Category: Movie Reviews

I’m sitting here on this couch because I just made an awesome movie that is going to print money for me until the end of time. Even middle-aged women in Northern Cali are gasping for breath after seeing it.

I’m Ben Kingsley and I’m totes amazing as The Mandarin, even though I’m not Chinese and I’m about to kill everyone.

I’m the Iron Patriot, a shameless Iron Man knock-off, and I can fly to Pakistan in like three minutes.

Hi, I’m Gwyneth, and I write cook-books and kiss men in armor.

See above comment about middle-aged women gasping for breath.

First gigantic, overpowering, explosion-filled movie of the summer powered by an emotionally-frail hero, an almost sympathetic nerd-turned-villain (think Syndrome), a highly-zealous security guard, a conflicted genius botanist, and a little boy who saves the day. Throw in Gwyneth looking lovely, Miguel Ferrer (NCIS: Los Angeles) as the US Veep, and a President who’s high-strung and vulnerable, and you’ve got yourself a movie, people.

There are some bikinis, but they are mocked. It’s the serious, smart girls who get the attention here. There’s some innuendo, and a little language, but all of that is subsumed in the explosions and the story. And the music, the beautiful music.

Stay all the way to the very very very end.

I’m afraid Leo and Company next week (Gatsby) and Kirk and Company the following week (Star Trek) may be in for a bruising.

My guys saw it in 3D and gave that a thumbs up.

Okay, just catching up here on a few movies I’ve recently seen.

This movie is so irrational, I couldn’t wrap my head around it enough after seeing it last week to write anything down, but I’ll try again now.

Tom Cruise is Jack Harper, an astronaut on Earth’s “mop up” crew. You see, there was this invasion and the bad guys stole the Moon–oh no, wait, that was in Despicable Me. Bad guys broke the Moon (it’s very pretty up there looking all Milky Way-scattered), so the tides went wild, the tsunamis raged, everything from the Coasts to Kansas was washed away, and the Empire State Building is buried up to its scenic overlook in sand.

Of course, all that water didn’t wash away a little King Kong toy, but never mind that. What’s an apocalyptic movie without the Empire State Building, King Kong imagery, and Lady Liberty’s torch?

Harper’s job is to zoom around in his very very cool airship and look for “scavs.” Scavs are scavengers or left-over bad guys, because we won the war, but lost the planet, and some scavs are still here. All the humans have moved to Titan, and that was accomplished with 2017 technology. Or 2077 technology, because, so we’re told, sixty years have passed since the invasion, and during that time we were able to up our technology from “We don’t even have a Shuttle” to “Let’s all move to Titan!” and this while Florida and the Vehicle Assembly Building are washed away by the Atlantic overflow, Houston is washed away from the Gulf overflow and JPL and whatever-else we’ve got here in Cali are sucked out into Mother Pacifica. Those brainiacs in Omaha must be the hope of the world.

In addition to moving the entire population of Earth to Titan, everyone’s memory was mandatorily “wiped” five years ago. That’s why he remembers so much. Like, he knows all about the 2017 Super Bowl, even though he’s not old enough to remember it, but has read about it and seen enough replayed NFL games on Titan to know what a Hail Mary is and how the crowd went wild. They must have taken YouTube with them, and hang the NFL copyright.

Turns out so many things we think are going on aren’t going on. In fact, the whole movie is about finding out that what you know isn’t true.

Turns out Harper’s not Harper, the girl he works with isn’t herself either, the big bad Spaceship “Tet” is not what we are told, and the giant machines sucking our water for energy (see Battleship) are doing so for…why? I don’t remember.

Speaking of derivations, there are little Eve-like bots who go around blasting things just like Eve does in Wall-E, scanner and all. And there’s a Hal controlling everything too, but that’s at the end when you’re groaning at the piled-on nonsense.

Suddenly, Harper stumbles upon a bunch of humans led by none other than Morgan Freeman (who else?) who sends Harper off on a journey to find himself. He does, and then all sorts of exciting things happen, but none of them make any sense.

