Tag: movie

This comes as a surprise to me, but I actually really liked this movie. Like a lot. Like I’m considering buying it when it comes out on Blu-ray and setting it perhaps a shelf or two below my hallowed copies of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

I honestly have not been that much of a Seth Rogen fan before. And to be fair, I’m not generally that into comedy movies. (This, despite the fact that my favorite movie ever–Hot Fuzz–is a comedy.) I have a low tolerance for gross humor, which seems like a button that often gets punched in comedy movies, particularly American ones. Look yes, I get that character X has some profound flatulence, could we move on? And so on.

Don’t get me wrong. There is some gross-out stuff in This Is the End. And plenty of dick jokes. And dicks, most of them attached to terrifying CGI demons. But it was an order of magnitude less about dicks than I actually expected. And (I never thought I would type this sentence in my life but all things truly are possible on the internet) I think the dicks on the demons were perfect. It added the twist of the ridiculous.

And let me be clear. There were dick jokes and rape jokes and gay jokes and race jokes and basically the full rainbow of offensive humor. If you want to avoid movies with that sort of thing in it, this one’s not for you.

But what was truly funny for me about This Is the End was the actors playing caricatures of themselves as mind-meltingly shallow and pathetically unable to cope as possible. I realized that I was going to get something far better than I expected when, at the very beginning of the movie Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel are driving and talking about the evils of gluten. Jay accuses Seth of not even knowing what gluten is. Seth comes to the conclusion that gluten is a catch-all term for anything that’s bad for you in food, including calories. And then cut to Seth and Jay eating giant Carl’s Junior hamburgers.

And James Franco wins everything by playing the most pretentious asshole version of James Franco imaginable, and with obvious glee.

Maybe that’s what it is; I like it when people don’t take themselves seriously, and that’s much of the meat in this movie. That, and amazing dance number that I will not spoil for you, but I almost peed my pants laughing.

I thought it was hilarious. Mike actually really liked it as well, and he has an even lower tolerance for comedy movies than I do. I think the last time I saw him laugh this hard in a movie was during Cabin in the Woods at the jumping the motorcycle over the chasm scene, and now everyone who knows Mike is nodding wisely because yes, of course he would have hysterics over that. But anyway, if we both found it funny, you might as well. I can’t guarantee that, since humor is such an individual thing, but it could well be worth a try.

Now I’m just waiting for The World’s End. Come to me, my pretty. Come to me.

Saw Man of Steel. For the record, I wanted to see This Is the End. I was outvoted by a combination of spouse and housemate interest, and the fact that I have an early morning ride tomorrow and the time was more convenient.

Gotta say, I wish I’d just stuck with it for This Is the End.

Light spoilers follow, I suppose, if you consider the revelation of how much real estate gets blown up and where a significant spoiler.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I’ve never been a fan of Superman as a character. In the droves of comic book movies and their respective main characters, I think the only one I ever cared even less about was the Hulk, and for very similar reasons. They’re both a bit too stupidly powerful for me to really find them interesting. But then Joss Whedon and Mark Ruffalo used their amazing wondertwin powers to get me to admit yeah, okay, maybe I could give a crap about the Hulk now.

So I was kind of hoping that Zack Snyder and Chris Nolan and generic strong-jawed white guy Henry Cavill could work the same magic. I’m sorry to say that was not the case, and all I feel I really got out of my evening was an excellent pizza at the Alamo Drafthouse and a new movie soundtrack I want to buy. Because all the bitching I’m about to do about this movie aside, the score for Man of Steel is excellent.

My biggest general complaint about Man of Steel is that it feels like it was trying to be about too many things and go too many places at once. We get to see bits of Clark’s past peeking through during the entire movie, but a lot of time without the full significance ever actually being explained. The movie never feels quite coherent, the major scenes never quite connected.

And the exposition. There is a lot more exposition in this movie than I’m normally prepared to take, I think because there is such a lack of development in the plotlines. It has to be verbally explained away, which is never a good thing. There is one character, I will call him General McDimpleChin, who seemed to only exist for the purpose of providing exposition or asking kind of dumb questions to enable other characters to do exposition.

