Displaying Category: Movie

Hey look, another Mike Judge movie! I felt pretty good about this movie. It wasn't hilarious or awesomely excellent or highly critical of American society (like Idiocracy) but it was funny and full of interesting caricatures... so in the end, I felt good about it. If anything, I felt like it all wrapped up a little too cleanly, because while it had a tone of "life is complicated and it sucks" through most of the movie, the ending just made everything neat and tidy with a pretty bow and, in a way, didn't feel true to the rest of the film. Still, I'd recommend it if you're looking for something fun.

4/5

After watching District 9 and seeing the trailer for Avatar and thinking back on the Matrix movies, we've definitely seen pretty good on-screen representations of land-walking, manned, robot-like tanks or "Mechs." So where is our Battletech/Mechwarrior movie already? And yes, I am totally ignoring Robot Jox and Robot Wars. Seriously, we need an American studio to finally produce this...

I had actually planned on seeing Julie & Julia, but apparently the film was damaged the night before and the replacement hadn't come in yet. So we got free tickets and I took the opportunity to see a different movie since I was there already. Inglorious Basterds was starting in fifteen minutes, so that's what I saw. And hence no ticketstub.

So I got pretty much what I expected from a Tarentino film. It's long. There's some pretty graphic violence. People like to talk. A lot. I actually kind of liked the movie, but I'm not entirely sure why. There were lots of really really slow sections as characters sat around a table and talked about all sorts of random things. I found the language to be interesting and some of the conversations were intense, but what with those conversations making up most of the film, it definitely felt long. I would probably only recommend it to people who are already familiar with Tarentino films and really enjoys them.

*SPOILERS FOLLOW*

Also, while the film has a historical setting, it is almost comically not historical in terms of the facts. I mean, it's a well known fact that the entire German high command didn't die in a small cinema in Paris, thereby ending the war in 1944. I find it almost absurd that the movie even suggests this without any explanation. No suggestion of an alternate timeline, no backhanded "...and that's how it would have gone, if things had worked out..." Nothing. It felt weird.

4/5

Post Grad follows a fairly predictable trajectory as recent college graduate Ryden (Alexis Bledel) discovers that life after school isn't so much under her control. When she fails to get her dream job and is forced to live at home with her perfectly normal abnormal family, her confidence in herself and her dreams begins to waver. Most of this is handled well and convincingly, though I kind of felt like Michael Keaton as Ryden's Dad was attracting way too much attention to himself. What really attracted me to the movie, though, was the romantic sub-plot between Ryden and her best (and as far as we can tell, only) friend Adam, who has clearly been in love with Ryden for years and clearly dealt with her "just friends" response for just as long. There were some really good juicy slivers of romance in there, but it rarely got as intense as it was suggesting it might. So while I was finally choked up a little at the end, I still felt like some really great potential was squandered on less interesting sub-sub-plots involving Dad.

Still, Alexis is good and I am always happy watching her do... whatever.

3/5

Ponyo is a Hayao Miyazaki film from studio Ghibli about a 5-year old boy who befriends a goldfish who longs to become human. While the film featured the typically great qualities of a Miyazaki film, great writing, good story, decent animation, and really great sound effects (maybe it's just me that notices), I felt like the target audience was just way too young for me to get much out of the movie. Obviously with main characters who are five years old, you can't really expect an adult perspective on things. That would be the major difference between movies from say, Pixar, that, while targeted toward children, still have significant content for adults to enjoy... Ponyo really doesn't have that interest. The movie is purely a fantasy that young children are going to love.

That isn't to say I didn't enjoy it, I just wasn't especially engaged by it. To be honest, I actually found myself distracted by the notion that a couple of 5-year old children know enough about love to commit to each other for the rest of their lives. This is the central theme of the story and I just couldn't buy into it. I also felt like the animation was "old" by today's standards... maybe simplified is the proper term. Of course, this makes sense if the target audience is young children, they certainly don't care about the details, but again, I found myself distracted by the art and not drawn in by it. In many ways, I also felt like the story mirrored that of The Little Mermaid which is also a Disney film (Ponyo is distributed by Disney in the US). So, not a bad movie, just not for me.

