Before I get into this review of an excellent movie, I want to mention getting one of my pet peeves kicked in the balls before the start of the movie.  I went to the mens room to take care of my business and there saw some dirtbag use the urinal and then leave with nary soap nor water touching his hands.  You, sir, are the reason we all get sick every year and I hope you catch a cold a week until you learn to wash your hands.

By the way, I say pet peeve but really, if this doesn’t peeve you then you can join your unwashed dirt bag friend down in the sewer.  This should be everyone’s peeve.

Anyway, Cowboys and Aliens.  Really, really fun.  It’s that simple.  I mean, it’s a movie about cowboys and aliens!  How could that possible go wrong?  Well, any number of ways, but fortunatly for the hapless reviewers who have to sit through every piece of tripe that comes down the pike, it doesn’t.  John Favreau  manages to forge a great genre film out of two different genre’s.  All around a positive experience.  (Alien image courtesy of the movie t shirt category)

I really don’t want to get into the story on this one, as everyone needs to see it and I don’t want to send out any spoilers.  I’ll talk about the stuff you should have already picked up from the trailer.  Daniel Craig wakes up in the Arizona desert with some kind of bracelet on his wrist and amnesia.  He is a very stereotypical high desert lone bad ass, and proves it in the first few minutes.  He heads into town where he runs into the rest of the Western stereotypical character types.  There’s the grizzled sheriff, the grizzled rich rancher who really runs the town (Harrison Ford), his wimpy, obnoxious son, the upscale fish-out-of-water big town guy who runs the saloon and doesn’t know how to use a gun, the hot gunslinger girl, the Native American raised by whites, and the grizzled preacher.  In fact the word grizzled can be applied to pretty much every male character in this film.  All of them are really stereotypical, but honestly it’s what we expect from a cowboy movie and so actually adds to the enjoyment of the film.  Of course, great acting and directing help keep them from becoming annoying.

Aliens show up and start abducting people (anal-probe-a-go-go).  Daniel Craig’s bracelet turns out to be a weapon that he uses to shoot down one of them.  Other alien/cowboy hijinks ensues.  His memory comes back in flashbacks.  Native Americans are portrayed as savage killers and then noble warriors.  A near inexhaustible supply of cowboys get killed by aliens.  Stuff blows up.  Other stuff happens.  I really don’t want to spoil anything, so I will leave it here.  Short review for me, I guess.

The stars.  Cowboy movie.  One star.  Alien movie.  One star.  Well written story with no visible plot holes.  Two stars.  Daniel Craig.  One star.  Harrison Ford.  One star.  All around great acting.  One star.  The aliens looked bad ass and their CGI was excellent.  One star.  Great special effects.  One star.  Scenery was over the top good.  One star.  Olivia Wilde was looking pretty good.  One star.  Generally a fun experience.  Two stars.  Total: thirteen stars.

Then, because I am a bitter soul who can’t let even a great movie go without dumping on it a little, the black holes.  There were a couple of sequences about 1/3 of the way through that kind of dragged.  It might be just in comparison to all the other action packed scenes they lagged, but I definitely felt it.  One black hole.  The aliens motivation for coming to Earth was kind of stupid and childish.  One black hole.  The writers all obviously had a huge slice of deus ex machine pie before writing the ending.  One black hole.  Cowboy henchmen who continuously respawn like monsters from a monster generator in Gauntlet.  One black holes.  Total: 4 black holes.

I don’t have any irksome-but-not-blackhole-worthy items, but I will talk a bit about one limitation from the entirety of the film.  It is fun and entertaining, but makes no pretense at being anything more than that.  I’m not in the business of telling a great director like John Favreau how to make a movie, but I think that if he had added some plot element to the movie other than the main story it would have made for a deeper meaning.  Maybe the aliens might have had a more complex motivation for attacking Earth, or maybe they could have landed in the middle of some big conflict between the cowboys and the Native Americans.  Some kind of fight between cow and sheep herders or the like.  While the characters were all very good and well developed, it was the story itself that felt 2 dimensional.  Very linear with no variance whatsoever.  Even the whole “You’re an outlaw we are going to hang you” conflict was resolved in about 30 seconds with hardly any discussion at all.  Harrison Ford’s character was portrayed as a brutal hard ass who would destroy anything that got in his way, but after the first 20 minutes never had a chance to display that quality.  Again, great movie, but I think it could have been better.

Final score of 10 stars and my hearty recommendation that you all see it in a theater.  You will be entirely entertained.  Not good date material, but if your girl is a fan of Daniel Craig at all it might work.

Anyway, no posts until Monday.  I have a Warhammer tournament I am playing in this weekend.  Then I get to watch all the Harry Potter films back to back.  At some point I plan to suffer through the new Smurfs film (at the request of my best friend.  Thanks a lot, Dave) and review that one, so don’t be surprised if my next movie review has me feeling a little blue (haw!).  Also, I need to do my next Star Trek retrospective.  Unfortunately I have run out of the good movies to do and am now left with the dregs, starting with Generations.  Ugh.

OK.  I really, really wanted to hate this movie.  First of all, the whole concept of friends having casual sex with no strings attached is so contrary to my experience it sounds like watching a movie about an eight armed hermaphrodite playing baseball.  I have no basis for comparison and therefore the alien nature of the premise prevents me from having a connection.  I have never successfully engaged in a FWB situation and, in my experience, an kind of sexual activity comes with so many strings that I end up feeling like a marionette.  The idea of people getting away with this, especially two people as attractive as Mila Kunis and (I assume, based on what all my friends who are into guys say) Justin Timberlake, is almost infuriating.  Also, I am thoroughly sick of Justin Timberlake’s perfect life.  How good can someone’s life be?

However, as much as I wanted to pour the bitter bile of my life all over this film, it turned out to be shockingly honest and overall very decent.  There is not an original bone in this films body; it is a typical Hollywood boy-meets-girl-for-casual-sex-but-then-they-discover-they-have-real-feelings-for-each-other rom com love story.  There isn’t a single surprise in the whole story, except for the idea that there isn’t a qualified art director in all of New York City.  The story, however, makes a lot of sense, there is real chemistry between the two characters, and there are a couple decent supporting characters.  I won’t say it was a great movie going experience, but it is a good time watching.