Realizing he’s been treated like nothing but a robot all this time by the powers-that-be, Harper goes on a journey that can only end one way, but before he goes, he sends a girl to an oasis of sorts all by herself with no defenses and no way to support herself. More silliness and baby clothes out of nowhere. I can’t go on.

The plot is lame, the writing is lame, the oft-repeated hark back to the “ashes of his fathers and the temple of his gods” is badly used here. Meaning, I’ve shed tears over that passage when it’s been used properly. Here, it’s just overused, as if the writer wanted to say, “Looky, I’m cultured. Really I am!”

Based on a graphic novel. No kidding.

It’s been a week since I saw this movie, but I don’t want it to entirely disappear from my memory before I tell you how much I loved it. If you can see only one movie this week and your choice is this movie or Mud, definitely see this one.

Act I
Ryan Gosling plays a professional motorcyclist who does shows at the fair. As in the traveling fair. He runs into someone he hooked up with last year. He learns he has a son. He wants to become a real man and take care of the little boy. He tries, but it goes south. Spectacularly.

Act II
Bradley Cooper is an up-and-coming cop who get put on desk duty for a questionable use of his weapon. He rats out some corrupt cops and moves over to the D.A.’s office. His career picks up steam. Spectacularly.

Act III
The sons of Gosling’s character and Cooper’s character meet. Everything hits the fan. Truths are spoken. Disaster follows.

But then, as the circle closes, there is hope–lots of it, lavished everywhere.

I loved this movie. Gosling is better than I’ve ever seen him. Cooper also very good. The wonderful Dane DeHaan is as good here as he is in Chronicle. I think he’s definitely going places.

Ninety-eight percent on Rotten Tomatoes is nothing to sneeze at, so I went to see MUD this afternoon, a movie I had never heard of until this morning. I read none of the reviews, only gazed at that stratospheric number and thought, “They can’t all be wrong.”

They’re not. The movie is beautifully written, beautifully filmed, beautifully acted. There’s depth of story, depth of emotion, and plenty of tension. I didn’t know what was going to happen until it happened. The end is finely crafted with just the right amount of denouement after a brutal shoot ’em up scene. And, the motivations were correct, except when they weren’t.

Motivations are everything in a movie. Ask yourself, “Would that person do that thing in that situation?” When the answer is yes, you have good motivations going on. Take Saving Private Ryan, as an example. In that movie, everyone from the battle-hardened Captain Miller down to the frightened typist-interpreter does what they would do in that situation. Some keep their heads. Some don’t. But whether they do or whether they don’t, it’s because that is what that person would have done right there.

Motivations here were squishy, but I loved the movie so much as I was watching it that I didn’t notice them until I was home and thinking about it. Which embarrassed me. Because there are some doozies.

And, what is called “moral tone” is off, in the same way it is off in Anna Karenina. In Anna, you want the adulterous lovers to succeed. Here, you’re rooting for vigilantism at the same time you think you are rooting against it. You’re rooting for a mental illness that isn’t defined, but is obviously present at some level. You’re rooting for dysfunction. You’re rooting for adolescent foolishness of magnificent scope.

There’s a lot to talk about in this movie. It would be good source material for an ethics discussion with teenagers.

There are a few glitches, of course. Is there a movie that has none? In this one, two boys are able to see and identify an inch-wide tattoo on a lady’s hand from across the street. It would have been just as easy to have the lady walk past them on the sidewalk. That tattoo matters, so this scene matters.

Here’s the story: Mud is a fugitive from the law and from some bounty hunters. He somehow arrives on an island, and although the State Police are looking for him, no one looks there. Two boys go to the island for fun and run into him. He tells them a story. They buy it. He needs stuff. They go get it. Even though they are (at least tangentially) “persons of interest” in the hunt for Mud, no one follows them or wonders where they go in that motor boat every day.

Reese Witherspoon is the love interest. She and McConaughey do not interact and only see each other once. She plays a serially-battered woman. We see some of that.

