Tag: 3 out of 4

This is one of the movies that when compared with the other three X-Men movies and Wolverine movie, it just doesn’t make much sense. It is called First Class because it is a prequel, and showing how the x-men came to be (in movie form). How can blah blah happen when in blah, blah happened? I did that a lot of times while watching. (Normally I’d complain about not being like the comics at all, but they are a different source, so they are allowed to be. But comparing the related movies all made by Fox seems like it should be plausible, right?). Example being Beast. Beast turns Blue in XM:FC, and is Blue in X3, yet in his cameo in X2, is not blue.

No! Because this isn’t actually related. It is more of a reboot. (So any attempts to complain about continuity can now be ignored :/).

I used to LOVE ReBoot!

After the disastrous X-Men: The Last Stand, Fox stated they were going to take the series in new directions, with some origin stories. At the time they said they would do a Wolverine Origin (which I thought was bad. Seriously. X2 already noted his origin, why do they need another? And then they made a whole movie that doesn’t make sense) and a Magneto Stand Alone film. This was changed to a Magneto Origin. Then canned. I was sad! Magneto is way awesome and deserves a movie. I didn’t like First Class when I first heard of it, but thankfully it is also kind of a Xavier and Magneto Origin story. Also, in terms of Reboots, this is nicely done.

It has a wider range of mutants than I am used to (not just Storm/Cyclops/Jean Grey. Finally. Branch out guys). I’ve always liked Emma Frost (As anyone who likes females should) played by January Jones of Mad Men. Xavier is played by James McAvoy, the lead of The Conspirator. Magneto is played by Michael Fassbender, who was in Inglourious Basterds.

Kinda messed up the black mutants gotta be the one who dies first. But the tension between Magneto / Xavier was pretty well played throughout the movie. The ending may have felt a little forced (and “Angels” reason for being bad) but overall it was enjoyable. I also have to ignore that Havok is actually Cyclops’ younger brother in the comics, as in this movie he would be much older and apparently not related. Maybe he was a creepy uncle?

Also it was nice to see Sebastian Shaw not dressed up like some creepy Victorian gentleman, but instead dressed up like Kevin Bacon.

Maybe the Hellfire Club forces its members to dress this way in the comics/cartoons? But then again, Sebastian Shaw is their leader.

3 out of 4.

When I first saw this movie, something crazy happened. It has zero ratings on Rotten Tomatoes (a site I never check, by the way. Who cares about other people’s opinions on movies? (Outside of you lovely people.)). IMDB was very similar. So as far as I could see, my first review of this movie may have been one of the…first reviews of this movie. It also lets me realize that most likely no one has heard of it!

This must be what Buzz Lightyear and Lance Armstrong felt when they first landed on the moon.

This movie is about an underprivileged college student, Kevin Zegers (of AIR BUD fame. Bit more sinister in this movie) who teams up with two anarchists to kidnap the kids of three rich people (aka The Entitled). One kid each! Oh very exciting, I know. The three kids were on the way to meet their dads in a cabin for the weekend, before the kidnapping takes place. So throughout the movie it switches between the different groups, and we learn that not everything is as great as it appears to be. Two of the dads are also Ray Liotta and Victor Garber.

I will admit the beginning of the movie was kind of slow. It had a bunch of set up that didn’t make as much sense until the end. Kind of felt patchy and confusing. But about 30 minutes in, shit. got. real.

From then on I could only describe myself as being at the edge of my seat. I didn’t know what would happen, and couldn’t guess anything right. It was well paced at that point and had a lot of great conflict between the characters. And yes some people. Great movie.

You may remember this as the movie that won Best Foreign Language film, of which finally came out last week on the DVDs and the Blurays. It is in Swedish/Danish/American, with the English parts actually taking place in a Sudan refugee camp. Go figure. This movie deals with a lot of troubling issues, on both parents, and on their kids.

Okay, so far it pretty much sounds like every American drama. Kids and parents having troubling issues? Oh, please DO go on.

For the main two kids, one has just lost his mother to cancer and moved to Denmark with his dad from London, and the other is a Swedish born family in Denmark whose parents are separated. In case you couldn’t tell, this takes place in Denmark. Thankfully, London kid befriends the Ratface kid, and stands up for him, but he ends up being a bad influence too.

Bullies, Sudan warlords, divorce, cancer, bombs, suicide, near death experiences, and conflicts are all hugely part of this movie. Some of those are pretty different than normal American dramas.

I guess morally it questions what is the right thing to do. Is it good to do bad things to bad people? Great movie though. But you knew that, it won things after all. The Swedish dad who was also a doctor in the movie is going to be in the Hobbit movies too, if you wanted to see how he was at acting. Damn it, just saying Hobbit “movies” sounds wrong.

There Can Be Only One!

3 out of 4.

I first thought this movie would be some lame Indie movie that was just trying to be like real life and bore me. But actually it got pretty interesting after the first ~15 minutes. Paul G is a volunteer wrestling coach at a high school, and lawyer. He also becomes the official guardian of an old dude and puts him in a home…as his grandson he never knew about comes to down to escape from his pseudo messed up mom (Played by Beth from Detroit Rock City. Whoaaa).

