Things are looking really busy this weekend, with three new movies on my must see list.  I will see one a day for the next three days, and review each in turn the next morning.  I offer to you, my beloved readers, the chance to help determine what order I should see them in.  If there is a movie upcoming that you are interested in but would like my humble opinion early on speak now via comment here or Twitter.  Your choices are:

The Grey-Liam Neeson and a bunch of disposable heroes land in the frozen North and have to escape while being hunted by a pack of wolves.  I can only hope he is forced to eat his fellow passengers to survive.  My prediction is that there turns out to be some kind of external influence causing the wolves to be unusually aggressive.

Man on a Ledge-I consider it both an insult to my intelligence and a warning sign of incoming suck when the movie description (not a review) calls this movie “heart pounding”.   I have a feeling these descriptions are actually written by the marketing department for the film itself.  The more they hype it the more it probably needs hyping.  My prediction: so little heart pounding that I will be checking my pulse in order to make sure I haven’t accidentally passed away during the show.  Man stands on a ledge in order to distract from his friends trying to steal a $40MM diamond in order to prove his innocence.  Is it so much to ask that a movie premise make sense?  I mean, does every crime in a movie have to be for some noble purpose?  Would it not be enough to simply say “A guy stands on a ledge in order to distract from his friends stealing a $40MM diamond which they intend to sell and use the money to buy stuff”?  Seems to make a lot more sense to me.

One for the Money-if your intention is to screw with my head vote for this one.  A super hot girl is desperate for cash and decides to become Dog the Bounty Hunter.  Apparently she is going after her ex boyfriend.  My predictions: a lot of “girl too dainty to do anything all of a sudden kicks a guy in the balls and discovers she enjoys the feeling of power and regained self worth”; a highly improbably series of luck allows her to exceed the performance of one or more much more experienced bounty hunters; and finally she catches her ex only to discover she has feelings for him.  These feeling either motivate her to let him go, or he is able to exploit her feelings in order to trick her and get away in the last five minutes.  (Protect your Nuts image courtesy of the Funny T Shirt category)

So make a comment here of hit me up on Twitter @NerdKungFu.  Given the actual number of responses I get from these things the first person to hit me up will probably be casting the deciding vote.  First review should be up tomorrow.  Thanks everyone for reading.  Have a great day

Dave

So it looks like Marvel is going ahead with a bunch of it’s B level super heroes for movies, and one of the ones they are considering is Dr. Strange.  To go with a B level hero they are running with B level writers, specifically Thomas Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer who wrote the remake of Conan the Barbarian.  The movie was kind of crap, and a lot of that blame sits right in the writers laps.  Conan image from the Movie T Shirts, by the way.

What can we do, you ask?  Well, in this post I am going to list a few major mistakes these two guys could make in hopes that they might read this and pick something up.  First of all, Dr. Strange is gay.  There, I said it.  You don’t need to hide that fact, and more specifically you don’t need to write in a female love interest.

Second of all, Dr. Strange has all kinds of mystical powers but really isn’t much for physical.  You don’t have to have him punch some guy out.  He uses his brains and powers to defeat bad guys, not a gun.  For that matter, his villains tend to be more than the run of the mill bank robbers, so let’s try to keep things nice and occult.

I’m sure there are other ways to suck this one up.  If I think of any I will mention it, but I feel like hell tonight and need to get to bed.  Have a good one.

Jason

So George Lucas has announced Feb. 10th as the day of evil as he rereleases his horrible movie The Phantom Menace, now in 3D.  I am calling on all nerds and, for that matter, all Americans to boycott the entire series.  As everyone knows the prequels were crap, and post production 3D is crap.  Why would you spend money to support crap?

This Empire logo comes from the Star Wars T Shirt category.

