watching movies one cup at a time

The commercials for this movie really hyped up the twist ending. Unfortunately when I went to see the movie I figured out the twist within the first 20 minutes and was hoping I was wrong the whole rest of the movie. But I wasn’t. It’s not that it’s that predictable, they just didn’t do a great job of hiding it. If you watch movies and know the cues and hints, it’s not hard at all. So the ending wound up being a let down when it became clear they weren’t going to flip it on me like I was hoping they would. I love seeing movies where I think I got it figured out but I was completely wrong. This is not one of them.

Having said that, this is a quality movie. Martin Scorsese doesn’t make bad movies. But this one falls in to the category of him doing something more for fun than pushing any boundaries, much like when he did Cape Fear with his other favorite actor, Robert DeNiro. It’s a classic Hitchcock homage, full of shadowy institutions and gritty, decayed scenery on a cold and miserable island. Toward the end it moves in to traumatic and heartbreaking territory as Leonardo Dicaprio’s character unravels and comes to grips with the horrors he’s experienced in his life. The flashbacks to when he was in WWII and was part of liberating Dachau are particularly gruesome and haunting. But overall it’s just a noir genre picture that happens to be done by one of the best directors out there. A pleasure to watch but ultimately not entirely satisfying.

Bottom Line: Good movie but not as clever as it could have been.

Family movie. Plain and simple. No great aspirations here, just some harmless fun. People often talk about Cuba Gooding Jr.’s descent into movie mush after his Oscar win (Daddy Day Camp, Boat Trip, etc.) but he does manage a good role in a good movie. And even tho this isn’t American Gangster or As Good As It Gets (yes, he’s in both), he’s playing the lead, his character is a successful, decent guy, and the movie is light-hearted fun. I see no harm done. He never slips into any stereotypes or gets put in any overly-humiliating situations. It’s mostly just the usual “fish-out-of-water” jokes.

The movie also features one of the last performances by James Coburn before he died. And he is really good in this as usual, a terrific presence on screen and fun to watch. Someone who I was rather surprised to see was Sisqo. Remember him? He sure dropped off the face of the earth. I’m guessing some manager/agent just stuck him in here to get his “movie career” going. I don’t really buy it that he plays a dentist, but no big deal. I’ll live. Read the rest of this entry »

Dude… WTF? Seriously… WTF? This is the long-awaited follow-up to the cult hit Donnie Darko from writer and director Richard Kelly. And I get the impression he is going for the “David Lynch of the 21st Century” title for crazy-ass movies. In fact I think Mullholland Drive might have made MORE sense than this film if you can believe that.

To say this movie didn’t make any sense would be like saying the ocean is wet. I’m all for sophisticated movies that make you think, but I don’t want a movie that I have to think THAT hard about. And one gets the impression that there isn’t much point to “figuring it out” anyway. Who cares? I’ve read this is a retelling of the Book of Revelations, but again, so what? It’s still very random, very all over the place, and the character relationships are very confused. Every one of the characters seems to be on the good guys team AND the bad guys team at the same time. There are so many backstabbing plots going on that you need a team of detectives to keep it sorted. Read the rest of this entry »

This movie is supposed to be a live action/fantasy film version of the classic ’60s cartoon show Speed Racer. Through endless reruns and cult following, an interest in Speed Racer has lasted over several generations of kids. This film however little to nothing to do with the original cartoon. Sure, there is a character named Speed Racer who drives the Mach 5, but the similarities end there.

The film has a very whacked-out, over saturated vibe to everything. The colors are beyond bright and also clearly fake. The whole movie feels like one big fake plastic fruit tree. It relies so heavily on CGI one wonders why they didn’t just make it 100% CGI instead of sticking out-of-place real people into the fake environments.

Story is weak, characters are weak leading to some unimpressive performances from otherwise great actors, and the whole thing is just drowned out with visual over-stimulation.

Bottom Line: Don’t bother.

For some reason my 5 year old daughter really really likes this movie. And before you say “you let your 5 year old watch Spice World?” let me just say that the movie is harmless. Love them or hate them, the Spice Girls were never raunchy or inappropriate for kids. They are very cartoon-like and the movie is a bit of a farce. It’s a silly little movie that exists solely to cash-in on the Spice mania that was happening over 10 years ago. it’s definitely done just for laughs. Interestingly enough it has a lot of cameos from British television comedians like Hugh Laurie, Barry Humphries, and Jennifer Saunders. There is a lot of self-parody in the film as well. the Spice Girls at that time did not take themselves so seriously. It was all about fun and music. So while I wouldn’t say this is necessarily a kids movie, it’s certainly safe for kids. And for what it is, it’s really not bad.

