Tag Archives: Movie Review

Movie Review: The Host

Wow, I feel like I’ve been had. Is it because it’s a holiday weekend? I thought studios love to snag people in with big movies during holiday weekends. But the only new releases this week were G.I. Joe, some Tyler Perry movie, and The Host.

I’d never heard of The Host, and all the better, I thought to myself. Here’s a chance to really do an honest film review. No marketing campaigns or commercials to influence my opinions beforehand. No, without any preconceived notions, I’d be able to truly judge a motion picture based on what I thought, what I felt.

Well, almost. Right as I was buying my ticket in the theater, I noticed a The Host movie poster. “From the makers of Twilight,” it read. Damn. The ticket lady directed me toward theater one, a room full of teenage girls, the occasional senior citizen, and me, at eleven in the morning on a Friday.

OK, the movie … jeez, I don’t know where to start. I guess I’ll mention that I’ve never actually seen Twilight, so I can’t really give an apt comparison, but I’ve read reviews about Twilight, I’ve seen tons of shows and online videos making fun of Twilight, so yeah, this movie was pretty much like Twilight. Except there aren’t any vampires. There are aliens.

The opening exposition cuts right to the chase, as the main character, Melanie, tells us how we’ve gotten to where we are. Aliens have invaded the earth, these little silver glowing worm aliens. They’re not invading, the invasion is already over. I don’t know how much trouble the first few aliens had in taking over individual earthlings, because they’re so tiny and delicate. They get beamed to our planet in these small silver pods and physically bond with and seize control of individual human beings. But it’s weird because, in order for this to happen, already-possessed humans have to perform a surgical operation on a non-possessed human for the little guys to weasel their way inside.

Backstory isn’t super important, I guess. They’re here. They’ve taken over nearly the whole world. And they’ve brought harmony. They don’t fight. They don’t pollute the planet. Everything’s just great.

Except there are a few remaining humans living like fugitives. The main character, Melanie, she’s caught right away at the beginning. Rather than succumb to the invaders, she chooses suicide, leaping through some pane glass out of a fourth or fifth story window. But she survives. This one’s a fighter. The aliens put an alien inside of her. We can tell because her eyes start glowing. Oh yeah, all of the possessed humans, their eyes all glow bright blue.

I could never wrap my head around this plot device, mostly because the aliens, spending so much time trying to locate the resistance, desperately trying to smoke out any remaining humans, they never think to maybe put on some contact lenses. The eyes are always the dead giveaway of who’s possessed and who’s not.

The alien in Melanie’s body, her name is Wanderer, and at first she’s put in charge of finding the remaining humans, of eliminating the resistance. But that same fighting spirit that helped Melanie survive that fall? You guessed it: it allows her to somehow survive the mind-meld. She’s still around, albeit as a sassy disembodied echo-voice with a Southern accent. But the aliens don’t have Southern accents, just regular accents.

As she struggles to assert dominance in Wanderer’s new body, we learn more of Melanie’s alliterative backstory, about her kid brother Jamie, her boyfriend Jarred, her uncle Jeb. She convinces Wanderer to escape the alien city, to make her way to the desert, where we find the rest of the survivors, living in some intricate network of pretty cozy looking caves. Her uncle Jeb “found” them, somehow. There’s a hospital inside the caves. And electricity. And running hot water. Also, there’s a gigantic system of crank operated mirrors that allow them to grow acres and acres of underground wheat. But they have to retract the mirrors every time an alien helicopter flies by, because you know, they don’t want to get caught. It turns out the whole process is a lot easier than I’d imagine.

The rest of the movie is just this long weird series of events. The Seekers are trying to hunt down the resistance. Melanie’s boyfriend and family at first treat Wanderer like a prisoner, but then they grow to love her. Melanie rekindles her romance. But Wanderer develops a romance for someone else. There’s a lot of perfectly groomed and shaved refugees staring longingly at each other, almost about to kiss, but then fighting off their temptation, because, I don’t know, I guess that’s a teenage problem or something.

