MovieOx

This was a film I was looking forward to seeing.

If you’ve seen a preview, the plot isn’t particularly complicated: Cameron Diaz plays a public school teacher (grade 7) who has thus far failed in her mission to land a rich husband and never teach again.  As the film begins she is engaged to what seems to be the perfect wealthy idiot; but the idiot’s family is looking out for him and manage to save him from Diaz’s (very entertaining) aging harpy.  So after a summer of following around pro basketball players, who are surprisingly skillful at denying any opportunity for Diaz to conceive a love child, she must return to teaching.

She hates her coworkers, her students, and engages in constant (and hilarious) substance abuse.  Then she meets the new substitute teacher (Justin Timberlake).  Not only does he look like Justin Timberlake; he also comes from old (and huge) money.  Diaz has some initial trouble coercing him and learns he has recently ended a long relationship.  Diaz concludes that her failure to land Timberlake isn’t because of any (numerous) character flaws; but that her tits are too small.  New, high quality implants will run her $10,000; which she does not have.  So Diaz proceeds to scam every red cent she can out of the public school system and everyone else she encounters.

I’m not usually a fan of Cameron Diaz, though I did enjoy her in Any Given Sunday.  Apparently I only like her when she plays an evil bitch.  (I’m not sure whether that’s a knock on me or her)  But her evil bitch in this movie is epic.  She can be bribed for good grades, keeps a mini-bar/pharmacy/hydroponic site in her desk at school, and only begins to teach her students when she realizes there’s a cash prize.

Justin Timberlake turns in a solid performance as the reason Diaz is getting her tits done.  Jason Segel is great as the gym teacher who stages an entertaining Machiavellian campaign to nail Diaz.  Lucy Punch plays the good teacher and enemy of the Diaz’s titular bad teacher.  One of the best elements of the movie is Lucy’s campaign to expose Diaz’s many many transgressions and Diaz’s innovative defense.  Really, her defense is so crafty that you’ll find yourself rooting for the bad teacher.

There’s also good comedy support from Phyllis Smith (The Office) and Eric Stonestreet (Modern Family).  The film is directed by Jake Kasdan (stable boy 1 from Silverado).  The movie was written by Office vets Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky.  It’s well worth seeing.

I never really read much Green Lantern.  I wasn’t really ever a DC guy.  Overall I felt that DC books were aimed at a demographic younger than I ever remember being.  I read a little Batman but that was really it.  Supposedly the silver age Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories actually inspired civic debate and wrestled with social issues but I’ve not read them.

I actually came across Green Lantern because I hate Superman.  Well maybe hate is a strong word; he bores the piss out of me (except for Superman Returns[film]; that was quite good.  And also Red Son[comic]; that was awesome.).  So when I heard they were going to kill Superman off; I immediately became interested in the story.  And to give the title credit; it was highly entertaining watching Doomsday kick the crap out of the Justice League and murder the man of steel.  And as I was reveling in the funeral and mourning period (yes, I am a bad person) DC began a whole resurrection story line.

And that actually was pretty entertaining as well but I’m veering from my main point.

During this resurrection story; aliens destroyed DC universe LA (of course they did) and since that’s where Green Lantern lived he became involved in the story.  There was exactly one issue of GL in the whole deal and that’s the one issue I read.  And it was actually pretty cool.  The Lantern found his home and his friends had been nuked and he proceeded to beat the holy hell out of the aliens.  He had a knock down drag out fight with Mongol that ended with a satisfactory breaking of an alien face with a sledge hammer.  I had been briefly exposed to the power ring concept when the Eradicator beat the crapola out of Guy Gardener a month or so earlier, but I wasn’t clear on the whole deal.  This was before Wikipedia so all I was able to glean was that yellow and green were some kind of opposing forces.

So other than that one issue and a couple of episodes of the animated Justice League (waaaay less stupid than expected, bordering on decent) I came into Green Lantern fairly uninformed about the character.

I have to say, whoever constructed the early previews for this film ought to be harvested for stem cells.  The bar for the trailer/preview has been raised way too high for this kind of crap to be tolerated.  Seriously, I was prepared to skip this movie based on the first preview.  I wouldn’t have seen it at all had I not decided to start reviewing again.  I’d say the craptacular previews cost Warner Brothers at least 20 million in the opening weekend.