The story.  Justin Timberlake (just typing his name bugs me) is Dylan (could they have given him a sexier name?  How about Studly McSuperpenis?), a guy who runs his own blog (the irony is NOT lost on me) in LA.  Mila Kunis is is Jamie, a headhunter in NYC.  GQ magazine needs a new Art Director and she recruits Dylan.  He is at first hesitant to move to New York and she spends the evening showing him how great the city is.  He abandons his employees in LA and moves out.  As he is more or less friendless he starts hanging out with Jamie.  They are both coming out of a recent painful breakup where they more or less got their hearts tossed in a wood chipper and then dumped onto a compost heap.  They turn into fast friends and, as these things inevitably go (except in my life) start sleeping together for funsies rather than realsies.

Meanwhile, Dylan is working at GQ and befriends the gay sports writer Tommy, played by Woody Harrelson.  I have to say that Woody doesn’t come across particularly well as a gay guy, but it’s obvious that he knows that and instead plays it so over the top that it gets hilarious.  He dominated every scene he was in and added an extremely nice touch to the film. I especially liked him asking Dylan “You sure you’re not gay?” several times.  However, for every Yin there inevitably must be a Yang, and in this case the Yang is pro snowboarder Shaun White.  First of all, I met him back in my days of working in the skateboard industry (hahahahaha.  They call it an industry) and he was kind of a jerk back then.  I have contempt for extreme sports pro “athletes”, especially from sports so extreme that they actively try to keep anyone not “core” out.  Say what you will about professional runners, but anyone can buy a pair of shoes and go running.  Anyway, Shaun White plays a completely unnecessary bit character who brings the flow of movie to a head on collision every time he shows up.  In a movie filled with really good actors delivering great performances all around he delivers a stilted, fake, Tweeki-like performance.  Honestly, R2-D2 had more emotion and nuance.  It is brutally apparent that one of the producers emailed the writers with something like “We got Shaun White to be in our film.  This will help bring in teenage guys who would otherwise avoid our chick flick like this like a week old dead skunk.  Find some way to crow bar him into the story”.

Anyway, enough of my personal bias.  Dylan and Jamie bump uglies in a montage of sex scenes that are really funny and honestly shows a lot of what goes on when two people spend a lot of time together in bed.  There were a few moments that seemed to drag on a lot and a couple that made me wish I had been simultaneously struck blind and deaf, but overall the montage was decent.  Jamie’s free spirited mother showed up and added to the chaos.  It was about that time that the movie started to get real.  The whole “friends with benefits” thing really only works if both parties are true sociopaths, and since they aren’t they started to care for each other in ways beyond their original deal.  They stop long enough for Jamie to get totally used by a jerk doctor and Dylan to have some kind of weird, awkward one night stand or something.  They fly to LA together to deal with Dylan’s Alzheimer’s dad.  Other romantic comedy comedy hijinks ensues.  Conversations are overheard and misinterpreted.  Feelings are hurt.  Huge, cheesy romantic gestures are made.

The stars.  Good story, well written.  One star.  Good acting by all the main characters and most of the supporting characters.  One star.  Mila Kunis was looking so hot with her big, puppy dog eyes and she spent a lot of the movie wearing just a bra and panties.  One star.  Whoever they got to be her body double for the brief nudity was great too.  One star.  Woody Harrelson as a gay sports writer.  One star.  Some really great and funny dialog.  One star.  I found the “laid back Californian dealing with New York city” entertaining.  One star.  They let the emotions actually go the way they should.  I felt a certain satisfaction in how things didn’t really work out the way they all thought they would.  One star.  Generally an entertaining film.  One star.  Total: nine stars.

Now the black holes.  Shaun White.  One black hole.  The script was as predictable as saying stubbing your bare toe is going to really hurt.  One black hole.  The whole Alzheimer’s dad sub plot, while adding some depth to Dylan’s character, was actually really depressing and out of tone for the rest of the movie.  Every time you dealt with him on screen the film really slowed down.  I’m not saying I wouldn’t have kept it in there.  Just that it was kind of a bummer.  One black hole.  I also found the Jamie’s free spirited mother kind of unnecessary and a little annoying.  One black hole.   The entire basic premise of the movie.  One black hole.  Total: five black holes.

In the annoying-but-not-black-hole worthy category, I have a couple.  While I enjoyed the Dylan as the Californian in NY thing, the Dylan having the perfect life in Malibu thing was annoying, as was the young nephew who wanted to be a magician.  Not a bad thing, but just didn’t really add anything.  Also, how that I think about it, Dylan’s older sister didn’t really ring as true as the rest of the characters (except Shaun White, who ironically managed to sound fake while playing himself).

Total of four stars, a really good score from me for a rom com.  Good chick flick, but not really a good date movie unless you are in your relationship already.  If it is a new thing she might misinterpret your intentions, which could turn into something really awkward (in a “I just got rejected again” sense).  On the other hand, if you happen to have a friend you have been hoping lose by sleeping with for a while, this movie might plant the idea in her head.  Don’t see it without a girl, and especially don’t see it by yourself, unless you are going to write a review for it, in which case you look totally normal and not at all creepy.

By the way, I just got copies of all the Harry Potter movies and plan to watch them all back to back over the next few days.  Then I will see and review the newest one.  I am not going to review each one seperatly but will instead do like a paragraph on each over two posts, than the big review.  I think I am going to need a good supply of Diet Mountain Dew for this.  (I thought the Wizard Promised you a Brain shirt courtesy of the funny t shirt category).

Warhammer tournament this weekend, so I won’t get it all done this week.  Wish me luck!

So I did Captain America last week, and gave it a good review.  I stand by that, as it was a decent movie with a good story.  Generally enjoyable.  However, I was talking to a friend of mine last night about it and he raised a couple points that got me thinking about the problems with origin movies in general.

Really, it all boils down to the fact that origin stories are really cool, but very few directors seem comfortable letting the origin run the entirety of the movie.  In other words, about halfway through the movie they have introduced the superhero, told where he came from, explained his powers, and gotten his costume organized when suddenly the thought occurs to them “Oh, crap.  What are we doing to do to fill the last half of the movie?”