The main character in this movie is Ellis, a 14-year-old boy whose world goes from This to That in twenty-four hours and then gets worse. In a very short amount of time, he falls in love, aids and abets a fugitive, stumbles onto a bunch of very angry men who want to kill his new friend, acquires a shiner, loses a girlfriend, and sees his parents’ marriage implode. Then it gets really bad.

Lots of suspense. Hopeful, but not necessarily right, ending.

You will enjoy this movie about Jackie Robinson and the integration of professional baseball in 1947. This is the story of hard work, courage, and integrity.

However, I will not be taking my thirteen-year-old African-American sons. My young black men do not need to hear anyone shouting, “Nigger, nigger, nigger, coon, coon, coon,” any more than any young gay person needs to watch a movie where bullies yell, “Faggot, faggot, faggot, queer, queer, queer.” That it has turned out that black athletes dominate many professional sports today will not make my boys’ hearts hurt any less hearing this, and they have their whole lives ahead of them in which, no doubt, they will hear things like this.

(Pauses for people to say, “Well, you can’t protect them forever.” No, but I can protect them today.)

There is also the issue of the kind white man who makes everything all better. Naturally, the movie could have been made to emphasize Robinson’s efforts more and Branch Rickey’s less, but the scriptwriter chose to balance the portrayal of effort more (in my opinion) toward Rickey. He’s the one who makes the plot move—Mr. Robinson is more passive, in the sense that his greatest contribution to the success of integrating America’s Pastime was to keep his head down, turn the other cheek, keep quiet and hit the heck out of the baseball, while Branch Rickey is the guy aggressively making it all happen for the good of baseball. It may be an entirely accurate portrayal for all I know, but I would like to know what Spike has to say about it.

One awkward moment in this movie: I was sitting there enjoying the movie, when, at the beginning of yet another baseball game (it may have been the last one, where they grab the pennant), someone begins to sing the Anthem (i.e., the World’s Most Unsingable Song) and sings it slowly from beginning to end, and I’m thinking, “What the—“ because, really, did we need to hear the entire thing? Then, at the end of the Anthem, the camera lovingly caresses the elderly male singer, and I’m thinking (again), “What the—“ because, “What?” I mean, really, if you are going to sing The Song, at least have the football stadium collapsing or fireworks or something else going on while the song is interminably happening.

Don’t yell at me here: one of my favorite memories is getting the chance to sing the Anthem at a high school basketball game on January 18, 1991 (look it up). True story, the person who was supposed to sing it didn’t show, and someone ran over to me and said, “Hurry!” and then, “You know the words right?” And all I could think was “Start low enough. Start low or the rockets red glare is going to be ugly.” But still. It’s too long to just sit through for no reason other than because you want your old relative to be in a movie.

Yep, that’s the answer I got in the credits. The anthem singer has the same last name as the screenwriter. Note to writers: don’t put yourself (or your father) in the story, even if you (he) does have a fairly decent set of pipes. Unless you are Stan Lee: then you know how to do this, which is not with the Entire Dawn’s Early Light Home Of The Brave. Put your dad in the stands with a pennant. Let him yell, “Go home, nigger!” if you want to give him a speaking part. Just saying. It was awkward, and he was no Whitney.

More awkward, and forgive me, that last paragraph was supposed to be the end, but I suddenly remembered that the screenwriter committed another sin which angers me, and that is that he started out the movie with this: “In 1945, American’s Greatest Generation came home,” which irritates me to no end. Stop with that Greatest Generation nonsense already. You know how Dr. Paisley says the AntiChrist is the Papacy Corporate—the entire line of Popes from Peter to Francis? Well, I’d like to steal that idea and state that the American Soldier corporately and generically (including sailors, marines, airmen, guard, etc.) is the Greatest Generation. Brokaw can lionize his parents and older brothers all he wants, but do not start with me on this. Those kids were not braver than these kids. Those kids were not more patriotic than these are. Posey’s daddy who sits in a wheelchair now because he gave the use of his legs to America in 2010 is not less a Hero, less a Patriot than someone who charged onto a beach in Normandy 69 years ago. That “Greatest Generation” lie is a slander against All Our Heroes. (End rant.)