This goes beyond mere dislike of what Lucas did to his franchise.  We need to take a stand against the raping of cherished movie franchises.  Hollywood needs to realize that they don’t have carte blanche with regards to good movies just for a fast buck.  In case you were wondering what the inevitable conclusion to this ugly trend I have one thing to say to you: Highland 2, the Quickening with 500 Years Ago on Planet Zeist.  You think I’m kidding?  How about a Alien prequel that has Ripley in flight school but somehow involved with aliens?  A remake of Weird Science starring Justin Bieber and Jaden Smith as “geeks” who can’t get girls?  How about a remake of the Karate Kid starring Jaden Smith but mistakenly set in China?  Oh, wait.  That one happened. How about On the Waterfront but make it about MMA?

So do the movie world a favor and don’t go see any of these.  This goes well beyond my personal desire to see Lucas fall on his face.  Don’t take your kids to see these films.  You know the new ones will just damage their soft brains and the older ones will be so full of extra worthless crap that you will want to scream.

Jason

Extremely Depressing and Incredibly Painful

I am going to start this review with a lesson from my upcoming book “How to Make Movies that Don’t Suck”.  The lesson is this: no matter how good the story, acting, direction, filming, or editing is, if you make the movie about 9-11 then the biggest American tragedy of the 21st century is going to overwhelm the story and plot in a depressing gloom and actually annoy the hell out of your audience.  It’s like if you set out the world’s finest buffet table, with sushi, caviar, and all the best foods possible, set it out on a table covered with flowers, fine china, and a silk tablecloth, but then dead center put a big platter of dog feces.  No matter how good the food may be, the very fact that it sat on a table with dog crap is going to put a lot of people off even touching it.  Furthermore, when someone looks at your beautiful buffet their eyes will be drawn to the crap in the middle and they will want to look away.  Some people might start on one end of the buffet and not notice the dog crap until halfway through, but as soon as they see it the food they have collected will end up left untouched on the credenza, while others will have been chased from the room by the smell wafting through the air alone.

Thus we come to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a movie about a troubled kid dealing with his dad dying on 9-11.  I am not actually saying that this movie is the greatest buffet of all time except for the dog crap salad at the center.  It has plenty of other issues, most related to pacing, but I can see what director Stephen Daldry (The Hours, Billy Elliot, The Reader) was trying to accomplish.  However, it does have elements that in a movie without the dog crap centerpiece would have made for an excellent cinema experience.

The funny thing is at first I thought this movie was treating 9-11 as a main issue without forcing the audience to sit through it, to it’s benefit.  The death of the father was related via expository scenes rather than footage of the Twin Towers falling.  However, as the movie progresses through a never ending Vortex of Flashbacks we are subjected to everything from that day I never wanted to see or hear about again.  I don’t even want to talk about it here.  I watched all that stuff live on TV and still get the chills.

The story is basically As Good as it Gets meets Stand by Me set in the City of Lost Children.  Tom Hanks plays super dad to his highly intelligent but disturbed kid Oskar (no other real credits).  They play games and Tom’s character Thomas likes to give his son puzzles like a scavenger hunt to solve.  Thomas dies in one of the towers and the kid has a breakdown of sorts.  He finds a key in his dad’s possession and decides it must be part of the last game Thomas was setting up for him.  He blows off his mother (Sandra Bullock-she is excellent in this movie, BTW) in a big way and undergoes an OCD inspired quest to find what lock the key fits into.  Along the way he meets a ton of people, deals with his own phobias and issues, alienates his long suffering mother, and meets up with a creepy older man (Max von Sydow-Minority Report, Shutter Island, the Exorcist) who is mute and writes everything down on a piece of paper.  The plot plods on and on like me trying to push my ’79 T-Bird to the gas station, with lots of boring non productive scenes punctuated by temper tantrums from the kid.  The kid in a weird way describes a perfect character arc.  At the beginning of the movie I found him painfully annoying.  Towards the middle I kind of really got to like him and his eccentric ways.  Then towards the end I found him really annoying again.

The story is obviously about the character development in the kid, and in it’s own way does an admirable (if boring) job of portraying it.  The problem is the 9-11 basis for the story so overshadows everything else that you really couldn’t care.  I will say the story managed to not step in any other major quagmires.  While the ending was a little fanciful it did not really bend my mind accepting it.  The acting was very good, and the dialog decent.  If the story had been about about a kid dealing with his dad dying in a tragic Segway accident it would have been a decent, if slow, movie.