What really stuck out to me was that the overall plot of the movie resembled the radical right’s exaggerated fears of what a liberal America might do to God’s favorite country. The aliens are sleek, sophisticated. They live in cities with socialized medicine, socialized everything, there is no more money at all. They wear all white. They drive chrome sports cars, fly chrome helicopters, zip around in chrome motorcycles. They complain in their northern accents that humans are barbaric, polluters of the environment. They shop for big boxes labeled “food” and jugs labeled “water” in big warehouses labeled “Store.” It’s big government at it’s worst, controlling the lives of every citizen, punishing, overbearing, cracking down on dissent in all forms.

The resistance is the real America, down to earth people with real Southern accents, listenin’ to country music, slingin’ shotguns, sayin’ stuff like, “I reckon,” and “ain’t” and “for a spell.” When Wanderer successfully fights off the advances of an admiring boy, Melanie screams in her head, “Hallelujah! (pronounced Hah-luh-LOO-ya!)

Wanderer falls in love with the real America. They rename her Wanda. She says that after being alive for one thousand years, spending her time amongst countless worlds, this is the hardest but most beautiful life in the whole galaxy. It’s American exceptionalism on a cosmic scale.

Now I just feel bad, tearing apart this movie that’s clearly intended for an audience that I’m not a part of. Still, maybe I wouldn’t mind all of the cheesiness if the movie weren’t so boring. The plot isn’t really a plot at all. It’s solipsistic. Most of the movie is the main character talking to herself, about boys, about feelings, about how feelings are hard. Whatever it’s for teenagers.

What was I watching when I was a teenager? Face-Off, The Water Boy, Starship Troopers. I guess it’s a hard market to sell stuff to. Actually, it’s a really easy market to sell stuff to. I don’t know. Next week I’m going to see Evil Dead, so come back and read the review.

Movie Review: Olympus Has Fallen

What is Olympus Has Fallen about? Because the commercials don’t really tell you anything, other than that it’s an action movie. It’s a big action movie, true to form, never straying at all far from the tropes of the genre. It’s about the President, kind of. The opening scene is of the President boxing one of his secret service agents at Camp David. It’s a big action movie.

I think it’s President Asher or something like that, but that kind of stuff never matters. In fact, just hearing “President Asher” only serves to remind the audience how not real any of this stuff is. Which to me is fine. You go to see an action movie, you have to suspend your belief in lots of things if you want to have a good time. But hearing stuff like “President Asher” kind of messes with the illusion somewhat.

Whatever, that’s a small point, Aaron Eckhart, who plays the President, is hardly in the movie at all. The boxing scene at the beginning is about as good as it gets, because almost immediately after, his wife dies in a freak falling-off-a-bridge accident.

The movie isn’t really about the President. It’s about the Koreans. And Gerard Butler. But really the Koreans. They don’t tell you any of that in the commercials. Because the Korean people are not well represented in this movie, that is, coming from this non-Korean’s perspective. I’m assuming it’s why it was left out of any advertisements.

They’re going for a good old-fashioned America vs. movie. America vs. what? You had Red Dawn in the eighties, but now there’s no Soviet Union anymore. And didn’t they just reboot that movie also? I can’t imagine how the story stood up to the geopolitics of 2013. So no Russia, no Middle East, I mean, those actions movies are all too depressing, too weighed down in the realities of the past decade.

North Korea. It just might work. There’s a sort of real threat coming from that direction. Technically we’re still at war, right? Brilliant, North Korea it is. Without ruining the movie, I’ll tell you that a rogue group of North Koreans stage an all out assault on the White House, capturing the President and some other senior officials in an underground bunker.

Before you say, “But, how? That doesn’t make sense,” the movie already has it answered: “It takes fifteen minutes for the armed forces to get to the White House. We took it down in thirteen.” Actions movies like this don’t have to rely on making sense or logistical plausibility, as long as they keep the helicopters crashing, the knives stabbing, and the Abe Lincoln busts bludgeoning, the audience will accept that the terrorists somehow got their hands on a prototype US antiaircraft gun. “How they hell did they get that?” somebody screams in the situation room, to which some general responds, “It doesn’t matter how they got it!”

After the White House is in enemy hands, our nation’s only hope lies in Gerard Butler, a former secret service agent who had a little something to do with the first lady falling off of that bridge. He sees the White House under attack, and he runs there, making it inside, everybody else dead, just he makes it, on foot, and eventually he finds a conveniently placed Bluetooth cell phone that somehow maintains constant communication with the situation room.