But whatever; the film is not near as bad as previews would have you believe.  It’s also been pretty much panned by critics.  But most critics are predisposed against sci-fi in general, let alone comic book sci-fi.  The best way to get a well-reviewed sci-fi movie is to cast half the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The movie started out rocking and rolling.  There’s doings afoot in the galaxy; a very bad guy/entity who feeds on fear (yellow energy) escapes from “prison” and the galactic cop (that’s what the Green Lanterns are) tussles with him and is seriously injured.  The cops don’t choose who comprises their forces; the rings from which they draw their power do.  The injured cop’s ring leads him to earth and it chooses a military test pilot as the new Lantern.

The idea of the choosing is that the ring can basically do whatever one can will (willpower is green) it to do and can only be defeated by fear.  Test pilot Hal (Ryan Reynolds) apparently is fearless or isn’t affected by fear; so the ring chose him (1^st human to be chosen).  So Hal is whisked away to a far off planet to be trained to fight the fear monster. (Parallax)

I had always thought Green Lantern to be a more somber fellow than Reynolds; (though other nerds have informed me that Reynolds is a solid choice for Hal) but he’s a natural action hero and is his usual charming self in the movie.  The movie itself is pretty entertaining up until the point we get back to earth.  I for one would have been fine with a movie set entirely off earth; those were the scenes that worked the best.  I’m also not clear what Peter Sarsgaard is doing in this film.  He’s a human that ends up being an earthside lackey for Parallax.  He did a fine job playing an insane scientist; but I don’t know that his side tale is good/necessary/worth anyone’s time.

This movie might also hurt Blake Lively’s career.  I’m pretty sure all her dialogue was crafted according to an algorithm for inspiring pure hatred.

One of the better supporting performances is turned in by Mark Strong’s Sinestro, a fellow Lantern.  However, story wise, this character does go through a few changes that don’t feel particularly earned.

Overall this was not a good film, though I enjoyed the 1^st half of it or so very much.  If you’re a stickler for immaculate CGI, you might find things here to gripe about.  The biggest drawback is this is not an easy character to introduce.  There is a great deal of backstory and mythology in this story and the filmmakers may have tried to explain too much and they didn’t have enough time left for a good fight at the end.  I think this might be one of those properties that is best served by keeping the story in space and dropping the viewer into the heart of the action and explaining as little of the backstory as possible.  I liked this better than X-men 1^st Class; but that may have been because I know so little about the story in Green Lantern.

Bottom Line; this is the studio that put out Dark Knight.  We expect more.

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation…while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

Terrence Malick is an interesting story in himself.  He graduated with honers from Harvard (philosophy); went on to Oxford where he got within a hair of his doctorate but had a pissing contest with his adviser over some abstract concept in his doctoral thesis and said,”Fuck it, I’m out.”  He wound up back in America teaching philosophy at M.I.T. and writing articles as a freelance journalist.

He came to the film industry as a writer(he wrote the original draft of Dirty Harry), and eventually a director.  He directed 2 films I haven’t seen (Badlands, Days of Heaven) which were rumored to be troubled productions, but were very successful.  Terrance then dropped off the face of the earth.

I came across him the same time everyone else did.  In 1998, 20 years since his last film, he directed The Thin Red Line.

The Thin Red Line was a haunting film about the pacific theater of WW2.  It depicts the horror and beauty of battle the way Kubrick wishes Full Metal Jacket did.  And it also suggests another world, just beyond our own.  The music is amazing.

He then disappeared for a shorter interval and came out with The New World; a film about the founding of Jamestown and the English and Native Americans coming together.  They are both friends and enemies of each other and themselves.  Neither can survive in the other’s world unchanged.

And today, I saw the film he was rumored to be working on when he disappeared the first time, Tree of Life.  I can see why he may have needed some time off.  This was one acid trip of a movie.  In exploring the nature of life, Terrance traces life’s primordial origins all the way through time to a family in Texas.  And I do mean origins; beginning at the big bang.

The movie is non-linear.  It jumps through time as it considers the nature of life, the usefulness of love, and the utility of aggression.  A good portion of screen time is dedicated to the Texas family.  Brad Pitt is a brilliant man trapped in industry, and he attempts to raise his 3 sons to be without weakness.  His wife Jessica Chastain is the film’s embodiment of grace; she teaches her sons to love unconditionally.  The two forces are at war in the boys; and their parents are the necessary hero and villain.  The hero is necessary to protect the children from the aggression of nature enough so they can experience wonder and love.  The villain is necessary to provide constraint to struggle against and thus prepare one to struggle.