The stars.  Acting was decent all around, although in spite of getting top billing Tom Hanks was only in about 15 minutes of the film and more or less played a grown up version of Josh Baskin from Big.  I thought Sandra Bullock did a particularly good job.  Two stars.  For the most part I liked the characters, especially the mute old man.  One star.  The movie did what movies should at least try to do: actually have a character show some form of development (for most of you directors out there this phenomenon is called “character development”) and truly describe a true story arc.  One star.  Overall of a quality I wish more filmmakers would aspire to.  Two stars.  Total: six stars.

The black holes.  9-11 based story.  Two black holes.  The story kept coming back to 9-11.  One black hole.  Pacing felt like my mother was driving the movie.  Sluggish and boring.  One black hole.  Total: four black holes.

So a total of two stars.  I honestly did not want to see this film when I saw the trailers, and only “professional” obligations got me into the theater.  Now that I have seen it I know I was right in that assessment.  If you think enough time has passed and you are not disturbed by images and stories set on 9-11 then by all means go see it.  You will probably enjoy it, but you won’t be invited to any of the wild parties I throw on a regular basis (the last one was in 1998, I think.  Party like a Vulcan image courtesy of the Spock T Shirt category).  I think the acting will carry this movie if you can ignore the subject matter.  The kid is talented, and Tom Hangs and Sandra Bullock have a good chemistry together (I thought so when I reviewed Larry Crowne).  However, overall the entire movie was pretty much a bummer.

Thanks for reading, as always.  Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu.  Nothing really on deck until Friday, so I think I will take a break and let Jason post more of his short rants.  Talk to you soon.

Dave

So after I read Dave’s review for Tree of Life months ago I went and saw it to see if he was right on how bad it was.  It totally sucked.  I’ve seen YouTube videos that had better plots and stories.  How can the morons at the academy give a Best Director nomination on a film that was a random pile of weird footage?  Dave’s probably smarter on movies than I am and he couldn’t figure out what the damned point was.

This is a pretty good sign that the academy is chock full of pretentious a-holes who use their position to try to prove to the rest of Hollywood that they are smarter than they really are.  The question on my mind is if this is so why do they bother with such blue collar awards like best special effects?  Shouldn’t they be focused on which movie had the best caviar at the catering trucks?  If Tree of Life actually wins either of these awards I am going to set up a camera at the dog park near my house and submit whatever random footage I get as the animal movie of the year.

By the way, I don’t think Starfleet Academy is full of pretentious a-holes.  This shirt from the Star Trek T-Shirts category was the only image I could find with the word academy on it.

Jason

Geez, must every movie be remade?  It’s one thing when a great movie is remade into a cruddy one, but if I recall correctly Red Dawn was not exactly the greatest film ever made.  I guess that’s the sound of the bottom of a barrel being scraped, which is funny when you think about all the really good movies out there that could be remade.  Maybe the really good movies are somehow immune to remakes.  It keeps looking like they are going for movies that were good enough to do OK at the box office but not so good as to make the fans get really pissed off.

The reason I pulled this Chairman Mao image from the Political T Shirts is the original story was supposed to be about the Chinese invading the US to reposes on a bunch of defaulted debts.  That actually might have been good and would have definitely been timely.  However, the studio decided they couldn’t afford to alienate the Chinese and opted instead to go with the sucktastic choice of North Korea.  Do they really expect me to believe a county the size of Minnesota has the resources and manpower to even seriously threaten the United States?  This is one of the rare times you get to see a studio actively make the decision to create a crap movie.  It really just goes to show how little respect they have for their audience.  I would bet they only see us as bleating sheep with wallets.  I will not see this garbage.  Dave probably will, and I hope he dumps all over it.

Jason

Maybe I’m just not cut out to review spy movies.

This is the second spy movie in a row that I spent a lot of asking what the hell was going on.  However, in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy the complexity was the result of a poor adaptation of what is reportedly a great, complex spy novel aggravated by the fact that everyone in the movie looked the same.   In Haywire it feels like they just added complexity to give an otherwise simple story a thin veneer of sophistication.

