I guess this is old news, as the announcement was made last November, but I just heard this and it’s kind of blowing my mind.  Johnnty Depp, shown here as the Mad Hatter from the Movie T Shirts, has been cast as Tonto in the next remake in the “We are all out of creativity in Hollywood” tour, the Lone Ranger.  Are Native American actors so hard to find?  How about all the guys from Windtalkers?  I mean, sure he did a decent job and looked kind of Ethnic as Captain Sparrow in Pirates of the Carribean, and according the the Interweb he is part Cherokee, but I think if you need makeup to look like an ethnicity maybe they should have cast someone more closely associated with that ethnicity.

However, this isn’t really what has my boxers in a knot.  What does is the interview he did when they announced the roll.  He apparently has said that he wants to remake Tonto into the star rather than the sidekick.  While I appreciated the desire to maybe not play such a stereotype, Tonto is the ultimate sidekick, even more than Robin from Batman.  If you look up “sidekick” on the Interlink the Wikipedia article about it lists him third on their short list of examples.  In the show Tonto’s job was to get his ass kicked so the Lone Ranger would have an excuse to come into town and shoot some guys.  Seems a pretty simple formula.

Jason

The title pretty much describes the movie.

There’s a little more than that, of course.  There is a motivation that seems to work, and the characters all seem to appeal.  The story is griping enough and well done through the first 90%, but the whole thing falls apart into Inspector Clouseau  style chaos at the end.

I guess it’s inevitable that even movies I enjoy these days seem to have flaws that irk me like a paper cut on the end of my tongue.  This film has the appearance of a well packed cargo train, with everything tight, organized, and in it’s proper place, that at the last minute had a ton of extra luggage attached to the outside of the third car and a caboose full of clowns hitched up to the rear.  There was a long, extended flashback scene in the first 20 minutes that felt completely out of place and in my opinion actually detracted from the story, and at the end, after 85 minutes of decent, coherent story telling the plot exploded like someone flushed a cherry bomb down it’s toilet.  All of a sudden the pacing gets cranked up to ramming speed and a the plot threads start flying all over the screen like someone fed crystal meth to a nest of psychotic spiders.

(Train image courtesy of the Funny T Shirt category)

On the other hand, this movie features the hottest woman in the history of the human race, Genesis Rodriguez.  It frustrates me that women like this exist and don’t want to talk to me.  The only thing that could make it more painful was if I found out her name was not a Biblical reference her parents saddled her but a screen name she chose from the Genesis project from TWOK.  I think I would be out on a ledge at that point.

The story is, of course, about a man on a ledge.  Sam Worthington (Avatar, Clash of the Titans, Terminator Salvation)  crawls out on a ledge and starts threatening to kill himself.  A crowd gathers.  He request a specific police negotiator, discredited Detective Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks-Spiderman, the 40 Year Old Virgin, the Next Three Days).  At that point we get into the flashback that in retrospect bugged me so much.  It basically details how Sams character Nick Cassidy was an ex cop convicted of stealing a gigantic diamond from the bad guy David Englander (Ed Harris-A Beautiful Mind, the Abyss, the Rock) and how he escaped from prison and ended up in this hotel.  First of all this whole sequence felt really out of place, but more importantly I think the story would have gone a lot better if we had discovered these things as the police did.  Add an element of mystery to the whole thing.

Anyway, he is motivated to prove his innocence, and while he is distracting everyone his friends, including the aforementioned Genesis Rodriguez (Prisionera, Doña Bárbara) and his brother (Jamie Bell-Jumper, the Adventures of Tintin, Billy Elliot).  Somehow they have become expert cat burglars and safe crackers with no experience whatsoever.  Whatever.  So the plan is based entirely on Nick distracting people at the right moments in order to give his team the time they need.  Stuff blows up.  Genesis strips down to her underwear and slithers into a body stocking in the most gratuitous and appreciated scene (from me) in cinema history.  I don’t want to give the ending away, but all of a sudden the story takes every freeway off ramp simultaneously and then ends up in a multi car crash at the denouement (this is a word I just learned a few minutes ago.  Me so smart).

Anyway, the stars.  While not terribly original, it was an interesting twist on a crime story.  One star.  Acting was decent from Sam Worthington and the rest of the cast.  One star.  In spite of spending the entire time on a ledge, there were definitely parts that were exciting.  One star.  Genesis Rodriguez.  One star.  I do enjoy a good crime story, with the burglars having to defeat each of the security systems in turn.  One star.  I thought Ed Harris did an admirable job as the villain.  He seemed a little over the top and out of place at times, but really gave you someone to hate.  One star.  I thought direction and camera work managed to give a definite sense of vertigo.  Well done IMO.  One star.  Generally a good film that didn’t make me think I had wasted my money.  One star.  Total: eight stars.