The disconnection between the narrative threads also turned into a disconnection between characters. The only characters I ever felt any real chemistry or emotional connection between were basically young Clark and his parents and… Faora and Colonel Hardy, who had the most giant battle hateboners for each other that it kind of took my breath away. Lois and Clark didn’t have much going on, probably because any relationship development time was abandoned in favor of destroying a few more blocks of New York City Metropolis. (By the way, I’m pretty sure Superman personally destroyed more acreage than Loki did in Avengers, which I find quite hilarious.) The only other time a movie has ever made me wish for less destruction and fewer explosions was in Transformers 2. Well, I guess this movie at least didn’t involve a lot of slow motion shots of people running away, but it’s probably not a good thing when Man of Steel gets compared in my mind to a Michael Bay film. But for goodness sake, I would have rather a few more buildings got to stand and we had more character development. Plus Superman’s apparent lack of concern for flattening an entire town while he had his fight felt very, very weird from what I know of the character.

(For another point on this and the reason I didn’t care for the ending, please see the review in Locus. It’s more coherent and thoughtful than I could manage, and also lets me keep this basically spoiler free.)

And since I’ve mentioned the Marvel franchise, I’ll note yet another problem I had with Man of Steel: this movie wasn’t having any fun, and therefore it was difficult to sit in the audience and have fun with it. The Marvel movies have always been incredibly playful; I think DC could have done with stealing a bit of that. They’ve already got one hideously serious superhero franchise (Batman). They didn’t need another. And come on. Superman wars red underpants over his tights. How serious can he be? There’s about two minutes of Clark having a good time when he figures out how to fly, and the only real verbal playfulness in the movie ended up in the trailer, when Lois asks him about the S.

Now, it was a visually beautiful movie. Though in the field of pretty, it honestly had nothing on Oblivion. However, unlike Oblivion, Man of Steel did not actively piss me off. It just annoyed me and occasionally made me slap my palm to my forehead. And while it’s not saying much, a couple of the women in this movie got some actual agency, unlike in Oblivion. Lois Lane sure does some stuff in between screaming uselessly and needing to be rescued, even if we never have any idea why. And then there’s Faora. She had agency, and decided to use that agency to be a giant BAMF and punch missiles in the face (no, really). Which was a very nice change from the sighing over Superman’s chiseled jawline and needing to be caught up in his manly arms.

Though I will note one thing I found interesting. Even if the female characters were what I’ve come to expect from a comic book movie for the most part, they generally weren’t visually objectified. Take Faora, over there on the right.

I mean holy shit. They dressed her in armor that actually looks like, you know, armor. There’s not even a boob window! And there was at least one other female Kryptonian, who had the same sort of armor. Also, in the scenes that involved the US military, there were actually visibly women in uniform, combat ready. That impressed me a lot.

I’d guess it’s fun if you like that sort of movie. If you’re really in to Superman. I have it on good authority from my housemate that this one is immeasurably better than the previous Superman movie, though that apparently also isn’t hard to do. And it is, of course, Zack Snyder pretty. But if you’re like me and have never been that excited about the concept or the character, you might want to just to see something else or risk spending close to two hours of your life picking at nagging plot threads that never seem to quite connect. Now, I can’t say if This Is the End is any better yet, but I intend to find out soon.

So I usually take long flights to catch up on movies I didn’t have time to see in the theater. There was actually a bit less of that this time around since I had a lot of editing work to do both ways (I completely killed my laptop battery on the flight home) and then I actually managed to sleep some on the flight out (shock!). But, here are my thoughts on the few movies I saw. If a bit late.

I imagine there are technically spoilers for these. They’re also generally older movies so I’m a little less concerned, but there you go.

Rise of the Guardians

I kind of already expressed my opinion on this one, which was a resounding: meh. It’s a pretty movie, yes, but these days a movie needs a damn good excuse to not be pretty. The plot just wasn’t there for me. After I got over my delight at Hugh Jackman and Alec Baldwin being over the top as the Easter Bunny and Santa respectively, there just didn’t end up being a lot of there there. It was very much a kid’s movie, without enough added oomph to it to make it interesting to me as an adult. Now I’m sure, in the grand scheme of movies that adults are forced to watch by their children, it’s probably a superior offering. But since I don’t have kids making me watch bad, treacly movies, I can be picky.

The Tempest (2010)

I wanted to love this movie. I really, really, really wanted to love it. It’s The Tempest genderbent so that Prospero is a woman – Prospera. And there were certain parts I did really love. Every scene involving Helen Mirren as Prospera just had me breathless. That woman is a treasure, and the depth she gave to that character was beyond anything I’ve ever imagined. I also really liked Ben Whishaw as Ariel, and some of the visual effects trickery they did with him. But other than those two? Much of the cast left me unconvinced, I’m afraid, and the play was very liberally cut down to fit in a standard movie length. The cutting they did still spent too much time on the more comedic scenes with Caliban, and the way that was all played just didn’t grab me at all. (Particularly since I’d just seen Hamlet and perhaps my expectations were even higher than normal.) I also can’t say a lot of the visual effects in the movie felt like they added to it.