Here’s how I define good movie complexity verses bad movie complexity.  Good movie complexity has you pulled in and intrigued by the cleverness of the action.  Bad movie complexity is when you find yourself asking “Why didn’t they just…and win?”  This movie generates it’s complexity by not explaining anything to the audience ever and adding layer after layer of bad guys who appear on screen long enough have you wondering who the hell the are and how they got involved in all this and then vanish into the void.

That’s not to say this movie is bad.  I was really impressed by newcomer Gina Carano (Ring Girls, American Gladiators, Blood and Bone).  She is an accomplished MMA fighter and it shows in the action sequences.  It is amazing how good fight scenes are when you don’t resort to doing .5 to 1.5 second cut sequences in order to make up for the remarkable inadequacies of the actors martial skills and/or the lack of a qualified fight choreographer.  Each of the fight scenes was brutal, cool, and believable without being over the top.  Gina shows her skills and manages to use techniques that seem to make up for the fact that she is fighting against guys who weigh 100lbs more than her.  I was also really impressed by her acting ability.  Coming from the MMA world you wouldn’t think acting was a honed skill but she seems to have some.

The problems with this movie are twofold.  The first being the unnecessary levels of pointless complexity for complexity’s sake.  The second is the movie was flat for it’s entirety, at least for me.  There never seemed to be any kind of buildup or climax.  The pacing was as regular as a metronome.  Fight-coffee-fight-drive-fight-phone call-fight-shoot guys-fight-meeting-fight-spy stuff-fight.  There is no moment I can pinpoint as the climax, introduction, or conclusion.  There are no acts in this movie.  It’s like a 93 minute steady 3.4 Ricter scale earthquake.  Enough to to feel (or, as we say in California, enough to stir your coffee) but not enough to excite you.

I am not going to get into the story too much as it is a spy/mystery one, but let me say none of it really caught me by surprise.  The story is of a ex Marine (Mallory-the aforementioned Gina Carano.  I anticipate seeing her in other roles soon) who works for a private mercenary spy company (?).  She is sent off on a mission and ends up being betrayed in a plot so complex Tolkien would have trouble following it.  She tells the story flashback style to a hapless goof (Michael Angarano-Sky High, Almost Famous, Red State) she sort of carjacks after beating the hell out of her former partner Aaron (Channing Tatum-Step Up, the Eagle, Dear John) in a crappy diner.  Her former employer Kenneth (Ewan McGregor-Star Wars prequils, Trainspotting, Big Fish) is after her.  Somehow two other guys played by Michael Douglas (Falling Down, the Game, Basic Instinct) and Antonio Banderas (Desperado, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Zorro) are involved, and she runs into a fellow mercenary/spy played by Michael Fassbender (X-Men First Class, Inglorious Basterds, 300) who gets sucked into the complexity.

Anyway, spy action hijinks ensues.  Guys get their asses beaten by a girl (a kick ass girl).  People get shot.  Not a lot of explosions, which I thought was cool.  The completely even keel movie motors it’s was to a completely even keel ending.

The stars.  Excellent fight sequences, with a bonus star for not making me suspend my disbelief too much.  Three stars.  Gina Carano was good, and shows a lot of talent.  One star.  A really good cast of extremely talented actors with a lot of nerd cred, including the great Bill Paxton (“Game over, man!  Game over!”  Alien image courtesy of the Movie T Shirt category) as Mallorys father.  One star.  Decent camera work.  The people on this film know how to shoot fights.  One star.  Total: six stars.

The black holes.  Overly complicated for no reason.  Two black holes.  In spite of being an action film, the tick-tock pacing never actually had me excited.  Two black holes.  As I wrote this review I had to struggle to remember the plot or any of my relevant points.  Forgetability is never a good thing in a movie (although in truth there are several that I wish I could forget (cough cough Lucas cough cough)).  One black hole.  Total: five black holes.

A total of one star, and yet another bland middle of the road film.  2012 has not really started off great for films.  The problem I am really having with this film is it’s another one that had all the elements to be one of the greatest spy movies of the last 10 years.  Excellent action, excellent cast, massive potential.  However, the truth is in the execution and this movie fell apart in the editing room, in my opinion.  Too bad.

