Month: December 2011

Before you get confused, Letters to Juliet and Dear John are different movies. Both are romantic comedies starring Amanda Seyfried with “letter” themes. Or at least I assume Dear John has that in it. But Dear John is a Nicholas Sparks book/movie, while Letters To Juliet came out…well damn, after Dear John and in the exact same year.

What the hell Amanda Seyfried?

“Oh, my bad.”

Amanda is a fact-checker for a new york newspaper! Oh man! But she wants to be a writer. Too bad. Oliver Platt don’t care. She is going on an early honeymoon with fiance, Gael Garcia Bernal, to Italy! For he is Italian and opening an Italian restaurant in NYC and needs to meet with suppliers. But when they get there, it seems like he only wants to do work. For shame!

Amanda scurries around on her own, bored, and finds the “Juliet House” from that Shakespeare thing. For some reason, a whole bunch of women write romantic queries to Juliet and hope she responds. A group of women write letters back with advice, because they are bored. She finds a 50 year old letter, and decides to respond.

A week later, very British Christopher Egan appears on her doorstop. Oh, with his grandmother, played by Vanessa Redgrave. She has determined to return to Italy and find her long lost love when she was 15, and see if he remembers her. Amanda agrees to go on the journey with him, since her fiance doesn’t mind, as they travel the country looking for the right old dude.

As you can imagine, the thought of old people love and growing old with the person you actually love is discussed a lot. Turns out Amanda doesn’t love the husband that cares about his restaurant more than her (Selfish). So yes. Another movie where a woman travels and changes her mind about marriage, choosing another foreign person.

I knew this would happen! Why did I watch this movie in the first place?!

This is NOT an answer.

Only a few moments did I find amusing. At the end, where the balcony scene was “accidentally recreated” before Amanda officially started to get it on with British dude was pretty funny though. After all, NYC is kind of overrated.

For some reason (not that one, damn it) I did find this one more enjoyable. I thought they were good together chemistry wise, and the old woman love story was fantastic. So it is decent, you know, for a RomCom.

Red. Another graphic novel turned movie. Or at least loosely based on the graphic novel. I have never read it, but I knew there was major nerdrage when it came out, comparing to the source (“They are nothing alike!! rawrrawrrage!” – Nerd). But eh, whatever. Loosely is fine. Wouldn’t want the story I just read to be identical to what is on screen. Consider it another chapter, and we are good to go.

Fun fact! This is the first “DC” movie to not be made via Warner Brros in anyway.

However, it definitely keeps its “comic” feel to it.

Red seems to stand for “Retired: Extremely Dangerous”, or at least it does in the movie. It is a classification given to a CIA/whatever operative after they are done, if they are supposed to be disposed of. A situation which Bruce Willis finds himself in. He just wanted to enjoy life, and chat with case worker assigned to him on the phone, Mary-Louise Parker. BUT ASSASSINS! Bruce realizes their formation makes them USA trained, so he has to figure out whats going on.

He tries to get his team back together, exceptionally crazy John Malkovich, more calm yet sexual Morgan Freeman, and deadly with a gun Helen Mirren. I came up with those descriptions myself, you’re welcome.

But that is not all the old people involved. Richard Dreyfuss is some sort of bad guy, I guess. And Karl Urban is a young gun at the CIA in charge of bring Bruce and his friends down.

Mary-Louise Parker just gets to run around, being bait, confused, and pretty.

The driving point for this movie is obviously an “older” group of people kicking ass, instead of some young muscled dude. We get to accept that all these people have been in their fair share of spy missions, so they are all clever and hopefully good at kicking ass. Which they are. The action scenes are very interesting. Some of which is just people shooting at each other (read: normal action movie action) but they raise the bar a lot.

John Malkovich is also fucking crazy.

Don’t worry, he shares some crazy with Morgan Freeman.

Almost every scene with Malkovich you will find yourself laughing or, you know, yelling “holy shit!” at something cool they had him do. The “roof scene” early on with him is one of my favorites in terms of action.

This movie thankfully picked up the slack from the rest of the movies I have seen this week. Even if it is nothing like the comic.

This is the 250th movie review! Which means more Twilight action, and more pictures.

Twilight: Eclipse is the third movie/book, behind Twilight and Twilight: New Moon.

Let us start with the important things first!