Oz the Great and Powerful

I expected to not give a single shit about this movie, and was shocked by giving a small fraction of one by the end. Mostly because James Franco. My dislike of this movie is woven into its very fabric, however. The entire plot hinges on there being a prophecy about how a powerful man will come save Oz. I’m not keen on prophecy as plot fuel to begin with, and considering this basically meant three very strong and interesting female characters spent the whole movie going on and on about how a man needed to save Oz, it’s a wonder I didn’t just implode on the plane. I really liked the three witches. I thought their interplay was fascinating. And then every time one of them brought up the stupid prophecy, I wanted to grind my teeth, because any one of them was shown over and over again to be far more competent than the Wizard. Save yourselves, ladies. For fuck’s sake.

Seven Psychopaths

This move was weird, and twisted, and darkly humorous. And Christopher Walken. If you like movies like Boondock Saints, you will like Seven Psychopaths. It hits those same places of dark, macabre hilarity, over and over again. It’s about dognapping and psychopaths and assassins and, oddly enough, the struggle of what you want to write not being the same as what you actually write or what people want. I loved it. I also can’t really say much more about it without seeing it again because it’s a very difficult movie to explain.

Taken 2

Seriously, why do people keep messing with Liam Neeson’s family? I just watched this to pass the time before landing, and I ended up really enjoying it, for much the same reason I really liked all of the Bourne movies (other than my shaky cam objections). While there is a lot of fighting and killing, there are also lovely scenes where it’s just Bryan using his brain. The ending kind of annoyed me, however, with Bryan’s wife being randomly dead but not really and apparently she forgets to breathe unless he touches her or something. I didn’t get it, it made no sense, and it was just kind of stupid.

The longer I think about it, the more utterly furious this movie makes me.

(SPOILERS, duh.)

Though I will say, Oblivion is an incredibly pretty movie. (Though is it me, or does all the tech look like it could have come straight out of Aperture Science?) It’s just gorgeous. The landscapes Tom Cruise flies over as Jack Harper left me absolutely breathless as a geologist (even while, as a geologist, my brain was screaming THAT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE). It’s beautiful. It’s stylish.

It makes no fucking sense.

I could go on and on about the ridiculous science (the moon blows up so there are earthquakes and tsunamis what) but frankly at this point, expecting a movie to have even a passing handshake relationship with science is really an invitation to just never enjoy another scifi film again. So fine, Oblivion, I will give you your ridiculous MacGuffins, and well may you enjoy them.

It’s the plot that does it. The plot is one where, if you can thread your suspension of disbelief along, it almost scans. And then something happens and WHAM you’re left wondering what kind of incoherent dartboard of ideas was used to produce this story. To be honest, I cannot even describe to you in detail what major plot holes really tripped me up. The plot has completely slipped from my mind, not because I wasn’t paying attention, but because the lack of internal logic honestly made it hard for me to parse the events when considering them later, while at the time it all superficially made sense. This is a movie that desperately wants to be a mind screw, and it almost succeeds as long as you clap your hands hard enough and believe in fairies. The reveals were shocking, until five minutes later my brain caught up and thought Now wait one damn minute…

But no. The thing that has me breathing fire right now is the fact that of the three main characters in the movie, two were women, and there was not even a sliver of agency between the two of them. The only “female” character that got to be anything but a passive vehicle for Tom Cruise’s soulful or nutty looks was Sally, and I put female in quotation marks because she was, in fact, and evil alien computer thing that just happened to sound like a Southern belle.

And then he blew her up so. Oh well. He destroyed the only female that wasn’t a passive receptacle. Parse that how you will.

So much about this just chaps my ass. If nothing else, a giant point is made in the movie that Jack Harper was an astronaut, and thus one of the best the Earth had to offer. Well, both Victoria and Julia were astronauts on the same goddamn mission, and they were both utterly useless. Victoria existed only to mindlessly adhere to rules and regulations and then, in what I’m sure is complete adherence to the intelligence, determination, and curiosity inherent to being an astronaut, betrays Jack because she’s upset he likes another woman better than her. She doesn’t stop to ask why shit that makes no sense keeps happening. And then she gets blown up by a drone like a sad little foot note, having acted as the agent of her own death.

