watching movies one cup at a time

This movie starts out with a very interesting sci-fi concept. It is set in a presumably future or alternate society where the currency is no longer money, it is time. You have a time keeper embedded in your arm and it displays how many years, days, hours, minutes you have left to live. The rich can afford to live for centuries while the poor live literally day to day. This process kicks in at 25 or something so everyone’s appearance is frozen while they buy and sell everything with the time they have embedded in their arm. Justin Timberlake starts out on the poor end of society but manages to gain a large amount of time from a rich citizen who no longer wants to be immortal.

The problem with this movie, as with many clever idea sci-fi films, is that it just never really finds a good use for it’s clever idea. Timberlake goes to the rich part of the city/state/country (we never really know) and gets in trouble trying to fit in with the upper crust. Why he’s in trouble and proceeds to get chased around for the next hour is never really clear, some vague notion that poor have to remain poor and so he’s breaking some unwritten rule. So we have to endure another pointless runaround chase scene (see The Adjustment Bureau) as this movie tries to fill up it’s time with something interesting. From there it devolves in to a simplistic and unbelievable Robin Hood scenario that feels very forced. By the time the movie ends, the two main characters are about to break in to a time bank that’s the size of a mountain and they are armed with two handguns and little else. It’s like they filmmakers just gave up and wanted it over as soon as possible.

The acting is pretty bland. I like Justin Timberlake but he’s pretty one-note in this movie, and the always awesome Cillian Murphy looks like he’s just there to collect a check. Everyone else just doesn’t have much to say or do.

Bottom Line: Rather boring and empty.

This is a movie that will make you never want to touch anything with your bare hands ever again. A mutated flu virus epidemic breaks out after Gwenyth Paltrow takes a business trip to Asia. The movie follows several parallel stories that are dealing with the crisis, and it treats the epidemic in a very real way. The characters are very relatable and so are the situations. What makes this movie so scary is how real it feels and how easily we can envision this happening.

The acting is very subdued from a very large ensemble. Though there are stressful scenes, I never felt like anyone went over the top. It never gets cartoonish. Director Steven Soderberg also does a very good job of keeping the action believable and on the ground. A warning though, if you are any kind of germaphobe, you will not be able to sit thought this movie, or probably sleep ever again.

Bottom Line: Enjoyable, well-acted, and a very real fear.

Hugo is an amazingly beautiful film from Martin Scorsese that is truly a love letter to movies. It’s about a boy named Hugo living within the systems of clocks in the main train station in Paris. Hugo lost his family and lives alone, working on a animatronic figure that his father found in a museum. He gets to know a toy seller in the train station and uncovers the toy seller’s link to a rich history of creative film making during the silent era. There are many scenes of silent films being made with wonder and excitement that is quite contagious.

Everything about this movie is a lavish and detailed sensual experience that is creatively enhanced by Scorsese’s first use of 3D film making. The 3D done exceptionally well in this case and adds a great deal to the overall story. I enjoyed the sweeping camera movements through the train station crowds as well as an exciting train crash and the fluid movements through the clock towers. It really brought the film alive and it’s unfortunate that the 3D aspect of the movie will get lost on the TV-viewing audience. It’s no wonder the film won so many artistic awards.

Bottom Line: A delightful and awe-inspiring film from an amazing director.

The Artist is a very enjoyable movie done in the style of silent films from the ’20s and ’30s. It’s main character is George Valentin who is at the top of his career while silent movies are big hits, but slowly sees his star fade as talkies take over. His downfall is mirrored by the rise of Peppy Miller who makes it big in talking films. It’s presented in black and white with virtually no dialogue, and while many people are initially put off by that, I found it to be an interesting experience as well as a very original film. It could have been gimmicky and cliche but there is a lot of style and substance here that feels genuine and full of life. The movie’s theme just wouldn’t have worked if the story wasn’t done so well. The acting is exceptional. Jean Dujardin’s George Valentin carries the movie and matches the style of the silent era perfectly. It’s exaggerated but it works.

Bottom Line: Very stylized movie that works.

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.