The black holes.  An ending that can best be described as a clusterf***.  Two black holes.  The early on out of place and unnecessary flashback.  One black hole.  Total: three black holes.

In the irksome but not black hole worthy category, I have a couple.  The idea of Nick’s compatriots somehow having the skills need to defeat a multi million dollar security system is laughable, but since it gave a lot of screen time to my dream woman I can’t complain too much.  Also, after an entire movie of sneaking through vent shafts and tricking cameras the final stage of the security system is defeated by opening up a thermostat control box and clipping a single wire.  It’s like they paid their security systems consultant but ran out of budget for the last 25 minutes.

So a grand total of 5 stars.  A decent score for a decent movie.  I think you would enjoy seeing this on a big screen.  The sense of danger the vertigo gives you will probably be lost on a TV.  I think this would make a decent date movie too.  There is some emotional stuff going on, and a couple of decent female characters.  Nothing uber creepy that might put her off the idea of intimacy if you know what I mean.  Good luck.

Three movies in three days and I am kind of movied out.  I will take a break for a day or two.  I have some thoughts on the Academy Awards Nominations (mostly around God awful Tree of Life getting nominated for anything other than going out and getting beer for all the other movies) and might do something on that tomorrow.  Thanks for reading.  Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu.  Talk to you soon.

Dave

A bad night at the movies, or a mediocre night at home watching a TV pilot.

Yes, I saw this.  I will say that this story appeals to a very specific audience, and that audience seems to be middle aged women who like to see men in pain.  I was one of four guys in a half full theater and clearly the only one who hadn’t been dragged along by a significant other.  One of the major problems this film suffers from is that if you had shown it to me on DVD I would have said it was a TV pilot that failed to go anywhere.  I kept waiting for commercial breaks.

My predictions for this movie did not come 100% true.  She did have feelings for her ex, but they did not do anything to prevent her from doing her job.  She did outdo a more experienced bounty hunter, but only in the most superficial way.  My last prediction did indeed come true, although instead of kicking a guy in the nuts it was shooting him in the chest.

I said one of the major problems with this film is the fact that it felt like a TV show, but there are many others.  Another huge problem is the fact that the plot runs like a Ruth Goldberg machine that keeps breaking down.  You know, the woodpecker breaks the wood pin that causes the iron tied to a string to release, turning the cog that pulls the trigger on the pistol, starting the bowling ball to roll along the tracks eventually turning on the washing machine etc etc?  Except in this case none of the separate devices connect properly and you can see the director and the producers (including star Katherine Heigl.  More on that later) running around putting the bowling ball back on the track, replacing the woodpecker when it dies, and using the pistol to shoot their agent for getting them involved in this dog.  The plot (for lack of a better term) advances only through the most random happenstance and farcical connections.

Another problem this movie suffers from is the incredibly bland supporting characters and the avalanche of otherwise interesting minor characters who vanish off the screen after a couple scenes.  Katherine Heigl is the Executive Producer of this thing and it really feels like she is dealing with a massive insecurity issue.  In other words, she won’t put anyone on the screen who may overshadow her.  Everyone else in the film is a relative nobody.  Also, there is not a single scene except for a couple out of focus flashbacks that don’t feature her.  The most interesting characters are all the minor ones to literally don’t last past the two minute mark.  Her competing bounty hunter gets killed within one minute of meeting her.  A goofy Asian pot head with a dragon tattoo on his forehead gets killed in the scene after we meet him.  Her best friend only appears on screen in phone calls and then vanishes into the ether, along with the mother and daughter of the hooker she is trying to help.  Even the main bad guy has one lousy scene with her and then kind of waits in the wings to do anything.

The last problem, although not as major as the first three, is the stupid voice over monologue.  I know this is a movie adapted from a book, but honestly books have expository monologues because they are made of words.  Movies are made of pictures and sounds and as such can convey events and feelings without telling us what is going on in the dumbest manner possible.  The only genre where the expository voice over works is in noir detective stories.  This movie is not noir.  Look at Bladerunner.  The voice over monologue was forced into the film by the studio, and in the end when they came out with the directors cut it was entirely deleted, making for a much better film (Replicant image courtesy of the Science Fiction T Shirt category).