Also, Morgan Freeman, in a surprise move, is demoted from Hollywood’s favorite black President to America’s first fictitious black Speaker of the House. I was like, what the hell? How can you have a table full of fake officials and not automatically defer to Morgan Freeman? But it’s OK, because after the Vice President gets executed, Freeman gets to be acting President for the rest of the movie. That’s more like it.

Olympus Has Fallen was entertaining, although not as entertaining as say The Rock, or Con Air, or Apocalypto. I feel like six months from now we’re all going to be watching it on USA or TBS. This movie looks like it was made specifically for strategically placed TV commercial breaks. The pace definitely slowed down toward the end, and I didn’t have that same sitting on the edge of my seat feeling that I usually get toward the climax of good actions movies. But that’s because I think it was a relatively safe film, a pretty safe script, a safe cast, a safe time of the year when not a lot of cool stuff is playing in theaters.

But it’s an OK movie, if you like over the top action flicks. I don’t want to spoil anything, but somewhere around the middle, Butler tells the main villain, Kang, that he’s going to “stab you through your brain with my knife.” Who do you think wins in the end and how do you think he does it?

Movie Review: The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

I’m going to start writing movie reviews. I figure every Friday, I’ll look at the week’s new releases, I’ll pick one at random, go see it, and then review it. So today was the first day. Unfortunately, I chose The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. I guess it was kind of subpar week for new releases. My options were this or The Call, which labeled itself as a low-budget thriller starring Halle Berry. It was a tossup, but Burt Wonderstone was showing earlier, and I figured I’d get it out of the way earlier, before I have to go to work tonight.

I don’t want to be overly negative. I hate reading movie reviews where everything is about how bad the movie was, how unfunny all of the jokes were, how positively unwatchable everything turned out to be as whole. So I want to start with something positive. Here it is: While I was watching Burt Wonderstone, I didn’t die. As far as I know, everybody else in the theatre escaped equally unscathed.

That’s all I’ve got. In all honesty, the movie was terrible. It stars Steve Carell and Steve Buscemi playing Burt Wonderstone and Anton Marvelton, two childhood misfits that find solace and friendship in their shared love of magic. We experience their start as kids, learning all about magic from some boxed magician set, complete with a VHS of Allen Arkin playing Rance Holloway, an older magician.

Anybody who saw DodgeBall will notice the almost exact same bit being stolen directly from the VHS of old dodge ball pro, Patches O’Houlihan. As soon as I saw them pop in that cassette, I knew it would be a total rip-off, that sometime later one of the main characters would find Rance as an old washed up magician, that he would help them overcome whatever problems the story might throw their way.

Anyway, cut to the present day, Wonderstone and Marvelton are famous magicians hosting a nightly show at some Vegas hotel. There are a few cheap shots, some sort-of gay jokes, “We have a magical friendship / We always knew we weren’t like other boys,” and the usual over-the-top in-your-face sex jokes. After insulting his magician’s assistant to the point where she walks off stage, Wonderstone picks a female volunteer from the audience. After the show, we see the woman signing a release form in Wonderstone’s penthouse, agreeing that she is providing consent to all of the various sexual acts they will be performing.

The rest of the story is pretty cliché. The duo’s magical act is getting stale. A threat arises in the form of Jim Carrey, who plays Steve Gray, one of these edgy street magicians, a weird combination of David Blaine and Chris Angel. Gray’s show is called “Brain Rape,” a not at all subtle or funny jab at Angel’s “Mind Freak.” This all might be clever if “Human Giant” hadn’t successfully parodied all of this stuff years ago. As Gray’s star rises, Wonderstone and Marvelton lose their audience. They get in a fight, they split up. What follows is the typical riches to rags to personal epiphany to reunion to comeback story.

Great, terrific. Yes, I could go on about how the movie is totally uninspired, how it blatantly tries to copy movies like DodgeBall, like Anchorman, like every other big budget comedy movie. I could write about how the supporting cast is made up of has-been TV typecast actors, James Gandolfini, Britta from “Community,” Raymond’s cop brother from “Everybody Loves Raymond,” plus lots of old SNL faces I haven’t seen anywhere else in like ten years. The whole cast, they’re like crabs trying to get out of a barrel, clawing every which way in a futile effort to somehow stay famous, to be relevant. At one point Carell goes to a retirement home in Las Vegas. He walks in and goes, “So this is where old entertainers go to die.” This movie has to be self-aware.

