Tag Archives: movie reviews

Movie Review: The Heat

The Heat is a buddy cop movie. But there’s a twist: the buddy cops are coppettes. Can you believe they made a woman police officer movie? With women? That’s kind of the gist we get from the opening sequence, Sandra Bullock leads a SWAT team into a house, nobody listens to her, and the all-male task force is almost happy when a thorough inspection of the scene turns up negative.

Not so fast. Sandra Bullock isn’t like most other cops. She’s a woman. She checks under the table for drugs. And behind that wall for guns. Bingo. If only all of the guy cops could stand to be around her for more than ten seconds. They hate her. She’s so annoying. “I wonder why she doesn’t have a boyfriend,” some dude sarcastically wonders out loud.

It’s the old try-twice-as-hard-to-get-half-as-far dilemma, as evidenced by this accomplished federal agent’s inability to convince her boss that she deserves a promotion. “It’s just that,” her boss tries to break it to her gently, “nobody likes you.” And yeah, it’s not a very subtle gender bias, but they’re laying it on thick on purpose.

After a sweeping seventies cop-movie intro sequence, filled with this huge sweeping camera shot tour of New York City, the plot of the movie picks up, leading Bullock to go after a drug smuggling ring … in Boston. Someone should have told her that the Queensboro Bridge heads toward Long Island, but whatever, I’m sure that, once off camera, she must have realized her mistake and asked for directions, because she makes it to Boston in no time.

That’s where we meet Melissa McCarthy. Whereas nothing Sandra Bullock achieves seems to earn her the respect that she desires, McCarthy has thrown all sense of professionalism in the garbage. She knows that the system sucks, that it’s inherently unfair for her as a woman. So she does whatever she wants. She doesn’t try to get her coworkers to like her or to respect her accomplishments. No, when she doesn’t get her way, she curses, she threatens to smash people’s heads in, she plays Russian roulette with a guy’s penis, she’s a real loose cannon.

And surprisingly, this dynamic works. It’s a really funny, entertaining movie. When I saw the trailer, I thought it looked lame, cliché. I was like, didn’t Sandra Bullock already do the whole FBI agent role? I didn’t get it. And then I saw clips of McCarthy cursing and acting like lunatic, I thought, OK, she’s really riding that Bridesmaids character all the way.

But it works. The jokes are funny. Everything is really over the top. The only time that I felt like the movie got a bit carried away was when they started blatantly saying stuff like, “It really is hard for us women.” The whole theme of women in the workplace, it’s obvious just by having these two women team up and try to take down a drug kingpin. You don’t necessarily have to have anybody shooting a bad guy in the penis – which actually happens – to drive home the message that our conception of law enforcement is that it’s still a very male dominated industry.

Another reason why I think this movie is a success is because we’re so familiar with the buddy cop genre. Two cops with wildly different dispositions and philosophies are forced to team up, in turn overcoming their mutual distrust while at the same time learning more about themselves. They get carried away, they get taken off the case, they decide to go forward with the investigation anyway, and everything pays off in the end. Normally, a movie like this would get me upset. How dare the movie studios make such a derivative film and expect me to pay money for it?

But it’s the perfect vehicle for two women to take the lead. Because the plot is all but laid out already, it allows the characters to focus on how and why it’s different for them as women. Why should we care about a cop’s gender? I can’t help but feel that it’s one of those movies that’s almost more worried about getting male viewers to buy tickets than it is for females. Based on personal experience, it’s much easier for a woman to go on a date with a guy to see an action movie or a blockbuster or a comedy than it is for them to go see a romance or a chick-flick. This is the kind of rare exception that would probably satisfy both audiences.

A lot of it has to do with the dialogue, with McCarthy’s comedic presence. I got the image of cameras just running on her constantly, taping long improvised rants of obscenities and violent fantasies, and then they’d take the best stuff and edit it down for the movie. And even the stuff that did seem written out was equally as funny. There’s an absurd scene involving a botched tracheotomy at a Denny’s. It’s one of the most insane yet original bits I’ve seen in a long time.

Am I gender biased by continually writing about how surprised I am that I enjoyed this movie? I have no idea. I’d like to think no, because I’m usually surprised when I enjoy any movie. But again, I’m always reluctant to see a girlie movie. Why? Because I’m a guy, I don’t know, and no offense, but a lot of girlie movies out there put me to sleep.