I am pretty sure that is the original draft of The Simpsons as well.

Anyways, the kid joins the wrestling team, does good, and continues to have family issues. Was a very real story, but super interesting. Movie has some comedic elements, but the kid actor really did fantastic in his role. I IMDB’d him and he has only done this role. Never acted before this. Used to be a great wrestler himself but had some spine injury or something. Alex Shaffer would be a very interesting person to watch to see if he continues to act, because he was very believable.

The ending had everything just fit into place, almost forced, but overall just a very enjoyable film. Of course before then everyone gets mad at each other, the kid doesn’t do as good at wrestling, and almost leaves his small town. But thankfully not only does he find a new family to live with, he also finds something he can excel at, and enrich the lives of others. You could even call it a Win Win situation.

“I see what you did there.”

Also, the wife is played by Michael Scott’s lover in The Office.

Alright, this is an indie movie that I probably never would have noticed until a friend of mine saw it and liked it. She said I probably wouldn’t enjoy it.

Shows what she knows. I mean, once I saw that it starred Kat Dennings, I had to see it, no matter how weird indie, chick flicky, it may turn out to be.

What big “eyes” you have.

Another way to describe this movie is as one where Kat Dennings has sex. A lot. Like. Constantly.

Kat is a high school girl, and new to the area. So what does she do? She tries to seduce the teacher and get high a bunch. The teacher is played by Josh Lucas, who was also recently in The Lincoln Lawyer. While getting high she also gets somewhat involved with a random junkie. That random junkie of course being played by Reece Thompson. Oh what a crazy adolescenes she lives!

The movie has a lot of smart dialogue, and interesting plot. It is also filled with a lot of flashbacks and, you guessed it, daydream fantasies. I am mad that all Kat Dennings is doing now is some stupid show. It has a laugh track, which lessens the overall amount of awesome it could achieve.

When I daydream, I generally don’t think of movie plots, but of how big Kat Dennings’s…eyes are.

3 out of 4.

Whew! Thats a long title. So from now on, it will be PJOTLT. Just rolls right off the tongue. This movie is I guess based off of some book series as well. Not to mention greek mythology (no way!). When I saw this preview a year and a half ago, I thought it was a joke. What is this crap? Well, after viewing it….I liked it. It was a very interesting movie.

A friend of mine says compared to the source is no where close. Oh well, fuck the source material. I only care if it is super wrong, and I was just told it left parts out. Movies aren’t books.

Picture taken just after some people read the previous lines.

A lot happens in the movie, and its very close to two hours in length. The visuals are pretty, and there is a lot of action. Are there things I’d like to change? Heck yeah. Afterall, I am a damn ancient history major as well as a geologist. I know me some greek mythos (as it is real history).

I don’t like how they like to show the Underworld/Hades as Hell/Satan. That bugged me, in terms just Americanizing greek mythos. Some may say that me not caring that these movies being different from the books, but caring that it doesn’t fit in with greek mythology is hypocritical. I say it is wayyy different. It’d be like calling a person a Christian in a movie, and noting that they plan on going to Las Vegas once they die. Just different stuff.

Seeing Brandon T. Jackson as a Satyr was cool. Pierce Brosnan as a centaur was awesome. Logan Lerman was also in 3:10 to Yuma (the new one, obviously), and carried the movie well as the lead Percy Jackson. A lot of cheesiness was in this movie, but it is to be expected with its rating. Having the story be about the son of Poseidon, and not Zeus, was a refreshing change.

I couldn’t find a good picture, but you can kinda see his crazy legs.

All I am saying is I might be watching the next one of these in theaters. If someone had told me it had Brandon T. Jackson as a Satyr, I would have seen this movie immediately. So there you go.

Now clearly I am not the market group this movie was trying to capture with this movie. As a white guy, something about the title For Colored Girls does not appeal to me. But as a movie watcher, all movies appeal to me. So I had to see this movie now. Maybe it contained secrets that I wasn’t supposed to know? Like reading letters addressed to to other people. I definitely don’t do that, because that is a crime. Crime is illegal.

And I don’t do illegal things, but I do legal things with items used to stop illegal things.

I was SHOCKED and Taken Aback from this film. I don’t think those are mutually exclusive terms. This movie could be viewed as a series of unfortunate events to happen to seven different black women. From underground abortions, to rape, to child death, the negative happenings just continued to pound away at the viewer, leaving the second half of the film to mostly be a recovery phase, to try and recollect. Seriously. It sucked. You will feel horrible at the midpoint, and then a little bit worse right after that. Each women (who have real names but also represent a color of the rainbow) also gets a long monologue that seems really out of place in the movie. It is in poetic form and it is because the movies are based off of a series of poems, called…wait for it…

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.

Rainnnnbowwwwwwww

Overall, most of the actresses did very well, and the three~ mainish man characters. Unfortunately, with all of the characters and story lines it is easy to forget what is happening to who. Similarly the out of place feel of the monologues push it from a 4 to a 3.