It’s all of the bloat of big Hollywood, the bad writing, the terrible acting, all in a one and a half hour snooze fest. The studio must have been aware of this, must have been conscious that the film was unwatchable. The finale involved the two magicians drugging their entire audience unconscious. I wish they would’ve handed out samples for us on the way in.

But the real problem with this movie is that it’s just not funny. The jokes were awful. I only laughed once, mildly, at a minor scene where Buscemi, having left for Cambodia to provide magic to the poor (Operation Presto,) gives some little kid a rabbit to pull out of a hat. We see the little kid walking the animal off screen as he pulls out a huge knife. Also, Wonderstone’s hair goes from long to short, back and forth multiple times throughout the course of the film, with no explanation. That was kind of funny.

Steve Carell screams a lot. Jim Carrey makes Jim Carrey faces and Jim Carrey noises. We’ve seen stories like this a thousand times, with the same endings, the same one-dimensional romances. The girl hates the lead. The lead tries to seduce her all while calling her the wrong name throughout the entire movie. She’s disgusted. He has his personal epiphany. He calls her by the correct name. Now she’s in love. Now she’s having sex with him. Her reward is a promotion, from magician’s assistant to magician’s opening act. Go women. How liberating.

Whenever I watch really bad comedies, I always get to a point probably three quarters of the way in where I’m just like, this sucks, I’m bored, I don’t want to have to finish this movie, and it’s taking forever. This movie was way too long. I was struggling to pay attention. I was thinking, how do they get away with making boring movies like this? They definitely cost millions of dollars to produce.

And then I remember being in high school, after I first got my driver’s license. I remember being free, for the first time, I didn’t have to ask my parent’s to take me to the movies, I didn’t have to answer their, “What movie are you going to see?” followed by, “I don’t know, that sounds inappropriate.” I’d go see all sorts of shows, finally, movies I wanted to see, adult movies. I’m remembering stuff like American Pie 2, Shallow Hal, Austin Powers 3, Some ping-pong movie with Christopher Walken.

That’s how they get you. They make these movies for adults, but market them to little kids. Adults leave their kids at home to watch these terrible comedies. Kids sit at home and wish they could go and see adult movies. Adults come home, disappointed, because nobody can watch this junk. But the damage is already done, the kids are totally primed to get their driver’s licenses and head out to see whatever’s opening up on Friday night. Then they have their own kids and leave them at home. It’s generation after generation of big movie studios making terrible movies and robbing us blind, laughing all the way to the bank.

At one point, Wonderstone and Marvelton try to do a Blaine-esque spectacle where they sit in a glass box suspended in the sky for a week. As they get hoisted up, some producer shouts at them, “Remember, all you have to do is nothing!” I think everybody involved in this movie took those instructions a little too strictly.

Don’t see it. If you were going to see, and didn’t because of this review, I just saved you thirteen bucks. I’m not saying I deserve all of those thirteen dollars, but if you could give me five, that would nice.

Movie Review: Looper (it sucks)

If you’ve seen the movie Looper, let me just tell you, I’m sorry. I know what you’re going through. And while it never really gets better, that dead part of your soul slowly overtakes the very essence of your being, erasing happiness so thoroughly that after a while you don’t even remember what happy ever felt like in the first place, eventually the emptiness you feel inside turns into something manageable. And so, unable to identify joy anymore, the hollow despair that oozes through your pores, it won’t be as crippling as it was immediately after the end of the film. That film. Looper.

I’m not even exaggerating. If anything, it’s the opposite. What’s the opposite of exaggeration? I don’t know. Playing it down? That’s not a word. There’s got to be a word. Understated? I guess, but that doesn’t sound just right. Whatever, if you haven’t seen it, don’t. In fact, if you haven’t seen it, stop reading this review, because it’s best to just keep this whole subject as far removed from your life as possible.

If I had a time machine, I’d travel back to the past and stop myself from ever renting the movie. Or, even better, I’d go back a few months ago to the casual conversation I was having with someone at work, someone who just saw Looper, and told me it was really good. I’d punch him in the face, return to the present, and hopefully the crisis would have been averted.

