Tag: Michael Pena

Cesar Chavez is one of those indie movies that kind of just never came out near where I lived, so I never really got a chance to watch it. It came out on DVD a few weeks ago (or if I delay this review by a few weeks, a month or more ago!) so at that point it just came down to finding a time to throw it up on my website. Only doing five reviews a week has its perks and its disadvantages. It is good that all of my free time isn’t looking for movies or writing reviews, yes. But those two reviews a week less than I am used to means a lot of indie or weird movies that my website is none for is pushed to the side if a week has a lot of big titles coming out.

Oh well. Cesar Chavez. A biographical movie with some subtitles and a comedic actor playing a serious role. My body is ready.

And I am sure they will do everything in their power to make sure they don’t make him look like Hitler.

Cesar Chavez (Michael Pena) is already a polarizing figure in the US. A farm worker in California, during the 1950s to the 1970s he became political, organizing the farm workers of California into labor groups to fight for better rates and conditions.

At this point, most of the farm workers were braceros, temporary workers from Mexico permitted to live in the US to work on these farms. Should they ever stop, they’d be forced back to Mexico. But the conditions were terrible and wages low, so it felt like a form of slavery.

With the help of others, Cesar organized boycotts, marches, and created a labor union, while also encouraging Mexican Americans to register and vote on elections to help swing results towards their side.

And uh, you know, I guess that is all the movie is really about? America Ferrera plays Mrs. Chavez, and Rosario Dawson and Yancey Arias are also on their side. In terms of white people to get in the way / help, we have John Malkovich, Michael Cudlitz, Wes Bentley, and Gabriel Mann.

You can tell he is an activist based on the number of scarves he is wearing.

After watching this pseudo-biopic, I don’t think I have a lot to say about Cesar or the film itself. From what I remember, he went in a hunger strike that lasted a long time, did some marching, and did a nice boycott.

And well, that was it? The movie was kind of short for bio standards, only dealt with a few events and didn’t seem to show many sides to the character. I am sure Cesar was a complicated individual, since everyone is complicated. I just didn’t get any sense of that.

Besides the potential bias issue, I found the movie kind of…boring. I could never really get into it, despite any parallels that may exist in our own time. It lacked an entertainment quality that I would hope to see in a film about an activist. There were a few tense moments only in dealings with anti-protesters.

On top of that? Acting was only okay. Nothing great. One cool scene sticks out from America Ferrera, and the rest is forgettable.

1 out of 4.

Turbo is the latest example of a kids movie following a very standard formula. Let’s take some sort of entity and either a) give them an impossible dream (and reach it!), or b) give them some ridiculous flaw (and overcome it!). Like a bird who doesn’t know how to fly. Or a plane that is afraid of heights (and wants to race). Or an overweight comedian who wants to box. Or a snail who wants to race in the Indy 500. Oh wait, that one is Turbo!

Fuck. Let’s get this over with. Turbo (Ryan Reynolds) is a snail! He has big dreams. He wants to go fast, and is the fastest snail he knows. In fact, he just did the yard in 17 minutes, a new personal record. He dreams of entering the Indy 500, thanks to words of advice from his hero Guy Gagne (Bill Hader), who claims that no dream is too big. His brother Chet (Paul Giamatti) thinks his dream is stupid, rightfully so.

Well, eventually Turbo falls into a car engine and gets coated with NOS, transforming his DNA and giving him incredible speed! This also somehow turns him partially into a car, with headlights, radio, rear review lights and stuff. Not sure how that second part happened. Even more eventually, Chet and Turbo find themself caught by Tito (Michael Pena), a down on his luck Taco maker. He works for his older brother (Luis Guzman) and their business is not doing well. Why did Turbo decide to not run away as soon as they were captured? No idea. But he could have.

Luckily, Tito is all into snail racing. Turns out Turbo is stupid fast and he wants to use Turbo to get more business. A very noble cause. So they set off to enter him into the Indy 500, for exposure. Nowadays kids would just make a YouTube video and become famous that way.

Oh yeah, Turbo has his own snail crew to back him up now. There is Whiplash (Samuel L. Jackson), Smoove Move (Snoop Dogg), Burn (Maya Rudolph), Skidmark (Ben Schwartz), and White Shadow (Mike Bell). Of course Ken Jeong voices a tiny Asian nail technician.

This movie is about to get fucked. Seriously. No mercy. Cover your eyes if you don’t like violent imagery.Let’s start with some factual errors. Why? Because they matter to me. I am a Masters Geophysics Student, and the sloppiness bugged me. Basically I am going to be super critical.

Turbo made a big deal about getting a yard in 17 minutes. I know it was a yard, because they showed the measuring stick briefly. However, 36 inches in 17 minutes is really slow. Like, really really slow. That is why I went over to WolframAlpha to convert it. Seriously check the link.

WolframAlpha is so amazing it compared the velocity calculated to the the velocity of a garden snail automatically and it is about 33% the speed of the actual garden snail. Great, we have a snail that is statistically slower than most garden snails. Let’s say that factual error can be ignored, fine. Unfortunately, almost every other point in the movie (pre-genetic manipulation), Turbo and other snails are still shown with greater velocities than his trial. Unless it was important to the plot that is (see: the tomato/lawn mower scene).