Anyway, the story.  Katherine Heigl (Grey’s Anatomy, Knocked Up, Life as we Know It) plays Stephanie Plum, an ex lingerie salesperson who is desperate for some kind of income.  She has dinner with her family, the New Jersey Stereotypes, and gets told that her cousin Vinnie (no joke.  Her New Jersey cousin is named Vinnie.  My Cousin Vinnie?  By the way, he is played by Patrick Fischler-Twister, Old School, Speed, Mulhulland Drive), who owns a bail bond shop, has a job.  She ends up, with no training, experience, or equipment, a bounty hunter and is hot on the case of the guy who took her virginity (a fact that we are repeatedly and painfully reminded of over and over again) back in high school, Joe Morelli (Resident Evil Extinction, Life on Mars, Terra Nova).  He is a cop who has been accused of shooting a drug dealer or something.  By the time we get to what actually happened all the Ruth Goldberg devices had so cluttered up the screen that I couldn’t really tell what was going on.  Anyway, she embarks on a wacky adventure to all the worst parts of town and doesn’t seem to get killed.  She meets up with another bounty hunter named Ranger (Daniel Sunjata-All My Children, Rescue Me, the Devil Wears Prada) who buys her a gun (in complete disregard for cooling off periods and/or concealed weapon laws) and shows up to back her up occasionally.  She meets the very scary and intense villain (Gavin-Keith Umeh-Law and Order SVU, Unforgettable, White Collar) but I guess he was too cool to actually show as he spent most of the movie not on screen.  Probably it was felt he would overpower Heigl’s performance.  A car gets blown up.  Oddball plot twists that add nothing and don’t make a lot of sense crop up.  The pilot (I mean movie) ends and retreats to the failed idea shelf.

The stars.  I don’t know.  There were a couple of entertaining scenes, I guess.  One star.  I would normally give a star for some interesting minor characters, but they all vanished like free finger food at an open mike poetry reading.  Katherine Heigl is definitely easy on the eyes, and seems to have cornered the market on skin tight jeans (and giant purses).  One star.  She does a partially nude scene that is pretty good, but since she is only half naked I can only give her half a star.  Total:  Two and a half stars.

The black holes.  Disjointed Ruth Goldbergian plot.  Two black holes.  Making me pay for what in reality should have been a free pilot episode.  One black hole.  Bland, boring support characters.  One black hole.  The voice over monolog that made me want to run screaming into the night.  One black hole.  In addition to being a big, disjointed mess, the end of the movie was at the same time labyrinthine and pat.  Basically you couldn’t have wrapped up the story neater if the main character had actually been a producer of the film (oh, wait…).  One black hole.  A complete disregard of all forms of gun laws.  One black hole.  Loading the plot with extra characters and then erasing them to make more room for Katherine Heigl.  One black hole.  Total: eight black holes.

So a grand total of five and a half black holes.  Not a great score.  I don’t really have anything against Katherine Heigl.  I think she has talent and is super hot.  I enjoyed her as the stuck up prissy girl in Knocked Up.  If she could find the right role I would be happy to give her a good review.  This one isn’t it.  Worth seeing?  Not really.  There is nothing in this movie that makes it worth spending your hard earned dollars.  It really does feel like you are watching TV.  Date movie?  Actually yes.  This might work as a date movie to a certain extent.  You will sit there fuming about having to spend money and 106 minutes of your life on it, but as long as your date doesn’t have to pay for it she might well enjoy it.  The chemistry on screen is tepid at best, but could put her in the right mood, if you know what I mean.

Man on a Ledge later today, so look for that review tomorrow.  Thanks for reading.  Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu.  I have some thoughts on the Academy nominations and might blog some about them later this week.  Talk to you soon.

Dave

I read this morning on Nerd Reactor that RE6 is rumored to take place in China.  I think this is hilarious.  You see, Capcom has received a lot of well deserved abuse for the apparent racism associated with RE5, with a white protagonist mowing down hundreds of diseased Africans in an attempt to prevent a worldwide plague.  In fact, RE4 got a certain amount of protest for being racist, with the abused race being South American.  Capcom responded by coming out with an even more racist game.

So why does that make China really funny?  Well, racially the Japanese and Chinese don’t exactly get along like peas in a pod, and in truth the majority of the blame for that can rest on the Japanese shoulders.  They did horrific things to the Chinese during WWII, and the Chinese have not forgotten.  The Chinese are pretty sensitive about fictional things happening in their country, and have really strict rules for gore and blood (they can’t, for example, show human bones ever).  While we may not see this from our Western perspective, this is a huge racist insult.  I guess Capcom isn’t going to let any petty morality prevent them from making a buck.  Sounds a little like Umbrella Corp. to me.  This very cool zombie picture I got from the Resident Evil T Shirts category, by the way.

Talk to you soon.

Jason

Survivor Man just got real.

So my little “Choose Dave’s Adventure” contest ended in an exact tie, with one vote cast for The Grey and one vote cast for One for the Money (by my best friend, whom I think is screwing with me).  However, I was feeling like crap and opted to cast the tiebreaker in the direction that would cause me the least pain.

