watching movies one cup at a time

I’ll warn you up front that there are “spoilers” in this review since people are making a big deal about the ending. If you haven’t seen it and don’t want to know the ending, skip this review until later.

I read “The Mist” when I was in high school and I have always really liked it. I had mixed feelings about a movie version but in general I was pretty excited to see it. We all know how mixed Stephen King movies can be. But one of Frank Darabont’s other Stephen King movies, The Shawshank Redemption, is absolutely brilliant. So the odds were in favor of this one turning out better than most.

The story is basically a monster movie/disaster flick. A thick mist descends on a town and it’s filled with horrible creatures possibly from another dimension. A group of survivors are holed up in a supermarket but things quickly unravel and between gruesome monster attacks and panic-driven mob insanity, all seems pretty hopeless. Read the rest of this entry »

Boring. looks nice and all, but just plain boring. Not a whole hell of a lot happens and who really cares what does happen. The characters are flat, the acting is weak, and the direction is just lethargic. This is comic book legend Frank Miller’s first film directed solely by him (he got a co-directing credit for Sin City) and one gets the sense that after Sin City he said to himslef “Hey, I could do this directing thing no problem.” Well there is a problem. What works in comic books is very hard to translate into movies. Very well experienced directors rarely pull it off, and Frank is not an experienced director by any stretch. It just all feels so bland and pointless, more impressive as still camera shots than moving action. Yawn.

Eva Mendes is one of the lead actresses in this film and she is a TERRIBLE actress. She really sucks the life out of every scene she’s in. Scarlett Johanassen is a real dead fish on screen as well. Samuel L. Jackson is a larger-than-life cartoony villain and he does that well. And Gabriel Macht as the Spirit does a good job as well. But too much bad acting and a very weak story leaves this shiny piece of jewelry not shiny enough to make it worth the trip.

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.

This is a kid’s flick about the Loch Ness monster, except in this movie he’s not a monster. He’s a lovable, misunderstood little scamp that devours lots of food and is best friend’s with a young boy who finds his egg. Too cute for you? Well there is that whole WWII thing going on at the same time, which the kid’s father has already died in. And the intrusive soldiers shacked up at the family’s home, adding a lot of tension and generally shooting at whatever comes in their path. But in general it’s a nice enough story that kids probably around 7 or 8 will enjoy best. There is some kid style action but not enough to be frightening. And of course there is a happy ending, which I think is a must in a kid’s flick. Nothing very challenging here but like I said, it’s nice. And sometimes that’s just good enough.

John Carpenter’s attempt at political commentary is pretty ham-fisted. Not going for subtlety, he creates a world where everything is going to hell fast and weird skinless aliens are the cause. And they just happen to be brainwashing all of us through sublimal messages behind everything. Messages like “Obey” “Submit” and “Marry and procreate.” And with “Rowdy” Roddy Piper in the lead role, you know this is going to be more like Die Hard than All The President’s Men. For what it is, it’s not bad. It does provide a way to criticize Ronald Reagan’s Yuppie Utopia of the ’80s and feed into a million conspiracy theories about how this government is controlling us. Aliens? More like the ruling class. I think it’s a little optimistic to pin this on aliens and not the evil nature of men. They don’t need an alien to dupe them into manipulating the masses. But it’s a simple, kinda fun movie. And since we are being manipulated anyway, anyone drawing attention to it is a good thing.

Pixar is really good as delivering a quality story along with it’s top-notch animation. It never fails to connect with it’s audience and use computer-animation as an artistic storytelling tool instead of a flashy gimmick. Up continues in that tradition and it is a quality movie. However, this film feels the least “fun” out of all the previous films. Overall it’s kind of a downer and not really something I would want to take a kid to. And the story itself just lacks a lot of the punch and cleverness of their earlier films. I’m not saying every Pixar film should be Finding Nemo or Toy Story, but these films are marketed to kids. And there just isn’t a lot here for kids to feel good about or relate to. Plus the entire first part of the film leading up to the main story of the floating house is a big bummer. It was a really gloomy way to start out and it really didn’t get much better until the very end.

Nevertheless, the overall movie maintained Pixar’s high standards. And I did appreciate the not-so-subtle message of our “baggage” weighing us down and keeping us from moving on and living in the present. Up is definitely worth seeing and has a lot of heart, but I would not put it up in the top grouping of Pixar films.

Creepy. What’s up with David Cronenberg? He’s like obsessed with creepy flesh movies where people are puling themselves apart. Videodrome is a tv show that sends out a signal that makes you hallucinate and then lets people control you. James Woods plays a small-time TV network buyer always on the look out for “cutting edge” programs. He comes across videodrome and gets sucked into a world of S&M, sex, violence, and twisted hallucinations. Debbie Harry plays a sort of muse to the videodrome and you never really know if she is real or a hallucination in Wood’s mind. They get freaky, video tapes turn into breathing flesh, tvs come alive and get sexually turned on, and the line between video and reality disappears. It’s got lots of violence, weird sexual images and Debbie Harry looking hot. Not bad.

It would be interesting to see an update in contemporary culture since television is being replaced by the portable media device and the wireless world. Video tapes are now a dead medium so it really dates the movie. But it’s an interesting idea that reality and the perceptual visual image can be manipulated and blurred to the point where it no longer matters what is “real” or not since it’s all just perception anyway. How much of the news and info do we get now through the filters of the internet and cable? It’s a perception that has expanded to a tremendous range but has also reduced our experiences to something best viewed on a screen in isolation, separated from the world.

Videodrome is dated but it is creepy like all of Cronenberg’s movies. Not for the faint of heart but not overly gross either. An interesting look into early ’80s culture and fears of the future.

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.

Bottom Line: Good popcorn flick. Fans of the series should enjoy it.

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.

My favorite zombie movie is Shaun Of The Dead. It’s funny, scary, and extremely clever. Just a good movie that took the zombie apocalypse and did something entirely original and enjoyable. The makers of Zombieland said they wanted to make a movie on the level of Shaun. And I can see their intentions and how they wanted to make a more comedic, light-hearted but good zombie movie. The problem is that Zombieland is just not enough of anything to make any kind of real impression. It’s not enough of a zombie movie, it’s not enough of a comedy, it’s not enough of an awkward teen romance, it’s just not enough. It winds up being a rather well-done weak movie. The characters are good, the actors are great, but they just don’t have enough to do in this movie and I was honestly just plain bored. This is a zombieland where the zombies are just kind of afterthoughts. They aren’t any real threat, no one is really scared of them, and basically “it’s the end of the world as we know it but I feel fine.”

Overall it was a decent movie. Just not enough to make it great or even really good. And that’s a shame because you can really see the potential for something so much better.