Unfortunately, time travel doesn’t exist. But it did in Looper. And it didn’t make any sense. So now I can’t even imagine what time travel would be like, because events in Looper have totally ruined the whole concept for me. It’s all about people who come from the future to kill people, also from the future, but in the past. And they make a big show about not messing with the timeline, or, they pretend to. Whenever one of the characters looks confused because something doesn’t make sense with the story, another character will begin the first four or five words of an explanation before shrugging and going, “Ah, blah blah blah time travel, it’s confusing.”

It’s confusing, but it’s not absolutely impossible to wrap your head around. And if it is impossible, they should have incorporated that into the movie. Instead, you have unnecessarily gruesome scenes of a young guy getting maimed and mutilated so that way his future self gets stopped in his tracks, in the present. They amputate all of his limps so they don’t have to kill him. But then they kill him. Ah, blah blah blah, this movie doesn’t make sense.

The whole movie tries way too hard to be Inception, which it fails at, miserably. They shoot for big ideas, for huge plot twists. It never works. It’s all cheap and lame. Like I said, the entire premise of the movie is based around time travel. Kind of. There’s also telekinesis. Which isn’t supposed to be a big deal, but then why do they bother telling us about it at the very beginning of the movie? To tell us specifically that it’s not a big deal. But guess what? It turns out to be a very big deal. Not really the best use of foreshadowing there. And, again, it’s cheap. Is this a time travel movie or a telekinesis movie? I’ve watched the whole thing and I can safely say that it’s really about neither.

It’s about nothing. It’s about Bruce Willis and it’s about making Joseph Gordon Levitt looking slightly more like Bruce Willis. It’s about depicting the future without really changing anything, just adding a few flying motorcycles. Oh yeah and now drugs now come in eye drop form.

Things just happen in this movie. They happen without any introduction or explanation. Like the telekinesis. Like some guy calling up Bruce Willis in the future and giving him the birthday and hospital number of the main bad guy. In the future. But from the past. Confused? Yeah, it’s a stupid movie. There’s not really much more to say. If you’re ever on a plane somewhere and they have one of those built in monitors on the seat in front of you, I guarantee you that Looper is going to be on there. It’s exactly the type of bullshit movie that always makes it onto airplanes. If it’s a free movie, and it sucks, you just know those asshole airlines are going to coerce you to watch it, just to make your flight a little bit shittier.

Sorry, I’m all worked up now. I don’t like being this negative. But Looper, man, it was so bad. Like didn’t somebody review the script? Or take a look at the finished product, wondering if audiences might not react negatively to such a poorly thought up story?

I also saw Magic Mike this weekend. It was pretty good, you know, for a male stripper movie. Definitely better than Looper.

Movie Review: The Dark Knight Rises: Part 2: Of the Review

I wrote last summer about how obsessed I was with the new Batman movie. It’s been a while now, but the obsession hasn’t diminished. In fact, I think that I’m even more obsessed with it now than I was when I saw it the first time. Or the second time. Ever since movie theaters stopped showing it, and because I haven’t yet bought it on DVD, I have no way to satisfy the gaping hole in the core of my very being that cries out on a daily basis for more Batman. Seriously, that movie was f’n ridiculous.

You remember the beginning? That airplane scene? I can’t think of any movie that’s had a more gripping or a more dramatic opening. Remember when they dragged those hostages onto the plane and the CIA agent pulls off the one hostage’s mask, and it’s Bane, and he’s wearing his breathing mask, and the CIA guy says to Bane, “Will it hurt if I take off this mask?” and Bane goes, “Yes … for you!” Seriously, remember that scene? Right before he somehow gets out of his handcuffs, and then the other plane comes out of nowhere and somehow Bane escapes? I think I actually passed out from excitement during those first five minutes. I must have, because when I saw it the second time, I was like, wait a second, I don’t remember exactly what happened. I have a sense memory of euphoria, followed by a warm and fuzzy sensation, so yeah, I must have fainted. I can’t wait to see it again because, maybe I lost consciousness during the second viewing also, and so it’ll only be after repeated viewing that I’ll be desensitized enough to actually make it through the entire movie awake. I’ve never been more hopped up on visual stimuli than I was when I saw Batman.

Seriously, sometimes when I’m sitting around with my friends, I’ll just go, totally unprompted, into the whole, “Yes … for you!” bit. And maybe nobody will get it. Maybe only some of the people will get it. Even if you get it, it’s a pretty random thing to just say, totally out of context from whatever else we might be doing or talking about. But it’s so awesome. Bane was such a badass bad guy.