3/5

This was a presentation of Ed Wood's infamous film Plan 9 from Outer Space, featuring riffing by the RiffTrax guys. In short, the movie was bad and the riffing was hilarious. I made the mistake of trying to eat Junior Mints while watching this which resulted in me nearly choking on a 'mint, causing me to go into a coughing fit and get dangerously close to vomiting. Good times! I had never seen Plan 9 before this, so it was definitely educational, in the sense that I now know how bad a movie can get... Michael Bay, you still have a long way to fall...

The rating I am presenting here goes mostly to the quality of the riffing, not Plan 9.

4/5

When I saw the trailer for this movie my initial thoughts were "Now there is a good romantic movie sure to twist and manipulate my heartstrings. I can't wait!" I hate being disappointed by something that seems so easy (seriously, commercials make me cry). I think I actually did get choked up once, but I don't remember what it was about and it definitely wasn't anything central to the story. Anyway, the basic premise is, guy travels back and forth within his own lifetime (yes, just like Quantum Leap and Journeyman). That's pretty much it. This traveling means he knows who he's going to marry and how he's going to die and what his daughter's name will be, etc. The key idea here is what it means to know one's destiny. That should introduce all sorts of interesting questions and ponderings, but TTTW just doesn't care. They'd rather whine about how much it sucks that he travels and that he can't control it, which really emphasizes how stupid it is to whine about.

It isn't a terrible movie, I found it reasonably well put together, I just didn't feel like it accomplished anything it was really set up to satisfy. I walked out feeling moderately entertained, but rather more significantly disappointed.

3/5

The movie opens as a sort of quasi-documentary following a bureaucrat as he tries to evict 1.8 million insect-like aliens stranded in Johannesburg, South Africa for the last 20 years, and move them to a different, worse slum further away from the city population who are now tired of the alien refugees. This first section of the movie serves as a dark satire on man's inhumanity to man (that's right, I'm taking it back to grade school). We get many of those awkward chuckle moments where we see something genuinely funny, and then realize if this were real (and it definitely could be real) and we were treating other people this way, it would be sickening. Without warning, the movie takes a hard right turn into more serious science fiction involving transformations and amazing alien weaponry and space ships and battlemechs and the whole way through I am thrilled and sickened and loving every minute of it. Note that the movie is extremely violent and graphically gory, all heightened by the documentary film style.

To anyone interested in seeing District 9 or even those who have already seen it, I would highly recommend reading this interview with directory Neill Blomkamp. It outlines Blomkamp's backstory for the aliens and how the ended up at Earth. Though it says there are spoilers, I don't think there was anything there that hurt my experience. It actually gave me a better feel for what was going on and put everything into better context.

4/5

Sony Screen Gems has announced plans to make a fourth Underworld movie. Now, I like this franchise just fine, but I wonder what story they are trying to tell that they haven't told already. Is there a greater arc they want to expand on, or is this just another chapter in the lives of the vampire/werewolf lovers that may or may not be entertaining? I guess we wait and see...

Tom Hansen believes he will never truly be happy until he finds "the one." And so we are launched into an amazing story of love and relationships between two very dynamic characters.

This movie was pretty much perfect. Excellent and extremely humorous writing. Some wonderful (though obvious) insights into love and how it can affect people differently and how those differences can affect a relationship. Because the story takes place over a 500 day period (frequently jumping around in that space) we experience the full spectrum of new love (expressed through a fantastic music and dance spectacular in the park) deepening love, heartbreak, hope, and hopelessness. Honestly, I went into this movie expecting to cry. I wanted to cry. Mostly, there was too much laughing to cry. Even as we watched in sympathetic horror as Tom experienced the depths of heartbreak-induced depression, we were treated to well-timed and orchestrated hilarity that managed to keep every emotion in-check with reality.

I actually left feeling more hopeful, even after or maybe because I recognized myself in much of what Tom experienced. Whether it's all just coincidence or destiny, I feel like maybe there's still some hope for something good. And yes, this is a movie that explicitly calls out TV and movies and even greetings cards as the shepherds of false ideas on love, itself selling ideas of love that may or may not be false. It doesn't matter, it was all crazy fun and I would happily do it again.

5/5