Sorry for the short, kind of boring review but these middle of the road films tend to leave me lacking in inspiration.  If you want something really entertaining you have to give me a movie that is either really good or really bad to sink my teeth into.  Bland films result in bland review, I guess.  Thanks for reading.  Still a ton of movies to see, and tonight is $5 night, so look for something tomorrow.  Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu.  Talk to you soon.

Dave

Not really sure how I feel about this news.  Was Kevin Spacey so hard to get for a minor appearance?  Honestly he made the last Superman movie for me.  Without him it was really kind of dull and boring.  Sorry, but Superman just doesn’t have the angst and pull of Batman or Spiderman.  This Supes verses Doomsday image from the Superman T Shirts.

Bradley Cooper I find entertaining in comedies, but I don’t know if he can pull off a serious villain roll.  My big worry is that given an actor known for comedy the director and writers will be drawn to making Lex Luthor the comedy relief.  Big mistake in my opinion.  There can be a certain amount of humor from him, but he can’t be made into a big joke.  Although I have to say I am intrigued by the idea of Bradley Cooper completely bald.  Will he man up and shave his scalp, or go the wimpy route with one of those skin caps?

Jason

At least they don’t glitter in sunlight.

So last night I saw Underworld Awakening in 3D.  In fact I saw it on IMAX, which I consider a true test of what I think my time is worth.  You see, in order to watch a regular price show I would have had to sit around bored for over an hour.  I have always believed that my time is worth more than $7 an hour, so I sprang for the ticket at full price.  I also have a liking for the entire Underworld series and wanted to give it the best opportunity to present itself.

Good or bad?  Sort of.  Kate Beckinsale is back and looking as hot as ever.  The action is honestly weaker than any of the previous movies in my opinion.  Still decent and exciting, but kind of rote and formulaic.  The problems really arise in the plot and pacing.  The story progresses at warp speed (Enterprise image courtesy of the Star Trek T Shirt category), leaving a messy chum of plot holes, unanswered questions, and highly questionable motivations in its wake.  I really feel that a ton of expository footage ended up on the cutting room floor, which is a shame as the entire movie felt criminally short at a lousy 88 minutes.  No one would have begrudged Swedish directors Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein an extra 15-20 minutes of screen time to flesh out the plot a little and give us a reason to care about anyone.

The two directors don’t have a lot of film experience and seem to be more well known for their TV work.  This actually makes a lot of sense, as the pacing seems very 2 part TV show-ish.  In fact, since most hour shows usually go 40-42 minutes than 88 minutes makes a lot of sense.  When you have to fit into a specific time limit you learn to be economical with your development scenes.  However, someone should tell them that the only limit cinema movies really has is how long an audience will sit in a seat.  Some movies actually have been know to go well over two hours.

Anyway, the story is (once  again) about the never ending war between Lycans and Vampires.  Given what we learned about the start of the war in the last movie I have to say my sympathy more soundly resides with the Lycans, but they don’t have super hot Deathdealers in leather body suits so I guess I will let it pass.  The twist in this film is humans have discovered both races and more or less hunted them into extinction using ammo specifically designed to kill them.  Anyway, in a scene so blatantly ripped off from the first Resident Evil movie they might as well have called Selene Alice Selene wakes up from a frozen cryo tube in a laboratory.  For some reason (the first example of “what the hell were they thinking?” plot holes) the scientists studying her felt the need to keep her leather outfit in the exact same lab for the last 12 years.  She has been frozen and incommunicado for those 12 years while the humans destroyed all her old friends and enemies.  She managed to gut a bunch of guards with a scalpel in about 1/4 of a second, which raises the question of if this is what vampires can do how did humans ever wipe them out even with magic bullets?  Anyway, her love interest in the movie before last, the vampire/Lycan hybrid Michael, is missing and she wants to find him.  She seems to have some kind of mental connection with someone she assumes to be him but actually turns out to be her 12 year old daughter (wait a minute.  I might buy into the idea that she was impregnated before being captured (which actually raises a ton of other questions), but do they really expect me to believe that while in a freezer she managed to carry a child to term, give birth to it, regain her pre-pregnancy shape and athletic ability, and somehow has no memory of it?).  Anyway, she meets up with another vampire (Theo James-the Inbetweeners Movie, Bedlam, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger) who for no apparent reason knows who she is and wants to help her.  He leads her to a hidden coven led by a guy who looks almost exactly like Phillip but isn’t (Charles Dance-Alien, Last Action Hero, Swimming Pool).  Lycans attack and the girl gets recaptured by the scientist experimenting on her (Stephen Rae-V for Vendetta, Crying Game).  At that point the whole humans hunting vampires story is more or less dropped for the remainder of the film.  A human cop decides to help Selene for no discernible reason.  Vampire on Lycan hijinks ensues.  Stuff gets blown up.  Cars get thrown around.  The lead in for the next movie is crammed down our throats.