And Julia? A million times worse. She seems to exist only for Jack to save her repeatedly (four times, by my count) and then help him regain his memories by pointing out that she’s his wife. Oh, and get knocked up. The one meaningful decision she makes in the entire goddamn movie, which is to sacrifice herself with Jack to save humanity, is disregarded by him in one of the more obvious plot holes (where did they get another sleep chamber? how did they transfer her? why bother to put her in the sleep chamber at all except as deus ex machina?) in a way that I’m sure is supposed to be about twue wuv but really just highlights the fact that nothing a female character in this movie does has any goddamn meaning.

Argh. ARGH. I don’t know what makes me angrier, that I sat through two hours of beautiful wasted potential where the plot shit on me at every turn, or that this movie made me actually hope it would be good scifi.

You bet your ass there are SPOILERS. This is the only warning you get.

The funny thing is, I don’t particularly like baseball. But I really do like movies about baseball. Maybe it’s because even if I don’t appreciate the sport in and of itself, I can appreciate that people love it and feel very passionate about it.

42 is one of those baseball movies. It’s also a movie about the first crack being put in segregation for that part of society. It’s a movie that intends to be inspirational and let you leave the theater feeling good, and it makes no bones about that fact. There are a lot of moments in the film where someone who is horrible and racist gets slapped down verbally by someone who isn’t, and you feel a bit like cheering. You’re supposed to.

It’s not a sweeping biography of Jackie Robinson; there’s still a hell of a lot left unsaid about the man. The focus is instead on his year with the Montreal Royals in the minor leagues, and then his rookie year with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and because of that much is left unsaid. Though thankfully, it’s not all baseball. Jackie Robinson gets a life outside the game in this movie, and it’s not all focused on the constant, grinding fight against racism. There are a lot of lovely scenes that sketch (and it is very much just a sketch) his relationship with his wife Rae and the arrival of their first child.

In 42, Jackie Robinson feels more like the legend than the man who became a legend, which is the only complaint I have at all. And considering what a likable legend Chadwick Boseman plays him to be, that’s not really much of a complaint at all. I loved watching him steal bases. But I also feel like the focus of the movie wasn’t really Jackie Robinson’s journey – it was the journey of the white men surrounding him who had to step up to meet him. But then again, Jackie Robinson changed the game; the game didn’t change him, other than perhaps to temper him if the movie is to be believed.

The cast in general is really good, and full of familiar faces. Boseman communicates pain, inner turmoil, and struggles with his temper without needing to say a word. Alan Tudyk as Ben Chapman, the horribly racist manager of the Phillies made me cringe in my seat. John McGinley (who I will always know as Dr. Cox from Scrubs) looked convincingly old and sounded entirely different as Red Barber. Christopher Meloni was… well, Christopher Meloni, really, perhaps a bit rougher and more tough-talking than before. 

And Harrison Ford? Holy shit Harrison Ford. I actually didn’t realize it was him, until a scene where he yells at Jackie and then I really recognized his voice. They did some excellent makeup on him. And he did a great job, jabbing the air with his cigar and doing the old man wobble with his chin.

The movie’s got its uplifting and triumphant moment (though at times the score is really trying a little too hard) and a lot of fun back and forth. (The pre-shower scene. Just.) There’s a lot to like about it, and it’s fun. If you ask me, much more fun than actually watching baseball, though I know I’m in the minority there.

This movie is not nearly as silly as I thought it would be.

Which is not to say that it isn’t silly. It is, wonderfully so. It’s an action movie where large portions of the White House get alternately shot up and blown up, and where they randomly make up super secret military technologies just to try to ratchet the stakes up an itty bitty bit more. Where the protagonist literally waits until the glowing red countdown until doomsday has reached 00:03 before entering the abort code.

See, if it was a truly silly movie, he would have waited until 00:01.

Ultimately, Olympus Has Fallen is like political Die Hard. Particularly the first movie, when it was a bit grittier and darker and slightly less quippy. And this one is less quippy than your average Die Hard. And since the protagonist is special forces instead of a cop, he stabs people in the brain and snaps necks instead of shooting and punching.

The thing I liked most about the movie, actually, is that a few major plot points actually surprised me. I won’t spoil those for you, but I really liked it. 

Gerard Butler is excellent as the aforementioned neck-snapping brain-stabbing special forces secret service guy. Morgan Freeman was very Morgan Freeman, as you’d expect from him. I wish the real Speaker of the House was even a thousandth that awesome. And I’d like to give a special shout-out to Melissa Leo as the most badass Secretary of Defense ever seen in a movie.

I’d definitely recommend this one if you like action movies.