Yes. See this movie. It’s great. Harrison Ford rocks the old man look as Branch Rickey. Lots of horrible repeated racial slurs. Also lots of change, good humor, hope for our own future. We can change. We don’t have to hate people who are different from us. Could we get that?

Bring a book for the first hour of JP3D, which is all set-up and reaches a level of boring that might have worked in 1993, but does not work in the days of Movies That Are Actually Exciting. If you are going to make a movie (or even 3D up an old movie), find a script with a story and some character development that doesn’t revolve around “Dontcha wanna be my babydaddy, huh, please?”

Nothing happens until everything happens and then you’re just running from dinosaurs, except when you’re patting them on the nose, because everyone knows that while you should definitely scream and rush off in terror from a carnivore that weighs a hundred thousand pounds, a vegan who weighs a hundred thousand pounds should be patted on the nose. Take that, meat-eaters!

Also fascinating was that Ellie, who is a paleo-botanist, knows all about the causes of the vesicles on the “Trike’s” tongue. A trike, of course, is a triceratops. Ellie knows more about what might cause the trike’s every-six-week’s lethargy than the reptile vet does, but that’s because she’s a woman. Any woman can figure this out. Duh. Bloating. The vesicles are from eating too much dark chocolate (92% cacao) trying to get through the week.

A little boy is shocked by 10,000 volts, and the only permanent damage seems to be to his hair-do. My hair is like that naturally, so I feel his pain, if not his electrification.

Not to belabor this movie at all, but there are two further points that I’ll hit and then we’ll be done. (That was the movie reviewer’s “In conclusion,” at which the congregation begins packing.)

First, it took the United States government ten years to map the human genome with the world’s best minds and the open wallet of the American Taxpayer behind it. The far-superior work being done in Costa Rica not only to map the dino DNA, but clone it, and maintain it until there are entire herds of adult animals is financed by a single man who looks like Colonel Sanders, with work done by about ten scientists who work in a small lab into which anyone may go who jumps out of the Intro Ride without having to gown and glove. So much could be said here, but you’re losing interest, so I’m going to move on to the worst part of this silly show.

It’s the sexist part. Ellie has a doctorate in paleo-botany, but her life will not be complete unless Alan (doctorate in paleontology, never mind he has no clue about tongue vesicles), who hates children, decides that he wants to marry her and have kids after all. He declares, “Kids smell,” which is probably especially true if they are walking around giant piles of dinosaur excrement all the time.

Alan’s lifelong aversion to kids is remediated by spending one day hanging around with an irritating little boy and a nerd girl (“I know UNIX. I can save the world.”). The kids take right to him–cuddling up in trees and helicopters–but I don’t blame them. They are obviously starved for affection. Their grandpa eats ice cream (“it’s melting”) while they are out in a storm being chased by omnivores. (I know they are omnivores, because one of them eats a man who is sitting on a toilet. What’s more omni than that?)

We’ve seen II and III, so we know the fatherhood bit didn’t take, right? I just hate that a woman so educated is so needy. She needs to find a man who (drum roll) wants her and her dreams for the future. (Bites tongue and does not give into temptation to rant about the silly idea that a woman should give up her identity/hopes/dreams to marry anyone. Check first that the hopes and dreams match.) Besides, if she had looked closely, she would have noticed it was the little girl who saved the world–at least temporarily–by locking the door. Alan doesn’t really do anything except stay with the kids, which may be enough in today’s world, now that I think about it.

The best part of this movie is, of course, Wayne Knight, the fat guy who gets killed by velocigoo.

The 3D is great, but sadly, no dinos (carnivore or otherwise) jump out at you.
If your movie budget is limited, see GI JOE: RETALIATION instead of this one. Nothing boring there.