Tag: Mireille Enos

Oh hey look, a young adult book about death getting turned into a movie!

When I first saw the trailer to If I Stay, I had two thoughts.

1) The song choice, ugh.

2) Holy shit, did I just watch the entire movie?

That is how I feel after seeing only two minutes. Because in the trailer I got a beginning and a middle and a whole lot of other stuff. The only thing I don’t have is the very end. That is a lot of movie it seems to have spoiled. Unless the event we see takes place like, 20 minutes into the movie, I think I got the entire gist of it already. Fuck you, trailer makers.

Hell, I can even draw a bunch of similarities to the Carrie remake.

Mia’s (Chloe Grace Moretz) life is about to get turned on its head. You know. Because of a car crash. Icy roads can be deadly, especially when two cars crash into each other on them.

Mia finds herself outside of her body, watching the ambulance crew work, a car on fire, people running around. Shit. Is she dead? Is she dying? What in the flying fuck is going on?

Well, since we are here, might as well flash back to the last few years of her life. Finding out how her parents (Mireille Enos, Joshua Leonard) changed since she was a young girl. How they became responsible adults when her younger brother Teddy (Jakob Davies) was born.

And of course, her first and only real love. The sweet rocker Adam (Jamie Blackley), who played the guitar and sang in a band, while Mia is a solo cellist! He likes the punk scene, she likes books and not the punk scene! He likes being alive and she is, well, you know.

With her family all banged up, her relationship in maybe turmoil, and her future uncertain, does she even have a reason to fight back out of the coma?

Also Liana Liberato as her best friend and Stacy Keach and Gabrielle Rose as her grandparents.

Finally. Finalllyyyyy. This is the moment I live for. Seeing a movie that, for all intents and purposes, looks terrible to me from the trailers. And then it being great.

Okay, more than that I love finding a random movie no one has heard of that ends up being amazing. But this is the second main reason I watch all the movies. I never know what might actually be good or bad and finding the good is wonderful.

I thought If I Stay was surprisingly spectacular. Not like, best movie ever spectacular, but really emotional at least. It jerks. It tear jerks hard.

The parents may be the cutest/funniest parents of a high school movie since Easy A. Chloe did really great as the lead role. Jamie Blackley, as the boyfriend, was also surprisingly great. He is one of the main concerns I had after seeing the trailer. But he pulled it off and didn’t look 30 the whole movie.

The movie is told mostly through flashbacks, which explains how the entirety wasn’t spoiled by trailers. After all, most of the trailer events would have had to happen before crash. And they do! Just not before the crash in the film. Still, it does show case a lot more of the cuter moments I would have liked to experience. The ending might surprise some people, but I loved how it ended, giving us everything we needed to know.

If I Stay is the kind of movie I would gladly buy in the future and suggest it for a nice romance cry night in the future. I heard there was a sequel book and when I heard the plot it pissed me off. Do not do a sequel to this movie. It would be shit. Please. Please listen movie makers. Don’t do it.

Yay! Finally, we are getting a movie version of the Beastie Boy’s song Sabotage. I am also immediately killing that joke before it gets too stupid. I don’t even like that song. Too hard for me, I guess.

The actual movie Sabotage is the next attempt for Arnold Schwarzenegger to get back into action. I think I saw the trailer once before a month or two ago, so going into it, I really didn’t remember at all what I was about to watch. That was a good feeling. I did learn right before that the director also directed and wrote End Of Watch, which I loved so I did get all sorts of excited. A great underrated movie from two years ago.

Aw shit. Here is them with presumably the bad guy. I guess they all win, spoilers!

The story is about a special operations DEA team who are really good at getting the job done. They are lead by Breacher (Schwarzenegger) and they all get snazzy nicknames too, because they are cool. They also have Tripod (Kevin Vance), Monster (Sam Worthington), Grinder (Joe Manganiello), Neck (Josh Holloway), Sugar (Terrence Howard), Pyro (Max Martini) and Lizzie (Mireille Enos). She doesn’t get a nickname presumably because she is a woman.

Oh, they might be a little bit dirty too. Not The Shield levels of dirty, but a little bit dirty. The story begins with them taking down a huge drug lord, but also stealing a measly ten million from the pile and stashing it to split amongst the team later. Well, someone dies during their operation, and later the money is gone as well, so it the drug bust was a bust. Especially when they all go under the microscope, with the ten million reported missing.