Anna Kendrick is barely in this movie again. Why is she even agreeing to do this? She was in an early lunch scene, to show that they are still in school? Then Valedictorian speech at graduation, and quick hey lets party, at the after party.

Here is what appears to be a photo Kendrick leaving the set from a stalker. Probably did all of her scenes in one day, so this is rare.

So what happens in this movie? First off, it turns out that red head bitch from the first and second movie (who I thought died in the second movie!) isn’t dead yet and /still/ causing problems. Really? Not only that, but it took me awhile to realize it was the same one, because a different actress was brought in. (Further research had me find out that Twilight fans were mad at the change, thinking the new person couldn’t do it as good as the last person. You know, the character who I easily ignored in the first two movies. What?).

“I’m important, notice me!”

This movie also gave you all the back story you didn’t know you wanted. I think at least two vampires told their “and then I became a vampire” tales. Additionally, with the “Were”wolves, we got to hear a story about how they started to hate vampires.

A sexy story told over a sexy campfire.

But yeah! Turns out red headed chick is making a small army of “firstyear” vampires in order to kill Bella. She is super mad about things from awhile ago. Apparently first year vampires are the worst. They are all, rawr, and shit. So they are more dangerous than actual vampires that are badass? Weird. So Kristen Stewart doesn’t like that. Thankfully, both Edward Cullen and Jacob Black want to protect her, so they join forces to train how to kill vampires. Very weird thing to train a mortal enemy, but hey. It is BELLA guys.

No one even wears a red shirt for the training.

So yeah. In other dramatic news. Edward keeps asking Bella to marry him. She keeps saying “make me a vampire first”. It is like Paradise by the Dashboard Lights all over again, but a role reversal. Bella is all fine living her whole life with him, but doesn’t want to “marry young” or else she will be a slut, or pregnant, or something. Her mom did it, and she doesn’t want too. Does that mean Bella is willing to risk turning into a vampire and leaving Edward? Maybe. There is after all…Jacob!

Who she also loves. But not as much. So the point is moot. Doesn’t stop a hot (and weird) tent scene, where Jacob has to warm her up because it is cold, and Edward cannot. Thankfully, the bros bond over the moment.

This is not an actual scene from the movie. But if it was, that’d be fucked up.

But Jacob is a dick and says he will still fight over Bella until she makes up her mind. Oh well. Even gets an awesome kiss out of it, making Edward mad. Bella is a bitch, really. Eventually, red headed chick finds Bella. But Jacob/Edward kills her and save Bella. (She turns to stone at death? And it was a lot easier death than the guy from the first movie. Hell, all the vampires were. WTF?).

But then the weird group from the other movie show up late to fix the problem. Didn’t even realize it was Dakota Fanning from New Moon. Oh well, as far as I can tell, they still have little point. They enforce rules I guess? Probably the final villains.

How could I miss that?? She even has the same red eyes.

So the movie ends where I thought we were at the end of the second. With the red headed chick dead, and Bella choosing Edward. But this time agreeing to marry him, then sex, then vampirism. Weird order, but alright. I would definitely choose vampire before sex. I wouldn’t say Sex with Edward would cause problems, but man, if he is dead / has no blood flow, how can he get it up? Also, it would probably fuck up your child somehow.

Thankfully this movie didn’t have long boring parts like the second. But instead of half of it feeling like it didn’t need to exist, it felt like most of it didn’t need to exist. I think the next movie will start right where I thought the second one ended.

But I will be disappointed, because now that high school is over, they have no real ways to fit Anna Kendrick into any more screen time.

Here is a movie that started out interesting, but got boring by the end. Relying on teen angst, bad special effects, and a “oh man sequels?” ending to attempt to bring it to the big time.

Shit, do I even need a review anymore after that?

Everything I just said is described in this picture.

I Am Number Four is about Aliens! When I first heard that, I assumed it was a spoiler. Turns out that is a very obvious and told right away fact of the movie. Main dude, played by Alex Pettyfer is the main character. Turns out when they were kids, their home planet was destroyed. Nine babies were taken to Earth. For some reason, they can only be killed in numerical order. So Four (the main guy) cannot die until One, Two, Three area dead. Cool for four. But what the fuck does that mean for one? Was he the “slaves child” or something? That is some bullshit for him.

Well it turns out the first three are dead! By the same evil aliens who took over their old planet. He also has a protector dude, played by Timothy Olyphant. Thanks to fucking up, he had to move again, this time to Ohio. He meets at school outsider/photographer Dianna Agron, and new friend Callan McAuliffe.