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, as well as the otherwise brilliant Bryce Dallas Howard, who is also barely in the movie. But I thought the “fake” Arnold Schwarzenegger was a brilliant move. However, watching Sam Worthington was like watching a mannequin talk. How does this guy keep getting in these blockbusters? He’s such a blank actor and instantly forgettable. I’m still not clear what the hell he was or why he did what he did. More Bale, less Worthington. In fact just delete the character altogether and get to the action.

Bottom Line: A decent movie but not really worth the effort.

Richard Kelly continues in his filmmaking attempt to be the next David Lynch of weird narrative movies, though this one is a lot less crazy than his last movie, Southland Tales. But while I found the movie to be interesting and done well, ultimately the story seemed a little light and grasping.

The premise of the story is that at a time of financial crisis for a married couple in the ’70s, a strange and disfigured man appears with a promise that if they push a button on a particular box, they will get one million dollars in cash. However, the catch is that someone they do not know will die if they push the button. This causes a lot of moral back-and-forth with the couple but ultimately they push the button. What happens next is kind of an odd mish-mash of government conspiracy mixed with aliens mixed with spiritual allegories.

Ultimately though the “great conspiracy” part of the movie was slow to develop and never really paid off in the end. While the rather simplistic and cliche’d message of “nothing comes for free” and “man’s greed will be his downfall” just seemed like an obvious and easy way out. By the end of the movie I didn’t really feel satisfied that this story really pushed any boundaries or tried hard enough to be clever in it’s agenda. It tries to build up the hype that there is a larger puzzle to be solved, but ultimately it just feels like lazy storytelling with a rather mundane set of circumstances.

Bottom line: Not bad but not as good as it could have been.

Yawn. Boring. Honestly the best thing about the first Narnia movie was Tilda Swinton as the Witch. She has a cameo in this movie but it’s all too brief. The 4 british kids are lackluster, Prince Caspian is rather cliche, and the whole Narnia battle feels a bit warmed over from The Lord Of The Rings. And none of it is very compelling. Then throw on top of that the whole “Aslan saves the day” at the last minute and it just feels really hacked together and just too easy. It isn’t clear WHY Aslan has been gone for so long or why he all-of-a-sudden comes back to fix everything. Maybe it’s more clear in the book, but the movie sacrifices details for action sequences. And not very exciting ones either.

This is another one of those “virus-turns-people-psycho” movies kind of like 28 Days Later or I Am Legend mixed with Outbreak. But what sets this one apart is the actions of the government/military in dealing with the situation. Instead of the drama of “We have to find a cure and save these people!” the faceless and almost anonymous government immediately jumps to extermination. This greatly heightens the tension adds to the terror the townspeople face as even the ones who are so-called uninfected are brutally killed in an unsympathetic and chilling way. You only once see any of the government officials beyond facemasks and haz-mat suits, and only once is a soldier shown with his mask off. It makes the military/government scarier than the infected townspeople, right up to the end when they launch what should be a last resort but one gets the feeling they were going to do it all along anyway.

Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell are great in this too. Timothy Olyphant is one of my favorite actors out there today and he can play a brilliant good guy, brilliant bad guy, and everything in between. He is the calm center in the swirl of chaos.

The movie is not without it’s faults and in general is just another genre film. But there are some good scrares and heavy tension. It’s worth seeing.

This film is the 4th version of the Invasion of The Body Snatchers that’s been released. Originally the first film released in the 50′s was a rather obvious “red scare” flick barely hiding it’s metaphor of alien clones as evil commies coming and brainwashing freedom-loving Americans. However now that the “red menace” is a forgotten bedtime story, what do the aliens represent this time?

There are some huge plot differences in this version. The main one being that the humans are no longer replaced by alien clones. In the original, there would be a pod-like thing that would suck all your mojo from you while you slept and then spit out a perfectly identical clone. In the new version tho the alien takeover is more like a virus that gets in your system and kind of reprograms you. But it can be cured, whereas in all the previous flicks once they got you, it was over. You were dead and Mr. Pod Clone was the new you. Which is how this movie scored a happy ending while the other ones kind of ended rather ominously. Does this help or hurt the movie? Well it’s not as scary if you can “cure” an alien invasion. It was much more frightening when they were just straight up killing people and replacing them with “pod people.” Read the rest of this entry »