watching movies one cup at a time

Tina Fey is awesome. She may not be the best actress in the universe but what she is capable of, she does extremely well. Baby Mama is the story of Fey’s character, Kate, who decides that after years of being a career-centered woman she now wants to make room for a family. Unfortunately she finds many road blocks in making that happen and decides to go the surrogate route. Amy Poehler becomes the surrogate and eventually winds up living with Kate. From there we get a lot of “The Odd Couple” type of jokes but it never gets stupid or overly-cliche. And eventually both characters make changes for the better.

It is an interesting view of contemporary family life. The nuclear family has eroded to the point of extinction as modern life keeps changing and more possibilities become available to people. And in the end, as long as there is a loving, secure environment, it shouldn’t matter if a family has 2 moms, 2 dads, just 1 parent or any combination. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are given some chances to stretch and show some real emotion and I believed it. They pulled it off. Read the rest of this entry »

Nicolas Cage makes about 3 or 4 mediocre movies a year. I guess it pays the bills. Every once in a while he does an exceptional performance that justifies why he got an Oscar all those years ago. However, this film is not one of those exceptions. Now having said that, it’s really not that bad. I kind of enjoyed this movie.

Cage plays an assassin-for-hire named Joe. He is on one last job in Bangkok and things don’t go as planned. But Cage’s role doesn’t slip into a two-dimensional one-note character. It could very easily but he gives it some edge, some depth. Not a lot, but just enough to make you pay attention. This isn’t Shakespeare and most likely this movie will be forgotten, but for what it is, it’s pretty decent.

This movie was quite a phenomenon when it came out in 1989. I remember actually waiting in a line that stretched down the block on opening day. People ate it up. The timing was just right for this movie and Tim Burton did a great job of capturing a dark, brooding Batman that had become popular largely due to Frank Miller’s milestone graphic novel, The Dark Knight Returns.

This movie kicked off a string of big budget hero movies that hadn’t been seen since Superman IV stank up the theaters. But with each film you got the sense they were trying to outdo the previous one by getting more “big stars” and more characters crammed in. Until you had the unholy Batman and Robin piece of garbage with 3 villians, 3 heros, Arnold freakin’ Schwarzeneger… too much. But back when this was the only kid on the block, it was impressive. Read the rest of this entry »

Holy Bats**t, Batman! This movie SUCKED! It sucked so fiercely there is a video montage on YouTube of just the sucky parts strung together (shown below in this post). Though one could argue the entire film itself is just one big sucky part. By far the worst Batman film ever, where do we even start with the crimes committed by this movie?

First of all, Joel Schumacher needs to be beaten with a bat-stick for the two films he helmed. Tim Burton injected a lot of style into the first two and the decision to go in such a radically different direction for the next two was a huge miscalculation by Warner Bros., who appeared to be under the assumption people loved the frickin’ craptastic television show more than the actual comic book that the hero is based on. Read the rest of this entry »

It is generally acknowledged that the Batman film franchise went down in flames with the campy, horrible Batman and Robin film from 1997. Nevertheless, Batman’s power as a recognizable icon and marketable hero is still irresistible for film studios, especially in the wake of the gazillion-dollar-making Spider-man movies. So it is not surprising that a new Batman movie would get made, but clearly a new direction had to be taken.

First a little back story. Frank Miller is a legend in the comic industry. The writer and artist has released several groundbreaking and masterful graphic novels and series over the past 30 years, including some fantastic Batman stories. The most famous one is The Dark Night Returns which inspired some of the style used in the first Tim Burton Batman movie and is considered a landmark in the Batman canon. It could be argued that the popularity of The Dark Night Returns contributed significantly to the first Batman movie getting made at all. There is another great Frank Miller comic book mini-series called Batman: Year One. In that series, Miller fleshes out how Batman got started and the rocky road he took to perfect his technique. It is set against a corrupt and desperate Gotham City and the series reads like a noir detective story. Batman Begins doesn’t tell the same story as Year One. But clearly there is a connection and the idea was sparked in those pages. Read the rest of this entry »

Since The Dark Knight opens today, they are playing a lot of the previous Batman movies on cable. Batman Forever was included and I’d forgotten how stupid it was. Way stupid. It’s the second worst Batman movie after the criminally terrible Batman & Robin. Val Kilmer is a terrible Bruce Wayne/Batman, just stiff as a board and looking bored the entire time. Nicole Kidman is a disposable vamp who is just filling in the cliche, must-have love interest role. Tommy Lee Jones is over-the-top in a bad way and just annoying, a total waste of his talents. And Jim Carrey… holy crap he needs to be shot! Over-the-top doesn’t even cover it. He blew the top off, ate it, vomitted it up, and blew it off again. And it’s all 100% stupid.

Everyone always talks about the movie Breakin’. And I think Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo not only goes down as the stupidest sequel title, it is also the most played-out sequel joke of all time. I’ve got nothing against Breakin’. It was a decent movie. But Beat Street was the S**T. These 2 movies came out within a month of eachother at a time when breakdancing was huge and, along with hip-hop, it was making it’s way into mainstream culture. Breakin’ pretty much stole all the attention. But while Breakin’ was all L.A. and sunny, Beat Street was The Bronx in the winter. It was raw and it was real. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

A lot has been said about this movie’s use of CGI. It was made by the same people that created the Polar Express. It uses motion capture technology to digitally record an actor’s real, physical performance, and then interpret that into a computer to guide a computer generated character. So in that sense it greatly differs from films like Shrek and the Pixar films. It is much more direct attempt to mimic a “real life” depiction through computer generated animation. The people are meant to look like real people, etc. As opposed to the more “cartooney” CGI movies put out by other studios. Does it succeed? Do the digital characters look like real people? Well, it’s getting close. Read the rest of this entry »

Bruno is the next movie from Sacha Baron Cohen, the same performer that brought us Borat. Like Borat, Brüno is basically a series of outrageous situations where his character interacts with an unsuspecting public to illicit a reaction and hopefully cause a scene. This time instead of a foreign journalist, it’s a gay fashion “expert” let loose on models, hunters, soldiers, swingers, Hollywood, and heterosexuals in general. This is definitely low brow, often gross humor. But I have to admit I laughed out loud at least 3 times. He just has a way of making these ridiculous situations humorous. It’s just so crazy you have to laugh and laugh at the poor people caught in the middle trying to make sense of it. It’s crazy and crude, but it definitely has it’s moments where it connects. If you laughed at Borat, you will laugh at this.