Overall this movie was very good, at least in a couple very specific directions.  I don’t know what kind of pain Liam Neeson (the Phantom Menace, Shindler’s List, Taken) has experienced in his life to allow him to project so much darkness all over the screen, but it must have been pretty heavy.  No one else can project so much pain and despair combined with anger and gritty realism.  He carries the movie entirely on his back, with a support cast of disposable heroes along give him a framework upon which to showcase suffering.

Before I get much deeper into this, let me say that if you have any kind of deep seated fear of plane crashes, being eaten by wild animals, or freezing to death in the Alaskan tundra than this is probably not the movie for you.  This movie shows these deaths in a manner that makes you feel like it is you who is getting disemboweled.  I will call this a credit to the director, Joe Carnahan (A-Team, Narc, Smokin’ Aces), and say further that this movie is far, far scarier to watch than any film about a goofy supernatural hockey mask wearing maniac risen from the dead to kill teenagers with a chainsaw (Friday the 13th image courtesy of the Horror Movie T Shirt category).  The fact that these deaths not only could happen but actually have makes them far more graphic and horrible.

Let me also give myself a self congratulatory pat on the back for my prediction about this movie, that there was some factor making the wolves unusually aggressive, being more or less true.  Feel free to call me the movie Nostradamus.

In the movie, Liam Neeson plays John Ottway, a sharpshooter hired by an oil company to shoot wolves, bears, and such in order to keep the oil workers safe.  He is plagued by his wife leaving him and suffers from suicidal thoughts.  He boards a plane for Anchorage which goes down for unexplained reasons (ice buildup on the wings is implied, but never confirmed.  Nor does it really need to be).  The plane crashing scene is as horrific and realistic as possible without actually throwing the theater you are sitting in down a cliff and setting it on fire.  He and six others manage to survive relatively intact and set up a camp in order to not freeze to death.  That night they encounter a pack of timber wolves who attack and kill one of them.  Don’t make the mistake of seeing these wolves as being like dogs, by the way.  They are huge and scary like nothing you have seen before.  Anyway, they decide they need to get out of the area before they freeze to death or get eaten.  Thus the long trek through the frozen woods begins, with member after member of the party dying with standard regularity, usually just after we learned more about them and got to like them.  I want to give props to director Joe Carnahan for managing to make the audience really identify with and like his characters before killing them off.  The fact that they were all gritty oil workers rather than vacuous teeny bopper contributed to that.

That’s pretty much the entirely of the movie.  I don’t want to give any spoilers but want to say this movie was really, really scary (making the life of the loner movie critic going solo to see this stuff that much harder.  I was seeing a lot of wolves out of the corner of my eye as I headed out to the car).

The stars.  Liam Neeson was awesome.  Two stars.  Most of the rest of the cast was really great too.  One star.  Scary, scary movie.  Two stars.  The wolf CGI was very good.  One star.  The director managed to make me connect with pretty much every character before killing him off.  One star.  Overall he also managed to keep the tension ratcheted up to eleven on a continuous basis.  One star.  As long as you aren’t terrified of plane crashes or wolves, an excellent movie.  Two stars.  Total: ten stars.

The black holes.  One of the support characters seemed a little over the top (although he got cool towards the end) and was sort of bugging.  One black hole.  The pacing, which seemed spot on for most of the movie, really slowed down in the last 20 minutes.  One black hole.  SPOILER ALERT I don’t want to spoil this movie in any way, but if you are clever you might be able to infer something from this next point so maybe you want to skip to the next paragraph.  The entire movie seemed to be pushing towards some kind of meta message about things happening for a reason and the hand of God creating fate, only to prove that there was no reason of any of the stuff that happened in this film.  I left the theater with a distinct feeling of “What point was the director trying to make?” in my head.  One black hole.  Total: three black holes.

So a grand total of seven stars.  A really good movie, if you want scary.  I think the camera work warrants a big screen, so try to see it in a theater if possible.  Not a good date movie, in my opinion.  There is nothing going on here that will inflame your her passion, unless she is turned on by gritty middle aged men wearing six layers of clothing (in which case, after you fail with her send her my way).

A little shorter than I would like, but I really am feeling like crap and think I am going to go crawl back into bed.  Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu.  If I wake up with enough energy I will probably go see One for the Money, which I expect to suck like nothing ever seen before in this universe or the three universes next to us.  Feeling this bad will probably hone my bitter sarcasm to the point that I will either write the best negative review ever or just spew a bunch of random words and letters all over the screen.  Talk to you soon.

Dave

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