The initial summer blockbusters have come and gone, and now it’s hit-or-miss comedies and action flicks until August and September. The Heat definitely hits. Go check it out.

Movie Review: World War Z

The zombie apocalypse has finally arrived, for real this time. It’s not some rinky-dink comic book, or a cable TV show based on a rinky-dink comic book. This is a serious major motion picture. And it’s not based off of a comic book, ahem, graphic novel, no, it’s based off a real book, with real words. Go ahead and go to the bookstore, it should be right on display when you walk in, the booksellers are all like, “Please! Come inside please! Buy our books, any books! Buy anything! A cup of coffee! Something, please, we need to eat, we’re starving! Look, they just did a reprinting of World War Z, and Brad Pitt’s on the cover!”

Because Brad Pitt is the costar of the movie. Rumor has it that Pitt was a little burned that he couldn’t secure the lead billing. The studio execs were like, “Listen, Brad, we want to give it to you, and normally we would. But we’ve got a huge new star taking center stage, a real up-and-comer.” And Brad Pitt was like, “Who is it? Who’s bigger than Brad Pitt?”

Brad Pitt’s haircut is the real star of the film. And once he and his new hairstyle were formally introduced, the rage kind of subsided somewhat as even Brad Pitt couldn’t help but look at the new do in the mirror and think to himself, damn, that is a ridiculously cool haircut.

It’s a groundbreaking new cut, perfect for breathing fresh life into the kind-of, about-to-be-played-out zombie movie genre. You’ve seen the trailers, right? I don’t know how to describe it other than that it’s like a man-bob, but masculine. It’s long, definitely longer than my hair, but professional. Each strand of hair, when combed or pulled back behind his ears, rests precisely at the top of his neck.

It’s great because, while I already told you that it’s professional, it’s also versatile. Perfect for that zombie apocalypse type of … well … what is it that Brad Pitt does in this movie? I never really got it, other than the fact that he works for the UN. They go about telling you what he isn’t. “I’m not a doctor. I’m not a soldier. I’m not a baker.”

And my missing his exact occupation wasn’t due to a lack of me paying attention. I thought I paid pretty good attention. Whatever it is that he does, he gets ferried around by the government from location to location, running around, trying not to make any noise, because that’s how these zombies know you’re coming, noise. But still, you know, he steps on some glass sometimes, and the zombies hear that, or he’ll kick a can of Mountain Dew down the hall, again, it’s an accident, but the zombies hear that also.

He keeps making so much noise I started to doubt that he was a … what should I call him? A specialist? Man, it’s going to drive me crazy, especially because at one point, right after he gets off the plane at a new location, some guy comes over to him and he’s like, “Who the hell are you?” and Brad Pitt’s like, “Do you know exactly what it is that I do?” And I thought to myself, here we go, things might start to make sense here, like maybe he’s an operative, or …

“I work for the UN.” Back to square one. But it’s all inconsequential. Because there’s this haircut. Oh my God, it’s like, if you have this haircut and, let’s say, you’re on a plane and the plane goes down, you’ll wake up and most of your hair is still going to be tucked neatly behind your ears. The man-bob makes it through! And I know that I keep spending a lot of time on shape, bounce, the way that, when he wills it to, Brad Pitt’s haircut can kind of fall playfully in front of his face, just a little, only obscuring say, one eye, the other eye looking back at you mischievously.

But there’s more. It’s like perfectly highlighted. Brown underneath, yeah, but sun kissed, just the right amounts of blond that, while still maintaining its professionalism, it screams out: what isn’t this haircut capable of? It’s the men’s haircut of the future. It’s perfect for at home or at the office. From casually running away from a hoard of zombies to frantically running away from an even bigger hoard of zombies. I don’t know why the director didn’t make the obvious choice to change the title to World War H.

As if to highlight the magnificence of Brad Pitt’s new haircut, they give him this woman soldier sidekick, and her head is completely shaved. What a role reversal! Hey lady, hope you’re not too attached to your hair, because if you want to act along Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt’s new haircut, you’re going to have to buzz your head entirely.

I feel like I’m not saying enough about the haircut, but I haven’t said much about the movie. It’s an OK movie. The scenes where it’s classic zombie stuff, like running, or trying to get through a building, stuff like that, those scenes totally work. It’s just the right amount of suspense and shit-in-your-pants zombies popping out of the closet.