This is not every movie.  Thor more or less ignored the whole origin question entirely and just jumped into the action.  X Men First Class let the origin story travel through the entirely of the film with great results.  This was probably motivated by the fact that they had a dozen different characters to work with, but the net result was very pleasing.  However, when I think back to Captain America I realize that the part of the film I really enjoyed was the first half.  Once Steve Rogers got his team together and starting fighting as Captain America it kind of started to grind along.

I have been thinking about how to avoid this problem.  Wolverine Origins labored under this (and about 10 tons of other crap).  Even Batman Begins kind of had this going on.  Green Lantern ground it face first into the ground, with a massive villain pulled out of their ass with all the active malice of a natural disaster, like a tornado.  Even Iron Man kind of lagged after the suit was built.  Episodes I-III was nothing but a six hour origin story that only focused on Darth Vader.

So what is the solution?  Upon reflection I realized that the movies that do the origin story well (Spiderman, X Men, Kick Ass, Unbreakable, Hellboy, etc) all have one thing in common: they didn’t make the origin of a single hero the only thrust of the story.  In Spiderman, while we are watching Peter Parker figure out his new powers, we keep cutting back to Norman Osborne transforming into the Green Goblin.  X Men First Class had a dozen different characters developing.  Kick Ass was mostly about Kick Ass, but at the same time you see Hit Girl and Big Daddy doing their thing.  Unbreakable was more about Samuel Jackson’s character than that Bruce Willis, and that made the double origin story really cool.  In each case the really good origin movies presents the origin of their hero, but don’t make it the entirety of the script.  In other words, when they reach that halfway point and the story is in danger of lagging they have other elements to fall back on.

(Xavier Institute image courtesy of the movie t shirt category)

I don’t know if anyone from the movie industry reads this.  In fact, I doubt it sincerely.  However, I think that if by some weird coincidence one of my three readers is somehow involved in film production, or perhaps one day will end up working in film, try to remember what I just said.  I really think it’s worthwhile.

I admit I have been putting this off a bit, as this is the last of the “good” Star Trek movies.  After this the franchise stops circling the drain and finally goes down.  By no small coincidence it was directed by Nicholas Meyer, the man responsible for all the best Star Trek films.  They were pretty much done with the actors directing films by this point, although Nimoy did a decent job.  (The Undiscovered Country image courtesy of the Star Trek t shirt category)

I have fond memories of this film, and enjoyed seeing it.  However, this film really drove home the fact that instead of the young action figures I was used to seeing I was watching some older men kind of fumble around on the screen.  When James Doohan was the one to save the day at the end I knew the action days of the Star Trek crew were pretty much over (we’ll talk about Kirk fighting it out with Malcolm McDowell in Generations later).

What was happening in 1991?  Well, I was a sophomore in my second try at college.  I was grinding my way through the mechanical engineering program and hating it (I would later switch to Studio Art).  We attacked Iraqi forces in Kuwait in Operation Desert Storm (good thing we were done there and never had to go back.  Oh, wait…).  Iraq also agreed to eliminate all WMD’s and, as far as all evidence since has shown, complied.  Russia has its first free elections and votes in Boris Yeltsin.  A big fire in my home town of Oakland, CA burns thousands of houses.  The Prime Minister of India, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandh, is assassinated.  South Africa adopts a new constitution that was multicultural.  The Balkan war started.  Mike Tyson was arrested and charged with rape.  The phrase “going postal” started up by a postal worker shooting up a bunch of people.  Freddie Mercury died of AIDS.  The Rodney King video tape is shown.  The Internet is opened to the public and has over 1 million computers on it (ha ha ha ha aha ha).  The first web browser is released.

Movies were kind of ok.  Good ones included T2: Judgement Day, Silence of the Lambs, Backdraft, Father of the Bride, and Thelma and Louise.  Less good ones include Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, Hook, the Addams Family, Beethoven, Beauty and the Beast, and the Naked Gun 2 1/2: the Smell of Fear.  Popular music included Pearl Jam, Brian Addams, Phil Collins, Guns ‘n Roses, Metallica, Gloria Estephan, R.E.M., U2, Van Halen, the Clash, Garth Brooks, and Nirvana.

So, the Undiscovered Country.  The Klingon moon Praxis (by the way, there is a series of books called Dread Empires Fall that talks about the Praxis as a philosophy.  Great science fiction, especially if you like space battles that actually take most real physics into account) blows up and more or less wrecks the Klingon Empire.  They sue for peace and send Kirk to transport the Klingon ambassador even though it is known that he hates the Klingons for killing his son David, who he knew for all of 2 weeks or so.  Kirk is framed for killing the guy, and surrenders to the Klingons.  He and McCoy are convicted and sentenced to a prison gulag.  Some prison stuff happens, including an attempted escape with the help of a shapeshifter who really plans to kill them.  Spock beams them out after he discovers what really happened.  They find two assassins dead but trick their accomplice to reveal herself.  Turns out it was Samantha from Sex and the City.  Anyway, a bunch of Klingon, Romulan, and Federation officers are working together in a conspiracy to prevent the treaty that would allow them all to work together(?).  The crew finds the cloaked Bird of Prey that did the original attack and blow it up.  They all beam down to the conference and save the presidents life.

What it had:

The full crew.  Captain Sulu.  Captain Spock.  Captain Scott(?  I guess all the S names got promoted).  Some cool space battles.  A decently complicated plot that didn’t drive me berserk.  Some decent humor.  An illustration of the bonds of friendship between the crew that was organic and not shoved down our pie holes in the form of an awkward dumb speech made around a campfire.  A dumb cameo by Christian Slater.  Super hot Imam as the shape shifter.  A shockingly large number of minor continuity failures. A generally good movie experience.

What it didn’t have:

Sulu on the bridge with the rest of the crew.  That’s pretty much it.  I can’t think of a lot from this one.

So a very positive experience, especially given the dross we were forced to watch in the last one.  Unfortunately this would be the last positive Star Trek film experience, pretty much for ever (and don’t give me any crap about the J.J. Abrams movie.  If you are really a Star Trek fan than you know it’s garbage).  I warn you now that the following retrospectives, starting with (de)Generations, are going to take a much darker and bitter tone so if you feel you need positivity in your life you might want to skip them.  It’ll be a couple more posts before I get to it, especially since I am about to go see Friends with Benifits and expect it to burn up my bile reserves pretty easily.

