watching movies one cup at a time

Classic ’80s zombie movie! When we were kids and starving for any view of punk culture in the mainstream, this movie was perfect.

A group of “punk rock” kids break into a cemetery to hang out and wait for their friend who works at a medical supply warehouse next door. The warehouse happens to have a chemical that can raise the dead and of course it gets loose and floods the cemetery. The dead rise and they need brains… lots of brains. What I love about this movie is that even though the punk kids are cliche and kind of cheesy, they have a tongue-in-cheek playfullness and are never treated like bad people. I’m reminded a little bit of some of the characters from Repo Man. It’s got a similar vibe. And having The Cramps, TSOL, and The Damned on the soundtrack adds a lot of credibility. I also like how the zombies have a sense of humor about them. This isn’t the highest budget flick and the zombies are mostly just covered in mud, but they are this crazed mob that just swarms everything that comes into cemetery, even when the zombies call the cops themselves to get more cops to come. The ending is pure ’80s nihilism too as the government simply nukes a major city to solve the problem.

This was OUR zombie movie and it’s brilliant.

This is Daniel Craig’s debut as James Bond and some had questioned the whole notion of a “blond Bond.” But Craig lives up the character and in fact kicks some major ass. In a sense this is a prequel. It depicts Bond’s first mission after becoming a 00. But in another sense I think this film is more how I envision the entire James Bond canon. I believe that “James Bond” is actually a title and not a real person in these stories. A man becomes “James Bond” after the previous one retires or is killed. Anyone with the 007 status adopts the identity. So Daniel Craig is not the original James Bond but he is the current one. And I’m talking about IN the movie, not the actor. That way James Bond is timeless and the several actors that have played him can be explained easily enough.

Having said that, Daniel Craig does a phenomenal job. He is a perfect cool, calm, and ruthless agent that is completely capable of all that’s required of the character. The film takes more inspiration from the recent Bourne movies than it does the campy, doomsday schemes of the 80s and 90s. This Bond will do a 15 minute fight sequence smashing through windows and jumping off of roofs before anything with lasers comes out. And all with the same cool and effortless expression on his face. Hardcore.

Great action, great characters, a great Bond film for a new generation.

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

(500) Days of Summer is a story about a guy named Tom falling in love with a girl named Summer and the entire course of their relationship over a year and a half. But what makes it an interesting and engaging story is a combination of the original way the story unfolds combined with empathetic characters that feel very genuine. This is a love story I can see happening around me in real life. It’s not a fantasy, a happily-ever-after, or overly-dramatic. In fact it’s pretty simple and uncomplicated, as life often can be. And it’s uncomplicated-ness is it’s charm.

The clever story technique employed here involves taking each day of their relationship and jumping around the numbered days 1-500 to piece together how their relationship began, unfolded, and eventually fell apart. The natural highs and lows, the awkward moments, the painful conflicts, the expectations and realities. There is a brilliant sequence where Tom, riding high on a positive post-breakup experience with Summer, gets invited to her place for a roof-top party and we are shown how his high-hopes for the evening play out next to the all too crushing reality. It’s a scene most people can relate to and reinforces the sense in the film that life is rarely one beautiful scene after another. It’s messy, unplanned, and unpredictable, but that is also it’s source of hope. An unexpected turn, a chance encounter, a moment of intimacy can come seemingly out-of-the-blue and change our entire perspective.

The acting is great here as well. I’m a big Joseph Gordon-Levitt fan and he does his usual brilliant job here. There is a classic dance sequence in the middle of the film that beautifully articulates the feeling of the euphoria the character has, and JGL pulls it off effortlessly. Zoey Deschanel is a perfect fit for her character, however, I often feel like she is just playing herself. I suspect that Summer is really just Zoey with scripted dialogue. Nevertheless, I believe these characters and I believe this relationship. These feel like real people, not two-dimensional caricatures.

Bottom Line: (500) Days of Summer is warm, endearing and clever film that rises above a lot of other “relationship” flicks, even the cool, hipster indie ones. I enjoyed it from beginning to end. Go see it.

Visually this is an amazing looking film. I love it when the frame itself is used as a stylized element, making it a really immersive experience. If you took that away and had a more mediocre director, this movie would just have been a boring Gladiator-like retread. But Zack Snyder pulled it off. It’s a visually rich and exciting movie.

The story follows a group of soldiers in Sparta who have to defend their city/state from invading Persians. Double-dealings have cut off the whole of the army from fighting, so it’s up to 300 soldiers to fight hundreds of thousands headed their way. Fortunately they figure out that if they take their stand at a narrow canyon passageway, they will strategically be able to fight off the hordes. I found it kind of ridiculous that these guys were basically only wearing underwear and capes. I’m sure it’s somewhat historically accurate, but still, they look like Superman B.C. And though they have big shields, they do seem very wide open to something stabby.

But this movie was a fun ride. Very entertaining and quite a site to experience. Maybe they’ll make a sequel called “301″

First let me say I LOVED Ocean’s Eleven. It was brilliant. And I HATED Ocean’s Twelve. It was pointless and a waste of time. So I had no preconceptions going into Thirteen. It could easily have sucked and it could have also easily been brilliant. And of course it wound up falling somewhere in between. But the good news is that it fell much more to the brilliant side than the sucking side. Thank goodness Clooney and crew came back and cleansed our palette from that horrible Twelve movie. Yuck.

They did the right thing by going back to Vegas. The original classic with the Rat Pack was set in Vegas. And the far superior Eleven was in Vegas. The problem with Twelve is they went all over the place just doing random crap. Who cares? A big heist that all comes together is the piece that makes this work and Thirteen’s got it. Al Pacino was great as a douchebag casino owner as was Ellen Barkin as his stressed-out second-in-command. And the whole Mission Impossible vibe keeps you on the edge of your seat trying to figure how it’s all going to go down. Of course they are going win in the end, but how they pull it off is the fun part.

Danny Ocean is the perfect character for Clooney. He plays it very natural and smooth as glass. Brad Pitt as his sidekick is the perfect understated operator that you could see pulling this off. Some of the remainder of the cast could maybe take a time out at this point though. And I didn’t miss Julia Roberts one bit. I’m not a big fan of hers anyway and in Twelve she was just downright annoying a lot of the time.

Ocean’s Eleven still reigns as the best of this bunch. But Thirteen was good enough to almost make up for Twelve. Let’s hope Fourteen (I’m sure they are doing a Fourteen) won’t suck either.