While the family’s journey is poignant, I found the prehistoric scenes to be the best in the film.  There is moment, in pre-history in which we see the invention of love, or at least the seeds of it.  A dinosaur lies injured next to a river, from the jungle another (different species) jumps out and steps on the first ones neck and prepares to kill it.  The standing animal looks down at the first, and decides not to kill it and moves away.  The prone beast, not as injured as it had let on, considers killing the other while his back is turned.  He does not.  Both live.

If you’re not in a thoughtful mood, don’t watch this movie.  If you found 2001: A Space Odessy ponderous, this probably isn’t for you.  It’s a quiet, thoughtful, intense, and powerful film.  If you have siblings you will not escape without tearing up.  8.5 of 10.

Life is the enemy of friendship.  The paths our lives take can sweep friendships by the wayside.  Life can change geography at will; it can separate friends with a school district line or place them on different continents.  As life goes on and friends’ careers evolve it can erect social barriers to friendship.  With marriage, life can deal friendship all these blows in one serving.

In Bridesmaids (brought to you by Judd Apatow of 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up fame), Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph are two friends that marriage will drive apart.  Rudolph has been proposed to by her longtime boyfriend (who is on his way to wealth and success) and Wiig is a hilariously insensitive Jon Hamm’s “#3 option”.  Rudolph’s fiancée is (by business necessity) very close with his boss who has a younger 2^nd wife played by Rose Byrne.  Byrne is a conspicuously wealthy socialite and enacts a not-quite subtle campaign to take Wiig’s place in Rudolph’s life.

Kristen is outgunned as her long history as Maya’s friend is apparently outgunned by Rose’s wealth and social standing.  But that doesn’t mean Kristen backs down.  Hilarity ensues.

I’m not a huge comedy guy; usually comedy is analogous with lazy filmmaking.  Which is not to say I don’t enjoy a good comedy; I do.  I just think good ones are very rare.  And comedies about marriage usually bore the shit out of me.  But this film actually has a few new things to say; but more importantly it’s funny as all hell.  For instance: a dress fitting ends with someone taking a dump in the middle the street.  There’s also a hilarious stretch on an airplane that involves quaaludes, scotch, several 7and7’s, sexual harassment, bi-curious behavior, assault, an Air Marshal, class warfare, and a plea to be able to watch the Daily Show without being penetrated.  My only complaint is that I wish they let that scene go on longer before involving federal authorities.  And again, besides all the shenanigans Bridesmaids is also a real movie.  All the good comedies are.

First, let me say that this film stars Ray Stevenson, who is one of my favorite actors.  I’ve rarely enjoyed anything on television as well as I enjoyed Ray Stevenson as Titus Pullo in Rome.  It would be natural to think I’d be predisposed to react positively to any movie he’s in. Let me address those concerns:  Fuck you, Ray Stevenson is awesome.

Now moving on.

Kill the Irishman was recommended to me by an Irish friend who shall remain nameless.  (though if his credit keeps improving I’ll be auctioning off his social security number on this site, stay tuned)  The friend in question does like ALL movies Irish so he’s not particularly reliable in this instance; but listen to this cast: Besides Ray Stevenson they have Vincent D’Onofrio, Christopher Walken, and Val Kilmer.  Yeah.  And also if you watch Mad Men you might recall the Count’s daughter that talked Don Draper off the job in California, Laura Ramsey.  Yup, cast is solid.

But in the end, that may not get you much; the Star Wars prequels had solid casts.  Blech.

I’m also a fan of the director, John Hensleigh.  He directed the often maligned 2004 Tom Jane Punisher.  I enjoyed that movie very much.  I’m not going to sit here and say its a good film; but compared to 3/4 of comic book adaptations it’s a fist sized diamond.  John gets story; besides writing Punisher among other movies I like less, he also wrote Die Hard with a Vengence.  Easily the best entry in the franchise.

Ok, enough with the resume.  Kill the Irishman is based on the true story of the crime wars in the 1970’s in Cleveland.  Ray Stevenson is the titular Irishman, Danny Green, and Val Kilmer is a cop who grew up in the same neighborhood (who wrote the book that became this movie).  Danny comes to be a power in the Cleveland underworld basically by accident.  He starts out as a longshoreman who doesn’t take any shit and ends up president of the local union and all the shenanigans that entails.  He makes inroads with the Sicilians also by accident when arranging to square a friend’s gambling debts with stolen merchandise from his docks.  He rises in the mafia world and at a certain point asks what exactly the bosses were doing for their cut of his money.  He concludes: nothing.  And the war begins.

