Monday, August 16, 2010
Eat, Pray, Love, and "the mouth."
I will not be seeing Eat, Pray, Love this weekend. Why? I'm not sure...sort of in the same way I never saw "Duplicity," "Charlie Wilson's War," or "Mystic Pizza." They have Julia Roberts. I'm not sure what it is about Julia Roberts. Usually that phrase has good connotations. Like "I'm not sure what it is about her, but she's growing on me." Nope. Exact opposite. I don't like her dumb hair, enormous mouth, her voice, or the movies she's in. If Eat, Pray, Love had Natalie Portman, or hell, Jessica Alba, I would be there. It's about food right? Just not Julia Roberts. Please.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Iron Man 2.
I'm going to keep this brief.
The original Iron Man was a breath of fresh air in the superhero genre. Robert Downey Jr. was awesome, it was snarky, fun, and well cast. Iron Man 2 retains some of the positives from the original but also suffers from a lot of sequel fever. First off, there are waaaay too many characters going on here. Scarlett Johansson is hot but completely unnecessary, and gives a stiff awkward performance. Gwyneth Paltrow is lovely as always, and is one of the only characters in the movie that really works. Then you've got Don Cheadle stepping in as Tony's bff "Rhoadie." Note to blockbuster movies; Never ever ever ever ever switch actors midway through a series. The audience notices. Duh. You just don't do it. Look at how crappy the Batman franchise got after they ditched Michael Keaton. Now I could forgive this but Cheadle also gives a crappy stiff performance. Should have brought back Terrance Howard...just sayin'. So basically the plot goes as follows, the world is now aware that Tony Stark is Iron Man and the army wants to weaponize the suite. Tony doesn't. Then we have a vengeful Russian (Mickey Rourke) out for Stark's blood. Said Russian creates sweet whiplash suit in his little basement laboratory, and somehow it's actually believable. Nice touch. Rourke actually pulls off the roll with some grace, and I realllly enjoyed the badass character. The action sequences are excellent, and I think every guy out there will be drooling over all the sweet technology. Overall, Iron Man 2 makes a few missteps but nothing huge or unforgivable. Robert Downey Jr continues his unprecedented career resurrection and I really hope he keeps it rolling. The guy is crazy likable. Decent flick.
Grade: B-
The original Iron Man was a breath of fresh air in the superhero genre. Robert Downey Jr. was awesome, it was snarky, fun, and well cast. Iron Man 2 retains some of the positives from the original but also suffers from a lot of sequel fever. First off, there are waaaay too many characters going on here. Scarlett Johansson is hot but completely unnecessary, and gives a stiff awkward performance. Gwyneth Paltrow is lovely as always, and is one of the only characters in the movie that really works. Then you've got Don Cheadle stepping in as Tony's bff "Rhoadie." Note to blockbuster movies; Never ever ever ever ever switch actors midway through a series. The audience notices. Duh. You just don't do it. Look at how crappy the Batman franchise got after they ditched Michael Keaton. Now I could forgive this but Cheadle also gives a crappy stiff performance. Should have brought back Terrance Howard...just sayin'. So basically the plot goes as follows, the world is now aware that Tony Stark is Iron Man and the army wants to weaponize the suite. Tony doesn't. Then we have a vengeful Russian (Mickey Rourke) out for Stark's blood. Said Russian creates sweet whiplash suit in his little basement laboratory, and somehow it's actually believable. Nice touch. Rourke actually pulls off the roll with some grace, and I realllly enjoyed the badass character. The action sequences are excellent, and I think every guy out there will be drooling over all the sweet technology. Overall, Iron Man 2 makes a few missteps but nothing huge or unforgivable. Robert Downey Jr continues his unprecedented career resurrection and I really hope he keeps it rolling. The guy is crazy likable. Decent flick.
Grade: B-
Monday, January 25, 2010
Avatar.
Well here I am again after a long hiatus. I know that my cult fan base has just been dying for some new material, so here I am obliging them.
Being the movie buff that I am I saw Avatar on opening weekend, needless to say, I was extremely disappointed.