And if you haven’t seen the movie, one, I have a little piece of advice: go see the movie. It’s so amazing. I’ve tried watching other movies since I’ve seen Batman, but they’ve all been terrible. That’s not to say that they’re terrible movies, although they might be. All I’m saying is, Batman is such a good movie, hold on, such a good film, that it’s going to ruin movies for you for the rest of your life. And films. It’s like that whole every square is a parallelogram but not every parallelogram is a square thing, but with movies and films, and Batman, and Batman is the film. Get it? What I’m getting at here is after you watch Batman, you realize that nothing else is ever going to come close to making you feel the way you did when you saw Batman for the first, second, third, five-hundredth time.

So you might be saying to yourself, why would I want to go see Batman? If it’s going to ruin the movies for me altogether, why bother? Because. It’s so fucking awesome. Even though you’ll never be able to watch another movie again, it’ll totally be worth it, to see Batman, to see The Dark Knight Returns. And besides, you won’t ever have to go see another movie again. Because eventually it’ll be released on DVD, or Blue-Ray, or whatever format happens to be the current standard, and any time you hear colleagues or family members talking about how much they loved a recent picture that came out, you can just go home and pop Batman in, and I’m serious here, I guarantee that you’ll be having a better time watching Batman over and over and over and over again than all of your friends and family watching all of those other movies combined, at the same time. It doesn’t make a lot of sense until you see it. I hope you already saw it.

And that opening scene? The whole “For you!” part that I was talking about before? It only gets better. I remember when I wrote my original Batman review, I was still a little bitter with my wife, because she made me wait to see Prometheus with her, but then she quickly lost interest in seeing Prometheus all together, and so we never wound up seeing it. I thought this was a bad thing. I thought I was being held back. And that’s one of the reasons I went to see Batman by myself, behind my wife’s back, while she was at school.

And when I finally did see Prometheus, I was left totally underwhelmed. Angry, even. It was more of a confusion that gradually built up to anger as I contemplated what Ridley Scott had just snuck up from behind and shoved my face in, but this is all really small minded of me. Now that I’m a couple of months removed from Batman, I can safely say that God himself purposely made Prometheus turn out to be a totally terrible movie, if only to show me that my wife wasn’t about to let me see a huge summer blockbuster by myself, and when I missed the Prometheus train entirely, I realized that I couldn’t let the same mistake happen with Batman. And so, if Prometheus hadn’t sucked so bad, maybe I would have waited for my wife to take a break from her books to see Batman with me, and in this scenario, maybe we would have never seen it, and I’m forced right now to contemplate a reality in which I’ve never seen Batman. And I can’t stand to even think about it. But then I think about all of the other alternate realities, universes in which I’ve never seen Batman, and it makes me crazy, to try and imagine a version of me that hasn’t seen Batman, that doesn’t recognize it as the greatest film in the multiverse, and that thought makes me insane with despair. And so if somebody ever invents a machine to travel to parallel universes, that’s going to be the only thing that I’ll want to do, to hop around from Earth to Earth, warning any potential Rob’s to see Batman immediately. But I’d also need a time machine, so I could first travel to the alternate world, and then go back in the past, back to this summer, when Batman came out, and I’ll grab myself by the collar and say, “Go see Batman, now!” But what if he’s like, “Batman? What? Who’s Batman?” And I’ll have realized that maybe I’ve accidentally travelled to a world where there is no Batman. And that’s too much. It’s too much to even think about. And so I’ll have to travel back to my original reality, kidnap Chris Nolan, and take him with me, to that and every other parallel universe where Batman doesn’t exist. And I’ll threaten him, scream at him “Make the Batman movie! Or I’ll never take you back to our Earth! Now!” And he’ll have to. And I know, it’s crazy, because there are probably an infinite number of worlds out there, and so I probably won’t have time to take Christopher Nolan to every single alternate reality. But I’ll try as hard as I can. Because that movie was so fucking sick, so unbelievably amazing. And so if all I’m doing is just increasing the number of realities where Batman exists, even if it’s just a handful of worlds, then it’s all worth it. I just … I just … I just, really, really, really, really love that movie.