Blah blah. Eventually bad guys show up. Turns out they are supposed to protect Earth from them. Number Six (Teresa Palmer) shows up out of no where (And you know, isn’t afraid of dying). Blah blah blah. And yeah. End of movie. Looking for more survivors. He doesn’t end up boning Dianna Agron.

Which is a shame, because she is so Bumpable when she isn’t singing.

But as I said, it was way more interesting at the start of the movie. Then it just took some weird turns and made it less appealing, and then yeah. Ended. For shame, I Am Number Four. For Shame.

I think Drive Angry is the last Nick Cage movie in the last few years (outside of Bangkok Dangerous) that I have not yet reviewed. I have come to expect a certain amount of apathy from some of his movies, but not all of them. For every Knowing, there is a Kick-Ass. For every Season of the Witch there is a Sorcerer’s Apprentice. So who knows what the next movie will be like? He forces you to watch them all, damn it.

Cage: The human embodiment of an enigma.

This review probably has some spoilers, but I doubt those reading it will care. The movie stars Cage as a man who has escaped from Hell. His daughter was killed by cultists, and they took his granddaughter, a baby, to be sacrificed in three days in order to bring Hell on Earth. Satanists! Also an enigmatic group of people. So he, along with his Godslayer (a gun that can remove a soul from existence, stolen from Satan) are on a quest to catch up with the cultists and end them completely. Or at least just Billy Burke, the head guy.

He meets up with Amber Heard and borrows her car / helps her out quickly on the journey. There is also The Accountant, played by William Fichtner, a mysterious suited man following Cage and trying to bring him back to Hell.

This movie is a grindhouse-like movie. It is gritty, over the top action, bad effects, all on purpose. But what made the other “Grindhouse” movies entertaining was that besides all of that, the plot was decent and the action was awesome. This isn’t true for Drive Angry. It had all of the right parts, but the plot and action I found to be pretty boring. As you would guess, there is a lot of driving and chasing too, and even that seemed lackluster.

When you take the words “Hell”, “Driving”, and “Nick Cage” together, most people are going to expect Ghost Rider, another bad movie, and not this. This is accidentally too close to Ghost Rider (not in plot, just in keywords). That seems like another mistake on Cage’s part.

Wait, is that him with a badass gun in Ghost Rider too? What the hell?

It is obvious what kind of movie they were going for. They definitely succeeded in that. But Drive Angry just is not as entertaining as the other films of that genre. Probably the real reason Cage has been in a lot of movies since this one, to cover it up.

Roland Emmerich. You all know him. He brought us the new Godzilla, Day After Tomorrow, and 10,000 BC. Sure, he also brought us Independence Day, but some people don’t like that (I do!). But not really the others. All over CGI’d disaster films (like ID4. Shh) or just overly CGI’d mess, if not a disaster. So, as expected, 2012 is pretty much the exact same thing.

“Welcome to Earth!” – Will Smith, narrating the movie.

Plot of the movie is simple enough to grasp. 2012 in December is the end of the world. Why? Mayans “predicted” it. Or they just stopped caring at least. Oh shit though. Large solar flares fucking up the earth. I think melting the core (err) or something, causing crustal shifts and other problems. Oh man, the poles end up switching, land breaks apart, and so many earthquakes guys. This leads to Yellowstone blowing up (a supervolcano) and a lot of tsunami’s from the earthquakes.

There ya go.

Some people knew this may happen a long time ago. So they began making “Arcs” to hold the rich, the powerful, and the brilliant, to recreate the world once all this shit happens. John Cusack, who was camping with his son and daughter in Yellowstone, heard crazy old Woody Harrelson talking about it all, and started to believe him. Similarly, GEOPHYSICIST played by Chiwetel Ejiofor is trying to get DC to evacuate and stuff.

We also have Danny Glover as the president, who is getting two old for this evacuation shit, and his daughter, Thandie Newton. Who else? None other than Oliver Platt as vague political guy who wants to save himself. Amanda Peet plays Cusack’s ex wife and Thomas McCarthy as new husband, boob doctor.

That is probably enough.

So as expected, this movie is a mess. It is actually 2.5 hours long, so you will get your disaster on hard and you will get it on long. I am a big fan of a geophysicist not only being an important part of the movie, but also a strong moral leader for the other characters. Normally since geophysicist are usually seen as godless people anyways, its good that this one could be that and a good person.