OK, I admit that I have been really looking forward to this movie, and that’s usually a precursor for me being bitterly disappointed when the suck seeps in.  However, Marvel managed to keep the suck at bay, and delivered a fun and entertaining origin movie (Capt America shield logo courtesy of the Marvel Comic t-shirt category).

That’s not to say that it doesn’t have its problems, which we will explore in excruciating detail shortly.  It just overall makes for a good flick.

Why do I like Captain America?  He was never one of the main hitters in the Marvel Pantheon (although I loved him in Marvel Zombies).  Nevertheless, I felt a real sadness when he died at the end of Civil War (bite me, Tony Stark) and am always glad to see him in a comic.  I think there are two main reasons.  The first is he is only a marginally improved human.  I love heroes who can be taken out by any lucky punk with a gun.  It makes their bravery and dedication that much more impressive and worthy of my admiration.  This is why Batman rules and Superman sucks.  The second reason is he represents all that is good and noble in the excellent men and women who serve in the military to defend us.  Sure, it’s easy to stand for truth, justice, and the American way when you are invulnerable to all but a very rare element (see my post on the Science and Stupidity of Kryptonite for more on this), but to stand firm against oppression and evil is a real task when all you have is a shield and a heavy punch (or, more accurately, some body armor and an M16).

Something else that really appealed to me about this movie is they set the whole thing in WWII and didn’t make the lame attempt to modernize it.  There is something really satisfying about a clear cut villain who is known by all to be demonstrably evil like Nazis.  Even in something like Tranformers it seemed that the Decepticons were not totally lacking in sympathy.  Sure, they wanted to enslave the human race, but they wanted to do it in order to rebuild their home world.  Who’s to day given the same choice we might not do the same (Avatar?).  Anyway, I like Nazis as villains.

The story.  I won’t go into too many details as I expect you all to see it.  Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is a skinny kid who keeps getting rejected by the US Army during WWII.  He catches the eye of a government scientist (Stanley Tucci) who is impressed by his dedication and understanding of what it means to be bullied (cough cough topical reference cough cough).  He recruits Steve into a top secret project that apparently starts off by putting guys through Basic Training.  The Colonel in charge (Tommy Lee Jones, who did a great job) wants to boot him but the scientist is sold on him.  They stick Steve into a giant martini mixer and inject him with super steroids or something.  He comes out looking like Adonis and capable of kicking some serious ass.

Meanwhile, a Nazi officer (played brilliantly by the amazing Hugo Weaving, although what role has he not been brilliant in?) has found an ancient artifact (cough cough Indiana Jones cough cough) that he can use to power up all his super secret weapons with blue power (cough cough V cough cough.  Ok I’ll stop) that makes them almost as good as a regular rifle, but have the benefit of making the bodies disappear completely as a blatant tool to get rid of any inconvenient rated R mangled corpses and screaming wounded Americans.  His organization is called Hydra and he is indeed the infamous Red Skull (also looking very cool).

Anyway, there is some crap getting in the way of the actual story but eventually Capt. America and the Red Skull cross paths.  WWII meets super science hijinks ensues.  There’s a hot girl in there for no real reason (Hagley Atwell).  There are some actually funny moments that are accomplished without an annoying comic relief character (suck it, Michael Bey).  Once they get past all the war bonds selling stuff none of the story gets in the way of the story, if you know what I mean.  Stuff blows up.  Guys on both sides get killed.  The director managed to steer clear of the obvious cheesy ending trap.

First, as always, the stars.  Comic book movie.  Two stars.  Really decent story.  Two stars.  Hugo Weaving.  One star.  Tommy Lee Jones.  One star.  Not invulnerable hero.  One star.  Geeky kid turns into hero.  One star.  Nazis as enemies.  One star.  The Red Skull looks uber cool and  uber creepy.  One star.  Good acting all around.  One star.  Hagley Atwell was driving me nuts all the way through the movie.  One star.  Non-cheesy ending.  One star.  Minor love interest managed to not derail or dominate the story.  One star.  All the supporting characters were cool and added to the story.  One star.  They kept more or less true to the story (remember Dum Dum Dugan?).  One star.  The final Capt. America costume was cool, especially the shield.  One star.  Total: 17 stars.

Now the black holes.  I am going to have to give these guys a black hole for making what is essentially a two hour trailer for The Avengers.  One black hole.  The ever present Marvel spoiler, for which I had to sit through any number of credits (what exactly does a Best Boy do?  Sounds like the son of Best Buy.  Either that of some kind of sexual predator tag), was in fact an actual trailer for the Avengers.  Thanks a lot, guys.  One black hole.  While Hugo Weaving was great as the Red Skull, he really played up every corny evil super genius cliche in the book.  Execute henchmen who fail, faceless minions who look imposing as hell in their S&M helmets but can’t shoot straight, grandiose plan to conquer the planet by blowing stuff up (face it, Red Skull.  In order to really conquer a territory you need boots on the ground, not some super weapon), capture the plucky hero but don’t just put a bullet in him so you can explain your whole diabolical plan, etc.  Also, I think the movie would have benefited from more Red Skull screen time.  One black hole.  The whole villains-can-never-hit-a-hero-who-is-charging-directly-at-their-guns card got played so much I started to wonder if there were any other cards in the deck.  One black hole.  A lot of the action, especially towards the end, got kind of hokey.  One black hole.  There was a rescue mission early on that seemed to drag on for ever, as did the whole Capt. America as a vaudeville show to sell war bonds sequence.  One black hole.  A few story holes, including one big one towards the end.  One black hole.  As cool as the story was, pretty much all the characters seemed pretty two dimensional.  I think the movie could have done with a hair more character development (125 minutes.  They could have added 1o more without hurting the plot).  One black hole.  Total: eight black holes.