I originally listed this movie as 30 Seconds or Less. Whoops. Minutes are larger than seconds, by at least a factor of 60. Math!

The start of Skynet was actually learning how to make calculators speak.

So we have the good guys. Mark Zuckerberg and Todd Haverford.

And the bad guys. Kenny Fucking Powers and Bucky Larson. Ugh. Sorry. Nick Swardson is better known as Nick Swardson. He doesn’t have many memorial roles. Instead you think of him as that guy in blah and blah.

Jesse is just a down on his luck no prospects pizza delivery boy. For some reason, his restaurant also has the 30 minutes or less guarantee, which as everyone knows is silly. No real basis for who’s clock is actually right, just leads to a whole bunch of problems. Especially since they apparently don’t start the timer until the pizza is given to the driver and on the way, not when the call is made. How are these customers going to be all “oh man, 2 minutes late”. Unless they magically know when he left. Err, nevermind.

So yeah, he is a slacker, but a good guy and smart. Danny McBride is living off of his dad (a war vet’s) wealth, and mad that his dad keeps buying shit with his lotto earnings. He figures at this rate, by the time he dies, there will be no money left. So why not have his dad killed? But they gotta play it smart, cant just have them be the killer. So they find a guy who will do the job, but first they need $100,000.

Using that same logic, they think they should find someone else to steal the money for them too. So they agree to kidnap a complete stranger, strap a bomb to his chest, and give him 24 hours to rob a bank. CRIMINAL. MASTERMINDS.

This was a pretty funny movie. Aziz may have been the funniest part of the movie. But that is because he is secretly one of the funniest people in television. It is his high pitched voice when he is yelling that does it.

Danny McBride acted how he generally acts in all movies. Swardson was dumb sidekick. Jesse E is in more serious things than he is in comedies. He was a funny character as well, but more importantly, when he had a bomb stuck to his chest and he was panicking, I believed the fear he displayed. That alone is almost worth the watch itself. It is hard to play believably scared, especially in a comedy, but he does it well.

Pictured: Serious shit.

So yeah. Good movie. Why aren’t you watching it yet?

I was told I needed to watch this movie when I revealed Source Code. Same director, and he did Moon before Source Code. Had a LOT less budget, many less actors, and was independently released.

“Independently released? Well I approve!”

This was a great sci-fi movie. Thankfully, by reading the back cover, you really have no idea what the movie is about. For the sake of everything, don’t try and figure out what it is about before watching it. Don’t watch the trailer. Here is a synopsis that will not ruin it for you:

Moon: Sam Rockwell is on the moon alone. He is there to harvest moon stuff, and send it back to earth, as a new and awesome energy source. He has a robot companion (voiced by Kevin Spacey). Then some weird shit happens.

There ya go! So once the “Weird shit” starts to happen, I continued to make guesses “Oh the ending will be blahdyblahblah” and then 10 minutes later, said guess happens. This just leaves me dumbfounded. Why would that happen so soon? “Oh!” I says to myself. “Well. Maybe this is going to be lead to this?”.

I think I did that like, three times. Until I was wrong and got an overall ending sequence I wasn’t guessing. Hooray for not knowing what will happen! The simplisticness of the movie makes it work, with only really two main characters. Sam Rockwell with a beard is cool, but I kept finding it odd his characters name was Sam Bell. What is he, trying to turn into Bill Paxton now? Either way, this does what a good sci-fi movie should do. Question humanity. And other philosophical things. (The other acceptable good sci-fi movie is of course the one that is secretly political).

Whoa whoa. Only Bill Paxton can be Bill Paxton. If you aren’t Bill Paxton, you can’t be Bill Paxton. And I am Bill Paxton. Bill Paxton.

3 out of 4.

Barney’s Version is a movie I had never heard of, but apparently it was nominated for an Academy Award AND starred Paul Giamatti? At the same time?

This is my subtle way of implying Hell has frozen over.

Of course after watching, I saw that it was actually only nominated for Best Makeup. Whoops. It lost to The Wolfman.

That is a shitty category anyways. The fact that Curious Case of Benjamin Button beat out Hellboy II is a sham! (Yes, I have opinions on who should win Best Makeup).

Regardless, this was a pretty good movie. Calling a comedy, I don’t agree with. Paul makes a bunch of jokes, and some situations occur, but overall I thought of it as a drama. Especially when you realized WHY this movie is called Barney’s Version, and what is actually going on.

The ending was pretty sad. I had some tears. It is a story of a man who falls in love with three women throughout his life. It also explores the relationship with his best friend, also leading to some very interesting moments. The story is told out of order, but that also has a reason.

And it not just because of alcohol.

The movie is actually based off of a book. I don’t know of anyone who has read the book. So it probably sucks. The best part of this movie is that it takes place in Canada, which means, you guessed it, there are hockey related scenes in it. He is from Montreal in the movie, and in one great scene, he is rushing into the streets to catch a woman before she hops on a train….and traffic is backed up because the Habs have won a playoff game. Good stuff.

Clearly any movie with a hockey scene is a good movie too. Good, not as well known, pick up.