Most of what goes down in this film, really happened.  During a year stretch of the gang violence, nearly 40 bombs were detonated.  Keep in mind, this was in Ohio not Belfast.  The Cleveland turf war became a national news story and Danny Green attained a kind of cult hero status.

I enjoyed the hell out of this movie.  It begins like a fairly stock gangster film; but at some point it veers from the beaten path.  Because its not really a gangster film.  It’s a biopic.  This was a real man and some people thought he was a hero.  And many people wanted to kill him.  The movie gets into your heart a little; then it starts with the bagpipes and you’re hooked.  Good stuff.

So, this movie was pretty hyped.  I think that’s going to end up biting ad companies in the ass.  Spielberg started it all (or whomever was doing his marketing) with Jaws, with an unprecedented media blitz to generate hype for the film.  But that’s a dangerous game, friendo.  I mean eventually nobody will give a shit about anything.  (dramatic pause as I realize with horror this has already happened…)

I think this movie will be more ill received than it ought to be because of its over-hype.

All that out of the way, this was a charming little movie.  Imagine if the kids from Stand By Me saw a train from Area-51 derail.  That’s the basic idea.  A group of friends begin their summer by making a monster movie for a local film festival.  They’ve convinced the hot girl from school to be in it.  They have a scene at a real train station as a real train is going by to make their movie look real.  This happens to be an Air Force train and it happens to derail in spectacular fashion.  They drop their camera and run, but the camera continues to record and it documents something tear its way out of the train.

Then of course, weird shit starts to go down.

The world is well built, the small town along the train tracks is full of charming (though stock) characters and everyone knows everybody well enough to make for some good growing up humor.  The town is almost (not quite) a character itself.  The hot girl from school ends up being a natural actress (who saw that coming?) and there’s a well established yet palatable level of adorableness to the whole thing.

The thing about this film is that it doesn’t really do anything new.  Everything in this movie you’ve seen somewhere else.  And not in a badass, Kill Bill kind of way.  More in a way that annoys you a little.  The scientists are good.  The military is bad.  The hot girl is in danger.  People come to terms with things.  Which isn’t necessarily the problem, the problem is all the pieces of this puzzle were better somewhere else.  The father getting over his wife’s death during an alien invasion was better in Signs.  The scientist is good/military is bad back and forth in this film is very close to Starman.  The clique of close friends was better in Stand by Me.

This movie isn’t bad, its just not special.  It brings nothing new to the table.

Oh well.  They can’t all be District 9.

I wonder how long Fox has the rights to the X-men characters.  Probably forever, oh well.

Anyway, after the epic failure that was X-Men Origins: Wolverine, it seems like fans of the characters were owed a decent film.  They almost got it.  Not quite.

This film isn’t a reboot (at least I don’t think) it’s a prequel to the first X-men.  And while there’s some cool things in this movie, and I will talk about them, lets just get one thing out of the way first.  This movie has the same problems all the X-men movies have had.  Some of the characters in the movie die and nobody gives a shit.

Fans will recall Brian Singer’s pretty good scene in the first X-men with Magneto-to-be in a Nazi concentration camp.  Well, we go into more detail about young Eric’s history with the National Socialist Party.  Clearly he survives the camp, though mostly nobody else does.  So we next see him in Jewish Avenger mode hunting down Nazi’s in Switzerland and South America.  These are actually the coolest parts of the movie.  Watching Magneto as a one man Mossad death team is pretty cool.  Though a very good murder is almost ruined by a line that sounds like it was written by a Schwarzenegger.

Professor X can still walk at this point and he uses his mental powers to get good grades and to get laid.  One assumes he’s having quite a time on college campuses in the 60’s.  They could have done more with this, as the one scene where he’s using telepathy to get laid is cut a bit short for almost no reason.

Other characters from the franchise are kicking around doing shit, but the story mainly introduces ones we don’t know.  Many of them are in cahoots hoping to trick humans into making the Cold War into a real war (of course they are, otherwise why have a submarine with a bloody mary bar).  So the G decides it needs some mutants of its own.  And they go to great lengths to make sure there is nothing at all interesting about any of them.  Readers of X-men will recognize most if not all of the characters and wonder why they’re having trouble caring.