In the irksome-but-not-black-hole-worthy category, I have a couple.  First of all, the Hydra salute was painfully stupid.  I understand the need to have a distinct salute that is derived from but not quite the same as the Nazi salute, but come on.  There is a reason most countries us a reasonably similar salute.  Also, while I am a fan of and support every reasonable attempt to include racial diversity in a movie cast, the fact is there were no African Americans who had a combat role during WWII (ironic, really, as 160,000 of them fought for the North in the Civil War).  I am just kind of a stickler for historical accuracy.  Additionally, why would you put all your best new technology, your prisoner, and yourself in a room with huge glass windows that can be easily zip lined to (or, for that matter, just put a sniper bullet through?)?  All the Nazis spoke perfect English, even the rank and file troops when they yelled “Hail Hydra”.  And finally, while I appreciated the eye candy that Hayley Atwell brought to the screen, in pretty much every scene with her in it I found myself asking “What function does her character actually serve?”  The romance was never developed enough to make it significant, and the purpose of most of the rest of her character kind of felt crow barred in.

However, a great film going experience all around.  Go see it in a theater to get max benefit and to support the kinds of movies we nerds like.  Not a real date flick, as I believe most girls will not really appreciate the comic book story and the female character is too underdeveloped to draw her in.  See it with your nerd friends.

What the hell, Dave?  Have you seen everything else and your life is so pathetic that you have to see a kids movie to have something to do and write about???

Well, yes, kind of.  Tuesday night is cheap movie night, and I have seen literally everything else playing at Jack London or the Grand Lake.  I could head to the Shattuck and see something more independent, but I am still a little bitter about missing 13 Assassins.  Also, I was feeling lazy and didn’t want to really drive anywhere.

So, Winnie the Pooh.  At the time I bought my ticket I was kind of hoping that I would feel a wash of nostalgia and pleasant childhood memories, but unfortunately five minutes into the film I remembered that even as an appropriately aged child I never had really good feelings for Winnie the Pooh.  Too sweet and innocent for me.  Of course at that age my dad was taking us to the drive in to see One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and Orca the Killer Whale, so I don’t think I am really a good barometer for movie age appropriateness. After the first five minutes of tripe cuteness I started hoping it would sharpen up to the point where I could call it Winnie Poohter and the Deadly Hollows, but that was not to be.

So I rolled into the theater and was suddenly overwhelmed by the creepiness of being a single grown man with no kids watching a movie for children.  I sat as far away from any of the children and tried to look inconspicuous as possible.  Fortunately an even creepier crazy cat lady (she looked exactly like the kind of lady who would kidnap a kid out of a shopping cart at Walmart) sat down two seats down from me, so either I wasn’t the creepiest in the theater or at least I was a member of a club.  The usher came in several times during the film and gave us both the stink eye, for which I applaud his diligence. (Stranger Have the Best Candy image courtesy of the funny t shirt category)

Anyway, the movie.  I am going to forgo my usual stars/black holes rating system, as giving this movie black holes for plot and direction seems unnecessarily harsh and brutal, even for the cold lump of flint that passes for my heart.  I will instead talk about my impressions and then as a few questions that occurred to me while watching this flick.

I will say the film was pretty good in it’s intended direction.  The children in the audience seemed enraptured when they weren’t screaming, crying, running up and down the aisle, or puking from eating too much popcorn.  The film was narrated by the great John Cleese, which was one of the real highlights of the movie.  All the characters had English accents, which was very appropriate considering the Hundred Acres Woods is in England.

Pooh wakes up hungry and is out of honey.  He tries to mooch off his friends and neighbors (including single mom Kanga and her son Roo) but to no avail.  He runs into Eeyore (easily my favorite character) and discovers that Eeyore’s tail is missing.  The rest of the gang decide that they would have a contest to see who can find a new tail for Eeyore, with the first prize being a pot of honey.  Meanwhile, Christopher Robin (easily the wimpiest kid in literary history.  I predict a rough time of it for him in middle school) disappears and the gang thinks he’s been kidnapped by a monster that Owl dreamed up.  Anyway, cute stuffed animal hijinks ensues.  I don’t want to ruin the plot for you, but there is indeed a happy and heartwarming ending.

Like I said, I am not going to pick this one apart with my stars and black holes.  For what it is, it is brilliant.  If I were five and not a victim of parental abuse I would probably love it.  Parents will feel a deep sense of smug self satisfaction for giving their kids some quality  entertainment instead of the usual folderol.  I am sure it is softening our kids brains, but at least it has a good look.

However, during the course of the movie a few questions occurred to me.  They are pretty bitter and sarcastic, so if you are a massive fan of Winnie the Pooh you should probably stop reading now.  If, on the other hand,  you have a good answer to any of these feel free to respond here.

First of all, what is the basis of the economy of the Hundred Acre Woods?  In Pooh Bears house you see literally hundreds of empty honey pots.  Someone had to manufacture all those clay pots, and someone else had to fill them.  Every time Winnie the Pooh tries to get his own honey he gets chased by bees all over the place.  At the end of the movie Christopher Robin gives him a pot of honey the size of a refrigerator.  Where do you go to get something that size?  Then, assuming there is a secret honey bottling factory somewhere in the woods, what does Pooh bear actually do for money?  He seems to be shockingly lazy and doesn’t really have employment.  For that matter, what do the animals of the Hundred Acre Woods use for currency?  It would be funny if they called their currency Acres.  Seems to be a lot of borrowing going on there.

Second, is honey all Winnie the Pooh really eats?  I understand that it is his favorite food, but really it’s not very filling.  Furthermore, if that’s all you eat wouldn’t you end up with diabetes pretty fast?  For that matter, bears require protein at some point.  Shouldn’t Winnie the Pooh be suffering from massive malnourishment?

Is Winnie the Pooh kindhearted and gracious or selfish and narcissistic?  Towards the end he passes up on a free pot of honey in order to bring his good friend Eeyore his tail, which is cool, but a half an hour earlier he had talked his apparently developmentally disadvantaged friend Piglet to do some really dangerous stuff in order to get some honey, resulting in Piglet getting his head stuck in a beehive.  Winnie then beats on the beehive (with Piglets head stuck inside) and more or less enrages the bees.  Sure, he give of himself for his “cool” friend, but treats Piglet like a door mat.

Where exactly is Roo’s father?  Is Kanga divorced, or is he in the merchant marines, or what?  In my mind I see him living just over the border of the Hundred Acre Woods in the Three Acre Trailer Park with his stripper girlfriend in a single wide.  Maybe Kanga secretly sleeps around with every Joey (haw!) that bounces by and doesn’t know who exactly is responsible.  I kind of see a deadbeat dad somewhere in here.