But in terms of plot? Eh. I don’t know. Again, I didn’t not like it. It’s just, you know, what do you think happens in a global zombie movie? Yeah, that’s about it. The ending is kind of lame. But endings are always the toughest part of a movie, and I’m trying not to let my entire judgment of a film be based solely on how well everything wrapped up. Because I’ve found that most movies are constitutionally incapable of having a decent wrap up.

Kind of like this review. I spent so much time talking about the haircut, and then I made that awkward, forced transition to review, and now I’m trying equally as hard to abruptly end it without really making it too obvious that I don’t know what I’m doing. So, uh, yeah. It’s not bad. The movie, that is. The haircut is fantastic.

Movie Review: Man of Steel

You’ve seen the trailers. Everybody knows the story. It’s Superman. What can you really say about a Superman movie? Americans are more familiar with Kal-El’s origins than they are with the Bible. There’s nothing to spoil here. There’s nothing to do except comment on what worked and, unfortunately, everything that didn’t.

The previous new Superman movie was so bad that I personally thought that the man in the red cape was going to be condemned to at least a twenty-year exile from the big screen. But no sooner did the tepid reviews of Superman Returns start trickling in than Hollywood announced plans for a reboot.

And then they teased it out like you can only tease out a big superhero movie. In any other genre, audiences won’t have the patience for these types of games. Like, a year before the release, they’ll show a glimpse of the costume’s shoulder pad. And then a month later a poster. This all culminated in the onslaught of trailers released in the past month or so.

Which, I’m sorry to say, kind of baited me in. The previews looked great. Everything felt cool and modern. I was actually sort of looking forward to a Superman movie, I couldn’t believe it. But then I saw it, and the cynical jaded part of my brain laughed at how gullible I’d been. Because a stunning three-minute trailer does not guarantee a whole two-plus-hour feature film.

It’s stupid to complain about the story, but I’ll do it anyway. How many times are we audiences expected to sit through another tried-and-true opening of Jor-El sending his infant son to escape from the dying planet Krypton? Russell Crowe gives a totally generic and bland performance as Superman’s biological dad. He tries warning the Kryptonian leaders about the planet’s imminent destruction. Nobody listens.

General Zod shows up. There’s a chase scene. There’s a flying bird thing that Jor-El rides around, and it’s almost exactly like the flight scenes from Avatar, only sepia-toned. General Zod gets banished to the Phantom Zone. Wow! So exciting. I really can’t imagine where they came up with such a novel idea for a Superman origin movie.

And then it’s just this weird out of order montage of Clark Kent growing up, learning about his powers, about himself. Even though Jor-El dies, he’s somehow still around the rest of the movie, talking to Superman in his weird Russell Crowe pseudo-English accent. General Zod has an American accent. I never understood why they don’t just streamline the accents at casting. It doesn’t matter, really, because everyone on Krypton speaks English I guess, that’s all that’s important.

You know what? I’m not even going to talk about the plot anymore. There are some cool scenes here and there, but ultimately it’s a boring, boring movie. It goes on forever. There are a lot of grandiose ideas and sweeping shots filled with a larger-than-life Superman-ish score. A lot of the more glaring plot holes are either casually written-off or more blatantly ignored. Like Kevin Costner talking about why the government didn’t show up to collect the spaceship. “I don’t know why they didn’t come. They just didn’t.” Or when a bearded Clark Kent shows up at Jor-El’s twenty-thousand year old spaceship and emerges in a Kryptonian Superman costume, totally clean-shaven.

And then it’s just punch, punch, fly, kick, hit, punch, heat-vision eyes, punch, shove, fly, swoop, kiss, punch, punch, punch, punch, fly, punch, fly for the rest of the movie.

And is it just me, or do the effects here feel kind of cheap? It’s like, maybe Avatar set the bar pretty high in terms of digital graphics, but every new CGI laden movie that comes out lately, it feels like the artists are just rushing through the film. Everything’s kind of blurry, just a little too intentionally soft around the edges. I keep seeing the preview for World War Z and it looks just the same, like a bad cartoon. Also, another note about cinematography here, they went for the whole shaky camera thing, which, I don’t know, I guess it was supposed to make me feel like I was chasing Superman or something? And what about those sun glare spots? That’s like the first thing that everybody makes fun of in modern movies. Why are they still doing it?