What else was kick ass? Woody Harrelson as crazy conspiracy nut.

Neither left nor right wing, this guy isn’t even a bird.

So what was the bad parts? I could do a long article about how scientifically some stuff is stupid. But I won’t. But seriously? The supervolcano was actually UNDER exaggerated when it exploded. Which is crazy for any movie to do, but I guess they wanted to have a plot afterwards as well.

But a bigger complaint to have, that in terms of “Disasters” they used the same device three times to show panic and running away. Meaning, on three separate occasions, with the same group of people, there was a panic to hurry and have their plane take off with not much runway. Three. Times. In a row, actually. Every place they went, until the final “oh now its hard to land” scene. There wasn’t much creativity there at all. Very aggravating.

Effects were okay. Kind of got tired of them killing off people just for the sake of killing someone, instead of any good real disaster reason. (See: When they first get on the Arc).

Oh well.

Dreamworks is known as the CGI-animation company that is not Pixar. More or less, everything Pixar does is instantly praised, while everything Dreamworks does is hated on. Sure, Pixar has more good movies, but damn it, Dreamworks has some good ones too.

Like the first Shrek. And Kung Fu Panda. The first one got about fifty sequels, the latter so far only has Kung Fu Panda 2. And it is more epic than the first.

But Kung Fu Panda also lead to the worst rip off in recent years.

The plot of the movie is similar to the first. Someone is kicking a lot of ass and is evil, and needs to be stopped. This time, instead of training montages and noodle shops, Po (Jack Black) starts out as a kick ass warrior. The dragon warrior! Which we all know he became later in the first film. Now we get to ignore all of that, and go straight into lots of fight scenes.

One of the central plots is that Po realizes the goose is not his real dad! Shocking, I know.His parents were killed as a boy and he was orphaned. Killed by who? A peacock. Or at least an evil peacock (Gary Oldman). While they originally thought his threat was dealt with, he has been hiding away, building an army of wolves and gorillas, and making a weapon that renders kung fu and other fighting types useless. (Its based on fireworks, aka pretty).

Speaking of pretty, the CGI in this movie is fantastic on Blu-Ray. Everything was wowable, and noticeably better than the effects in the first movie. In addition to the normal CGI, during flashbacks to Pos youth, they used a more traditional style of Asian cartoon work, and it was pretty damn nifty. I’d have liked it if the beginning had a story similar to the one Po made up in the first to open the film. Had some of the better lines.

The same gang from the first film is also back, Crane (David Cross), Mantis (Seth Rogen), Viper (Lucy Liu), Monkey (Jackie Chan) and Tigress (Angelina Jolie). I still don’t like Tigress though.

The end of the movie also does what a lot of movies try to do and fail. Give us both a full story, and set up a possible sequel. I have reviewed numerous movies that have focused more on setting up a sequel than giving a satisfactory ending. But this one does a nice job and I want there to be a Kung Fu Panda 3.

Oh don’t look so shocked Po. I will let you wait at least three years first.

Overall? The fight scenes are pretty great and creative. I am sure Chan had a lot of influence on how they were developed, since he has a knack for that sort of thing. They were also comedic enough to laugh without taking away the seriousness of the fights/plot. Everything was weaved together well, plot, action, backstory, effects. Just the “inner peace” plotline seemed forced. Or Po is just that awesome. Not sure.

Fright Night! Rawr vampires! This is of course a remake of a movie with the same name. I don’t know anything about the older movie though. Besides it also had a “comedic” element to the horror trope and was self aware of that fact. I am sure it is a fine movie, and I have probably seen a few parts of it before on TV. So I think I would rather just assume that this new version and the original are only similar, and not actually alike.

After all, this movie had to come up with a reason why cell phones do not work.

“WHAT DID I TELL YOU ABOUT ROAMING FEES?!?

The movie begins with a death! After that, yay school. Anton Yelchin is the main character, who used to be a big nerd but now is trying to be all “Cool” and shit. His old friend, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, thinks that their third friend not showing up to school is a bad sign. He thinks a vampire got him! But Yelchin is too cool for vampires. He doesn’t listen to him. You know. Until Chris also disappears.

So he starts to get all paranoid. Could his neighbor Colin Farrell actually be a vampire? (Yes). I know I know, its crazy. He is way too charming to be a vampire.