Is Winnie the Pooh (and the rest of them, for that matter) a real bear or a stuffed toy?  He eats a lot of honey, but at one point the stitching in his belly comes undone and white stuffing comes spilling out kind of graphically (no danger of childhood trauma there, kids).  So where does all the honey go?  Eeyore’s tail appears to be attached with a nail, and yet he eats thistles.

Does Christopher Robin not have any human friends?  Young boy, growing up alone in the woods with only hist stuffed animals and imagination for company?  He’s one manifesto away from becoming the Unibomber.  Seriously, this kid has home-schooled weirdo written all over him.

Anyway, I’m going to stop there before my house gets torched by an irate gang of grandmothers, librarians, and cute girls who had a Winnie the Pooh stuffed bears as a kid.  The movie?  Worth taking your kid to, I guess.  Not worth going to as a single man with no kids, unless you plan to write an acerbic review.  I will say you shouldn’t pay full price for it, as the movie only runs 69 minutes and about 6 of that is taken up by a cartoon short.  However, I suspect that is on purpose as most of the kids were pretty restless by the end of the movie.  Personally, I counted the shortness as a kindness.

Ok, I guess I can’t not see the new Harry Potter, as it is breaking all kinds of records.  The problem I have is that I have never seen a single Harry Potter movie or read any of the books.  My first instinct was to just see the most recent and then try to review it blind, but while I might write something funny I don’t think that would be fair.  In addition, I don’t want to get on the bad side of all the rabid Harry Potter fans.

So what options have I?  Really only one.  I am going to borrow all the Harry Potter movies from my friend who is a rabid fan (hi Liz) and watch them all back to back, marathon style, next weekend.  Then I will watch the one in the theaters on Sunday night and right possibly the best review ever for it.  I don’t know any other reviewers who are dedicating a whole weekend to this.

The only problem I have is I can’t decide if I should be looking forward to or dreading this weekend.  I guess I’ll see.

(Wizard image courtesy of the video game t shirt category)

Guns don't Kill People. Magic Missiles do.

Maybe there is a reason animals can’t really talk.

Check this out on my YouTube video review.

Before I start ripping into this execrable film, can I state that I for one am sick of Kevin James?  I can see him as possibly funny in stand up, but his film presence has just gotten overused and unpleasant.  He seems to always play the same role he pioneered in King of Queens: fat loser who through the machinations of fate has somehow managed to land one or more stunningly hot women.  I am not sure what dimension this is a viable possibility in, but for those of us who remain firmly ensconced in this reality it is actually a really annoying insult.  I don’t consider myself fat or a loser and I can’t pull that kind of action on my best day.  I’m stuck in the Bizarro world version where I get rejected constantly by the hot girls and seem to end up with the female Kevin James’s of the world.  Unfortunately, he seems patently unqualified for any other type of role (could you really see him as a villain of in a serious role?) so it looks like we will be inundated in future moronic rom-coms like this (mor-rom-coms?)

Which brings us to the Zookeeper.  Kevin James stars as a fat loser who works as a zookeeper and, for some ungodly reason, dates the stunning Leslie Bibb.  Her character, Stephanie, is in all regards a one dimensional, self centered, shallow bitch who rejects the most awkward marriage proposal of all time simply because he works as a zookeeper.  Apparently his lack of fitness or financial status are not really a concern.  Anyway, she crushes him in a manner so cruel that it is likely banned by Geneva convention.  Fast forward five years and he is now the lead zookeeper who works with the even more stunning Rosario Dawson, who is an “eagle enclosure expert” (does that seem a little specific to you?  How many jobs are there for such a person) with a heart of gold.  SPOILER ALERT: in a plot “twist” so cookie cutter I could smell ginger she turns out to be the girl he should have been into the whole time and ends the movie with.  I normally would hesitate to give away something that crucial to the story, but within the first 30 seconds of her being on the screen I said” Yep, she’s the one he’ll end up with.”

By the way, I would like to point out that I am totally into Rosario Dawson.  She is super hot and can actually act.  What she can’t do is find a movie script that doesn’t suck.  Before doing the Zookeeper, she has starred in any amount of crud.  Her best movie to date (IMO) would have to be Unstoppable.  She was in Death Proof, but as much as a fan of grind house theater as I am I can’t really see it as a vehicle (haw) for advancing your acting career.  Percy Jackson sucked, as did Sin City, Clerks II, the Adventures of Pluto Nash, Josie and the Pussycats, Kill Shot, Eagle Eye, and Seven Pounds.  When she was younger she did Kids, which is a good movie in the “looking for something to watch while killing yourself” category, but other than that she needs to find a new agent.  (Josie and the Pussycats image courtesy of the comic t shirt category)

Anyway, the guy states that he should leave working for the zoo in order to get a job that better appeals to the most shallow woman on the planet.  We also start getting subjected to some truly painful and hard to watch physical comedy.  At that point we find out that the animals can not only understand everything the humans are saying, but can speak perfect English too when they want to.  They decide they need to help Kevin ‘mate” with Stephanie and end up giving him dopey advice with dialog so cliche and hackneyed that it made me wish that  the animals only speak in barks and roars, as well as the humans in this flick.

So, romantic animal hijinks ensues.  Kevin James urinates into a potted plant at a fancy restaurant to “mark his territory” and doesn’t get arrested.  He more or less ruins his brother’s wedding and physically assaults the bride.  He ends up toe to toe with another ex boyfriend of Stephanie, played horribly by Joe Rogan.  I’ve seen Joe do some funny stuff, but the combination of his stiff delivery and the flaccid, depthless character he was handed made every scene with him in it feel like waiting on line at the DMV.  Kevin’s character does a Peter-Parker-in-Spiderman-3 transformation into a suave, sophisticated urbanite who sells exotic cars to the thousands of millionaire who reside in his city.  Stephanie plays the shallow, cultureless girlfriend to the hilt.  Somehow Ken Jeong managed to land a roll as the creepy reptile guy.  Is he going to have a bit part in every movie?  Eventually Kevin discovers he really loves Rosario Dawson but apparently forgets how to use a cell phone as the only way to intercept her on the way to her new job in Nairobi (no joke.  I guess they need an eagle cage there too) is a “hilarious” chase sequence in a stolen van.

