overall it was enjoyable if not super-deep or having a lot of variety. Definitely worth seeing in the 3D theater before it hits DVD.

Nicolas Cage makes a lot of movies where he looks very concerned all the time. In Knowing he’s very concerned because his son has come across a series of numbers that accurately predict major disasters. It’s a leap of faith how this all comes together but it’s believable enough. What to do about it or how this affects anything are kind of lightly touched on but ultimately there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of rhyme or reason to what’s going on here. The ending tries to tie it all together but even that’s kind of a stretch and just seems like an easy way out.

Overall there is not much to this movie. It’s not a bad way to pass some time but don’t go looking for anything too meaningful here.