Unfortunately, of course, no one believes him either. Not even Peter Vincent (played by everyone’s favorite new doctor, David Tennant), the bad ass vampire hunter on TV and in Vegas shows.

It isn’t until Colin openly attacks his home, with his mother, Toni Collette, and girlfriend, Imogen Poots (can we all laugh at her name for a second?), inside does he finally get any help.

Now, I am not one for normally watching “Scary” movies. But the new releases this week were not plentiful, so I gave it a chance. This movie is definitely not scary, but more kind of bad ass. It was very very entertaining. No one is going to win any best actor/actress awards from it, but you will definitely have a good time.

Here is a scene of people not having a good time.

Honestly, all the vampire tropes you want will be in this movie. They didn’t invite a new vampire or anything silly. I was surprised at how much was actually packed in the movie. Halfway through, I thought the film was climaxing, but it got more and more intense instead. Which definitely was a good feeling.

I don’t think you will leave feeling screwed at the ending either. The worst part of some movies is the buildup of how powerful the bad guy is, but in the final fight something easy takes him down due to cockiness or love or something. But in this movie, the vampire proves he is a badass, and the final fight is actually worth it.

Probably would have been better if I watched this at night, instead of noon time though.

Champions. Or a film hard to find on IMDB because a lot of movies are called that. This one being a hidden one too, because no one really cares I guess.

It is also super hard to find pictures of the movie for, given that title. So here is something completely “unrelated”.

This movie is inspired by true events, but you know, only inspired. It is the 1930s or 1920s, and China is going to participate in their first Olympic games! Woo! Only like, running, and some karate show, and that is about it. The main character is played by Dicky Cheung (heh), and he is a master at some form of martial arts, and also just a charismatic guy. He wears hats for goodness sake!

This movie is pretty much like an older martial arts movie. Kind of cheesy, and lots of experts. It is just set to a different story. Dicky is in love with the best runner China has, but she won’t marry him. They have to do things like raise money to even make it there (damn cheap government). Not only that, but of COURSE a martial arts tournament takes place to see which group of people should go!

Oh yeah. And one of the gyms is “evil” and wants to fight too much. Also there was a plot about a stolen baby, that came WAY out of no where, and took forever to finish. It was super pointless.

The fighting was decent, but no one really changed or did as good as Dicky Cheung. Good at fighting, was pretty funny, and when necessary, sweet and dramatic.

This film came out in China in 2008 and is clearly just mostly propaganda. Just took a long time for it to come out to the USA on dvd (three years later).

“At this rate, we won’t make the Olympics until 2008!” – Real line, not real scene.

So yeah, unless you really like martial arts, you probably wont find anything exciting about the movie.

1 out of 4.

Oooh a kind of foreign film. Watching it now, you can tell that the director probably wanted this whole movie to be in French. Probably made one of the main characters speak English, just to get more viewers. I say don’t half ass it. Go full french, or full american. That way my senses don’t get boggled.

Boggled like Texas champion Peggy Hill.

Sarah’s Key is a story about nazis! Didn’t see that one coming.

First there is a journalist in modern day Paris, Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas), who just got a new apartment that has been in her family for decades. Not knowing much about it, she learns that it actually was taken away from a Jewish family in 1942 during the “Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup”. What is that? That is when 10,000 Jewish people around Paris were arrested and brought into a theater house. They were taken away in busses eventually, and separated to camps. Apparently the theater setting was about “10,000 times worse” than the Katrina Superdome incident.

So the story tells of the journalist trying to find out about the family who used to live there. She wants to return it to them, it just feels right. So outside of that story, we get to see the story of the family right before they are evicted and the many years after, intertwined through the story. That is where Sarah comes in! Played by Melusine Mayance. When the police arrive she hides her brother in a secret compartment and locks the key, thinking it is just another random visit that will be quick. She tells him to wait for them to come back. Once the family realizes that they won’t be returning anytime soon, they go into freak out mode. The story is mostly about Sarah and her desire to get away, and return to the home to try and find her brother.

That story, the one in the 40s. That is pretty interesting. The modern parts? Not as much.

Unfortunately the climax of the 40s story line happens around halfway through the movie, leaving the viewer with a lore more modern stuff. Sure it mostly ties up the story lines, but who really cares about those other story lines? So while the overall story is interesting, the excessive modern parts are ho-humable, dragging the movie down a peg.

I forced a King of the Hill reference earlier. Here is an actual helpful photo!