The stars.  Vampires and Lycans who do what they are supposed to do, not sparkle in daylight.  One star.  Kate Beckinsale looking pretty hot.  One star.  Some of the action was palatable.  Two stars.  There was a nice merging of the Gothic vampire world with a dystopian slightly futuristic society.  One star.  Two bonus stars for the fact that I kind of enjoyed the film without being able to put my finger on why.  Seven stars total.

The black holes.  Plot holes bigger than the IMAX screen I was looking at.  One black hole.  A complete failure to give us anything in the way of an explanation of what was actually going on.  One black hole.  A complete lack of motivation from anyone to do anything.  What was the villain trying to accomplish?  Why did the other vampire help Selene?  Why did the cop join up with her?  The list goes on and on.  One black hole.  A lack of consistency in the powers that vampires or Lycans have.  One minute Selene is running down a corridor and killing guys so fast they can’t even follow her, the next she is struggling to keep up with a moderately fast moving car.  One black hole.  The CGI was about as good as you will see on True Blood and the 3D was completely non existent for the majority of the film.  Thanks for the headache and souvenir glasses.  One black hole.  A lot of the action kind of used cheesy camera angles and off camera shooting to create a fake feeling sequence.  One black hole.  Total: six black holes.

A grand total of one star.  Kind of mediocre.  The decision to see it or not really depends on the individual.  If you are the type to enjoy mindless action and blood, like vampires, have a thing for Kate Beckinsale, or just want to kill an afternoon without involving the majority of your brain cells then by all means see it on a big screen.  If you find lame plot holes aggravating and can’t stomach a film that fails to provide you with any insight into what any of the characters are actually thinking than bail.  Date movie?  Probably not.  Too much blood.

By the way, I didn’t give them a black hole for this but if you think the movie got it’s R rating for any kind of nudity or language prepare to be disappointed.  It’s all about the blood on this one.  Honestly it felt more PG-13 to me except for a few graphic gut scenes.

Thanks for reading.  I’m seeing Haywire tonight so look for that review tomorrow.  Busy weekend for movies.  Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu.  Talk to you soon.

Dave

One thing it appears Dave and I agree on it’s that zombies rule and the Walking Dead is one of the greatest TV shows on right now.  Great story, great characters, and great zombies.  The good news is I just found out is that AMC has just ordered another 16 episodes is addition to the ones they are showing right now in season 2.  Excellent choice.  Of course it always makes me laugh when AMC does great original TV like the Walking Dead or Breaking Bad when their initials stand for American Movie Classics.  Shouldn’t they be showing Gone With the Wind all day or something?

Something that has always amused me about zombies is the guys who are huge fans and are hoping for the big zombie apocalypse (like Dave) are also the guys most likely to end up zombie chow in the first ten minutes.  Most of them seem to think hey are going to run around with a shotgun like on this zombie t shirt and be the hero of the wasteland, but based on what I have seen with regards to physical abilities things are going to go badly for them pretty quick.  I’m sure if zombie apocalypse took place in Warsong Gulch they would do fine, but anyone remember the scene in Zombieland when the main guy describes the reason cardio is so important?

Jason