Come on now, consistency.

[Editor’s note: Apparently IRL and F1 are different things, but similar vehicles. I just know them as “Not NASCAR”. Point still stands, basically.]
The ending bugged me a lot as well. As it is a car race, it involved a pile up of cars real close to the finish. At this point, Turbo and Guy go into a “foot race” type of situation for the finish like, similar to Talladega Nights.  But according to official Formula 1 racing rules (here and here specifically), none of it would count and the whole thing feels pointless.

Let’s get to the most important part of the movie. This plot is inherently stupid and bad. I didn’t read the full rules for the Formula 1 racing, so I can’t confirm if there is no rule that would disallow a snail. However, the concept behind it can only be described as cheating and a snail would never be allowed to race in such an event. They have very specific standards for the size of the vehicles, type of protection they need, everything you can possibly imagine. The snail’s dimensions do not match a car’s dimensions. For an extreme example, it’d be like using a Ferrari. Or like doping.

At one point during the race, the announcer screams that he can’t believe Turbo is passing a car from below. I am fine with his reaction, because Turbo is basically cheating. But the announcer is surprised instead that he could fit, even though Formula 1 cars have about 4.5 inches of room underneath them, while a garden snail is at most 1.5 inches tall.

If you hadn’t figured out by now, Guy is the villain of this movie, but only because he wants to win the race too. Just like the other 30ish humans in the race, all doing it without cheating.

I laughed I think a total of two times. The laziness of the plot, the laziness of the details, and the laziness of the character development ruined this movie for me. To quote Eleanor Roosevelt. “America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, bad-ass speed.” Turbo would not have lived up to the former First Lady’s opinions on America or Racing.

 

1 out of 4.

Not going to lie. When I first saw the trailer for Gangster Squad, I thought it might be interesting. But I was worried based on the dialogue given it might all be cheesy. But I do love vigilantism. Especially real vigilantism. But above all of that, the thing I liked most was just the music featured in it. Made me all sorts of pumped up. But I learned long ago that if I hear a song in a movie trailer, it most definitely won’t be in the movie.

Bitches, yo.

It is amazing that he picked such a diverse group of guys too. I had my money on all white all middle aged!

In the late 1940s, the city of Los Angeles is under siege. Not by the Russians or Germans. Nope, by Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn). From New York, he is now the most powerful criminal in LA, having bought cops, judges, you name it. No one can touch him, not even the mobsters in Chicago. Not everyone is corrupt though. Once Chief Parker (Nick Nolte) sees that Sgt. John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) has brought down an illegal brothel by himself, he enlists him on a secret mission.

There is no way to get Mickey Cohen legally. Killing him wont do anything, someone will just take his place. No, he needs to leave his badge at home, recruit a team (or squad, if you will), take down his entire infrastructure, and sure, maybe kill a bunch of gangsters.

Fuck the law, do what is right!

Well, he gets a team of mostly cops, people who aren’t as worth being bought off who all have special skills. Conway (Giovanni Ribisi), an intelligence expert, Coleman (Anothony Mackie), who grew up on the streets and is one of the few who cares to fix them, Max (Robert Patrick), a fabled cop who has quick hands and can hit anything, and Navidad (Michael Pena), his Mexican partner who is willing to do anything.

Oh, and of course another detective Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling) who has a personal vendetta against Cohen, and not just because he is sexing up his current fling (Emma Stone).

Cohen is going to get those coppers, so hard they don’t even know it yet.

Whew. Well, if you watch the trailer, you are going to get exactly as it shows. The lines are unfortunately mostly cheesy. The “No Ma’am, I was just hopin’ to take you to bed.” Imagine a whole film of that.

I think the movie is a bit of a shame. A lot of great actors involved, but it felt a lot like a no emotion cartoon. I didn’t feel sad when they wanted me to, nothing really resonated. The chemistry is really what was missing here. Between everyone, but especially between Stone and Gosling, who had an unbelievable romance going on. We know they can do that too, since they were together in Crazy, Stupid, Love. So I guess it is a director issue?

Another reason it felt cartoony to me was the filter they used to film it. I don’t know what it was, but look at the second picture. It has a yellow/orange tint almost, but something about it just really turned me off from the whole movie.

The fact that this is based off of a true story seems like a farce as well. It might actually be that Mickey Cohen existed only, in which case, fuck your true story tag lines.

Action was okay, acting was mostly forgettable, except a few Sean Penn moments. It was weird seeing Giovanni Ribisi as a good guy finally, so I am glad he can not be type casted (so much) anymore.

1 out of 4.

End of Watch (I hate that there is no ‘the’ there) is another of those movies that I felt bombarded by trailers for. Unfortunately they only made a single trailer for this movie, so I saw the same two minutes over and over again. But from that trailer, I was definitely curious about this movie. Filming style was different, might have been a buddy cop movie, but at the time with very serious overtones. I do love genre bending movies!