James Cameron's film Titanic holds the record for largest grossing film of all time, somewhere around a ridiculous 600 million in the States alone. Since that enormous success he's kept quiet save for some tooling around with the Terminator franchise. Obviously, his 15 years in the making space opera/special effects bananza had people excited. The movie is said to be the most expensive film ever made to date, and boy does it look it. The lushness of the universe, the texture of the alien characters, the spot on 3d effects...it's a beautiful movie. It's truly a shame that the stories and characters are a cliche fest. Basically, in the story's undeveloped back story (thank God they didn't develop it or the movie would have been 5 hours) earth is dying. And there's this enormously valuable rock that ambitious albeit douche baggy earthlings are dying to get their hands on. There is an enormous deposit of these rocks on the distant plant Pandora, which is inhabited by a bunch of weirdy tree hugging blue aliens. To make an extremely long story short, the humans hook up handsome paraplegic marine, Jake Sully, played by Sam Worthington ( in a definite star turn) to a machine that allows him to take control of an alien body. He enters into the alien tribe to learn their ways and pass their tests to become an honorary member of their tribe. The marines do all of this in hopes that Jake, once he's a member of the community, can convince the aliens to move away from the rock deposit so that the humans can swoop in and take it. Unfortunely, the deposit sits right under the aliens large tree that stands as sort of a god/goddess mother nature figure. Here's where the movie gets cliche and boring. Sully enters the foreign culture, struggles at first, falls in love with beautiful alien trainer, switches sides, warns aliens of impending human attack...I don't even have to say anymore to give away the movie, I'm sure you can fill in the blanks. Not only is the whole hero-falls-in-love-switches-sides story so cliche it's almost a subgenre, but the characters right down to Sigourney Weaver's envirnmentalist are as well. Oh and one more thing. James Cameron needs to find a damn good editor before he tries to make another one of these epics. He really needs it. The two bright spots of the film are obviously, the gorgeous special effects, and the surprisingly strong script. Yes, horrible story, done with a good script. It's possible, so shut up. See it if you have to, but just for the special effects, they're the only thing that kept me from napping for 3 hours.
Hey, please excuse the poor grammar and overall poorness of this review, I can do better I just had to write this in 5 minutes! Thanks for bearing with :)
Being the movie buff that I am I saw Avatar on opening weekend, needless to say, I was extremely disappointed.
James Cameron's film Titanic holds the record for largest grossing film of all time, somewhere around a ridiculous 600 million in the States alone. Since that enormous success he's kept quiet save for some tooling around with the Terminator franchise. Obviously, his 15 years in the making space opera/special effects bananza had people excited. The movie is said to be the most expensive film ever made to date, and boy does it look it. The lushness of the universe, the texture of the alien characters, the spot on 3d effects...it's a beautiful movie. It's truly a shame that the stories and characters are a cliche fest. Basically, in the story's undeveloped back story (thank God they didn't develop it or the movie would have been 5 hours) earth is dying. And there's this enormously valuable rock that ambitious albeit douche baggy earthlings are dying to get their hands on. There is an enormous deposit of these rocks on the distant plant Pandora, which is inhabited by a bunch of weirdy tree hugging blue aliens. To make an extremely long story short, the humans hook up handsome paraplegic marine, Jake Sully, played by Sam Worthington ( in a definite star turn) to a machine that allows him to take control of an alien body. He enters into the alien tribe to learn their ways and pass their tests to become an honorary member of their tribe. The marines do all of this in hopes that Jake, once he's a member of the community, can convince the aliens to move away from the rock deposit so that the humans can swoop in and take it. Unfortunely, the deposit sits right under the aliens large tree that stands as sort of a god/goddess mother nature figure. Here's where the movie gets cliche and boring. Sully enters the foreign culture, struggles at first, falls in love with beautiful alien trainer, switches sides, warns aliens of impending human attack...I don't even have to say anymore to give away the movie, I'm sure you can fill in the blanks. Not only is the whole hero-falls-in-love-switches-sides story so cliche it's almost a subgenre, but the characters right down to Sigourney Weaver's envirnmentalist are as well. Oh and one more thing. James Cameron needs to find a damn good editor before he tries to make another one of these epics. He really needs it. The two bright spots of the film are obviously, the gorgeous special effects, and the surprisingly strong script. Yes, horrible story, done with a good script. It's possible, so shut up. See it if you have to, but just for the special effects, they're the only thing that kept me from napping for 3 hours.
Hey, please excuse the poor grammar and overall poorness of this review, I can do better I just had to write this in 5 minutes! Thanks for bearing with :)
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