Whatever, I can make snarky comments about the production all I want. But I’m mostly kidding. This was a highly polished big budget Superman movie. It looked cool. It would have been good as a series of ten-minute installments. Really, the problem lies with the Superman story. We’re talking about a character that’s older than my dead grandfather here. His story is legend and as such it is immune to change.

So what do we have? Just this never-ending intro, an infinite origin story. Superman is all beginning, no end, not even a middle anywhere in sight. To make Superman relevant, to keep the character interesting, someone’s eventually going to have to do something wildly different. But in a good way, not in the blue electric Superman from the 90s. Otherwise he’s destined to a fate of obscurity. Maybe not immediately, maybe not this generation, but eventually there’s going to be another Superman origin movie released, and all the kids are going to look at this giant S and think, this is boring. Man of Steel was boring.

Movie Review: Now You See Me

Iron Man Three, Star Trek, Fast 6, for a while I thought that the summer blockbuster season wasn’t ever going to skip a beat. But then I checked out my options for this week and was reminded that, yeah, if I’m planning on seeing a new release every weekend, I guess I’m going to have an occasional lineup of slim pickings.

And so I almost resigned myself to buying a ticket for Will Smith’s After Earth. I really, really didn’t want to see After Earth. I’ve seen the same way-too-long preview several times, and nothing about it looks interesting. The ship crash-lands. It’s the future. It’s Earth. Will Smith’s in it. Man, remember when Will Smith used to make only good movies? I’m glad I wasn’t writing movie reviews when Men In Black 3 premiered.

But just before I made my post-apocalyptic purchase, Yoda’s voice came alive in my head, “No. There is another.” And sure enough, there was another new release this week, a movie called Now You See Me. Huh. I’d never even heard of this movie. I was about to do a quick Google search to find out the general plot, something that could give me a clue as to what I might be in for, but I decided, fuck it, let’s go in blind.

Now You See Me starts off fast. It’s about four magicians who team up to rob banks, giving the money to the public in a Robin Hood display of vigilante economics. And for the first hour or so, it’s a pretty cool movie. The FBI gets involved and it turns into an old-school New York City heist movie, crazy crime-genre background music and all, something reminiscent of the original The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3.

But shit keeps escalating. Chase scenes give way to fight scenes that give way to car crashes. Instead of even beginning to hint at like a general direction in which the movie might be headed, they just keep on piling on random clues, mysterious characters, a few dead-end leads and even a flimsy romance subplot. After a little while you’re like, what? How? Who is this guy again? Wait, why are they robbing the banks?

And after that first enjoyable hour, the movie spirals out of control. The whole time I was thinking to myself, man, these writers had better have come up with something genius to get to some sort of a resolution, to even begin to answer all of these questions. And yeah, I guess it’s theoretically possible. There are movies out there that weave insane plots together in acts of superhuman storytelling.

But I kept thinking about how it’s so weird that a major movie studio could release a big summer film and not have any marketing campaign at all. Why hadn’t I seen this movie coming? Why weren’t there any previews during any of the other movies I’ve been watching every single week for the past three months?

While I don’t want to be a cynic, while I wanted to hold out hope that maybe they’d be able to yet turn this into a great movie, a moment of realism set in as I deduced that the only reason nobody’s heard about this movie is because maybe it really wouldn’t get any better. Maybe the writers wrote themselves into a corner and couldn’t figure a way out. But you know how big Hollywood is, they already signed Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson. Shooting was to begin in three weeks. If one group of writers couldn’t figure it out, they’d just fire them, get a new group in. Whatever, just write something, just wrap it up boys, we’ve got to get this film debuted by the end of May.

The ending of this movie is just an insult to intelligent life anywhere in the cosmos. I’d equate the making of this movie to the running of a marathon, one in which after twenty-five miles of agony, with only one mile left in sight, everybody just stopped. They just said, eh, whatever, who cares. I’m tired. I don’t feel like running anymore.

And then not only did they stop running, they didn’t even bother walking the rest of the way. They couldn’t manage even a limp to the finish line. In fact, they cheated, they took a cab to the end. Their score was totally disqualified. And then once they got there, they started punching random people in the face, stealing all of the other runners’ medals, knocking over tables of Gatorade for no good reason.

It’s like, what the hell guys, you’re only going to make half of a decent movie? Why bother? Is Morgan Freeman this desperate for work? Is Mark Ruffalo still trying to convince the world he’s a real actor after that ghost movie he made with Reese Witherspoon?