Oh man, look how happy they are! If only they knew…

Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Peña) are partners working the hard streets of South Central LA. They are great at their job, if not a bit reckless. Brian is slowly taking classes, working on a Pre-law degree, with high aspirations. Mike is happily married (Natalie Martinez) with a child on the way.  The beginning of the film opens with a chase scene and subsequent shootout, causing the two to be suspended for a month while they make sure it was a legitimate shooting.

But no worries! They make sure they follow the book, mostly. Brian is also taking an ‘art’ class, where he has to make a movie so he decides to document his life. Why not? Cops are exciting! So he has his normal hand held camera, and some ‘spy cameras’ on their shirts, along with other footage from police scanners to make up the majority of the film.

They are like most stereotypical cop units, there is a hardass equal who always gives them crap (David Harbour), a lieutenant who only cares about results (Frank Grillo), and some other friendly cops who actually appreciate what they do (America Ferrera, Cody Horn). Heck, even Brian has started to see someone, a smart girl who is more than just a booty call (Anna Kendrick).

But when the two start an investigation on a Hispanic gang shooting, they soon find themselves deeper and deeper in the dealings with the drug cartel, who have expanded their operations out of Mexico.  Discovering mass murders, cocaine, golden guns, cash, and human trafficking have put them as the number 1 priority for the cartel to deal with. What they just assumed was a normal shift will turn into a fight for survival to just make it to the end of (the) watch.

Yes, the same Cody Horn who helped ruin Magic Mike is a cop in this. Same disgruntled face.

I know my description of the plot made it seem like a pretty serious action movie, but surprisingly I would instead describe it as a “Comedy Drama Action Thriller” film. It is seriously all of the above. I laughed, quite often, I cried once, there was the obvious action, and I felt scared more than once.

The film isn’t a typical ‘found footage’ film. I believe the director originally wanted the whole thing to be in police camera / hidden camera footage, but there is plenty of actual camera work thrown in as well. So that means we have a movie that fits multiple genres, and doesn’t even keep its camera use constant, but yet it works really really well.

Frankly I thought the movie would be stupid, but I ended up loving every minute of it. Gyllenhaal and Peña had excellent chemistry together, and it shows that they spent months shadowing LA cops and hanging out for inspiration.  My only suggestion for watching this movie is to be prepared to have scenes change suddenly. It may go from hilarious banter to scary cop moments in an instant. This form of ‘genre shock’ is pretty rare, and now something I hope to see more often in movies after this. End of Watch is a definite must see.

4 out of 4.

From the start I think Tower Heist got a lot of bad publicity. Why initially? Because it planned on releasing itself for download only a month after going to theaters, before coming out on DVDs. Apparently a lot of theaters were mad about that, and were refusing to show it. So of course it backed down.

But then after that, people are generally “Ben Stiller? Gross, next.”

That is the face Ben Stiller makes every time someone walks away and calls him gross.

I think the trailer did a bad job of explaining the overall plot. So here we go. The Tower is actually some large sky scrapper building in NYC, that is basically just apartments. Large staff, super secure, and they don’t accept tips.

Ben Stiller is the overall manager, runs the day to day, keeps his staff in tip top shape and helps all of the top clients. Casey Affleck is his second in command. Matthew Broderick is a formerly rich guy getting evicted and divorced, Michael Pena plays an elevator operator, and Gabourey Sidibe is a Jamaican maid.

And they all get fucked over. The penthouse belongs to rich wall street investor Alan Alda. And he has just been arrested for stealing investments, and getting people trapped in Ponzi schemes. And he also handled everyone who works in the Tower’s pensions!

Stiller gets mad. And he takes it out on Alda’s apartment (as he is now stuck there for temporary house arrest), getting himself and other fired. He then takes the drunk advice of a special agent on the case, Tea Leoni, and decides that the old school method of pitchforks and mobs to storm the castle were appropriate. But instead of storming, they should rob him.

The amount of money he should own versus what they found didn’t match up, so it is likely that Alda is hiding a batch in his apartment, in a safe in a secret wall. Can his team get the maybe 20 million dollars in the safe, escape without jail time, and divide it up amongst the workers to get their money back? Not without a criminal. Thankfully Stiller “knows” a guy, Eddie Murphy, who steals shit!

Potted plants, cash, and scenes, mostly.

Seriously. Eddie Murphy is hilarious in this movie. This is best classified as an action/comedy, despite the action not being that much, and the comedy not being…that much. Oddly enough. There was only a few times I really had a good laugh, some of Eddie Murphy’s scenes, the thing about lesbians, and a few others. But I could just classify it as a “movie” and maybe that genre is specific enough.

But I really enjoyed it as a whole. When I saw the preview, I assumed it wasn’t an apartment, but just some big corporation in NYC. I assumed they were people who had lost their jobs due to budget cuts, and I assumed Stiller used to be a big fat cat, but got screwed over. But they really do a good job of making you feel for and root for them. There are many other workers at the building who aren’t part of the thievery, but they show enough of why their lives were affected by it.

Some jokes and situations, sure predictable. But not all of them, nor the ending really. I was surprised that I liked it that much.

3 out of 4.