Ok, the stars.  The animation for the animals was as good as you are likely to see.  One star.  There were a few funny moments.  One star.  Rosario Dawson was looking hot throughout the movie, and when she dressed up super hot.  One star.  While the animal dialog sucked, there were a couple voices that made me laugh (Adam Sandler and Sylvester Stallone, for the most part).  One star.  For the extremely brief amount of time he was on screen, Ken Jeong managed to amuse me and more or less stole every scene he was in.  Also he had a really cool car.  One star.  There was one scene where Kevin takes a gorilla out to TGI Fridays that was actually fun to watch, mainly because it was Kevin James cutting loose with a guy in a gorilla suit.  One star.  Total: six stars.

Now, like a tiger who has taken down an antelope and is ready to dig into the succulent entrails, I move to the black holes.  The animal dialog was as bad as human language can get.  Two black holes.  Painful to watch physical humor.  One black hole.  For some reason, the director of photography seemed to feel that Kevin James’s moon face was the most appealing thing in the movie and thus we are subjected to a lot of it.  Also, at one point we see him naked in a bathtub.  One black hole.  I’d like to give a black hole for every awkward moment that seemed to drag on forever (starting with the opening one), but will hold myself back.  Two black holes.  There was a completely irrelevant tangent that added nothing to the movie about Kevin’s character interacting with the high fashion world.  One black hole.  What extremely little character development the film had was extremely predictable.  One black hole.  In fact, the whole movie was excruciatingly predictable.  One black hole.  While pretty much all the animals except the gorilla annoyed me (there’s something you don’t say every day), the interaction between the two bears seemed to actually cause me physical pain.  One black hole.  Implied and described animal cruelty.  One black hole.  Joe Rogan bringing whatever momentum the film had to a screeching halt.  One black hole.  And two more black holes for just not being as much fun as it should have been.  Total: fourteen black holes.

So a total of eight black holes, a fairly miserable score but not as bad as the score I gave Green Lantern.  I can hear some of you asking if I might be being a little unfair to this film, critiquing it as an adult when it could possible just be a kids film.  Well, honestly that is one of the issues here.  This movie is a romantic comedy with talking animals.  It can’t really decide if it is going to be a kids film or an adult film.  Some of the dialog is too sophisticated and adult themed for kids, but some of it is just too dumb for grown ups.  It sits right in the middle, which means it will inevitably be relegated to the mediocrity archive of all time.  I’m actually curious as to where video shops (assuming any still exist) end up placing it. Honestly, don’t waste your time with this dog, unless you are one of those rare individuals who are enraptured by a Geico commercial.

I did experience something weird while watching this.  For the first time since I started these reviews I found myself wondering if I am really qualified to do them.  I am very rarely plagued by self doubt, but while I was praying for a film break or merciful death most of the audience was laughing their asses off.  I worried that maybe I am too out of touch with the general movie going audience, but I thought about it a lot on the way home and came to the conclusion that this is an example of cultural Darwinism.  If, for example, I were to open a retail shop that specialized in left handed scissors and the like, than I would not be surprised to find that most of my customers were left handed.  Likewise, if Hollywood sets out to create a film designed to appeal to the true idiots of our society, than I should not be surprised if I sit in a theater full of idiots.  I have found that when I go to the movies on $5 night the bar seems to be lowered considerably.  Odds are this movie will make a disappointingly large amount of money, leading us inevitably to the next bad rom-com staring Kevin James with yet another super hot girl.

So a few weeks ago I saw the most recent Superman movie again.  Something has been always bothering me about Superman and Kryptonite, and earlier today while sitting in traffic on the Bay Bridge it suddenly occurred to me what it was.  For this explanation we will have to turn to true friend of all nerds, science.

(Superman image courtesy of the Superman t shirt category)

Here’s the deal.  I will buy that Jor-el was a super scientist who could make a space ship capable to traveling to earth in a matter of a few hours (any more than that might have resulted in a bad case of SIDS).  However, if the planet Krypton blew itself up, how long would it really have taken for chunks of the planet to arrive on Earth?  If we assume Krypton was close to us (and not on the other side of the galaxy) then at best it’s 4.5 light years minimum distance.  Now, an explosion that propels an object is essentially a bullet.  The fastest rifle bullets travel at about 4,000 feet per second.  If we boost that up (assuming Krypton REALLY blew up) to about 5,280 feet per second, that’s about a mile a second (I never said I was going to make this science part hard on me).

So a mile a second (which is extremely generous) will essentially mean that it would take a chunk of Krypton 5,865,696,000,000 seconds to cover one light year.  A little basic arithmetic tells me that it would take a meteorite of Kryptonite 837,000 years to reach Earth.  Why, then, does the local museum have a chunk of it lying around for Lex Luthor to steal?  For that matter pieces of it are falling out of the sky all the time in the comics.  I’m sure some kind of argument could be made for a relativistic shift in time for Superman’s ship, but that would just make things worse.  If his ship were slowing down it time it could only be because he were traveling at close to the speed of light, which would still have had him arriving here in a few short years.

Now let’s consider the geometry.  I did some research and discovered that in order for a sizable meteor to arrive on the planet earth it has start out about basketball sized.  In order to make things easier for me, I am going to assume a 1 foot ball.  Now, assume Krypton were broken up into nothing but 1 foot squares (and none of it were broken up into marble sized of just vaporised outright).  If Krypton were about earth sized it would have a radius of 3,963 miles, or 209,246,440 feet.  Using the volume of a sphere equation, V=4/3(pi)(r)cubed, we get 3.86762×10(25)th power.  That’s a lot of basketballs.  However, if we take a volume of space with a radius of 4.5 light years, we get an area of space encompasing 8.4537×10(38)th power.  That’s one basketball of Kryptonite per 2.18578×10(13)th power.  At our largest point we are 94.5 million miles from the sun.  That means we occupy a disk of space that is 4.70614×10(12)th power.  In other words, in our little volume or space there should be exactly on chunk of Krypton big enough to land on Earth and, assuming it doesn’t get caught by Saturn or any of the other outer planets, there is only about a 1/10 chance of it landing on us.