I really am sorry, because I don’t want to be so negative, but Now You See Me is a joke. A stupid, not-funny, fifteen-dollar-a-ticket joke. If you’re on an airplane flying across the country, and the in-flight entertainment system has this movie available to stream, do yourself a favor, just take a nap instead, or just sit up straight and stare at the back of the seat in front of you for two hours or so. Yeah, it might be a little boring, but at least it won’t be as incredibly disappointing.

Movie Review: Fast & Furious 6

I was a junior in high school when I went to see The Fast and the Furious in theaters. It’s been a while, but I remember something about an undercover cop joining an underground street racing gang in Los Angeles. People raced for each other’s cars. Honda Civics could drive right under the beds of sixteen-wheelers. And every vehicle came equipped with Nos, some sort of a magic gas that gave an extra speed boost, essential to coming from behind to win a drag race.

Fast forward ten years to Fast & Furious 6. Most of the original cast is still here, Vin Diesel, the other guy, the girl (although she has amnesia, which we’re reminded of every ten minutes or so.) The Rock’s part of the crew now. So is Ludacris. I don’t know, maybe I missed something during parts two through five. Aside from the familiar faces and the close-up shots of people shifting gears, I really don’t get how things could have connected from point A to point wherever we are now.

But it totally doesn’t matter. Fast 6 is a standalone movie. You don’t need to know anything about the franchise, I don’t even think you need to speak English. You just sit back and you watch cars go fast, you watch things blow up, you watch crazy fight scenes.

The plot has about as much to do with actual storytelling as iceberg lettuce has to do with being a vegetable. It’s green, yeah, and I guess it came from the ground, but it has zero in the way of nutritional value, it’s just a means to devour as much salad dressing as you want. The story has something to do with Vin Diesel’s racing gang trying to take down a criminal racing gang. The evil gang is trying to steal some sort of a military computer chip. They never really hone in on the specifics, but it’s a really valuable and powerful computer chip.

It just reminds me how far we’ve come from the first movie. I clearly remember a scene in part one where Vin Diesel and the other guy are standing around an old PC, bewildered as some hacker nerd guy explains that, “You can find anything on the net.” They’ve since caught up with the technology. Ludacris is constantly surrounded by at least a dozen computer screens. The bad guys have guns that fire computer chips onto cars, “chip-guns” I think they’re called. Again, I’m not certain about the specifics, but they can somehow disable any car’s computers.

Fast 6 is an action movie that has a very loose affiliation with cars and racing. The bad guy has a car. There are a lot of chase scenes. They do manage to squeeze in one underground drag race, but they never explain stuff like, where’s the course? How do the drivers know where they’re going as they swerve into oncoming traffic and try to lose the cops? Why can’t the racers ever figure out that whoever uses their Nos first always winds up losing?

But like I said, all of this stuff is unimportant. Pass me the salad dressing. I want to see more explosions. I want to see The Rock jump from one car to another. Anytime he tells someone else to, “Take the wheel!” it’s a sure sign that he’s seconds away from dramatically exiting the vehicle. As I’m sure you’ve seen from every preview and commercial, there’s a tank. It flattens every car that it comes into contact with. Except for the car being driven by a member of the good crew. This car gets slowly eaten, giving the good guys a fighting chance at survival.

Why is everybody so concerned with keeping this computer chip out of the hands of the bad guys? “It’s about family,” Vin Diesel tells us, I think. It’s hard to understand him, because he’s always talking in this barely audible baritone whisper. The director must have told him to take a handful of Nyquil before every shoot, because it’s all Diesel can do to spit his words out.

“It’s about having a code,” the bad guy tells us, over and over and over again. “My brother once told me that it’s essential for every man to have a code.” And he’s not talking in the abstract at all. He’s serious about his codes. “Mine is precision,” whatever that means.

But seriously, it doesn’t matter. This movie is absolutely bat-shit crazy, and it’s totally on purpose. It would have been terrible had anybody taken anything going on in this film seriously. I was dizzy, because the cameras are constantly circling around everything, swooping around the action scenes, swirling around people standing still talking to each other. Watching Fast 6 is like riding the Gravitron at a local carnival. What’s the point? Who thought of this shit? I liked it, I think, even though I’m kind of nauseous, and the whole place was way too crowded. Can I ride it again?