Well, eventually they all survive and since no one trusts Breacher in the department that much, they just let him have his team back for special missions. Then, one of their own dies.

Shit. Then another. Turns out someone is trying to take them out. But why? They have tons of enemies, it could be anyone. But local cop people (Olivia Williams, Harold Perrineau) are on the case, so I am sure they will stop the bad guys.

Many guns. Both the actual weapons and these gentleman arms.

Pew pew pew! Action and death. This film really earns that R rating with the amount of graphic violence (extreme deaths), language, and nudity in it. Some of it was indeed really gross too.

On the same note, the story itself was interesting. Yeah, I said it. I liked the plot of this movie. It wasn’t a simple story, it had some layers, and characters had motivations. At the same time, some characters had absolutely no motivations and even by the end, I am not sure why they did what they did.

In fact, the climactic ending complete with a chase scene and finding out who the bad guys are was very disappointing. It doesn’t match the tone of the rest of the movie. It was drawn out and suddenly no one knew how to aim, despite being tactical and military elites.

So that is that. It has some cool stuff. But the ending is pretty lame. There ya go.

It is a strange time for zombie movies, with the last few serious ones never really living up to the “George A. Romero” Standards. Who decides these standards? Well, fans of the old stuff, who hate everything new, basically. Thankfully with films like Warm Bodies, zombies that break the mold are becoming a bit more accepted by movie watchers.

However, the fact that World War Z (Trailer) has really fast moving zombies doesn’t seem to be the major concern with most viewers. It is the fact that the movie is almost nothing like the book (According to book author Max Brooks) that the name comes from.. I never tend to care about source material with reviews. If a movie is good on its own merits, it should be judged on its own merits. But even I can admit that making it nothing like the material and only borrowing the name is just a bit scummy.

I tried to tell Brad Pitt that I was disappointed in that fact, but with a face like his, how could I stay mad?

Let’s not even get into the luscious hair that he sports for this film.

The movie begins with a series of news reports letting the viewer note the currents state of the world. After that, we are introduced to the main family in this story. Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) is now a stay at home dad, with two young daughters and a loving wife Karin (Mireille Enos).

About seven minutes into the film, they stop with all the boring drama nonsense, and get straight into crazy zombie madness! All around the world, zombie outbreaks are occurring, with many major cities falling. The Lanes are in Pennsylvania and find themselves on the run with the world crumbling beneath them.

However, it turns out Gerry used to be a pretty big deal in the United Nations, a smart guy, very tactical, and good at the surviving in extremely volatile locations. His former boss John Garang (Fana Mokoena) is able to lift him out of Newark, New Jersey, giving his family a space on the fleet in the Atlantic. Far away from any mean old zombies. Unfortunately, this lift to freedom doesn’t come without a price. Gerry has to go with a small team of seal soldiers and a scientist to help figure out the cause of the outbreak, or you know, the end of the world.

Let’s also not forget that Matthew Fox is in this movie as the important role of “Paratrooper.” Arguably a big name actor, he has less than a minute of real screen time I’d estimate. Danielle Kertesz plays a female Israeli soldier!

They would make great mindless cheerleaders. Dat pyramid.

Did I mention I loved that the action in the movie started so dang early? I thought I was going to be left with a lot of family drama, worrying about protecting the kids, but within the first half hour they are dropped off on the aircraft carrier and only a minor nuisance after that. When watching this movie, you are not going to care about his family, or any other character. Really the only important person in this movie is Brad Pitt. His youngest daughter is particularly distracting early on, mostly because she is a nine or ten year old girl acting like a four year old.

Another potential issue is that this film is only PG-13. The lack of blood and decapitated bodies seems to be a problem for the die-hard zombie fans, but it was a problem I could ignore. My biggest issue is with the sometimes sub par CGI. The mass hoards of zombies would often appear more blurry, which just ruins otherwise fantastic action scenes.

Despite the narrative flaws and less than stellar effects, the movie kept me interested throughout its almost two hour run time. I jumped out of seat on multiple occasions, often surprised how much fear was in the movie. Yes, it is zombie based, but the trailers made it seem like it would be action/adventure oriented. Brad Pitt survives some ludicrous situations, almost making me laugh at how ridiculous it all is. But he is a big movie star, I know he is going to survive inconsequential things like airplane crashes and stab wounds.

As a zombie movie, it is actually pretty tame, but I think it adds something unique to the genre.