Now that’s not entirely fair, as everyone knows that the basketballs would not be distributed evenly throughout the universe.  They would keep traveling.  So instead of volume, lets consider the explosion of Krypton the instigator of an expanding sphere of planetary debris.  I think the best way to think of this would be as 1 foot chunks of Kryptons surface expanding outwards.  Now the area of a sphere is determined by A-4(pi)r(squared).  Again assuming Krypton about the same as planet Earth means the surface is comprised of at most 5.50206×10(15)th power basketballs.  If they all blew up strait ahead (and assuming the debris underneath it more or less followed in a strait line from the center of the explosion) by the time the debris reach earth the area of the sphere would be 4.32363×10(26)th power square miles.  That’s one basketball per 7.8219×10(10)th power.  Assuming the eliptical plane of the planet rotation is exactly perpendicular to the expanding debris, our planet occupies a ring of about 5.9565×10(8)th power.  That’s even worse than going by volume.  And again, this is all based just on the area of space we are likely to occupy, not the fact that our planet is actually pretty tiny on an astronomical scale.

So you can see how dumb it is that Kryptonite be just lying around for any petty criminal or evil scientific super genius to find and fashion into a weapon.  Sorry if I spoiled the magic for you, but I have always been more of a Batman guy myself.

Horribly mediocre.

Yet another raunchy rated R comedy hoping to score a seat on the success train that the Hangover powered and then later derailed, I guess.  Funny in parts, long and boring in others.  I guess I am tired of Hollywood not doing a lot of either really good or really bad films.  Best film I have seen in months was the Trollhunter, an independant.

Anyway, Horrible Bosses.  It tells the story of three employees who have good jobs ruined by bad bosses.  They are Dale, Nick, and Kurt, played by Kenny Sommerfield, Nick Hendricks, and Jason Sudeikis respectively but for the duration of this review I am going to call them Larry, Moe, and Curly for reasons that will be painfully obvious to anyone who watches this flick (Three Stooges image courtesy of the movie t shirt category).  Larry works as a dental hygienist who’s boss is a dentist so painfully hot she made my eyes water and is consistently sexually abusing him (which of us hasn’t had to deal with that, right guys?).  Moe is a white collar drone who is abused by his boss (played very well by Kevin Spacey).  Curly is an accountant at a chemical firm who’s boss dies and leaves the company to his drug addicted son.

Anyway, all three of them are terribly abused by their bosses and decide they need to kill them.  The go looking for a hit man at a bar they should have all been killed in and find “M-F-Er” Jones (Jamie Foxx).  He tells them they should each kill the others bosses to allay suspicion.  So, having decided that first degree murder is a reasonable solution for someone inconveniencing their lives, they start to plan it out.

At this point the movie, which had been kind of entertaining and had the potential to be decent, took a wrong turn and ended up in Stupidville, USA.  Ever see that episode of the Three Stooges where they break into someones house who turns out to be a Nazi spy?  Imagine that, but less funny.  Larry, Moe, and Curly start doing everything possible to avoid making an intelligent or well thought out move.  They run around the bosses houses, breaking stuff and leaving a laundry list of forensic evidence.  Other stooges-like hijinks ensue.  Unfunny recurring jokes are drummed on and on.  Kevin Spacey turns out to be even more evil than first portrayed.  The realities of living in the world and dealing with police (remember that cops can hold you for 48 hours without charging you for questioning?) or more or less ignored.  At one point Kevin Spacey rams his SUV into Moe’s Prius and then tells them he is going to frame them for something and claim they tried to kill him.  Really?  When any idiot could look at the two cars and figure out that you just tried to flatten them?  No chance of that plan backfiring on you.

Anyway, the stars.  The three main characters are reasonably funny.  One star.  Kevin Spacey.  One star.  Some funny lines and decent dialog.  One star.  The dentist (played by my dream woman Jeniffer Aniston, who decided to drive me even more crazy by going brunette) is super hot and doesn’t mind dressing skimpy.  In fact most of the women were very easy on the eyes.  Two stars.  Jaime Foxx was pretty damned good and dominated every scene he was in in a good way.  One star.  Donald Sutherland.  One star.  Total: six stars.

Now the black holes.  The movie and plot devices got really dumb after a while.  Two black holes.  All the boss characters were horribly (haw!) one dimensional, especially Kevin Spacey.  One black hole.  In spite of the fact that the bosses were one dimensionally evil, the fact that the protagonists were planning a capital crime to make their lives easier did nothing to make me sympathetic to them, nor did they do anything during the movie to change that.  I don’t really feel sympathy towards idiots.  One black hole.  The whole “super-hot-and-successful-chick-is-a-freak-and-feels-the-need-to-molest-a-wimpy-innocent-guy plot device is so asinine and infuriating that I wanted to punch out the theater manager on the way to my car.  It would have actually made the movie so much more tolerable and believable (as well as made me more sympathetic to their cause) if the person being sexually harassed were a woman by a male boss, not to mention add a nice diversity to the main cast (I guess they wanted to keep that Stooges dynamic rolling).  One black hole.  All the supporting characters except M-F-er Jones were moronic and annoying.  One black hole.  I can’t put my finger on what the problem was, but the pacing seemed really off.  It was like the movie had a 85 minute Act 1 setup, 13 minute Act 2 confrontation, and a 2 minute Act 3 resolution (thank you world wide web).  One black hole.  The resolution so reeked of deus ex machina that the main characters might as well have been trapped inside stasis pods.  One black hole.  And finally, if you are going to create a rated R comedy anyway for gods sake put some nudity in there somewhere.  Rated R for language is like going to prison for stealing socks.  If you are going to do the time, you might as well enjoy the crime. One black hole.  Total: nine black holes.

In the irksome category, I have a couple.  I don’t know what planet the script writers live on, but if on their alien world all it takes is five minutes to meet a married super hot model and convince her to have sex with you in a restroom I want to move there.  Same with super hot dentists willing to have sex with any stalker parked across their street.  Also, during the course of the film I thought of about 10 different ways the protagonists could have resolved their issues without resorting to murder.  I have to imagine at some point someone read the script before or during the production.

So a less than grand total of four black holes.  Entertaining enough, I suppose.  I had a free ticket so it didn’t cost me anything.  I don’t think I would have been happy spending money on it.  Wait for NetFlix, I guess.

By the way, I have fixed the issue with leaving comments but getting rid of that stupid capcha thing.  Just try to be human when you post something.  Thanks Cassady for pointing that out.