Because there’s never a sense that anyone important is in real jeapordy.  Ever.  A couple characters drop out of the sky and land on a battleship in the middle of about 50 marines.  Nothing happens.  The marines just watch.  It’s like they were whispering to each other,”Guys, don’t get involved, those are main characters.”

And when some of them do die, you almost yawn.  I say almost because you’re probably already asleep.

So, yeah this was a good idea that was basically utter crap.

3.5 of 10

I was never much on Thor.  I didn’t read his main title much.  I didn’t read The Avengers much (though I really got into The Ultimates).  I came across Thor mostly when he crossed the paths of other Marvel characters like Bruce Banner or Daredevil.  I didn’t hate the character or anything, but I thought the writers (or maybe just Marvel) were kind of pussy-assed with it.  It’s Thor the god of thunder!  (shhh…  he’s not really a god, he’s from another dimension where people are magic…shhh)  God is ill defined within Marvel.  Which is really an issue for as many story lines they have with people going to hell.  (shhh…its not really hell but another dimension with many attributes of the Christian notion of hell and people’s spirits go there when they die…shhh).  And then there’s all the crap with Donald Blake.  Is he actually Thor, or does the hammer cause Thor to posses whosoever wields it.  It seems to change with each writer.  Maybe I’m wrong but to me Thor was one of those characters whose retcons I could never keep up with.  But then I have a job…

There was a really cool cameo in a Frank Miller Daredevil run by Thor and the Avengers that was actually pretty cool.  Miller was able to make the Avengers seem larger than life and a bit scary.  It was as if Daredevil was an infantryman who called in an airstrike and had to witness what happened and wonder if it wasn’t a bit much.

But, for all the convoluted mythology with the character, I’ve found him ill defined.  (Though I have heard that he’s become more interesting in his current run with Asgard floating over Oklahoma or some such nonsense.)

But color me glad that Sony has the movie rights to Spiderman and the X-men are elsewhere, because I really like what Marvel is doing with their Avengers properties.  (Although Iron Man 2 was mostly a waste of my time)  Because we’re getting a period WW2 movie out of it (this year has 2 period comic films and at least 2 period sci-fi movies, weird) and we got a very good take on Thor.

The film took a flat out stance on what Thor is.  He’s an alien.  He hales from a cosmic entity (not quite a planet) where all lines of force converge.  If this were Stephen King, he’d be from the world where the Dark Tower is actually a tower and not a rose.  Being a super human race, his people thwarted an invasion of frost giants on earth in northern Europe in the dark ages and gave birth to the Norse pantheon of ‘gods’.  As tends to happen, the political intrigue of this alien world spills over into ours when Thor starts a war with his arrogance and is banished to Earth, striped of his strength.

Chris Helmsworth plays Thor; and a good part of the movie only works because he’s so natural in the part.  Sir Hopkins plays his father, Odin; and Natalie Portman plays Thor’s reason to get out of bed in the morning.  There’s also a really cool small role for Stringer Bell.  All of the acting (especially Hopkins who I wish was in the film more) is way better than one would expect in a movie of this type(guys in viking armor walking around in New Mexico).  But then I noticed Kenneth Branaugh was directing.  I respect Kenny, he knows what he’s doing.  The film does a very credible job of adding some science to the mix to keep things in the realm of quasi-realityish possibilities.  If you want to know what they got right and what they got wrong science-wise, there’s a good column by Copernicus on Ain’t it Cool.

This movie could have been a disaster.  It could have been Superman 3.  It could have been X-men Origins: Wolverine.  It’s waaaay easier to tell a bad Thor story than a bad Wolverine story.  Ken took things in a brave direction and made a movie that is actually beautiful in moments.  I don’t use that word lightly.

5.5 of 10 because its still a comic book movie, but some of the space stuff should be seen in the theater, it’s gorgeous.

But don’t bother with 3-D.  This will end up being a running theme, but 3-D is stupid.  It was stupid in 1950 and it’s stupid now.

This movie was the exact same as the first one except you know what’s going to happen so it sucks.

Also the funny parts were removed so it sucks.

Also, there’s 80% more Asian cock, take that for what you will.

But this movie is a steaming pile of shit.